Tag Archives: paul krugman

The Rate Of Saving In Wynne Godley’s Models

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In Krugman’s blog post which is dismissive of Wynne Godley’s work (referred in my previous post) he (Krugman) makes the following claim:

First involved consumption spending. Conventional Keynesian consumption functions suggested that the savings rate would rise as incomes rose — and this wasn’t just the Keynesian interpreters, Keynes himself made the same claim.

which shows that Krugman has less clue about what he talks. Funny, the profession is ruled by clowns like him.

In Wynne Godley’s models, there is a propensity to consume out of income and out of wealth – represented in his models by the parameters α1 and α2 and the rate of saving in any period is given by the model. So in the simplest model – for example in Godley’s book with Marc Lavoie Monetary Economics, the rate of saving can has the following dynamic:

Disposable Income - G&L

Rate Of Saving - G&L

(image screenshot via amazon.com “Look Inside”)

(Note: In the above model, money is the only asset). This is starting from scratch but similar behaviour can be seen if one starts with some initial self-consistent configuration.

This is contrary to what Paul Krugman claims of Keynesian models. The above shows how the rate of saving first rises and then starts to fall and this whole adjustment will happen with a time lag given by a “stock-flow norm” and can be fast.

The reason it happens is simple. It is clear Krugman doesn’t realize the underlying stock-flow dynamics. As households’ saving and income rises because of a rise in government expenditure, they are also accumulating wealth. So a scenario where saving rises forever is meaningless because they would start consuming from their wealth as well.

Krugman continues:

This, in turn, led to predictions of rising savings rates after World War II, and hence a persistent shortage of demand — hence the secular stagnation theory briefly prominent. (There was even an early Heinlein novel built in part around the secular stagnation theory. As I recall, it was pretty bad.)

which is quite wrong – as stock-flow consistent dynamics suggests otherwise.

I’ll hold it to make any generic statements but it is clear that Krugman doesn’t know a thing or two about Keynesian Macroeconomics 🙂

*Many times standard textbooks use a Keynesian consumption function of the form

C = α0 + α1·YD

where C is the consumption, and YD is the disposable income.

It is then easy to see that C/YD decreases with YD and this is what Krugman is talking of.

However only slight improved modification where the consumption function depends on wealth as well leads to a different behaviour as highlighted in the main text. So it is strange Krugman dismisses consumption functions and instead talks of “failures that it seemed could have been avoided by thinking more in maximizing terms” !

*I thank Nick Edmonds in pointing this out.

Wynne Godley: The Keynes Of Flow Of Funds

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Monetary and financial data, so far as they are based on institutional balance sheets and prices in organized markets, are abundant. Modern machines have made it possible to improve, refine and expand the compilation of these data, and also to seek empirical regularities in financial behavior in the magnitude of individual observations. On the aggregate level, the Federal Reserve Board has developed a financial accounting framework, the “flow of funds,” for systematic and consistent organization of the data, classified both by sector of the economy (households, nonfinancial business, governments, financial institutions and so on) and by type of asset or debt (currency, deposits, bonds, mortgages, and so on). Although many people hope that this organization of data will prove to be as powerful an aid to economic understanding as the national income accounts, this hope has not yet been fulfilled. Perhaps the deficiency is conceptual and theoretical; as some have said, the Keynes of “flow of funds” has yet to appear.

– James Tobin in Introduction (pp xii-xiii) in Essays In Economics, Volume 1: Macroeconomics, 1987.

[bolding: mine]

Paul Krugman writes in his blog responding to a recent Times article on Wynne Godley with a dismissive tone with mischaracterisation on saving etc. He writes:

But it is kind of funny to see a revival of old-fashioned macro hailed, at least by some, as the key to a reconstruction of the field.

Strange. First it is the story of a journalist from NYT who presented it the way it was. The NYT article was fine – what more can we ask from the journalists? But the funny thing is Krugman’s blog post itself which appeals to Friedmanism. Even funnier is the fact that Paul Krugman himself has turned to Keynesianism in recent times and talks about Michal Kalecki but when it suits his purpose, he dismisses Godley’s ideas as old fashioned!

