europe – Page 3 – J. W. Mason

Default ≠ Drachma

I’ve been saying for a while that people should stop assuming that a Greek default implies leaving the euro for a new currency. Much of the media coverage of the negotiations continues to assume that the two are inseparable — that, in effect, the negotiations are over Greece remaining in the euro system. But there is no logical necessity for a default to be followed by the creation of a new currency; indeed it’s hard to see any reason why the former should lead to the latter.

Finally the consensus that default must mean exit seems to be breaking down. Here’s John Cochrane:

Please can we stop passing along this canard — that Greece defaulting on some of its bonds means that Greece must must change currencies. Greece no more needs to leave the euro zone than it needs to leave the meter zone and recalibrate all its rulers, or than it needs to leave the UTC+2 zone and reset all its clocks to Athens time. When large companies default, they do not need to leave the dollar zone. When cities and even US states default they do not need to leave the dollar zone.

Cochrane’s political views are one thing, but he is a very smart guy. And in this case, I think the Walrasian view of money as numéraire is helpful. It’s important to remember that euros are not physical things, they are simply units in which contractual commitments are denominated.

And now in today’s FT, Wolfgang Munchau writes:

The big question — whether Greece will leave the eurozone or not — remains unanswerable. But I am now fairly certain it will default. My understanding is that some eurozone officials are at least contemplating the possibility of a Greek default but without Grexit. …

On whom could, or should, Greece default? It could default on its citizens by not paying public-sector wages or pensions. That would be morally repugnant and politically suicidal… it could default on the two loans it received from its EU partners, though it is not due to start repaying those until 2020… Defaulting on the IMF and ECB is the only option that would bring genuine financial relief in the short term. …

Default is not synonymous with exit. There is no EU ruling that says you have to leave the eurozone when you default on your debt. The link between default and exit is indirect; if a country defaults, its defaulting securities are no longer eligible as IOUs for the country’s banks to tender at ECB money auctions.…

So to default “inside the eurozone” one only needs to devise another way to keep the banking system afloat. If someone could concoct a brilliant answer, there would be no need for Grexit.

… The economic case for a debt default is overwhelming. … Full servicing would require huge primary surpluses — that is, surpluses before payment of interest on debt. It would leave Greece trapped in a debt depression for a long time. The scheduled primary surplus for 2016 is 4.5 per cent, which is bordering on the insane. Athens absolutely needs to default. At the same time, there is a strong case for remaining in the eurozone.

This hits all the key points. First, there is no logical connection between defaulting and creating a new currency. (Probably better to use that wording, rather than “exit.”) Second, default would open up significant space in Greece’s fiscal position, and would not hurt the its external position. This follows from the fact that Greece currently has a substantial primary surplus and a slight positive trade balance. [1] Third, the only reason there is any link is that default might cause the ECB to cease accepting new liabilities from Greek banks, and it might be hard for the Bank of Greece and/or Greek government to take the ECB’s place under the existing rules of the eurosystem. So, fourth, the real problem with default is the need to ensure that the Greek payments system continues to operate even if the ECB tries to sabotage it.

The phrasing of that last point might seem hyperbolic. But imagine if, during the Detroit bankruptcy negotiations, the Fed had announced that if the city did not pay off its creditors in full, the Fed would use all its regulatory tools to shut down any banks operating in the city. That’s a close analogy to the situation in Europe.

Maintaining interbank payments within Greece does not necessarily require the Greek government to issue any new liabilities. And it certainly doesn’t require that Greek bank accounts be redenominated. All that is necessary is that if someone with a deposit in Greek bank A wants to make a payment to someone with an account at Greek bank B, there is some system by which bank A can transfer a settlement asset to bank B, acquiring the asset if necessary by issuing a new liability. The technical aspect of this is not challenging, and even the practical aspect, since the Bank of Greece already performs exactly this function. As far as I can tell, the only problem is a political one — given that the Bank of Greece is run by holdovers from the former Greek government, it’s possible that if the ECB told them to stop facilitating payments between Greek banks they would listen, even if the Greek government said to carry on.

Now some people will say, “oh but the Treaties! oh but the Bank of Greece isn’t allowed to accept the liabilities of Greek banks if Brussels says no! oh but the ELA rules!” [2] Obviously I think this is silly. In the first place, the “rules” are hopelessly vague, so if the ECB’s does shut off liquidity to Greek banks in the event of a default, that will be a political choice. And on the other side, Greece is a sovereign nation. It may have delegated decisionmaking at the Bank of Greece to the ECB, but that also was a political choice, which can be reversed. More to the point, the rules definitely don’t allow for exit. Nor for that matter do they allow for default — and as Munchau correctly points out, cuts to the salaries and pensions of public employees are also a form of default. Rules are going to be broken, whether Greece creates a new currency or not. And it is not at all clear to me that the demands on the Greek state from recreating the drachma, are any less than the demands from maintaining payments between Greek banks in the absence of ECB support — which is all it takes to default and continue using the euro. If anything, the former seems strictly more demanding than the latter, since Greece will need its own central bank either way.

This all may seem pedantic, but it is important: The threat of ejection from the euro is one of the most powerful weapons the creditors have. And let’s remember, the only direct consequence of a breakdown in negotiations, is a default on Greek government debt.

Now there is another argument, which is that exit is positively desirable since a flexible currency would allow Greece to reliably achieve current account balance even once income growth resumes. I think that is wrong — but that’s a topic for another post. (I discussed the issue a couple years ago here.) But even if, unlike me, you think that a flexible exchange rate would be helpful for Greece, it doesn’t follow that that decision is bound up with the debt negotiations.

[1] It is possible that the apparent primary surplus is due to manipulation of the budget numbers by the previous government. I think that the arguments here would still apply if there were really a primary deficit, but it would complicate things.

[2] Or, “oh but that would be ungrateful.” In one of its more disingenuous editorials I can recall, the FT last month wept crocodile tears over the fact that “default on Greek debts would deter wealthier voters from ever again helping their neighbours in financial distress.” Apparently German banks didn’t care about the interest on all the Greek government bonds they bought; they only lent so long out of kindness, I suppose. Also, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the editorialists that deterring the financing of large current account deficits might be a good thing.

UPDATE: This seems important:

A country that defaults would not have to leave the euro, the European Central Bank’s vice president said on Monday…

Vitor Constancio discussed the possibility of a debt default and controls on the movement of money, saying neither necessarily meant a departure from the currency bloc. “If a default will happen … the legislation does not allow that a country that has a default … can be expelled from the euro,” he told the European Parliament…

Constancio also touched on the possibility of capital controls. “Capital controls can only be introduced if the Greek government requests,” he said, adding that they should be temporary and exceptional. “As you saw in the case of Cyprus, capital controls did not imply getting out of the euro.” …

“We are convinced at the ECB that there will be no Greek exit,” he said. “The (European Union) treaty does not foresee that a country can be formally, legally expelled from the euro. We think it should not happen.” …

“If the state defaults, that has no automatic implications regarding the banks, if the banks have not defaulted, if the banks are solvent and if the banks have collateral that is accepted,” Constancio said.

Maybe they were worried that Greece would call their bluff. Or who knows, maybe the culture of the place has changed under Draghi and they are no longer ready to serve as austerity’s battering ram. In any case, it’s hard to see this as anything but a big step back by the ECB.

UPDATE 2: Martin Wolf is on board as well. (Though he doesn’t like my Detroit analogy.)

Causes and Effects of Wage Growth

Over here, a huge stack of exams, sitting ungraded since… no, I can’t say, it’s too embarrassing. There, a grant proposal that extensive experimentation has shown will not, in fact, write itself. And I still owe a response to all the responses and criticism to my Disgorge the Cash paper for Roosevelt. So naturally, I thought this morning would be a good time to sit down and ask what we can learn from comparing the path of labor costs in the Employment Cost Index compared with the ECEC.

The BLS explains the difference between the two measures:

The Employment Cost Index, or ECI, measures changes in employers’ cost of compensating workers, controlling for changes in the industrial-occupational composition of jobs. … The ECI is intended to indicate how the average compensation paid by employers would have changed over time if the industrial-occupational composition of employment had not changed… [It] controls for employment shifts across 2-digit industries and major occupations. The Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, or ECEC… is designed to measure the average cost of employee compensation. Accordingly, the ECEC is calculated by multiplying each job quote by its sample weight.

