Krugman still thinking about Sweden — and still only gets it partly right

21 Apr, 2014 at 11:33 | Posted in Economics | 23 Comments

As I reported last week, Sweden is according to Statistics Sweden in a state of deflation. The inflation rate was -0.6 percent in March.

To a large extent the deflation is caused by tight monetary and fiscal policies  pursued by Sweden’s  Central Bank and the government. With a very defensive fiscal policy and a targeted inflation rate set at a very low level, real inflation has during the last 2-3 years been very close to zero, and now even negative. Another consequence of the austere fiscal and monetary policies is that overall unemployment is still at almost 9 % and youth unemployment close to 26 %.

This is deeply worrying. On this Krugman and yours truly seem to agree:

I’m still thinking about Sweden’s slide into deflation, which actually offers several lessons relevant to the rest of us.

First, it’s an object lesson in the power of sadomonetarism, the desire of many monetary officials to raise interest rates … In 2010 Sweden had high unemployment and low inflation; Econ 101 level macro should have said that this was no time to raise rates. Yet the Riksbank went ahead and did so anyway. Why?

It now says that it was all about financial stability, about fears of excessive house prices and borrowing. But that’s not what it was saying at the time! The bank’s governor did a chat in December 2010 in which he declared that it was about inflation:

“If the interest rate isn’t raised now, we’ll run the risk of too much inflation further ahead. This wouldn’t be good for the economy. Our most important task is to ensure that we meet our inflation target of 2%.”

Strange to say, however, when inflation started coming in well below the target, the Riksbank just kept raising rates, and switched to the financial stability justification.

Krugman’s argumentation, however, gives a somewhat too simplistic view of the problems facing the Swedish economy today. And just pooh-poohing deeply felt concerns and fears of a housing bubble with conspiracy theories (“excuses”) is debating economic policies analogous to playing tennis with the nets down.

So let’s try to get the full — and somewhat more complicated — picture right.

Lars E. O. Svensson — former deputy governor of the Riksbank — has repeatedly during the last year lambasted the Swedish Riksbank for having pursued a policy during the last fifteen years that has increased unemployment in Sweden:

The conclusion from the analysis is thus that the actual monetary policy has led to substantially lower inflation than the target and substantially higher unemployment than a policy that would have kept the policy rate unchanged at 0.25 percent.

The Riksbank has more recently justified the tight policy by maintaining that a lower policy rate would have increased the household debt ratio (debt relative to disposable income) and would have increased any risks connected with the debt. But, as I have shown … this is not true. A lower policy rate would have led to a lower debt ratio, not a higher one. This is because a lower policy rate increases the denominator (nominal disposable income) faster than the numerator (nominal debt). Then the debt ratio falls …

In summary, the Riksbank has conducted a monetary policy that has led to far too low inflation, far too high unemployment, and a somewhat higher debt ratio compared to if the policy rate had been left at 0.25 percent from the summer of 2010 until now. This is not a good result.

By the way, the latest report The Swedish Economy by the National Institute of Economic Research includes a very interesting special study, ”The Riksbank has systematically overestimated inflation,” which may be important in this context. In an analysis of the Riksbank’s inflation forecasts, the NIER shows that Riksbank forecasts have systematically overestimated inflation. The NIER concludes that “[t]he Riksbank’s overestimation of inflation has contributed to overly tight monetary policy with higher unemployment and lower inflation than would have been the case if, on average, its inflation forecasts had been on the mark.”

Why the majority of the Executive Board so systematically has exaggerated inflation risks so systematically is a question that may be worth returning to.

The Swedish Riksbank has according to Lars E. O. Svensson been pursuing a policy during the last fifteen years that in reality has made inflation on average more than half a percentage units lower than the goal set by the Riksbank. The Phillips Curve he estimates shows that unemployment as a result of this overly “austere” inflation level has been almost 1% higher than if one had stuck to the set inflation goal of 2%.

What Svensson is saying, without so many words, is that the Swedish Fed for no reason at all has made people unemployed. As a consequence of a faulty monetary policy the unemployment is considerably higher than it would have been if the Swedish Fed had done its job adequately.

So far, so good — I have no problem with Svensson’s — or Krugman’s — argument about the inadequacy of the Swedish inflation targeting policies.

However, what makes the picture more complicated than Krugman — and Svensson — wants to admit, is that we do have a housing bubble in Sweden — it’s not just a figment of imagination the “bad guys” use to intimidate us with. [That said, I, of course, in no way want to imply that central bank interest rate targeting (and/or accommodations) is the best way to counteract housing bubbles. Far from it.]

The increase in house loans – and house prices – in Sweden has for many years been among the steepest in the world.

Sweden’s house price boom started in mid-1990s, and looking at the development of real house prices since 1986, there are obvious reasons to be deeply worried:

Source: Statistics Sweden

The indebtedness of the Swedish household sector has also risen to alarmingly high levels, as indicated by the figure below (based on new data published earlier this year by Statistics Sweden, showing the development of household debts/disposable income 1990 – 2012):

Source: Statistics Sweden

As a result yours truly has been trying to argue with “very serious people” that it’s really high time to “take away the punch bowl.”

The Swedish housing market — with a high level of prices and household indebtedness — has become increasingly fragile during the last two decades. A ‘Minsky moment’ actually doesn’t seem to be that far away, and we may sooner than we think face a deflationary house price spiral driving the economy to a classic Fisher-Keynes-Minsky debt deflation crisis.

And this is the part of the story that Krugman doesn’t want to admit gives some credence to the arguments put forward recently by the Riksbank.

“Simple” models may sometimes help you think clearly about matters. But sometimes it’s also absolutely imperative to get the full picture. As H. L. Mencken once famously had it:

There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible and wrong.

Added 22 & 23 April: There’s more on the rather heated Swedish debate here, here, and here.