Is The Fed Right To Discuss An Exit Strategy When The Economy Is Weak?

Tim Iacono discusses whether all the talk by the Federal Reserve of plans for an "exit strategy" is premature with the poor state of jobs, consumer confidence, and the housing market. While the economy is far from full strength, could winding down monetary stimulus be a preemptive strike necessary to prevent runaway inflation? See the following post from The Mess That Greenspan Made.

Boy, for a group of policymakers at the nation's central bank who, in a best case scenario, are going to just sit on their hands for at least the rest of the year, there sure has been a lot of talk about an "exit strategy".

That is, how the Federal Reserve plans to withdrawal the trillions of dollars in asset purchases, emergency lending facilities, and liquidity measures that have been undertaken over the last year that purportedly saved us from another Great Depression.

While it's probably a good idea to begin thinking about this sort of thing, the way Fed chief Ben Bernanke and others at the central bank have been talking lately, you'd think that the economy is about ready to fire on all cylinders again and that there's a pressing need to begin dialing back on some of the aid they've been providing.

What they should probably be worried about instead is the massive wave of foreclosures now washing up onto shore and the waning inventory rebuilding cycle that, when combined, will require more assistance in the form of money printing in the year ahead, not less.

Just this morning, Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser said that he would favor selling some of the $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities that have been piling up on the Fed's balance sheet "sooner rather than later", as if, he really thinks that the economic recovery we've been experiencing over the last six months - built mostly on government bailouts and handouts - is going to last.

Last week, it was Chairman Ben Bernanke who detailed a plan to Congress that would have the central bank adjusting the interest paid on "excess reserves" - money held by member banks at the Fed - in order to keep credit from expanding too rapidly and realizing the worst of the inflation hawks' fears - runaway inflation.

Shouldn't the question of what will happen to the market for home loans when the Fed stops their monthly purchases of between $60 to $100 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities next month be a more pressing concern?

Sure, they now own a considerable amount of the souring mortgage debt in the U.S., but they'll probably have to buy at least another trillion dollars or so to keep the housing market propped up, that is, unless there is some other plan in the works where, with their loss limits recently removed, wards of the state Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can take on the job.




[The graphic above is from Standard and Poor's report on troubled mortgages]

Goldman Sachs weighed in last week with something about the Fed not raising interest rates until 2012 and there are more than a few who think that we'll be turning Japanese this decade in a very big way, as in, ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) for as far as the eye can see.

Maybe all this talk about "exit strategies" is simply a way for policymakers to generate confidence that might not otherwise be there.

For example, anyone looking at consumer spending, consumer confidence, or the unemployment rate could easily come to the conclusion that we've got a long way to go before the economy begins to grow again in any substantive sort of way.

But, if they were to listen to the Federal Reserve talking about how they're going to get out of the business of printing money on a scale never before seen by Mankind, then maybe they'll think that, just maybe, the Fed knows something that they don't know.

Then again, the more likely explanation is that economists at the central bank are just as clueless about where the economy is headed today as they were a few years ago before we all experienced the worst financial market crisis and the sharpest economic contraction since the end of World War II.

In case anyone needs to be reminded, here's what Fed chief Ben Bernanke thought about the economy and financial markets back in the middle of the last decade.

Is there any reason to think that he'll do any better in this decade than he did in the last one?

Isn't this talk of the Fed's "exit strategy" way too premature?

This post has been republished from Tim Iacono's blog, The Mess That Greenspan Made.

Bernanke Deflects Blame For Financial Crisis

Bernanke's denial that monetary policy was a main factor leading up to the financial collapse may prevent the Fed from learning from past mistakes says James Picerno from The Capital Spectator. The real Fed funds rate was negative for roughly three years leading up to the financial collapse, suggesting that monetary policy was aggressively stimulative. See the following post from The Capital Spectator.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says the central bank's monetary policy played no role laying the groundwork for 2008's financial debacle. The issue here is one of debating if interest rates were too low for too long and if that was a catalyst for sending the real estate market into overdrive.

