A Political Economy Moment

This is a critical moment for economic policy in the industrialized countries. After a year and a half of emergency rescue, with large fiscal deficits and rock-bottom interest rates, governments are beginning to pull back. Especially in countries with large current account deficits, stimulus spending is being withdrawn, and central banks are under pressure to begin raising rates and tightening money. The threat of deflation and cascading insolvencies in the financial system are so yesterday; today’s threat is said to be inflation and sovereign default.

If you survey the center-to-left economics blogs, including this one—economists who see the world at least in part through Keynesian eyes—you will find howls of protest. It is simply irrational, we say, to allow this slump to run its course. There is no threat of inflation at all, which is actually a problem, since a bit of inflation would be medicine against effectively high nominal interest rates at the zero lower bound. And every indication is that the recovery under way owes its feeble pulse to the lingering effects of last year’s stimulus.

But is this just a problem of economic analysis? Is it only that New, Post and other Keynesians haven’t been persuasive enough? Does economic argument and evidence drive policy?

In a sense yes: those who make the decisions summon economic arguments to justify their actions. But who gets to make the decisions and what arguments they find appealing is not the outcome of academic seminars. What got us into this mess in the first place, and what now threatens to throw us back into the maelstrom, is the political hegemony of the “finance perspective”, the interests and outlook of those whose main concern is maximizing (and now simply protecting) the value of their financial assets.

Within the world of elite interests, this is almost a mass constituency. While the bulk of such assets are held by an infinitesimal few, perhaps the top 10-20% of the population in the industrialized countries have significant financial wealth and actively monitor their returns. Their understanding of how economies work and what priorities policy-makers should adhere to follow from their personal position. Inflation is a constant threat to asset-holders. They fear the laxity of central banks as well as the buildup of government debt, which can serve as an incentive to future inflation. They want their portfolios to have a component of absolutely risk-free government securities, and the very whisper of sovereign default chills them to the core. They believe in the inherent reasonableness of financial markets and believe that anyone who wishes to borrow from them should demonstrate their prudence and fiscal rectitude. They were willing to relax their principles temporarily during the panic, but now that they have caught their breath they want to see a return to “sound” practices. Governments will bend to their wishes not because they have better arguments, but because they hold power.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not making the crude claim that policy is driven directly by interests. In fact, I believe that, if they get their way, holders of financial assets will suffer along with the rest of us. (Not as much, of course: succumbing to a haircut because of debt deflation cannot be compared to losing one’s job and not being able to meet basic needs.) The process is more complicated: where one sits in society and the kinds of problems one typically has to solve leads to a way of thinking, and this manner of thinking then informs politics. For centuries, the finance perspective has played a central role in economic theorizing, and there is ordinarily a body of research to support it. What I am proposing is this: economic orthodoxy is regaining control over policy because it reflects the outlook of those who occupy the upper reaches of government and business.

Up to this point, the Great Economic Event we are passing through has not caused even a hint of political realignment, and that is why policy is returning to the old normal.

The Role of Home Equity Extraction

Daniel Cooper of the Boston Fed has posted a summary of his recent study of household consumption and its relationship to home equity extraction. He uses the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), because it has detailed information on all the relevant household financial information. What Cooper wants to know is, to what extent did households use their rising home values during the bubble years to finance higher levels of consumption? His study is useful in many ways but ultimately doesn’t answer the question he is asking. The shortcomings are instructive.

First the results. The summary can be seen in this table, a condensed version of Table 8 in Cooper’s original paper.


It appears that at no time was the mortgage ATM machine used to finance more than twenty cents per dollar of equity extraction. This seems to suggest that the housing bubble played a minor role in financing the consumption boom of the 00's, and that the deflation of this bubble should be having little effect on consumer demand during the current period.

There are two significant problems. One is on the household level: Cooper’s analysis tries (not entirely successfully, but that is another matter) to control for the endogeneity of the equity extraction decision—the impact that changes in household income have on the decision of households to pull money out of their homes via refinancing. The idea is to isolate the role of equity extraction as an “independent” decision. From a macroeconomic standpoint, however, this is not appropriate. Even if equity extraction is simply a conduit for economic influences originating elsewhere, its role is still significant. After all, it is the bubble that opened this channel and the deflation of the bubble that is shutting it down.

