Author: JW Mason

Inflation, Interest Rates and the Fed: A Dissent

Last week, my Roosevelt colleague Mike Konczal said on twitter that he endorsed the Fed’s decision to raise the federal funds rate, and the larger goal of using higher interest rates to weaken demand and slow growth. Mike is a very sharp guy, and I generally agree with him on almost everything. But in this case I disagree. 

The disagreement may partly be about the current state of the economy. I personally don’t think the inflation we’re seeing reflects any general “overheating.” I don’t think there’s any meaningful sense in which current employment and wage growth are too fast, and should be slower. But at the end of the day, I don’t think Mike’s and my views are very different on this. The real issue is not the current state of the economy, but how much confidence we have in the Fed to manage it. 

So: Should the Fed be raising rates to control inflation? The fact that inflation is currently high is not, in itself, evidence that conventional monetary policy is the right tool for bringing it down. The question we should be asking, in my opinion, is not, “how many basis points should the Fed raise rates this year?” It is, how conventional monetary policy affects inflation at all, at what cost, and whether it is the right tool for the job. And if not, what should we be doing instead?

What Do Rate Hikes Do?

At Powell’s press conference, Chris Rugaber of the AP asked an excellent question: What is the mechanism by which a higher federal funds rate is supposed to bring down inflation, if not by raising unemployment?1 Powell’s answer was admirably frank: “There is a very, very tight labor market, tight to an unhealthy level. Our tools work as you describe … if you were moving down the number of job openings, you would have less upward pressure on wages, less of a labor shortage.”

Powell is clear about what he is trying to do. If you make it hard for businesses to borrow, some will invest less, leading to less demand for labor, weakening workers’ bargaining power and forcing them to accept lower wages (which presumably get passed on to prices, tho he didn’t spell that step out.) If you endorse today’s rate hikes, and the further tightening it implies, you are endorsing the reasoning behind it: labor markets are too tight, wages are rising too quickly, workers have too many options, and we need to shift bargaining power back toward the bosses.

Rather than asking exactly how fast the Fed should be trying to raise unemployment and slow wage growth, we should be asking whether this is the only way to control inflation; whether it will in fact control inflation; and whether the Fed can even bring about these outcomes in the first place.

Both hiring and pricing decisions are made by private businesses (or, in a small number of cases, in decentralized auction markets.) The Fed can’t tell them what to do. What it can do – what it is doing – is raise the overnight lending rate between banks, and sell off some part of the mortgage-backed securities and long-dated Treasury bonds that it currently holds. 

A higher federal funds rate will eventually get passed on to other interest rates, and also (and perhaps more importantly) to credit conditions in general — loan standards and so on. Some parts of the financial system are more responsive to the federal funds rate than others. Some businesses and activities are more dependent on credit than others.

Higher rates and higher lending standards will, eventually, discourage borrowing. More quickly and reliably, they will raise debt service costs for households, businesses and governments, reducing disposable income. This is probably the most direct effect of rate hikes. It still depends on the degree to which market rates are linked to the policy rate set by the Fed, which in practice they may not be. But if we are looking for predictable results of a rate hike, higher debt service costs are one of the best candidates. Monetary tightening may or may not have a big effect on unemployment, inflation or home prices, but it’s certainly going to raise mortgage payments — indeed, the rise in mortgage rates we’ve seen in recent months presumably is to some degree in anticipation of rate hikes.

Higher debt service costs reduce disposable income for households and retained earnings for business, reducing consumption and investment spending respectively. If they rise far enough, they will also lead to an increase in defaults on debt.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that a significant and rising part of recent inflation is owners’ equivalent rent, which is a BLS estimate of how much homeowners could hypothetically get if they rented out their homes. It is not a price paid by anyone. Meanwhile, mortgage payments, which are the main actual housing cost for homeowners, are not included in the CPI. It’s a bit ironic that in response to a rise in a component of “housing costs” that is not actually a cost to anyone, the Fed is taking steps to raise what actually is the biggest component of housing costs.)

Finally, a rate hike may cause financial assets to fall in value — not slowly, not predictably, but eventually. This is the intended effect of the asset sales.

Asset prices are very far from a simple matter of supply and demand — there’s no reason to think that a small sale of, say 10-year bonds will have any discernible effect on the corresponding yield (unless the Fed announces a target for the yield, in which case the sale itself would be unnecessary.) But again, eventually, sufficient rate hikes and asset sales will presumably lead asset prices to fall. When they do fall, it will probably by a lot at once rather than a little at a time – when assets are held primarily for capital gains, their price can continue rising or fall sharply, but it cannot remain constant. If you own something because you think it will rise in value, then if it stays at the current price, the current price is too high.

Lower asset values in turn will discourage new borrowing (by weakening bank balance sheets, and raising bond yields) and reduce the net worth of households (and also of nonprofits and pension funds and the like), reducing their spending. High stock prices are often a major factor in periods of rising consumption, like the 1990s; a stock market crash could be expected to have the opposite impact.

What can we say about all these channels? First, they will over time lead to less spending in the economy, lower incomes, and less employment. This is how hikes have an effect on inflation, if they do. There is no causal pathway from rate hikes to lower inflation that doesn’t pass through reduced incomes and spending along the way. And whether or not you accept the textbook view that the path from demand to prices runs via unemployment wage growth, it is still the case that reduced output implies less demand for labor, meaning slower growth in employment and wages.

That is the first big point. There is no immaculate disinflation. 

Second, rate hikes will have a disproportionate effect on certain parts of the economy. The decline in output, incomes and employment will initially come in the most interest-sensitive parts of the economy — construction especially. Rising rates will reduce wealth and income for indebted households. 2. Over time, this will cause further falls in income and employment in the sectors where these households reduce spending, as well as in whatever categories of spending that are most sensitive to changes in wealth. In some cases, like autos, these may be the same areas where supply constraints have been a problem. But there’s no reason to think this will be the case in general.

It’s important to stress that this is not a new problem. One of the things hindering a rational discussion of inflation policy, it seems to me, is the false dichotomy that either we were facing transitory, pandemic-related inflation, or else the textbook model of monetary policy is correct. But as the BIS’s Claudio Borio and coauthors note in a recent article, even before the pandemic, “measured inflation [was] largely the result of idiosyncratic (relative) price changes… not what the theoretical definition of inflation is intended to capture, i.e. a generalised increase in prices.” The effects of monetary policy, meanwhile, “operate through a remarkably narrow set of prices, concentrated mainly in the more cyclically sensitive service sectors.”

These are broadly similar results to a 2019 paper by Stock and Watson, which finds that only a minority of prices show a consistent correlation with measures of cyclical activity.3 It’s true that in recent months, inflation has not been driven by auto prices specifically. But it doesn’t follow that we’re now seeing all prices rising together. In particular, non-housing services (which make up about 30 percent of the CPI basket) are still contributing almost nothing to the excess inflation. Yet, if you believe the BIS results (which seem plausible), it’s these services where the effects of tightening will be felt most.

This shows the contribution to annualized inflation above the 2% target, over rolling three-month periods. My analysis of CPI data.

The third point is that all of this takes time. It is true that some asset prices and market interest rates may move as soon as the Fed funds rate changes — or even in advance of the actual change, as with mortgage rates this year. But the translation from this to real activity is much slower. The Fed’s own FRB/US model says that the peak effect of a rate change comes about two years later; there are significant effects out to the fourth year. What the Fed is doing now is, in an important sense, setting policy for the year 2024 or 2025. How  confident should we be about what demand conditions will look like then? Given how few people predicted current inflation, I would say: not very confident.

This connects to the fourth point, which is that there is no reason to think that the Fed can deliver a smooth, incremental deceleration of demand. (Assuming we agreed that that’s what’s called for.) In part this is because of the lags just mentioned. The effects of tightening are felt years in the future, but the Fed only gets data in real time. The Fed may feel they’ve done enough once they see unemployment start to rise. But by that point, they’ll have baked several more years of rising unemployment into the economy. It’s quite possible that by the time the full effects of the current round of tightening are felt, the US economy will be entering a recession. 

This is reinforced when we think about the channels policy actually works through. Empirical studies of investment spending tend to find that it is actually quite insensitive to interest rates. The effect of hikes, when it comes, is likelier to be through Minskyan channels — at some point, rising debt service costs and falling asset values lead to a cascading chain of defaults.

In and Out of the Corridor

A broader reason we should doubt that the Fed can deliver a glide path to slower growth is that the economy is a complex system, with both positive and negative feedbacks; which feedbacks dominate depends on the scale of the disturbance. In practice, small disturbances are often self-correcting; to have any effect, a shock has to be big enough to overcome this homeostasis.

Axel Leijonhufvud long ago described this as a “corridor of stability”: economic units have buffers in the form of liquid assets and unused borrowing capacity, which allow them to avoid adjusting expenditure in response to small changes in income or costs. This means the Keynesian multiplier is small or zero for small changes in autonomous demand. But once buffers start to get exhausted, responses become much larger, as the income-expenditure positive feedback loop kicks in.

The most obvious sign of this is the saw-tooth pattern in long-run series of employment and output. We don’t see smooth variation in growth rates around a trend. Rather, we see two distinct regimes: extended periods of steady output and employment growth, interrupted by shorter periods of negative growth. Real economies experience well-defined expansions and recessions, not generic “fluctuations”.

This pattern is discussed in a very interesting recent paper by Antonio Fatas, “The Elusive State of Full Employment.” The central observation of the paper is that whether you measure labor market slack by the conventional unemployment rate or in some other way (the detrended prime-age employment-population ratio is his preferred measure), the postwar US does not show any sign of convergence back to a state of full employment. Rather, unemployment falls and employment rises at a more or less constant rate over an expansion, until it abruptly gives way to a recession. There are no extended periods in which (un)employment rates remain stable.

One implication of this is that the economy spends very little time at potential or full employment; indeed, as he says, the historical pattern should raise questions whether a level of full employment is meaningful at all.

the results of this paper also cast doubt on the empirical relevance of the concepts of full employment or the natural rate of unemployment. … If this interpretation is correct, our estimates of the natural rate of unemployment are influenced by the length of expansions. As an example, if the global pandemic had happened in 2017 when unemployment was around 4.5%, it is very likely that we would be thinking of unemployment rates as low as 3.5% as unachievable.

There are many ways of arriving at this same point. For example, he finds that the (un)employment rate at the end of an expansion is strongly predicted by the rate at the beginning, suggesting that what we are seeing is not convergence back to an equilibrium but simply a process of rising employment that continues until something ends it.

Another way of looking at this pattern is that any negative shock large enough to significantly slow growth will send it into reverse — that, in effect, growth has a “stall speed” below which it turns into recession. If this weren’t the case, we would sometimes see plateaus or gentle hills in the employment rate. But all we see are sharp peaks. 

In short: Monetary policy is an anti-inflation tool that works, when it does, by lowering employment and wages; by reducing spending in a few interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, which may have little overlap with those where prices are rising; whose main effects take longer to be felt than we can reasonably predict demand conditions; and that is more likely to provoke a sharp downturn than a gradual deceleration.

Is Macroeconomic Policy the Responsibility of the Fed?

One reason I don’t think we should be endorsing this move is that we shouldn’t be endorsing the premise that the US is facing dangerously overheated labor markets. But the bigger reason is that conventional monetary policy is a bad way of managing the economy, and entails a bad way of thinking about the economy. We should not buy into a framework in which problems of rising prices or slow growth or high unemployment get reduced to “what should the federal funds rate do?”

