LARS P. SYLL

Krugman vs Kelton on the fiscal-monetary tradeoff

Paul Krugman is back again telling us that he doesn’t really want to spend time on arguing about MMT — and then goes on complaining that well-known MMTer Stephanie Kelton says things “obviously indefensible.” What has especially irritated the self-proclaimed ‘conventional’ Keynesian is that Kelton “seems to claim that expansionary fiscal policy … will lead to lower, not higher interest rates.”

Now, the logic behind Krugman’s “conventional Keynesian” loanable-funds-IS-LM-theory is that if the government is going to pursue an expansionary fiscal policy it will have to borrow money and thereby increase the demand for loanable funds which will — “other things equal” — lead to higher interest rates and less private investment.

The loanable funds theory is in many regards nothing but an approach where the ruling rate of interest in society is — pure and simple — conceived as nothing else than the price of loans or credits set by banks and determined by supply and demand in the same way as the price of cars and raincoats.

It is a beautiful fairy tale, but the problem is that banks are not barter institutions that transfer pre-existing loanable funds from depositors to borrowers. Why? Because, in the real world, there simply are no pre-existing loanable funds. Banks create new funds — credit — only if someone has previously got into debt! Banks are monetary institutions, not barter vehicles.

In the traditional loanable funds theory — as presented in Krugman’s own textbooks — the amount of loans and credit available for financing investment is constrained by how much saving is available. Saving is the supply of loanable funds, investment is the demand for loanable funds and assumed to be negatively related to the interest rate.

The loanable funds theory in the ‘New Keynesian’ approach means that the interest rate is endogenized by assuming that Central Banks can (try to) adjust it in response to an eventual output gap. This, of course, is essentially nothing but an assumption of Walras’ law being valid and applicable, and that a fortiori the attainment of equilibrium is secured by the Central Banks’ interest rate adjustments. From a Keynes-Minsky-MMT point of view, this can’t be considered anything else than a belief resting on nothing but sheer hope.

The traditional loanable funds theory is that it assumes that saving and investment can be treated as independent entities. This is seriously wrong:

The classical theory of the rate of interest [the loanable funds theory] seems to suppose that, if the demand curve for capital shifts or if the curve relating the rate of interest to the amounts saved out of a given income shifts or if both these curves shift, the new rate of interest will be given by the point of intersection of the new positions of the two curves. But this is a nonsense theory. For the assumption that income is constant is inconsistent with the assumption that these two curves can shift independently of one another. If either of them shifts​, then, in general, income will change; with the result that the whole schematism based on the assumption of a given income breaks down … In truth, the classical theory has not been alive to the relevance of changes in the level of income or to the possibility of the level of income being actually a function of the rate of the investment.

Savers and investors have different liquidity preferences and face different choices — and their interactions usually only take place intermediated by financial institutions. This, importantly, also means that there is no ‘direct and immediate’ automatic interest mechanism at work in modern monetary economies. What happens at the microeconomic level is not always compatible with the macroeconomic outcome. The ‘atomistic fallacy’ has many faces — loanable funds is one of them.

We have to free ourselves from the loanable funds theory — and scholastic gibbering about ZLB — and start using good old Keynesian fiscal policies. Keynes — as did Lerner, Kaldor, Kalecki, and Robinson — showed that it was possible to promote economic growth with an “appropriate size of the budget deficit.” The stimulus a well-functioning fiscal policy aimed at full employment may have on investment and productivity does not necessarily have to be offset by higher interest rates.

What’s wrong with MMT? Nothing!

MMTists often like to position themselves as the only ones to properly understand the ‘operational realities’ of modern monetary systems. Ironically, many of the claims made by MMTists on this topic are misleading at best. One common rhetorical tactic that I’ve noticed they employ, which often catches their critics out, is to use the term ‘government’ in a way that’s different typically from how it is used in mainstream economics. When they say ‘government’, they tend to include basically any institution that is an agent of the state, including the central bank — hence the ‘government’ here includes consolidating the treasury and the central bank into one entity, effectively ignoring or assuming away any independence the central bank may have.

Upholding Economics

Effectively “ignoring or assuming away any independence the central bank may have”? That is strange indeed: Last — just to take one example — I had a look in L. Randall Wray’s Modern Money Theory there were more than fifty pages devoted to “technical details of central bank and treasury coordination” and diverse fiscal operations of the Fed and the Treasury. Guess we have to go looking for bad monetary crankery somewhere else …

Abba Lerner and the true nature of public debt

One of the most effective ways of clearing up this most serious of all semantic confusions is to point out that private debt differs from national debt in being external. It is owed by one person to others. That is what makes it burdensome. Because it is interpersonal the proper analogy is not to national debt but to international debt … But this does not hold for national debt which is owed by the nation to citizens of the same nation. There is no external creditor. We owe it to ourselves.

A variant of the false analogy is the declaration that national debt puts an unfair burden on our children, who are thereby made to pay for our extravagances. Very few economists need to be reminded that if our children or grandchildren repay some of the national debt these payments will be made to our children or grandchildren and to nobody else. Taking them altogether they will no more be impoverished by making the repayments than they will be enriched by receiving them.

Abba Lerner The Burden of the National Debt (1948)

Equilibrium — an assumption making many theories inaccurate

For the learning rules we study, the players never converge to any sort of “intertemporal equilibrium”, in the sense that their expectations do not match the outcomes of the game even in a statistical sense …

Are these results relevant for macroeconomics? Can we expect insights that hold at the small scale of strategic interactions between two players to also be valid at much larger scales?

While our theory does not directly map to more general settings, many economic scenarios – buying and selling in financial markets, innovation strategies in competing firms, supply chain management – are complicated and competitive. This raises the possibility that some important theories in economics may be inaccurate. Challenges to the behavioral assumption of equilibrium also challenge the predictions of the model. In this case, new approaches are required that explicitly simulate the behavior of economic agents and take into account the fact that real people are not good at solving complicated problems.

Marco Pangallo & Torsten Heinrich & J Doyne Farmer

Monismus in der ökonomischen Hochschullehre

Eine Reihe von Studien des Forschungsinstituts für gesellschaftliche Weiterentwicklung hat in den letzten Jahren den Zustand der Ökonomik in Deutschland untersucht. Dabei wurde unter anderem gefragt welche Lehrbücher verwendet werden, wie plural sie sind, und was eigentlich der wissenschaftliche Nachwuchs über sein Fach denkt.

Insgesamt bestätigen die Studierenden der Stichprobe die Kritikpunkte der Pluralismus-Debatte: Sie nehmen im Lehralltag kaum Bezüge zu angrenzenden Disziplinen wahr, wie z. B. Geschichte, Psychologie oder Soziologie. Dabei stimmt der Großteil der Befragten (74,2%) der Aussage zu, dass Erkenntnisse aus anderen Fächern notwendig seien, um ökonomische Sachverhalte verstehen zu können. Stattdessen sei das VWL-Studium praxisfern (55%) und von einer starken mathematischen Grundausrichtung geprägt.

Dies zeigt sich besonders in den vermittelten Methoden: Es dominieren Gleichgewichts- (93,5%) und aggregierte ma­kroökono­mische Modelle (92,4%) sowie Regressions- bzw. Zeitreihenanalysen (78,6%). Andere sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge wie Fallstudien (27,5%), Experimente (22,4%), Umfragen (11,4%) oder Diskurs- (8,4%) bzw. Netzwerkanalysen (3,0%) würden dagegen kaum in den ersten vier Semestern vermittelt. Dies gilt ebenso für Neuerungen innerhalb der VWL, wie z.B. die Bereiche Neuroökonomik (2,4%) und Ökonophysik (0,6%) …

Das Auseinanderdriften zwischen Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft und die wahrgenommenen Einseitigkeiten in der ökonomischen Hochschullehre führen allerdings nicht dazu, dass sich die Studierenden verstärkt für eine Erneuerung ihres Faches einsetzen. Zwar hat der Großteil der Befragten schon von der Pluralismus-Debatte gehört. Nur wenige verfolgen diese jedoch intensiv und allein ein Bruchteil ist persönlich engagiert, etwa über die Teilnahme an entsprechenden Veranstaltungsreihen oder durch die Mitarbeit in lokalen Initiativen.

Eva Schweitzer-Krah & Tim Engartner

MMT — Krugman still does not get it!

Krugman complains that Lerner was too “cavalier” in his discussion of monetary policy since he called for the interest rate to be set at the level that produces “the most desirable level of investment” without saying exactly what that rate should be.

It’s an odd critique, since Krugman himself subscribes to the idea that monetary policy should target an invisible “neutral rate,” a so-called r-star that exists when the economy is neither depressed nor overheating. For what it’s worth, research suggests the neutral rate “may be flat-out wrong,” and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has admitted that the Fed has been too cavalier in relying “on variables that cannot be measured directly and which can only be estimated with great uncertainty.”

But Lerner wasn’t trying to use interest rates to optimize the economy. That was a job for fiscal policy. He argued that the government should be prepared to spend whatever is necessary to sustain full employment without raising taxes or borrowing …

Krugman’s other objection is that Lerner “didn’t fully address the limitations, both technical and political, on tax hikes/or spending cuts” as a means of fighting inflation.

In fact, Lerner actually had quite a lot to say about this. Here’s the opening sentence to an entire chapter on the subject in his 1951 book “The Economics of Employment”: “We have now concluded our treatment of the economics of employment, but a word or two must be added on the politics and the administration of employment policies in general and of Functional Finance in particular” (emphasis in original) …

Where does that leave us? Paul Krugman and I agree on a great many things, but we come at certain questions from a fundamentally different place.

He believes there are inherent tradeoffs between fiscal and monetary policy. Outside of the so-called liquidity trap, Krugman adopts the standard line that budget deficits crowd out private investment because deficits compete with private borrowing for a limited supply of savings.

The MMT framework rejects this, since government deficits are shown to be a source (not a use!) of private savings. Some careful studies show that crowding-out can occur, but that it tends to happen in countries where the government is not a currency issuer with its own central bank.

This seems like a disagreement we should be able to resolve either empirically or intuitively. But who knows? As Lerner wrote, “a man convinced against his will retains the same opinion still.”

Stephanie Kelton

Few issues in politics and economics are nowadays more discussed — and less understood — than public debt. Many raise their voices to urge for reducing the debt, but few explain why and in what way reducing the debt would be conducive to a better economy or a fairer society. And there are no limits to all the — especially macroeconomic — calamities and evils a large public debt is supposed to result in — unemployment, inflation, higher interest rates, lower productivity growth, increased burdens for subsequent generations, etc., etc.

But the truth is that public debt is normally nothing to fear, especially if it is financed within the country itself (but even foreign loans can be beneficent for the economy if invested in the right way). Some members of society hold bonds and earn interest on them, while others have to pay the taxes that ultimately pay the interest on the debt. The debt is not a net burden for society as a whole since the debt cancel itself out between the two groups. If the state issues bonds at a low-interest rate, unemployment can be reduced without necessarily resulting in strong inflationary pressure. And the inter-generational burden is also not a real burden since — if used in a suitable way — the debt, through its effects on investments and employment, actually makes future generations net winners. There can, of course, be unwanted negative distributional side effects for the future generation, but that is mostly a minor problem since when our children and grandchildren repay the national debt these payments will be made to our children and grandchildren.

To both Keynes and Lerner, it was evident that the state has the ability to promote full employment and a stable price level – and that it should use its powers to do so. If that means that it has to take on debt and (more or less temporarily) underbalance its budget – so let it be! Public debt is neither good nor bad. It is a means to achieve two over-arching macroeconomic goals – full employment and price stability. What is sacred is not to have a balanced budget or running down public debt per se, regardless of the effects on the macroeconomic goals. If ‘sound finance,’ austerity and balanced budgets means increased unemployment and destabilizing prices, they have to be abandoned.