The bigger problem, however, is that the significance of equity extraction for aggregate consumption cannot be determined by adding up each household separately. Home repairs are a direct component of aggregate demand, for example, and indirectly stimulate the demand of those who get jobs in that line of work. Also, if one household saves the income it extracts from its rising home equity, and if this money is used to finance the consumption of another household, macroeconomically it’s all the same. (As mother used to say when you tried to separate the food on your plate, it all mixes in your stomach.)

The Cooper exercise is interesting from a sociological point of view. His more detailed work uses PSID data to get at the differences in equity extraction across different income groups and according to other demographic criteria. I learned a lot. Nevertheless, it doesn’t alter the systemic significance of the rise and fall of equity extraction for financing domestic demand during a period of aggregate net borrowing (global imbalances).

Protect the Free Market From Consumer Choice

Not content to keep the tyrannical hands of government off Medicare, the Tea Party now wants to keep the private spending decisions of consumers out of the Free Market. So we hear in a report on a rally held in Phoenix in support of Arizona’s new immigration law:

“We are doing this to crush any boycott against the free market,” said Tina Loudon, a Tea Party member from St. Louis who helped organize the rally. “Arizona has a sovereign right to enforce immigration laws on the books.”

I guess the campaign against statism changes course when the state goes after people the TPers don’t like. And whatever you do, don’t let rock stars or other private individuals challenge government decisions through the nefarious methods of supply and demand.

Deficit Dementia

Across the industrialized world, governments have responded to the economic crisis by running enormous fiscal deficits, rediscovering a deep, previously unacknowledged love for the legacy of John Maynard Keynes. Now there seems to be a gathering consensus that these deficits are unsustainable and have to be cut as quickly as possible. This seems to be the word from the Group of 30, the OECD, the EU, Obama’s deficit commission and the US Congress.

Genuine Keynesians have to be worried. If so many governments simultaneously decide to withdraw stimulus, the combined effect could well be to tip the world into a second round of economic tailspin. Just for starters, assume a multiplier of one; then the average reduction in fiscal deficits as a percentage of combined GDP has to be deducted from projected growth rates. Given plausible numbers on both sides, the result could well be negative. A multiplier greater than one, particularly in light of trade spillover effects, pushes us further into the red.

But the economic myopia is, if anything, even more fundamental. The deficit hawks seem to have forgotten, if they ever learned, the granddaddy of all accounting identities: a country’s current account is equal to the sum of its domestic budget positions. If you hold the CA constant, a reduced fiscal deficit is feasible only if it is offset by a corresponding increase in the indebtedness of households and firms. Of course, it was the inability of the private sector to sustain its borrowing that led to the crisis, and the runup in fiscal red ink, in the first place.

Notice that the biggest pressure to cut government spending is being felt in the countries running current account deficits, like the US, the UK and the peripheral members of the eurozone. This is not surprising, since, according to the laws of arithmetic, they must also have the biggest domestic budget deficits. If squeezing the public sector could produce expenditure-switching, so that countries on a fiscal diet would also find their way to external balance without economic collapse, that would be the proper medicine. Unfortunately, there is no evident channel by which this can happen. The US and the UK are unlikely to see a substantial devaluation as a result of their fiscal rectitude, and the folks in the eurozone can’t devalue at all. If there is to be rebalancing as a result of these cuts, it will happen only through shrinkage of incomes and employment.

So that’s what the arithmetic tells us: fiscal cuts must equal the sum of increased private indebtedness plus decreased external deficits, where the latter are driven by economic contraction. Lovers of historical irony will note that this is exactly the circumstance Keynes was responding to in the 1930s, informed by his prior analysis of the imbalance-generating Treaty of Versailles. His insistence on the need for symmetry in adjustment was directed against the foolhardy insistence that deficit countries must shrink and shrink, dragging down the surplus countries as well.

U.Va Fights Back Against AG Cuccinelli Attack On Academic Freedom

Today's Washington Post metro section reports in "U-Va begins court fight of subpoena by Cuccinelli" that initially their Board was going to go along with his request for emails and records of climatologist and former Environmental Sciences prof, Michael Mann, father of the "hockey stick" diagram. However, piles of petitions from academics across the country, including critics of the scientific work of Mann, pushed them and U-Va prez John Casteen to change their stance and resist the demand by their supposed attorney. After all, the state attorney general is supposedly the attorney of state agencies like the University of Virginia, so it is a bit odd for them to be in a court against each other.