Paul Krugman in his debates with heteredox economists has been exposed with his poor understanding of the nature of money. Wynne Godley’s approach on the other hand goes into a detailed look at the nature of money using the flow of funds among other things in a Keynesian way.

Now Krugman’s post is hardly a critique of any sort to deserve a response. But I thought quoting James Tobin is a good way to advertise Wynne Godley’s work because he has achieved what Tobin dreamed of and could not do it himself.

Also Wynne’s own idea about his work and aims can be seen from his writing in his article Keynes And The Management Of Real National Income And Expenditure, (in Keynes And The Modern World, ed. George David Norman Worswick and James Anthony Trevithick, Cambridge University Press, 1983):

… I have been forced to the conclusion that Keynes was a long way from achieving a coherent theoretical basis for maintaining them [correct ideas], and largely for this reason, his ideas have proved very vulnerable to the attacks from many different directions to which they have been subjected, particularly in the last fifteen years.

Wynne Godley’s work lays the foundation for Keynesian Economics. And Wynne Godley is the Keynes of flow of funds.

Correction: I am mistaken about Jonathan Schlefer’s background. He is in academics.

Games Economists Play

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The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

– Joan Robinson, 1955, “Marx, Marshall And Keynes”, Occasional Paper No. 9, The Delhi School of Economics, University Of Delhi, Delhi.

It is fun to watch what economists have to say after the recent Reinhart-Rogoff episode and look at their behaviour.

To be brutally straightforward, I think economists are playing games here to mislead and deceive everyone. Mainstream economists in the past few days have been trying their best to persuade everyone into believing that they are modest people and economics is a hard science* and it’s two outliers who have misled politicians into worldwide austerity etc.

So we hear Mark Thoma saying something like lack of sufficient data prevents economists from choosing the best model. It gives the impression that mainstream economists broadly know how the world works and that they are just unable to give the best solution from a pack of 10 good models. But it hides the fact that at the most elementary level, macroeconomists struggle to even understand basic macroeconomics and that there exists a supreme Post-Keynesian alternative.

In a recent NYT blog post Destructive Creativity Paul Krugman tries his best to mislead everyone about the status of macroeconomics.

According to him:

If you stayed with Econ 101, you got it right, if you went with the trendy stuff you made a fool of yourself.

It is the most inaccurate statement about the state of macroeconomics and reflects poorly on someone who has written articles such as A Dark Age Of Macroeconomics. Econ 101 – as taught in most universities – is deeply misleading and erroneous.

I won’t go into how chimerical macroeconomics is because there are already a few good blogs there. This post is not about attempting to prove how economics taught at universities is chimerical but to point out games economists play.

Krugman tries to play a supergame on top of what other economists are doing. He says:

You can already see quite a few people reacting to this affair by declaring that macro is humbug, we don’t know anything, and we should just ignore economists’ pronouncements. Some of the people saying this are economists themselves!

No, this is misleading. Mainstream economists are not saying this really but are playing games. Those who have been saying that mainstream economics is a chimera have been saying this for a long time. There is hardly any new entrant in this from within the orthodox community. And Krugman tries to defend the subject itself:

What we have experienced since 2007 is a series of huge policy shocks — and basic macroeconomics made some very counterintuitive predictions about the effects of those shocks. Unprecedented budget deficits, the model said, would not drive up interest rates. A tripling of the monetary base would not cause runaway inflation. Sharp government spending cuts wouldn’t free up resources for the private sector, they would depress the economy more than one-for-one, so that private spending as well as public would fall.

There are three things wrong about this. First, basic macroeconomics did not make these predictions. Second, Krugman – as he has done in the past – is saying that in liquidity trap situations exceptions appear and more importantly he knew it beforehand! Third, Krugman says Econ 101 notes the exception.

(Some great tactics to avoid saying that Econ 101 is garbage).

Of course some points should be given to Krugman because he has been saying things which are different from most of his colleagues but it is incorrect and thoroughly misleading and to say that Econ 101 survives the crisis.

*of course true that Macroeconomics is hard but read Luigi Pasinetti’s Keynes And The Cambridge Keynesians: A Revolution In Economics To Be Accomplished.

