The new Marriner S. Eccles Institute, and his legacy

There are many issues I take exception with the piece at the Deseret News on the new Marriner S. Eccles Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. In the first place, the notion that it, somehow, “will provide some philosophical balance to the university’s educational offerings and scholarship on economics.” Not just because there is no need for more balance. Everybody in the David Eccles School is mainstream, neoclassical (so no balance there), and a good chunk of the Econ Dept (yep, basically there are two Econ. Depts at the U, which shouldn’t surprise anybody; NYU has a very neoclassical and conservative one with Thomas Sargent in the Liberal Arts/Social Sciences division, and another with Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini, at the Stern School of Business) also is neoclassical. The department was always pluralistic.

Actually, the balance in the education is brought by the fact that there are still a few heterodox economists in the Social Sciences Econ Dept., not including the two retired professors cited in the piece. And given the failure of the profession (in particular after the Great Recession) and the fact that a few at the Dept, when I was there btw, where aware of the bubble and the crisis (I remember getting emails from students saying that I had called the crisis; I didn’t per se, but was connected with many people that did and many like Jamie Galbraith or Jane D’Arista visited and taught at the U because of its diversity).

But the important problem with this institute is that it is a complete subversion of Marriner S. Eccles economic philosophy. In his Beckoning Frontiers (pictured above in a copy signed by him, btw), he says:

I believe, however, that the most basic right of all is the right to live, and next to that, the right to work. I do not think that empty stomachs build character, nor do I think the substitution of idleness and a dole for useful work relief will improve either the dignity or the character of the people affected. We cannot expect to preserve our free institutions in this country if we condemn a substantial proportion of our people to prolonged idleness on a bare subsistence level of existence. Further than the right to eat and the right to a position, I think the individual, whether rich or poor, has a right to a decent place to live. I think he has a right to security in old age and to protection against temporary unemployment. I think he has a right to adequate medical attention and to equal educational opportunities with the rest of his countrymen. The government expenditures (…) have in large part been the means of translating these basic rights into realities. [Italics added]

How in hell you square that philosophy, which is quintessentially the one of the New Deal, with a center funded by the Koch brothers’ libertarian, minimal state philosophy is hard to understand. On Eccles read my old paper in the working paper series (later published in this volume) of the U’s Econ Dept.

"The Question of Confidence" According to Marriner Eccles

From an address at a Conference on "Debt, Taxation, and Inflation" organized by the Wharton Institute of the University of Pennsylvania in May 8, 1936, and held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In his words:

"Leaving aside plans which involved fundamental and far-reaching changes in our whole economic organization, the solutions offered to the country in 1933 were of two main types. On the one hand there were those who contended that all that was needed was the restoration of confidence. They insisted that it was essential to balance the budget... On the other hand there were those who, like myself, felt that recovery in the present situation could only be achieved by bold and aggressive intervention by the government, largely through underpinning the entire private credit structure which had collapsed, and undertaking to restore purchasing power through relief, public expenditures and other measures.
...
What businessman would have added to his plant, when he already possessed a great amount of excess capacity, merely because he read that the budget had been balanced? It is difficult to understand why people would be expected to invest money in new enterprise when existing investments were becoming less profitable every day. It should not require any great insight to understand that a reduction of government expenditures while everybody else as a matter of self-protection was being forced to reduce expenditures, could only accentuate the processes of deflation by reducing buying power.
...
A belief that industry would have voluntarily entered upon capital expenditures in 1933 if the government had restricted its expenditures and raised taxes is unrealistic to the highest degree. It displays an utter miscomprehension of the considerations that influence a business man in planning expenditures. There must be reason to believe that capital expenditures can be profitably made before they are undertaken."

Note that this argument builds on a clear comprehension of the accelerator mechanism. Firms buy machines when  they expect demand to increase and, hence, higher profits. In this sense, the empirical evidence on the accelerator should be relevant not just to show that low interest rates are not sufficient for expanding demand, but also to put a nail in the coffin of the confidence fairy. Austerity hurts confidence and private investment.

