You Say You're a Homeowner and Not a Renter? Think Again.

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March 11, 2013

You Say You're a Homeowner and Not a Renter? Think Again.

As we've said before, we're suckers for cool charts. The latest that caught our eye is the following one, originally created by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It highlights the relative importance assigned to the various components of the consumer price index (CPI) and shows where increases in the index have come from over the past 12 months.

It probably won't surprise anyone that the drop in gasoline prices (found in the transportation component) exerted downward pressure on the CPI last year, while the cost of medical care pushed the price index higher. What might surprise you is the size of that big, blue square labeled 'housing.' Housing accounts for a little more than 40 percent of the CPI market basket and, given its weight, any change in this component significantly affects the overall index.

This begs the question: In light of the recent strength seen in the housing market'and notably the nearly 10 percent rise in home prices over the past 12 months'are housing costs likely to exert more upward pressure on the CPI?

Before we dive into this question, it's important to understand that home prices do not directly enter into the computation of the CPI (or the personal consumption expenditures [PCE] price index, for that matter). This is because a home is an asset, and an increase in its value does not impose a 'cost' on the homeowner. But there is a cost that homeowners face in addition to home maintenance and utilities, and that's the implied rent they incur by living in their home rather than renting it out. In effect, every homeowner is his or her own tenant, and the rent they forgo each month is called the 'owners' equivalent rent' (or OER) in the CPI. OER represents about 24 percent of the CPI (and about 11 percent of the PCE price index). The CPI captures this OER cost (sensibly, in our view) by measuring the cost of home rentals (details here). So whether the robust rise in home prices will influence the behavior of the CPI this year depends on whether rising home prices influence home rents.

So what is likely to happen to OER given the continued increase in home prices? Well, higher home prices, in time, ought to cause home rents to rise, putting upward pressure on the CPI. Homes are assets to landlords, after all, and landlords (like all investors) require an adequate return on their investments. Let's call this the 'asset market influence' of home prices on home rents. But the rents that landlords charge also compete with homeownership. If renters decide to become homeowners, the rental market loses customers, which should push home rents in the opposite direction of home prices for a time. Let's call this the 'substitution influence' on rent prices.

Consider the following charts, which show three-month home prices and home rents (measured by the CPI's OER measure). It's a little hard to see a clear correlation between these two measures.

So we've separated these data into their trend and cycle components (using Hodrick-Prescott procedures, if you must know) shown in the following two charts. Now, if one takes the trend view, there is a clear positive relationship between home prices and home rents. This is consistent with the asset market influence described above. But also consider the detrended perspective. Here, home prices and home rents are pretty clearly negatively correlated. This, to us, looks like the substitution influence described above.

So let's get back to the question at hand. What do rising home prices mean for OER and, ultimately, the behavior of the CPI? Well, it's rather hard to say because the link between home prices and OER isn't particularly strong.

Not definitive enough for you? OK, how about this: We think the recent rise in home prices will more likely lean against the rise in OER for the near term as the growing demand for home ownership provides some competition to the rental market. But, in time, these influences will give way to the asset market fundamentals, and rents are likely to accelerate as returns on real estate investments are reaffirmed.

By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist, and

Nick Parker, economic research analyst, both in the Atlanta Fed's research department

March 11, 2013 in Economics, Housing, Real Estate | Permalink

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Will the Next Exit from Monetary Stimulus Really Be Different from the Last?

« What the Dual Mandate Looks Like | Main

March 08, 2013

Will the Next Exit from Monetary Stimulus Really Be Different from the Last?

Suppose you run a manufacturing business'let's say, for example, widgets. Your customers are loyal and steady, but you are never completely certain when they are going to show up asking you to satisfy their widget desires.

Given this uncertainty, you consider two different strategies to meet the needs of your customers. One option is to produce a large quantity of widgets at once, store the product in your warehouse, and when a customer calls, pull the widgets out of inventory as required.

A second option is to simply wait until buyers arrive at your door and produce widgets on demand, which you can do instantaneously and in as large a quantity as you like.

Thinking only about whether you can meet customer demand when it presents itself, these two options are basically identical. In the first case you have a large inventory to support your sales. In the second case you have a large'in fact, infinitely large'"shadow" inventory that you can bring into existence in lockstep with demand.

I invite you to think about this example as you contemplate this familiar graph of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet:

I gather that a good measure of concern about the size of the Fed's (still growing) balance sheet comes from the notion that there is more inherent inflation risk with bank reserves that exceed $1.5 trillion than there would be with reserves somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion (which would be the ballpark value for the pre-crisis level of reserves).

