Default ≠ Drachma

I've been saying for a while that people should stop assuming that a Greek default implies leaving the euro for a new currency. Much of the media coverage of the negotiations continues to assume that the two are inseparable -- that, in effect, the negotiations are over Greece remaining in the euro system. But there is no logical necessity for a default to be followed by the creation of a new currency; indeed it's hard to see any reason why the former should lead to the latter.

Finally the consensus that default must mean exit seems to be breaking down. Here's John Cochrane:

Please can we stop passing along this canard -- that Greece defaulting on some of its bonds means that Greece must must change currencies. Greece no more needs to leave the euro zone than it needs to leave the meter zone and recalibrate all its rulers, or than it needs to leave the UTC+2 zone and reset all its clocks to Athens time. When large companies default, they do not need to leave the dollar zone. When cities and even US states default they do not need to leave the dollar zone.

Cochrane's political views are one thing, but he is a very smart guy. And in this case, I think the Walrasian view of money as numéraire is helpful. It's important to remember that euros are not physical things, they are simply units in which contractual commitments are denominated.

And now in today's FT, Wolfgang Munchau writes:

The big question — whether Greece will leave the eurozone or not — remains unanswerable. But I am now fairly certain it will default. My understanding is that some eurozone officials are at least contemplating the possibility of a Greek default but without Grexit. ... 

On whom could, or should, Greece default? It could default on its citizens by not paying public-sector wages or pensions. That would be morally repugnant and politically suicidal... it could default on the two loans it received from its EU partners, though it is not due to start repaying those until 2020... Defaulting on the IMF and ECB is the only option that would bring genuine financial relief in the short term. ... 

Default is not synonymous with exit. There is no EU ruling that says you have to leave the eurozone when you default on your debt. The link between default and exit is indirect; if a country defaults, its defaulting securities are no longer eligible as IOUs for the country’s banks to tender at ECB money auctions.... 

So to default “inside the eurozone” one only needs to devise another way to keep the banking system afloat. If someone could concoct a brilliant answer, there would be no need for Grexit. 

... The economic case for a debt default is overwhelming. ... Full servicing would require huge primary surpluses — that is, surpluses before payment of interest on debt. It would leave Greece trapped in a debt depression for a long time. The scheduled primary surplus for 2016 is 4.5 per cent, which is bordering on the insane. Athens absolutely needs to default. At the same time, there is a strong case for remaining in the eurozone.

This hits all the key points. First, there is no logical connection between defaulting and creating a new currency. (Probably better to use that wording, rather than "exit.") Second, default would open up significant space in Greece's fiscal position, and would not hurt the its external position. This follows from the fact that Greece currently has a substantial primary surplus and a slight positive trade balance. [1] Third, the only reason there is any link is that default might cause the ECB to cease accepting new liabilities from Greek banks, and it might be hard for the Bank of Greece and/or Greek government to take the ECB's place under the existing rules of the eurosystem. So, fourth, the real problem with default is the need to ensure that the Greek payments system continues to operate even if the ECB tries to sabotage it. 

The phrasing of that last point might seem hyperbolic. But imagine if, during the Detroit bankruptcy negotiations, the Fed had announced that if the city did not pay off its creditors in full, the Fed would use all its regulatory tools to shut down any banks operating in the city. That's a close analogy to the situation in Europe.

Maintaining interbank payments within Greece does not necessarily require the Greek government to issue any new liabilities. And it certainly doesn't require that Greek bank accounts be redenominated. All that is necessary is that if someone with a deposit in Greek bank A wants to make a payment to someone with an account at Greek bank B, there is some system by which bank A can transfer a settlement asset to bank B, acquiring the asset if necessary by issuing a new liability. The technical aspect of this is not challenging, and even the practical aspect, since the Bank of Greece already performs exactly this function. As far as I can tell, the only problem is a political one -- given that the Bank of Greece is run by holdovers from the former Greek government, it's possible that if the ECB told them to stop facilitating payments between Greek banks they would listen, even if the Greek government said to carry on. 

Now some people will say, "oh but the Treaties! oh but the Bank of Greece isn't allowed to accept the liabilities of Greek banks if Brussels says no! oh but the ELA rules!" [2] Obviously I think this is silly. In the first place, the "rules" are hopelessly vague, so if the ECB's does shut off liquidity to Greek banks in the event of a default, that will be a political choice. And on the other side, Greece is a sovereign nation. It may have delegated decisionmaking at the Bank of Greece to the ECB, but that also was a political choice, which can be reversed. More to the point, the rules definitely don't allow for exit. Nor for that matter do they allow for default -- and as Munchau correctly points out, cuts to the salaries and pensions of public employees are also a form of default. Rules are going to be broken, whether Greece creates a new currency or not. And it is not at all clear to me that the demands on the Greek state from recreating the drachma, are any less than the demands from maintaining payments between Greek banks in the absence of ECB support -- which is all it takes to default and continue using the euro. If anything, the former seems strictly more demanding than the latter, since Greece will need its own central bank either way.

