I have a working paper up at the Roosevelt Institute, as part of their new Financialization Project. Much of the content will be familiar to readers of this blog, but I think the argument is clearer and, I hope, more convincing in the paper.
The paper has gotten a nice writeup at the Washington Post, and at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
UPDATE. And in the International Business Times.
What determines the level of interest rates? It seems like a simple question, but I don’t think economics — orthodox or heterodox — has an adequate answer.
One problem is that there are many different interest rates. So we have two questions: What determines the overall level of interest rates, and what determines the spreads between different interest rates? The latter in turn we can divide into the question of differences in rates between otherwise similar loans of different lengths (term spreads), differences in rates between otherwise similar loans denominated in different currencies, and all the remaining differences, grouped together under the possibly misleading name risk spreads.
In any case, economic theory offers various answers:
1. The orthodox answer, going back to the 18th century, is that the interest rate is a price that equates the desire to save with the desire to borrow. As reformulated in the later 19th century by Bohm-Bawerk, Cassel, etc., that means: The interest rate is the price of goods today relative to goods tomorrow. The interest rate is the price that balances the gains from deferring consumption with our willingness to do so. People generally prefer consumption today to consumption in the future, and because it will be possible to produce more in the future than today, so the interest rate is (normally) positive. This is a theory of all transactions that exchange spending in one period for spending (or income) in another, not specifically a theory of the interest rate on loans.
The Wicksell variant of this, which is today’s central-bank orthodoxy, is that there is a well-defined natural interest rate in this sense but that for some reason markets get this one price wrong.
2. An equally old idea is that the interest rate is the price of money. In Hume’s writings on money and interest, for instance, he vacillates between this and the previous story. It’s not a popular view in the economics profession but it’s well-represented in the business world and among populists and monetary reformers,. In this view, money is just another input to the production process, and the interest rate is its price. A creditor, in this view, isn’t someone deferring consumption to the future, but someone who — like a landlord — receives an income thanks to control of a necessary component of the production process. A business, let’s say, that needs to maintain a certain amount of working capital in the form of money or similarly liquid assets, may need to finance it with a loan on which it pays interest. Interest payments are in effect the rental price of money, set by supply and demand like anything else. As I say, this has never been a respectable view in economic theory, but you can find it in more empirical work, like this paper by Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, where credit is described in exactly these terms as an input to current production.
3. Keynes’ liquidity-preference story in The General Theory. Here again the interest rate is the price of money. But now instead of asking how much the marginal business borrower will pay for the use of money, we ask how much the marginal wealth owner needs to be compensated to give up the liquidity of money for a less-liquid bond. The other side of the market is given by a fixed stock of bonds; evidently we are dealing with a short enough period that the flow of new borrowing can be ignored, and the bond stock treated as exogenously fixed. With no new borrowing, the link from the interest rate is liked to the real economy because it is used to discount the expected flow of profits from new investment — not by business owners themselves, but by the stock market. It’s an oddly convoluted story.
4. A more general liquidity-preference story. Jorg Bibow, in a couple of his essential articles on the Keynesian theory of liquidity preference, suggests that many of the odd features of the theory are due to Keynes’ decision to drop the sophisticated analysis of the financial system from The Treatise on Money and replace it with an assumption of an exogenously fixed money stock. (It’s striking that banks play no role in in the General Theory.) But I’m not sure how much simpler this “simplification” actually makes the story, or whether it is even logically coherent; and in any case it’s clearly inapplicable to our modern world of bank-created credit money. In principle, it should be possible to tell a more general version of the liquidity preference story, where, instead of wealth holders balancing the income from holding a bond against the liquidity from holding “money,” you have banks balancing net income against incremental illiquidity from simultaneously extending a loan and creating a deposit. I’m afraid to say I haven’t read the Treatise, so I don’t know how much you can find that story there. In any case it doesn’t seem to have been developed systematically in later theories of endogenous money, which typically assume that the supply of credit is infinitely elastic except insofar as it’s limited by regulation.
5. The interest rate is set by the central bank. This is the orthodox story when we turn to the macro textbook. It’s also the story in most heterodox writers. From Wicksell onward, the whole discussion about interest rates in a macroeconomic context is about how the central bank can keep the interest rate at the level that keeps current expenditure at the appropriate level, and what happens if it fails to do so. It is sometimes suggested that the optimal or “natural” interest rate chosen by the central bank should be the the Walrasian intertemporal exchange rate — explicitly by Hayek, Friedman and sometimes by New Keynesians like Michael Woodford, and more cautiously by Wicksell. But the question of how the central bank sets the interest rate tends to drop out of view. Formally, Woodford has the central bank set the interest rate by giving it a monopoly on lending and borrowing. This hardly describes real economies, of course, but Woodford insists that it doesn’t matter since central banks could control the interest rate by standing ready to lend or borrow unlimited amounts at thresholds just above and below their target. The quite different procedures followed by real central banks are irrelevant. [1]
A variation of this (call it 5a) is where reserve requirements bind and the central bank sets the total quantity of bank credit or money. (In a world of bind reserve requirements, these will be equivalent.) In this case, the long rate is set by the demand for credit, given the policy-determined quantity. The interbank rate is then presumably bid up to the minimum spread banks are willing to lend at. In this setting causality runs from long rates to short rates, and short rates don’t really matter.
6. The interest rate is set by convention. This is Keynes’ other theory of the interest rate, also introduced in the General Theory but more fully developed in his 1937 article “Alternative Theories of the Rate of Interest.” The idea here is that changes in interest rates imply inverse changes in the price of outstanding bonds. So from the lenders’ point of view, the expected return on a loan includes not only the yield (as adjusted for default risk), but also the capital gain or loss that will result if interest rates change while the loan is still on their books. The longer the term of the loan, the larger these capital gains or losses will be. I’ve discussed this on the blog before and may come back to it in the future, but the essential point is that if people are very confident about the future value of long rates (or at least that they will not fall below some floor) then the current rate cannot get very far from that future expected rate, no matter what short rates are doing, because as the current long rate moves away from the expected long rate expected capital gains come to dominate the current yield. Take the extreme case of a perpetuity where market participants are sure that the rate will be 5% a year from now. Suppose the short rate is initially 5% also, and falls to 0. Then the rate on the perpetuity will fall to just under 4.8% and no lower, because at that rate the nearly 5% spread over the short rate just compensates market participants for the capital loss they expect when long rates return to their normal level. (Obviously, this is not consistent with rational expectations.) These kinds of self-stabilizing conventional expectations are the reason why, as Bibow puts it, “a liquidity trap … may arise at any level of interest.” A liquidity trap is an anti-bubble, if you like.
What do we think about these different stories?
I’m confident that the first story is wrong. There is no useful sense in which the interest rate on debt contracts — either as set by markets or as target by the central bank — is the price of goods today in terms of goods tomorrow. The attempt to understand interest rates in terms of the allocation across time of scarce means to alternative ends is a dead end. Some other intellectual baggage that should overboard with the “natural” rate of interest are the “real”rate of interest, the idea of consumption loans, and the intertemporal budget constraint.
But negative criticism of orthodoxy is too easy. The real work is to make a positive case for an alternative. I don’t see a satisfactory one here.
The second and third stories depend on the existence of “money” as a distinct asset with a measurable, exogenously fixed quantity. This might be a usable assumption in some historical contexts — or it might not — but it clearly does not describe modern financial systems. Woodford is right about that.