I understand this concern, but I don't believe that it is entirely warranted. My argument is as follows: The policy strategy for tightening policy (or exiting stimulus) when the banking system is flush with reserves is equivalent to the strategy when the banking system has low (or even zero) reserves in the same way that the two strategies for meeting customer demand that I offered at the outset of this post are equivalent.

Here's why. Suppose, just for example, that bank reserves are literally zero and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has set a federal funds rate target of, say, 3 percent. Despite the fact that bank reserves are zero there is a real sense in which the potential size of the balance sheet'the shadow balance sheet, if you will'is very large.

The reason is that when the FOMC sets a target for the federal funds rate, it is sending very specific instructions to the folks from the Open Market Desk at the New York Fed, who run monetary policy operations on behalf of the FOMC. Those instructions are really pretty simple: If you have to inject more bank reserves (and hence expand the size of the Fed's balance sheet) to maintain the FOMC's funds rate target, do it.

To make sense of that statement, it is helpful to remember that the federal funds rate is an overnight interest rate that is determined by the supply and demand for bank reserves. Simplifying just a bit, the demand for reserves comes from the banking system, and the supply comes from the Fed. As in any supply and demand story, if demand goes up, so does the "price"'in this case, the federal funds rate.

In our hypothetical example, the Open Market Desk has been instructed not to let the federal funds rate deviate from 3 percent'at least not for very long. With such instructions, there is really only one thing to do in the case that demand from the banking system increases'create more reserves.

To put it in the terms of the business example I started out with, in setting a funds rate target the FOMC is giving the Open Market Desk the following marching orders: If customers show up, step up the production and meet the demand. The Fed's balance sheet in this case will automatically expand to meet bank reserve demand, just as the businessperson's inventory would expand to support the demand for widgets. As with the businessperson in my example, there is little difference between holding a large tangible inventory and standing ready to supply on demand from a shadow inventory.

Though the analogy is not completely perfect'in the case of the Fed's balance sheet, for example it is the banks and not the business (i.e., the Fed) that hold the inventory'I think the story provides an intuitive way to process the following comments (courtesy of Bloomberg) from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, from last week's congressional testimony:

"Raising interest rate on reserves" when the balance sheet is large is the functional equivalent to raising the federal funds rate when the actual balance sheet is not so large, but the potential or shadow balance sheet is. In both cases, the strategy is to induce banks to resist deploying available reserves to expand deposit liabilities and credit. The only difference is that, in the former case, the available reserves are explicit, and in the latter case they are implicit.

The Monetary Policy Report that accompanied the Chairman's testimony contained a fairly thorough summary of costs that might be associated with continued monetary stimulus. Some of these in fact pertain to the size of the Fed's balance sheet. But, as the Chairman notes in the video clip above, when it comes to the mechanics of exiting from policy stimulus, the real challenge is the familiar one of knowing when it is time to alter course.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed

 

March 8, 2013 in Banking, Fed Funds Futures, Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy, Monetary Policy | Permalink

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One potential risk this time is that the Fed has been buying lots of assets that aren't treasuries, and some of the riskier assets can no longer be sold for the same price at which it was bought. In theory that situation could leave the Fed unable to recall all the money it put into circulation.

That said, you are right that interest on reserves could still be raised to have the same effects.

Posted by: Matthew Martin | March 08, 2013 at 03:30 PM

What the Dual Mandate Looks Like

« Nature Abhors an Output Gap | Main

March 01, 2013

What the Dual Mandate Looks Like

Sometimes simple, direct points are the most powerful. For me, the simplest and most direct points in Chairman Bernanke's Senate testimony this week were contained in the following one minute and 49 seconds of video (courtesy of Bloomberg):

At about the 1:26 mark, the Chairman says:

So, our accommodative monetary policy has not really traded off one of [the FOMC's mandated goals] against the other, and it has supported both real growth and employment and kept inflation close to our target.

To that point, here is a straightforward picture:

I concede that past results are no guarantee of future performance. And in his testimony, the Chairman was very clear that prudence dictates vigilance with respect to potential unintended consequences:

Highly accommodative monetary policy also has several potential costs and risks, which the committee is monitoring closely. For example, if further expansion of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet were to undermine public confidence in our ability to exit smoothly from our accommodative policies at the appropriate time, inflation expectations could rise, putting the FOMC's price stability objective at risk...