Here for example is former CEA Chair Jason Furman’s list of ways to reduce inflation:

What’s missing here is any policy action by anyone other than the Fed. It’s this narrowing of the discussion I object to, more than the rate increase as such.

Rents are rising rapidly right now — at an annual rate of about 6 percent as measured by the CPI. And there is reason to think that this number understates the increase in market rents and will go up rather than down over the coming year. This is one factor in the acceleration of inflation compared with 2020, when rents in most of the country were flat or falling. (Rents fell almost 10 percent in NYC during 2020, per Zillow.) The shift from falling to rising rents is an important fact about the current situation. But rents were also rising well above 2 percent annually prior to the pandemic. The reason that rents (and housing prices generally) rise faster than most other prices generally, is that we don’t build enough housing. We don’t build enough housing for poor people because it’s not profitable to do so; we don’t build enough housing for anyone in major cities because land-use rules prevent it. 

Rising rents are not an inflation problem, they are a housing problem. The only way to deal with them is some mix of public money for lower-income housing, land-use reform, and rent regulations to protect tenants in the meantime. Higher interest rates will not help at all — except insofar as, eventually, they make people too poor to afford homes.

Or energy costs. Energy today still mostly means fossil fuels, especially at the margin. Both supply and demand are inelastic, so prices are subject to large swings. It’s a global market, so there’s not much chance of insulating the US even if it is “energy independent” in net terms. The geopolitics of fossil fuels means that production is both vulnerable to interruption from unpredictable political developments, and subject to control by cartels. 

The long run solution is, of course, to transition as quickly as possible away from fossil fuels. In the short run, we can’t do much to reduce the cost of gasoline (or home heating oil and so on), but we can shelter people from the impact, by reducing the costs of alternatives, like transit, or simply by sending them checks. (The California state legislature’s plan seems like a good model.) Free bus service will help both with the short-term effect on household budgets and to reduce energy demand in the long run. Raising interest rates won’t help at all — except insofar as, eventually, they make people too poor to buy gas.

These are hard problems. Land use decisions are made across tens of thousands of local governments, and changes are ferociously opposed by politically potent local homeowners (and some progressives). Dependence on oil is deeply baked into our economy. And of course any substantial increase in federal spending must overcome both entrenched opposition and the convoluted, anti-democratic structures of our government, as we have all been learning (again) this past year. 

These daunting problems disappear when we fold everything into a price index and hand it over to the Fed to manage. Reducing everything to the core CPI and a policy rule are a way of evading all sorts of difficult political and intellectual challenges. We can also then ignore the question how, exactly, inflation will be brought down without costs to the real economy,  and how to decide if these costs are worth it. Over here is inflation; over there are the maestros with their magic anti-inflation device. All they have to do is put the right number into the machine.

It’s an appealing fantasy – it’s easy to see why people are drawn to it. But it is a fantasy.

A modern central bank, sitting at the apex of the financial system, has a great deal of influence over markets for financial assets and credit. This in turn allows it to exert some influence — powerful if often slow and indirect — on production and consumption decisions of businesses and households. Changes in the level and direction of spending will in turn affect the pricing decisions of business. These effects are real. But they are no different than the effects of anything else — public policy or economic developments — that influence spending decisions. And the level of spending is in turn only one factor in the evolution of prices. There is no special link from monetary policy to aggregate demand or inflation. It’s just one factor among others — sometimes important, often not.

Yes, a higher interest rate will, eventually reduce spending, wages and prices. But many other forces are pushing in other directions, and dampening or amplifying the effect of interest rate changes. The idea that there is out there some “r*”, some “neutral rate” that somehow corresponds to the true inter temporal interest rate — that is a fairy tale. 

Nor does the Fed have any special responsibility for inflation. Once we recognize monetary policy for what it is — one among many regulatory and tax actions that influence economic rewards and incomes, perhaps influencing behavior — arguments for central bank independence evaporate. (Then again, they did not make much sense to begin with.) And contrary to widely held belief, the Fed’s governing statutes do not give it legal responsibility for inflation or unemployment. 

That last statement might sound strange, given that we are used to talking about the Fed’s dual mandate. But as Lev Menand points out in an important recent intervention, the legal mandate of the Fed has been widely misunderstood. What the Federal Reserve Act charges the Fed with is

maintain[ing the] long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long-run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

There are two things to notice here. First, the bolded phrase: The Fed’s mandate is not to maintain price stability or full employment as such. It is to prevent developments in the financial system that interfere with them. This is not the same thing. And as Menand argues (in the blog post and at more length elsewhere), limiting the Fed’s macroeconomic role to this narrower mission was the explicit intent of the lawmakers who wrote the Fed’s governing statutes from the 1930s onward. 

Second, price stability, maximum employment and moderate interest rates (an often forgotten part of the Fed’s mandate) are not presented as independent objectives, but as the expected consequences of keeping credit growth on a steady path. As Menand writes:

The Fed’s job, as policymakers then recognized, was not to combat inflation—it was to ensure that banks create enough money and credit to keep the nation’s productive resources fully utilized…

This distinction is important because there are many reasons that, in the short-to-medium term, the economy might not achieve full potential—as manifested by maximum employment, price stability, and moderate long-term interest rates. And often these reasons have nothing to do with monetary expansion, the only variable Congress expected the Fed to control. For example, supply shortages of key goods and services can cause prices to rise for months or even years while producers adapt to satisfy changing market demand. The Fed’s job is not to stop these price rises—even if policymakers might think stopping them is desirable—just as the Fed’s job is not to … lend lots of money to companies so that they can hire more workers. The Fed’s job is to ensure that a lack of money and credit created by the banking system—an inelastic money supply—does not prevent the economy from achieving these goals. That is its sole mandate.

As Menand notes, the idea that the Fed was directly responsible for macroeconomic outcomes was a new development in the 1980s, an aspect of the broader neoliberal turn that had no basis in law. Nor does it have any good basis in economics. If a financial crisis leads to a credit crunch, or credit-fueled speculation develops into an asset bubble, the central bank can and should take steps to stabilize credit growth and asset prices. In doing so, it will contribute to the stability of the real economy. But when inflation or unemployment come from other sources, conventional monetary policy is a clumsy, ineffectual and often destructive way of responding to them. 

There’s a reason that the rightward turn in the 1980s saw the elevation of central banks as the sole custodians of macroeconomic stability. The economies we live in are not in fact self-regulating; they are subject to catastrophic breakdowns of various forms, and even when they function well, are in constant friction with their social surroundings. They require active management. But routine management of the economy — even if limited to the adjustment of the demand “thermostat,” in Samuelson’s old metaphor — both undermine the claim that markets are natural, spontaneous and decentralized, and opens the door to a broader politicization of the economy. The independent central bank in effect quarantines the necessary economic management from the infection of democratic politics. 

The period between the 1980s and the global financial crisis saw both a dramatic elevation of the central bank’s role in macroeconomic policy, and a systematic forgetting of the wide range of tools central banks used historically. There is a basic conflict between the expansive conception of the central bank’s responsibilities and the narrow definition of what it actually does. The textbooks tell us that monetary policy is the sole, or at least primary, tool for managing output, employment and inflation (and in much of the world, the exchange rate); and that it is limited to setting a single overnight interest rate according to a predetermined rule. These two ideas can coexist comfortably only in periods of tranquility when the central bank doesn’t actually have to do anything. 

What has the Fed Delivered in the Past?

Coming back to the present: The reason I think it is wrong to endorse the Fed’s move toward tightening is not that there’s any great social benefit to having an overnight rate on interbank loans of near 0. I don’t especially care whether the federal funds rate is at 0.38 percent or 1.17 percent next September. I don’t think it makes much difference either way. What I care about is endorsing a framework that commits us to managing inflation by forcing down wages, one that closes off discussion of more progressive and humane — and effective! — ways of controlling inflation. Once the discussion of macroeconomic policy is reduced to what path the federal funds rate should follow, our side has already lost, whatever the answer turns out to be.

It is true that there are important differences between the current situation the end of 2015, the last time the Fed started hiking, that make today’s tightening more defensible. Headline unemployment is now at 3.8 percent, compared with 5 percent when the Fed began hiking in 2015. The prime-age employment rate was also about a point lower then than now. But note also that in 2015 the Fed thought the long-run unemployment rate was 4.9 percent. So from their point of view, we were at full employment. (The CBO, which had the long-run rate at 5.3 percent, thought we’d already passed it.) It may be obvious in retrospect (and to some of us in the moment) that in late 2015 there was still plenty of space for continued employment growth. But policymakers did not think so at the time.

More to the point, inflation then was much lower. If inflation control is the Fed’s job, then the case for raising rates is indeed much stronger now than it was in December 2015. And while I am challenging the idea that this should be the Fed’s job, most people believe that it is. I’m not upset or disappointed that Powell is moving to hike rates now, or is justifying it in the way that he is. Anyone who could plausibly be in that position would be doing the same. 

So let’s say a turn toward higher rates was less justified in 2015 than it is today. Did it matter? If you look at employment growth over the 2010s, it’s a perfectly straight line — an annual rate of 1.2 percent, month after month after month. If you just looked at the employment numbers, you’d have no idea that the the Fed was tightening over 2016-2018, and then loosening in the second half of 2019. This doesn’t, strictly speaking, prove that the tightening had no effect. But that’s certainly the view favored by Occam’s razor. The Fed, fortunately, did not tighten enough to tip the economy into recession. So it might as well not have tightened at all. 

The problem in 2015, or 2013, or 2011, the reason we had such a long and costly jobless recovery, was not that someone at the Fed put the wrong parameter into their model. It was not that the Fed made the wrong choices. It was that the Fed did not have the tools for the job.

Honestly, it’s hard for me to see how anyone who’s been in these debates over the past decade could believe that the Fed has the ability to steer demand in any reliable way. The policy rate was at zero for six full years. The Fed was trying their best! Certainly the Fed’s response to the 2008 crisis was much better than the fiscal authorities’. So for that matter was the ECB’s, once Draghi took over from Trichet. 4 The problem was not that the central bankers weren’t trying. The problem was that having the foot all the way down on the monetary gas pedal turned out not to do much.

As far as I can tell, modern US history offers exactly one unambiguous case of successful inflation control via monetary policy: the Volcker shock. And there, it was part of a comprehensive attack on labor. 

It is true that recessions since then have consistently seen a fall in inflation, and have consistently been preceded by monetary tightenings. So you could argue that the Fed has had some inflation-control successes since the 1980s, albeit at the cost of recessions. Let’s be clear about what this entails. To say that the Fed was responsible for the fall in inflation over 2000-2002, is to say that the dot-com boom could have continued indefinitely if the Fed had not raised rates. 

Maybe it could have, maybe not. But whether or not you want to credit (or blame) the Fed for some or all of the three pre-pandemic recessions, what is clear is that there are few if any cases of the Fed delivering slower growth and lower inflation without a recession. 