"Monetary policy during that period [2002-2006] -- though certainly accommodative -- does not appear to have been inappropriate, given the state of the economy and policymakers' medium-term objectives," he said at a speech today in Atlanta at the American Economic Association, CNNMoney reports. The culprit, Bernanke added, was ill-conceived mortgages that made buying homes too easy.

The Fed head is half right. It's hard to imagine that the real estate boom would have been as strong as it was if interest rates weren't as low as they were in 2002-2006. Consider our graph below, which shows the effective Fed funds rate less the annual change in inflation, as defined by the consumer price index.



It's obvious that for a roughly three-year period starting in late-2005, the real Fed funds rate was negative, which is to say that monetary policy was aggressively stimulative. The case for keeping rates low was compelling in the wake of the 2000-2002 stock market correction and the mild 2001 recession. But the central bank misjudged what the economy needed at the time. That's clear now, with the benefit of hindsight, as a number monetary economists advise.

For example, Anna Schwartz, an economist at the NBER, recently opined that "the Fed was accommodative too long from 2001 on and was slow to tighten monetary policy, delaying tightening until June 2004 and then ending the monthly 25 basis point increase in August 2006."

We can argue if central bankers should have made better policy decisions in real time. In a world of fiat money, mistakes are inevitable when mere mortals are at the monetary helm, as we discussed recently. That's the price of doing business in central banking as it's currently practiced. What's troubling is arguing that the Fed played no role in stoking the fires of the former real estate bubble. Policy is never going to be perfect, but the degree of error in 2002-2006 now looks extraordinary. Yes, hindsight is 20-20, and so we should be careful here in arguing that another crew might have done things differently. But if we can't at least recognize an error, the odds of learning from past mistakes look virtually nil.

The question is less about blame and more of figuring out how to improve monetary policy going forward. Indeed, the stakes are higher than ever for the years ahead.

Progress comes slowly in economics and finance. It's even slower with a brick of denial tied to your legs.

This post has been republished from James Picerno's blog, The Capital Spectator.

No End In Sight For Fed's Massive Monetary Interventions

The Federal Reserve is walking a fine line on when to start retreating from its massive monetary interventions. If history is any indication, central banks tend to err on the side of inflation, suggesting a rate increase will be delayed even as the dollar falls rapidly in relation to gold. See the following post from The Capital Spectator.

“We have to be sure that the recovery is final, that domestic demand is self-sustaining and the peak in unemployment is on the foreseeable horizon,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, said yesterday in London yesterday in connection with a speech he gave at a British industry conference.

The topic of discussion was the exit strategy, and the ever-topical question of when to begin retreating from the massive liquidity injections that remain the status quo in the global economy, particularly in the U.S. Straus-Kahn emphasized that “a premature exit is the main danger,” and that’s probably true. But the risk associated with keeping the stimulus running too hot for too long isn’t exactly chopped liver either.

Waiting for absolute certainty is waiting for the impossible in central banking. As we discussed last week, prescience is the stuff of dreams in a world where mortals manage monetary policy. Mistakes are inevitable, which implies that central bankers should hedge their bets if only slightly.

Should the Fed start hiking rates immediately by a large degree? No, but it’s time to begin the inexact science of sending a message to the crowd that the price of money will climb in the months and years ahead. A 25-basis-point increase in Fed funds wouldn't derail the stimulus efforts but it would send a timely reminder of things to come.

The soaring price of gold suggests it’s time for a nudge upward in the price of money. A similar message arises from the internal discussions at the Fed these days. As discussed in the FOMC earlier this month, “members [of the Fed] noted the possibility that some negative side effects might result from the maintenance of very low short-term interest rates for an extended period, including the possibility that such a policy stance could lead to excessive risk-taking in financial markets or an unanchoring of inflation expectations.”

