Results for “interest rates risk fed”

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Brad titles his post: “I Genuinely Do Not Understand Why There Is A Question Here…” and after quoting my post from yesterday writes:

If people thought that government debt was risky, its price would be falling as well. The fact that people are willing to pay more for government debt indicates that it is increasingly valuable–and so we should make more of it.

Ryan Avent comments as well.  A few points:

1. My post and question is about spending, but Brad has shifted the discussion to borrowing.  It’s easy enough to borrow more without increasing spending, if that is needed.  It’s still an open question whether spending should go up.

2. The countervailing forces which might favor lower government spending simply aren’t mentioned.  Those include lower wealth and higher tail risk.  If those can’t, at least possibly, imply lower government spending, what could?  The Japanese will need to spend on recovery, but must the U.S., normatively speaking, now feel compelled to spend more on its domestic programs?  A priori?  No way.

3. The earthquake and related events are a negative supply shock, so on Keynesian grounds they need not increase the case for activist fiscal policy.

4. Don’t forget that Mike Jensen answered Kenneth Arrow on risk in 1972.  Even if government spreads its pecuniary losses over many taxpayers, the relevant real risk is the covariance of the value of government output with private consumption.  Given that, an increase in risk still implies at least one force operating in favor of less government spending.

5.  It is an oddly non-Keynesian or perhaps even anti-Keynesian point.  In 1936 Keynes argued that the rate of interest did not allocate investment properly, or correctly signal the proper amount of investment, because interest rates also channeled liquidity preferences.  Today this is a claim which DeLong and Krugman are arguing against.

In other words, it’s an open question, as my original post implied.

Megan McArdle had some to-the-point words:

It’s hard to argue that we should become more willing to borrow because Japan had an earthquake that will cut into global GDP.

And:

And the bad signals aren’t just to the federal debt market–the flight to quality is ultimately going to push things like mortgage rates down too.  Would the people urging the government to take on as much debt as possible also urge our homeowners to once again leverage themselves as far as the banks will allow?

Update (12:25 pm) Reader abUWS has perhaps the best, most succinct metaphor I’ve ever seen for this argument:

“When the Titanic was sinking everyone eventually rushed to the stern of the ship. That didn’t mean that that part of the ship was actually safe.”

Addendum: Arnold Kling offers relevant comments.

Scott's post is here, Krugman's is here.  (My first post on the topic is here, my last post here).  Let's start with Scott, excerpt:

This post by Stephen Gordon shows US employment in 2010:3 falling about 5% below its 2008:1 peak, while output seems to have declined only about 0.7%.  This is what Cowen finds puzzling. 

But I don’t see any puzzle at all.  If employment didn’t change, I’d expect US output to grow at about 2% a year, which is the trend rate of productivity growth.  Because we are looking at a two and a half year period, you’d expect output to grow roughly 5% with stable employment.  Now assume that employment actually fell 5%.  If the workers who lost jobs were similar to those who remained employed, I’d expect output to be flat over that 2.5 year period.  Because output fell slightly, it seems like the workers who lost jobs were slightly more productive than those who remain employed.

Do I believe this?  No, for several reasons I think they were less skilled than those who remained employed.  Labor productivity growth (assuming we were at full employment) probably slowed in the most recent 2.5 years, as investment in new capital declined.  Measured productivity continued to rise briskly, partly because technological progress continues in good times and bad, and partly because those workers still employed are somewhat higher skilled, or perhaps are trying harder in fear of losing their own jobs.  So Tyler is probably right that those workers who lost their jobs have a lower than average marginal product.  I just don’t see why zero is the natural starting point for consideration of the issue, as you only get that number by making some fairly extreme assumptions about technological progress coming to a screeching halt after 2008:

A few points:

1. The claim is that some workers have zero marginal product (net of employment costs), not all workers (as Krugman inexplicably ponders for two full paragraphs), and not even all unemployed workers.  Just as a hypothetical example, if unemployment is 9.5 percent and the natural rate is 5.5 and zero MP helps account for half of that difference, that's two percent of the labor force at zero MP.  Try hiring labor for a while and see how crazy that sounds.

