Real Interest Rate in the Early 1980’s and the Last Few Years

Brad DeLong constructs a real interest rate series for the past 50 years using the nominal rate on 10-year government bonds minus inflation. Our graph is based on TIPS which limits us to the past few years. Brad notes:

If You Think That the Equilibrium Real Ten-Year Treasury Rate Is 2.5%/Year...as you might conclude from the historical track of the past fifty years: then the current 10-year Treasury rate of 1.87%/year is consistent with market expectations of deflation at an average rate of 0.63%/year over the next decade. If you think that the market's forecast of the equilibrium Treasury real rate over the next decade will be much less than 2.5%/year--as the real TIPS rate of -0.185/year suggests--then it seems likely that it is because the market expects a high unemployment rate for the next decade. Neither possibility seems consistent with market expectations of a Federal Reserve that understands its mission

.

I’m puzzled by the behavior of the real rate during the most recent recession period. At first, this real rate dropped from nearly 2.5% (August 2007) observed before the recession to around 1% (March 2010) as one would have hoped from Federal Reserve policies designed to offset the recession. But by October 2010, the real rate increased to 3%. I realize that this was the period when fiscal policy was trying to revive the weak economy but given the depth of the Great Recession, but most of us thought the fiscal stimulus was too weak to get us even remotely close to full employment.

But let’s also look at the early 1980’s, which was a period when fiscal policy turned stimulative for whatever reason. Some defenders of the Reagan tax cut might have argued we were in a deep recession then as well, while others justified that tax cut on supply-side silliness. Of course, macroeconomic history tells us that the Volcker Federal Reserve was hell bent on combating inflation and decided to offset the Reagan tax cuts with a period of tight monetary policy, which led to much higher real interest rates crowding-out investment. Not exactly the parable that the supply-side crowd likes to tell. But then there has always been a third school of economists who preach Barro-Ricardian equivalence. Their message – as best exemplified by “Do Higher Deficits Produce Higher Interest Rates” by Paul Evans (AER, 1985) – was that households would save all of the tax cuts so that there would be no impact on national savings and hence no effect on interest rates. That prediction was clearly not borne out by the evidence as Brad’s graph clearly shows. The good news is that we finally recovered from the 1982 recession as Federal Reserve policy eventually reversed its draconian contraction and allowed real rates to fall from their peak.

Ratings Agencies Demonstrate Power Over Markets Again (Not)!

So, Fitch has downgraded Spain, Italy, Belgium, Cyprus, and Slovenia. The market response? Yields on Spanish and Italian bonds fall, and the euro rises. Yet more reason to fear the mighty power of the ratings agencies!

Perverse Fiscal Policy

Assuming a picture is worth a thousand words, our graph is offered as an illustration of some wise words from Mark Thoma:

We need a temporary increase in government spending to increase demand and employment through, for example, building infrastructure. That would help to get us out of the deep hole we are in. Instead, the government seems to be trying to make it harder to escape. We do need to address our long-run budget problems once the economy is healthy enough to withstand the tax increases and program cuts that will be required. But the idea of "expansionary" austerity has failed.

Real government purchases fell by almost $30 billion (annualized) last year with $20 billion of this decline shockingly coming from Federal purchases. While it is true that state & local purchases have been declining since late 2007 with the cumulative decline exceeding $90 billion per year, we have also seen a significant decline in Federal purchases over the past year. We should add that Keynesian macroeconomists have always worried about the implications those state & local balanced budget requirements, which force this kind of perverse fiscal reaction to recessions. But as Barkley Rosser noted over at Mark’s blog:

Is it not the case that the main source of this outright decline in G is coming from the state and local levels with their balanced current budget rules, along with the ending of fed stim support for them? Of course, this suggests that the easiest way to offset this would be renewed support by the feds for the states and locals, but obviously this is unlikely to happen in the near future.

Federal revenue sharing should be increased but then the leaders of the Republican Party seem hell bent on balancing even the Federal budget during this Great Recession.

For Once The Military Is Right

Despite the title here I absolutely support civilian control of the military in democratically ruled countries. However, in both the US and Israel we have a weird situation where the military and the intel establishments are not only better informed and more aware of the implications of current serious policy issues than their civilian political superiors, along with their media abettors, but they are right. The issue is the Iranian nuclear program where the disconnect between not only what military intelligence knows (yes, I know, hahahaha, milintel is an oxymoron (decrepitly old joke), hahahaha), and what the public discourse in the media and the political debates and what the official policymakers are saying (including amazingly enough US Nat Sec Advisor Thomas Donilon earlier this evening on Charlie Rose) are totally out disconnected.

The media reports on this recently have become blatant, and I apologize for not providing relevant links. But, last week WaPo and NYTimes reported on how Israeli milintel were saying Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program currently. Then today the NYT was a mass of conflicting stories with the ones from top Israeli governmental leadership (somewhat backed up by NSC director Donilon on Charlie Rose) arguing that Iran is indeed pursuing nukes and when or how will either Israel or the US just bomb the heck out of them blah blah blah to stop it, despite the contrary claims of their respective military intel establishments.

Sorry folks, but the people who will have to do this, either the Israeli or US military, are not all that excited about this (much less convinced by the official reports that go against their offical intel assessments, see US NIE reports). Their leaders know what is not acknowledged by President Obama in his SOTU, or Natenyahu in his public statements, or certainly not by the GOP prez candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul), that in fact Iran is not actively or currently pursuing obtaining nuclear weapons. All the war whooping and hawkishness by the political leaders and their pathetic rivals and related media and much of the public is ignorant and stupid and worthless. But, they cannot speak up publically on this matter. Let us hope that we shall muddle through this without yet another worthless new war.

It’s a Bruegal World

I just returned from seeing “The Mill and the Cross”, the remarkable remake of The Way to Calvary by Pieter Bruegal the Elder.  Some quick reactions:

1. If you were an art history major you will have multiple orgasms.  Guaranteed.

2. Even if you weren’t, if your eyes are open you will be enchanted by images that occupy a gray zone between painting and live-action film.

3. The pace is extremely slow, which works if you allow yourself to be hypnotized.  Don’t go to see it on an empty stomach.

4. The crucifixion thing is overdone, even after allowing for the fact that Bruegel overdoes it too.

5. The scene with the crows eating a dead guy’s eyeballs is really gross.

6. The people in this window on 16th century Flanders are much too clean and healthy.  This is not only a distracting anachronism, it also distances us from the world we see in Bruegal’s paintings.

7. You can see why the Dutch fought so intensely to free themselves of Spanish rule.

8. If the movie doesn’t grab you, you will find it to be a mashup of Masterpiece Theater and Bread and Puppet, except that a rich banker would never be a good guy in a Bread and Puppet production.

9. This film is auteur theory on steroids: Lech Majewski not only directed it, he did camera work, art design and the musical score.  If you don’t like it, you know who to blame.

10. How do people do those slow, gently hopping dances that Bruegal paints so well?  Can we start a new craze?

The Blade’s Response to the State of the Union Address

The transcript of what Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said can be found here. When the Blade claims Obama’s policies were pro-poverty, what he seems to be saying that in the face of insufficient aggregate demand, the right policy should have been austerity - cutting government spending. Talk about Herbert Hoover economics!

Governor Daniels also expressed concerns about the size of the Federal deficit. Folks give this governor too much credit for the fiscal shape of Indiana, which they assert has been dramatically improved by his policies. Lest we forget, however, that a source of revenues for Indiana was the one time sale of toll rights to the private sector. Sacrificing future toll revenues to collect cash that has a lower present value is not a long-term solution to a government’s fiscal follies.

Of course, we get this rhetoric:

There is a second item on our national must-do list: we must unite to save the safety net. Medicare and Social Security have served us well, and that must continue. But after half and three quarters of a century respectively, it’s not surprising that they need some repairs.

By repairs – does he mean the Paul Ryan plan to effectively eliminate Medicare?

Finally, we get this canard:

Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.

Rebuttal outsourced to Paul Krugman.

The Radical Right in the US and Europe

Today’s mandatory reading is a news report from the New York Times about a film shown in NYPD training sessions entitled “The Third Jihad”. You should read the whole thing, but here is the CliffNotes version:

1. The feature-length film portrays the entire Muslim world as engaged in a nefarious, secret plot to destroy non-Muslim institutions and achieve global domination.

2. It was shown to about fifteen hundred NYPD officers across all ranks as part of their routine training.

3. It was produced by an organization called the Clarion Fund, which has financial links to gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson.

4. Adelson is also the principal funder of the super PAC whose support of Newt Gingrich has propelled him to the front of the GOP presidential pack.

Put the pieces together, and what you see is a glimpse of the extreme, xenophobic right, American-style. It is our answer to groups like the National Democratic Party in Germany, Finland’s True Finns, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Danish People’s Party, Hungary’s Jobbik, France's National Front and so on. They share an authoritarian traditionalism in culture, paranoia about immigration (especially from Muslim regions) and a profound hatred of secularism and the left.  The link between xenophobia and authoritarianism is the view, fundamental to fascism, that the “true” members of the nation have a common interest that can only be undermined by the give and take of democratic politics.

