It’s Politics, Stupid

I quickly want to come back to the issue of fiscal rules and of the Commission’s proposal for reforming the Stability and Growth Pact. In my previous post I discussed how the proposal does not do enough for public investment. Yet, this is not what most commentators have been focusing on.

The proposal foresees an important role for the Commission. First, it goes without saying, it is central in the sanctioning process, the Excessive Deficit Procedure, that is mostly the same as in today’s framework. But on two crucial aspects of the reformed Pact, if it had to see the light, the Commission acquires new competencies (and the power that goes with them).

The first is in setting the stage for the countries’ debt reduction plans. The Commission is in fact supposed to define the scenarios with which debt sustainability risks are determined, using a tool developed in recent years by the World Bank and IMF, the Dynamic Debt Analysis, or DSA). The tool is well tested but, as it is obvious, the different scenarios heavily depend on the parameters (growth, interest rates, etc) that are fed to it. The second expanded role that the Commission has is in negotiating with the governments the country-specific debt reduction paths and expenditure targets.

This centrality of the Commission, however, has been almost unanimously criticised. Opponents of austerity fear that discretion will allow draconian  policies to be imposed, thus reviving the austerity catastrophic experiment of the 2010s. At the other side of the spectrum, the fiscal hawks of the so-called “frugal” countries do not trust the Commission in its role of watchdog of public finances, and have criticized it several times for being too permissive with the “Club-Med” countries. They are therefore afraid that too timid debt-reduction paths will be agreed with profligate governments of the South.

Here is an unpopular opinion: both teams are right, and it is very good this way. As far as I am concerned, I always believed that the fiscal policy of deeply integrated countries should never be a technocratic endeavor but, on the contrary, be the result of a political process of coordination, in which more or less hawkish outcomes stem from bargaining between different positions, economic and political contingencies and, last but not least, compromises between the needs of individual countries and the attainment of common goals. No rule can deliver this. In 2002, the then President of the Commission Romano Prodi was violently attacked when he defined the Stability Pact “stupid, like all decisions which are rigid.” But in fact he was perfectly right, and as we finally manage to abandon the flawed view that all countries should implement the same policies (one-size-fits-all), then no rule can be put in place unless it leaves space (a lot of it!) to discretion, negotiation, case-by-case assessments.

In short, how much and how to use fiscal policy must emerge from the capacity of governments and policy makers to persuade their partners of the pertinence of their policy stance. Those opposing excessive fiscal discipline should reach their goals by winning the hearts and minds of those favoring it (and vice-versa), not by pushing  for mechanical (“stupid”) rules that embed their views. As a side note, we already have, in the European framework, a seat for discretionary assessments and choices. The European Semester was created for coordinating and monitoring fiscal policies, to then quickly become, in the austerity frenzy of the time, just a tool for the latter. It would be time to go back to the letter of the Law and finally make the European Semester the place for dialogue and coordination among member states and the Commission.

There should not be a discussion on whether fiscal policy in European countries should be determined leaving space to discretion. The discussion should be about who should have the discretionary power. Some argue for example that an almighty Commission might create an imbalance in the delicate tripartite decision structure of the EU, and that it would be better to give a role (for example in debt sustainability assessments) to a reformed European Fiscal Board. There are pros and cons of such a strategy, but that is the discussion that we must have.

Whatever your views on the desirability and on the extent of fiscal policy in managing the European economies, blaming the Commission proposal because it leaves too much space to discretion does not make any sense. Fiscal policy is politics, stupid.

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A Plea for a European Public Investment Agency

The European Commission has introduced a legislative proposal for the reform of European fiscal rules with the aim to have the new rules approved by member states and the European Parliament by the end of the year, and to be in force by 2024. If this timeline is not met, the old Stability and (lack of) Growth Pact (SGP), adopted in 1997 and discredited during the sovereign debt crisis, will be reintroduced.

The Stability Pact, together with the  Fiscal Compact hastily adopted in 2012 in the belief (oh, how erroneous! ) that it was necessary to impose austerity in order to get out of the sovereign debt crisis, impose annual targets in terms of structural (i.e. cyclically-adjusted) deficit to ensure that public debt falls steadily towards the level of 60% set by the Maastricht Treaty (a level that is totally arbitrary, incidentally).  From the outset, many of us criticised the Stability Pact, because the emphasis on annual targets pushes countries to adopt pro-cyclical policies: in the event of a crisis  and a fall in GDP, to stay on the path of debt reduction, fiscal restraint is needed; this has nevertheless a negative impact on growth, triggering a vicious circle. Moreover, the Pact imposes the same objectives on everyone (one size fits all is used). Last but not least, the current rule does not distinguish between current expenditure and investment spending, ending up penalizing the latter which, politically, is less problematic to cut.

