Is The Fed Corrupt or Out of Control?

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The Federal Reserve System is an extremely controversial and largely misunderstood institution. Senators on both the right (Ron Paul) and the left (Bernie Sanders) are highly critical of The Fed.   I’ve shied away from commenting on The Fed because it’s  a pretty complex subject. Every time I think there’s a point to be made, I find it requires explaining some other point, which leads to yet another, and on and on.  It’s always seemed too daunting.  I could never figure out where to start.  But a reader asked last week for my thoughts about The Fed audit, so I’ll make an effort:

What’s the meaning of the audit of the Federal Reserve Bank that has just been completed? I am hearing from friends that the revelation of loans made to banks by the Fed is evidence that they “are out of control” and doing something corrupt or dishonest. I find that hard to believe.

At the risk that I’ll have a few “I’ll explain this later” points in this post, let’s talk about The Fed and whether it’s corrupt.  Let’s start with the results of the audit of The Fed which were released in July 2011 in response to a Congressional bill requiring a one-time public audit of The Fed..  The Raw Story summarizes the report for us and also has an embedded copy of the audit results for those interested:

The U.S. Federal Reserve gave out $16.1 trillion in emergency loans to U.S. and foreign financial institutions between Dec. 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010, according to figures produced by the government’s first-ever audit of the central bank.

Last year, the gross domestic product of the entire U.S. economy was $14.5 trillion.

Of the $16.1 trillion loaned out, $3.08 trillion went to financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) analysis shows.

Additionally, asset swap arrangements were opened with banks in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, Singapore and Switzerland. Twelve of those arrangements are still ongoing, having been extended through August 2012.

Out of all borrowers, Citigroup received the most financial assistance from the Fed, at $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merrill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion.

The audit also found that the Fed mostly outsourced its lending operations to the very financial institutions which sparked the crisis to begin with, and that they delegated contracts largely on a no-bid basis. The GAO report recommends new policies that would eliminate such conflicts of interest, and suggests that in the future the Fed should keep better records of their emergency decision-making process.

The Fed agreed to “strongly consider” the recommendations, but as it is not a government-run institution it cannot be forced to do so by lawmakers. The seven-member board of governors and the Fed chairman are, however, appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate.

The audit was conducted on a one-time basis, as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed last year. Fed officials had strongly discouraged lawmakers from ordering the audit, claiming it may serve to undermine confidence in the monetary system.

The big news, judging by both Ron Paul’s and Bernie Sanders’ reactions is the three-fold fact that The Fed provided loans (or their equivalent in asset swaps) to large banks and governments to the tune of $14.5 trillion “in secret”.  The first concern is the size of the actions. The second concern seems to be that some of these banks and governments were foreign. And the third is that the loans were secret. I think the conflicts of interest and poor decision making processes are bigger issues uncovered by the audit. But I’ll get to that later in this post.

Before we can conclude The Fed is “out of control” or corrupt we need to look at what The Fed is supposed to do.  The Fed, being the central bank for the U.S., is responsible for:

  • maintaining the health of the U.S. banking and financial system and institutions.  It does this by regulation of those institutions and by being lender of last resort in a crisis.
  • conducting monetary policy. Legally, The Fed has a “dual mandate” on monetary policy. It is supposed to:
  1. maintain price stability (in other words, avoid inflation or deflation)
  2. maintain full employment

The critics from the right tend to be followers of Austrian economics (Ron Paul) or far-conservative and libertarian. These are the ones most likely to claim The Fed is “out of control”.  What they generally mean (a typical example is here) is they think The Fed has created too much money and is debasing the currency.  There’s very little The Fed can do that would satisfy most of these people other than to shut down and ask the government to return to a gold standard.  Their concerns about the $14 trillion in loans being inflationary and “newly printed money” reveal deep misunderstandings about the nature of money (a post yet to be written), the functioning of the financial system, and even the nature of inflation.  They make a big deal of the size of the loans by comparing them to real GDP.  That’s apples to oranges.  To figure out if the $14 trillion in loans was large, it should be compared to the total balance sheet of the banking system, not GDP.   Yes, the loans The Fed made were of record amount, but so was the crisis. The Fed has a duty to act as lender of last resort in a financial crisis.  It did that. And it largely avoided the scale of disaster that occurred in 1929-1933 when The Fed failed to act as lender of last resort and was complicit in creating The Great Depression, snuffing out thousands of banks in the U.S. and depositors’ savings with it.  So if “out of control” means The Fed is wildly “printing money”, creating inflation, and debasing the currency, then, no, The Fed is not out of control.

