Podcasts

John Taylor on Monetary Policy

El-Erian Says Banks Face Harder Time Raising Capital
El-Erian's latest book, ``When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change.''

The Stuff of Thought with Steven Pinker

Georgia revisited

Confessions of a subprime lender

Chinese repression of Falung Gong


Paying to be permanent
A high number of people who get Australian permanent resident visas don't get the skilled jobs they are trained for. And there are scams aplenty in the world of international students looking for any way to stay here.

Objective truth
For a long time now, it has been fashionable to say that what science offers is not a true mirror of nature but a distorting mirror, reflecting our presuppositions, prejudices and politics. But can we take the criticisms on board while still maintaining a belief in objective truth? We meet a philosopher who says we can. Also, objectivity and the arts: can artistic judgments ever be objective or is it all down to just knowing what you like?

Uprootedness and national conflicts
he French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil identified the basic human need for roots as crucial. Uprootedness and disapora in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have shaped the narratives about the past and the future on both sides. Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London has been in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil lecture on human value

The Wallace-Darwin papers on biological evolution - 150 years ago

Lung transplant
Australia has one of the highest success rates in organ and tissue transplantation, but it also has one of the world's lowest donation rates. About 3,000 Australians are on the official organ and tissue transplant waiting list and 20% of the people waiting for a heart, lung or liver transplant will die before they receive one. ABC journalist Phil Ashley Brown met a patient 20 minutes after she received the good news that she would get new lungs and he follows her progress through the transplant and recovery


Picture this!
Images by the illustrator and author Shaun Tan adorn the Children's Book Council's advertising for this year's Book Week (16-22 August, 2008). Reflecting on his fascination with both writing and painting, he reveals his thoughts on visual literacy and about creating an intimate distance between words and pictures.

Economic Prediction of the Day

Comment on tomorrow’s announcement by the Treasury and Bank of England

Breaking News- Anti- Penny Lobby Endorses Obama

Citizens for Retiring the Penny

Picturesque Poverty and Monetary Policy in Haiti

For the picturesque poverty see the Tyler Cowen's post.

For the monetary policy see the Letter of Intent of Haitian government- they're promises the Haitian government has to keep in return for IMF's assistance;

The Government believes that the policies set forth in the attached Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies (MEFP) are adequate to achieve the objectives of its program, but it will take any further measures that may become appropriate for this purpose. Haiti will consult with the IMF on the adoption of these measures, and in advance of any revision to the policies contained in the MEFP, in accordance with the fund’s policies on such consultation...

The program envisages attaining an inflation rate of 9.0 percent by end-September 2008. This rate slightly exceeds the FY2007 outcome, as a result of higher international prices for food and petrol. To ensure that these increases do not translate into broader inflationary pressures, base money growth will be kept slightly below that of nominal GDP, with an indicative target for the year of 9.6 percent. The bulk of monetary expansion will come from an increase in net international reserves, with a program floor of US$40 million. This will boost gross reserves coverage to 2.7 months’ worth of imports. Recognizing that appreciation of the real exchange rate is a reflection mainly of changing fundamentals, the BRH will maintain exchange rate flexibility, limiting interventions to purchases for the achievement of the program NIR target and temporary smoothing of excessive market volatility...

Building on the cessation of non-essential activities in the first program year, we will strengthen the institutional foundation for our monetary policy framework through further reinforcement of the independence of the BRH, including through strengthening its balance sheet. A strategy to divest the BRH’s interest in the state telephone company, Teleco, is currently being prepared (PC for end-March 2008), with support from the IFC. Taking into account the expected proceeds from that operation, the BRH will, together with the MEF, devise a plan for the recapitalization of the central bank (PC for end-March 2008). The plan will contain steps to revert the BRH’s quasi-fiscal losses, and put its balance sheet on a sound financial footing.

Quote of the Day

If the government underwrites all the risks, call it socialism. If it underwrites only the failures, call it foolishness.

