Publications
Andrea Terzi
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In the Media | July 2016
Andrea Terzi
Public Debt Project, July 14, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Twice in the second half of the twentieth century, in the midst of a robust economy, economists optimistically talked about the taming and even “the death of the business cycle” based on the belief that advances in macroeconomics had reached a point of perfection. Yet, both times, the economy underwent serious turbulence and the policies that seemed to have “solved the problem” proved inadequate to the challenges presented by unexpected realities. In the 1970s, the “neo-classical synthesis,” with its faith in forecasting and macroeconomic “fine tuning,” succumbed to stagflation and a new theory, the Monetarist paradigm, came to prominence....
Read more: http://privatedebtproject.org/view-articles.php?Connecting-the-Dots-Debt-Savings-and-the-Need-for-a-Fiscal-Growth-Policy-21
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Working Paper No. 810 | June 2014
Monetization Fears and Europe’s Narrowing Options
With the creation of the Economic and Monetary Union and the euro, the national government debt of eurozone member-states became credit sensitive. While the potentially destabilizing impact of adverse cyclical conditions on credit-sensitive debt was seriously underestimated, the design was intentional, framed within a Friedman-Fischer-Buchanan view that “no monetization” rules provide a powerful means to discipline government behavior. While most countries follow some kind of “no monetization” rule, the one embraced by the eurozone was special, as it also prevented monetization on the secondary market for debt. This made all eurozone public debt defaultable—at least until the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the Outright Monetary Transactionsprogram, which can be seen as an enhanced rule-based approach that makes governments solvent on the condition that they balance their budgets. This has further narrowed Europe’s options for policy solutions that are conducive to job creation. An approach that would require no immediate changes in the European Union’s (EU) political structure would be for the EU to fund “net government spending in the interest of Europe” through the issue of a eurobond backed by the ECB.
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In the Media | March 2014
The Old Lady Fails to Get an "A"
Credit Writedowns, March 21, 2014. All Rights Reserved.
One thing’s for sure: The financial crisis has dealt a deadly blow to what was until recently considered the state-of-the-art of monetary policy. Just compare the 1992 edition of Modern Money Mechanics, published by the Federal Bank of Chicago, with the articles and videos published this month by the Bank of England (BoE).
The former publication explains that a bank’s excess reserves can be used to make loans, that prudent bankers “will not lend more than their excess reserves,” and that there is a “deposit expansion and contraction associated with a given change in bank reserves,” a.k.a. the money multiplier. Ultimately, “the total amount of reserves is controlled by the Federal Reserve.”
In stark contrast to what was considered common knowledge twenty years ago, the BoE now considers the multiplier a mistaken belief. For the Bank of England, a “common misconception is that the central bank determines the quantity of loans and deposits in the economy by controlling the quantity of central bank money — the so-called ‘money multiplier’ approach.” Contrary to a widespread view, “neither are reserves a binding constraint on lending, nor does the central bank fix the amount of reserves that are available.” The BoE further explains: “Loans create deposits, not the other way around”; and bank reserves do not provide incentives for banks to lend “as the money multiplier mechanism would suggest.”
The many professionals in the banking and finance industry who often have trouble with the way academics teach and discuss money and monetary policy will find the new view much closer to their operational experience. The few economists who have long rejected the “state-of-the-art” in their models, and refused to teach it in their classrooms, will feel vindicated. Those lagging behind had better adapt quickly to a changing paradigm, re-write their lecture notes, and avoid describing the stance of monetary policy with the position of a money supply function. For example, the Khan Academy’s course in banking includes several lectures based on the notion of the money multiplier. To serve its users well, the Khan Academy should largely revise those lectures or at least explain that they apply to a monetary system based on gold or some other fixed-rate system.
The views expressed in the BoE publication do not come out of the blue. Several studies have recently challenged the notion of the money multiplier. The fact that this is now stated by a central bank marks good progress in the understanding of monetary operations, especially in light of conventional wisdom having inspired a number of erroneous interpretations during the banking and financial crisis.
It is also a blow to the “Monetarist Keynesian” approach that continues to inspire mainstream macroeconomic models. In a video that is part of a 1980 series called “Free to Choose,” Milton Friedman explains the money multiplier in a fixed-rate monetary system (the gold standard) and argues that the same principle holds in the contemporary U.S. banking system. Friedman concludes that the Great Depression was caused by the U.S. Fed doing a very poor job, forcing the money multiplier to work its way downwards and effectively destroying the money supply. A former graduate student at MIT who had studied Friedman’s view of the Great Depression—named Ben Bernanke—has seemingly dealt with the 2007-08 crisis with one idea in mind: prevent the money supply contraction that caused the Great Depression. This was the theoretical foundation of Helicopter Ben’s QEs.