A second charge that both the right and left have leveled is that The Fed shouldn’t have made loans to foreign banks and governments.  In a pure-thought fantasy world of theoretical political economy, I suppose The Fed would be a nationalist institution.  Certainly we expect the central bank of any other nation to be dominated by solely by protecting their own nation’s interests. (in the case of the Eurozone, it would be a great improvement if the ECB gave a hoot about even it’s own).  But reality has to intrude.  The U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency. We wanted it that way. More than half of all U.S. money is outside the U.S.  The world’s trading and financial systems depend on the dollar. Given the scale and scope of the crisis in 2008, The Fed had little practical alternative to making loans to some large foreign banks and even some nations.  Nobody else could do it.  The alternatives were too nasty.  Should it be regular practice? No. Should it be encouraged? No. Should we second guess the middle of the crisis when nobody else was stepping up?  Probably not.  Should we think about how to handle it better in the future so we don’t have to rely on The Fed?  Yes.  Have we thought about it and changed? No.  So the second charge of being “out of control” as evidenced by making foreign loans doesn’t really hold up.

The third charge, the question of “secrecy” in the loans is more difficult.  On the one side, it is unseemly for The Fed to be able to make large loans on favorable terms to banks, loans that save those banks’ managers from failure, without any sunshine or transparency.  It makes fertile ground for corruption.  On the other hand, banking is a confidence game. Publicizing loans to banks, even when part of the normal course of affairs, can be misinterpreted by the public, fund managers, or other banks.  It alone could spark a run on a bank. The run then creates the very crisis the loan was intended to avert, turning temporary liquidity crisis into permanent bank failure.

Some fear of the secrecy of these loans is driven by a misunderstanding of what The Fed loans and where it comes from.  Again, this arises from common misunderstandings of what money really is or where it comes from.  Many fear the “money” The Fed lends is money that had to come from somewhere (they suspect taxpayers) or diverted from some other useful purpose.  Not so.  The Fed doesn’t actually lend “money” in the sense that you and I have “money” to spend.  The Fed creates new bank reserves out of thin air.  It’s not spending money and it’s not scarce. The Fed can as easily remove these reserves later in the future.

So, is The Fed “out of control”?  I don’t think so in the way that many critics make the accusation.  Just because I don’t think The Fed is some “out of control money printing machine” doesn’t mean I think The Fed is innocent or doesn’t need to be changed.  The audit revealed other issues regarding decision-making and transparency that I find much more troubling.  They reveal that The Fed has fallen into a kind of “group think” that doesn’t serve the nation well.  I think The Fed is both misguided and poorly structured.  But I’ll deal with that in tomorrow’s post.

The Fed is a Rorschach test.

Giving Thanks

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Today is Thanksgiving Holiday here in the U.S.

I just want to take a moment to thank all of those who help make my life rich and rewarding. They include:

  • my wife and son.  I couldn’t do this all without you.
  • my extended family
  • you, my readers on this blog, it’s been fun and inspiring to see so many people come to the site.  Evidently I’m helping you learn things because you keep referring the site to friends.  Thanks.
  • my students, whose perseverance and curiosity make the teaching fun
  • especially all of my colleagues at the college.  My fellow professors, whose dedication, constant effort, and support have been an enormous inspiration to me, especially with strategic planning project.
  • the college and the people of Michigan and Lansing who provide me the opportunity to teach.
  • the people of Ohio and Michigan who supported the schools and universities that nurtured my learning and education.
  • the people of Occupy wherever for their inspiration and courage.

To all, thanks.

 

 

Malartu, My Other Project

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This is only tangentially related to economics, but I’m pretty excited about some coverage I got for my other project (besides blogging here and teaching at LCC).  If you teach in higher education yourself, you might be interested.  If so, contact me.  The article is from Converge Magazine yesterday:

Economics Professor Starts Designing Tools for Faculty That Meet Their Needs

By Tanya Roscorla
on November 21, 2011 Policy

While vendors make plenty of technology platforms and services that serve students, most of them don’t meet professors’ needs, according to the experience of Jim Luke, an economics professor from Lansing College.

They require a major time investment and make professors’ jobs harder, he said.

“Just in 10 years the amount of time and work it takes to be a good teacher has just really skyrocketed, and a good bit of it is because of the software and the systems. They are not friendly and easy to use.”

While billions of dollars pour into campus enterprise technology and services for students, few people look at the teacher’s job. And few people create tools for teachers that they need.

For these reasons, Luke decided to start a nonprofit called Malartu Inc. While projects exist in the early stages, he hopes that the tools he envisions will help professors be more productive and effective.

Please read the rest of the article here as it describes our plans for TheProfNet and Curriculum Intelligence.

Occupy Wall Street Meets Fahrenheit 451 – Whose Property Rights?

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I’m not the most regular blogger.  I really do strive to post daily, it often doesn’t work out. Sometimes my schedule pinched.  Other times, health issues get in the way (ever try to write with a toothache?).  But then there are times when the news makes me so angry I can’t find civil words that might illuminate instead of inflame.  This past week my tooth hurt, but it was really the latter.

