Sharing Central Banks’ costs and profits of monetary policy in the euro area

By Sergio Cesaratto

A debate has developed in Europe (on Vox.eu and elsewhere) on the fiscal costs related to the interest payments that central banks in the eurozone are bestowing on commercial banks, a result of the way monetary policy is currently conducted. The implementation of monetary policy currently revolves around the ECB’s direct control of the interest rate paid on an abundant excess of bank reserves (relative to mandatory reserve requirements) (see Cesaratto 2020, chapter 7). This excess is the result of past quantitative easing (QE) operations whereby the eurozone’s national central banks (NCBs) bought government and corporate bonds by issuing reserves (liquidity). At the ECB’s current target rate of 3.75 per cent, banks are collecting considerable sums, more than 118 billion per year rebus sic stantibus. This also happens in other monetary areas, but there are European peculiarities.

Read rest here.

Central Banks, Development and the Argentinean Economy

My interview (in Spanish) on central banks, development and some moderate optimism about the forthcoming Argentinian government of Alberto Fernández.

Kicking away the ladder too: On central banks and development

In case you missed it, and are interested on the topic, the video of my webinar is available here.

What is the Central Bank of Argentina Actually Doing?

Brief note in Spanish (no translation, sorry) on the long history of central banks and the current policies of the Argentinean central bank (BCRA). The gist of the argument is that while central banks where created to finance developmental states in the nascent merchant capitalist societies, in the periphery they tended to follow the Victorian model (implemented later) emphasizing inflation control as the main official goal. However, often, as in the recent case of the BCRA, they are used to accelerate inflation and fuel speculation, if that allows for lower real wages, which was Macri's administration not so hidden goal (from an old, but revealing interview).

Prebisch and Central Banking

You can read here the Power Point of our presentation at History of Economics Society conference on Prebisch and Central Banking and his role as a Money Doctor in the 1940s after he left the Central Bank of Argentina.

Kicking Away the Ladder, Too: Inside Central Banks

Last January the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) sessions at the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) meetings revolved around the theme of "Inside Institutions," meaning that within institutions there are many actors with different sets of interests, so one must look under the hood, so to speak, of the institution itself to understand its actions. My paper followed my previous discussion of the historical evolution of central banks, and a brief discussion within the Argentine Central Bank. From the abstract of my paper:

Central banks are evolving institutions. In developed countries, particularly in Britain, central banks were used as instruments of the state to finance government and to promote economic development. However, once they went up the economic ladder, advanced economies kicked it to preclude developing countries from climbing it, too. It is in this context that the modern independent central bank, concerned with inflation targeting alone, which harkens back to the Victorian era, should be interpreted. This paper analyzes the recent evolution of the Argentine central bank in this broad historical perspective.

Download full paper here.

PS: This are the proofs and there are some mistakes. And yes, it should say seventeenth century in the first paragraph.

New Book: The Encyclopedia of Central Banking

New book on central banking, edited by L-P Rochon & Sergio Rossi, has recently been published. I have two chapters: 1. on Classical Dichotomy, & 2. on Dollar Hegemony.

See here.

PS: Posted here with an entry on Bretton Woods by Omar Hamouda.

Kicking away the ladder too

The table below comes from Broadberry and O’Rourke's The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe. It shows that national control of the money supply, the monopoly of emission, is a 19th century phenomena, something we discussed with L-P. Rochon in this paper back in 2003.

Note that before the mid-19th century period, which Charles Goodhart aptly calls the Victorian era, central banks had been created for supporting the State’s financing needs. Also, the role of lender-of-last resort (LOLR) in the late 19th century, associated to Bagehot, did not lead to a significant change in the Victorian preoccupation with price stability.

It is only with the Great Depression that the Victorian dreams of a self-adjusting economy with a tendency to full employment and an orderly division of labor, where the periphery only produced commodities and imported manufactured goods, were utterly shattered. In my view, an contrary to Goodhart, the crucial element on the rise of Keynesian Central Banks was the abandonment of Say's law, not of the Real Bills Doctrine, as we discuss here with Esteban Pérez.

I wrote a paper (in Spanish), when I was at the Central Bank of Argentina, that has not been published on these topics, titled 'Kicking Away the Ladder Too,' in obvious allusion to Ha-Joon Chang's use of List's expression. The point is that central banks were used as tools of economic development (the Bank of England for sure), but once central economies went up the ladder they kicked it, suggesting that central banks should only be concerned with inflation. Now that the Keynesian moment has passed, the mainstream has gone back to the inflation obsession.

Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan on Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly to the People

By Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan

In theory, governments can boost spending in two ways: through fiscal policies (such as lowering taxes or increasing government spending) or through monetary policies (such as reducing interest rates or increasing the money supply). But over the past few decades, policymakers in many countries have come to rely almost exclusively on the latter. The shift has occurred for a number of reasons. Particularly in the United States, partisan divides over fiscal policy have grown too wide to bridge, as the left and the right have waged bitter fights over whether to increase government spending or cut tax rates. More generally, tax rebates and stimulus packages tend to face greater political hurdles than monetary policy shifts. Presidents and prime ministers need approval from their legislatures to pass a budget; that takes time, and the resulting tax breaks and government investments often benefit powerful constituencies rather than the economy as a whole. Many central banks, by contrast, are politically independent and can cut interest rates with a single conference call. Moreover, there is simply no real consensus about how to use taxes or spending to efficiently stimulate the economy.

Read rest here.

Independence and monetary unions

So, as the map above shows, independence from the UK is nothing new. And I personally have no particular opinion on whether independence is good or bad for Scots, although many on the left seem to think it's a good idea. However, it is undeniable that independence and maintenance of the pound is a terrible idea. Here is Wynne Godley, who I should add was in favor of the European Union, but not of the currency union as it was organized, in 1992 (from a previous post available here).

"the power to issue its own money, to make drafts on its own central bank, is the main thing which defines national independence. If a country gives up or loses this power, it acquires the status of a local authority or colony. Local authorities and regions obviously cannot devalue. But they also lose the power to finance deficits through money creation while other methods of raising finance are subject to central regulation. Nor can they change interest rates. As local authorities possess none of the instruments of macro-economic policy, their political choice is confined to relatively minor matters of emphasis – a bit more education here, a bit less infrastructure there."

So much for the possibility of a more social democratic Scotland after independence. A bit more spending on education, in exchange for a lot of austerity.  Mind you, these effects my take a long time. Wynne predicted the problems of the Euro in 1992.

What is 'Dollar Hegemony'?

Fields, David (Forthcoming), “Dollar Hegemony,” Edward Elgar Encyclopedia on Central Banking, edited by L.P. Rochon et. al, Edward Elgar

Today, the world economy operates under the artifice of US hegemony, fortified by the US dollar as an international reserve and vehicle currency. How did the United States arrive at achieving such pre-eminence?

From 1944 to 1973, the financial architecture of the world economy centered on a US engineered Keynesian accumulation agenda as a response to the devastation wrought by the Great Depression. The capitalist institutional structure, or social structure of accumulation (see Kotz et al., 1994), rested on finance being subservient to the promotion of industrial enterprise.

With socially-engineered capital–labour compromises in developed countries, neo-colonial governing institutions in the Third World, active State regulation in decisions with respect to capacity utilization, and a co-respective form of competition among large corporations set by regulations that brought together monetary authorities, large banks as well as large industrial capitalists, the post-World-War-II system was the era of “regulated capitalism”. Altogether, the world system was underpinned by the Bretton Woods arrangement, which called for globally fixed exchange rates against the US dollar tied to the price of gold and capital controls.

The international political-economic conditions were such that domestic macroeconomic autonomy, specifically with respect to monetary policy, for aggregate demand management could be feasible. Capital controls were seen as essential to reduce the volatility of capital flows and allow for low interest rates with the objective of pursuing full employment. As Keynes (1980, p. 276) argued, “we cannot hope to control rates of interest at home if movements of capital moneys out of the country are unrestricted.”

By the 1960s, however, US officials began to actively encouraging the growth of the Euromarket, that is, the pool of unregulated US dollar reserves concentrated in the City of London (Helleiner, 1994). With traditionally marginalized segments of the population in developed countries, particularly in the United States and in Western Europe, demanding social, political, and economic rights, and with national liberation movements in the Third World overthrowing US-supported oppressive governments, calls for an expanded role of the State in meeting citizens’ needs dramatically circumscribed global capital accumulation owing to heightened nominal wage–price spirals. Consequently, the global capitalist rate of profit fell (Duménil and Levy, 2004, p. 24). The Euromarket thus became the means for international financial markets to re-establish their influence, lost as a result of the Great Depression, and allow industrial enterprise to rebuild the conditions for future profitability via offshoring.

Speculative capital flows, however, began to undermine the capacity for the United States to guarantee the convertibility of US dollars into gold at fixed parity (Triffin, 1960). Even though the US dollar was the key international currency, it was fixed to gold. As such, debt was ultimately redeemable in an asset that was not directly controlled by the US monetary authority. Default was a possibility, even if a remote one, since through manipulation of the rate of interest, and through coercion and cooperation with other central banks in the world economy, the stability of the system could be maintained. With the globalization of finance via the Euromarket, nevertheless, speculation against the gold–dollar parity proliferated, making functional finance on a worldwide basis difficult to manage.

