The Swiss National Bank announced that it discontinues the exchange rate floor of CHF 1.20 vis-a-vis the Euro and lowers interest rates, to -0.75%. Markets are surprised. Michael Hunter writes in the FT:
The move came as a surprise since Thomas Jordan, SNB chairman, said as recently as December that Switzerland’s defence of the SFr1.20 rate against the euro was “absolutely necessary”.
A graph of the exchange rate series (source):
The Economist explains the “spine-tingling and blissful infinity” of Wagner’s opera.
Robert Hall’s session on “The Economics of Secular Stagnation” featured talks by Robert Gordon, Larry Summers and Barry Eichengreen as well as comments by Hall, William Nordhaus and Gregory Mankiw.
Not surprisingly, both Gordon (on the supply side) and Summers (on the demand side) identified signs of stagnation. Eichengreen didn’t; in his view only the price of investment goods displayed an unusual trend. Hall argued that the year 2000 marked a turning point: Since then, income per household stagnates as a consequence of falling labor supply by rich families and in particular, the teenagers in those families (they play video games instead). Nordhaus expected not stagnation but acceleration, due to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. And Mankiw pointed out that negative real interest rates are the most normal thing in many economic models and not necessarily related to stagnation. Moreover, he argued that the job market pointed to the end of secular stagnation. He predicted the topic would no longer be debated a year from now.
Update (Feb 2015): Webcasts of this as well as other sessions (including on Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”) are available here.
In a recent paper, Robin Greenwood, Sam Hanson, Josh Rudolph and Larry Summers discuss the joint effect of Fed and Treasury policy on the maturity structure of government liabilities in the hands of the private sector. John Cochrane commends the paper in a blog post.
Greenwood, Hanson, Rudolph and Summers make several points. First, “monetary and fiscal policies have been pushing in opposite directions in recent years.” In spite of QE, long-term government debt held by the private sector increased, mostly due to government deficits but also because the government lengthened the maturity of its debt. Second, Fed and Treasury policies largely are uncoordinated. They argue that this is suboptimal, in particular when the Fed strongly intervenes as it did in the recent QE episodes.
The Federal Reserve has focused purely on the effects that its bond purchases were expected to have on long-term interest rates and, by extension, the economy more broadly. … it completely ignored any possible impact on government fiscal risk, even though the Federal Reserve’s profits and losses are remitted to the Treasury. Conversely, Treasury’s debt management announcements and the advice of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC) have focused on the assumed benefits of extending the average debt maturity from a fiscal risk perspective, and largely ignored the impact of policy changes on long-term yields. To the extent that the Federal Reserve and Treasury ever publicly mention the other institution’s mandate, it is usually in the context of avoiding the perception that one institution might be helping the other achieve an objective. Specifically, the Fed does not want to be seen as monetizing deficits, while the Treasury has been reluctant to acknowledge the Fed as anything more than a large investor.
Third, they argue that from a consolidated government policy perspective, the optimal debt maturity structure is rather short. This saves on interest payments to the private sector (on average) and reduces “liquidity transformation” by the financial sector with dangerous consequences for financial stability. They downplay the risk sharing benefits of longer-term debt and argue that short-term debt has additional advantages at the zero lower bound.
Pages 11-12 contain the following figure, among others:
The Swiss National Bank imposes negative interest rates on sight deposit account balances. The press release explains the details, including the calculation of exemption thresholds.
In an NBER working paper, Charles Jones discusses Piketty’s famous r-g term in light of several simple and transparent macroeconomic models. Jones emphasises the role of the Pareto distribution and the difference between partial and general equilibrium reasoning. Importantly,
… exponential growth that occurs for an exponentially-distributed amount of time leads to a Pareto distribution.
The Economist reviews history and performance of auditing firms. The tone is rather downbeat. Thirteen years after Enron, both the business model and auditors’ performance remain questionable. Independence, reputation risk and legal risk do not suffice to align auditor and investor incentives. Regulation has helped, for example in the form of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), due to the Sarbanes-Oxley act. Fundamental change could take the form of nationalisation of audit firms; “financial statements insurance;” or scrapping the legal requirement for audits.