According to Alan Blinder, since World War II the Fed has achieved a soft landing in exactly two out of 11 tightening cycles, most recently in 1994. In that case, it’s true, higher rates were not followed by a recession. But nor were they followed by any discernible slowdown in growth. Output and employment grew even faster after the Fed started tightening than before. As for inflation, it did come down about two years later, at the end of 1996 – at exactly the same moment as oil prices peaked. And came back up in 1999, at exactly the moment when oil prices started rising again. Did the Fed do that? It looks to me more like 2015 – a tightening that stopped in time to avoid triggering a recession, and instead had no effect. But even if we accept the 1994 case, that’s one success story in the past 50 years. (Blinder’s other soft landing is 1966.)

I think the heart of my disagreement with progressives who are support tightening is whether it’s reasonable to think the Fed can adjust the “angle of approach” to a higher level of employment. I don’t think history gives us much reason to believe that they can. There are people who think that a recession, or at least a much weaker labor market, is the necessary cost of restoring price stability. That’s not a view I share, obviously, but it is intellectually coherent. The view that the Fed can engineer a gentle cooling that will bring down inflation while employment keeps rising, on the other hand, seems like wishful thinking.

That said, of the two realistic outcomes of tightening – no effect, or else a crisis – I think the first is more likely, unless they move quite a bit faster than they are right now. 

So what’s at stake then? If the Fed is doing what anyone in their position would do, and if it’s not likely to have much impact one way or another, why not make some approving noises, bank the respectability points, and move on? 

Four Good Reasons to Be Against Rate Hikes (and One that Isn’t)

I think that it’s a mistake to endorse or support monetary tightening. I’ll end this long post by summarizing my reasons. But first, let me stress that a commitment to keeping the federal funds rate at 0 is not one of those reasons. If the Fed were to set the overnight rate at some moderate positive level and then leave it there, I’d have no objection. In the mid-19th century, the Bank of France kept its discount rate at exactly 4 percent for something like 25 years. Admittedly 4 percent sounds a little high for the US today. But a fixed 2 percent for the next 25 years would probably be fine.

There are four reasons I think endorsing the Fed’s decision to hike is a mistake.

  1. First, most obviously, there is the risk of recession. If rates were at 2 percent today, I would not be calling for them to be cut. But raising them is a different story. Last week’s hike is no big deal in itself, but there will be another, and another, and another. I don’t know where the tipping point is, where hikes inflict enough financial distress to tip the economy into recession. But neither does the Fed. The faster they go, the sooner they’ll hit it. And given the long lags in monetary transmission, they probably won’t know until it’s too late. People are talking a lot lately about wage-price spirals, but that is far from the only positive feedback in a capitalist economy. Once a downturn gets started, with widespread business failures, defaults and disappointed investment plans, it’s much harder to reverse it than it would have been to maintain growth. 

I think many people see trusting the Fed to deal with inflation as the safe, cautious position. But the fact that a view is widely held doesn’t mean it is reasonable. It seems to me that counting on the Fed to pull off something that they’ve seldom if ever succeeded at before is not safe or cautious at all.5 Those of us who’ve been critical of rate hikes in the past should not be too quick to jump on the bandwagon now. There are plenty of voices calling on the Fed to move faster. It’s important that there also be some saying, slow down. 

2. Second, related to this, is a question I think anyone inclined to applaud hikes should be asking themselves: If high inflation means we need slower growth, higher unemployment and lower wages, where does that stop? Inflation may come down on its own over the next year — I still think this is more likely than not. But if it doesn’t come down on its own, the current round of rate hikes certainly isn’t going to do it. Looking again at the Fed’s FRB/US model, we see that a one point increase in the federal funds rate is  predicted to reduce inflation by about one-tenth of a point after one year, and about 0.15 points after two years. The OECD’s benchmark macro model make similar predictions: a sustained one-point increase in the interest rate in a given year leads to an 0.1 point fall in inflation the following year, an 0.3 fall in the third year and and an 0.5 point fall in the fourth year.

Depending which index you prefer, inflation is now between 3 and 6 points above target.6 If you think conventional monetary policy is what’s going to fix that, then either you must have have some reason to think its effects are much bigger than the Fed’s own models predict, or you must be imagining much bigger hikes than what we’re currently seeing. If you’re a progressive signing on to today’s hikes, you need to ask yourself if you will be on board with much bigger hikes if inflation stays high. “I hope it doesn’t come to that” is not an answer.

3. Third, embracing rate hikes validates the narrative that inflation is now a matter of generalized overheating, and that the solution has to be some form of across-the-board reduction in spending, income and wages. It reinforces the idea that pandemic-era macro policy has been a story of errors, rather than, on balance, a resounding success.

The orthodox view is that low unemployment, rising wages, and stronger bargaining power for workers are in themselves serious problems that need to be fixed. Look at how the news earlier this week of record-low unemployment claims got covered: It’s a dangerous sign of “wage inflation” that will “raise red flags at the Fed.”  Or the constant complaints by employers of “labor shortages” (echoed by Powell last week.) Saying that we want more employment and wage growth, just not right now, feels like trying to split the baby. There is not a path to a higher labor share that won’t upset business owners.

The orthodox view is that a big reason inflation was so intractable in the 1970s was that workers were also getting large raises. From this point of view, if wages are keeping pace with inflation, that makes the problem worse, and implies we need even more tightening. Conversely, if wages are falling behind, that’s good. Alternatively, you might think that the Powell was right before when he said the Phillips curve was flat, and that inflation today has little connection with unemployment and wages. In that case faster wage growth, so that living standards don’t fall, is part of the solution not the problem. Would higher wages right now be good, or bad? This is not a question on which you can be agnostic, or split the difference. I think anyone with broadly pro-worker politics needs to think very carefully before they accept the narrative of a wage-price spiral as the one thing to be avoided at all costs.

Similarly, if rate hikes are justified, then so must be other measures to reduce aggregate spending. The good folks over at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget just put out a piece arguing that student loan forbearance and expanded state Medicare and Medicaid funding ought to be ended, since they are inflationary. And you have to admit there’s some logic to that. If we agree that the economy is suffering from excessive demand, shouldn’t we support fiscal as well as monetary measures to reduce it? A big thing that rate hikes will do is raise interest payments by debtors, including student loan debtors. If that’s something we think ought to happen, we should think so when it’s brought about in other ways too. Conversely, if you don’t want to sign on to the CFRB program, you probably want to keep some distance from Powell.

4. Fourth and finally, reinforcing the idea that inflation control is the job of the Fed undermines the case for measures that actually would help with inflation. Paradoxical as it may sound, one reason it’s a mistake to endorse rate hikes is precisely because rising prices really are a problem. High costs of housing and childcare are a major burden for working families. They’re also a major obstacle to broader social goals (more people living in dense cities; a more equal division of labor within the family). Rate hikes move us away from the solution to these problems, not towards it. Most urgently and obviously, they are entirely unhelpful in the energy transition. Tell me if you think this is sensible: “Oil prices are rising, so we should discourage people from developing alternative energy sources”. But that is how conventional monetary policy works. 

The Biden administration has been strikingly consistent in articulating an alternative vision of inflation control – what some people call a progressive supply-side vision. In the State of the Union, for example, we heard:

We have a choice. One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer. I think I have a better idea … Make more cars and semiconductors in America. More infrastructure and innovation in America. …

First, cut the cost of prescription drugs. We pay more for the same drug produced by the same company in America than any other country in the world. Just look at insulin. … Insulin costs about $10 a vial to make. … But drug companies charge … up to 30 times that amount. …. Let’s cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month so everyone can afford it.7

Second, cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combating climate change. Let’s provide investment tax credits to weatherize your home and your business to be energy efficient …; double America’s clean energy production in solar, wind and so much more; lower the price of electric vehicles,…

Of course weatherizing homes is not, by itself, going to have a big effect on inflation. But that’s the direction we should be looking in. If we’re serious about managing destructive price increases, we can’t leave the job to the Fed. We need to be looking for a mix of policies that directly limit price increases using  administrative tools, that cushion the impact of high prices on family budgets in the short run, and that deal with the supply constraints driving price increases in the long run. 

The interest rate hike approach is an obstacle to all this, both practically and ideologically. A big reason I’m disappointed to see progressives accepting  the idea that inflation equals rate hikes, is that there has been so much creative thinking about macroeconomic policy in recent years. What’s made this possible is increasing recognition that the neoliberal, central bank-centered model has failed. We have to decide now if we really believed that. Forward or backward? You can’t have it both ways.

Today’s Inflation Won’t be Solved by the Fed

(This post originally ran as an opinion piece in Barron’s.)

The U.S. today is experiencing inflation. This is not controversial. But what exactly does it mean?

In the textbook, inflation is a rise in all prices together, caused by an excessive increase in the money supply. But when we measure it, inflation is just a rise in the average price of goods and services. That average might reflect a uniform rise in prices due to excessive money creation. Or, as today, it might instead be the result of big rises in the prices of a few items, for their own reasons.

Over the past year, prices have risen by 7.5%, far above the usual 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. But 70% of that 5.5 points of excess inflation has come from two categories that make up just 15% of the consumption basket: energy (2 points) and new and used cars (1.9 points). Used cars alone make up barely 4% of the consumption basket, but accounted for a third of the excess inflation.

Some commentators have argued that inflation is just a matter of too much money. If that were true, it’s hard to see why so much of it would be flowing to cars. (And before you say cheap financing: Rates on auto loans were lower through most of the 2010s.)

In recent months, vehicle and energy prices have begun to stabilize, while food and housing prices have picked up. These price increases hit family budgets harder. A car purchase can usually be put off, but not rent or groceries. But this is still a story about specific sectors following their own dynamics.

Energy prices are global, and their periodic rise and fall depends mostly on the politics of oil-producing regions (as we are being reminded today). As recently as the summer of 2014, gas prices were higher than they are now, before falling precipitously. No doubt they will fall again, but in the short run there is not much to do about them—though it may be possible to shield people from their impact. In the longer run, decarbonization will leave us less vulnerable to the gyrations of the oil market.

As for vehicles, it’s no mystery why prices soared. Early in the pandemic, automakers expected a long period of depressed demand, and cut back production plans. When the economy bounced back rapidly, automakers found themselves short of key inputs, especially semiconductors. Combine this with a pandemic-induced shift in demand from services to goods, and you have a formula for rapid price increases. The effect was strongest for used cars, whose supply is essentially fixed in the short run.

Housing has made a smaller contribution so far—0.6 of the 5.5 points of excess inflation—but given the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures them, housing prices are likely to rise sharply over the coming year. This is a problem. But, it was also a big problem before the pandemic, when rents were rising by nearly 4% annually. Housing affordability is a serious issue in the U.S. But if the question is why inflation is higher today than in 2018 or 2019, housing is not the answer.

Finally, there are food prices, which have contributed about 0.7 points to excess inflation over the past year, and more in recent months. Food prices, like energy prices, are famously volatile; there’s a reason they are both excluded from the Fed’s measure of “core” inflation. They’re also an area where market power may be playing a major role, given the high concentration in food processing. Monopolies may be reluctant to fully exploit their power in normal times; price increases elsewhere in the economy give them a chance to widen their margins.

The great majority of the excess inflation over the past year has come from these four areas. Other sectors—including labor-intensive services where prices have historically risen more quickly—have contributed little or nothing.

The point is not that these price increases don’t matter. Food, housing and energy are necessities of life. People are naturally unhappy when they have to pay more for them. The point is that current price rises are not symptoms of economy-wide overheating.