“It’s remarks like that which explain why people hate economists!”

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A lot of heterodox economists are sympathetic to Paul Krugman because he seems to have argued for fiscal expansion.

Ha!

First, we are in this mess because of people like Paul Krugman who has promoted free trade – which has been destructive to the world economy as a whole and has prevented debtor nations from engaging in fiscal expansion to reflate their economies. The creditor nations won’t reflate their economies by fiscal expansion so easily – just barely the minimal needed to prevent social tensions from building up – because they don’t want to become debtors down the road. They overdo this but free trade has created this situation in the first place.

This crisis has made nations realize the importance of exports in growth and nations will want to improve their international investment position should there be growth in the rest of the world and they will want to wait sufficiently for exports to improve before expanding domestic demand. This creates a game theory like problem for growth of the world as a whole.

Now, Krugman is a smart man. He will make it look as if he was not all that dogmatic. And now ridicules everyone who opposes fiscal expansion. While it is good in a sense because the world needs a worldwide fiscal expansion (but this needs to be coordinated at least), it is nowhere close to the simplistic solutions Krugman presents with his comical IS/LM diagrams and liquidity trap theories and confusions with his notions of exogenous money – which is only a smart way of defending his earlier positions – even though we hear frequent Mea Culpas on his blog.

I came across this article by William Greider – Why Paul Krugman Is So Wrong in which he reminds the readers of how the mania of free trade has been promoted by Paul Krugman and how he has ridiculed everyone showing dissent.

It is generally nice in parts and is worth reading. I like the part in which Greider says that even though free trade has created problems for the United States, it wants to get out of the problems by promoting more free trade!

I am also reminded of a sacred tenet article of Paul Krugman making the case for free trade. The article titled Ricardo’s Difficult Idea not only ridicules anyone arguing against free trade but also gives out strategies on how to promote it.

Here is one paragraph which is worth quoting:

During the NAFTA debates I shared a podium with an experienced, highly regarded U.S. trade negotiator, a strong NAFTA suppporter [sic]. At one point a member of the audience asked me what I thought the effect of NAFTA would be on the number of jobs in the United States; when I replied “none”, based on the standard arguments, the trade official exploded in anger: “It’s remarks like that which explain why people hate economists!”

I like this quote by Francis Cripps from an article in The Guardian from 27 Feb 1979: Economists With A Mission:

Francis Cripps - If Economists Did Not Exist

A Quiz On National Accounts

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Recently CNBC asked Paul Krugman to argue against government spending which provoked Krugman to write a blog post Zombies On CNBC.

Krugman is asked – how high can government expenditure go – 100%?

Okay two theoretical questions which are purely theoretical – nothing much to do with the discussion above.

  1. Can government expenditure be greater than 100% of gdp?
  2. Economists use the phrase net investment to describe investment net of consumption of fixed capital (“depreciation”). This can go negative if the consumption of fixed capital is higher than gross investment. This happened in the United States in 2009 – for example because of the deflationary environment. The System of National Accounts uses the phrase “gross fixed capital formation” and in quarterly gdp news release you see this phrase being used than investment. Can this go negative for an economy as a whole?

The fact that I have asked the two questions means the answer is likely yes.

So how?

Comments welcome – although I do not publish them.

Not In His Lifetime, Says Krugman :(

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Paul Krugman was in Spain recently.

In this video which has a lot of discussion on the European crisis, Krugman says that the ideal solution for the Euro Area will be federal but doesn’t hope to see it in his lifetime unless advances in medical sciences is made which will make him live longer. (Time: 1:22:36)

click to watch the video on YouTube

He rightly points that a degree of trust required to do so.

This is lacking and someone really needs to build this!

Also, from NIESR (link updated to one from July 2014, as the original link doesn’t work), the pace of the recovery compared in various deflationary episodes in the UK’s history:

Open Mouth Operations

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In the previous post Is Paul Krugman A Verticalist?, I discussed the confusions economists and market commentators have on open market operations. Even top economists such as Krugman suffer from confusions on central banking and monetary matters.