But while the Fed is on record as worrying about irrational exuberance and the possibility that the central bank might be promoting the next bubble, the official position is that such a risk is at present “relatively low.” And the Fed funds futures market is inclined to agree. Futures are priced in anticipation that the current 0-0.25% target rate will endure at least through next year's first half.

That's no surprise, of course. Central banks prefer to err on the side of inflation, modestly so if possible. It's what they know and monetary policy works better with a little pricing juice. That implies that even a small 25-basis-point hike is probably far off in the future. Ultimately we won’t know for sure if the Fed made a timely decision to keep inflationary pressures at bay until several years down the road. Of course, by that time it’ll difficult to retroactively correct any mistakes. Waiting for absolute clarity is a nice idea, but only if it works.

This post has been republished from James Picerno's blog, The Capital Spectator.

When The Federal Reserve Gets It Wrong

While often criticized as ignorant and misguided, central bankers make decisions that they deem as the best for their country using the facts and information that they have available to them at the time. Setting monetary policy is a high-stakes, high-skill game played by fallible humans, and flawed decisions have led to major consequences throughout history. See the following post from The Capital Spectator.

Central bankers are a powerful lot and so it’s an easy to assume that they’re also prescient. When you’re making decisions that affect the livelihoods of millions of people—billions on a global scale—confusing people with their institutional authority can become habit forming. But central bankers are mortal, and therefore prone to mortal decisions, a.k.a. flawed decisions. Heck, it happens to the best of us at times. The only difference is that most people’s day jobs don’t cast a long shadow over a nation’s money supply.

No less an expert on central banking than Paul Volcker, the patron saint of inflation slayers everywhere, advises that “central bankers suffer from hubris like everybody else.” That’s not surprising, but it does have consequences.

The monetary policy du jour, as a result, may not be exactly what the macroeconomic gods ordered. A mismatch between the optimal monetary policy and current events is in some sense fate. Working with limited information makes it hard to know if today’s actions will suffice for the uncertainty that arrives tomorrow. As a result, we can talk of monetary policy in terms of its degree of inaccuracy or accuracy.

Intelligently dispensed or not, monetary policy steers economic activity, ranging from decisions in asset pricing to lending preferences to choices that affect the labor market. Alas, poor decisions have a habit of delivering less-than-satisfying results.

Remember all the talk of the Great Moderation? “One of the most striking features of the economic landscape over the past twenty years or so has been a substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility,” Ben Bernanke pronounced in early 2004 in his then-current position as a Fed governor. “Reduced macroeconomic volatility,” he went on to explain, “has numerous benefits. Lower volatility of inflation improves market functioning, makes economic planning easier, and reduces the resources devoted to hedging inflation risks. Lower volatility of output tends to imply more stable employment and a reduction in the extent of economic uncertainty confronting households and firms. The reduction in the volatility of output is also closely associated with the fact that recessions have become less frequent and less severe.”

It’s debatable how much the Fed was influenced by the past for setting monetary policy in 2004 and beyond, but some observers of central banking suggest that the calm history in those halcyon days led policymakers astray. Anna Schwartz of the National Bureau of Economic Research speaks for many dismal scientists when she charges in a recent essay that the Fed kept interest rates too low for too long earlier in this decade. In turn, the inappropriate interest rates distorted markets, she says, and the fallout wasn't trivial. “In the case of the housing price boom, the government played a role in stimulating demand for houses by proselytizing the benefits of home ownership for the well-being of individuals and families.” The net result, to state the obvious, was less than optimal.

Volcker has commented that the preference for low interest rates earlier in this decade was based on a “misreading of the Japan situation.” The worry that deflation threatened in 2001-2005 was simply wrong, as was the resulting prescription: low interest rates.