- Allan Meltzer

Common Sense and Nonsense on Global Imbalances

This forum, featuring Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, Dr. Jose Antonio Ocampo, and Dr. Mark Weisbrot, was organized by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Multilateral economic institutions are facing a period of unprecedented challenges — among these are large macroeconomic imbalances (including the US current account deficit), stalled negotiations at the WTO, and a much-reduced IMF. Three economists discussed some of these current challenges and their implications for economic growth and development. The panel discussion was followed by a brief question and answer period.

The Fed’s New Alphabet Soup- Vincent Reinhart

First, the mnemonics. On March 14, the Federal Reserve extended access to its discount window to a non-depository, Bear Stearns, for the first time since the 1930s. (The discount window is the Fed’s lending facility, where loans are made at a rate above the federal funds rates and can be secured with a wide variety of collateral.) According to the Federal Reserve Act, lending to such an individual, partnership, or corporation (an IPC) requires the affirmative vote of five of the governors of the Federal Reserve Board. Moreover, the Federal Reserve must attest that there are “unusual and exigent” circumstances and that failure to lend would impair the economy. On March 16, the Fed granted other investment banks access to its lending facility.

On the prior Tuesday, the Fed had introduced a new program called the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), under which it will loan some of the Treasury securities currently on its balance sheet to key financial market participants in return for other securities as collateral. The term of these transactions is 28 days, and the fee paid for the loan of Treasury securities will be set in an auction.

For the past few months, the Fed has been holding regular auctions for depositories of its discount window credit, also for a term of 28 days. This is referred to as the Term Auction Facility (TAF), in which depositories bid for credit. Earlier this month, these auctions were bumped up to total $100 billion per month. To put that sum in perspective, the amount of discount window loans outstanding this month will likely be nine times the previous monthly record from 1919 to the inception of the TAF (see the nearby chart). And if the TAF continues at its recent pace through June of this year, the Federal Reserve will have extended a greater volume of loans over the first eight months of the program than it had cumulatively lent over the prior 90 years.

Last but not least, the Fed also announced that it will loan another $100 billion in the form of 28-day term repurchase (RP) agreements. RPs are the bread-and-butter of a central bank’s open market operations. In the typical RP, the Fed lends money to its dealer counterparties for a fixed term, taking collateral in the form of Treasury securities or the debt and mortgage-backed securities of the government-sponsored lenders, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

If we tally up all these new programs, the Federal Reserve appears willing to commit almost one-half of its balance sheet, around $400 billion, to promote the renewed health of financial markets. Given its open-ended invitation for investment banks to follow the Bear Stearns route and tap the Fed’s discount window, it may wind up committing even more.

-The Fed’s New Alphabet Soup

Three Questions to Bernanke from Carmen Reinhart

From Reinhart's congressional testimony last month;

First, Federal Reserve policy easing in the last five months of last year seemed to be constrained by concerns about inflation. Judging from the longer-term projections included in the minutes of the October 2007 and January 2008 meetings, Federal Reserve policy makers seem to have an informal goal for PCE inflation (excluding food and energy) or something less than 2 percent. Was that goal reining in their response to the weakening of spending in 2007, and will it constrain their actions their actions over the remainder of this year?

Second, policy actions this year suggest that the Federal Reserve has abandoned the practice of gradually responding to economic events that marked the experience of the prior two decades. Will this phase of post-gradualism apply symmetrically later this year if evidence accumulates that inflation expectations are on the rise?

Third, Chairman Bernanke and his predecessors have previously argued that Federal Reserve involvement in the supervision of financial institutions is important in making both the conduct of supervision and monetary policy better. But the past few years apparently witnessed multiple regulatory lapses. Supervisors failed to caution depositories offering potential borrowers unsuitable mortgages. They also acquiesced as complicated structures were booked off the balance sheet, even though, in the event, they were not treated as such by corporate headquarters at the first sign of stress. At the same time, it is hard to read the hesitant easing of late 2007 as evidence that monetary policy makers were receiving useful insights from their supervisory colleagues. Does Chairman Bernanke still view supervision and regulation as an appropriate responsibility of the Federal Reserve?

Related;
Read Rogoff and Reinhart

Challenges for the world’s divided economy

5 Historical Economic Crises and the U.S.
Learning from experience

Third world America

Could it turn out like those times?

