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Why fiat money means higher inflation & why a radical Reserve Bank review is needed w/ Darren Brady Nelson – EP179

In his recent Spectator Australia article, Darren Brady Nelson argues for a radical, not a reserved review of Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which he describes as reckless. In Economics Explored episode 179, Darren provides an Austrian economics perspective on central banks, fiat money, and inflation. Show host Gene Tunny wraps up the episode with a discussion of the historical evidence on different monetary systems and inflation, evidence which confirms economies with fiat money are much more inflation prone. Gene then discusses whether a return to the gold standard would be desirable. 

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You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

What’s covered in EP179

  • Darren’s thoughts on the current review of the Reserve Bank of Australia [1:46]
  • How the RBA interprets the stability of the currency objective [6:54]
  • What is the Austrian School? [10:19]
  • Would the Austrians recommend abolishing the central bank? [21:08]
  • The Bank of England’s report on modern banking [25:54]
  • The need for a broader review of the Reserve Bank of Australia [30:35]
  • Fiat money systems are much more prone to inflation than commodity money systems [34:20]

Links relevant to the conversation

Darren’s bio on the Economics Explored website:

https://economicsexplored.com/regular-guests/

Darren’s opinion piece on the Spectator Australia website:

The RBA (reckless bank of Australia) needs a radical, not reserved, review

Bank of England paper on money creation:

Money creation in the modern economy | Bank of England  

Minneapolis Fed paper on fiat money, commodity money, and inflation:

Money, Inflation, and Output Under Fiat and Commodity Standards | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

US Gold Commission Report 

Minority report of the Gold Commission, co-authored by Ron Paul:

The Case for Gold: Minority Report of the US Gold Commission 1982  

Alan Greenspan’s autobiography discusses his advice to President Reagan regarding gold:

The Age of Turbulence

Another great book on Greenspan which discusses Friedman’s views too:

The Man who Knew: The LIfe & Times of Alan Greenspan

*You can help support the show by buying a copy of either book via the links above. 

Transcript: Why fiat money means higher inflation & why a radical Reserve Bank review is needed w/ Darren Brady Nelson – EP179

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:06

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Hello, thanks for tuning in to the show. This is episode 179. In this episode, I chat with my old friend Darren Brady Nelson about his recent spectator Australia opinion piece on the Reserve Bank of Australia. Darren’s piece is titled The RBA reckless Bank of Australia needs a radical not reserved for review. Although Darren’s article focuses on Australia’s Central Bank, the issue is considered irrelevant to central banks around the world such as the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. Before we get into it, I should note that Darren is coming from a non mainstream school of thought known as Austrian economics. While it’s outside of mainstream economic thinking, I think the Austrian perspective is valuable. Nonetheless, it’s forced me to confront some of the things I take for granted about the modern mixed economy, such as fiat money and the existence of a central bank at all. I’ve had to think more deeply about whether they make sense. Please stick around to the end for some additional thoughts from me. Okay, let’s get into the episode. Darren Brady Nelson, welcome back to the show.

Darren Brady Nelson  01:46

Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a while now actually.

Gene Tunny  01:48

It has Yes, I’ve given you a breakdown. And I’ve tried to get here a broad range of guests on the show. But yes, sir. Good to have you back on the show to chat about some recent work that you’ve done. So work in both public finance or fiscal policy, you could say, and monetary policy. Darren, so we’ve got a monetary policy review in Australia at the moment, and you’ve written a piece on the monetary policy review. And could you just tell us what your thoughts are on that review, please?

Darren Brady Nelson  02:21

Well, look, just to step back slightly from that, you know, I’ve kind of been disappointed over, you know, probably the course of a decade or something like that, that, you know, obviously, it’s good to have a variety of different takes on things like the Reserve Bank are obviously, you know, this review, that’s, you know, nearing the end, I believe the reporting to government next month. But, you know, there’s, there’s this never been, you know, look, I’d love to see kind of more of an Austrian take on things, at least once in a while in the Australian media, or even in Australian think tanks. To tell you the truth, I’d settle for a bit of a Chicago take on things and you just don’t get really neither of those takes for the most part, certainly not in the media. You know, look, I’ve never had a chance to read our friend, Tony, Megan’s take on the Reserve Bank. I know, he wrote an article for spectator, just like the article I’ve just written is meant to be published soon by the spectator, Australia. So I’m not sure his his exact take, and maybe you can tell me if you’ve read his article, I’m not sure, Gene, if you can give a little bit of overview of what how he viewed things, but so I just wanted to kind of bring a little bit of a, you know, an Austrian, take two things, in terms of, you know, linking sort of, you know, the Reserve Bank, the money supply and inflation, in a nutshell. And also, I found that people often didn’t kind of step back. And they, they vaguely mentioned what the Reserve Bank is supposed to do, and kind of leave it at that just kind of go into in to have a very different take than what I wanted to give. So, as not only an economist, but also a former law student, I also wanted to kind of start out and go, Hey, this is, you know, this is what, you know, the legislation says, for instance, about the Reserve Bank, and what they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, and then kind of jump in to, you know, like I said, sort of an Austrian economics take on things and, and also kind of stir the hornet’s nest a little bit, you know, by using a little bit of satire at the beginning and at the end of the article.

Gene Tunny  04:29

Right, okay, so yeah, we might get into a few of those things. So what does the law say? What, what does the what was your analysis of the, of the legal underpinnings or what they’re supposed to do under the is it the Reserve Bank act?

Darren Brady Nelson  04:45

Yeah, I mean, some people really just don’t understand what it is, you know, exactly, you know, sort of made that clear this, this is a central bank, you know, they, they basically have a monopoly control over currency in Australia. And you know, people kind of vaguely maybe understand that, but just to make that kind of really clear, you know, this is what it is. It has some other roles, of course, it has, you know, kind of these other banking, regulatory functions, but they really, you know, those are really to support the main goal, which is, obviously, Reserve Bank’s not unusual, it’s a central bank, very similar to the other central banks around the world, like the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve. But just to remind people, Hey, this is, you know, this is a government entity, it has a monopoly on on money, essentially, but at the same time, it’s required to do, you know, in that context, it’s, it has, you know, some of these broader sort of things, it’s three main things, you know, where it goes under Section 10, A, the stability of the currency, the maintenance of full employment, very, you know, 1940s 50s sort of thing that was thrown in, because the, you know, the Reserve Bank act is from 1959. So, you know, very Keynesian sort of thing there. And the other one kind of, you know, somewhat more vaguely, but, you know, still important, obviously, the economic prosperity and welfare, the people of Australia. Now, you know, look, there’s only so much you can say, in an in an article, even though my article is a bit longer than your average op ed, if you like, but there’s even within that there’s so much you could say, and I couldn’t say, but, you know, obviously like to say the audience, I think they got some issues, because these things conflict, or, you know, you can interpret these things and quite different ways. You know, clearly, I think, you know, I would argue, and I do to some extent, at least I think in my piece is, you know, certainly printing the sort of amounts of money that they have, and not just not just recently, and not just since COVID, but actually over a much longer period of time. is, you know, quick, you know, I would question that that really helps the stability of the currency. You know, that seems to me to be at least something questionable. I think it harms the stability of the currency, but I think it’s at least questionable. It also argued that it actually helps out the other two, I don’t think it may help with statistical, full employment. But does it really help with economically efficient, full employment, much less, you know, actual economic prosperity and welfare? Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

Gene Tunny  07:19

I was just thinking it was an interesting point you made about stability, the currency. And you don’t think that the growth of the money supply we’ve seen that the RBA has overseen is consistent with stability of the currency, they have essentially redefined stability of the currency, they now we now define stability, the currency is not zero inflation, we define it as a two to 3% inflation on average over the economic cycle. So we’ve accepted a certain, a small well – I won’t make any judgement a lower than average historical average rate of inflation as the target. That’s what they’re going for. And over the last 30 years, they would argue that they’ve achieved that. And it’s much better than the performance in the post war period prior to that. So they would argue that they’ve done a good job at achieving stability of the currency in that regard. But yeah, it just occurred to me that when you said that that’s in the Reserve Bank act, that they’ve redefined what stability actually means, in turn, using that inflation target.

Darren Brady Nelson  08:24

Yeah, look, I mean, it’s fairly easy to pull up what, for instance, CPI looks like, and it’s an, even though CPI is only accounting for, you know, something like 40% of the economy, and we, you know, it’s a big chunk of the economy, but people have this impression that accounts for 100% of the economy or something like that. So even in that context, it’s not a pretty picture, you know, and we’re not talking about just like, oh, for a quarter or two, or for a year or two, we’re talking over, you know, quite long, you know, timeframes, you know, we’re talking from the basically the 1970s, with some flattening out, I would argue, do some pretty good counter reforms, if you like more that counter reforms that, you know, reforms that, you know, would counter some of the bad effects of, of just, you know, kind of having fairly loose monetary policy. And that not equally loose throughout that whole period of time. But, you know, it’s really, really hasn’t had a Volcker, for instance, you know, that I’m aware of, in the same sort of timeframe that, you know, since Volcker appeared on the scene in the late 70s, and has since left it. So putting aside, you know, again, my pieces and obviously, to go, so, do some technical thing to go like, Well, did they meet their own sort of technical requirements, and then just criticise them that way? Because there’s plenty of articles like that. You know, my aim was to point to the broader thing that just looks money like this. And if you look, I mean, CPI doesn’t look good over time. But if you start looking at money supply, whichever one you want to pick, it’s not a pretty picture.

Gene Tunny  10:00

right. Okay, so can I ask what do you mean by an Austrian Economics take?

Darren Brady Nelson  10:05

Yeah, look at that. So for those who don’t know, Austrian Economics is, I mean, I mean, a lot of people even economist for some reason don’t fully are aware that there’s actually different schools of thought, quite a few different schools of thought. And one of them is the Austrian School. It started with Karl Menger, in the sort of mid to late 1800s. He’s also, you know, attributed along with a couple other economists is kind of starting the marginal revolution as well. In the end, they call it Austrian School, basically, because he is actually from Austria. And then some of the other sort of people who followed him like Bomba Virk, Mises, Hayek, etc, they were also literally from the country of Austria. So I guess that stuck, obviously, is the name of the school of thought. I mean, I mean, the very free market, I argue that the there’s certainly the most free market oriented, I’d argue that they’re not the most free market oriented because they have an ideological stance. So you can always say that, you know, certainly, like someone like Mises, certainly, you know, went to great pains to go like, this is what I think the logic and even the data, even though they’re not sort of like the, they’re not, they use data, they’re not they don’t think data, without theory tells you anything, but they would argue that, you know, they take a scientific approach to things like, you know, like other schools of thought would also argue, and, you know, they have very, they, they have the most comprehensive take on understanding money, basically, including, you know, I mentioned Bomba Virg actually Menger even before that, that even from the start Menger Bomba, Varick and Mises were, were and still are kind of, you know, the greatest thinkers on money. Some may argue that you could put Keynes in that category, you know, that was one of his, you know, one of his big sort of focuses prior to him writing the general theory. But, you know, the Austrians certainly have a lot to say, and I think, a lot of credible things to say, with the, you know, you ultimately agree with them or not, you know, I just want to get those kinds of ideas, you know, out there in the Australian public.

Gene Tunny  12:20

Okay, and what are those ideas, Darren, and how are they relevant to the RBI review?

Darren Brady Nelson  12:25

Well, look, I mean, in a nutshell, and, you know, I’ve used this quote, a million times, it seems, you know, using Milton Friedman, who’s not Austrian, but Chicago School, who him and Anna Schwartz, you know, sort of took a an empirical approach if you like, I mean, I don’t think you’re setting out to, if you, like, test the theories of Mises, and people like that as such, but they confirm that, you know, inflation, it’s a monetary phenomenon. And it’s always in, at least in practice, you know, you know, maybe the Chicago school don’t necessarily agree that in theory, things like central banks, are really the root cause of inflation. They certainly agree that in practice, that’s what actually happened in history. So but the Austrians, like I said, they go, they go one step further, they go in great detail, to set out the case of why central banks are at the centre of, of why we have ongoing inflation. And the only way you’ll ever solve the inflation problem is to do something about central banks, and they would argue you have to do something stronger than just holding them within certain bounds. As you know, the Chicago school would argue,

Gene Tunny  13:38

Rod, okay, and I mean, fiat money is relevant to isn’t it? So you’re yes, you’re saying the the issue is that you’ve got a central bank that has the monopoly on fiat money, the monopoly control of the currency, which is fiat money, and they can just print it, they can create it out of thin air. And we saw that during the pandemic in Australia, when they finally the RBA, finally engaged in quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve had done it previously, the Bank of Japan and Bank of England and ECB, but we hadn’t actually gone that we hadn’t taken that step yet. But we did during the pandemic,

Darren Brady Nelson  14:15

well, the Austrians were there to drag, you know, central banks always are involved in a process and printing money out of nothing. Now, quantitative easing, took it to new levels, makes the new mechanisms, new levels, and then obviously, modern monetary theory sort of opens the floodgates to go further than, you know, quantitative easing, but if you like allow within that sort of framework of thinking, and we may get onto this later on, but, you know, the Bank of England produced a couple, you know, excellent papers that an Austrian or a neoclassical or a Keynesian or Chicago can all appreciate. It takes something out of just like, you know, just clearly setting out how does the central bank work, but also You know, just as importantly, how does the banking system more broadly, in cooperation, if you like, with the central banks operate, you know, How is money created? I mean, I think the, the title of the paper is money creation in the modern economy, you know, that sets it out quite nicely, they have a different view of that, the course they don’t think that’s an issue as such, you know, it provided obviously, or you stay within certain bounds and all that type of thing. But it does set out the fact that, you know, money is being created from nothing, which is quite a different system, to what, you know, say, for instance, the gold standard, you know, the classical gold standard with all its whatever foibles it had, because Austrians would argue that there could have been a better gold standard, but fine, there was a gold standard, and even central banks. Were part of that system previously, if you like, and the Bank of England also nicely sets that out that history as well. Yeah. So basically, again, coming back, you know, the Reserve Bank’s not any different from the Bank of England Federal Reserve, largely speaking, I mean, there are differences, you know, obviously, you know, the Federal Reserve, obviously, they’re different sized economies, different sides, sizes of the Australian dollar, the US dollar being traded around the world, obviously, the US dollar is special in the sense that it’s still the reserve currency for the world. So you know, their, their prolific money printing, they can get away with it a lot better than, you know, a smaller economy or economies, it’s not the reserve currency of the world, you can get away with Australia being does punch above its weight, and its currency is traded a lot more than you would expect for a small country. Because of you know, obviously, Australia is a big player in commodities, for instance. And that kind of part of the reason is, Australia, punches above its weight if you like.

Gene Tunny  16:45

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  17:20

Now back to the show. Now I’m just on the what the RBA review is doing it’s it has rather than a narrower terms of reference is looking at the monetary policy framework inflation targeting is looking at the governance the board, whether we have a separate Monetary Policy Committee, I think that’ll end up being one of the recommendations. And the way that John Humphrys described it to me on his Australian taxpayers Alliance live stream, he just said, Well, look, there’s an Overton window of what it’s going to look at, right? I mean, there’s things that are in the Overton Window, there’s things that are outside, and I think you are advocating that they should they should go outside of that window, they should go outside of what’s conventional and actually think about the role of the the RBA as a central bank, is that the type of thing we need? Is that working for us? Or Are there alternative approaches? Is that what you’re you’re arguing? Darren?

Darren Brady Nelson  18:18

Yeah, look, I think I’ve I pull out some recommendations I did. When for Liberty works at the request of Senator Malcolm Roberts, you know, did a submission to his rural banking inquiry, because he wanted to get on the record. And so did I just kind of some of these broader issues of monetary policy and how they do impact the kind of the more narrow review that he was doing at the time. And, yeah, basically suggests, you know, kind of a three pronged approach, you know, sort of, in a shorter term, doing something, you know, a bit broader than what this current review is doing, but nothing, you know, something that might still be within the Overton Window, as you say, and then, you know, what I’m suggesting over the medium term in the longer term are certainly things that, you know, I guess the average policy person, monetary policy person would think, would be outside the Overton Window, like, you know, the Overton window. It’s a good thing to understand in terms of what is, but it can be a very big obstacle to what should be, but because, because I can point to, you know, the reforms, the Hocking Kingdom reforms of the 19, mid 1980s were, you know, not particularly within the Overton Window, national competition policy when it came along in the early 1990s. Not quite in the Overton window. There’s been a lot of good reforms that that are not in the Overton window. Obviously, you know, there’s obviously a politics involved and making sure that even though it’s not quite the Overton window that you know, you don’t scare the horses too much. And people who who’ve been pushing things In the direction of more and more government interference in the economy, including if you like the more draconian stuff, you know, the the over the top lockdowns, the the censorship, all these sorts of things. Putting aside the fact that no a lot of censorship are done by private companies, but they’re done by the best of government, they’re done by the best of government, if you don’t do it, you know, there’ll be trouble for you, private company. So, you know, it’s it’s certainly not, I don’t think, you know, the libertarians have suggested that, so it’s private property, so doesn’t matter. That’s not right. So, you know, people on the left, in a nutshell, don’t care, a rat’s butt about the Overton window for the most part. They keep on plugging away. And they are largely winning. So which is why I wanted to point out some of these reforms, if you like, went more in the direction of the right centre, right, for instance, including, you know, a Labour Government and including, you know, some liberal governments in the past, things can be done. So the Overton window, you got to be aware of it, you got to understand it. And it’s something you need to deal with, but it shouldn’t be something that just stops you from doing

Gene Tunny  21:08

something. Right. And so what would, what would the Austrians recommend abolition of the central bank? I mean, what would happen? What would you recommend?

