and my cold . . . but I just don’t get this Conor Sen Bloomberg article:

Trump Wants the Fed to Roll Back the U.S. Economy

I’m only at the subtitle, but already lost.  How do higher interest rates boost manufacturing and exports?  And if they did, why would that hurt workers?

One of the main ways the Fed has won its credibility on inflation has been setting interest rates higher, sometimes much higher, than the inflation rate. This was most extreme in 1984, when short-term interest rates spent much of the year over 10 percent while consumer price inflation (stripping out food and energy) finished the year under 5 percent.  When investors and savers can get a “free lunch” by earning a high inflation-adjusted return in Treasuries, they’re incentivized to do so rather than invest in new production or consuming goods and services, both of which would put upward pressure on inflation.

This is reasoning from a price change.  Real rates were high in the mid-1980s precisely because growth was strong.  And buying Treasuries is not an alternative to producing consumer and investment goods.  That’s mixing up financial investment with physical investment.  For instance, suppose America had a massive corporate investment boom financed by corporate bonds.  Then you’d see lots of bond buying and lots of physical investment at the same time.  They are not alternatives.  A better argument would have been that Reagan’s fiscal deficits crowded out private investment.

But this has broader distortionary effects in the economy. On a global level, if investors can earn a high real interest rate on U.S. assets, they’re going to do so, which all else equal will drive the dollar higher in foreign exchange markets than it otherwise would be. The dollar being artificially higher will make U.S. exports less competitive in global markets, leading to larger trade deficits.

Distortionary?  Artificial?  Sorry, but Volcker and Greenspan were targeting inflation at about 4% from 1982-90.  There was nothing “artificial” about the resulting interest rates, they were simply the result of market forces.  The Fed does not set the real interest rate over an extended period of time.  Again, the fiscal deficits might have played a role (although even that factor was probably less important than widely believed at the time.)

In other words, the Fed established its credibility on inflation over the past few decades by setting real interest rates at a high level, which helped to orient the economy around financial activities, consumption and imports rather than production, labor and exports.

These are not either/or scenarios.  Consumption is not an alternative to production, labor etc.  Consumption is an alternative to investment.  Indeed consumption often booms during periods of high employment, such as the late 1960s and the late 1990s.  The same is true of financial activities.  And production is an alternative to leisure, not an alternative to consumption.  And real interest rates have not in fact been high over the “past few decades”.  They were high in the 1980s and have been low since 2001.

Trump wants a different model. It’s what his tariff threats seek to accomplish: making the U.S. economy more production-oriented rather than consumption-oriented. And he wants monetary policy to help do the same thing. If the Fed stops increasing interest rates over the next few quarters, then we’ll never get those high real interest rates in this economic cycle that we’ve gotten in past cycles. This should put downward pressure on the dollar, making U.S. exports more competitive, but at the cost of cheaper imports for U.S. consumers.

Where to begin?  How does downward pressure on the dollar lead to cheaper imports for U.S. consumers?  How does Trump’s tariff model lead to a more “production-oriented” economy?  Are low tariff countries like Singapore, Switzerland and Germany not production-oriented?  And how can monetary policy make the US more production-oriented? Isn’t money neutral in the long run? Where’s the long run aggregate supply curve in this model?

Update:  Several commenters suggested I misinterpreted the phrase “at the cost of cheaper imports”.  Perhaps it was meant to imply that imports would get more expensive.  I.e., “at the cost of more expensive imports for consumers”.

In the long run, if trade and monetary policy leads the U.S. economy to be somewhat less consumption-oriented and more investment-oriented, that’s something we can handle.

How could monetary policy have any long run impact on the share of GDP going to investment?  Is Sen arguing that monetary policy has a long run impact on real interest rates?

I guess in Bloomberg world, high interest rates lead to more manufacturing and exports, which hurts workers.  Low interest rates lead to more production, which helps workers.  But consumers must pay the “cost” of cheaper imports from the weaker dollar.

Am I missing something?

HT: Ramesh Ponnuru

Paul Krugman has an excellent piece on the potential effects of an all out trade war.  Likely Krugman, I think it unlikely that we actually go that far.  My view is that before that happened, Trump would become frightened by a sharp fall in stocks and negotiate some sort of face saving deal where he could claim “victory”.  (But when thinking about the stock market as a warning device, beware of the “circularity problem”.  The stock market won’t warn Trump if it thinks he would heed their warning.)

Here I’d like to add one additional downside to a trade war, the way trade policy can (and has) interacted with monetary policy.  A trade war might be even worse than Krugman estimates, if it leads to tighter monetary policy and falling NGDP.