Another potential cost that the committee takes very seriously is the possibility that very low interest rates, if maintained for a considerable time, could impair financial stability. For example, portfolio managers dissatisfied with low returns may reach for yield by taking on more credit risk, duration risk, or leverage.

Concerns about such developments are fair and, as Mr. Bernanke makes clear, shared by the FOMC. Furthermore, the language around the Fed's ultimate decision to end or alter the pace of its current open-ended asset-purchase program is explicitly cast in terms of an ongoing cost-benefit analysis. But anyone who wants to convince me that monetary policy actions have been contrary to our dual mandate is going to have to explain to me why that conclusion isn't contradicted by the chart above.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed

March 1, 2013 in Employment, Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy, Inflation, Monetary Policy | Permalink

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Nature Abhors an Output Gap

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February 22, 2013

Nature Abhors an Output Gap

In The Washington Post, Neil Irwin highlights a shortcoming that I know all too well:

Throughout the halting economic recovery that began in 2009, the formal economic projections released by the Congressional Budget Office, White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Federal Reserve have displayed quite a consistent pattern: This year may be one of sluggish growth, they acknowledge. But stronger growth, of perhaps 3.5 percent, is just around the corner, and will arrive next year.

Consider, for example, the Fed's projections in November of 2009. Sure, growth would be slow in 2010, they held. But 2011 growth, they expected, would be 3.4 to 4.5 percent, and 2012 would 3.5 to 4.8 percent growth. The actual levels of growth were 2 percent in 2011 and 1.5 percent in 2012.

What's amazing is that the Fed's newest projections, released in December of 2012, look like they could have been copy and pasted from 2009, just with the years changed: They forecast sluggish growth in 2013, 2.3 to 3 percent, followed by a pickup to 3 to 3.5 percent in 2014 and 3 to 3.7 percent in 2015.

I, for one, am guilty as charged, and feel pretty fortunate that the offense is not a hanging one. In fact I don't think Irwin's indictment is overly harsh, and he is on the right track when he offers up this explanation for the last several years' persistently overly rosy projections:

Economic forecasters tend to look at past experience and extrapolate; in the past, when there has been a recession, the very forces that caused the recession become unwound, sowing the seeds for expansion...

Here is a basic fact about macroeconomic forecasting. The truly powerful driver of forecasts is mean reversion, which is the tendency of models to predict that gross domestic product (GDP) will move toward an average trend over time. This fact holds true whether we are talking about formal statistical analysis or the intuitive judgmental adjustments that all forecasters apply to their formal statistical models.

Forecasters are not completely robotic, of course. Irwin is correct when he says "forecasters tend to look at past experience and extrapolate, but forecasters do leaven past experience with incoming details that alter judgments about what is the mean'the "normal state," if you will'to which the economy will converge. But whatever is that normal state, our models insist that we will converge to it.

Nothing illustrates this property of forecasting reality better than this chart, which supplements the latest economic projections from the Congressional Budget Office:

The potential GDP line in that chart is the level of production that represents the structural path of the economy. Forecasters, no matter where they think that potential GDP line might be, all believe actual GDP will eventually move back to it. "Output gaps"'the shaded area representing the cumulative miss of actual GDP relative to its potential'simply won't last forever. And if that means GDP growth has to accelerate in the future (as it does when GDP today is below its potential)'well, that's just the way it is.

Unfortunately, potential GDP is not so simple to divine. We have to guess (or, more generously, estimate) what it is. That guessing game has been harder than usual over the past several years. Here is the record of the CBO's potential GDP since 2009:

I think this picture is a fairly representative record of how views about the potential level of U.S. GDP has evolved over the past several years. What has not been resolved is the debate over what conclusions should be drawn from persistent overestimates of potential and serial misses to the high side on GDP projections.

Irwin seems to be of two minds. On the one hand he offers very structural-sounding reasons for poor forecasting experience:

... the financial-crisis-induced recession of 2008'2009 was so deep that it had deep-seated effects that go beyond those explained by those traditional relationships. It messed up the workings of the financial system, and banks are still trying to figure out what the new one looks like.

On the other hand, he makes appeals to very traditional explanations tied to deficient spending and insufficient policy stimulus (though even here structural change may be one reason that stimulus has been insufficient):

Breakdowns in the financial system mean that low-interest rate policies from the Fed don't have their usual punch. An overhang of household debt means that consumers hold their wallets more than usual. Federal fiscal stimulus to offset those effects is now long-over...

