Category: Pet Topics

The elimination of money from economics theory and teaching leads to major practical problems.

1. Why did we have the financial crisis and the prolonged recession?

The Queen famously asked why economists failed to see the crisis and ensuing recession coming. What is less talked about is how they subsequently also failed to understand a) what was happening as it was occurring and b) the nature of the recovery. Once you appreciate that money and credit are central to a modern economy, and academic macroeconomists were using models without money or credit, this failure is much easier to understand.

Some policy makers did a better job of learning and adapting to the crisis. Ben Bernanke, at the US Fed, with his study of the 1930s depression years, was well placed to support the economy once the crisis was underway. The Bank of England was not so well led. Mervyn King appeared to believe in a banking model in which the lender of last resort need not exist. When this model failed to have any correspondence to reality, he acted as though reality was at fault, not his personal model.

The financial crisis and its aftermath was predicted and understood by some people however.
But they were likely to be eclectic economists, on the fringes of the mainstream, who did not exclude the views of Keynes and Minsky for their lack of “microfoundations”.

2. Why did the enormous monetary stimulus not lead to a stronger recovery?

The answer is that the monetary stimulus was not so enormous. The numbers were large, but the transmission mechanism was very weak, and therefore the recovery has been slower than most predicted.

Another misunderstanding follows, since the recovery has been slower than expected, new ideas have been sought to explain it away, such as secular stagnation. But once you accept the idea that QE is eye-catching, but not very powerful for the economy (it may be more powerful for asset prices but that is a different matter) then the slow recovery is not so surprising.

3. Why do we ever have unemployment at all?

The academic models we have been looking at, theoretically make the existence of unemployment impossible. Given that this is evidently not the case, the models must be augmented with ad-hoc frictions, to make them have some connection to observed reality.

If money is allowed in the model at the start then you do not run into such issues, and surely this is evidence that the theories with don’t include it, don’t make much sense.

Why do economists believe these myths?

If an economist is typical pressed on this, responses vary from claiming that the representation is broadly accurate (it is not!) or more likely that it does not matter (it does!). If the assumption does not matter, why choose such a strange one?

A more recent defence has been that the latest batch of sophisticated new Keynesian models incorporate money and credit and a banking sector. But if that is the case why not change all the teaching? Why is money tacked onto the end of a model rather than incorporated as a critical building block?

I think that they attempt to tack money onto the end of their model building because it is not possible to incorporate it at the start. The assumptions which exclude money are critically important to the complex mathematical models that the current breed of academic economists revel in building. The worry for me is that armed with them, they go on to lead to key policy and market implications. It would also be fair to say that pretty much everything I do in studying the macroeconomy would not be classed as macroeconomics by a current mainstream academic.

Modern academic economists believe that conversations about macroeconomics should be based upon General Equilibrium (GE) and rational expectations and have “microfoundations”. The most recent iteration is the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model. GE is a truly majestic piece of mathematics which describes an economic system based upon essentially perfect barter.

The concept of money is added as purely commodity money. Any asset can be arbitrarily chosen as the denominator in which to price all others, it is just the numeraire. This helps with the solution as it reduces the number of independent variables by one when solving a set of simultaneous equations.

The advantage of building models in this way is that you can translate many concepts used in micro economics and apply them to macroeconomic questions. This is known as “microfoundations” and many Noble Prizes have been won, tying the neat General Equilibrium theory up with clever mathematics.

After the financial crisis, it is obvious that money and credit had to be included, and so the most recent batch of Neo-Keynesian models attempt to do so. But this is an ad hoc tacking on of a couple of new variables that do not connect to the central mechanism of the model. I see these models as sophisticated in the same vein as the geocentric models used to argue against Galileo.

If we use Kuhn’s model of paradigms, then this looks like economists trying to bury “anomalies” during a period of “model drift” when their models are increasingly unable to answer the questions people think matter. The next stage is “model crisis”. Or perhaps we are already there.

Relationship to Politics and Free-market thinking

This model creates the illusion of a perfect economy in which everything works, with the practicalities of reality being termed “imperfections” such as imperfect competition or sticky wages. This links strongly to the ideology of free markets being the answer to all questions i.e. the idea is to make reality behave more like the model.

Economists of a more interventionist or left-wing persuasion can exist within this paradigm. But ad hoc elements such as asymmetric information have to be added, combined with some pretty inventive and tortuous modelling, eventually producing models which suggest intervention is the correct policy response.

Conclusion

Recent mathematical models cannot be held responsible for the birth of the myths of money and banking. In Classical economics the concept of value is separate from money and logically prior to it and so JS Mill told us that “There cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money”.

We have recently seen stirrings from eminent economists that all is not well with the profession, https://piie.com/system/files/documents/pb16-11.pdf, but it is not yet filtering through to how the subject is being taught at grass roots.

Where we are left is a deeply divided set of disciplines. Practitioners, both in financial markets and many Central Bankers have a different approach to pure academics. But even academia is split between macroeconomists who study an economy without money and Finance professors who study a monetary system without an economy.

Both can be seen, to borrow a phrase from Keynes, as “an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in bedlam”.

I will again use the bestselling undergraduate textbook “Macroeconomics” by Greg Mankiw as the source for this story.

How does money get created?

