James Tobin on why deflation isn't a cure for unemployment

There's been a lot written lately on why the Pigou effect (i.e., increase in output and employment caused by an increase in consumption due to a rise in the real balances of wealth) isn't a foolproof way around the problem of the zero lower bound. It reminded me of these lines by James Tobin:

Suppose all dollar prices and wages are lower by x per cent. Will aggregate demand for products and for labour be greater? Maybe, because with the same quantity of currency and bank reserves, interest rates could be lower and encourage businesses and households to spend. But in depressions, interest rates may be already as low as they can be; after all, the interest rate on currency cannot be less than zero. Anyway, as Keynes observed, lowering the overall price level cannot reduce interest rates more than the central bank could on its own, with much less social trauma. 

Another possibility, stressed by Professor Pigou, is that owners of assets denominated in dollars feel richer after the purchasing power of the dollar has increased; therefore, they buy more goods. The trouble is that debtors with dollar obligations are correspondingly poorer. There is a small excess of privately owned credits over private debts, the monetary issues and near-money obligations of the central government. But this net credit may not be sufficient to offset the likelihood that increased private debt burdens deter spending more than the corresponding gains in the purchasing power of creditors encourage it. So argued Irving Fisher, my revered predecessor at Yale. Even if Pigou, rather than Fisher, is right, the direct effect of the price level on demand is not an equilibrating mechanism of any practical importance. Certainly, the big deflation during the Great Depression did no good. 

A serious drawback to deflation (or disinflation) as an adjustment mechanism is its perverse effect on aggregate demand. Even if lower prices stimulate demand once prices have fallen, the process of falling prices is destabilizing. If you expect falling prices, you will postpone purchases, preferring to hold money rather than buy goods. For this reason, Keynes and Fisher rejected concerted deflation as a remedy for depression and unemployment. 

Reference

Tobin, J., "Business cycles and economic growth: Current controversies about theory and policy", Bulletin, the American Academy of Arts and Science, Vol. XLVII, No.3, December 1993.

Bankers as public servants

An insightful anecdote by a reader of the American Scholar on how banking has changed during his lifetime:

“Good Fences Make Good Bankers” by William J. Quirk (Spring 2013) reminds me of an experience I had in the 1950s. A final-year law student interviewing for a position with a major bank in Ohio, I had the temerity to ask the interviewer what kind of financial future I might expect in a legal career with a bank. He paused and in measured tones told me that if I was concerned with financial success, I should not go into banking. Banking, he said earnestly, was a quasi-public-service industry, and its primary mission was to protect the funds of its depositors and assist its borrowing customers. 

Can you picture a bank interviewer, with a straight face, uttering these same words to a young job applicant today? (italics added)

Reference

Shapiro, Fred., "Bankers as public servants", American Scholar, Summer 2013.

Janet Yellen most prescient among colleagues

Economist James Tobin once wrote that every policymaker thinks and makes decisions based a model of the economy. Tobin explained that the model need not be a complicated one; it just needs to provide a useful framework for understanding the economy and how it evolves, as well as assist the policymaker in decision-making:

There is really no substitute for making policy backwards, from the desired feasible paths of the objective variables that really matter to the mixture of policy instruments that can bring them about. [...]  

The procedure requires a model -- there is no getting away from that. Models are highly imperfect , but they are indispensable. The model used for policymaking need not be any of the well-known forecasting models. It should represent the policymaker's beliefs about the way the world works...Any policymaker or advisor who think he is not using a model is kidding both himself and us...

This week, the Wall Street Journal published the results of an interesting study examining the statements of 14 policymakers made during the course of the recovery concerning the economy and its outlook. According to the WSJ, the statements of Janet Yellen have been the most prescient (see this clip). In other words, her model of the economy has been very effective at helping her anticipate the economy's prospects during the last few years. According to Jan Hilsenrath of the WSJ, one of the authors of the study, Yellen

...had a model of the economy that worked in this case. She has a model that says when there's a lot of slack in the economy, when there is a lot of unemployment, when there is a lot of idle factories, you don't get a lot of inflation. And that model worked this time around. [...] 

Her fans who want her to become the next Fed chair would argue she's been right before. She was issuing some warnings in 2006 about the housing bubble. She was talking in the 1990s -- you know, when you go to transcripts of Fed meetings -- about froth in the financial markets.

One interesting fact is that Janet Yellen was a student of Tobin (and a good one too).

When Janet L. Yellen was a graduate student in economics at Yale University, classmates quickly figured out that the best way to decipher Professor James Tobin's lectures was to borrow her notes. And long after Yellen received her PhD in 1971, the Yellen Notes--as they became known--served as the unofficial textbook for generations of graduate students. ''She has a genius for expressing complicated arguments simply and clearly,'' says Nobel winner Tobin.

"You want to make sure you have sustainable economic growth? Invest in your kids"

Those words are from Art Rolnick, former senior VP of the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis. They're from a recently released video entitled The Raising of America - Are we Crazy about our Kids?