Depression, You Say? Check Those Safety Nets;

“I used to give a lecture explaining that the Great Depression could never happen now because of the regulations that emerged from that crisis,” said Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. “But we’re learning that there is a shadow banking system, of hedge funds and investment banks, that are outside of those safety nets. What happened to Bear Stearns last week looked a lot like a 19th-century run on the bank. And that’s why the Fed reacted so quickly.”...

“To understand the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics,” Mr. Bernanke wrote in a 1994 paper, when he was a professor at Princeton focused on analyzing the financial cataclysm that began in 1929. While economists have made great progress, he continued, “we do not yet have our hands on the Grail by any means.”

More sub-prime crisis explainers

Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club;

“We’re exposing parts of the capital markets that most of us had never heard of,” Ethan Harris, a top Lehman Brothers economist, said last week. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and current Citigroup executive, has said that he hadn’t heard of “liquidity puts,” an obscure kind of financial contract, until they started causing big problems for Citigroup.

What Created This Monster?;

Timothy F. Geithner, a career civil servant who took over as president of the New York Fed in 2003, was trying to solve a variety of global crises while at the Treasury Department. As a Fed president, he tried to get a handle on hedge fund activities and the use of leverage on Wall Street, and he zeroed in on the credit derivatives market.

Mr. Geithner brought together leaders of Wall Street firms in a series of meetings in 2005 and 2006 to discuss credit derivatives, and he pushed many of them to clear and settle derivatives trading electronically, hoping to eliminate a large paper backlog that had clogged the system.

Even so, Mr. Geithner had one hand tied behind his back. While the Fed regulated large commercial banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan, it had no oversight on activities of the investment banks, hedge funds and other participants in the burgeoning derivatives market. And the industry and sympathetic politicians in Washington fought attempts to regulate the products, arguing that it would force the lucrative business overseas.

“Tim has been learning on the job, and he has my sympathy,” said Christopher Whalen, a managing partner of Institutional Risk Analytics, a risk management firm in Torrance, Calif. “But I don’t think he’s enough of a real practitioner to go mano-a-mano with these bankers.”

Mr. Geithner declined an interview request for this article.

In a May 2006 speech about credit derivatives, Mr. Geithner praised the benefits of the products: improved risk management and distribution, as well as enhanced market efficiency and resiliency. As he had on earlier occasions, he also warned that the “formidable complexity of measuring the scale of potential exposure” to derivatives made it hard to monitor the products and to gauge the financial vulnerability of individual banks, brokerage firms and other institutions.

“Perhaps the more difficult challenge is to capture the broader risks the institution might confront in conditions of a general deterioration in confidence in credit and an erosion in liquidity,” Mr. Geithner said in the speech. “Most crises come from the unanticipated.”

What went wrong with the economy?

Subprime crisis: causes, consequences and cures

As Venezuela’s worst banking crisis unfolded in 1994-1995 (conservative estimates of the bailout costs of that crisis are at around 18 percent of GDP), no one in that country seemed to know whose responsibility it was to supervise the financial institutions. As is usual in most banking crises, lending standards had become lax, there was interconnected lending, and there was plenty of plain old-fashioned graft. The central bank blamed the main regulatory agency (SUDEBAN), the regulatory agency blamed the deposit insurance agency (FOGADE), and everyone else blamed the central bank.

At the time of that crisis, the received wisdom was that such supervisory disarray could only happen in an emerging market; advanced economies had outgrown such chaos. We now know better.

For starters, part of the supervisory responsibilities in the US is delegated to the states, which is to say that 50 emerging markets agencies were partially responsible for the oversight of real estate lending. Supervisors failed to caution depositories as they offered potential borrowers unsuitable mortgages. They also acquiesced as complicated structures were booked off the balance sheet, even though, in the event, they were not treated as such by corporate headquarters at the first sign of stress. And after the fact, they have pointed to the other guy as responsible for the problem.

In the private sector, mortgage brokers often sought no more assurance of future repayment than a signature. That act of faith was made easier because their own compensation came from originating loans rather than how the loans played themselves out. And underwriters took that raw material of mortgages and somehow convinced themselves that the law of large numbers would make the whole better than the sum of its parts, even though many of those pieces needed double-digit house price growth to make economic sense. Credit rating agencies, encouraged by their own fee structure, listened attentively to underwriters’ assurances of the power of pooling and their ability to predict despite a limited track record. And final investors substituted the judgment of the rating agencies for their own due diligence, perhaps abetted by regulation and accounting rules that imparted special significance to those judgments.

