MacroScope

Central bankers have said repeatedly since the start of the global financial crisis that monetary policy can only do so much to heal a broken economy. Agustín Carstens, president of Mexico’s central bank, chose an interesting analogy at an IMF event this weekend to describe the adjustment needed in countries with very high debt levels:

In relatively modern cars the spare tire is (pretty small). Basically that spare tire should be enough to take you to the next gas station. But if you want to drive your car (a very long distance) it’s likely you will never get there.

So today I think what central banks have done is that the tire was gone, they used the spare tire, the spare tire is this big, and you can go just a few miles to the next gas station and you repair the car. So, if they (the fiscal authorities) don’t do that then they will be left on the road.

Somebody call AAA.

The Fed appears to have moved away from the notion of additional bond purchases in recent weeks, for a  mix of tactical and practical reasons including:

1. Policymakers worry about venturing any further into uncharted territory.

2. Growth isn’t weak enough to make a clear case for additional monetary easing.

3. Many officials think QE is better at thwarting deflation than boosting employment.

It’s something of a dissonant communications strategy: Fed officials are willing to tell us what they think will happen three years from now, but not what they discussed three years ago.

The Federal Reserve’s public relations arm holds up the chairmanship of Ben Bernanke as a model of transparency. And it’s true. Press conferences and federal funds rate forecasts are major steps forward for a central bank that until the mid-1990s didn’t even tell the markets what it was doing with interest rates.

Still, the old habits of secrecy die hard. Monetary policy transparency aside, the Fed has remained adamantly opaque in other ways – to the point that it took a Bloomberg News lawsuit for it to name the recipients of emergency era loans.

Thursday, April 12

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley speaks on regional and national economic conditions before the Center for Economic Development, 0715 EDT/1115 GMT. Audience Q&A expected.

ATLANTA – Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart moderates “Bridging the Border: Reinforcing Ties Between the U.S. and Mexico” panel discussion presented by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the World Affairs Council of Atlanta

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley speaks on regional and national economic conditions before students and faculty at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, 1100 EDT/1500 GMT.

One trillion euros is a lot of money. And as we have previously noted on this blog it did a lot for stock markets early this year but not much for the real economy.

But recent bond auctions in the euro zone suggest the impact of two rounds of cheap 3-year ECB funding on the region’s struggling bond market may also be fading.

Italian three-year borrowing costs surged more than a full percentage point at an auction to 3.89 percent – its highest since mid-January.

Central banks across the industrialized world responded aggressively to the global financial crisis that began in mid-2007 and in many ways remains with us today. Now, faced with sluggish recoveries, policymakers are reticent to embark on further unconventional monetary easing, fearing both internal criticism and political blowback. They are being forced to rely more on verbal guidance than actual stimulus to prevent markets from pricing in higher rates.

How do the world’s most prominent central banks stack up against each other? The Federal Reserve was extremely aggressive, more than tripling the size of its balance sheet from around $700-$800 billion pre-crisis to nearly 3 trillion today. Still, the ECB’s total asset holdings are actually larger than the Fed’s – it started from a higher base.

The Bank of England, for its part, went even deeper into uncharted territory, with its assets as a percentage of GDP surpassing the Fed’s. By the same measure, the ECB has overtaken the Bank of Japan, which has been grappling with deflation for some two decades and started from a much higher level.

Economists at times fancy themselves scientists – and they like to borrow from scientific lingo to lend their theories some extra gravitas.

The U.S. unemployment crisis is a case in point. There is a long-running debate among economists as to whether the bulk of joblessness is cyclical, resulting from a lack of demand in a depressed phase of the business cycle, or structural, the product of more fundamental issues such as skills mismatches. The latter problem is more intractable, economists say, and less amenable to treatment via an easy monetary policy.

Nearly three years into the economic recovery, the jobless rate remains at a historically elevated 8.2 percent. Moreover, the economy has only made up about 3.6 million of the nearly 9 million lost during the recession. Against this backdrop, there is widespread concern that the U.S. economy might soon reach a point of what economists call (and here’s where the science comes in) “hysteresis.” In physics, the concept is defined as follows:

OK, this time, maybe it was a mistake to do the math.

Concluding the Fed was cooler to more monetary easing by trying to tally policymakers who openly expressed support for further stimulus at the March meeting may have led to a distorted picture of where officials’ views stand. Weak March payrolls data underscore the shakiness of this analysis.

First, let’s run the numbers. Minutes of the Fed’s March meeting revealed that “a couple” participants on the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee thought the economy would need more help from the Fed if things got worse. That head count was a lot smaller than the previous meeting. January minutes had shown “a few” participants thought there should be more easing if things continued as they were. “Other members” at the first meeting of the year had thought the Fed should act if the outlook got worse.

So, comparing the two meetings, some people, including this reporter, thought it was fair to assume that “a couple” was less than “a few” plus “other members.”

Avast ye swabs! Maybe the disconnect between improving labor markets and sluggish economic growth that  has Federal Reserve policymakers scratching their heads makes sense if viewed through a pirate’s spyglass – with a lot of latitude, according to a top Fed official.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard sees the 8.3 unemployment rate continuing to fall at a sprightly pace. That’s even though Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has fretted the jobless rate’s precipitous tumble since August, when it was 9. 1 percent, doesn’t square with the relatively modest pace of growth.

Bernanke has explained that according to a rule of thumb that has currency among economists, Okun’s Law, the jobless rate shouldn’t  fall much if growth doesn’t exceed the economy’s long-run average. So he and others at the Fed find it hard to be confident a growth rate of around 2 percent – the forecast for the first three months of the year – can do much to boost hiring.

A Fed economist for nearly two decades, San Francisco Fed President John Williams also taught for half a year at Stanford’s Business School in 2008, but on Tuesday, his students appeared to be only half listening.

When Williams took the podium a warm, sunny day at the University of San Diego’s School of Business Administration, he argued that the U.S. central bank must press on with its easy money policy to boost the economy. The recovery is growing too slowly to trim unemployment very quickly, he told the audience of perhaps 200 students and professors, and inflation is set to fall below the Fed’s 2 percent target. The Fed, he emphasized, is nowhere close to raising rates.

After taking a few questions from students,Williams left to chat with reporters and then to head to the airport for his flight back home. Then, with the help of economists from the San Francisco Fed, students held a mock Fed policy-setting panel.