More on Heterodox Central Bankers

The Great Depression led to a need to rethink the principles of central banking, as much as it had led to the rethinking of economics in general, with the Keynesian Revolution at the forefront of the theoretical changes. This paper suggests that the role of the monetary authority as a fiscal agent of government and the abandonment of the view of the economy as self-regulated were the central changes in central banking in the center. In addition, in the periphery central banks changed to try to insulate the worst effects of balance of payments crises and the use of capital controls became more common. Marriner S. Eccles, in the United States, and Raúl Prebisch, in Argentina, are paradigmatic examples of those new tendencies of central banking in the 1930s.

Fed up with the full empoyment target?

The debate on Bernanke's views on inflation targeting -- whether it should be 2 or 4% -- as I noted in a previous post is peculiar, to say the least. After all the Fed has a dual mandate, and inflation preoccupations have to be tempered by the pressing question of unemployment. The preoccupation in some quarters is that the Fed has already accepted as a matter of fact that it has single mandate (see here and here). It seems to me that critics (e.g. Krugman, DeLong and others) are correct for the wrong reasons.

The graph below shows the effective Fed Funds rate in the last three recessions (represented by the shaded areas). The rate of interest falls in all three during or just before the recession.

Further, after the trough of the recession the Greenspan Fed took 46 and 35 months to start raising the rate in the previous two recessions. So far, 35 months after the last trough, the Bernanke Fed has not increased the rate. This time around it has done Quantitative Easing allowing for lower long term rates too, which was not done during the Greenspan era. If anything the Fed has done more now than under Greenspan, and unless you believe in the inflation expectations fairy, the old Eccles maxim is still true, monetary policy now is like pushing on a string.

So how is that critics of the Fed are correct and I believe that the dual mandate (full employment and inflation) is gone. Well look at the graph below. It shows the Fed Funds, again, with the 10 year Treasury bonds rate.

Notice that the Fed eventually raises the Fed Funds sufficiently to surpass the bond rate, and invert the yield curve. The point is to slowdown the economy, and avoid full employment. Even in the 1990s, when Greenspan allowed the bubble to continue and unemployment to fall below the then official limit of 6%, he eventually took action, when wages started to increase. Full employment has not been a target, but keeping workers demands for higher wages checked has been very much part of the reaction function. Jamie Galbraith has written about it (go here for a technical paper). So the Fed has a single target mandate, but is not an inflation target, it is a "fear of full employment target."

The Fed can do practical things like helping distressed borrowers (with defaulted or underwater mortgages), but it cannot directly increase spending, and in the absence of private spenders (domestic or foreign), or local governments, it must be the federal government. Bernanke is not the problem right now. Geithner is (and so is Congress).

PS: The New Keynesian view that if you increase expected inflation spending goes up is now defended by Brad DeLong. He says: "an extra $100 billion of quantitative easing boosts the expected price level ten years hence by 1%--and boosts expected inflation after the next decade by an average of 0.1%/year. That is enough to spur higher spending and a more rapid and satisfactory recovery." I'm not against QE per se, the idea of maintaining long term rates low. But the notion that it would lead to inflation (printing money generates inflation) and that expected inflation generates a boost in productive spending is clearly another confidence fairy story.

The inflation expectations fairy

There are confidence fairies and there is the inflation expectations fairy. It's a 4% fairy apparently. I'll explain. So Krugman correctly points out always that the more fundamentalist neoclassical economists (the Talibans that love price flexibility and instantaneous adjustment to full employment, not the moderates that also believe in a natural rate, but think it takes a while to get to it like Krugman himself) believe that the economy would recover if only a proper environment for investment was created. Hence, if confidence returned we would have a recovery.

They obviously invert causality between confidence and recovery. As noted by Marriner Eccles long ago: "confidence itself is not a cause. It is the effect of things already in motion. (...) What passed as a 'lack of confidence' crisis was really nothing more than an investor's recognition of the fact that new plant facilities were not needed at the time." Investment is the result of a growing economy, in which firms tend to adjust their capacity to demand. No demand for your goods no need to invest to create capacity to produce more. Plain and simple.