2. Zero MP is a property which may hold in an AS-AD equilibrium, it is not a substitute for an AS-AD view.  Krugman mischaracterizes the hypothesis here, by identifying it with "AD denialism."  In my post which Krugman links to (and indeed for years), I've made it clear that demand matters in any coherent account of the equilibrium.  

Oddly, Krugman himself stated one of the coherent versions of the Zero MP view in July 2010, and then he considered it possible and appropriately, he expressed uncertainty about what might be going on.

3. The Zero MP hypothesis is simply another way of talking about "labor hoarding," a well-known and time-honored idea, except that the labor is not in fact hoarded.  It doesn't encounter strange paradoxes and it is more intuitive than when the labor is hoarded (which appears to violate first-order conditions).  There is plenty of very specific and indeed striking evidence that the "previously hoarded labor" isn't being hoarded any more.  That same link implies that Krugman's invocation of 1983 is a red herring and probably not a good instance for finding many zero MP workers.  The "oughties" job market differs in a number of other "real" ways from the 1980s, including the fact that we've had no net job growth over the last decade, not even pre-crisis.  Here is further evidence on how productivity patterns were different during the early 1980s.

4. For another take on #3, during the job-destroying periods of 2009, per hour labor productivity growth is rising at astonishing rates, try 3.4, 8.4, 7, and 6 percent, each quarter, annualized.  That's not just the regular accretion of technological progress (though some of it may be), it is an artifact from dumping lower quality and zero MP workers.  If I look in the second quarter and see labor hours go down 7.9 percent and see per hour productivity rise 8.4 percent, well, that's no proof but I sure go hmm….

5. I would not take it for granted that "normal" productivity growth continues in times of shock and crisis.  Maybe yes, maybe no. Scott's talk of the "trend rate" is assuming that the growth and cyclical components are separable and that is begging part of the question.

6. The zero MP hypothesis helps explain why unemployment is so much more severe among the less educated and the lower earners.  In contrast, Krugman writes: "As Mike Konczal points out, basically everyone’s unemployment rate has doubled, no matter their education level or location."  In reality, that kind of multiplicative relationship is very much consistent with joint AS-AD determination, including a zero MP for many workers in the equilibrium.  I'll write an entire blog post on that question soon, and then we'll see that this result actually discriminates against pure AD theories or is at best a neutral pointer.

7. What does the zero MP hypothesis add?  First, the zero MP hypothesis explains why wage adjustments can't do the trick for a lot of the unemployed, as wages won't fall below zero.  Second, the zero MP hypothesis explains why you need steady real growth, boosting the entire chain of demand, to reemploy lots of workers and reflation alone won't do the trick.  (I still, by the way, favor reflation because I think it will do some good.)  Those predictions are not looking terrible these days.

8. The AD-only theories, taken alone, encounter major and indeed worsening problems with the data.  Year-to-year, industrial output is up almost six percent, sales up more than six percent, but the labor market has barely improved.  How does that square with the AD-only hypothesis?  Has it been seriously addressed?  Arnold Kling also has relevant comments and in passing I'll note that the "increases in the risk premium" factor is being neglected in this discussion of Kling's points. 

9. Krugman (not Scott), in particular, is proposing an alternative view with a) upward-sloping AD, b) downward-sloping AS, c) the implication that huge boosts in the minimum wage would restore the economy and employment, and d) requires a tight liquidity trap when the theoretical literature distinguishes between "interest rates literally at zero" and "interest rates near zero."  His comparison of ZIRP and ZMP does not raise those issues on the other side of the ledger.

I think Scott is underplaying some of the more detailed facts about labor markets, such as mentioned in #3, #4, #6, and #8.  Krugman simply isn't considering the stronger versions of the zero MP hypothesis and thus he is dismissive rather than confronting the very real problems in the AD-only point of view.

Addendum: Arnold Kling has more.