The European extremists are forced to organize their own factions, since the political mainstream, including the established conservative parties, see them as echoes of a fascism their societies had actually experienced and would like to see buried forever. This consensus does not exist in the US, and proto-fascist groups can operate freely within the Republic Party. There is a possibility that one of their anointed candidates will be elected president this fall.

Incidentally, this is not about Gringrich personally. Everything in his prior public career and private life tells us he is an opportunist, and he is simply seizing the opportunities that present themselves at the moment. Nor should we assume that his backers are the only financiers of xenophobic authoritarianism; Adelson is simply the one who shows up in this specific instance.

As an American who spends a lot of time in Europe, I am troubled by the laws against racist and fascist propaganda; I worry about the slippery slope that leads to criminalization of unpopular political expression. Maybe I should be worried about the opposite too—the view that all varieties of politics are equally legitimate, that there are no hard lines that respectable political figures cannot cross.

Is the Oil Price Scare From The Strait Of Hormuz Over?

Maybe not, but there is good reason to think that maybe it is over, even though US gasoline prices were still rising over this past weekend. But that is probaby just the pass-through of the earlier spikes in crude prices due to the scare arising from Iran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, which it is capable of doing, if the US follows through on its newest economic sanctions, which it appears to be doing. In the longer run higher oil prices would be useful for getting us onto a more sustainable energy path, but in the short run they certainly do not help get the world economy out of its prolonged slump of recent years. I see two signs here.

The first was the report last Wednesday that Israeli Defense Secretary Ehud Barak has announced that Israeli military intelligence has concluded that Iran is not currently in active pursuit of nuclear weapons and that any decision by them to bomb Iran is "far off" in the future. Needless to say, this undercuts some of the more hysterical "bomb Iran" presidential candidates in the US. But, of course, this does not remove the new economic sanctions that Iran was objecting to and which many think that the US and Europe were going along with partly to restrain Israel from such bombing efforts.

The other sign is that over the weekend the Iranian vice president has specifically denied that Iran is planning to block the strait. One can dismiss this, just as many dismiss the anti-nuclear weaons fatwas of Iran's supreme leader, Khamene'i (that is to say, some of those who actually know that he has issued such fatwas, not widespread public knowledge), but it does look as if Iran has backed off for whatever reasons. It now looks extremely unlikely that the Strait of Hormuz will be blocked, even though the US looks to be following through on the new sanctions, which most reports say are already hurting the Iranian economy. Three further thoughts.

One is that David Ignatius claims in WaPo that this was due to Obama putting pressure on Iran through back channels. Maybe, although this smells a bit like the administration giving itself too much credit and leaking this to Ignatius. I suspect that backing off by Israel has played a bigger role.

Another point is that Iran has enough outs to avoid the worst of the economic outcomes. The main method for these sanctions is to attack settlements of oil sales through the Iranian central bank. Yes, several major customers of Iran appear to be scaling back purchases, such as Japan and China. But there are limits to this, particularly if indeed oil prices go up rather than back down (or stay steady). More importantly, Venezuela and possibly other countries are apparently setting up financial arrangements that may allow for these contracts to be completed without being directly blocked by the sanctions. So, Iran may already have seen the worst economically.

And finally, the main evidence for problems is the decline of the Iranian currency. However, such a decline makes it easier for the non-oil sector of Iran's economy to compete with foreigners and even possibly export, Iran usually suffering from the well-known "Dutch disease" endemic to so many nations dependent on exports of a highly priced natural resource. They have a respite from this a bit, although of course imports are more expensive also. Iran is taking a hit economically, but in the end the sanctions will probably backfire politically in Iran, given the strong support even by the political opposition of their civilian nuclear power program.

Hedge Funds for Human Rights

At a time when finance is coming under intense scrutiny, it is heartening to learn about hedge funds' concern about human rights. Greece is wrestling with the idea of asking (forcing) investors to accept 32 cents on the dollar. Hedge funds have been buying up the paper in the expectation that they can force Greece to pay in full.

Now the hedge funds is toying with the idea to sue the country in the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that Greece had violated bondholder rights, surely a more serious matter than the slaughter of a few dissidents demanding democracy.

At least we now know that capital is seriously concerned about more than maximizing profits.
Thomas, Landon Jr. 2012. "Hedge Funds May Sue Greece if It Tries to Force Losses." New York Times (19 January)http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/business/global/hedge-funds-may-sue-greece-if-it-tries-to-force-loss.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Reviewing Econometric Papers

Chris Blattman helpfully links to the syllabus for his course on research design and causal inference.  At the end is a list of questions he thinks (and I agree) would provide a useful checklist for reviewers of econometric papers.  Take a look at it.

Of course, me being me, I have some issues.

Once More on Ricardian Equivalence

I can’t let this rest.  Why should anyone bother with this idea?  RE depends on the specification of an intertemporal government budget constraint: any increase in the fiscal deficit in the current period must imply a corresponding decrease in the future, so that the relationship between the present value of the tax and spending streams remains unchanged.  But why?

Here are three arguments against the assumption of such a constraint.

1. The government’s debt/GDP ratio can and does change permanently.  Governments can borrow a lot, run up this ratio and then continue to live at their new level of indebtedness.  There is no reason why the US government cannot continue at the current debt/GDP ratio rather than the one we had on the eve of the financial crisis.  There is also no reason why this ratio cannot be increased to some higher level and maintained in perpetuity.  No doubt there is some level of indebtedness that is not sustainable, but we don’t know what it is, and in particular there is no compelling argument that says we are up against that constraint today.  (Credit markets, for what it’s worth, think US debt sustainability is a non-issue, given that they do not require a risk premium.)

2. The debt/GDP ratio is predictably altered by changes in nominal GDP.  Both real and price level effects matter.  Robust real economic growth can reduce the debt burden with no contribution from fiscal stringency, and if deficit spending increases subsequent growth (both through capacity utilization and hysterisis effects on potential income) a portion of the debt burden is directly offset.  (Models that assume away such effects simply beg the question.)  Just as relevant is the price level impact: inflation can erode the debt burden, and the question of whether such erosion is “optimal” from a representative household point of view (whatever that means—probably nothing) is irrelevant to whether such inflation will actually occur.  Note, incidentally, that the net effect of inflation on private sector wealth depends on whether the country in question runs a persistent current account surplus or deficit.

3. Finally, what we should now know from history is that it is far more likely that governments will default on their debts than pay them off.  Show me an RE model that accounts for even the possibility of default.....I’m waiting.

What does it say about the state of economics that a theory with no apparent connection to reality can spawn untold dissertations and journal articles and even crowd out rational thinking about current policy alternatives?

John Maynard Keynes on Occupy Mitt Romney

"No man of spirit will consent to remain poor if he believes his superiors to have gained their goods by lucky gambling. To convert the business man into a profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The economic doctrine of normal profits, vaguely apprehended by everyone, is a necessary condition for the justification of capitalism. The business man is tolerable so long as his gains can be said to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society."

Who is Voting to Shrink the IRS?

On the whole, David Cay Johnston has a very important point:

Congress will spend a trillion dollars more than it levies this year, so how do Washington’s politicians respond to the 11th consecutive year of federal budgets in red ink? They plan to shrink the IRS … if you believe government is too big and that cutting everywhere is the best way to shrink government. But this is the staff that generates revenue, and there is easy money to be made.

But then he goes a little astray with the politics:

So why would President Barack Obama and Congress cut the IRS budget? Their actions illuminate the rise of corporate power and values, and the diminishing voice of Joe Sixpack, thanks partly to how we finance election campaigns.

The how we finance elections part may be right but let’s recall that Joe Sixpack votes Republican and it is mainly the Republican Party that wants to hamstring the IRS in its enforcement of the tax laws against the larger corporations.

Scott Sumner v. Paul Krugman on a Simple Identity

Sumner tried to tease out the proposition that a rise in government purchases has no effect on the real economy from an identity, which prompted Krugman to school him on comparative statics. Sumner replies by basically repeating himself:

If Krugman were right that consumption smoothing somehow refuted Cochrane’s argument, then it would be impossible for consumers to react to a $100 million dollar fall in after-tax income as follows: Spending on consumer goods falls by $20 million. Spending on new homes falls by $80 million. Or spending on inventory accumulation falls by $80 million. Now I’m not saying that would happen, but if it did it would validate Cochrane’s claim and yet would incorporate consumption smoothing. So consumption smoothing can’t be the issue; it plays no role in whether Cochrane is right or wrong.

Time to call a time out. It is not the existence of the national income identity that is at play here but rather Sumner’s claim that the rise in the sum of consumption and government purchases necessarily completely crowds out investment. Two points:

(1) Complete crowding-out would occur if we were at full employment or if we had some sort of insane Federal Reserve policy that mandated we stay as far below full employment as we are now. Of course, neither condition describes today’s economy.