In other words, the ECI measures the change in average hourly compensation, controlling for shifts in the mix of industries and occupations. The ECEC simply measures the overall change in hourly compensation, including the effects of both changes in compensation for particular jobs, and changes in the mix of jobs.

Here are the two series for the full period both are available (1987-2014), both raw and adjusted for inflation (“real”).

What do we learn from this?

First, the two series are closely correlated. This tells us that most of the variation in compensation is driven by changes within occupations and sectors, not by shifts in employment between occupations and sectors. This is clearly true at annual frequencies but it seems to be true over longer periods as well. For instance, let’s compare the behavior of compensation in the five years since the end of the recession to the last period of strong wage growth, 1997-2004. The difference between the two periods in the average annual increase in nominal wages is almost exactly the same according to the two indexes — 2.7 points by the ECI, 2.6 points by the ECEC. In other words, slower wage growth in the recent period is entirely due to slower wages growth within particular kinds of jobs. Shifts in the composition of jobs have played no role at all.

On the face of it, the fact that almost all variation in aggregate compensation is driven by changes within employment categories, seems to favor a labor/political story of slower wage growth as opposed to a China or robots story. The most obvious versions of the latter two stories involve a disproportionate loss of high-wage jobs, whereas stories about weaker bargaining position of labor predict slower compensation growth within job categories. I wouldn’t ask this one piece of evidence to carry a lot of weight in that debate. (I think it’s stronger evidence against a skills-based explanation of slower wage growth.)

While the two series in general move together, the ECEC is more strongly cyclical. In other words, during periods of high unemployment and falling wages in general, there is also a shift in the composition of employment towards lower-paid occupations. And during booms, when unemployment is low and wages are rising in general, there is a shift in the direction of higher-paid job categories. [1] Insofar as wages and labor productivity are correlated, this cyclical shift between higher-wage and lower-wage sectors could help explain why employment is more stable than output. I’ve had the idea for a while that the Okun’s law relationship — the less than one-for-one correlation between employment and output growth — reflects not only hiring/firing costs and overhead labor, but also shifts in the composition of employment in response to demand. In other words, in addition to employment adjustment costs at the level of individual enterprises, the Okun coefficient reflects cyclically varying degrees of “disguised unemployment” in Joan Robinson’s sense. [2] This is an argument I’d like to develop properly someday, since it seems fairly obvious, potentially important and empirically tractable, and I haven’t seen anyone else make it. [3] (I’m sure someone has.)

What’s going on in the most recent year? Evidently, there has been no acceleration of wage growth for a given job, but the mix of jobs created has shifted toward higher-wage categories. This suggests that to the extent wages are rising faster, it’s not a sign of labor-market pressures. (Some guy from Deutsche Bank interprets the same divergence as support for raising rates, which it’s hard not to feel is deliberately dishonest.) As for which particular higher-wage job categories are growing more rapidly — I don’t know. And, what’s going on in 1995? That year has by far the biggest divergence between the two series. It could well be an artifact of some kind, but if not, seems important. A large fall in the ECEC relative to the ECI could be a signature of deindustrialization. I’m not exploring the question further now (those exams…) but it would be interesting to ask analogous question with some series that extends earlier. It’s likely that if we were looking at the 1970s-1980s, we would find a much larger share of variation in wage growth explained by compositional shifts.

Should we adjust for inflation? I give the “real” series here, but I am in general skeptical that there is any sense in which an ex post adjustment of money flows for inflation is more real than, say, The Real World on MTV. I am even more doubtful than usual in this case, because we are normally told to think that changes in nominal wages are the main determinant of inflation. Obviously in that case we have to think of the underlying labor-market process as determining a change in nominal wage. Still, if we do compute a “real” index, things look a little different. Real ECI rises 14 percent over the full 1987-2014 period, while real ECEC rises only 5 percent. So now we can say that about two-thirds of the increase in real wages within particular job categories over the past three decades, was offset by a shift in the composition of employment toward lower-paid job categories. (This is all in the first decade, 1987-1996, however.) This way of looking at things makes sense if we think the underlying wage-setting process, whatever it is, operates in terms of a basket of consumption goods.

This invites another question: How true is it that nominal wages move with inflation?

Conventional economics wisdom suggests we can separate wages into nominal and “real” components. This is on two not quite consistent grounds. First, we might suppose that workers and employers are implicitly negotiating contracts in terms of a fixe quantity of labor time for, on the one hand, a basket of wage goods, and on the other, a basket of produced goods (which will be traded for consumption good for the employer). This contract only incidentally happens to be stated in terms of money. The ultimate terms on which consumption goods for the workers exchange with consumption goods for the employer should not be affected by the units the trade happens to be denominated in. (In this respect the labor contract is just like any other contract.) This is the idea behind Milton Friedman’s “natural rate of unemployment” hypothesis. In Friedman’s story, causality runs strictly from inflation to unemployment. High inflation is not immediately recognized by workers, leading them to overestimate the basket of goods their wages will buy. So they work more hours than they would have chosen if they had correctly understood the situation. From this point of view, there’s no cost to low unemployment in itself; the problem is just that unemployment will only be low if high inflation has tricked workers into supply too much labor. Needless to say, this is not the way anyone in the policy world thinks about the inflation-unemployment nexus today, even if they continue to use Friedman’s natural rate language.

The alternative view is that workers and employers negotiate a money-wage, and then output prices are set as a markup over that wage. In this story, causality runs from unemployment to inflation. While Friedman thought an appropriate money-supply growth rate was the necessary and sufficient condition for stable prices, with any affect on unemployment just collateral damage from changes in inflation, in this story keeping unemployment at an appropriate level is a requirement for stabilizing prices. This is the policy orthodoxy today. (So while people often say that NAIRU is just another name for the natural rate of unemployment, in fact they are different concepts.) I think there are serious conceptual difficulties with the orthodox view, but we’ll save those for another time. Suffice it to say that causality is supposed to run from low unemployment, to faster nominal wage growth, to higher inflation. So the question is: Is it really the case that faster nominal wage growth is associated with higher inflation?

Wage Growth and Inflation, 1947-2014

A simple scatterplot suggests a fairly tight relationship, especially at higher levels of wage growth and inflation. But if we split the postwar period at 1985, things look very different. In the first period, there’s a close relationship — regressing inflation on nominal wage growth gives an R-squared of 0.81. (Although even then the coefficient is significantly less than 1.)

Wage Growth and Inflation, 1947-1985

Since 1985, though, the relationship is much looser, with an R-squared of 0.12. And even is that driven almost entirely by period of falling wages and prices in 2009; remove that and the correlation is essentially zero.

Wage Growth and Inflation, 1986-2014

So while it was formerly true that changes in inflation were passed one for one into changes in nominal wages, and/or changes in nominal wage growth led to similar changes in inflation, neither of those things has been true for quite a while now. In recent decades, faster nominal wage growth does not translate into higher inflation.

Obviously, a few scatterplots aren’t dispositive, but they are suggestive. So supposing that there has been a delinking of wage growth and inflation, what conclusions might we draw? I can think of a couple.

On the one hand, maybe we shouldn’t be so dismissive of the naive view that inflation reduces the standard of living directly, by raising the costs of consumption goods while incomes are unchanged. There seems to be an emerging conventional wisdom in this vicinity. Here for instance is Gillian Tett in the FT, endorsing the BIS view that there’s nothing wrong with falling prices as long as asset prices stay high. (Priorities.) In the view of both Keynes (in the GT; he modified it later) and Schumpeter, inflation was associated with higher nominal but lower real wages, deflation with lower nominal but higher real wages. I think this may have been true in the 19th century. It’s not impossible it could be true in the future.

On the other hand. If the mission of central banks is price stability, and if there is no reliable association between changes in wage growth and changes in inflation, then it is hard to see the argument for tightening in response to falling unemployment. You really should wait for direct evidence of rising inflation. Yet central banks are as focused on unemployment as ever.

It’s perhaps significant in this regard that the authorities in Europe are shifting away from the NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) and increasingly talking about the NAWRU (Non-Accelerating Wage Rate of Unemployment). If the goal all along has been lower wage growth, then this is what you should expect: When the link between wages and inflation weakens, the response is not to find other tools for controlling inflation, but other arguments for controlling wages. This may be the real content of the “competitiveness” discourse. Elevating competitiveness over price stability as overarching goal of policy lets you keep pushing down wages even when inflation is already low.

