Why We Shouldn't Feel Well-Guided

Today's FOMC statement was as expected on the quantitative easing (QE) side of policy. The Fed will continue to purchase $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) per month, and will be purchasing $45 billion per month in long Treasury securities outright, rather than swapping short Treasuries for long ones.

There were some surprises (for me) in the change in forward guidance. Let's see what the statement says, so we can parse it:

the Committee decided to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that this exceptionally low range for the federal funds rate will be appropriate at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6-1/2 percent, inflation between one and two years ahead is projected to be no more than a half percentage point above the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run goal, and longer-term inflation expectations continue to be well anchored. The Committee views these thresholds as consistent with its earlier date-based guidance. In determining how long to maintain a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy, the Committee will also consider other information, including additional measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial developments. When the Committee decides to begin to remove policy accommodation, it will take a balanced approach consistent with its longer-run goals of maximum employment and inflation of 2 percent.

The first part of this, is a trigger at at a 6.5% unemployment rate. Actually, it's not a trigger, as the 6.5% unemployment rate is just a necessary condition for tightening. The second part - the inflation trigger - is pretty weird. A second necessary condition for tightening is an inflation forecast -one to two years ahead - that exceeds 2.5%. Note the following:

(i) The FOMC is going to ignore actual inflation. Apparently that's irrelevant.
(ii) Whose forecast is this? You know whose. It's the Fed's own forecast. If you're paying attention to the Fed's forecasts, you'll understand that they basically make it up so that it's consistent with their own policy.

We're also told that inflation expectations becoming unanchored would be grounds for tightening. What is that supposed to mean? Then we're told that, of course, the Fed will look at everything, just as it always does.

If the goal was to provide a more precise statement about what will trigger a tightening of policy in the future, the FOMC has failed dismally. This statement is more vague than the last one, in October, which contained a calendar date.

What about policy after liftoff? We're told that the committee"...will take a balanced approach consistent with its longer-run goals of maximum employment and inflation of 2 percent." I'm worried that this is balanced like Fox News. The last reference to "balanced approach" I saw was in a speech by Janet Yellen. The balanced approach, as far as I can tell, represents a marked change in monetary policy, toward an activist approach rooted in the belief that short-run non-neutralities of money are a very big deal. The Fed has just told us that they care a lot less about inflation. They're losing sight of what their job is.

Option C

In the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, many people think the House Republicans are in a tough spot.  The logic is that they have little leverage, because they face only two choices:

A. Concede to most of the president's demands.
B. Take the economy over the cliff, and get blamed for it.

As a result, the logic goes, they will end up doing A, because B is so much worse.

Keith Hennessey points out that there is also option C: Extend the tax cuts, except at the top, for one year. Apparently (and I was not aware of this), Senate Democrats passed a bill doing exactly this back in July.  If the House passes it now, it goes to the President's desk, and he would have a hard time vetoing it.

This is not great policy, as it sets up another fiscal cliff one year from now, and it does not address all the spending cuts that are part of the fiscal cliff.  But from the Republicans' point of view, it may be better than either A or B.  Keith argues that the ability of Speaker Boehner to fall back on this option should give him more bargaining power as he negotiates with the president.  That is, because the president won't like option C either, the possibility that it could occur may make him more willing to compromise.  From the president's perspective, it is better to make concessions today than having to do this whole fiscal-cliff thing again a year from now.

Fed Update

The FOMC is meeting today and tomorrow. What is on its collective mind? There are two issues which are likely to be on the agenda relating, respectively, to the two legs of the Fed's current unconventional policy actions: quantitative easing and forward guidance.

Quantitative Easing
The Fed's "operation twist" will end at the end of this month. Recall that this asset swap program began in September 2011, and was extended in June of this year. The program involves sales of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of 3 years and less in exchange for Treasury securities with remaining maturities 6 years or more. Those swaps have been proceeding at a rate of $45 billion per month. Even if the Fed wanted to continue that program, it would not be feasible, as the short-term Treasury securities on the Fed's balance sheet are all but depleted.

Since September, the Fed has been purchasing $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) per month - the "QE3" program. This is also an asset swap, but in this case a swap of reserves for MBS. QE3 is an open-ended program, which will continue under conditions stated, for example, in the last FOMC statement:

If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability.