I'm not sure it will work, because it won't fix the housing market, may not restore the demands for wealth-elastic goods in a sustainable manner, may not restore the normal flow of credit to small businesses, may not lower subjective estimated risk premia, and may not fix the general disconnect between expectations and reality.  The effects on long-term interest rates are murky.  No one — and I mean no one — has a coherent story about how nominal stickiness of wages lies at the heart of our current dilemma.

Still, QEII may do some good.  Money matters, even if we don't always understand how or why, and excessively tight money has never done market-oriented economics any favors.  Think of QEII as a make-up for some earlier monetary policy mistakes.  Some of the relevant alternatives include a trade war with China or direct government employment of the unemployed and with what endgame?  QEII is not some terrifying burst of potential hyperinflation.  The TIPS market is forecasting in the range of two percent inflation and it's gone up — what — sixty basis points since August?  That's hardly the end of the Republic.  During the Reagan recovery, inflation never fell below four percent.  I've thought through "trigger models" of rapidly escalating inflation, but they don't scare me much.  The Fed simply needs to be ready to unload its heavy balance sheet without delay.

I do take seriously some of the more speculative criticisms, namely that QEII may set off bubbles in some emerging markets, or that it may break the euro (and that the euro would not otherwise break of its own accord).  Still, those hypotheses are far from established and it is difficult to believe that say three percent U.S. price inflation should bring international doom.  These factors also need to be weighed against the international and political economy costs of continued American economic stagnation.

I'm unhappy with claims that "we're not doing enough" and that therefore this is no test of the idea of monetary stimulus.  This is what QEII looks like, filtered through the American system of political checks and balances.  And if it looks small, compared to the size of our problems, well, monetary policy almost always looks small compared to its potential effects.  I'm willing to consider this a dispositive test and I am very curious to see the results.

Read the whole thing; my original post was here.  

On my point 1, that the central bank moves last, Brad writes:

Yes, the central bank can neutralize any additional fiscal stimulus by raising interest rates. (It is not clear that it can undo any fiscal contraction by some combination of lowering interest rates and quantitative easing: it may be able to.) What is clear is that the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are right now definitely not in a place where they would neutralize any additional fiscal stimulus by raising interest rates. And my bet is that the ECB is also not in such a place–although it is much harder to figure out what they think and what they will do. That the central bank moves last is important and relevant, but not determinative when you are in the neighborhood of the zero lower bound on interest rates.

Maybe the central bank cannot undo a fiscal tightening, but surely it can undo a fiscal expansion, by making money tighter, limiting QE, and/or changing the pace at which it undoes previous QE.  My assumption is that the central bank has a preferred inflation vs. unemployment position for the economy, so why be so sure they won't undo the expansion of the fiscal authority, if only probabilistically?  Portfolio considerations, or public relations, may matter, so I am not postulating strict neutrality, rather changes in fiscal debt do less good than we might think.   

On point two, that monetary expansion is easy, even at the zero bound, Brad writes:

That's why having the government hire unemployed people to do useful things and paying for it by printing up money at basically zero budgetary cost (right now) is an even better policy. Even if consumers do save all that money, fiscal stimulus on the spending side still has an impact: useful stuff gets done.

That's fine, with the side note that I am more skeptical about public sector spending.  I'll push this line of reasoning to the next step, however, and stress we don't need to increase debt at all to have a big and effective stimulus.  (By the way, accepting this argument means that a central bank can undo a decrease in the federal debt, as mentioned in point one.)   

On point three, on federalizing Medicaid, we agree.  Point four is about the value of worst-case thinking and that means a fiscal crisis can come even when it appears unlikely.  I wish to heed that risk by doing something other than pledging our next President and Congress will solve the problem.

Elsewhere, Brad has written:

The obvious policy is the long-term debt neutral stimulus: spending increases and tax cuts for the next three years, standby tax increases with triggers and spending caps with triggers thereafter, all calculated to guarantee that the debt is no larger ten years from now than in the baseline.

An alternative version of this would be:

We can and should do major stimulus without increasing the debt burden, short-term or long-term.  Increasing M, through monetary policy, is usually more effective than making periodic attempts to keep V up and running, through fiscal policy.  Plus it is often easier to turn monetary rather than fiscal policy on a dime, especially in a democracy and for Brad I can cite the risk of a Republican administration.  Talk of the zero bound doesn't matter much for the policies we should choose, namely money-financed, non-exotic direct stimulus.