Worth noting here: While the ECB’s “surrender Dorothy” letter to the Spanish government ordered them to get rid of price indexing, their justification was not, as you might expect, that indexation contributes to inflationary spirals. Rather it was that it is “a structural obstacle to the adjustment of labour costs” and “contribute to hampering competitiveness.” [4] This is interesting. In the old days we would have said, wage indexing is bad because it won’t affect real wages, it just leads to higher inflation. But apparently in the new dispensation, we say that wage indexing is bad precisely because it does affect real wages.

[1] This might seem to contradict the previous point but it doesn’t, it’s just that the post-2009 recovery period includes both a negative composition shift in 2008-2009, when unemployment was high, and a positive compositional shift in 2014, which cancel each other out.

[2] From A Theory of Employment: “Except under peculiar conditions, a decline in effective demand which reduces the amount of employment offered in the general run of industries will not lead to ‘unemployment’ in the sense of complete idleness, but will rather drive workers into a number of occupations [such as] selling match-boxes in the Strand, cutting brushwood in the jungles, digging potatoes on allotments which are still open to them. A decline in one sort of employment leads to an increase in another sort, and at first sight it may appear that, in such a case, a decline in effective demand does not cause unemployment at all. But the matter must be more closely examined. In all those occupations which the dismissed workers take up, their productivity is less than in the occupations that they have left.”

[3] The only piece I know of that makes the connection between demand and productivity variation across sectors is this excellent article by John Eatwell (which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be available online), but it is focused on long run variation, not cyclical.

[4] The ECB’s English is not the most felicitous, is it? The Spanish version is “contribuyen a dificultar la competitividad y el crecimiento,” which also doesn’t strike me as a phrase that a native speaker would write. Maybe it sounds better in the original German.

Mark Blyth on the Creditor’s Paradise

There’s a lot to like in this talk by Mark Blyth, reposted in Jacobin. I will certainly be quoting him in the future on the euro system as a “creditor’s paradise.” But I can’t help noting that the piece repeats exactly the two bits of conventional wisdom that I’ve been criticizing in my recent posts here on Europe. [1]

First, the uncritical adoption of the orthodox view that if Greece defaults on its debts to the euro system, it will have to leave the single currency. Admittedly it’s just a line in passing. But I really wish that Blyth would not write “default or ‘Grexit’,” as if they were synonyms. Given that the assumption that they have to go together is one of the strongest weapons on the side of orthodoxy, opponents of austerity should at least pause a moment and ask if they necessarily do.

Second, this:

Austerity as economic policy simply doesn’t work. … European reforms … simply ask everyone to become “more competitive” — and who could be against that? Until one remembers that being competitive against each other’s main trading partners in the same currency union generates a “moving average” problem of continental proportions.

It is statistically absurd to all become more competitive. It’s like everyone trying to be above average. It sounds like a good idea until we think about the intelligence of the children in a classroom. By definition, someone has to be the “not bright” one, even in a class of geniuses.

In comments to my last post, a couple people doubted if critics of austerity really say it’s impossible for all the countries in the euro to become more competitive. If you were one of the doubters, here you go: Mark Blyth says exactly that. Notice the slippage in the referent of “everyone,” from all countries in the euro system, to all countries in the world. Contra Blyth, since the eurozone is not a closed trading system, it is not inherently absurd to suggest that everyone in it can become more competitive. If competitiveness is measured by the trade balance, it’s not only not absurd, it’s an accomplished fact.

Obviously — but I guess it isn’t obvious — I don’t personally think that the shift toward trade surpluses throughout the eurozone represents any kind of improvement in the human condition. But it does directly falsify the claim Blyth is making here. And this is a problem if the stance we are trying to criticize austerity from is a neutral technocratic one, in which disagreements are about means rather than ends.

Austerity is part of the program of reinforcing and extending the logic of the market in political and social life. Personally I find that program repugnant. But on its own terms, austerity can work just fine.

[1] One of my posts was also cross-posted at Jacobin. Everybody should read Jacobin.

What Has Happened to Trade Balances in Europe?

It has gradually entered our awareness that the Greek trade account is now balanced. Greece no longer depends on financial markets (or official transfers, or remittances from workers abroad) to finance its imports. This is obviously important for negotiations with the “institutions,” or at least it ought to be.

I was wondering, how general is this shift toward a positive trade balance. In the FT last week, Martin Wolf pointed out that over the past five years, the Euro area as a whole has shifted from modest trade deficits to substantial trade surpluses, equal to 3 percent of euro-area GDP in 2013. He does not break it down by country, though. I decided to do that.

Euro area trade ratios, 2008 and 2013. The size of the dots is proportional to total 2008 trade.

Here, from Eurostat, are the export-import ratios for the euro countries in 2008 and 2013. Values greater than one on the horizontal axis represent a trade surplus in 2008; only a few northern European countries fall in that group. Meanwhile, in seven countries imports exceeded exports by 10 percent or more. By 2013, the large majority of the euro area is in surplus, while not a single country has an excess of imports over exports of more than 5 percent. The distance above the diagonal line indicates the improvement from 2008 to 2013; this is positive for every euro-area country except Austria, Finland and Luxembourg, and the biggest improvements are in the countries with the worst ratios in 2008. The surplus countries, apart from Finland, more or less maintained their surpluses; but the deficit countries all more or less eliminated their deficits.

So does this mean that austerity works? Yes and no. It is certainly true that Europe’s deficit countries have all achieved positive trade balances in the past few years, even including countries like Greece whose trade deficits long predated the euro. On the other hand, it’s also almost certainly true that this has more to do with the falls in domestic demand rather than any increase in competitiveness.

This is shown in the second figure, which gives the ratio of 2013 imports to 2008 exports on the vertical axis, and 2013 exports to 2008 imports on the horizontal axis. (This is in nominal euros.) Here a point on the diagonal line equals and equal growth rate of imports and exports. Most countries are clustered around 15% growth in imports and exports; these are the countries that had balanced trade or surpluses in 2008, and whose trade ratios have not changed much in the past five years. Only one country, Estonia, has export growth substantially above the European average. But all the former deficit countries have import growth much lower than average. (As indicated by their position to the left of the main cluster.) It’s evident from this diagram that the move toward balanced trade in the deficit countries is about throttling back imports, not boosting exports. This suggests that it has more to do with slow income growth than with lower costs.

Again, the sizes of the dots are proportional to 2008 trade volumes.

Still, the fact remains, trade deficits have almost been eliminated in the euro area. Liberal critics of the European establishment often say “not every country in Europe can be a net exporter” as if that were a truism. But it’s not even true, not in principle and evidently not in practice. It turns out it is quite possible for every country in the euro to run a trade surplus.

The next question is, with whom has the euro area’s trade balanced improved? Europe outside the euro, to begin with. The country with the biggest single increase in net imports from the euro zone is, surprisingly, Switzerland, whose deficit with the euro area has increased by close to 60 billion. Switzerland’s annual trade deficit with the euro area is now 75 billion, about a quarter of the area’s overall trade surplus. Norway and Turkey have increased their deficits by about 15 billion each. The rest of the increase in net exports are accounted for by increased surpluses with Africa (26 billion), the US (27 billion), and Latin America (35 billion, about half to Brazil), and a decreased deficit with Asia (135 billion, including a 55 billion smaller deficit with China, 30 billion smaller with Japan and 20 billion with Korea). Net exports to Australia have also increased by 10 billion.

Why do I bring this up? One, I haven’t seen it discussed much and it is interesting.

But more importantly, the lesson of the Europe-wide shift toward trade surpluses is that austerity can succeed on its own terms. I think there’s a tendency for liberal critics of austerity to assume that the people on the other side are just confused, or blinkered by ideology, and that there’s something incoherent or self-contradictory about competitiveness as a Europe-wide organizing principle. There’s a hope, I think, that economic logic will eventually compel policymakers to do what’s right for everyone. Personally, I don’t think that the masters of the euro care too much about the outcome of the struggle for competitiveness; it’s the struggle itself — and the constraints it imposes on public and private choices — that matters. But insofar as the test of the success of austerity is the trade balance, I suspect austerity can succeed indefinitely.

UPDATE: In comments Kostas Kalaveras points to a report from the European Commission that includes a similar breakdown of changes in trade balances across the euro area. There’s some useful data in there but the interpretation is that almost all the adjustment has been structural rather than cyclical. This is based on estimates of declining potential output in the periphery that I think are insane. But it’s interesting to see how official Europe thinks about this stuff.