My best guess is that the committee will not think of the new information received since the last meeting as indicating "substantial" improvement in the labor market, and they will be looking to keep their policy stance the "same" as it was at the last meeting. But they can't do that, as it's impossible to continue the twist asset swap. What's the next best thing? Well, if you believe that QE works to actually ease something, as the FOMC certainly does, then you should also think that there is little difference between swapping short Treasuries for long Treasuries and swapping reserves for long Treasuries. What you should expect to see is a QE4 program involving purchases of $40 billion in MBS per month and $45 billion in long Treasuries per month. In terms of total purchases, that's a little larger than QE2, which involved purchases of about $75 billion per month (all Treasuries). The Fed could of course buy more than $40 billion in MBS per month, but that would signal a change, and they're not likely to do it (I'm not sure about the feasibility either - how big is that market?).

Some concerns:
1)The Treasury and the Fed are clearly thinking about debt management in completely different ways. As for example James Hamilton and David Beckworth have pointed out, the Treasury has been systematically increasing the average maturity of the outstanding government debt in the hands of the public, while the Fed is systematically reducing it. The Treasury might be thinking that it can save a huge amount on debt service in the future by, for example, locking in a 30-year borrowing rate of 2.84%. The Treasury seems to think it is looking after us by lengthening the average maturity of government debt, lowering borrowing costs, and presumably lowering our future tax burden. But the Fed thinks that we get more real economic activity (temporarily, permanently?) if the average maturity of government debt is lower. The Fed also thinks it is looking out for us. Maybe Ben Bernanke should walk down the street and try to sort this out with Tim Geithner (or his successor).
2)Short of a theory of QE - or more generally a serious theory of the term structure of interest rates - no one has a clue what the effects are, if any. Until someone suggests something better, the best guess is that QE is irrelevant. Any effects you think you are seeing are either coming from somewhere else, or have to do with what QE signals for the future policy rate. The good news is that, if it's irrelevant, it doesn't do any harm. But if the FOMC thinks it works when it doesn't, that could be a problem, in that negative QE does not tighten, just as positive QE does not ease.

Forward Guidance
This is where the big change in policy is likely to occur. In public statements, various Fed presidents have been honing a policy rule that involves quantitative triggers. Until now, the FOMC's forward guidance statements have included a calendar date for "liftoff" - the date at which the Fed's policy rate (the interest rate on reserves currently, given the large stock of reserves outstanding) rises above 0.25%. The last FOMC statement says that date is "likely" to be mid-2015.

After living with calendar dates in the forward guidance language since August 2011, FOMC members now appear to think they are a bad idea. Why? The Fed generally likes the idea of forward guidance, as it is another tool the Fed thinks it can use when it is up against the zero lower bound. Support for the idea comes from New Keynesians - Woodford et al. - and New Keynesian models. But Woodford is on record as thinking that a calendar date is a bad idea. One may think that extending the liftoff date will be more accommodative, as this increases anticipated inflation and lowers the real rate of interest, but extending the liftoff date also conveys pessimism.

The triggers for liftoff typically take the following form. The policy rate should stay at 0.25% until one of two things happen: (i) the inflation rate rises above x%; (ii) the unemployment rate falls below y%. Most of the public debate currently seems to be over what x and y should be. x is typically in the range 2.5 to 3.0, and y is typically 5.5 to 7.0. The argument for triggers is that a calendar date can lead to policy errors, or negates the intent of the policy. If the Fed commits to the calendar date, it risks waiting too long to tighten, or it tightens too soon. But if the Fed appears willing to move the calendar date in response to new information, the forward guidance becomes meaningless. With triggers, the FOMC can state the policy once, commit to it, and move forward.

Here are the problems with triggers:
(1)To be well-understood, the triggers need to be specified in a very simple form. As such it seems as likely that the Fed will make a policy error if it commits to a trigger as if it commits to a calendar date. The unemployment rate seems as good a variable as any to capture what is going on in the real economy, but as such it's pretty bad. It's hardly a sufficient statistic for everything the Fed should be concerned with.
(2)This is a bad precedent to set, for two reasons. First, the Fed should not be setting numerical targets for anything related to the real side of the dual mandate. As is well-known, the effect of monetary policy on real economic activity is transient, and the transmission process poorly understood. It would be foolish to pretend that we know what the level of aggregate economic activity should be, or that the Fed knows how to get there. Second, once you convince people that triggers are a good idea in this "unusual" circumstance, those same people will wonder what makes other circumstances "normal." Why not just write down a Taylor rule for the Fed, and send the FOMC home? Again, our knowledge of how the economy works, and what future contingencies await us, is so bad that it seems optimal, at least to me, that the Fed make it up as it goes along.