Darren Brady Nelson  21:18

But look, you know, look, the Austrians there’s quite a variety of views, even within the look, you know, there’s sort of a high IQ, sort of, like competing currency approach, there’s the Roth bar, it’s more, let’s do a new and improved version of the gold standard, if you like, obviously, these things are digitised. No one’s ever suggesting that, you know, that we carry hunks of gold. That’s fine. If you want to carry hunks of gold with you. You know, it’s probably not going to be a huge market for that. That’s going to be but I mean, they recognise that centuries ago anyway. So like, you know, the gold standard, really, there were people running around with bits of gold with them all the time that that was never the case. You know, because the goldsmith’s figured it out before the official gold standard came around today, certificates, it seemed to be a little bit more convenient, you know, which that’s where actually money came from your paper money, I should say, sorry, paper came from from those certificates. So have John freeze. It, he always has a bee in his bonnet about Murray Rothbard. In particular, his argument that he considers, you know, today’s system of fractional reserve banking to be fraud. You know, from a, from a common law perspective, you know, is that Rothbard is arguing literally, in the laws on the books, that it’s actually fraud. He’s saying, under common law, this would be considered fraud. Yeah, okay, maybe, maybe not. But certainly the market would allow a whole lot of fractional reserve banking, I’m sure there won’t be like a one to one alignment all the time, you know, between, you know, reserves and loans and all that sort of stuff, that’s fine. But there wouldn’t be such a huge disconnect that we have, you know, we’re talking 90% and above disconnect between, you know, safe savings and what’s being lent out, getting back to sort of Rothbard is not given sort of credit for being more practical than he was. Yeah, he goes like, here’s the ideal I want. Yeah, you get rid of central banks, and fractional reserve banking. But any little step in that direction, could be pain. How about is a start? What’s just what’s just audit this thing? And, you know, like they talked about in the US sometimes, so let’s just audit the Federal Reserve. Yeah. What are they up to? How do they do things, but the public know, this is what it is, you know, are you happy with this? Is this make sense? You know, yeah. Do you? Are you happy with the consequent the inflationary consequences? Are you happy with the fact that I mean, this thing is very inexorable. You know, like, it causes the booms and busts as well, at least from an Austrian perspective, because inflation and bubbles, it’s the same thing. Inflation doesn’t uniformly happen. It goes, it ends up in asset bubbles, it goes over here, it goes over there. Some people can make a killing out of really not being very good at what they do. They just, they’re just in the right place at the right time. Now, we’re not talking about discouraging proper entrepreneurialism, sometimes, you know, this is kind of like, you know, sort of not very good, sloppy, property oriented sort of entrepreneurialism. And there’s a lot of it, there’s a lot just, it’s a lot of just kind of transfers from, from the poor to the rich. I mean, let’s just get that all out there and report, I’ll be happy with multiple views, you know, red versus blue type of project, Hey, what are the Keynesian think of this, you know, what are the Austrians think of this, whether neoclassical think of this, you know, you know, get it all out there. And, you know, just make it more transparent would be a great start, rather than this kind of, you know, tweaking at the edges. There’s basically a lot of people in political and business power, who, who obviously liked the system as it is,

Gene Tunny  24:55

or they or they don’t want to, I mean, yeah, they haven’t really thought too deeply about Got it? Yeah, they don’t want to rock the boat too much, perhaps. I think we might have to come back to Rothbard views. That sounds interesting. And because it’s probably we probably don’t have enough time to go into it now. That yeah, I think it’d be worth coming back to that. Because yeah, I’m all for a more wider ranging review. I think it’d be fascinating. I think we chatted about this last time we caught up, but we hadn’t seen the terms of reference yet to the review. And I think you’ve predicted that it’d be quite narrow. And it’d be very, you’d get standard sort of mainstream economists on it as we ended up doing, as we ended up doing. I’m not critical of any of them. I think. But yeah, they could have had a broader terms of reference. For sure.

Darren Brady Nelson  25:44

Just one thing to say that the Rothbard you know, some people go look here, you’re kind of in your libertarian utopia, you don’t understand how the system works. He wrote the very best book on how banking works. modern banking, what’s the book called modern banking, is it? No, it’s called the mystery of banking, the mystery of banking. Okay. It’s in great detail exactly how so it’s basically the Bank of England, you know, they they don’t refer to the mystery of banking, they, but they did a very good job of doing something smaller. Got some really good graphics, you know, in the Bank of England report bits, they’re very much aligned. They just have different conclusions. You know, obviously, they don’t come to the same conclusion that Rothbard does.

Gene Tunny  26:26

Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s the article where they describe how the banks essentially, they’re at the vanguard of creating money, or they’re the, the money supply is endogenous to an extent, because the banks are extending credit. And when they’re extending more new loans and paid back then that’s an expansion of the monetary money supply. Now, the central banks involved, the central bank can influence the money supply. But the banks are heavily in the private banks are heavily involved in it. And I think that’s what they’re arguing with they it’s that endogenous view of the money supply. And yeah, I think it is worth reading. What What was the main takeaway for you out of it, Darren, what the Bank of England wrote, I’m just trying to remember what they what was in those articles.

Darren Brady Nelson  27:16

The main takeaway wasn’t like, wow, I’m surprised. This is how they do it. My main takeaway was, Wow, I’m surprised he said it. And I guess another WoW is Wow, thank you. That’s, you know, they explained it really well. It was a really clear, I mean, rock bards. Book mystery. bankings really big, you know. So, you know, it’s, it’s a tome, it’s huge. So, you know, the Bank of England’s report has both an introduction, if you don’t want to redeem read the more detailed report, but even the more detailed report is nowhere near the size of the mystery of banking, but they’re all saying the same thing in terms of like, describing the process, right. You know, you know, what is central banks do what do the commercial banks to? I mean, so basically, the thing, you know, when right away when someone gets gets a loan, that’s money already. So you’ve just increased the money supply right there. Yeah. They don’t need things to happen. It’s right there. They whack it in your bank account. Obviously, people do all sorts of different things with that. Yeah. But yeah, the right there. So there is one thing I must admit, I figured, you know, fractional reserve banking, or those banks creating money, I knew that I was, you know, over time, I was trying to understand that they were actually printing most of the money. It wasn’t the central banks themselves. But when I saw when I saw the Bank of England, I didn’t realise the percentage was quite as big as it is. They said, 97% 97% of all money. Yeah, in the UK. And it wouldn’t be very different from you know, going to any Western country, it’s probably all gonna be the 90s to some extent, was this, you know,

Gene Tunny  28:54

they actually used the term fountain pen money. Yeah. Okay. So I guess I was even surprised at the size. Right. Yeah. Okay. And so you see that as a, as a confession or just acknowledgement of the Bank of England by the Bank of England of, of how the money supply can grow. And in you’re taking from that, that the system that we have naturally leads to expansion of the money supply into inflation. Is that what you’re inferring? From that, Darren?

Darren Brady Nelson  29:27

Yeah, but basically, it’s, it’s that it’s even more than that. It is literally inflation. But, but obviously, there’s certain levels of inflation, the other can be vary quite a bit. I think it incentivizes, you know, high inflation or certainly, it’s certainly incentivize booms and busts. Yeah, I wouldn’t say necessarily there was a confession or anything like that, but they do actually, early on in the report. Take the method that I certainly read in my economic textbooks, you know, that basically banks are just purely these intermediaries who get savings and then lend them out. Obviously take a little bit of a cut. Okay, fine. That’s, that’s, that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that as a business. Yeah. They basically knock that on the head. Yeah. But interestingly enough, they don’t do it in a way that they say this is bad. But for me, I read it and go, you know, because of my kind of Austrian take on things I go, Well, that’s not good. You know, they’re just kind of, they’re just saying, This is what it is basically, it’s not this. They’re not just simply intermediaries. This is what these banks are. And this is how we, as a central bank, interact with those banks. Again, I think any any economist of any school of thought would find it, you know, an informative paper.

Gene Tunny  30:42

Oh, absolutely. I’ve talked about it on the show before I’ll put some links in the show notes. I think it’s good paper. And yeah, I’ll link to your spectator article. Once it’s out. Gee, Darren, there’s so much to talk about. Really appreciate your time, we dealt with some big issues, and we’ve still got more to talk about. Certainly, I want to come back to Rothbard. Yeah, that’s, uh, I’ll have to have a read of his of his book, and mystery of banking. And, yeah, I really appreciate your time. So thanks once more for coming on to the show.

Darren Brady Nelson  31:15

Thank you for having me.

Gene Tunny  31:26

Okay, I hope you found that informative, and enjoyable. I welcome Darren’s call for a broader review of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Given the importance of the Reserve Bank in the economy, we should be thinking about what presuppositions were making about the bank, and we should subject them to critical thought. The current review of the bank appears to take for granted that the reserve bank should continue as an entity and it should retain its extensive powers under the Reserve Bank Act. The review focuses on the appropriateness of the inflation targeting regime and the governance of the bank, but it should be much broader. The reviews Terms of Reference noted explicitly that the review will exclude the RBS payments, financial infrastructure, banking and bank note functions. Arguably, it would have been desirable to review even these functions of the RBA. So I think Darren is on the right track here. Even if I disagree with him over what a broader review would recommend. There are at least two big related questions that a wider review would consider. First, do we need a central bank? That is Do we need a government owned or authorised bank which acts as a bank for other banks and is ultimately responsible for the currency. Secondly, would commodity backed money where money is convertible to gold at a fixed rate? Would that be preferable to fiat money, where money is decreed to be the legal tender of the land by the government and the money supply is the responsibility of the central bank. In a Wi Fi at money presupposes a central bank or an arm of government such as the Treasury which effectively acts as a bank. But a central bank can exist in a commodity money system too, and indeed several such as the Bank of England and US Federal Reserve. They did exist during the years in which the gold standard was in place or some of the years in which the gold standard was in place. A central bank can perform an important role regardless of the monetary standard in place. As the 19th century British polymath Walter Badgett illustrated in Lombard Street, a central bank and perform an important role by acting as a lender of last resort. That is lending to banks when they temporarily get into trouble. And, you know, saving those banks from collapsing and causing lots of hardship. My view is that a central bank is an indispensable part and an unavoidable part of a modern economy. Regarding the second big question, I wouldn’t recommend a return to commodity money by say reintroducing the gold standard. But I will concede that advocates of a gold standard have some good arguments on their side. These arguments are even more appealing in times of high inflation such as the time we’re now living in. Most importantly, in my view, it is clear that fiat money systems are much more prone to inflation, then commodity money systems. A 1998 study by economists at the Minneapolis Fed found that the average inflation rate for the Fed standard observations so this is observations and the data set they’re analysing the average inflation rate for the Fed standard observations is 9.17% per year. The average inflation rate for the commodity standard observations is 1.75%. That’s a big difference. The data set they use contain data on 15 countries including In the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Argentina and Brazil, among others. Every country in the data set had a higher rate of inflation under a feared standard than a commodity standard. What’s going on is that obviously, there are physical constraints on the amount of commodity money available. It’s limited by the rate at which it can be discovered dug up and produced. Under a feared standard, new money is virtually costless to produce. As Darren and I discussed, the central bank and commercial banks are both involved in new money creation. And it’s possible for the money supply to expand faster than the productive capacity of the economy, leading to inflation, there can be too much money chasing too few goods. This is not to say that you can’t have inflation in a commodity money system. For example, there was prolonged inflation in Spain in in the UK in the 16th and 17th centuries, due to new silver mining and Mexico and Peru following European conquest. Still, as the Minneapolis Fed economists point out the average inflation rates over the period in these countries, it was only around one to 1.2% over 100 to 150 years. That’s one to 1.2% per annum. I’ll link to that study in the show notes so you can check it out. To me, it really clearly shows that fiat money systems are much more prone to inflation and you end up with inflation at higher rates than under a commodity money system. While a commodity standard would yield better inflation outcomes and a feared standard, it would be very difficult to return to say the gold standard. US President Reagan appointed a Gold Commission in 1981. To consider whether the US should return to the gold standard. The majority of the commission rejected such a move, and prominent economists such as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, they advised Reagan against the return to gold. GREENSPAN did, however, suggest issuing some US Treasury bonds backed by gold, something which would provide some fiscal disciplined. He did not, however, advocate a full return to the gold standard. GREENSPAN thought that a return to the gold standard would be impractical given the nature of the modern economy with a large role for government and a welfare state. A gold standard requires fiscal discipline for several reasons, which I might have to cover in a bonus episode. One of these reasons is that under a gold standard, a government can’t rely on future inflation to erode the real value of the debt it owes. In his 2007 autobiography, The Age of turbulence, Greenspan wrote the following. I have always harboured a nostalgia for the gold standards inherent price stability, a stable currency was its primary goal. But I’ve long since acquiesced in the fact that the gold standard does not readily accommodate the widely accepted current view of the appropriate functions of government. In particular, the need for government to provide a social safety net. The propensity of Congress to create benefits for constituents without specifying the means by which they are to be funded, has led to deficit spending in every fiscal year since 1970. With the exception of the surpluses of 1998 to 2001, generated by the stock market boom. The shifting of real resources required to perform such functions has imparted a bias toward inflation. In the political arena, the pressure to make low interest rate credit generally available, and to use fiscal measures to boost employment and to avoid the unpleasantness of downward adjustments in nominal wages and prices has become nearly impossible to resist. For the most part, the American people have tolerated the inflation bias as an acceptable cost of the modern welfare state. There is no support for the gold standard today, and I see no likelihood of its return. Austrian economists would say that Greenspan gave into big government into inflation, and there may be some truth in that. But Greenspan’s position is entirely pragmatic. I’ll put some links in the show notes so you can learn more about this fascinating episode of the Gold Commission, and about Friedman’s and Greenspan’s advice to Reagan. I’ll also add a link to the minority report of the Commission which recommended a return to the gold standard. It was co authored by Ron Paul, the noted libertarian politician. I’ll leave it there for now, but I recognise there are several aspects of monetary economics that I need to explore and explain some more. I think the process of money creation and how the central bank can influence the money supply would be good to go over in some depth, as it’s challenging to understand. My conversation with Darren also reminded me that it would be good to look at how we ended up with inflation. targeting in the first place? Why do we think it’s sensible to have a two to 3% inflation target rather than a zero target? I hope you’ll forgive me if I leave these questions to a future episode. Among other topics in coming episodes, I’ll have a closer look at the growing US China tensions and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. geopolitics obviously can have a big impact on economy, so I think it’s important that I cover it on this show. If there are topics you’d like me to cover in future episodes, please let me know. As always, feel free to email me at contact at economics explored.com Thanks for listening. rato thanks for listening to this episode of economics explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact at economicsexplored.com or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.

41:26

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Credits

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Categories
Podcast episode

Normalization of interest rates & monetary policy – EP173

Last year we saw the beginning of the normalization of interest rates and monetary policy, as central banks responded to accelerating inflation. Show host Gene Tunny talks about the current tightening cycle and when it might end with his colleague Arturo Espinoza. Among other things, Gene and Arturo discuss what history tells us about typical interest rates and returns on capital, referencing UK bank rate since 1694, interest rates on UK government consols, and returns on land written about by Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac. They also consider whether we might see 17-18 percent interest rates again in Australia, rates which were last seen in 1989-90. 

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored

You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

What’s covered in EP173

  • What’s been happening with interest rates? [3:00]
  • What is monetary policy normalization? [6:00]
  • How many more interest rate increases will be needed? [11:11]
  • Will we have a recession this year? [19:12]
  • Is there a risk that we could get back to the crazily high interest rates seen in 1989-90 in Australia? [24:00]
  • What is the equilibrium rate of interest? What is the real interest rate? [26:54]
  • The main takeaway from this episode: monetary policy is still in a tightening cycle because inflation is too high [38:43]

Links relevant to the conversation

Data released since the episode was recorded

Australian retail trade fell 3.9% in December, suggesting interest rate increases are starting to bite, meaning the RBA faces an even more difficult challenge in deciding how many more interest rate increases to make:

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/retail-and-wholesale-trade/retail-trade-australia/dec-2022

CBC article “U.S. inflation and consumer spending eased in December, new numbers show”:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/us-consumer-spending-holidays-1.6728173

Nine News story “Inflation in Australia rises to higher-than-expected 7.8 per cent”:

https://www.9news.com.au/finance/australia-inflation-consumer-price-index-december-quarter/9ef0ed13-e606-4c9e-b7db-feaccfae39fb

Inflation targets

US: 2%; see https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2022/09/02/inflation-part-3-what-is-the-feds-current-goal-has-the-fed-met-its-inflation-mandate

Australia: 2-3%; see https://www.rba.gov.au/inflation/inflation-target.html

UK: 2%; see https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy

Bank of Finland article on monetary policy normalisation:

https://www.bofbulletin.fi/en/2022/3/what-is-monetary-policy-normalisation/

Chatham Financial article on US tightening cycles:

https://www.chathamfinancial.com/insights/historical-interest-rate-tightening-cycles

Jo Masters, Barrenjoey Chief Economist on how “Everything must go right for Australia to dodge a recession”

https://www.afr.com/markets/debt-markets/australia-will-dodge-close-call-recession-20221216-p5c71b

Chart on historical UK bank rate:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NDH7WjQBY0ZjWDWgY430qZdrrIf017_4/view?usp=share_link

Chart on central bank policy interest rates since 1960:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mrzre-ijAKAvrU0j4YeQt71FkTr-gzob/view?usp=share_link

Chart on inflation in the US, UK and Australia:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11lp880Wwb9bk_GI5wJ0EQ975h-ZkAuDK/view?usp=share_link

Wikipedia article on the Fisher equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_equation

Wikipedia article on UK consols:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consol_(bond)

Guardian article on “UK bonds that financed first world war to be redeemed 100 years later”:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/31/uk-first-world-war-bonds-redeemed

What Jane Austen can tell us about historical rates of return:

https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/02/10/the-economics-of-pride-and-prejudice-or-why-a-single-man-with-a-fortune-of-4000-per-year-is-a-desirable-husband/

Transcript: Normalization of interest rates & monetary policy – EP173

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:00

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode, please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Hello, thanks for tuning into the show. This episode I talk about the normalisation of interest rates and monetary policy with my colleague Arturo Espinoza. Please note, the episode was recorded on the 11th of January 2023. Now, obviously, we weren’t able to cover any new economic data released after that date. So I’ve added some info into the show notes about important developments since then. One of the most important bits of data was the December US inflation rate. It came in at 6.5% yearly down from 7.1% in November. This figure was interpreted by economists as supporting the view that the US Fed will slow the pace of interest rate hikes in 2023. No longer increasing the federal funds rate in increments of half a percentage point or three quarters of a percentage point. Interest rates still need to increase because inflation is still too high and well above the 2% target. On the first of February, the Fed will probably increase its federal funds rate target by a quarter percentage point from the 4.25 to 4.5% range to the 4.5 to 4.75% range. If it doesn’t do this, I’ll release a short bonus episode looking at what’s going on. Economists expect there’ll be at least another interest rate rise in 2023. Beyond the quarter percentage point increase on the first of February, a view supported by the stronger than expected fourth quarter 2022 GDP figure that came out on the 26th of January. Unlike in the states in Australia, our latest inflation figures surprised on the upside coming in at 7.8% over 2022. I must say I was stunned yesterday when I noticed a 560 gram jar of Vegemite now cost $9 at Woolworths. The Reserve Bank of Australia really has no choice but to continue with its interest rate increases until it sees inflation falling or the economy crashing. As I noted my conversation with Arturo so much depends on how rapidly the economy slows down over 2023. Okay, let’s get into the episode. Please stick around to the end because I have additional thoughts after my conversation with Arturo. Okay, this is episode 173 on the normalisation of monetary policy. So, I’m joined by Arturo, my colleague at Adapt Economics. Arturo, good to have you with me today.

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  02:58

Hi Gene, it’s my pleasure to be here.