The fifth story is clearly right with respect short rates, or at least it was until recently. But it’s incomplete. As an empirical matter, it is true that interbank rates and similar short market rates closely follow the policy rate. The question is, why? The usual answer is that the central bank is the monopoly supplier of base money, and base money is used for settlement between banks. This may be so, but it doesn’t have to be. Plenty of financial systems have existed without central banks, and banks still managed to make payments to each other somehow. And where central banks exist, they don’t always have a monopoly on interbank settlement. During the 19th century, the primary tool of monetary policy at the Bank of England was the discount rate — the discount off of face value that the bank would pay for eligible securities (usually trade credit). But if the discount rate was too high — if the bank offered too little cash for securities — private banks would stop discounting securities at the central bank, and instead find some other bank that was willing to give them cash on more favorable terms. This was the problem of “making bank rate effective,” and it was a serious concern for 19th century central banks. If they tried to raise interest rates too high, they would “lose contact with the market” as banks simply went elsewhere for liquidity.
Obviously, this isn’t a problem today — when the Fed last raised policy rates in the mid-2000s, short market rates rose right along with it. Or more dramatically, Brazil’s central bank held nominal interest rates around 20 percent for nearly a decade, while inflation averaged around 8 percent. [2] In cases like these, the central bank evidently is able to keep short rates high by limiting the supply of reserves. But why in that case doesn’t the financial system develop private substitutes for reserves? Mervyn King blandly dismisses this question by saying that “it does not matter in principle whether the disequilibrium in the money market is an aggregate net shortage or a net surplus of funds—control of prices or quantities carries across irrespective of whether the central bank is the monopoly supplier or demander of its own liabilities.” [3] Clearly, the central bank cannot be both the monopoly supplier and the monopoly demander of reserves, at least not if it wants to have any effect on the rest of the world. The relevant question — to which King offers no answer — is why there are no private substitutes for central bank reserves. Is it simply a matter of legal restrictions on interbank settlements using any other asset? But then why has this one regulatory barrier remained impassable while banks have tunneled through so many others? Anyway, going forward the question may be moot if reserves remain abundant, as they will if the Fed does not shrink its balance sheet back to pre-crisis levels. In that case, new tools will be required to make the policy rate effective.
The sixth story is the one I’m most certain of. First, because it can be stated precisely in terms of asset market equilibrium. Second, because it is consistent with what we see historically. Long term interest rates are quite stable over very long periods. Third, it’s consistent with what market participants say: It’s easy to find bond market participants saying that some rate is “too low” and won’t continue, regardless of what the Fed might think. Last, but not least from my point of view, this view is clearly articulated by Keynes and by Post Keynesians like Bibow. But while I feel sure this is part of the story, it can’t be the whole story. First, because even if a conventional level of interest rates is self-stabilizing in the long run, there are clearly forces of supply and demand in credit markets that push long rates away from this level in the short run. This is even more true if what convention sets is less a level of interest rates, than a floor. And second, because Keynes also says clearly that conventions can change, and in particular that a central bank that holds short rates outside the range bond markets consider reasonable for long enough, will be able to change the definition of reasonable. So that brings us back to the question of how it is that central banks are able to set short rates.
I think the fundamental answer lies behind door number 4. I think there should be a way of describing interest rates as the price of liquidity, where liquidity refers to the capacity to honor one’s promises, and not just to some particular asset. In this sense, the scarce resource that interest is pricing is trust. And monetary policy then is at root indistinguishable from the lender of last resort function — both are aspects of the central bank’s role of standing in as guarantor for commitments within the financial system. You can find elements of this view in the Keynesian literature, and in earlier writers going back to Thornton 200-plus years ago. But I haven’t seen it stated systematically in way that I find satisfactory.
UPDATE: For some reason I brought up the idea of the interest rate as the price of money without mentioning the classic statement of this view by Walter Bagehot. Bagehot uses the term “price of money” or “value of money” interchangeably with “discount rate” as synonyms for the interest rate. The discussion in chapter 5 of Lombard Street is worth quoting at length:
Many persons believe that the Bank of England has some peculiar power of fixing the value of money. They see that the Bank of England varies its minimum rate of discount from time to time, and that, more or less, all other banks follow its lead, and charge much as it charges; and they are puzzled why this should be. ‘Money,’ as economists teach, ‘is a commodity, and only a commodity;’ why then, it is asked, is its value fixed in so odd a way, and not the way in which the value of all other commodities is fixed?
There is at bottom, however, no difficulty in the matter. The value of money is settled, like that of all other commodities, by supply and demand… A very considerable holder of an article may, for a time, vitally affect its value if he lay down the minimum price which he will take, and obstinately adhere to it. This is the way in which the value of money in Lombard Street is settled. The Bank of England used to be a predominant, and is still a most important, dealer in money. It lays down the least price at which alone it will dispose of its stock, and this, for the most part, enables other dealers to obtain that price, or something near it. …
There is, therefore, no ground for believing, as is so common, that the value of money is settled by different causes than those which affect the value of other commodities, or that the Bank of England has any despotism in that matter. It has the power of a large holder of money, and no more. Even formerly, when its monetary powers were greater and its rivals weaker, it had no absolute control. It was simply a large corporate dealer, making bids and much influencing—though in no sense compelling—other dealers thereby.
But though the value of money is not settled in an exceptional way, there is nevertheless a peculiarity about it, as there is about many articles. It is a commodity subject to great fluctuations of value, and those fluctuations are easily produced by a slight excess or a slight deficiency of quantity. Up to a certain point money is a necessity. If a merchant has acceptances to meet to-morrow, money he must and will find today at some price or other. And it is this urgent need of the whole body of merchants which runs up the value of money so wildly and to such a height in a great panic….
If money were all held by the owners of it, or by banks which did not pay an interest for it, the value of money might not fall so fast. … The possessors would be under no necessity to employ it all; they might employ part at a high rate rather than all at a low rate. But in Lombard Street money is very largely held by those who do pay an interest for it, and such persons must employ it all, or almost all, for they have much to pay out with one hand, and unless they receive much with the other they will be ruined. Such persons do not so much care what is the rate of interest at which they employ their money: they can reduce the interest they pay in proportion to that which they can make. The vital point to them is to employ it at some rate…
The fluctuations in the value of money are therefore greater than those on the value of most other commodities. At times there is an excessive pressure to borrow it, and at times an excessive pressure to lend it, and so the price is forced up and down.
The relevant point in this context is the explicit statement that the interest, or discount, rate is set by the supply and demand for money. But there are a couple other noteworthy things. First, the concept of supply and demand is one of monopolistic competition, in which lenders are not price takers, but actively trade off markup against market share. And second, that the demand for money (i.e. credit) is highly inelastic because money is needed not only or mainly to purchase goods and services, but first and foremost to meet contractual money commitments.
[1] See Perry Mehrling’s useful review. Most of the text of Woodford’s textbook can be downloaded for free here. The introduction is nontechnical and is fascinating reading if you’re interested in this stuff.
[2] Which is sort of a problem for Noah Smith’s neo-Fisherite view.
[3] in the same speech, King observes that “During the 19th century, the Bank of England devoted considerable attention to making bank rate ‘effective’.” His implication is that central banks have always been able to control interest rates. But this is somewhat misleading, from my point of view: the Bank devoted so much attention to making its rate “effective” precisely because of the occasions when it failed to do so.
In a post last week, I suggested that an alternative to thinking of capital as quantity of means of production accumulated through past investment, is to think of it as the capitalized value of expected future profit flows. Instead of writing
α = r k
As in Fisher, Black’s emphasis is on the market value of wealth calculated as the expected present value of future income flows, rather than on the quantity of wealth calculated as the historical accumulation of savings minus depreciation. This allows Black to treat knowledge and technology as forms of capital, since their expected effects are included when we measure capital at market value. As he says: “more effective capital is more capital” (1995a, 35). Also as in Fisher, capital grows over time without any restriction from fixed factors.