You might think that Krugman has already factored falling NGDP into his estimate that a trade war could reduce RGDP by 2 to 3 percent.  But unless I’m mistaken, he’s using a general equilibrium approach that abstracts from demand shocks.  In other words, Krugman is showing that even in a world where the central bank stabilizes AD, a trade war could reduce RGDP by 2 to 3 percent by making the economy less efficient.  But what if the central bank does not stabilize AD? In that case you might get an ordinary recession, piled on top of the adverse supply shock produced by a trade war.  A recession slows the process of worker re-allocation into non-tradable sectors.

I can see two possible channels by which a trade war could reduce aggregate demand:

1.  Imagine the central bank is targeting interest rates.  If a trade war occurs, it’s likely that investment demand would fall, reducing the global equilibrium (i.e. “natural”) rate of interest.  If the central bank does not reduce the policy rate as quickly as the natural rate is falling, that would lead to (effectively) tighter money and falling NGDP.  (Think of this as a channel that operates if I’m wrong about monetary offset, and the Keynesians are right.)

2.  Imagine the central bank is targeting inflation.  If inflation is kept at 2% while RGDP growth is falling, then NGDP growth will also slow.  (Here the problem can occur even if monetary offset is operative, as long as they target inflation, not NGDP.)

Keep in mind that slower NGDP growth is always a problem, even if there are other problems at the same time.  Careful readers might recall that this is exactly what went wrong in 2008.  The Fed adopted IOR to prevent its liquidity injections aimed at rescuing banking from spilling out into more aggregate demand, out of fear of inflation.  They thought the banking crisis was “the real problem” when in fact there were two real problems, banking distress and falling NGDP.  The falling NGDP led directly to higher unemployment, and also as a side effect made the other “real problem”, i.e. banking distress, even worse.

In my research on the Great Depression I found that the biggest problem caused by Smoot-Hawley was not that it reduced the efficiency of the US economy (the direct effects were modest), or even the retaliation from abroad.  Rather the biggest problem was that Smoot-Hawley led to lower aggregate demand.  This occurred either because of a fall in the Wicksellian equilibrium rate (very bad news under a gold standard), or because it reduced the likelihood of international monetary cooperation, or both.

BTW, this is no surprise:

Fears of a looming trade war between the U.S. and China are paradoxically helping to increase the value of the U.S. dollar in global currency markets, analysts say, potentially undercutting a Trump administration policy goal.

This is what happens when you have a president who hires crackpot economists who don’t even know that the current account deficit is a saving/investment issue, not an import/export issue.

HT:  Tyler Cowen

I am currently a bit over half way through an excellent book entitled “American Default“, by Sebastian Edwards. The primary focus of the book is the abrogation of the gold clause in debt contracts, which (I believe) is the only time the US federal government actually defaulted on its debt. But the book also provides a fascinating narrative of FDR’s decision to devalue the dollar in 1933-34.  I highly recommend this book, which I also discuss in a new Econlog post. Later I’ll do a post on the famous 1935 Court case on the gold clause.

Edwards has an interesting discussion of the difference between Irving Fisher and George Warren.  While both favored a monetary regime where gold prices would be adjusted to stabilize the price level, they envisioned somewhat different mechanisms.  Warren focused on the gold market, similar to my approach in my Great Depression book.  Changes in the supply and demand for gold would influence its value.  Raising the dollar price of gold was equivalent to raising the nominal value of the gold stock.  Money played little or no role in Warren’s thinking.

Fisher took a more conventional “quantity theoretic” approach, where changes in the gold price would influence the money supply, and ultimately the price level.  Edwards seems more sympathetic to Fisher’s approach, which he calls a “general equilibrium perspective”.  Fisher emphasized that devaluation would only be effective if the Federal Reserve cooperated by boosting the money supply.

I agree that Warren’s views were a bit too simplistic, and that Fisher was the far more sophisticated economist.  Nonetheless, I do think that Warren is underrated by most economists.

To some extent, the dispute reflects the differences between the closed economy perspective championed by Friedman and Schwartz (1963), and the open economy perspective advocated by people like Deirdre McCloskey and Richard Zecher in the 1980s.  Is the domestic price level determined by the domestic money supply?  Or by the way the global supply and demand for gold shape the global price level, which then influences domestic prices via PPP?  In my view, Fisher is somewhere in between these two figures, whereas Warren is close to McCloskey/Zecher.  I’m somewhere between Fisher and Warren, but a bit closer to Warren (and McCloskey/Zecher).

