inflation targeting

Central Banks, Helicopter Money and How Not to Spot Bubbles

The idea for this piece came after reading the latest edition of Dylan Grice’s fantastic newsletter Popular Delusions. It took my mind back to some stuff I had written about, a while back, in the second volume of the Easy Money trilogy. Now what do they say about the more things change the more they remain the same?

Anyway, Grice’s latest newsletter starts with a comment made by Jerome Powell, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank.

As Powell said on CNBC:

“The big picture is still that we’ve seen … three decades, a quarter of a century, of lower and more stable inflation and we’ve seen really the last decade be characterized by global disinflationary forces and large advanced economy nations struggling to reach their 2% inflation goal from below.”

He further said:

“If the economy reopens, there’s quite a lot of savings on peoples’ balance sheets… you could see strong spending growth and there could be some upward pressure on prices. Again though, my expectation would be that that would be neither large nor sustained.”

How do we interpret the above statements in simple English?

1) What Powell is basically saying here is that all the money printing carried out by central banks across the world over the last decade, hasn’t really led to high inflation. In fact, the inflation has constantly been less than the 2% level targeted by the Western central banks (a disinflationary environment as Powell put it).

And he is right. Take a look at following graph which basically plots inflation in the United States, as measured by the core personal expenditures index excluding food and energy. This is the index followed by the Federal Reserve when it comes to inflation.

Since 2008, the year when the financial crisis broke out, the only year in which inflation in the US touched 2%, was 2018. Clearly, the trillions of dollars printed by the Fed since then haven’t led to a high inflation at the consumer level.

I clearly remember that when the Fed started printing money post the breakout of the financial crisis, many writers (including yours truly) said very high inflation was on its way as too much money would end up chasing the same amount of goods and services, and this would drive up prices. But nothing like that happened. (The good bit is that the newspaper I wrote all this in, has since shutdown. So, finding evidence of it won’t be easy :-))

2) Powell also said that while he expects some inflation as people go back to leading normal lives once again post covid, but that’s not something to worry about because it would neither be large nor sustained. Hence, Powell expects the inflation to rise and then settle down.

This leads to the question why inflation has continued to remain less than 2% all these years through much of the Western world, despite the massive amount of money printing that has been carried out.

In an essay written in 1969, the economist Milton Friedman came up with the concept of the helicopter drop of money. As he had written in the essay:

“Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community.”

The idea here was to distribute money to the public, so that they got out there and spend it, in the process creating inflation and economic growth.

The money printing carried out by the Federal Reserve and other central banks in the recent past and since 2008, was supposed to be a version of this helicopter drop. Of course, there was no helicopter going around dropping money directly to citizens, but central banks printed money and pumped that money into the financial system by buying bonds.

This was supposed to drive down interest rates. At lower interest rates people were supposed to borrow and spend, as they had before the financial crisis, and companies were supposed to borrow and expand.

The hope was that the increased spending would create some inflation and some economic growth along the way, like a helicopter drop is expected to.

The trouble with this argument is that it doesn’t take a basic factor into account, which is, when the money is being dropped from a helicopter, who is standing under it. The point being that people standing under the helicopter are likely to collect the money before others do and this changes the situation.

In fact, this possibility was first observed by Richard Cantillon an Irish-French economist, who lived in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, before the era of Adam Smith as well as helicopters. Clearly, economists of the modern world, have forgotten him, which is hardly surprising given that economists these days rarely read any history.

When central banks print money, they do so with the belief that money is neutral. So, in that sense, it does not really matter who is standing under the helicopter when the money is printed and dropped into the economy, but Cantillon showed that money wasn’t really neutral and that it mattered where it was injected into the economy.

Cantillon made this observation based on all the gold and silver coming into Spain from what was then called the New World (now South America). When money supply increased in the form of gold and silver, it would first benefit the people associated with the mining industry, that is, the owners of the mines, the adventurers who went looking for gold and silver, the smelters, the refiners, and the workers at the gold and silver mines.

These individuals would end up with a greater amount of gold and silver, that is, money. They would spend this money and thus drive up the prices of meat, wine, wool, wheat, etc. Of course, everyone in the economy had to pay these higher prices. ((I came to know of this effect from Dylan Grice, after having interviewed him many years back and then starting to read his newsletter regularly).