…
For Black, the standard aggregative neoclassical production function is inadequate because it obscures sectoral and temporal detail by attributing current output to current inputs of capital and labor, but he tries anyway to express his views in that framework in order to reach his intended audience. Most important, he accommodates the central idea of mismatch to the production function framework by introducing the idea that the “utilization” of physical capital and the “effort” of human capital can vary over time. This accommodation makes it possible to express his theory in the familiar Cobb-Douglas production function form: y = A(eh)^α(fk)^(1-α), where y is output, h and k are human and physical capital, e and f are effort and utilization, and A is a temporary shock (1995, eq. 5.3).
It’s familiar math, but the meaning it expresses remains very far from familiar to the trained economist. For one, the labor input has been replaced by human capital so there is no fixed factor. For another, both physical and human capital are measured at market values, and so are supposed to include technological change. This means that the A coefficient is not the usual technology shift factor (the familiar “Solow residual”) but only a multiplier, indeed a kind of inverse price earnings ratio, that converts the stock of effective composite capital into a flow of composite output. In effect, and as he recognizes, Black’s production function is a reduced form, not a production function at all in the usual sense of a technical relation between inputs and outputs. What Black is after comes clearer when he groups terms and summarizes as Y=AEK (eq. 5.7), where Y is output, E is composite utilization, and K is composite capital. Here the effective capital stock is just a constant multiple of output, and vice versa. It’s just an aggregate version of Black’s conception of ideal accounting practice (1993c) wherein accountants at the level of the firm seek to report a measure of earnings that can be multiplied by a constant price- earnings ratio to get the value of the firm.
…
In retrospect, the most fundamental source of misunderstanding came (and comes still) from the difference between an economics and a finance vision of the nature of the economy. The classical economists habitually thought of the present as determined by the past. In Adam Smith, capital is an accumulation from the careful saving of past generations, and much of modern economics still retains this old idea of the essential scarcity of capital, and of the consequent virtue attached to parsimony. The financial point of view, by contrast, sees the present as determined by the future, or rather by our ideas about the future. Capital is less a thing than an idea about future income flows discounted back to the present, and the quantity of capital can therefore change without prior saving.
In The Nature of Capital and Income, Irving Fisher (1906) straddled the older world view of economics and the emerging world view of finance by distinguishing physical capital goods (for which the past-determines-present view makes sense) from the value of those goods (for which the future-determines-present view makes sense). By following Fisher, Black wound up employing the same straddle.
Last week’s big monetary-policy news was the ECB’s decision to target a negative interest rate, in the form of an 0.25 percent tax on bank reserves. This is the first time a major central bank has announced a negative policy rate, though some smaller ones (like the Bank of Sweden) have done so in the past few years.
When a bank pays a 1 percent interest rate, it’s clear what happens: If you deposit your money at the bank, it will pay you a penny each year for every dollar you deposited. When the interest rate is negative, the money goes the other direction. … Put bluntly: Normally the banks pay you to keep your money there. Under negative rates, you pay them for the privilege.
The theory is that when it becomes more costly for European banks to keep money in the E.C.B., they will have incentive to do something else with it: Lend it out to consumers or businesses, for example.
Banks will most likely pass these negative interest rates on to consumers, or at least try to. They may try to do so not by explicitly charging a negative interest rate, but by paying no interest and charging a fee for account maintenance.
It is possible that, assuming banks pass along the negative rates through either fees or explicitly charging negative interest, people will withdraw their money as cash rather than keeping it on deposit at banks. … That is one big reason that the E.C.B. and other central banks are going to be reluctant to make rates highly negative; it could result in people pulling cash out of the banking system.
As intermediaries, banks buy primary securities and issue, in payment for them, deposits and currency. As the payments mechanism, banks transfer title to means of payment on demand by customers. It has been pointed out before, especially by Henry Simons, that these two banking functions are at least incompatible. As managers of the payments mechanism, the banks cannot afford a shadow of insolvency. As intermediaries in a growing economy, the banks may rightly be tempted to wildcat. They must be solvent or the community will suffer; they must dare insolvency or the community will fail to realize its potentialities for growth.
All too often in American history energetic intermediation by banks has culminated in collapse of the payments mechanism. During some periods, especially cautious regard for solvency has resulted in collapse of bank intermediation. Each occasion that has demonstrated the incompatibility of the two principal banking functions has touched off a flood of financial reform. These reforms on balance have tended to emphasize bank solvency and the viability of the payments mechanism at the expense of bank participation in financial growth. They have by no means gone to the extreme that Simons proposed, of divorcing the two functions altogether, but they have tended in that direction rather than toward endorsement of wildcat banking. This bias in financial reform has improved the opportunities for non-monetary intermediaries. The relative retrogression in American banking seems to have resulted in part from regulatory suppression of the intermediary function.
Turning to another matter, it has seemed to be a distinctive, even magic, characteristic of the monetary system that it can create money, erecting a “multiple expansion”of debt in the form of deposits and currency on a limited base of reserves. Other financial institutions, conventional doctrine tells us, are denied this creative or multiplicative faculty. They are merely middlemen or brokers, not manufacturers of credit. Our own view is different. There is no denying, of course, that the monetary system creates debt in the special form of money: the monetary system can borrow by issue of instruments that are means of payment. There is no denying, either, that non-monetary intermediaries cannot create this same form of debt. …
However, each kind of non-monetary intermediary can borrow, go into debt, issue its own characteristic obligations – in short, it can create credit, though not in monetary form. Moreover, the non-monetaryintermediaries are less inhibited in their own style of credit creation than are the banks in creating money. Credit creation by non-monetary intermediaries is restricted by various qualitative rules. Aside from these, the main factor that limits credit creation is the profit calculus. Credit creation by banks also is subject to the profit condition. But the monetary system is subject not only to this restraint and to a complex of qualitative rules. It is committed to a policy restraint, of avoiding excessive expansion or contraction of credit for the community’s welfare, that is not imposed explicitly on non-monetary intermediaries. It is also held in check by a system of reserve requirements. … The [money multiplier] is a remarkable phenomenon not because of its inflationary implications but because it means that bank expansion is anchored, as other financial expansion is not, to a regulated base. If credit creation by banks is miraculous, creation of credit by other financial institutions is still more a cause for exclamation.
The first paragraph of this long footnote is a succinct statement of a basic tension in bank regulation that remains unresolved. (Recall that Simons’ proposal to eliminate the intermediation function of banks was recently revived by Michel Kumhof at the IMF.) The other two paragraphs are a good clear statement of the argument I’ve been trying to develop on this blog, that there is no fundamental difference between money and other forms of financial claims, and a macroeconomically meaningful “quantity of money” was an artifact of mid-20th century regulatory arrangements.
Even today, textbooks on Money, Currency, and Banking are more likely than not to begin with an analysis of a state of things in which legal-tender ‘money’ is the only means of paying and lending. The huge system of credits and debits, of claims and debts, by which capitalist society carries on its daily business of production and consumption is then built up step by step by introducing claims to money or credit instruments that act as substitutes for legal tender… Even when there is very little left of [money’s] fundamental role in practice, everything that happens in the sphere of currency, credit, and banking is construed from it, just as the case of money itself is construed from barter.