There’s a fundamental tension in Fisher’s monetary theory, which combines the quantity of money approach with the price of money approach.  Why does Fisher favor adjusting the price of gold to stabilize the price level (a highly controversial move), as opposed to simply adjusting the money supply (a less controversial move)?  Presumably because he understands that under a gold standard it might not be possible to stabilize the price level merely through changes in the domestic quantity of money.  If prices are determined globally (via PPP), then an expansionary monetary policy will lead to an outflow of gold, and might fail to boost the price level.  Thus Fisher’s preference for a “Compensated Dollar Plan” rather than money supply targeting is a tacit admission that Warren’s approach is in some sense more fundamental than Friedman and Schwartz’s approach.

Warren’s approach also links up with certain trends in modern monetary theory, particularly the role of expectations.  During the 1933-34 period of currency depreciation, both wholesale prices and industrial production soared much higher, despite almost no change in the monetary base.  Even the increase in M1 and M2 was quite modest; nothing that would be expected to lead to the dramatic surge in nominal spending.  That’s consistent with Warren’s gold mechanism being more important that Fisher’s quantity of money mechanism.  In fairness, the money supply did rise with a lag, but that’s also consistent with the Warren approach, which sees gold policy as the key policy lever and the money supply as being largely endogenous.  You might argue that the policy of dollar devaluation eventually forced the Fed to expand the money supply, via the mechanism of PPP.

A modern defender of Warren (like me) would point to models by people like Krugman and Woodford, where it’s the expected future path of policy that determines the current level of aggregate demand.  Dollar devaluation was a powerful way of impacting the expected future path of the money supply, even if the current money supply was held constant.

This isn’t to say that Warren’s approach cannot be criticized. The US was such a big country that changes in the money supply had global implications.  When viewed from a gold market perspective, you could think of monetary injections (OMPs) as reducing the demand for gold (lowering the gold/currency ratio), which would reduce the value of gold, i.e. raise the price level.  A big country doing this can raise the global price level.  So Warren was too dismissive of the role of money.  Nonetheless, Warren’s approach may well have been more fruitful than a domestically focused quantity theory of money approach.

PS.  Because currency and gold were dual “media of account”, it’s not clear to me that the gold approach is less of a general equilibrium approach, at least under a gold standard.  When the price of gold is not fixed, then you could argue that currency is the only true medium of account, and hence is more fundamental.  During 1933-34, policy was all about shaping expectations of where gold would again be pegged in 1934 (it ended up being devalued from $20.67/oz. to $35/oz.)

PPS.  There is a related post (with bonus coverage of Trump!) over at Econlog.

I’ve done a number of posts comparing New Keynesian and NeoFisherian views on the relationship between monetary policy and interest rates.  Here I’d like to illustrate the problem with a picture, as people often have trouble understanding this issue.  It’s really hard to not reason from a price change.  It’s hard to stop thinking of interest rate movements as a “policy” rather than an outcome.

These two graphs show the path of the exchange rate (E) over time, under two different monetary policies.  In both cases a higher exchange rate (E rising) reflects domestic currency appreciation.  Importantly, both of these examples are “low interest rate policies”, when the central bank reduces interest rates to a lower level than before.  But case #1 is an easy money policy, whereas case #2 is a tight money policy:

To focus on the essentials, I’d like to assume that a policy change occurs at time = T’, and that the following movement in the exchange rate is anticipated, once policy has shifted.  (The policy move itself was unanticipated beforehand.)

Notice that in both cases, the exchange rate is expected to appreciate after time = T’.  Because of the interest parity theory, this expected appreciation means that interest rates will be lower than before the policy change, when the exchange rate was stable and interest rates were the same as in the other country.  So from the interest parity theory we know that these two cases are both shifts to a lower interest rate policy.

But now let’s look at the long run impact of the two policies on the level of the exchange rate.  In case #1, the exchange rate ends up lower (depreciated) in the long run, despite the near-term expectation of appreciation.  Because of PPP, that means the policy is expected to increase the price level in the long run.  In other words, it’s an expansionary monetary policy.

In case #2, the exchange rate appreciates in the long run, yielding a lower price level.  That’s a contractionary policy.

Because the first case looks so convoluted—a currency that is expected to appreciate over time but still end up lower than before—you might think it represents the “weird and controversial model”.  Just the opposite, the first case is the New Keynesian model of easy money, and more specifically the Dornbusch overshooting version.  The second more straightforward case reflects the weird and controversial NeoFisherian model.  Just looking at the second graph, it’s easy to see how the NeoFisherians are able to get their result from mainstream mathematical models of the economy.

Here’s another way of thinking about the two cases.  In case #1, there is a one-time increase in the money supply (and/or reduction in money demand).  It reduces interest rates (due to the liquidity effect.)  But it also leads to expectations of a higher price level in the long run, due to currency depreciation and PPP.  Because prices are sticky in the short run, the effect of easy money is to initially depreciate the currency, not raise the price level in proportion.