(2) Even if we did have complete crowding-out, notice that Sumner left off the transmission mechanism here. In his example, real interest rates would rise to crowd out the investment spending. So there would be at least this real effect.

As the title of Sumner’s second post notes – it is what he didn’t say that is revealing.

Update: Noah Smith and Paul Krugman anticipated my argument. First Noah:

Accounting identities are mostly just definitions. Very rarely do definitions tell us anything useful about the behavior of variables in the real world.

Then Paul:

the question is how the identity gets reflected in individual motives — is it via the interest rate, via changes in GDP, or what?

The Irrelevance Of Bond Ratings

It was front page news today, top story in WaPo, that S&P downgraded France and Austria from AAA status. Eeeeek! Except that their bond yields fell in the wake of this. The same thing happened after the US downgrade. And Japan has been downgraded 13 times, only to have the world's lowest bond yields. Really.

United Airlines' New Frontier in Ripoffs

I had about $500 worth of electronics gear stolen from my luggage in June. I spent several hours figuring out how to download the claim forms. After I filled them out, I got a brief note indicating that they received my submission.

Then I heard nothing. I spent many hours -- my guess is more than 20, mostly spent on wait times -- trying to contact somebody. I could get to an Indian call center, which could not give me any information on what to do.

After several months, I was informed that I had not included the tag from my baggage, which I did. I resent it. Many weeks later, I learned that I never sent it according to their records. After several iterations, I learned that my claim was denied because the company never received the tags.

A lawyer friend sent a letter to United. Now in January, I received a letter informing me that United does not accept responsibility for lost electronics.

Monti’s Message

I won’t get into his “rescue” program for Italy, but Mario Monti is saying what needs to be said about the current moment in EU politics.  In a word, the situation is dangerous and moving in the wrong direction.

To begin with, the continent is clearly in recession.  Economies are in the process of contracting, and every indicator of future demand—fiscal policy, consumer sentiment, investment and exports—are pointing down.  Economic misery is already baked in for 2012.

The countries that will be hardest hit, like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, have no policy levers to defend themselves.  They gave up monetary policy when they joined the euro, and fiscal deficits can’t be financed.  They are in a terrible situation.

The combination of economic hardship and political blockage is a recipe for volatile politics.  People rightfully demand action to fight unemployment and cuts in services, but the established parties have nothing to offer.  Fringe groups will be the beneficiaries, and many of them will be practitioners of the worst forms of xenophobia.  Fascist movements, complete with paramilitary wings, are on the rise in Hungary and Greece, and I would be surprised if more countries are not added to this list in the coming year.

In this context, Monti’s urgent words need to be heard.  Germany in particular needs to listen, because resentment against German policy and its moralistic pronouncements (the grasshopper and ant business, the paranoia about printing presses) will only increase, with repercussions for the German position in Europe.  If the German public thinks that the post-WWII era of humility is over, they will be in for an unpleasant surprise.  This does not mean that Germany cannot behave as a “normal” country, but it cannot set itself up as the chief enforcer of economic punishment for what is seen elsewhere as the crime of being insufficiently German.  I am not taking sides: this is the real political context of European fracture.

On a practical level, Monti is also right about Eurozone policy.  The ECB has to step in and guarantee sovereign debt inherited from the past.  Without this, a massive wave of defaults, with all this implies for the fragile European banking system, is unavoidable.  It is a choice between a difficult but manageable situation and full-tilt disaster.  Why dither any longer?

Meanwhile, the recession demands a response: its economic as well as political costs are too great.  Most European countries are unable to finance the fiscal deficits rational economic policy now requires.  This means that those who can, like Germany and the other net exporters, need to do some of this lifting themselves.  Above all, it means that there is an urgent need for a Eurozone-wide fiscal entity that can carry on countercyclical policy as the situation requires.  The constitutional process for creating such an entity should be deliberative and methodical, but a temporary, ad hoc version can and should be put into place immediately.  The alternative is simply the breakup of the zone.

Behind these particulars lies the underlying political question: is there a European people corresponding to the institutions of the single market?  If there is, then there is a reservoir of solidarity to draw on and the basis for a politics that puts the common good above short-term self interest and pejorative moralizing.  If not, the European project was always an elite illusion, waiting to fail its first serious test.

Rush Limbaugh – the President Should Fire People

Newt Gingrich has taken a page from the Occupy Wall Street crowd as he goes after Mitt Romney. While I say welcome to our side Newt, Rush Limbaugh is quite upset. Fair enough but Democrats should really highlight this:

"So Romney is out there saying that he likes being able to fire people. Folks, don't we want somebody in the White House who's gonna fire people? How are we going to reduce the size of government? Don't we want somebody who loves firing people in the White House? Isn't that what we're all talking about here?" Limbaugh said.

So according to Rush – we need to layoff even more government workers. Isn’t that part of the problem, however? We are practicing Herbert Hoover economic policy by reducing government employment during a period of slack aggregate demand?

Economics and Fracture

On the plane back from Chicago I started reading Age of Fracture, the new book by Dan Rodgers on US intellectual history since the 1960s.  I had high hopes, since Atlantic Crossings, his earlier work on the origins of Progressive-era American policy activism in European (mostly German) reform, was a fantastic read.  And, to be honest, Rodgers kept me engaged on a redeye to Copenhagen, a layover, and a second leg to Amsterdam.  You can measure a book’s readability that way.

All the same, I felt misgivings on several fronts:

Making an ASSA out of U and ME

The 2012 ASSA meetings have come and gone, and I guess I’ll have to add my reactions to the heap already beginning to accumulate in the blogosphere.

Kudos—really!—to the AEA for its new ethics policy.  Using the publication lever is exactly right, in my opinion, and I hope the disclosure requirements are copied by non-AEA journals.

My worst experience—nothing else comes close—was attending a panel of economics bloggers.  Actually, it began well with an interesting, thoughtful and directly useful presentation by Jennifer Imazeki of Economics for Teachers.  I urge everyone who teaches this stuff at any level to check out her work.  After that it was pretty dismal.  None of the other panelists seem to have thought seriously about the practical issues involved in integrating blogs and teaching.  There was little reflection on the issue of boundary-busting, that entering the blogosphere means sharing intellectual space with people coming from different academic/cognitive/experiential backgrounds.  Quit the opposite: the other panelists (Alex Tabarrock, Jodi Beggs and especially Steve Leavitt) argued that the mission of economics bloggers should be to systematically push the viewpoint of incentives and markets because that’s what econ has to offer.  There was an amusing moment in which Leavitt, noting the disconnect between the arguments economists make on the web when they discuss current issues and the parade of models in the textbooks, considered the possibility that the textbooks might be irrelevant.  That moment lasted no more than ten seconds; he dismissed the heresy and recommended that teachers spend more time on the textbooks and less on the blogs.

I congratulate myself for not getting cranky.  I made a comment which was intended to be entirely constructive.  One point was that none of the panelists had mentioned Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, which is an essential aggregator.  I considered mentioning that one of the virtues of Mark’s site is that he links to noneconomists that economists ought to be interested in, like Andrew Gelman, the Bayesian statistician, but decided not to in order to spare the feelings of Leavitt.

As usual, however, the real action was in the hallways and over dinner.  I got more gossip about the inner workings of the Bank and the Fund than I can hope to remember, and I met lots of actual human beings corresponding to the names I recognized from books, papers and blog posts.  One standout was a fascinating conversation with a prominent economist, who will go unnamed, who has knocked himself out to inject some rationality and honesty into policy debates and who now appears to have largely given up.  His discouragement was hard to argue with—but there were hordes of young, proto-rabble-rousers at many of the sessions and receptions I attended that left me with the feeling that a significant energy recharge is taking place in the world of dissident economics.

Incidentally, Europe is really not looking good, and a Europe/US financial decoupling is absolutely impossible.  2012 augurs to be a wonderful year for bloggers, if not for humans.

The Fed Is Financing the ECB's Support For European Banks

Perry Mehrling will probably be blogging on this soon, but I cannot resist getting this news out now. I saw him at Maurice Obstfeld's Ely lecture yesterday here at the AEA/ASSA meetings in Chicago. Obstfeld spoke on "Does the Current Account Still Matter?" Answer: It no longer determines overall balance of payments because of disconnect from ever larger capital flows, but does still matter in that a country with a current account deficit may be subject to a bop crisis, whereas a surplus country is not. But that is not what this post is about.

I asked Perry if the Fed was doing what it did for a period following the Sept. 2008 crisis, taking on ECB assets onto its balance sheet. The answer from him was yes, and this is a recent development, only a month old. He pulled it up on his android: as of Jan. 5 the Fed had acquired $99.8 billion in ECB assets, all within the past month. This is not small change.