The Cantillon effect has played out since 2008. When central banks printed and pumped money into the financial system, the large institutional investors, were the ones standing under the helicopter.

They borrowed money at cheap rates and invested across large parts across the world, fuelling stock market and bond market rallies primarily, and a few real estate ones as well.

As economist Bill Bonner put it in a 2013 column:

“The Fed creates new money (not more wealth … just new money). This new money goes into the banking system, pretending to have the same value as the money that people worked for. And people with good connections to the banks take advantage of the cheap credit this new money creates to aid financial speculation.”

After the large institutional investors came the corporates, who were expected to borrow money and expand, and create jobs and economic growth in the process. What they did instead was borrow money to buyback their shares.

When companies announce a decision to buyback their shares, it pushes up the possibility of their earning per share going up and this leads to higher stock prices, benefitting the top management of the company who owns company stock. Of course, the company ends up with lesser equity and more debt in the process. But that is a problem for a later date, by which time the top management would have moved on.

So, instead of consumer price inflation, what the world got was asset price inflation, with the values of financial assets, totally out of whack from the underlying fundamentals.

This dynamic has played out again since the beginning of 2020, in the post-covid world. Once the covid pandemic broke out, central banks decided to print and pump money into the financial system, like they had after the financial crisis. The US Federal Reserve has printed more than three trillion dollars and the Bank of Japan has printed more than 100 trillion yen, in the last one year.

And guess who was standing beneath the helicopter this time around? …

But along with this something else happened. The governments of the Western world also decided to send cheques directly to people, so that they could spend money directly and help boost economic activity. .

The trouble was with the pandemic on, people were stuck at homes. Hence, the money got saved and invested. Along with the institutional money, retail money also flowed into financial markets all across the world.

This has sent prices of financial assets soaring. As of March 2, the total market capitalization of the US stock market stood at 191.5% of its gross domestic product. The long term average of this ratio is 85.55%.

As Grice puts it in his latest newsletter:

“As the stock market makes new all-time highs… The IPO market is hot, credit markets are hot, commodity markets are hot, the crypto markets are hot. Everything, it seems is hot.”

Of course, other than the inflation as the Fed likes to measure it, which continues to be under 2%. And given that, all is well.

In every era when the prices of financial assets go up substantially, people forget history. This is not the first time that the Fed and other central banks are ignoring financial inflation and looking only at consumer price inflation.

Something similar happened both before the dotcom and telecom bubble, which burst in 2000 and 2001, and the sub prime and real estate bubble, which burst in 2007 and 2008. The Fed kept ignoring the bubbles while waiting for the inflation to cross 2%. This time is no different. (For details you can refer to the third volume of the Easy Money trilogy).

Inflation targeting as a policy, worked when inflation was high and central banks wanted to bring it down. This happened right through the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.

Since the mid-1990s, inflation has been low in much of the Western world thanks to Chinese imports and outsourcing. As Niall Ferguson writes in The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World: “Chinese imports kept down US inflation. Chinese savings kept down US interest rates. Chinese labour kept down US wage costs.”

This has led to inflation targeting being used in reverse. Instead of trying to control inflation, Western central banks have been trying to create it, using the same set of tools.

As Gary Dugan, who was the CIO, Asia and Middle East, RBS Wealth Division, told me in a 2013 interview:

“We got inflation which was too low. So, we have changed it all around to actually try to create inflation, rather than to dampen it. I don’t think they know what tools they should be using. The central banks are using the same tools they used to dampen inflation, in a reverse way, in order to create it. And that is clearly not working.”

What was true for 2013 is also true for 2021. The playbook of central banks continues to remain the same. As I wrote in a recent piece for the Mint, the whole situation reminds me of the Hotel California song, where The Eagles sang, you can check out any time you want but you can never leave.

The trouble is that along with the money printing there is something else at play this time around. A large part of the global population has been stuck at their homes for more than a year. As they get vaccinated and start living normal lives again, a huge amount of pent-up demand is going to hit the market .

This might lead to inflation as the bond market investors have been fearing for a while, given that supply is not expected to keep up with demand. A higher inflation will mean higher interest rates, something which is not good for the stock market as a whole.

But there is another important factor that needs to be kept in mind. People will be spending their savings . And this means that they will be cashing in on their investments, be it stocks, bitcoin or whatever.

The greater the pent-up demand that hits the market, the higher will be the savings that will be cashed out on and more will be the pressure on the financial markets.

