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How should recessions be fought when interest rates are low?

2017-10-24 11:50:31

Both monetary-policy and fiscal-policy answers remain contentious

ONE day, perhaps quite soon, it will happen. Some gale of bad news will blow

in: an oil-price spike, a market panic or a generalised formless dread.

Governments will spot the danger too late. A new recession will begin. Once,

the response would have been clear: central banks should swing into action,

cutting interest rates to boost borrowing and investment. But during the

financial crisis, and after four decades of falling interest rates and

inflation, the inevitable occurred (see chart). The rates so deftly wielded by

central banks hit zero, leaving policymakers grasping at untested alternatives.

Ten years on, despite exhaustive debate, economists cannot agree on how to

handle such a world.

During the next recession, the zero lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates will

almost certainly bite again. When it does, central banks will reach for

crisis-tested tools, such as quantitative easing (creating money to buy bonds)

and promises to keep rates low for a long time. Such policies will prove less

potent than in the past; bond purchases are less useful, for instance, when

credit markets are not impaired by crisis and long-term interest rates are

already low. In the absence of a solid policy consensus, the use of any

unorthodox` tool is likely to be too tentative to spark a fast recovery.

Broadly, economists see two possible ways out, both aired at a recent

conference run by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a

think-tank. One is to change monetary strategy. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the

Federal Reserve during the crisis, proposed a clever approach: when the economy

next bumps into the ZLB, the central bank should quickly adopt a temporary

price-level target. That is, it should promise to make up shortfalls in

inflation resulting from a downturn. If a recession causes below-target

inflation for a year, the central bank would promise to tolerate above-target

inflation until prices reach the level they would have attained without the

slump.

If credible, that promise should buck up animal spirits, encourage spending,

and drag the economy back to health. Raising inflation targets would reduce the

frequency and severity of ZLB episodes. It would, however, force households to

accept higher inflation all the time, rather than just in the aftermath of a

severe downturn. A permanent price-level target, for its part, would force

central banks to respond to an inflation-increasing blow to the economy such as

a big natural disaster with rate rises, piling on pain in such cases. Less

clear is whether a central bank could fulfil its promise. The Fed has failed to

hit its 2% inflation target for the past five years, after all. Mr Bernanke s

proposal would do little good if markets doubted a central bank s ability to

fulfil its promise to deliver catch-up inflation.

The constraints facing central banks suggest better hopes for the second way

forward greater reliance on fiscal policy. This was the theme of a contribution

to the conference from Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, crisis veterans

from the IMF and the American administration, respectively. Before the crisis,

economists used to dismiss fiscal policy as a recession-fighting tool. Stimulus

was clumsy, slow and, given the control exercised by central bankers,

unnecessary. But with interest rates near zero, stimulus might be the most

effective way to boost demand so long as the central bank is willing to play

along. Recent history, however, suggests that it could certainly not be relied

upon to do so. In 2013, the Fed announced it would begin reducing its asset

purchases, despite low and falling inflation and an unemployment rate above 7%

conditions which might elicit a fiscal stimulus from an anxious government.

More government spending in such cases, if deemed likely to raise inflation,

might simply prompt a central bank to move forward its timetable for

tightening. That would dampen and perhaps offset entirely the effect of the

fiscal stimulus.

The dawn of a new error

So fiscal and monetary policy would have to be closely co-ordinated amounting,

in all likelihood, to a loss of central-bank autonomy. A central bank that

stood by as fiscal stimulus pushed inflation above its target has in effect

relinquished its independence. One that stubbornly raised rates as elected

leaders sought to boost growth would quickly find its position politically

untenable much as the Federal Reserve did after the election of Franklin

Roosevelt in 1932. Just how troubling a loss of independence would be is

intensely debated. Messrs Blanchard and Summers are themselves at odds on it:

Mr Summers is open to relaxing independence; Mr Blanchard worries that

politicised central banks might have been too timid during the crisis, just as

many governments turned too quickly to austerity. Other economists cite a more

common fear: that governments would inevitably push for too much monetary

stimulus, accelerating inflation.

Central-bank independence was an institutional response to the inflation of the

1970s, just as government business-cycle management was a response to the

Depression. But the rules that underpinned the conditions of the 1970s seem no

longer to apply. For a decade (more, in Japan) inflation and interest rates

have limped along at historically low levels, even as government debts

ballooned and central banks created piles of new money. That presents a

significant problem for prevailing institutions, but also for conventional

macroeconomic wisdom.

In the 1970s, an intellectual shift within economics took place in tandem with

the change in policy practice. The discipline could explain why predictable

monetary policy set by independent central banks was preferable to a government

s attempts to spend its way to full employment. Yet things need not unfold

that way this time. With economists at odds as future ZLB episodes loom, the

example of the 1930s might be more apt. Then populist politicians struck out in

unorthodox new directions, for better and occasionally much worse. It was only

later that experts could settle on a coherent narrative of the crisis and

recovery. That is not the ideal way forward. Yet it may be the only option

available.