And the Winner is (should be)…. Fiscal Policy!

So, Mario Draghi is disappointed by eurozone growth, and is ready to step up the ECB quantitative easing program. The monetary expansion apparently is not working out as planned.

Big surprise. I am afraid some people do not have access to Wikipedia. If they had, they would read, under “liquidity trap“, the following:

A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which injections of cash into the private banking system by a central bank fail to decrease interest rates and hence make monetary policy ineffective. A liquidity trap is caused when people hoard cash because they expect an adverse event such as deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or war.

In a liquidity trap the propensity to hoard of the private sector becomes virtually unlimited, so that monetary policy (be it conventional or unconventional) loses traction. It is true that the age of great moderation, and three decades of almighty central bankers had made the concept fade into oblivion. But, since 2008 we were forced to reconsider the effectiveness of monetary policy at the so-called zero lower bound.Or at least we should have…

So, had policy makers taken the time to look at the history of the great depression, or at least to open the Wikipedia entry, they should have learnt that when monetary policy loses traction, the witness in lifting the economy out of the recession, needs to be taken by fiscal policy. In a liquidity trap the winner is fiscal policy.  Or at least it should be. Here is a measure of the fiscal stance, computed as the change in government balance once we exclude cyclical components and interest payments.

The vast majority of EMU countries undertook a strong fiscal tightening, regardless of the actual health of their public finances. This generalized austerity, an offspring of the Berlin View, led to our double dip recession, and to further divergence in the eurozone, that would have needed coordinated, not synchronized fiscal policies. Well done guys…

And yet, Mario Draghi is surprised by the impact of QE.

Advertisement

Walls Come Tumbling Down

Yesterday I quickly commented the disappointing growth data for Germany and for the EMU as a whole, whose GDP Eurostat splendidly defines “stable”. This is bad, because the recovery is not one, and because we are increasingly dependent on the rest of the world for that growth that we should be able to generate domestically.

Having said that, the real bad news did not come from Eurostat, but from the August 2014 issue of the ECB monthly bulletin, published on Wednesday. Thanks to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard I noticed the following chart ( page 53):

The interesting part of the chart is the blue dotted line, showing that the forecasters’ consensus on longer term inflation sees more than a ten points drop of the probability that inflation will stay at 2% or above. Ten points in just a year. And yet, just a few pages above we can read:

According to Eurostat’s flash estimate, euro area annual HICP inflation was 0.4% in July 2014, after 0.5% in June. This reflects primarily lower energy price inflation, while the annual rates of change of the other main components of the HICP remained broadly unchanged. On the basis of current information, annual HICP inflation is expected to remain at low levels over the coming months, before increasing gradually during 2015 and 2016. Meanwhile, inflation expectations for the euro area over the medium to long term continue to be firmly anchored in line with the aim of maintaining inflation rates below, but close to, 2% (p. 42, emphasis added) 

The ECB is hiding its head in the sand, but expectations, the last bastion against deflation, are obviously not firmly anchored. This can only mean that private expenditure will keep tumbling down in the next quarters. It would be foolish to hope otherwise.

So we are left with good old macroeconomic policy. I did not change my mind since my latest piece on the ECB. Even if the ECB inertia is appalling, even if their stubbornness in claiming that everything is fine (see above) is more than annoying, even if announcing mild QE measures in 2015 at  the earliest is borderline criminal, it remains that I have no big faith in the capacity of monetary policy to trigger decent growth.  The latest issue of the ECB bulletin also reports the results of the latest Eurozone Bank Lending Survey. They show a slow easing of credit conditions, that proceed in parallel with a pickup of credit demand from firms and households. While for some countries credit constraints may play a role in keeping private expenditure down (for example, in Italy), the overall picture for the EMU is of demand and supply proceeding in parallel. Lifting constraints to lending, in this situation, does not seem likely to boost credit and spending. It’s the liquidity trap, stupid!

The solution seems to be one, and only one: expansionary fiscal policy, meaning strong increase in government expenditure (above all for investment) in countries that can afford it (Germany, to begin with); and delayed consolidation for countries with struggling public finances. Monetary policy should accompany this fiscal boost with the commitment to maintain an expansionary stance until inflation has overshot the 2% target.

For the moment this remains a mid-summer dream…

 

Blame the World?

Yesterday’s headlines were all for Germany’s poor performance in the second quarter of 2014 (GDP shrank of 0.2%, worse than expected). That was certainly bad news, even if in my opinion the real bad news are hidden in the latest ECB bulletin, also released yesterday (but this will be the subject of another post).

Not surprisingly, the German slowdown stirred heated discussion. In particular Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor, blamed the slowdown on geopolitical risks in eastern Europe and the Near East. Maybe he meant to be reassuring, but in fact his statement should make us all worry even more. Let me quote myself (ach!), from last November:

Even abstracting from the harmful effects of austerity (more here), the German model cannot work for two reasons: The first is the many times recalled fallacy of composition): Not everybody can export at the same time. The second, more political, is that by betting on an export-led growth model Germany and Europe will be forced to rely on somebody else’s growth to ensure their prosperity. It is now U.S. imports; it may be China’s tomorrow, and who know who the day after tomorrow. This is of course a source of economic fragility, but also of irrelevance on the political arena, where influence goes hand in hand with economic power. Choosing the German economic model Europe would condemn itself to a secondary role.

