Tag: posts I thought would be great when I started writing them but did not quite pan out

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.1 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.2

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.3 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.

Alternative Visions of Inflation

Like many people, I’ve been thinking a bit about inflation lately. One source of confusion, it seems to me, is that underlying concept has shifted in a rather fundamental way, but the full implications of this shift haven’t been taken on board.

I was talking with my Roosevelt colleague Lauren Melodia about inflation and alternative policies to manage it, which is a topic I hope Roosevelt will be engaging in more in the later part of this year. In the course of our conversation, it occurred to me that there’s a basic source of confusion about inflation. 

Many of our ideas about inflation originated in the context of a fixed quantity money. The original meaning of the term “inflation” was an increase in the stock of money, not a general increase in the price level. Over there you’ve got a quantity of stuff; over here you’ve got a quantity of money. When the stock of money grows rapidly and outpaces the growth of stuff, that’s inflation.

 In recent decades, even mainstream economists have largely abandoned the idea of the money stock as a meaningful economic quantity, and especially the idea that there is a straightforward relationship between money and inflation.

Here is what a typical mainstream macroeconomics textbook — Olivier Blanchard’s, in this case; but most are similar — says about inflation today. (You can just read the lines in italics.) 

There are three stories about inflation here: one based on expected inflation, one based on markup pricing, and one based on unemployment. We can think of these as corresponding to three kinds of inflation in the real world — inertial, supply-drive, and demand-driven. What there is not, is any mention of money. Money comes into the story only in the way that it did for Keynes: as an influence on the interest rate. 

To be fair, the book does eventually bring up the idea of a direct link between the money supply and inflation, but only to explain why it is obsolete and irrelevant for the modern world:

Until the 1980s, the strategy was to choose a target rate of money growth and to allow for deviations from that target rate as a function of activity. The rationale was simple. A low target rate of money growth implied a low average rate of inflation. … 

That strategy did not work well.

First, the relation between money growth and inflation turned out to be far from tight, even in the medium run. … Second, the relation between the money supply and the interest rate in the short run also turned out also to be unreliable. …

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, frequent and large shifts in money demand created serious problems for central banks. … Starting in the early 1990s, a dramatic rethinking of monetary policy took place based on targeting inflation rather than money growth, and the use of an interest rate rule.

Obviously, I don’t endorse everything in the textbook.1 (The idea of a tight link between unemployment and inflation is not looking much better than the idea of a tight link between inflation and the money supply.) I bring it up here just to establish that the absence of a link between money growth and inflation is not radical or heterodox, but literally the textbook view.

One way of thinking about the first Blanchard passage above is that the three stories about inflation correspond to three stories about price setting. Prices may be set based on expectations of where prices will be, or prices may be set based on market power (the markup), or prices may be set based on costs of production. 

This seems to me to be the beginning of wisdom with respect to inflation: Inflation is just an increase in prices, so for every theory of price setting there’s a corresponding theory of inflation. There is wide variation in how prices get set across periods, countries and markets, so there must be a corresponding variety of inflations. 

Besides the three mentioned by Blanchard, there’s one other story that inflation is perhaps even more widespread. We could call this too much spending chasing too little production. 

The too-much-spending view of inflation corresponds to a ceiling on output, rather than a floor on unemployment, as the inflationary barrier. As the NAIRU has given way to potential output as the operational form of supply constraints on macroeconomic policy, this understanding of inflation has arguably become the dominant one, even if without formalization in textbooks. It overlaps with the unemployment story in making current demand conditions a key driver of inflation, even if the transmission mechanism is different. 

Superfically “too much spending relative to production” sounds a lot like “too money relative to goods.” (As to a lesser extent does “too much wage growth relative to productivity growth.”) But while these formulations sound similar, they have quite different implications. Intuitions formed by the old quantity-of-money view don’t work for the new stories.

The older understanding of inflation, which runs more or less unchanged from David Hume through Irving Fisher to Milton Friedman and contemporary monetarists, goes like this. There’s a stock of goods, which people can exchange for their mutual benefit. For whatever reasons, goods don’t exchange directly for other goods, but only for money. Money in turn is only used for purchasing goods. When someone receives money in exchange for a good, they turn around and spend it on some good themselves — not instantly, but after some delay determined by the practical requirements of exchange. (Imagine you’ve collected your earnings from your market stall today, and can take them to spend at a different market tomorrow.) The total amount of money, meanwhile, is fixed exogenously — the quantity of gold in circulation, or equivalently the amount of fiat tokens created by the government via its central bank.

Under these assumptions, we can write the familiar equation

MV = PY

If Y, the level of output, is determined by resources, technology and other “real” factors, and V is a function of the technical process of exchange — how long must pass between the receipt of money and it spending — then we’re left with a direct relationship between the change in M and the change in P. “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”2

I think something like this underlies most folk wisdom about inflation. And as is often the case, the folk wisdom has outlived whatever basis in reality it may once have had.3

Below, I want to sketch out some ways in which the implications of the excessive-spending-relative-to-production vision of inflation are importantly different from those of the excessive-money-relative-to-goods vision. But first, a couple of caveats.

First, the idea of a given or exogenous quantity of money isn’t wrong a priori, as a matter of logic; it’s an approximation that happens not to fit the economy in which we live. Exactly what range of historical settings it does fit is a tricky question, which I would love to see someone try to answer. But I think it’s safe to say that many important historical inflations, both under metallic and fiat regimes, fit comfortably enough in a monetarist framework. 

Second, the fact that the monetarist understanding of inflation is wrong (at least for contemporary advanced economies) doesn’t mean that the modern mainstream view is right. There is no reason to think there is one general theory of inflation, any more than there is one general etiology of a fever. Lots of conditions can produce the same symptom. In general, inflation is a persistent, widespread rise in prices, so for any theory of price-setting there’s a corresponding theory of inflation. And the expectations-based propagation mechanism of inertial inflation — where prices are raised in the expectation that prices will rise — is compatible with many different initial inflationary impulses. 

That said — here are some important cleavages between the two visions.

1. Money vs spending. More money is just more money, but more spending is always more spending on something in particular. This is probably the most fundamental difference. When we think of inflation in terms of money chasing a given quantity of goods, there is no connection between a change in the quantity of money and a change in individual spending decisions. But when we think of it in terms of spending, that’s no longer true — a decision to spend more is a decision to spend more on some specific thing. People try to carry over intuitions from the former case to the latter, but it doesn’t work. In the modern version, you can’t tell a story about inflation rising that doesn’t say who is trying to buy more of what; and you can’t tell a story about controlling inflation without saying whose spending will be reduced. Spending, unlike money, is not a simple scalar.