“The Idea Was to Create a Modern Gold Standard”

My view on the euro is that it has become a project to restore the rule of money over humanity. To move us back toward a world where in every sphere of life, and especially in collective choices made through government, the overriding question is, “what is most consistent with the accumulation of money claims?” or, “what will the markets think?” The euro is a project to roll back social democracy and to reimpose the “discipline of the market” on the state — or in other words to restore the logic of the gold standard, whose essential condition was that preservation of money-claims had priority over democratic government. From this point of view, crises are not a failure of the system but an essential part of its functioning, since discipline requires that punishment be sometimes visibly meted out.

This kind of Polanyian perspective is typically found on the left. But it’s increasingly clear that many of those on the other side think this way too. Here is a striking recent op-ed from the FT, by one Thomas Mayer:

Germany relied on the Maastricht treaty to make it possible to share a currency without sacrificing political accountability. The idea was to create an economic framework that was in some ways the modern equivalent of a gold standard. Monetary decisions would be made by the European Central Bank, whose only goal would be price stability. The lack of shared political institutions did not matter, because the ECB was to operate in total independence from all political influence. It would never lend to member states, even ones that were at risk of going bankrupt.

Despite these provisions, the Germans did not entirely trust their partners’ fiscal discipline, so they imposed strict limits to government budget deficits and debt…. With the benefit of hindsight, it was all rather naive. Germany should have insisted on a procedure for government insolvency, and a way of showing the door to states that were unable or unwilling to respect the rules.

Mayer, the head of a German think tank, does not mention that in the first decade of the euro Germany was one of the most frequent violators of the “strict limits” on fiscal deficits. But it’s helpful to see the idea of the euro as a new gold standard stated so plainly by a supporter. And he makes another important point, which is that even under a new gold standard, the discipline of the markets is unreliable, and needs to be supplemented with (or simulated by) overt political authority.

From early 2010, when a Greek default was narrowly avoided, until early 2012, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, attempted to re-establish the Maastricht model … and contemplated the possibility that Greece might leave the euro. But she is risk-averse by nature and, confronted with the incalculable risks, she changed course in the spring of 2012. The Greek debt restructuring, she now said, was “exceptional and unique”. Leaving the euro was out of question for any member country. Since this decision meant markets would no longer pressurise governments into sound economic policies, she built a pan-European “shadow state” — a web of pacts to ensure that countries followed policies consistent with sound money.

It has not worked. From Greece to France, countries resist any infringement on their sovereignty and refuse to act in a way that is consistent with a hard currency policy. The ECB is forced to loosen its stance. Worse, it has allowed monetary policy to become a back channel for transfering economic resources between eurozone members. This is Germany’s worst nightmare…

A century ago, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, the Austrian economist and finance minister, proclaimed laws of economics to be a higher authority than political power. Some Germans say that a hard currency is an essential part of their economic value system. If both are right, politicians will be powerless to prevent Germany’s departure from a monetary union that is at odds with the country’s economic convictions.

The essential points here are, first, that the goal of the euro system to create a situation where markets can “pressurise governments into sound economic policies,” meaning first and foremost, policies that preserve the value of money; second, that this requires limits on national sovereignty, which will be resisted by democratic governments; and third, that this resistance can only be overcome through the threat of a crisis. In this sense, from Mayer’s perspective, the steps that were taken to resolve the crisis were a terrible mistake, and required the use of direct political control by a “shadow state” to substitute for the blunted threat of financial catastrophe. This is all very clarifying; the one piece of mystification still intact is the substitution of “Germany” as the social actor, rather than European wealth owners as a class.

Mayer is just one guy, of course, but presumably he speaks to some extent for his old colleagues at Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and the IMF. [1] And anyway this kind of language is everywhere these days.

The FT’s review of “Lords of Secrecy,” for instance, acknowledges that we increasingly seem to be subjects of “a vast secret state beyond control.” That sounds bad! But the reviewer concludes on a cheerful note:

The “lords of secrecy” do need to be kept in check, of course. But that may soon happen anyway. After all, principles go only so far in holding the clandestine arms of the state to account; money goes a lot further. But money is one thing that is not quite so freely available in Washington, or many other capitals in the west, no matter how many secrets they have.

Here, subservience to the bond markets doesn’t just require limits on democracy or the rule of law, it makes them superfluous.

Returning to the euro, here, via Bill Mitchell, is Graham Bishop on the “revolutionary political implications” of unified interbank payments in the euro area:

While payments are an intensely technical area, the political implications are immense… SEPA establishes an effective ‘referendum veto’ to be exercised by citizens whose national governments might contemplate leaving the euro. In SEPA, citizens are empowered to embed the freedom and the choices associated with the single market so deeply in the economy to make it impossible for any EU government which adopted the euro to abandon the common currency. It is hard to imagine that citizens and enterprises accustomed to these choices would want to leave the euro once they considered what they individually would give up by way of returning to narrow, national offerings for trade in goods and services.

With SEPA, any citizen who fears that his home state is about to leave the euro to implement a major devaluation can protect themselves by transferring their liquid funds into a bank in another euro country – in an instant and at negligible cost. In effect, this is a free option for all citizens and amounts to an instantaneous referendum on government policy. Such an outflow of retail liquidity from a banking system would cause its rapid collapse. The quiet run out of deposits in the Irish banks last year demonstrated the power of depositors to force radical political change.

There’s not much to say about that unctuous, preening first paragraph, with its cant about freedom and choices, except to hope that some future novelist (or screenwriter, I guess) can do justice to the horrible people who rule us. (Also, notice the classic bait-and-switch in which the only alternative to complete liberalization of capital flows is autarchy.) But what’s interesting for the argument I’m making here is the claim that the great political innovation of the euro is that it gives money-owners the right to a veto or referendum over government policy — up to the point of forcing through “radical change,” on pain of a bank crisis. And to be clear: This is being presented as one of the great benefits of the system, and an argument for the UK to join the single currency.

(Also, if I’m correct that the effect of a withdrawal of ECB liquidity support for Greek banks would just prevent transfers to banks elsewhere, this suggests the threat is self-negating.)

The masters of the euro themselves talk the same way. The “analytic note” just released by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, “in close cooperation with Donald Tusk, Jeroen Dijsselbloem and Mario Draghi,” begins with the usual claims about the crisis as due ultimately to lack of competitiveness in the southern countries, thanks to their “labor market rigidities.” (They don’t say what specific rigidities they have in mind, but they do nod to a World Bank report that identifies such distortions as minimum wages, limitations on working hours, and requirements for severance pay.) “While the Maastricht Treaty was based on the assumption that market discipline would be a key element in preventing a divergent development of the euro area economies and their fiscal positions, with increasing government bond interest rates having a signalling effect.” But in practice divergent policies were not prevented, as bond markets were happy to lend regardless. Then, “when the crisis hit… and markets reappraised the risk and growth potential of individual countries, the loss of competitiveness became visible and led to outflows.” [2] What’s most interesting is their analysis of the political economy of removing these “rigidities” and restoring “competitiveness”:

The policy commitments of euro area countries, made individually or collectively, to growth-enhancing structural reforms have not been implemented satisfactorily. Often, commitments are strong in crisis times and then weakened again when the overall economic climate has improved. In this sense, the stabilising effect of the single currency has certain counterproductive effects with regard to the willingness of national governments to start and implement the necessary structural reforms…

Naomi Klein couldn’t have said it better. Crises are a great time to roll back “employment protection legislation” and force down labor costs — the unambiguous content of “structural reforms” in this context. If your goal is to to roll back protective legislation and re-commodify labor, then resolving economic crises too quickly is, well, counterproductive.

A couple years ago, Paul Krugman was expressing incredulity at the idea that prolonging the European crisis could be a rational act in the service of any political agenda. Last week, he was still hoping that Draghi would emerge as the defender of European democracy. No disrespect to my CUNY colleague, who understands most of this stuff much better than I ever will. But in this case, it seems simpler to take Draghi at his word. Restricting the scope of democratic government was the entire point of the euro system. And since the automatic operation of bond markets failed to do the job, a crisis is required.

UPDATE: Schauble today: “If we go deeper into the [debt] discount debate, there will be no more reforms in Europe. There will be joyful celebrations in the Elysée and probably in Rome, too, if we go down this path.” Thee is not even a pretense now that this is about resolving the crisis, as opposed to using the crisis as leverage to promote a particular policy agenda. It’s surprising, though, that he would suggest that the Euro zone’s second and third largest economies are on the side of the debtors. Would that it were so.