The basic message of the video is that investing in early childhood pays off in the long run. Here's what economist James Heckman has to say about one of the studies that concluded high-quality early childhood learning is beneficial to a child's performance later in life:

"What did we learn? Many things. It's very successful in terms of the economic performance of the children. For each dollar invested you get back somewhere between 7 and 10 percent rate of return per year over the lifetime of the child. Which is a huge rate of return."

Behind this impressive rate of return are large amount of statistics showing that the children who were enrolled in a high-quality early childhood program performed significantly better in school (and later in life) than those who weren't:

"They found that the children that were in the high-quality program were less likely to be retained in the first grade, were less likely to need "special ed", were more likely to be literate by the sixth grade, graduate high school, get a job, pay taxes and start a family. And the crime rate between the two groups -- the randomized group and the control group -- the crime rate goes down by 50 percent. So those look like pretty good outcomes."

A very smart production.

Does the concentration of finance matter?

It may sound like a strange question in light of all the talk about "too big to fail" during the last few years. But, believe or not, the idea that bank concentration has an impact on real economic activity isn't the standard view. Here's from a recent blog post by NY Fed economists Mary Amiti and David Weinstein:

The notion that financial institutions are large relative to the size of economies is not something that plays a prominent role in traditional economic theory. Macroeconomic textbooks tend to treat economies as composed of representative firms that are infinitesimal in size compared to any given market. As a result, positive and negative idiosyncratic shocks [movement in bank loan supply net of borrower characteristics and general credit conditions] to financial institutions cancel out due to the law of large numbers. 

However, this representation stands in stark contrast with the reality of concentration in financial markets. A striking regularity is that a few banks account for a substantial share of an economy’s loans.

Starting from this basis, Amiti and Weinstein have examined Japanese aggregate bank lending data and other aggregates and were able to demonstrate the following: banks matter, bank concentration matters, bank lending matters. No small feat.

On the issue of bank concentration and aggregate lending, they found that

...if markets are dominated by a few financial institutions, cuts in lending due to some change in financial conditions in just a small number of banks have the potential to substantially affect aggregate lending. Moreover, if firms find it hard to find good substitutes for loans like issuing equity or debt, then it is possible for their investment rates to fall as well. 

As for their take on banks' impact on the real economy, the conclusion to their paper (on which their blog post in based) gives a good summary:

Our paper contributes to this literature by providing the first evidence that shocks to the supply of credit affect firm investment rates. We find that even after controlling for firm credit shocks, loan supply shocks are a significant determinant of firm-level investment of loan-dependent firms. This result is particularly surprising because our sample is comprised of listed companies that have, by definition, access to equity markets. Moreover, the fact that so much lending is intermediated through a few financial institutions means that idiosyncratic shocks hitting large financial institutions can move aggregate lending and investment. We show that about 40 percent of the movement in these variables can be attributed to these granular bank shocks. This means that the idiosyncratic fates of large financial institutions are an important determinant of investment and real economic activity.

And the implication for policy, according to Amiti and Weinstein, is significant. Here is the relevant excerpt of their blog post on this point:

...[P]olicymakers without detailed information on the major financial institutions are likely to have a difficult time understanding the causes of lending and investment fluctuations. A large portion of Japan’s aggregate economic fluctuations can be traced to the country’s banking problems. 

While many researchers have focused on the implications of banks being “too big to fail,” we show that even if large banks do not fail, granular bank shocks can have substantial impacts on aggregate investment. 

For example, reductions in bank capital at large financial institutions can cause investment declines by firms that would like to borrow, while recapitalization of the right institutions can stimulate investment. In sum, this study shows that what happens to large financial institutions is important for understanding aggregate investment behavior. 

While their paper looks specifically at Japanese data, the authors suggest that the overall conclusions are relevant to the situation in the US given that it too has a very concentrated banking sector.

Amiti, Mary and David Weinstein, How much do banks shocks affect investment: Evidence from matched bank-firm loan data, NY Fed staff paper 604, March 2013

Robert Gordon on the death of innovation and end of growth

This TED talk by Robert Gordon (Northwestern) is a must-see (do it, it's only 12 minutes long). You may recall that a paper by Gordon created quite a stir in the news a few months ago because of the bleak outlook it gives regarding future economic growth in the US.

In the talk, Gordon counters the commonly-held idea that economic growth is a continuous process. He makes the case that the rapid growth experienced during the last two and half centuries may have been an anomaly rather than the start of a new, everlasting historical trend.

According to Gordon, economic growth in the coming decades will slow as a result of six headwinds that will reduce future productivity and income growth. In the end, the impact of these six headwinds will leave long-term growth at half or less of the (near) 2 percent annual rate experienced between the mid-1800s and today.

The six negative headwinds that make up Gordon's "exercise in subtraction" are demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy and debt (for more, see Gordon, 2013).

