• Tag Archives monetary policy
  • The Federal Reserve is Embracing Left-Wing Policies—Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Be Surprised

    The Federal Reserve System has come under fire in the last few months for extending itself into areas outside its Congressional “dual mandate” of stabilizing prices and maximizing employment. There are two areas where the Fed is being accused of overreaching.

    The first area is economic equality. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York website greets visitors with a message stating, “we are firm in the belief that economic equality is a critical component for social justice.” Senator Pat Toomey recently sent letters to several Regional Federal Reserve Banks criticizing this policy pursuit of economic equality as, “wholly unrelated to the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate.”

    The second area, environmental policy, has also become a more central focus. Economist Alex Salter reports that the Fed recently created two climate committees and joined a group dedicated to making the financial system more environmentally focused. And, although Chairman Jerome Powell says the Fed isn’t trying to set climate policy, a report out of Reuters alleges that the Fed has begun to pressure banks to assess climate risk.

    As a result of this public shift, Salter has published an open letter with 42 distinguished co-signatories expressing concern. The letter’s author and co-signers are bothered by the Fed’s mission creep, and call for the Fed to focus on monetary policy and money, rather than activism.

    While this concern is well-placed, it’s important to note that the Fed abandoning political independence is nothing new. The Fed has a long history of breaching its political independence “norms.”

    Perhaps the most famous example of this was when then-President Richard Nixon pressured Fed Chairman Arthur Burns into crafting monetary policy in a way that would help his re-election. A recorded conversation between the two has Nixon laughing about the idea of political independence:

    “‘I know there’s the myth of the autonomous Fed . . .” Nixon barked a quick laugh. “…and when you go up for confirmation some Senator may ask you about your friendship with the President. Appearances are going to be important, so you can call Ehrlichman to get messages to me, and he’ll call you.’”

    However, the Fed hasn’t only been beholden to politicians—special interest groups also appear to have power over the Fed. After the 2008 financial crisis, a new wave of bank regulators was sent to deal with large financial institutions such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. One regulator sent by the New York Fed, Carmen Segarra, released recorded conversations between herself, her supervisors at the New York Fed, and officials at Goldman Sachs.

    In the conversations, Segarra is urged by her supervisors at the Fed to change her report suggesting Goldman Sachs had an insufficient policy for dealing with conflicts of interest. When she refused, Segarra was fired by the Fed.

    Although being urged to change her report may be the most egregious example, the common theme in the tapes is clear: the Fed regulators seem more like partners of Goldman Sachs than watchdogs.

    The takeaway is clear. The Fed has a storied history of political corruption, and this shouldn’t be surprising.

    To understand why we should expect corruption from the Fed we need to consider the lessons of Public Choice economics.

    Public Choice looks at politics as an exchange. Bureaucrats, politicians, and political appointees, for example, want things like good jobs after retirement, funding for political projects, and valuable relationships with powerful people. In order to obtain these things, these political actors may be willing to craft policies to benefit special interest groups or other politicians.

    Consider, for example, the Fed. One of the powers the Fed has is the ability to print new money. When a new 100 dollar bill is printed, the first person to receive the new money will be able to use it to buy real goods and services. If they buy a TV, for example, the new 100 dollar bill goes to the person who sold the TV. However, as the new dollar bill is spent more and more, the increased demand it creates leads to higher prices, everything else held constant.

    So while the first people to get the new money get a good deal, it leads to higher prices for everyone else. Inflation is like a hidden tax on whoever gets new money after the prices have risen. Receiving new money first, then, is a privilege that some may be willing to pay for. If it only costs you $90 to lobby the Fed for a new 100 dollar bill, you come out $10 richer.

    Printing money isn’t only beneficial for those who receive the money first, though. As the example of president Nixon highlighted, politicians focused on short-term re-election goals may be interested in giving favors, privileges, or punishments to members of the Fed in order to improve the economy before an election.

    Finally, the Fed’s regulatory role in banks is another “asset” special interests would like to purchase. The Segarra tapes show a clear example of how powerful special interest groups can use their influence to control the regulations within their industry. Economists call this “regulatory capture.”

    So, although I ultimately agree with Salter’s open letter, it’s important to recognize that what’s happening isn’t very new. The Fed has long been involved in pursuing goals other than monetary stability. The only new development is the mask is dropping. The Fed is now being more transparent about its other activities.