In 1971, Nixon closed the gold window and loosened capital controls. American officials concluded that it was no longer in their interests to maintain the linchpin relation between gold and the US dollar, and ipso facto withdrew support for the Bretton Woods system by which exchange rates were fixed and flows of capital were to a large degree controlled (see Helleiner, 1994; Vernengo, 2003; Ingham, 2008). The deregulation of financial markets established a global market of mobile financial capital, and the US dollar established itself as a global fiat-money standard. The world economy moved from a fixed dollar standard to a flexible dollar standard (Serrano, 2003).

For the first time in history, it is possible for the hegemonic country, in this case the United States, to be a global debtor, as national States are within their domestic economies, and to provide a default-risk-free asset to facilitate global capital accumulation. The risk that the United States would be unable to expand demand globally, because it is forced to maintain a fixed exchange rate between its currency and an external asset, is thus non-existent. It is true, however, that foreign countries and agents may show unwillingness to hold US-dollar-denominated assets, but, as in the domestic case, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) can always monetize public debt. This would be inflationary and lead to a run on the US dollar only if there is currency substitution on a massive scale, which would require a credible alternative to the US dollar (which does not exist yet). As such, the United States can therefore incur foreign debt without any reasonable limit.

Global imbalances, in particular the large US current account deficits that reflect their so-called “exorbitant privilege”, are instrumental for the functioning of the world economy, as evidenced by the dominance of the US dollar in international trade (Fields and Vernengo, 2013). An important part of this is associated to the fact that key commodities, like oil, are priced in US dollars in international markets. This not only implies that there cannot be an insufficient amount of dollars for the United States to import key commodities, but also that a depreciation of the US dollar does not reduce US imports necessarily (Parboni, 1981).

In fact, the Fed is the world economy’s central bank, which acts as the safety valve for mass amounts of international liquidity (Arrighi, 1999). The hegemonic position of the US dollar structures the world economy in such a fashion that the United States determines the international transmission mechanism for global economic activity. Hence, the role of the US dollar in international markets, and the advantages that come with it, are the spoils of structural power. The provision of this asset allows the United States to become the source of global demand, and to insulate itself from fluctuations and contradictions of perilous cumulative disequilibria that may arise in the world economy. The US dollar enables the United States to set the global social, political, and economic conditions, within which the transmission of misery (contagion) between countries, and between global and national levels, is essentially regulated.


REFERENCES:

Arrighi, G. (1999), “The global market”, Journal of World Systems Research, 5 (2), pp. 217–51.

Duménil, G. and D. Lévy (2004), Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, Boston: Harvard University Press.

Fields, D. and M. Vernengo (2013), “Hegemonic currencies during the crisis: the dollar versus the euro in a Cartalist perspective”, Review of International Political Economy, 20 (4), pp. 740–59.

Helleiner, E. (1994), States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ingham, G. (2008), Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Keynes, J.M. (1980), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XXV: Activities 1940–1944. Shaping the Post-War World: The Clearing Union, London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Cambridge University Press.

Kotz, D., T. McDonough and M. Reich (eds) (1994), Social Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parboni, R. (1981), The Dollar and Its Rivals: Recession, Inflation, and International Finance, London: Verso.

Serrano, F. (2003), “From static gold to floating dollar”, Contributions to Political Economy, 22 (1), pp. 87–102.

Triffin, R. (1960), Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Vernengo, M. (2003), “Bretton Woods”, in J. King (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 30–34.

New Levy Working Paper: Shadow Banking - Policy Challenges for Central Banks

By Thorvald Grung Moe*

Central banks responded with exceptional liquidity support during the financial crisis to prevent a systemic meltdown. They broadened their tool kit and extended liquidity support to non-banks and key financial markets. Many want central banks to embrace this expanded role as “market maker of last resort” going forward. This would provide a liquidity backstop for systemically important markets and the shadow banking system that is deeply integrated with these markets. But how much liquidity support can central banks provide to the shadow banking system without risking their balance sheets? I discuss the expanding role of the shadow banking sector and the key drivers behind its growing importance. There are close parallels between the growth of shadow banking before the recent financial crisis and earlier financial crises, with rapid growth in near monies as a common feature. This ebb and flow of shadow-banking-type liabilities are indeed an ingrained part of our advanced financial system. We need to reflect and consider whether official sector liquidity should be mobilized to stem a future breakdown in private shadow banking markets. Central banks should be especially concerned about providing liquidity support to financial markets without any form of structural reform. It would indeed be ironic if central banks were to declare victory in the fight against too-big-to-fail institutions, just to end up bankrolling too-big-to-fail financial markets.

Read rest here.

*Thorvald Grung Moe is a senior adviser at Norges Bank.