No doubt, change is needed in both the private and public sectors. My immediate fear is that, as in most prior episodes, the initial reaction will be overdone and inefficient. Financial institutions are already tightening the terms and standards for new lending at a ferocious clip. Rating agencies, following their pro-cyclical tendencies, will overreact as well in the effort to distract the investing public from their laxness of the past few years by strict standards going forward. Similarly, bank examiners will interpret the regulations narrowly, reinforcing the natural tendencies of depositories to tighten credit availability.

And last but not least, politicians have already turned their focus toward the financial industry. If the regulation of financial institutions needs to be revisited, there are compelling arguments to pare the multitude of regulators of depository institutions and insurance companies and to restructure the supervision of rating agencies. But the outcome of hurried debate in the heat of the moment is more likely to be legislative overreach than informed policy making. It would be far better to get the job done right than get the job do

Explainer of the Day

How the Fed took the money out of monetary policy

Money creation and the Federal Reserve

Creating Money (or Jobs) Out of Thin Air

First and foremost, the Federal Reserve does NOT print new dollar bills. So how is it able to create new money? There are two main forms of money—cash in circulation and checking deposits held in banks. Separate from the money supply are “reserve accounts” that commercial banks are required to have at the Federal Reserve. These reserve accounts hold cash for the commercial banks in case depositors cash-out some of their deposits.

The Federal Reserve can expand the money supply by expanding the amount of deposits held in the U.S. commercial banking system. One way to do so is to purchase U.S. government bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury department. When the Federal Reserve purchases government bonds from commercial banks, it takes bonds out of circulation and electronically credits reserve accounts. U.S. commercial banks armed with more cash reserves will issue new loans which are then deposited back into the banking system. This method effectively increases the dollar amount of checking deposits in the economy, and hence, expands the money supply.

Consequences of Falling

Where is Bernanke taking us?- BusinessWeek cover story podcast
BusinessWeek's John Byrne and Michael Mandel discuss Fed Chairman Bernanke's new mandate, the damage on Wall Street, and the downside of a reeling dollar in Europe.

Volcker doesn't like Inflation targeting

From an interview Volcker gave to Bloomberg in 2006;

Volcker was skeptical that inflation targeting, a device for anchoring inflation expectations embraced by Bernanke, would be helpful.

``That's a little too precise for me,'' he said. ``The inflation rate is bound to go up and down a little bit and it should go up and down a little bit. But I would like to see stability as the target.''

He suggested that Bernanke, who has championed better communication through transparency at the central bank, may be communicating too much.

``It's kind of ironic,'' said Volcker. ``Mr. Bernanke seems to be criticized for a little too much transparency.''

For soft landing try fiscal

Achieving a Soft Landing: The Role of Fiscal Policy

Summary: This paper utilizes an open-economy New Keynesian overlapping generations model to assess the extent to which fiscal policy, along side an inflation-forecast-based monetary policy, could enhance macroeconomic stability in Colombia. The model simulations indicate that, in addition to stabilizing output and inflation, a stronger response of the fiscal balance to excess tax revenue would reduce the burden on the central bank of adjusting interest rates, lessen the associated degree of exchange rate volatility, and contribute to a more stable external current account balance. The analysis also assesses how the success of fiscal policy in enhancing macroeconomic stability depends on the type of shock, the response of monetary policy, and the length of fiscal policy implementation lags.

Gaps in Securities Market Regulation

A summary of a recent IMF Conference on Securities Statistics

Conference participants agreed on the need for a compilation guide for securities statistics, because no international standard for compiling these statistics exists. The intention is to have a concise reference document that will address the key methodological issues identified at the conference. The guide, which will include some templates and a list of reference metadata, will focus initially on statistics on debt securities issued but will eventually be expanded to cover other securities and securities holdings. The manual will also include an assessment of costs and benefits of security-by-security databases.