Economist Scott Sumner opines that another Fed mistake of some consequence was the decision in September 2008 to leave interest rates as is. “On September 16, 2008, the Fed made one of its most costly errors ever,” he recently wrote. “Immediately after the failure of Lehman Brothers, the FOMC decided to leave the target rate unchanged at 2.0 percent.” Monetary policy, in other words, should have been far more supportive given current events. It wouldn’t have prevented the financial crisis, but it might have minimized the fallout, perhaps by more than a trivial amount.

The idea that central banks have power of the ebb and flow of economies isn’t new. In 1963, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz reordered perceptions of the Great Depression with their the monumental A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, which indicts the central bank’s monetary policy for the events of the 1930s. Friedman and Schwartz argued that the central bank’s errors in managing the money supply were the primary catalyst that turned recession into something far worse. “Prevention or moderation of the decline in the stock of money, let alone the substitution of monetary expansion, would have reduced the [economic] contraction’s severity and almost as certainly its duration,” they wrote.

Today, central bankers the world over are faced with another decision of above-average consequence. The exit strategy, as it’s called, requires that the Fed and its counterparts choose when to begin drawing back the enormous liquidity that’s been injected into the global economy.

“It is clear…that our exceptional support cannot last for too long a period of time since there are negative side effects,” Jürgen Stark, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, said last week. Jan F Qvigstad, deputy governor of the Central Bank of Norway, also remarked last week that the country’s current target policy rate of 1.5% “will be 2.75 per cent around the end of next year.”

Some central banks have already begun raising rates, as we noted a month ago. The Fed too must return monetary policy in the U.S. to something approaching a normal state. As always, the possibility of raising rates too early, too late or insufficiently keeps everyone guessing. Accordingly, inflation may or may not be a problem in the years ahead.

“At some point, the economic trends will shift and waiting too long to raise interest rates will be the primary hazard,” we wrote in March. “We don't know if the turning point will come in a few months or a few years, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that it's never coming.”

The risk tied to the timing and magnitude of the exit strategy isn’t necessary limited to inflation, as the tumultuous history of this decade reminds. We might add that we also shouldn’t kid ourselves that the Fed will make exactly the right decisions at exactly the right time.

There are many advantages to fiat money. But the main advantage is also the primary risk: flexibility. As with democracy and investing, choices matter. Rarely are those choices perfect. Sometimes they’re egregiously wrong, sometimes they’re more or less productive. The great question is what outcome will the decisions give us this time?

This post has been republished from James Picerno's blog, The Capital Spectator.

Preparing For The Consequences Of The Great Stimulus

While the aggressive action by the government may have prevented a depression, Warren Buffet is one of the many who are concerned about the future side effects on the economy. Is now the time for the Fed to start tightening monetary policy to prevent economic fallout? James Picerno from The Capital Spectator discusses why we should be shifting more attention to the future.

Warren Buffett advises in today's New York Times that the Great Stimulus must one day be clipped as the Great Recession fades. As the Oracle of Omaha explains, the "enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects."

We've been making a similar argument for some time, although the cause seemed lost when we advised in May that the crowd should recognize that the Federal Reserve must begin raising interest rates at some point. That future has been easily ignored, and perhaps for obvious reasons, given the economic events of the past year or so. But the arrival of Buffett's warning suggests that sentiment may be set to turn by focusing the crowd's gaze on the inevitable. If so, that's healthy, if only because recognizing the risks that loom, as opposed to the ones that just passed, is always a productive exercise in managing money and otherwise boosting one's odds of survival.

As we wrote in May, "At some point, the economic trends will shift and waiting too long to raise interest rates will be the primary hazard. We don't know if the turning point will come in a few months or a few years, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that it's never coming."

If more pundits and policymakers are on board with this outlook, chalk up another win on the side of progress. But lurking behind this rise in enlightened thinking is another problem, which can be summed up as the expectation that the central bank will begin tightening at a time when it's clear that the economy is on a sustainable path to recovery. A nice idea, but like fairy tales and campaign promises, danger lurks in accepting such notions without question.