As most know by now, the New York City Police organized and conducted a raid to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters last week.  They did it under cover of night using paramilitary tactics.  There was excessive and unnecessary violence.  I won’t go into that here. You can try one of the literally thousands of YouTube videos about the police brutality.  It was an apparent coordinated national effort since 18 other cities conducted similar raids with similar tactics on the same day.

Yale University lecturer John Stoehr has written how the order for the police to clear the Occupy Wall Street crowd from Zucotti Park came from Brookfield Properties, a private company, despite a court order allowing the protesters. For Mayor Bloomberg private property rights trump any kind of public rights, even when the public’s right is backed by a court.  Stoehr also observes how Brookfield Properties is also subsidized by the public coffers to the tune of $174.5 million.  Apparently those private property rights include the right to the public’s money.  It’s no wonder that JP Morgan Chase has felt the need to bribe donate to the Police Department.

The mayor and his police force’s concern with property rights doesn’t extend to everybody.  Only the rich, the 1%, are entitled to property rights protection.  Ordinary citizens are not.  Consider the police department’s treatment of the property of a private library.  Many have told the story of the police’s destruction of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s public library, but I’ll let the American Library Association tell it here:

The People’s Library, a library constructed by the New York Occupy Wall Street movement, was seized in the early morning hours of Nov. 15, by the New York Police Department during a planned raid to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park. The library held a collection of more than 5,000 items and provided free access to books, magazines, newspapers and other materials.  According to ALA members who visited the site, the library reflected many of ALA’s core intellectual freedom values and best practices—a balanced, cataloged collection, representing diverse points of view, that included children’s books and reference service often provided by professional librarians.

City officials assured library staff that library materials would be safely transported to a sanitation depot, but the majority of the collection is still missing and returned items were damaged, including laptops and other equipment.  The likelihood of recovering all library materials is bleak, as witnesses reported that library materials were thrown into dumpsters by police and city sanitation workers.

Longstanding ALA policy states:

“The American Library Association deplores the destruction of libraries, library collections and property, and the disruption of the educational purpose by that act, whether it be done by individuals or groups of individuals and whether it be in the name of honest dissent, the desire to control or limit thought or ideas, or for any other purpose.”

American Library Association (ALA) President Molly Raphael released the following statement regarding the destruction of the People’s Library:

“The dissolution of a library is unacceptable. Libraries serve as the cornerstone of our democracy and must be safeguarded. An informed public constitutes the very foundation of a democracy, and libraries ensure that everyone has free access to information.

“The very existence of the People’s Library demonstrates that libraries are an organic part of all communities. Libraries serve the needs of community members and preserve the record of community history.  In the case of the People’s Library, this included irreplaceable records and material related to the occupation movement and the temporary community that it represented.

“We support the librarians and volunteers of the Library Working Group as they re-establish the People’s Library.”

The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 60,000 members. Its mission is to promote the highest quality library and information services and public access to information.

The police and Mayor Bloomberg had no right to destroy these books, magazines, and computers. They had no court orders to do it.  They simply did it because they could. Because they can’t tolerate people learning and thinking for themselves.  In doing so, Mayor Bloomberg and the entire police force have revealed that none of this is about property rights as conservatives and libertarians like to claim. It’s not about the “rule of law” – they ignored the courts. It’s not about protecting some “liberty” or “Western cultural tradition”.  It makes no difference whether the police seize steal private books and destroy them in hiding, or they burn them in public. There’s a long history of  governments and police forces that destroy books. None of it is democratic or supportive of freedom.  It’s about enforcing special privilege for an elite and for destroying democracy.  It is in service to oligarchy, not democracy or liberty.

The Top 0.1% Vs. Rest of Us Throughout the 20th Century

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Following up on yesterday’s post about the Global Top Incomes Database, I thought I’d give an example.  Here’s what I created:

So what are we looking at?  The blue line shows almost a century of the average income of the bottom 90% of American earners (in constant, real 2008 dollars – scale on right side).  This represents the typical American worker and the fate of the working/middle classes.  Basically it shows nine different trends or periods.