Some of these prices, like autos, will come back down on their own as supply-chain kinks work themselves out. Others, like housing, will not, and call for a policy response. But that response is not raising interest rates, which would only make the problem worse. The main reason why housing costs are rising is that the U.S. does not build enough of it, especially in the expensive metro areas where employment opportunities are concentrated. Construction is one of the most interest-sensitive sectors of the economy. Rate hikes will cause supply to fall further short of demand.

Some might say that the Fed still controls the overall level of spending in the economy. If people spent less on used cars, wouldn’t they spend more on something else? This ignores the existence of balance sheets. Households hold cash, and finance many purchases—including cars—with debt. Lower used-car prices wouldn’t mean higher prices elsewhere, but higher household savings and less debt.

An inability to build housing where people want to live, dependence on fossil fuels, fragile supply chains and the monopolization of key industries: These are all serious economic problems. But they are not monetary-policy problems. Looking at them through the lens of a textbook story of inflation will not get us any closer to solving them.

 

No Maestros: Further Thoughts

One of the things we see in the questions of monetary policy transmission discussed in my Barron’s piece is the real cost of an orthodox economics education. If your vision of the economy is shaped by mainstream theory, it is impossible to think about what central banks actually do.

The models taught in graduate economics classes feature an “interest rate” that is the price of goods today in terms of identical goods in the future. Agents in these models are assumed to be able to freely trade off consumption today against consumption at any point in the future, and to distribute income from any time in the future over their lifetime as they see fit, subject only to the “no Ponzi” condition that over infinite time their spending must equal their income. This is a world, in other words, of infinite liquidity. There are no credit markets as such, only real goods at different dates.8

Monetary policy in this framework is then thought of in terms of changing the terms at which goods today trade for goods tomorrow, with the goal of keeping it at some “natural” level. It’s not at all clear how the central bank is supposed to set the terms of all these different transactions, or what frictions cause the time premium to deviate from the natural level, or whether the existence of those frictions might have broader consequences. 9 But there’s no reason to get distracted by this imaginary world, because it has nothing at all to do with what real central banks do.

In the real world, there are not, in general, markets where goods today trade for identical goods at some future date. But there are credit markets, which is where the price we call “the interest rate” is found. The typical transaction in a credit market is a loan — for example, a mortgage. A mortgage does not involve any trading-off of future against present income. Rather, it is income-positive for both parties in every period.

The borrower is getting a flow of housing services and making a flow of mortgage payments, both of which are the same in every period. Presumably they are getting more/better housing services for their mortgage payment than they would for an equivalent rental payment in every period (otherwise, they wouldn’t be buying the house.) Far from getting present consumption at the expense of future consumption, the borrower probably expects to benefit more from owning the house in the future, when rents will be higher but the mortgage payment is the same.

The bank, meanwhile, is getting more income in every period from the mortgage loan than it is paying to the holder of the newly-created deposit. No one associated with the bank is giving up any present consumption — the loan just involves creating two offsetting entries on the bank’s books. Both parties to the transaction are getting higher income over the whole life of the mortgage.

So no one, in the mortgage transaction, is trading off the present against the future. The transaction will raise the income of both sides in every period. So why not make more mortgages to infinity? Because what both parties are giving up in exchange for the higher income is liquidity. For the homeowner, the mortgage payments yield more housing services than equivalent rent payments, but they are also harder to adjust if circumstances change. Renting gives you less housing for your buck, but it’s easier to move if it turns out you’d rather live somewhere else. For the bank, the mortgage loan (its asset) carries a higher interest rate than the deposit (its liability), but involves the risk that the borrower will not repay, and also the risk that, in a crisis, ownership of the mortgage cannot be turned into immediate cashflows while the deposit is payable on demand.

In short, the fundamental tradeoff in credit markets – what the interest rate is the price of – is not less now versus more later, but income versus liquidity and safety.10

Money and credit are hierarchical. Bank deposits are an asset for us – they are money – but are a liability for banks. They must settle their own transactions with a different asset, which is a liability for the higher level of the system. The Fed sits at the top of this hierarchy. That is what makes its actions effective. It’s not that it can magically change the terms of every transaction that involves things happening at different dates. It’s that, because its liabilities are what banks use to settle their obligations to each other, it can influence how easy or difficult they find it to settle those liabilities and hence, how willing they are to take on the risk of expanding their balance sheets.

So when we think about the transmission of monetary policy, we have to think about two fundamental questions. First, how much do central bank actions change liquidity conditions within the financial system? And second, how much does real activity depends on the terms on which credit is available?

We might gloss this as supply and demand for credit. The mortgage, however, is typical of credit transactions in another way: It involves a change in ownership of an existing asset rather than the current production of goods and services. This is by far the most common case. So some large part of monetary policy transmission is presumably via changes in prices of assets rather than directly via credit-financed current production. 11 There are only small parts of the economy where production is directly sensitive to credit conditions.

One area where current production does seem to be sensitive to interest rates is housing construction. This is, I suppose, because on the one hand developers are not large corporations that can finance investment spending internally, and on the other hand land and buildings are better collateral than other capital goods. My impression – tho I’m getting well outside my area of expertise here – is that some significant part of construction finance is shorter maturity loans, where rates will be more closely linked to the policy rate. And then of course the sale price of the buildings will be influenced by prevailing interest rates as well. As a first approximation you could argue that this is the channel by which Fed actions influence the real economy. Or as this older but still compelling article puts it, “Housing IS the business cycle.”

Of course there are other possible channels. For instance, it’s sometimes argued that during the middle third of the 20th century, when reserve requirements really bound, changes in the quantity of reserves had a direct quantitative effect on the overall volume of lending, without the interest rate playing a central role one way or the other. I’m not sure how true this is — it’s something I’d like to understand better — but in any case it’s not relevant to monetary policy today. Robert Triffin argued that inventories of raw materials and imported commodities were likely to be financed with short term debt, so higher interest rates would put downward pressure on their prices specifically. This also is probably only of historical interest.

The point is, deciding how much, how quickly and how reliably changes in the central bank’s policy rate will affect real activity (and then, perhaps, inflation) would seem to require a fairly fine-grained institutional knowledge about the financial system and the financing needs of real activity. The models taught in graduate macroeconomics are entirely useless for this purpose. Even for people not immersed in academic macro, the fixation on “the” interest rate as opposed to credit conditions broadly is a real problem.

These are not new debates, of course. I’ve linked before to Juan Acosta’s fascinating article about the 1950s debates between Paul Samuelson and various economists associated with the Fed.12 The lines of debate then were a bit different from now, with the academic economists more skeptical of monetary policy’s ability to influence real economic outcomes. What Fed economist Robert Roosa seems to have eventually convinced Samuelson of, is that monetary policy works not so much through the interest rate — which then as now didn’t seem to have big effect on investment decision. It works rather by changing the willingness of banks to lend — what was then known as “the availability doctrine.” This is reflected in later editions of his textbook, which added an explanation of monetary policy in terms of credit rationing.

Even if a lender should make little or no change in the rate of interest that he advertises to his customers, there may probably still be the following important effect of “easy money.” …  the lender will now be rationing out credit much more liberally than would be the case if the money market were very tight and interest rates were tending to rise. … Whenever in what follows I speak of a lowering of interest rates, I shall also have in mind the equally important relaxation of the rationing of credit and general increase in the availability of equity and loan capital to business.

The idea that “the interest rate” is a metaphor or synecdoche for a broader easing of credit conditions is important step toward realism. But as so often happens, the nuance has gotten lost and the metaphor gets taken literally.

At Barron’s: There Are No Maestros

(A week ago, I had an opinion piece in Barron’s, which I am belatedly posting here. I talk a bit more about this topic in the following post.)

In today’s often acrimonious economic debates, one of the few common grounds is reverence for the Fed. Consider Jay Powell: First nominated to the Fed’s board of governors by President Obama, he was elevated to FOMC chair by Trump and renominated by Biden His predecessors Bernanke, Greenspan and Volcker were similarly first appointed by a president from one party, then reappointed by a president from the other. Politics stops at Maiden Lane.

There are disagreements about what the Fed should be doing — tightening policy to rein in inflation, or holding back to allow for a faster recovery. But few doubt that it’s the Fed’s job to make the choice, and that once they do, they can carry it out.

Perhaps, though, we should take a step back and ask if the Fed is really all-powerful. You might like to see inflation come down; I’d like to see stronger labor markets. But can the Fed give either of us what we want?

During the so-called Great Moderation, it was easy to have faith in the Fed. In the US, as in most rich countries, governments had largely turned over the job of macroeconomic management to independent central banks, and were enjoying an era of stable growth with low inflation. Magazine covers could, without irony, feature the Fed chair as  “Pope Greenspan and His College of Cardinals,” or (when the waters got choppier) the central figure in the “committee to save the world.”

Respectable opinion of the 1990s and 2000s was captured in a speech by Christina Romer (soon to be Obama’s chief economist), declaring that “the Federal Reserve, is directly responsible for the low inflation and the virtual disappearance of the business cycle in the last 25 years. …The story of stabilization policy of the last quarter century is one of amazing success.”

Romer delivered those words in late 2007. At almost exactly that moment, the US was entering its then-deepest recession since World War II.

The housing bubble and financial crisis raised some doubts about whether that success had been so amazing after all. The subsequent decade of slow growth and high unemployment, in the face of a Fed Funds rate of zero and multiple rounds of QE, should have raised more. Evidently the old medicine was no longer working – or perhaps had never worked as well as we thought.

In truth, there were always reasons for doubt.

One is that, as Milton Friedman famously observed, monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. A common  estimate is that the peak impact of monetary policy changes comes 18 to 24 months later, which is cripplingly slow for managing business cycles. Many people – including at the Fed – believe that today’s inflation is the transitory result of the pandemic. When the main effects of today’s tightening are felt two years from now, how confident are we that inflation will still be too high?

More fundamentally, there’s the question of what links monetary policy to inflation in the first place. Prices are, after all, set by private businesses; if they think it makes sense to raise prices, the Fed has no mind-control ray to convince them otherwise.

In the textbook story, changes in the Federal funds rate are passed through to other interest rates. A higher cost of borrowing discourages investment spending, reducing demand, employment and wages, which in turn puts downward pressure on prices. This was always a bit roundabout; today, it’s not clear that critical links in the chain function at all.

Business investment is financed with long-term debt; the average maturity of a corporate bond is about 13 years. But long rates don’t seem particularly responsive to the Federal funds rate. Between Fall 2015 and Spring 2019, for example, the Fed raised its policy rate by 2.5 points. Over this same period, the 10-year Treasury rate was essentially unchanged, and corporate bond yields actually fell. Earlier episodes show a similar non-response of long rates to Fed actions.

Nor is it obvious that business investment is particularly sensitive to interest rates, even long ones. One recent survey of the literature by Fed economists finds that hurdle rates for new investment “exhibit no apparent relation to market interest rates.”

Former Fed chair Ben Bernanke puzzled over “the black box” of monetary policy transmission. If it doesn’t move interest rates on the long-term debt that businesses mostly issue, and if even longer rates have no detectable effect on investment, how exactly is monetary policy affecting demand and inflation? It was a good question, to which no one has offered a very good answer.

To be sure, no one would claim that the Fed is powerless. Raise rates enough, and borrowers unable to roll over their loans will face default; as asset values fall and balance sheets weaken, households will have no choice but to drastically curtail consumption.