Why is it necessary to take on or intellectually defend higher debt levels?  Short-term debt can too easily become a long-term commitment.  Why is it necessary to discuss the zero bound so much?  In my view of this exchange, Brad and I largely agree, but he does not (yet?) agree that we largely agree.  I want to see him criticize debt finance more than he seems willing to do.

I believe the "zero bound" is perhaps the single largest "red herring" in the economics profession today.

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.  And Brad DeLong responds in the comments section.

It's obvious that the economy still isn't doing well.  Furthermore the rate of foreclosures won't peak until the end of 2010.  On top of that, most observers agree that the Obama mortgage modification plan has been a failure.

That all said, I'm surprised that so few commentators have leapt on the "we should write off some of the principal" bandwagon.  It's not currently a bandwagon at all.

I know that a) this idea is WRONG, b) it is terrible for the long run rule of law, and c) it is EVIL and UNFAIR.  It's also one of the few suggested economic remedies that might have worked or maybe could still work. 

How so?  It limits value-destroying foreclosures.  It gives homeowners the right marginal incentive to keep on making payments and maintain the value of the home and to maintain their credit capabilities.  It gives the housing market a fresh start rather than this waiting/coordination game where we wait for everyone to move on down a notch in house quality, thereby freezing parts of the housing market and choking off required recalculations.  (How can you have a well-functioning housing market when so many people have negative equity?  I've read estimates of twenty percent of the U.S. population.)  It also limits the problem of future ARM resets, once interest rates rise in the future.

It's all about long-run vs. short-run and I usually side with the long run.  But the short run modification of property rights has so many defenders in other contexts, so why not here?  Call it "clearing up financial logjams" if you wish.

Is it a better marginal incentive than suddenly increasing the taxes on banks?

Bernanke himself once suggested the idea.

I might add that by fostering an actual recovery, writing off the principal on mortgage loans might limit some of the other bad interventions that we will try or have ended up trying.  There's more than one way to toss away the rule of law.

Stocks are doing well yet interest rates remain low and flat.  What's up?  John De Palma sends along this very interesting analysis by Paul McCulley.  Excerpt:

Thus, as long as economic recovery appears underway, even if stoked primarily by (1) policy stimulus and (2) a turn in the inventory cycle, there is no urgent reason for investors to run from risk assets. Put differently, investors can be agnostic about (3) the strength of private demand growth until the one-off forces supporting growth exhaust themselves, as long as they don’t have fear of Fed tightening.

In turn, a bull flattening bias of the Treasury curve, with longer-dated rates falling toward the near-zero Fed policy rate, can be viewed as a consensus view that the level of the output/unemployment gap plumbed during the recession is so great that disinflationary forces in goods and services prices, and perhaps even more important, wages, will be in train, even if growth surprises on the upside. Accordingly, Treasury players, like their equity brethren, need not fear the Fed, as there is no economic rationale for an early turn to a tightening process.

Thus, both rich risk markets and the lofty Treasury market can be viewed as rational in their own spheres, even if they are seemingly irrational when compared to each other. The tie that binds them, that allows them to co-exist, need not be a common view regarding the prospective strength of the recovery, but rather a common view as to the Fed’s friendly intent and reaction function.

Is it a good thing when asset markets are so much about the Fed?  There is more to the short essayt, read the whole thing.  Here is his conclusion:

Simply put, big-V’ers should be wary of what they wish for. U’ers, meanwhile, must be mindful of just how bubbly risk asset valuations can get, as long as non-big-V data unfold, keeping the Fed friendly. But that’s no reason, in our view, to chase risk assets from currently lofty valuations. To the contrary, the time has come to begin paring exposure to risk assets, and if their prices continue to rise, paring at an accelerated pace.

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.