  • From 1917 until 1929, there was no improvement at all (actually a dip in the 1920-21 depression).  Despite all the talk about “roaring twenties”, it wasn’t for the average American worker.
  • 1929-1933, incomes really drop precipitously as the nation falls into the Great Depression.
  • 1933-1937, incomes begin to recover based on the government spending programs of the New Deal and correction of the banking/financial crises of 1932-33.  But the progress stumbles in 1938 as Roosevelt and Congress switch course and try to balance the budget before we’re back to full employment (are you listening Obama?).
  • 1938-1943 incomes really grow dramatically as the nation regains full employment and unions gain power.  The driver of the recovery is the near unlimited willingness to spend to arm for World War II and the demand for food and other items by warring allies.
  • 1944-1949, incomes stagnate again, partly as a result of demobilization of the war effort.
  • 1949-1973 brings the Golden Age. Real economic growth in the U.S. is the strongest it’s ever been and thanks to Keynesian government policies, a productivity-sharing social contract between managements and unions, and strong world demand, the workers get their share of it.  This is the period of fastest U.S. growth.
  • 1973-1993 brings twenty years of declining real incomes for most workers.  Part of it is driven by slower growth brought on by two oil price supply shocks.  Part is inflation (although only until the mid-80′s). Part is driven by a major political shift towards conservative free market policies (“Reaganomics”).  And part is driven by a weakening of unions and union membership.  The economy, while it grows, doesn’t grow near as fast as it did in the Golden Age.
  • 1994-2000 shows a slight recovery in incomes during the Clinton administration.
  • 2001 starts another decline and it’s been pretty much downhill ever since.  Note that the graph ends in 2008 (last available data), but other more recent data indicates the time series has continued to decline significantly.

So what can we conclude from the typical worker incomes, the blue line of average incomes for the bottom 90%,?  Well, yes, as some conservatives and libertarians have been pointing out, today’s incomes are historically high – around $32,000 per worker.  And consumption by household is even higher.  But consumption has risen despite incomes stagnating recently. It’s because many, many more households now depend on two workers for incomes.  Yes today’s incomes are dramatically higher compared to 76 years ago – roughly 6 times higher. But all of the increase happened in the first 38 years after 1932.  Today’s incomes per worker are actually lower than they were in 1973 – 38 years ago.

Now let’s consider the red line.  This shows the percentage share of the national income earned received by the top 0.1%, the top one tenth of one percent.  These are the really, really rich.  There are really only three periods here.  The period before the Great Depression.  Observe that it really was a roaring twenties for the really rich.  In the decade of 1920-1929 their share of national income rose from around 3.5% to over 6.5% – all while the average American worker stagnated. The game was rigged.  As the U.S. economy grew in total GDP terms in the 20′s and as productivity soared, the benefits of that improved productivity went to the rich, not to workers.  The rich lost ground in the Great Depression because the stock market crashed and the banking system imploded.

From 1936 until 1979, the share of income taken by the top 0.1% declines rather steadily and significantly.  Why?  A dominant factor is that income tax rates were rather progressive with high rates on the very high top end.  Now this simply means that the share declined – they took a slightly smaller slice of the pie each year.  But the pie was growing very, very fast, so in dollar terms their incomes were still rising too.  Do not take away the idea that the rich suffered income declines during this period.  On contrary, they did well in absolute terms.  They just didn’t do well at the expense of others.

But in 1979 the rich strike back.  Their share of income starts rising steadily until it reaches the same very high levels today that are reminiscent of the late 1920′s.  What happened?  Well the same forces that hurt the working/middle classes during the last 30+ years worked to the rich’s advantage.  But another important shift was changes in income tax policies.  Initially Carter, but then Reagan and Bush all cut tax rates for the top end.  Reagan did even more.  He eliminated several top end brackets.  This resulted in people in the top 0.1% (multi-millionaires) now paying the same rates as people making $250,000 per year.  That didn’t happen in the Golden Age.  Back then there were special brackets for the very, very rich top end.

So what can we conclude overall?  Well, for one thing, we should definitely bury any idea of “trickle-down” tax cuts helping average workers.  When the economy grew the fastest and typical workers did best was when tax rates on the rich were high.  When tax rates on the rich are lower, the economy grows more slowly and average worker incomes stagnate.  We might also conclude that the OccupyWallStreet movement (#OWS) has a point.  The system isn’t fair and it isn’t working for average workers.  This isn’t a call for socialism, it’s a call for the vibrant capitalism we had in the mid-20th century. That Golden Age of the middle of the 20th century is the only time when we really didn’t have “class warfare”.  We had a social contract that called for sharing the gains from improved productivity. But a little over 30 years ago the really rich declared war on the rest.  It’s class warfare and the middle class has been losing. 

Awesome Resource – The World Top Incomes Database

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Any student, researcher, or #OWS protestor interested in income distribution and income growth should definitely be aware of this resource:  The World’s Top Incomes Database.  (hat tip to Krugman, from whom I learned about it).  It’s a very powerful database combined with a very easy to use interface that allows you to extract exactly the data you want as a spreadsheet (see the Database tab) or to customize your own graphs.

You can pick from a growing list countries -over 25 already and more under development.  It’s particularly interesting because it’s not just the usual developed nation suspects.  There’s also data on developing countries and some less-developed nations.  Then you can pick your time series and variables.  It’s a tremendous variety:  share of national income by the top  x% (without or with capital gains).  In some case, data series are available on actual average real incomes by percentile groups.  What’s also nice is that they don’t just leave it at a split between the top 1% and the bottom 90%.  You can specify the top 1%, 5%, 10%, 0.1% or even the 0.01%.  Amazing.  You pick the time frame from early in the 20th century up to 2008.  Then you regenerate your graph or data table.  The best part is that by right clicking on the graph, you can download and save the graph.  Students: are you listening?  Understand the implications for research papers?  