Gene Tunny  03:01

Excellent. Arturo. So I thought for our first episode of the year, it would be good to talk about interest rates. So one of the big developments last year was the, you know, the increases in the interest rates by central banks, their policy interest rates. So the cash rate here in Australia, the federal funds rate, we had some rather unexpected increases in interest rates, all unexpected by many people in response to the high inflation rates that we’ve been experiencing. And so this did catch quite a few people by surprise, and our RBA governor here in Australia, Philip Lowe, as late as I think November 2021, he was saying that, he thought they’d probably be able to keep their cash rate at 0.1% until 2024. So that was his central case scenario, as he was calling it. But it turns out that inflation was ended up being higher than the Reserve Bank expected. And you know, perhaps they should have seen it coming because you would seen inflation accelerating in 2021 in the US and the UK. And so maybe the central bank should have seen it coming, but they didn’t. And we ended up going from a 0.1% cash rate. And now it’s at 3.1%. And that was over a period of from May 2022 to December 2022. And they had the last cash rate increase. So the same three percentage points over seven months or so. So just an extraordinary rate of increase. And similarly in the US, we had high rate of increase. And what we’re seeing is that interest rates are responding to the high inflation. And one thing I thought it’d be good to talk about is, well, where do we think these interest rates are going? Is there any guidance historically, or is there any guidance from theory regarding what’s a normal level of interest rates? So that’s one question we could ask. And how I came to think about this is that I saw increasingly these references to normalisation, so normalisation of monetary policy, normalisation of interest rates, and, and it got me thinking, Okay, well, what’s normal? So I thought that’d be good to explore. Do you have any thoughts on that, Arturo? Does that sound like a reasonable thing to talk about?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  05:51

Yeah exactly, that is gonna be an interesting topic, to know, what will be the normal interest rate?

Gene Tunny  05:59

Yes, well, this is a bit of a spoiler, but I think the key message will be that there really isn’t any normal interest rate that we can say that the interest rates are adjusting to that’s one of the challenges it’s it just depends on a whole range of factors, variables that we’ll talk about in this conversation. So to begin with a lot I’d read this article I found from the Bank of Finland, this was back in October and I thought this was really quite a neat way of talking about this normalisation. So they talk about the articles called what is monetary policy normalisation. And so they’re written in monetary policy normalisation, key interest rates or policy rates are once again becoming key instruments of monetary policy. At the same time, the central bank is gradually withdrawing from asset purchases and other unconventional measures. Monetary policy normalisation may also involve adjustments to forward guidance, normalisation leads to a tightening of financial conditions, helping the central bank reduce the inflationary pressures in the economy. Okay. So what they’re talking about there is that during the pandemic, when all of those policy interest rates were effectively cut to zero, our cash rate here in Australia got cut to 0.1%. Right, so it’s effectively zero. That’s what economists call the zero lower bound. So there’s nowhere else for the that policy rate to go, then what central banks what the Australian Central Bank did for the first time. So this has been done previously by the US, and the ECB and Bank of Japan, in response to the financial crisis back in the late 2000s. But we hadn’t done this yet. We did the quantitative easing, what they call quantitative easing, which is printing money. well printing money electronically, and then using that to buy bonds or other financial assets to drive down yields to drive down borrowing costs, with the idea of stimulating the economy that way. So that’s unconventional monetary policy. So what the Bank of Finland saying is that part of this normalisation story is yes, increasing that policy rate getting it away from that zero, lower bound, and moving away from the unconventional monetary policy. Yeah, that’s essentially what they’re saying in that passage there. Okay. And then they go on to talk about where are interest rates going to settle in the future. And this is where this is where they’re essentially saying that will no one, no one really knows, it’s very difficult to forecast that. They’re saying that the normalisation of monetary policy does not mean that the central bank is attempting to restore its balance sheet and interest rates to a past levels such as that preceding the 2008 global financial crisis. Okay, so what they’re saying is don’t necessarily look to what interest rates have been in the past, rather than the aim of monetary policy normalisation is that the inflation rate should accord with the price stability objective. In the absence of further economic shocks, interest rates should in the longer term settle at a level where economic resources are in full use and inflation is at its target, ie at the equilibrium real interest rate, also known as the natural rate of interest. However, the level of the equilibrium real interest rate is affected by a number of factors unrelated to monetary policy. Okay, so, gee, there’s a lot going on that passage there that I’ve just read. The way I interpret this is that essentially, we’ve got to get to an interest rate. So what the central bank is trying to do, its increasing interest rates to get inflation under control. And after it gets inflation under control, the interest rate is going to settle at a rate whereby it’s consistent with keeping inflation in the target band. So in Australia, that’s two to 3%. On average, other countries have similar target rates for inflation and that sort of 2%.

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  10:28

Between two and 3%. Yeah,

Gene Tunny  10:31

yeah, yeah. So just, I’ll just put some links in the show notes, clarifying that what they are for all other economies. So we’ll end up with an interest rate where it’s consistent with that. And it’s also consistent with a reasonable level of economic activity. So a stable, well, a sustainable rate of economic growth. And I mean, you could call it full employment, but I’d probably say unemployment at what you’d say is the natural rate of unemployment rather than full employment, which is, I think, a difficult concept to actually to define in practice. So, I mean, what would that be? I mean, it’s hard to know, because it depends on how the economy will first we’ve got to find out how the economy responds to the current interest rate increases, and just how far the central bank has to increase the rates from here. So I think there’s generally agree that well, there’s quite a bit of agreement among commentators among the market economists, that interest rates will have to increase a bit more from where they are now. Because we’ve still got inflation in Australia over 7% Us 7% over 7%, we’ve still got these high rates of inflation or higher rates than we’ve experienced for a long time. We’ve pushed the policy interest rates up to 3.1% in Australia, 4.25 to 4.5%. In the US, I think, is the current target band for the federal funds rate. There seems to be a view that there’s still scope for them to push those up further. So in Australia, we could have another maybe two up to two cash rate increases. That seems to be you know, that’s a possibility depends on what your outlook is for the state of the economy. Some people are thinking that might be too much given that, you know, these interest rate increases are really starting to bite already is having a big impact on house prices. We’re seeing that already. So house prices are really coming off. If I look at the ASX this thing called the ASX 30 Day interbank cash rate futures implied yield curve. So this is based on market pricing for financial market products. So this is this What is it 30 Day interbank cash rate future. So, essentially you can bet on what the cash rate is going to be in the future. And from this, it’s showing that the markets essentially expecting that the cash rate will peak at a bit over 3.8% later this year, and then it starts coming off from a peak around I think that’s October, and then it’s slightly falling. And then by June 2024, it’s down around 3.6%. So the market here in Australia is expecting two to three additional increases in the cash rate it appears of around 25 basis points or a quarter of a percentage point. So the markets expecting two to three more increases. I think other economists would be but there’s debate about just how many and the current state of the economy and how the economy will react to that. That’s one of the great unknowns, how will households react to these higher interest rates. And that’s one of the unknowns too in other countries in the States. It looks like there’s probably there will probably be another, at least one more increase in the federal funds rate in the States. There was a report in the Financial Times yesterday regarding some comments from one of the Federal Reserve officials, Mary Daly think she’s from San Francisco fed and the FT reported that Mary Daly became the latest Federal Reserve official to raise the prospect of the US central bank slowing the pace of its interest rate increases to a quarter point rise next month, even as policymakers backed the benchmark rates surpassing 5% Okay, so if you, I think in the Federal Reserve in their publication when they publish their decisions, they have these charts, which show what the Federal Open Markets Committee members, what they forecasting for future federal funds rate, which is a really interesting way to do it. And it gives you some insight and into how the members are thinking and where federal funds rate could be going. It’s really quite a clever thing to do and possibly something the Australian reserve bank could think about doing. And I don’t know whether this is an issue that they’re considering in their manage their review of the reserve bank that’s going on at the moment, I might have to look into that. But it looks like yep, so. So members are the people who are responsible for monetary policy, and the states are expecting a couple more increases in that federal funds rate. So they expect it’ll end up getting beyond 5%. They’re currently targeting 4.25 to 4.5%. But what this is saying is based on recent data in the States, which suggests that the economy might be losing some of the some steam, its inflation may not be as much of a problem as previously, based on that. They’re saying, well, the Federal Reserve can slow down the rate of interest rate increases. So that’s what’s going on there. Okay, so the general expectation that we’d have is that there will still be a few more interest rate increases this year in the US and the in Australia, maybe two, maybe three? I don’t know, it’s so difficult. Everything depends on how the economy reacts. New data. It’s just very difficult to forecast. But one thing I think we can say is that there will be additional interest rate increases. Do you have any thoughts on that? Arturo?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  17:01

I have a question about, at what point those heights interest rates will cause a slowdown in the economy. What do you think about that? We will face a slowdown or not?

Gene Tunny  17:21

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s starting to occur. All in Australia, I think households are really starting to feel those interest rate increases and, and more households will this year, because we’re seeing mortgages that were taken out. So the home purchases, they borrowed at fixed rates, and that was for a fixed term, a couple of years, or whatever it was. And then after that, these fixed rates reset to another level. And so that’s going to happen increasingly over this year, we’re going to see more people who borrowed at a fixed rate, they will end up facing a higher interest rate. So those rates that they’re paying reset at a higher level based on current rates, and the current variable rate based on that, and they will therefore have, they will have to pay more to service their mortgage. So there are various estimates of what it means it depends on the type of loan you’ve got, it depends on the amount you’ve got outstanding on your home loan, but for many households, the interest rate rises, we’ve seen it could mean an extra thing is $1,000 a month or something that they have to pay in mortgage

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  18:43

and depending on what loan.

Gene Tunny  18:46

Yeah, it depends on a whole range of things. It depends on what was the deal you got originally and how much you borrowed, how much is outstanding still in, in what you owe and the principal that you are? So look, it’s going to depend, but there’s no doubt that it will be a substantial hit to the budgets of many households. And we should start seeing consumption spending slow. But look, I mean, the last year the Australian economy performed, I think extraordinarily well. And unemployment got down to under three and a half percent, which is just incredible. Yeah, but I think definitely will go we shouldn’t see, nothing’s definite in economics in macro economics. Yeah. Things could judge. You just don’t know what’s around the corner sometimes. But look, I mean, my guess would be that we will start to see the economy slow this year. Will we have a recession? Well, I hope not. I think I’ve seen some forecasts from some of the bank economists might have been Jo Masters, or I’ll have to dig it up. But basically, they, they’ll say, oh, look, we think it’s more likely than not we won’t have a recession. But the probability of a recession is, I don’t know is 30% or something or 40%. I don’t know, I have to look that up. But I know that there are some people saying, Look, yes, it is possible that there could be a recession here, and also in the States. In fact, there were some people last year saying, Oh, the US had already had a risk that it was in recession last year, because they were two negative quarters of GDP. But it turns out that that was a bit of a statistical anomaly or just a freak result, and really didn’t signal that an economy then in recession. So yeah, look, it’s possible, we could see some recessions. But I mean, as always, I mean, I think, given the complexity of the economy, and all of the moving parts and all of the shocks that could occur, it’s just so hard to actually forecast that sort of thing. I mean, I remember when I was in Treasury, and right up until 2008, we were saying, and most macro economic forecasters, were saying, Oh, we’re in this new era of the Great Moderation, and we didn’t have to worry about the business cycle anymore. And then, I mean, then we have the financial crisis, and it’s the worst, worst crisis since the Great Depression. So things can change the I’m always reluctant to to provide any, any forecasts. Okay. So yeah, those are my thoughts. I mean, what do you think, Arturo, do you have any thoughts on it?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  21:42

Well, I think that we are under a period of higher certainty than other times after the global financial crisis. Of course, there are a lot of Australians that are suffering with these higher tax rates. Mortgages, as you have mentioned, I think we need to be cautious about this period.

Gene Tunny  22:07

Yeah, exactly. I found that that article by that mentions, recession forecasts by Jo  masters, she’s with think it’s a bank or some sort of investment being Baron Joey, is it. So masters thinks Australia will avoid a recession, but it will be a very close call. So this is an article in the financial review January 3, this year, so we’re recording this on the 11th of January, everything must go right for Australia to dodge a recession. Okay. So she’s one of the people who is concerned that because of these higher interest rates, then yeah, it’s going to have a significant impact on consumption, then she’s saying that offsetting that is the fact that we’re getting all of these international students coming back into Australia. So that’s one thing that’s going to add to demand. Okay. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by that mentions, Jo masters, predictions. Okay. So that’s, that’s where to from here. Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  24:00

Now back to the show. One thing that is concerned some people is wondering, Well, is there a risk that we could get back to some of the crazily high interest rates that have been seen in past periods? So in Australia, for example, we had interest rates at 17 to 18%. At one time, back in the late 80s, early 90s, we had really high interest rates, but that was also at a point in time. When we had inflation of around 8% We had money supply growth of 20% plus. So we had a big boom in the late 80s. This was the age of the entrepreneurs a lot of lending a lot of property, lots of speculation, and I would say that it’s probably unlikely I can’t see interest rates getting back to anywhere near that sort of crazy heights. Given that the macro economic conditions are different today, there was much more entrenched inflation, people expected high inflation. I think if you look one year ahead, some market economists are expecting inflation of over 4% or something like that. But it’s not as if every year we’re expecting inflation of 8% or something like that. So monetary policy doesn’t have to be as restrictive to get inflation under control to to get all of the money creation, all the credit creation that’s leading to the growth in the money supply, it doesn’t need to be as aggressive to get that under control. So my expectation is that we don’t have to, we wouldn’t see that, again, just because inflation is not at those Well, it’s not entrenched at those rates. So we’ve got high inflation at the moment at 7%. If it turns out that the RBA can’t get inflation down, then they will have to increase, keep increasing the cash rate. But I would expect they wouldn’t have to increase it anywhere near some of those really high interest rates that they have in the past, because it seems like your households are already they’re going to start suffering even with the interest rate increases that we’ve seen. So if they increase the interest rates a bit more, say another half a percent, then the hope is that that will start you know slowing the economy taking the heat out of the economy enough that we can get inflation under control. So yeah, we won’t get back to those, those crazy interest rates that have been seen in the past, just because the nature of the economy is different. We haven’t had sustained inflation over such a long period as we had back then over several years. And then having that inflation, getting expected having these entrenched inflation expectations which the central banks have to then act aggressively against. I’ll put some links to some charts on on inflation and interest rates and what we’ve seen in the past, and just so people can see if you’re in the audience, you’re interested, you can have a look at what what these things have been in the past. They what strikes me is when I look at, well, interest rates, which is what we’re talking about today, you look at interest rates historically, and they’ve been all over the place. This is why when we’re talking about normalisation when we’re talking about normalisation to some, what do they call it some equilibrium rate of interest where we’ve got the economy balanced, we’ve got inflation at Target, we’ve got the economy going along smoothly. We don’t know there’s no one interest rate over history, that’s it’s not going to be the same interest rate, it’s going to depend on the macro economic circumstances at the time. There was an estimate that the Reserve Bank put out of what the equilibrium real interest rate is. And the central estimate they came up with, I think it averaged at 1%. Now, that’s a real interest rate. And then if we think about what would the nominal interest rate be, this is something I may not have defined yet, Arturo. But we’ve got to think about, one of the reasons you end up with a 17% or 18% interest rate is because inflation is expected to be about 8% or something, or whatever it is. So the interest rate at least has to compensate for the inflation that’s expected. And then you’ve got the real component of the interest rate, the so called real interest rate. And the inflation gets added to that to get the nominal interest rate. So when this is one of the tricky things with interest rates, it needs to be appreciated. There’s a there’s a nominal interest rate and all of these, these rates that we’ve been talking about the policy, the cash rate, the RBA cash rate, or the federal funds rate, that’s a nominal interest rate. That’s not the real interest rate that has been paid. Because one thing that inflation does, it erodes the real value of debts. So if you’re only earning, I mean, you’d be earning more than the cash rate, if you’ve invested if you’ve bought a you know, an asset of some kind of financial asset. But let’s just say you, the cash rates 3.1% at the moment, the inflation rate 7.1%. Now, you could argue or looking backwards, this is an ex post view of things. So after the fact, if you’re only earning 3.1% per year on your asset and inflation was 7.1% then you’ve gone backwards 4% hit right. Yeah. Now that’s an ex post calculation another way, well, what ends up happening is that the market is going to adjust these interest rates will adjust to incorporate expectations of future inflation. And so, therefore, the interest rate that you see at a point in time, should equal whatever people demand on the market determined real rate of interest, plus the expected rate of inflation, which I think is that’s the Fisher equation, I think, isn’t it? There’s a relationship between inflation and interest rates. That’s called the Fisher equation after Irving Fisher, that I’ll put it in the show notes. Yes. Okay. So that’s a that’s a bit of technical detail. I’ll put some links on all of that. Yeah. And what I find extraordinary is that just over recorded history, there are all these different types of interest rates that we’ve observed. And I always go back to this great passage from John Maynard Keynes, one of the great economists, obviously. And Keynes, in chapter 15 of the general theory, incentives to liquidity wrote that it might be more accurate, perhaps to say that the rate of interest is a highly conventional rather than a highly psychological phenomenon, for its actual value is largely governed by the prevailing view as to what its value is expected to be. Okay, I think that’s quite clever and observation. And, yeah, what he’s getting out there is that it ends up being conventional, in a way, it depends on what it’s expected to be. And I think that’s quite interesting, because for a long time, well, after the financial crisis, there was this expectation of low interest rates, and that was supported by the central bank’s pumping a lot of money into the economy. But now, I mean, who knows, I mean, the expectation could be of higher interest rates. So we’ll have to wait and see where things settle, and what expectations and being and what people, people think as an acceptable interest rate. Historically, we’ve seen interest rates and the ones I’m quoting, they’re going to be nominal interest rates of around three to 4%. On government bonds. And so this can be considered a risk free rate, this could be considered as similar to the the cash rate, although a bit higher due to the fact that there’s a yield curve that if you borrow for, for a longer period, you generally have to pay a higher interest rate. But if we look at what we see in the data, or what we’ve observed in history, these UK consoles, which are perpetual bonds, whereby the government, the UK government borrowed, say, I don’t know let’s say they borrow 100 pounds, and then you get this console, this note that says, The UK government will pay you three to 4% of that. So three pounds or four pounds every year, in perpetuity, on that, that console of 100 pounds. I don’t know if that was the  actual denomination, but this is just to explain it. So these were perpetual bonds that the government never repaid. It just paid an interest rate each year. And historically, that was three to 4%, depending on when they issued the console, and what they thought was necessary to attract the people to buy the console to lend money to the UK Government, it turns out I think was about seven or eight years ago, the UK actually bought back the final consoles that are on issue. So there were these consoles that were that have been on issue for decades or centuries, that were still owned by nothing to various investors in England in the UK that the HM Treasury bought back finally, so I’ll put a link in the show notes there. So if we look at the historical evidence, we see consoles, they were yielding three to 4%. And if we look at the history of what’s called bank rate in the UK, which is the last day, that overnight interest rate, the policy rate, that the Bank of England influences historically, it’s ranged from, if we look at, from when the Bank of England was set up, so in 1694, it was looks like it was 6% or so I’ll put a link in the show notes to the actual data, and then it dropped down to what’s that nearly 3%, around 3%. Then for a long period from 1720 to 1820 it was about it was 5%. And then it fluctuates a bit more, I’ve got a chart that I’ve pulled off macro bond that I think that’s a great chart, I’ll put a link in the show notes. And then in the 19th century, it fluctuates quite a bit. And at times, it gets up to 10%. This must be related to the UK trying to maintain the gold value of sterling. So this is related. I think this is related to the gold standard, and having to maintain that and adjusting bank rate to do that. But I think what’s fascinating about that is for a very long time, so for about 100 years, it had the interest rate it at 5%. And that’s their policy rate. Okay, so we’ve been talking about interest rates, and these are interest rates related to financial securities. And other bit of evidence that is, that is interesting is the evidence, or the data points that you’ll see in novels by Jane Austen or Balzac? So Jane Austen, obviously, right Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, etc. Balzac wrote old man glorioso, his French writer, this is something Thomas Piketty pointed out in his book on capital in the 21st century that if you read these novels, you’ll see that it was generally understood that the rate of return on land was about four to 5%. That’s a rate of return on an investment that’s different from the interest rate. But it gives you an idea of what was people were expecting to earn from investments in assets, and there’s some risk associated with land, or owning anything. So it’s not going to be a risk free interest rate. But I think it gives you gives you some idea of what rates of return were so right rate of return on land, historically, 4 to 5%. And it was taken for granted, that land yields 5% is what picket is writing. So the value is equal to roughly 20 years of annual rent. So I think that’s, that’s a really interesting data point. So what we’re getting is that, but another thing to consider is that that’s probably in a time when, historically there wasn’t a lot of inflation. I mean, there was during war time. But generally, until we had this, we adopted fiat currency in the 20th century, inflation wasn’t usually a problem, although you could have episodes of inflation, if there was a crisis of some kind. But I think you could probably interpret that as those is real rates, real rates of return almost. What we could conclude is that, yeah, I mean, interest rates are normalising historically, we’ve seen a range of interest rates, rates of three to 4%, four, or 5%. For risk free rates. That’s something you might expect, where current interest rates and up, it’s difficult to say it’s going to depend on the state of the economy, or how the economy reacts to those rate rises. I mean, this is something we’ll we’ll keep tracking we’ll keep following this year, and provide some more commentary, some more analysis on the future. Arturo, anything else you think we should cover?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  38:33

I think you have to cover most of the important things. So that was a good conclusion for this episode of the books.