Quite aside from the matter of political attacks on academic freedom involved here, Cuccinelli seems not to have much of a leg to stand on regarding even the trival legal issues. So, he is acting on the basis of an anti-fraud statute passed in 2002 that is to catch people engaging in fraud with state funds. Mann got five grants for his research, but four of them were federal grants, and the only one that was a state grant was granted in 2001, the year before the statute was passed.

Now there are people defending this outrageous nonsense, such as Sheldon Steinbach, "a lawyer who represented the American Council of Education for 37 years," who defended Cuccinelli. "Sometimes upon more detailed explanation you might determine people have, indeed, cooked the books." Let us be clear. This is not a matter of Mann "cooking the books" to waste state funds on prostitutes in Las Vegas. Cuccinelli is hoping to find something like the "use a trick" quote from the East Anglia climategate emails, which is not a matter of "cooking books" but simply a reference to using better statistical methods, as anybody who knows anything about this knows. Apparently Steinback is not among them.

In any case, I applaud the Board and the President at the University of Virginia for standing up to this utterly indefensible assault on academic freedom by the Commonwealth's Attorney General. More power to them, and may the courts rule in their favor. As it is, President Casteen has accurately stated that, "The attorney general's order has sent a chill throught the Commonwealth's colleges and universities."

Senator Mitch Herbert Hoover McConnell

Real state and local government purchases (2005$) had fallen from $1543.7 billion per year as of 2007QIV to $1537 billion per year as of 2009QIV and then dropped to $1521.7 billion last quarter. Economists understand the problem with state governments needing to annually balance their budgets and one of the big concerns is that such pro-cyclical fiscal policy could undermine much of the Federal fiscal stimulus – a phenomena known as 50 little Herbert Hoovers. We also have a remedy for this problem known as Federal revenue sharing if those in Washington, DC have the wisdom and courage to adopt such a sensible move.

While such wisdom and courage has been in short supply, Christina Romer makes the case for an emergency spending bill that prevent the layoff of school teachers:

The emergency spending bill before the House would address the education crisis facing communities across America -- and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers are at stake. Because of continued high unemployment, state and local budgets are stressed to the breaking point. Many states and localities are drastically cutting education spending. This year school districts in Hawaii went to only four days of instruction a week. In many other districts, officials are ending the school year early to save money. Most worrisome, hundreds of thousands of public school teachers are likely to be laid off over the next few months. As many as one out of every 15 teachers could receive a pink slip this summer, the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates. These layoffs would be spread throughout the country -- in urban, rural and suburban districts. Such layoffs are terrible for teachers, for communities and, most important, for students. For the families directly affected, layoffs mean not only lost wages but often lost homes and postponed dreams. Because unemployed teachers have to cut back on spending, local businesses and overall economic activity suffer. And the costs of decreased learning time and support for students will be felt not just in the next year or two but will reduce our productivity for decades to come. Additional federal aid targeted at preventing these layoffs can play a critical role in combating the crisis.

Alas, the leader of the party of no has the following concern:

"This is fiscal recklessness. And that's why even some Democrats are starting to revolt," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a speech on the Senate floor. "Far from doing anything about our own looming debt crisis, Democrats only seem interested in making it worse."

His call for fiscal restraint in a time when unemployment is high given weak aggregate demand can be seen as follows – far from doing anything about our weak economy, Republicans only seem interested in making it worse. OK, the Senator from Kentucky might be allowed to have one vote on fiscal policy matters even if his views on fiscal policy as dumb as those we have learned to tag as Hoover economics but why should we allow him to effectively block any action by Congress?

The Stupid!

If you read Mark Thoma's blog, you will have seen his passionate response, called "Modern Macroeconomic Theory and Fiscal Policy" to some self-styled "modern macroeconomic theorist" who claims that people like Brad Delong and Krugman who think that fiscal policy can help us out of a recession when the interest rate is at the zero bound are not modern macrotheorists and so are obviously wrong.

Thoma and Krugman's response has been to cite papers by DSGEers in which a version of the model does allow fiscal policy to work - papers by Eggertson and Woodford and others of that ilk. Read the two comments by Robert Waldman to be reminded of why he- Robert - is a national treasure. Waldman says the DSGEers cannot be presumed to have explained anything about the modern macroeconomy at all, so the idea that we have to reject the idea that fiscal policy is efficacious if a DSGE model can't show it to be is a nonsensical non sequitur.

