Free exchange: Game, set and match

Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley have won this year’s Nobel for economics

Oct 20th 2012 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip] IN MOST countries it is illegal to buy or sell a kidney. If you need a transplant you join a waiting list until a matching organ becomes available. This drives economists nuts. Why not allow willing donors to sell spare kidneys and let patients (or the government, acting on their behalf) bid for them? The waiting list would disappear overnight.

The reason is that most societies find the concept of mixing kidneys and cash repugnant. People often exclude financial considerations from their most important decisions, from the person they marry to the foster child they adopt. Even some transactions that do involve money are not really about price. Universities in America do not admit students based on who pays the most, for example. Rather, they select students based on complex criteria that include grades, test scores and diversity. Similarly, students choose their university on more than just financial factors.

Money is not essential to a market. After all, economics is about maximising welfare, not GDP. But the absence of a price to allocate supply and demand makes it harder to know whether welfare is being maximised. This year’s Nobel prize in economics went to two scholars—Alvin Roth, who has just joined the economics department at Stanford University, and Lloyd Shapley, a retired mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles—who have grappled with that very problem.

Free exchange: The mystery of Jackson Hole

Central bankers wonder why success eludes them

Sep 8th 2012 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip] IMAGINE that the world’s best specialists in a particular disease have convened to study a serious and intractable case. They offer competing diagnoses and treatments. Yet preying on their minds is a discomfiting fact: nothing they have done has worked, and they don’t know why. That sums up the atmosphere at the annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, convened by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and attended by central bankers and economists from around the world*. Near the end Donald Kohn, who retired in 2010 after 40 years with the Fed, asked: “What’s holding the economy back [despite] such accommodative monetary policy for so long?” There was no lack of theories. But, as Mr Kohn admitted, none is entirely satisfying.

Free Exchange: Humbler Horizons

America’s economy is growing at an unimpressive rate. It may not be able to go much faster

May 26th 2012 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip] WHEN the American economy emerged from recession three years ago, forecasters fell into two broad camps. Optimists reckoned brisk growth would quickly return the economy to its long-term potential level of output, the maximum sustainable GDP that could be achieved with the capital and labour on hand. That would pull down unemployment and prop up inflation. Pessimists, however, predicted sluggish growth, persistently high unemployment and inflation that would slip ever lower as a result of unused capacity in the economy.

What has actually happened since then has been a mixture of the two. Unemployment and inflation have moved in the directions that optimists expected. Since peaking at 10% in late 2009, the jobless rate has now fallen by nearly two percentage points. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, dipped below 1% in 2010 but is now above 2%. Yet economic growth has averaged 2.5%, a rate more typical of the economy at full employment rather than when recovering from a deep bust.

Economists advance several explanations for this dichotomy. The drop in unemployment may simply be mechanical, a snapback after employers fired workers too indiscriminately during the recession. Inflation has been underpinned by the indirect effects of higher commodity prices, rising rents and the influence of stable inflation expectations on prices and wages. Optimists say that GDP may be revised up later.

But there is another, more troubling possibility: the crisis may have permanently dented America’s productive capacity. If so, the “output gap” between the economy’s current level of production and its potential level is much smaller than expected.

Free exchange: Bond shelter

America’s ability to issue debt is helped by a resemblance between Treasuries and money

Mar 10th 2012 | from the print edition

IN A financial landscape full of oddities, the prospect of America being paid interest by its creditors when its national debt is rocketing is one of the oddest. The Treasury recently disclosed it is exploring how to let investors enter negative yields when bidding at debt auctions. Clearly, demand for American government debt is driven by much more than a hunger for returns. Financial-market participants use Treasury bonds and bills as collateral to secure lending, for instance. And for risk-averse investors such as foreign central banks, money-market funds and retirees, America’s debt is uniquely suited to storing savings without much due diligence. In short, its government debt is a lot like money.

This analogy is not perfect, of course. Treasury bonds are less useful for buying things and government debt carries at least the possibility of default. But in terms of liquidity, risk and returns, few things come closer to money. In a recent paper* Arvind Krishnamurthy and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen of Northwestern University quantify the money-like properties of American debt by comparing its supply from 1926 to 2008 with market-based measures of safety and liquidity. They find that when the supply of Treasuries is lower (as measured by the debt-to-GDP ratio), demand goes up, widening the spread between their yields and those on AAA-rated corporate bonds.