Now a dispute on what is the appropriate policy for the Fed, and what has been Bernanke's role has developed between Krugman and Bernanke (see here and here) [Ball has a more academic paper saying basically the same as Krugman here]. They argue that Bernanke has been correct in pursuing quantitative easing -- the buying of long term Treasury bonds to keep not just short, but also long term interest low -- and saving banks, but he has been reluctant to increase the inflation target to 4%. Blanchard has said pretty much the same about the need for a higher inflation target (this was hailed as new thinking in macroeconomics; with that criteria when Greenspan disregarded the 6% natural rate of unemployment level, believing it was somewhat lower, he was a radical innovator!). [I’ll leave for another post the question of why are we even talking about an inflation target in the US if the Fed supposedly doesn’t have one].

Krugman notes that Greg Mankiw actually has sent a veiled (or not so veiled threat, as he is the advisor to Romney, which may or may not have something to do with Bernanke’s reappointment in the future), saying that “if Chairman Bernanke ever suggested increasing inflation to, say, 4 percent, he would quickly return to being Professor Bernanke” (originally published here, yep Mankiw also writes regularly for the NYTimes).

So what is the mechanism according to Krugman (and the ‘progressives’ like the IMF chief economist Blanchard) by which a higher inflation target would lead to a recovery? In Krugman’s own words:

"If the Fed were to raise its target for inflation — and if investors believed in the new target — expected inflation over the medium term, say the next 10 years, would be higher. … [and] higher expected inflation would aid an economy up against the zero lower bound, because it would help persuade investors and businesses alike that sitting on cash is a bad idea. "

So if the Fed says it’s willing to accept a higher level of inflation – without doing anything concrete and objective like intervening and forcing banks to refinance the mortgages of people in foreclosure – then if investors are persuaded they may be confident enough to spend more. And that’s not a fairy?! The problem with any theory, including the New Keynesian, that believes [or says it does in order to get published] that there is a tendency to full employment, is that it must end on some sort of confidence for spending story, since under normal conditions the system would actually do it anyways. The confidence fairy is dead; long live the inflation expectations fairy!

Heterodox central bankers II

"At the present time we are still in the depths of a depression and, beyond creating an easy money situation, there is very little, if anything, that the Reserve organization can do toward bringing about recovery. One cannot push a string. I believe, however, that if a condition of great business activity were developing to a point of credit inflation, monetary action could be very effective in curbing undue expansion. That would be pulling a string."

Marriner S. Eccles

Chairman, Federal Reserve Board

March 4-20, 1935.

"The factor of unutilized capacity appears to furnish the decisive answer to the argument that if the budget had been balanced the resulting restoration of confidence would in itself have led to recovery. There is nothing in balancing the budget that would lead to an absorption of excess capacity and hence make it profitable for business to increase its disbursements for plant and equipment. On the contrary, balancing the budget, by curtailing the incomes of people receiving money from the Government and by reducing buying power through increased taxes, would heve been expected to decrease demand and hence increase excess capacity."

Marriner S. Eccles

Chairman, Federal Reserve Board

June 8, 1936

Zingales vs. DeLong: Eccles wins!

So Luigi Zingales, from the University of Chicago, said that "the current crisis is not a demand crisis, it is a trust crisis," as quoted in Brad DeLong's post. DeLong replies that "bad government policies certainly produced a trust crisis," and "as a consequence, all across the economy agents cut back on their expenditures on currently-produced goods and services." In other words, this is a confidence crisis that led to a demand crisis.

Marriner S. Eccles, the chairman of the Fed during the depression, wrote in his autobiographic book, Beckoning Frontiers, that "confidence itself is not a cause. It is the effect of things already in motion. (...) What passed as a 'lack of confidence' crisis was really nothing more than an investor's recognition of the fact that new plant facilities were not needed at the time." Put clearly, lack of trust is the result of lack of demand. I suppose, in Chicago and Berkeley, Eccles, and common sense, are démodé.