Gene Tunny  38:43

Okay. Very good. Okay. All right. Thanks so much for your time.

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  38:47

Thank you for having me.

Gene Tunny  38:50

Okay, have you found that informative and enjoyable. In my view, the main takeaway is that monetary policy is still in what’s called a tightening cycle. Interest rates will have to increase some more because inflation is still too high. It’s hard to know when the tightening will stop. The US experience suggests tightening cycles last a bit under two years on average, according to an informative note from Chatham financial, which I’ll link to in the show notes. The US Fed started tightening in March last year, and the Reserve Bank of Australia started last May, suggesting we could still have many months to go. Of course, this tightening cycle doesn’t necessarily have to conform to the average. Much depends on how the economy responds. In Australia, we’re hopeful we won’t need many more interest rate increases to sufficiently slow demand and get inflation under control. Even though the cash rate hasn’t been pushed up to a very high level in historical terms, the rate increases that we’ve seen could still be effective because of the heavy load of household debt that people have incurred to buy high priced properties. How much will the economy slow down? Will it just be a slowdown a reduction in the GDP growth rate or a contraction in which GDP falls? And we have negative growth for a couple of quarters at least that is a recession. Recessions in both Australia and the US are definitely possible. Indeed, recessions often occur after central banks tighten monetary policy. The 2009, New York Fed paper noted 11 and 14 monetary tightening cycles since 1955, were followed by increases in unemployment. That is, it’s very difficult for central banks to bring about a so-called soft landing. That was me speaking rather than the Fed. I’d note that some economists are even speculating that because economies will slow down substantially, we’ll start seeing interest rate cuts toward the end of 2023. Honestly, I don’t know whether we’ll have soft landings or recessions, a lot depends on psychology, and just how entrenched expectations of high inflation have become, the more entrenched they are, the more interest rates have to keep on increasing. We need to wait and see just how effective the interest rate increases we’ve seen already have been and will be. Obviously, this is one of the big economic issues of the year. And I’ll continue to keep a close eye on it. And I’ll come back to you in a future episode this year. Thanks for listening. Alright, thanks for listening to this episode of Economics Explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact@economicsexplored.com Or a voicemail via SpeakPipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you, then please write a review and leave a rating. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.

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Podcast episode

Stagflation: be alert, not alarmed – EP143 + transcript

In early June 2022, the World Bank downgraded its global economic growth forecast and warned of the rising risk of stagflation, the uncommon combination of high inflation and high unemployment, or falling GDP growth. Stagflation is a portmanteau word, combining stagnation with inflation. Economists first noticed stagflation in 1970s USA (see the chart below) and other advanced economies, when it was triggered by the 1973 oil price shock, which pushed up prices and reduced industrial output as input costs soared.

A simultaneous acceleration of inflation and an increasing unemployment rate in the mid-1970s surprised many people at the time, because it was contrary to the Phillips curve trade-off between unemployment and inflation.

In Episode 143 of Economics Explored, show host Gene Tunny and his colleague Arturo Espinoza discuss how the current global situation is similar and dissimilar to the 1970s, including consideration of recent perspectives from the World Bank and BIS.  While we also have a commodity price shock, associated partly with the war in Ukraine, it is less in proportionate terms than in the 1970s, and we also have better macroeconomic policy frameworks (i.e. explicit inflation targets) than in the 1970s. So the takeaway of the episode is that, while we should be alert to the possibility of stagflation, at this stage we shouldn’t be alarmed.

You can listen to episode 143 using the embedded player below or via Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher, among other podcast apps. A transcript and relevant links are also available below.

Links relevant to the conversation

Is a US recession imminent? w/ Michael Knox, Chief Economist, Morgans Financial – EP142 – Economics Explored (Previous episode with Michael Knox)

Jobs report May 2022: Payrolls rose 390,000 in May, better than expected as companies keep hiring 

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=stagflation&geo=US (Google Trends for stagflation)

The Fed must act now to ward off the threat of stagflation | Financial Times

Are major advanced economies on the verge of a wage-price spiral? (BIS Bulletin 53)

Commodity market disruptions, growth and inflation (BIS Bulletin 54)

Robert Heller’s paper on International Reserves and Global Inflation (from p. 28)

Stagflation Risk Rises Amid Sharp Slowdown in Growth (World Bank report) 

Stagflation danger prompts  World Bank to cut growth outlook (Washington Post article)

EP59 on the Natural Rate of Unemployment (re. Milton Friedman’s AEA presidential address)

Friedman’s presidential address

Chart of the Week – The real price of crude oil – Callum Thomas

Clarification

Australia’s wage price index increased 2.4% through the year to March 2022 (see Wage Price Index, Australia, March 2022 | Australian Bureau of Statistics

Transcript of EP143 – Stagflation: be alert, not alarmed

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:01

Coming up on Economics Explored. My personal feeling is that; and this is informed by my conversation with Michael Knox last week. I don’t think we’ll end up with stagflation similar to the 70s or rather, I hope not. I don’t see at the moment.

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host, Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia, and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is episode 143 on Stagflation.

Joining me this episode is my colleague at Adept Economics, Arturo Espinosa. Arturo, good to have you on the show again.

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  00:44

Thank you, Gene. I am glad to be here.

Gene Tunny  00:48

Excellent, yes. It should be a good conversation because we know that this issue of Stagflation is topical with the recent World Bank report that we’ll get into in this episode. But before we do that, I just thought I’d provide an update on last week’s episode.

So, in Episode 142, I spoke with Michael Knox, who is the Chief Economist at Morgan’s, which is a major Australian wealth management and stock broking firm. And Michael and I chatted about the prospects for the US and Australian economies and what’s been happening with monetary policy. And Michael made a bold prediction in that episode, on where the Australian cash rates, so the policy rate that’s controlled by the Reserve Bank of Australia, so that’s the equivalent of the Federal Reserve in the US or the Bank of England. And he forecast that they would lift it by 50 basis points. So, half a percentage point from 0.35%, he forecast that they would increase it to 0.85%. He was the only economist in Australia who was forecasting there, and he explained why he thought that was the case in the episode.

So, if you’re in the audience, you haven’t listened to that episode yet, please, think about having to listen to it because Michael, I think is one of the best economic forecasters out there. He looks at the global economy, he looks at the Australian economy. And it turned out that the Reserve Bank did increase the cash rate by 0.85%. And it surprised all of the other market economists, all the commentators, and now there’s all this talk about what does this mean for the economy?

Will people now have trouble paying their home loans? Will they get into financial trouble? And there’s a huge conversation about that now in Australia; well done to Michael Knox for forecasting that correctly.

And we were also chatting about this idea or this concern that there could be a recession coming up in the US. So, there’s been a lot of commentary about that. It’s associated with all of this commentary, all this discussion at the moment about stagflation, which we’re going to get into. But Michael is very optimistic about the US economy as we talked about, and just after that episode was published, there was some new data that came out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; at the BLS. And they reported better than expected, employment numbers in the US for May, CNBC reported that the US economy added 390,000 jobs in May, better than expected despite fears of an economic slowdown and with a roaring pace of inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, at the same time, the unemployment rate held at 3.6% just above the lowest level since December 1969.

Okay, so that’s an update on last week’s episode. Okay. Any questions or thoughts on that, Arturo?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  04:04

No, let’s start discussing about the topic.

Gene Tunny  04:09

Yep, about stagflation, absolutely. So, I want to devote the bulk of this episode, or the rest of this episode to talking about stagflation. This is something that I asked Michael about last week in our conversation. And I mean, this is something we haven’t; it’s a term that, that I remember, you know, I learned in when I studied Economics, and as you did, we would have learned this term stagflation about what happened in the 1970s. But we haven’t really heard it in the economic commentary for a while. So, there were decades when no one was really talking about it. And then there was this revival of interest in it, I think, from around late last year.

And if you look at the Google Trends Data, and I’ll put this chart on the show notes, so you can see, when interest in the concept of stagflation has picked up again. And that was from around, I think it was around September, 2021. And we’ve had various commentators talking about the risks of stagflation. So, on 25th of May this year, Martin Wolf; so Martin Wolf is one of the leading financial economic commentators in the world. He writes for The Financial Times. He wrote a column; “The Fed must act now to ward off the threat of stagflation.” And we know from the 1970s, the time to throttle an inflationary upsurge is at the beginning. And is there going to be a recession in the US and other leading economies? This question has naturally arisen among participants at this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. So, you probably saw, I think that meeting, they had their World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland last week.

Martin Wolf wrote that this is however, the wrong question, at least for the US. The right one is whether we are moving into a new era of higher inflation and wage growth, similar to the stagflation of the 1970s. If so, what might this mean? That was one of the motivations for having this conversation today.

And almost as if I forecast that the World Bank would produce this study on stagflation, they released it overnight, or it came overnight our time. And so, we’ve just been looking at this morning, this new report, from the reserve; sorry, not the Reserve Bank, that’s our bank here in Australia, the World Bank. And the press release; June 7, press release, I’ll put this in the show notes. So, if you listen, and you’re interested, you can find that; stagflation risk rises amid sharp slowdown in growth.

So, you had a look at this earlier, Arturo, didn’t you? What were your main takeaways from this report from the World Bank?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  06:59

Well, I think these are very good reports, where they dedicate special focus on globalist inflation. And there is a section which they talk about similarities to the 1970s. They mentioned that they are three of them. The first is that supply shocks after a prolonged monetary policy accommodation, the existence of weaker growth. Also, there are some significant problems or inabilities in emerging economies. Those three things can be similar from 1970s to the current period.

Gene Tunny  07:51

This is because these supply side shocks really hurt those emerging economies more than the richer economies; is that the idea? Because they generally have lower incomes in those countries. And so, they’re going to be very badly affected by increases in oil prices, increases in food prices, and that can bring not only economic turmoil, but political turmoil as well.

So, what we might do is; we might revisit those, those similarities. Again, in the podcast first, it just occurred to me that we probably should, or I probably should just talk about what Stagflation is, what does it mean? And I couldn’t find any or there’s no strict definition of what it is. It’s a combination of unemployment and inflation or low GDP growth and high inflation. But there’s no agreed definition of it’s stagflation, if unemployment and GDP growth are x and y and inflation is there; there’s no quantitative definition as far as I can tell.

So, stagflation; it’s a pretty horrible word, if you think about it. I mean, it’s one of these, what do you call it? A portmanteau word. So, it’s a word that is a combination of other words, to try and convey a particular meaning, the combination of themselves. So, it’s a combination of stagnation, plus inflation. Glenn Hubbard’s introductory Economics textbook. So, Glenn Hubbard was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George W. Bush, in the early 2000s. In his textbook, they define it as a combination of inflation and recession, usually resulting from a supply shock. Okay, and like with everything in Economics, we’ve defined a concept by referring to another concept, we have to define a lot of times. So, supply shock. What do we mean by that? We mean, something that increases the cost of inputs; it’s a shock on the supply side of the economy, our ability to produce.

It’s not like a demand shock, where there’s an increase in spending or an increase in the amount of money. It’s a shock to our productive capacity. So, this concept, I think, originally came into Economics, or it became prominent in the 1970s, when there was the huge spike in oil prices in 1973, when OPEC, because of the Arab countries are upset with the West because they were backing the Israelis in the war, I think it was the young people war. That meant that the cost of inputs increased. And when those inputs increase, we use oil, well for petrol and, you know, across the economy. And so, it’s pushing up costs of production and produces; firms will try and pass that on to customers. That can be inflationary. Okay.

And you mentioned supply shocks before, didn’t you? In terms of the similarities with the 70s? So, we’ve had that,

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  11:10

Yeah, we have the impact. However, there is a difference there in the case of the World Bank report, they say that the current shocks or current supply shocks are smaller, compared to those shocks in 1970s.

Gene Tunny  11:33

That’s right. I should have checked the numbers before I came on to record. But if you look at the real oil price back in the 70s, that was in proportionate terms, that was a huge increase, wasn’t it? I mean, it was multiples of the then current price, and it really shocked people. It was a huge shock to face those price rises.

So, I’ll have to dig out what that stat was and put it in the show notes. But that’s what they’re driving out there, aren’t they? They’re saying, well, okay, we’ve seen some big increases in commodities prices, but they’re, they’re smaller still than what we saw in the 1970s. So, they may have a chart and that report that we can refer people to in the show notes. Okay.

So, just on this definition of stagflation again, that was one definition. Now, note, there’s no quantitative; there aren’t any numbers in that definition. Dornbusch and Fisher; so, that was the textbook I use when I studied macro Economics back in the 90s. Rudy Dorn, Bush and Stan Fisher, so very prominent, US macro economists, I think are at MIT. They wrote that stagflation occurs when inflation rises, while output is either falling or at least not rising. And on well, actually, there’s probably no point me giving textbook page references, because this is sort of the 1994 edition. But in that edition, they wrote that during periods of stagflation, such as 1973, 74, 1980, and 1991. There are articles in the newspapers that the laws of Economics are not working as they should, because inflation is high or rising, even though output is falling.

So if we go to the, the data for the US, so I’ll put this chart in the show notes as well. We look at what happened in 1973 – 74. And this was a huge shock, I think at the time. We see that inflation went from a rate of 2 to 3%. And it ended up at a rate of over 10%. I think it looks like nearly 12½ % on this chart, I’ve pulled up. And so, we had those two years; well, after the ‘73 oil shock, so 74, 75 inflation is accelerating. And unemployment is also increasing, and it’s increasing from about 5% to nearly 8 to 9% or so. I’ll put this chart in, and I’ll just check those numbers. And this came as a big shock, because there was this concept of the Phillips Curve wasn’t there? There was this idea that there was this tradeoff between unemployment and an inflation, that if you had high unemployment, then at the same time, you should have low inflation. Or if you had high inflation, you’d have low unemployment. There was this idea that there was this trade off; because empirically, if you looked at the data for the 50s and 60s in the States, or for the UK or other advanced economies, it looked like there was this trade off. It looked like there was a menu from which economic policymakers could choose.

The typical story about the Phillips Curve was that, you could get unemployment down by stimulating your economy, a bit of Keynesian fine tuning, a bit of pump priming. You could reduce unemployment, but if you get unemployment; if you if you do reduce that, that puts more power in the hands of Labor relative to capital, you can tell stories about unions, you can tell stories about people being more aggressive in their wage negotiations, because Labor is scarcer, and that leads to higher inflation.

So, there’s this idea of a tradeoff. And this Phillips Curve was something that was found by Bill Phillips, who was a professor, Bill is from New Zealand originally. And he ended up being a professor at the London School of Economics. Have you heard about that? This is a bit of a tangent, but he built that hydraulic, economic model. Have you ever heard of that, ever heard of LSE?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  16:08

No, I haven’t heard about it.

Gene Tunny  16:11

And he developed this hydraulic, economic model in the 50s and 60s. They built a representation of the economy; they’re essentially modelling the circular flow of income with using water and mechanical parts. And this was a model that London School of Economics; I just remember that because she gave a lecture at the University of Queensland in 2016, Mary Morgan, she’s a professor at LSE, London School of Economics. She wrote a great book on the World in a Model. So, she’s done some great work on the history of economic modelling. Her first job, she said, was looking after that hydraulic computer.

So, Bill Phillips, one of the great economists, he discovered this correlation between all this trade off; the Phillips Curve, the relationship that ended up being influential in economic policy in the 60s until it broke down in the 70s. As we are talking about, he looked at UK wages growth, so wages, inflation and unemployment data. Even though what he did was look at wages data, well, it soon transferred as a concept to a tradeoff between price inflation and unemployment, because well, there is obviously a link between wages and prices, because employers will try and pass on those increases.

Does that all make sense? I was just trying to explain why this idea of this stagflation came as such a shock in the 1970s.

So, what was wrong with that Phillips Curve concept? Why didn’t it work out? Well, it was because of this supply side shock, wasn’t it? This was something that wasn’t really anticipated in that Phillips Curve story. And the other problem was that when you have high inflation, the expectations of people in the economy of workers and businesses, your expectations of inflation increase. You essentially, come to expect inflation and inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because every time there’s a wage negotiation, or a contract negotiation, you essentially allow for the future inflation, you expect it. And you have things like cost-of-living adjustments, you essentially build it into contracts and under wage bargaining. So that’s one of the reasons why the traditional Phillips Curve breaks down. And there was a very famous speech by Milton Friedman; the presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1968. And I’ve talked about this in a previous episode – Episode 59, on the Natural Rate of Unemployment. And Friedman argued, well, in the long run, there’s really no Phillips Curve, you might think that there’s some sort of tradeoff in the short run, that you can get unemployment down if you pump-prime; if you stimulate your economy, and you’ll get some inflation as a result of that or you could go the other way and try and contract the economy to reduce inflation.

But in the long run, there is no trade off; there’s no Phillips Curve to speak of this. The economy should gravitate towards a natural rate of unemployment. And inflation can be whatever is consistent with people’s expectations.

There’s a big problem if you don’t get inflation under control, and people come to expect inflation, and then you can just have persistently high inflation, and you can have that with high unemployment as well.

Have you seen those diagrams of the Phillips Curve, with the vertical long run Phillips Curve? And then if you start off at a point on that Phillips Curve, so say you’re at your natural rate of unemployment, and you’ve got high inflation expected, then what can happen is, there some sort of shock that increases unemployment. And so, you start off at that high point with high inflation already. Maybe, it eventually has some sort of; it does contribute to a reduction in inflation somewhat, but you still at that higher level of inflation. And so, you can have higher unemployment or high unemployment and high inflation still.