This is an important dynamic that investors need to keep in mind this year.

Inflation targeting will only work if govt keeps its end of bargain

narendra_modi
The finance minister Arun Jaitley’s budget was slightly high on the policy front. One of the things that Jaitley announced in the budget was: “To ensure that our victory over inflation is institutionalized and hence continues, we have concluded a Monetary Policy Framework Agreement with the RBI…This Framework clearly states the objective of keeping inflation below 6%. We will move to amend the RBI Act this year, to provide for a Monetary Policy Committee.”
This strategy essentially involves a central bank estimating and projecting an inflation target, which may or may not be made public, and then using interest rates and other monetary tools to steer the economy toward the projected inflation target.
In the Indian case the target has been made public. As per the agreement between the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) and the government, the RBI will aim to bring down inflation below 6% by January 2016. From 2016-2017 onwards, the rate of inflation will have to be between 2% and 6%.
One of the popular theories going around(especially in the social media among Narendra Modi bhakts) is that by doing this the government has managed to clip the wings of the RBI governor Raghuram Rajan.
Nothing can be far from truth as this. Rajan has been an active advocate of central banks following inflation targeting as a strategy, over the years. He believes that the RBI should be concentrating on controlling inflation, instead of trying to do too many things at the same time.
As Rajan wrote in a 2008 article (along with Eswar Prasad): “The central bank is also held responsible, in political and public circles, for a stable exchange rate. The RBI has gamely taken on this additional objective but with essentially one instrument, the interest rate, at its disposal, it performs a high-wire balancing act.”
By trying to do too many things at the same time, RBI ends up being neither here nor there, the RBI governor feels. As Rajan and Prasad put it: “What is wrong with this? Simple that by trying to do too many things at once, the RBI risks doing none of them well.”
Hence, Rajan felt that the RBI should focus on controlling inflation. As he wrote in the 2008 Report of the Committee on Financial Sector Reforms: “The RBI can best serve the cause of growth by focusing on controlling inflation.”
The agreement chalked out by the government and the RBI is in line with the recommendations of the Report of the Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework (better known as the Urjit Patel committee report) which was released in January 2014. The Committee had recommended that the RBI be set an inflation target of 4%, with a band of +/- 2 per cent around it.
Also, the way the RBI is currently structured, it is another remnant of the British Raj. World over central banks are essentially run by monetary policy committees. In India setting the interest rate is the personal responsibility of the RBI governor. This should change with Jaitley saying that the RBI Act will be amended to put a monetary policy committee in place, this year. From the point of view transparency and clear goal setting this is a good move.
Nevertheless, the question though is, is inflation targeting the right strategy to follow? First and foremost, the agreement between the government and the RBI is about maintaining inflation as measured by the consumer price index(CPI) between 2% and 6%, starting in 2016-2017. Before this, the RBI needs to ensure that inflation stays below 6%.
Every six months, the RBI is supposed to publish a document which explains the sources of inflation and forecasts inflation for a period of six to eighteen months from the date of publication of the document.
The thing is that food and beverages constitute 54.18% of the CPI. Food inflation in India is typically caused by disruptions in supply (majorly due to the weather). Take the recent case of rains hitting North India. This has had a dramatic impact on vegetable supply in New Delhi, and led to higher prices.
The RBI cannot do anything in a situation like this. Further, the government policy of the day also has a huge impact in determining which way the food prices go. The government through the Food Corporation of India(FCI) buys wheat and rice at minimum support prices (MSPs). The previous Congress led United Progressive Alliance(UPA) government increased the MSP of rice and wheat dramatically over the years, which in turn led to higher food prices.
As the Economic Survey released a day before the budget points out: “High MSPs result in farmers over-cultivating rice and wheat, which the Food Corporation of India then purchases and houses at great cost. High MSPs also encourage under-cultivation of non-MSP supported crops. The resultant supply-demand mismatch raises prices of non-MSP supported crops and makes them more volatile. This contributes to food price inflation that disproportionately hurts poor households who tend to have uncertain income streams and lack the assets to weather economic shocks.”
This is something that the RBI has no control over. And in situations like these, monetary policy is more or less useless.
What this also means is that the RBI alone cannot ensure that inflation stays less than 6% (or between 2-6% from 2016-2017 onward). The government will also have to follow a responsible fiscal policy. Getting the RBI to sign to an agreement of maintaining low inflation clearly does not mean that only the RBI is responsible for inflation and the government can do whatever it wants to on the fiscal front.
As Rajan said in the monetary policy statement released yesterday: “The central government has signed a memorandum with the Reserve Bank setting out clear inflation objectives for the latter. This makes explicit what was implicit before – that the government and the Reserve Bank have common objectives and that fiscal and monetary policy will work in a complementary way.” I hope, the government keeps its end of the bargain. 