This much, in any event, is clear: Given any starting point where the level of GDP is below its potential level'that is, given an output gap'forecasts will include a bounce back in GDP growth above its long-run average, at least for a while. That's just the way it works.

If, contrary to conventional wisdom, you believe that the true output gaps are much smaller than suggested in the CBO picture above, you might want to take the under on a bet to whether GDP forecasts will prove too optimistic once again.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed

 

February 22, 2013 in Forecasts, GDP | Permalink

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Promoting Job Creation: Don't Forget the Old Guys

« 2013 Business Hiring Plans: Employment, Effort, Hours, and Fiscal Uncertainty | Main

February 15, 2013

Promoting Job Creation: Don't Forget the Old Guys

In a provocative article posted this week, the American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis concludes that the state of entrepreneurship in the United States is, disturbingly, weaker than ever. In particular, Pethokoukis documents a decline in jobs created by establishments less than one year old, a trend that began before the 2001 recession and has continued more or less unabated since. He specifically cites the following symptoms of trouble:

1. Had small business come out of the recession maintaining just the rate of start-ups generated in 2007, according to McKinsey, the U.S. economy would today have almost 2.5 million more jobs than it does.


2. There were fewer new firms formed in 2010 and 2011 than during the Great Recession.


3. The rate of start-up jobs during 2010 and 2011'years that were technically in full recovery'were the lowest on record, according to economist Tim Kane of the Hudson Institute.

That last point appears to be all the more ominous given this observation from Tim Kane:

"...that startups create essentially all net new jobs. Existing employers, it turns out, tend to be net job losers, averaging net losses of 1 million workers per year."

Pethokoukis makes his case with political commentary that we don't endorse and don't find particularly helpful. But we won't argue with his conclusion that more entrepreneurial start-up activity would be a good thing. Nonetheless, we get a little concerned when the conversation jumps from data on net job creation and the role of start-ups and early life-cycle firms, and moves on to policy conclusions that seem to disproportionately focus on that class of businesses specifically.

Here is the source of our concern: Though it is also tempting to lump all "existing employers' into the basket of net job destroyers, there are existing firms that create jobs, and a few are doing so on a very large scale.

Take 2006, for instance. Based on data from the Commerce Department called Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), new firms (businesses with a payroll that existed in March 2006 but not in March 2005) had about 3.5 million employees. This is the large net job creation by new firms reported by Kane. However, over the same year, expanding firms more than 10 years old added a whopping 11 million jobs'about three times as many jobs as created by new firms. Of course, some older firms were downsizing or closing'contracting mature firms destroyed an estimated 10 million jobs. So the net number of jobs created by older established firms looks somewhat less impressive than the record of those young start-ups. But in the overall picture, were the 11 million jobs created by the expanding older businesses really less important than 3.5 million created by the newbies?

It turns out that older firms also account for a large fraction of the job creation occurring in fast-growing firms, arguably a better characterization of entrepreneurism than newness. We found some compelling evidence reported in recent research by Akbar Sadeghi, James Spletzer, and David Talan. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Business Employment Dynamics (BED), Sadeghi, Spletzer, and Talen find that older firms (those at least 10 years old) accounted for more than 40 percent of the employment created by high-growth firms (those with at least 20 percent annual employment gains between 2008 and 2011). A similar conclusion about the role of older, fast-growing firms is found in this earlier Kauffman Foundation report based on BDS data looking at the 1 percent of fastest-growing firms in the United States.

The point is not that start-up entrepreneurial activity is unimportant. It is vitally important. But in larger terms, we should recognize that all entrepreneurial activity is important, no matter what the age of the firm in which it occurs. Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart highlighted this point in a speech delivered earlier this week at Instituto de Empresas in Madrid, Spain:

My bank's experience in trying to understand the role of small businesses, small-growth businesses, young businesses, and mature-growth businesses in job creation illustrates a key point, I think. In the pursuit of economic growth and increased employment, there is no silver bullet. Rather, the policy community should be pursuing an effective mix of policy elements (with focus in areas such as new business formation, labor rules, and regulatory efficiency, to name a few) that together catalyze a virtuous circle of innovation, growth, and employment.

Certainly, entrepreneurial risk-taking, whether by large, mature businesses or start-ups aimed at becoming growth companies, is part of the solution.