The same goes for the wages-markup story of the textbook. In the model, there is a single wage and a single production process. But in reality, a fall in unemployment or any other process that “raises the wage” is raising the wages of somebody in particular.

2. Money vs prices. There is one stock of money, but there are many prices, and many price indices. Which means there are many ways to measure inflation. As I mentioned above, inflation was originally conceived of as definitionally an increase in the quantity of money. Closely related to this is the idea of a decrease in the purchasing power of money, a definition which is still sometimes used. But a decrease in the value of money is not the same as an increase in the prices of goods and services, since money is used for things other than purchasing goods and services.  (Merijn Knibbe is very good on this.4) Even more problematically, there are many different goods and services, whose prices don’t move in unison. 

This wasn’t such a big deal for the old concept of inflation, since one could say that all else equal, a one percent increase in the stock of money would imply an additional point of inflation, without worrying too much about which specific prices that showed up in. But in the new concept, there’s no stock of money, only the price changes themselves. So picking the right index is very important. The problem is, there are many possible price indexes, and they don’t all move in unison. It’s no secret that inflation as measured by the CPI averages about half a point higher than that measured by the PCE. But why stop there? Those are just two of the infinitely many possible baskets of goods one could construct price indexes for. Every individual household, every business, every unit of government has their own price index and corresponding inflation rate. If you’ve bought a used car recently, your personal inflation rate is substantially higher than that of people who haven’t. We can average these individual rates together in various ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is no true inflation rate out there, only the many different price changes of different commodities.

3. Inflation and relative prices. In the old conception, money is like water in a pool. Regardless of where you pour it in, you get the same rise in the overall level of the pool.

Inflation conceived of in terms of spending doesn’t have that property. First, for the reason above — more spending is always more spending on something. If, let’s say for sake of argument, over-generous stimulus payments are to blame for rising inflation, then the inflation must show up in the particular goods and services that those payments are being used to purchase — which will not be a cross-section of output in general. Second, in the new concept, we are comparing desired spending not to a fixed stock of commodities, but to the productive capacity of the economy. So it matters how elastic output is — how easily production of different goods can be increased in response to stronger demand. Prices of goods in inelastic supply — rental housing, let’s say — will rise more in response to stronger demand, while prices of goods supplied elastically — online services, say — will rise less. It follows that inflation, as a concrete phenomenon, will involve not an across-the-board increase in prices, but a characteristic shift in relative prices.

This is a different point than the familiar one that motivates the use of “core” inflation — that some prices (traditionally, food and energy) are more volatile or noisy, and thus less informative about sustained trends. It’s that  when spending increases, some goods systematically rise in price faster than others.

This recent paper by Stock and Watson, for example, suggests that housing, consumer durables and food have historically seen prices vary strongly with the degree of macroeconomic slack, while prices for gasoline, health care, financial services, clothing and motor vehicles do not, or even move the opposite way. They suggest that the lack of a cyclical component in health care and finance reflect the distinct ways that prices are set (or imputed) in those sectors, while the lack of a cyclical component in gas, clothing and autos reflects the fact that these are heavily traded goods whose prices are set internationally. This interpretation seems plausible enough, but if you believe these numbers they have a broader implication: We should not think of cyclical inflation as an across the board increase in prices, but rather as an increase in the price of a fairly small set of market-priced, inelastically supplied goods relative to others.

4. Inflation and wages. As I discussed earlier in the post, the main story about inflation in today’s textbooks is the Phillips curve relationship where low unemployment leads to accelerating inflation. Here it’s particularly clear that today’s orthodoxy has abandoned the quantity-of-money view without giving up the policy conclusions that followed from it.

In the old monetarist view, there was no particular reason that lower unemployment or faster wage growth should be associated with higher inflation. Wages were just one relative price among others. A scarcity of labor would lead to higher real wages, while an exogenous increase in wages would lead to lower employment. But absent a change in the money supply, neither should have any effect on the overall price level. 

It’s worth noting here that altho Milton Friedman’s “natural rate of unemployment” is often conflated with the modern NAIRU, the causal logic is completely different. In Friedman’s story, high inflation caused low unemployment, not the reverse. In the modern story, causality runs from lower unemployment to faster wage growth to higher inflation. In the modern story, prices are set as a markup over marginal costs. If the markup is constant, and all wages are part of marginal cost, and all marginal costs are wages, then a change in wages will just be passed through one to one to inflation.

We can ignore the stable markup assumption for now — not because it is necessarily reasonable, but because it’s not obvious in which direction it’s wrong. But if we relax the other assumptions, and allow for non-wage costs of production and fixed wage costs, that unambiguously implies that wage changes are passed through less than one for one to prices. If production inputs include anything other than current labor, then low unemployment should lead to a mix of faster inflation and faster real wage growth. And why on earth should we expect anything else? Why shouldn’t the 101 logic of “reduced supply of X leads to a higher relative price of X” be uniquely inapplicable to labor?5

There’s an obvious political-ideological reason why textbooks should teach that low unemployment can’t actually make workers better off. But I think it gets a critical boost in plausibility — a papering-over of the extreme assumptions it rests on — from intuitions held over from the old monetarist view. If inflation really was just about faster money growth, then the claim that it leaves real incomes unchanged could work as a reasonable first approximation. Whereas in the markup-pricing story it really doesn’t. 

5. Inflation and the central bank.  In the quantity-of-money vision, it’s obvious why inflation is the special responsibility of the central bank. In the textbooks, managing the supply of money is often given as the first defining feature of a central bank. Clearly, if inflation is a function of the quantity of money, then primary responsibility for controlling it needs to be in the hands of whoever is in charge of the money supply, whether directly, or indirectly via bank lending. 

But here again, it seems, to me, the policy conclusion is being asked to bear weight even after the logical scaffolding supporting it has been removed. 

Even if we concede for the sake of argument that the central bank has a special relationship with the quantity of money, it’s still just one of many influences on the level of spending. Indeed, when we think about all the spending decisions made across the economy, “at one interest rate will I borrow the funds for it” is going to be a central consideration in only a few of them. Whether our vision of inflation is too much spending relative to the productive capacity of the economy, or wages increasing faster than productivity, many factors are going to play a role beyond interest rates or central bank actions more broadly. 

One might believe that compared with other macro variables, the policy interest rate has a uniquely strong and reliable link to the level of spending and/or wage growth; but almost no one, I think, does believe this. The distinct responsibility of the central bank for inflation gets justified not on economic grounds but political-institutional ones: the central bank can act more quickly than the legislature, it is free of undue political influence, and so on. These claims may or may not be true, but they have nothing in particular to do with inflation. One could justify authority over almost any area of macroeconomic policy on similar grounds.