But being able to sink a ship is not the same as being able to steer it. The fact that the Fed can, if it tries hard enough, trigger a recession, does not mean that it can maintain steady growth. Perhaps it’s time to admit that there are no central banking “maestros” who know the secret of maintaining full employment and price stability. Balancing these critical social objectives requires a variety of tools, not just a single interest rate. And it is, for better or worse, the responsibility of our elected governments.

Climate Policy from a Keynesian Perspective

(This is the extended abstract for a piece I am writing for “The Great Turnaround,” a collection of essays on the economics of decarbonization from ZOE-Institute for Future-fit Economies and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.) 

In the world in which we live, large-scale cooperation is largely organized through payments of money. Orthodox economics conflates these money flows, on the one hand with quantities of real social and physical things, and on the other hand with a quantity of wellbeing or happiness. One way of looking at Keynes’ work is as an attempt to escape this double conflation and see money as something distinct. Eighty years later, it can still be a challenge to imagine our collective productive activity except in terms of the quantities of money that organize it. But this effort of imagination is critical to address the challenges facing us, not least that of climate change.

The economic problems of climate change are often discussed, explicitly or implicitly, in terms of the orthodox real-exchange vision of the economy, in which problems are conceived of in terms of the allocation of scarce means among alternative ends. 

In the real-exchange framework, decarbonization is a good which must be traded off against other goods. From this point of view, the central question is what is the appropriate tradeoff between current consumption and decarbonization. The problem is that since climate is an externality, this tradeoff cannot be reached by markets alone; the public sector must set the appropriate price via a carbon tax or equivalent. In general, more rapid decarbonization will be disproportionately more costly than slower decarbonization. A further problem is that since the climate externality is global, higher costs will be borne by the countries that move more aggressively toward decarbonization while others may free-ride. 

This perspective does leave space for more direct public action to address climate change. Public investment, however, faces the same tradeoff between decarbonization and current living standards that price-mediated private action does. It is also limited by the state’s fiscal capacity. Governments have a finite capacity to generate money flows through taxation and bond-issuance (or equivalently to mobilize real resources) and use of this capacity for decarbonization will limit public spending in other areas. 

The claims in the preceding two paragraphs may sound reasonable at first glance. But from a Keynesian standpoint, none are correct; they range from misleading to flatly false. In the Keynesian vision, the economy is imagined as aa system of monetary production rather than real exchange, with the binding constraints being not scarce resources, but demand and, more broadly, coordination. From this perspective, the problem of climate change looks very different. And these differences are not just about terminology or emphasis, but a fundamentally different view of where the real tradeoffs and obstacles to decarbonization lie.

In this paper, I will sketch out the central elements that distinguish a Keynesian vision of the economics of climate change. For this purpose, the Keynesian monetary-production framework can be seen as involving three fundamental premises.

1. Economic activity is coordination- and demand-constrained, not real resource-constrained. 

2. Production is an active, transformative process, not just a combining of existing resources or factors. 

3. Money is a distinct object, not just a representative of some material quantity; the interest rate is the price of liquidity, not of saving. 

These premises have a number of implications for climate policy.

1. Decarbonization will be experienced as an economic boom. Decarbonization will require major changes in our patterns of production and consumption, which in turn will require substantial changes to our means of production and built environment. In capitalist economies, these changes  are brought about by spending money. Renovating buildings, investing in new structures and equipment, building infrastructure, etc. add to demand. The decommissioning of existing means of production does not, however subtract from demand. Similarly, high expected returns in growing sectors can call forth very high investment there; investment can’t fall below zero in declining sectors. So even if aggregate profitability is unchanged, big shift in its distribution across industries will lead to higher investment. 

2. There is no international coordination problem — the countries that move fastest on climate will reap direct benefits. While coordination problems are ubiquitous, the real-exchange paradigm creates one where none actually exists. If the benefits of climate change mitigation are global, but it requires a costly diversion of real resources away from other needs, it follows that countries that do not engage in decarbonization can free-ride on the efforts of those that do. The first premise is correct but the second is not. Countries that take an early lead in decarbonization will enjoy both stronger domestic demand and a lead in strategic industries.  This is not to suggest that international agreements on climate policy are not desirable; but it is wrong and counterproductive to suggest that the case for decarbonization efforts at a national level is in any way contingent on first reaching such agreements. 

3. There is no tradeoff between decarbonization and current living standards. Real economies always operate far from potential. Indeed, it is doubtful whether a level of potential output is even a meaningful concept. Decarbonization is not mainly a matter of diverting productive activity away from other needs, but mobilizing new production, with positive spillovers toward production for other purposes. The workers engaged in, say, expanding renewable energy capacity are not being taken away from equal-value activity in some other sector. They are, in the aggregate, un- or underemployed workers, whose capacities would otherwise be wasted; and the incomes they receive in their new activity will generate more output in demand-constrained consumption goods sectors. 

4. Price based measures cannot be the main tools for decarbonization.  There is a widely held view that the central tool for addressing climate should be an increase in the relative price of carbon-intensive commodities, through a carbon tax or equivalent. This make sense in a vision of the economy as essentially an allocation problem where existing resources need to be directed to their highest value use. But from a Keynesian perspective there are several reasons to think that prices are a weak tool for decarbonization, and the main policies need to be more direct. First, in a world of increasing returns, there will be multiple equilibria, so we can not think only in terms of adjustment at the margin. In the orthodox framework, increasing the share of, say, a renewable energy source will be associated with a higher marginal cost, requiring a higher tax or subsidy; but in an increasing-returns world, increasing share will be associated with lower marginal costs, so that while even a very large tax may not be enough to support an emerging technology once it is established no tax or subsidy may be needed at all. Second, production as a social process involves enormous coordination challenges, especially when it is a question of large, rapid changes. Third, fundamental uncertainty about the future creates risks which the private sector is often unwilling or unable to bear.

5. Central bank support for decarbonization must take the form active credit policy. As applied to central banks, carbon pricing suggests a policy to treat “green” assets more favorably and other assets less favorably. This is often framed as an extension of normal central bank policies toward financial risk, since the “dirty” asset suppose greater risks to their holders or systematically than the “green” ones. But there is no reason, in general, to think that the economic units that are at greatest risk from climate change are the same as the ones that are contributing to it. A deeper and more specifically Keynesian objection is that credit constraints do not bind uniformly across the economy. The central bank, and financial system in general, do not set a single economy wide “interest rate”, but allocate liquidity to specific borrowers on specific terms. Most investment, conversely, is not especially sensitive to interest rates; for larger firms, credit conditions are not normally a major factor in investment, while for smaller borrowers constraints on the amount borrowed are often more important.  Effective use of monetary policy to support decarbonization or other social goals requires first identifying those sites in the economy where credit constraints bind and acting to directly to loosen or tighten them. 

6. Sustained low interest rates will ease the climate transition. A central divide between Keynesian and orthodox macroeconomic theory is the view of the interest rate. Mainstream textbooks teach that the interest rate is the price of saving, balancing consumption today against consumption in the future — a tradeoff that would exist even in a nonmonetary economy. Keynes’ great insight was that the interest rate in a monetary economy has nothing to do with saving but is the price of liquidity, and is fundamentally under the control of the central bank. He looked forward to a day when this rate fall to zero, eliminating the income of the “functionless rentier”. As applied to climate policy, this view has several implications. First, market interest rates tell us nothing about any tradeoff between current living standards and action to protect the future climate. Second, there is no reason to think that interest rates must, should or will rise in the future; debt-financed climate investment need not be limited on that basis. Third, while investment in general is not very sensitive to interest rates, an environment of low rates does favor longer-term investment. Fourth, low interest rates are the most reliable way to reduce the debt burdens of the public (and private) sector, which is important to the extent that high debt ratios constrain current spending.

7. There is no link between the climate crisis and financial crisis. It is sometimes suggested that climate change and/or decarbonization could result in a financial crisis comparable to the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2009. From a Keynesian perspective, this view is mistaken; there is no particular link between the real economic changes associated with climate change and climate policy, on the one hand, and the sudden fall in asset values and cascading defaults of a financial crisis, on the other. While climate change and decarbonization will certainly devalue certain assets — coastal property in low-lying cities; coal producers — they imply large gains for other assets. The history of capitalism offers many examples of rapid shifts in activity geographically or between sectors, with corresponding private gains and losses, without generalized financial crises. The notion that financial crises are in some sense a judgement on “unsound” or “unsustainable” real economic developments is an ideological myth we must reject. This is the converse of the error discussed under point 6 above, that measures to protect against the financial risks from climate change and decarbonization will also advance substantive policy goals. 

8. There is no problem of getting private investors to finance decarbonization. Many proposals for climate investment include special measures to encourage participation by private finance; it is sometimes suggested that national governments or publicly-sponsored investment authorities should issue special green bonds or equity-like instruments to help “mobilize private capital” for decarbonization. Such proposals confuse the meaning of “capital” as concrete means of production with “capital” as a quantity of money. Mobilizing the first is a genuine challenge for which private businesses do offer critical resources and expertise not present in the public sector; but mobilizing these means paying for them, not raising money from them. On the financing side, on the other hand, the private sector offers nothing; in rich countries, at least, the public sector already borrows on more favorable terms than any private entity, and has a much greater capacity to bear risk. If public-sector borrowing costs are higher than desired, this can be directly addressed by the central bank; offering new assets for the private sector to hold does nothing to help with any public sector financing problem, especially given that such proposal invariably envision assets with higher yields than existing public debt.

These eight claims mostly argue that what are widely conceived as economic constraints or tradeoffs in climate policy are, from a Keynesian perspective, either not real or not very important. Approaches to the climate crisis that frame the problem as one of reallocating real resources from current consumption to climate needs, or of raising funds from the private sector, both suffer from the same conflation of money flows with real productive activity. 

I will conclude by suggesting two other economic challenges for climate change that are in my opinion underemphasized.

First, I suggest that we face a political conflict involving climate and growth, this will come not because decarbonization requires accepting a lower level of growth, but because it will entail faster economic growth than existing institutions can handle. Today’s neoliberal macroeconomic model depends on limiting economic growth as a way of managing distributional conflicts. Rapid growth under decarbonization will be accompanied by disproportionate rise in wages and the power of workers. There are certainly reasons to see this as a desirable outcome, but it will inevitably create sharp conflicts and resistance from wealth owners that has to be planned for and managed. Complaints about current “labor shortages” should be a warning call on this front.

Second, rapid decarbonization will require considerably more centralized coordination than is usual in today’s advanced economies. If there is a fundamental conflict between capitalism and sustainability, I suggest, it is not because the drive for endless accumulation in money terms implies or requires an endless increase in material throughputs. Rather, it is because capitalism treats the collective processes of social production as the private property of individuals. (Even the language of “externalities” implicitly assumes that the normal case is one where production process involves no one but those linked by contractual money payments.) Treatment of our collective activity to transform the world as if it belonged exclusively to whoever holds the relevant property rights, is a fundamental obstacle to redirecting that activity in a rational way. Resistance on these grounds to a coordinated response to the climate crisis will be partly political and ideologically, but also concrete and organizational. 

“Inflation is bad. But mass unemployment would have been worse.”

(Lauren Melodia and I had an op-ed in the Nov. 21 Washington Post, challenging the idea that today’s inflation means that the stimulus measures of the past year and half were too large. I’m posting it here as well.)