So, that was probably a bit more technical information than we needed. If you have a look at an intermediate or advanced macroeconomics textbook, they’ll have some diagrams; I have some models that go over, that we probably don’t need to look into that. But the main point is that this Phillips Curve, discovered by Bill Phillips; people thought it was this stable tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, didn’t hold in the long run. And if your economy is subject to the supply side shocks, so increase in the price of oil, for example. And then if people come to expect inflation, then you can get high levels of inflation. And they can be very persistent, and you can have the economy slow down, you’re going to have high unemployment, and inflation can still persist for a long time.

And if you did want to get that inflation down, you really need a change in monetary policy, you need a much more aggressive monetary policy, and you need a credible Central bank that can deliver it. And I think this is what Paul Volcker in the US did in the early 80s. And this is what when they massively tighten monetary policy, high interest rates, crunch the economy, but they did get inflation under control. And I think this is related to this point that the World Bank made. There was a point about better monetary policy frameworks. Is that right?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  22:37

Yes, that’s right. After that economic event occurring 1970s, most of Central banks started to control prices, try to target inflation. Also, they incorporated the old thing related to these rational speculative in order to take into account potentials proven that pulling golden, been analyzed before 1970s since the Phillips Curve wasn’t explained correctly, the prequel evidence, as you mentioned. In the short run, that Phillips Curve is playing well, but in the long run, they didn’t account other factors, and relationships was different. So, I think most of the Central bank started to work better in terms of expectations.

Gene Tunny  23:45

Yeah. And so, this is this point, that Central banks, they need to have a credible monetary policy. And one way of having a credible monetary policy is to have an explicit inflation target that you’re judged on. And that’s why our Reserve Bank of Australia has a 2 to 3% inflation target, and the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, they’re aiming for, I think it’s 2%. I’ll put that in the show notes. But they sort of; all of these Central banks tend to have inflation targets in 2 to 3%, which is a recognition that you’re going to have some inflation, but what you want to avoid is higher rates of inflation or double-digit inflation, or even worse, that’s what you really want to avoid, because that really causes a lot of misery. People can sort of, live with inflation of 2 to 3%.

So, that was this point about monetary policy; another thing that helps signal a credible monetary policy. So, by credible, we mean that people in the economy, businesses and workers know that if inflation starts to accelerate, the Central bank is going to squash that inflation as soon as it can. And that helps keep inflationary expectations down so people don’t come to expect higher inflation.

Okay, and one other thing that does help with the credibility of a Central bank is having an independent Central bank, who the worst thing you can have is if your Central bank is influenced by politicians; if it’s controlled by politicians, because, say they’re coming up to an election, there might be inflation increasing, but the politicians don’t want the Central bank putting up interest rates just before an election.

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  25:43

That’s right. In the world, we have seen many examples. For example, Peru is a good example of a thing that would the government shouldn’t do. For example, in the middle of 80s, Peruvian government, had a high level of debt. That moment, government Allan Garcia took place, and he didn’t recognize the debth. So, they didn’t want to pay. And also, in the government, they started to print money because the other Central bank, was subordinated to the current government. And that was the world’s respond for [unclear] because Peru initiated a stage of hyperinflation. And also, Peru faced a recession period.

Gene Tunny  26:52

So, hyperinflation; there is a quantitative definition of hyperinflation. It’s when you have inflation running at about 50% a month or something. It’s a very high rate, and you can end up with annual inflation rates of over 1,000% or something, which is just mad. What they had in Germany in the 1920s. But also, we’ve seen it in South American countries in the;

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  27:18

Most South American countries, experience periods of hyperinflation.

Gene Tunny  27:23

So, you are highlighting one of the; when it gets really bad when you don’t have that independence. And because the Central bank is the bank for the government as the government just commits to making all of these payments, and it might not actually have the money, but the Central bank just prints the money. It just pays the bills for the government; the money is just created. So yeah, what they call modern monetary theory nowadays; bad results.

We’ve chatted about the Phillips Curve, why it’s not reliable. I’ll put links to all of these things I’ve mentioned particularly to Milton Friedman’s presidential address, which is just brilliant.

Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  28:47

Now back to the show.

Okay, now, one of the things Central banks are essentially wanting to avoid is this idea of a wage price spiral. So, we’ve talked about inflationary expectations, you want to avoid inflation becoming expected, and then it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, one of the concepts that disgusts is a wage-price spiral.

Okay, so in early May 2022, the Reserve Bank of Australia; this was a report in the Australian Financial Review. The Reserve Bank of Australia has warned of a wage price spiral if unions exploit the low jobless rate to push for higher pay rises to compensate for an inflation rate to peak at a higher than expected 6%.

So, what is a wage-price spiral? The Bank of International Settlements in Basel in Switzerland; it’s defined a wage price spiral in the following way, and this is in a bulletin that they produced, BIS bulletin number 53 on Major Advanced Economies on the verge of a Wage Price Spiral.

A wage price spiral entails feedback in both directions between wages and prices. Inflation then rises persistently on the back of such a spiral. Once the economy enters the spiral, workers bid up nominal wages more than prices, prompting firms to raise prices further, the likelihood of an economy entering the wage price spiral depends in part on macro-economic conditions.

Workers bargaining power is typically greater when Labor demand is strong and Labor supply is tight. Similarly, firms may have more pricing power when aggregate demand is strong. Labor market institutions also influenced the likelihood of a wage price spiral emerging.

Automatic wage indexation and cost of living adjustment. So C-O-L-A or COLA clauses make wage price spirals, more likely.

And this was important in the; well, it became an issue in the Australian election campaign, because the then opposition leader now Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese; did you see his comments when he was saying that, if we were in government, we would support workers being getting a wage rise in line with inflation. Inflation was rising at well; inflation was 5.1%. That was the last reported estimate from the Reserve Bank, which was higher than expected. And then, Anthony Albanese came out and said, yes, workers, their wages should increase by at least 5.1% To make up for that. And then, the then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison tried to make a big thing out of that and he said, Anthony Albanese is a loose unit, because this could then lock in inflation permanently.

So, this is his concern about a wage price spiral and the BIS was arguing that, this sort of thing; there’s automatic wage indexation, which is almost what well, it’s essentially what Anthony Albanese, our current prime minister here in Australia was almost hinting at. I think he regretted making that comment, because they really don’t want to do that. And if I think they’ve walked back a bit from that position, I mean, they put a submission to the Fair Work Commission, ultimately, it’s up to the Fair Work Commission to decide the increase in minimum wages in Australia.

There was some criticism of the opposition leader at the time, because it could have; there were commentators who were saying, this is a sort of thing that risks a wage price spiral. And you could take that BIS note as supportive of that position. Ultimately, I don’t think that mattered much in the election campaign. So, who knows? I mean, it could have even increased support for Anthony Albanese. People think, well, that sounds fair enough that we’re compensated for inflation. Most people are wage earners as more wage earners than business owners in the country. So, it could have been a popular thing. The PM at the time was trying to say, well, he’s a loose unit, who knows how much impact it had on the election campaign?

Ultimately, I think the election was decided over concerns about climate change. There was this general perception out there that the government wasn’t doing enough on climate change, rightly or wrongly. And that was the dominant consideration.

Do you remember that whole debate or that whole discussion around the opposition leader’s comments?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  33:43

I remember that. I saw some news about it. I also reviewed some comments from some Australians, And some people or some citizens mentioned that the proposal is not correct for the current situation in the global economy. Because of course, if you want to raise salary, that will be loads, let’s say factor, or determinant to boost inflation pressures in Australia.

I remember that I checked some economic paper; it’s okay to raise the wages, but it could be implemented gradually. Or maybe you can target some sectors in order to improve the salaries but it’s not a good policy response to increase generally, the wages in the whole Australia.

Gene Tunny  35:01

Maybe limited to the lowest paid workers, rather than have at across all of the wage agreements in the economy so that; fair enough. Okay, we might have to come back to this whole issue of how wages are set in a future episode.

So, what did the BIS conclude about whether major economies are on the verge of a wage price spiral? Well, with most economic issues, they weren’t able to reach a firm conclusion. I mean, none of us has a crystal ball. I mean, I’m always very reluctant to give firm or precise forecast, because you just can’t, because there’s so much uncertainty.

So, my reading of what the BIS was saying in that wage price spiral bulletin, is that, well, they’re not really sure. The key things that they noted in their analysis were that while inflation is returned, it’s reached levels not seen in decades, whether inflation enters a persistently higher regime will depend on labor market developments and on whether a wage price spiral emerges. To date, evidence for a broad acceleration in wage growth is mixed. It’s picked up significantly in the US, but it remains moderate in most other advanced economies. So, it’s certainly still moderate in Australia, it is picking up a bit, but it’s not near what arguably, we’d like to have. And this became an issue in the election campaign to you probably remember this. Well, this is why Albanese made those comments to begin with. Because if you looked at wage’s growth, which was, 2.7 or maybe it was a bit lower through the year, compare it with inflation of 5.1%, then you get a real wage decline of 2.6%.

I will put the exact numbers in the show notes. It must have been about 2½%. If we’ve got a 5.1% inflation rate, I think they were saying the real wage decline was 2.6 or 2.7%, that it must have been a 2½% wage price index increase. I’ll put the right data in the show notes.

That became an issue in the recent election campaign.

Here is where the BIS basically admits; we really don’t know:, Extrapolating behavior from low inflation periods is problematic if inflation remains high, households may ask for higher wages to make up for lost purchasing power and firms may raise prices to protect profit margins. And stubbornly high inflation may lead to institutional changes, such as automatic indexation and cost of living adjustment clauses. So, that’s the sort of thing we want to avoid. And that’s why people were worried about what our current Prime Minister was saying, because there was a concern that we could effectively do that sort of thing, if he followed through on what he was saying.

Did you have any thoughts on that wage price spiral article? You had a looked at that today, didn’t you Arturo?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  38:17

Yes. I think, in the report, they also mentioned that some condition must be complied to be under these kinds of wage price spirals. But from my point of view, I think is quite complex to determine if all the countries are going to face that wage price spiral? I think that depends on the particular condition from each country.

Gene Tunny  38:50

Yeah, that’s the problem that the World Bank and the BIS, or the IMF have, because they’re trying to produce forecasts, or do analysis for the whole world or all major economies, whereas there are differences in the institutions within those economies; a very good point.

Okay, so let’s get back to the central question. I mean, all of these things we’ve been talking about, are related to because if we have a wage price spiral, and then we have some shock or the economy goes into a downturn, then we could end up with stagflation. So, it’s all related.

We’ll talk about now, the prospects for stagflation. So, is this something we should be worried about? And it turns out the BIS looked at this last month, so before the World Bank, so this is obviously something that economists in these major institutions are concerned about, and the BIS had to report commodity market disruptions, growth and inflation.

We’ve talked about the broad base supply shock increasing inflation, food and energy prices spilling over to other components of inflation, and possibly; well contributing to a reduction in global economic growth. And we should talk about the World Bank’s forecasts because the World Bank now is forecasting a reduction in global growth, isn’t it? That was one of the major things in that latest report. I’ve got it here.

The bank slashed its annual global growth forecast to 2.9% from January’s 4.1% and said that subdued growth would be likely to persist throughout the decade because of weak investment in most of the world.

And so, the BIS was saying that this is the sort of thing that would happen. It was saying this last month, and I guess, I mean, a lot of other economists have been concerned about that. There’s a recognition that what’s happening with Ukraine, what’s happening with commodity prices, that is going to compromise, global economic growth.

Now, it looks like the BIS; they’re saying similar things to the World Bank and the World Bank, probably. I mean, I’m sure it read what the BIS analysis is pretty much; I think they reach the same conclusions almost. So, let’s go over what the BIS says, and then we’ll compare it with what the World Bank says. So, the BIS has concluded, recent shocks have been smaller than the 1970s oil shocks, but broader based encompassing food and industrial commodities as well as energy. Nonetheless, structural changes, as well as stronger policy frameworks and nominal anchors.

So, by a nominal anchor, they mean, something that’s keeping prices down. They’re talking about inflation targets. So, they make stagflation less likely to return. But this is where they acknowledge that.; we’ve said that, but ultimately, things can happen that derail the economy that can mean our forecast is incorrect. And they know commodity price increases in the wake of the war in Ukraine are likely to weigh on global growth and add to inflation. While lower energy dependence and stronger policy frameworks make a repeat of the 1970s stagflation unlikely, high and volatile commodity prices could still be disruptive. This puts a premium on restoring low inflation quickly before it becomes ingrained in household and corporate decisions.

Absolutely. I think that’s a very good point to make. So, that’s what the BIS said, That’s pretty similar to what the World Bank said, isn’t it?

We might have a look at that now, again. Let me just go back to the media release. They also got a comprehensive report and that chapter, the focus on stagflation, which I’ll link to in the show notes, which is worth reading. I’m just going to consult their media release, which is a really good summary and well written.

Let’s just talk about how the current situation resembles the 70s. And why? What are the reasons why we might think that we could end up with global stagflation?

The current juncture resembles the 1970s in three key aspects: persistence supply, side disturbances, fueling inflation, preceded by a protracted period of highly accommodative monetary policy and major advanced economies, prospects for weakening growth and vulnerabilities in emerging market and developing economies face with respect to the monetary policy tightening that will be needed to rein in inflation.

Let’s have a look at what they’re talking about there. We’ve talked about the persistent supply side disturbances, preceded by a protracted period of highly accommodative monetary policy. By accommodative, we mean, loose, we mean, ultra-low interest rates, we mean lots of money printing, that sort of thing; credit creation, due to the low interest rates. And that’s what we’ve seen in Australia, we’ve seen in the US, we’ve seen it in other advanced economies. So, there’s no doubt about that. And the argument is that buildup of that additional money, that additional liquidity will end up with too much money chasing too few goods, accelerating inflation, right. We’ve talked about that on the show before.

They also talked about vulnerabilities that emerging market and developing economies face with respect to the monetary policy tightening that will be needed to rein in inflation.

So, let’s have a think about what they’re driving out there. I mean, as the western economies increase interest rates, that’s going to mean; this is just one aspect of it. That will attract investment capital, portfolio investment to the US or to other major advanced economies. And if those developing economies don’t put up their interest rates, then that will lead to a depreciation of their exchange rates, which means that the cost of imported goods in those economies will be compromised, or if they’re trying to fix their exchange rates, it puts pressure on their balance of payments. So, it’s a bad situation for those emerging economies.

And also, the thing is, when you have situations like this in the world, when there’s concerns about volatility, there is this flight to safety and money can flow to the advanced economies where there’s a perception, it’s safer, and that could compromise these emerging economies. I wouldn’t be forecasting this yet, but things can happen unexpectedly or rapidly. We know that there can be crises in emerging economies that are difficult to predict, such as the Asian crisis in the late 1990s.

 Any thoughts on any of those key aspects, Arturo? About how, how there are similarities with the 70s?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  46:19

No. Your explanation was very clear.

Gene Tunny  46:23

Okay, well, then we should; before we conclude this episode, we should talk about how the ongoing episode also differs from the 1970s. The dollar is strong, a sharp contrast with a severe weakness in the 1970s, the percentage increases in commodity prices are smaller, and the balance sheets of major financial institutions are generally strong.

More importantly, unlike the 1970s, Central banks in advanced economies, and many developing economies, now have clear mandates for price stability. And over the past three decades, they have established a credible track record of achieving their inflation targets.

And they go on to conclude as the World Bank global inflation is expected to moderate next year, but it will likely remain above; I think I’ve missed the words there, it must be above average.

And they talked about; something’s gone wrong with my printout. They do talk about, you know, there is a risk of stagflation. So, stagflation risk rises amid sharp slowdown in growth, okay, so, there’s going to be some moderation in inflation, but it’s likely to still remain high or higher than the normal. And you couple that with the fact that there’s a risk of a slowdown, and they’re talking about a slowdown in global growth. That’s what they’re forecasting, then, yes, certainly, stagflation of some kind is a risk.

My personal feeling is that; and this is informed by my conversation with Michael Knox last week, I don’t think we’ll end up with stagflation similar to the 70s, or rather, I hope not. I don’t see at the moment. I think the US economy based on the indicators I’ve seen in my conversation with Michael, I think, at least for the next year or so, the prospects for the US economy are very good. Likewise, for Australia, I mean, there are always risks. We’ve got some heavily indebted households; we’ve got interest rates increasing. That’s one of the great unknowns at the moment. But if you look at the indicators, such as job vacancies, you look at the fact we’ve got a 3.9% unemployment rate. You look at what’s happening with commodity prices, which were in net terms benefiting from, because we’re a net exporter of energy and minerals to the world. Like, our coal prices have been $400 – $500 US a ton.

Queensland is a huge producer of coal; and that’s benefiting our state and budget. I mean, there’s ultimately; there may have to be a transition out of coal because of concerns over climate change. But at the moment, it’s something that is beneficial to the state economy. So, I think in Australia, I’m not concerned about stagflation at the moment, but as always, I need to say, I don’t have a crystal ball.

Any thoughts, Arturo? I mean, what’s your general feeling on stagflation? Is this just the latest thing that we’re worried about? Perhaps for no really good reason? I mean, it certainly; I haven’t seen this interest in the concept for a long time. And yes, is it something we should be worried about? What do you think?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  49:35

I think the case is; it’s good to have these discussions and it’s good to know that most of the Central banks are considering these potential, let’s say, this potential event. If they are well prepared, they can avoid that kind of situation for some countries. As I mentioned this thing, if a cure isn’t going to be general, so some countries perhaps are going to face stagflation. In some cases, if they don’t manage properly their monetary policy and some fiscal responses.

But of course, there are many risks that are out there, for example, as the World Bank report mentioned, if the supply disruption proceeds or the commodity prices continue to climb, inflation could remain above Central bank’s target. So, I think those are potential risks, the Central bank must consider giving good response.

Gene Tunny  51:00

Yeah, good point.

One other point I wanted to make is; and this is related to the other thing that differs from the 70s, which is, the World Bank set out a few ways that the economy is not the same as the 70s. And, one of the important ones, I think, is they talk about the US dollar, don’t they, the dollar is strong. Now, this is a very technical issue, it’s a hard one to sort of get your head around, because you have to go back to the situation in the 60s and the early 70s, before the era that we’re now in, in advanced economies of floating exchange rates. When we had the Bretton Woods system.

Michael Knox referred to the growth in international reserves, he talked about the growth of foreign currencies, held by Central banks in the early 70s that just massively increased in the early 70s. Because what was happening were because of the issues in the US and higher budget deficits and concerns about inflation, people around the world were trying to get out of US dollars. And because of the Bretton Woods system, they were trading their US dollars for their own currency or other currencies, or for European currencies, because there was the strong; well, in those that post-war recovery in Europe and Europe was becoming more prominent. And so, there was a move out of US dollars and to buy those US dollars, the Central banks essentially printed money, they created new money.

So, these changes in international reserves that Michael was talking about, I think was like 80%, over from the end of 1972, sometime in 1972. It was a huge growth in these international reserves, that led to a big increase in domestic money supplies, and that fueled inflation.

This is a great article by Robert Heller, that was in one of the IMF journals; might have been finance and development. I put a link to it in the show notes before, I’ll put it again, because it’s just well worth reading. But I think for us to do that justice, we will probably have to come back and talk about Bretton Woods and the whole international financial system pre 1970s. And look, that’s going to be a lot of work.  