My take on this issue is that I'm generally optimistic about the prospect of continued future growth but becoming somewhat pessimistic about the ability of governments to take the appropriate steps to encourage the type of innovation and technological advancements that promote robust long-term economic growth.*

As I've mentioned before, the current preoccupation of politicians and policymakers with slashing spending and reducing public debt levels is likely going to be detrimental to long-term growth. I doubt there are many growth theorists out there who would argue that trillions of dollars in lost output (as witnessed by the huge amount of idle resources, including unemployed workers) and cuts to public investment are beneficial to a nation's long-term growth prospects.

A few years ago, (the great) economist Albert Wojnilower summed up the problem that's emerged in the US with respect to government support for innovation in a 2011 interview as follows:

Gail Foster: What about the long term? There are many, maybe even a majority, who believe that we are possibly in a temporary innovation funk — maybe not so temporary. In other words, while it may be possible to be encouraged about the short term, we are just getting back to where we were before the recession, and there is not much that is economically exciting to look forward to. Would you agree?

Albert Wojnilower: I wouldn’t sell the future short. There is no lack of new business opportunities (cell phones, Facebook, electric cars, energy innovation, services that cater to aging societies). The question is, where will they be invented, used and exploited? And to whom will the benefits be distributed? The United States has traditionally been a leader in this important growth process; now it is a laggard. The shift in the U.S.’s relative position is a matter of ideology, not economics.

GF: What do you mean by ideology?

AW: The United States has adopted a free-market, small-government ideology, ostensibly copying what we did in the distant past. The difference today is that there is no frontier. Most opportunities tread on someone else’s toes (as in property rights). There is less space for greenfield experimentation. The small-government mentality means that there is no effective arbitrator of the trade-offs to break the log jam. Many of our newest “innovations” have occurred outside the traditional economic sectors — for example, creating a new sector that today we refer to as technology. Major inventions have been made by civil servants, at little personal benefit. The United States has usually been pragmatic on these matters, but now it appears to be headed in a much more dogmatic direction...

GF: Would it be fair to say that you are an optimist with respect to human ingenuity but not human nature?

AW: Yes, indeed.

* For a more optimistic view, see Baily et al, the TED talk by Eric Brynjolffson and this debate between Robert Gordon and Eric Brynjolffson
 
References

Gordon, Robert, US Productivity Growth: The slowdown has returned after a temporary revival, International Productivity Monitor, Spring 2013.

Baily, Martin.N. James Manyika and Shalabh Gupta, US Productivity Growth: An optimistic perspective, International Productivity Monitor,  Spring 2013.

Fosler, Gail and Albert Wojnilower, Interview: Are we out of the woods yet, Gail Foster Group LLC. February 9, 2011.

Impact of the US Payroll tax cut...and tax hike

This is a very informative (and short) piece by economists at the NY Fed on the effect of the 2011 US payroll tax cut and its recent expiration.

Here's a good summary:

Overall, our analysis suggests that the payroll tax cut during 2011-12 led to a substantial increase in consumer spending and facilitated the consumer deleveraging process. Based on consumers’ responses to our recent survey, expiration of the tax cuts is likely to lead to a substantial reduction in spending as well as contribute to a slowdown or possibly a reversal in the paydown of consumer debt. These effects are also likely to be heterogeneous, with groups that are more credit and liquidity constrained more likely to be adversely affected. Such nuances may be lost in the aggregate macroeconomic statistics, but they’re important for policymakers to consider as they debate fiscal policy.

Reference

Zafar, B., van der Klaauw, W., My Two (Per)cents: How are American Workers dealing with the Payroll Tax Hike, Federal Bank of New Work, Liberty Street Blog.

A kind word for Paul

Paul Krugman's recent posts on the abuse use by politicians of economic studies as a way to support ideologically-driven fiscal austerity have been right on. Here's from his latest:

...the important story isn’t about the sins of the economists; it’s about our warped economic discourse, in which important people seize on academic work that fits their preconceptions. Even if you don’t think Reinhart-Rogoff made much difference to actual policy, the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of their reputation speaks volumes about why this slump goes on and on.

I made a similar point in an earlier column when I wrote that austerity was a

...prepackaged "solution to a problem" that fits with today's dominant policy-making ideology, which holds that governments have little or no purpose other than catering to financial interests and leaving the path clear for free-market actors to find solutions to every problem facing society.

...[F]iscal austerity is simply another example of a "solution looking for a problem", an empty and empirically ineffectual idea with no clear rationale other than giving the appearance that "something is being done".

This is why I continue to think that the ones who are really responsible for austerity are the politicians who support this view. Economic studies were used to provide cover for these leaders' preferred set of policy choices.

Anyway, there's no matching Prof. Krugman's performance these last few months. Not only have his forecasts been right on, but his retrospective look at why things unfolded the way they did has been downright flawless.