Fumbling Around in the Dark

Fumbling around in the dark is a scary thing. You awaken at 2am in a very dark hotel room to find that you are relieving yourself in the closet. Or maybe you are trying to find the glass with one ounce of JD left in it, and you accidently knock your wife’s mobile phone into the toilet. Regardless, fumbling around in the dark can be pretty destructive.

Such fumbling is simple to explain. You are used to having light to guide your eyesight. Take away the light or the eyesight and you find yourself in a treacherous environment. Decision making becomes a totally new thing. You can do it but it necessitates new rules. It might require that you memorize the layout of your hotel room. It might mean groping with hands or buying a cane. How you operate depends very much on the expected time period of the darkness. A temporary situation would be dealt with differently than a permanent one.

It seems to me that the Fed is operating in the dark today. With Congressional economic policy in the potty, we rely on the Fed to guide the economy. Unfortunately, the lights went out in 2008 and the Fed has been groping around for ways to assist the economy ever since. In the beginning, most of us thought that the darkness would be temporary. Now I am not so sure. 

By darkness I mean that we have been dealing with economic problems and performance that are new. Our economic indicators are misbehaving. GDP contracted far more than during our experience of the last 75 years. US inflation bordered on the negative during those years. The Fed was correct to assume its role of lender of last resort. Economic darkness called for rare policies right after 2007.

But the great recession ended in 2009 and, according to my JD calendar, it has been eight years since we started an economic recovery. And yet in those eight years the Fed saw the same thing – economic weakness. And thus the Fed keeps its interest rate target at less than 1% and it leaves trillions of dollars in bank excess reserves. Why is the Fed so afraid to return to a normal monetary policy? Note I haven’t asked why they didn’t raise interest rates to 3-4%. I simply asked, why didn’t they start to return us to a more normal policy?

The latest answer is that they have already attained a normal policy. That is, the economists at the Fed looked into the darkness and drew a conclusion. Normal has changed! In particular, they resurrected a concept called the neutral or natural rate of interest. Aha – the neutral rate of interest has declined and therefore the current rate of less than 1% looks a lot more normal. 

What is the neutral rate and why is the Fed so confident that it dropped like a rock? Tuna – the neutral rate is not the neutered rate. To the rest if you – the neutral rate is an interest rate at which monetary policy is just right. As in Goldilocks, the Fed wants a monetary policy that is neither too cold nor too hot – they want it just right. If for example, the current policy interest rate (the Fed’s main policy target is an interest rate called the Federal Funds Rate) is 0.6% and the neutral rate is 4%, then we would conclude that the Fed’s policy rate is too low. It would also imply that the Fed is stoking the fires of the economy too much. But if the policy rate and the neutral rate are both around 1%, then Goldilocks kissed the charming prince and she and the frog live happily ever after.

As you can imagine, the Fed is relieved that it found economists who would explain why the neutral rate is low – and why it might stay that way until Nolan applies for Social Security. Not to contradict economists who work for the Fed, I will say that if they are wrong about this, then the Fed will continue providing stimulus to the economy long after it should have stopped, and the consequences could and probably will be a Fed-engineered bout of stagflation.

Could they be wrong about the size of the neutral rate? I think so. To conclude that the neutral rate is low, the Fed focuses on recent data that shows among other things a slowly growing economy. Such data includes declining labor force participation, a slowdown in productivity, and a discovery of new planets that might have doppelgangers for Barbara Streisand and Sara Palin. But can we believe all this?

I recall a very widely held concept called Secular Stagnation advanced by leading economists that explained why, after World War II, the US economy would slip back into the Great Depression. It never happened. Similarly, economists today look at data from a spoiled batch of milk. Whatever caused the great recession of 2008-09 and whatever unprecedented policies followed that decline appear to remain with us today. But just as turning off a light switch causes confusion for a while, the impacts of the last eight years will dissipate and then disappear. In the meantime our usual data are going to be very suspect, and thus our conclusions from such data will be equally suspect.

This darkness meant that the Fed had an excellent excuse to use emergency policies in the beginning of the recession. But it does not mean it should make up excuses to continue that policy forever. While the Fed is supposed to support full employment with stable prices, nowhere does it say they should engage in a binary policy of spigots open followed abruptly by closed spigots. The Fed does not know the value of the neutral rate. Erring on the side of a low rate to support its current aggressive policy means risking a future burst of inflation and an eventual Fed-induced recession. To mix metaphors – it is time to take the foot off the accelerator.