Functional Finance, MMT and Blanchard's Presidential Address

So Olivier Blanchard gave the AEA presidential address at the Atlanta meetings earlier this year. If you missed it you can watch it here. The paper is also here. In all fairness, there is nothing new there. He notes the famous rule by Evsey Domar about sustainability of public debt, meaning that if the rate of interest on debt is lower than the rate of growth, debt-to-GDP ratios tend to be stable and you are in no danger in pursuing active fiscal policies.

Note that functional finance is in many ways compatible with Old Neoclassical Synthesis Keynesianism, and it should not be a surprise that New Keynesians accept some of the same arguments. Certainly Domar was an Old Keynesian in that mold, and although he was more difficult to classify, Abba Lerner the founder of functional finance accepted many marginalist arguments.

Blanchard actually is quite conventional and argues that public debt has negative welfare effects and reduces growth (forget this, that the Industrial Revolution was done on a pile, a huge pile, of public debt). He is very clear that he's not in general in favor of more debt, but only under the current circumstances, in which the rate of growth would be above the risk free interest rate of government bonds (that he calls the safe rate) and the marginal efficiency of capital (which really means he thinks in terms of a natural rate, in Wicksellian fashion).

Yet, of course, pundits went crazy. A typical reaction is from Desmond Lachman, and ex-IMF economist (i.e. worked for Blanchard), and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in the Wall-Street Journal. Two things, one he suggests that Blanchard is a defender of MMT, which is a stretch. MMT involves more than functional finance, like a notion of endogenous and chartal money, and a policy preoccupation with full employment, often embodied in an Employer of Last Resort (ELR) proposal (that's a non exhaustive list). The second issue is that his whole argument is that the rate of interest will go up soon (as a result, presumably of foreign bond holders; in his words: "It’s more likely that investors, particularly from overseas, will demand higher government bond yields to compensate for the elevated inflation or default risk they see from an ever-increasing public debt ratio"). In other words, the foreign crowding-out of the old Mundell-Fleming model.

Of course, the are many problems with this arguments. The Fed has considerably more room than other central banks, and US bonds play a special role in the global economy. The dollar has been relatively appreciated, even with very low rates of interest, and the notion that something has to be done, even with some depreciation, is bogus. Depreciation is neither inflationary, nor contractionary in the US, in contrast to developing countries. The chances of higher inflation, are also subdued, even with the current long, but slow, recovery with low official unemployment. But it says something that there is all this crazy reaction about a very modest defense of fiscal expansion (note also that after Bernie, and AOC, MMT has become synonymous with fiscal expansionism, in ways that Keynesianism was before; naked Keynesianism, you might argue).

PS: If you are interested on the effects of monetization of public debt read this old post that replied to Krugman (who has warmed up to some functional finance/MMT ideas).

Crowding out: what's the evidence?

Before the publication of Keynes' General Theory, most marginalist economists were against expansionary fiscal policy. It was believed that an increase in government spending would reduce by the same amount private spending, and, hence, it would have no effect on output and employment. Keynes referred to this as the Treasury View, since bureaucrats at the Treasury were prone to believe it. This has been known as crowding-out in more recent times.The evidence is not particularly forthcoming, as far as I can tell.

Amazingly, given the relevance of the topic for conservative ideas, and the fact that this is still the reason why the fear of deficits and debt is so pervasive, there is not much research on the effects of deficits on interest rates. Robert Murphy, on the Instructor's Resources for Mankiw's manual (funny that is NOT in the manual) says:

"Economists worry, therefore, that high deficits imply low levels of investment, leading ultimately to a lower capital stock and so lower living standards. It is, therefore, important to see if this prediction that high deficits lead to high interest rates is supported by the data. Like many empirical questions in economics, this one is difficult to answer unequivocally. Figure 1 shows a scatterplot of the real government deficit and the ex post real interest rate between 1960 and 2000. While there is some evidence of a positive association, it is not strong."

The graph below.

Updating the graph for 1962 to 2014, with CPI for deflating the rate of interest, I've got the following graph:

 

There is a very weak, and statistically insignificant relation between deficits and the real rate of interest (note that in mine deficits are negative). In my view, this suggests that there is no clear relation. Deficits do not seem to impact the rate of interest, and crowding out is not empirically relevant. There are plenty theoretical reasons for not believing in it too. And Ricardian Equivalence is NOT one of those. But that would be material for another post.

PS: The weak correlation remains even if one adjusts for outliers, by the way. So no there is nothing there, and that's why there isn't much in the mainstream published on this.