My overriding concern is that the Fed's unconventional policy moves - one on top of the other - are digging a deep hole that it will find it difficult to get out of. Of course, Ben Bernanke seems likely to leave at the end of his term in about a year's time, so it won't be his problem.

The Poverty Trap in France

From Forbes:

Let’s take an unemployed mother living alone with two children between six and 10 years old. In 2010, there were 284,445 French families in this situation that were on welfare.

This mother will be given the “Active Solidarity Income.” Since she has two children, the amount will be $1,100. If she is renting an apartment with a $650 rent, she will be given the “Housing Customized Aid,” amounting to $620. Then she will receive “Family Allowances,” which amounts to another $160. Finally, let’s add the payment known as “Allowance for the start of the school year,” which is $750 once a year, or $62.50 per month. (She might even benefit from other aids, but these are the most common.) She will be given a total of $1,942.50 per month.

Now imagine that this mother has found work and will be paid the “legal minimum wage,” which amounts to $1,820 gross—or $1,430 after taxes. Since she would be earning $1,430, she will no longer receive the “Active Solidarity income.” Her “Housing Customized Aid” will be lowered to $460, but she will still be given “Family Allowances” and the “Allowance for the start of the school year.” Therefore, her total income will amount to $2,112.50....

For this mother of two, working again will bring her family an additional income of only $170. Moreover, this $170 is likely to be lost in the cost of transportation to work, since the cost of gas in France is $7 per gallon. In any case, such a small amount of money is not an incentive to go back to work. Between staying home and working, the choice is simple: welfare is a better deal.

Make Your Own Deficit-Reduction Plan

The Wall Street Journal's interactive graphic lets you choose from a menu of options.

She's German. He's Greek. It's Christmas.

Click here for the previous installment.

Gaps and Triangles

James Tobin once said:

It takes a heap of Harberger triangles to fill an Okun gap.

Gregory Mankiw once discussed gaps versus triangles in the context of fiscal policy issues (the 2009 stimulus package). According to Mankiw, Keynesians think of Harberger triangles as small potatoes, and output gaps as large potatoes; non-Keynesians think the opposite. That's certainly consistent with Paul Krugman's view of the world. Krugman quotes Tobin in his post, and states:

...it’s a more general observation that even bad microeconomic policies, which lead to substantial distortions in the use of resources, have a hard time doing remotely as much damage as a severe economic slump, which doesn’t misallocate resources — it simply wastes them.

What's a Harberger triangle? It's a partial equilibrium measure of the welfare loss from a distortion - a tax or monopoly power for example. Total welfare from the production and consumption of a given good or service can be measured as consumer surplus plus producer surplus, which is the area under the demand curve minus the area under the supply curve, calculated given the quantity traded in the market. Total welfare is maximized at the competitive equilibrium quantity and price, but a proportional tax, for example, reduces the quantity traded, and the welfare loss (when we include the revenue generated from the tax) is a triangle - indeed a Harberger triangle.

In the 1950s, Harberger measured the welfare loss from monopoly in the United States, essentially by adding up these triangles for monopolized industries. He came up with a small number - about 0.1% of GDP. Thus, if we were to use Harberger's methods to add up the heap of Harberger triangles arising from tax distortions, monopoly, various trade restrictions, and other synthetic obstacles to exchange, the welfare loss we obtain should be small.

Are output gaps large? Certainly Paul Krugman thinks so.

Right now the U.S. economy is operating something like 6 percent below capacity.

A 6% output gap is what you get if you use the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's) measure of potential output. The chart shows this measure, along with actual real GDP. Suppose we take the CBO output gap of 6% of GDP as an accurate measure of what could be achieved if the fiscal and monetary authorities in the United States behaved appropriately. Also suppose that 0.1% is a good part of the heap of Harberger triangles in existence in the US economy. Then, indeed, the heap of triangles looks trivial relative to the gap.