    And while I’d like to believe we can reign in the Fed and convince its members to follow rules, I’m not so sure. The Fed, as an institution, has the ability to transfer enormous amounts of wealth from some groups to others in the form of inflation and regulation. Given the enormity of these transfers, it seems unlikely that self-interested politicians will be willing to give up that power any time soon.


    Peter Jacobsen

    Peter Jacobsen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ottawa University and the Gwartney Professor of Economic Education and Research at the Gwartney Institute. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University, and obtained his BS from Southeast Missouri State University. His research interest is at the intersection of political economy, development economics, and population economics.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Because of Inflation, We’re Financing the Financiers

    It may come as a surprise to you that the United States has been financing a welfare program that takes money from the poor and gives it to the rich.

    If you read a lot of modern macroeconomic literature or major in economics in college, you’ll hear economists talk of the “multiplier effect” of monetary and fiscal stimulus. In times of economic slump, money injection (for monetary policy) or government spending (fiscal policy) greases the wheels of our complex economic machine, bringing unemployment down and output up.

    In response to these policy proposals to change the level of unemployment or production, “real” metrics of the economy, Milton Friedman argued that money is “neutral.” In other words, changing the supply of money in the economy to manipulate relative price levels doesn’t actually change anything in the long run. When people realize their money is worth less than before, they adjust their mindset, demanding higher wages for higher prices. After these changes are made, unemployment and production end up in the same place as before.

    While Friedman’s argument sheds light on many failed economic policies from the latter half of the 20th century, it doesn’t explain the mechanics behind rising price levels (from inflationary policy) once the newly created money travels through the economy, sector by sector.

    Richard Cantillon first suggested in 1755 that money is not as neutral as we think. He argued that money injection—what we could consider inflationary policies—may not change an economy’s output over the long-term. However, the process of readjustment affects different sectors of the economy differently. This analysis, known as the Cantillon Effect, serves as the foundation for the non-neutrality of money theories.

    Cantillon’s original thesis outlines how rising prices affect different sectors at different times and suggests that time difference effectively acts as a taxing mechanism. In other words, the first sectors to receive the newly created money enjoy higher profits as their pay increases, but general costs are still low. On the other hand, the last sectors in which prices rise (where there is more economic friction) face higher costs while still producing at lower prices. Because, as Friedman taught us, the real economic variables are still the same in the long run, the price of inflation is paid for by a “tax” on the sectors with more friction, which subsidizes more time-responsive sectors. In our modern economy, the Cantillon Effect is at play with a stratified socioeconomic impact, favoring investors over wage-earners.

    Let’s say the Fed decides to lower interest rates (by expanding the supply of money in the economy). Soon after the Fed makes its announcement, investors anticipate new earnings from increased investment. In fact, once even a few people get wind of the Fed’s intentions, investors expect prices to rise, whether they rely on algorithms or rumors for their information. Investors flock to the financial markets, hoping to get there first; if they can buy stocks while the prices are still low, they can reap enormous profits once prices rise.

    However, the sudden increased demand for stocks in the financial market bids up asset prices, and this happens rapidly. Within minutes—seconds, even—the expected increase in the price level has been factored into the financial markets. The first place where “inflation” is felt is in the financial marketplace.

    This means that people who are most invested in the market are the first to benefit from inflation. They see their asset prices increasing, yet the prices in the rest of the economy are still low because this happens seconds after it’s clear the Fed is inflating the money supply.

    While the companies with investors buying up shares see the increased inflow of cash, they also have new investment opportunities because of lower interest rates from inflation. Both of these factors help their profits rise, and they find ways to continue expanding business (by increasing their purchases of intermediate goods). The first few businesses to turn their profits into production benefit from lower prices, but once other companies start demanding more intermediate goods, their prices start to rise. Thus, the intermediate goods sector, which includes raw materials and technology that facilitates business, is the next to experience rising price levels. Companies that primarily sell these intermediate goods now have more profit, but the rest of the prices in the economy are still relatively low.

    Afterward, these higher-priced intermediate goods increase the costs of business operations and production, so final goods (for consumers) begin to rise in price, as well. The companies that can turn around their initial investments to final goods the quickest have the most to gain.

