‘QE, triumph or folly?’

The Institute of International Monetary Research (IIMR, affiliated with the University of Buckingham) is holding an international conference on the assessment of Quantitative Easing (QE) in the US, UK, Eurozone and Japan on the 3rd of November (London). In the last few years a return to a more conventional set of monetary policies has been widely heralded, and in particular the return to a monetary policy rule focused on monetary stability and the stability of the overall economy over the long term (see the excellent conference organised by CATO and the Mercatus Centre  (George Mason University, US) on this very question just few weeks ago); but we believe the first priority at the moment is to analyse and clarify the impact of QE on financial markets and the broader economy. Amongst others, the following questions will be discussed: Has QE been instrumental in preventing another Great Depression? If QE is meant to boost asset prices, why has inflation generally been so low in recent years? Has QE increased inequality? Has QE been able to expand effectively broad money growth? Should QE programmes be extended at all? These are all vital questions we will address at the conference.

The conference is by invitation only and there are still (very few) places available, so please send an email to Gail Grimston at gail.grimston@buckingham.ac.uk should you wish to attend. It will be held on Thursday 3rd November 2016, in collaboration with Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), at the IEA headquarters in London. You will be able to find a programme with all the topics and the speakers here  As you will see we are delighted to have an excellent panel of experts on this field from the US, continental Europe and the UK. There will be of course very well-known academics but also practitioners as well as central bank economists. In particular economists such as George Selgin (CATO), Kevin Dowd (Durham University), Christopher Neely (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), Ryland Thomas (Bank of England) or Tim Congdon (IIMR, University of Buckingham) amongst many other very distinguished  economists will be giving a talk at the conference, which provides a unique opportunity to analyse in detail the effects and the effectiveness of QE in the most developed economies.

For your information you can also follow the conference live/streaming; please visit the IIMR website this week for further details on how to follow it remotely on the day. In addition the presentations (but not the discussion) will be filmed and published on our website later on. Drop us an email (enquiries@mv-pt.org) should you want to be updated on the Institute’s agenda and latest news.

Thank you,

Juan Castaneda

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A plea for a more neutral monetary policy rule: the ‘productivity norm’

In a series of posts on the assessment of the bias of the US Fed prior to the Global Financial Crisis published on Alt-M, the blog of the recently established Center for Money and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, David Beckworth just published a post with a very clear analysis of the inflationary bias of the Fed before 2008, based on an excellent paper written along with George Selgin and Berrak Bahadir in the Journal of Policy Modelling (those interested in monetary policy rules cannot miss it!).

The publication of both these posts and the academic article couldn’t be more timely. Surprisingly enough, monetary economists still disagree on the stance of monetary policy (not just in the US but elsewhere) before the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis; this proves that we, economists, are not even that good at what we were supposed to do well, that is, the ‘prediction’ of the past. Leaving the academic interest of the subject aside, this is a policy question of major concern for all, should we want to contribute to the running of more sound, and more monetary-stability-oriented, monetary policy rules in the years to come. Now there are very good academics suggesting the way to exit QE and to move forward towards a more ‘normal’ monetary environment, and it is thus the perfect time to make the case for a different type of policy rules, those compatible with the fall of prices in a growing economy.

As I wrote as a comment on a recent George Selgin’s entry to this blog, the productivity rule ‘certainly provides solid theoretical basis to support the running of a different type of monetary policy rules; indeed different to the (CPI) inflation stabilising rules applied by all and sundry before 2008, which contributed to the recent crisis as well as to the instability generated in markets in the last years. It is time to apply less active and less inflationary monetary rules, those that allow the price level to reflect changes in productivity during expansions. Rather than focusing on price stability (actually it is most often ‘inflation stability’) we should be focusing on rules that better preserve monetary and financial stability on longer term basis; and the productivity norm is a good example of the latter. They are not going to be the cure for all problems but at least they will not be adding monetary disturbances on top of other (real-side) disturbances and shocks affecting the economy. And this will help agents form their expectations and make their plans.‘

For those unfamiliar with this literature, David Beckworth’s post provides the explanation for why (market or Fed’s) interest rates should be increased whenever productivity raises, so that the market interest rate runs in parallel with the natural interest rate, as Wicksell put it a century ago. Since then, this has been taken as the condition to keep monetary equilibrium in the economy (or at least, to put it more modestly and accurately, to avoid at least major disequilibria in the markets) and thus to  prevent from the excess of money creation that so often has contributed to monetary and financial crises in the past as well as to the succession of the so-called boom and bust business cycles. Quoting Beckworth’s words from his recent post, ‘Was monetary policy loose during the last housing boom?’:

‘Note that the rise in the labor force and productivity growth rates both raised the expected return to capital. The faster productivity growth also implied higher expected household incomes. These developments, in turn, should have lead to less saving and more borrowing by firms and households and put upward pressure on the natural interest rate. Interest rates, in short, should have been rising given these large positive supply shocks during this time.‘

And guess what the Fed did during those years of increase in productivity? Focused much more on (a falling) CPI rate of inflation in a growing economy (which shouldn’t be surprising at all), its policy rule didn’t recommend a change in the Fed’s nominal interest rates (at the very best) and later on it kept on cutting them down for years to avoid deflation by all means. It is well time to put the debate on policy rules on the agenda so we dot repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Juan Castaneda

PS. To be fair and fully transparent, let me declare myself any possible conflict of interest (if at all): I am a lecturer at the University of Buckingham and yes, I am a visiting research scholar at Cato (during the spring 2015).

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