To address these issues, the European Commission reform proposal replaces annual targets with multi-year debt reduction programs agreed upon by member countries and the Commission. Although very imperfect, the proposal represents a very clear improvement on the existing rule, on two grounds..

1. The annual numerical targets are replaced by multi-annual (4-year) debt reduction programs. The adoption of a medium-term perspective, is the only reasonable one when it comes to the sustainability of public finances. It is good that we have finally realised the absurdity of annual targets
2. Debt-reduction plans are formulated (in terms of expenditure targets) by member countries in agreement with the Commission, on the basis of scenarios for the evolution of public finances. High-debt countries obviously need to make greater efforts, especially if the most likely scenarios are high interest rates and low growth, and therefore more risks to future sustainability. Abandoning the one-size-fits-all and top-down approach is important for democratic legitimacy and credibility of implementation.

Against these very significant improvements, the amended rule would remain seriously problematic for two reasons. The first is that overall the focus is still on debt reduction. Too much Stability and not enough growth, like with the old SGP, at the risk of obtaining neither (ever heard of self-defeating austerity?) This is even trues since, to accommodate strong German pressures the Commission has introduced safeguards to ensure that debt remains strongly anchored to a downward path. This excessive weight on debt reduction might be tempered by the increased politicization of the process, a feature of the Commission proposal that has been criticized but that on the contrary I find quite appealing. I will come back to that in a future post.

The second reason why the Commission proposal (a significant improvement, let me state it again) falls short of my expectations is the lack of specific provisions for protecting public investment. The only concession that is made is that “Member States will benefit from a more gradual fiscal adjustment path if they commit in their plans to a set of reforms and investment that comply with specific and transparent criteria”. This is what I would like to address in this post.

With my colleagues Floriana Cerniglia (Catholic University Milano) and Andy Watt (IMK Berlin), we have been editors for some years of a series of yearly European Public Investment Outlook involving dozens of European researchers. Volume after volume, the message that comes out of this series is that in OECD countries public investment has been sacrificed on the altar of fiscal discipline since the 1980s. In Europe the downward trend is particularly marked and  has further accelerated with the austerity programs of the 2010s. The result is a chronic shortage of public capital, both tangible and intangible (social capital) which today seriously limits the growth potantial of all European countries, even those that are apparently healthier. As an example, the German colleagues who worked on the chapters on Germany estimated the  amount needed over the next decade to fill the German infrastructure gap at around 45 billion per year, not to mention the additional investment needs made necessary by an aging population and by the ecological and digital transition. Italy is no exception: Cerniglia and her co-authors report  an estimate by which between 2008 and 2018 about 200 billion were lost along the way compared to the scenario in which public investment had continued at the (not excellent) previous rates. This figure is sobering: the entire allocation of the Italian NRRP (191 billion), which should project us into the ecological and digital transition, will not even be able to bridge the gap that has opened up in the last ten years.

Looking ahead, the numbers get even more impressive. The Commission has estimated that the  European Union would need €520 billion in additional investment each year to meet the Green Deal’s 55% emissions cut target before the end of the decade.  Although the Commission believes that a significant part of this investment should come from the private sector, the figure gives a measure of the colossal effort that lies before us.

A team from the New Economics Foundation (NEF), took the figure given by the Commission as a basis for simulations in which it also considered the needs related to social investment (education, health, etc.) and the digital transition. These simulations lead, in a report also published last week, to conclude that only nine European countries would have the fiscal space to implement such large investment programs, were they to respect the existing rule or even the one amended by the Commission proposal. Italy is obviously not one of them, but neither are France nor Germany. The assumption of the NEF report may be questioned, of course, but the overall picture they draw is quite clear, and highlights a  fundamental incompatibility between the huge investment needs of the coming years and a system of European rules that, even in the reformed version, remain too oriented towards debt reduction as a self standing objective. The intransigent position of the German government has even prompted a usually cautious and moderate economist like Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the IMF, to ask rhetorically  whether it is preferable to preserve the earth with a slightly higher debt or to go towards climate catastrophe with  sound public finances

Many, including myself have for years called for a reform of European rules that would allow governments to invest outside the constraints of the budget. Such a “golden rule” would make it possible to finance the ecological transition while preserving the stability of public finances. In the past year it has at times seemed that such a proposal might have a chance of being discussed. Today the mood has changed. We should consider ourselves lucky if the Commission’s proposal is not twisted in an even more restrictive way by the negotiations with the Member States. In the coming years, therefore, it will be necessary to accept a continued state of chronically insufficient national public investment.