Historically, this method of building up the analysis of money, currency, and banking is readily understandable… Legal constructions, too, … were geared to a sharp distinction between money as the only genuine and ultimate means of payment and the credit instrument that embodied a claim to money. But logically, it is by no means clear that the most useful method is to start from the coin—even if, making a concession to realism, we add inconvertible government paper—in order to proceed to the credit transactions of reality. It may be more useful to start from these in the first place, to look upon capitalist finance as a clearing system that cancels claims and debts and carries forward the differences—so that ‘money’ payments come in only as a special case without any particularly fundamental importance. In other words: practically and analytically, a credit theory of money is possibly preferable to a monetary theory of credit.
Perry Mehrling quotes this passage at the start of his essay Modern Money: Credit or Fiat. If you’re someone who worries about the vexed question of what is money anyway, you will benefit from the sustained intelligence Perry brings to bear on it.
Readers of this blog may not be familiar with Perry’s work, so let me suggest a few things. The Credit or Fiat essay is a review of one of Randy Wray’s books, but it makes important positive arguments along with the negative criticism of MMT. [1] A good recent statement of Mehrling’s own views on the monetary system is The Inherent Hierarchy of Money. Two superb essays on monetary thought in the postwar neoclassical synthesis are The Money Muddle and MIT and Money. [2] The former of these coins the term “monetary Walrasianism.” This refers to the idea that the way to think of a monetary economy is a barter system where, for whatever reason, the nth good serves as unit of account and must be on one side of all trades. This way of thinking about money is so ingrained that I suspect that many economists would be puzzled by the suggestion that there is any other way of thinking about money. But as Perry shows, this is a specific idea with its own history, to which we can and should imagine alternatives. Finally, The Vision of Hyman Minsky is one of the two best essays I know giving a systematic account of Minsky’s, well, vision. (The other is Minsky as Hedgehog by Dymski and Pollin.) Anyone interested in what money is, what “money” means, and what’s wrong with economists’ answers, could save themselves a lot of trouble and wrong turns by reading those essays. [3]
But let’s talk about the Schumpeter quote. I think it is right. To understand the monetary nature of modern economies, you need to begin with the credit system, that is, the network of money obligations. Where we want to start from is a world of IOUs. Suppose the only means of payment is a promise to pay. Suppose it’s not only possible for me to tell the bartender at the end of the night, I’ll pay you later, suppose there’s nothing else I can tell him — there’s no cash register at the bar, just a box where my tab goes. Money still exists in this system, but it is only a money of account — concretely we can imagine either an arbitrary unit of value, or some notional commodity that does not circulate, or even exist. (Historical example: non-circulating gold in medieval Europe.) If you give something to me, or do something for me, the only thing I can pay you with now is a promise to pay you later.
This might seem paradoxical — jam tomorrow but never jam today — but it’s not. Debts in this system are eventually settled. As Schumpeter says, they’re settled by netting my IOUs to you from your IOUs to me. An important question then becomes, how big is the universe across which we can cancel out debts? If A owes B, B owes C, and C owes A, it’s not hard to settle everyone up. But suppose A owes B who owes C who owes …. who owes M who owes … who owes Z, who owes A. It’s not so easy now for the dbets to be transferred back along the chain for settlement. In any case, though, my willingness to accept your IOUs depends on my belief that I will want to make some payment to you in the future, or that I’ll want to make some payment to someone who will want to make a payment to someone …. who will eventually want to make a payment to you. The longer the chain, the more important it is for their to be some setting where all the various debts are toted up and canceled out.
The great fairs of medieval Europe were exactly this. During their normal dealings, merchants paid each other with bills of exchange, essentially IOUs that could be transferred to third parties. Merchants would pay suppliers by transferring (with their own endorsement) bills from their customers. Then periodically, merchant houses would send representatives to Champagne or wherever, where the various bills could be presented for payment. Almost all the obligations would end up being offsetting. From Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization Vol. 2:
… the real business of the fairs, economically speaking, was the activity of the great merchant houses. … No fair failed to end with a ‘payment session’ as at Linz, the great fair in Austria; at Leipzig, from its early days of prosperity, the last week was for settling up, the Zahlwoche. Even at Lanciano, a little town in the Papal States which was regularly submerged by its fair (though the latter was only of modest dimensions), handfuls of bills of exchange converged on the fair. The same was true of Pezenas or Montagnac, whose fairs relayed those of Beaucaire and were of similar quality: a whole series of bills of exchange on Paris or Lyons travelled to them.
The fairs were effectively a settling of accounts, in which debts met and cancelled each other out, melting like snow in the sun: such were the miracles of scontro, compensation. A hundred thousand or so “ecus d’or en or” – that is real coins – might at the clearing-house of Lyons settle business worth millions; all the more so as a good part of the remaining debts would be settled either by a promise of payment on another exchange (a bill of exchange) or by carrying over payment until the next fair: this was the deposito which was usually paid for at 10% a year (2.5% for three months).
This was not a pure credit-money system, since coin could be used to settle obligations for which there was no offsetting bill. But note that a “good part” of the net obligations remaining at the end of the fair were simply carried over to the next fair.
I think it would be helpful if we replaced truck-and-barter with something like these medieval fairs, when we imagine the original economic situation. [4] Starting from a credit view of money modifies our intuitions in several, as I see it, helpful ways.
1. Your budget constraint is always a matter of how much people will lend you, or how safe you feel borrowing. Conversely, the consequences of failing to pay your debts is a fundamental parameter. We can’t push bankruptcy onto the back burner as a tricky but secondary question to be dealt with later.
2. The extension of credit goes with an extension of the realm of the market. The more things you might be willing to do to settle your debts, the more willing I am to lend to you. And conversely, the further what you owe runs beyond your normal income, the more the question of what you won’t do for money comes up for negotiation.
3. Liquidity, money, demand, depend ultimately on people’s willingness to trust each other, to accept promises, to have confidence in things working out according to plan. Liquidity exists on the liability side of balance sheets as much as on the asset side.
4. When we speak of more or less liquidity, we don’t mean a greater or lesser quantity of some commodity designated “money,” but a greater or lesser degree of willingness to extend credit. So at bottom, conventional monetary policy, quantitative easing, lender of last resort operations, bank regulations — they’re all the same thing.
When Minsky says that the fundamental function of banks is “acceptance,” this is what he means. The fundamental question faced by the financial system is, whose promises are good?
[1] I don’t want to get into Perry criticisms of MMT here. Anyone interested should read the article, it’s not long.
[2] MIT and Money also makes it clear that I was wrong to pick Samuelson’s famous consumption-loan essay as an illustration of the neoclassical position on interest rates. The point of that essay, he explains, was not to offer a theory of interest rate determination, but rather to challenge economic conservatives by demonstrating that even in a simple, rigorous model of rational optimization, a public pension system could could be an unambiguous welfare improvement over private retirement saving. My argument wasn’t wrong, but I should have picked a better example of what I was arguing against.
[3] Perry has also written three books. The only one I’ve read is The New Lombard Street. I can’t recommend it as a starting point for someone new to his work: It’s too focused on the specific circumstances of the financial crisis of 2008, and assumes too much familiarity with his larger perspective.
EDIT: I removed some overly belligerent language from the first footnote.
Government shutdown, debt ceiling deadline just around the corner. Were you watching this show when it was first on, in the summer of 2011? People were predicting that even the possibility of a technical default (which almost happened), or credit-rating downgrade (which did happen, on Aug. 11) should lead to a sharp rise in US interest rates and a fall in the dollar. Neither of these things took place. There were some interesting discussions why not, which are worth revisiting now.
How is it possible that a downgrade in federal debt could increase demand for it? One obvious reason is that it could increase the political pressure for austerity, making lower growth more likely, and owners of financial assets might recognize this.