I also mentioned the work of Alfred Eichner on bringing out more clarity on the defensive nature of open market operations. Let’s look at these matters more closely.

Before this let’s look at what people in general think. Most people think of open market operations as some kind of extra activity on the part of the central bank in collaboration with the bureau of engraving and printing and think of it as operational implementation of Milton Friedman’s helicopter drops! So when a central bank such as the Federal Reserve changes its target on interest rates – such as lowering the “Fed Funds target rate”, people start commenting as if the Federal Reserve is undertaking a mystical operation.

This is Monetarist or Verticalist intuition. It is easy to show that open market operations have nothing to do with fiscal policy and as we saw in the previous blog – very little with monetary policy itself. The open market operation of the central bank is not an income/expenditure flow such as government expenditure flows or tax flows and the former does not affect the net worth of the change the net worth of either the domestic private or the foreign sector. Hence it is hardly fiscal. Yet commentators and economists keep arguing that the central bank is “injecting money” into the economy!

Even Paul Krugman erred on some of these matters and was shown how to do good economics by Scott Fullwiler in his post Krugman’s Flashing Neon Sign. Missing everything Fullwiler was saying, Krugman wrote another post A Teachable Money Moment which has the following diagram:

Below we will see how Krugman’s Neoclassical/New Keynesian (whichever) intuition is flawed.

Setting Interest Rates

These matters (the public understanding) have become worse ever since the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world started purchasing government debt in the open markets on a large scale – in programs called Large Scale Asset Purchases (also called “QE”). In the following I will consider cases when there is no “asset purchase program” by the central bank and tackle this issue later in another post.

A simple case to highlight how a central bank defends an interest rate (as opposed to changing it) is considering the corridor system. There target for overnight rates is usually at the midpoint of this “corridor”. At the lower end of the corridor banks get paid interest on their settlement balances they keep at the central bank while at the upper end it is the rate at which the central bank lends.

Because banks settle among each other on the books of the central bank, this gives the latter to fix the short-term rates and indirectly influence long term rates.

Why do banks need to settle with each other?

One of the first economists to understand the endogenous nature of money was Sir Dennis Holme Roberston who used to work for the Bank of England. In 1922, he wrote a nice book simply titled Money.

 From page 52:

. . . If A who banks at bank X pays a cheque for £10 to B who banks at bank Y, then Bank Y, when it gets the cheque from B, will present it for payment to Bank X: and bank X will meet its obligation by drawing a cheque for £10 on its chequery at the Bank of England. As a matter of fact, the stream of transactions of this nature between big banks is so large and steady in all directions that the banks are enabled to cancel most of them out by an institution called the clearing-house:  but the existence of these chequeries at the Bank of England facilitates the payment of any balance which it may not be possible at the moment to deal with in this way …

Because banks finally settle at the central bank finally, central banks have learned since their creation that they can set interest rates. This is strongest at the short end of the “yield curve” but directly or indirectly central banks also influence long term rates.

At the end of each day, some banks will be left with excess of settlement balances (if they see more inflows than outflows) and some banks will face the opposite situation. Because they need to satisfy a reserve requirement at the central bank (which can be zero as well), some banks would need to borrow funds from others. Borrowing means paying back with interest and this is where the central bank’s ability to target rates comes enters the picture.

For suppose some bank X needs funds and other banks wish to lend bank X at a very high interest rate. In this scenario bank X can simply borrow from the central bank, while other banks who demanded higher interest will see themselves with excess settlement balances earning less than the target rate. So it would have been better for the latter to have lent than keep excess balances. (Of course the qualifier is that these things are valid under scenarios when there is less stress on the financial system). Also with the same logic, the rate at which banks lend each other will not fall below the corridor because it will be foolish of a bank to have lent settlement balances to another bank when it could have earned higher by just keeping excess settlement balances at the central bank.

Here is a diagram from the post Corridors And Floors In Monetary Policy from FRBNY’s blog which explains central bank’s operations:

The other system as per this post is the floor system – in which the central bank’s target is the interest paid on settlement balances itself, rather than the midpoint of any corridor. This is what has been followed by the US Federal Reserve in recent times.