This shows the complexity of the issues that we’re dealing with. In the economy, so many moving parts, it’s all interconnected. And yes, but what we’re trying to do, I think on this show is to simplify it as much as possible. And really make sure we understand those mechanisms because in a lot of economic discussion, there’s just too much that’s assumed in terms of the knowledge of the people reading or listening. There are too many concepts explained by reference to other concepts without explaining those concepts. And I want to try to make sure that we’re as clear as possible.

I think we’re probably in a position to wrap this up. Arturo, any final words? Thoughts?

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  54:18

I think this conversation was pretty clear. And you’re to understand what is going on globally, in terms of inflation, potentially stagflation problems that some country may face. So, I think let’s stay alert. I think that Central banks are going to react properly in order to address that problem.

Gene Tunny  54:56

Okay, so you said, be alert, I like that. As our Former Prime Minister John Howard once said, Be alert, not alarmed. We will be alert to the prospects for global stagflation. But we’re not going to be alarmed at the moment.

You may not have been in Australia when he said that. That was something that people had amusing. There was about a serious issue is talking about international terrorism, which was, of course, a serious issue. And he said, be alert, but not alarmed. And then that sort of prompted all of these sorts of jokes about, what does that exactly mean to be alert, but not alarmed? I mean, how worried should we be?

And there was the old joke in Australia. Be alert, Australia needs Lurtz. I don’t know if you’ve heard that one. So, I think people would probably; as soon as John Howard said, Be alert, not alarmed. People were instantly sort of thinking, this is a bit of a funny thing to say. But maybe because I remembered that all joke about being alert.

Thank you, Aturo, I really enjoyed that conversation. And if you’re in the audience, and you’re listening, and you’d like to know more about these issues, I’ll put links to everything we chatted about in the show notes. I’ll also make any corrections. If I’ve got anything wrong I discover, in terms of numbers. I generally think the concepts and the facts; I think we got that right. But it’s possible some of the numbers I may have misremembered. So, we’ll put clarifications links in the show notes. And thanks again for listening. Arturo, really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much.

Arturo Espinoza Bocangel  56:43

Thank you again. Thank you very much.

Gene Tunny  56:46 Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com And we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye.

Credits

Big thanks to EP143 guest Arturo Espinoza and to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode and to Peter Oke for editing the transcript. 

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. Economics Explored is available via Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.

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Podcast episode

Nominal GDP targeting w/ Stephen Kirchner – EP135

Market monetarists such as Stephen Kirchner argue nominal GDP targeting would be better than inflation targeting and could help central banks such as the RBA and the US Federal Reserve get back on track. Stephen is Director of the International Economy Program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. 

Stephen spoke about nominal GDP targeting with Economics Explored host Gene Tunny in episode 135 of the show, recorded in April 2022. Among other details of nominal GDP targeting, Stephen discussed the potential role of a nominal GDP futures market and for blockchain and Ethereum in such a market and in financial markets more broadly. You can listen to the conversation using the embedded player below or via Google PodcastsApple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher, among other podcast apps.

About this episode’s guest – Dr Stephen Kirchner

Dr Stephen Kirchner is Director of the International Economy Program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute in Canada, where he has contributed to research projects comparing public policies in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Previously, he was an economist with the Australian Financial Markets Association, where he worked on public policy issues relating to the efficient and effective functioning of Australian financial markets and Australia’s position as a regional and international financial centre.

Stephen has been a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Technology Sydney Business School and an economist with Standard & Poor’s Institutional Market Services based in both Sydney and Singapore. He has also worked as an advisor to members of the Australian House of Representatives and Senate.

He has published in leading academic and think-tank journals, including Public Choice, The Australian Economic Review, Australian Journal of Political Science and The Cato Journal.

His op-eds have appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Straits Times, Businessweek, The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Stephen holds a BA (Hons) from the Australian National University, where he was awarded the L. F. Crisp Prize for Political Science, a Master of Economics (Hons) from Macquarie University, and a PhD in Economics from the University of New South Wales.

Stephen posts regularly on his substack: 

https://stephenkirchner.substack.com/

Links relevant to the conversation

Stephen’s papers on nominal GDP targeting:

Reforming Australian Monetary Policy: How Nominal Income Targeting Can Help Get the Reserve Bank Back on Track

The RBA’s pandemic response and the New Keynesian trap

Transcript of EP135: Nominal GDP targeting w/ Stephen Kirchner

N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.

Gene Tunny  00:01

Coming up on Economics Explored.

Stephen Kirchner  00:04

If you want to avoid, you know hitting the zero lower bound or expanding your balance sheet by a significant amount, the way to do that is to respond quickly and aggressively upfront. If you don’t do that, then you fall behind the curve and then monetary policy has to work a lot harder to stabilise the economy.

Gene Tunny  00:23

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of the important economic issues. I’m your host, Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is Episode 135 on nominal GDP targeting. My guest this episode is Dr. Stephen Kirchner, who is Director of the International Economy Programme at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in Australia. In this episode, Stephen tells us why nominal GDP targeting would be better than inflation targeting and how central banks such as the Reserve Bank of Australia and the US Federal Reserve can get back on track. Please check out the show notes for relevant links and for details of how you can get in touch with any comments or suggestions. I’d love to hear from you. Righto, now for my conversation with Dr. Steven Kirschner on nominal GDP targeting. Thanks to my audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Dr. Steven Kirchner of the US Studies Centre. Welcome to the programme.

Stephen Kirchner  01:36

Thanks for having me, Gene.

Gene Tunny  01:37

It’s a pleasure, Stephen, keen to chat with you about a paper you wrote last year on Reforming Australian Monetary Policy: How Nominal Income Targeting Can Help Get the Reserve Bank Back on Track. So there’s a lot to talk about here. And I think this is of general interest to people in other countries, as well, other than Australia, because this idea of nominal income targeting, it’s been raised in other countries, I know that you’ve appeared on David Beckworth’s podcast, Macro Musings, and I know that David Beckworth is a proponent of this in the United States. So I’d like to ask about, essentially, what is this nominal income targeting compared with how we normally, or how central banks have been running monetary policy? Would you be able to give us an overview of that, please?

Stephen Kirchner  02:38

Sure. I think nominal income targeting is actually not a huge change from where we are at the moment. So most central banks do what they call inflation targeting. And as part of an inflation targeting regime, they’re typically adjusting their monetary policy instrument, usually an official interest rate in response to deviations in inflation from target. But also responding to deviations in output from its full employment, or potential level. And the reason you have output as part of your reaction function is the output gap is predictive of future inflation outcomes. So if you’re running an inflation targeting regime, you want to respond to both deviations inflation from target, and output from potential.

Well, if you think about those two things, inflation on the one hand, and output on the other, if you put those two things together, then you’ve got nominal income, or nominal GDP. So in some respects, nominal GDP targeting or nominal income targeting is just a really weighting of that standard central bank reaction function. So if you think about a Taylor rule, which is just an empirical description of how the interest rate responds to deviations and inflation from target, and output from potential, all nominal GDP targeting is doing is saying you want to put inflation output together and weight them equally in terms of the interest rate response.

Gene Tunny  04:14

Ah, right. Okay. Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it. Yeah, please go on.

Stephen Kirchner  04:18

Yeah, so in that sense, it’s not a huge leap from where we are at the moment. But what it does mean is that the central bank is a bit more agnostic about its response to inflation, and deviations in output from potential. So it’s saying really we want to stabilise both, and the reason you want to stabilise both is if you’re just focusing on inflation, one of the problems you face is not all of the deviations in inflation from target are reflective of aggregate demand shocks. As we know, especially at the moment inflation can deviate from target due to supply shocks. Supply shocks have the effect of lowering output. And so this creates a dilemma for a central bank in how do you respond to a supply-driven inflation shock, or deviation from target. Because if you respond to the deviation in inflation from target and raise interest rates, then that’s going to compound the reduction in output you’d get from a supply shock.

Gene Tunny  05:28

Right. So one example, I’m just thinking, Stephen, is one example of this, did this occur, arguably a policy mistake? Was it 2008 when the European Central Bank put up its policy rate? Not long before the financial crisis? Because there was a supply shock? Or was there an increase in the price of oil? I’m trying to remember, is that one of the examples I give?

Stephen Kirchner  05:55

Well, I think the canonical example here is what happened in the 1970s, when you had very significant increases in oil prices giving rise to higher rates of inflation. And central banks did respond to those oil price shocks through tighter monetary policy. And so there’s an influential paper by Ben Bernanke, Watson and Gertler in 1997, which showed that the propagation of the oil price shock to the US economy was essentially through the monetary policy reaction. And so it was the central bank that actually put the stag into stagflation.

Another example of this would be if you go to September 2008, the FOMC meeting took place a couple of days after the failure of Lehman Brothers. And this was at a time when inflation expectations were collapsing and nominal GDP expectations were collapsing. At that meeting, the FOMC incredibly left the Fed funds rate unchanged, and cited inflation pressures arising from higher oil prices as the reason for keeping monetary policy steady. So this is a very good example of monetary policy being led astray by inflation outcomes that are being driven by supply shocks rather than aggregate demand shocks.

And so what we want is the central bank to respond to inflation pressures to the extent that they’re reflective of aggregate demand shocks, not aggregate supply shocks. And nominal GDP lets you do that without actually having to take a view on what’s driving inflation. So nominal GDP outcomes will tell you the extent to which your inflation issues are being driven by aggregate demand rather than aggregate supply.

Gene Tunny  07:51

Okay, so yeah, a few things to try and explore here. Stephen, inflation targeting. So it’s typically going for something around well, in Australia, it’s 2 to 3%, we’ve got a target band for inflation. And in the US, is it 2%? Or I remember thinking of Bank of England? But the different countries have just slightly different targets.

And what’s fascinating is that when these things were first formulated, we had much higher inflation. And I think no one ever expected we’d be getting consistently, we’d inflation outcomes consistently lower than those targets. And it makes it difficult to think about what’s the appropriate monetary policy response.

I better make sure I understand your argument about why you think the Reserve Bank needs to get back on track. Are you suggesting that the fact that Australia is similar to some other advanced economies, who’ve had inflation outcomes below the target for a substantial amount of time, that would imply that the Reserve Bank, the central bank had scope to expand to have a more expansionary monetary policy which could have pushed the economy closer to full employment? Is that the argument, broadly?

Stephen Kirchner  09:14

Yeah, that’s certainly true of the sort of pre-pandemic period basically, the period in which the RBA was undershooting from approximately 2014 through to the onset of the pandemic and even into the pandemic. So it’s certainly in the last couple of quarters that inflation has returned to target. I mean, I think the specification of the inflation target inevitably is a little bit arbitrary. What matters most is not the exact target range, but the fact that you hit that target more often than not over time and thereby establish your credibility in relation to that target. So ultimately, what you’re trying to do is condition the expectations of price, and wage setters in the economy should be consistent with that target. And so whether it’s a 2% target or 2 to 3% target, it’s less important than the fact that you have one and that you actually stick to it.

But the case for nominal income targeting is to say if you’re only targeting inflation, and this creates a bit of a presentational problem and a sort of implementation problem, which is that what happens in the context of a supply shock when inflation might be above target? How do you explain to people the fact that you’re not hitting your target, even though there’s probably a very good reason why you’d want to look through that supply shock.

If you’re expressing your monetary policy target in terms of nominal GDP, that task becomes a lot simpler, because yes, you may be above target on inflation, but in the context of a supply shock, output is going to be lower. And so you don’t get the same sort of deviation from target under a nominal GDP targeting regime than you would under an inflation targeting regime. Policymakers are less likely to be led astray, because by focusing on nominal GDP, they don’t have this issue of trying to figure out whether inflation outcomes reflect demand shocks or supply shocks.

Gene Tunny  11:23

Okay, so how would this work in practice? So in nominal terms, so by nominal, you’re talking about, we’re not talking about a real GDP measure where we adjust for inflation, we try and get things in consistent dollars, you’re just talking about the total value of the economy, in GDP in nominal terms, so what it is in current dollars, and say that it’s over $2 trillion in Australia annually. And so would the Reserve Bank have a target? They would have an expectation of what that nominal income for Australia should be in 2022, what it should be in 2023. So it should be 2.3 billion by this date or something? Is that Is that how it’s formulated? A trillion I meant, not billion. Sorry,

Stephen Kirchner  12:16

You can’t express it in level terms. So with a nominal GDP target, you can express it both as a growth rate or an implied path for nominal GDP. But I think it’s important to emphasise that, just as with inflation targeting, you don’t target inflation outcomes, necessarily. What you’re targeting is actually the inflation forecast. So what you’re saying is, in future, you’re going to be realising inflation outcomes consistent with target, or with nominal GDP targeting, it’s exactly the same thing. So you want to specify a target path for the future evolution of novel income or novel output. And you want to adjust your monetary policy instruments to be consistent with that target path.

So if in any given quarter, your level of nominal GDP is a little bit above or a little bit below the target path, that’s not necessarily a problem. Again, what you’re trying to do is conditions people’s expectations in relation to what future nominal income will be. And I think that has very useful properties from the point of view of stabilising the economy, because if you think about things like wage and price contracting in the economy, people borrowing and lending, all those activities are conditional on expectations for future normal income. And so if you can stabilise both expectations for that future nominal income path, and by implication, also nominal GDP outcomes, then I think that’s a recipe for macroeconomic stability, more so than if you’re targeting inflation without regard to whether inflation is being driven by demand or supply shocks.

Gene Tunny  14:13

Right. Okay. Might go back to that Taylor rule. So you mentioned the Taylor rule. And you mentioned you can actually think of nominal GDP targeting in a, you call it a reaction function, so how the central bank reacts to the macroeconomic variables. And you said this gives equal weight to deviations of inflation from the target end of real GDP from the target. What does the Taylor rule typically do? Do ou know, what sort of normal parameters there are in that reaction function and what that means?

Stephen Kirchner  14:53

So the Taylor rule was due to John Taylor, who in the early 1990s sat down and said, well empirically, how do we characterise movements in the Fed funds rate. So he regressed the Fed funds rate on various macroeconomic variables. And the empirical description that he came up with for the Feds reaction function was to say, well, the Fed responds to deviations in inflation from target, and had estimated a weight of about 1.5 on that deviation, and also response to deviations and output from potential. And he estimated a weight of .5 on that.

But to sort of round out that empirical description of the Fed funds rate, you also needed an estimate of what the neutral Fed funds rate would be. So in other words, what happens when inflation is a target and output is a potential? What is the Fed funds rate consistent with that? And so that just ends up being a constant regression.

One of the big issues that sort of comes out of that is that’s obviously a historical estimate. What happens if your equilibrium real interest rate changes over time. So you then have the issue of, if you’re responding based on those historical relationships, but the actual equilibrium interest rate changes, and you may end up with monetary policy being miscalibrated. And I think that arguably happens in the United States, and to a certain extent here in recent years, where I think the equilibrium real rate probably fell considerably. And that meant that monetary policy ended up being tighter than central banks intended.

Gene Tunny  16:53

Okay, we might come back to that, I just want to go back to the Taylor rule that you mentioned 1.5. So that means for every percentage point that inflation would be above the target, so if the target’s 2%, and inflation is 3%, the central bank would put up the policy interest rate, the overnight cash rate or the federal funds rate by 1.5 percentage points. And the idea is there that you’re trying to engineer an increase in the real interest rate. So you want to make sure the interest rate increases more than the inflation component of it. Actually, yeah,

Stephen Kirchner  17:41

Yeah, that’s right. So this thing actually has a name, it’s called the Taylor principle. And the Taylor principle says that you want to move your nominal interest rate by more than one for one with the deviation inflation from target, because if you just do a one for one or a less than one point move, then you’re not going to move the real rate, you’re not going to move it in the desired direction. So it has to be a move that is more than the change in inflation. So that’s why you get a parameter estimate of a little bit more than one.

For some central banks, you get higher responses to inflation. So the BOJ, Bank of Japan, the ECB, depending on what sort of model that you look at, sometimes their reactions will be up around two. But yeah, the basic Taylor principle is that you want a response to inflation that is greater than one. But essentially, nominal GDP targeting says that you want to combine inflation and output in the form of nominal GDP, and you want to respond to that.

Gene Tunny  18:46

So I guess one of the points that you make, and I think it is a good point, that to do this Taylor rule properly, you need estimates of these unobservable variables, such as this equilibrium real interest rate. And as you rightly point out, I mean, this is something that… Interest rates are much lower now than we ever expected. You compare historically, it’s quite extraordinary what we’ve seen since the financial crisis in Australia, and the US and UK, and even before then in Japan, since the ‘90s. Absolutely extraordinary.

So I want to make sure I understand the logic again. You mentioned that this means that monetary policy was not as aggressive or as accommodative, or however you describe it, because the equilibrium real interest rate, whatever that is, whether it’s… Say it was 4% and now it’s much lower than that. How does that logically work, Stephen? Can you take us through that logic? I just want to make sure I understand how it would lead a central bank to go astray.

Stephen Kirchner  20:00

Actually, the problem is a bit broader than that. So there are potentially three unobservable variables it would impact. Taylor rule style reaction function, and potentially monetary policy Australia. So one is the real equilibrium interest rate, as we’ve discussed. It’s not directly observable. And it could be higher or lower than we think. But I would say it’s probably been lower than policymakers have thought. In terms of the output gap, then you have the problem that we don’t directly observe potential output either. And so that could be higher or lower than we think. And so policy can be miscalibrated on that basis.

An alternative way of thinking about the output gap is to think in terms of an unemployment gap. So the deviation in unemployment from its full employment level, and this is of course where we get the NAIRU from. So the idea that there’s an unemployment rate that’s consistent with the stable interest rate. And both the Federal Reserve and the RBA have conceded in recent years that the NAIRU has actually been a lot lower than they realised. So they have downwardly revised their estimates of the NAIRU.

And so for much of the post financial crisis period, I think both the Fed and to a lesser extent, the RBA were conditioning monetary policy on a view that the unemployment rate was pretty close to the NAIRU, when in fact, it was probably sitting quite a bit above the NAIRU. And so what that meant was we had monetary policy that was two tight. They could have actually pushed the unemployment rates lower. And done it in a way that would have meant that inflation was more consistent with target as well.

So you can see that the problem with a sort of Taylor rule type approach is that embedded in the Taylor rule, you’ve got at least two unobserved variables.  You’re trying to estimate what those unobservable variables are and condition policy on it. So what nominal income targeting says is well, in fact, you don’t need to take a view on either the equilibrium real rate or the NAIRU or potential output, because nominal GDP in and of itself is a complete description of the stance of monetary policy. And in the long run, nominal GDP is fully determined by the central bank. So the central bank can both influence the long run level of nominal GDP, and the level of nominal GDP tells you whether monetary policy is too easy or too tight at any given time.

You don’t need to do what’s sometimes called navigating by the stars, which is, in macroeconomics, when you write this stuff down in the form of equations, the equilibrium values,  the real interest rate, the NAIRU and potential output, those variables denoted with an asterisk or a star. And so we were first and policy that sort of conditions on those variables as navigating the stars. This is what leads monetary policy astray. It’s the problem that nominal GDP targeting seeks to address

Gene Tunny  23:24

Okay, so by NAIRU, N-A-I-R-U, which stands for non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, such a horrible expression. We use it all the time. Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.