[1] It’s almost too good that he hosts a lecture series on “The Order of Money.”

[2] The funny thing is that, after talking about the “misallocation of financing” by markets, and describing the crisis as “a crisis of markets in terms of their capacity to price risk correctly,” they go on to recommend the removal of all remaining restrictions on capital flows: “we need to address remaining barriers to investment and the free movement of capital and make capital market integration a political priority.” Reminds me of the opening paragraphs of this Rodrik essay.

German Unification as Proto-Europe?

Here is the opening passage of a pamphlet published by the German central bank in 1900, on the 25th anniversary of its founding:

The newly established German Empire found in the organization of the coinage, paper money, and bank-note systems, an urgent and difficult task. Probably in no department of the entire national economic system were the disadvantages of the political disunion of Germany so clear…; in no economic department were greater advantages to be expected from a political union.

Although the customs union (Zollverein) had happily united the greater part of Germany in a commercial union, similar attempts in monetary affairs had met with but modest success, and were absolutely fruitless in banking.

The inconvenience most complained of was the multiplicity and variety of the different coinage systems (seven in all) in the different states, also the want of an adequate, regulated circulation of gold coins.

This is quoted in Goodhart’s Evolution of Central Banks. An additional motivation for establishing a German central bank, Goodhart notes, was to organize the national payment system. Before then, there had ben no Germany-wide clearinghouse for interbank settlement. When the Reichsbank (as it then was) opened branches throughout Germany, the purpose was not only to manage the money supply but to offer a new facility for long-distance payments.

(Goodhart’s larger themes are first, that central bank-like institutions develop organically within banking systems, whether or not they are established by law. And second, that the fusion of payment and intermediation functions that defines banks is a historical accident; banks as we know them needn’t, and he probably shouldn’t, be features of future financial systems. I am convinced on the first point, not so much on the second.)

What this passage makes me wonder is: Has anyone ever written about European integration in the light of German unification in the late 19th century? The claim in the Reichsbank pamphlet that customs union was the easy first step, and that monetary union followed only later and with difficulty, certainly suggests some parallels. So does the suggestion that monetary union was the biggest economic benefit of political union. It would be interesting to ask, what were the concrete problems that monetary union was understood to be solving? And how did it fit into the larger political agenda of German unification?

Of course there are fundamental differences — most importantly that German unification took place under the aegis of a sovereign political authority, whereas the central political-economic fact about Europe is that the monetary authority stands above the various national governments. But it still seems like the comparison could be illuminating.

Wealth Distribution and the Puzzle of Germany

There’s been some discussion recently of the new estimates from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the distribution of household wealth in the US. Using the capital income reported in the tax data, and applying appropriate rates of return to different kinds of assets, they are able to estimate the distribution of household wealth holdings going back to the beginning of the income tax in 1913. They find that wealth inequality is back to the levels of the 1920s, with 40% of net worth accounted for the richest one percent of households. The bottom 50% of households have a net worth of zero.

There’s a natural reaction to see this as posing the same kind of problem as the distribution of income — only more extreme — and respond with proposals to redistribute wealth. This case is argued by the very smart Steve Roth in comments here and on his own blog. But I’m not convinced. It’s worth recalling that proposals for broadening the ranks of property-owners are more likely to come from the right. What else was Bush’s “ownership society”? Social Security privatization, if he’d been able to pull it off, would have dramatically broadened the distribution of wealth. In general, I think the distribution of wealth has a more ambiguous relationship than the distribution of income to broader social inequality.

Case in point: Last summer, the ECB released a survey of European household wealth. And unexpectedly, the Germans turned out to be among the poorest people in Europe. The median German household reported net worth of just €50,000, compared with €100,000 in Greece, €110,000 in France, and €180,000 in Spain. The pattern is essentially the same if you look at assets rather than net worth — median household assets are lower in Germany than almost anywhere else in Europe, including the crisis countries of the Mediterranean.

At the time, this finding was mostly received in terms the familiar North-South morality tale, as one more argument for forcing austerity on the shiftless South. Not only are the thrifty Germans being asked to bail out the wastrel Mediterraneans, now it turns out the Southerners are actually richer? Why can’t they take responsibility for their own debts? No more bailouts!

No surprise there. But how do we make sense of the results themselves, given what we know about the economies of Germany and the rest of Europe? I think that understood correctly, they speak directly to the political implications of wealth distribution.

First, though: Did the survey really find what it claimed to find? The answer seems to be more or less yes, but with caveats.

Paul de Grauwe points out some distortions in the headline numbers reported by the ECB. First, this is a survey of household wealth, but, de Grauwe says, households are larger in the South than in the North. This is true, but it turns out not to make much of a difference — converting from household wealth to wealth per capita leaves the basic pattern unchanged.

Per capita wealth in selected European countries. From de Grauwe.

Second, the survey focuses on median wealth, which ignores distribution. If we look at the mean household instead of the median one, we find Germany closer to the middle of the pack — ahead of Greece, though still behind France, Italy and Spain. The difference between the two measures results from the highly unequal distribution of wealth in Germany — the most unequal in Europe, according to the ECB survey. For the poorest quintile, median net worth is ten times higher in Greece and in Italy than in Germany, and 30 times higher in Spain.

This helps answer the question of apparent low German wealth — part of the reason the median German household is wealth-poor is because household wealth is concentrated at the top. But that just raises a new puzzle. Income distribution Germany is among the most equal in Europe. Why is the distribution of wealth so much more unequal? The puzzle deepens when we see that the other European countries with high levels of wealth inequality are France, Austria, and Finland, all of which also have relatively equal income distribution.

Another distortion pointed to by De Grauwe is that the housing bubble in southern Europe had not fully deflated in 2009, when the survey was taken — home prices were still significantly higher than a decade earlier. Since Germany never had a housing boom, this tends to depress measured wealth there. This explains some of the discrepancy, but not all of it. Using current home prices, the median Spanish household has more than triple the net wealth of the median German household; with 2002 home prices, only double. But this only moves Germany up from the lowest median household wealth in Europe, to the second lowest.

The puzzle posed by the wealth survey seems to be genuine. Even correcting for home prices and household size, the median Spanish or Italian household reports substantially more net wealth than the median German one, and the median Greek household about an equal amount. Yet Germany is, by most measures, a much richer country, with median household income of €33,000, compared with €22,000, €25,000 and €26,000 in Greece, Spain and Italy respectively. Use mean wealth instead of median, and German wealth is well above Greek and about equal to Spanish, but still below Italian — even though, again, average household income is much higher in Germany than in Italy. And the discrepancy between the median and mean raises the puzzle of why German wealth distribution is so much more uneven than German income distribution.

De Grauwe suggests one more correction: look at the total stock of fixed capital in each country, rather than household wealth. Measuring capital consistently across countries is notoriously dicey, but on his estimate, Germany and the Netherlands have as much as three times the capital per head as the southern countries. So Germany is richer in real terms than the South, as we all know; the difference is just that “a large part of German wealth is not held by households and therefore must be held by the corporate sector.” Problem solved!

Except… you know, Mitt Romney was right: corporations are people, in the sense that they are owned by people. The wealth of German corporations should also show up as the wealth of the owners of German stocks, bonds, or other claims on those corporations — which means, overwhelmingly, German households. Indeed, in mainstream economic theory, the “wealth” of the corporate sector just is the wealth of the households that own it. According to de Grauwe, the per capita value of the capital stock is more than twice as large in Germany as in Spain. Yet the average financial wealth held by a German household is only 25% higher than in Spain. So as in the case of distribution, this solution to the net-wealth puzzle just creates a new puzzle: Why is a dollar of capital in a German firm worth so much less to its ultimate owners than a dollar of capital in a Spanish or Italian firm?

And this, I think, points us toward the answer, or at least toward the right question.

The question is, what is the relationship between the level of market production in an economy, and the claims on future production represented by wealth? It’s a truism — tho often forgotten — that the market production counted in GDP is only a part of all the productive activity that takes place in society. In the same way, not all market production is capitalized into assets. Wealth in an economic sense represents only those claims on future income that are exercised by virtue of a legal title that is freely transferable, and hence has a market value.