Related;
IMF Study Points to Gaps in Securities Market Regulation
IMF Helping Fill Global Securities Data Gap

'Could we have risked the failure of Bear Stearns?'

Volcker: Fed’s ‘Extreme’ Intervention ‘Raises Some Real Questions’


An older interview talking about the UN oil for food corruption scandal.

Econ Talks

James Hamilton Says Fed Rate Cuts Lack Previous `Power'

Robert Parry Says Fed Focus on Growth Is Understandable

Subprime is not an emerging markets style crisis

I agree with Ajay Shah;

This is undoubtedly a difficult situation. But is it a crisis? One estimate of the size of losses on sub-prime home loans is $400 billion. This is roughly 2.85% of US GDP. In India, with roughly Rs.50 lakh crore of GDP, a comparable scenario would involve home loan losses of Rs.1,43,000 crore. If such a shock hit India, one can only imagine how bad things would be.

In such difficult times, why is the US economy still rolling with the punches? Why has the US economy not collapsed in a mire of failed firms, finger-pointing by government agencies, morchas in the streets, and JPC inquiries? Understanding how this shock is being absorbed, and the equilibriating forces in play, is important in making a call on whether this is a crisis or a mere recession.

In the idealised world of securitisation, a parcel of home loans is converted into securities, which are then sold into the broad market. The ownership of these securities is dispersed amidst international hedge funds, pension funds, etc. The originator of the home loan is largely immune to the outcome : if a default takes place, the losses are borne by the owners of the securities.

Many critics of securitisation have pointed out that this theory has not quite panned out as expected. However, at the same time, there is no doubting the fact that securitisation has given a substantial dispersion of the $400 billion loss. For this reason, the impact of the massive loss on the US financial system is not as large as it might otherwise have been.

The second equilibriating channel lies in monetary policy. Unlike many other countries which have experienced crises, the US has well functioning institutions for conducting monetary policy. The US Fed has cut rates dramatically in response to difficulties in the economy. On 14th March, the 90-day treasury rate in the US had dropped to 1.16%. The impact of lowered interest rates on the economy is not as strong as it used to be, owing to difficulties in finance. However, a certain impact is surely there. Low interest rates are helping strengthen demand, and help attract smart speculators to buy assets at fire sale prices.

Difficulties in finance inflict damage on the economy when they trip up the debt financing of firms. However, US corporations are unusually under-leveraged and cash-rich. Hence, this recession-inducing channel from credit market distress to the real economy is absent. The health of US corporations today is very different from the health of Japanese firms in Japan's lost decades.

Low interest rates are doing their job in one critical respect: the decline of the dollar. Unlike other countries which have experienced crisis, the US has a floating exchange rate and an open capital account. The exchange rate pegging with capital controls, which has brought down so many emerging markets, is absent. When interest rates dropped, the dollar fell - exactly as it should. The weak dollar is bolstering net exports and helping the economy.

These effects are large. The Q4-2005 current account deficit was 7% of GDP; this has shrunk to 4.9% of GDP in Q4-2007. In other words, over these two years, the decline in the dollar contributed roughly 2% of higher demand for goods and services produced in the US.

A second remarkable feature of the decline in the dollar is the funding channel for the US through Asian central banks and governments in the middle east. For each $1 trillion of reserves held in USD assets, a 10% decline in the dollar constitutes a transfer of $100 billion to the issuer of liabilities in the US. Every Asian country should be asking whether this deal makes any sense for them, but in understanding the present situation, it's useful to note that no other country facing a crisis in the past has had such a good deal, which produces fiscal transfers in the time of need.

Unlike many countries which have experienced crises, monetary policy in the US is manned by brilliant intellectuals like Ben Bernanke and Fred Mishkin. Few people in the world understand the interplay between monetary policy and financial sector difficulties as well as them.

The Fed cut rates, but the monetary transmission was not quite working owing to difficulties in finance, so the rate cuts were not doing their job. Hence, the Fed has been innovating with new ways to get back into the game. These innovations include changing rules on collateral, reaching out to financing non-banks, etc. These strategies are on the right track and will help.