Back to the corridor system, an important question arises. Hopefully the reader is convinced that the overnight rate at which banks lend each other is between the corridor. However it is still unclear how and why the central bank can keep it at the midpoint.

If the central bank and the bankers understand the system well, it is possible for the central bank to be quite perfect in this. This happens for example in the case of Canada, where the bank is quite accurate in its objective.

The reason is that the central bank can easily add and subtract settlement balances by various means.

Take an example. Suppose the interest on reserves is 2.25%, the target is 3.00% and the discount rate – the rate at which the central bank lends overnight – 3.75%. If the central bank observes that banks are lending each other at 3.25% – slightly away from the target of 3.00%, it can simply create excess balances. Among the many ways, there are two –

  1. purchase/sale of government securities and/or repurchase/reverse repurchase agreements.
  2. shifts of government deposits from the central bank account into the Treasury’s account at banks or the opposite.

So the central bank knows how the curve in the figure above looks like and adds/subtracts settlement balances by the above methods (mainly). So banks are lending each other at 3.25%, the central bank will add settlement balances; if they are lending each other at 2.75% – the central bank will drain settlement balances.

More generally the “threat” by the central bank is reasonably sufficient to make banks lend at the target!

Open Mouth Operations

Let us suppose the central bank had been targeting 3.00% for three months now and decides to decrease rates.

What does it do?

Almost nothing!

The announcement itself will make banks gravitate toward the new target!

In his paper Monetary Base Endogeneity And The New Features Of The Asset-Based Canadian And American Monetary Systems, Marc Lavoie says:

When they [central banks] are not accommodating—that is, when they are pursuing “dynamic” operations as Victoria Chick (1977, p. 89) calls them—central banks will increase (or decrease) interest rates. As shown above, to do so, they now need to simply announce a new higher target overnight rate. The actual overnight rate will gravitate toward this new anchor within the day of the announcement. No open-market operation and no change whatsoever in the supply of high-powered money are required.

Hence the term “open mouth operations” which was coined by Julian Wright and Greame Guthrie in their paper Market-Implemented Monetary Policy with Open Mouth Operations.

Open Market Operations

The above paper by Marc Lavoie is an excellent source for open market operations and looking at central banking from an endogenous money viewpoint.

I mentioned in the previous post that the open market operations are defensive. In my analysis in this post till now, I ignored the factors which cause settlement balances of the banking sector as a whole to change. Let us bring in this complication.

Apart from banks, the Treasury – the domestic government’s fiscal arm – and other institutions such as foreign central banks, governments and international official institutions (such as the IMF) also keep an account at the (domestic) central bank. When these institutions transact, there is an addition/subtraction of banks’ settlement balances at the central banks.

Here’s one example. Suppose the Treasury transfers funds of $1m to a contractor for settlement of a project done by the latter. When the funds are transferred, the contractor’s bank account increases by $1m and the bank in which he banks sees its deposits and settlement balances rise by $1m while the central bank will reduce the Treasury’s deposits by $1m.

This may lead to a deviation of banks’ lending rate to each other and the central bank needs to drain reserves. The central bank can achieve this by shifting government funds at a bank into the central bank account. If the central bank transfers $1m of funds, banks’ deposits and settlement balances reduce by $1m and the Treasury’s account at the central bank will increase by $1m.

This is not an “open market operation” but another way of adding/draining reserves. In general, depending on institutional setups, the central bank may also do purchase/sale of government securities and/or repurchase agreements.

But this has nothing to do with policy itself – rather it is to maintain status quo. (Of course “large scale asset purchases” is a slightly different matter – first one needs to understand the corridor system).

In other words, this is a defensive behaviour on part of the central bank.

Alfred Eichner

In the previous post and in Alfred Eichner And Federal Reserve Operating Procedures, I mentioned about the contribution of Eichner. In an essay in honour, Alfred Eichner, Post Keynesians, And Money’s Endogeneity – Filling In The Horizontalist Black Box, (from the book Money And Macrodynamics – Alfred Eichner And Post-Keynesian Economics) Louis-Philippe Rochon says:

For Eichner, the overall or “primary objective [of the central bank], in conducting its open market operations, is to ensure the liquidity of the banking system,” which applies to either the accommodating or defensive roles. In either case, Eichner argues that “the Fed’s open market operations are largely an endogenous response to . . . the need both to offset the flows into and out of the domestic monetary-financial system and to provide banks with the reserves they require”; that is, resulting from the demand for money and the demand for credit respectively (1987, 847, 851).

