Can the Fed Stimulate Growth or Only Inflation?

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of the coming book “The Benefit and the Burden.”

Many economists, myself included, believe that a more aggressive Federal Reserve policy is needed to turn the economy around. Additional fiscal stimulus would also help. As the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke put it at a Nov. 2 news conference, “It would be helpful if we could get assistance from some other parts of the government to work with us to create jobs.”

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However, such assistance will not be coming. President Obama’s jobs package has been blocked by Republicans in Congress, and the order of the day is fiscal tightening, with the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction poised to offer recommendations for $1.5 trillion in additional deficit reduction by Nov. 23.

Perspectives from expert contributors.

With fiscal stimulus off the table, monetary stimulus is all that is available. But the Republican view is that monetary policy is incapable of stimulating real growth – that it will stimulate only inflation. This view is regularly enforced by The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which establishes the ideological line for Republicans on Fed policy.

In an editorial on Feb. 29, 2008, The Journal said it was certain that higher inflation was on the way, calling it the “Bernanke reinflation.” An editorial on June 9, 2008, warned that easy money and Keynesian stimulus “is taking us down the road to stagflation.” On Feb. 6, 2009, the Journal editorial writer George Melloan said the inevitable result of economic stimulus would be inflation. On June 10, 2009, the economist Arthur Laffer wrote on the Journal editorial page that the increase in the Fed’s monetary base was “a surefire recipe for inflation and higher interest rates.”

Echoing the party line, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, in a New York Times op-ed article on Feb. 14, 2009, said it was a virtual certainty that 1970s-style stagflation was coming back. In The New York Times on May 4, 2009, the conservative economist Allan Meltzer wrote that enormous budget deficits, rapid growth in the money supply and a sustained currency devaluation were “harbingers of inflation.”

More than two years later, none of those predictions has come to pass. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, inflationary expectations have been falling for years and continue to fall. Indeed, recent reports from Reuters and CNNMoney found that deflation – falling prices – is a growing problem.

Although the anticipated inflation rate is falling and the “risk premium” — the difference between a bond that doesn’t adjust for inflation and one that does, in the same maturity — has scarcely changed, conservatives continue to warn that inflation is right around the corner, especially if the Fed were to adopt a new operating procedure called nominal gross domestic product targeting.

This is an idea supported by Christina Romer of the University of California, Berkeley, economists at Goldman Sachs and others. The idea is to permit a period of catch-up inflation to get nominal G.D.P. back to its prerecession trend, which would increase incomes, employment and household balance sheets.

But conservatives want nothing to do with N.G.D.P. targeting. Amity Shlaes, a columnist with Bloomberg News and a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, denounced the idea in a Nov. 2 column, calling it “a license to inflate.”

Her view is that if a recession causes growth to fall, unemployment to rise and home prices to crash, people should just suck it up and learn to live with it. Allowing prices to rise from wherever they are, even if there has been a deflation that caused them to fall, opens the door to stagflation and even hyperinflation. It’s a risk too great to take. The risk of continuing the status quo is, apparently, nothing to be concerned about.

It’s tiresome to read such rationalizations for doing nothing about the second-greatest economic crisis in our history, especially from someone like Ms. Shlaes, who is well versed in the history of the Great Depression.

Then, too, there were those just like her, like Henry Hazlitt, an editorial writer for The New York Times, and Benjamin M. Anderson, an economist with Chase National Bank, who also said people should just suck it up, that unemployment was only caused by excessive wages and greedy workers and that inflation was a cure worse than the disease, even as the price level fell 25 percent from 1929 to 1933.

With fiscal stimulus off the table and Republicans gambling that continued economic stagnation will hurt Democrats more than them, the Federal Reserve is the only institution with the freedom of action and power to stimulate growth. But it is constrained by conservatives who charge that it is fostering inflation whenever it tries to provide monetary stimulus.

The fact that conservatives have consistently been wrong about this for the last three years has done nothing to diminish their confidence. They are like the French Bourbons, who learned nothing and forgot nothing.

Of course, no one wants to go back to the 1970s, when we had both rising inflation and rising unemployment. But the risk of inflation is now as low as it’s been since the 1950s, while slow growth and high unemployment impose a crushing burden on a huge portion of the population. If the Fed believes it can help, it has a responsibility to do so.

