Killing Them Softly?

Just a very quick and unstructured note on Greece. There is lots of confusion under the sky, and it seems to me that creditors are today advancing in sparse order.

Yesterday something rather upsetting happened, as the Eurogroup suspended bailout payments because Greece engaged in some extra expenditures. These are mostly targeted to pensioneers and to the Greek islands that had to endure unexpected costs linked to the refugee crisis. Unexpectedly, the Commission is siding with Greece, with Pierre Moscovici arguing that the country is on target, and that its effort has been remarkable so far. In fact, I have understood, Greece is doing so well that it overshot the target of structural surplus for 2016, and it it these extra resources that it is engaging in order to soft the impact of austerity.

And then there is the IMF, accused by Greece of pushing for more austerity, is also under attack from EU institutions (Eurogroup and Commission) for its refusal to join the bailout package. The Fund has hit back, in a somewhat irritual blog post signed by Maurice Obstfeld and Poul Thomsen (not just any two staffers) and seems not to be available to play the scapegoat for a program that in their opinion was born flawed. In fact, I think that more than to Greece, Obstfeld and Thomsen have written with the other creditors in mind.

I have two considerations, one on the economics of all this, one on the politics.

• I think I will side with the IMF on this. At least with the recent IMF. Since the very beginning The IMF has dubbed as irrealistic the bailout package agreed after the referendum of 2015 . The effort demanded to Greece (the infamous 3.5% structural surplus to be reached by 2018) was recognized to be self-defeating, and the IMF asked for more emphasis on reform, with in exchange a more lenient and realistic approach to fiscal policy: debt relief and much lower required suprluses (1.5% of GDP). In other words, the IMF seems to have learnt from the self-defeating austerity disaster of 2010-2014, and to have finally an eye to the macroeconomic consistency of the reform package. I still believe that the bailout should have been unconditional, and require reforms once the economy had recovered (sequencing, sequencing, and sequencing again). But still, at least the IMF now has a coherent position. Moscovici’s FT piece linked above also seems to go in the same direction, arguing that nothing more can be asked to Greece. It falls short of acknowledging that the package is unrealistic, but at least it avoids blaming the country. And then there is the Eurogroup, actually, Mr Dijsselbloem and Schauble (let’s name names), that did not move an inch since 2010, and fail to see that their demands are slowly (?) choking the Greek economy, stifling any effort to soften the hardship of the adjustment.
• The political consideration is that the hawks still give the cards, as they dominate the eurogroup. But they are more isolated now. Evidence is piling that the eurozone crisis has been mismanaged to an extent that is impossible to hide, and that the austerity-reforms package that the Berlin View has imposed to the whole eurozone is a big part of the explanation for the political disgregation that we see across the continent. The more nuanced position of the Commission, the IMF challenge to the policies dictated by the hawks, therefore represent an opportunity. There is a clear political space for an alternative to the Berlin View and to the disastrous policies followed so far. The question is which government will be willing (and able) to rise to the occasion. I am afraid I know the anwser.

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The IMF: Of Words and Actions

Some comments, and endless twitter discussions on my Blanchard Touch post call for a couple of clarifications.

The first has to do to the most common reaction, that has been: “the IMF may well have made advances in its analysis, but the policy prescriptions are remarkably unchanged. So what good is it?” After all, isn’t the IMF considered an hardliner in the current Troika Institutions‘ negotiation with Greece? No Blanchard touch, there.

These objections are of course justified, but in my opinion they miss an important point: Blanchard is not the IMF executive director. Nor the representative of  a major country. He is “only” the head of the research department, and as such his job is to provide analyses, not to decide the use of these analyses made by a process that (luckily) is political in nature. Does this mean that what Blanchard and his staff do is irrelevant? Of course not. I do think that making the debate evolve is a fundamental task for public figures like Blanchard. One of the strength of the Washington Consensus has been the narrative that accompanied it, the market efficiency hypothesis that laid the theoretical foundations of supply side policies. This is why I believe that the fact that the narrative is crumbling, among other things thanks to the IMF own research, is of paramount importance. The change in narrative is a precondition for a policy change. The hiatus between the Fund’s actions and words will be increasingly visible, and eventually, I hope, it will lead to a change of policies. I cannot believe that the narrative is irrelevant; otherwise I would have chosen a different job.