Conversely, once we fully take on board the idea that the central bank’s control over inflation runs through to the volume of credit creation to the level of spending (and then perhaps via unemployment to wage growth), there is no basis for the distinction between monetary policy proper and other central bank actions. All kinds of regulation and lender-of-last-resort operations equally change the volume and direction of credit creation, and so influenced aggregate spending just as monetary policy in the narrow sense does.

6. The costs of inflation. If inflation is a specifically monetary phenomenon, the costs of inflation presumably involve the use of money. The convenience of quoting relative prices in money becomes a problem when the value of money is changing.

An obvious example is the fixed denominations of currency — monetarists used to talk with about “shoe leather costs” — the costs of needing to go more frequently to the bank (as one then did) to restock on cash. A more consequential example is public incomes or payments fixed in money terms. As recently as the 1990s, one could find FOMC members talking about bracket creep and eroded Social Security payments as possible costs of higher inflation — albeit with some embarrassment, since the schedules of both were already indexed by then. More broadly, in an economy organized around money payments, changes in what a given flow of money can buy will create problems. Here’s one way to think about these problems:

Social coordination requires a mix of certainty and flexibility. It requires economic units to make all kinds of decisions in anticipation of the choices of other units — we are working together; my plans won’t work out if you can change yours too freely. But at the same time, you need to have enough space to adapt to new developments — as with train cars, there needs to be some slack in the coupling between economic unit for things to run smoothly. One dimension of this slack is the treatment of some extended period as if it were a single instant.

This is such a basic, practical requirements of contracting and management that we hardly think about it. For example, budgets — most organizations budget for periods no shorter than a quarter, which means that as far as internal controls and reporting are concerned, anything that happens within that quarter happens at the same time.6Similarly, invoices normally require payment in 30 or 60 days, thus treating shorter durations as instantaneous. Contracts of all kinds are signed for extended periods on fixed money terms. All these arrangements assume that the changes in prices over a few months or a year are small enough that they can be safely ignored.can be modified when inflation is high enough to make the fiction untenable that 30, 60 or 90 days is an instant. Social coordination strongly benefits from the convention that shorter durations can be ignored for most periods, which means people behave in practice as if they expect inflation over such shorter periods to be zero.

Axel Leijonhufvud’s mid-70s piece on inflation is one of the most compelling accounts of this kinds of cost of inflation — the breakdown of social coordination — that I have seen. For him, the stability of money prices is the sine qua non of decentralized coordination through markets. 

In largely nonmonetary economies, important economic rights and obligations will be inseparable from particularized relationships of social status and political allegiance and will be in some measure permanent, inalienable and irrevocable. … In monetary exchange systems, in contrast, the value to the owner of an asset derives from rights, privileges, powers and immunities against society generally rather than from the obligation of some particular person. …

Neoclassical theories rest on a set of abstractions that separate “economic” transactions from the totality of social and political interactions in the system. For a very large set of problems, this separation “works”… But it assumes that the events that we make the subject of … the neoclassical model of the “economic system” do not affect the “social-political system” so as … to invalidate the institutional ceteris paribus clauses of that model. …

 Double-digit inflation may label a class of events for which this assumption is a bad one. … It may be that … before the “near-neutral” adjustments can all be smoothly achieved, society unlearns to use money confidently and reacts by restrictions on “the circles people shall serve, the prices they shall charge, and the goods they can buy.”

One important point here is that inflation has a much greater impact than in conventional theory because of the price-stability assumption incorporated into any contract that is denominated in money terms and not settled instantly — which is to say, pretty much any contract. So whatever expectations of inflation people actually hold, the whole legal-economic system is constructed in a way that makes it behave as if inflation expectations were biased toward zero:

The price stability fiction — a dollar is a dollar is a dollar — is as ingrained in our laws as if it were a constitutional principle. Indeed, it may be that no real constitutional principle permeates the Law as completely as does this manifest fiction.

The market-prices-or-feudalism tone of this seems more than a little overheated from today’s perspective, and when Arjun and I asked him about this piece a few years ago, he seemed a bit embarrassed by it. But I still think there is something to it. Market coordination, market rationality, the organization of productive activity through money payments and commitments, really does require the fiction of a fixed relationship between quantities of money and real things. There is some level of inflation at which this is no longer tenable.

So I have no problem with the conventional view that really high inflations — triple digits and above — can cause far-reaching breakdowns in social coordination. But this is not relevant to the question of inflation of 1 or 2 or 5 or probably even 10 percent. 

In this sense, I think the mainstream paradoxically both understates and overstates the real costs of inflation. They exaggerate the importances of small differences in inflation. But at the same time, because they completely naturalize the organization of life through markets, they are unable to talk about the possibility that it could break down.

But again, this kind of breakdown of market coordination is not relevant for the sorts of inflation seen in the United States or other rich countries in modern times. 

It’s easier to talk about the costs (and benefits) of inflation when we see it as a change in relative prices, and redistribution of income and wealth. If inflation is typically a change in relative prices, then the costs are experienced by those whose incomes rise more slowly than their payments. Keynes emphasized this point in an early article on “Social Consequences of a Change in the Value of Money.”7

A change in the value of money, that is to say in the level of prices, is important to Society only in so far as its incidence is unequal. Such changes have produced in the past, and are producing now, the vastest social consequences, because, as we all know, when the value of money changes, it does not change equally for all persons or for all purposes. … 

Keynes sees the losers from inflation as passive wealth owners, while the winners are active businesses and farmers; workers may gain or lose depending on the degree to which they are organized. For this reason, he sees moderate inflation as being preferable to moderate deflation, though both as evils to be avoided — until well after World War II, the goal of price stability meant what it said.

Let’s return for a minute to the question of wages. As far as I can tell, the experience in modern inflations is that wage changes typically lag behind prices. If you plot nominal wage growth against inflation, you’ll see a clear positive relationship, but with a slope well below 1. This might seem to contradict what I said under point 4. But my point there was that insofar as inflation is driven by increased worker bargaining power, it should be associated with faster real wage growth. In fact, the textbook is wrong not just on logic but on facts. In principle, a wage-driven inflation would see a rise in real wage. But most real inflations are not wage-driven.

In practice, the political costs of inflation are probably mostly due to a relatively small number of highly salient prices. 