What to do then?  If we do not want to fail in the objective of ecological transition, there  is only  one way: to work on the quick creation of a European Investment Agency able not only to finance national governments’ investment (as in the proposal for a Sovereign Fund for Industrial Policy, buried in the Brussels’ mist); but also to design and implement genuinely European investment projects. The governance of such an Agency should be designed very carefully: fiscal policy has an inherently political dimension that requires accountability in front of voters.  In our non federal system this accountability lies with national governments, which should therefore be involved in European public investment choices. Some form of control by the Parliament and the Council in determining (or at least validating) investment projects would certainly make the work of the European Investment Agency more cumbersome. But this seems inevitable to ensure the democratic legitimacy of spending programmes (and their financing) at the European level.

Germany’s longing for the Ancien Régime is a Threat for Europe

Note: this is a rough translation of a piece published on the Italian neswpaper Domani, with a few edits and additions.

While the campaign for the election captures all the attention of the Italian establishment, we should not stop looking beyond our borders. In particular, the lack of interest in what is happening in Germany is striking and worrisome. The difficulties Europe’s largest economy is experiencing will in fact have far more significant consequences for many European countries than their domestic political struggles.

Last week, the ministry of economy and ecological transition (headed by the vice-chancellor and number two of the Green party, Robert Habeck) published a report on the reform of the stability pact, which, although we tend to forget it, will be THE topic of the coming months. The guiding principles for reform that the report outlines are basically a re-proposal of the existing rule, as if the disasters of the sovereign debt crisis and the Covid tsunami were a parenthesis to be closed as soon as possible by returning to the old world.

Under a gleaming hood, the German engine has been in crisis for years

There will be time to return to the inadequacy of this proposal (Carlo Clericetti does it well in the Italian magazine Micromega) and to the issue of European governance. What I would like to emphasise here is that the German elites, with this frenzy to return to the past, do not seem to fully grasp at least two things: First, the fact that after the experience of the last ten years it is not possible to return to an idea of economic policy for which the only beacon is fiscal discipline, neglecting public investment, industrial policy, social protection and so on. Second, and this is more surprising, they do not grasp the fact that the German growth model seems to have hit its boundaries. As a reminder, we are talking about a model aiming at export-led growth, that was based on the one hand on the compression of domestic demand (with wages that for decades grew much less than productivity); on the other hand it was based on an export sector that took advantage of both the dualism of the labour market and of value chains rooted in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Germany could therefore import intermediate goods and low-cost components and re-export finished products, often with a high technological content, to non-European markets. This is the main reason why it remained a manufacturing power while most advanced countries had to cope with de-industrialisation and relocation.
Many, including myself have criticised this model, which during the sovereign debt crisis Germany successfully managed to generalise to the rest of the eurozone. In 2020, in concluding an essay on Europe, I pointed out how that model has come to an end. The public and private investment deficit, the result of decades of self-imposed frugality, has progressively depleted the capital stock and reduced the competitiveness of German industry. Meanwhile, while the growth of emerging countries has helped to provide outlets for German goods, it has also seen these countries develop high value-added production that competes with German exporting firms. But there is more: I also noted that the progressive distortion of the ordoliberal model, the increase in inequality and precariousness (which contributes to demographic stagnation and to the ageing of population), and the growing dependence on foreign demand, more problematic than ever in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical context, have all contributed to making Germany a giant with feet of clay.

A Giant with Feet of Clay

Feet of clay that today are cracking. The bottlenecks that appeared during and after the pandemic, due to lockdowns and to the recomposition of global supply and demand, have (not surprisingly) proved to be more persistent than many expected. Furthermore, the acceleration of investment in the ecological transition, obviously welcome and all too late, creates shortages particularly in sectors that are key for the German economy, such as the automotive. Finally, geopolitical tensions, the slowdown in emerging economies, and of course the war in Ukraine greatly reduce the outlets for the German export sector and have laid bare the short-sightedness of the past German leadership’s choice to rely on Russian oil and gas, admittedly reducing costs, but creating a dependency for which the country is now paying the price. It is important, however, to emphasise again that the events of the last two years have only come to add to the structural problems of a model of growth and organisation of production that was beginning to show its limits even before the pandemic.