This all may seem pedantic, but it is important: The threat of ejection from the euro is one of the most powerful weapons the creditors have. And let's remember, the only direct consequence of a breakdown in negotiations, is a default on Greek government debt.

Now there is another argument, which is that exit is positively desirable since a flexible currency would allow Greece to reliably achieve current account balance even once income growth resumes. I think that is wrong -- but that's a topic for another post. (I discussed the issue a couple years ago here.) But even if, unlike me, you think that a flexible exchange rate would be helpful for Greece, it  doesn't follow that that decision is bound up with the debt negotiations.

[1] It is possible that the apparent primary surplus is due to manipulation of the budget numbers by the previous government. I think that the arguments here would still apply if there were really a primary deficit, but it would complicate things.

[2] Or, "oh but that would be ungrateful." In one of its more disingenuous editorials I can recall, the FT last month wept crocodile tears over the fact that "default on Greek debts would deter wealthier voters from ever again helping their neighbours in financial distress." Apparently German banks didn't care about the interest on all the Greek government bonds they bought; they only lent so long out of kindness, I suppose. Also, it doesn't seem to have occurred to the editorialists that deterring the financing of large current account deficits might be a good thing.


UPDATE: This seems important:

A country that defaults would not have to leave the euro, the European Central Bank's vice president said on Monday...  

Vitor Constancio discussed the possibility of a debt default and controls on the movement of money, saying neither necessarily meant a departure from the currency bloc. "If a default will happen ... the legislation does not allow that a country that has a default ... can be expelled from the euro," he told the European Parliament... 

Constancio also touched on the possibility of capital controls. "Capital controls can only be introduced if the Greek government requests," he said, adding that they should be temporary and exceptional. "As you saw in the case of Cyprus, capital controls did not imply getting out of the euro." ... 

"We are convinced at the ECB that there will be no Greek exit," he said. "The (European Union) treaty does not foresee that a country can be formally, legally expelled from the euro. We think it should not happen." ... 

"If the state defaults, that has no automatic implications regarding the banks, if the banks have not defaulted, if the banks are solvent and if the banks have collateral that is accepted," Constancio said.

Maybe they were worried that Greece would call their bluff. Or who knows, maybe the culture of the place has changed under Draghi and they are no longer ready to serve as austerity's battering ram. In any case, it's hard to see this as anything but a big step back by the ECB.


UPDATE 2: Martin Wolf is on board as well. (Though he doesn't like my Detroit analogy.)

The Mirage of Devaluation

The papers are full of the rupee crisis. India's worst economy in decades, supposedly.

The silver lining, according to this morning's FT, is that the fall in the rupee should eventually boost exports. After all, after the the 1997 Asian crisis, "countries like Thailand and Malaysia enjoyed export-led recoveries following wrenching devaluations." Is that so?

The devaluation part is right -- all these countries saw their currencies fall steeply when they abandoned their pegs in the second half of 1997, typically losing about half their value against the dollar. The supposed export-led recoveries are a different story.

Annual growth of export volumes and average rates for the decades before and after 1997, Malaysia and Thailand. Source: IMF.

The solid lines in the figure above are the annual growth rates of export volumes. The dotted lines are the average rates for the ten years prior to and following the 1997 crisis. As you can see, export growth was substantially slower after the crisis than before -- in both Malaysia and Thailand, export growth after devaluation was about half the previous pace. In Indonesia, whose currency fell even more, export growth essentially ceased -- from 8 percent annual rates before 1997 to less than 1 percent in the decade following. And these are volumes; given the devaluation, foreign exchange earnings did even worse. In Thailand, for instance, exports earnings in dollars were still lower in early in 2002 than they had been before the crisis, almost five years before. For Indonesia, export earnings were still at their pre-crisis levels as late as 2004. This is about as far from an export boom as you can get.

You can argue, I suppose, that without the devaluations export performance would have been even worse. But you cannot claim that faster export growth following the devaluations boosted demand, because no such faster growth occurred.

It's really remarkable how much the devaluation-export growth link is taken for granted in discussions of foreign trade. But in the real world, for whatever reason, the link is often weak or nonexistent.

Practical policymakers seem to have an easier time grasping this than economists. There's a reason why falling currencies are seen as major problems in much of the developing world, even though they supposedly should boost exports. And there's a reason, presumably, why the leaders of Syriza, hardly slaves to conventional wisdom, have ignored the advice from progressive American economists that Greece would be better off out of the Euro.

The Cash and I

Martin Wolf in the FT the other day:

The third challenge is over the longer-term sources of demand. I look at this issue in terms of the sectoral financial balances – the balances between income and spending – in the household, business, external and government sectors. The question, then, is where expansion will come from. In the first quarter of this year the principal offset to fiscal contraction was the declining household surplus. 

What is needed, as well, is a big swing towards surplus in the US current account or a jump in corporate investment, relative to retained profits. Neither seems imminent, though the second seems more likely than the first. The worry is that the only way to balance the economy will be via big new bubbles. If so, this is not the fault of the Fed. It is the fault of structural features of the domestic and global economies...

