Monday, June 17, 2013

Monetary policy: The negative rates we need

I know a few gold, ahhh, enthusiasts who would love to see some deeply negative rates.
From The Economist:
LAST week Cardiff Garcia produced a lovely taxonomy of views on the proper composition of stimulus. The idea is that there is a large group of economists and economics writers who think most rich-world economies are suffering from a demand shortfall. But within that group there are big disagreements over how to address that shortfall, and in particular how much work fiscal policy—changes in taxes and spending—needs to do relative to monetary policy. Mr Garcia makes the useful point that there are lots of possible policy combinations that should in practice appeal to many of the people in the more-demand group, regardless of their position on the fiscalist-monetarist spectrum, and he's right. It's worth noting that Milton Friedman's helicopter drop—a money-financed tax cut—is kind of a monetary policy ideal which also happens to have at its heart a policy (a tax cut) that is clearly fiscal in nature.

David Beckworth responds to Mr Garcia with an idea to operationalise the fiscalist-monetarist synthesis:
First, the Fed adopts a NGDP level target. Doing so would better anchor nominal spending and income expectations and therefore minimize the chance of ever entering a liquidity-trap. In other words, if the public believes the Fed will do whatever it takes to maintain a stable growth path for NGDP, then they would have no need to panic and hoard liquid assets in the first place when an adverse economic shock hits....MUCH MORE