Some quotes from the article:
But such frequent scandals call into question whether this is the best the Big Four can do—and if so, whether their efforts are worth the $50 billion a year they collect in audit fees. … But because the profession was historically allowed to self-regulate despite enjoying a government-guaranteed franchise, it has set the bar so low—formally, auditors merely opine on whether financial statements meet accounting standards—that it is all but impossible for them to fail at their jobs, as they define them. … investors disregard auditors and make little effort to learn about their work, value securities as if audited financial statements were the gospel truth, and then erupt in righteous fury when the inevitable downward revisions cost them their shirts. …
The modern audit does not even provide an opinion on accuracy. Instead, … merely provides “reasonable assurance” that a company’s statements “present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of [the company] in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)”.
Werner Marti reports in the NZZ that in contrast to events in 2001, Argentina’s latest default has not generated significant additional costs for the typical Argentinian household. Additional, that is, to the costs that households had to bear because their country had already mostly been excluded from international capital markets at affordable rates.
Laut allen unseren Gesprächspartnern ist dieses Ereignis an den Argentiniern weitgehend folgenlos vorbeigegangen, denn das Land hatte bereits zuvor keinen Zugang zu internationalen Krediten mit zahlbaren Zinssätzen. Dies heisst natürlich nicht, dass sich mittel- und langfristig das Investitionsklima nicht weiter verschlechtern wird, falls die Präsidentin den Konflikt mit den von ihr als «Geierfonds» bezeichneten Gläubigern nicht doch noch löst.
Marti also reports about new trains that take commuters from Buenos Aires to the Tigre-Delta. They are imported from China, and financed with Chinese credit.
Tyler Cowen points out in a blog post that price increases adjusted for changes in quality have differed substantially across product categories. Depending on the basket of goods and services one wishes to consider this gives rise to large differences in measured CPI inflation. Cowen suggests that low-income households experienced much stronger CPI increases for their relevant basket than high-income households. In other words, the commonly reported increase in income inequality severely underestimates the effective rise.
Against the background of an upcoming referendum in Switzerland (on the popular initiative to ‘Save our Swiss gold’) Willem Buiter discusses the role of gold as a central bank asset in a Citi research note.
One of his conclusions is that “[c]entral bank fiat paper currency and fiat electronic currency are socially superior to gold and Bitcoin as currencies and assets.” Accordingly, central banks should not hold gold in his view.
The considerations guiding the IMF’s debt sustainability analysis which crucially determines the Fund’s lending policy is explained on an IMF website.
The DSA framework is in place since 2002. It has three objectives: To assess the current state; identify vulnerabilities; and examine alternative debt stabilising policies. Both total public and total external debt are analysed. Market-access countries and low-income countries are distinguished. These charts and tables summarise the DSA indicators for a market-access country. An example of the DSA is at display on page 41 in the September 2014 report on Italy.
An IMF staff report published in September and entitled “Strengthening the Contractual Framework to Address Collective Action Problems in Sovereign Debt Restructuring” discusses recent legal developments of relevance for sovereign debt markets and implications for the sovereign debt restructuring process.
The New York court decisions (NML Capital, Ltd v. Republic of Argentina) have rendered a holdout strategy more likely to succeed. This tends to exacerbate collective action problems and raises the risk of more protracted debt restructuring processes. Market participants, including the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA) are discussing contractual clarifications and modifications in response to this challenge. The IMF observes these discussions and supports the preliminary results.
The New York court decisions established a broader interpretation of the standard pari passu clause in sovereign debt contracts. Specifically, they extended the standard notion of “protection of a creditor from legal subordination of its claims in favor of another creditor” to the broader notion that a sovereign must pay creditors on a pro rata basis. The court decisions prohibited Argentina from making payments to holders of restructured bonds unless it paid holdout creditors on a pro rata basis, and it prevented banks from making payments on Argentina’s behalf. In this context, the decisions also interpret the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The scope of the rulings is not clear, not least because the decisions also refer to Argentina’s “course of conduct.” If interpreted broadly, the court decisions change the legal framework and are likely to complicate the restructuring of New York law-governed debt contracts (while probably not affecting London law-governed contracts).
Box 1 of the report discusses in detail the history of the Argentine litigation in the U.S. The report also contains an annex on the history of pari passu clauses in New York law-governed sovereign debt contracts.
Sovereign issuers have already reacted to the court decisions, by modifying the pari passu clauses in debt contracts. Also, ICMA has proposed a new standard pari passu clause, emphasising equal ranking as opposed to pro rata payments.