7. Inflation and production. The old monetarist view had a fixed quantity of money confronting a fixed quantity of goods, with the price level ending up at whatever equated them. As I mentioned above, the fixed-quantity-of-money part of this has been largely abandoned by modern mainstream as well as heterodox economists. But what about the other side? Why doesn’t more spending call forth more production?

The contemporary mainstream has, it seems to me, a couple ways of answering the question. One is the approach of a textbook like Blanchard’s. There, higher spending does lead to to higher employment and output and lower unemployment. But unless unemployment is at a single unique level — the NAIRU — inflation will rise or fall without limit. It’s exceedingly hard to find anything that looks like a NAIRU in the data, as critics have been pointing out for a long time. Even Blanchard himself rejects it when he’s writing for central bankers rather than undergraduates. 

There’s a deeper conceptual problem as well. In this story, there is a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. Unemployment below the NAIRU does mean higher real output and income. The cost of this higher output is an inflation rate that rises steadily from year to year. But even if we believed this, we might ask, how much inflation acceleration is too much? Can we rule out that a permanently higher level of output might be worth a slowly accelerating inflation rate?

Think about it: In the old days, the idea that the price level could increase without limit was considered crazy. After World War II, the British government imposed immense costs on the country not just to stabilize inflation, but to bring the price level back to its prewar level. In the modern view, this was crazy — the level of prices is completely irrelevant. The first derivative of prices — the inflation rate — is also inconsequential, as long as it is stable and predictable. But the second derivative — the change in the rate of inflation — is apparently so consequential that it must be kept at exactly zero at all costs. It’s hard to find a good answer, or indeed any answer, for why this should be so.

The more practical mainstream answer is to say, rather than that there is a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation with one unambiguously best choice, but that there is no tradeoff. In this story, there is a unique level of potential output (not a feature of the textbook model) at which the relationship between demand, unemployment and inflation changes. Below potential, more spending calls forth more production and employment; above potential, more spending only calls forth higher inflation. This looks better as a description of real economies, particular given that the recent experience of long periods of elevated unemployment that have not, contrary to the NAIRU prediction, resulted in ever-accelerating deflation. But it begs the question of why should be such a sharp line.

The alternative view would be that investment, technological change, and other determinants of “potential output” also respond to demand. Supply constraints, in this view, are better thought of in terms of the speed with which supply can respond to demand, rather than an absolute ceiling on output.

Well, this post has gotten too long, and has been sitting in the virtual drawer for quite a while as I keep adding to it. So I am going to break off here. But it seems to me that this is where the most interesting conversations around inflation are going right now — the idea that supply constraints are not absolute but respond to demand with varying lags — that inflation should be seen as often a temporary cost of adjustment to a new higher level of capacity. And the corollary, that anti-inflation policy should aim at identifying supply constraints as much as, or more than, restraining demand. 

Finance, Money and Cow Clicking

Finance and its derivatives like financialization, are like many political economy categories: they’re a widely used term but lack an agreed-upon definition. One often encounters formulations like “financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions.” That isn’t very helpful!

Let me offer a simple definition of finance, which I think corresponds to its sense both for Marx and in everyday business settings. Finance is the treatment of a payment itself  as a commodity, independent of the transaction or relationship that initially gave rise to it. 

The most straightforward and, I think, oldest, form of finance in this sense is the invoice. Very few commercial transactions are in cash; much more common is an invoice payable in 30 or 60 or 90 days. This is financing; the payment obligation now appears as a distinct asset, recorded on the books of the seller as accounts receivable, and on the books of the buyer as accounts payable.

The distinct accounting existence of the payment itself, apart from the sale it was one side of, is a fundamental feature, it seems to me, of both day-to-day accounting and capitalism in a larger sense. In any case, it develops naturally into a distinct existence of payments, apart from the underlying transaction, in a substantive economic sense. Accounts payable can be sold to a third party, or (perhaps more often) borrowed against, or otherwise treated just like any other asset.

So far we’re talking about dealer finance; the next step is a third party who manages payments. Rather than A receiving a commodity from C in return for a promise of payment in 30 or 60 or 90 days, A receives the commodity and makes that promise to B, who makes immediate payment to C. Until the point of settlement, A has a debt to B, which is recorded on a balance sheet and therefore is an asset (for B) and a liability (for A.) During thins time the payment has a concrete reality as an asset that not only has a notional existence on a balance sheet, but can be traded, has a market price, etc.

If the same intermediary stands between the two sides of enough transactions, another step happens. The liabilities of the third party, B, can become generally accepted as payment by others. As Minsky famously put it, the fundamental function of a bank is acceptance — accepting the promises of various payors to the various payees. Yes, the B stands for Bank.

Arriving at banks by this route has two advantages. First, it puts credit ahead of money. The initial situation is a disparate set of promises, which come to take the form of a uniform asset only insofar as some trusted counterparts comes to stand between the various parties. Second, it puts payments ahead of intermediation in thinking about banks 

But now we must pause for a moment, and signal a turn in the argument. What we’ve described so far implicitly leans on a reality outside money world. 

As money payments, A —> C and A —> B —> C are exactly equivalent. The outcomes, described in money, are the same. The only reason the second one exists, is because they are not in reality equivalent. They are not in reality only money payments. There is always the question of, why should you pay? Why do you expect a promise to be fulfilled? There are norms, there are expectations, there are authorities who stand outside of the system of money payments and therefore are capable of enforcing them. There is an organization of concrete human activity that money payments may alter or constrain or structure, but that always remain distinct from them. When I show up to clean your house, it’s on one level because you are paying me to do it; but it’s also because I as a human person have made a promise to you as another person.

This, it seems to me, is the rational core of chartalism. The world, we’re told, is not the totality of things, but of facts. The economic world similarly is not the totality of things, but of payments and balance sheets. The economic world however is not the world. Something has to exist outside of and prior to the network of money payments.

This could, ok, be the state, as we imagine it today. This is arguably the situation in a colonial setting. The problem is that chartalism thinks the state, specifically in the form of its tax authority, is uniquely able to play this role of validating money commitments. Whereas from my point of view there are many kind of social relationships that have an existence independent of the network of money payments and might potentially be able to validate them.

Within the perspective of law, everything is law; just as within the perspective of finance, everything is finance. If you start from the law, then how can money be anything but a creature of the state? But if we start instead from concrete historical reality, we find that tax authority is just one of various kinds of social relations that have underwritten the promises of finance. 

Stefano Ugolino’s Evolution of Central Banking describes a fascinating variety of routes by which generalized payments systems evolved in Western Europe. The overwhelming impression one takes away from the book is that there is no general rule for what kinds of social relationships give rise to a centralized system of payments. Any commitment that can be commuted to cash can, in principle, backstop a currency.