For example, imagine two otherwise similar countries, one of which makes provision for retirement income through a pay-as-you-go public pension system, and the other of which uses some form of funded pension. The two countries may have identical levels of output and income, and retirees may receive exactly the same payments in both. But because the assets held by the pension funds show up on balance sheets while the right to future public pension payments does not, the first country will have less wealth than the second one. Again, this does not imply any difference in production, or income, or who ultimately bears the cost of supporting retirees; it is simply a question of how much of those future payments are capitalized into assets.

This is just an analogy; I don’t think retirement savings are the story here. The story is about home ownership and the value of corporate stock.

First, home ownership. Only 44 percent of German households own their own homes, compared with 70-80 percent in Greece, Italy and Spain. Among both homeowners and non-homeowners considered separately, median household wealth is comparable in Germany and in the southern countries. It’s only the much higher proportion of home ownership that produces higher median wealth in the South. And this is especially true at the bottom end of the distribution — almost all the bottom quintile (by income) of German households are renters, whereas in Greece, Spain and Italy there is a large fraction of homeowners even at the lowest incomes. Furthermore, German renters have far more protections than elsewhere. As I understand it, German renters are sufficiently protected against both rent increases and loss of their lease that their occupancy of their home is not much less secure than that of home owners. These protections are, in a sense, a form of property right — they are a claim on the future flow of housing services in the same way that a title to a house would be. But with a critical difference: the protections from rent regulation can’t be sold, don’t show up on the household’s balance sheet, and do not get counted as wealth.

In short: The biggest reason that German household wealth is lower than than elsewhere is that less claims on the future output of the housing sector take the form of assets. Housing is just as commodified in Germany as elsewhere (I don’t think public housing is unusually important there). But it is less capitalized.

Home ownership is the biggest and clearest part of the story here, but it’s not the whole story. Correct for home ownership rates, use mean rather than median, and you find that German household wealth is comparable to household wealth in Italy or Spain. But given that GDP per capita is much higher in Germany, and the capital stock seems to be so much larger, why isn’t household wealth higher in Germany too?

One possible answer is that income produced in the corporate sector is also less capitalized in Germany.

In a recent paper with Zucman, Thomas Piketty suggests that the relationship between equity values and the real value of corporate assets depends on who exercises power over the corporation. Piketty and Zucman:

Investors who wish to take control of a corporation typically have to pay a large premium to obtain majority ownership. This mechanism might explain why Tobin’s Q tends to be structurally below 1. It can also provide an explanation for some of the cross-country variation… : the higher Tobin’s Q in Anglo-Saxon countries might be related to the fact that shareholders have more control over corporations than in Germany, France, and Japan. This would be consistent with the results of Gompers, Ishii and Metrick (2003), who find that firms with stronger shareholders rights have higher Tobin’s Q. Relatedly, the control rights valuation story may explain part of the rising trend in Tobin’s Q in rich countries. … the ”control right” or ”stakeholder” view of the firm can in principle explain why the market value of corporations is particularly low in Germany (where worker representatives have voting rights in corporate boards without any equity stake in the company). According to this ”stakeholder” view of the firm, the market value of corporations can be interpreted as the value for the owner, while the book value can be interpreted as the value for all stakeholders.

In other words, one reason household wealth is low in Germany is because German households exercise their claims on the business sector not via financial assets, but as workers.

The corporate sector is also relatively larger in Germany than in the southern countries, where small business remains widespread. 14 percent of Spanish households and 18 percent of Italian households report ownership of a business, compared with only 9 percent of German households. Again, this is a way in which lower wealth reflects a shift in claims on the social product from property ownership to labor.

It’s not a coincidence that Europe’s dominant economy has the least market wealth. The truth is, success in the world market has depended for a long time now on limiting dependence on asset markets, just as the most successful competitors within national economies are the giant corporations that suppress the market mechanism internally. Germany, as with late industrializers like Japan, Korea, and now China, has succeeded largely by ensuring that investment is not guided by market signals, but through active planning by banks and/or the state. There’s nothing new in the fact that greater real wealth in the sense of productive capacity goes hand hand with less wealth in the sense of claims on the social product capitalized into assets. Only in the poorest and most backward countries does a significant fraction of the claims of working people on the product take the form of asset ownership.

The world of small farmers and self-employed artisans isn’t one we can, or should, return to. Perhaps the world of homeowners managing their own retirement savings isn’t one we can, or should, preserve.

Demand and Competitiveness: Germany and the EU

I put up a post the other day about Enno Schroder’s excellent work on accounting for changes in trade flows. Based on the comments, there’s some confusion about the methodology. That’s not surprising: It’s not complicated, but it’s also not a familiar way of looking at this stuff, either within or outside the economics profession. Maybe a numerical example will help?

Let’s consider two trading partners, in this case Germany and the rest of the EU. (Among other things, having just two partners avoids the whole weighting issue.) The first line of the table below shows total demand in each — that is, all private consumption, government consumption, and investment — in billions of euros. (As usual, this is final demand — transfers and intermediate goods are excluded.) So, for instance, in the year 2000 all spending by households, firms and governments in Germany totaled 2.04 trillion euros. The next two lines show the part of that expenditure that went to imports — from the rest of the EU for Germany, from Germany for the rest of the EU, and from the rest of the world for both. The final two lines of each panel then show the share of total expenditure in each place that went to German and rest-of-EU goods respectively. The table looks at 2000 and 2009, a period of growing surpluses for Germany.

		2000	2009
Germany	Demand	2,041	2,258
	Imports from EU	340	429
	Imports from Rest of World	198	235
	Germany Share	74%	71%
	EU ex-Germany Share	17%	19%
EU ex-Germany	Demand	9,179	11,633
	Imports from Germany	387	501
	Imports from Rest of World	795	998
	Germany Share	4%	4%
	EU ex-Germany Share	87%	87%

Ratio, Germany-EU Exports to Imports		1.14	1.17
EU Surplus, Percent of German GDP		2.27	3.02

So what do we see? In 2000, 74 cents out of every euro spent in Germany went for German goods and services, and 17 cents for goods and services from the rest of the EU. Nine years later, 71 cents out of each German euro went to German stuff, and 19 cents to stuff from the rest of the EU. German households, businesses and government agencies were buying more from the rest of Europe, and less from their own country. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe was spending 4 cents out of every euro on goods and services from Germany — exactly the same fraction in 2009 as in 2000.

If Germans were buying more from the rest of the EU, and non-German Europeans were buying the same amount from Germany, how could it be that the German trade surplus with the rest of Europe increased? And by nearly one percent of German GDP, a significant amount? The answer is that total expenditure was rising much faster in the rest of Europe — by 2.7 percent a year, compared with 1.1 percent a year in Germany. This is what it means to say that the growing German surplus is entirely accounted for by demand, and that Germany actually lost competitiveness over this period.

Again, these are not estimates, they are the actual numbers as reported by EuroStat. It is simply a matter of historical fact that Germans spent more of their income on goods from the rest of the EU, and less on German goods, in 2009 than in 2000, and that the rest of the EU spent the same fraction of its income on German goods in the two years. Obviously, this does not rule out the possibility that German goods were becoming cheaper relative to the rest of Europe’s, if you postulate some other factor that would have reduced Germany’s exports without a growing cost advantage. (This is not so easy, since Germany’s exports are the sort of high-end manufactures which usually have a high income elasticity, i.e. for which demand is expected to rise over time.) And it is also compatible with a story where German export prices fell, but export demand is price-inelastic, so that lower prices did nothing to raise export earnings. But it is absolutely not compatible with a simple story where the most important driver of German trade imbalances is changing relative prices. For that story to work, the main factor in Germany’s growing surpluses would have to have been expenditure switching from other countries’ goods to Germany’s. And that didn’t happen.

NOTE: This my table, not Enno’s. The data is from Eurostat, while he uses the Penn World Tables, and he does not look at intra-European trade specifically.

UPDATE: There’s another question, which no one asked but which you should always try to answer: Why does it matter? The truth is, a big reason I care about this is that I’m curious how capitalist economies work, and this stuff seems to shed some light on that, in terms of both the specific content and the methodology. But more specifically:

First, seeing trade flows as driven by income as well as price fits better with a vision of economy that has many different possible states of rest. It fits better with a vision of economies evolving in historical time, rather than gravitating toward an equilibrium which is both natural and optimal. In this particular case, there is no reason to suppose that the relative growth rates consistent with full employment in each country are also the relative growth rates consistent with balanced trade. A world in which trade flows respond mainly to relative prices is a world where macropolicy doesn’t pose any fundamentally different challenges in an open economy than in a closed one. Whatever mechanisms operated to ensure full employment continue to do so, and then the exchange rate adjusts to keep trade flows balanced (or appropriately unbalanced, for a country with a good reason to export or import capital.) Whereas when the main relationship is between income and trade, they cannot vary independently.