    But there’s more. When prices are higher throughout the economy, the last to benefit are workers, who see an increased cost of living and factor this cost into their wage demands. Even among workers, wage-earners are the worst off, for many salaried employees anticipate inflation and factor it into their contracts. And with that, the inflationary policy has passed through the economic system, raising prices. And, as Friedman said, the policy—in the long run—doesn’t change real factors.

    In the modern financial system, the current realization of the Cantillon Effect looks quite similar to a regressive tax. The first to benefit are often corporations with plenty of investors, whether publicly traded or financed through private equity. Next, raw goods benefit from increased prices, including already heavily subsidized industries such as steel and aluminum. Technology also benefits, for it is utilized as an intermediate good for many companies. Even within the raw goods and technology sectors, the quickest corporations to turn investments into production—larger corporations like Amazon or Microsoft, which have the infrastructure to expand—benefit disproportionately.

    On the consumer side, people investing most of their savings in the stock market benefit from increased investment bidding up prices. On the other hand, individuals living from paycheck to paycheck, or even those who just have a savings account in a bank, lose money to price increases.

    Nonetheless, policymakers neglect these effects in an effort to reign in the economy without considering the consequences of their actions. Often, they justify surprise inflation by claiming it will “help the poor.” However, any inflationary monetary policy regime suffers from the ramifications of the Cantillon Effect.

    In fact, even a price-stable economy requires money injection to counter the deflationary effects of growth. This money injection may keep prices for real goods stable, but asset prices continue to rise. It’s true that most economists accept a low level of inflation as fine—healthy, even. But when our current expansionary system, however well-intentioned, ends up exacerbating inequalities in the marketplace under the pretense of egalitarian stability, we ought to examine its true consequences more thoroughly.

    Source: Because of Inflation, We’re Financing the Financiers – Foundation for Economic Education


  • Why Experts Get the Gold Standard Wrong

    Why Experts Get the Gold Standard Wrong

    Many mainstream economists, perhaps a majority of those who have an opinion, are opposed to tying a central bank’s hands with any explicit monetary rule. A clear majority oppose the gold standard, at least according to an often-cited survey. Why is that?

    First some preliminaries. By a “gold standard” I mean a monetary system in which gold is the basic money. So many grains of gold define the unit of account (e.g. the dollar) and gold coins or bullion serve as the medium of redemption for paper currency and deposits.

    By an “automatic” or “classical” gold standard I mean one in which there is no significant central-bank interference with the functioning of the market production and arbitrage mechanisms that equilibrate the stock of monetary gold with the demand to hold monetary gold.

    The United States was part of an international classical gold standard between 1879 (the year that the dollar’s redeemability in gold finally resumed following its suspension during the Civil War) and 1914 (the First World War).

    Serving the Status-Quo

    Why isn’t the gold standard more popular with current-day economists? Milton Friedman once hypothesized that monetary economists are loath to criticize central banks because central banks are by far their largest employer. Providing some evidence for the hypothesis, I have elsewhere suggested that career incentives give monetary economists a status-quo bias. Most understandably focus their expertise on serving the current regime and disregard alternative regimes that would dispense with their services. They face negative payoffs to considering whether the current regime is the best monetary regime.

    Here I want to propose an alternative hypothesis, which complements rather than replaces the employment-incentive hypothesis. I propose that many mainstream economists today instinctively oppose the idea of the self-regulating gold standard because they have been trained as social engineers. They consider the aim of scientific economics, as of engineering, to be prediction and control of phenomena (not just explanation).

    They are experts, and an automatically self-governing gold standard does not make use of their expertise. They prefer a regime that values them. They avert their eyes from the possibility that they are trying to optimize a Ptolemaic system, and so prefer not to study its alternatives.

    The actual track record of the classical gold standard is superior in major respects to that of the modern fiat-money alternative. Compared to fiat standards, classical gold standards kept inflation lower (indeed near zero), made the price level more predictable (deepening financial markets), involved lower gold-extraction costs (when we count the gold extracted to provide coins and bullion to private hedgers under fiat standards), and provided stronger fiscal discipline.

    The classical gold standard regime in the US (1879-1914), despite a weak banking system, did no worse on cyclical stability, unemployment, or real growth.