In the medieval Kingdom of Naples payments were ultimately based on the transfer of claims tokens at the network pawnbrokers operated by the Catholic Church. The Kingdom of Naples, writes Ugolino, “is the only country with a central bank that was founded by a saint.” 

A somewhat parallel example is found in Knibbe and Borghaerts’ “Capital market without banks.”  There they describe an early modern setting in the Low Countries where the central entity that monetizes private debt contracts is not the tax-collecting state, but the local pastor. 

The general point is made with characteristic eloquence by Perry Mehrling in “Modern Money:Credit of Fiat”:

For monetary theory, so it seems to me, the significant point about the modern state is not its coercive power but the fact that it is the one entity with which every one of us does ongoing business.We all buy from it a variety of services, and the price we pay for those services is our taxes. … It is the universality of our dealings with the government that gives government credit its currency. The point is that the public “pay community” …  is larger than most any private pay community, not that the state s more powerful than any other private entity.

There are different kinds of recipients of money payments and the social consequences they can call on if the payments aren’t made vary widely both in severity and in kind. The logic of the system in which payments are automatically made is the same in any case. But all the interesting parts of the system are the places where it doesn’t work like that. 

Let me end with a little parable that I wrote many years ago and stuck in a drawer, but which now seems somehow relevant in this new age of NFTs.

Once upon a time there was a game called cow clicker. In this game, you click on a cow. Then you can’t click it again for a certain period of time. That’s it. That is the game.

How much is a cow click? Asked in isolation, the question is meaningless. You can’t compare it to anything. It is just an action in a game that has no other significance or effect.  How much is a soccer goal, in terms of baseball runs?

On one level, you cannot answer the question. They exist in different games. You could add up the average score per game as a conversion factor … but then should you also take into account the number of games in a season… ? But you can’t even do that with cow clicker, there is no outcome in the game that corresponds to winning or losing. There is no point to it at all — the game was created as a joke, and that is the point of the joke.

Nonetheless, and to the surprise of the guy who created it, people did play cow clicker. They liked clicking cows. They wanted more cows. They wanted to know if there was any way to shorten the timeline before they could click their cow again. 

Now suppose it was possible to get extra cow clicks by getting other people to also click a cow. These people, who wanted to click their cows more, now could persuade their friends to click cows for them. Any relationship now is a potential source of cow clicks.

For example, if you exercise any kind of coercive power over someone — a subordinate, a student, a child — you might use it to compel them to click cows for you. Or if you have anything of value, you might offer it in return for clicking cows. Clicking cows is still inherently valueless. And your relationship with your friends, kids, spouse, are valuable but not quantifiable in themselves. But now they can be expressed in terms of cow clicks.

Imagine this went further. If enough cow-clicker obsessives are willing to make real-life sacrifices — or use real-life authority — to get other people to click cows, then a capacity to click cows (some token in the game) becomes worth having for its own sake. Since you can offer it to the obsessives in return for something they have that you want. Even people who think the game is pointless and stupid now have an interest in figuring out exactly how many cows they can click in a day, and if there is any way to click more.

As more and more of social life became organized around enticing or coercing people into clicking cows, more and more relationships would take on a quantitative character, and be expressible in as a certain number of cow-clicks. These quantities would be real — they would arise impersonally, unintentionally, based on the number of clicks people were making. For instance, if a husband or wife can be convinced to click 10 times a day, while a work friend can only be convinced to click once a day on average, then a spouse really is worth 10 co-workers. No one participating in the system set the value, it is an objective fact from the point of view of participants. And, in this case, it doe express a qualitative relationship that exists outside of the game — marriage involves a stronger social bond than the workplace. But the specific quantitative ratio did not exist until now, it does not point to anything outside the game.

In this world, the original  contentless motivation of the obsessives becomes less and less important. The answer to “why are you clicking cows” becomes less anything to do with the cows, and more because someone asked me to. Or someone will reward me if I do, or someone will punish me if I don’t. And — once cow-clicks are transferable — this motivation applies just as much to the askers, rewarders and publishers. The original reason for clicking was trivially feeble but now it can even disappear entirely. Once a click can reliably be traded for real social activity, that is sufficient reason for trading one’s own social existence for clicks.

EDIT: The idea of finance as intermediation as an object in itself comes, like everything interesting in economics, from Marx. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the Grundrisse:

Bourgeois wealth, is always expressed to the highest power as exchange value, where it is posited as mediator, as the mediation of the extremes of exchange value and use value themselves. This intermediary situation always appears as the economic relation in its completeness… 

Thus, in the religious sphere, Christ, the mediator between God and humanity – a mere instrument of circulation between the two – becomes their unity, God-man, and, as such, becomes more important than God; the saints more important than Christ; the popes more important than the saints.

Where it is posited as middle link, exchange value is always the total economic expression… Within capital itself, one form of it in turn takes up the position of use value against the other as exchange value. Thus e.g. does industrial capital appear as producer as against the merchant, who appears as circulation. … At the same time, mercantile capital is itself in turn the mediator between production (industrial capital) and circulation (the consuming public) or between exchange value and use value… Similarly within commerce itself: the wholesaler as mediator between manufacturer and retailer, or between manufacturer and agriculturalist…

Then the banker as against the industrialists and merchants; the joint-stock company as against simple production; the financier as mediator between the state and bourgeois society, on the highest level. Wealth as such presents itself more distinctly and broadly the further it is removed from direct production and is itself mediated between poles, each of which, considered for itself, is already posited as economic form. Money becomes an end rather than a means; and the higher form of mediation, as capital, everywhere posits the lower as itself, in turn, labour, as merely a source of surplus value. For example, the bill-broker, banker etc. as against the manufacturers and farmers, which are posited in relation to him in the role of labour (of use value); while he posits himself toward them as capital, extraction of surplus value; the wildest form of this, the financier.

You read this stuff and you think — how can you not? — that Marx was a smart guy,

Michael Woodford on the Interdependence of Monetary and Fiscal Policy

(I started writing this post a couple weeks ago and gave up after it got unreasonably long. I don’t feel like finishing it, but rather than let it go to waste I’m putting it up as is. So be warned, it goes on for a long while and then just stops.)

I sat down and read the Michael Woodford article on monetary and fiscal policy I mentioned in the earlier post. It’s very interesting, both directly for what it says substantively, and indirectly for what it says about the modern consensus in economics.