The German elites at a crossroads

In 2020, I concluded my essay by stating that the crisis of the German model could have been an opportunity for Europe, as it would have forced Germany to worry about the imbalances within the eurozone, to promote public and private investment, to rethink industrial policy, to support (German and European) domestic demand; not out of altruism, but to create a stable European market in an international context that had become structurally uncertain and turbulent. The heartfelt support for Next Generation EU seemed to confirm the feeling that something had changed in Germany. The recent turn of the German debate is therefore worrisome and should be looked at closely. Habeck’s paper and the recent stances of the Minister of Finances, the liberal Lindner, point to a kind of “ostrich syndrome” of the German elites, who seem to long for a return to the past in order not to have to deal with the structural problems of Germany and of European integration. If this tendency prevails, not only the German citizens but the whole of Europe, which will slip into irrelevance, will pay the price in the coming years. On the contrary, representatives of the German government at European tables need to be called upon to contribute to the rethinking of industrial and energy policy and public investment policies, to the development of a European welfare state, to the definition of budget rules that allow for active and sustainable policies, to the development of the internal market, to the completion of the banking union, and the list could go on. In short, an ambitious and wide-ranging European discussion is needed to make the German elites look away from their navels and try to restore Europe’s centrality at a time of great geopolitical turbulence (which will certainly extend well beyond the war in Ukraine). France and Italy, because of their size and the influence they have had in Europe in the recent past, would obviously play a key role in countering the return to the past of the German elites. This is why the absence of European issues from the (pre-electoral) Italian and (post-electoral) French debate cannot but cause concern.

Zombie Arguments Against Fiscal Stimulus

Busy days. I just want to drop a quick note on a piece just published on the Financial Times that is puzzling on many levels. Ruchir Sharma pleads against Joe Biden’s stimulus on the ground that it risks “exacerbating inequality and low productivity growth”. The bulk of the argument is in this paragraph:

Mr Biden captured this elite view perfectly when he said, in announcing his spending plan: “With interest rates at historic lows, we cannot afford inaction.”

This view overlooks the corrosive effects that ever higher deficits and debt have already had on the global economy. These effects, unlike roaring inflation or the dollar’s demise, are not speculative warnings of a future crisis. There is increasing evidence, from the Bank for International Settlements, the OECD and Wall Street that four straight decades of growing government intervention in the economy have led to slowing productivity growth — shrinking the overall pie — and rising wealth inequality.

If one reads the two papers cited by Sharma, they say, in a nutshell, (a) that expansionary monetary policies have deepened income inequality via an increase in asset prices (while for low interest rates and bond prices there is no clear link); (b) that the increasing share of zombie firms drags down the performance of more productive firms thus slowing down overall productivity growth.

So far so good. So where is the problem? Linking these results to excessive debt and deficit, to the “constant stimulus”, is stretched (and I am being kind). A clear case of Zombie Economics.

Let’s start with monetary policy and its impact on inequality (side note: the effect is not so clear-cut). One may see expansionary monetary policies as the consequence of fiscal dominance, excessive deficit and debt that force central banks to finance the government. But, they can also be seen as the consequence of stagnant aggregate demand that is not properly addressed by excessively restrictive fiscal policies, forcing central banks to step in. Many have argued in the past decade that especially in the Eurozone one of the causes of central bank activism was the inertia of fiscal policies. Don’t take my word. Read former ECB President Mario Draghi’s Farewell speech, in October 2019:

Today, we are in a situation where low interest rates are not delivering the same degree of stimulus as in the past, because the rate of return on investment in the economy has fallen. Monetary policy can still achieve its objective, but it can do so faster and with fewer side effects if fiscal policies are aligned with it. This is why, since 2014, the ECB has gradually placed more emphasis on the macroeconomic policy mix in the euro area.

A more active fiscal policy in the euro area would make it possible to adjust our policies more quickly and lead to higher interest rates.

This is as straightforward as a central banker can be: in order to go back to standard monetary policy making, fiscal policy needs to step up its game. Notice that Draghi also hints to another source of problems: the causality does not go from expansionary policies to low interest rates, but the other way round. We have been living in a a long period of secular stagnation, excess savings, low interest rates and chronic demand deficiency which monetary policy expansion can accommodate by keeping its rates close to “the natural” rate, but not address. Once again, fiscal policy should do the job.

Regarding zombie firms, it is unclear, barring the current and very special situation created by the pandemics, why this would prove that stimulus is unwarranted. The paper describes a secular trend whose roots are in insufficient business investment and a drop in potential growth rate (that in turn the authors link to a drop in multi-factor productivity). The debate on the role of fiscal policy in these matters is as old as macroeconomics. In the past ten years, nevertheless, the cursor has moved against the Sharma’s priors and an increasing body of literature points to crowding-in effects: especially when the stock of public capital is too low (as is the case in most advanced countries), an increase of public investment — “constant stimulus”– has a positive impact on private investment and potential growth (see for reference the most recent IMF fiscal monitor and the chapter by EIB economists of the European Public Investment Outlook). Lack of public investment is also widely believed to be one of the factors keeping our economies stuck in secular stagnation.