Here is my latest column, on the monetary proposals of Scott Sumner.  You probably know Sumner from his blog TheMoneyIllusion and in my view he has become possibly the most astute commentator on monetary policy at this time.  Excerpt:

The Fed has already taken some unconventional monetary measures to
stimulate the economy, but they haven’t been entirely effective.
Professor Sumner says the central bank needs to take a different
approach: it should make a credible commitment to spurring and
maintaining a higher level of inflation, promising to use newly created
money to buy many kinds of financial assets if necessary. And it should
even pay negative interest on bank reserves, as the Swedish central
bank has started to do. In essence, negative interest rates are a
penalty placed on banks that sit on their money instead of lending it.

Much
to the chagrin of Professor Sumner, the Fed has been practicing the
opposite policy recently, by paying positive interest on bank reserves
– essentially, inducing banks to hoard money.

The Fed’s balance
sheet need not swell to accomplish these aims. Once people believe that
inflation is coming, they will be willing to spend more money.

In
other words, if the Fed announces a sufficient willingness to undergo
extreme measures to create price inflation, it may not actually have to
do so. Professor Sumner’s views differ from the monetarism of Milton Friedman by emphasizing expectations rather than any particular measure of the money supply.

There are more excellent posts on Scott's blog than I am able to link to.  Read through it all, if you have any interest in these topics. 

One thing I learned from a systematic reread of Sumner is that he isn't quite the advocate of quantitative easing that I had thought.  All things considered, he seems to favor QE over doing nothing, but he also thinks that a truly credible commitment to future inflation can get us there without much painful-for-the-Fed's-balance-sheet QE being required.

While I think there is a very good chance Sumner is correct, my reread of his blog also gave me a better sense of, if he is wrong, why he is wrong or maybe incomplete is a better word.

In very general terms, think of our government, or central bank, as being able to do some good things by creating credibility, the rule of law being one example.  In this particular case the Fed could use its credibility to guarantee two to three percent price inflation annually or more exactly some target for nominal GDP growth.

One point is that bureaucracies tend to hoard credibility rather than to spend it.  That still could mean Sumner's advice is correct and this is simply why the Fed doesn't follow it.  There is, however, a deeper worry.  One possibility is that a weakened Fed cannot today precommit to delivering on two to three percent.  Let's say that Congress gets upset along the way, for whatever reason.  The Fed has then put its credibility on the line, including for the longer future, and that credibility is utterly refuted.  Ouch.  More technically, combine the two ideas of self-fulfilling prophecies and nested games.

Maybe the Fed is too risk-averse but there's also the possibility that the Fed is prudent in its unwillingness to stick its neck out.  Maybe the Fed has credibility only as long as it doesn't try to spend it (try modeling that).  This would bring us into the literature on creative ambiguity and signaling.

Another possibility is that, instead of Congress intervening, markets simply don't respond.  Sumner's theory makes sense to me, but how certain can we be?  The Fed again is putting a lot of longer-term credibility on the line.  Maybe the best the Fed can do is a kind of "inch-along" promise, which probably won't be very effective, as we are observing.

Perhaps the key question is just how credible a central bank can be, relative to its (possibly unjustified) risk aversion.

I now read Sumner much more as a "theorist of credibility," and thus as an implicit game theorist, than I used to. 

The Fed is ready to do more, namely:

Two points are worth making.  First, defenders of large-scale stimulus point out that such measures may well not work.  That is true, but what are the conditions under which unorthodox monetary policy maybe will not work?  Low confidence and zombie banks, which are more or less the same conditions under which fiscal policy may not work either.  In that sense unorthodox monetary policy doesn't face a separate problem.

Second, cash and T-Bills have a broadly similar risk profile but cash and these other assets do not.  At some point monetary policy becomes fiscal policy too, as a quick look at the Fed's balance sheet will indicate.  So it's fiscal policy based on Treasury borrowing vs. fiscal policy based on Bernanke and money creation.  In a time of deflationary pressures, and a bad fiscal future, usually I would prefer Fed-led fiscal policy.  I do recognize that we are placing more weight on the Fed than it can bear, but of course at this point there are no good options.