Postscript: The RBI cut the repo rate yesterday by 25 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) to 7.5%. Honestly, I was not expecting this and I had more or less said so in the column that appeared on March 2, 2015.
One thing the rate cut tells us is that Rajan hasn’t bought into the new GDP growth number of 8.1-8.5% in 2015-2016. Jaitley had talked about India soon hitting double digit economic growth in his speech.

The column appeared in The Daily Reckoning on Mar 5, 2015

Is inflation targeting really the way out for India?

 ARTS RAJAN

Vivek Kaul

The Report of the Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was recently released. The Committee has recommended that the RBI follow a policy of inflation targeting. This strategy essentially involves a central bank estimating and projecting an inflation target, which may or may not be made public, and then using interest rates and other monetary tools to steer the economy toward the projected inflation target.
The Committee has recommended that the RBI sets an inflation target of 4%, with a band of +/- 2 per cent around it . The Committee has further recommended that the “transition path to the target zone should be graduated to bringing down inflation from the current level of 10 per cent to 8 per cent over a period not exceeding the next 12 months and 6 per cent over a period not exceeding the next 24 month period before formally adopting the recommended target of 4 per cent inflation with a band of +/- 2 per cent.”
These recommendations are in line with the thinking of the RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan. Rajan believes that the RBI should be concentrating on controlling inflation, instead of trying to do too many things at the same time.
As Rajan wrote in a 2008 article (along with Eswar Prasad) “The central bank is also held responsible, in political and public circles, for a stable exchange rate. The RBI has gamely taken on this additional objective but with essentially one instrument, the interest rate, at its disposal, it performs a high-wire balancing act.”
And given this the RBI ends up being neither here nor there. As Rajan and Prasad put it “What is wrong with this? Simple that by trying to do too many things at once, the RBI risks doing none of them well.”
Hence, Rajan felt that the RBI should ‘just’ focus on controlling inflation. As he wrote in the 2008 Report of the Committee on Financial Sector Reforms“The RBI can best serve the cause of growth by focusing on controlling inflation.”
So far so good. The trouble is that inflation targeting has come in for a lot of criticism since the advent of the current financial crisis. As Taumir Baig and Kaushik Das of Deutsche Bank Research write in note titled RBI’s path towards (soft) inflation targeting and dated January 22, 2014, “The period since the 2008 global financial crisis has not been kind to the theory and practice of inflation targeting. After two decades of enthusiastic embrace by many central banks, both from advanced (e.g. Australia and UK) and emerging market (Brazil, Thailand) economies, the wisdom and efficacy of inflation targeting have came under intense scrutiny.”
And why is that the case? Inflation targeting might have been one of the major reasons behind the current financial crisis. Stephen D. King, group chief economist of HSBC makes this point in his book When the Money Runs Out. As he writes, “the pursuit of inflation-targetting … may have contributed to the West’s financial downfall.”He gives the example of the United Kingdom to make his point: “Take, for example, inflation targeting in the UK. In the early years of the new millennium, inflation had a tendency to drop too low, thanks to the deflationary effects on manufactured goods prices of low-cost producers in China and elsewhere in the emerging world. To keep inflation close to target, the Bank of England loosened monetary policy with the intention of delivering higher ‘domestically generated’ inflation. In other words, credit conditions domestically became excessively loose… The inflation target was hit only by allowing domestic imbalances to arise: too much consumption, too much consumer indebtedness, too much leverage within the financial system and too little policy-making wisdom.”
