First, what has the Fed done recently? Until September, its bond-buying program was explicitly limited in size and duration. Fed policy makers then replaced it with an open-ended program, whose pace was to be determined by progress in healing the labor market. And they adopted simpler, more positive explanations for their actions — jettisoning the gloomy, expectations-killing language that cited wretched economic prospects to justify every expansionary move.
Then, in December, the Fed surprised markets by replacing its somewhat confusing predictions for interest rates with numerical guidelines. It said it would keep the rate it controls — the federal funds rate — near zero at least until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent or inflation rose above 2.5 percent.
Under the circumstances, it was significant that the policy makers took these actions at all. The economic data that came out before the September meeting were actually better than expected. And, based on forecasts released after the meeting, members of the Fed’s policy-making committee were slightly more optimistic about prospects for employment and output growth than they had been three months before. That they nevertheless adopted a more expansionary policy can be read as an admission that they hadn’t been doing enough earlier.
The pledge to keep rates low, even if inflation edged above 2 percent, is particularly consequential. For the last several years, the Fed has acted as if 2 percent were not just a target but a ceiling that should never be breached. But coming out of a terrible recession, with unemployment excruciatingly high, a period of very rapid growth is needed to repair the damage — and it wouldn’t be surprising for such growth to push inflation a bit over 2 percent. A Fed acknowledgment that 2.5 percent inflation would be tolerable for a short while isn’t a sign that it has lost its commitment to price stability. Instead, it’s a strong statement that it is committed to ensuring a faster recovery.
The more positive language, along with the “we’ll do whatever it takes” approach to bond buying, seems designed to reassure Americans that conditions will improve. This, too, is important. With short-term rates close to zero, the Fed’s main tool is expectations management. If it can persuade people to expect more growth — and yes, a little more inflation — it may help encourage companies to stop sitting on cash and start investing again.
The new policies are improvements, but I don’t want to oversell them. As I suggested in a previous column, a more definitive policy shift — like adopting a new target for monetary policy — would likely have a greater impact on expectations and in stimulating the recovery.
And the new policy’s numerical parameters are too conservative. According to the Fed’s own assessments, normal unemployment over the longer run is well below 6.5 percent. If inflation remains low and unemployment gets down to 6.5 percent, there’s no reason to rush to raise interest rates.
The most pressing problem, though, is that the Fed’s commitment to its new policies appears shaky. Soon after the December meeting, some members of the policy-making committee spoke out against the action — killing some of the positive buzz created by the policy statement and by a spirited news conference by the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke. Also, the minutes of the December meeting showed that some who had voted for the new guidance on the fed funds rate were skeptical about the complementary action on bond-buying.
No one of the Fed’s recent actions is particularly powerful on its own, but together they create a sense of aggressive expansion and commitment to recovery. If the Fed now stops some of them, giving the public a mixed message, the positive effect on expectations could easily evaporate.
So why has the Fed moved slowly, and why are some policy makers threatening to undo the recent actions? In a recent paper, Prof. David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley (my husband), and I found that pessimistic views about the effectiveness and costs of expansionary actions have played a major role in limiting Fed moves over the last few years. Policy makers worry that such actions will do little good and that they could cause inflation, distortions in financial markets and losses on the Fed’s portfolio.
I can’t say for sure that those views are wrong today. We just don’t have enough experience with situations like the current one to have conclusive evidence one way or the other.
But our paper shows that in two periods when the Fed made terrible errors, the same kinds of pessimistic views were present. Faced with the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the high inflation of the early and late 1970s, monetary policy makers did little because they were convinced that action would be ineffective.
Subsequent events proved both decisions wrong. In the 1930s, a propitious gold inflow allowed the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to conduct monetary expansion without the Fed. Real interest rates plummeted, expectations improved and investment spending and consumer purchases of durable goods took off — jump-starting the recovery. At the end of the 1970s, a new Fed chairman, Paul A. Volcker, concluded that monetary policy absolutely could reduce inflation, and he led the Fed to raise interest rates to historic highs. The recession that followed was painful, but inflation did come down — and it has been low ever since.
WHEN monetary policy makers meet again at the end of this month, they should keep these historical lessons in mind. At the very least, the Cassandras on the committee might want to reread the policy record from the 1930s. The degree to which some of them sound like their Depression-era counterparts might shock them — and give them pause.
The Fed’s new more aggressive policy shows every sign of being helpful, and there are no indications that the feared costs are materializing. So rather than trimming the policy before it can bear fruit, why not give it a chance?
Even better, why not give it some extra oomph? Rather than just continuing the bond-buying program, accelerate it somewhat. Instead of just reiterating the numerical guidelines on the funds rate, policy makers could follow the suggestion of Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, that they lower to 5.5 percent the unemployment level at which the Fed starts to consider raising interest rates. And if Mr. Bernanke wanted to be truly aggressive, he could broach the idea that in a weak economy, a strong dollar isn’t necessarily desirable.
The important thing is that hypothetical fears shouldn’t stop the Fed’s evolution. History is on the side of doing more, not standing on the sidelines.
Christina D. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/business/fed-monetary-policy-drives-best-at-higher-speeds.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