The Quantity Theory of Money and Fears of Inflation Are Nonsense

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We rarely get to conduct scientific experiments in economics, but for the last 3+ years The Federal Reserve has unintentionally conducted a test of an economic theory called the “Quantity Theory of Money” (QTM). QTM makes some very specific predictions – predictions that Ron Paul, conservatives on Wall Street, and others have been repeating a lot.  Unfortunately for them, QTM has failed the test.

First, some background on the theory. The QTM is and has been one of the foundations of both monetarist thought and Austrian economic thought.  In it’s base form, it’s based on an accounting identity that must, by definition, be true.  The notation sometimes varies, but the quantity theory of money is based on a definition called the equation of exchange.  This equation goes like this:

M times V = P times Q
where:
M: Money supply
V:  velocity of money, or the number of times the average dollar changes hands and is spent during the same time period as Q is measured.
P:    price level
Q:   real GDP (sometimes real National Income, Y, is used – same thing essentially)

So what does the equation say?  If you look at the left hand, M x V, you get a representation of the total spending in the economy.  It’s how much money was in circulation times the number of times that money was spent.  The right side, P x Q, gives us the value of nominal GDP.  It’s the value of all the real stuff we bought (Q, real GDP) times the Price level P which translates it into today’s prices.  Put the two sides together and you’ve got total nominal spending in money terms must be the same as the total value of the things we bought.  Duh.  Of course it is.  It’s an identity.   It’s the macro equivalent of saying that if I spend $5 each time (M) on 7 trips to the grocery (V) to buy 70 apples (Q) at $0.50 each (P), then I will spend $35 on $35 worth of stuff.

As an identity definition it’s not really very interesting.  It’s when economists begin to use it as a model of future outcomes that problems arise.

The typical way QTM is used, and the simple way folks like Ron Paul and a lot of folks who are upset at Federal Reserve efforts to stimulate the economy, is by thinking of what happens when M, the money supply, is suddenly increased.  The thinking is that an increase in M must result in an increase in P in order to keep the equation balanced.  This is the foundation of modern inflationary fears in the last  few years.  Typically folks using the QTM this way don’t say things like “an increase in M must lead to an increase in P”.  They say things like “The Fed is printing money like mad and that’s going to lead to inflation”  since an increase in the price level, P, is how we measure inflation.

But there’s actually four terms in this equation.  Any of them can change.  That’s where assumptions come in.  The advocates of QTM, whom I’ll call “inflation-phobes” for the moment since they’re always fearful of inflation, make some strong assumptions.  They assume three big things.  First, they assume that the velocity, V, is constant.  In other words, according to them, you and I always spend our money at exactly the same rate. Suppose I spend my whole paycheck every two weeks now.  They assume that I’ll always spend my whole paycheck every two weeks no matter how big or small that check is or whether I’m suddenly fearful of losing my job next month.  The evidence for the constant velocity assumption is weak.  You be the judge using the St.Louis Fed data:

To me, that doesn’t look constant.  If V is constant, then any increase in M also increases spending, MxV.  But if V isn’t constant, then an increase in M can be offset by simultaneous slowdown in velocity.

The next assumption is that real GDP is always at capacity.  In other words, there is no unused capacity in the economy such as unemployed workers or empty office buildings or factories running only 1 shift when they can run 2.  This is assumption is essential to the inflation-phobes because it means that Q can’t be increased.  This is necessary to their desired outcome because it would imply that the only way for PxQ to rise to meet an increase in MxV is by having P increase.  I won’t go to the trouble of showing data and graph to prove that Q isn’t at capacity.  If you have doubts, see last week’s update on employment and GDP.

There’s one more unstated assumption by the inflation-phobes.  They assume that any increase in base money, which is primarily the bank reserves The Fed makes available to commercial banks, will necessarily translate into M1, money in circulation among the public.  This too is a bad assumption.  There times, like the last 3 years, when commercial banks don’t want to or can’t lend.  In times like this bank reserves just sit there on the books safely tucked away from any kind of productive economic activity or spending.  The Fed can push reserves onto the banks’ books, but it can’t turn those reserves into loans or spending by customers. Another weakness in this assumption is the idea that even if the money ends up in private hands it will be used for spending on goods and services. Instead, what we’ve seen is that much of what little lending the big banks have been doing has been to finance financial market trading and speculation – things like oil futures.  Speculating in oil futures isn’t the same thing as actually refining and selling oil.  The speculation doesn’t create jobs and isn’t part of the circular flow. Production is.