Some hedge funds and private equity funds have failed. From the viewpoint of public policy, this reiterates the case for having hedge funds and private equity funds as major players, since these failures have no repercussions. The failure of Carlyle is very different from the failure of financial firms like banks or insurance companies which have assured returns obligations to the general public. It is an excellent risk management strategy for society to have hedge funds where rich people place their money, which can blow up when times go bad inflicting losses on rich people.

In the failure of Bear Stearns, there was no bailout. Senior managers will be sacked, and the shareholders were expropriated. In this fashion, bit by bit, the losses on the housing market are being absorbed by various portfolios.

Conditions in the US are undoubtedly difficult. However, it is important to also understand the institutional depth of economic policy making, and the equilibriating responses which are in play. This may well be a recession, but it is not an emerging markets style crisis.

Confused about 'Syntax Destruction'

"I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant,"- Greenspan

Imperfect Central Bank Communication - Information versus Distraction

Summary: Much of the information communicated by central banks is noisy or imperfect. This paper considers the potential benefits and limitations of central bank communications in a model of imperfect knowledge and learning. It is shown that the value of communicating imperfect information is ambiguous. There is a risk that the central bank can distract the public; this means that the central bank may prefer to focus its communication policies on the information it knows most about. Indeed, conveying more certain information may improve the public's understanding to the extent that it "crowds out" a role for communicating imperfect information.

A Primer on Monetary Policy in Australia

A recent speech by Australian Reserve Bank governor;

I turn now to arguments about monetary policy and inflation. The first one that I want to address is the assertion that monetary policy, in adjusting interest rates, is ineffective in controlling prices, because it is failing to restrain demand. More than once I have seen people state that the rises in interest rates seemed not to make much difference.

But if it were really true that the sequence of adjustments that took place to raise the cash rate from its low of 4.25 per cent in 2001 to 7.25 per cent today made no difference to the economy or inflation, it would follow that we could reduce the cash rate by 300 basis points tomorrow and nothing would change. If we put it like that, surely not many people could seriously believe that the changes to interest rates have made no difference.

More realistically, people might think that it is the changes in rates that matter, more than the level, and that the changes were too small. In this view, interest rate changes should perhaps have been bigger, so as to give more of a ‘shock’ to behaviour on each occasion (though they should presumably also have been less frequent – otherwise the level of rates we would have reached would have been much higher).

I suppose it is possible that a different sequence of changes, including some bigger ones, would have changed behaviour in the economy. We cannot know because that alternative scenario cannot be run, but as everyone knows, the Board has on occasion in the recent past considered larger movements. So the idea of larger changes is not absurd.

Yet it is hardly as though interest rate changes were so small that no‑one noticed. There are few issues reported at more length than interest rates; no‑one could say they were unaware of what was happening. Beginning with the March 2005 rate change, moreover, the extent of coverage in the media has been far more intense than it had been prior to then, and far more intense than is the case in other comparable countries. We could debate the reasons for that, but they do not matter for present purposes. On every one of those occasions, there was no shortage of dramatic media coverage, and no shortage of predictions of serious consequences for indebted households, the economy and so on. If we were looking for announcement effects, surely they should have been at work through this period.

My own view is that monetary policy is most effective when actions are seen to be consistent with the factual evidence available on the economy, a sensible assessment about future risks, and a framework that has a clear medium‑term objective for policy. Apart from that, we have to accept that the likely effect of any one move of 25 or even 50 basis points is, while uncertain, probably only modest. It is the combination of changes, and more particularly the level reached, that will do most of the work.

A second version of the ‘ineffectiveness’ argument holds that (1) the price rises are coming from factors beyond the control of any Australian policy, and particularly from abroad, from which it follows that (2) monetary policy cannot do anything about them. For some people, it follows that it is therefore (3) futile, and unnecessarily disruptive, to try.

I have already addressed the question of whether all the price rises can be put down to a few special factors, obviously not under our control. The fact is that the price rises are broader than that.

But even if all the initial impetus for higher prices comes from events abroad, we still have to decide how we will respond to that shock. In the case of energy prices, while the world price of oil in US dollars certainly is completely outside our control, it is the Australian dollar price of oil that actually matters for the Australian motorist. That price is lower at present than it might have been, because of the rise in the exchange rate. Insofar as interest rates have a bearing on the exchange rate, they can affect petrol prices, indirectly, and have done so.