This is a good point, which should be made more. If we compare aggregate expenditure today to expenditure just before the recession, it is clear that the lower level of demand today is all about lower  consumption. But maybe that's not the best comparison, because during the housing boom period, consumption was historically high. If we take a somewhat longer view, what's unusually low today is not household consumption, but business investment. Weak demand is about I, not C.

This is especially clear when we compare investment by businesses to what they are receiving in the form of profits, or, better cashflow from operations -- after-tax profits plus depreciation. [1] Here is the relationship over the past 40 years:

Corporate Investment and Cashflow from Operations as Fraction of Total Assets, 1970-2012

The graph shows annualized corporate investment and cashflow, normalized by total assets. Each dot is data from one quarter; to keep the thing legible, I've only labeled the fourth quarter of each year. As you can see, there used to be a  clear relationship between corporate profitability and corporate investment. For every additional $150, more or less, that a corporation took in from operations, it would increase capital expenditures by $100. This relationship held consistently through the 1960s (not shown), the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s.

But now look at the past ten years, the period after 2001Q4.  Corporate investment rates are substantially lower throughout this period than at any earlier time (averaging around 3.5% of total assets, compared with 5% of assets for 1960-2001). And the relationship between aggregate profit and investment rates has simply disappeared.

Some people might say that the problem is in the financial system, that even profitable businesses can't borrow because of a breakdown in intermediation, a shortage of liquidity, an unwillingness of risk-averse investors to hold their debt, etc. I don't buy this story for a number of reasons, some of which I've laid out in recent posts here. But it at least has some certain prima facie plausibility for the period following the great financial crisis. Not for for the whole decade-plus since 2001. Saying that investment is low today because businesses can't find anyone to buy their bonds is merely wrong. Saying that's why investment was low in 2005 is absurd.

(And remember, these are aggregates, so they mainly reflect the largest corporations, the ones that should have the least problems borrowing.)

So what's a better story?

I am going to save my full answer for another post. But regular readers will not be surprised that I think the key is a shift in the relationship between corporations and shareholders. I think there's a sense in which the binding constraint on investment has changed from the terms on which management can get funds into the corporation, from profits or borrowing, to the terms are on which they can keep them from going out, to investors. But the specific story doesn't matter so much here. You can certainly imagine other explanations. Like, "the China price" -- even additional capacity that would be profitable today won't be added if it there's a danger of lower-cost imports entering that market.

The point of this post is just that corporate investment is historically low, both in absolute terms and relative to profitability. And because this has been true for a decade, it is hard to attribute this weakness to credit constraints, or believe that it will be responsive to monetary policy. (This is even more true when you recall that the link between corporate borrowing and investment has also essentially disappeared.) By contrast, household consumption remains high. I have the highest respect for Steve Fazzari, and agree that high income inequality is a key metric of the fucked-upness of our economy. But I don't think it makes sense to think of the current situation in terms of a story where high inequality reduces demand by holding down consumption.

Consumption is red, on the right scale; investment is blue, on the left. Both as shares of GDP.

As I say, I'll come back in a future post to my on preferred explanation for why a comparably profitable firm, facing comparable credit conditions, will invest less today than 20 or 30 years ago.

In the meantime, one other thing. That first graph is a nice tool for showing how a Marxist thinks about business cycles.

If you look at the graph carefully, you'll see the points follow counterclockwise loops. It's natural to see this as cycles. Like this:

Start from the bottom of a cycle, at a point like 1992. A rise in profits from whatever source leads to higher investment, mainly as a source of funds and but also because it raises expectations of future profitability. That's the lower right segment of the cycle. High investment eventually runs into supply constraints, typically in the form of a rising wage share.[1] At that point profits begin to fall. Investment, however, continues high for a while, as the credit system allows firms to bridge a growing financing gap. That's the upper right segment of the cycle. Eventually, though, if profits don't recover, investment will follow them downward. This turning point often involves a financial crisis and/or abrupt fall in asset values, like the collapse of tech stocks in 2000. This is the upper left segment of the cycle.  Finally, in the  lower left, both profits and investment are low. But after some time the conditions for profitability are restored, and we move toward the right and begin a new cycle. This last step is less reliable than the others. It's quite possible for the economy to come to rest at the lower left and wobble there for a while without any sustained change in either profits or investment. We see this in 2002-2003 and in 1988-1991.

(I think the investment boom of the late 70s and the persistent slump of the early 1990s are two of the more neglected episodes in recent economic history. The period around 1990, in particular, seems to have all the features that are supposed to be distinctive to the current macroeconomic conjuncture. At the time, people even called it a balance-sheet recession!)

For now, though, we're not interested in the general properties of cycles. We're interested in how flat and low the most recent two are, compared with earlier ones. That is the structural feature that Martin Wolf is pointing to. And it's not a new feature of the post financial crisis period, it's been the case for a dozen years at least, only temporarily obscured by the housing bubble.