For the same reason that mere mortals can't hope to sell exactly at market peaks or buy at bear-market bottoms, the Fed is destined to be early or late at the start of the next great change in monetary policy. This is a critical point because it belies the notion that the Fed will be able to tighten monetary policy at just the right time and keep everyone happy in the process. Wrong. Not only does the Fed face a tough challenge in purely monetary policy terms, the potential for political and even economic fallout are commensurately large as well.

Central banks, like the rest of us, are making real-time decisions with lagging data. Even worse, it takes time to assess if the decisions were timely, or not. The folly or fortune of policy choices made today will be evident a year or two hence. It's a bit like a surgeon working in the dark and then finding out a year later if the patient survived.

So be it. That's how running fiat currencies works: it's a job that's highly subjective in real time. The question is whether the crowd understands what's coming. Normally, the margin for error is relatively wide in the highly subjective business of central banking. These days, that margin has shrunk considerably, even if the ramifications won't be obvious for several years.

No one will ring a bell at the ideal moment for tightening. The fact that the Fed's timing wasn't perfect in the years running up to the Great Recession reminds that fallibility infects the institution, just as it does every other area of human decision making.

What's more, when the Fed launches the new monetary era, the criticism is likely to be deep and broad, from politicians and investors, businesses and the people on the street. No one has perfect information and insight, but that doesn't stop anyone from thinking (and speaking) as if they did. The net result: lots of noise and confusion.

With the benefit of hindsight at some point, it's a virtual certainty that we'll recognize that the Fed was too early, or too late. Heck, maybe they'll get it exactly right this time, although we're not holding our breath. In any case, such things can only be determined after the fact.

The stakes are high, perhaps unusually high compared with previous business cycles of recent vintage. But at least we know what the two main threats will be. On the one hand, the central bank runs the risk of choking off the incipient recovery by tightening too early. At the other extreme, the central bank may wait too long and thereby give inflationary pressures a foundation to pester the economy for some time after.

No, these risks aren't absolute. One or the other may arrive but in moderate form, which still leaves the natural forces of inflation-adjusted growth to dominate eventually. Nonetheless, let's not forget that one or the other still looms. Markets and economies are forever evolving, as are the embedded hazards and opportunities. Perhaps the biggest risk of all is thinking otherwise.

This post has been republished from James Picerno's blog, The Capital Spectator.

Anti-Federal Reserve Sentiment On The Rise

No one is immune from blame for the financial crisis, including the Federal Reserve, which is facing renewed anti-fed sentiment. This has reintroduced the debate on whether the role of the Federal Reserve should be part of the reform of the financial system. Mark Thoma from Economist's View discusses this issue in the following post.

Continuing the recent discussion here and elsewhere on Fed independence, this is not the first time audits and other threats to independence have been seriously considered:

On the mend, The Economist: It has been a long time since comments on the economy by an official of America’s Federal Reserve comments could be described as cheerful. Yet there was no denying the upbeat tone of Ben Bernanke’s testimony to Congress on Tuesday... His fingers may be crossed but it is clear that Mr. Bernanke thinks the recession, if not over now, soon will be.

That is a far cry, though, from seeing a threat from inflation and Mr. Bernanke made it clear that the federal funds target rate, now near zero, will remain there for a long time. On Wall Street, most reckon that means until well into 2010 at least.

Yet the Fed is already under pressure to explain how it intends to tighten monetary policy, even by congressmen who usually want nothing of the sort. ... Whether inflation [occurs] depends on if the Fed raises interest rates in time and thereby curbs the appetite for credit. Mr. Bernanke spent much of his testimony explaining how he can do just that. ...

Politics could ... interfere with the Fed’s willingness to tighten monetary policy in time. Congress’s nonpartisan investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, can now audit the Fed with the exception of its monetary policy, lending programs or relations with foreign central banks. A bill in Congress would lift those prohibitions. Mr. Bernanke argued that the threat of such audits would lead investors to question the Fed’s willingness to do unpopular things, like tighten monetary policy, unsettling them and driving up long-term interest rates.