As we think about rising prices today, it’s important not to lose sight of where we were not so long ago. In the spring of 2020, much of the economy abruptly shut down. Schools and child-care centers closed. Air travel fell below 100,000 people a day, compared with 2.5 million daily passengers in a normal year. No one was staying in hotels or going to the gym. About 1.4 million small businesses shut their doors in the second quarter of the year.

More than 20 million Americans lost their jobs in the early days of the pandemic, and there was a very real possibility that many would face hunger, eviction and poverty. Many economists predicted a deep downturn comparable to the Great Recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007-08, if not the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Even at the start of this year, as Congress was debating the American Rescue Plan, it was far from clear that we were out of danger. In January, there were 10 million fewer jobs than a year earlier. Covid-related deaths were running at 30,000 per week — the highest rate at any point in the pandemic. No one knew how fast vaccines could be rolled out. There was still a real risk that the economy could tip into depression.

Thanks to stimulus measures, including the $2.2 trillion Cares Act, signed by President Donald Trump in March 2020, and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, signed by President Biden in March 2021, that didn’t happen. People who lost their jobs in restaurants, airports, hotels and elsewhere continued to pay their rent and put food on the table.

For much of 2020 and 2021, all the uncertainty — and the risks associated with vacationing, dining out and so on — meant households held back on spending, and savings piled up. Now, with the economy reopening and the worst of the pandemic (let’s hope) behind us, people are rushing to make use of those savings. Unfortunately, businesses can’t adjust production as fast as people can spend money, resulting in the inflation we’re seeing now: Prices rose 0.9 percent from September to October 2021 and are up 6.2 percent since October 2020.

It would be nice if there were a way to avoid economic catastrophe during the year-plus of pandemic restrictions while also avoiding rising prices today. But in the real world, there probably wasn’t. The pandemic imposed costs on the economy that had to be paid one way or another.

Think of it this way. When a restaurant shuts down for public health reasons, two things happen: Its services are not available for purchase, and the people who work there lose their incomes. If the government does nothing, aggregate demand and supply will remain in rough balance, but the displaced workers will be unable to pay their bills. Alternatively, the government can step in to maintain the incomes of the displaced workers. In this case, the spending that consumers might have done in restaurants will spill over into the rest of the economy — if not right away, then eventually. In a sense, the rising costs we’re seeing today are a result of economic production that didn’t happen last year.

In economics textbooks, the level of demand that brings the economy to full employment will also cause stable inflation — an assumption labeled “the divine coincidence.” But here on Earth, things don’t always work out so neatly. The level of spending required to replace incomes lost in the pandemic, combined with the disruptions to production and trade, meant there was no way to get an adequate recovery without some increase in inflation, especially given the bumps on the road to controlling the coronavirus. As the spread of the delta variant and some Americans’ resistance to getting a vaccine have held back spending on services, demand has spilled over into goods. And as it turns out, our global supply chains are unable to handle a rapid rise in demand for goods — especially because many manufacturers had expected a deep downturn and planned accordingly.

Today’s inflation has surprised many people, including us. We had been more worried about sustained high unemployment. One of us even gave a talk a year ago called “The Coronavirus Recession Is Just Beginning.” We were wrong about that. But then, so was almost everyone. In the summer of 2020, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting that the unemployment rate in late 2021 would be 8 percent; in fact, it has fallen to 4.6 percent. Many private forecasters were similarly gloomy. Under the circumstances, policymakers were absolutely right to prioritize payments to families.

The economist Larry Summers has been making the case since February that the government’s stimulus programs were larger than required and ran the risk of “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Fiscal conservatives are claiming that Summers has been vindicated because inflation is higher than most supporters of the most recent relief package expected. But the economic data doesn’t match the scenario he described.

Summers predicted that the cumulative stimulus impact would be larger than the country’s output gap — the difference between actual and potential gross domestic product. Today, despite the stimulus, both real and nominal GDP remain significantly below the pre-pandemic trend. So unless you think the economy was operating above potential before the pandemic, there’s no reason to think it is above potential now. To the extent that domestic conditions are contributing to inflation, it’s not because spending has surpassed the economy’s capacity but because there has been a rapid shift in demand from services to goods.

In any case, most of the inflation we’re seeing is due not to domestic conditions but to the worldwide spike in food, energy and shipping costs. Perhaps we could have had inflation of 5 percent instead of 6 percent if the stimulus had been smaller. The cost of that trade-off would have been material hardship for millions of families and the risk of tipping the economy into a downturn. And that, fundamentally, is why today’s inflation is not a sign that the stimulus was too large: It has to be weighed against the risks on the other side.

After 2007, the United States experienced many years of high unemployment and depressed growth, thanks in large part to a stimulus that most now agree was too small. Policymakers belatedly learned that lesson, and as a result, the United States is making a rapid recovery from the most severe economic disruption in modern history. Yes, inflation is a real problem that needs to be addressed. In a recent Roosevelt Institute brief, we suggested that rather than raise interest rates, the best way to control inflation is to address supply constraints in the sectors where prices are climbing. But as bad as inflation is, mass unemployment is much worse. Given the alternatives, policymakers made the right choice.

“Earnings Shocks and Stabilization During COVID-19”

The other day, I put up a post arguing, on the basis of my analysis of the income data in the Current Population Survey, that the economic disruptions from the pandemic had not led to any reduction in real income for the lowest-income families. This is the opposite of the Great Recession, and presumably earlier recessions, where the biggest income losses were at the bottom. The difference, I suggested, was the much stronger fiscal response this time compared with previous downturns. 

My numbers were rough — tho I think informative — estimates based on a data set that is mainly intended for other purposes. Today I want to call attention to an important paper that reaches similar conclusions on the basis of far better data.

The paper is “Earnings Shocks and Stabilization During COVID-19” by Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson and David Splinter.13 If you’re following these debates, it’s a must-read.

The question they ask is slightly different from the one I did. Rather than look at the average change in income at each point in the distribution, they ask what fraction of workers experienced large declines in their incomes. Specifically they ask, for each point at the distribution of earnings in a given year, what fraction of workers had earnings at least 10 percent lower a year later? They include people whose earnings were zero in the second year (which means the results are not distorted by compositional effects), and do the exercise both with and without unemployment insurance and — for the most recent period — stimulus payments. They use individual tax records from the IRS, which means their sample is much larger and their data much more accurate than the usual survey-based sources.

What they find, first of all, is that earnings are quite volatile — more than 25 percent of workers experience a fall in earnings of 10 percent or more in a typical year, with a similar share experiencing a 10 percent or more increase. Looking at earnings alone, the fraction of workers experiencing large falls in income rose to about 30 percent in both 2009 and 2020; the fraction experiencing large increases fell somewhat in 2009, but not in 2019. See their Figure 1 below.

Turning to distribution, if we look at earnings alone, large falls were more concentrated at the bottom in 2020 than in 2009. This is shown in their Figure 2.  (Note that while the percentiles are based on earnings plus UI benefits, the  vertical axis shows the share with large falls in earnings alone.)  This pattern is consistent with the concentration of pandemic-related job losses in low-wage sectors. 

But when you add unemployment insurance in, the picture reverses. Now, across almost the whole lower half of the distribution, large falls in earnings were actually less common in 2020 than in 2019. And when you add in stimulus payments, it’s even more dramatic. Households in the bottom 20 percent of the distribution were barely half as likely to experience a larger fall in income in the crisis year of 2020 as in they were in the normal year of 2019.

The key results are summarized in their Table 1, below. It’s true that the proportion of low-wage households that experienced large falls in earnings during 2020 was greater than the proportion of high-wage households. But that’s true in every year — low incomes are just much more volatile than high ones. What’s different is how much the gap closed. Even counting the stimulus payments, households in the top fifth of earnings were somewhat more likely to experience a large fall in earnings in 2020 than in 2019. But in the bottom fifth, the share experiencing large falls in income fell from 43 percent to 27 percent. Nothing like this happened in 2009 — then, the frequency of large falls in income rose by the same amount (about 6 points) across the distribution. 

One thing this exercise confirms is that the more favorable experience low-income households in the pandemic downturn was entirely due to much stronger income-support programs. Earnings themselves fell even more disproportionately at the bottom than in the last recession. In the absence of the CARES Act, income inequality would have widened sharply rather than narrowed.

The one significant limitation of this study is that tax data is only released well after the end of the year it covers. So at this point, it can only tell us what happened in 2020, not in 2021. It’s hard to guess if this pattern will continue in 2021. (It might make a difference whether the child tax credit payments are counted.) But whether or not it does, doesn’t affect the results for 2020.

While the US experienced the most rapid fall in economic activity in history, low-wage workers experienced much less instability in their incomes than in a “good” year. This seems like a very important fact to me, one that should be getting much more attention than it is.

It didn’t have to turnout that way. In most economic crises, it very much doesn’t. People who are saying that the economy is over stimulated are implicitly saying that protecting low-wage workers from the crisis was a mistake. When the restaurant workers should have been left to fend for themselves. That way, they wouldn’t have any savings now  and wouldn’t be buying so much stuff. When production is severely curtailed, it’s impossible to maintain people’s incomes without creating excess demand somewhere else. But that’s a topic for another post. 

The point I want to make — and this is me speaking here, not the authors of the paper — is that the protection that working people enjoyed from big falls in income in 2020 should be the new benchmark for social insurance. Because the other thing that comes out clearly from these numbers is the utter inadequacy of the pre-pandemic safety net.  In 2019, only 9 percent of workers with large falls in earnings received UI benefits, and among those who did, the typical benefit was less than a third of their previous earnings. You can see the result of this in the table — for 2009 and 2019, the fraction of each group experiencing large  falls in earnings hardly changes when UI is included. Before 2020, there was essentially no insurance against large falls in earnings.

To be sure, the tax data doesn’t tell us how many of those with big falls in earnings lost their jobs and how many voluntarily quit. But the fact that someone leaves their job voluntarily doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be protected from the loss of income. Social Security is,  in a sense, a form of (much more robust) unemployment insurance for a major category of voluntary quits. The paid family and medical leave that, it seems, will not be in this year’s reconciliation bill but that Democrats still hope to pass, is another.

Back in the spring, people like Jason Furman were arguing that if we had a strong recovery in the labor market then we would no longer need the $400/week pandemic unemployment assistance. But this implicitly assumes that we didn’t need something like PUA already in 2019.

I’d like to hear Jason, or anyone, make a positive argument that before the pandemic, US workers enjoyed the right level of protection against job loss. In a good year in the US economy, 40 percent of low-wage workers experience a fall in earnings of 10 percent or more. Is that the right number? Is that getting us the socially optimal number of evictions and kids going to bed hungry? Is that what policy should be trying to get us back to? I’d like to hear why. 

A C-Shaped Recovery?

The coronavirus crisis has been different from normal recessions in many ways, but one of the most important is the scale of the macroeconomic response to it. 

Thanks to the stimulus payments, the pandemic unemployment insurance, the child tax credit, and a raft of other income support measures, this is the first recession in history in which household income actually rose rather than fell, and households ended up in a stronger financial position than before — with bankruptcies, for instance, running at half their pre-pandemic rates. It’s this that’s allowed spending to come back so quickly as the pandemic recedes. It wasn’t written in stone that the economic problem at the end of 2021 would be labor “shortages” and inflation, rather than double-digit unemployment and mass immiseration. The rising wave of hunger, homelessness and bankruptcies that people feared at the start of the pandemic hasn’t shown up. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have. Without the stimulus measures of the past year and a half, it most likely would have. 