Crowding out and the Industrial Revolution

A while ago I posted on Bill McColloch's paper on the role of financial regulation during the 18th century. One of the arguments that Bill's paper tries to refute is the idea that the revisionist views that suggest slower growth in England during the Industrial Revolution (Crafts and Harley here; subscription required) was caused by crowding out (see, for example, Jeffrey Williamson here). Bill correctly points out that interest rates remained low in England.

The graph below, from Dickson's classic book on the Financial Revolution shows that throughout the 18th century interest rates actually fell.

More importantly, British rates remained well below the levels of the French ones, and gave a significant advantage in their quest for global hegemony, as the graph below shows (source here).

Note that even if one accepts the lower rates of growth suggested by Crafts and Harley, the explanation for the lower rates of investment should not be that surprising. Yes, the accelerator. Lower levels of growth imply one needs lower levels of investment in order to adjust supply to growing demand.

The usual rules of economics

Krugman continues to defend his activist policies on the basis of the 'liquidity trap.' Beyond the usual confusion criticized several times here, he says that: "some of the usual rules of economics are in abeyance as long as the trap lasts. Budget deficits, for example, don’t drive up interest rates; printing money isn’t inflationary; slashing government spending has really destructive effects on incomes and employment." So according to him usually you have crowding out (higher interest rates with higher deficits), inflation is demand driven and caused by money printing (exogenous money), and cutting spending has no effect on employment (expansionary contractions).

None of this holds in normal times either, and he should know better. The evidence for the effects of budget deficits on interest rates, even in normal times, is not particularly favorable to the crowding out argument. The effects of a higher deficit-to-GDP ratio on long-term interest rates tends to be small, when it's statistically significant. And arguably even that small effect might be due to reverse causality, that is, the higher interest rate causes higher financial spending and higher deficits.

The same problems of causality plague the relationship between money and inflation too. And it has been accepted by almost everybody that central banks, always and not just in liquidity traps, control the rate of interest, not money supply. Unless you really believe that the economy in normal times is at full employment. If unemployment is the normal situation, then that would mean that the Fed sets the rate of interest, money supply is endogenous, and inflation, if it does exist, is cost driven. And if you really think that the 1970s inflation in the US was casued by money printing rather than the oil shocks and wage resistance, then it's hard to take you seriously.

Finally, wait, does he seriously think that, in non-liquidity trap periods, if you cut spending, then income and unemployment don't increase? I guess Okun's Law only works during liquidity traps. Oh well; and he is on our side. As they say, with friends like this...

A Shackled Revolution? The Bubble Act and Financial Regulation in 18th Century England

New Working Paper by Bill McColloch, which refutes anti-Keynesian (crowding out) views on the Industrial Revolution (IR). From the abstract:

"Revisionist estimates of growth rates during the British industrial revolution, though largely successful in presenting a more modest picture of Britain’s ‘take-off’ prior to the 1830s, have also posed fresh analytical difficulties for champions of the new economic history. If 18th-century Britain was witness to a diffuse explosion of ‘useful knowledge,’ why did aggregate growth rates or industrial output growth rates not more closely shadow the pace of technological change? In effort to explain this paradox, Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth have claimed that a few key institutional restrictions on financial markets – namely the Bubble Act, and tightening of usury laws in 1714 – served to amplify the "crowding out" impact of government borrowing. Against this vision, the present paper contends that the adverse impact of financial regulation and state borrowing in 18th century Britain has been greatly overstated. To this end, the paper first briefly outlines the historical context in which the Bubble Act emerged, before turning to survey the existing diversity of perspectives on the Act’s lasting impact. It is then argued that there is little evidence to support the view that the Bubble Act significantly restricted firms’ access to capital. Following this, it is suggested that the “crowding out” model, theoretical shortcomings aside, is largely inapplicable to 18th century Britain. The savings-constrained vision of British capital markets significantly downplays the extent to which the Bank of England, though founded as an institution to manage the public debt, provided the entire financial system with liquidity in the 18th century."

The paper by Temin and Voth is here. Their recently published book is here.

Crafts and Harley's re-interpretation of the IR in Britain, alluded to in the text, is available here (subscription required). The classic book on the British IR that Crafts and Harley try to supersede is by Deane and Cole (here). A discussion of the two views by Temin is available here.