UPDATE: In comments, Seth Ackerman asks if maybe using total assets to normalize investment and profits is distorting the picture. It's a good question, but the answer is no. Here's the same thing, with trend GDP in the denominator instead:

As you can see, the picture is basically the same. Investment in the 200s is still visibly depressed compared with earlier decades, and the relationship between profits and investment is much weaker. Of course, it's always possible that current high profits will lead an investment boom in the next few years...



[1] Cash from operations is better than profits for at least two reasons. First, from the point of view of aggregate demand, we are interested in gross not net investment. A dollar of investment stimulates demand just as much whether it's replacing old equipment or adding new. So our measure of income should also be gross of depreciation. Second, there are major practical and conceptual issues with measuring depreciation. Changes in accounting standards may result in very different official depreciation numbers in economically identical situations. By combining depreciation and profits, we avoid the problem of the fuzzy and shifting line between them, making it more likely that we are comparing equivalent quantities.

[2] A rising wage share need not, and often does not, take the form of rising real wages. In recent cycles especially, it's more likely to combine flat real wages with a rising relative cost of wage goods.

Tell Me About that "Safe Asset Shortage" Again

From today's FT:

US Junk Debt Yield Hits Historic Low

The average yield on US junk-rated debt fell below 5 per cent for the first time on Monday, setting yet another milestone in a multiyear rally and illustrating the massive demand for fixed income returns as central banks suppress interest rates. 

Junk bonds and equities often move in tandem, and with the S&P 500 rising above 1,600 points for the first time and sitting on a double digit gain this year, speculative rated corporate bonds are also on a tear. ... With corporate default rates below historical averages, investors are willing to overlook the weaker credit quality in exchange for higher returns on the securities, analysts said. ... The demand for yield has become the major driver of investor behaviour this year, as they downplay high valuations for junk bonds and dividend paying stocks. 

“Maybe the hurdles of 6 per cent and now 5 per cent on high-yield bonds are less relevant given the insatiable demand for income,” said Jim Sarni, managing principal at Payden & Rygel. “People need income and they are less concerned about valuations.”

In other words, the demand for risky assets is exceptionally high, and this has driven up their price. Or to put it the other way, if you are a high-risk corporate borrower, now is a very good time to be looking for a loan.

Here's the same thing in a figure. Instead of their absolute yield, this shows the spread of junk bonds over AAA:

Difference between CCC- and AAA bond yields

See how high it is now, over on the far right? Yeah, me neither. But if the premium for safe assets is currently quite low, how can you say that it is a shortage of safe assets that is holding back the recovery? If financial markets are willing to lend money to risky borrowers on exceptionally generous terms, how can you say the problem is a shortage of risk-bearing capacity?

Now, the shortage-of-safe-assets story does fit the acute financial crisis period. There was a period in late 2008 and early 2009 when banks were very wary of holding risky assets, and this may have had real effects. (I say "may" because some large part of the apparent fall in the supply of credit in the crisis was limited to banks' unwillingness to lend to each other.) But by the end of 2009, the disruptions in the financial markets were over, and by all the obvious measures credit was as available as before the crisis. The difference is that now households and firms wished to borrow less. So, yes, there was excess demand for safe assets in the crisis itself; but since then, it seems to me, we are in a situation where all markets clear, just at a lower level of activity.

This is a perfect illustration of the importance of the difference between the intertemporal optimization vision of modern macro, and the income-expenditure vision of older Keynesian macro. In modern macro, it is necessarily true that a shortfall of demand for currently produced goods and services is equivalent to an excess demand for money or some other asset that the private sector can't produce. Or as DeLong puts it:

If you relieve the excess demand for financial assets, you also cure the excess supply of goods and services (the shortfall of aggregate demand) and the excess supply of labor (mass unemployment).

Because what else can people spend their (given, lifetime) income on, except currently produced stuff or assets? If they want less of one, that must mean they want more of the other.

In the Keynesian vision, by contrast, there's no fixed budget -- no endowment -- to be allocated. People don't know their lifetime income; indeed, there is no true expected value of future income out there for them to know. So households and businesses adjust current spending based on current income. Which means that all markets can clear at a various different levels of aggregate activity. Or in other words, people can rationally believe they are on their budget constraint at different levels of expenditure, so there is no reason that a decline in desired expenditure in one direction (currently produced stuff) has to be accompanied by an increase in some other direction (safe assets or money).

(This is one reason why fundamental uncertainty is important to the Keynesian system.)

For income-expenditure Keynesians, it may well be true that the financial meltdown triggered the recession. But that doesn't mean that an ongoing depression implies an ongoing credit crisis. Once underway, a low level of activity is self-reinforcing, even if financial markets return to a pristine state and asset markets all clear perfectly. Modern macro, on the other hand, does need a continued failure in financial markets to explain output continuing to fall short of potential. So they imagine a "safe asset shortage" even when the markets are shouting "safe asset glut."


EDIT: I made this same case, more convincingly I think, in this post from December about credit card debt. The key points are (1) current low demand is much more a matter of depressed consumption than depressed investment; (2) it's nonsense to say that households suffer from a shortage of safe assets since they face an infinitely-elastic supply of government-guaranteed bank deposits, the safest, most liquid asset there is; (3) while it's possible in principle for a safe-asset shortage to show up as an unwillingness of financial intermediaries to hold household debt, the evidence is overwhelming that the fall in household borrowing is driven by demand, not supply. The entire fall in credit card debt is accounted for by defaults and reduced applications; the proportion of credit card applications accepted, and the average balance per card, have not fallen at all.