This extraordinary success story is the missing context for today’s macroeconomic debates. It’s somehow becoming conventional wisdom that the economy is “overstimulated,” as if the economic disruptions of the pandemic could have been managed some other way. As Claudia Sahm observed last week, the choice facing policymakerswas either to repeat the mistakes of the Great Recession or to go big. Fortunately, they went big.

The aggregate dimension of this story is familiar, even it’s sometimes forgotten these days. But I’ve seen much less discussion of the distributional side. Disposable income has held up overall, but what about for people at different income ranges?

For detailed statistics on this, we will have to wait for the American Community Survey produced by the Census. The ACS comes out annually; the first data from 2020 will be released in a month or so, and 2021 numbers will take another year. For real-time data we depend on the Current Population Survey, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the source for all the headline numbers on unemployment, wages and so on. 

The CPS is mainly focused on labor-market outcomes, but it does have one question about income: “What was the total combined income of all members of your family over the past 12 months?”14 The answer is given as one of 15 ranges, topping out at $150,000 or higher.

Compared with what we get from the ACS (or other more specialized surveys like the Survey of Consumer Finances or the Survey of Income and Program Participation) that’s not very much information. But it’s enough to get the big picture, and it has the major advantage of being available in close to real time. 

I have not seen anyone use the CPS to look at how real (inflation-adjusted) income changed across the distribution during the pandemic, compared with in the previous recession. So I decided to look at it myself. The results are shown in the figure nearby.

What I’ve done here is construct a household income measure by distributing households evenly within their buckets. Then I adjusted that income for inflation using the CPI. Then I compared family income at each point in the distribution in September 2021 — the most recent available — with September 2019, and then did the same thing for September 2009 and September 2007. I used the CPI for the inflation adjustment because the PCE index isn’t available yet for September.15 Using two-year periods ending in September seemed like the best way to make an apples-to-apples comparison and avoid seasonal effects.16 The idea is to see what happened to income across the distribution during the pandemic as compared to a similar time period during the Great Recession.

What you see here, for instance, is that a household at the 10th percentile — that is, whose income was higher than 10 percent of households and lower than 90 percent — had an income 4 percent higher in September 2021 than in September 2019. Over the 2007-2009 period, by contrast, real income at the 10th percentile fell by 8 percent. Real income the 80th percentile, on the other hand, fell by about 3 percent in both periods.17

As the figure makes clear, the difference between this recession and the previous one is not not just that disposable income fell last time but has been stable this time. The two crises saw very different patterns across income levels. The overall stability of personal income over the past two years is the result of substantial gains at the bottom combined with modest falls in the upper two-thirds. Whereas the fall in aggregate income during the Great Recession — as in most recessions — combines a much larger fall at the bottom with relative stability at the top. 

This seems to me like a very important and very under-appreciated fact about the past two years. This is not just the first recession in which household income didn’t fall. It’s the first recession — in modern times, if not ever — that hit higher income families harder than low-income ones. So far, it looks less like a K-shaped recovery than a C-shaped one.

Let’s look at it another way. Between December 2007 and December 2009 — the period of the Great Recession — the share of households who reported a total income under $30,000 rose from 26.3 percent to 28.6 percent. Incomes rose over the next decade, so that by December 2019, a similar roughly one-quarter share of households reported total income of under $35,000. But over the next two years, this share fell by almost two points, from 25.7 to 23.9 percent. The fraction reporting incomes under $30,000 fell from 20.5 to 18.8 percent, while the fraction reporting incomes under $20,000 fell from 16.3 percent to 14.6 percent. This suggests a substantial decline in the number of families facing serious material hardship. 

You might say: But real income did fall across most of the distribution. That is true.18 But think about it: We have just lived through a pandemic that, among other things, caused the most rapid fall in economic activity in US history. 20 million jobs disappeared overnight, and millions of them still have not come back. Of course income fell! What’s surprising is that it didn’t fall by more — that the short-term disruption was followed by a rapid bounce back rather than the long jobless recovery we’ve had after previous crises. What’s also a departure from previous downturns is whose incomes fell and whose didn’t.

Because the CPS income data is top-coded at $150,000 — about 15% of US households are above this — and the bucket below that is quite wide, the CPS isn’t informative about income at the top end. That’s why the figures cut off at the 80th percentile. I don’t see any obvious reason why high-income families should have had very different experiences in the two recessions, but we will have to wait for other data to be released to find out for sure.

There are certainly problems with measuring income with a single question. It’s not always clear what households are counting as income, especially at the low end where transfers make up a higher portion of the total. But it’s the same question in all four years. I find it hard to believe that the contrasting shifts in the numbers don’t reflect a genuine difference in the experience of low-income families over the two periods.

After all, this is consistent with what we know from other sources. Wage gains have been stronger at the bottom than at the top, by a growing margin. In the Household Pulse survey that the Census has been conducting regularly since the start of the pandemic, the dog that didn’t bark is the lack of any increase in most measures of material deprivation. In the most recent survey, for example, 9 percent of families reported that in the past week, they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat. That’s a shockingly high number — but it is a somewhat lower number than in April 2020. And of course, what’s all the talk about labor shortages but complaints — sometimes in so many words — that people no longer feel they have to accept underpaid drudge work out of sheer desperation?

Maintaining or improving access to necessities for the most vulnerable through an economic catastrophe is a major accomplishment. Yet what’s striking about the current moment is how little anyone is taking credit for it. 

Of course there are reasons why the focus is where it is. It’s easier to talk about the problems we are actually facing than the much worse crisis we didn’t have. (There ought to be a name for the fallacy where a timely response to head off some danger is retroactively treated as a sign there was no danger in the first place.) Conservatives obviously don’t want to acknowledge the success of a massive public spending program, especially when Democrats are in office (and don’t necessarily approve of making poor people less poor in the first place.) Progressives are more comfortable criticizing bailouts than celebrating economic success stories. (And of course there is plenty to criticize.) And with the Build Back Better agenda on the line, one might worry that talking about how the measures of the past year and a half have raised up the bottom will feed a dangerous complacency, a sense that we’ve done enough already.

As it happens, I’m not sure that last worry is justified. Back when I did political work, one of things that came though most clearly talking to organizers, and to people at doors myself, is that for most people the biggest obstacle to political engagement isn’t satisfaction with the way things are, but doubt that collective action can change them. Most people,I think, are quite aware that, as we used to say, “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.” What they lack is a sense of the connection of politics and policy with the concrete problems they face. Even among political professionals, I suspect, doubt that things can be very different is often a more powerful conservative force than a positive attachment to things as they are. Remembering how policymakers made the choice go big during the pandemic might, then, strengthen, rather than undermine, the case for going big today.

Be that as it may, if it is in fact the case that during a period when unemployment spiked to 15 percent, incomes at the bottom end actually rose, that seems like an important fact about the world that someone ought to be talking about.

 

UPDATE:

Some people have asked whether the apparent rise in incomes at the bottom might be due to changes in family size — maybe more people moved in together and pooled their income during the pandemic? To address that, here’s another version of the figure, this one showing the change in real income divided by household size.

As it turns out, average household size actually shrank slightly over 2019-2021. This was not the case in 2007-2009, so adjusting for household size makes the recent performance look a bit better relative to the previous one. But as you can see, the broad picture is essentially the same.

 

The Politics of Pay-Fors Revisited

A couple of weeks ago  I wrote a post on the logic of pay-fors.

The key point of that post was that you might support the principle that public spending ought to be be paid for, even if you did not believe that government faces a genuine financing constraint. Specifically, you might think that linking spending to tax increases would (1) enforce a stricter prioritization of public spending, eliminating programs of minimal or negative social value that would otherwise be adopted; and/or, (2) create pressure for desirable but politically. challenging tax increases, including higher taxes on concentrated income and wealth.

I thought it was worth spelling this out because there are a nontrivial number of people in the liberal-to-left world whose hostility to the idea that the government is financially unconstrained seems to be on these grounds — that the spending thus enabled would be positively harmful, and/or that the only way we will see higher taxes on the rich is if somebody has to pay for the stuff we want government to do. These arguments get lost when the debate is framed in terms of the economics of public debt, so I wanted to surface them explicitly.

The premise of the post was that these views were sincerely held. I think that’s generally a good premise to start with. But it’s also, more or less by definition, a superficial one. In reality views are not always sincere.

We know there are many people who express concerns about deficits in a strategic way, to disguise substantive objections to public spending as concerns over how it is financed. The real goal is to impose strict limits on the domain of the public sector, and preserve the tyranny of property owners outside of the public’s delineated sphere.

The idea that constraints on public finance are part of a broader project to insulate the economy from democratic control is a familiar one at this point. Whether we’re talking about New York in the 1970s or Greece in the 2010s, instead of saying “the government had to roll back social spending because of a fiscal crisis,” we might better say “the government had to have a fiscal crisis so it would roll back social spending.”19 In the euro area, this teleology is right out in the open. You can find the more general case for it in books like Gindin and Panitch’s Making of Global Capitalism or Slobodian’s Globalists.

A more recent version is in Grégoire Chamayou’s The Ungovernable Society: A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism, which I’ve just been reading. (And which prompted me to write this post.) The book is sort of a compendium of arguments over the past 50 years for why and how democratic politics should be excluded from economic questions. I don’t know that it adds much new to the story (especially since it is almost entirely US-focused) but it does assemble a lot of useful material in one place.

In Chamayou’s chapter on government budgets, he summarizes the authoritarian-liberal position as:  “Balance is not a value in itself. The overriding objective is the reduction of the state budget.” Or more precisely, not necessarily reduction in quantitative terms, but limitation to certain strictly delineated ends.

The first witness he calls is Hayek, who makes the case for balanced-budget requirements in explicitly political terms: “Democracy needs even more severe restraints on the discretionary powers government can exercise than other forms of government.” The reason to enshrine restrictions on debt-financed public spending is to “make all socialist measures for redistribution impossible.”

James Buchanan is then brought in to carry the argument to the next step: “What if ordinary politics cannot balance the budget?” His answer (in Chamayou’s paraphrase) is to “short-circuit the process by formulating a higher rule that will compel it to do so.” Chamayou quotes his 1977 book Democracy in Deficit to the effect that “all of our ills … stem from Keynesian destruction of balanced budgets”; public budgets  “cannot be left adrift in the sea of democratic politics.”

Milton Friedman is another central figure in the rogues gallery of neoliberalism, and naturally he also shows up in the Chamayou chapter: “‘The reason a balanced budget is important,’ Friedman continues, ‘is primarily for political, not economic reasons; to make sure that if Congress is going to vote for higher spending, it must also vote for higher taxes’ — something that a parliamentarian … will balk at doing.”

In this view, what superficially appear to be costs of government financing constraints — that activities that could in principle be better performed by the state must be left to private businesses — are in fact the reason for imposing such constraints in the first place.

This is all at a very high level of abstraction. But it’s obviously relevant for current debates.

That said, at the moment, it’s not clear how central the question of “paying for it”  is to whatever expansion of the public sector we’ll see in 2021.