The second clarification concerns the end of my post:

If I write a paper saying that austerity will not be costly because multipliers are 0.5, and 2 years later retract my previous statement and argue that austerity is in fact self defeating, the impact on the world is zero. If the IMF does the same, during the two years huge suffering will be needlessly inflicted to masses of people. This poses a problem, as research by definition may be falsified. In the past an institution like the IMF would never have admitted a mistake. And we certainly do not want to go back there. Today they do admit the mistakes, but the suffering remains. The only way out to this problem is that the “new” IMF should learn to be cautious in its policy prescriptions, and always remember that any policy recommendation is bound to be sooner or later proven inappropriate by new data and research. We don’t live in a black and white world. Adopting a more prudent stance in dictating policies  would be wise (in Brussels as well, it goes without saying)

By this I surely did not mean that the IMF should refrain from giving policy advice. Nor that governments should follow their guts instead of informed analysis, as one reader very clearly put it. I meant that the first and most important achievement for a policy adviser is to abandon dogmatism, and acknowledge that however robust we believe our knowledge to be, there always is a chance that it will be proved wrong. With such an attitude, policy advice would become “cautious” in the sense of being aware of possible unintended consequences of policies; policies that should therefore be implemented with in mind alternative scenarios. Just to make an example, the IMF could have suggested, as it did, to implement austerity based on the belief that the multiplier was low. But it should have asked governments to do it gradually, in order to be ready to reverse course in case the estimated multipliers would prove (as it did) to be larger. In a sentence, being cautious means avoiding advising for extreme behaviors that could prove to be extremely costly and hard to unwind. Especially in crisis situations, policy makers should look east and cross the river by feeling the stones.

I would also like to add that in the case of the Washington Consensus, we had already, in the past decade, a number of episodes when its prescriptions turned out to be catastrophic. Thus, caution would have been even wiser. But hey, dogmatism is by definition unwise…

The Blanchard Touch

Yesterday I commented on the intriguing box in which the IMF staff challenges one of the tenets of the Washington consensus, the link between labour market reform and economic performance.
But the IMF is not new to these reassessments. In fact over the past three years research coming from the fund has increasingly challenged the orthodoxy that still shapes European policy making:

1. First, there was the widely discussed mea culpa in the October 2012 World Economic Outlook, when the IMF staff basically disavowed their own previous estimates of the size of multipliers, and in doing so they certified that austerity could not, and would not work (of course this led EU leaders to immediately rush to do more of the same).
2. Then, the Fund tackled the issue of income inequality, and broke another taboo, i.e. the dichotomy  between  fairness and efficiency. Turns out that unequal societies tend to perform less well, and IMF staff research reached the same conclusion. And once the gates opened, it did not stop. The paper by Berg and Ostry was widely read. Then we had Ball et al on the distributional effects of fiscal consolidation (surprise, it increases inequality). Another paper investigated the channels for this link, highlighting how consolidation leads to increased inequality mostly via unemployment. And just last week I assisted to a presentation by IMF economists showing how austerity and inequality are positively related with political instability.
3. On labour markets, before yesterday’s box 3.5, the Fund had disseminated research linking increased inequality with the decline in unionization.
4. Then, of course, the “public Investment is a free lunch” chapter three of the World Economic Outlook, in the fall 2014.
5. In between, they demolished another building block of the Washington Consensus: free capital movements may sometimes be destabilizing…

These results are not surprising per se. All of these issues are highly controversial, so it is obvious that research does not find unequivocal support for a particular view. All the more so if that view, like the Washington Consensus, is pretty much an ideological construction. Yet, the fact that research coming from the center of the empire acknowledges that the world is complex, and interactions among agents goes well beyond the working of efficient markets, is in my opinion quite something.