(For those who don’t know, Michael Woodford is a central figure in mainstream New Keynsian macro. His book Interest and Prices is probably the most widely used New Keynesian macro text in top graduate programs.)

The argument of this article is that the question of what monetary policy rule is the best route to price stabilization, cannot be separated from what fiscal rule is followed by the budget authorities. Similarly, any target for the public debt cannot be reduced to a budget rule, but depends on the policy followed by the monetary authorities — though Woodford is not so interested in this side of the question.

This is not a new idea for readers of this blog. But it’s interesting to hear Woodford’s description of the orthodox view.

It is now widely accepted that the choice of monetary policy to achieve a target path of inflation can …, and ought, to be separated from .. the chice of fiscal policy.

Woodford rejects this view — he insists that fiscal policy matters for price stability, and monetary policy matters for the debt-GDP ratio. Most economists think that monetary policy is irrelevant for the debt-GDP ratio, he says,

because seignorage revenues are such a small fraction of total government revenues. … [This] neglects a more important channel … the effects of monetary policy upon the real value of outstanding government debt, through its effects on the price level and upon the real debt service required, … insofar as monetary policy can affect real as well as nominal rates.

There are two deeper issues in the background here, that help explain why orthodox economics ignores the importance of monetary policy for the debt ratio and fiscal policy for price stability. First is the idea, which we can trace from Wicksell through Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to today’s New Keynesians, that the “natural” interest rate in the sense of the interest rate consistent with price stability, must be the same as the “natural” interest rate in the sense of the Walrasian intertemporal rate that would exist in a frictionless, perfect-information economy that somehow corresponded to the economy that actually exists. Few economists are bold enough or naive enough to state this assumption explicitly, but it is fundamental to the project of reconciling orthodox monetary policy with a vision in which money is neutral in the long run. If you want the same interest rate to be “natural” in both senses, it’s a problem if the price-stability natural rate depends on something like fiscal policy, which is not reducible to tastes, technologies and endowments.

Second is the notion of the “long run” itself. For economists, this refers to a situation in which the endogenous variables have fully adjusted to the exogenous variables. This requires a clean (or anyway order-of-magnitude) separation between “fast” endogenous and “slow” exogenous variables; it also requires a sufficiently long time between disturbances.

Woodford, in the passage above, refers to the effects of changes in inflation and interest rates on the burden of the outstanding government debt. This is an important departure from orthodoxy, since in a true “long run” situation, debt would have fully adjusted to the prevailing interest and inflation rates. Woodford, in tune with the practical concerns of central bankers, rejects the ubiquitous methodological condition of modern macroeconomics, that we should only consider fully adjusted long run positions. His whole discussion of public debt, in this paper and elsewhere, rejects the usual working assumption that the existing levels of inflation and interest rates have prevailed since time immemorial. He explicitly analyzes changes in interest and inflation in the context of a historically given debt stock.

Woodford’s attitude toward the “natural” rate is more complicated. He certainly doesn’t take it for granted that the price-stability and Walrasian “natural” rates are the same. But a big part of his project — in Interest and Prices in particular — is precisely to develop a model in which they do turn out to coincide.

Let’s continue with the paper. Most economists believe that:

“Fiscal policy is thought to be unimportant for inflation… [because] inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon,” or else because “insofar as consumers have rational expectations, fiscal policy should have no effect on aggregate demand.”

Woodford rejects both of these claims. Even if people are individually rational, the system as a whole can be “non-Ricardian.” By this he means that changes in government spending will not be offset one for one by changes in private spending. “This happens essentially through the effects of fiscal disturbances upon private sector budget constraints and hence on aggregate demand.” For this reason, “A central bank charged with maintaining price stability cannot be indifferent as to how fiscal policy is set.”

Traditionally, the orthodox view of inflation is that it is the result of the money supply growing at a different rate than real economic activity, the latter being independent of the money supply. This does allow for fiscal effects on the price level, but only insofar as public borrowing is monetized. In the familiar “fiscal dominance” scenario, the primary surplus or deficit is fixed by the budget authorities and if the implied issue of public debt is different from the desired holdings of the private sector, the central bank must finance the difference with seignorage. The resulting change in the money supply produces corresponding inflation.

As Woodford says, this is not a useful way of thinking about these issues in real economies, at least in developed countries like the United States. In reality, even when the central bank is subordinate to the budget authorities, as in wartime, this does not take the form of direct monetization of deficits. Rather, “fiscal dominance manifests itself through pressure on the central bank to use monetary policy to maintain the market value of government debt. A classic example is … U.S. monetary policy between 1942 and 1951. … Supporting the price of long-term [government] bonds seems to have been the central element of Fed policy through the late 1940s.” This policy did not affect the price level directly through the money supply, but rather because the target interest rate was too low during the war (although the resulting inflation did not show up until after 1945, due to price controls during the war itself), and too high during in 1948-1950, when the federal government was running large surpluses. In either case, Woodford emphasizes, the causality runs from interest rates, to the price level, to the money supply; the quantity of money plays no independent role.

The basic story Woodford wants to tell is the fiscal theory of the price level. If the stock of outstanding government bonds is greater than the public wants to hold at the prevailing interest rate, then the price of bonds should fall. Normally, this would mean an increase in rates. But if interest rates are pegged — or in other words, if the price of bonds relative to money is fixed — then the price of the whole complex of government liabilities falls. Which is another way of saying the price level rises. Another way of looking at this is that, if output is initially at potential and the volume of government debt rises  with no fall in its nominal price, this must

make households feel wealthier … and thus leads them to demand goods and services in excess of those the economy can supply. … Equilibrium is restored when prices rise to the point that the real value of nominal assets no longer exceeds the present value of expected future primary surpluses.

Of course, this begs the question of why government debt is voluntarily held at a positive price even when there is no reason to expect future primary surpluses. More broadly, it doesn’t explain why anyone wants to hold non-interest bearing government liabilities at all. Woodford could take a chartalist line, talk about tax obligations, but he doesn’t. But even then he’d haven’t of he wouldn’t have explained why people hold large stocks of government debt, which by definition is in excess of tax burden.  The natural answer is that government liabilities are a source of liquidity for the private sector. But if he says that, the rest of his argument is in trouble. First, if demand for government debt is about liquidity, then private actors should consider the terms on which other private actors will accept government liabilities. Second, if liquidity is valuable, then real outcomes will be different in a liquidity-abundant world than in a liquidity-scarce one. This is the fundamental problem with the idea that money is neutral. If money were truly neutral, in the sense that the exact same transactions happen in a world with money that would happen in a hypothetical moneyless world, then there would be no reason for money to be used at all.