For the Bank of England, now, there are two common misconceptions about Quantitative Easing: “that QE involves giving banks ‘free money’; and that the key aim of QE is to increase bank lending by providing more reserves to the banking system, as might be described by the money multiplier theory.” The BoE also explains how the amount of central bank money (banknotes and bank reserves) is fixed by the demand of its users and not by the central bank “as it is sometimes described in some economics textbooks.”
And yet, more progress is desirable, and I would not mark the BoE paper with an A.
For all those economists who feel they have been ahead of the curve on this matter, the Bank of England should make an additional effort, especially on two remaining issues.
1. Why money is valuable to its holders
In its account of money and monetary policy, the BoE asks the question: What makes an inconvertible piece of paper valuable? The BoE explains that money is an IOU issued by a single (monopolist) supplier rather than by a variety of individuals. Although a twenty-pound note is no longer convertible into gold, it is “worth twenty pounds precisely because everybody believes it will be accepted as a means of payment both today and in the future… And for everyone to believe that, it is important that money maintains its value over time and is difficult to counterfeit. It’s the central bank’s job to ensure that that is the case.”
Economists have always had a hard time proving how confidence alone could suffice. Money historians dealing with “token money” (not redeemable in gold or silver) and those economists who are aware of the political foundation of money or who have read or heard Warren Mosler have a different answer. It is inaccurate to describe paper currency as an “unredeemable” asset whose value depends on users’ confidence. Paper money gives its holder a credit that is redeemable in a very concrete way, and it is so redeemed every time holders of money use currency to pay their liabilities to the government: taxes, sanctions, and fines. In fact, the national currency is the only means available for making such payments.
The BoE remains silent on this point. Acknowledgement of this fact would entail accepting that the payment of taxes is made possible by government spending and not the other way around. It is tax payers, not governments, that can go broke!
2. How powerful is monetary policy
On this point, the BoE publication does not break much with the past, at the risk of making statements that clash with the rest of the paper.
The BoE makes two accurate statements regarding central bank money (banknotes and bank reserves):
1) it is not chosen or fixed by the central bank;
2) it does not multiply up into loans and bank deposits.
This would seem to imply that a central bank does not control the money supply. More accurately, as the ECB states on its website, “by virtue of its monopoly, a central bank is able to manage the liquidity situation in the money market and influence money market interest rates.”
To the reader’s surprise, however, the BoE concludes that the central bank can:
“influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money.”
For the BoE, changing interest rates is a powerful means to influence bank lending and thus the money supply and the overall economy. This view that interest rates trigger an effective “transmission mechanism” is one of the Great Faults in monetary management committed during the Great Recession.
There are various channels through which interest rates influence demand, output, and the price level, yet none is empirically strong, and some work in different directions. Bank lending is primarily pro-cyclical, as a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain explains effectively (“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain”), and the Global Crisis proved central banks to be powerless in trying to reverse this course. The reality is that the level of interest rates affects the economy mildly and in an ambiguous way. To state that monetary policy is powerful is an unsubstantiated claim. -
Working Paper No. 614 | August 2010
The “Keynesian Moment” in Policymaking, the Perils Ahead, and a Flow-of-funds Interpretation of Fiscal Policy
View More View LessWith the global crisis, the policy stance around the world has been shaken by massive government and central bank efforts to prevent the meltdown of markets, banks, and the economy. Fiscal packages, in varied sizes, have been adopted throughout the world after years of proclaimed fiscal containment. This change in policy regime, though dubbed the “Keynesian moment,” is a “short-run fix” that reflects temporary acceptance of fiscal deficits at a time of political emergency, and contrasts with John Maynard Keynes’s long-run policy propositions. More important, it is doomed to be ineffective if the degree of tolerance of fiscal deficits is too low for full employment.
Keynes’s view that outside the gold standard fiscal policies face real, not financial, constraints is illustrated by means of a simple flow-of-funds model. This shows that government deficits do not take financial resources from the private sector, and that demand for net financial savings by the private sector can be met by a rising trade surplus at the cost of reduced consumption, or by a rising government deficit financed by the monopoly supply of central bank credit. Fiscal deficits can thus be considered functional to the objective of supplying the private sector with a provision of financial wealth sufficient to restore demand. By contrast, tax hikes and/or spending cuts aimed at reducing the public deficit lower the available savings of the private sector, and, if adopted too soon, will force the adjustment by way of a reduction of demand and standard of living.
This notion, however, is not applicable to the euro area, where constraints have been deliberately created that limit public deficits and the supply of central bank credit, thus introducing national solvency risks. This is a crucial flaw in the institutional structure of Euroland, where monetary sovereignty has been removed from all existing fiscal authorities. Absent a reassessment of its design, the euro area is facing a deflationary tendency that may further erode the economic welfare of the region.
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