I suspect what is going on is that the European banks are really struggling to adopt to the Basel III capital requirements in the continuing recessionary environment in Europe. Given the threat they face on sovereign debt, and the ECB wanting to limit its support for the sovereign debtors directly, it has been pumping money into the banks to keep them afloat. But this has become such a difficult enterprise, they have drawn on the old facility with the Fed that was renewed some time ago. Perry may disagree, but it looks to me that this is what lies behind this very striking and important recent development.

Belated In Memoriam

RIP Christopher Hitchens. I've always loved his writing. I think he went off the rails supporting Bush on Iraq, but I am reminded of what Auden wrote about Yeats:


Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Romney’s Tax Proposal

The Tax Policy Center provides its review of which taxpayers will pay more and which ones will pay less under the tax proposal introduced by Mitt Romney. A really short summary goes as follows:


(a) The well to do will pay less in taxes;

(b) The working poor will pay more in taxes; and

(c) Overall tax revenue will be significantly reduced.

But wasn’t that also the case for the Herman Cain tax proposal as well as any other tax proposal from the Republican candidates for President? And the Republicans claim they are for fiscal responsibility!

There ought to be clowns

From today's Times: "The Federal Reserve will begin later this month to publish the predictions of its senior officials about their own decisions..."

FOMC minutes: February 2012

Chairman Bernanke predicted that he would start the meeting promptly at 10 and, indeed, his forecast was correct -the meeting started at 10. Yellen began with a forecast that she would be getting into it with Plosser and Kocherlakota soon if they persisted with their standard nonsense about inflation threats and "it's all structural so what's the big deal." Plosser forecast that he would in fact claim that it's all structural, so that Yellen's forecast was a good one. He then stated "it's all structural, ladies and gentleman. Our work is done." Yellen then got into it with him, as she had predicted. At this point, Bernanke predicted that he would be stepping out in a minute to use the gents, but predicted that he would be right back. After a minute, Bernanke proceeded to step out. But he came right back and predicted that the meeting would resume, as it did. Evans then forecasted that he would forecast that he would forecast that he would forecast that he would forecast.......... (People began to file out)


Respectfully Submitted With a Forecast That I will Sign my Name But Inadvertently Misspell it,

Kavin Quenn

War Whooping on Iran

So, it is bad enough that GOP pols like Santorum are calling for bombing Iran and that reportedly 50% of the US population agrees with this, but we also have the Obama administration about to implement a seriously intensive sanctions policy on the Iranian central bank that has gotten the Iranians all worked up and making threats about closing the Straits of Hormuz. Some of this is clearly just politics, with the US in an election year and war whooping on Iran popular, while Iran is coming up on a parliamentary election on March 2, with similar sorts of tough guy strutting going on there as well as here. Needless to say, Iran is unlikely to follow through on its threat, but enjoys watching oil prices spike with the threats, thus threatening the economic recovery Obama needs for his reelection.

Let us remember certain things. While the latest US National Intelligence Estimate moved somewhat away from its previous firm denials of there being any Iranian nuclear weapons program, that movement amounted to saying that they maybe had one going on longer than we had previously thought, but continued to say that there is not one going on now. The more recent IAEA report that seems to lie behind Obama's plicy basically only amplified that somewhat, with some more recent reported simulations by some scientists of nuclear explosions and some evidence of not being fully forthcoming in certain areas. Neither report says that they have an active program to build nuclear weapons, so the vast majority of the current talk is basically hysteria, less credible than the claims that Iraq had WMD.

While Juan Cole has long argued that they would like to have the capability to build nuclear weapons, what they have done so far is completely legal according to the NNPT to which they are a party. They have a civilian nuclear energy program, which they are allowed to have, and their ongoing uranium enrichment program is fully consistent with it and not the higher levels associated with a nuclear weapons program. IAEA inspectors are still in the country, and Cole points out that we would be able to figure out if they went active because of a variety of things the inspectors and other sources would observe. And, although many dismiss this, the supreme military commander and supreme leader, Vilayat-el-faqih, Khamene'i has issued fatwas against nuclear weapons. As long as he does not undo those and remains in charge, there will be no nuclear weapons program in Iran.

What I confess to being a bit mystified about is the attitude of some of the Western European countries, who seem to be quite eager for these heightened sanctions and this confrontation. I can sort of understand that they might fear more any possible nukes from Iran due to proximity, just as Israel does. But I also think that there intel agencies ought to be able to figure out what the US intel agencies know, and that reportedly the Isreali ones do as well, even though they get majorly ignored by their politicians, that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran.

Indeed, I am really not at all clear what Obama or anybody else thinks is going to be acheived by these heightened sanctions. Are we actually demanding that they shut down their perfectly legal civilian nuclear weapons program? Presumably a negotiation would involve some sort of deal where they are allowed to have their civilian program if they promise not to have a military program. But that is already what they are doing and repeatedly declare that they are doing. Is this really about trying to achieve regime change? This will also not work, as sanctions simply reinforce the arguments of the hardliners, just as the US sanctions have done with regard to Cuba for a half a century. The only place I know where sanctions worked was maybe in South Africa, but they had a real problem and undid it, whereas what is being demanded of Iran is for them to stop doing something that they are not doing. Really, this war whooping is getting seriously out of hand. Do we really need to go into Iran now that we finally just got out of Iraq?

Oh, and hope to see some of you in Chicago, :-).

Oy! Deja-Voodoo Economics, and some Horn-Tooting

Here we go with the RE means fiscal policy is impotent meme again! Well, this blog was on the case early - PGL and I, along with Nick Rowe in the comments, sorted the whole thing out back when the Stimulus was being enacted, I think. And now, surely, it is a stylized fact that that the stimulus was effective compared to the counter-factual - no?

On a completely different subject: remember back in the campaign Obama made noises about raising revenue by lifting the cap on the payroll tax? That still seems like a good idea to me, and something that might have political legs in the wake of Occupy and all that. I await evisceration at the hands of my fellow bloggers, at least, who IMS didn't cotton much to the idea at the time.

Oh and Happy New Year!

A Modest Case for Guarded Optimism in 2012

I think that there is reason to think that economic performance in the US and many portions of the world will do better in 2012 than has been forecast by many recently. Basically, recently many trends seem to be doing better than what has been forecast, coming out of a long period of fear of various catastrophes (and many very real problems), which have been deeply embedded into the forecasts and the markets as well. A way of looking at this is to consider the analysis in the Sunday Washington Post New Year's article by Neil Irwin, "Could 2012 be better?'

Irwin lists five factors that will determine how things go.
1) US political system behavior
2) Can European leaders balance every country's demands?
3) Performance of US housing market
4) X-factor
5) Can China manage a soft landing?

Irwin thinks that things are pretty shakey still on many of these, but is mildly optimistic that things will be better than in 2011. I think they might even be better than does Irwin.

1) This may be the one that I am least optimistic about, particularly given that this is an election year. However, it may be that the worst is past on this front, and that was manifested in the debt ceiling conflict last summer when the tea party pushed things right to the edge of a default for the first time since the US became the first and only country ever to impose a nominal debt ceiling back in 1917. The sign may well be the collapse of the House Republicans at the end of this past year over the payroll tax issue. Now, I am not sure that I agree with the payroll tax cut, given my old position that the whole social security system should have been left alone. But, in terms of politics, it seems that the tea partiers are now aware of the impact of the OWS and the fact that they were blamed substantially for the bad economic performance after the debt ceiling fiasco. Indeed, ironically, the fact that this is an election year may keep their noses to the grindstone a bit more and increase their caution regarding engaging in really outrageous actions with regard to the economy. Too many people are watching very closely.

2) I think the situation in Europe may be better than many think. I have been off and on arguing here and elsewhere that the freakouts over Italian deficits were ridiculously overblown, and now the markets seem to have figured this out, with interest rates on their borrowings having declined even further even yesterday. Despite all the recessionary trends, Germany has reported increased manufacturing. No, Europe is not going to be booming, but I think the threat of a full-blown euro collapse is largely past. The carrying on about the end of the euro by many US commentators is looking increasingly likely to be a big embarrassment, once again (some of these folks have been at this since before it was adopted, snore). Curiously, I think the biggest drag on Europe will be the effort to meet the Basel III capital requirements for banks, which is definitely restricting lending in the EU, not just in the eurozone. Europe will have a bad first half of the year, but once this Basel adjustment is in place, things may improve, if gradually.

3) Housing prices continue to decline in the US, and foreclosures continue at a high rate in much of the country, with something like a quarter of mortgages still under water. I do not see much change in any of those. However, we have seen an uptick in construction of multiple unit housing in many areas of the country, fairly steadily since the middle of last year actually. With very little construction for basically the last half a decade, there is good reason to believe that there is pentup demand and that this increase in construction can continue, even if it is limited to certain regions. Construction was the first part of the aggregate US economy to go down. Having it rising again steadily is important and may provide one of the more important foundations for keeping the US economy growing this coming year, even if not enough to really noticeably dent the unemployment rate.