But this isn't as obvious as it might look to some of you. Let's go back to Tobin's article ("How Dead is Keynes?"), where the quote comes from, and try to figure out what he was trying to say. Perhaps surprisingly, he wasn't comparing the welfare cost of business cycles to the welfare costs of "micro" distortions. In his article, Tobin said that 1977 policymakers were between the rock and the hard place. To achieve disinflation would require some sacrifice in terms of lost output. But further monetary accommodation would just lead to self-fulfilling increases in inflation. According to Tobin, "the way out, the only way out, is incomes policy." Then he states:

Most of you will, I'm sure, have no idea what "incomes policy" is, and that's a wonderful thing. "Incomes policy" sounds innocuous. What could be wrong with a government policy that looks after our incomes, presumably making them larger? Well, incomes policy is actually wage and price controls. In the pre-Volcker era, wage-price controls were very much on the table as a means for controlling inflation. Wage and price controls were introduced by the Nixon administration, and were in effect from 1971 to 1974 in the United States. I had the misfortune to live through the era of the Anti-Inflation Board in Canada, 1975-1978. The key achievement of Milton Friedman and the Old Monetarists was to convince everyone that inflation control is the job of the central bank. It's hard to find anyone today who disagrees with that view, and I think that's a good.

The funny, and I think key, point comes out of Tobin's confusion about gaps and triangles. Relative to what he's discussing, the gap and the triangles are actually exactly the same thing. Early in his paper, Tobin discusses the "central propositions" of Keynes's General Theory. To start:

So, inefficiencies arise because prices and wages are not at their market-clearing values, and quantities traded are demand-determined. In this context, how would we measure the efficiency loss in a particular market? Guess what, it's a Harberger triangle. The inefficiencies Tobin envisions arising from wage and price controls arise from what? From wages and prices that deviate from their market clearing values. What's the efficiency loss? It's a Harberger triangle. It takes a heap of Harberger triangles to fill a heap of Harberger triangles.

If I were a hardcore Keynesian - New, Old, whatever - how would I measure the costs of business cycles? Well, to start, I would accept Tobin's first central proposition from the General Theory. Inefficiencies arise because wages and prices are misaligned. To calculate welfare losses I would add up Harberger triangles across markets. The inefficiencies that arise in New Keynesian models are indeed identical to the ones which would be generated by a set of good-specific taxes.

What's the conclusion? Keynesians - Paul Krugman in particular - can't have it both ways. Macro does not "trump" micro. This is a no-trump world. If I argue that Keynesian sticky wage/price distortions are large, and that tax distortions are small, that's a contradiction.

But it's not a contradiction to say that sticky wage/price distortions are small, and other inefficiencies that we face are large. Is 6% of GDP a serious measure of the current effects of sticky wage/price distortions? Of course not. Read this document and see if you think the CBO measures potential output the way any sensible macroeconomist would measure it. Yikes. I don't think so.

There are of course plenty of models around now that take wage and price stickiness seriously, and also contain a multitude of shocks that allow those models to fit the data. Christiano/Eichenbaum/Evans is one of those. It seems straightforward to take a model like that, turn off the wage/price rigidity, compare business cycles without the wage/price rigidity to those with it, and ask what the agents in the model would pay to live without the wage-price rigidity (this is with monetary and fiscal policies that are not correcting the inefficiencies). I don't know if that has ever been done.

We could think of such an experiment as giving us an upper bound on the welfare loss from wage/price rigidity. There are plenty of reasons to think that standard New Keynesian models exaggerate the effects of wage/price stickiness. For example, Calvo pricing is suspect. If the losses from wage/price rigidity are such a big deal, there are large surpluses left on the table that inventive buyers and sellers of labor, goods, and services, would be happy to have.

So, there are good reasons to think that the welfare losses from wage/price rigidity are small. There is also plenty of evidence that other inefficiencies matter a great deal. This paper by Hsieh and Klenow shows how the misallocation of resources in China and India is a big deal - for aggregate TFP (total factor productivity) and GDP. There is an upcoming special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on misallocation and productivity. This includes a paper by Greenwood, Sanchez, and Wang, showing that financial misallocation can be big-time. In the United States, we have experienced a decade where resources were apparently reallocated, inefficiently, to the housing and mortgage markets, with disastrous results. We understand more about that episode than we used to, but we have a lot to learn. What people should come to terms with, is that wage and price rigidity likely had little to do with that experience, and the sooner economists recognize that, the more progress we'll make.