Steve Jobs and the best investment I ever made

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who has died at the age of 56, was a genius who changed millions of people’s lives and – funnily enough – one of the first to recognise that fact was Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

When Mr Jobs literally unveiled the first Apple Macintosh computer in 1984, with showmanship that was in stark contrast to the techie norm, then as now, Mr Gates said: "To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different: it takes something that's really new, and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I've seen – is the only one that meets that standard."

The two titans of new technology were less kind toward each other later. Mr Jobs accused Microsoft of copying Apple and said they “just make really third-rate products” but then softened that with the characteristically quirky statement: "I wish [Bill Gates] the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

Coming down from the clouds, when the first Apple Macs went on sale in London, I was a cub reporter. When I joined The Daily Telegraph in 1986, we were still making the paper with much the same technology the Victorians used; hot metal presses at the back of our inky offices on Fleet Street.

Journalism is not a well-paid racket and I freelanced to make ends meet. In those days, that meant getting up early in the morning to deliver bits of paper – called ‘folios’ at a time when cutting and pasting meant just that – to magazine publishers before going on to do the day job.

Then a friend explained that computers would change all that forever; making it easier and quicker to produce, store and transmit copy. It all sounded rather technical to a Luddite like me. But I was impressed with the Apple Macintosh Classic. It was easy to use, with little or no need for technical training or back-up because the answer to every problem was always somewhere on the screen, and so I bought one in 1990.

It is an interesting perspective on the massive deflation in the price of technology during the last couple of decades that the Mac Classic then cost pretty much the same as the Mac laptop I am writing on now; about £1,000. Needless to say, that was a lot more money then than now – and you got a lot less for it. The Mac Classic had a small black and white screen and no internet access.

Despite those facts, I wrote more than 500,000 commercial words on that little box of tricks before trading up to an iMac about 10 years later. Without wishing to brag, the Nineties were a happy hunting time for freelance journalism when – for example – ‘a sentence like this might cost you £10 plus VAT’.

What a long time ago that seems now. But it meant that – unlike colleagues whose best investment might be their home or buying shares in emerging markets 20 years ago – mine was definitely the Apple Mac Classic. House prices and share prices can fall – and you haven’t made a penny profit until you sell – but all that freelance was invoiced, paid and taxed long ago.

So, while millions of consumers around the world will remember the Apple co-founder for their enhanced enjoyment of sound and vision on everything from iPods to iPhones and iPads, many of us also have good reason to be grateful to Mr Jobs for making it easier and more efficient to do what we do to make a living.

 

A Second Great Depression, or Worse?

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”

With the United States and European economies having slowed markedly according to the latest data, and with global growth continuing to disappoint, a reasonable question increasingly arises: Are we in another Great Depression?

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The easy answer is “no” — the main features of the Great Depression have not yet manifested themselves and still seem unlikely. But it is increasingly likely that we will find ourselves in the midst of something nearly as traumatic, a long slump of the kind seen with some regularity in the 19th century, particularly if presidential election-year politics continue to head in a dangerous direction.

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The Great Depression had three main characteristics, seen in the United States and most other countries that were severely affected. None of these have been part of our collective experience since 2007.

First, output dropped sharply after 1929, by over 25 percent in real terms in the United States (using the Bureau of Economic Analysis data, from its Web site, for real gross domestic product, using chained 1937 dollars). In contrast, the United States had a relatively small decline in G.D.P. after the latest boom peaked. According to the bureau’s most recent online data, G.D.P. peaked in the second quarter of 2008 at $14.4155 trillion and bottomed out in the second quarter of 2009 at $13.8541 trillion, a decline of about 4 percent.

Second, unemployment rose above 20 percent in the United States during the 1930s and stayed there. In the latest downturn, we experienced record job losses for the postwar United States, with around eight million jobs lost. But unemployment only briefly touched 10 percent (in the fourth quarter of 2009; see the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site).

Even by the highest estimates — which include people discouraged from looking for a job, thus not registered as unemployed — the jobless rate reached around 16 to 17 percent. It’s a jobs disaster, to be sure, but not the same scale as the Great Depression.

Third, in the 1930s the credit system shrank sharply. In large part this is because banks failed in an uncontrolled manner — largely in panics that led retail depositors to take out their funds. The creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation put an end to that kind of run and, despite everything, the agency has continued to play a calming role. (I’m on the F.D.I.C.’s newly created systemic resolution advisory committee, but I don’t have anything to do with how the agency handles small and medium-size banks.)