4) The X-factor is the unknown shock, you know, those Minnesota real business cycle folks with their technology shocks and so on. Whatever. Well, yes, maybe the Mayan calendar people are right and the world will end on Dec. 21. But at least maybe we'll luck out before then and not have too many more natural disasters as bad as the last couple of years. Even if we do have some, it looks to me that there is more of a foundation for continuing growth now than previously, although heck, maybe the Mayan doom will hit even earlier in the year (and no, I am not being pollyanna here about some longer term problems such as global warming, although in the near term global warming actually helps the US economy on net as the reduced heating bills outweigh rising costs in other parts of the economy).

5) China does have a property bubble, with housing prices having more than tripled since 2005 along with sharp rises in price to rent and price to income ratios. For a pathetic story about what is going on, with prices now falling hard in some parts of China, see http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/12/the_impacts_of_chinas_real_estate_crash_a_hard_rain_is_gonna_fall.htm . So, there is reason to believe that China is facing some slowdown in its growth rate. However, besides the fact that manufacturing rose in December above forecasts, there are other reasons to think this may have less impact there than has the housing crash in the US. Housing is a smaller part of the economy for one thing. Another is that China has had several quite sharp crashes of its stock markets in recent years with little impact on economic growth. China is planning for some growth slowdown, which would probably be a good thing and inevitable, but China is in much better shape to use macro policy tools including fiscal policy to offset a decline coming out of a property crash to some extent at least. This could be a problem, but for now much of East Asia seems to be performing above predicted levels.

So, all in all, folks, I think there is reason to think that 2012 may do better than many have been forecasting, although this may in the end prove to be wishful thinking on my part, even as I have a history of often forecasting doom and gloom.

Is Alex Tabarrok Saying Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic is Identical to Complete Crowding Out?

I am puzzled by this.

Paul Krugman has already replied noting that Brian Riedl is arguing complete crowding-out even as the economy is far from full employment. Go figure. And I have to really wonder how Brian Riedl thinks the problem is too little savings as if consumption was allegedly soaring.

But let me just add what I said in Alex’s comment box:

Krugman’s 2003 writing strikes me as the same type of concern that was contained in Sargent and Wallace’s Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic. Which I thought was an excellent discussion. Simply put – the long-run government budget constraint has to be honored somehow. And if markets are ever convinced that our political masters have decided to spend and spend without raising taxes – inflation would soar, which I think Irving Fisher in 1907 claimed would drive up nominal interest rates. So what is so bizarre about this argument again?

As I read what Paul has written at various times, his arguments strike me as quite clear and hardly inconsistent.

Shopping Is Not a Perfect Substitute for Politics

The New York Times has an interesting piece today on the shortcomings of organic agriculture in its current, commercialized form.  They describe vast monocultures, drawdowns of aquifers, wasteful attempts to prevent natural blemishes and deformation of vegetables, and long-distance shipping in the off-season.

A few of their criticisms are spurious; for instance, it is better ecologically to ship tomatoes and basil from Mexico to the US during the winter than to try grow them in greenhouses, and trying to persuade consumers to remove such things from their diet for half the year is not a reasonable strategy.  Nevertheless it is quite true that an organic label does not guarantee that the agriculture that brought the food to your table is sustainable, ecologically or socially.

The roots of the problem lie with the idea that agriculture can be fixed by establishing labels like organic or fair trade, so that shopping does the work of social change.  Of course, shopping can be better or worse.  You can have no labels at all and drift inexorably to the lowest common denominator in all aspects of food production outside the purview of the consumer.  Or you can have labels like the ones we have today and give shoppers a choice in how much social responsibility they want to trade off for price, product differentiation or other consumerly objectives.

Don’t expect these labels to do everything, however.  They have to be kept simple and standardized, so they can’t address all the practices that arise in different environmental conditions.  Also, they are assigned to production on a producer-by-producer basis, so they can’t take into account the interactions at a regional or sectoral level.  For instance, even if it were possible to insert language about sustainable water withdrawals into the organic standards, what constitutes sustainable depends on what other users sharing the same groundwater resources are doing.  An individual farm may simply be the wrong unit of observation.

Real solutions require regulation and coordination, stuff like water and soil conservation districts.  Reducing the burning of fossil fuels in food production and distribution requires a systematic control over carbon emissions, such as the permit system I’ve pushed in the past (such as here and here).  And better labor practices require better labor laws and healthy unions to enforce them.  You shouldn’t expect shopping to take care of all this.

So why is all the burden placed on labeling and consumerism?  Because we’ve given up on politics, at least for now.  If you don’t think the rules of the game can be changed through collective action, all you’ve got left is shopping.  But remind yourself from time to time that this is duct tape, not real repair.

Partisan Misrepresentation of Ricardian Equivalence is Nothing New

Paul Krugman catches Robert Lucas (not to be confused with Robert Barro - thanks for the comment David) misrepresenting Barro’s claim to fame:

But, if we do build the bridge by taking tax money away from somebody else, and using that to pay the bridge builder — the guys who work on the bridge — then it’s just a wash. It has no first-starter effect. There’s no reason to expect any stimulation. And, in some sense, there’s nothing to apply a multiplier to. (Laughs.) You apply a multiplier to the bridge builders, then you’ve got to apply the same multiplier with a minus sign to the people you taxed to build the bridge. And then taxing them later isn’t going to help, we know that.

Let’s get back to this after this abbreviated explanation of Ricardian Equivalence from David Andofatto. OK David, we know that in a life cycle world where households understand the long-run government budget constraint that households view all tax cuts (even the 1981 and Bush43 tax cuts) as mere tax surcharges that have to be repaid. But this model goes well beyond this. If fiscal policy involved a permanent increase in government consumption, it also involves a permanent increase in taxes which would be a wash as Barro alleges. So if the Obama Administration passed a law where we built a bunch of bridges every summer only to tear them down every winter for the rest of time, then maybe Barro’s claim makes sense.

But this is not the correct policy experiment. The building of a bridge is a temporary blip in spending intending to invest in the public infrastructure where the benefits will be long-term. The financing requirements can be met either by a blip in taxes or very low taxes each year over the future. And in either case, the fall in private consumption in the first year will be small in proportion in the rise in government spending to build this bridge (which it does not intend to subsequently tear down).

One would think this logic was well known. The reason for this blog post, however, is to note that Republican hacks have grossly misrepresented Ricardian Equivalence before. Recall all the fuss over why the Bush43 tax cuts would be better aggregate demand stimulus if that were to be made permanent as opposed to temporary? While that might be good life cycle theory if we could ignore a lot of other economic propositions – such as the long-run government budget constraint (and of course Ricardian Equivalence). Yet some Republican hacks even went so far as to dismiss any concern about crowding-out (even as the FED was already raising interest rates) based on the proposition that tax cuts do not raise interest rates ala Ricardian Equivalence and that Paul Evans AER 1985 paper entitled “Do Large Deficits Produce High Interest Rates”. But wait a darn second – the Ricardian reason for all of this is the assertion that tax cuts don’t encourage more consumption. This incredible dishonest mishmash was most evident when Victor Canto claimed in what National Review November 2002 piece that the Bush tax cuts would be more powerful in encouraging consumption if made permanent, while in another National Review November 2002 piece he used Ricardian Equivalence to argue that the tax cuts would not raise interest rates. To be fair to Mr. Canto – the National Review expects such brazen dishonesty if it is in defense of its rightwing agenda.

I should say that the Evans AER 1985 paper always puzzled me because the Reagan tax cuts did raise aggregate demand by raising consumption during a period when government spending was not reduced. And while nominal interest rates may have declined, real interest rates rose. In other words, we got classical crowding-out from a mix of expansionary fiscal policy and the Volcker tight monetary policy. Now if you wanted to remain a true believer of Ricardian Equivalence, I guess you could have argued that households expected the Reagan revolution to eventually get around to reducing government spending. Domestic spending after all was trimmed a bit even as defense spending soared. But we did eventually get that good old Peace Dividend – in the 1990’s.

Does The Italian Bond Sale Mean The Eurocrisis Is Over?

Yesterday Italy sold bonds for a little over 3% compared to over 6% in late November. Does this mean the eurocrisis is over? Not necessarily, but it may well mean that the markets have finally figured out that Berlusconi really is gone, that Italy is one of four countries in the eurozone that is running a primary budget surplus (Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg are the others), and a much higher proportion of its debt is held domestically by the high saving Italians.

The worst ongoing problem in the zone is Greece. It is caught in a downward spiral that is hard to see an end to other than an exit from the eurozone. While some worry what will happen "if Greece defaults," the hard fact is that it has already effectively done so. The wholse argument over the size of the "haircuts" on its sovereign debt is really just an argument over how bad the default will be and exactly who will end up having to bear the cost of their default. But for all the worry about linkage and contagion if Greece defaults, by now it looks like the ECB's plan to support European banks will probably work to keep the dominoes from falling down in a row as a result. Maybe Portugal might also have to depart, but both Spain and Italy have better budget fundamentals than either the UK or the US. Probably the eurocrisis will end with all that.