Pain Is the Agenda: The Method in the ECB's Madness

Krugman is puzzled by the European Central Bank:

I’ve been hearing various attempts to explain the ECB’s utterly bizarre refusal to cut interest rates... The most popular story seems to be that the ECB wants to “hold politicians’ feet to the fire”, letting them know that they won’t get relief unless they do what’s necessary (whatever that is). This really doesn’t make any sense. If we’re talking about enforcing austerity and wage cuts in the periphery, how much more incentive do these economies need?

He is certainly right that if the goal is resolving the crisis, or even price stability, then refusing further rate cuts is mighty strange. But who says those are the goals? His final question is meant to be rhetorical, but it really isn't. Because the more austerity you want, the more enforcement you need.

I met someone the other day with a fairly senior position at the Greek tax authority; her salary had just been cut by 40 percent. When, outside of an apocalyptic crisis, do you see pay cuts like that? Which, for you or me or Paul Krugman, is an argument to End This Depression Now. But if you are someone who sees pay cuts as the goal, then it could be an argument for not quite yet.

It's a tenet of liberalism -- and a premise of the conversation Krugman is part of -- that there are conflicting opinions, but not conflicting interests. But sometimes, when people seem to keep doing things with the wrong outcome, it's because that's the outcome they actually want. Paranoid? Conspiracy theory? Maybe. On the other hand, here's Deutsches Bundsbank president Jens Weidmann:

Relieving stress in the sovereign bond markets eases imminent funding pain but blurs the signal to sovereigns about the precarious state of public finances and the urgent need to act. Macroeconomic imbalances and unsustainable public and private debt in some member states lie at the heart of the sovereign debt crisis. It may appeal to politicians to abstain from unpopular decisions and try to solve problems through monetary accommodation. However, it is up to monetary policymakers to fend off these pressures.

That seems pretty clear. From the perspective of the central banker, resolving the crisis too painlessly would be bad, because that would allow governments to "avoid unpopular decisions." And it's true: If there's something you really want governments to do, but you don't think they will make the necessary decisions except in a crisis, then it is perfectly rational to prolong the crisis until you see the right decisions being made.

So, what kind of decision are we talking about, exactly? Krugman professes bafflement -- "whatever that is" -- but it's not really such a mystery. Here's an editorial in the FT on the occasion of last summer's ECB intervention to support the market for Italy's public debt:

Structural reform is the quid pro quo for the European Central Bank’s purchases last week of Italian government bonds, an action that bought Italy breathing space by driving down yields. ... As the government belatedly recognises, boosting Italy’s growth prospects requires a liberalisation of rigid labour markets and a bracing dose of competition in the economy’s sheltered service sectors. This is where the unions and professional bodies must play their part. Susanna Camusso, leader of the CGIL, Italy’s biggest trade union, is threatening to call a general strike to block the proposed labour law reforms. She would be better advised to co-operate with the government and employers... The government’s austerity measures are sure to curtail economic growth in the short run. Only if long overdue structural reforms take root will the pain be worthwhile.

A couple of things worth noting here. First the explicit language of the quid pro quo -- the ECB was not just doing what was needed to stabilize the Italian bond market, but offering stabilization as a bargaining chip in order to achieve its other goals. If ECB was selling expansionary policy last year, why be surprised they're not giving it away for free today? Note also the suggestion that a sacrifice of short-term output is potentially worthwhile -- this isn't some flimflam about expansionary austerity, but an acknowledgement that expansion is being give up to achieve some other goal. And third, that other goal: Everything mentioned is labor market reform, it's all about concessions by labor (including professionals). No mention of more efficient public services, better regulation of the financial system, or anything like that.

The FT editorialist is accurately presenting the ECB's view. My old teacher Jerry Epstein has a good summary at TripleCrisis of the conditions for intervention; among other things, the ECB demanded "full liberalisation of local public services…. particularly… the provision of local services through large scale privatizations”; "reform [of] the collective wage bargaining system ... to tailor wages and working conditions to firms’ specific needs...”;  "thorough review of the rules regulating the hiring and dismissal of employees”; and cuts to private as well as public pensions, "making more stringent the eligibility criteria for seniority pensions" and raising the retirement age of women in the private sector. Privatization, weaker unions, more employer control over hiring and firing, skimpier pensions. This is well beyond what we normally think of as the remit of a central bank.

So what Krugman presents as a vague, speculative story about the ECB's motives -- that they want to hold politicians' feet to the fire -- is, on the contrary, exactly what they say they are doing.

It's true that the conditions imposed by the ECB on Italy and Greece were in the context of programs relating specifically to those countries' public debt, while here we are talking about a rate cut. But there's no fundamental difference -- cutting rates and buying bonds are two ways of describing the same basic policy. If there's conditions for one, we should expect conditions for the other, and in fact we find the same "quid pro quo" language is being used now as then.