Fifteen years ago one could have read Sharma’s case against fiscal policy on many (more or less prestigious) outlets. Even then, it would have been easy to argue that it was flawed and fundamentally built on an ideological prior. Today, it seems simply written by somebody living in another galaxy.

Some Animals are More Equal than Others

This post is nothing new. It is just a reminder for non European readers (or for distracted European readers), about the way things work in the EMU. The German Bundesbank President Weidmann violently attacked the European Commission for failing to enforce fiscal discipline within the Stability Pact.

What is wrong with this? Is this not just another confirmation of the old cliché that Germans are obsessed with respecting the rules?

Well, think again. Everybody knows that EU countries need to curb their public deficit to be below 3% of GDP, and need to aim to structural balance. But it is less known, especially outside Europe, that since 2011, as a part of the so-called “six-pack”, the EU introduced the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP), “which aims to identify, prevent and address the emergence of potentially harmful macroeconomic imbalances that could adversely affect economic stability in a particular Member State, the euro area, or the EU as a whole”.

This procedure builds on a scoreboard of 14 indicators, among which we can read the following:

• 3-year backward moving average of the current account balance as percent of GDP, with  thresholds of +6% and -4%;

Yeah, that is right, at the very first place. And guess what, Germany’s current account surplus, since the MIP came into force has been above 6% every single year. (it is expected to be 9% in 2016).

And yet, no corrective action has been imposed, and of course no sanctions. I understand that Germany has no problems with not being sanctioned. But maybe it would be wise to keep a low profile regarding others’ violations..

So, for once, I agree with Jens Weidmann: the Commission should be harsher on those who do not respect the rules. And of course, it will, but just with some. Among the many problems European governance has, this is not the least: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

John Maynard Trump?

A sentence from Donald Trump’s victory speech retained a good deal of attention:

We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.

This was widely quoted in the social media, together with the following from an FT article about the Fed:

In particular, some members of his economic advisory team are convinced that central banks such as the US Federal Reserve have exhausted their use of super-loose monetary policy. Instead, in the coming months they hope to announce a wave of measures such as infrastructure spending, tax reform and deregulation to boost growth — and combat years of economic stagnation.

In spite of its vagueness, the idea of an infrastructure push has sent markets to beyond the roof. In short, a simple (and rather generic) speech on election night has dispelled all the anxiety about the long phase of uncertainty that we face. So long for efficient markets…

But this is not what I care about here. The point I want to make is that Trump’s announcement has triggered a strange reaction. Something going like: “See? Trump managed to break the establishment’s hostility to Keynes and to finally implement the stimulus policies we need. Forget the sexism and the p-word, the attacks on minorities, the incompetence. Enter Trump, exit neo-liberalism”. I see this especially (but not only) among Italian internauts, who tend to project the European situation in other contexts.

Well, I have some reservations on this claim. Where to start? Maybe with the “Contract with the American Voter“, that together with the (generic, once more) promise of new investment, promised a massive withdrawal of the State from the economy? Or from the fact that “Establishment Obama” made Congress vote, a month into his presidency, a “Recovery Act (ARRA)” worth 7% of GDP, that successfully stopped the free-fall and helped restore growth? Or from the fact that the “anti-establishment” Tea Party forced austerity since 2011, climaxing in the sequester saga of 2013?

Critics of current austerity policies in Europe should not be delusional. Trump is not the John Maynard Keynes of 2016. His agenda is, broadly speaking, an agenda of deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and retreat of the State from the economy. Not to mention the strong chance of a more hawkish Fed in the future. To sum up, Trump is, in the best case scenario a new Reagan, substituting military Keynesianism with bridges’ Keynesianism. And we all (should) know that Reaganomics does shine much less than usually claimed.

Those progressives looking for a Trump Keynesian agenda should probably have looked more carefully at the plan proposed by “establishment-Clinton”: A significant infrastructure push (in fact, the emphasis on infrastructures was the only point in common between the two candidates), with the ambition to crowd-in private investment. And what is more important, such an expansionary fiscal policy was framed within a more active role of the government in key sectors like education, health care, and with increased progressivity of the tax system.

Would we have had Hilary Rodham Keynes? Unfortunately we’ll never know…

Monetary Policy: Credibility 2.0

Life and work keep having the nasty habit of intruding into this blog, but it feels nice to resume writing, even if just with a short comment.

