macroblog

What, exactly, is the Fed trying to do?

There has been, of late, no shortage of official voices devoted to answering the question posed in the title of this post. Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, Richmond Fed President Jeff Lacker, Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser, and Chairman Bernanke have all given speeches in the last two weeks outlining their version of answers to this question. Add to that list Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart, who laid out his own views at a speech to the Atlanta Rotary Club this past Monday and again today at the University of Southern Mississippi's Outlook for South Mississippi Conference. Here's what he said:

"The Fed, as the country's central bank, conducts monetary policy—as distinct from fiscal policy—under legal mandates set down by Congress. The Fed's mandated policy objectives—the so-called dual mandate—are sustainable economic growth along with low and stable inflation.

"The mandates have not changed. But what has changed is some aspects of how we pursue those objectives. Extraordinary circumstances this last year and a half have required the Fed to expand the set of tools employed to meet those objectives."

What is the practical implication of those circumstances?

"The federal funds rate is a very general tool and one that relies on the functioning of credit markets to have its intended effects. But, as you know, credit markets have not been functioning normally even in markets strongly backed by the U.S. government, such as agency (e.g., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) mortgage-backed securities….

"Among the programs in force is the direct purchase of agency (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc.) notes and mortgage-backed securities. These securities are directly linked to mortgage rates. Purchases began just a few days ago. The goal of such a program is not, in my view, to engineer a particular interest rate level, that is, to hit a particular rate target. But direct purchases can promote directionally lower rates, help restore normal market functioning, and thereby achieve a return to reliance on private sector market-based credit allocation.

"The introduction of targeted asset-side measures has been aimed squarely at the breakdown of credit markets, the circulatory system of our modern economy. In my view, a precondition of economic recovery is the return of the normal functioning of credit markets."

Sometimes, if I may paraphrase, deviating from business as usual is the best way back to business as usual.

President Lockhart's Speech
Speech Q&A
From the Atlanta Fed Speeches podcast series

By David Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

On expanding balance sheets and inflationary policy

Here's a question I hear a lot (most recently during the Q&A portion of a speech delivered yesterday by my boss, Atlanta Fed president Dennis Lockhart): Has monetary policy become so expansive that the central bank's mandate to maintain price stability has been fundamentally compromised? Is the increase in the scale of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet inherently inflationary?

Jim Hamilton covered much of the territory implied by these questions in a very extensive Econbrowser post not too long ago, but the distinction between money creation and Fed balance sheet expansion continues to be confounded. Here, for example, is a passage from the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics coverage of Stanford professor John Taylor's (not exactly glowing) review of recent Federal Reserve action, delivered at this year's annual meeting of the American Economic Association:

"The Fed has launched nearly a dozen new programs in the past year to address the crisis. Its strategy is to target specific markets in distress—from commercial paper to asset backed securities to money market mutual funds and stresses overseas—with programs tailored to their problems. It also has gotten deeply involved in rescues of individual firms like Bear Stearns, American International Group and Citigroup.

"The Fed has funded these programs by pumping reserves into the banking system—essentially creating new money. In the process, its balance sheet has ballooned from less than $900 billion to more than $2 trillion."

The record though, as the article goes on to note, is that not all of that $2 trillion represents an increase in the money supply:

Only the blue portion of the graph above represents "pumping reserves into the banking system"—a fact that was covered pretty well in the aforementioned Econbrowser post—and in an even earlier post at News N Economics. In simple terms, the size of the Fed's balance sheet is not the same thing as the size of the monetary base (the sum of currency in circulation and reserve balances kept by banks with the Federal Reserve).

Of course, John Taylor's point was not that all of the increase in the balance sheet has amounted to pumping in reserves, just that a lot of it has, which is clearly true. But even here there may be less to the potential inflationary impact than meets the eye. In his speech at the London School of Economics earlier today, Chairman Bernanke explained:

"Some observers have expressed the concern that, by expanding its balance sheet, the Federal Reserve is effectively printing money, an action that will ultimately be inflationary. The Fed's lending activities have indeed resulted in a large increase in the excess reserves held by banks. Bank reserves, together with currency, make up the narrowest definition of money, the monetary base; as you would expect, this measure of money has risen significantly as the Fed's balance sheet has expanded. However, banks are choosing to leave the great bulk of their excess reserves idle, in most cases on deposit with the Fed. Consequently, the rates of growth of broader monetary aggregates, such as M1 and M2, have been much lower than that of the monetary base."

Last week Greg Mankiw had a nifty graph (courtesy of Professor Bill Seyfried of Rollins College) of the so-called money multiplier precisely illustrating the point:

The money multiplier measures the amount of money in the hands of the public—the M1 measure in this case, which is composed mainly of cash and demand deposits (i.e., checking and debit accounts)—that are created by a dollar of monetary base. That amount fell considerably when the Fed introduced the payment of interest on bank reserves.

That said, despite the fall in the money multiplier, the M1 measure of money has also expanded fairly noticeably since late summer:

 

The increase in M2—a slightly broader measure of money that adds to M1 items like savings accounts and time deposits—has been somewhat slower but still on the rise:

 

From December 2007 through August of last year, M1 and M2 grew by about 1.2 percent and 3.9 percent respectively. Since September—after which the rapid expansion of the Fed's balance sheet began and the Fed began to pay interest on reserves—the corresponding growth rates have been 13.4 percent and 5.9 percent.