And while the accommodating argument has been debated at length by post-Keynesians, the defensive role has been virtually ignored and only recently rediscovered (see Rochon 1999). Yet it is certainly Eichner’s greatest contribution to the post-Keynesian theory of endogenous money. . .

. . . The “defensive” behavior is defined by Eichner as the “component of the Fed’s open market operations [consisting] of buying or selling government securities so that, on net balance, it offsets these flows into or out of the monetary-financial system,” leaving the overall amount of reserves unchanged. This is the result of changes in portfolio decisions and increases or decreases in bank (demand) deposits. As a result of an increase in the nonbank’s desire to hold currency, for instance, “in order to maintain bank reserves at the same level, the Fed will need to purchase in the open market government securities equal in value to whatever additional currency the nonbank public has decided to hold” (Eichner 1987, 847).

In making the distinction between temporary and permanent open market operations, Rochon also quotes Scott Fullwiler:

Outright or permanent open market operations are primarily undertaken to offset the drain to Fed balances due to currency withdrawals by bank depositors. . . . Temporary open market operations are aimed at keeping the federal funds rate at its target on average through temporary additions to or subtractions from the quantity of Fed balances. Temporary operations attempt to offset changes in Fed balances due to daily or otherwise temporary fluctuations in the Treasury’s account, float, currency, and other parts of the Fed’s balance sheet, in as much as is necessary to meet bank’s demand for Fed balances. (2003, 857)

Paul Krugman

All this is completely opposite of Paul Krugman’s position that

. . . And currency is in limited supply — with the limit set by Fed decisions.

And Krugman’s mistake is not minor – it seems he is completely unaware of the huge difference money endogeneity makes.

So what is the difference between Krugman’s diagram and the one from FRBNY blog – even though they look similar? The difference is that the latter is descriptive of behaviour when policy is unchanged and is useful for describing open market operations etc while Krugman uses the same to describe policy changes – which in reality happen via open mouth operations. Paul Krugman confuses open market operations and open mouth operations. So much for a “teachable money moment”.

Krugman also shows his Monetarist intuition by claiming:

And which point on that curve it chooses has large implications for the economy as a whole. In particular, the Fed can always choke off a private-sector credit boom by moving up and to the left.

implying that the central bank in reality controls the monetary base and thence the money stock.

Some Post Keynesians argued since long ago that the central bank cannot control the money stock:

Here’s on Wynne Godley from from The Times, 16 June 1978:

(click to enlarge)

Is Paul Krugman A Verticalist?

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24 years back, Basil Moore wrote a book Horizontalists And Verticalists: The Macroeconomics Of Credit Money (Cambridge University Press, 1988) which begins like this:

The central message of this book is that members of the economics profession, all the way from professors to students, are currently operating with a basically incorrect paradigm of the way modern banking systems operate and of the causal connection between wages, prices, on the one hand, and monetary developments, on the other. Currently, the standard paradigm, especially among economists in the United States, treats the central bank as determining the money base and thence the money stock. The growth of the money supply is held to be the main force determining the rate of growth of money income, wages, and prices.

… This book argues that the above order of causation should be reversed. Changes in wages and employment largely determine the demand for bank loans, which in turn determine the rate of growth of the money stock. Central banks have no alternative but to accept this course of events, their only option being to vary the short-term rate of interest at which they supply liquidity to the banking system on demand. Commercial banks are now in a position to supply whatever volume of credit to the economy their borrowers demand.

The book built on his own work and that of Nicholas Kaldor and Marc Lavoie among others goes on to describe the banking system, horizontalism and endogenous money. Money is credit-led and demand-determined was his message. Economists believing in the “incorrect paradigm” are Verticalists in Moore’s terminology.