Essentially, since consumer price inflation was very low, the Bank of England, the British central bank, ended up keeping interest rates low for too long. This led to a huge real estate bubble in the United Kingdom. A similar dynamic played out in the United States as well, where inflation between 2001 and 2004 varied between 1.6 and 2.7 percent. 
With interest rates being low, banks were falling over one another to lend money to anyone who was willing to borrow. And this gradually led to a fall in lending standards. People who did not have the ability to repay were also being given loans. As King writes, “With the UK financial system now awash with liquidity, lending increased rapidly both within the financial system and to other parts of the economy that, frankly, did not need any refreshing. In particular, the property sector boomed thanks to an abundance of credit and a gradual reduction in lending standards.”
This inflation only focus turned out to be disastrous as other economic factors were ignored. As Felix Martin writes in Money—The Unauthorised Biography “The single minded pursuit of low and stable inflation not only drew attention away from the other monetary and financial factors that were to bring the global economy to its knees in 2008—it exacerbated them… Disconcerting signs of impending disaster in the pre-crisis economy—booming housing prices, a drastic underpricing of liquidity in asset markets, the emergence of the shadow banking system, the declines in lending standards, bank capital, and the liquidity ratios—were not given the priority they merited, because, unlike low and stable inflation, they were simply not identified as being relevant.”
India currently suffers from high inflation and not low inflation. But while deciding on a policy all factors need to be kept in mind. And the view in the Western world now seems to be that inflation targeting was one of the major reasons for the real estate bubbles that led to the current financial crisis. The RBI needs to keep this in mind.
Also, the bigger question about whether the RBI can play a role in curbing inflation continues to remain. If one looks at the consumer price inflation index, food and fuel items constitute 57% of the index. RBI’s interest rate policy cannot play any role in curbing the prices of these two items. As Chetan Ahya and Upasana Chachra of Morgan Stanley Research write in a report titled Where Are We in the Boom-Bust-Adjustment Cycle? dated January 16, 2014, “high rural wage growth has also been a key factor behind the bad growth mix. We believe the national rural employment scheme (NREGA) has been one of the key factors pushing rural wages without matching gains in productivity. Rural wages have shot up since just after the credit crisis from early 2009, when the full implementation of NREGA started showing an effect. The rural wage growth rate moved up from 10-13% in 1H08 to an average of 18.7% over the last three years – without a matching increase in productivity. In our view, this has been one of the key factors resulting in higher food, services and overall CPI inflation as well as inflation expectations.”
Hence, the only way the food inflation and in return the consumer price inflation can be controlled, is if the government decides to control its fiscal deficit. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a govenrment earns and what it spends. The RBI cannot play any role in this, other than suggesting to the government that its fiscal deficit is high.