We learned  a few weeks ago that the Bank of Japan has walked one extra step in its attempt to escape lowflation, and that it has committed to overshoot its 2% inflation target.  A “credible promise to be irresponsible”,  as the FT says quoting Paul Krugman.

This may be a long overdue first step towards a revision of the inflation target, as invoked long ago by Olivier Blanchard, and more recently by Larry Ball. This is all too reasonable: if the equilibrium interest rates are negative, if monetary policy is bound by the zero-or-only-slightly-negative-lower-bound, higher inflation targets would make sense, and 4% is an arbitrary target as legitimate as the current also arbitrary 2% level. Things may be moving, as the subject was evoked, if not discussed, at the recent Central Bankers gathering in Jackson Hole. We’ll see if anything comes out of this.

But the FT also adds an interesting comment to the BoJ move, namely that the more serious risk is a blow to credibility. If it failed to lift the inflation to the 2% target, how can it be credibly believed to overshoot it?

This is a different sort of credibility issue, much more reasonable indeed, than the one we have been used to in the past three decades, linked to the concept of dynamic inconsistency. In plain English the idea that an actor has no incentive to keep prior commitments that go against its own interest, and hence deviates from the initial plan. Credibility was therefore associated to changing incentives over time (typically for policy makers), and invoked to recommend rules over discretion.

Today, eight years into the zero lower bound, we go back to a more intuitive definition of credibility: announcing an objective and not being able to attain it.

The difference between the two definitions of credibility is not anodyne. In the first case, the unwillingness of central banks to behave appropriately can be corrected through the adoption of constraining rules. In the latter, the central bank cannot attain the objective regardless of incentives and constraints, and other strategies need to be put in place.

The other strategy, the reader will not be surprised to learn, is fiscal policy. Monetary dominance is in fact a second tenet of the Consensus from the 1990s that the crisis has wiped out. We used to live in a world in which structural reforms would take care of increasing potential growth, monetary policy would be used to take care of (minor) demand-driven fluctuations, and fiscal policy was in a closet.

This is gone (luckily). Even the large policy making institutions now call for a comprehensive and multi-instrument policy making. The policy mix, a central element of macroeconomics in the pre-rational expectations era, is now back.  Even the granitic dichotomy between short (demand driven) and long (supply driven) term, is somewhat rediscussed.

The excessively simplified consensus that dominated macroeconomics for the past thirty years seems to be seriously in trouble; complexity, tradeoffs, coordination, are now the issues discussed in academia and in policy circles. This is good news.

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Perseverare Diabolicum

Yesterday the Council decided that Spain and Portugal’s recent efforts to reduce deficit were not enough. This may lead to the two countries being fined, the first time this would happen since the inception of the euro.

It is likely that the fine will be symbolic, or none at all; given the current macroeconomic situation, imposing a further burden on the public finances of these two any country would be crazy.

Yet, the decision is in my opinion enraging. First, for political reasons:  Our world is crumbling. The level of confidence in political elites is at record low levels, and as the Brexit case shows, this fuels disintegration forces. It is hard not to see a link between these processes and, in Europe, the dismal political and economic performances we managed to put together in the last decade (you are free pick your example, I will pick the refugee crisis (mis) management, and the austerity-induced double-dip recession).

But hey, one might say. We are not here to save the world, we are here to apply the rules. Rules that require fiscal discipline. And of course, both Portugal and Spain have been fiscal sinners since the crisis began (and of course before):

Once we neglect interest payments, on which there is little a government can do besides hoping that they ECB will keep helping, both countries spectacularly reduced their deficit since 2010. And this is true whether we take the headline figures (total deficit, the dashed line), or the structural figures that the Commission cherishes, i.e. deficit net of cyclical components (the solid lines). Looking at this figure one may wonder what they serve to drink during Council (and Commission) meetings, for them to argue that the fiscal effort was insufficient…

What is even more enraging, is that not only this effort was not recognized as remarkable by EU authorities. But what is more, it was harmful for these economies (and for the Eurozone at large).

In the following table I have put side by side the output gaps and fiscal impulse, the best measure of discretionary policy changes¹. I have highlighted in green all the years in which the fiscal stance was countercyclical, meaning that a negative (positive) output gap triggered a more expansionary (contractionary) fiscal stance. And in red cases in which the fiscal stance was procyclical, i.e. in which it made matters worse.

