The Great Debate

The Fed must print money to head off a global crash

Adam Posen

Aug 31, 2011 11:01 EDT

By Adam Posen The opinions expressed are his own

It is past time for monetary policy to be doing more to support recovery. The Jackson Hole conference has come and gone, and no shortage of excuses was provided for central banks to hold their fire — even though most economists acknowledged the grim outlook for the advanced economies.

Too much attention has been paid, however, to the failings of fiscal policies and to the shortfall from effects of earlier quantitative easing. Further asset purchases by the G7 central banks are needed to check not just a downturn, but the lasting erosion of productive capacity and of debt sustainability — especially when even justified fiscal and financial consolidation is undercutting short-term recovery. Easier monetary policy will increase the odds of other policies improving, and those policies’ effectiveness when they do.

It is also past time to stop fearing inflationary ghosts. There is no credible threat of sustained higher inflation in the advanced economies that should restrain central bank action. The rate of wage growth is tepid and compatible with price stability, at most, even in Germany; the inability of wages to keep up with recent real price shocks underscores the ongoing downward pressure from labour market slack. Consumption was driven down by fiscal tightening and household retrenchment as much as oil prices, and those forces will be ongoing. Had consumer confidence not been weakly footed to begin with, the oil shock would not have had such an impact.

Commodity prices have since demonstrated again that they go down as well as up, and thus monetary policy should not react to their short-term gyrations (and deceleration in Western growth will likely send them further downwards). Credit and broad money aggregates are barely growing and current account deficits are slowly shrinking, so no asset price bubbles will emerge. Importantly, interest rates on long-term G7 government bonds display no consistent rise in inflation expectations, no matter how the data is parsed.

Some of us had seen this coming. This is what happens to economies following a financial crisis, particularly when the crisis hits simultaneously across integrated markets. That is why I began advocating more quantitative easing in the UK a year ago. Yet even if some believe that the recent setbacks reflect new developments — rather than just long-run vulnerabilities (fragile Central European banking systems, dysfunctional American fiscal politics, British over-dependence on the financial sector) exposed by the crisis — that still should be enough to downgrade any plausible prior forecast for growth and inflation to where additional monetary stimulus is called for on its own terms.

Just because a downturn is expected does not mean its course is inevitable, and some of the present prospects’ severity certainly still can be usefully offset. The lesson from past post-crisis recoveries, whether from the late 1930s worldwide, the late 1990s in East Asia, or the 2000s in Japan is that aggressive monetary easing can ease the process of real adjustment and limit its lasting damage to economies and to people. Insufficient monetary stimulus, let alone premature tightening, makes fiscal and financial problems worse, and raises prospects for dangerous political reaction to policy failure.

China tightening could undo risk markets

J Saft

Dec 24, 2009 08:34 EST

The key decision for global markets in 2010 will very likely not be made in Washington but Beijing, where emerging inflation and a property bubble may push China to begin reining in expansionary policies earlier than will suit the developed world.

After returning to a breakneck pace of growth with amazing speed, there are already signs that China is weighing steps to curtail the bank lending that has been a huge source of stimulus, helping to drive property and other asset prices sharply higher.

“We emphasize the role of the reserve-requirement ratio, although the ratio was internationally seen as useless for years and it was thought central banks could abandon the tool,” Chinese central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said at a Beijing conference on Tuesday.

“Besides benchmark interest rates, we also put emphasis on managing the gap between deposit and lending rates”, Zhou said.

Put simply, that implies that China may take steps to limit the amount of money banks are allowed to lend and to drive the margins between what they pay in interest and what they charge higher, both steps which will cool growth and speculation.

China’s central bank on Wednesday followed up by promising to exercise tighter control over bank lending next year while reaffirming a long-standing pledge to maintain “appropriately loose” monetary policy.

Even if you don’t own a million dollar apartment investment in Shanghai — kept empty of course because cash flows are for the little people – this could spell trouble.

from The Great Debate UK:

2010: the year of fiscal clean up

Jane Foley

Dec 9, 2009 16:12 EST

- Jane Foley is research director at Forex.com. The opinions expressed are her own. -

At the height of the financial crisis few argued against the need for a huge fiscal and monetary policy response.  As a result the global economy has moved away from the precipice.  For many governments 2010 will bring a different kind of precipice, this will be the year in which many electorates will be made to start paying for their governments’ huge fiscal binges.

Certain countries will enter this process severely disadvantaged.  Earlier this year UK debt was singled out by S&P for a possible downgrade.  This week Moody’s commented that UK debt along with that of the US will test the boundaries of its top AAA rating.

The UK stands with the U.S., Ireland and Greece as being one of the few economies likely to register a double digit budget deficit/GDP ratio this year.  Fitch’s downgrade of Greece this week has propelled it into the spotlight.  This news followed the decision from S&P to put its sovereign rating on negative watch.

The news forced Greece’s Finance Minister to reassure markets that Greek bonds are accepted by the ECB after concerns rose over whether it would meet ECB collateral eligibility once temporary "emergency" rules revert to normal.

Some commentators have started to talk about sovereign default but this is not realistic within the G-10.  Others believe that governments will deliberately inflate away the value of their debt.  While this is also unlikely in a world where central banks tend to be independent and credibility can take decades to restore, it may also be also be hard to achieve in the immediate post crisis environment.

BoE extends QE, fears 1930s re-run

John Kemp

Aug 6, 2009 10:18 EDT

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

The Bank of England’s decision to continue with its asset purchase programme, or quantitative easing (QE), at the rate of 50 billion pounds per quarter in Oct-Dec, unchanged from Jul-Sep, shows bank officials are more worried about ending support for the recovery too soon than about risking inflation by leaving it too late.

The problem with QE is that you have to keep buying the same amount of assets each month to maintain the same monetary stance. With interest rates, the Bank can cut them and they stay cut. If asset prices drop with QE, it represents a tightening of monetary policy.

The Bank initially bought 75 billion pounds in the first 3 months (Apr-Jun) and then tapered this to 50 billion in the second three months (Jul-Sep) as the crisis engulfing the banking system and the rest of the economy eased. A cautious approach might have tapered the QE programme again to 25 billion in the final three months of the year before ending it entirely at the start of 2010. But the Bank opted to stick at 50 billion.

Critics point out that the programme has not achieved its announced objective of increasing bank credit and the amount of money in circulation. The rate of growth in M4, the broadest money supply measure, has risen only marginally. But that ignores the counterfactual of what would have happened to M4 in the absence of the programme — it might have fallen sharply.

Growth in the monetary aggregates is, in any event, mostly endogenous. It depends on demand for credit. In the current environment, where many households and businesses have little or no collateral, credit is impaired, and most are focused on paying down debt rather than adding to it, limited growth in M4 is not surprising. Trying to make it grow faster is like force feeding a duck to make foie gras — possible but unnatural.