What we may be looking at is a better than expected scenario. I find it increasingly amusing to read and listen to commentators who note that Christmas sales did better than expected and that gasoline prices keep dropping, but who then warn that all this will probably turn around next year. Well, yes, maybe it all will. The eurozone has pretty much fallen into a recession that will probably continue into the next year, and more worryingly China is clearly slowing down with its property bubble seriously cratering. But it may be that the US will return to its old role as the engine of growth for the rest of the world, at least somewhat. Probably the biggest fly in the ointment may be the purely artificial crisis being ginned up over sanctions on Iranian oil to stop their nonexistent nuclear weapons program (despite all the hoopla, the IAEA report did NOT report an actual nuclear weapons program there, despite some new findings of some past research regarding a potential to have one).

Daring To Disagree With Dean?

That would be Dean Baker, briefly a co-blogger on the old maxspeak, who warns that the recent upbeat reports on housing are not reliable, with them being too much based on highly volatile changes in multi-family housing. For details see http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/erratic-patterns-in-monthly-housing-starts as well as the closely related http://www.cepr.net/index/blogs/beat-the-press/housing-is-back. Dean must be taken seriously on these matters since his being the first to call the housing bubble all the way back in 2002.

I am not disagreeing with him very much. I agree that for much of the year the hype over a possible double dip in the US has been overdone, which partly explains the sudden surge of enthusiasm we are now seeing at recent high GDP growth rates, which are probably overdone due to being heavily driven by inventory adjustments that are likely to halt after the first of the year, not to mention the continuing likelihood of a European recession with a Chinese slowdown that will put a drag on externally, although those fears have been the main source for all the moaning and groaning in the markets for much of the past few months. And Dean is right on part of the details: single family home construction is barely above its pit in 2009 and not moving; nearly all of this recent increase in housing starts has been for multi-family dwellings, and that is a highly volatile monthly series.

Nevertheless, if one looks at the charts he provides and those he links to, there is a clear upward trend since spring, despite the month-to-month volatility, even if it is mostly in multiple family units. It is also true that it is regional, mostly in the Northeast and West, but any apparently sustained movement should be welcomed. In the chart he shows, with January 2002 as 100, there was a peak in mid-2006 at around 140. The pit in late 2009 was around 20, and it was below 40 this spring. But the November number is at 80. This will probably show declines in coming months, but if the general upward trend continues, this will mean that for the first time since 2006, housing will be a net positive contributor to the US economy, even if only somewhat weakly so.

The newspaper reports have it that rents have been rising in the regions where construction has been rising, reflecting an increase in household formation, with this rising demand finally crashing against the long-depressed supply. Overall housing starts remain far below where they once were, but the issue is direction, and that does appear to be upwards, if erratically and not throughout the US. Dean links to data on rents, but that does not show the most recent that has been reported in the papers.

So, this is at most a mild disagreement with Dean, but in fact I am willing to say that the news on the housing front is improving, at least in terms of a trend for multi-family construction, even if there is a continuing problem in foreclosures and in the single-family home portion of the market. So, while Dean threw in a mention of celebrating Hanukah, I'll throw in one for celebrating Christmas as well, :-).

Lowering The Flag And Leaving Iraq

So, the US military has lowered the battle flag and the last official military have now left Iraq, although there will still be some engaged in advising and protecting the mammoth US embassy in Baghdad. Time for a reconsideration.

On the day that Saddam's last stronghold, his hometown of Tikrit, fell to US troops in April, 2003, I wrote a column published in my local paper, portions of which I posted on the old maxspeak. This was the moment of the highest US triumph, with the looting in Baghdad just starting and before the US stupidly disbanded the Iraqi army and fired all the Ba'athist civil servants, thus triggering the rebellion that eventually became the Sunni-Shi'i civil war, which seems to be picking up as the US leaves rather than tailing off. In that essay, I noted three positives and three negatives of the war, emphasizing that I thought the last of the negatives weighed more heavily than anything else. All six have come to pass.

The positives were that Saddam would no longer be violating human rights, that economic sanctions against Iraq would be ended, and that US troops would be reduced in Saudi Arabia, which had been a leading propaganda point of Osama bin Laden. Yes, despite the apparently tightening of authoritarianism of the Maliki regime and reports of ongoing torture, the human rights situation in Iraq is better today than under Saddam in general. Yes, economic sanctions were ended, but the benefits of that have been far overwhelmed by the subsequent economic collapse engendered by the ongoing war, with the effects of that still not ended. And the removal of US troops from Saudi was a strictly minor event, also overwhelmed by other events.

The negatives were that womens' rights would be worsened in the country as Shi'i fundamentalists would come to power, that the situation of Christians would also be worsened, and finally and most importantly, that this invasion would give al Qaeda a major propaganda gain. Womens' rights have not worsened as badly as I thought they might, but they have worsened. The situation of the Christians has been catastrophic, with more than half of their population having fled the country, not that this has registered one blip on the radar of the US fundamentalists backing the war. And, not only did al Qaeda get a propaganda boost, but as the civil war erupted al Qaeda gained a major foothold and became a major player in that war. More generally, the standing of the US in the Muslim world and more broadly was severey damaged by the entire episode and remains so.

Needless to say, I did not foresee the civil war or the scale of death and destructiont that followed. But then, just about nobody else did either, not at that point in time anyway.

One clear winner from the war has been the Kurdish population, who were under particular repression from the Saddam regime. They have won a virtual autonomy, now guaranteed as they remain power breakers in the federal government in Baghdad, and have been independently developing their oil industry with help of various minor oil companies from places like Norway and Canada. While not perfect, governance in autonomous Kurdistan seems to be reasonably competent, and the economic and social and political situation is almost certainly far improved over the previous period, something that cannot be said about the rest of Iraq.

Finally, I would like to comment on the whole issue of the role that oil played in the war, and here I shall largely be reiterating arguments I made long ago, although not in that original essay in April, 2003. While many thought and continue to think that the war was "mostly about oil," I have never accepted this. Yes, the first Gulf War was. Bush, Sr. clearly would not have bothered undoing Saddam's invasion of Kuwait if there were no oil there or if there was none in neighboring Saudi Arabia. As it was, it was the Saudis, satisfied that Saddam was contained, who held Bush Sr. back from rolling to Baghdad out of fear that this would lead to a pro-Iran, Shi'i-dominated government in Baghdad, which has indeed been an outcome of Bush Jr.'s invasion.

No, it was mostly about Bush Jr. trying to prove that he was a bigger man than his dad, a neo-Ronald Reagan, and many of the other backers of the war in the administration were neocons like Wolfowitz whose big concern was Israel and how Saddam's paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers was an affront, not to mention the Israeli fear of the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. As it is, the interests of Israel have basically never been in line with those of the US oil majors in the Middle East.

There was one player for whom oil was important: VP Dick Cheney, certainly a not inconsequential figure, and possibly the one who most effectively played on Bush Jr.'s inferiority complex vis a vis his dad to get him going on the whole thing. At a minimum, Cheney's own company, Halliburton, made money hand over fist, and there is a clear case of oil playing a role, if a minor one. It is also true that Cheney apparently semi-secretly plotted with various US majors about "getting back into Iraq" as a result of the war, although the CEOs of these companies were not enthusiastic about the idea of disruptions of oil production and transportation that might arise from the war and were not at all public supporters of it.

As it is, of course, the oil companies did make money as the price of oil rose with the disuptions that did occur, although these were not supposed to occur. Indeed, not only Cheney but Wolfie as well were fully under the delusion that we were going to be welcomed with flowers, and the drive to secure the Oil Ministry first in Baghdad was driven by the even more ridiculous delusion that as did Kuwait, Iraq would actually pay for the war itself out of their overwhelming gratitude. It is really astounding to think how such actually intelligent people (Paul Wolfowitz, whom I know personally, is in fact brilliant) could be so completely out of touch with reality.

In any case, the ultimate irony of this is that in the end, the US majors were probably right not to get too excited about all these prospects. They never came to pass. The Kurdish production is being handled by oddball small companies from around the world, although with a couple of minor US ones in there as well. And in the rest of Iraq, oil production has only barely gotten going again due to the ongoing problems of pipelines being blown up and so on, and the companies that have made contracts to do anything have been overwhelmingly non-US ones, with Chinese and Russian ones much more active than any US major. Cheney may have had getting the US majors into Iraq as a major goal of his own efforts, but this may have been the ultimate failure of the many that he was responsible for as VP of the US.

