Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has recently been on the receiving end of significant criticism for recent monetary policy. One critique can be labeled the American conservative critique, and is associated with the Wall Street Journal. The other can be termed the European critique, and is associated with prominent European Economist and Financial Times contributor, Willem Buiter. <\/p>\n
Both argue the Fed has engaged in excessive monetary easing, cutting interest rates too much and ignoring the perils of inflation. Their criticisms raise core questions about the conduct of policy that warrant a response.<\/p>\n
Brought up on the intellectual ideas of Milton Friedman, American conservatives view inflation as the greatest economic threat and believe control of inflation should be the Fed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s primary job. In their eyes the Bernanke Fed has dangerously ignored emerging inflation dangers, and that policy failure risks a return to the disruptive stagflation of the 1970s.<\/p>\n
Rather than cutting interest rates as steeply as the Fed has, American conservatives maintain the proper way to address the financial crisis triggered by the deflating house price bubble is to re-capitalize the financial system. This explains the efforts of Treasury Secretary Paulson to reach out to foreign investors in places like Abu Dhabi. The logic is that foreign investors are sitting on mountains of liquidity, and they can therefore re-capitalize the system without recourse to lower interest rates that supposedly risk a return of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc70\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s style inflation.<\/p>\n
The European critique of the Fed is slightly different, and is that the Fed has gone about responding to the financial crisis in the wrong way. The European view is that the crisis constitutes a massive liquidity crisis, and as such the Fed should have responded by making liquidity available without lowering rates. That is the course European Central Bank has taken, holding the line on its policy interest rate but making massive quantities of liquidity available to Euro zone banks.<\/p>\n
According to the European critique the Fed should have done the same. Thus, the Fed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new Term Securities Lending Facility that makes liquidity available to investment banks was the right move. However, there was no need for the accompanying sharp interest rate reductions given the inflation outlook. By lowering rates, the European view asserts the Fed has raised the risks of a return of significantly higher persistent inflation. Additionally, lowering rates in the current setting has damaged the Fed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anti-inflation credibility and aggravated moral hazard in investing practices.<\/p>\n
The problem with the American conservative critique is that inflation today is not what it used to be. 1970s inflation was rooted in a price – wage spiral in which price increases were matched by nominal wage increases. However, that spiral mechanism no longer exists because workers lack the power to protect themselves. The combination of globalization, the erosion of job security, and the evisceration of unions means that workers are unable to force matching wage increases.<\/p>\n
The problem with the European critique is it over-looks the scale of the demand shock the U.S. economy has received. Moreover, that demand shock is on-going. Falling house prices and the souring of hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages has caused the financial crisis. However, in addition, falling house prices have wiped out hundreds of billions of household wealth. That in turn is weakening demand as consumer spending slows in response to lower household wealth.<\/p>\n
Countering this negative demand shock is the principal rationale for the Fed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to lower interest rates. Whereas Europe has been impacted by the financial crisis, it has not experienced an equivalent demand shock. That explains the difference in policy responses between the Fed and the European Central Bank, and it explains why the European critique is off mark.<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that current criticism of the Bernanke Fed is unjustified. Whereas the Fed was slow to respond to the crisis as it began unfolding in the summer of 2007, it has now caught up and the stance of policy seems right. Liquidity has been made available to the financial system. Low interest rates are countering the demand shock. And the Fed has signaled its awareness of inflationary dangers by speaking to the problem of exchange rates and indicating it may hold off from further rate cuts. The only failing is that is that the Fed has not been imaginative or daring enough in its engagement with financial regulatory reform.<\/p>\n
Copyright Thomas I. Palley<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has recently been on the receiving end of significant criticism for recent monetary policy. One critique can be labeled the American conservative critique, and is associated with the Wall Street Journal. The other can be termed the European critique, and is associated with prominent European Economist and Financial Times contributor, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1611,"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/1611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaspalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}