This is not idle speculation. Anti-Fed sentiment was also strong in the 1970s, when Congress first sought to have the GAO audit the central bank. Arthur Burns, chairman at the time, fought back, and a compromise was struck to allow audits, but with the current prohibitions. Mr. Burns later reflected that the effort of “warding off legislation that could destroy any hope of ending inflation” involved “political judgments” that may have weakened his anti-inflationary resolve.

For all the discussion, any tightening of policy is a long way off. ...

I think one of the problems that people are trying to get at when they want to take away the Fed's independence is the concentration of power within the Board of Governors (the view by some that the Board represents special rather than public interests, e.g. Wall street, also plays a role), and they see devices such as audits from the GAO as a check on that concentration of power. Here's an edited version of part of an old post:

While the Fed was initially structured to balance competing interests and to share power, the system has evolved into an institution with centralized rather than shared power. The intent to share power and balance competing interests is evident in the structure of the Federal Reserve system. For example, individual district banks are overseen by a board of nine part-time directors. These directors come in three types. Three of the nine are type A and are bankers, and three are type B and represent the business community. Legislation prohibits type B board members from being bankers. In a further attempt to make the process representative, type A and type B directors representing banking and business interests are elected by member banks within each of the twelve Federal Reserve districts. Type C directors are appointed by the Board of governors and are intended to represent the public interest within the district banks.

Thus, the districts themselves provide geographic representation that is population based, while control of the district banks balances public, banking, and business interests. Initially, the district banks functioned as twelve cooperating banks and each district had considerable control of monetary conditions within the district. It was very much a shared power arrangement. As one example of the power district banks had, each bank had full control of the discount rate for its district (the discount rate was the only tool available for controlling the money supply when the Fed was formed, open-market operations were not well understood until later and there was no provision for the Federal Reserve system to control reserve requirements, another way to affect the money supply).

The shared power arrangement within the Federal Reserve system changed after the Great Depression when monetary authorities failed to respond adequately to crisis condition. The problem, or so it seemed, was the shared power nature of the system. The deliberative, democratic nature of the institution prevented it from taking quick, decisive action when it was most needed. Furthermore, the Fed did not have the tools it needed to deal with system-wide disturbances, it was mostly equipped to deal with problems at individual banks (the discount window is well-suited to help individual banks, but not system wide disruptions; on the other hand, open-market operations can inject reserves system-wide and hence is a better tool for systemic problems).

The solution to this was to concentrate power into the hands of the central bank so that should a crisis occur, they can act quickly. There are risks, of course, to concentrating power so narrowly, but in the aftermath of the Depression we were quite willing to take that risk if it helped to avoid another catastrophic outcome (as it may well have done).

Thus, after the Great Depression power was concentrated. For example, banks no longer control the discount rate in their districts. They can propose a change in the discount rate at an FOMC meeting, but the Board of Governors must approve the rate and they will only approve one rate, the rate they decide. So while the rates are still formally set in the districts, they are essentially set by the Board of Governors. When all such changes in the concentration of power over time from the districts to the Central Bank in Washington D.C. are considered, it becomes very clear that the Fed has evolved from a very democratic, shared power arrangement at its inception to one where it functions, for all intents an purposes, as a single bank in Washington, D.C,. with twelve branches spread across the U.S.

*****

I am not at all in favor of lessening the degree of independence that the Fed currently has, but I do think we need to make changes in the way the President and Boards of the district banks are chosen. As it stands, the Board of Governors in Washington has considerable influence over who is appointed to key positions such as the President of the district banks, and those Presidents represent five of the twelve votes at the meetings where monetary policy is set. More independence of the district bank Presidents and other district bank personnel from the Board of Governors would be a healthy change (there is also a question of whether geographic representation through district banks is the best way to capture the public interest, but I'll leave that aside for now).

This article was republished from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.