I have emphasized the point I want to stress, once again, here: adopting an export-led model structurally weakens a country, that becomes unable to find, domestically, the resources for sustainable and robust growth. And here we are, the rest of the world sneezes, and Germany catches a cold. The problem is that we are catching it together with Germany:

The ratio of German GDP over domestic demand has been growing steadily since 1999 (only in 19 quarters out of 72, barely a third, domestic demand grew faster than GDP). And what is more bothersome is that since 2010 the same model has been  adopted by imposed to the rest of the eurozone. The red line shows the same ratio for the remaining 11 original members of the EMU, that was at around one for most of the period, and turned frankly positive with the crisis and implementation of austerity.It is the Berlin View at work, brilliantly and scaringly exposed by Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann just a couple of days ago. We are therefore increasingly dependent on the rest of the world for our (scarce) growth (the difference between the ratio and 1 is the current account balance).

It is easy today to blame Putin, or China, or tapering, or alien invasions, for our woes.  Easy but wrong. Our pain is self-inflicted. Time to change.

Reforming Europe

I just finished editing a collective volume, in English and in French, on possible ways to reform Europe. Here is the blog post that presents it:

What Reforms for Europe?

by Christophe Blot, Olivier Rozenberg, Francesco Saraceno  et Imola Streho 

From May 22 to May 25, Europeans will vote to elect the 751 Members of the European Parliament. These elections will take place in a context of strong mistrust for European institutions. While the crisis of confidence is not specifically European, in the Old Continent it is coupled with the hardest crisis since the Great Depression, and with a political crisis that shows the incapacity of European institutions to reach decisions. The issues at stake in the next European elections, therefore, have multiple dimensions that require a multidisciplinary approach. The latest issue of the Debates and Policies Revue de l’OFCE series (published in French and in English), gathers European affairs specialists – economists, law scholars, political scientists – who starting from the debate within their own discipline, share their vision on the reforms that are needed to give new life to the European project. Our goal is to feed the public debate through short policy briefs containing specific policy recommendations. Our target are obviously the candidates to the European elections, but also unions, entrepreneurs, civil society at large and, above all, citizens interested by European issues.

In the context of the current crisis, the debate leading to the next European elections seems to be hostage of two opposing views. On one side a sort of self-complacency that borders denial about the crisis that is still choking the Eurozone and Europe at large. According to this view, the survival of the euro should be reason enough to be satisfied with the policies followed so far, and the European institutions evolved in the right direction in order to better face future challenges.

At the opposite, the eurosceptic view puts forward the fundamental flaws of the single currency, arguing that the only way out of the crisis would be a return to national currencies. The different contributions of this volume aim at going beyond these polar views. The crisis highlighted the shortcomings of EU institutions, and the inadequacy of economic policies centered on fiscal discipline alone. True, some reforms have been implemented; but they are not enough, when they do not go in the wrong direction altogether. We refuse nevertheless to conclude that no meaningful reform can be implemented, and that the European project has no future.

The debate on Europe’s future and on a better and more democratic Union needs to be revived. We need to discuss ways to implement more efficient governance, and public policies adapted to the challenges we face. The reader nevertheless will not find, in this volume, a coherent project; rather, we offer eclectic and sometimes even contradictory views on the direction Europe should take. This diversity witnesses the necessity of a public debate that we wish to go beyond academic circles and involves policy makers and citizens. Our ambition is to provide keys to interpret the current stakes of the European debate, and to form an opinion on the direction that our common project should take.

The volume can be downloaded  in French and in English, and for free!!

 

On Fiscal Rules and the Need for Reforming the Stability Pact

I recently wrote a paper with Jerome Creel and Paul Hubert, in which we try to assess the impact of the different fiscal rules that are being discussed for reforming the Eurozone governance. For our simulations we took into account the standard Keynesian positive effects of deficit spending: Government expenditure substitutes missing private demand, and hence supports economic activity. But we also embedded a negative effect of deficit and debt, that goes through increased interest rates (the famous spreads). High interest rates make it harder for the private sector to finance spending, and hence depress aggregate demand and growth. We assessed the performance of the rules in terms of average growth over the next 20 years.

Marathons…

A couple of years ago (February 2010), I thought I was being really heterodox, when I argued that Greece should be given 7-8 year to consolidate its public finances, because any sharp consolidation plan would push it into recession. The interview was in French, but more or less I said that

More on the Euro Crisis

Not surprisingly, the deal reached last week failed to put the EMU economies back on track. I have always looked with suspicion, if not with outright fear, to policy agendas dictated by financial markets. But the fact that a simple attempt by the Greek Prime Minister to involve his fellow citizens in crucial decisions is creating a panic attack, shows how fragile the agreement was. With André Grjebine I wrote a piece for the French daily Liberation last week, in which we argued that all the crucial weaknesses of the Eurozone were not addressed.

To summarize:

• Address current account imbalances symmetrically, along the lines already outlined by Keynes before Bretton Woods.
• Focus more on quality of public spending, and not on quantitative targets. We mention the golden rule in its original meaning, i.e. the exclusion of public investment from numerical deficit targets.  A study (working paper here) I made with some colleagues a while ago hinted that it worked for the UK.
• Finally, we insisted on debt monetization by the ECB, the only possible strategy to defuse speculation against sovereign debt of a currency union.