The very well known macroeconomist Roger Farmer says yes:

It is time for a greatly increased role for monetary policy through
direct intervention of central banks in world stock markets to prevent
bubbles and crashes. Central banks control interest rates by buying and
selling securities on the open market.

A logical extension of this idea is to pick an indexed basket of
securities: one candidate in the US might be the S&P 500, and to
control its price by buying and selling blocks of shares on the open
market.

That is from the FT.  Though he says he is warming to the idea, to my ear Mark Thoma sounds skeptical as am I.  Public choice considerations aside, if the Dow is valued at 7000 in market opinion and the Treasury (Fed?) is propping it up at 8500, a lot of people will sell shares into the hands of the government.  How much are the shares worth then?  How hard will the government try to break the shorts who speculate on lower prices?  Will this work any better than currency pegs?  What are the implications for pursuing other monetary targets, such as the rate of inflation?  If the peg succeeds who would hold other, riskier assets?

Some people might even say that the "Greenspan put" was part of what got us into this hole in the first place.

Farmer is working on a book How the Economy Works and How to Fix it When it Doesn’t.

Matt Yglesias points us to the following:

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday [February 2004] that Americans’ preference for long-term, fixed-rate mortgages means many are paying more than necessary for their homes and suggested consumers would benefit if lenders offered more alternatives.

By the way, Greenspan’s recent Op-Ed claims he is not to blame, plus he disavows blame in his NPR segment the other morning. 

The other day I wrote of widespread fraud; I was referring to the fact that many lower income borrowers lied on their mortgage applications or failed to provide documentation of income.  Do any of you have figures here?

The New York Times today blames many factors, including lax and fragmented regulators, but most of all the irresponsible practices of mortgage-lending affiliates of nationally chartered banks.  Here are the now well-known warnings of Ed Gramlich.

If you are curious to evaluate my record as a prognosticator, my earlier posts on whether we are in a housing bubble are here [TC: it turns out I didn’t buy close to the peak] and here.  Am I to blame?  Here is Alex’s insightful post.  Most to the point, here is my post "If I Believed in Austrian Business Cycle Theory."

Some of the Austrians blame Greenspan for lowering short-run interest rates to one percent.  From another direction, here are tales of a real estate bubble on the moon.

I browsed through a New York Fed conference summary the other day; it was about "systematic risk" and it was held about a year ago.  I did not see a word about housing bubbles.  The surprise was not the bubble, but rather than its collapse could be such a source of systemic risk and that it could freeze broader credit markets so much. 

Paul Krugman claimed that the fundamental problem is lack of solvency, but he doesn’t make a clear enough distinction between insolvent homeowners (for sure) and insolvent banks (has he bought puts?).  I haven’t seen an estimate of the losses that is large enough to imply anything close to widespread bank insolvency.

Matters would be easier to understand if they were either much better or much worse than they are; it is the current state of hovering which is so puzzling.

Here is Bob Dylan on what went wrong.  It’s the best account I’ve heard so far.

Ponder this one on your daily walk:

The key question asked by standard monetary models used for policy analysis is, How do changes in short-term interest rates affect the economy?  All of the standard models imply that such changes in interest rates affect the economy by altering the conditional means of the macroeconomic aggregates and have no effect on the conditional variances of these aggregates.  We argue that the data on exchange rates imply nearly the opposite: the observation that exchange rates are approximately random walks implies that fluctuations in interest rates are associated with nearly one-for-one changes in conditional variances and nearly no changes in conditional means.  In this sense standard monetary models capture essentially none of what is going on in the data.  We thus argue that almost everything we say about monetary policy using these models is wrong.

Or put it this way:

We have focused on exchange rates rather than the term structure of interest rates because the implications of exchange rates are so striking.  Specifically, if exchange rates are random walks, then all of the fluctuations in interest differentials are accounted for by fluctuations in conditional variances and none by fluctuations in conditional means.  The data are so opposite of what standard models assume that even the most die-hard defenders of them should take note:  If these data are accurate, then almost everything we say about monetary policy is wrong.