Output Gap and Discretionary Fiscal Policy Stance
	Portugal		Spain		EMU 12
	Output Gap	Fiscal Impulse	Output Gap	Fiscal Impulse	Output Gap	Fiscal Impulse
2009	-0.1	4.6	1.5	3.9	-1.9	1.4
2010	2.1	2.3	1.1	-2.3	-0.5	0.7
2011	0.6	-5.9	-0.3	-1.1	0.4	-1.6
2012	-3.2	-3.7	-3.3	-0.7	-1.1	-1.1
2013	-4.1	-0.9	-5.4	-4.4	-2.1	-0.9
2014	-3.2	2.9	-4.8	-0.2	-2.0	-0.1
2015	-2.0	-1.7	-2.8	1.2	-1.3	0.2
2016	-0.9	-1.0	-1.7	0.2	-0.8	0.3
2017	0.3	0.4	-0.9	0.3	-0.2	0.2
Source: Datastream – AMECO Database
Note: Fiscal Impulse computed as change of cyclically adjusted deficit net of interest

The reader will judge by himself. Just two remarks. linked to the fines put in place. First, the Portuguese fiscal contraction of 2015-2016 is procyclical, as the output gap was and still is negative. On the other hand, Spain has increased its structural deficit, but it had excellent reasons to do so.

One may argue that the table causes problems, because the calculation of the output gap is arbitrary and political in nature. Granted, I could not agree more. So I took headline figures, and compared the “gross” fiscal impulse with the “growth gap”, meaning the difference between the actual growth rate and the 3% level that was assumed to be normal when the Maastricht Treaty was signed (If you are curious about EMU numerology, just look here). This is of course a harsher criterion, as 3% as nowadays become more a mirage than a realistic objective. But hey, if we want to use the rules, we should take them together with their underlying hypotheses. Here is the table:

Growth Gap and Overall Fiscal Policy Stance
	Portugal		Spain		EMU 12
	Growth Gap to 3%	Fiscal Impulse	Growth Gap to 3%	Fiscal Impulse	Growth Gap to 3%	Fiscal Impulse
2009	-6.0	6.2	-6.6	6.4	-7.4	4.2
2010	-1.1	1.4	-3.0	-1.7	-0.9	0.0
2011	-4.8	-5.2	-4.0	-0.4	-1.4	-2.2
2012	-7.0	-2.3	-5.6	0.3	-3.9	-0.5
2013	-4.1	-0.8	-4.7	-3.9	-3.3	-0.5
2014	-2.1	2.3	-1.6	-1.0	-2.1	-0.2
2015	-1.5	-2.4	0.2	-0.5	-1.4	-0.3
2016	-1.5	-1.6	-0.4	-1.0	-1.4	0.0
2017	-1.3	-0.2	-0.5	-0.7	-1.3	-0.2
Source: Datastream – AMECO Database
Note: Fiscal Impulse computed as change of government deficit net of interest

Lot’s of red, isn’t it? Faced with a structural growth deficit, the EMU at large, as well as Spain and Portugal, has had an excessively restrictive fiscal stance. I know, no real big news here.

To summarize, the decision to fine Portugal and Spain is politically ill-timed and clumsy. And it is economically unwarranted. And yet, here we are, discussing it. My generation grew up thinking that When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best of What’s Still Around. In Brussels, no matter how bad things get, it is business as usual.

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^{1. The fiscal impulse is computed as the negative of the change in deficit. As such it captures the change in the fiscal stance. Just to make an example, going from a deficit of 1% to a deficit of 5% is more expansionary than going form a deficit of 10% to a deficit of 11%↩}.

On the Importance of Fiscal Policy

Last week’s data on EMU growth have triggered quite a bit of comments. I was intrigued by Paul Krugman‘s piece arguing (a) that in per capita terms the EMU performance is not as bad (he uses working age population, I used total population); and (b) that the path of the EMU was similar to that of the US in the first phase of the crisis; and (c) that divergence started only in 2011, due to differences in monetary policy (an impeccable disaster here, much more reactive in the US). Fiscal policy, Krugman argues, was equally contractionary across the ocean.
I pretty much agree that the early policy response to the crisis was similar, and that divergence started only when the global crisis went European, after the Greek elections of October 2009. But I am puzzled (and it does not happen very often) by Krugman’s dismissal of austerity as a factor explaining different performances. True, at first sight, fiscal consolidation kicked in at the same moment in the US and in Europe. I computed the fiscal impulse, using changes in the cyclically adjusted primary deficit. In other words, by taking away the cyclical component, and interest payment, we can obtain the closest possible measure to the discretionary fiscal stance of a government. And here is what it gives:

Krugman is certainly right that austerity was widespread in 2011 and in 2012 (actually more in the US). So what is the problem?
The problem is that fiscal consolidation needs not to be assessed in isolation, but in relation to the environment in which it takes place. First, it started one year earlier in the EMU (look at the bars for 2010). Second, expansion had been more robust in the US in 2008 and in 2009, thus avoiding that the economy slid too much: having been bolder and more effective in 2008-2010, continued fiscal expansion was less necessary in 2011-12.
I remember Krugman arguing at the time that the recovery would have been stronger and faster if the fiscal stance in the US had remained expansionary. I agreed then and I agree now: government support to the economy was withdrawn when the private sector was only partially in condition to take the witness. But to me it is just a question of degree and of timing in reversing a fiscal policy stance that overall had been effective.
I had made the same point back in 2013. Here is, updated from that post, the correlation between public and private expenditure:

Correlation Between Public and Private Expenditure
	2008-2009	2010-2012	2013-2015
EMU	-0.96	0.73	0.99
USA	-0.82	-0.96	-0.04

Remember, a positive correlation means that fiscal policy moves together with private expenditure, and fails to act countercyclically. The table tells us that public expenditure in the US was withdrawn only when private expenditure could take the witness, and never was procylclical (it turned neutral in the past 2 years). Europe is a whole different story. Fiscal contraction began when the private sector was not ready to take the witness; the withdrawal of public demand therefore led to a plunge in economic activity and to the double dip recession that the US did not experience. Here is the figure from the same post, also updated:

To sum up: the fiscal stance in the US was appropriate, even if it changed a bit too hastily in 2011. In Europe, it was harmful since 2010.

And monetary policy in all this? It did not help in Europe. I join Krugman in believing that once the economy was comfortably installed in the liquidity trap Mario Draghi’s activism while necessary was (and is)  far from sufficient. Being more timely, the Fed played an important role with its aggressive monetary policy, that started precisely in 2012. It supported the expansion of private demand, and minimized the risk of a reversal when the withdrawal of fiscal policy begun. But in both cases I am unsure that monetary policy could have made a difference without fiscal policy. Let’s not forget that a first round of aggressive monetary easing in 2007-2008 had been successful in keeping the financial sector afloat, but not in avoiding the recession. This is why in 2009 most economies launched robust fiscal stimulus plans. I see no reason to believe that, in 2010-2012, more appropriate and timely ECB action would have made a big difference. The problem is fiscal, fiscal, fiscal.

The Sin of Central Bankers

I read, a bit late, a very interesting piece by Simon Wren-Lewis, who blames central bankers for three major mistakes: (1) They did not see the crisis coming, while they were the only one in the position to see the build-up of leverage; (2) They did not warn governments that at the Zero Lower Bound central banks would lose traction and could not protect the economy from the disasters of austerity. (3) They may be rushing in declaring that we are back to normal, thus attributing all the current slack to a deterioration of the supply side of the economy.

What surprises me is (2), for which I quote Wren-Lewis in full:

Of course the main culprit for the slow recovery from the Great Recession was austerity, by which I mean premature fiscal consolidation. But the slow recovery also reflects a failure of monetary policy. In my view the biggest failure occurred very early on in the recession. Monetary policy makers should have said very clearly, both to politicians and to the public, that with interest rates at their lower bound they could no longer do their job effectively, and that fiscal stimulus would have helped them do that job. Central banks might have had the power to prevent austerity happening, but they failed to use it.

The way Wren-Lewis writes it, central banks were not involved in the push towards fiscal consolidation, and their “only” sin was of not being vocal enough. I think he is too nice. At least in the Eurozone, the ECB was a key actor in pushing austerity. It was directly involved in the Trojka designing the rescue packages that sunk Greece (and the EMU with it). But more importantly, the ECB contributed to design and impose the Berlin View narrative that fiscal profligacy was at the roots of the crisis, so that rebalancing would have to be on the shoulders of fiscal sinners alone. We should not forget that “impeccable disaster” Jean-Claude Trichet was  one of the main supporters of the confidence fairy: credible austerity would magically lift expectations, pushing private expenditure and triggering the recovery. He was the President of the ECB when central banks made the second mistake. And I really have a hard time picturing him warning against the risks of austerity at the zero lower bound.

And things are not drastically different now. True, Mario Draghi often calls for fiscal support to the ECB quantitative easing program. But as I argued at length, calling for fiscal policy within the existing rules’ framework has no real impact.

So I disagree with Wren-Lewis on this one. Central banks, or at least the ECB, did not simply fail to contrast the problem of wrongheaded austerity. They were, and may  still be, part of the problem.

The problem is one of economic doctrine. And as long as this does not change, I am unsure that removing central bank independence would have made a difference. Would a Bank of England controlled by Chancellor  Osborne have been more vocal against austerity? Would an ECB controlled by the Ecofin? Nothing is less sure…