Fiscal

Spring meetings: Has the IMF gone soft?

April 13, 2011 12:10 pm by Chris Giles

Although the IMF is super-orthodox and Anglo Saxon, when it comes to advanced economy monetary policy, even with a French managing director and chief economist, there are some signs of a softer IMF this spring.

Capital controls
Most attention has focused on capital controls, on which the Fund has issued its first ever guidelines on their use. This is seen as the IMF giving ground to countries, such as China, seeking to build foreign exchange reserves for currency management rather than expose itself to volatile capital inflows. This is a misreading of the IMF’s intentions.

The Fund could not have been clearer that capital controls are only a valid part of the macroeconomic toolkit if a country’s currency is not undervalued, it has sufficient foreign exchange reserves and it is unable to use monetary or fiscal policy. Only one - foreign exchange reserves – of these three criteria apply to China.

In contrast, in the World Economic Outlook, the Fund complains repeatedly about China’s exchange rate Read more

Tags: capital controls, capital flows, Fiscal, Global
Posted in International Monetary Fund | Permalink

The surprisingly secretive OBR

March 25, 2011 3:55 pm by Chris Giles

I am currently engaged in an entertaining tussle with the Office for Budget Responsibility, the newish and independent fiscal watchdog. I am sure our disagreement will be resolved quickly. I have no reason to doubt the independence of the OBR staff, nor their stated desire for transparency. But at the moment they are being surprisingly secretive over the most important judgment in their forecast.

The OBR’s remit is to determine whether the government has a greater than evens chance of meeting its binding fiscal goal to balance the structural current budget deficit by 2015-16. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am boringly consistent in thinking this goal is useless because it relies upon splitting the forecast for borrowing into structural and cyclical components, a task which is so difficult as to make it not worth bothering.

But we live in a world where a public body – the OBR – has been given this difficult task and so its judgments need to be scrutinised. Your taxes and the level of public spending literally depends on the OBR’s assessment. Read more

Tags: Fiscal, OBR, UK
Posted in OBR | Permalink

A forgettable Budget

March 23, 2011 3:16 pm by Chris Giles

I am sure George Osborne’s second Budget will soon be forgotten. The public will not thank him much for avoiding the scheduled rise in petrol duties – being hit by a bullet is more noticeable than dodging one. And the growth agenda – laudable though it is in its intentions – is hardly new for British chancellors.

In the minutes after an admirably clear speech from the chancellor without last year’s duplicitous use of numbers, the striking thing about the newish and independent Office for Budget Responsibility is the number of times it has taken the approach – “We hear what you are saying, but forget it”.

Growth: The OBR had the opportunity to endorse the “plan for growth” by raising its estimate of the long-term potential growth rate of the economy. It said forget it:

“We do not believe there is sufficiently strong evidence to justify changing our trend growth assumption in light of policy measures announced in Budget 2011″.

Growth forecasts: The OBR downgrades

Tags: Budget 2011, Fiscal, OBR, tax, UK
Posted in OBR | Permalink

Macroadvisers on drag from spending cuts

March 8, 2011 3:25 pm by Robin Harding

Macroadvisers have put out their estimates of the economic effect of passage of the House Republicans $61bn of FY11 spending cuts. They are lower than Goldman Sachs, higher than the Fed, and look pretty solid to me.

Our simulation analysis suggests this near-term fiscal drag would reduce annualized growth of real GDP during the second and third quarters of this year by ¾ percentage point, with smaller impacts for a few subsequent quarters.

Tags: Fiscal, fiscal policy, government spending, North America, US
Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink

Bernanke on the Fed’s fiscal calculus

March 2, 2011 5:39 pm by Robin Harding

Ben Bernanke is testifying at the House today (it’s pretty dull) but he has spelled out the Fed’s estimate of what a $60bn cut to federal spending in FY11 (i.e. in the remaining months until the end of September) would do to the economy.