Despite these serious logical problems, Woodford uses the orthodox apparatus to make some interesting points. For example, he argues that the reason the mid-century policy of fixing a nominal interest rate did not lead to price instability, was because of adjustments in the federal budget position. It is, he says, a puzzle how

a regime that … fixed nominal interest rates was consistent with relatively stable prices for so long. … According to the familiar Wicksellian view summarized by Friedman, an attempt to peg nominal interest rates should lead to either an inflationary or a deflationary spiral. … It is striking that people were willing to hold long-term Treasury securities at 2.5% during the temporary high inflation (25% annual rate) of 1946-1947; evidently there was little fear … [of] an explosive Wicksellian ‘cumulative process.’

Woodford is right that the consistency of fixed nominal interest rates with price stability even after the removal of wartime price controls is a problem for the simple Wicksell-monetarist view. Whether his preferred solution — an expectation of continued federal budget surpluses — is right, is a different question.

Turning to the other side, the dependence of the budget position on prevailing interest rates, Woodford gives an excellent critique of the prevailing notion of a government intertemporal budget constraint (ITBC), in which government spending must be adjusted so that the present value of future surpluses just equals today’s debt. It is widely believed, he says, that government must satisfy such a constraint, “just as in the case of households and firms. It would then follow that fiscal policy must necessarily be Ricardian,” that is, have no effect on the spending choices of rational, non-liquidity-constrained private actors. “It is true,” he continues, “that general equilibrium models always assume that households and firms optimize subject to a set of budget constraints that imply an intertemporal budget constraint, though they may be even more stringent (as it may not even be possible to borrow against all … future income.”

Note the careful phrasing: I’ve noticed this in Woodford’s other writing too, that he adopts rational expectations as a method without ever endorsing it as a positive claim about the world. Of course we shouldn’t talk about intertemporal budget constraints at all, it’s a meaningless concept for private as well as public borrowers, for reasons Woodford himself makes clear.

This is a nice part of the paper, Woodford’s treatment of the “transversality condition.” This, or the equivalent “no-Ponzi” condition, says that the debt of a government — or any other economic unit — must go to zero as time goes to infinity. The reason mainstream models require this condition is that they assume that in any given period, it is possible for anyone to borrow without limit at the prevailing interest rate. This invites the question: why not then consume an infinite amount forever with borrowed funds? The transversality condition says: You just can’t. It is still the case that at any moment, there is no limit on borrowing; but somehow or other, over infinite time net borrowing must come out to zero. This amounts to deal with the fact that one’s assumptions imply absurd conclusions by introducing another assumption, that absurd outcomes can’t happen. Woodford sees clearly that this does not offer a meaningful limit on fiscal policy:

What kind of constraint upon fiscal policy does this [theory] require? A mere commitment to “satisfy the transversality condition” is plainly unsuitable; this would place no constraints upon observable behavior over any finite time period, so that it is hard to see how the public should be convinced of the truth of such a commitment, in the absence of a commitment to some more specific constraint that happens to imply satisfaction of the transversality condition.

What Woodford doesn’t see, or at least doesn’t acknowledge, is that the transversality condition is equally meaningless as applied to private actors. Which means that you need some positive theory about what range of balance sheet positions are available in any given period — in other words a theory of liquidity. And, that the intertemporal budget constraint is meaningless, has no place in any positive economics.

But in any case, even if we accept the intertemporal budget constraint for private units, it is not applicable to sovereign governments since, (1) they are large relative to the economy and (2) they are not maximizing consumption. All that is needed is that someone ends up voluntarily holding the government’s debt. Even if the government is optimizing something, it is not doing so with respect to fixed prices — or fixed output, though Woodford never considers the possibility of unemployed real resources, a rather major limitation of all his work I’ve read.

Woodford notes, reasonably enough, that if the government issues more liabilities than the public wants to hold at the prevailing prices, then the price of government liabilities will fall; “but this is a condition for market equilibrium given the government’s policy, and not a precondition for the government to issue” new liabilities. In this respect, he suggests that the government is in the same position as a company that issues stock, or, more precisely, a company that repurchases shares rather than issuing dividends. (The formal argument that dividends and repurchases are interchangeable, for which Woodford cites Cochrane, is relevant for my “disgorge the cash” work.)

The advantage of this analogy [between the government a share-repurchasing corporation] is that it is clear in the stock case that the equation is an equilibrium condition that determines the share price, … and not a constraint on corporate policies. There is no requirement, enforced in financial markets, that the company generate earnings that validate whatever market valuation of its stock may happen to exist.

The government is different from the company only because prices happen to be “quoted in units of its liabilities.”

As a positive argument this is not useful, for two related reasons. First, it is still essentially a monetarist account of inflation, except with total government liabilities replacing “money.” And second, he deliberately leaves out any discussion of real effects of inflation. This means that he doesn’t give any explanation for price stability is important. More broadly, he doesn’t have any account of the inflation process that links up to real-world discussions. The article purports to be about a central bank following a Taylor rule, but the word “unemployment” does not occur in it. Nor does the word “liquidity”, inviting the question of why anyone holds money in the first place. As I mentioned earlier, this is a larger problem with the whole idea that money is neutral. In this case, Woodford suggests that one can fully explain inflation in a framework in which inflation is costless, and then introduce costs (to motivate policy) without the positive analysis being affected. Interest and Prices does not have this problem — it is carefully constructed precisely to ensure that conventional monetary policy is both welfare-optimizing, and produces an outcome identical to a Walrasian world without monetary frictions. But this isn’t general — the book’s central model is custom-designed to produce just that result.

The question raised by the article is: If both price stability and debt sustainability are functions of both the government budget and monetary policy, why do we have such a strong consensus in favor of stabilizing output solely via the interest rate, and adjusting the government budget position solely in view of the government debt? Woodford admits that in principle, price stability can be achieved in a “bond price-support regime” in which the government budget responds to shifts in private expenditure and the central bank is responsible only for interest payments on government debt. Formally, Woodford acknowledges, this type of regime should work just as well as the conventional “independent” central bank setup. The problem is that in practice

the nature of the legislative process in a democracy makes it unlikely that government budgets can subjected to the same degree of discipline as monetary policy actions. A nontrivial degree of random variation in the equilibrium price level would be inevitable under the price-support regime, both as a result of random disturbances to fiscal policy that could not be prevented, and as a result of inability to adjust fiscal policy with sufficient precision to offset the consequences of other real disturbances. 