In case #2, there is a permanent decrease in the growth rate of the money supply (and/or increase in money demand growth).  Because of the quantity theory of money, that leads to a permanent decrease in the inflation rate.  And because of the Fisher effect, the lower inflation leads to lower nominal interest rates.  And because of interest parity, lower nominal interest rates lead to an expected appreciation in the currency.  But you don’t even need the interest parity relationship.  By itself, the lower expected inflation combined with PPP leads to the expected appreciation in the currency.

So how does this help us to better understand the New Keynesian/NeoFisherian dispute?  It may be helpful to contrast the “highly visible” with the “highly important”.  The New Keynesians are focused on the highly visible, while the NeoFisherians are focused on the highly important.

The vast majority of specific, short-term decisions by central banks are better viewed as one-time shifts in the money supply, rather than permanent changes in the growth rate of the money supply.  Thus “easy money” announcements often make short-term interest rates fall, even as inflation expectations rise.  At the same time, the truly major moves in interest rates over time largely reflect longer-term changes in the growth rate of the money supply (and money demand—in more recent years).  Thus the low nominal rates in Japan are primarily due to tight money, not easy money.

Both the New Keynesian and the NeoFisherian models are wrong, as both sides engage in reasoning from a price change.  The correct (market monetarist) model says that low rates can reflect easy or tight money, and that one should not draw any inferences about the current stance of monetary policy by looking at interest rates.

If one cannot draw any inferences about the current stance of policy by looking at rates, can one draw any inferences at all?  I see two:

1.  On any given day, a decision by a central bank to cut rates by more than the market expected is usually (not always) expansionary.  It reflects “expansionary intent” and may be viewed as a signal by the central bank of a desire to make policy more expansionary.  This is, of course, consistent with New Keynesianism.  But it does not mean the current stance of policy is expansionary.

2.  When nominal interest rates fall persistently over a long period of time, it is usually (not always) evidence that monetary policy has been contractionary.  (This is more consistent with NeoFisherism).  But it does not mean that the current stance of monetary policy is contractionary.  As usual, Milton Friedman was decades ahead of the rest of the profession:

Low interest rates are generally a sign that money has been tight, as in Japan; high interest rates, that money has been easy.  .  .   .

After the U.S. experience during the Great Depression, and after inflation and rising interest rates in the 1970s and disinflation and falling interest rates in the 1980s, I thought the fallacy of identifying tight money with high interest rates and easy money with low interest rates was dead. Apparently, old fallacies never die.

In America, monetary policy in 2017 and 2018 became a bit more expansionary, despite higher rates.

Rajat directed me to a new post by Stephen Williamson, which suggests that recent events provide support for the NeoFisherian view.  The Fed has been gradually raising their interest rate target since late 2015, and inflation has gradually risen from near zero up to roughly 2%.  In addition, nominal interest rates are positively correlated with inflation rates at the international level.

Here are three ways of interpreting that evidence:

1. Higher interest rates cause higher inflation.  (NeoFisherism)

2. Low unemployment led the Fed to fear inflation (Phillips Curve), and they tightened monetary policy to prevent inflation from overshooting. (Keynesian)

3. The Fed did not tighten at all.  Contra NeoFisherism, raising the interest rate target is usually contractionary, ceteris paribus.  But the Fed often raises rates during periods when the natural rate is rising, and in most cases they raise rates more slowly that the natural rate is rising.  This means that while it is true that raising rates is usually contractionary, ceteris paribus, in the majority of cases a period of rising interest rates is also a period of increasingly expansionary monetary policy. I would argue that 2017 was no different. So I also reject the Keynesian view.

I prefer the second and third explanation to the first because the NeoFisherian view is inconsistent with the response of asset prices to unexpected changes in the central bank’s nominal interest rate target.  And I prefer the third explanation to the second because the Phillips Curve is not a reliable way of forecasting inflation, and changes in the nominal interest rate are not a reliable indicator of changes in the stance of monetary policy.

Off topic, I just returned from a monetary conference at the Hoover Institution, which was attended by no fewer than 4 Fed presidents.  I was delighted to see both John Williams (who was recently appointed to the New York Fed), and Robert Kaplan (Dallas Fed) mention both price level and NGDP level targeting as promising options to think about.  While neither endorsed these policy options, I had the impression that if the Fed were not already committed to inflation targeting, these two Fed presidents would probably be favorably inclined to one of these two approaches.  Kaplan seemed especially interested in NGDP targeting.  However, I don’t expect the Fed to change its policy target as long as things are going well.  Instead, I’d expect some consideration of level targeting the next time we go into a recession, and hit the zero bound.