George W. Bush's Second Biggest Foreign Policy Mistake Revisited

Of course the first would be invading Iraq. But a close second not often remembered or even realized occurred two months into his term of office. It was the humiliation inflicted on then South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former torture victim of earlier military dictatorships in that country, when he arrived to visit the US. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had planned on a continuation of the warming policies between the two Koreas and a friendly meeting with Bush and support for Kim. As it was, the "Vulcans" led by Cheney and Rumsfeld intervened to torpedo this and leave Kim not meeting in the cold and without his long-running policy. This also ended that round of negotiations with North Korea on nuclear weapons, with the Vulcans arguing that the US should pursue "regime change" in North Korea, which, hack cough, did not happen.

Instead what happened was that the nuclear negotiations came to and end and US-South Korean relations tanked until a more conservative government took over there. Not long after the end of the negotiations, the DPRK withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted its plutonium-based drive for nuclear weapons, which led to its successful acquisition of such not too long later. This is fish soup that cannot now be turned back into fish or spilled milk that cannot be returned to its container, a disastrous development that we might not now have to be dealing with at this time of leadership transition in North Korea, if Bush and his
Vulcans had not pulled this enormously stupid blunder.

KimJung Un should have such problems!

He doesn't have principles students telling him, on a final exam, that, for instance, the "shoe-leather costs" of inflation stem from "the rising price of leather" Or that hoary and hardy perennial, that the alternative to monetary policy is "physical policy" - carried out, no doubt, by the President's Council on Physical Fitness.

Why was I born?

How North Korea Became So Isolated

North Korea (DPRK) officially follows an ideology developed by its founder, Kim Il Sung, known as KimIlSungism (really), which his just deceased son continued to follow, and which it is likely will continue to be followed at least for awhile by his grandson, the Great Successor, Kim Jong Un. Besides generally following the Stalinist version of strict command planned socialism, somewhat loosened in recent years, the most famous aspect of KimIlSungism has been its doctrine of self-reliance, or juche (also transliterated as chuch'e). While some of the poverty of the DPRK is clearly due to its overemphasis on military production (fourth largest military in the world, and check out those nukes) and the typical stagnation of command planning, much is almost certainly due to the nearly autarkic approach due to KimIlSungism. Where did it come from? I see at least five sources.

The first is the Stalinist model itself. In the great struggle with Trotskyism, Stalin advocated "socialism in one country," although, of course, the Soviet Union was the largest nation in the world by far in land area. However, after WW II, this would be less emphasized as Eastern Europe went officially command socialist with the assistance of the Red Army in place. But in the DPRK, Kim Il Sung would cling to the older model.

Second is that after the death of Stalin, Kim would find fault even before Mao did to the moves towards thawing and loosening of the model that was going on in the Soviet Union. The first recorded speech of Kim supporting juche occurred in late 1955, prior to Khrushchev's 1956 deStalinization speech that reportedly upset Mao (according to official DPRK histories, Kim Il Sung gave his first pro-juche speech in 1930 at age 18, but no independent evidence supports this). With the failure of North Korea to conquer South Korea, and truce without official peace treaty after Stalin's death in 1953, the new leaders would go even softer with the Geneva summit in 1955, accepting the reunification of Austria, guaranteed to be neutral, a model possibly there for Korea that Kim rejected.

Third was the emergence of the Sino-Soviet conflict after 1956, although it would be a few years before this would become open and a problem for the DPRK, caught between the two. While Kim tended to side with Mao's critique of Khrushchev's ideological and policy deviations from Stalinism, he also disagreed with the more decentralized and agriculturally oriented version of socialism that Mao followed in China. As the conflict worsened, he wished to keep independent from both of them, which encouraged the idea of self-reliance. He also did not wish to go the capitalist road or fall into dependence on the capitalist West (or worse yet, Japan), so self-reliant juche became the way to go and was gradually developed over a long period.

Fourth was the emergence of his desire for a socialist monarchy, with his son to succeed him. Having a distinct ideology of self-reliant socialism fit in with this (and it is curious that some other dictatorships have followed the same path of de facto monarchy even if officially socialist republican, see Syria). Curiously, this is also consistent with traditional Confucian values of respect for family.

And the fifth involves the DPRK also falling back on traditional Korean attitudes and practices. Not only has Korea long been described as the most Confucianist nation, but prior to the Japanese conquest in 1910, it was also the most isolated, known as the Hermit Kingdom. In this it had long imitated Japan, but continued to resist being "opened up" even after Japan was by Commodore Perry's black ships in the 1850s, leaving it to the Japanese themselves to do the opening. Kim, of course, presented himself as the national hero of the anti-Japanese resistance, and this return to a traditional Korean practice burnished his credentials as the truly genuine national Korean leader who deserved to lead the unified nation.

Dear Leader Dead, Long Live Great Successor

While all had known that Kim Jong Il had long been seriously ill, his death on Saturday of a heart attack in a train has taken many by surprise, with citizens of the DPRK (North Korea) showing the same sort of hysterical grief they did when his father, Kim Il Sung (Dear Leader) died in 1994, which in turn repeated the sort of reaction seen in the Soviet Union on the death of Joseph Stalin.

In contrast with the long delay of reporting Kim Il Sung's death, it has taken only 48 hours for Kim Jong Il's death to be reported, with DPRK media reporting that his third son, Kim Jong Un, is to be called the Great Successor. Kim Jong Un had been reported to have been favored by his father and to have been groomed for acceptance by the family and military elites that rule the nation. Pretty clearly this ruling group has decided that he is to be the front man for continuing their dominance, although it is almost certain that it will be some time before he will be able to asert anything like the dominance his father and grandfather would come to have.

So, in the intermediate term the prospect is for stability, even as the South Korean stock market dropped 5% on the news before rebounding some, along with a drop in the ROK won as well, and various military maneuvers have been reported near the DMZ. Inter-Korean relations have been particularly bad during the past year, since military attacks by the North, thought by many to have been made to impress the DPRK military with Kim Jong Un on his appointment at a four star general.

Even as the near term seems to augur continuation of the system that has produced five straight years of GDP decline and ongoing malnourishment of large parts of the rural population, particularly in the nation's northeast. However, underneath this apparent stasis, many changes seem to be going on. Cell phones have spread widely, as have informal markets in various goods, towards which the government has oscillated in attitude. Chinese pressure to follow their model has steadily increased, and in recent months there have been reports of negotiations with the US. Kim Jong Un studied in Switzerland. So, there may be major changes down the road, if not immediately, particularly as the Great Successor may need to imitate in economic policy what was done in military policy this last year to assert his legitimacy to be officially on top of the nation's system. But this death and succession does mean the further future becomes much less clear.

President Gingrich Would Ignore The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act

I was scratching my head as to why any Presidential candidate would say Ben Bernanke should be fired until I read this:

"I would, first of all, demand a thorough audit [of the Fed]. Second, publish all the decision documents for 2008, 2009, 2010. Third, I would prepare legislation to eliminate the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which has totally confused the Fed," Gingrich said. The former House speaker went on to say that he would demand the Fed to hold "hard" money

There are lots of reasons why Newt should never be allowed near the White House again but this one has to go to the top of the list.

The Exegesis of Deceit

One of the steadiest hums of our time is liberal indignation at the dishonesty of the Right.  On any given day, you can hear the shock and disbelief: How can they say that?  Don’t they care about getting the facts right?  Don’t they realize they are being inconsistent?  Last week it was the Romney campaign ad that deliberately and even crudely misquoted Obama.  This morning I wake up to Krugman “truly amazed” at the way Paul Ryan would cite commodity prices on the way up and ignore them on the way down.  May I suggest that there is a method to this deceit and that being shocked is not an adequate response?

Obama's Payroll Tax Cut

When the cut was first announced, I wrote that it seemed to pose a threat to Social Security. Now, a few of the Democrats, especially Bernie Sanders, seem to be picking up on the risk to Social Security. What would have stopped Obama from making it a tax rebate in which the treasury would not have to leave the fingerprint on the Social Security system. Besides, it could be targeted to people who made under x millions of dollars a year. Of course, really smart CEOs do not have to pay the tax. They can take a one dollar salary, then cash in stock options instead.

The Brussels Agreement: Why it will Fail

One response would be to point out the irrationality of the agreement itself—the minimal role that fiscal profligacy played in bringing on the fiscal crisis, the lack of any mechanism for rebalancing between surplus and deficit countries, and the unchanged charter of the ECB, which prevents it from behaving like a normal central bank.  Those arguments have been made, are being made and will continue to be made, and will apparently have no effect on the course taken by European politics.

So let’s look at the realpolitik, past and future.

First of all, it is important to bear in mind that this is an agreement of the European right.  The economic collapse of 2008 resulted in an electoral rout of social democrats throughout the continent (and in the UK).  That’s a story that needs more explanation, but for now the point is simply that conservative parties have absolute control over Europe, and the agreement just reached represents their priorities.  It is for hard money, austerity in the face of recession, full guarantees for creditors, and implicitly for reining in the costs of the welfare state, which must happen if the deficit targets are to be met under foreseeable conditions.  This is why politics matters, after all.