Collective action clauses enable a qualified majority of bondholders (e.g., 75%) of a specific bond issuance to bind the minority to the terms of a restructuring agreement. If collective action clauses operate on a series-by-series basis rather than on the total stock of debt then a blocking minority can more easily be formed and a strategy of holding out is more likely to succeed, in particular in light of the recent New York court decisions. The possibility to aggregate claims across bond series for voting purposes works in the opposite direction. Some countries have included aggregation clauses in the debt contracts, and the ESM treaty requires standardised aggregation clauses (“Euro CACs”) in Euro area government bonds as well. These clauses feature a “two limb” voting structure, requiring a majority of bondholders in each series and across all series but a lower quorum (e.g., 66%). Currently, “single limb” procedures are being discussed. These would solely require a majority across all series. To prevent abuse, such single limb procedures would have to be accompanied by safeguards that ensure inter-creditor equity, in particular a restriction to offer all affected bondholders the same (menu of) instruments. (Offering the same (menu of) instruments would generally imply that some creditors suffer larger restructuring losses than others, depending on the type of instruments they held initially. But already today, this is common and generally accepted.)
Box 2 of the report discusses the history of collective action clauses. Box 3 of the report discusses disenfranchisement provisions. Their purpose is to limit the risk of a sovereign manipulating voting processes by influencing votes of entities under its control.
An IMF staff report published in May and entitled “The Fund’s Lending Framework and Sovereign Debt—Preliminary Considerations” proposes to drop an exemption related to systemic importance and to give a larger role to debt maturity extensions.
Prior to 2002, when a member state sought funds in excess of established limits, the Fund often waived these limits on the basis of “exceptional circumstances,” and did so in a discretionary manner. Growing concerns over the problems this may create (moral hazard, early exit of private creditors, delays in necessary debt reduction measures, large-scale Fund financing operations) and the Argentinian collapse of 2001 triggered a review that gave rise to the 2002 exceptional access framework.
This required as a precondition for Fund support that debt be sustainable with a high probability. Whenever debt sustainability was clearly not given or remained in doubt, the framework called for debt restructuring with the aim to render the remaining debt sustainable. In retrospect, this restructuring requirement is viewed as too inflexible since it generates restructuring costs even when it turns out ex post that a restructuring was not actually needed.
During the Euro area crises, the Fund did not judge debt sustainability of the most affected countries to be very likely and the exceptional access framework of 2002 therefore would have required a debt restructuring as a precondition for IMF funding. However, pointing to high risks of international systemic spillovers of a debt restructuring, the Fund waived in 2010 the requirement that debt had to be sustainable with a high probability. By now, this modification of the exceptional access framework is also seen as unsatisfactory because systemic exemption structurally favors large member states and does not address the problems that gave rise to the 2002 framework. Against this background, a reform proposal is put forward.
The reform proposal is guided by two objectives: To improve debt service capacity without imposing debt reduction as a prerequisite; and to avoid that private sector claims are fully honored while debt sustainability remains in doubt. According to the proposal, the IMF would require as precondition for funding that measures are taken to improve debt sustainability even if they do not necessarily restore sustainability with high probability. Chief among those measures, the proposal suggests that creditors should be asked to agree on a maturity extension (re-profiling). That is, private creditors would remain exposed to the default risk and would be forced to contribute to the refinancing.
Collective action clauses might be needed to win creditors over. For a majority of them to be voluntarily participating, they must perceive the maturity extension as likely leading to renewed market access of the sovereign. Even in the absence of a payment default, re-profiling would likely trigger a credit event if collective action clauses were activated, and a credit downgrade among rating agencies.
In the second of his Munich Lectures in Economics, Kenneth Rogoff discussed financial crises. (His first and third lecture covered a proposal to phase out cash, see my post.)
In addition to reviewing his work with Carmen Reinhart, Rogoff returned to an earlier proposal (Bulow and Rogoff 1990, Journal of Economic Perspectives) according to which sovereigns should issue public debt under domestic law. This would avoid complications in an eventual debt restructuring process but would also make it harder to issue debt in the first place.
Rogoff reminded his audience that not only developing countries are and were subject to IMF programs; advanced economies were too (e.g., the UK in the 1950s).
In the first and third of his Munich Lectures in Economics, Kenneth Rogoff argued in favour of phasing out cash, at least high denominations and in some developed economies. (His second lecture covered financial crises, see my post.)