There it is. The only argument for central bank independence is an argument against democracy. Woodford continues:

Controlling inflation through an interest-rate rule such as the Taylor rule represents a more practical alternative, both because it is more politically realistic to imagine monetary policy being subordinated wholly to this task, and because it is technically more feasible to “fine-tune” monetary policy actions as necessary to maintain consistency with stable prices.

The claim that interest rates can be adjusted more quickly than budgets is worth taking seriously. Though of course, one way of taking it seriously would be to contemplate arrangements under which taxes and spending could be adjusted more quickly. But look at the other point: The selling point of orthodoxy, says the pope of modern macroeconomics, is that policy can “subordinated wholly” to “controlling inflation.” Look at Europe today, and tell me they aren’t reaping what they sowed.

What is the Liquidity Trap?

In the common usage, popularized by Krugman, a liquidity trap is just a situation where the interest rate set by the central bank has reached zero. Since it can’t go below that (the Zero Lower Bound), if more expansionary policy is needed it will have to take the form of fiscal policy or unconventional monetary policy — quantitative easing and so on. But if there were some technical fix (a tax on excess reserves, say, or abolishing cash) that allowed central banks to make the policy rate negative, there would be no limit to the capacity of monetary policy to overcome any shortfall in demand. The idea — expressed by modern monetarists in the form of the negative natural rate — is that there are so few investment opportunities with positive expected returns that if investment rose enough to equal desired saving at full employment, the expected return on the marginal new unit of capital would be negative. So you’d need a negative cost of capital to get businesses to undertake it.

That makes sense, I guess. But it’s not what Keynes meant by liquidity trap. And Keynes’ version, I think, is more relevant to our current predicament.

Keynes himself doesn’t use the term, and his explanation of the phenomenon, in chapters 13 and 15 of the General Theory, is rather confusing. (Lance Taylor has a much clearer statement of it in Reconstructing Macroeconomics, which I may add a summary or excerpt of to this post when I get home tonight and have the book.) So rather than quote chapter and verse, I’m just going to lay out what I understand the argument to be.

Interest, says Keynes, is not, as the classical economists said, the price of consuming in the future relative to the consuming in the present. It is the price of holding an illiquid rather than a liquid asset today. (This is one of the main points of the book.) The cost of holding an illiquid asset (a bond, let’s say) is the inconvenience that it can’t be used for transaction purposes, but also the opportunity cost of not being able to buy a bond later, if interest rates rise. Another way of saying the same thing: The risk of holding a bond is not just that you won’t have access to means of payment when you need it; it is also the capital loss you will suffer if interest rates rise while you are holding the bond. (Remember, the price of an existing bond always moves inversely with the interest rate.)

This last factor isn’t so important in normal times, when opinions about the future rates of bonds vary; if the supply of liquidity rises, there will be somebody who finds themselves more liquid than they need to be and who doesn’t expect a rise in interest rates in the near future, who will purchase bonds, driving up their price and driving the interest rate down. The problem arises when there is a consensus about the future level of interest rates. At that point, anyone who holds a bond yielding below that level will be anxious to sell it, to avoid the capital loss when interest rates inevitably rise. (Or equivalently, to be able to purchase a higher yield bond when they do.) This effect is strongest at low interest rates, since bondholders not only are more likely to expect a capital loss in the future, but are getting very little interest in the present to compensate them for it. Or as Keynes says,

Nevertheless, circumstances can develop in which even a large increase in the quantity of money may exert a comparatively small influence on the rate of interest. For … opinion about the future of the rate of interest may be so unanimous that a small [decrease] in present rates may cause a mass movement into cash. It is interesting that the stability of the system and its sensitiveness to changes in the quantity of money should be so dependent on the existence of a variety of opinion about what is uncertain. Best of all that we should know the future. But if not, then, if we are to control the activity of the economic system by changing the quantity of money, it is important that opinions should differ.

In other words, the essence of the liquidity trap is a convention about the normal level of interest rates. It’s important to note that this convention is self-stabilizing — if everyone believes that interest rates on a particular class of bond cannot be below 3 percent, say, for any extended period of time, then anyone who finds themselves holding a bond yield less than 3 percent will be anxious to sell it. And their efforts to do so will push the price of the bonds down, which itself will increase their yield back to 3 percent, so that the people who did not share the convention are the ones who end up suffering the loss.

This probably seems confusing and tedious to most readers (and tediously familiar to most of the rest.) Maybe it will be clearer and more interesting with some pictures:

10-Year Treasury Rate and the Federal Funds Rate
BAA Bond Rates and the Federal Funds Rate

The horizontal axis of this scatterplot is the Federal Funds rate. The vertical axis shows a market interest rate — the 10-year Treasury bond rate in the first one, and the BAA corporate bond rate in the second. The heavy black diagonal corresponds to a market rate equal to the Fed Funds rate. In both cases, there’s a clear positive relationship over normal ranges of policy rates — 3 percent to 8 percent or so. But outside of this range, particularly at the bottom end, the relationship breaks down. The floor on Treasuries is a hard 3 percent or so, while the floor on BAA bonds varies from time to time but also doesn’t go below 3 percent. [1] This is Keynes’ liquidity trap. [2] And when you look at it, it becomes much less clear that the inability to extend the black line past the origin — Krugman’s liquidity trap — is the problem here. What good would it do, if market rates stop following the policy rate well before that?

UPDATE: A smart, skeptical comment by Bruce Wilder leads me to reformulate the argument in a hopefully clearer way.

The necessary and sufficient condition for a liquidity trap is a consensus among market participants that nominal interest rates are more likely to rise than to fall over the relevant time horizon. Obviously, one basis for such a consensus might be that it is literally impossible for short rates to fall any further. [3] In this sense the ZLB liquidity trap is a special case of the Keynesian liquidity trap. But the Keynesian concept is broader, because conventions about the floor of interest rates can be strongly self-stabilizing, especially where they are backed up by the political power of rentiers.

[1] “The most stable, and the least easily shifted, element in our contemporary economy has been hitherto, and may prove to be in future, the minimum rate of interest acceptable to the generality of wealth-owners. If a tolerable level of employment requires a rate of interest much below the average rates which ruled in the nineteenth century, it is most doubtful whether it can be achieved merely by manipulating the quantity of money. … Cf. the nineteenth-century saying, quoted by Bagehot, that ‘John Bull can stand many things, but he cannot stand 2 per cent.'”

[2] It also, not coincidentally, looks like the textbook LM curve. The replacement of LM with an central bank-determined interest rate curve in newer textbooks, is not progress.

[3] Note that it is not in fact the case that nominal interests cannot be negative, because in the real world cash has substantial carrying costs.