    Unnecessary Monetary Policy Tightening

    The classical gold standard’s near-zero secular inflation rate was not an accident. It was the systemic result of the slow growth of the monetary gold stock. Hugh Rockoff (1984, p. 621) found that between 1839 and 1929 the annual gold mining output (averaged by decade) ran between 1.07 and 3.79 percent of the existing stock, with the one exception of the 1849-59 decade (6.39 percent growth under the impact of Californian and Australian discoveries).

    Furthermore, an occasion of high demand for gold (for example a large country joining the international gold standard), by raising the purchasing power of gold, would stimulate gold production and thereby bring the purchasing power back to its flat trend over the longer term.

    A recent example of a poorly grounded historical critique is provided by textbook authors Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz. They imagine that the gold standard determined money growth and inflation in the US until 1933, and so they count against the gold standard the US inflation rate in excess of 20% during the First World War (specifically 1917), followed by deflation in excess of 10% a few years later (1921).

    These rates were actually produced by the policies of the Federal Reserve System, which began operations in 1914. The classical gold standard had ended during the Great War, abandoned by all the European combatants, and did not constrain the Fed in these years.

    Cecchetti and Schoenholtz are thus mistaken in condemning “the gold standard” for producing a highly volatile inflation rate. (They do find, but do not emphasize, that average inflation was much lower and real growth slightly higher under gold.) They also mistakenly blame “the gold standard” – not the Federal Reserve policies that prevailed, nor the regulatory restrictions responsible for the weak state of the US banking system – for the US banking panics of 1930, 1931, and 1933.

    Studies of the Fed’s balance sheet and activities during the 1930s have found that it had plenty of gold (Bordo, Choudhri and Schwartz, 1999; Hsieh and Romer, 2006, Timberlake 2008). The “tight” monetary policies it pursued were not forced on it by lack of more abundant gold reserves.

    Expert Opinion

    There are of course serious economic historians who have done valuable research on the performance of the classical gold standard and yet remain critics. Their main lines of criticism are two. First, they too lump the classical gold standard together with the very different interwar period and mistakenly attribute the chaos of the interwar period to the gold standard mechanisms that remained, rather than to central bank interference with those mechanisms.

    In rebuttal Richard Timberlake has pertinently asked how, if it was the mechanisms of the gold standard (and not central banks’ attempts to manage them) that destabilized the world economy during the interwar period, those same mechanisms managed to maintain stability before the First World War (when central banks intervened less or, as in the United States, did not exist)?

    Here, I suggest, a strong pre-commitment to expert guidance acts like a pair of blinders. Wearing those blinders, even if it is seen that the prewar system differed from and outperformed the interwar system, it cannot be seen that this was because the former was comparatively self-regulating and the latter was comparatively expert-guided.

    Second, it is always possible to argue in defense of expert guidance that even the classical gold standard was second-best to an ideally managed fiat money where experts call the shots. Even if central bankers operated on the wrong theory during the 1920s, during the Great Depression, and under Bretton Woods, not to mention during the Great Inflation and the Great Recession, today they operate (or can be gotten to operate) on the right theory.

    In the worldview of economics as social engineering, monetary policy-making by experts must almost by definition be better than a naturally evolved or self-regulating monetary system without top-down guidance. After all, the experts could always choose to mimic the self-regulating system in the unlikely event that it were the best of all options. (In the most recent issue of Gold Investor, Alan Greenspan claims that mimicking the gold standard actually was his policy as Fed chairman.) As experts they sincerely believe that “we can do better” by taking advantage of expert guidance. How can expert guidance do anything but help?

    3 Ways to Fail

    Expert-guided monetary policy can fail in at least three well-known ways to improve on a market-guided monetary system.

    First, experts can persist in using erroneous models (consider the decades in which the Phillips Curve reigned) or lack the timely information they would need to improve outcomes. These were the reasons Milton Friedman cited to explain why the Fed’s use of discretion has amplified rather than dampened business cycles in practice.

    Second, policy-makers can set experts to devising policies to meet goals that are not the public’s goals. This is James Buchanan’s case for placing constraints on monetary policy at the constitutional level.

    Third, where the public understands that the central bank has no pre-commitments, chronically suboptimal outcomes can result even when the central bank has full information and the most benign intentions. This problem was famously emphasized by Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (1977).