 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on January 23, 2014

In theory, Rupee at 72 to dollar is the solution to CAD


Gary Dugan 4
Gary Dugan is the CIO – Asia and Middle East, RBS Wealth Division. In this freewheeling interview with Vivek Kaul he talks about the recent currency crash in Asia, where the rupee is headed to in the days to come and why you would be lucky, if you are able to find a three BHK apartment, anywhere in one of the major cities of the world, for less than $100,000.
What are your views on the current currency crash that is on in Asia?
People are trying to characterise it as something like what has happened in the past. I think it is very different. It is different in the sense that we know that emerging markets in general have improved. Their financial systems are more stronger. The government policy has been more prudent and their exposure to overseas investors in general has been well controlled. I don’t think we are going to see a 12 month or a two year problem here. However, countries such as India and Indonesia have been caught out and the money flows have brought their currencies under pressure. So, it’s a problem but not a crisis.
One school of thought coming out seems to suggest that we are going to see some version of the Asian financial crisis that happened in 1998, over the next 18 to 20 months…
I totally disagree with that. The rating agencies have looked at the Indonesian banks and they have said that these banks are well-abled to weather the problems. If you look at India, the banking system is well-abled to weather the problems. It is not as if that there is a whole set of banks about to announce significant write down of assets or lending. The only thing could go wrong is what is happening in Syria. If the oil price goes to $150 per barrel then the whole world has got a problem. The emerging market countries would have an inflation problem and that would only create an exaggeration of what we are seeing at the moment.
Where do you see the rupee going in the days to come?
There is still going to be downward pressure. I said right at the beginning of the year, and I was a little bit tongue in cheek when I said that in theory the rupee could fall to 72. At 72 to a dollar, in theory, clears the current account deficit. I never expected it to get anywhere near that, certainly in a short period of time. But some good comes out of the very substantial adjustments, because pressure on the current account starts to disappear. Already the data is reflecting that. Where the rupee should be in the longer term is a very difficult question to answer.
Lets say by the end of year…
(Laughs) I challenged our foreign exchange market experts on this and asked them what is the fair value for the rupee? I ran some numbers on the hotel prices in Mumbai, relative to other big cities, and not just New York and London, but places like Istanbul as well. India, is the cheapest place among these cities. Like the Economist’s McDonald Index, I did a hotel index, and on that you could argue that the rupee should be 20-30% higher. But, if you look at the price that you have got to pay to sort out your economic problems, it is probably that the currency is going to be closer to 70 than 60 for the balance of this year.
One argument that is often made, at least by the government officials is that because the rupee is falling our exports will start to go up. But that doesn’t seem to have happened…
It takes a while. I was actually talking to a client in Hong Kong last week and he said that warehouses in India have been emptied of flat screen TVs, and they have all been sent to Dubai because they are 20% cheaper now. It is a simple story of how the market reacts to a falling currency.
But it’s not as simple as that…
Of course. A part of the problem that India has is that the economic model has more been based on the service sector rather than manufacturing. The amount of manufactured products that become cheaper immediately and everyone says that I need more Indian products rather than Chinese products or Vietnamese products, is probably insufficient in number to give a sharp rebound immediately. Where you may see a change, even though some of the call centre managers are a little sceptical about it, is that call centres which had lost their competitive edge because of very substantial wage growth in India, will immediately get a good kicker again. It would certainly be helpful, but I would say that it normally takes three to six months to see the maximum benefit of the currency adjustment.
What are the views on the stock market?
I am just a bit sceptical that you are going to see much performance before the elections. I always say it is a relative game rather than absolute one. If all markets are doing well, then India with its adjustment will do fine. Within the BRIC countries, India falls at the bottom of the pack, in terms of relative attractiveness, just because there is a more dynamic story for some of the other countries at the moment.
One of the major negatives for the stock market in India is the fact that the private companies in India have a huge amount of dollar debt…
It is definitely a reason to worry. It’s not something I have looked at in detail. But as you were asking the question, I was just thinking that people are dragging all sorts of bad stories out. When there were bad stories before, people were just finding their way through it. And India has a wonderful way of working its way through its problems and has been doing that for many many years. Remember that these problems come to the head only if the banks call them to account. I think there will be a re-negotiation. It is not as if a very substantial part of Indian history is about to go under because someone is going to pull the plug on them.
Most of the countries that have gone from being developing countries to becoming developed countries have gone through a manufacturing revolution, which is something that is something that has been missing in India…
It is. You look at the stories from the past five years, and the waning strength of the service sector in India, in th international markets, comes out. A good example is that of call centres that have gone back to the middle of the United States from India. A part of that came through currency adjustment. You can say that maybe the rupee was overvalued at the time when this crisis hit. But it is true, in a sense, that India has got to back-fill a stronger manufacturing industry and it has got to reinforce its competitive edge in the service sector.
What is holding back the Indian service sector?
A number of structural things. I talked to some service sector companies at the beginning of the year. And one of things I was told was that I have got all my workers sitting here in this call centre, but now they cannot afford to live within two hours of commuting distance. Why did that happen? That is not about service sector. It is about the broad infrastructure and putting people at home, close to where they work. There are lot of problems to be solved.
