Is there a case for a further co-ordinated global fiscal stimulus? Part 3

September 23, 2009 12:22 am

(IV). When does a fiscal stimulus boost aggregate demand?

A fiscal stimulus is a key weapon in the policy arsenal used to address an undesirable weakening of aggregate demand. For the policy to make sense, either an increase in public spending on goods and services (public consumption or investment) or a tax cut (an increase in transfer payments) must raise aggregate demand at a given price level, wage, interest rates, exchange rates and other asset prices. In the textbook IS-LM model this means that the fiscal measure shifts the IS curve to the right in output – interest rate space – there is no full direct crowding out, Ricardian equivalence or Minsky equivalence.

We may still not get any effect on output and employment, even if the IS curve shifts to the right, either because there could be ‘financial crowding out’ through higher interest rates, lower asset prices or a stronger exchange rate or because there is ‘real crowding out’ through scare real resources on the supply side; real crowding out or ‘factor market crowding out’ occurs through rising real wages and other real factor costs, and through rising inflationary pressures.

But unless the fiscal stimulus shifts the IS curve to the right, it achieves nothing at all – we don’t even have to investigate whether there is financial or real crowding out.

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Is there a case for a further co-ordinated global fiscal stimulus? Part 2

September 21, 2009 11:09 pm

(III) Fiscal policy

With monetary policy, both conventional and unconventional, having reached the limits of its effectiveness in most of the advanced industrial countries, the only instrument left for boosting demand is fiscal policy. By this I mean, until further notice) a cut in taxes or an increase in public spending financed either by borrowing from the public (domestic or foreign) or by borrowing from the central bank, that is, by creating base money.

Like all debt, public debt is both a wonderful and a dangerous social invention. It permits individuals and groups of individuals, including nations, to smooth consumption over time – it permits saving to be de-coupled from investment. In what follows it will be important not to use the word ‘debt’ as equivalent to ‘financial instrument’ or ‘financial claim’. Equity and other profit-, loss- and risk-sharing instruments also permit the de-coupling of saving and investment and the smoothing of consumption over time and across generations. When I refer to debt, it is narrowly defined as a financial instrument imposing fixed, non-contingent payment obligations on the borrower. Borrowing in this narrow sense creates a legal obligation to repay the debt with interest at some future date.

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Is there a case for a further co-ordinated global fiscal stimulus? Part 1

September 20, 2009 9:51 pm

On September 16 and 17, the Earth Institute at Columbia University (well, at least it’s not called the Universe Institute) and the Asian Development Bank organised a conference at Columbia University on The Future of the Global Reserve System. Papers were presented by the members of the Asian Development Bank’s International Monetary Advisory Group (IMAG), of which I am one (the other members are Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Dr. Nirupam Bajpai, Dr. Maria Socorro G. Bautista, Prof. Barry Eichengreen, Dr. Masahiro Kawai, Prof. Felipe Larrain, Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, Prof. Charles Wyplosz, Dr. Yu Yongding).

The paper “Is there a case for a further co-ordinated global fiscal stimulus” is my take on the subject assigned to me for the New York conference: “Are the coordinated stimulus plans working and are they effective? Should we continue with fiscal stimulus? Are there other approaches to aggregate demand management?”

I will publish the paper in this blog in two or three installments, as I revise the initial draft. Installment one follows below.

Introduction

For further internationally co-ordinated expansionary fiscal policy measures to be desirable today, a number of conditions must be satisfied.

First, there must be idle resources – involuntary unemployment of labour and unwanted excess capacity. Output and employment must be demand-constrained.

Second, there must be no more effective way of stimulating demand, say through expansionary monetary policy.

Third, expansionary fiscal policy must not drive up interest rates, either by raising the risk-free real interest rate or by raising the sovereign default risk premium, to such an extent that the fiscal stimulus is emasculated through financial crowding out.

Fourth, at given interest rates, the expansionary fiscal policy measures are not neutralised by direct crowding out (the displacement of private spending by public spending or of public dissaving by private saving at given present and future interest rates, prices and activity levels). Such direct crowding out can occur in the case of tax cuts (strictly speaking, cuts in lump-sum taxes matched by future increases in lump-sum taxes of equal present discounted value) because of Ricardian equivalence/debt neutrality. In economies with very highly indebted households, debt neutrality can occur when taxes on households are cut, because of what I shall call “Minsky equivalence” (see Minsky (2008)). Increases in public spending on real goods and services (“exhaustive” public spending) can fail to boost aggregate demand because of a high degree of substitutability (in the utility functions or the production technology) between private consumption and investment on the one hand and public consumption and investment on the other.

Fifth, there must be cross-border externalities from expansionary fiscal policies that cause decentralised, uncoordinated national fiscal expansions to be suboptimal.

This paper will consider these issues in turn. After reaching some fairly discouraging conclusions on the scope for further conventional expansionary fiscal policy now, unless there are significant political realignments in fiscally challenged nations that support coalitions in favour of significant future fiscal tightening through tax increases or public spending cuts, I briefly outline some unconventional fiscal/financial policies that may be effective in their own right and may help to enhance the effectiveness of conventional expansionary fiscal policy. Collectively, they can be characterised as the equitization of debt – household mortgage debt, bank debt and public debt.

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Expect little and you may yet be disappointed

September 15, 2009 10:23 am

Until yesterday’s defeat of Roger Federer in the final of the US Open at Flushing Meadows, the most disappointing development this year was the performance of president Barack Obama and his administration – and my expectations were modest to begin with.