Second, there are important implications for policy. Krugman keeps saying that Germany needs higher relative prices, i.e., higher inflation. Even leaving aside the political difficulties with such a program, it makes sense on its own terms only if there is a fixed pool of European demand. To say that the only way you can have an adequate level of demand in Greece is for prices to fall relative to Germany, is to accept, on a European or global level, the structural theory of unemployment that Krugman rejects so firmly (and rightly) for the US. By contrast if competitiveness didn’t cause the problem, we shouldn’t assume competitiveness is involved in the solution. The historical evidence suggests that more rapid income growth in Germany will be sufficient to move its current account back to balance. The implications for domestic demand in Germany are the opposite in this case as in the relative-prices case: Fixing the current account problem means more jobs and orders for German workers and firms, not higher inflation in Germany. [1]

So if you buy this story, you should be more pessimistic about a Greek exit from the euro — since there’s less reason to think that flexible exchange rates will lead to balanced trade — but more optimistic about a solution within the euro.

I don’t understand why, for economists like Krugman and Dean Baker, Keynesianism always seems to stop at the water’s edge. Why does their analysis of international trade always implicitly [2] assume a world economy continually at full capacity, where a demand shortfall in one country or region implies excess demand somewhere else? They know perfectly well that the question of unemployment in one country cannot be reduced to the question of who is getting paid too much; why do they forget it as soon as exchange rates come into the picture? Perhaps it’s for the same reasons — whatever they are — that so many economists who support all kinds of domestic regulation are ardent supporters of free trade, even though that’s just laissez-faire at the global level. In the particular case of Krugman, I think part of the problem is that his own scholarly work is in trade. So when the conversation turns to trade he loses one of the biggest assets he brings to discussions of domestic policy — a willingness to forget all the “progress” in economic theory over the past 30 or 40 years.

[1] A more reasonable version of the higher-prices-in-Germany claim is that Germany must be willing to accept higher inflation in order to raise demand. In some times and places this could certainly be true. But I don’t think it is for Germany, given the evident slack in labor markets implied by stagnant wages. And in any case that’s not what Krugman is saying — for him, higher inflation is the solution, not an unfortunate side effect.

[2] Or sometimes explicitly — e.g. this post has Germany sitting on a vertical aggregate supply curve.

What Drives Trade Flows? Mostly Demand, Not Prices

I just participated (for the last time, thank god) in the UMass-New School economics graduate student conference, which left me feeling pretty good about the next generation of heterodox economists. [1] A bunch of good stuff was presented, but for my money, the best and most important work was Enno Schröder’s: “Aggregate Demand (Not Competitiveness) Caused the German Trade Surplus and the U.S. Deficit.” Unfortunately, the paper is not yet online — I’ll link to it the moment it is — but here are his slides.

The starting point of his analysis is that, as a matter of accounting, we can write the ratio of a county’s exports to imports as :

X/M = (m*/m) (D*/D)

where X and M are export and import volumes, m* is the fraction of foreign expenditure spent on the home country’s goods, m is the fraction of the home expenditure spent on foreign goods, and D* and D are total foreign and home expenditure.

This is true by definition. But the advantage of thinking of trade flows this way, is that it allows us to separate the changes in trade attributable to expenditure switching (including, of course, the effect of relative price changes) and the changes attributable to different growth rates of expenditure. In other words, it lets us distinguish the changes in trade flows that are due to changes in how each dollar is spent in a given country, from changes in trade flows that are due to changes in the distribution of dollars across countries.

(These look similar to price and income elasticities, but they are not the same. Elasticities are estimated, while this is an accounting decomposition. And changes in m and m*, in this framework, capture all factors that lead to a shift in the import share of expenditure, not just relative prices.)

The heart of the paper is an exercise in historical accounting, decomposing changes in trade ratios into m*/m and D*/D. We can think of these as counterfactual exercises: How would trade look if growth rates were all equal, and each county’s distribution of spending across countries evolved as it did historically; and how would trade look if each country had had a constant distribution of spending across countries, and growth rates were what they were historically? The second question is roughly equivalent to: How much of the change in trade flows could we predict if we knew expenditure growth rates for each country and nothing else?

The key results are in the figure below. Look particularly at Germany, in the middle right of the first panel:

The dotted line is the actual ratio of exports to imports. Since Germany has recently had a trade surplus, the line lies above one — over the past decade, German exports have exceed German imports by about 10 percent. The dark black line is the counterfactual ratio if the division of each county’s expenditures among various countries’ goods had remained fixed at their average level over the whole period. When the dark black line is falling, that indicates a country growing more rapidly than the countries it exports to; with the share of expenditure on imports fixed, higher income means more imports and a trade balance moving toward deficit. Similarly, when the black line is rising, that indicates a country’s total expenditure growing more slowly than expenditure its export markets, as was the case for Germany from the early 1990s until 2008. The light gray line is the other counterfactual — the path trade would have followed if all countries had grown at an equal rate, so that trade depended only on changes in competitiveness. When the dotted line and the heavy black line move more or less together, we can say that shifts in trade are mostly a matter of aggregate demand; when the dotted line and the gray line move together, mostly a matter of competitiveness (which, again, includes all factors that cause people to shift expenditure between different countries’ goods, including but not limited to exchange rates.)

The point here is that if you only knew the growth of income in Germany and its trade partners, and nothing at all about German wages or productivity, you could fully explain the German trade surplus of the past decade. In fact, based on income growth alone you would predict an even larger surplus; the fraction of the world’s dollars falling on German goods actually fell. Or as Enno puts it: During the period of the German export boom, Germany became less, not more, competitive. [2] The cases of Spain, Portugal and Greece (tho not Italy) are symmetrical: Despite the supposed loss of price competitiveness they experienced under the euro, the share of expenditure falling on these countries’ goods and services actually rose during the periods when their trade balances worsened; their growing deficits were entirely a product of income growth more rapid than their trade partners’.

These are tremendously important results. In my opinion, they are fatal to the claim (advanced by Krugman among others) that the root of the European crisis is the inability to adjust exchange rates, and that a devaluation in the periphery would be sufficient to restore balanced trade. (It is important to remember, in this context, that southern Europe was running trade deficits for many years before the establishment of the euro.) They also imply a strong criticism of free trade. If trade flows depend mostly or entirely on relative income, and if large trade imbalances are unsustainable for most countries, then relative growth rates are going to be constrained by import shares, which means that most countries are going to grow below their potential. (This is similar to the old balance-of-payments constrained growth argument.) But the key point, as Enno stresses, is that both the “left” argument about low German wage growth and the “right” argument about high German productivity growth are irrelevant to the historical development of German export surpluses. Slower income growth in Germany than its trade partners explains the whole story.

I really like the substantive argument of this paper. But I love the methodology. There is an econometrics section, which is interesting (among other things, he finds that the Marshall-Lerner condition is not satisfied for Germany, another blow to the relative-prices story of the euro crisis.) But the main conclusions of the paper don’t depend in any way on it. In fact, the thing can be seen as an example of an alternative methodology to econometrics for empirical economics, historical accounting or decomposition analysis. This is the same basic approach that Arjun Jayadev and I take in our paper on household debt, and which has long been used to analyze the historical evolution of public debt. Another interesting application of this kind of historical accounting: the decomposition of changes in the profit rate into the effects of the profit share, the utilization rate, and the technologically-determined capital-output ratio, an approach pioneered by Thomas Weisskopf, and developed by others, including Ed Wolff, Erdogan Bakir, and my teacher David Kotz.

People often say that these accounting exercises can’t be used to establish claims about causality. And strictly speaking this is true, though they certainly can be used to reject certain causal stories. But that’s true of econometrics too. It’s worth taking a step back and remembering that no matter how fancy our econometrics, all we are ever doing with those techniques is describing the characteristics of a matrix. We have the observations we have, and all we can do is try to summarize the relationships between them in some useful way. When we make causal claims using econometrics, it’s by treating the matrix as if it were drawn from some stable underlying probability distribution function (pdf). One of the great things about these decomposition exercises — or about other empirical techniques, like principal component analysis — is that they limit themselves to describing the actual data. In many cases — lots of labor economics, for instance — the fiction of a stable underlying pdf is perfectly reasonable. But in other cases — including, I think, almost all interesting questions in macroeconomics — the conventional econometrics approach is a bit like asking, If a whale were the top of an island, what would the underlying geology look like? It’s certainly possible to come up with a answer to that question. But it is probably not the simplest way of describing the shape of the whale.