Here's a banker in the FT:

The future of Europe will therefore be determined by the interests of the ECB. Self-preservation suggests that it will prevent complete collapse. If necessary, it will overrule Germany to do this, as the longer-term refinancing operations and government bond purchase programme suggest. But self-preservation and preventing collapse do not amount to genuine cyclical relief and policy stimulus. Indeed, the ECB appears to believe that in addition to price stability it has a mandate to impose structural reform. To this extent, cyclical pain is part of its agenda.

Again, there's nothing irrational about this. If you really believe that structural reform is vital, and that democratic governments won't carry it out except under the pressure of a crisis, then what would be irrational would be to relieve the crisis before the reforms are carried out. In this context, an "irrational" moralism can be an advantage. While one can take a hard line in negotiations and still be ready to blink if the costs of non-agreement get too high, it's best if the other side believes that you'll blow it all up if you don't get what you want.  Fiat justitia et pereat mundus, says Martin Wolf, is a dangerous motto. Yes; but it's a strong negotiating position.

But this invites a question: Why does the ECB regard labor market liberalization (aka structural reform) as part of its mandate? Or perhaps more precisely, when the ECB negotiates with national governments, on whose behalf is it negotiating?

The answer the ECB itself might give is, society as a whole. After all, this is the consensus view of central banks' role. Elected governments are subject to time inconsistency, or are captured by rent seekers, or just don't work, so an "independent" body is needed to take the long view. It's never been clear why this should apply only to monetary policy, and in fact there's a well-established liberal view that the independent central bank model should be extended to other areas of policy. Alan Blinder:

We have drawn the line in the wrong place, leaving too many policy decisions in the realm of politics and too few in the realm of technocracy. ... the argument for the Fed's independence applies just as forcefully to many other areas of government policy. Many policy decisions require complex technical judgments and have consequences that stretch into the distant future. Think of decisions on health policy (should we spend more on cancer or aids research?), tax policy (should we reduce taxes on capital gains?), or environmental policy (how should we cope with damage to the ozone layer?). Yet in such cases, elected politicians make the key decisions. Why should monetary policy be different? ... The justification for central bank independence is valid. Perhaps the model should be extended to other arenas. ... The tax system would surely be simpler, fairer, and more efficient if ... left to an independent technical body like the Federal Reserve rather than to congressional committees.

I'm sure there are plenty of people at the ECB who think along the same lines as the former Fed Vice-Chair. Indeed, that central banks want what's best for everyone is practically an axiom of modern economics. Still, it's funny, isn't it, that "structural reform" so consistently turns out to mean lower wages?

Martin Wolf's stuff on the European crisis has been essential. But it has one blind spot: The only conflicts he sees are between nations. What perplexes him is "the riddle of German self-interest." But maybe the answer to the riddle is that national interests are not the only ones in play.

It's hard not to think here of Perry Anderson's thesis, developed (alongside other themes) in The New Old World, that the EU project is fundamentally a response by European elites to their inability to roll back social democracy at the national level. The new supra-national institutions of the EU have allowed them to bypass political cultures that remain stubbornly (if incompletely) egalitarian and solidaristic. In Alain Supiot's summary:

In Anderson’s view, the European project has engendered neither a federation nor an intergovernmental organization; rather it is the most fully realized form of Hayek’s ultraliberal ‘catallaxy’. ... Like a secular version of faith in divine providence, belief in the spontaneous order of the markets entails a desire to protect it from the untimely interventions of people seeking ‘a just distribution’ which, according to Hayek, is nothing more than ‘an atavism, based on primordial emotions’. Hence the need to ‘dethrone the political’ by means of constitutional steps which create ‘a functioning market in which nobody can conclusively determine how well-off particular groups or individuals will be’. In other words, it is necessary to put the division of labour and the distribution of its fruits beyond the reach of the electorate. This is the dream that the European institutions have turned into a reality. Beneath the chaste veil of what is conventionally known as the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ lies a denial of democracy.

Jerry Epstein puts it more bluntly. The ECB's insistence on structural reform "represents a cynical raw power calculus to destroy worker and citizen protections  without any real belief in the underlying neo-liberal economics they use to justify it." (If you prefer your political economy in audiovisual form, he has a video talking about this stuff.)

This kind of language makes people uncomfortable. Rather than acknowledge that the behavior of people in power could represent a particular interest -- let alone that of the top against the bottom, or capital against labor -- much better to throw your hands up and profess bafflement: their choices are "bizarre," a "riddle." This isn't, let's be clear, a personal failing. If you or I occupied the same kind of positions as Krugman or Wolf, we'd be subject to the same constraints. And I anyway don't want to find myself talking to no one but a handful of grumpy old Marxists.