Looking across the economy more generally, we can all see that the main external event of recent years is the rise in the terms of trade, which is obviously completely exogenous as far as Australia is concerned. But higher resource prices generate additional income, which then affects demand for goods and services at home. That is expansionary, and puts pressure on prices for non‑traded goods and services. Even though monetary policy cannot stop the initial shock – of course we cannot stop the Chinese demand for resources – we can, and should, seek to condition the economy’s subsequent response to that shock, rather than simply letting domestic overheating go unchecked. Tighter policy will dampen domestic demand and contain the pick‑up in non‑traded prices as well as raising the exchange rate, which makes imports cheaper, exports less competitive and fosters a move of productive resources into the parts of the economy where more production is needed. That is an appropriate form of adjustment to such a shock, particularly if the shock is likely to be fairly persistent.

So even when events beyond our control occur to put pressure on prices, we should still respond, and that response can be quite effective.

Another line of argument takes quite a different tack. It argues not that monetary policy is ineffective, but in fact that it makes the problem worse by actually raising prices. The logic here is that interest payments are a cost to business activity, and that raising this cost will simply result in businesses passing it on.

It is obviously true that interest is a cost, and for a business to stay solvent it has to cover that along with its other costs in its selling price. But when interest rates rise, can business just pass this cost on without losing sales? It might be possible initially, but since higher interest rates do eventually slow demand, it will get more difficult to raise prices in due course. So when some people say that higher rates will just push up prices, I think the answer is that it is the strength of demand that allows that, and the rise in interest rates will, in time, dampen demand. All the historical evidence is that monetary policy is quite effective in that regard.

I turn now to other arguments, not that monetary policy is ineffective, but that it is not terribly precise. One common expression is that it is a blunt instrument. People rarely define what they mean by that term, but I think they have in mind two things. First, if inflation is rising because particular prices are moving a lot, monetary policy cannot focus precisely on exactly those particular prices, or those particular features of economic behaviour causing the price rises. It is a general, rather than specific, instrument in that sense. Second, I think that when people say ‘blunt’, they mean ‘unfair’ – particularly that when interest rates rise, this affects households who owe money on a home loan. (Presumably the same argument would mean that it is equally unfair to savers to put interest rates down when the economy is weak.)

As I noted before, it is not actually true that the recent rise in inflation is confined to just a few items. To that extent, the use of a general instrument would seem quite appropriate. But there are also a couple of other quite important points to make in regard to the ‘blunt instrument’ critique.

The first is that the transmission channels for monetary policy are much wider than just the impacts on households with home loans. Most businesses have debts, too.2 Floating rate debt costs more for them to service as interest rates rise, which presumably causes some of them to reconsider some things they might have been doing or planning. So the ‘cash flow’ channel of monetary policy affects business.

Monetary policy also affects what economists would call inter‑temporal decision‑making. Incentives to save, as opposed to consume, alter. It is commonly observed that many Australians save rather little, but the household saving rate has in fact risen noticeably in recent years, largely unnoticed by conventional opinion. I do not claim that the increase is mainly due to rising interest rates, but I do not think we should assume that these incentives do not matter. Despite Australia’s extensive use of foreign saving to build up our economy, the bulk of our productive investment is financed via domestic saving of one form or another.

Changes in interest rates affect asset values over time, through effects on discount rates, expected earnings growth and so on. These feed through into behaviour in several dimensions – via the cost of capital to firms, wealth effects and so on. Through complex channels, monetary policy can sometimes also affect the non‑price terms of credit, particularly if it manages to affect expectations about future growth, creditworthiness and risk appetite.

Then there is the exchange rate, as I have already mentioned. Numerous factors affect exchange rates, and the relationships are hard to pin down. However, interest rate differentials between countries do matter to exchange rates, along with expectations about how those differentials may change (a function of growth expectations), factors affecting trade positions (such as commodity prices in our case), investor risk preferences and so on. I have already discussed the case of petrol, but there is surely little doubt that the prices of tradable goods and services generally are lower today than they would have been if the exchange rate had been at its long‑run average level. This is the case even with much more muted short‑term pass‑through of exchange rate changes than we used to have. In other words, changes in the exchange rate alter the terms at which the rest of the world supplies goods and services to Australia in a way that is stabilising for prices.