On whether the British government had a role in financing the IR, it is worth remembering Pressnell's (subscription required) words, for whom:

"Amongst the half-truths of economic history is the generalization that British Governments did not finance the Industrial Revolution. That public financial aid was not a regular and conscious process cannot be doubted; equally, it is indisputable that Government was not distinguished during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the provision of financial facilities commensurate with a period of economic expansion. In practice, however, a considerable volume of public money swelled the funds of private bankers, and in this indirect fashion helped to fructify private enterprise."

Pressnell suggests that country bankers were often tax collectors, and closely related to industrial activities. The incredible growth of public debt, to 260% of GDP by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the increase in government revenue to pay for debt service, implied a signiifcant increase in liquidity which is associated to the financing of the IR.

PS: Newton (pictured above) lost his pants in the South Sea Bubble, and also was famous for getting the exchange rate between gold and silver wrong (he was the Master of the Mint), leading to hoarding of silver, and the beggining of an effective Gold Standard in Britain.

The IMF and stylized fiction

The IMF has posted their Top 20 list of most popular entries since the launch of the blog. At #3 they have the Ten Commandments of Fiscal Adjustement in Advanced Economies, which is from 2010, but still worth reading, since their views have hardly changed. I am not going to go through the whole list, even though it does merit careful analysis. I want just to point out a few problems with three of the commandments (do they really need the religious analogy?). This 10 Commandments are based on the IMF's views on the stylized facts of fiscal consolidations.

Note that the IMF wants a reduction in debt-to-GDP ratios in the long run (commandment #3), even if nobody knows exactly what is the difference of having a 40% ratio, which they recommend for 'emerging markets' (meaning developing economies), or a 250%, as the UK had during the Napoleonic Wars (here). My first concern is with the idea that consolidation (by which they mean austerity) should be done by cutting spending and not increasing taxes (#4), because this is more conducive to growth.

This is a proposition they repeat in their last Fiscal Monitor (2012: p. 35), where we are told that:

"a number of earlier studies have shown that expenditure-based fiscal consolidations have a more favorable effect on output than revenue-based consolidations, in spite of the standard multiplier analysis … Chapter 3 of the October 2010 World Economic Outlook reaches the same conclusion (IMF, 2010b) and notes that this result is partly because, on average, central banks lower interest rates more in the case of expenditure-based consolidations (perhaps because they regard them as more long-lasting)."

Note, however, that the reason for the superior performance for cutting spending instead of raising taxes (on the rich one would hope) is that the Central Bank does not hike rates in the former case, since it is part of a conservative plan to reduce the size of government (note that the IMF asks for consolidations to be fair, #6, but then wants to cuts social spending, #5). Worse the notion is also based on the idea that lower (higher) spending brings down (up) the rate of interest and leads to crowding in (out) of private investment. The problem is that the evidence for a positive (negative) effect of fiscal deficits (surplus), or public spending increase (reduction), on interest rates, is that it is almost non-existent (see UNCTAD, 2011, chapter 3 for a review).

The other point is related to the last commandment (#10), which says that you should coordinate your macroeconomic policies with other countries. I'm not even going to deal with the problems of coordination. My problem is that the arguments tend to be based on the Mundell-Fleming (MF) model (the ISLMBP with perfect capital mobility), which suggests that fiscal policy is less efficient in a small open economy. In this case, fiscal policy raises the rate of interest, with capital mobility, pressures for inflows lead to an appreciation of the currency, and lower trade surpluses. Instead of crowding out, meaning lower investment, one gets lower output from the external accounts. That's why they say in their last Fiscal Monitor that "in line with the theory, fiscal multipliers tend to be smaller in more open economies" (2012, p. 33).

Again this depends on a weak empirical relation. In the United States seldom is the case that expansionary fiscal policy causes higher rates of interest. In fact, the policy of the strong dollar, with the impact on manufacturing output and exports, has often been detached from fiscal expansionism or higher rates of interest (e.g. the Clinton years in which a strong dollar went hand in hand with fiscal consolidation and monetary easing to feed the dot-com bubble).

Finally, note that even small open economies in several periods were able to have very effective fiscal policies, because in spite of relatively flexible exchange rates, they used capital controls to avoid the effects of volatile capital flows on their external accounts. In this sense, the world of relatively regulated capital flows, rather than of fixed exchange rates (even if sometimes the two are confounded as a result of the Bretton Woods arrangement), seems to be more conducive to effective fiscal policy. So the lesson should not be that small open economies cannot do effective fiscal policy, but that capital controls (which they are not quite okay with contrary to what you might have heard, but I leave for another post) are necessary.

PS: For a more consistent theoretical critique of the MF model see Serrano and Summa (2012).