Are those growth rates substantial? That is a tricky question—whether a particular growth rate of money is substantial or not can only be determined in relation to the pace of money demand (which has almost certainly accelerated as interest rates have fallen and the taste for safe and liquid assets risen). But I take two lessons from our early experience with the asset-oriented policies emphasized in the Bernanke and Lockhart speeches. First, expansions of the balance sheet need not imply expansions of the money supply. Furthermore, as Chairman Bernanke emphasized, the Fed has the capacity to contract reserves going forward:

"… the Treasury could resume its recent practice of issuing supplementary financing bills and placing the funds with the Federal Reserve; the issuance of these bills effectively drains reserves from the banking system, improving monetary control. Longer-term assets can be financed through repurchase agreements and other methods, which also drain reserves from the system."

The second lesson, clear in the M1 and M2 charts above, is that despite the payment of interest on reserves and near-zero federal funds rates, it is still possible to induce increases in the broad money supply through the standard channel of injecting reserves into the banking system.

Whatever direction you think the money supply ought to go, these observations should come as comforting news.

By David Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

Will tax stimulus stimulate investment?

On Monday, the form of potential fiscal stimulus, 2009-style, took a step forward detail-wise. From the Wall Street Journal:

“President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are crafting a plan to offer about $300 billion of tax cuts to individuals and businesses, a move aimed at attracting Republican support for an economic-stimulus package and prodding companies to create jobs.

“The size of the proposed tax cuts—which would account for about 40% of a stimulus package that could reach $775 billion over two years—is greater than many on both sides of the aisle in Congress had anticipated.”

The plan appears to make concessions to both economic theory—which suggests that consumers will save a relatively large fraction of temporary increases in disposable income—and recent experience—which seems to suggest that what works in theory sometimes works in practice. Again, from the Wall Street Journal:

“Economists of all political stripes widely agree the checks sent out last spring were ineffective in stemming the economic slide, partly because many strapped consumers paid bills or saved the cash rather than spend it. But Obama aides wanted a provision that could get money into consumers’ hands fast, and hope they will be persuaded to spend money this time if the credit is made a permanent feature of the tax code.”

As for the business tax package:

“… a key provision would allow companies to write off huge losses incurred last year, as well as any losses from 2009, to retroactively reduce tax bills dating back five years. Obama aides note that businesses would have been able to claim most of the tax write-offs on future tax returns, and the proposal simply accelerates those write-offs to make them available in the current tax season, when a lack of available credit is leaving many companies short of cash.

“A second provision would entice firms to plow that money back into new investment. The write-offs would be retroactive to expenditures made as of Jan. 1, 2009, to ensure that companies don’t sit on their money until after Congress passes the measure.”

A relevant question here is really quite similar to the one we ask when the tax cuts are aimed at households: Will the extra cash be spent? This graph provides some interesting perspective:

Relative to net worth (of nonfarm nonfinancial corporate businesses), private fixed investment has been in consistent decline since the second quarter of 2006. (The level of fixed investment has declined in each quarter, save one.) In fact, the investment/net worth ratio is currently at a postwar low.

Why? A couple of hypotheses come to mind. (1) Firms are extremely pessimistic about the outlook and see relatively few worthwhile projects in which to commit funds. (2) Credit markets are so impaired that the net worth of firms—a critical variable in mainstream models of the so-called “credit channel” of monetary policy—is supporting increasingly smaller levels of lending. (3) Nonfinancial firms, like financial firms, are deleveraging and hence not expanding.

Of course, even if one of these hypotheses is true, it need not be the case that marginal dollars sent in the direction of businesses will go uninvested. But it makes you wonder.

By David Altig, senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

Good news in income growth?

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be more consistent in responding to questions and comments from the loyal readers of macroblog. Though it remains the case that time constraints prohibit a response to all worthy queries, we’re still listening. Next year we’ll endeavor to give a shout back just a little more often.

In that spirit, I received an interesting inquiry from reader Robert Schumacher:

A cursory examination of the monthly trends in real disposable income in light of the NBER official business cycles suggests to me that a sustained rise in disposable personal income (at least three if not four months) signals the end of the recession is at hand. In that real disposable income rose in October and November how are we to interpret this amidst the dire economic forecasts for the coming year?

It does seem, as Robert suggests, that a sustained rise in real disposable income is characteristic of a typical recession’s end. Using a graphical device from a few posts back, here’s a look at the trajectory of disposable income up to and after December 2007 (the start date of the current recession according to the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee), compared with the average experience of the previous seven recessions dating from 1960:

As in the previous post, “time 0” represents the peak of a business cycle, or the month a recession begins. The average length of US recessions from 1960 through 2001 was 10.7 months, so the line indicating 10 months from the peak roughly coincides to the end of the average recession over this period.

On average, Robert’s conjecture looks right on track. In the typical case, growth in real disposable income stalls and then begins to pick up three or four months before recession’s end. If you smooth through the spike associated with the stimulus package of late spring, income growth was roughly flat through August but has increased since (and at a reasonably good clip). That would seem to portend well for all of us—and I assume it is all of us—hoping for a sooner rather than later end to the current contraction.

The picture is equally encouraging if we look at the income series preferred by the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which subtracts out transfers (that is, payments made to the public by the government):

That’s all encouraging, but there is a caveat: Individual results may vary. Here are the comparisons for the long-lived (16-month) recessions of 1973–75 and 1981–82:

In these two recessions—which are arguably better benchmarks than the average at this point—income measures were not such reliable harbingers of expansion.

Still, in current circumstances a glimmer of hope is better than nothing.

By David Altig, senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Because of the New Year holiday, today’s posting will be the only macroblog posting for this week.