What does this mass (yes, now it can be called a mass) of work tells us? Three things, I would say. First, fiscal policy is back. it really is. The Washington Consensus does not exist anymore, at least in Washington. Be it because the multipliers are large, or because it has an impact on income distribution (and on economic efficiency); or again because public investment boosts growth, fiscal policy has a role to play both in dampening business cycle fluctuations and in facilitating stable and balanced long term growth. The fact that a large institution like the IMF has lent its support to this revival of consideration for fiscal policy, makes me hope that discussions about macroeconomic policy will be less ideological, even once the crisis will have passed.

The second thing I learn is that the IMF research department proves to be populated of true researchers, who continuously challenge and test their own views, and are not afraid of u-turns if their own research dictates them. I am sure it has always been the case. What is different from the past is that now they have a chief economist who seems more interested in understanding where the world goes than in preaching a doctrine.

The third remark is more problematic. If I write a paper saying that austerity will not be costly because multipliers are 0.5, and 2 years later retract my previous statement and argue that austerity is in fact self defeating, the impact on the world is zero. If the IMF does the same, during the two years huge suffering will be needlessly inflicted to masses of people. This poses a problem, as research by definition may be falsified. In the past an institution like the IMF would never have admitted a mistake. And we certainly do not want to go back there. Today they do admit the mistakes, but the suffering remains. The only way out to this problem is that the “new” IMF should learn to be cautious in its policy prescriptions, and always remember that any policy recommendation is bound to be sooner or later proven inappropriate by new data and research. We don’t live in a black and white world. Adopting a more prudent stance in dictating policies  would be wise (in Brussels as well, it goes without saying). And of course, the disconnect between the army and the general is also a problem.

What Structural Reforms?

I am ready to bet that the latest IMF World Economic Outlook, that was presented today in Washington, will make a certain buzz for a box. It is box 3.5, at page 36 of chapter 3, which has been available on the website for a few days now. In that box, the IMF staff presents lack of evidence on the relationship between structural reforms and total factor productivity, the proxy for long term growth and competitiveness. (Interestingly enough people at the IMF tend to put their most controversial findings in boxes, as if they wanted to bind them).

What is certainly going to stir controversy is the finding that while long term growth is negatively affected by product market regulation, excessive labour market regulation does not hamper long term performance.

It is not the first time that the IMF surprises us with interesting analysis that goes against its own previous conventional wisdom. I will write more about this shortly. Here I just want to remark how these findings are relevant for our old continent.

The austerity imposed to embraced by eurozone crisis countries has taken the shape of expenditure cuts and labour market deregulation, whose magic effects on growth and competitiveness have been sold to reluctant and exhausted populations as the path to a bright future. I already noted, two years ago, that the short-run pain was slowly evolving into long-run pain as well, and that the gain of structural reforms was nowhere to be seen. The IMF tells us, today, that this was to be expected.

The guy who should be happy is Alexis Tsipras; he has been resisting since January pressure from his peers (and the Troika, that includes IMF staff!) to further curb labour market regulations, and recently presented a list of reforms that mostly pledges to reduce crony capitalism, tax evasion and product market rigidities. Exactly what the IMF shows to be effective in boosting growth. Of course, at the opposite, those who spent their political capital to implement labour market reforms are most probably not rejoicing at the IMF findings.

This happens in Washington. Problem is, Greece, and Europe at large, seem to be light years away from the IMF research department. We already saw, for example with the mea culpa on multipliers, that IMF staff in program countries does not necessarily read what is written at home. Let’s see whether the discussion on Greece’s reforms will mark a realignment between the Fund’s research work and the prescriptions they implement/suggest/impose on the ground.

Reduce Inequality to Fight Secular Stagnation

Larry Summers’ IMF speech on secular stagnation partially shifted the attention from the crisis to the long run challenges facing advanced economies. I like to think of Summers’ point of as a conjectures that “in the long run we are all Keynesians”, as we face a permanent shortage of demand that may lead to a new normal made of hard choices between an unstable, debt-driven growth, and a quasi-depressed economy. A number of factors, from aging and demographics to slowing technical progress, may support the conjecture that globally we may be facing permanently higher levels of savings and lower levels of investment, leading to negative natural rates of interest. Surprisingly, another factor that had a major impact in the long-run compression of aggregate demand has been so far neglected: the steep and widespread increase of inequality. Reversing the trend towards increasing inequality would then become a crucial element in trying to escape secular stagnation.