That is from the May 2007 American Economic Review, here is an earlier version of the paper.  I doubt if changes in interest rate differentials are driven by risk premia of the standard sort; I would sooner cite "noise plus news," but resist the pull toward calling that a "conditional mean."  I’ll also note that calling exchange rates a "random walk" is in the "do not reject" rather than "accept" statistical category.  Both asset price moves contain lots of junk information, so we shouldn’t be totally surprised if they don’t fit together in some simple manner.  Those moves weaken the paradox presented, but don’t come close to offering a coherent account of what is going on.

1. Alan Greenspan certainly has been heard from a lot since his "retirement". Apparently current club members don’t like it as Bank of England Governor Mervyn King put a brutal slam on Greenie last week (as the article details though, Alan is laughing all the way to the bank). I approve of anything that makes central banking more like professional wrestling.

2. Guillermo Ortiz (or the Alan Greenspan of Mexico) is closing in on 9 years as Head of Mexico’s central bank. He inherited an inflation rate of 19%, which was steadily reduced.  It is around 4% today and much less volatile than in the past. Good job, Guillermo!

3. Central Banking, Japanese style.  With the country beset and bedeviled by deflation and stagnant growth, the BOJ stuck with a virtually zero interest rate for almost 6 years before getting frisky and raising rates to .25% last July. By all accounts it was so much fun they wanted to do it again the next month but were heavily pressured by the Government to hold off. This winter they raised rates again to .5%. Now, prices and wages have started falling again in Japan, but the BOJ boys can at least hold their heads up high at the next club meeting.

4. In the US the FOMC now has an unprecedented level of academic economic expertise. Start with Chairman Bernanke, who is ranked 107 in this list of top 1000 economists by publications from 1990-2000, then add longtime MR friend Randall Kroszner (ranked 363) and Fredrick Mishkin (ranked 93). In addition, St. Louis Fed President William Poole is a voting member this year. Poole is among the top ranked economists by publications from 1969 – 2000, as is alternate member Charles Plosser, ex-editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics and President of the Philadelphia Fed (Plosser is also ranked very high on citations from 1975 – 2000). Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen!

5. Finally, for those hoping that new president Sarkozy will lead real reform in France, it turns out that he has met the enemy and it is the ECB!! This doesn’t seem good to me, though after taking a lot of hits Sarkozy has apparently backed down at bit.

Ben Bernanke argues that subprime mortgage lending is a natural and positive outgrowth of financial innovation.  Although some problems have occured they are being self-corrected and do not threaten the financial system.

…subprime mortgage lending began to
expand in earnest in the mid-1990s, the expansion spurred in large part by
innovations that reduced the costs for lenders of assessing and pricing risks.
In particular, technological advances facilitated credit scoring by making it
easier for lenders to collect and disseminate information on the
creditworthiness of prospective borrowers. In addition, lenders developed new
techniques for using this information to determine underwriting standards, set
interest rates, and manage their risks.

The ongoing growth and development of the secondary mortgage market has
reinforced the effect of these innovations. Whereas once most lenders held
mortgages on their books until the loans were repaid, regulatory changes and
other developments have permitted lenders to more easily sell mortgages to
financial intermediaries, who in turn pool mortgages and sell the cash flows as
structured securities. These securities typically offer various risk profiles
and durations to meet the investment strategies of a wide range of investors.
The growth of the secondary market has thus given mortgage lenders greater
access to the capital markets, lowered transaction costs, and spread risk more
broadly, thereby increasing the supply of mortgage credit to all types of
households…

The expansion of subprime mortgage lending has made homeownership possible
for households that in the past might not have qualified for a mortgage and has
thereby contributed to the rise in the homeownership rate since the mid-1990s…

As the problems in the subprime mortgage market have become manifest, we have
seen some signs of self-correction in the market. Investors are scrutinizing
subprime loans more carefully and, in turn, lenders have tightened underwriting
standards. Credit spreads on new subprime securitizations have risen, and the
volume of mortgage-backed securities issued indicates that subprime originations
have slowed. But although the supply of credit to this market has been
reduced–and probably appropriately so–credit has by no means evaporated.

More from Bernanke here.  Previous posts on credit snobs here, here and here.