Paul Krugman whom Post Keynesian have more respect than other mainstream economists probably disappointed them when he was arguing with Steve Keen in a 3-post blog series. Arguing like a Verticalist, Krugman claims (among other Verticalist claims) in his post Banking Mysticism, Continued:

… And currency is in limited supply — with the limit set by Fed decisions. So there is in fact no automatic process by which an increase in bank loans produces a sufficient rise in deposits to back those loans, and a key limiting factor in the size of bank balance sheets is the amount of monetary base the Fed creates — even if banks hold no reserves.

The Defensive Nature Of Open Market Operations

The reason there is widespread misunderstanding of what the central bank does is because it carries out open market operations where it buys or sells government securities or does repurchase agreements. The orthodox view is that the central bank is acting the way it is to increase or decrease the amount of banks’ settlement balances and this affects the money supply – allowing banks to expand lending or leading them to contract – and thence the whole economy. The view is that the central bank has a direct control these operations and are purely volitional.

This is an incorrect view because no central bank claims to be “controlling” the money stock.

If money is truly endogenous, the question is why the central bank does these operations often. The reason is that operations of the central bank are defensive. 

In his article Endogenous Money: Accomodationist, Marc Lavoie argues:

Some post-Keynesians have pointed out long ago that open market operations had little or nothing to do with monetary policy.

For instance, It is usually assumed that a change in the Fed’s holdings of government securities will lead to a change, with the same sign attached, in the reserves of the commercial banking system. It was the failure to observe this relationship empirically which led us, in constructing the monetary financial block of our model, to try to find some other way of representing the effect of the Fed’s open market operations on the banking system. (Eichner, 1986, p. 100)

That other way is that ‘the Fed’s purchases or sales of government securities are intended primarily to offset the flows into or out of the domestic monetary-financial system’ (Eichner, 1987, p. 849).

So the central bank purchases government bonds and/or does repos to neutralize the effects of transactions which change the settlement balances. One example is the flow of funds into and out of the government’s account at the central bank. Another is the demand for currency notes by banks to satisfy their customers’ needs. The central bank has no choice but to provide these notes.

Here’s a preview via Google Books:

click to view on Google Books

Also see this post Alfred Eichner And The Federal Reserve Operating Procedures.

Krugman is partly right when he says, “Banks are important, but they don’t take us into an alternative economic universe.” However he fails to see that money is endogenous and the way the banking system works show this endogeneity.

Of course, Steve Keen has issues with his models and accounting with which Krugman has troubles. Keen defines aggregate demand to be gdp plus “change in debt”. As much weird this definition is, it is double counting when investment expenditure is financed by borrowing rather than internal sources of funds. Also, if a person sells a home to another person who has financed this purchase by borrowing and the former does not make expenditure from this income, this does not increase aggregate demand – a point raised by Marc Lavoie here (h/t “Circuit” from Fictional Reserve Barking). But as per Keen’s definition it does. In his first post, Krugman seems to say the same thing as Lavoie – but in a roundabout way.

The resulting debate has however highlighted the Verticalist intuition of Krugman!

Krugman, Wolf And Goodhart

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Paul Krugman has a blog  post today titled Death By Accounting Identity, commenting on Martin Wolf’s FT Article Why cutting fiscal deficits is an assault on profits, where Wolf talks about the sectoral balances identity made famous by Wynne Godley. I guess the better way to put it is that Martin Wolf is trying to make the accounting identity famous.

A Damascene Moment

In his book with Marc Lavoie, Wynne Godley wrote in his part of Background memories (by W.G.)

