The Great Debate

Almost exactly a decade ago, Ben Bernanke visited Tokyo as a member of the Federal Reserve Board – he was not yet the powerful Fed chairman – and gave some shocking advice to his Japanese counterparts. Surveying the country’s abysmal record of deflation, Bernanke recommended that the Bank of Japan set an explicit inflation target and embark on a massive program of buying government debt to help achieve that goal.

It took a perplexingly long time for the advice to be heeded. Last week, Japan’s new central bank governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, announced that he hoped to achieve 2 percent inflation within two years from the current deflation of -0.70 percent.

To accomplish this, the BOJ will double the size of the money supply to $2.8 trillion in two years by buying long-term government bonds, increasing its balance sheet by 1 percent of gross domestic product a month this year and 1.1 percent next year.

In short, Japan will attempt to do in two years what Bernanke and the Fed have done under their program of quantitative easing in five years. For the cautious Japanese, it was a breathtaking departure from recent practice, which had been constrained by fears that pushing up the inflation rate might bankrupt the BOJ because its large government bond holdings would lose value when interest rates went up.

While these measures are almost universally applauded, it’s an open question whether they will be enough to fix what ails Japan. No two countries are alike, so using a solution that worked well in the United States may prove less than a perfect fit for the Japanese. For example, increasing the money supply is no guarantee that banks will lend and people will start buying consumer goods, the ultimate end of a deflationary liquidity trap. In addition, the Japanese prescription depends in part on the revival of Japan’s export trade – all that monetary easing has led to a sharp decline in the value of the yen, which is supposed to boost the fortunes of companies like Sony and Toyota. But that may prove elusive as long as economies in Europe and the United States struggle with high unemployment.

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.

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.

- 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.

– 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.