Matt Nolan

Working towards a “why” of changes in manufacturing

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There has been a long-running debate in New Zealand and around the world about the “hollowing out” of manufacturing – ultimately this is a subset of the wider concern about tradable vs non-tradable economic activity in NZ.  Also as we have said, it may be possible that what we are seeing is scarcity easing in manufacturing – a situation where we would expect productivity rise, and potentially employment fall.

With this in mind the RBNZ undertook research to figure out in what ways manufacturing output has changed post-crisis.  This can be found here.

By the way, I love the title “building a picture of New Zealand manufacturing”.  It captures the descriptive essence of economics 😀

Now, what comes out of this research?

  1. Employment fell during the GFC, and hasn’t recovered.
  2. Productivity has risen
  3. Exporting sectors have done well, due to their exposure to Australia.  The low NZ$ to Aussie and a strong Aussie market for plant and machinery (think fridges as much as capital equipment 😉 ) have helped out even as global demand has been weak.
  4. Import competiting sectors have been hit – as imported capital equipment, and imported consumer goods, have been cheap.  This is a story of the high dollar, and potentially “overcapacity” overseas.
  5. Construction, and the related drop in domestic demand for manufactured goods (think furniture and hardware as well – a retail area that has been gutted), has had a major impact. Get a remodeling done at affordable kitchen remodeling from Gamma Cabinetry
  6. Although manufacturing is currently close to where we would expect given construction – during the deepest parts of the crisis it was worse.

These trends are important to note.  It is construction exposed industries that have struggled the most – not firms looking to export (although this is definitely not to suggest that there have been difficulties for exporters – after all, this is a massive global slowdown).  Painting it this way shows that the “solution” to any perceived “problem” is unlikely to be as clear as some people writing articles are keen to suggest 😉

jamesz

Housing politics in the UK vs NZ

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Housing is expensive in NZ so the government commissioned a report into why that is. It said the problem was (largely) zoning restrictions constraining supply. The authorities were unimpressed.

Housing is expensive in the UK so the government suggested opening up more land to housing. The papers are unimpressed.

I doubt that the populations of Auckland and the UK are all that different in their views, so what is causing the divergence of political views? I’m sure there’s some inference to be made here about the politicians’ constituencies based on public choice ideas, so let me know in the comments if you can join the dots!

Matt Nolan

A different view of an inflation/price level target: No-monetization commitment

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In New Zealand a strange thing is happening.  While other countries are looking at making their inflation targets more explicit following the crisis, and many more countries are debating whether to use a level or growth target (eg the NGDP target is essentially a price level target with some flexibility – while flexible inflation targeting is very close to a NGDP growth targeting type rule), there appears to be calls here that we should throw these things away here.

We have discussed how these rules are useful a number of times in the past, especially important we always say is the ability these targets have for “anchoring expectations”.  After all, if we can anchor expectations of inflation then:

  1. We can largely avoid relative price distortions from unexpected inflation
  2. We increase certainty about the return on investment (by getting rid of purely nominal shifts for contracts without inflation adjustment)
  3. We have the ability to strongly respond in the face of a crisis – as inflation expectations are anchored, firms are monopolistically competitive, and some prices are sticky we can use monetary policy to help boost underlying demand in a demand constrained economy.
  4. As a result, fiscal policy only has to focus on the supply side of the economy and redistribution (unless we run into the zero lower bound, and the central bank isn’t allowed to print or buy assets to meet its targets).

However, for some reason this isn’t enough for people.  So lets look at the idea of expectation in a more public choice sense.

Governments don’t like us to know we are being taxed to pay for the treats we get given, some democratically elected officials are tempted to “monetize debt” in order to pay for it – its a silent tax!  To solve this, we give a central bank independence.  Ok, but the independence only exists in so far as the central bank is following a rule provided by government.  So we want contracts that help solve any possible “time-inconsistency problem”.  This is all fine and good.

So what should this contract be like?  Ultimately, the implicit tax appears whenever inflation is higher than expected – so when the central bank pumps in more juice than is consistent with the price setting behaviour of firms and households.  At first firms and households will be unsure if the extra currency is additional demand for their product/service, or for all products/services, so they will lift output/work … but once they see costs rise and once they see inflation itself is higher, they will respond by lifting inflation expectations.

This tells us that any extra output from breaking an inflation target, is only temporary, but the increase in inflation expectations will be permanent.  Again, this is one of our typical justifications … where does monetization come in?

Well the higher inflation also appears when we think about government bonds.  In money markets people ask for a nominal rate of return, based on expectations of inflation.  By increasing inflation past this level, we lower the real debt burden faced by government – they get a windfall, and the people paying for it are the people who lean’t to them.  However, this windfall is only temporary and ends up with higher nominal interest rates and higher inflation expectations (and realized inflation).