But on the other hand, as Doug Henwood likes to quote our late friend Bob Fitch, "vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what happens in the world." And then, I keep looking back through FT articles on the crisis, and finding stuff like this:

The central bank has long called for eurozone economies to press ahead with structural reforms. That the ‘E’ in EMU, or Economic and Monetary Union, has not occurred is a complaint often voiced by ECB officials. On this score, the central bank has managed to win an important concession in forcing Italy to sign up to liberalising its economy. Some may see this as a pyrrhic victory for the damage that the bond purchases have done to the central bank’s independence. But there was a significant threat to stability if the central bank did not act. ...That Mr Trichet, always among the more politically savvy of central bankers, managed to get some concessions on structural reform was all that could be hoped for.

One has to wonder: What does it mean for the ECB to "win an important concession" from an elected government? Who is it winning the concession for? And if the problem with the ECB is just an ideological fixation on its inflation-fighting credibility, why would it be willing to sacrifice some of that credibility to advance this other goal?

It's hard to suppress a lingering suppression that central bankers are, after all, bankers. And then you think, isn't there an important sense in which finance embodies the interests of the capitalist class as a whole? (In an anodyne way, this is even sort of what its conventional capital-allocation function means) You wonder if the only reason Karl Marx called "the modern executive is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," is that central banks didn't yet exist.

Imagine you're a European capitalist, or business owner if you prefer the sound of that. You look at the United States and see the promised land. Employment at will -- imagine, no laws limiting your ability to fire whoever you want. Private pensions, gone. Unions almost gone, strikes a thing of the past. Meanwhile, in 2002, 95 out of every 1,000 workers in the Euro area -- nearly ten percent -- was on strike at some point during the year. (In Spain, it was 270 out of every 1,000. In Italy, over 300.) And of course there's the vastly greater share of income going to your American peers. Look at it from their point of view: Why wouldn't they want what their American cousins have?

It seems to me that what would really be bizarre, would be if European capitalists did not see the crisis as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They'd be crazy -- they'd be betraying their own interests -- if, given the ECB's suddenly increased power vis-a-vis national governments, they didn't insist that it extract all the concessions it can.

Isn't that what they're doing? Moreover, isn't it what they say they're doing? When the "Global Head of Market Economics" at the world's biggest bank says that the ECB should only cut rates "as part of a quid pro quo with governments agreeing to more far-reaching structural reform," what do you think he means?

Get Your Gaman On

The other day, I quoted Howard Davies explaining the big macroeconomic advantage of a country like Latvia over a country like Greece:

Latvia could make austerity work because they'd been in the USSR for 50 years, they were used to unpleasant and dramatic things happening. The population would accept incredible privation. 

As a sort of followup, here's a letter from one Mr. Zachary Pessin, in yesterday's FT:

I have often thought that acclimatisation to a depressed economic environment is a state of mind that the Japanese have adjusted to... I first went to Japan in 1995 to live for a semester, then lived there full-time from 1999 to 2002. I have been every year since, save the last two. So, for 15 years I have seen how a generation of Japanese lost pride in their country, lost hope of an inspiring life and came to terms with the drudgery.

"Yikes," you're probably thinking, "Lost pride, lost hope and drudgery? That sounds awful -- we'd better figure out fast how to avoid it." Well, if that is what you're thinking, then you'd better think again. Losing hope is the whole point. The Japanese, Pessin says, are

a decade ahead of us in dealing with the world we now live in. ... Perhaps you know the Japanese term gaman, which is effectively translated as “to persevere valiantly through pain or difficulty; stoic determination”. This too will be another import from Japan, because they have been living in the House of Gaman for almost 20 years now, and we Americans are just arriving. And make no mistake, the deleveraging that must continue across the US economy for at least another five to eight years at best will keep us walking the precipice of deflation for at least that long. There will be a need for gaman.

I don't know how much pain or drudgery is in store for Zac Pessin personally, given that he is President and Chief Executive of the Distributed Capital Group; you can find him here crowing about double-digit returns on his investments in sub-Saharan Africa. But it's nice of our masters to let us know about the sacrifices we will be expected to make on their behalf.

Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

The Capitalist Wants an Exit, Facebook Edition

In today's FT, John Gapper reads the Facebook prospectus. [1] And he doesn't like what he sees:

There is still time to cancel its IPO and the filing provides plenty of reasons why it ought to... It begs a question if a company trying to raise capital from investors cannot think of anything to do with the money. Yet this is Facebook’s predicament – as it admitted in its filing on Wednesday, its cash flow and credit “will be sufficient to meet our operational needs for the foreseeable future”. ... So what are its plans for the additional $5bn it may raise from an IPO? It intends to put the cash into US government bonds and savings accounts...

Gapper, looking at the IPO from the perspective of what it does for Facebook the enterprise, understandably thinks this is nuts. Why incur the costs of an IPO and the ongoing requirements of a public listing, if you have so little need for the cash that you are literally just planning to leave it in a savings account. But of  course, the purpose of the IPO has nothing to do with Facebook the enterprise.

Given that it doesn’t need capital..., why the IPO? ... Facebook’s motivation is clear: to gratify its venture capital investors and employees. This is not a cynical statement; it is a quote from Mr Zuckerberg’s letter to new shareholders. “We’re going public for our employees and our investors,” he writes. “We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment.”

