Ben Bernanke on the secular stagnation hypothesis

Here is his second real blog post.  Excerpt:

My greatest concern about Larry’s formulation, however, is the lack of attention to the international dimension. He focuses on factors affecting domestic capital investment and household spending. All else equal, however, the availability of profitable capital investments anywhere in the world should help defeat secular stagnation at home. The foreign exchange value of the dollar is one channel through which this could work: If US households and firms invest abroad, the resulting outflows of financial capital would be expected to weaken the dollar, which in turn would promote US exports. (For intuition about the link between foreign investment and exports, think of the simple case in which the foreign investment takes the form of exporting, piece by piece, a domestically produced factory for assembly abroad. In that simple case, the foreign investment and the exports are equal and simultaneous.) Increased exports would raise production and employment at home, helping the economy reach full employment. In short, in an open economy, secular stagnation requires that the returns to capital investment be permanently low everywhere, not just in the home economy. Of course, all else is not equal; financial capital does not flow as freely across borders as within countries, for example. But this line of thought opens up interesting alternatives to the secular stagnation hypothesis, as I’ll elaborate in my next post.

Keep ’em coming Ben, but you’re not a real blogger until you’ve covered the infield fly rule…

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