So we’re back to the question of testing the QTM theory.  The QTM theory of money as inflation-phobes express it, says that increases in base money (M) necessarily must result in inflation (increases in P) at some time in the near future.

In 2008 and 2009 The Federal Reserve expanded bank reserves greatly.  It expanded the monetary base dramatically.  The Fed invented a variety of new names and methods for doing it, although almost all of them involved The Fed buying some kind of bond, security or financial asset.  If the QTM theory and the hard-money inflation-phobes are right, there should have been a dramatic increase in inflation.  They predicted it.  Again and again.  It simply hasn’t happened.  Paul Krugman put together an nice little graph showing the failure of the QTM theory:

The thing is, of course, that the past three years — the post-Lehman era during which the Fed presided over a tripling of the monetary base — have been an excellent test of that model, which has failed with flying colors. Here are the data — I’ve included commodity prices (IMF index) as well as consumer prices for the people who believe that the BLS is hiding true inflation (which it isn’t):

A couple of notes: for the commodity prices it matters which month you start, because they dropped sharply between August and September 2008. I use the IMF index for convenience– easy to download. (Thomson Reuters I use when I just want to snatch a picture from Bloomberg). But none of this should matter: when you triple the monetary base, the resulting inflation shouldn’t be something that depends on the fine details — unless the model is completely wrong.

So, we’ve had a test, a pretty substantial test of the Quantity Theory of Money and the assumption that any increase in monetary base must lead inevitably to an increase in prices and inflation.  The theory has failed.  It should be put to rest.  Milton Friedman, a man as responsible as any other for pusing QTM, once famously claimed that “inflation is anywhere and everywhere always a monetary phenomenon”.  He was clearly wrong, there’s more involved than just base money growth.

Rhetoric Is A Powerful Tool To Advance Moneyed Interests

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Money is essential to a successful economy.  But it’s money in circulation that’s useful.  Money that’s locked up in storage in vaults and savings doesn’t help.  The early economists understood this well and often used the analogy of money-is-to-economy as blood-is-to-human-body.  Circulating money, money that is used to buy things is as important to the economy as the blood in your arteries and veins.  The analogy works.  It leads us to realize that money, and more of it, can and usually is a good thing.

The analogy, however, doesn’t work for those economists and policy-makers who want are more interested in enabling the top 1% or so to profit at no risk by earning income on holding money.  Theoretically, the rich, the top 1%, could earn income from their large stores of wealth by investing it in production.  But the profit-by-investment-in-production method requires risk. It’s hard. It requires work to find and exploit good investment opportunities. From the perspective of the really wealthy, it can be more desirable to make money by simply owning money.  To do that, it’s necessary to that there be no inflation. They actually prefer deflation because then their cash wealth gets more valuable without being risked or used productively at all. The other approach to making money without risk by simply owning money is to lend it. Instead of starting, owning, and building a business, investing in equity, you make loans. Ideally you use your wealth and influence to get politicians to guarantee your loans – heads you win and tails somebody else loses. These approaches to making money by simply owning money require that money be scarce and hard to get.  It’s directly counter to the money in circulation paradigm.  A circulatory system deprived of money is good thing those who make money from money instead of labor.

But to persuade the mass of people, the 99%, the ones earning money from labor, it’s necessary to change the metaphor.  That’s been rather effectively in the second half of the 20th century.  It’s been done by extending a different metaphor.  Economists have long used the word liquidity for the idea of how easy it is to convert an asset into cash and therefore spent. For example, real estate (particularly in this market) is very illiquid.  I could own a $1 million house but be unable to buy a Coke from the 7-11 store because I lack any cash.  That’s an extreme example of illiquidity.  In contrast, a liquid asset is one that is either actually cash or easily turned into cash so it can be spent.  There’s a whole range of assets in between with varying degrees of liquidity.

This idea of liquidity and it’s association with cash has been used to push a metaphor that suggests the problem is too much money in the economy.  We’re peppered with phrases like “drowning in debt” or a house mortgage that is “underwater”.  It makes us feel that the liquid stuff is undesirable.  So we get  a central bank that’s reluctant to create and inject money into the economy because critics claim that will create too much liquidity and they falsely claim that it’s inflationary.  When the central bank does increase inject liquidity into the economy, it does it by getting the money to precisely the people who keep it from circulating.  We get a government that refuses to use it’s ability to directly inject money into the economy and get it into circulation.

Government ultimately is the source of all money.  Only government can define and create money.  It has two ways to do it. It can simply create (“print” or “mint” if you will, but it’s not that way anymore) money and spend it.  That puts money immediately into circulation in the circular flow of goods and services.  Or, the government could create money reserves for the banks, a riskier strategy.  The banks then can lend using a fractional reserve logic.  If the banks lend out the reserves, then money is created.  If the borrowers from the banks spend the borrowed money, then it’s in circulation.  If the borrowers use the money to simply buy other financial assets, then it’s not in circulation and is sterile.