In terms of Silicon Valley’s logic, it makes sense... For the company itself, however, the logic is far less obvious. As a corporate entity, Facebook could clearly thrive without seeking new shareholders, whose main purpose is to allow the insiders to get rich and eventually exit.

 As I've written before, the function of the stock market in modern capitalism is to get money out of corporations, not put money into them. The social problem they are solving is not society's need to allocate scarce savings to the most promising investments, but wealth-owners desire to free their fortunes from particular firm or industry and keep them as claims on the social product as a whole.


[1] It's been said before, but can I just point out how unbearably stupid is the FT's policy of actively discouraging people from excerpting their articles?

It's Not About the Deficits

I was going to write something about tonight's debt-celing deal. "Reduces Domestic Discretionary Spending to the Lowest Level Since Eisenhower," says the White House in triumphant title case. Yay! No more EPA, no more civil rights enforcement, no more federal spending on housing or child care or clean energy. They didn't need them in the Eisenhower era, so why should we?

It makes me mad. And it's not good to write when you're mad. As the man says,

Hatred, even of baseness,
Distorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice,
Makes the voice grow hoarse.

So instead of this appalling deal, let's talk about the trajectory of the debt historically. Specifically, this very interesting take from the always-interesting Willem Buiter:

The last time the US sovereign radically lowered the ratio of public debt to GDP was between 1946 (the all-time high for the Federal debt burden at 121.20 percent) and 1974 (its post-World War II low at 31.67 percent). Arithmetically, of the 89.53 percentage points reduction in the Federal debt burden, inflation accounted for 52.63pp and real GDP growth accounted for 55.86 pp. Federal surpluses accounted for minus 20.51pp. …

Longer average maturity and occasionally sharp bursts of inflation helped erode the real burden of the Federal debt between 1946 and 1974, but so did financial repression – ceilings on nominal interest rates. ... Until the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of March 1951, the Federal Reserve System was formally committed to maintaining a low interest rate peg on Treasury bonds – a practice introduced in 1942 when the Fed pegged the interest rate on Treasury bills at 0.375 percent. This practice was continued after the war despite a 14 percent rate of CPI inflation in 1947 and an 8 percent rate in 1948. The rate on 3-month Treasury Bills remained at 0.375 percent until June 1947 and did not reach 1.40 percent until March 1951.

Even after the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord, there remained financial repression in the form of ceilings on bank lending and borrowing rates like Regulation Q, which prohibited the payment of interest on demand deposits. Without financial repression and with a relatively short average debt maturity, it would take high US rates of (unanticipated) inflation to bring down the burden of the debt appreciably.

This is the key point that comes out of the relationships that govern the evolution of the federal debt: Deficits/surpluses are just one factor, along with growth rates, interest rates, and inflation, that determine the trajectory of the debt. There's no a priori reason to think that long-term shifts in the debt-GDP ratio are more likely to come about through changes in the government's fiscal stance rather than one of the other three variables; and there's historical evidence that in practice growth, inflation and interest rates usually matter more. At some point I'll do an exercise similar to Buiter's. But in the meantime, I'm happy to take it from him -- the dude is the chief economist at Citibank -- that, in the the postwar decades, growth and inflation contributed about equally to the very large reduction in the US debt-GDP ratio, while fiscal discipline contributed less than nothing.

So if you wanted to follow the postwar US in reducing the debt-GDP ratio over a long period -- it's not entirely clear why you would want to do this -- you should be thinking about faster growth, higher inflation and policies to hold down interest rates (aka "financial repression"), not higher taxes and lower spending. Anyone who says, "The growth of the debt is unsustainable, therefore we need to move the federal budget toward balance" doesn't know what they're talking about.

Or, they're talking about something else.

You can interpret Obama's relentless pursuit of defeat in the budget-ceiling fight in psychological terms. But it seems more parsimonious to at least consider that he's simply an honest servant of the country's owners, who see the crisis as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to roll back the social wage. Raising the Medicare eligibility age wouldn't have done anything much to reduce the long-term debt-GDP ratio. But it definitely would reduce the number of people with Medicare.


UPDATE: This post is evidently the kind of thing Matt Yglesias has in mind when he says he's

frustrated by lefties who seem to see the unprecedented Republican obstruction the President is dealing with as part of an 11-dimensional chess game through which Obama “really” wants his progressive initiatives to be frustrated at every term. 

 But this gets the n-dimensional chess metaphor backward, I think. The whole reason people claim Obama is playing a deeper or more complex game is to argue that even when his actions don't seem to get him closer to his supposed goals, he really is getting there but by some devious route. But if your theory, as here, is that the actual outcome was the intended outcome, you don't need to assume any deviousness. If I sacrifice my knight for no apparent gain, then maybe I have some complex plan you don't see -- that's the extra dimensions. But if I'm playing to lose, no extra dimensions are needed to explain my bad move. Yglesias's frustration here would apply to lefties who argued that Obama's big progressive victories were really serving a conservative agenda. And there are certainly people who would argue that -- if there were any big progressive victories to argue about.