Reforming macroeconomics
Claudio Borio on the financial cycle
Dec 14th 2012, 12:34 by M.C.K. | WASHINGTON, D.C.
CLAUDIO BORIO is one of the world’s most provocative and interesting monetary economists. Based at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Mr Borio was one of a handful of people who warned of the financial system’s fragility back in 2003. Now he is out with a new working paper called “The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt?” This important paper summarises what we know about booms and busts, Mr Borio’s own suggestions for the next research agenda in macroeconomics, and the optimal policy responses to financial crises. What follows is a summary and analysis of the most interesting bits. Those who are interested should read the entire paper.
Mr Borio's thesis is worth quoting in full:
Economists are now trying hard to incorporate financial factors into standard macroeconomic models. However, the prevailing, in fact almost exclusive, strategy is a conservative one. It is to graft additional so-called financial “frictions” on otherwise fully well behaved equilibrium macroeconomic models, built on real-business-cycle foundations and augmented with nominal rigidities. The approach is firmly anchored in the New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) paradigm…The main thesis is that macroeconomics without the financial cycle is like Hamlet without the Prince. In the environment that has prevailed for at least three decades now, just as in the one that prevailed in the pre-WW2 years, it is simply not possible to understand business fluctuations and their policy challenges without understanding the financial cycle. This calls for a rethink of modelling strategies. And it calls for significant adjustments to macroeconomic policies.
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Mr Borio combines these ideas into a radical departure from conventional macro:
Models should deal with true monetary economies, not with real economies treated as monetary ones, as is sometimes the case. Financial contracts are set in nominal, not in real, terms. More importantly, the banking system does not simply transfer real resources, more or less efficiently, from one sector to another; it generates (nominal) purchasing power. Deposits are not endowments that precede loan formation; it is loans that create deposits. Money is not a “friction” but a necessary ingredient that improves over barter. And while the generation of purchasing power acts as oil for the economic machine, it can, in the process, open the door to instability, when combined with some of the previous elements. Working with better representations of monetary economies should help cast further light on the aggregate and sectoral distortions that arise in the real economy when credit creation becomes unanchored, poorly pinned down by loose perceptions of value and risks. Only then will it be possible to fully understand the role that monetary policy plays in the macroeconomy. And in all probability, this will require us to move away from the heavy focus on equilibrium concepts and methods to analyse business fluctuations and to rediscover the merits of disequilibrium analysis.
Many academics across the world have worked (and are working) on these ideas. Hyman Minsky, the late American economist, thought that it was more helpful to divide economic actors by the way they financed themselves rather than what they did in the "real" economy. The late Wynne Godley co-wrote a textbook on how to model the economy as a monetary and credit system with Marc Lavoie, a professor in Canada. Agent-based modelling rejects equilibrium solutions in favor of enormous computer simulations, where representations of actual people, firms, and banks can interact and alter their environment. Scholars in Europe have built sophisticated models of the EU economy using this technology, while others have used it to improve our understanding of financial markets. Steve Keen, an Australian economist, has long argued that macro needs to incorporate these ideas, and has developed a prototype of a computer program, called "Minsky," that can be used to model economies as monetary systems. So while most economists have not embraced Mr Borio's agenda for the reformation of macro, some have. That is encouraging news.
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Also, while America, Britain, Ireland, and Spain all suffered from private sector debt bubbles, this did not occur in Italy, Portugal, or Greece, although those nations did have very large stocks of public debt denominated in a currency they could not print.
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But while fiscal policy can be very helpful at the trough of the financial cycle, monetary policy is much less likely to be successful
Monetary policy typically operates by encouraging borrowing, boosting asset prices and risk-taking. But initial conditions already include too much debt, too-high asset prices (property) and too much risk-taking. There is an inevitable tension between how policy works and the direction the economy needs to take.
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It seems unlikely that Mr Borio’s thoughtful and dense new paper will affect the consensus. When he and William White, his colleague at the BIS, warned the world that a credit bubble was inflating back in 2003, they were roundly ignored by the academic and policy establishments. Yet they were right. (A few other observers, including this publication, were also convinced of the danger.) The world would be wise to heed them this time.