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I know I know nothing; but at least I know that

September 10, 2009 3:00 pm

Science with very few (if any) data

Doing statistical analysis on a sample of size 1 is either a very frustrating or a very liberating exercise. The academic discipline known as history falls into that category. Most applied social science, including applied economics, does too. Applied economists use means fair and foul to try to escape from the reality that economics is not a discipline where controlled experiments are possible. The situation that an economically relevant problem can be studied by means of a control group and a treatment group that are identical as regards all but one external or exogenous driver, whose influence can as a result be isolated, identified and measured, does not arise in practice.

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Does poverty give a country the right to pollute the atmosphere?

July 24, 2009 8:39 pm

In the current worldwide debate about greenhouse gas emissions, the political leaders of the new big polluters (NBPs, especially China and India) attempt to shift the burden of reducing the global flow of new carbon-dioxide-equivalent (CO2E) emissions to the old big polluters (OBPs, mainly Europe, North America and Japan) by claiming the moral high ground, based on two arguments: (1) we are poor, you are rich, and (2) it’s our turn now to pollute.

I will, in what follows, take as given the proposition that (1) global warming is a reality; (2) global warming is a bad thing and (3) that human-made CO2E emissions are a significant contributor to global warming. The science underlying these propositions is inevitably shaky – as has to be the case for any non-experimental science. Still I believe that, even if I don’t really know whether my grandchildren are more likely to swim down Oxford Street or to ice-skate down Oxford street, the cost of not doing something about man-made CO2E emissions if they are indeed as harmful as the Greenhouse Lobby argues is vastly greater than the cost of unnecessarily restricting CO2E emissions – an application of the precautionary principle, if you want.

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The real estate roots of the crisis in the US

July 21, 2009 3:42 pm

Today’s guest blogger is Elena Panaritis, an expert in property rights, creating markets in illiquid real estate assets, and public sector management. She is also the author of Prosperity Unbound; Building Property Markets with Trust, which is definitely not one of those odious get-rich-quick-in-real-estate-without-capital-brains-or-effort books. Instead it is a get real book for social entrepreneurs about how to turn real estate possessions into socially productive, and indeed also privately profitable, capital.

This Crisis Demands Non-Traditional Solutions to Get to a Path of Quick Recovery

By Elena Panaritis

Two years after it began, there is now a coalescing of opinion about the causes of the U.S. financial crisis and what should be done to resolve it, yet there is a serious element missing both in the causation analysis as well as in the prescriptive solution. This crisis, which has infected the global economy so severely, is very much a non-traditional one that calls for a non-traditional solution. The impact in the United States so far has been worse than anything since the Great Depression: unemployment reached 9.5 percent in June, up from 7.8 percent in January, home prices were down 27% at the end of the first quarter from their 2006 peak, and 1.5 million homes were in foreclosure. After jumping by 30 percent in February, home foreclosure rates tapered off but are again on the rise. According to the New York Times, the loss in property value could total $500 billion.

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What to do with the Fed

July 17, 2009 1:39 am

The Fed is in trouble. Obama administration proposals for enhancing the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory role and for assigning it new macro-prudential responsibilities and powers – effectively turning it into the nation’s systemic risk regulator - are meeting with strong and vocal opposition. The criticism is not just coming from the other agencies in the US financial sector regulatory and supervisory spaghetti bowl – agencies that would stand to lose power and influence or could be put out of business completely. The desire for stronger Congressional oversight of the Fed is no longer confined to a few libertarian fruitcakes, conspiracy theorists and old lefties. It is a mainstream view that the Fed has failed to foresee and prevent the crisis, that it has managed it ineffectively since it started, and that it has allowed itself to be used as a quasi-fiscal instrument of the US Treasury, by-passing Congressional control. Are any or all of these criticisms justified? Let’s ponder a few of them.

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Harmful financial innovation

July 1, 2009 1:49 pm

Like most authors, I tend to cringe when I read something I wrote more than a few years ago. But while engaging in some authorial auto-archeology recently when preparing the index for a new paper (after all, if I don’t cite myself, who will?), I was pleasantly surprised with a few bits from a paper I wrote in 1999 and published in 2000 in the Bank of England’s Quarterly Bulletin, titled “The new economy and the old monetary economics”.

The paper takes aim at the assertion, rampant in 1999, that the behaviour in recent years of the world economy, led by the United States, could only be understood by abandoning the old conventional wisdom and adopting a ‘New Paradigm’. Prominent among the structural transformations associated with the New Paradigm were the the following: increasing openness; financial innovation; lower global inflation; stronger competitive pressures; buoyant stock markets defying conventional valuation methods; a lower natural rate of unemployment; and a higher trend rate of growth of productivity.

I argue, first, that the New Paradigm has been over-hyped. “…Unfortunately, the ‘New Paradigm’ label has been much abused by professional hype merchants and peddlers of economic snake oil.”

Second, I argue that, to the extent that we can see a New Paradigm in action, its implications for monetary policy have often been misunderstood.

I was particularly pleased that I had written following about financial innovation:

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Recapitalising the banks through enhanced credit support: quasi-fiscal shenanigans in Frankfurt

June 28, 2009 8:04 pm

Last week the Eurosystem performed a €442bn injection of one-year liquidity into the Euro Area banking system. They did this at the official policy rate – the Main refinancing operations (fixed rate) – of 1.00 percent, against the usual collateral accepted for Longer Term Financing Operations, effectively anything euro-denominated, not based on derivatives and rated at least BBB-. It was a fixed-rate tender, that is, the ECB was willing to meet any demand at the 1 percent interest rate, as long as eligible collateral was offered; 1121 banks participated in the operation.

You will not be surprised to hear that this was the largest one-day ECB/Eurosystem operation ever. Even more remarkable than its scale are the terms on which the one-year funds were made available. There can be no doubt that this operation represents both a subsidy and a gift from the Eurosystem to the banks that participated in the operation. I hope to clarify the distinction between a subsidy and a gift in what follows.

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