There has been talk about the Federal Reserve going slow on money printing(or tapering as it is called) in the days to come. How do you see that going?
Everyone has got to understand that the principle of quantitative easing is to generate growth. So, if there is enough growth around they will keep tapering, even if they get it wrong by starting to taper too early. They will stop tapering if growth is slow. Secondly, number of Federal Reserve governors are worried about imprudent actions of consumers and industrialists, in terms of taking cheap money and spending it on things that they typically do not need to spend on. A good example is speculation in the housing market, something which created the problem in the first place. So they want to choke such bad behaviours. They will probably start tapering in September in a small way. The only thing that may stop it from happening is if the middle Eastern situation blows up. The US didn’t think it was going to get involved a few weeks ago. Now it is.
Isn’t this kind of ironical, that the solution to the problem of propping up the property market again, is something that caused the problem in the first place…
That’s been very typical of the United States for the last 100 years. Evertime there is a problem you ask people to use their credit cards. Or use some form of credit. And when there is an economic slowdown because of the problems of non performing loans, then you get the credit card out again. So, yeah unfortunately that is the way it is.
Why is there this tendency to go back to the same thing that causes the problem, over and over again?
It is the quickest fix. And you hope that you are going to bring about structural changes during the course of a better economic cycle. So people don’t bring the heavyweight policies in place until they have got the economy going again and sadly the only way you can get the economy going again is to just to make credit cheap and encourage people to borrow.
Inflation targeting by central banks has come in for criticism lately. The point is that because a central bank works with a certain inflation target in mind, it ends up encouraging bubbles by keeping interest rates too low for too long. What is your view on that?
These concepts were brought in when central banks thought they could control inflation. If you look at one country that dominates the world at the moment in terms of product prices and in terms of the inflation rate, it is China. Your monetary policy isn’t going to change the behaviours of China. And some of the flairs up in inflation have been as a consequence of China and therefore monetary policies have no impact. Secondly, the idea of controlling inflation, the concept worked for the 20 years of the bull market. Then we got inflation which was too low. So we have changed it all around to actually try to create inflation rather than to dampen inflation. I don’t think they know what tools they should be using. The central banks are using the same tools they used to dampen inflation, in a reverse way, in order to create it.
And that’s where the problem lies…
For nearly two to three hundred years, the world had no inflation, yet the world was kind of an alright place. We had an industrial revolution and we still had negative price increases, but that did not stop people from getting wealthy.
Many people have been shouting from the rooftops that because of all the money that has been printed and is being printed, the world is going to see a huge amount of inflation, so please go and buy gold. But that scenario hasn’t played out…
Chapter one of the economic text book is that if you create a lot of money, you have got a problem. Chapter two is that there is actually another dimension to this and that is the velocity of money. If you have lots of money and if it happens to go around the world very very slowly it doesn’t have any impact. And that has been the point. The amount of money has gone up considerably but the velocity of money has come down. To date, again in the western world, there is little sign of the velocity improving. We are seeing this in the lending numbers. Even if banks have the appetite for lending money, nobody wants to borrow. Someone’s aged 55, and the job prospects are no wage growth, and the pension is tiny, I am not sure that even if you have gave him ten credit cards, he’ll go and use any of one of them. And that is the kind of thing that is happening in Europe and to some extent in the United States.
Yes that’s true…
The only money going into housing at the moment is the money coming from the institutional market, as they speculate. If you look at students coming out of college in the United States, they have come out way down with debt. There is again no way that they are going to go and take more loans from the bank because they have already done that in order to fund their education. So I do not seeturnover of money in the Western world.
There may be no inflation in everyday life but if you look at asset inflation, it has been huge.. That’s right. People just find stores of value. Gold went up as much as it did, in its last wave. If you look at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, in the art market, they are doing extremely well. The same is true about the property market. Places which are in the middle of a jungle in Africa, there prices have gone up to $100,000 an acre. Why? There is no communication. No power lines. It is just because people have money and are seeking out assets to save that money. Also, there has been cash.If you go to Dubai, 80% of the house purchases there, are in cash. So you don’t need the banks.
Can you tell us a little more on the Africa point you just made?
I did laugh when Rwanda came to Singapore to raise money for its first ever bond issue and people were just discovering these new bond markets to invest purely because they did not know what to do with their money. So someone said that I am building, you know in a Rwanda or a Nigeria, and people just ran with their cash, buying properties and buying up land wherever the policies of the government allowed. Sri Lanka again just closed the door on foreign investors because you start to get social problems as the local community cannot afford properties to live in. It was amazing how commercial many of these property markets became, even though in the past they were totally undiscovered. And as we have seen with many of them, you take considerable risk with the legal system. The world has got repriced. I always say that if you can find a three bedroom house below a $100,000-$150,000 in a major city, you are doing well anywhere in the world today.
In Mumbai you won’t find it even for that price..
Yes, though five years ago it was true. It is impossible now.
(The interview appeared in the Forbes India magazine edition dated Oct 4, 2013) 