But there’s another explanation, which is the that federal debt is a kind of Giffen good. This Baseline Scenario post makes one version of the argument. Here’s my version.
Wealthholders choose their portfolio to maximize risk-adjusted return, but subject to a survival constraint such that expected probability of returns at each future time t falling below some floor is subjectively zero (less than epsilon, we can say.) The existence of this kind of floor is one of the central things that distinguishes the Minskyan view of the world. (Minsky would talk here about cashflows rather than returns, but the logic is the same.)
Now suppose the riskiness of the portfolio increases. Then to keep the distribution of returns from crossing the floor, investors need to shift toward lower-risk assets. This is true even if the increased riskiness of the portfolio came from the lower risk assets themselves.
Here’s another way of looking at it, more in the spirit of Holmstrom and Tirole. Making a risky/illiquid investment requires holding a greater quantity of money-like assets to ensure a zero (or less than epsilon) probability of the investment pulling you below your survival constraint. In effect, this lowers the return on the investment, since the total return has to be calculated on the cost of the asset itself plus the cushion of money-like assets you need to purchase along with it. If safe assets are less safe, you have to hold more of them to cushion the same risky asset. This means that an increase in the riskiness of safe assets implies a shift in demand toward safe assets and away from risky ones.
There was a very interesting piece from the BIS recently about why a fall in the price of US assets may be associated with an appreciation of the dollar. (It’s the McCauley chapter in the linked document.) They argue that many purchasers of dollar assets wanted the asset, not the foreign-exchange risk, so they hedged it by simultaneously selling the dollar forward, or otherwise issuing a dollar liability of equal value to the asset. But this means if the value of the US asset declines, they are overhedged, they now have a short position in the dollar. To get rid of that foreign-exchange risk they have to liquidate the dollar liability, which means buying dollars.
If this sort of hedging were universal, it would have somewhat counterintuitive implications for the exchange rate. Changes in demand for dollar assets would then have no effect on the value of the dollar. And changes in the dollar value of US assets would induce opposite-signed changes in the value of the dollar. According to the BIS, this kind of hedging is very common among European investors in US assets, but not at all common among US purchasers of foreign assets — for US purchasers, the foreign-exchange risk is part of the asset, not something they want to get rid of.
I don’t see any reason to have a strong prior that hedging the forex risk cannot be common among purchasers of foreign assets. If it is common, this sort of “perverse” movement of exchange rates in response to asset-price changes is not just possible, but predictable. And if the hedging is asymmetric, as the BIS study suggests, then we would expect a global rise in asset prices to lead to a decline in the value of the dollar, and a global fall in asset prices to lead to a rise in the price of the dollar.
Going a step beyond the BIS study, I think there’s a sociological element here. Actual portfolio choices are very seldom made by the ultimate owners, they’re made by intermediaries who are typically specialists of some kind. Now if, let’s say, European purchasers of US equities are largely made by intermediaries, who specialize in equities (domestic and foreign), then they’re going to want to hedge the forex risk — that’s not what they have the expertise to manage. Whereas if US purchases of European equities are largely made by intermediaries who specialize in European or in general foreign assets (equities and otherwise) then they are not going to want to hedge the forex risk, managing it is part of how they get their returns. And I think this question is going to depend on the specific kinds of financial institutions that have developed historically in each place, you can’t deduce it from any underlying tastes or endowments.
But in any case I think we have to accept that it’s perfectly possible for a decline in the value of US assets to lead to a rise in the value of the dollar, even if it seems implausible at first glance.
[Apologies to any non-econ readers, this is even more obscure than usual.]
Brad DeLong observed last week that one of the most surprising things about the Great Recession is how far long-term interest rates have followed short rates toward zero.
I have gotten three significant pieces of the past four years wrong. Three things surprised and still surprise me: (1.) The failure of central banks to adopt a rule like nominal GDP targeting, or it’s equivalent. (2.) The failure of wage inflation in the North Atlantic to fall even farther than it has–toward, even if not to, zero. (3.) The failure of the yield curve to sharply steepen: federal funds rates at zero I expected, but 30-Year U.S. Treasury bond nominal rates at 2.7% I did not.
… The third… may be most interesting.
Back in March 2009, the University of Chicago’s Robert Lucas confidently predicted that within three years the U.S. economy would be back to normal. A normal U.S. economy has a short-term nominal interest rate of 4%. Since the 10-Year U.S. Treasury bond rate tends to be one percentage point more than the average of expected future short-term interest rates over the next decade, even five expected years of a deeply depressed economy with essentially zero short-term interest rates should not push the 10-Year Treasury rate below 3%. (And, indeed, the Treasury rate fluctuated around 3 to 3.5% for the most part from late 2008 through mid 2011.) But in July of 2011 the 10-Year U.S. Treasury bond rate crashed to 2%, and at the start of June it was below 1.5%. [
The possible conclusions are stark: either those investing in financial markets expect … [the] current global depressed economy to endure in more-or-less its current state for perhaps a decade, perhaps more; or … the ability of financial markets to do their job and sensibly price relative risks and returns at a rational level has been broken at a deep and severe level… Neither alternative is something I would have or did predict, or even imagine.
I also am surprised by this, and for similar reasons to DeLong. But I think the fact that it’s surprising has some important implications, which he does not draw out.
Here’s a picture:
The recent fall in 10-year treasuries is striking. But it’s at least as striking how slowly and incompletely they, and corporate bonds, respond to changes in Fed policy, especially recently. It’s hard to look at this picture and not feel a twinge of doubt about the extent to which the Fed “sets” “the” interest rate in any economically meaningful sense. As I’ve mentioned here before, when Keynes referred to the “liquidity trap,” he didn’t mean the technical zero lower bound to policy rates, but its delinking from the economically-important long rates. Clearly, it makes no difference whether or not you can set a policy rate below zero if there’s reason to think that longer rates wouldn’t follow it down in any case. And I think there is reason to think that.
The snapping of the link between monetary policy and other rates was written about years ago by Benjamin Friedman, as a potential; it figured in my comrade Hasan Comert’s dissertation more recently, as an actuality. Both of them attribute the disconnect to institutional and regulatory changes in the financial system. And I agree, that’s very important. But after reading Leijonhufvud’s On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes [1], I think there may be a deeper structural explanation.
As DeLong says, in general we think that long interest rates should be equal to the average expected short rates over their term, perhaps plus a premium. [2] So what can we say about interest rate expectations? One obvious question is, are they elastic or inelastic? Elastic expectations change easily; in particular, unit-elastic expectations mean that whatever the current short rate is, it’s expected to continue indefinitely. Inelastic expectations change less easily; in the extreme case of perfectly inelastic interest rate expectations, your prediction for short-term interest rates several years from now is completely independent of what they are now.
Inelastic interest-rate expectations are central to Keynes’ vision of the economy. (Far more so than, for instance, sticky wages.) They are what limit the effectiveness of monetary policy in a depression or recession, with the liquidity trap simply the extreme case of the general phenomenon. [3] His own exposition is a little hard to follow, but the simplest way to look at it is to recall that when interest rates fall, bond prices rise, and vice versa. (In fact they are just two ways of describing the same thing.) So if you expect a rise in interest rates in the future that means you’ll expect a capital loss if you hold long-duration bonds, and if you expect a fall in interest rates you’ll expect a capital gain. So the more likely it seems that short-term interest rates will revert to some normal level in the future, the less long rates should follow short ones.
This effect gets stronger as we consider longer maturities. In the limiting case of a perpetuity — a bond that makes a fixed dollar period every period forever — the value of the bond is just p/i, where p is the payment in each period and i is the interest rate. So when you consider buying a bond, you have to consider not just the current yield, but the possibility that interest rates will change in the future. Because if they do, the value of the bonds you own will rise or fall, and you will experience a capital gain or loss. Of course future interest rates are never really known. But Keynes argued that there is almost always a strong convention about the normal or “safe” level of interest.
Note that the logic above means that the relationship between short and long rates will be different when rates are relatively high vs. when they are relatively low. The lower are rates, the greater the capital loss from an increase in rates. As long rates approach zero, the potential capital loss from an increase approaches infinity.
Let’s make this concrete. If we write i_s for the short interest rate and i_l for the long interest rate, B for the current price of long bonds, and BE for the expected price of long bonds a year from now, then for all assets to be willing held it must be the case that i_l = i_s – (BE/B – 1), that is, interest on the long bond will need to be just enough higher (or lower) than the short rate to cancel out the capital loss (or gain) expected from holding the long bond. If bondholders expect the long run value of bond prices to be the same as the current value, then long and short rates should be the same. [*] Now for simplicity let’s assume we are talking about perpetuities (the behavior of long but finite bonds will be qualitatively similar), so B is just 1/i_l. [4] Then we can ask the question, how much do short rates have to fall to produce a one point fall in long rates.
Obviously, the answer will depend on expectations. The standard economist’s approach to expectations is to say they are true predictions of the future state of the world, an approach with some obvious disadvantages for those of us without functioning time machines. A simpler, and more empirically relevant, way of framing the question, is to ask how expectations change based on changes in the current state of the world — which unlike the future, we can observe. Perfectly inelastic expectations mean that your best guess about interest rates at some future date is not affected at all by the current level of interest rates; unit-elastic expectations mean that your best guess changes one for one with the current level. An of course there are all the possibilities in between. Let’s quantify this as the subjective annual probability that a departure of interest rates from their current or “normal” level will subsequently be reversed. Now we can calculate the exact answer to the question posed above, as shown in the next figure.
For instance, suppose short rates are initially at 6 percent, and suppose this is considered the “normal” level, in the sense that the marginal participant in the bond market regards an increase or decrease as equally likely. Then the long rate will also be 6 percent. Now we want to get the long rate down to 5 percent. Suppose interest rate expectations are a bit less than unit elastic — i.e. when market rates change, people adjust their views of normal rates by almost but not quite as much. Concretely, say that the balance of expectations is that there is net 5 percent annual chance that rates will return to their old normal level. If the long rate does rise back to 6 percent, people who bought bonds at 5 percent will suffer a capital loss of 20 percent. A 5 percent chance of a 20 percent loss equals an expected annual loss of 1 percent, so long rates will need to be one point higher than short rates for people to hold them. [5] So from a starting point of equality, for long rates to fall by one point, short rates must fall by two points. You can see that on the blue line on the graph. You can also see that if expectations are more than a little inelastic, the change in short rates required for a one-point change in long rates is impossibly large unless rates are initially very high.
It’s easy enough to do these calculations; the point is that unless expectations are perfectly elastic, we should always expect long rates to change less than one for one with short rates; the longer the rates considered, the more inelastic expectations, and the lower initial rates, the less responsive long rates will be. At the longest end of the term structure — the limiting case of a perpetuity — it is literally impossible for interest rates to reach zero, since that would imply an infinite price.
This dynamic is what Keynes was talking about when he wrote:
If . . . the rate of interest is already as low as 2 percent, the running yield will only offset a rise in it of as little as 0.04 percent per annum. This, indeed, is perhaps the chief obstacle to a fall in the rate of interest to a very low level . . . [A] long-term rate of interest of (say) 2 percent leaves more to fear than to hope, and offers, at the same time, a running yield which is only sufficient to offset a very small measure of fear.
Respectable economists like DeLong believe that there is a true future path of interest rates out there, which current rates should reflect; either the best current-information prediction is of government policy so bad that the optimal interest rate will continue to be zero for many years to come, or else financial markets have completely broken down. I’m glad the second possibility is acknowledged, but there is a third option: There is no true future course of “natural” rates out there, so markets adopt a convention for normal interest rates based on past experience. Given the need to take forward-looking actions without true knowledge of the future, this is perfectly rational in the plain-English sense, if not in the economist’s.
A final point: For Keynes — a point made more clearly in the Treatise than in the General Theory — the effectivness of monetary policy depends critically on the fact that there are normally market participants with differing expectations about future interest rates. What this means is that when interest rates rise, people who think the normal or long-run rate of interest is relatively low (“bulls”) can sell bonds to people who think the normal rate is high (“bears”), and similarly when interest rates fall the bears can sell to the bulls. Thus the marginal bond will be held held by someone who thinks the current rate of interest is the normal one, and so does not require a premium for expected capital gains or losses. This is the same as saying that the market as a whole behaves as if expectations are unit-elastic, even though this is not the case for individual participants. [6] But when interest rates move too far, there will no longer be enough people who think the new rate is normal to willingly hold the stock of bonds without an interest-rate risk premium. In other words, you run out of bulls or bears. Keynes was particularly concerned that an excess of bear speculators relative to bulls could keep long interest rates permanently above the level compatible with full employment. The long rate, he warned,
may fluctuate for decades about a level which is chronically too high for full employment; – particularly if it is the prevailing opinion that the rate of interest is self-adjusting, so that the level established by convention is thought to be rooted in objective grounds much stronger than convention, the failure of employment to attain an optimum level being in no way associated, in the minds either of the public or of authority, with the prevalence of an inappropriate range of rates of interest’.
If the belief that interest rates cannot fall below a certain level is sufficiently widespread, it becomes self-fulfilling. If people believe that long-term interest rates can never persistently fall below, say, 3 percent, then anyone who buys long bonds much below that is likely to lose money. And, as Keynes says, this kind of self-stabilizing convention is more likely to the extent that people believe that it’s not just a convention, but that there is some “natural rate of interest” fixed by non-monetary fundamentals.
So what does all this mean concretely?
1. It’s easy to see inelastic interest-rate expectations in the data. Long rates consistently lag behind short rates. During the 1960s and 1970s, when rates were secularly rising, long rates were often well below the Federal Funds rate, especially during tightening episodes; during the period of secularly falling rates since 1980, this has almost never happened, but very large term spreads have become more common, especially during loosening episodes.
2. For the central bank to move long rates, it must persuade markets that changes in policy are permanent, or at least very persistent; this is especially true when rates are low. (This is the main point of this post.) The central bank can change rates on 30-year bonds, say, only by persuading markets that average rates over the next 30 years will be different than previously believed. Over small ranges, the existence of varying beliefs in the bond market makes this not too difficult (since the central bank doesn’t actually have to change any individual’s expectations if bond sales mean the marginal bondholder is now a bull rather than a bear, or vice versa) but for larger changes it is more difficult. And it becomes extremely difficult to the extent that economic theory has taught people that there is a long run “natural” rate of interest that depends only on technology and time preferences, which monetary policy cannot affect.
Now, the obvious question is, how sure are we that long rates are what matters? I’ve been treating a perpetual bond as an approximation of the ultimate target of monetary policy, but is that reasonable? Well, one point on which Keynes and today’s mainstream agree is that the effect of interest rates on the economy comes through demand for long-lived assets — capital goods and housing. [7] According to the BEA, the average current-cost age of private fixed assets in the US is a bit over 21 years, which implies that the expected lifetime of a new fixed asset must be quite a bit more than that. For Keynes (Leijonhufvud stresses this point; it’s not so obvious in the original texts) the main effect of interest rates is not on the financing conditions for new fixed assets, as most mainstream and heterodox writers both assume, but on the discount rate used of the assets. In that case the maturity of assets is what matters. On the more common view, it’s the maturity of the debt used to finance them, which may be a bit less; but the maturity of debt is usually matched to the maturity of assets, so the conclusion is roughly the same. The relevant time horizon for fixed assets is long enough that perpetuities are a reasonable first approximation. [8]
3. So if long rates are finally falling now, it’s only because an environment of low rates is being established as new normal. There’s a great deal of resistance to this, since if interest rates do return to their old normal levels, the capital losses to bondholders will be enormous. So to get long rates down, the Fed has to overcome intense resistance from bear speculators. Only after a great deal of money has been lost betting on a return of interest rates to old levels will market participants begin to accept that ultra-low rates are the new normal. The recent experience of Bill Gross of PIMCO (the country’s largest bond fund) is a perfect example of this story. In late 2010, he declared that interest rates could absolutely fall no further; it was the end of the 30-year bull market in bonds. A year later, he put his money where his mouth was and sold all his holdings of Treasuries. As it turned out, this was just before bond prices rose by 30 percent (the flipside of the fall in rates), a misjudgment that cost his investors billions. But Gross and the other “bears” had to suffer those kinds of losses for the recent fall in long rates to be possible. (It is also significant that they have not only resisted in the market, but politically as well.) The point is, outside a narrow range, changes in monetary policy are only effective when they cease to be perceived as just countercyclical, but as carrying information about “the new normal.” Zero only matters if it’s permanent zero.
4. An implication of this is that in a world where the lifespan of assets is much longer than the scale of business-cycle fluctuations, we cannot expect interest rates to be stationary if monetary policy is the main stabilization tool. Unless expectations are very elastic, effective monetary policy require secular drift in interest rates, since each short-term stabilization episode will result in a permanent change in interest rates. [9] You can see this historically: the fall in long rates in the 1990 and 2000 loosenings both look about equal to the permanent components of those changes. This is a problem for two reasons: First, because it means that monetary policy must be persistent enough to convince speculators that it does represent a permanent change, which means that it will act slower, and require larger changes in short rates (with the distortions those entail) than in the unit-elastic expectations case. And second, because if there is some reason to prefer one long-ru level of interest rates to another (either because you believe in a “natural” rate, or because of the effects on income distribution, asset price stability, etc.) it would seem that maintaining that rate is incompatible with the use of monetary policy for short-run stabilization. And of course the problem is worse, the lower interest rates are.
5. One way of reading this is that monetary policy works better when interest rates are relatively high, implying that if we want to stabilize the economy with the policy tools we have, we should avoid persistently low interest rates. Perhaps surprisingly, given what I’ve written elsewhere, I think there is some truth to this. If “we” are social-welfare-maximizing managers of a capitalist economy, and we are reliant on monetary policy for short-run stabilization, then we should want full employment to occur in the vicinity of nominal rates around 10 percent, versus five percent. (One intuitive way of seeing this: Higher interest rates are equivalent to attaching a low value to events in the future, while low interest rates are equivalent to a high value on those events. Given the fundamental uncertainty about the far future, choices in the present will be more stable if they don’t depend much on far-off outcomes.) In particular — I think it is a special case of the logic I’ve been outlining here, though one would have to think it through — very low interest rates are likely to be associated with asset bubbles. But the conclusion, then, is not to accept a depressed real economy as the price of stable interest rates and asset prices, but rather to “tune” aggregate demand to a higher level of nominal interest rates. One way to do this, of course, is higher inflation; the other is a higher level of autonomous demand, either for business investment (the actual difference between the pre-1980 period and today, I think), or government spending.
[1] The most invigorating economics book I’ve read in years. It’ll be the subject of many posts here in the future, probably.
[2] Why there should be a pure term premium is seldom discussed but actually not straightforward. It’s usually explained in terms of liquidity preference of lenders, but this invites the questions of (1) why liquidity preference outweighs “solidity preference”; and (2) why lenders’ preferences should outweigh borrowers’. Leijonhufvud’s answer, closely related to the argument of this post, is that the “excessively long” lifespan of physical capital creates chronic excess supply at the long end of the asset market. In any case, for the purpose of this post, we will ignore the pure premium and assume that long rates are simply the average of expected short rates.
[3] Keynes did not, as is sometimes suggested by MMTers and other left Keynesians, reject the effectiveness of monetary policy in general. But he did believe that it was much more effective at stabilizing full employment than at restoring full employment from a depressed state.
[4] I will do up these equations properly once the post is done.
[5] I anticipate an objection to reasoning on the basis of an equilibrium condition in asset markets. I could just say, Keynes does it. But I do think it’s legitimate, despite my rejection of the equilibrium methodology more generally. I don’t think there’s any sense that human behavior can be described as maximizing some quantity called utility,” not even as a rough approximation; but I do think that capitalist enterprises can be usefully described as maximizing profit. I don’t think that expectations in financial markets are “rational” in the usual economists’ sense, but I do think that one should be able to describe asset prices in terms of some set of expectations.
[6] We were talking a little while ago with Roger Farmer, Rajiv Sethi, and others about the desirability of limiting economic analysis to equilibria, i.e. states where all expectations are fulfilled. This implies, among other things, that all expectations must be identical. Keynes’ argument for why long rates are more responsive to short rates within some “normal” range of variation is — whether you think it’s right or not — an example of something you just can’t say within Farmer’s preferred framework.
[7] Despite this consensus, this may not be entirely the case; and in fact to the extent that monetary policy is effective in the real world, other channels, like income distribution, may be important. But let’s assume for now that demand for long-lived assets is what matters.
[8] Hicks had an interesting take on this, according to Leijonhufvud. Since the production process is an integrated whole, “capital” does not consist of particular goods but of a claim on the output of the process as a whole. Since this process can be expected to continue indefinitely, capital should be generally assumed to be infinitely-lived. When you consider how much of business investment is motivated by maintaining the firm’s competitive position — market share, up to date technology, etc. — it does seem reasonable to see investment as buying not a particular capital good but more of the firm as a whole.
[9] There’s an obvious parallel with the permanent inflation-temporary employment tradeoff of mainstream theory. Except, I think mine is correct!
Felix Salmon is my favorite business blogger — super smart, cosmopolitan and impressively unimpressed by the Masters of the Universe he spends his days observing. In general, I’d expect him to be much more on top of current financial data than I am. But in today’s post on the commercial paper market, he makes an uncharacteristic mistake — or rather, uncharacteristic for him but highly characteristic of the larger conversation around finance.
According to Felix:
The commercial paper market has to a first approximation become an entirely financial market, a place for banks and shadow banks to do their short-term borrowing while the interbank market remains closed.
According to David S. Scharfstein of Harvard Business School, who also testified last week, of the 50 largest issuers of debt to money market funds today, only two are nonfinancial firms; the rest are banks and other financial companies, many of them foreign.
Once upon a time, before the financial crisis, money-market funds were a mechanism whereby individual investors could make safe, short-term loans to big corporates, disintermediating the banks. But all that has changed now. For one thing, says Davidoff, “about two-thirds of money market users are sophisticated finance investors”. For another, the corporates have evaporated away, to be replaced by financials. In the corporate world, it seems, the price mechanism isn’t working any more: either you’re a big and safe corporate and don’t want to run the refinancing risk of money-market funds suddenly drying up, or else you’re small enough and risky enough that the money market funds don’t want to lend to you at any price.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s right.