    These lessons have not been fully absorbed. A central bank that announces its own inflation target (as the Fed has), and especially one that retains a “dual mandate” to respond to real variables like the unemployment rate or the estimated output gap, retains discretion.

    It is free to change or abandon its inflation-rate target, with or without a new announcement. Retaining discretion – the option to change policy in this way – carries a cost.

    The money-using public, uncertain about what the central bank experts will decide to do, will hedge more and invest less in capital formation than they would with a credibly committed regime. A commodity standard – especially without a central bank to undermine the redemption commitments of currency and deposit issuers – more completely removes policy uncertainty and with it overall uncertainty.

    Blaming Gold for Failed Policy

    Speculation about the pre-analytic outlook of monetary policy experts could be dismissed as mere armchair psychology if we had no textual evidence about their outlook. Consider then, a recent speech by Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer.

    At a May 5, 2017 conference at the Hoover Institution, Fischer addressed the contrast between “Committee Decisions and Monetary Policy Rules.” Fischer posed the question: Why should we have “monetary policy decisions … made by a committee rather than by a rule?” His reply: “The answer is that opinions – even on monetary policy – differ among experts.”

    Consequently we “prefer committees in which decisions are made by discussion among the experts” who try to persuade one another. It is taken for granted that a consensus among experts is the best guide to monetary policy-making we can have.

    Fischer continued:

    Emphasis on a single rule as the basis for monetary policy implies that the truth has been found, despite the record over time of major shifts in monetary policy – from the gold standard, to the Bretton Woods fixed but changeable exchange rate rule, to Keynesian approaches, to monetary targeting, to the modern frameworks of inflation targeting and the dual mandate of the Fed, and more. We should not make our monetary policy decisions based on that assumption. Rather, we need our policymakers to be continually on the lookout for structural changes in the economy and for disturbances to the economy that come from hitherto unexpected sources.

    In this passage Fischer suggested that historical shifts in monetary policy fashion warn us against adopting a non-discretionary regime because they indicate that no “true” regime has been found. But how so?

    That governments during the First World War chose to abandon the gold standard (in order to print money to finance their war efforts), and that they subsequently failed to do what was necessary to return to a sustainable gold parity (devalue or deflate), does not imply that the mechanisms of the gold standard – rather than government policies that overrode them – must have failed.

    Observed changes in regimes and policies do not imply that each new policy was an improvement over its predecessor – unless we take it for granted that all changes were all wise adaptations to exogenously changing circumstances. Unless, that is, we assume that the experts guiding monetary policies have never yet failed us.

    Better, Because Science

    Fischer further suggested that a monetary regime is not to be evaluated just by the economy’s performance, but by how policy is made: a regime is per se better the more it incorporates the latest scientific findings of experts about the current structure of the economy and the latest models of how policy can best respond to disturbances.

    If we accept this as true, then we need not pay much if any attention to the gold standard’s actual performance record. But if instead we are going to judge regimes largely by their performance, then replacing the automatic gold standard by the Federal Reserve’s ever-increasing discretion cannot simply be presumed a good thing. We need to consult the evidence. And the evidence since 1914 suggests otherwise.

    Contrary to Fischer, there is no good reason to presume that expert-guided monetary regimes get progressively better over time, because there is no filter for replacing mistaken experts with better experts. We have no test of the successful exercise of expertise in monetary policy (meaning, superiority at correctly diagnosing and treating exogenous monetary disturbances, while avoiding the introduction of money-supply disturbances) apart from ex post evaluation of performance.

    The Fed’s performance does not show continuous improvement. As previously noted, it doesn’t even show improvement over the pre-Fed regime in the US.

    A fair explanation for the Fed’s poor track record is Milton Friedman’s: the information necessary for successful expert guidance of monetary policy is simply not available in a timely fashion.

    Those who recognize this point will be open to considering the merits of moving, to quote the title a highly pertinent article by Leland B. Yeager, “toward forecast-free monetary institutions.” Experts who firmly believe in expert guidance of monetary policy, of course, will not recognize the point. They will accordingly overlook the successful track record of the automatic gold standard (without central bank management) as a forecast-free monetary institution.

    Reprinted from Alt-M.


    Tim Worstall

    Tim is a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.