All these are channels for monetary policy’s effects. They operate at different speeds, and to differing extents in different episodes – but they are all there, and I would say that they are all working at present. The transmission of monetary policy is not just about home loan rates, as important a channel as that is.

Secondly, to say monetary policy is a blunt instrument begs the question: where are the sharp instruments? It is not obvious that there are all that many. People mention supply‑side reforms of various kinds and unquestionably these have been extremely important over the years. To the extent that more can be done, that is all to the good for Australians’ standard of living. But they are long term. It is hard to deploy them in a hurry. And many of them are very general – ‘blunt’ even – rather than specific.

Many people will appeal, perhaps not unreasonably, to the possibility of using fiscal policy to counter inflation pressure. For some time now, fiscal policy has not been actively deployed to manage the business cycle. The focus has mainly been on achieving and then maintaining a structurally sound, long‑run fiscal position and, subject to that, making tax and spending decisions aimed at various other objectives that governments have. This does not preclude allowing the budget’s ‘automatic stabilisers’ to operate over the cycle (though it might be observed that, with an elongated upswing like the one we have been having, it is getting more difficult to decide what should be thought of as a temporary rise in revenue and what can be assumed to be permanent).

It strikes me that in the popular discussion about fiscal policy, many participants talk past each other because they are looking at different time dimensions. It is not unreasonable to say that if the budget is perpetually in surplus, there is no debt to speak of and no other looming large unfunded liability, taxes should probably, over some long‑run horizon, be lower. This, it seems to me, is the economic case for structural reductions in taxes, which some observers articulate. Others argue that such reductions should be delayed, for cyclical reasons, given that demand needs to slow to contain inflation. So there is a structural case for taxes to fall, and a cyclical case for them not to. It is no doubt difficult for any government to reconcile these two, equally valid, points of view, the more so if the same tension persists for a number of consecutive years.

Leaving that aside, let us give some thought to just how effective an instrument budgetary policy is likely to be. If inflationary pressures were just due to specific, narrow issues (which, as is clear above, I doubt), precise targeting of the sources of inflationary pressure via tax and spending measures could nonetheless be exceedingly difficult at a technical level, let alone politically.

If it is accepted, on the other hand, that inflation is sufficiently general that overall demand has to slow, the amount of slowing has to be the same regardless of whether it comes via monetary policy or fiscal policy. It would be somewhat differently distributed across sectors and regions, as the impact of interest rate and exchange rate effects obviously would not overlap exactly with the tax or spending measures that would occur in their place. I would hazard a guess, though, that a good many people who are today paying higher interest rates would instead pay higher taxes in a world where fiscal policy was used more actively to manage the business cycle. We are unlikely, I submit, to witness a situation where income taxes are raised only for those without home loans, or only for those living in Western Australia and Queensland, or those working in the mining sector.

Then there are the time lags in implementing fiscal measures. The Budget occurs once a year, and has a very long and gruelling process in the lead up. I am not expecting to be stampeded by people in this room wishing to do that more often. The economy could conceivably look rather different in mid May when the Budget occurs than it did when the budget processes began, and different again by the time the measures actually take effect. Monetary policy has its full effects with a long lag, but we at least get to reconsider each month, and if need be we can reverse direction quickly.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing that fiscal policy does not matter to the cyclical outcomes, or that fiscal policy should not be made with an eye to the cycle as well as to the structural position. To the extent it can be, of course that is welcome. I am not here to offer any particular suggestion on what fiscal policy should do at present. I am simply saying that the task of fine‑tuning fiscal policy for stabilisation purposes, if that were thought desirable, is unlikely to be any more straightforward than that of using monetary policy. Fiscal policy, in its own way and for its own reasons, is also likely to prove a fairly blunt instrument. Inevitably, even with fiscal policy ideally calibrated for the conjunctural position, monetary policy would still have a lot of work to do managing inflation.

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Glenn Otto