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Gene Tunny  24:14

Now back to the show. So how’s this gonna work in practice, Stephen? I’m wondering, and does that mean the main thing the central bank is looking at it in their deliberations, so the board meeting of the Reserve Bank or at the Federal Open Markets Committee, or the Monetary Policy Committee, in the UK, or in the FOMC and in the US, they’re just looking at what the latest data are telling them about GDP, about nominal GDP? They’re trying to forecast that themselves based on a range of indicators, I suppose. Have you thought about how it’s going to work in practice?

Stephen Kirchner  24:55

I think central banks should basically look at all the information that’s available to them in forming a view. So the question is more in terms of what their target is and how they specify that target. And, importantly, also how they describe their policy actions in relation to that target. And so, the purposes of adopting a nominal GDP target, one way to do that is to specify a target path for the future evolution of nominal GDP. So you can do that out a few years in advance. And you would then explain your changes in your operating instrument in terms of an attempt to hit that target path.

So for Australia, for example, it would be a simple matter of rewriting the agreement with the treasurer, what we call a statement on monetary policy, which basically sets out what the RBA is trying to achieve through its conduct of monetary policy. And you would specify that in terms of a path, the future path for nominal GDP.

One of the things I do in my paper for the Mercatus Centre is to estimate an implicit forward-looking nominal GDP targeting rule for the Reserve Bank. So I basically do for the RBA, what John Taylor did for the fed back in the early 1990s, and say, How would an empirical description is nominal GDP targeting of how the RBA has actually changed the cash rate in the past?

And as it turns out, it’s actually not a bad empirical model of what they’ve been doing historically, because even if you’re thinking of monetary policy material type framework, you know, you’re still trying to stabilise nominal GDP. You’re just putting different weights on those two components of inflation output. But if you think of monetary policy as just responding to the nominal GDP, well, to some extent, the RBA is already doing that. Where I think nominal GDP targeting is helpful is, at the margin, I think it would lead to better monetary policy decisions, for the reasons that we’ve already talked about that. At the margin, they would be focusing more squarely on nominal demand shocks and looking through supply shocks, which I think is where monetary policy has run off track in the past.

Gene Tunny  27:34

Okay, so I want to ask about the RBA. So you want to get the RBA back on track. And one of the areas or one way you think that it’s off track is that over the last decade or so, or maybe over the last five years, or maybe a bit longer than that, it’s paid too much attention. Am I getting this right? You think it’s paid too much attention to financial stability risks, and this is called leaning against the wind? I think it’s denied that it actually does lean against the wind. Is this one of your criticisms of it, Stephen? And if so, what’s wrong with taking financial stability risks into account when setting monetary policy?

Stephen Kirchner  28:15

So there’s a long running debate about the role of financial stability, inflation targeting framework, and to what extent you should take financial stability concerns into account when doing inflation targeting. And one conception of this is to say that if you are doing inflation targeting, and you’re underpinning nominal stability in the economy, that this in itself is conducive to financial stability. And so, you want to prioritise nominal stability and that is the way you get financial stability.

And to the extent that financial instability becomes a problem, then monetary policy can always address that ex post. So the way the debate is sometimes characterised is between leaners and cleaners. So if your reaction to financial instability is ex post, then you’re cleaning up after you get a financial stability problem. If you’re a leaner, then you’re trying to sort of anticipate those financial instability problems. And to that extent, you’re going to potentially sacrifice your inflation target in order to head off some of those concerns.

So central banks will always obviously have to respond to financial instability after the fact to the extent that it creates problems for the macro economy. The real question is, to what extent do you try to do that preemptively. And I would argue that we don’t have enough information about financial stability risks to really do that successfully, preemptively. And traditionally, that was kind of the view that the RBA took. So if you look at the 2010 statement on monetary policy agreed between the treasurer and the RBA governor, that statement was the first to incorporate financial stability as a consideration. So it was the first statement after the financial crisis. And so it’s no surprise that that statement took on financial stability concerns.

And in that 2010 statement, it says very explicitly that, yes, the Reserve Bank should take account of financial stability, but without compromising the price stability objective. So financial stability concerns were made explicitly subordinate to price stability. And so that reflects the view I talked about before where you view nominal stability as being the most conducive way to address financial stability risks. So that would be the way that I would tend to formulate that relationship between price stability and financial stability.

What happened when Philip Lowe became governor in 2016 is there was a change in the wording on the statement on the conduct of monetary policy, which essentially turned that relationship on its head. So that statement explicitly provided for short-term deviations in inflation from target in order to address financial stability risks. So that agreement was essentially saying that there may be times when in the short run, we’re going to allow inflation to deviate from target in order to address financial stability concerns. And those concerns were explicitly nominated as a reason why you might look at the inflation target.

Gene Tunny  31:51

They might accept lower than the target inflation, because they don’t want monetary policy so stimulatory that it means that there’s a big growth in housing credit and house prices. Is one of the criticisms of what the RBA is doing now. I mean, I’m interested in your views on what it’s done during the pandemic, because we’ve had very aggressive monetary policy response. And this has arguably contributed to the boom in housing credit and house prices where we’ve got double digit, we’ve had house prices increase by over 20% In some cities. And I mean, to me, I mean, it looks like monetary policy has been too aggressive during this period. But yeah, I’m interested in your view on that, Stephen. And I mean, how does what they’ve done, how do you assess that given you’re an advocate of this nominal income targeting? How compatible is what they’ve done with that, please?

Stephen Kirchner  32:58

So if you look at the period from 2016, through to the onset of the pandemic, that changed, and the wording of the statement in the conduct of monetary policy ended up then being a very good description of monetary policy under Governor Lowe. So, through that period, the RBA very explicitly traded off concerns around, in particular the household debt-to-income ratio, and said, Well, the reason why we’re letting inflation run below target is we’re worried that if we provide more stimulatory monetary policy settings, then that would trigger more household borrowing, and potentially create risks in in the housing market. And the concern was that by the household sector taking on increased leverage, that this would increase the household sector’s exposure to a shock. So essentially, you’re trying to fight the last war in terms of the 2008 financial crisis. They were trying to mitigate what they saw as the risks that led to that particular event.

Now, one of the criticisms of leaning against the wind, I think, and this is a criticism that’s been made very persuasively, I think, by Lars Svensson, Swedish economist, is to say, well, if you’re conducting monetary policy on the basis of an apprehended financial stability, its annual trading off inflation and output against those risks, then in a sense, what you’re doing is you’re setting yourself up to have a weaker starting point if and when a financial crisis does occur. So the starting point for the economy is actually going to be weaker because you’ve been running monetary policy, it’s been too tight. And so this is a mistake that the Swedish central bank made In the early 2010s, and which led Lars to sort of formally model leaning against the wind and coming up with that characterization.

Peter Tulip who was a former Reserve Bank economists, when he was at the bank. He also did some work, basically applying Svensson’s framework to Australia and showing that in terms of the trade-off between the central bank’s objectives and financial stability risks, the RBA was basically incurring costs anywhere from three to eight times the benefit in terms of mitigating financial stability risks. So the cost in terms of having unemployment, for example, higher than would have been otherwise, you know, more than offset any gain in terms of reducing financial stability risk.

So essentially, I think this is a hierarchy in knowledge problem that the central bank really does not have enough knowledge about the economy to be able to successfully lean against the wind. This explains why the RBA undershot its inflation target for the better part of seven years. And it was an explicit policy choice, you know. This wasn’t an accident.

Going into the pandemic, I would say that the initial monetary policy response was inadequate. And this was essentially a function of the RBA trying to conduct monetary policy within its traditional operating framework. So they were still trying to use the cash rate as their main operating instrument, even though the cash rate was constrained by the zero lower bound on a nominal interest rates.

Gene Tunny  36:43

So we had a cash rate of, was it .25% going into the pandemic?

Stephen Kirchner  36:49

Going into the pandemic, it was point .75.

Gene Tunny  36:52

Oh, right. Yeah, sorry.

Stephen Kirchner  36:54

In March of 2020 they lowered it by 50 basis points in 2 increments of .25. And that took it down to a quarter of a point, which they argued at the time was an effective lower bound inasmuch as the RBA operates a corridor system around that target cash rate. And so the bottom of the corridor would have normally been at zero, if they had maintained that system. Subsequently, of course, the RBA did lower the cash rate below .25. So it turned out that it wasn’t a lower bound after all. It was very much a self-imposed constraint.

But going into the pandemic, they tried to conduct monetary policy very much within that conventional operating framework with the cash rate as the main operating instrument. And I think, because they allowed the level of the cash rate to determine how much stimulus they would provide… And initially, monetary policy was way too tight. So even though they had lowered the cash rate, what we saw between March 2020 and November 2020, when they finally adopted QE, was that the Australian dollar appreciated significantly. So the Australian dollar outperformed all of the other G10 currencies over that period. The appreciation on the trade-weighted index was about 10%.

And so what this is telling you is that in relative terms, we were not doing nearly as much as other central banks. And we were paying a penalty for that on the exchange rate. The other element of this, of course, was the macroeconomic policy mix, so the relative weight on monetary and fiscal policy. So our fiscal policy response was one of the strongest in the world. But our monetary policy response wasn’t.

Gene Tunny 38:52

Initially, yeah, gotcha.

Stephen Kirchner 38:54

At least up until November 2020. And so this is a recipe for the open economy crowding out effects that you discussed with Alex Robson, when you talked about Tony Makin’s work on open economy crowding out. So if you have a fiscal policy response, if you’re overweighting on fiscal policy relative to monetary policy, you’ll pay a penalty for that exchange rate. And that’s exactly what happened. And that was a pretty strong indication that monetary policy of this period was too tight. The RBA could have done more but didn’t because it was trying to conduct policy within its traditional operating framework.

Gene Tunny  39:33

Right, and by more you mean quantitative easing or large scale asset purchases, creating new money, printing money electronically and then using it to buy financial securities bonds, for example?

Stephen Kirchner  39:48

Yeah, so there are two alternative operating frameworks that they could have used. One is negative interest rates and the other is large scale asset purchases or QE. And so by November 2020, the RBA conceded that other central banks had done more to expand their balance sheet. And they needed to do the same. They also lowered the cash rate target from .25 to .1. And they lowered the bottom of the cash rate corridor from one to zero. So effectively, they conceded that they could have done more and needed to do more, and they finally delivered. And at that time, they did adopt a very aggressive asset purchase programme because they were playing catch up to other central banks. And so by the time we’ve got to the end of 2021, in fact, the RBA had expanded its balance sheet as a share of GDP by an amount that was broadly equivalent to what the Fed had done.

So one of the ironies here is that the RBA’s attempt not to expand its balance sheet actually ended up being a balance sheet expansion that was comparable to that of the Fed. And I think this is an important lesson for monetary policy generally, that typically, if central bank is using its policy instruments aggressively, and over a very extended period of time, that’s usually an indication that it didn’t do enough upfront. So in fact, if you want to avoid, you know, hitting the zero lower bound or expanding your balance sheet by a significant amount, the way to do that is to respond quickly and aggressively upfront. If you don’t do that, then you fall behind the curve, and then monetary policy has to work a lot harder to stabilise the economy. And I think that’s what ended up happening in Australia in response to the pandemic.

Gene Tunny  41:42

Right, okay. You’ve written another fascinating paper on this, Stephen. The paper’s titled The Reserve Bank of Australia’s Pandemic Response and the New Keynesian Trap. So this was published in Agenda, which is a journal put out by the Australian National University. And I want to ask you what you mean by New Keynesian trap. But I think I sort of know, I think you’re sort of alluding to the fact that a new Keynesian policy approach would be inflation targeting, but you can correct me on that. But the point you make, and I think this is fascinating, you want to explore this and make sure I understand what you mean here, you write, “A monetarist conception of the monetary transmission mechanism would have encouraged more rapid adoption of alternative operating instruments.” So could you explain what you mean there, please?

Stephen Kirchner  42:33

Yeah, so the New Keynesian trap was exactly what I was describing in terms of the monetary policy response to the pandemic. The New Keynesian framework for monetary policy analysis relies excessively on an official interest rate as not just the central bank’s only operating instrument, but also the only way that you get monetary policy into that model. And the problem with this is that if the central bank thinks of monetary policy implementation and monetary policy transmission exclusively in terms of an official interest rate, then that’s going to be a problem when your official interest rate hits the lower bound, because at that point, your model basically blows up, because if you can’t lower the nominal interest rate, in a situation which is calling for easy monetary policy, then that’s a recipe for macroeconomic instability. And in fact, it becomes a downward spiral because the economy deteriorates and you can’t respond through your conventional monetary policy instrument.

And in the sort of New Keynesian literature on monetary policy, there are all sorts of ways in which they try and sort of solve this problem. So in some of that literature, for example, there’s just an assumption that  fiscal policy steps in to bail out the central bank. And to some extent, that’s what we saw with the pandemic response, which was that you might have noticed during the early stages of the pandemic, the Reserve Bank Governor was begging the federal and state governments to do even more with fiscal policy than they were actually doing, even though the fiscal policy response is quite large. And so really what he was saying was, my hands are tied, you need to do more to stabilise the economy.

Now, were the central bank’s hands tied by its operating framework? Well, only in the sense that they perceive that framework to be binding on their decision making. If you go back to November 2019. Governor Lowe gave a speech in which he addressed the issue of negative interest rates and quantitative easing. And he was arguing that it was very unlikely that the central bank would have to go there. And if you read that speech, you can see he’s very reluctant to contemplate using either of those policy instruments. So for me, the New Keynesian trap, it’s a self-imposed constraint on monetary policy. It’s because of the way you’re conceiving both the monetary policy instrument and the monetary policy transmission mechanism, it leads you to pull your punches in an environment where you need to adopt a new operating frame.

And for me, the fact that the RBA walked away from that framework in November of 2020 basically concedes the point, they realised that their traditional operating framework was not adequate in responding to a massive shock when the interest rate was hitting the zero bound, and so they needed to think of monetary policy in an alternative framework. And so this is where an RBA officials started giving speeches about the role of quantitative policy instruments and quantitative transmission mechanisms in the monetary policy implementation. If they had done that back in March of 2020, I think we would have had a more timely, more effective monetary policy response and avoided what I’ve called the New Keynesian trap.

Gene Tunny  46:22

Yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, I think you’ve been rightly critical of the RBA. If they eventually had to adopt these measures, and arguably, they should have done them earlier. So very good point. I want to make sure I understand why it’s a monetarist conception, why that would have led to more rapid adoption. Is that because a monetarist would have been looking at the monetary aggregates, they would have been thinking about, well, how, how could we make the monetary aggregates grow at the rate that would be optimal? Is that what you’re thinking? And you’re just not thinking in terms of a cash rate? You’re thinking in terms of the money supply?

Stephen Kirchner  47:03

Monetarists have always been very critical of the idea that an official interest rate is both the best characterization of what monetary policy is doing, but also the idea that it’s a complete representation of the role that monetary policy plays in the economy. So it’s true that, you know, in equilibrium, you could say that an official interest rate might be a good representation of the contribution of monetary policy.

The way monetarists tend to think of the long run evolution of the price level is in terms of the long run supply and demand for real money balances. And so they tend to think of the evolution of monetary policy in a quantity framework rather than a price framework, the price being the interest rate. So you can think of monetary policy instruments either working through a price, which is the interest rate, or quantity, which is the supply and demand of real money balances. I think both modes of analysis have their place, and they’ve clearly linked. But the focus on official interest rates, I think has been very misleading, because you know, of itself, the level of the cash rate, tells you very little about the stance of monetary policy.

I think one of the mistakes monetary policymakers have made internationally and in Australia has been to assume that because the nominal cash rate is low, monetary policy must be stimulatory. And one of the points that Milton Friedman made repeatedly was to say, if the nominal interest rate is low, then that’s probably indicative of tight monetary policy because that probably means that inflation is very low as well, if you think of the contribution that inflation makes to the nominal interest rate. So if you’ve got very low nominal interest rates, that’s probably an indication that monetary conditions are too tight, rather than too easy. And I think it’s a mistake that monetary policymakers have repeatedly made.

Milton Friedman warned against it in his 1968 presidential address to the American Economics Association. And throughout his life, he tried to impress upon policymakers the significance of this. But it’s something that’s still eludes policymakers, I think, and you can see it in some of the comments that the RBA and Governor Lowe has made in recent years where they often emphasise the low level of the cash rate as being self-evidently indicative of an easy monetary policy stance when, in fact, if anything, it’s probably an indication that monetary policy is too tight.

By the same token, if you go back to say, the late 1980s, in Australia, when we had double digit inflation rates, well, we had double digit interest rates as well. At that time, very high level of interest rates was in fact indicative of the fact that the RBA had run monetary policy in a way that was way too easy, giving us high inflation.

Gene Tunny  50:34

Yeah. And it was that experience that did prompt the adoption of inflation targeting because we weren’t inflation targeting back then. They had some checklist approach or whatever. This was just after they had the brief experiment with monetarism, and then they had a checklist or something and they didn’t have an explicit inflation target until the early ‘90s. I mean, Stephen, would you agree that arguably, inflation targeting was a good thing to adopt at the time? I mean, did it actually improve? Do we get better monetary policy for a while with inflation targeting? Was it better than what we had before?

Stephen Kirchner  51:09

I think inflation targeting was a very important and helpful innovation. They’ve got central banks focused on nominal stability, which is what you want them to do. And I mean, I’m still a defender of inflation targeting as much as I think you could make the current inflation targeting framework work better. And the way in which you would do that would be to focus on as you’re looking through supply shocks, so in other words, not responding to increases in inflation that are clearly driven by supply side constraints, like some of the inflation pressures that we’re seeing at the moment. Where nominal income targeting is helpful I think is helping you to do that.

So one way of thinking about nominal income targeting is you could think of nominal income as an indicator variable or an inflation variable, which tells you when you need to respond to inflation with monetary policy and when you shouldn’t. So that would be one way in which you could improve an inflation targeting regimen would be to sort of look at both variables and use that to help you sift through what inflation shocks you want to respond to, what inflation shocks you want to look through. I don’t think we have to necessarily give up on inflation targeting but we probably do need to change the way we do it, because I think inflation targeting in recent years has failed on its own terms, because central banks have said, well, we’re targeting inflation, but in fact, they’ve missed the target. So if you’re missing the target, you’re not doing it properly. So clearly, you need to change the way you’re doing it.

Gene Tunny  52:49

So as an implication of what you’ve said, are you implying that there’s a risk of the Reserve Bank could increase the cash rate too much, because it’s reacting to CPI data that partly, the inflation is going to be driven by this supply shock? Is that a concern of yours?

Stephen Kirchner  53:12

Yeah, I mean, we’ve certainly seen that in the past. So we talked before about the Fed, and the ECB in 2008 I think clearly made that error. And I think it’s a risk at the moment. At the moment, we have both supply and demand shocks driving inflation. So there’s been a huge dislocation in the supply side of the global economy due to shifts in demand, so that the speed of the recovery has basically caught the supply side of the world economy short. It’s struggling to keep up. And so there’s a big supply component to existing inflation pressures.