Try Again. Fail again. Fail better – Disaster formula of US Federal Reserve

Bernanke-BubbleVivek Kaul
“Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself,” wrote economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer, in a research paper titled Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case with the Federal Reserve of United States, which seems to be making the same mistakes that led to the financial crisis in the first place. Take its decision to continue printing money, in order to revive the American economy.
In a press conference to explain the logic behind the decision, Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of United States, said “we should be very reluctant to raise rates if inflation remains persistently below target, and that’s one of the reasons that I think we can be very patient in raising the federal funds rate since we have not seen any inflation pressure.”
The Federal Reserve of United States prints $85 billion every month. It puts this money into the financial system by buying bonds. With all this money going around interest rates continue to remain low. And at low interest rates the hope is that people will borrow and spend more money.
As people spend more money, a greater amount of money will chase the same number of goods, and this will lead to inflation. Once a reasonable amount of inflation or expectations of inflation set in, people will start altering their spending plans. They will buy things sooner rather than later, given that with inflation things will become more expensive in the days to come. This will help businesses and thus revive economic growth.
The Federal Reserve has an inflation target of 2%. Inflation remains well below this level. As Michael S. Derby writes in the Wall Street Journal “As of the most recent reading in July, the Fed’s favoured inflation gauge, the personal consumption expenditures price index, was up 1.4% from a year ago.”
So, given that inflation is lower than the Fed target, interest rates need to continue to be low, and hence, money printing needs to continue. That is what Bernanke was basically saying.
Inflation targeting has been a favourite policy of central banks all over the world. This strategy essentially involves a central bank estimating and projecting an inflation target and then using interest rates and other monetary tools to steer the economy towards the projected inflation target. The trouble here is that inflation-targeting by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world had led to the real estate bubble a few years back. The current financial crisis is the end result of that bubble.
Stephen D King, Group Chief Economist of HSBC makes this point When the Money Runs Out. As he writes “the pursuit of inflation-targetting…may have contributed to the West’s financial downfall.”
King writes about the United Kingdom to make his point. “Take, for example, inflation targeting in the UK. In the early years of the new millennium, inflation had a tendency to drop too low, thanks to the deflationary effects on manufactured goods prices of low-cost producers in China and elsewhere in the emerging world. To keep inflation close to target, the Bank of England loosened monetary policy with the intention of delivering higher ‘domestically generated’ inflation. In other words, credit conditions domestically became excessive loose…The inflation target was hit only by allowing domestic imbalances to arise: too much consumption, too much consumer indebtedness, too much leverage within the financial system and too little policy-making wisdom.”
What this means is that the Bank of England(as well as other central banks like the Federal Reserve) kept interest rates too low for too long because inflation was at very low levels. Low interest rates did not lead to inflation, with people borrowing and spending more, primarily because of low cost producers in China and other parts of the emerging world.
Niall Ferguson makes this point in The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World in the context of the United States. As he writes “Chinese imports kept down US inflation. Chinese savings kept down US interest rates. Chinese labour kept down US wage costs. As a result, it was remarkably cheap to borrow money and remarkably profitable to run a corporation.”
The same stood true for the United Kingdom and large parts of the Western World. With interest rates being low banks were falling over one another to lend money to anyone who was willing to borrow. And this gradually led to a fall in lending standards.
People who did not have the ability to repay were also being given loans. As King writes “With the UK financial system now awash with liquidity, lending increased rapidly both within the financial system and to other parts of the economy that, frankly, didn’t need any refreshing. In particular, the property sector boomed thanks to an abundance of credit and a gradual reduction in lending standards.” What followed was a big bubble, which finally burst and its aftermath is still being felt more than five years later.
As newsletter write Gary Dorsch writes in a recent column “Asset bubbles often arise when consumer prices are low, which is a problem for central banks who solely target inflation and thereby overlook the risks of bubbles, while appearing to be doing a good job.”
A lot of the money printed by the Federal Reserve over the last few years has landed up in all parts of the world, from the stock markets in the United States to the property market in Africa, and driven prices to very high levels. At low interest rates it has been easy for speculators to borrow and invest money, wherever they think they can make some returns.
Given this argument, it was believed that the Federal Reserve will go slow on money printing in the time to come and hence, allow interest rates to rise (This writer had also argued something along similar lines). But, alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
As Claudio Borio and Philip Lowe wrote in the BIS working paper titled Asset prices, financial and monetary stability: exploring the nexus (the same paper that Dorsch talks about) “lowering rates or providing ample liquidity when problems materialise but not raising rates as imbalances build up, can be rather insidious in the longer run.”
Once these new round of bubbles start to burst, there will be more economic pain. The Irish author Samuel Beckett explained this tendency to not learn from one’s mistakes beautifully. As he wrote “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
The Federal Reserve seems to be working along those lines.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on September 20, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)