Economics focus: Clause and effect

The business cycle matters when assessing the cost of new regulations

Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip]

AMERICAN policymakers are pulling every lever they can to revive the economy, from fiscal stimulus to quantitative easing. The big exception has been regulatory policy. From environmental protection to bank oversight, the rule book has steadily thickened in recent years. Republican critics of Barack Obama think this explains America’s economic malaise. Scrap the rules, they claim, and the economy will spring to life. Nonsense, responds the Treasury. In a recent article, Jan Eberly, an assistant secretary for economic policy, scrutinised the behaviour of corporate-bond yields, corporate profits and other indicators. She found no evidence that regulatory uncertainty is holding businesses back from hiring or investment; weak demand is the big culprit.

Economics focus: Prices or jobs?

Could the Federal Reserve lower unemployment by revamping its goals?

Sep 17th 2011 | from the print edition

 [Greg Ip] THE Federal Reserve has scored highly for creativity over the course of the economic crisis. It has already, in effect, lowered short-term interest rates to zero, and carried out two rounds of quantitative easing (QE), the purchase of government bonds with newly printed money. On August 9th it surprised the market by saying it expected to hold its short-term interest rate where it is until mid-2013. By removing any expectations of monetary tightening before then, the announcement delivered a powerful downward jolt to bond yields. The Fed also disclosed it had discussed other policy options and was “prepared to employ these tools as appropriate”. That has fuelled speculation that the Fed will play yet another card when its policy-setting committee gathers for an extended meeting on September 20th-21st.

The entire article is linked here.

Economics Focus: War footing

Monetary and fiscal stimulus make a potent, if uneasy, combination

Sep 2nd 2010 |From the print edition

[Greg Ip] THE Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is the big event of the year for central bankers. But defining monetary policy is far harder than it used to be. In recent years central bankers have lurched ever closer to the realm of fiscal policy, mainly by buying government debt with freshly printed money. They can justify such “quantitative easing” (QE) on monetary grounds since they have already lowered short-term interest rates to, or close to, zero. But they also worry it is a slippery slope from QE to monetising government deficits and thence, inevitably, to inflation. When Phillip Swagel, then an official with the US Treasury, was asked why he attended the conference in 2008, he shrugged: “Fiscal policy, monetary policy—what’s the difference?”For central bankers this is an unsettling thought. Their mistrust of fiscal policy was nicely captured in a paper presented at this year’s Jackson Hole conference by Eric Leeper of Indiana University*. As central bankers have become more independent, they have increasingly based their policies on rigorous economic analysis. By contrast fiscal policy is deeply politicised, with haphazard methods and few, if any, defined goals.Much as central bankers would like to ignore fiscal policy, they cannot. “Fiscal alchemy can undermine monetary science,” says Mr Leeper. A wise monetary policy aims to keep prices stable, prudent fiscal policy to stabilise government debt. This division of labour works as long as the public believes that, after running a big deficit, the government will raise taxes or cut spending enough to keep debt under control. But, he argues, if the debt is so large that the government cannot credibly commit to these actions, the public assumes the central bank will inflate away the debt by printing money. Inflation expectations soar and the central bank loses control of prices.

Economics Focus: Hoard instinct

The nature of the recession, not government schemes, may explain why some countries lost so few jobs

Jul 8th 2010

 [Greg Ip] GERMANY’S gross domestic product fell by 4% in the two years to the end of 2009, twice as much as in America. Yet its employment rose by 0.7% while America’s plunged by 5.5% (see left-hand chart). When German politicians contemplate why a gruelling recession produced almost no increase in unemployment, they usually have a one-word answer: Kurzarbeit. “It is only thanks to Kurzarbeit that more jobs were not lost,” Angela Merkel, the chancellor, told Germany’s parliament in November.

Economics focus: A winding path to inflation

Even if governments could create inflation, they may not want to

Jun 3rd 2010

 [Greg Ip] IN THE short run inflation is an economic phenomenon. In the long run it is a political one. This week The Economist asked a group of leading economists whether they reckoned inflation or deflation was the greater threat; this was our inaugural question in “Economics by invitation”, an online forum of more than 50 eminent economists. The rough consensus was that in the near term, as Western economies struggle to recover, the bigger worry there is deflation. But as the time horizon lengthened, more experts cited inflation, because it seems the most plausible exit strategy for governments trying to deal with crushing debts. “Deflation is not a lasting threat,” wrote Arminio Fraga, a former president of Brazil’s central bank. “The more interesting question is whether they can manage to keep inflation down over time under the regime of fiscal irresponsibility now prevailing almost everywhere.”

 

What if Lehman had not failed?

The original article is linked here.

Economics focus

What if?

Sep 10th 2009
From The Economist print edition

If Lehman had not failed, would the crisis have happened anyway?

Illustration by Jac Depczyk

 

[Greg Ip] IN AUGUST 2008 Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist, briefly rocked world stockmarkets when he warned a conference in Singapore: “We’re not just going to see midsized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one—one of the big investment banks or big banks.” A month later, in the early hours of September 15th, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.