In our modern system, the government (in the U.S. and many other nations) has delegated the responsibility for creating money and putting it into circulation to quasi-private central banks such as The Federal Reserve Bank.  In today’s workings of the financial system, these central banks have further delegated the responsibility and decision-making on money-creation to private commercial banks by providing reserves for whatever level of loans they choose.  When those banks choose not to create money or choose not to create and provide money in a way that puts it into circulation, the system suffers. We suffer from too little liquidity.

Daniel Becker at Angry Bear made this point very well in a long post there in June 2011.  He points out that we should really talk about “dehydrating in debt”, not “drowing in debt”.  The dehydration metaphor leads us directly to the solution – more money in circulation.  I from the conclusion to his post:

Got that? Let’s summarize: The share of income to the 99% of people declined from 1976 onward. At the same time the means of making money changed from labor production to money manipulation (producer economy to finanicialized economy) adding to the reduction in share of income. We also changed the ideology to one from relying on the vast population (as represented by the individual and We the People) to relying on a small portion of the population to distribute what money was created. We did this for 33 years. By 1996, people were borrowing as a means to sustain their standard of living (not increase it). If the people are not spending to increase their standard of living, then is the economy really growing? By 2006 people were no longer able to make the payments and consumption was declining.  Then gas hit $4/gal and winter heating was looking like another $4000 to $6000 would be needed.

To date, nothing has been done to address this. Nothing at all. And, by “this” I mean, the income inequality that has resulted in an an economy where a very small group of people (top 1%) are taking money out of the system (that is money that would fuel the engine) faster than the engine can make it which results in an ever faster declining share to the rest of the people. Instead, we have refined new fuel and dumped it right into the top 1%’s hands and wonder why the engine is still sputtering?

One other issue I have with framing and the words used today: Under water.

People are not under water. They are not drowning in debt. On the contrary, people are dehydrating. They are starving for water. Do you know what the symptoms are of dehydration? You get thirsty and then urinate less to conserve water. (debt spending) Then you stop making tears and stop sweating. (can’t borrow) Eventually your muscles cramp, the heart palpitates and you get dizzy. (close to bankruptcy, voting against your interest) Let it go long enough and you get confused, weak and your coping mechanisms fail. (Tea Party, etc) In the end, your systems fail and you die. (recession)

People are dehydrating and Washington is doing nothing about it because they believe it is drowning.  They are throwing out life boats to people in a desert.  That is the chart Ken linked to.

Sometimes Methodology Isn’t Everything

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Brad Delong points us to a study published in the British Medical Association jounal BMJ and quotes from it:

Smith and Pell: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials 327 (7429): 1459 — bmj.com:

No randomised controlled trials of parachute use have been undertaken

The basis for parachute use is purely observational, and its apparent efficacy could potentially be explained by a “healthy cohort” effect”

The full journal article is well worth following at the link he quotes.  Besides the laugh (warning: the positive health effects of laughing haven’t been proved by randomized controlled trials either), the authors suggest by parody an excellent point.  Sometimes rigid adherence to one single methodology in science is sometimes not only uncalled for and useless, it can also be immoral.  Some Austrian and New Classical economists might want to take note.

Quickie – Some Graphs

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I’ll be talking tomorrow to a bunch of students about income distribution, student loans, and other things of interest to the #OWS crowd.  These are some graphs I’ve collected from other sources that I’ll use.  No time to write much analysis today. It’s mostly just the graphs.

From Paul Krugman:

The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

From CBO via Krugman again:

Inequality Trends In One Picture

Just an addendum on the role of the top 1 percent versus the college-noncollege differential. Here, from the CBO report, are the changes, in percentage points, of the shares of income going to three groups. The top quintile excluding the top 1 percent – which is basically the abode of the well-educated who aren’t among the very lucky few – has only kept pace with the overall growth in incomes. Just about all of the redistribution has taken place from the bottom 80 to the top 1 (and we know that most of that has actually gone to the top 0.1).

It’s a tiny minority, not a broad class of well-educated Americans, who have been winning here.

Again from CBO via Krugman:

A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Lose

OK, I see that some people are doubling down on the claim that rising inequality is all about education — when what the CBO report drives home is that this is all wrong, the big increase has come from gains at the very top. I have to admit that I have a sneaking suspicion that this is in part driven by KDS (DS for derangement syndrome): some people will rush to take a position precisely because I have debunked it. But anyway, it’s really, really wrong.

Here’s the CBO result:

Notice that the 81-99 percentiles have seen only modest gains; it’s really the top 1 percent that drives the story.

For comparison, here’s some data on wages of men by education from EPI:

Again from CBO via Krugman:

Graduates Versus Oligarchs

Dean Baker raises an important point here: it’s really awfully late in the game to be saying that the important inequality issue is college graduates versus non-graduates. It’s not clear that this was ever true, and it certainly hasn’t been true for a while.