[1] A perennial question at these things is whether we should continue identifying ourselves as “heterodox,” or just say we’re doing economics. Personally, I’ll be happy to give up the distinct heterodox identity just as soon as economists are willing to give up their distinct identity and dissolve into the larger population of social scientists, or of guys with opinions.

[2] The results for the US are symmetrical with those for Germany: the growing US trade deficit since 1990 is fully explained by more rapid US income growth relative to its trade partners. But it’s worth noting that China is not: Knowing only China’s relative income growth, which has been of course very high, you would predict that China would be moving toward trade deficits, when in fact it has ben moving toward surplus. This is consistent with a story that explains China’s trade surpluses by an undervalued currency, tho it is consistent with other stories as well.

A Greek Myth

Most days, I’m a big fan of Paul Krugman’s columns.

Unlike his economics, which makes a few too many curtsies to orthodoxy, his political interventions are righteous in tone, right-on in content, and what’s more, strategic — unlike many leftish intellectuals, he clearly cares about being useful — about saying things that are not only true, but that contribute to the concrete political struggle of the moment. He’s so much better than almost of his peers it’s not even funny.

But — well, you knew there had to be a but.

But this time, he’s gotten his economics in his politics. And the results are not pretty.

In today’s column, he rightly dismisses arguments that the root of the Euro crisis is that workers in Greece and the other peripheral countries are lazy, or unproductive, or that those countries have excessive regulation and bloated welfare states. “So how did Greece get into so much trouble?” he asks. His answer:

Blame the euro. Fifteen years ago Greece was no paradise, but it wasn’t in crisis either. Unemployment was high but not catastrophic, and the nation more or less paid its way on world markets, earning enough from exports, tourism, shipping and other sources to more or less pay for its imports. Then Greece joined the euro, and a terrible thing happened: people started believing that it was a safe place to invest. Foreign money poured into Greece, some but not all of it financing government deficits; the economy boomed; inflation rose; and Greece became increasingly uncompetitive.

I’m sorry, but the bolded sentence just is not true. The rest of it is debatable, but that sentence is flat-out false. And it matters.

The analysis behind the “earning enough” claim is found on Krugman’s blog. He writes,

One of the things you keep hearing about Greece is that if it exits the euro one way or another there will be no gains, because Greece basically can’t export — so structural reform is the only way forward. But here’s the thing: if that were true, how did Greece pay its way before the big capital flows starting coming? The truth is that before the euro and the capital flow bubble it created, Greece ran only small current account deficits (the broad definition of the trade balance, including services and factor income)…

And he offers this graph from Eurostat:

The numbers in the graph are fine, as far as they go. And there is the first problem: how far they go. Here’s the same graph, but going back to 1980.

Starting the graph ten years earlier gives a different picture — now it seems that the near-balance on current account in 1993 and 1994 wasn’t the normal state before the euro, but an exceptional occurrence in just those two years. And note that that while Greek deficits in the 1980s are small relative to those of the mid-2000s, they are still very far from anything you could reasonably describe as “the country more or less paid its way.” They are, for instance, significantly larger than the contemporaneous US current account deficits that were a central political concern in the 1980s here.

That’s the small problem; there’s a bigger one. Because, what are we looking at? The current account balance. Krugman glosses this as “the broadest measure of the trade balance,” but that’s not correct. (If he taught undergraduate macro, I’m sure he’d mark someone writing that wrong.) It’s broad, yes, but it’s a different concept, covering all international payments other than asset purchases, including some (transfers and income flows) that are not trade by any possible definition. The current account includes, for example, remittances by foreign workers to their home countries. So by Krugman’s logic here, the fact that there are lots of Mexican migrant workers in the US sending money home is a sign that Mexico is able to export successfully to the US, when in the real world it’s precisely a sign that it isn’t.

Most seriously, the current account includes transfer between governments. In the European context these are quite large. To call the subsidies that Greece received under the European Common Agricultural Policy export earnings is obviously absurd. Yet that’s what Krugman is doing.

The following graph shows how big a difference it makes when you call development assistance exports.

The blue line is the current account balance, same as in Krugman’s graph, again extended back to 1980. The red line is the current account balance not counting intergovernmental transfers. And the green line is the current account not counting any transfers. [*] It’s clear from this picture that, contra Krugman, Greece was not earning enough money to pay for its imports before the creation of the euro, or at any time in the past 30 years. If the problem Greece has to solve is getting its foreign exchange payments in line with with its foreign exchange earnings, then the bulk of the problem existed long before Greece joined the euro. The central claim of the column is simply false.

Again, it is true that Greece’s deficits got much bigger in the mid-2000s. I agree with Krugman that this must have ben connected with the large capital flows from northern to peripheral Europe that followed the creation of the euro. It remains an open question, though, how much this was due to an increase in relative costs, and how much due to more rapid income growth. By assuming it was entirely the former, Krugman is implicitly, but characteristically, assuming that except in special circumstances economies can be assumed to be operating at full capacity.

But the key point is that the historical evidence does not support the view that current account imbalances only arise when governments interfere in the natural adjustment of foreign exchange markets. Fixed rates or floating, in the absence of very large flows of intergovernmental aid Greece has never come close to current account balance. According to Krugman, Greece’s

famous lack of competitiveness is a recent development, caused by massive post-euro inflows of capital that raised costs and prices. And that’s the kind of thing that currency devaluations can cure.

The historical evidence is not consistent with this claim. Or if it is, it’s only after you go well beyond normal massaging of the data, to something you’d see on The Client List.

* * *

So why does it matter? What’s at stake? I can’t very well go praising Krugman for writing not only what’s true but what is useful, and then justify a post criticizing him on the grounds of Someone Is Wrong On the Internet. No; but there’s something real at stake here.

The basic issue is, does price adjustment solve everything? Krugman won’t quite come out and say Yes, but clearly it’s what he believes. Is he being deliberately dishonest? No, I’m sure he’s not. But this is how ideology works. He’s committed to the idea that relative costs are the fundamental story when it comes to trade, so when he finds a bit of data that seems to conform to that, he repeats it, without giving five minutes of critical reflection to what it actually means.

The basic issue, again, is the need for structural as opposed to price adjustment. Now if “structural adjustment” means lower wages, then of course Godspeed to Krugman here. I’m against structural whatever in that sense too. But I can’t help feeling that he’s pulling in the wrong direction. Because if external devaluation cures the problem then internal devaluation does too, at least in principle.

The fundamental question remains how important are relative costs. The way I see it, look at what Greece imports, most of it Greece doesn’t produce at all. The textbook expenditure-switching vision implicitly endorsed by Krugman ignores that there are different kinds of goods, or accepts what Paul Davidson calls the axiom of gross substitution, that every good is basically (convexly) interchangeable with every other. Hey Greeks will have fewer computers and no oil, but they’ll spend more time at the beach, and in terms of utility it’s all the same. Except, you know, it’s not.

From where I’m sitting, the only way for Greece to achieve current account balance with income growth comparable to Germany is for Greece to develop new industries. This, not low wages, is the structural problem. This is the same problem faced by any developing country. And it raises the same problem that Krugman, I’m afraid, has never dealt with: how to you convince or compel the stratum that controls the social surplus to commit to the development of new industries? In the textbook world — which Krugman I’m afraid still occupies — a generic financial system channels savings to the highest-return available investment projects. In the real world, not so much. Figuring out how to get savings to investment is, on the contrary, an immensely challenging institutional problem.

So, first step dealing with it, you should read Gerschenkron. We know, anyway that probably the rich prefer to hold their wealth in liquid form, or overseas, or both. And we know that even if — unlikely — they want to invest in domestic industries, they’ll choose those that are already cost-competitive, when, we know, the whole point of development is to do stuff where you don’t, right now, have comparative advantage. So, again, it’s a problem.

There are solutions to this problem. Banks, the developmental state, even industrial dynasties. But it is a problem, and it needs to be solved. Relative prices are second order. Or so it seems to me.

[*] Unfortunately Eurostat doesn’t seem to have data breaking down nongovernmental transfer payments to Greece. I suspect that the main form of private transfers is remittances from Greek workers elsewhere in Europe, but perhaps not.