Thursday, April 13, 2017

The Zero Lower Bound and Monetary Policy

Ben Bernanke has written a couple of blog posts on the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates, and some implications for monetary policy going forward. The first deals with the extent of the ZLB "problem," and the second with monetary policy solutions.

In a previous post I wrote about the low-real-interest-rate phenomenon, and how central bankers view the implications for monetary policy. Basically, the real rate of return on government debt in the United States, and around the world, has been persistently low because of low productivity growth, demographic factors, and - most importantly, I think - the high demand and low supply of safe and liquid assets.

In his first piece, Bernanke is primarily interested in a paper written at the Federal Reserve Board by Kiley and Roberts, which I also commented on in my earlier post. Kiley and Roberts determine, based on simulations of the Board's FRB/US model, that if low real interest rates persist into the future, then US monetary policy will more frequently be constrained by the zero lower bound - assuming that negative nominal interest rates are not an option. The consequences, according to Kiley and Roberts, are that inflation will tend to fall short, on average, of the 2% inflation target, and - by Phillips curve logic - real output will fall short of "full employment" output.

But, Bernanke finds it puzzling that most of the measures of inflation expectations he has been looking at tend to be fairly persistent at about 2%. If the ZLB were such a big problem for inflation control, in the way that Kiley and Roberts envision, shouldn't market participants be predicting low inflation? Let's look at one measure of inflation expectations - the 10-year breakeven rate (the yield on a 10-year Treasury bond minus the yield on a 10-year TIPS):
Currently, that measure has dropped a bit below 2%. Recall that TIPS are indexed to CPI inflation, not PCE inflation, which is what the Fed targets. Here's the difference between CPI inflation and PCE inflation:
As you can see, the difference is on average positive, and quite variable. But, if the 10-year breakeven rate is biased upward as a measure of anticipated inflation, then maybe anticipated inflation is in fact substantially lower than 2%. So maybe Bernanke shouldn't be so puzzled.

But suppose that we take other measures of anticipated inflation seriously, as Bernanke does (and perhaps as we should not). For example, professional forecasters, rightly or wrongly, tend to persistently forecast 2% inflation over the medium term. Bernanke's interpretation is that Kiley and Roberts are doing the analysis right, but they're not taking into account other aspects of policy - forward guidance and quantitative easing (QE). That is, according to Bernanke, the Fed will "do what it takes" to maintain its 2% inflation target in the future - binding ZLB or not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bernanke's advice for hitting the 2% inflation target given a frequently binding ZLB constraint is to do what he did:
One possibility, which seems desirable in any case, is just to build on and improve the approaches used between 2008 and 2015. Strategies the Fed used to address the zero lower bound included aggressive rate-cutting early on, quantitative easing, forward guidance about future rate paths, and a “risk-management” strategy that entails a very cautious liftoff from the zero bound when the time comes.

It seems to me that Bernanke has mischaracterized the problem and, given that, he's not going to do well in solving it. Here's my take on this:

1. A persistently low real interest rate, if it is a problem for inflation control, would imply that the central bank on average misses on the high side. This is just the logic of the Fisher effect. As Kiley and Roberts say,
According to the Fisher equation, higher average inflation would imply a higher average value of nominal interest rates, and so the ELB would be encountered less frequently.
But they don't seem to understand that a corollary is that, if the ELB (effective lower bound) is encountered more frequently, this implies that the nominal interest rate is on average higher than what is required to hit the 2% inflation target. So, "according to the Fisher equation," as they say, inflation will be higher, on average, than 2%, not lower.

I've written a paper about this. My model can accommodate a number of things - sticky prices, money, credit, open market operations, collateral, safe asset shortages. And it's got neo-Fisherian properties, as all mainstream macroeconomic models do. In the model, one can work out optimal monetary policy, and I do this in the context of different frictions, to separate out how these frictions matter for policy. With just a basic sticky price friction, the model exhibits a Phillips curve, and if the ZLB binds in the optimal monetary policy problem, due to a low real interest rate, then inflation and output are too high. If we take this version of the model seriously, an interpretation in terms of recent history, is that low real interest rates have not been impinging on monetary policy in the United States. Inflation has persistently come in below the 2% target, and the Fed was doing the right thing in raising nominal interest rates, so as to increase inflation.

2. If forward guidance works, it does so through commitment to higher future inflation. And this promise is carried out with a higher future nominal interest rate. Again, this is just standard neo-Fisherian logic. The current nominal interest rate determines anticipated future inflation. So, if the problem is a binding ZLB constraint, and current inflation is too high as long as the ZLB binds, then the central bank can reduce current inflation while at the ZLB by promising higher inflation when the ZLB no longer binds. But, according to the Fisher effect, the central bank achieves higher inflation through a higher setting for the nominal interest rate. That's in my paper too.