Look who’s Gloomy

Wolfgang Munchau has an excellent piece on today’s Financial Times, where he challenges the increasingly widespread (and unjustified) optimism about the end of the EMU crisis. The premise of the piece is that for the end of the crisis to be durable, it must pass through adjustment between core and periphery. He cites similar statements made in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook. This is good news per se, because nowadays, with the exception of Germany it became common knowledge that the EMU imbalances are structural and not simply the product of late night parties in the periphery. But what are Munchau’s reasons for pessimism?

The Italian Job

A follow-up of the post on public investment. I had said that the resources available based on my calculation were to be seen as an upper bound, being among other things based on the Spring forecasts of the Commission (most likely too optimistic).

And here we are. On Friday the IMF published the result of its Article IV consultation with Italy, where growth for 2013 is revised downwards from -1.3% to -1.8%.

In terms of public finances, a crude back-of-the-envelop estimation yields a worsening of deficit of 0.25% (the elasticity is roughly 0.5). This means that in the calculation I made based on the Commission’s numbers, the 4.8 billions available for 2013 shrink to 1.5 once we take in the IMF numbers. It is worth reminding that besides Germany, Italy is the only large country who can could benefit of the Commission’s new stance.

And while we are at Italy, the table at page 63 of the EC Spring Forecasts (pdf) is striking. The comparison of 2012 with the annus horribilis 2009 shows that private demand is the real Italian problem.  The contribution to growth of domestic demand was of -3.2% in 2009, and -4.7% in 2012! In part this is because of the reversed fiscal stimulus; but mostly because of the collapse of consumption (-4.2% in 2012, against -1.6% in 2009). Luckily, the rest of the world is recovering, and the contribution of net exports, went from -1.1% in 2009 to 3.0% in 2012. This explains the difference in GDP growth between the -5.5% of 2009 and the -2.4% of 2012.

Italian households feel crisis fatigue, and having depleted their buffers, they are today reducing consumption. I remain convinced that strong income redistribution is the only quick way to restart consumption. Looking at the issues currently debated in Italy, this could be attempted  reshaping both VAT and property taxes so as to impact the rich and the very rich significantly more than the middle classes. The property tax base should be widened to include much more than just real estate, and an exemption should be introduced (currently in France it is 1.2 millions euro per household). Concerning VAT, a reduction of basic rates should be compensated by a significant increase in rates on luxury goods.

Chances that this will happen?

It’s the Denominator, Stupid!

This weekend’s news was the downgrade of the UK by Moody’s. Chancellor Osborne took this as a sign that austerity should be strengthened even more, probably because he had little choice (never put all your eggs in one basket…). And yet, if only somebody in Downing Street bothered going through the text, they would have read this:

The key interrelated drivers of today’s action are:
1. The continuing weakness in the UK’s medium-term growth outlook, with a period of sluggish growth which Moody’s now expects will extend into the second half of the decade;
2. The challenges that subdued medium-term growth prospects pose to the government’s fiscal consolidation programme, which will now extend well into the next parliament;
3. And, as a consequence of the UK’s high and rising debt burden, a deterioration in the shock-absorption capacity of the government’s balance sheet, which is unlikely to reverse before 2016.

Thus, Moody’s analysts clearly state the direction of causality:

IMF Schyzophrenia

I had already noticed that the IMF at times looks like Jekyll and Hide. But not to this point. Last time I cited a simple working paper. This time we are talking about the most important document produced by the IMF. Here are some excerpts from the October  IMF World Economic Outlook, released on Monday:

The Strange Case of Dr IMF and Mr Troika

With Greece desperately trying to obtain more time to carry on its fiscal consolidation plan, it is interesting to read a recent IMF working paper on “Successful Austerity in the United States, Europe and Japan”. The study tries to assess how fiscal consolidation and the growth rate affect each other, in expansions and in contractions. I copied and pasted (from their page 7; I just suppressed a couple of technical points) the main results of the paper: