'Hard Money'

Brad DeLong:

Austerity, Gramscian Hegemony, and Hard Money: To the Re-Education Camp! Weblogging: ... Paul Krugman tries to untangle why so many center-right and right-wing economists are so resistant to the elementary logic of Hicks (1937) and the IS-LM model—even those who, like Marty Feldstein, teach the IS-LM model to their students, and teach it very well (after all: he taught it to me).

Back in 2009 ... Mark Thoma wrote a good piece giving what seemed to me to be the correct answer to the inflationistas: He wrote that there was some reason to fear an outburst of inflation when and if the long run came in which the government budget constraint bound and yet congress was continuing to refuse to either:

• curb the growth of public health care costs, or
• raise taxes to pay for them.

But, he went on, the IS-LM logic meant that that was not a risk in the short run. And the cost of the stimulus program and how much debt was "monetized" by QE had at best a second decimal-place effect on the vulnerability of the U.S. to long-run inflation driven by the fiscal theory of the price level. The big enchilada was health-care costs...[quotes my old post]...

That seemed and seems to me to be right, and that is driven by a coherent theoretical view: (i) an unemployment short-run until production returns to potential output, (ii) a medium run in which confidence and interest rates and full-employment growth rates depend on market assessments of how the long-run fiscal gap will be closed, and (iii) a long run in which, perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly, the fiscal theory of the price level binds.

The only thing wrong with Mark's analysis back in 2009 that I saw then and that I see now--other than the short run being a very long time indeed, the bending of the health care costs curve occurring much more sharply than I had imagined possible, and a configuration of interest rates which raises the strong possibility that the long-run in which the fiscal theory of the price level binds has been put off to infinity--was that it missed the easiest way of shrinking the velocity of money in a recovery: raising reserve requirements. So I always had a very hard time figuring out what Feldstein and company were fearing at all...

Indeed, it seemed to me not to be coherent:

 Martin Feldstein: "The unprecedented explosion of the US fiscal deficit raises the spectre of high future inflation. ... It is surprising that the long-term interest rates do not yet reflect the resulting risk of future inflation...

... As I looked back on the situation in 2009 and 2010--with a dead housing credit channel, and the increasing likelihood of a recovery characterized not as a V or as a U but as an L--I find myself thinking that Marty Feldstein and the others had turned all their smarts to trying to find reasons not to believe the IS-LM models that they (or at least Feldstein and Taylor) had taught, and not to believe that the marginal investor in financial markets was not-stupid. That fiscal and monetary ease would bring back the 1970s in short order was their conclusion. The task was to think of not-implausible reasons and mechanisms that would make this so.

The corollary, of course, is that for them the only good policies are hard-money austerity policies; and the only good portfolios are those that assume a departure from hard-money austerity will produce inflation.

So perhaps there is a deeper problem somewhere..., it really makes no sense for my contemporaries to be hard-money believers. Yet an astonishing share of the rich among them are.

A great and enduring puzzle...

So: To the re-education camp! I have a lot of rethinking to do--but not about IS-LM, hysteresis, or the fiscal theory of the price level; rather, about the connecting-belts between asset values, wealth levels, and people's ideal interests of what proper monetary and fiscal policy should be.