Conventional ZLB economics doesn't work that way. Work by Eggertsson and Woodford and Werning derives results that Bernanke describes as "make-up" policy. That is, the central bank makes up for a period during which the ZLB binds by committing to staying at the ZLB for longer than it othwerwise would. As far as I can make out, these results are particular to how these authors set up the problem. I can turn the results on their head in a model with sticky prices, demand-determined output, and a Phillips curve. And I can do it in a way that doesn't yield various "paradoxes" - a paradox such as less price stickiness being a bad thing (Werning).

But that's forward guidance in theory. I have yet to see forward guidance work in practice. Indeed, Bernanke's execution of forward guidance in the post-financial crisis period is an example of how not to do it.

3. Quantitative easing as an approach to inflation control? Forget it. A great example here is Japan, which I most recently discussed in this post. QE appears to be ineffective in pushing up inflation in a low-nominal-interest-rate environment - the solution if inflation is too low is what comes naturally: increase the nominal interest rate.

In conclusion, if low real interest rates persist, at the levels we have seen, then this should not be a problem for inflation control. The Fed can control inflation, albeit with a lower average level of short-term nominal interest rates than we have seen in the past. Potentially, problems could be encountered, not with inflation control, but in affecting real economic activity. Though neo-Fisherism says increases in the central bank's nominal interest rate target make inflation go up, these ideas do not suggest that an increase in the nominal rate makes output go up. The conventional notion that monetary stabilization policy is about reducing interest rates in the face of shocks that make output go down seems to be strongly supported by the data. Thus, if there is a problem for monetary policy in a low-real-interest-rate environment, it's that the nominal interest rate cannot fall enough in the face of a recession. Between mid-2007 and late 2008, the fed funds rate target fell from 5.25% to (essentially) zero. But, if the average fed funds rate is 3%, or 2%, it can't fall by 500 basis points or more in the event of a downturn.

But how do we know that historical Fed behavior was optimal, or even close to it? Standard New Keynesian theory says that, if the real interest rate is sufficiently low, then the nominal interest rate should go to zero. But in my paper, if we're explicit about the reasons for the low real interest rate - in this case a tight collateral constraint - then the low real interest rate implies that the nominal interest rate should go up. That is, a low real interest rate reflects an inefficiently low supply of safe collateral, and an open market sale by the central bank can mitigate the collateral shortage, which results in higher nominal and real interest rates.

5 comments:

  1. "...inflation will be higher...", what is your point here? Is it a critiqueof their policy recommendation or model maybe? I lost the plot...

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    1. Expand the quote so that I can locate it and answer your question.

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    2. "So, "according to the Fisher equation," as they say, inflation will be higher, on average, than 2%, not lower."

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    3. The conclusion comes from simulations of the FRB/US model. If you know how FRB/US works (it's basically an expanded IS/LM/Phillips curve large-scale macroeconometric model), then their results are not at all surprising. In that model, long-run inflation expectations are exogenous, so a binding zero lower bound constraint implies the real rate is too high, output is too low, and via the Phillips curve, inflation is too low. But, in all the models that macroeconomists actually work with, if the zero lower bound constrains policy, this means the nominal interest rate is on average too high, and through the Fisher effect, inflation must be too high.

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  2. The money stock can never be managed by any attempt to control the cost of credit. Interest is the price of loan-funds (free market clearing rates). The price of money (the Fed's bailiwick) is the reciprocal of the price level. E.g., savings flowing through the non-banks increases the supply of loan-funds, not the supply of money (the opposite process of remunerating IBDDs). The 1966 S&L credit crunch is the economic prologue and paradigm.

    Instead of couching the “desk’s” instructions in terms of reserves available for private non-bank deposits (RPDs), as Paul Meek described in “Open Market Operations” in 1972, FOMC policy was bifurcated, and this subsequently emasculated the Fed’s “open market power”, ”, viz., the Central Bank’s sovereign right to promulgate the creation of new money and credit: at once and ex-nihilo.

    And monetary policy is impossible without the cooperation of the U.S. Treasury. The Fed requires “grist for its mill” as if the Great Depression didn’t teach anyone, including BuB, anything. There was a blatant lack of coordination between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept. (e.g., necessitating the Treasury Supplementary Financing Program -SFP), etc.

    And the perverse and counter-cyclical increase in bank capital adequacy accounts destroyed over a trillion dollars of new money creation.

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