I've looked at the latest Eggertson paper. They are all -all the fiscal-policy friendly DSGE papers, I mean- alike in making the mechanism by which fiscal policy works in a liquidity trap this: it increases expected inflation. This is not the mechanism by which it works in Keynes. Of course if it works, it increases Y and that will increase inflation and expected inflation chez Phillips/Friedman/Phelps. The expected inflation is consequence, not cause.

The reason that it works in Keynes, of course, is that it increases demand. Period. Put another way: In a liquidity trap, the problem is that the Wicksellian/Keynesian natural rate is below the expected deflation rate (the latter may be a small negative number, as it is now), which latter is the lower bound on the real rate of interest given that nominal rates can't be negative. Fiscal policy in the trap works not, or not necessarily, by reducing the lower bound, but rather by raising the natural rate above the lower bound. But this can't happen in the DSGE models, because the natural rate - what they call the natural rate, which isn't what Keynes and Wicksell meant by it - can never change. That's a fact about their ridiculous models, not a fact about the world.

Palin Attempts To Impale Obama On The Oil Spill

A column in today's Washington Post by Ruth Marcus reports such an incredible quotation from Sarah Palin, that I am simply going to reproduce it without any commentary, other than to note that it was made during a recent speech in favor of a losing tea party candidate in Idaho she favored (where there appear to have been several "tea party" candidates) and to remind one and all that she was the loudest advocate of "drill, baby, drill" back in 2008. So, Sarah Palin.

"The oil companies who have so supported President Obama in his campaign and are supportive of him now -- I don't know why the question can't be asked by the mainstream media and by others if there's any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration. If there's any connection there to President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico."

Another Clumsy Attack On Income Redistribution Policies

This time it was in today's Washington Post Outlook section, although, well, it was a column by the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur G. Brooks, "The New Culture War." This is supposed to be between "statism" and the "free enterprise system," the now-favored term by libertarians over "capitalism" as the latter is not popular among young people, but the former is. Brooks cited a poll showing that 70% of Americans approve of "the free enterprise system" and only 30% believe we would be better off "without free markets at the core of our sysytem."

OK, fine, this is believable. But then Brooks somehow decides that this 70% also believes that "free enterprise brings happiness; redistribution does not," and "that it is 30% coalition, not the 70% majority, that is fundamentally materialistic." Brooks gives no ground for any program at all in any form, whether food stamps, or social security, or medicare, or progressive income taxation, or whatever. They are all bad and not supported by the free-enterprise-loving majority. I guess this would include all those tea partiers who were opposed to Obama's "socialistic" health care reform because it might damage their free market medicare.

Another Clumsy Attack on the European Social Model

The New York Times, supposedly the reliable voice of bleeding-heart liberalism, has repeatedly attacked European welfare state institutions in its news pages. The latest assault was published today, informing us that pensions and other social benefits are no longer “affordable” and that the coddled European public must wake up and face reality. All such “analyses” require the reader to accept without questioning the strange notion that social programs that were instituted decades ago when Europe was substantially poorer have now become, after a long run of economic growth, too expensive to bear.

You might wonder how the article’s author (Steven Erlanger) deals with this conundrum. Wisely, he doesn't even try. A quarter of the article is taken up with man-on-the-street interviews, in which selected students, workers and pensioners say what Erlanger wants them to say. (No one says anything different; apparently European public opinion is monolithic on this issue.) The article tells us that the dependency ratio, the number of retired people as a proportion of the working population, has increased, but it doesn’t point out that economies have grown even faster. (The ratio of real economic growth to growth in the dependency ratio over the period 1980-2005 is 2.4 for the countries that now make up the Eurozone, and a whopping 6.6 for the US. Don’t let Pete Peterson hear about this.)

The article suggests that all sorts of damage has been caused by excessive concern for the old, the sick and other insufficiently productive citizens, with the result that “the region generally lacks competitiveness in world markets.” I have to rub my eyes every time I see a comment like this. Let’s get this straight: journalists tell Europeans to emulate America’s high-octane approach to economic efficiency when the Eurozone has approximately balanced trade with the rest of the world, while the US runs the largest trade deficits the world has ever seen.

It is true that the current economic stall, combined with immense, ill-considered financial bailouts, has diminished the fiscal space available to governments everywhere. This is a problem of, well, stalled economic growth and unwise bailouts. Europe, like the US, needs to deal with this. But those problems have nothing to do with “unaffordable” social welfare programs. On the contrary, maintaining transfers to the most vulnerable households is not only the right thing to do, it is also an excellent vehicle for sustaining effective demand in a downturn.

Maybe, if you prowled the cafes and restaurants of Europe long enough, you might find an interviewee or two to stick up for social solidarity.

Social Security: On the Chopping Block Again?

Out of FireDogLake comes a new report that the Deficit Commission Obama set up is getting ready to carve out hunks of Social Security, perhaps by zipping the cuts through a lame duck session of congress.

Bad ideas with money behind them never die, do they? Is it time yet to pull our old writings out of the archives and spread the word that, no, Social Security is not in trouble, and that cutting it would be bad for our people and bad for the economy?

Bashing BP Is "Un-American"?

So, Rand Paul has just denounced Barack Obama as being "un-American" (do we need a special House committee for this?), for criticizing British Petroleum's behavior in the Gulf of Mexico. Something funny about this is not just the name, but indeed the ownership: while there are certainly some American stockholders, BP is overwhelmingly British, indeed was substantially owned by the British government itself for many decades from WW I up into the Thatcher era. Since when is it "un-American" to bash a British company for misconduct?

Rand Paul, Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Becker’s Hypothesis on Discrimination

Rand Paul says he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act but he would have preferred that Title II not be included. Now it is not surprising that a libertarian would be opposed to government discrimination. The real issue is whether a government should be allowed to limit private discrimination. My favorite summary of what Rand Paul is saying can be found here:

The libertarian answer in this instance is that property rights trump civil rights, and that the state should prioritize enforcing those.

Gary Becker summarized the literature on the economic effects of discrimination as part of his 1992 Nobel Lecture. Libertarians could emphasize one aspect of Becker’s writing:

in a world with constant returns to scale in production, two segregated economies with the same distribution of skills would completely bypass discrimination and would have equal wages and equal returns to other resources, regardless of the desire to discriminate against the segregated minorities ... A literature has developed on whether discrimination in the marketplace due to prejudice disappears in the long run.

A fair reading of Becker’s Nobel Lecture, however, would note that he believed that private discrimination by the majority does injure the minority. Is this the kind of economic policy Tea Party types such as Rand Paul are advocating?

Manufacturing Uncertainty in the Gulf

According to this morning’s New York Times, British Petroleum, with apparent cooperation from the US government, is making an all-out effort to obstruct measurement of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil blowout. University researchers have been prevented from approaching the scene, and whatever data are being collected are being withheld from the public. A possible scenario is that numbers will be released only after the flow has stopped, that they will not be viewed as credible, but it will be too late to correct them.

This is a very big deal for BP and their contractors. They are looking at vast potential liability for damages from Florida to Texas, not to mention the Caribbean islands, who are truly innocent potential victims. At some point there will be lawsuits, testimony, juries, and awards. Down the road it will be of great value to have uncertainty over the amount of oil involved in the disaster. If I’m a BP lawyer, I want to say “Maybe this damage was caused by us, but maybe not, because we just don’t know the exact extent of the spill. We will be happy to accept responsibility for damages that can be proved, but we don’t think we should be made to pay just on someone’s speculation.”

BP’s legal team is no doubt emphasizing that effective defense against liability began on day one of the blowout and continues until the end of the process. It would be interesting to know what motives impel cooperation on the government’s side.

I hope the political focus is sharpened: we need the most accurate possible measurements of how much petroleum is entering the gulf and how and where it is being transported, starting right now.

UPDATE: My crude economic speculation is corroborated by actual investigation. And someone should tell the good people at NRDC that squeezing BP dry in court is not a secondary matter to the current cleanup; it is society's first line of defense against future eco-malfeasance.

Fiscal Policy: Arizona Governor May Have a Point

While I think Jan Brewer – Arizona’s governor – should be made to pay for signing into law SB1070, the horrific immigration law, her support of
Proposition 100 is commendable. Fiscal restraint during weak aggregate demand is generally bad economics but state governments often are forced into such measures by their requirements to annually balance their budget. If the choice is between reducing government purchases versus a temporary tax increase, then on Keynesian grounds the latter is the least undesirable move as it likely has less of an impact effect on aggregate demand. Then again – state governments would not be faced with such Draconian choices had we decided to increase Federal revenue sharing by more than what barely got through the Senate.