In the beginning, there were bank reserves……

 

1. The Central Bank determine Bank Reserves – this is the money that the banks have on deposit with the Central Bank
2. Banks, holding these reserves, then lend them out to customers, who then either put that money on deposit themselves or transfer the money to someone else who does. The mountain of customer deposits is generally many times larger than bank reserves. This is known as the “reserve-deposit ratio, rr”.
   It is an “exogenous variable” in other words “the model takes as given”.
3. There is also the currency in circulation which the central bank also determines.
   This is known as the “currency-deposit ratio, cr”. It is also an “exogenous variable”.
4. Combining these via “money multiplier”, gives you the Money Supply.

In this way, the Central Bank determines the level of reserves, and thus controls the money supply in a predictable way.

From bank reserves to money supply to inflation……

The next stage in this story is the “Quantity Theory of Money” which “remains the leading explanation for how money affects the economy in the long run.”
This starts with a key identity or equation:

Add a few assumptions….

P * Y is also nominal GDP, so if we assume that V (the income velocity of money) is constant (or “exogenous”), then a change in M leads to a change in nominal GDP.

Via a separate assumption, the level of output Y is determined by a production function which does not include money, therefore a change in M leads to a change in P i.e. changing the money supply causes inflation.

Economists are taught this key conclusion at university:
“Thus, … the central bank, which controls the money supply, has ultimate control over the rate of inflation.”

Unfortunately, like many Creation Myths none of this is true.
As Mankiw says, this model “is simplified. That is not necessarily a problem.”
I agree, “all models are simplified”. But when causation is the wrong way around, this is a massive problem.

Banking – a personal perspective

When I left university, I became a trader at a bank, spending many years on a money markets desk. It is at the least glamorous end of trading, but I found it fascinating being at the centre of the banking system, funding the bank’s activities, and forming the link between the Central Bank and the markets. What was immediately striking was that bank operations were nothing like the models I had been taught at university.

In the story above, the driving force is the Central Bank adding reserves, causing banks to lend money. The mechanisms described are correct, just in the exact opposite order. The actual sequence goes something like this:

1. Customer decides to buy something and uses credit card for the purchase.
2. Transaction goes through. i.e. bank lends the customer money for the purchase.
3. The money shows up as a credit entry on the shop’s bank account and a debit entry on the credit card.
4. The banking system now has a debit and a credit. Banks move the money between them to square their accounts.
5. It is important to note that the central bank wasn’t required to do anything in this process.

What if the customer takes out cash? Then the banking system is short of reserves.
This is not a problem as the central bank just adds or takes out reserves on a regular basis to make sure the banking system has exactly as much as it demands.

It is not the case that the Central Bank tells the bank funding desk it has more reserves, who then calls round the rest of the bank to tell them to do some more lending. In simple terms the central bank sets the rate of interest (Fed Funds in the US and the Base Rate in the UK) and then supplies money as demanded. The supply of money is determined completely by the demand for money.

Evidence

Correlation of money supply with inflation

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz “wrote two treatises on monetary history that documented the sources and effects of changes in the quantity of money over the past century.” What they did was document that money supply and inflation are positively correlated. This is a most obvious prediction from either story of money, and so I have never seen an argument that it supports one over the other. As inflation rises, then more money will be demanded in the economy to facilitate transactions. The central bank accommodates this so we see a direct relationship between money and inflation. This tells us nothing about causation. Friedman’s attempts to show causation by econometric tricks with “long and variable lags” are completely bogus.

Stability of velocity of money

An argument for why one can assume V is a constant, is that historically, over short periods, it has been. Unfortunately, this again is a direct prediction from both stories. If the central bank always supplies as much money as is demanded then there is no reason for velocity to change.

Why did QE not lead to hyperinflation?

According to this monetary theory in the textbooks, the vast increase in reserves caused by Quantitative Easing should have led to an explosion in bank lending and a rapid rise in inflation.

This clearly hasn’t been the case, and in fact, the taught theories really struggle with reality here. They are forced to rely on ad hoc and non-quantitative explanations such as “animal spirits” or a reduction in confidence. Since this “confidence” is not directly predictable or even observable, it requires a leap of faith, equivalent to “magic”.

It’s a wonderful coincidence that a model which predicts a MASSIVE stimulus finds, in reality, an unseen counterbalancing force which is of EXACTLY the same magnitude. But still, I read that MV=PY holds and the miraculous drop in V to exactly offset the rise in M, was a bizarre coincidence and that once the velocity of money rises back to “normal”, inflation will come.

There is a much simpler explanation. The amount of loans created by banks was never constrained by reserves and so increasing reserves has no effect on the behaviour of banks or their clients.

What do central bankers say they are doing?

Central bankers involved in monetary policy and the oversight of the banking system must understand how banking works. What do they say is going on?
They agree with my model and say that “the reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks” and describe the model that is taught as “some popular misconceptions”. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf

Conclusion

Money is simply not exogenous and does not cause inflation.

Amongst practitioners, including bankers and central bankers, this is obviously well understood. Bagehot famously described it perfectly in 1873. What is striking is the contrast to academic economists who persist with a very different mythical version of banking and continue to educate our bright, young minds with a story of pure fantasy. So why do they do it? I will speculate on that in the next post.