Not liking a political program is not the same as predicting its failure, however.  It could happen that the conservatives get their way and a socially regressive stability takes hold.  Under this scenario, the fiscal crisis recedes and Europe enters a long period of slow growth which is favorable for those who acquired wealth during the go-go years: the value of their assets is protected, and labor is mortally weakened.  For those who designed the Brussels agreement, and for those who bankrolled them, this would look like victory.

A clear-eyed view of the situation suggests, for me at least, that this outcome is unlikely.  I believe that the fiscal pledge will buy time—at most a year—for German support for peripheral finances.  It is essentially a quid pro quo: the countries of Europe make a (foolish) promise to bind themselves to a 3% deficit rule, and in return the main creditor country, Germany, softens its stance toward transfers.  How much softer?  From first appearances, it looks like about €250B net, with some financing moved forward from 2013 to 2012.  (This assumes that the €200B directed to the IMF is returned to Europe without leveraging Chinese or other commitments.)  Is that enough?  It depends on whether the market response is favorable.  If interest rates come down in Italy, Spain and the rest, debt can be rolled over until the economy subsides.  This means something like a quarter or two.  If interest rates shoot back up, the money is not sufficient.  In that case, everything depends on the ECB and whether Draghi now has implicit German forbearance to monetize a portion of euro-denominated sovereign debt.

But this about whether the plan can make it through the next few months.  I believe it is simply impossible for it to survive much more than this.  Absent a miracle, Europe is sliding into a recession.  This will affect Germany as much as the weaker countries, even more considering its dependence on Eurozone exports.  (Germany suffered an exceptionally sharp contraction post-Lehman too.)  The result will be a risk of debt deflation in all markets.  The sovereign debtors will again face default as public revenue dries up.  Speculative assets like real estate will resume their decline.  Overleveraged financial institutions—and Europe is the world leader in overleveraged finance—will need to be bailed out.  Of course, a rise in unemployment will trigger automatic stabilizers and increase the pressures for discretionary fiscal deficits as well.  It is likely that there will be a wave of elections in which center-left parties take revenge for their defeats of the past few years—Germany could lead the way, in fact.

When it comes to whether European economies will simply collapse into a deflationary spiral, or whether the Brussels commitments will be abrogated, I’ll put my money on abrogation.  This agreement has a ticking clock, and when the time winds down, it will be history.

The Meme that Refuses to Die: Government Debt Must Be Paid Back

No it doesn’t.  It almost never is.  To pay back government debt, you have to run a budget surplus, and while there may be modest surpluses from time to time, they don’t add up to more than a minuscule fraction of all the accumulated debt.  But don’t take it from me, look at the record.

The story is unmistakable: the US jacked up its public debt to finance WWII and increased it further in almost every year since then.  We are not paying off the debt left by our parents and grandparents, and our children and grandchildren will not pay off ours.

The debt burden depends on the ratio of debt to GDP as well as the interest cost in servicing it.  The way to reduce this burden is to have a combination of real economic growth, inflation and modest interest rates.  If you want to show your solicitude for the well-being of future generations, demand macroeconomic policies that will boost demand and raise inflation a bit, consistent with continued low interest rates.

What to avoid: nonsense like this excerpt from today’s column by Catherine Rampell of the New York Times:

Total debt for the United States — that is, also including corporate and government debt — hit another all-time high because government borrowing is still outpacing the rate at which households shed debt.

 Guess who will ultimately pay back that government debt: American households.

A Theory About Polish Politics

This morning’s New York Times has a piece about Polish PM Tusk’s avid support for Germany’s stance in EU bargaining.  The article plays up Tusk’s pan-Europeanism and leaves out his equally passionate attachment to fiscal orthodoxy à la Merkel/Schäuble.  Putting both together, you have the classical liberal position, one that can still be found in every European country, although seldom with as much backing as in Poland.

I don’t have a detailed understanding of Polish politics, and I welcome comments from readers who can set me right, but here is my tentative explanation:

More on Teaching Intro

Peter started a discussion here. And Nick Rowe at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, under the title "God and Man at Yale" has another one, with hundreds of comments. I'll add my two cents. This is a comment I sent to WCI actually.

I want an Intro. Course to show students "how to think like an economist," but I also want some time devoted to the limitations of such thinking. I used to teach the course with David Friedman's *Hidden Order* and Robert Frank's *Choosing the Right Pond*, so they could see how the same methodology - rationality plus equilibrium - could give you very different political-economic visions. But the methodology itself -whether wielded in support of libertarian or left-liberal politics - ought not to be accepted uncritically. So I would assign Dickens' *Hard Times*. The students hated the Dickens, so I dropped it and substituted Amartya Sen's "Rational Fools." I wanted them to understand how the phenomenon of "commitment", as Sen uses it, by which he means "counter-preferential choice" is a deep critique of the conception of rationality that economists use. Unlike the behavioral critique, which simply documents all the ways people make mistakes in maximizing, a Senian critique says that human beings are more than utility maximizers. As the late lamented David Foster Wallace puts the point in a discussion of Dostoevsky, "[Dostoevsky’s] concern was always with what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal." I don't think this deep critique cuts either right or left, but I think we do a disservice to our students by not exposing them to it. The fact is that most of them when they come to us are already "thinking like economists" in important and pernicious respects: they are cynical about the possibility of principled behavior, they are sure that behind every alleged "value" lies a preference, they are nihilistic about normative authority. The have been brought up, after all, in the age of "sophisters, calculators and economists."

At an AEA meeting one year long ago, there was a session on "Teaching the Principles Course" I attended, which was really just advertising for two new texts by the presenters, one of whom was Robert Frank. (The text he was introducing is the one I have used in the Micro split ever since - it's a great book.) Frank talked about how the book encouraged the students to be economic naturalists, and to apply the economic way of thinking to everything they came across. I asked a question: suppose a student comes to your office hours and thanks you for teaching him the EWT. He was in a long-term relationship and felt that he owed his partner loyalty, but that after learning that sunk costs shouldn't play any part in guiding one's choices, he decided - given that the net benefit of the relationship going forward was negative- that he owed his partner nothing, and consequently was dis-loyal. Frank seemed genuinely at a loss for a response and after the session sought me out to talk more about it.

John Taylor Clarifies His Summary

John Taylor is not happy with a critic from Paul Krugman. His most recent summary states:

Krugman says my conference summary suggested that “Bloom, Baker and Davis had showed that fear of Obama was holding the economy down.” No, my summary said or implied no such thing; there is no mention of Obama, Bush, or any politician in my summary. It simply says that these authors “presented their empirical measures of policy uncertainty and showed that they were negatively correlated with economic growth.” … As part of his presentation Bob said that now and going forward we should assume “no chance of conventional fiscal expansion; rather, possible cutbacks motivated by excessive federal debt.”

Contrast this to what Taylor originally wrote:

In sum there was considerable agreement that (1) policy uncertainty was a major problem in the slow recovery, (2) short run stimulus packages were not the answer going forward

Wow – I read (1) as saying a lot more than simply negatively correlated. I also read (2) as asserting fiscal policy was ineffective but now we know that Dr. Taylor meant fiscal stimulus was never tried and will not be tried. I’m so glad he cleared this up!

Climate Change Proposal

If a large number of countries wish to band together to limit climate change, could they impose a tariff on imports from countries that do not limit CO2 production, accusing the non-compliant of taking advantage of an unfair trade practice?

John Taylor May Have One Thing Right

Paul Krugman provides us with the summary of a conference at the Hoover Institute provided by John Taylor. Paul notes that Taylor’s summary misrepresented what Bob Hall said:

Taylor makes it seem as if Bob Hall showed that fiscal expansion is ineffective. Yet if you have actually been following Hall — which I have, carefully — you’d know that he has been producing extensive evidence that fiscal expansion does, indeed, work; he argues that the Obama stimulus made the slump considerably less severe. His complaint is that the stimulus wasn’t big enough — which is the same argument I made from the beginning.

For a more fair and balanced summary – see Noahpinion. But let’s also note the following from Taylor’s summary:

I presented research with John Cogan on fiscal policy showing that it had not been successful in raising government purchases and was ineffective regardless of the size of the multiplier.

In other words – we really did not try fiscal stimulus after all. Isn’t that also been what Paul has been saying for quite a while!

Eurologic

The word has come down from on high in Europe.  Merkozy have decided:

1. Henceforth, after Greece, there will be no more haircuts administered to creditors of sovereign debt.  All obligations will be paid in full, no matter what interest rate has to be paid or how onerous the debt service program has become.

2. Every country will be subjected to hard limits on its budget deficit and must even show progress toward reducing debt-to-GDP to 60% if it is now above that target.

There are problems with each of these taken alone, but has anyone noticed that, under predictable circumstances, they contradict each other?  You can explain this as a quid pro quo for the two main players in the Eurozone, but sometimes political agreements also have to make sense.