Reading Felix, you get the clear impression that before the crisis, or anyway not too long ago, most borrowers in the commercial paper market were nonfinancial corporations. It has only “become an entirely financial market” relatively recently, he suggests, as nonfinancial borrowers have dropped out. But, to me at least, the real picture looks rather different.
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| Source: Flow of Funds |
The graph shows outstanding financial and nonfinancial commercial paper on the left scale, and the financial share of the total on the right scale. As you can see the story is almost the opposite of the one Felix tells. Financial borrowers have always dominated the commercial paper market, and their share has fallen, not risen, in the wake of the financial crisis and recession. Relative to the economy, nonfinancial commercial paper outstanding is close to where it was at the peak of the past cycle. But financial paper is down by almost two-thirds. As a result, the nonfinancial share of the commercial paper market has doubled, from 7 to 15 percent — the highest it’s been since the 1990s.
Why does this matter? Well, of course, it’s important to get these things right. But I think Felix’s mistake here is revealing of a larger problem.
One of the most dramatic features of the financial crisis of fall 2008, bringing the Fed as close as it got to socializing the means of intermediation, was the collapse of the commercial paper market. But as I’ve written here before, it was almost never acknowledged that the collapse was largely limited to financial commercial paper. Nonfinancial borrowers did not lose access to credit in the way that banks and shadow banks did. The gap between the financial and nonfinancial commercial paper markets wasn’t discussed, I believe, because of the way the crisis was seen entirely through the eyes of finance.
I suspect the same thing is happening with the evolution of the commercial paper market in the past few years. The Flow of Funds shows clearly that commercial borrowing by nonfinancial borrowers has held up reasonably well; the fall in commercial paper lending is limited to financial borrowers. But that banks’ problems are everyone’s problems is taken for granted, or at most justified with a pious handwave about the importance of credit to the real economy.
And that’s the second assumption, again usually unstated, at issue here: that providing credit to households and businesses is normally the main activity of finance, with departures from that role an anomalous recent development. But what if the main action in the financial system has never been intermediating between ultimate lenders and borrowers? What if banks have always mostly been, not to put too fine a point on it, parasites?
During the crisis of 2008 one big question was if it was possible to let the big banks fail, or if the consequences for the real economy would be prohibitively awful. On the left, Dean Baker took the first position while Doug Henwood took the second, arguing that the alternative to bailouts could be a second Great Depression. I was ambivalent at the time, but I’ve been moving toward the let-them-fail view. (Especially if the counterfactual is that governments and central banks putting comparable resources into sheltering the real economy from collapsing banks, as they have into propping them up.) The evolution of the commercial paper market looks to me like one more datapoint supporting that view. The collapse of interbank lending doesn’t seem to have affected nonbank borrowers much.
(Which brings us to a larger point, of whether the continued depressed state of the real economy is due to a lack of access to credit. Obviously I think not, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
An insidious feature of the world we live in is an unconscious tendency to adopt finance’s point of view. This is as true of intellectuals as of everyone else. An anthropologist of my acquaintance, for instance, did his fieldwork on the New York financial industry. Nothing wrong with that — he’s got some very smart things to say about it — but you really can’t imagine someone doing a similar project on any other industry, apart from high-tech internet stuff. In our culture, finance is just interesting in a way that other businesses are not. I’m not exempting myself from this, by the way. The financial crisis and its aftermath was the most exciting time in memory to be thinking about economics; I’m not going to deny it, it was fun. And there are plenty of people on the left who would say that a tendency, which I confess to, to let the conflict between Wall Street and the real economy displace the conflict between labor and capital in our political language, is a symptom — a kind of reaction-formation — of the same intellectual capture.
But that is perhaps over-broadening the point, which is just this: That someone as smart as Felix Salmon could so badly misread the commercial paper market is a sign of how hard we have to work to distinguish the state of the banks, from the state of the economy.
When I first started reading blogs a decade ago (I’m pretty sure the first blogpost I ever read was one of these Eschaton posts on Trent Lott) there was a distinctly truncated Left in the blog world, especially on economics. Just mainstream liberals, conservatives, and libertarians as far as the eye could see. Which, what else is new, right? Except that it really wasn’t true of mailing lists, the predecessor medium, where you had super active lists like PEN-L and LBO Talk. I used to wonder if there was something specific about the formats that made mailing lists more hospitable to radical politics. Like, flatteringly, maybe we prefer collective discussions rather than one-man shows? Anyway, the question is moot now, because there’s certainly no shortage of left/radical blogs now, economics-oriented and otherwise.
All of which is a long-winded introduction to introducing a new progressive economics blog, Wonkupy. It’s by “Rotwang,” a very sharp comrade who needs to remain pseudonymous for professional reasons. It bills itself as “Occupy for wonks,” but my sense is it’s going to be more the other way round; well worth reading either way.
That said, I have some disagreements with his current post, arguing that criticism of private equity is a distraction. I put them in comments there, but since it touches on some regular themes at the Slack Wire, I thought I’d post an abridged version here.
Rotwang’s argument is that it’s wrong to suggest that buyouts and takeovers of firms by private equity funds and the like have any systematic effect on the way those firms are managed: profit maximization at the expense of workers and the pubic is the order of the day whether the bosses are vulture capitalists or just the regular kind. (It’s sort of a political-economic version of the Modigliani-Miller theorem.) Rotwang:
In [private equity] discussions, it is easy to focus on outright theft, abuse of borrowing, and inefficient government subsidies. We suggest this is not unique to PE, but is generic to Capitalism. One could imagine regulatory responses to such problems, but we insist the problems are part of the system, not tumorous growths on something otherwise fundamentally healthy. A narrow focus on PE glosses over the features it shares in common with Capitalism in general, now and throughout history. The narrow view plays to limited and ineffective remedies that fail to engage the long-standing, systematic problems of capital markets.
I disagree — tentatively on the substance, but emphatically on this way of framing it.
Suppose for the moment it’s true that the problems with private equity are no different from the problems with capitalism in general. I still don’t think that’s a valid reason to not talk about private equity in particular. After all, “X in general” is just all the specific instances of X. To the extent that the way productive enterprises are treated by PE firms like Bain is a representative example of why an economy oriented around the private pursuit of profit is incompatible with a humane and decent society, I don’t see what’s wrong with starting with it as a particularly vivid and timely example. Of course you have to then move on to a more general critique — there’s nothing that stops management at companies that aren’t subject to buyouts from acting like Bain, and many do — but a ban on discussion of particular cases doesn’t smooth the way to that general critique.
The other question is, is it really true that there is no difference between what a firm like Bain does and what a “normal” capitalist firm does? Rotwang writes, “From the worker’s standpoint, it makes little difference if her life is ruined by PE or by old management,” which is inarguable. But are we sure ruination is equally likely in either case?
It seems to me that while capitalist firms always pursue profit, and this pursuit is always ultimately inimical to the interests of workers, it’s not always equally single-minded. Managers want their firms (and themselves personally) to make money, but they also want them to survive, to grow, to gain market share, to be perceived as prestigious, cutting-edge, etc., and, in a non-trivial number of cases, to make genuinely good products by whatever objective standard of the business that they’re in. To the extent that finance exercises more active control of the firm, those other motives get subordinated to pure pursuit of profits. And I think that does tend to make life worse for their workers, and communities and customers, and everyone else who depends on the business as an ongoing enterprise.
No question, there is (or was; is Occupy still a thing?) a strong anti-finance vibe around OWS. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing that — especially in its weirder Ron Paulish forms — but it seems to me this is a case where “Yes, and” is distinctly preferable to “no, but”. For some people, a criticism of private equity may be an alternative to a broader critique of capitalism, but for many more, I suspect, it’s a starting point towards it.