At an earlier stage, it certainly mattered. The need to offset spending increases with tax increases and spending cuts elsewhere was an important consideration in the initial iteration of the Build Back Better agenda, both for procedural reasons and as a substantive commitment by at least some of the Democratic leadership. But it’s less clear that it’s a major factor in the resistance it’s currently facing. From where I’m sitting — I just read the newspapers like everyone else — it appears that the most important objections have less to do with how or whether spending is paid for, and more with the spending itself. Joe Manchin does talk about the “burden of debt” we are leaving our children, and he may well be sincere in that, groundless as those fears seem to you or me. But he talks more about the dangers of an entitlement society, and those objections are more consequential — they can’t be resolved with concessions elsewhere, since they go directly to what the Build Back Better program is trying to do.

If a smaller bill turns out to be unavoidable, I personally would rather have a narrower bill that perhaps drops some of the current goals, while the programs it does create are permanent, universal and come into effect immediately. That seems preferable, from the perspective of materially improving people’s lives, and setting the stage for further future expansions of the public sector, and improving the Dems’ prospects in the midterms next year, than a bill that notionally does everything but gives ground on phase-ins and means tests and sunset provisions. But if it’s specifically the universality that Manchin and company object to, there may be no compromise in that direction.

And that is the point. My personal preferences don’t matter. But if one is going to make arguments within a public debate, it’s important to think carefully about where the arguments one is trying to overcome are really coming from.

The Politics of Pay-Fors: A Simple Framework

One of the central economic debates among progressives is over the necessity or desirability of accompanying new public spending with similar-sized tax increases. In recent years perhaps the most visible, or at least the most heated, instances of this debate have been around Modern Mone(tar)y Theory. But the debate itself is broader and older.

These debates are in part about economic questions — both what the constraints on issuing new public-sector liabilities (“borrowing”) are in principle, and of how close we are to those constraints in practice. But a second and arguably more important dimension of the debate is political: In a public or legislative debate, what are the advantages and disadvantages of linking proposals for public spending with proposals for increased taxes?

I think it’s useful to think of this second question in terms of the grid of possibilities below. Some of this may seem obvious, but I find it’s sometimes helpful to spell out even obvious points.

On the horizontal axis we have spending relative to the baseline, from less to more. This axis also describes the political priority of the new spending — if there is to be only a small increase in spending, it will presumably go to items that are deemed highest value by the budget authorities, while greater overall spending allows for lower value items. Assuming that we think the priorities of the political process at least somewhat reflect social value, points at the far right can be thought of as socially useless or “waste”.

The vertical axis shows tax increases relative to the baseline, from less to more. Again, this also has a qualitative dimension. Modest tax increases can be targeted, for instance on higher incomes or on socially undesirable products or activities (Pigouvian taxes). But in order to raise large amounts of revenue, broad-based taxes are needed.20 The upper left corner, then, represents the status quo; the diagonal line coming down from it represents proposals that are fully paid for, that leave the expected fiscal balanced unchanged. Points below the line represent shifts toward fiscal surpluses, while points above it represent shifts toward deficit. If you think that spending to some degree pays for itself through Keynesian and/or supply side effects, you can imagine the slope of the diagonal line being flatter.

Remember: This is just a conceptual diagram, useful for organizing the debate. It doesn’t imply any substantive claims about what particular forms of spending will be prioritized by the political process, or what particular taxes should be seen as desirable for their own sake. And “status quo” here just means the null, what will happen if nothing happens, which might or might not be a continuation of current spending and tax policies.

Since I want to focus on the political question here, let’s stipulate that the budget balance itself isn’t economically important. So we can assess our preferred spending and tax proposals independently. We will want whatever progressive and Pigouvian taxes are desirable for their own sake, indicated by the blue bar on the left of the figure. And we will want whatever level of spending is required to meet urgent social needs, indicated by the blue bar at the top of the figure. Both of these will be modified based on current macroeconomic conditions — unemployment calls for more spending and/or lower taxes, while sustained inflation calls for less spending and/or higher taxes. (That’s why they are ranges rathe than points.) Thus the social optimal mix of spending and taxes will fall in the region marked with blue dotted lines.21

The question is now, what is the effect of linking spending changes with revenue changes — of requiring that new spending be “paid for”?

In general, it is to shift the policy debate away from the upper right and toward the lower left. This is shown by the various red arrows in the the figure, all of which represent trajectories from budget deficit toward surplus. The different arrows reflect the extent to which the pay-for requirement is  felt more strongly on the expenditure side (the flatter arrow) or the tax side (the steeper arrow), and what kinds of proposals you think are likely to be put forward in the absence of such a requirement.

Independently of where you think the socially optimal region is located, your judgement about the desirability of pay-for requirements will depend on what mix of spending cuts and revenue increases you think will result from it; what outcome you expect in its absence; and how you prioritize getting close to the optimum on the expenditure side versus on the revenue side. The argument of this post is that where people fall on paying for public spending depends more on these political judgments than on disagreements about economics. 

Here are some cases, corresponding to the arrows in the picture:

Arrow a reflects a view that the main effect of pay-for requirements is to impose priorities on spending. In this view, the normal outcome of the legislative process when large spending increases are proposed is to increase them even further, with items of limited or negative social value. So the main effect of fiscal constraints, in this view, is to force the budget authorities to focus on higher-priority items.22 This is reflected in an arrow that moves mainly to the left out of the “waste” region, toward the social optimum. This, I think, captures the view of the Obama team in 2009 and of prominent Obamanauts still in public life.

Arrow b is even flatter, and starts further to the left. This reflects a similar judgement that the main effect of pay-for requirements is to limit spending, but also that the bias of the political system is toward too little spending and that tax increases are politically very difficult. In this view, the main effect of a pay-for requirement is to make it likely that socially valuable spending will not take place. This is the view of most people in the progressive macro space today, as far as I can tell. Here is a version of this argument from some of my colleagues at the Roosevelt Institute.

Arrow c is steeper, moving directly toward the balanced-budget line. This reflects a judgement that a pay-for requirement will result in a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Unlike the first two lines, which clearly move toward and away from the social optimum, respectively, this one is ambiguous on that point. This arrow, I think, captures where a lot of people around the Biden administration are right now. There is a range of views about what kind of fiscal position is appropriate in current conditions, and no significant commitment to balanced budgets as such. But there is, or has been, a strong view that it’s not possible to pass further large deficit-financed spending increases through Congress, in which case it’s important to preemptively move the debate (in the terms of the diagram) towards the diagonal. There’s also a view — reflected in the position of the arrow — that even if a pay-for requirement means the loss of some useful spending, the revenue raisers it encourages may be socially desirable for their own sake.

Finally, arrow d is even steeper, and starts higher up. This reflects a judgement that the main effect of pay-for requirements is to create pressure for higher taxes, and that this is a good thing. In this view, the main effect of “Keynesian” deficit financing is to allow the rich to escape the burden of paying for public spending, spending which will take place one way or the other. This is a minority but not fringe position on the left. It’s especially pronounced among MMT critics who attribute the school’s prominence to the fact that rich people welcome an excuse not to be taxed.

Broadly then, we have views that pay-for requirements are: politically helpful, because they reduce wasteful spending; politically harmful, because they reduce valuable spending; an unfortunate necessity, because deficit increases are politically harder than raising revenue; and politically helpful, because they motivate taxes on the rich. 

Again, all of this may seem a bit obvious. But I think it’s worth spelling out, because there’s some avoidable confusion that comes from treating as economic disagreements what are actually differing judgements about the contours of political possibility.

Between the two “left” positions (b and d), for example, you could put it this way: If we’re looking at a big expansion of public spending, what’s the effect of adding a requirement that it be paid for? Relative to the case without the requirement, it is more likely that we will get both the spending and a progressive tax increase. But it is also more likely that we won’t get the spending at all, or get less of it. How you trade these off against each other depends not just on your assessment of the relative likelihood, but also the relative importance you assign to the two goals. If you think that income inequality and the political power of the rich is the existential problem of our times, and progressive taxes are the only tool to rein it in, it’s not unreasonable to, in effect, hold public spending hostage in order to win them. If you think that other problems or more important, or there are other tools, you’ll feel differently.

My purpose here is not to say that any of these views is right or wrong. I’m just trying to clarify what’s being argued about. 

That said, here is the news story that prompted me to finally sit down and write this post. It’s a Financial Times article with the eye-catching headline “‘A Humiliating Climbdown’”:

This week Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat and the leading tax writer in the House of Representatives, released his plan for $2.9tn in tax increases to fund Biden’s $3.5tn package… Neal’s proposal includes an increase in the top individual income tax rate from 37 per cent to 39.6 per cent, yet shies away from more aggressively targeting taxes on capital gains, the source of a huge share of wealth for millionaires and billionaires.

… The changes to Biden’s tax plan proposed in the House highlight the extent of the backlash among Democratic donors, lobbyists and constituents who have balked at the president’s efforts to tax wealth — especially capital gains.

\The point is, in this case at least, the link to tax increases seems to be making House Dems less likely to vote for something that includes them, not more likely. And this is especially true for the progressive income and wealth taxes that are central to the progressive case for pay-fors.

Even more than to the intra-left debate I just mentioned, the article speaks to the pragmatic mainstream case for pay-fors. One sometimes hears people say, ok, you’re right, there isn’t any real economic argument for matching spending and revenue. With interest rates on public debt still well below anything seen in US history before 2020, it’s hard to argue with a straight face that financial markets limit the US government’s ability to borrow. But, they say, there are still political constraints — at some point Congress is not going to pass more spending financed with debt.

In the view in which pay-fors are politically helpful, the space of political possibility slopes downward from upper right to lower left. The less borrowing you ask people to vote for, the easier it is. By committing to fully paying for all new spending, you are more likely to end up with a package that can make it past all the various veto points. But things like the FT article suggests that this isn’t the case — that the gradient of political feasibility instead slopes from bottom to top. The less revenue you need, the easier. 

In Arjun Jayadev’s and my piece on MMT and mainstream economics, we argued that differences between the two schools mostly “involve practical judgement about policy execution rather than any fundamental difference about how policy works in principle.” We continued:

We suspect that most in the mainstream macroeconomic policy world reject a functional finance rule not because they believe that it would not work if followed, but because they believe it would not in fact be followed. There is a widely shared though not always explicitly theorized presumption in mainstream policy discussions that macroeconomic policy in democratic polities suffers from a systematic bias toward deficits and inflation… Conversely, many MMT advocates believe that policymakers operating under a conventional assignment consistently err in the direction of accepting unemployment higher than required to maintain stable prices. … These judgements about the most likely direction of policy error are quite important for evaluating alternative policy rules, but they do not depend on any difference in strictly economic analysis.

That still seems right to me.

So which, then, seems more plausible? “Congress can’t pass something that will raise the deficit, so we need to find revenues to offset our spending,” versus “Congress hates raising taxes, so we need to be ready to accept higher deficits if we want higher spending.” 

Or again, which seems more plausible? “In the absence of some kind of financial constraint — even an artificial or imaginary one — we’ll see a wave of wasteful or even socially harmful spending,” versus, “Even in the absence of financial constraints, any expansion of the public sector has to overcome all kinds of hurdles and resistance.”  

I am arguing against my own interest as an economist here. But I suspect that clarifying what we believe — and why — on these kinds of questions would at this point advance the conversation around paying for public spending more than more narrowly economic analysis would.