In the United States, I’d say there’s also a demand component inasmuch as one of the things that Mercatus Centre has done has been to develop what they call an NGDP gap, which is basically a measure of the deviation in nominal GDP from long-run expectations. At the moment, we have a positive nominal GDP gap in the United States. And so consistent with the nominal GDP targeting framework, that’s saying that there are excess demand pressures in the US economy. And so you would want monetary policy to respond to that. And so I think this is why the Fed is tightening at the moment. It’s appropriate that they do so because there is excess demand in the US economy, and GDP expectations are a good guide. But at the same time, there’s a very significant supply side component to this. And that is something you probably want to look through.

So one way to think about US monetary policy at the moment is the Feds should be tightening with the views of closing that nominal GDP expectations gap on the Mercatus measure. That would require some tightening of monetary policy but not nearly as aggressive as if you were trying to fully stabilise consumer price inflation.

Gene Tunny  55:13

Right. So nominal GDP in the US by that Mercatus measure, it’s higher than that path that long-run path. Is that right?

Stephen Kirchner  55:25

Yeah, that’s right. So on their measure, the level of nominal GDP is running at about, I think, 3% above the path implied by long-run expectations for nominal income. So from a nominal GDP targeting framework, you would certainly want to respond to that.

Gene Tunny  55:41

Right. Now, this is one thing I’ll want to just make sure I understand. In your paper, you talk about how it’s good to correct for deviations from that target path, that nominal path. Why does a target path in nominal terms? Why is that relevant? I think one of the points you make is that, traditionally, central bankers wouldn’t really worry about the nominal path, or they if you did have low inflation for a period, and that meant that you were below that nominal level, it’s not as if you’re going to ramp up, they wouldn’t have a more stimulatory monetary policy just to try and hit a particular GDP number in nominal terms, say two and a half trillion or something, because well, what does the actual nominal value of it matter? What matters is what’s the real value of it and how many people are employed, that sort of thing? I want to understand that. Are you saying that we should try and get back to some sort of the nominal GDP number that was implied by the path we’re on?

Stephen Kirchner  56:54

Yeah, I would say that nominal GDP stabilisation is still implicit in what the RBA and the Fed do today. So if you’re stabilising inflation around target and output around potential, then that will certainly be conducive to stability in nominal GDP. It’s just that we’re not explicitly framing monetary policy in those terms. So at the moment, we frame it in terms of the cash rate responding to deviations in the inflation target, or deviations in output or the unemployment rate from their assumed equilibrium values. All I’m saying is you want to reframe the way in which you implement monetary policy in terms that are currently implicit, but arguably should be explicit.

So really, I’d say monetary policy is trying to stabilise a path for the future path of nominal GDP. Were just not explicit about it. So it’s really reframing monetary policy in those terms, to bring out those relationships. But I think it does it in a way that’s less conducive to monetary policy running off track, for all the reasons that we’ve talked about, that you’re no longer making guesses about the equilibrium interest rate, the equilibrium unemployment rate, or the equilibrium level of real output. You can abstract from all of those things and just ask the question, How is nominal GDP evolving relative to, A, expectations, or B, in my sort of operating framework, you know, where you want monetary policy to be. So just be explicit about that and nominate a target path.

One of the advantages of doing that is in fact, I think, better financial stability outcomes, reason being if you think about the decisions that lenders and borrowers are taking in credit markets, whether it be in relation to housing or business lending or any other type of credit, the serviceability of those contracts depends entirely on the future flow of nominal income. So putting yourself in the shoes of a holder of a mortgage, for example. The amount I borrow is very much a function of what I think my future nominal income is going to be. And the lender is making the same assessment, right? They’re saying, Does this person have the capacity to service a mortgage? Well, that’s a function of what’s going to happen with their normal income in the future.

So by stabilising both expectations for nominal income and actual outcomes for nominal income, I think that’s conducive to financial stability because then the economy is going to evolve in line with the expectations embedded in those credit contracts. So I think you’re less likely to run into financial stability concerns in that context.

So this is essentially Scott Sumner’s critique of US monetary policy in response to the global financial crisis. So what Scott Sumner argues is that the recession in the United States was made deeper by the fact that nominal GDP and expectations for nominal GDP in the early stages of the crisis were allowed to collapse, and that more than anything affected the ability of people to service their mortgages.

Gene Tunny  1:00:42

That’s an interesting argument. I’ll have to have a look back over his work. I’ve seen it in the past. But have you got time for two more questions or do you have to get going? Because there are a couple –

Stephen Kirchner  1:00:52

Oh no, absolutely. Take all the time in the world.

Gene Tunny  1:00:55

Great. There are a couple other things I want to chat about. On page 27 of your Mercatus Centre paper you write, “There’s a growing empirical literature on the advantages of NGDP targeting relative to inflation targeting and other policy rules. I’m interested what that literature is. What does it comprise of? Is it cross-country regression studies, or how do they determine that, that this actually is superior to what we’re doing at the moment?

Stephen Kirchner  1:01:23

So there’s a long history is who the literature on monetary policy rules. And it really goes back to a Brookings Institution project back in the early 1990s. And it was as part of that project that John Taylor published his Taylor rule estimates. And Warwick McKibbin, the Australian economist, was actually an early contributor to that literature as well. And I mean, one of the things I did, as part of that Brookings Institution project was to just simulate different types of rules. So on one hand, you can estimate empirically what the central bank response to macro variables is . But you can also do simulations, where you say, well, what would happen in a economic model if the central bank responded to nominal GDP or some other specification of the monetary policy reaction function.

And I think it’s fair to say that, in that early literature, both nominal GDP targeting, whether in level or growth rate terms, did not fare well, relative to the sort of more Taylor rule type specification. The problem with that literature was that it wasn’t taking account of the knowledge problems that we talked about earlier, which is the unobservability of some of the key conditioning variables, namely the real equilibrium interest rate, either potential output or an estimate of an error. Once you take account of those knowledge problems, then the Taylor rule literature becomes much less robust. And nominal GDP targeting becomes much more robust. So once you allow for the fact that there’s uncertainty around those assumed equilibrium values, then inflation targeting as it’s currently conducted in a Taylor rule framework looks a lot less attractive. So really, that early literature was conditioning on historical relationships, which, when you’re operating in real time, become much more problematic.

Gene Tunny  1:03:53

Okay. I have to ask you about an NGDP futures market. So this was mentioned in your Mercatus Centre paper. Why would that be useful? And what’s the role of Ethereum, so a cryptocurrency, isn’t it? What’s the role of Ethereum in that?

Stephen Kirchner  1:04:15

So if you’re targeting nominal GDP, then one of the things that would be very helpful in that context would actually be a market-based estimate of where nominal GDP is going. People like myself who call themselves market monetarists, the market part of that expression refers to the fact that we think that markets are in fact the best gauge, financial markets at the best gauge of the stance of monetary policy and also what effect any given policy change is likely to have on the economy.

So if you take that view, then what you want to do is get a market-derived estimate of where nominal GDP is going and then base your monetary policy response on that estimate, because that’s going to be your best guess of where nominal GDP is going. And there are various versions of this. Scott Sumner has a version where the central bank would actually tie its open market operations mechanically to prices in that nominal GDP market. So monetary policy would then basically become market-driven. But you don’t need to go quite that far. I mean, it would be sufficient, I think, just for the central bank to take account of what the nominal GDP market was telling you about the stance of monetary policy.

The beauty of this is that any macroeconomic policy measure that you might implement, the nominal GDP futures market will give you instant and real time information on what the market thought that was going to do to the economy. So for example, if you had a fiscal stimulus package, a nominal GDP futures market would tell you basically on announcement, what it thought the impact of that package would be. And my expectation would be that if we had a nominal GDP futures market and you announced a big fiscal stimulus, we would actually probably see very little movement in the nominal GDP futures market because most of the economy crowding out effects that we discussed before, I suspect that in a small open economy with a floating exchange rate like Australia, fiscal policy actually doesn’t do very much in terms of aggregate demand.

Gene Tunny  1:06:45

Right.

Stephen Kirchner  1:06:46

We see that a little bit already, because although we don’t get sort of very clean or discreet announcements of fiscal policy measures, typically when the budget lands every year, and they announce what the change in the budget balance the share of GDP is going to be, which is your sort of best measure of the impact that fiscal policy is going to have on the economy. The national markets very rarely move in response to that announcement.

So the case for a nominal GDP futures market is you want that market to basically inform monetary policy decision making. And it really goes to the issue of what paradigm do you want for monetary policy? The market monetarist paradigm is essentially to say central bank is a lot smarter than financial markets when it comes to assessing where the economy is going. And we should do away with the fiction that they know more than what’s embodied in financial crises. And so conduct monetary policy on the basis of the best available information, which is what financial markets are telling you about the evolution of the economy,

Gene Tunny  1:08:01

What does this instrument look like? And who sets up the market? Does the central bank set up the market? I mean, people are gambling, or they’re betting on what future nominal GDP is. But how’s the market actually work? Has anyone thought about how it would be designed? Does the central bank have to run out or could it be a privately owned market?

Stephen Kirchner  1:08:26

So this could be a conventional futures markets? So we have at the moment futures contracts available, various financial instruments, so there are futures contracts for 10-year bond yields for the Australian dollar. We effectively have futures contracts on inflation outcomes, which is the difference between the prices on bond yields and index bond yields, so that it’s bond yields adjusted for inflation. So we actually already effectively have a futures market in inflation outcomes. And that’s actually a very important input into monetary policy decision making.

So one of the things that the RBA pays very close attention to is what market prices are saying about the future evolution of inflation? So we already have one half of the equation. What we need is the other half, which is to say, a view on what’s going to happen with real output. But if we combine those two things, and what we’re saying is we want a financial market view on where nominal GDP has gotten. So it’s very straightforward to design a futures market contract that you would list on the Australian Stock Exchange, which would be traded by financial market participants.

And I think another thing that would be useful that comes out of this is it would be a very good hedging instrument. So we think of corporations, their top line revenues are in fact often largely a function of nominal GDP. So one of the things the company will look at when they’re forecasting their revenues is an assumption about what nominal GDP is going to do. So corporates could actually use a nominal GDP futures market as a hedging instrument. And that increases the information content of NGDP futures prices. It becomes highly informative of what decision makers in the economy are expecting in relation to the future evolution of nominal income. That information is very useful for policymaking.

And my argument to the Reserve Bank, when I’ve presented this work to them, is to say, Do you think that would be useful input into monetary policy decision making? And of course, the answer has to be yes. You know, you want more information, not less. And so my argument to them is, well, if that information will be useful, then it’s probably worth incurring some costs in order to get that information. So what I’ve suggested is they need to remove some of the regulatory barriers to the creation of a nominal GDP futures market.

A huge regulatory barrier to any sort of financial innovation in Australia is the fact that the costs of financial system regulation in Australia are paid for by the financial sector. So all of the costs of ASIC and APRA in regulating the Australian financial system is recovered from market participants, economic institutions. But that cost recovery framework has a public interest clause, which basically says you should be able to get relief from cost recovery if there’s a public interest in doing so. And so I like it that the creation of a nominal GDP futures market is a perfect application of the public interest case for relief from cost recovery. So basically, the institutions and the Securities Exchanges that would put together that market should basically get an exemption from regulatory cost recovery. I think that would give a huge boost to making that sort of market commercially viable.

Gene Tunny  1:12:37

It’s a fascinating idea, because occasionally, you do have these new financial instruments. I mean, I know in the US they have a market in… Is there a futures market for house prices based on the Case-Shiller Index?

Stephen Kirchner  1:12:51

Yeah, that’s right. There’s derivatives around house prices in the United States. The NSX tried to get a derivatives market in house prices up and running a few years ago. I would argue that, yes, we should have house price futures as well, for exactly the same reasons. It’s informative for policymakers, t gives them information that they would not otherwise have. It will tell you, for example, when APRA changes its regulation of financial institutions. A house price futures market would tell you straightaway what the implications for that are for house prices. It’d be useful hedging instrument as well. So yeah, ideally, I think we should have both markets.

I think the impediments to those markets, given that they are potentially so useful, are most likely regulatory in nature. And so we need to lower the regulatory barriers to the creation of those markets. And arguably, I think there’s a case for implicit public subsidies for those markets as well, so relief from regulatory cost recovery. I think the RBA could use its balance sheet to become a market maker in those markets. So not with a view to influencing the prices, but just providing, being a liquidity provider, which would lower costs for other people transacting in those markets and would help get them up and running.

Gene Tunny  1:14:25

I was just thinking, I was just trying to think, how would this actually start up? And, I mean, you’d need someone to actually develop the instruments, create the contracts and sell them, so that could be say, an investment bank, for example. It could be a Goldman Sachs or it could be a Morgan Stanley or one of those businesses. It’s a fascinating idea.

Stephen Kirchner  1:14:50

Yeah, I mean, in my Mercatus paper, I make the case that the council of financial regulators should jointly mandate the creation of a nominal GDP futures market. And I mean, when regulators mandate something in financial markets, it usually happens. So it’s not uncommon for the financial regulators to actually come out and say to financial market participants, okay, we’re doing this. If it becomes a regulatory mandate, then the financial market participants will cooperate with that mandate. And you know, I think it would be enthusiastic participants. So I think it’s really incumbent upon the RBA to say this is something that we want and need, would be helpful for policymaking and for hedging, as I’ve described. And so we’re going to sit down with financial market participants and make it happen

Gene Tunny  1:15:46

And just finally, you’ve mentioned that there could be a role for blockchain. So you talk about how US NGDP futures have already been implemented on the Augur blockchain. Did I pronounce that right? And then, Eric Falkenstein has also developed Ethereum-based derivatives contracts. These contracts could provide competitive alternatives to listed securities, okay, on existing exchanges and require little or no public support while still yielding useful information about monetary policy in the economy. So is there anything special about the blockchain in this context?

Stephen Kirchner  1:16:22

Well, the role for blockchain I think is just in terms of lowering the costs of doing it. So as we’ve already discussed, there are significant cost barriers to listing nominal GDP futures on our traditional securities exchange. I’ve argued that we should try and lower some of those costs. But another way of doing this is to implement it in blockchain space. There’s already been some interest in doing this in the US. I think, eventually, almost all financial derivatives will move off exchanges and onto the blockchain at some point, main reason being you can then do instantaneous clearing and settlement. So you no longer have trillions of dollars tied up in collateralizing clearing and settlement of financial derivatives. So if derivatives markets are going to move onto blockchain, then arguably NGDP futures should move on to blockchain as well. But I think there’s more scope for innovation in the blockchain space at the moment, just because it’s a different regulatory environment.

And so I’ve sort of argued for a two-prong approach where on the one hand, you want to go through sort of the conventional channel other listed securities market for NGDP futures. But at the same time, I think there’s scope for entrepreneurs to innovate in the blockchain space and do something similar. And hopefully, what we get out of this is a viable future market, not just in nominal GDP, but [with] other macro variables included. And I think it would not only provide policymakers with useful information, but it would really change the way people think about financial markets and monetary policy, because you can’t beat the sort of real-time financial market verdicts on what policy is doing.

It would eliminate a lot of arguments about the implications of various types of public policy, because let’s say the government is proposing a change in some tax rate, and there’s an argument about what the implications of that tax change is for the economy. Well, a nominal GDP futures market will instantaneously settle that argument, because when the tax change is announced, you can observe what the change in the nominal GDP futures is. And that basically tells you what the economic impact is,

Gene Tunny  1:19:07

Assuming the market expectation is correct.

Stephen Kirchner  1:19:11

It doesn’t have to be correct. It’s probably our best guess.

Gene Tunny  1:19:15

Best guess, gotcha. Yeah. I agree. I was just wanting to –

Stephen Kirchner  1:19:19

Ex post it could be completely wrong. At the time of the announcement, it would be the best guess of everyone who actually has a real-time financial stake in that outcome.

Gene Tunny  1:19:31

Yeah, very good point. Okay, Stephen, this has been terrific. I’ve learned so much and it’s made me think about a lot of a lot of things that hadn’t been thinking about before. I love this idea of futures markets in economic indicators. I think that’s brilliant. So yes, I’ll have to come back and explore that in the future. So Stephen, you’ve got a sub stack, which I’ll put a link to in the show notes. I’ll also put links to your two fascinating papers on monetary policy. Any final words before we wrap up?

Stephen Kirchner  1:20:06

I think this has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it, Gene.

Gene Tunny  1:20:09

Thank you, Stephen. I’ve really enjoyed it too. I must admit, initially I don’t think I’ve really understood this nominal income targeting idea and its merits and what the problems with inflation targeting were as much as I do now, I think I’ve got a much better understanding. So absolutely, really appreciate that. So, again, thanks so much for coming on to the programme. And yeah, hopefully, I have you on again, sometime in the future. We could chat more about these issues. So thanks so much.

Stephen Kirchner  1:20:46

Thank you, Gene. It’s been a pleasure.

Gene Tunny  1:20:49 Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com And we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye.

Credits

Big thanks to EP135 guest Stephen Kirchner and to the show’s audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode. 

Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. Economics Explored is available via Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.

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EP89 – CPI inflation concerns with Darren Brady Nelson

There are growing concerns over CPI inflation after all the money printing associated with the pandemic response.

Episode 89 of Economics Explored features a conversation on just how worried we should be about future inflation in this time of MMT and QE between Economics Explored host Gene Tunny and returning guest Darren Brady Nelson, chief economist of the Australian libertarian think tank LibertyWorks and a policy adviser to the Heartland Institute.
Charts of data referred to in this episode:

Charts on CPI, money supply, US 10 year bond yield, and asset prices

This is the classic book by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz mentioned in this episode:

A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960

Please send through any questions, comments, or suggestions to contact@economicsexplored.com and we will aim to address them in an upcoming episode. Alternatively, please leave a comment on this post.

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Podcast episode

EP68 – COVID and Wartime: Comparison of economic impacts

Economics Explored episode 68 COVID and Wartime features a conversation on whether COVID can be compared to wartime, which considers the different scales and scopes of the shocks, and what it all means for prospects for economic recovery. Economics Explored host Gene Tunny, an Australian professional economist and former Treasury official, speaks with businessman Tim Hughes, also based in Brisbane, Australia.

Gene and Tim conclude that a comparison of COVID to wartime isn’t valid. One reason is that World War II required a complete reorganisation of the economy to maximise production for the war effort, while COVID has involved restrictions that have reduced economic activity. 

Links relevant to the conversation include:

Comparing COVID-19 to past world war efforts is premature — and presumptuous

US Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder on The National Debt Dilemma

Brookings on What’s the Fed doing in response to the COVID-19 crisis? What more could it do?

Australia’s Boldest Experiment (excellent book on Australia’s wartime economy)

Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth (outstanding book by a leading US economist containing a great discussion of America’s wartime economy)

Aussies over-confident after being over-compensated by Gov’t for COVID-recession

Mint security lapse amazes judge (story about theft from the Australian Mint in early-to-mid 2000s)

Finally, the word Gene got stuck on at 6:55, irredentist, means, “a person advocating the restoration to their country of any territory formerly belonging to it”, according to Oxford Languages.

If you’d like to ask a question for Gene to answer in a future episode or if you’d like to make a comment or suggestion, please get in touch via the website. Thanks for listening.

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