It would cut 0.1-0.2 percentage points from output this year and 0.1 percentage points next year. At some unspecified time horizon, it would lower employment by 200,000. Read more

Tags: ben bernanke, Fiscal, government spending
Posted in Federal Reserve | Permalink

Economics headlines

February 22, 2011 4:51 pm by Daniel Pimlott

Eurozone price rises sound alarms at ECB – FT

Libya turmoil crushes risk appetite – FT Read more

Tags: credit crunch, Fiscal, Macro-economics
Posted in Central banks | Permalink

Should fiscal or monetary exit come first?

January 25, 2011 11:36 pm by Robin Harding

Today’s UK GDP shocker once again raises the question of whether the rapid, pre-announced tightening of fiscal policy underway in Britain is wise. But at least one new academic paper suggests that chancellor George Osborne has it right.

Ignazio Angeloni and colleagues at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy run fairly comprehensive simulations on exit strategies from crisis fiscal and monetary policies and conclude: Read more

Tags: exit strategy, Fiscal, fiscal consolidation
Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink

George Osborne on the level of UK trend growth

December 8, 2010 12:06 pm by Chris Giles

Giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee this morning, George Osborne claimed the UK economy was back on track.

He added that it was pretty clear to him that the previous Labour government had overstated trend growth for much of its time in office and there had been a big “boom” in the economy for much of the decade.

Warming to this theme, the chancellor referred the Committee to his favourite chart of the June Budget, which shows what the output gap would have looked like if a more modest figure – and what Mr Osborne said was “more realistic” estimate for trend growth – had been assumed by the previous government. Read more

Tags: Fiscal, fiscal policy, OBR, UK, UK economy
Posted in OBR | Permalink

Automatic sanctions and the ECB

October 29, 2010 5:15 pm by Emma Saunders

In the early days of the telephone, human operators played a crucial role: you called the operator, asked for the Joneses at a certain address, and she called them for you and connected you. Telephones were never forecast to be ubiquitous: their number would be forever constrained by the cost and availability of human operators required to make the system work.

Few people – if any – envisaged automatic connection. When it finally came along, no doubt it was unpopular with telephone operators. But the sacrifice of their jobs – painful as it was – paved the way for the highly efficient system we know today. It is unlikely the telephone operators were consulted on the matter, much less given the deciding vote.

So there is a level on which it seems strange that EU policymakers should get to choose whether or not they remain a part of the fiscal sanctions process. Euro member states might be punished if they are fiscally irresponsible, going forwards, but then again they might not: it will depend upon votes by policymakers. The ECB’s proposal for semi-automatic sanctions has been thwarted: the decision to punish will remain lengthy – and political.

There is a problem with this. Read more

Tags: EU, euro, Europe, eurozone, Fiscal, integration, sanctions
Posted in European Central Bank, European Union (EU) | Permalink

IMF paper: central fiscal body for eurozone

July 22, 2010 3:05 pm by Emma Saunders

Creating a central fiscal agency for the eurozone is one of two solutions suggested in a new staff paper from the IMF. The current (decentralised) system doesn’t work properly, argues the paper, because buffers are not built up in good times; there is insufficient central risk management; and decentralised crisis response is inefficient, increasing the chance of ad hoc bail-outs.

“The case for binding fiscal constraints in a fiscally decentralized monetary union ultimately rests on the fact that all members’ solvency constraints need to be simultaneously satisfied, effectively exposing the credibility of the common currency to fiscal policy mistakes by the weakest performer,” reads the paper.

Centralising European functions has two proposed elements: a central fiscal agency, and the creation of a single European bond. Such moves would require changes to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Less radical suggestions, requiring minimal legislative changes, include broader sanctions such as financial penalties in good times, and reduced voting rights in bad times. Read more

Tags: Europe, eurozone, eurozone crisis, Fiscal, MF
Posted in International Monetary Fund | Permalink