Rogoff is well aware that cash preserves privacy and he acknowledges that one should have very good reasons to advocate phasing it out. He believes that there are two: Tax evasion and the black economy on the one hand, and the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates on the other.
Based on earlier research (Rogoff 1998) he argues that withdrawing bank notes with high denominations (e.g., USD 100 bills, EUR 500 bills etc.) would increase the cost of evading taxes or engaging in the black economy sufficiently strongly as to raise tax revenues, and that increased tax revenues would more than compensate for any loss of seignorage.
The (close to) zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and the resulting constraints for monetary policy derive from the fact that cash pays a zero nominal interest rate. Rogoff emphasised the seminal contribution of Lebow (1993 Fed working paper) in identifying the problems connected with the zero lower bound as well as possible ways to address them. Rogoff added that earlier writers (e.g., Gesell, Goodfriend, Mankiw or Buiter) who suggested to relax the constraint by subjecting cash to depreciation missed the point. Rather than forcing a negative nominal interest rate upon cash one should eliminate it altogether. He also dismissed shifting to a higher inflation target to avoid the zero lower bound problem, pointing to the huge loss of credibility that central banks would suffer as a consequence. Among factors for the trend towards lower real interest rates, Rogoff emphasised demographics and the asset pricing consequences of rare disasters; he dismissed secular stagnation. He also discussed forward guidance in the form of price level targeting.
Rogoff suggests to replace cash by universal debit cards. He does not expect significant technical difficulties in the process and proposes to subsidise debit cards for low income households.
Morten Freidel reports in the FAZ about six links (recommended by Cloud Fender) that allow users to get a sense of their Google user profile.
Matthew Klein discusses corporate and personal income tax evasion and avoidance in the FT (part 1, part 2), with reference to a JEP article by Gabriel Zucman. Klein makes several points:
Dylan Matthews presents interesting facts about the use of languages, their roots and in particular, about the English language, in Vox.
The median number of languages spoken in Denmark, the Netherlands or Slovenia equals 3. In the English language, the letter “b” mostly appears at the beginning of a word, the letter “d” at the end and the letter “u” in the middle. Also in the English language, a “d” or “y” is most often followed by a blank; a “h”, “v” or “z” by an “e”; and a “q” almost always by a “u”. And the most common letter combinations in Google Book archive are
Julia Belluz reproduces US mortality data published in the New England Journal of Medicine (sourced from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Vox.
Timothy Lee and collaborators provide a map-based account of World War II in Vox. Short texts and 42 maps cover Germany, China and Japan, Central Europe, Finland, France and the UK, Russia, the Pacific, Africa, the Allies’ invasions, the Holocaust, Israel and Korea, among other aspects. An animated map displays the opponents’ varying spheres of influence during the war years.
John Cochrane argues in the Wall Street Journal that deflation fears are overblown. His main points are:
In an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (data appendix), John Conley and Sina Önder argue that
only the top 10–20 percent of a typical graduating class of economics PhD students are likely to accumulate a research record that might lead to tenure at a medium-level research university. … graduating from a top department is neither necessary nor sufficient for becoming a successful research economist. Top researchers come from across the ranks of PhD-granting institutions, and lower-ranked departments produce stars with some regularity, although with lower frequency than the higher-ranked departments. Most of the graduates of even the very highest-ranked departments produce little, if any, published research.
The Economist discussed the article here.
The British Museum and the BBC review German history.
In the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of “Across the Great Divide: New Perspectives on the Financial Crisis,” Randall Guynn, Kenneth Scott, David Skeel and Michael Helfer discuss legal strategies to resolve financial institutions, including single-point-of-entry, orderly liquidation authority under the Dodd-Frank act, or proposals for a new chapter in the bankruptcy code.
Proposed in 2012 by the FDIC, the single-point-of-entry strategy has widely been acknowledged as useful, both in the US and internationally (for example in Switzerland by FINMA). Guynn writes:
The key to solving the TBTF problem without taxpayer-funded bailouts is a high-speed recapitalization of the failed financial group that imposes losses on shareholders and other stakeholders but avoids unnecessary value destruction and preserves the group’s going-concern value. …
The SPOE strategy can be implemented under the existing Bankruptcy Code, although a new Chapter 14 could increase the likelihood of its success, particularly if it were coupled with a secured liquidity facility from the government that would be able to provide such liquidity under the most severe economic conditions.