Government could commit to not doing this in two ways:  1)  Only sell inflation adjusted bonds,  2)  Have a central bank with an inflation target.

Here a credible inflation target also amounts to a commitment by government to not tax its citizens by stealth.

Inflation/price level/NGDP targeting (where we are targeting forecasts of the future) offers a clear and consistent way of dealing with the fact that we have a monopoly supplier of currency in a public choice sense, and it allows central bankers to manage the “demand side” of the economy IF we have appropriate information and an understanding of what is going on.  Getting a central bank to target “other things” outside of how they impact upon the forecast of inflation/price level/NGDP doesn’t make any sense.  [Note:  People weirdly seem to think that the Bank completely ignores them – this is completely wrong.  They focus on them as issues with regard to monetary policy, and all that information is captured in their inflation forecast]

If we think the “exchange rate is too high” ask why.  We might say the current account deficit has been high for a long time, but then why.  Well its high because the real exchange rate is high, and real interest rates are high – this tells us that domestic savings are too low … this has nothing to do with the inflation target of a central bank (as they do not control the long-term real interest or exchange rates) and everything to do with competition and fiscal policy in the domestic economy.  It is part of the “cost” of the policies that we have put in place as a society – so we should accept that there is a trade-off there, instead of destroying the RBNZ’s ability to do its job – as we have mentioned before.  Scott Sumner discusses this issue more here – and I think it is a fundamental confusion between the two that is creating so much noise in NZ at present.

 

jamesz

Anomalies and market efficiency

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Tim Harford points to a paper on the EMH showing that:

…after an anomaly has been published, it quickly shrinks – although it does not disappear.

The anomalies are most likely to persist when they apply to small, illiquid markets – as one might expect, because there it is harder to profit from the anomaly.

It’s always good to remind ourselves that all anomalies are only fully priced in equilibrium, and we’re probably never in equilibrium. The process of moving towards equilibrium involves market participants seeking out those anomalies and exploiting them. So the continued discovery of new market anomalies isn’t evidence against market efficiency: it’s merely observation of the normal equilibrating process.

Matt Nolan

More on describing the crisis

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Rates blog posted another article by me, this time talking about why the GFC persisted.  So in the first one I laid down Fed actions as the catalyst, and in the second one I’ve primarily laid the blame on institutional confusion in Europe.  I’m not sure anyone will find this article, by itself, particularly enlightening.  These first two are both simply descriptive (although with a background structure guiding what I talk about), and their only purpose is to illustrate that the “crisis” itself was kicked off by a sudden change in the expected actions of policy makers, and uncertainty about that action.  This isn’t to say that even with perfect policy we wouldn’t have had a recession – but it is to say that the depth and length of the slowdown that has occurred is related to such policy inconsistency.

So if we live in a world where we have decided that a lender of last resort is required in the case of such a crisis, what does that mean for the rest of the time.  After all such a commitment leads to moral hazard.  I’ll be covering that next week in the conclusion article.

The reason I’ve tied these three articles together as I have is because I wanted to create a clear narrative, and then work out what that suggests from policy – that requires answering a bunch of stylised facts (the timing in the crisis, the length of the crisis) with a central story.  The world is not that simple, and so every movement and every “bad thing” that occurred cannot be explained by such a clear narrative.  But it does allow us to help identify an issue and then understand what this means.

Matt Nolan

Where the moral hazard comes from

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I have a sneaking suspicion that the term moral hazard is getting a bit abused at the moment.  Let’s use the Wikipedia definition:

A moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk

Cool, and in the case of the bank bailouts that have occurred around the world, who were the people who knew that the cost of their “risky behaviour” would fall on someone else … bondholders.  This is from Garett Jones:

So by their estimate over 90% of the benefit to banks’ balance sheets went to bondholders …

If most political battles need a villain to succeed, it’s easy to see why bondholders have largely escaped the wrath of voters: Bondholders make poor villains.  The bank promised to repay, and now the bank can’t.  The bondholder wasn’t out there making the loans; the bondholder didn’t vote for the directors who led the company to the brink of destruction; the bondholder just handed some cash to the bank and hoped for the best.

Bondholders have had good luck getting government guarantees, and I suspect their luck will continue.  That means rational investors will dump more cash into the megabanks with minimal scrutiny: The megabanks are the new Fannie and Freddie.
The fact is, if we wanted to “get rid of moral hazard” we’d have to accept the inherent riskiness of our lending – we don’t get paid an interest rate for kicks, it covers inflation and a rate of return stemming from lending that has some inherent risk.
The reason economists have generally shown no sympathy for people when the finance companies collapsed here isn’t because we are heartless, it is because people wanted to act as if their lending was riskless.
Remember, if you are complaining about “moral hazard” you are attacking bondholders – not so much the banks (who are easy to demonise because they wear suits), but the people who leant money without considering risk and those who advised them.