… In 1970 I moved to Cambridge, where, with Francis Cripps, I founded the Cambridge Economic Policy Group (CEPG). I remember a damascene moment when, in early 1974 (after playing round with concepts devised in conversation with Nicky Kaldor and Robert Neild), I first apprehended the strategic importance of the accounting identity which says that, measured at current prices, the government’s budget deficit less the current account deficit is equal, by definition, to private saving net of investment. Having always thought of the balance of trade as something which could only be analysed in terms of income and price elasticities together with real output movements at home and abroad, it came as a shock to discover that if only one knows what the budget deficit and private net saving are, it follows from that information alone, without any qualification whatever, exactly what the balance of payments must be. Francis Cripps and I set out the significance of this identity as a logical framework both for modelling the economy and for the formulation of policy in the London and Cambridge Economic Bulletin in January 1974 (Godley and Cripps 1974). We correctly predicted that the Heath Barber boom would go bust later in the year at a time when the National Institute was in full support of government policy and the London Business School (i.e. Jim Ball and Terry Burns) were conditionally recommending further reflation! We also predicted that inflation could exceed 20% if the unfortunate threshold (wage indexation) scheme really got going interactively. This was important because it was later claimed that inflation (which eventually reached 26%) was the consequence of the previous rise in the ‘money supply’, while others put it down to the rising pressure of demand the previous year. …

I believe Wynne Godley discovered this identity while working for the British Treasury in the ’60s – at least the identity relating two sectors – domestic private sector and the government sector, but the damascene moment happened in 1974. The accounting identity is also used heavily in his 1983 book Macroeconomics, with Francis Cripps.

Charles Goodhart

Charles Goodhart also seems to be making use of the accounting identity (and a mental model built around this identity) in his recent Voxeu post Europe: After the Crisis. The difference is that in Charles Goodhart’s writing, fiscal policy is given less importance than monetary policy.

He talks of three implicit and incorrect assumptions:

  • The first, and most important, incorrect assumption was that a private-sector deficit in any country, matched by a capital inflow (current account deficit), should not be potentially destabilising.

The thinking was that the private sector must have worked out how to repay its debts before incurring them.

  • The second misguided assumption was that, in a single monetary system, local current account conditions not only cannot be calculated, but do not matter.
  • The third was that the public sector deficit of a member country is just as damaging when it is matched by a national private sector surplus, as by capital inflows.

I think each of these points is really insightful.

The first assumption is reminiscent of the economic agent in models who has a perfect foresight. The agent must have seen the future very well and would have calculated well in advance that things will go well. Consolidate all agents and we have the first assumption.

The second assumption is extremely well presented. People, especially economists asked – if the states in the United States used the same currency, why not Europe? The pitfall in this assumption is assuming away the U.S. Federal Government which makes fiscal transfers without anyone noticing.

The third assumption has to do with the lack of understanding the various causalities linking the three financial balances.Goodhart also goes into providing ideas for the design of “The fiscal counterpart to a monetary union”. One point I liked was on transfer dependency: 

For a stabilisa­tion instrument to be pure and effective, three principles are key (see Goodhart and Smith 1993 for details):

  • The instrument should be triggered following changes in economic activity but its intervention should be halted as soon as no further changes occur, irrespective of the level at which the economy has again become stable.

Otherwise, the instrument would perform not only a stabilisation function, but also play a redistribu­tive role. Such an ‘impurity’ is typical for traditional fiscal policy measures, but should be avoided in the Community context as it may perpetuate adjustment problems and induce transfer dependency.

….

Goodhart also makes a nice point on Japan – something (a part of it) you can see me writing in the Chartalists’ blogs’ comments section:

This analysis implies that the Eurozone needs a wholesale reorientation of the stability conditions. They must be refocused towards concern with external debt, and deficit, conditions and much less single-minded focus on the public sector finances.

If a member country is in a Japanese condition with a huge public-sector debt, but fully financed domestically, with a current-account surplus and large net external assets, then its debt should entirely be its own concern, and not subject to censure or control by any outside body, whether in a monetary union, or not. Of course, such greater attention to external, especially current-account, conditions needs to be more nuanced, since deficits, and external debts, incurred to finance tradeable goods production subsequently should provide the extra goods to sell to pay off such debts.

Japan’s public debt of 200% of GDP is quoted in rhetoric about public debt, but it is forgotten that Japan is a creditor nation and hence not always great to compare it with other nations.

Another recent article by Goodhart starts off well:

There are two main problems to be faced in any attempt to improve the architecture of international macro‐economic and financial oversight. The first is structural; the second is analytical. The first difficulty resides in the discord between having a system of national sovereignty at the same time as an international market economy, …