I wrote about this years ago, using Ben Bernanke’s maiden testimony as Fed chair as an entry point. As I said then, Bernanke — like many others — had made

a fundamental misreading of what’s happening to American society. What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke’s position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It’s the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don’t have these skills.

…

Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting. The notion that it’s all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it’s just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that’s the real story.

Let me illustrate this point with some CBO data. First, from the new report, here are the income shares of the top 1 percent and the rest of the top quintile:

There has been no rise in the share of the 81-99 group! It’s all about the top 1 percent.

Second, even within the top 1 percent the gains are going mainly to a small minority. An earlier CBO report, using slightly different methods, looked inside the top 1 percent up through 2005. Here’s some of that data:

The big gains have gone to the top 0.1 percent.

From Menzie Chinn:

CBO on Income Inequality, and Interpreting OWS

by Menzie Chinn

Tabulating Inequality Trends

The CBO released a report on income inequality earlier this week. This means that the “inequality deniers” are having a more difficult time arguing that widening spreads an wages, compensation, or overall income are merely statistical artifacts dreamt up by liberals (see e.g. here). What is of most interest is (i) real after-tax income of the top 1 percentile has risen about 275%, and (ii) the pre-transfers/pre-tax income share of the top 1% has increased most profoundly.

SummaryFigure1.png
Summary Figure 1, Growth in Real After-Tax Income from 1979 to 2007, from “Trends in Income Distribution,” CBO Director’s Blog, 25 October 2011. SummaryFigure2.png
Summary Figure 2, Shares of Market Income, 1979 and 2007, from “Trends in Income Distribution,” CBO Director’s Blog, 25 October 2011.The CBO Director’s Blog observes:

The rapid growth in average real household market income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income was a major factor contributing to the growing dispersion of income. Average real household market income for the highest income group tripled over the period, whereas such income increased by about 19 percent for a household at the midpoint of the income distribution. As a result, the share of total market income received by the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled between 1979 and 2007, growing from about 10 percent to more than 20 percent.

The foregoing is completely consistent with the views laid out in Lost Decades (by me and Jeffry Frieden), Add-Figure 6-1 highlighted in this post, as well as this post.

Interpreting the OWS Protests

Against this backdrop, powerful forces have been deployed against raising tax rates at all on the top one percentile (and instead want to raise taxes on the lower quintiles).[1] [2]. The OWS protests can be interpreted in ths context. From TPM:

…Harvard Government Professor Jeffry Frieden said…

“Every debt crisis leads to major political conflicts over who will pay the price of dealing with the debt burden,” Frieden wrote. “One way or another, the accumulated debts will have to be addressed — either by writing some of them off, or by paying them off. Will the burden be borne by taxpayers? Government employees? Financial institutions? … I think that, in the context of our financial difficulties, OWS may reflect the fact that many Americans feel that too much sacrifice has been demanded of working people and the middle class, and too little of the financial community and the wealthy.”

Diane Lim Rogers, Chief Economist at the fiscally hawkish Concord Coalition, made similar points about the more reckless economic policies of the past decade: Much of the distaste with both Washington and Wall Street comes back to fact that DC is simply unwilling to change course.

“The difference is that during the Clinton years the rising tide was lifting all boats,” Lim Rogers said in an interview with TPM. “Low-income households were still doing better. Even then, the rich did really well, despite their taxes being raised.”

But what’s different now is that income inequality isn’t a political tenet of the left: it’s truly hurting people. Lim Rogers said the poverty rate is actually of more concern than the rich doing better given the circumstances.

“The outrage is not that the rich are richer,” she said. “It’s that the poor have gotten poorer — the inequality has become bipolar.”

Interestingly, Lost Decades, which makes many of these points, has been cited approvingly in at least one OWS document.

This is of course in contrast to views such as that of Econbrowser reader Brian who commented:

I honestly fail to see why some on the left are so concerned about how much money those at the top of the income distribution earn. Why not focus instead on why poor people are poor? And please, blaming that on the rich is a non-starter. People make bad choices in life. They get pregnant before they finish school and have a career started. They use drugs. They get tattoos and body piercings all over themselves and then wonder why no one will hire them for an entry-level job. They do not take school seriously. They have parents who never should have bred in the first place. I really, honestly and truly feel for the poor people and hope they can lift themselves out of poverty. But throwing more money at the problem, and taking it from the “rich”, is not the solution.

This worldview is apparently not rare; see this quote:

I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations (Occupy Together) are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! …

I think the defenders of the interests of the top income percentile will continue to harp on these arguments: The unemployed are deservedly unemployed; the poor are deservedly poor. This will help distract the electorate from the issue of whom will bear the burden of adjustment to the aftermath of the financial crisis(including stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio), and the response to secular trends in income inequality.See more on tax policyhere.