But the experience at the end of the 19th century was also quite different from the 1930s — not as horrendous, yet very traumatic for many Americans. The heavily leveraged sector more than 100 years ago was not housing but rather agriculture — a different play on real estate.

There were booming new technologies in that day, including the stories we know well about the rapid development of transportation, telephones, electricity and steel. But falling agricultural prices kept getting in the way for many Americans. With large debt burdens, farmers were vulnerable to deflation (a lower price level in general or just for their products). And before the big migration into cities, farmers were a mainstay of consumption.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, falling from peak to trough in each cycle took 11 months between 1945 and 2009 but twice that length of time between 1854 and 1919. The longest decline on record, according to this methodology, was not during the 1930s but rather from October 1873 to March 1879, more than five years of economic decline.

In this context, it is quite striking — and deeply alarming — to hear a prominent Republican presidential candidate attack Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, for his efforts to prevent deflation. Specifically, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said earlier this week, referring to Mr. Bernanke: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous — er, treasonous, in my opinion.”

In the 19th century the agricultural sector, particularly in the West, favored higher prices and effectively looser monetary policy. This was the background for William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896; the “gold” to which he referred was the gold standard, the bastion of hard money — and tendency toward deflation — favored by the East Coast financial establishment.

Populism in the 19th century was, broadly speaking, from the left. But now the rising populists are from the right of the political spectrum, and they seem intent on intimidating monetary policy makers into inaction. We see this push both on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill — for example, in interactions between the House Financial Services Committee, where Representative Ron Paul of Texas is chairman of the monetary policy subcommittee, and the Federal Reserve.

The relative decline of agriculture and the rise of industry and services over a century ago were long believed to have made the economy more stable, as it moved away from cycles based on the weather and global swings in supply and demand for commodities. But financial development creates its own vulnerability as more people have access to credit for their personal and business decisions. Add to that the rise of a financial sector that has proved brilliant at extracting subsidies that protect against downside risk, and hence encourage excessive risk-taking. The result is an economy that is at least as prone to big boom-bust cycles as what existed at the end of the 19th century.

The rise of the Tea Party has taken fiscal policy off the table as a potential countercyclical instrument; the next fiscal moves will be contractionary (probably more spending cuts), whether jobs start to come back or not. In this situation, monetary policy matters a great deal, and Mr. Bernanke’s focus on avoiding deflation and hence limiting the problems for debtors does not seem inappropriate (for more on Mr. Bernanke, his motivations and actions, see David Wessel’s book, “In Fed We Trust“).

Mr. Bernanke has his flaws, to be sure. Under his leadership, the Fed has been reluctant to take on regulatory issues, continuing to see the incentive distortions of “too big to fail” banks as somehow separate from monetary policy, its primary concern. And his team has consistently pushed for capital requirements that are too low relative to the shocks we now face.

And the Federal Reserve itself is to blame for some of the damage to its reputation, although it did get a major assist from Treasury in 2008-9. There were too many bailouts rushed over weekends, with terms that were too generous to incumbent management and not sufficiently advantageous to the public purse.

But to accuse Mr. Bernanke of treason for worrying about deflation is worse than dangerous politics. It risks returning us to the long slump of the late 1870s.

Is Deflation Back?

Deflation has returned.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

For the first time in a year, consumer prices fell in June, according to a new report from the Commerce Department released Tuesday. The price decline was driven by energy declines, and is just one month’s data point, but even so, the figure is worrisome. The Federal Reserve pays close attention to this price index (more so, reportedly, than to the Consumer Price Index released by the Labor Department); and you may recall that part of the reason the Federal Reserve engaged in quantitative easing was the threat of a deflationary spiral.

Dollars to doughnuts.

The Commerce Department’s report delivered other bad news, too.

Nominal personal income increased by just 0.1 percent in June — and the increase was due to higher government transfer payments (like unemployment benefits) and capital gains income, not wages and salaries.

In fact, private wage and salary income fell in June.

None of these facts bode well for growth in the third quarter of this year, given that the economy is so dependent on consumer spending. And the austerity measures created by the recent debt ceiling deal look unlikely to make things better.