Social Credit and "Neutral" Monetary Policies: A Rant on "Helicopter Money" and "Monetary Neutrality"

Brad DeLong:

Social Credit and "Neutral" Monetary Policies: A Rant on "Helicopter Money" and "Monetary Neutrality": Badly-intentioned or incompetent policymakers can mess up any system of macroeconomic regulation. And we now have two centuries of history of demand-driven business cycles in industrial and post-industrial economies to teach us that there is no perfect, automatic self-regulating way to organize the economy at the macroeconomic level.

Over and over again, the grifters, charlatans, and cranks ask: "Why doesn't the central bank simply adopt the rule of setting a "neutral" monetary policy? In fact, why not replace the central bank completely with an automatic system that would do the job?"

Over the decades many have promised easy definitions of "neutrality", along with rules-of-thumb for maintaining it. All had their day:

• advocates of the gold standard,
• believers in a stable monetary base,
• devotees of a constant growth rate for the (narrowly defined) supply of money;
• believers in a constant growth rate for broad money and credit aggregates;
• various "Taylor rules".

And the answer, of course, is that by now centuries of painful experience have taught central bankers one thing: All advocates, wittingly or unwittingly, were simply selling snake oil. All such "automatic" rules and systems have been tried and found wanting.

It is a fact that all such rule-based central bank policies and all such so-called automatic systems have fallen down on the job. They have failed to properly manage "the" interest rate to set aggregate demand equal to potential output and balance the supply of whatever at that moment counts as "money", in whatever the operative sense of "money" is at that moment, to the demand for it.

Nudging interest rates to the level at which investment equals savings at full employment is what a properly "neutral" monetary policy really is.

Things are complicated, most importantly, by the fact that the business-cycle patterns of one generation are never likely to apply to the next. Consider: At any moment in the past century, the macroeconomic rules-of-thumb and models of economies' business-cycle behavior that had dominated forty, thirty, even twenty years before--the ones taught then to undergraduates, assumed as the background for op-eds, and including in the talking points of politicians whose aides wanted them to sound intelligent in answer to the first question and fuzz the answer to the follow-up before ducking away. We can now see that, for fifteen years now, central banks have been well behind the curve in their failure to recognize that the business-cycle pattern of the first post-World War II generations has definitely come to an end. The models and approaches developed to understand the small size of the post-WWII generation’s cycle and its bias toward moderate inflation are wrong today--and are worse than useless because they propagate error.

And this should not come as a surprise. ...