When it comes to promoting job creation, forgetting to throw mature businesses into the mix with start-ups is surely not the path to finding the best policy solutions.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president, and

John Robertson, vice president and senior economist, both in the Atlanta Fed's research department

February 15, 2013 in Employment, Labor Markets, Small Business | Permalink

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2013 Business Hiring Plans: Employment, Effort, Hours, and Fiscal Uncertainty

« Half-Full Glasses | Main

February 05, 2013

2013 Business Hiring Plans: Employment, Effort, Hours, and Fiscal Uncertainty

How much is fiscal uncertainty holding back hiring? The answer seems to depend on whom you ask. Early in January, the Atlanta Fed spoke to 670 businesses in the Southeast about employment. Conditional on the respondents' 2013 hiring plans (expand, hold steady, or contract), the following set of charts summarizes the results for how the businesses viewed activity relative to their own interpretation of 'normal' along three dimensions: their current employment level, the amount of effort required from their staff per hour, and the average hours worked per employee. These questions were modeled on questions asked in the Atlanta Fed's December 2012 Business Inflation Expectations Survey. In the following three charts, the green bars represent firms that said they planned to expand employment in 2013. The grey bars represent firms that said they did not plan to change their employment level in 2013, and the red bars represent firms that planned to reduce employment in 2013.

The first chart shows the results for current employment. Regardless of hiring plans over the next 12 months, most firms said they were currently at or below normal employment levels. Those planning on increasing employment over the next 12 months were a bit more likely to say they have already surpassed normal levels of employment than other firms, while those looking to shed employees were very likely to say their employment level is below normal employment levels.

Chart 2 shows that businesses are generally pushing hard along the effort dimension. Firms were quite likely to say that their staff's effort per hour worked was currently at or above normal,  whether or not they were planning to change employment in 2013.

Chart 3 shows that firms planning to expand were very likely to say that average hours worked were at or above normal (28 percent said hours were above normal, 60 percent about normal), whereas firms planning to contract were more likely to say that hours were at or below normal (48 percent about normal, 39 percent below normal).

Taken together, these results suggest that some firms are approaching the limit of how far they can go along the intensive margins of effort and hours before they have to hire more workers. With effort elevated, as more firms increase average hours worked to above-normal levels, one might expect more hiring to follow.

Each business was also asked how uncertainty about future fiscal policy was affecting its hiring plans. Firms planning to reduce employment tended to cite fiscal uncertainty as having a negative impact on their hiring plans. However, for those firms, hours also tended to be well below normal, so it is unlikely that removing fiscal uncertainty would move many of those firms into expansion mode (although it may help stabilize their outlook).

In contrast, fiscal uncertainty was generally viewed as having less impact by those planning to expand employment and those planning to hold employment levels steady. Presumably, reducing fiscal uncertainty would move some of the firms planning to hold steady into expansion mode, and those planning to expand would do so a bit more. To get some idea of this potential, Chart 4 shows the responses by firms who reported above-normal effort per hour and above-normal average hours worked. About 40 percent of those businesses said that fiscal uncertainty had caused them to scale back their hiring plans.

It is unclear whether eliminating fiscal uncertainty would have a big impact on the hiring plans of these firms. But these results suggest that it sure couldn't hurt.

By John Robertson, vice president and senior economist, and

Ellyn Terry, a senior economic analyst in the Atlanta Fed's research department

February 5, 2013 in Employment, Labor Markets, Small Business | Permalink

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Half-Full Glasses

« Still a Skeptic: Addressing a Few Questions about Nominal GDP Targeting | Main

February 01, 2013

Half-Full Glasses

Just in case you were inclined to drop the "dismal" from the "dismal science," Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon has been doing his best to talk you out of it. His most recent dose of glumness was offered up in a recent Wall Street Journal article that repeats an argument he has been making for a while now:

The growth of the past century wasn't built on manna from heaven. It resulted in large part from a remarkable set of inventions between 1875 and 1900...

This narrow time frame saw the introduction of running water and indoor plumbing, the greatest event in the history of female liberation, as women were freed from carrying literally tons of water each year. The telephone, phonograph, motion picture and radio also sprang into existence. The period after World War II saw another great spurt of invention, with the development of television, air conditioning, the jet plane and the interstate highway system'

Innovation continues apace today, and many of those developing and funding new technologies recoil with disbelief at my suggestion that we have left behind the era of truly important changes in our standard of living'

Gordon goes on to explain why he thinks potential growth-enhancing developments such as advances in healthcare, leaps in energy-production technologies, and 3-D printing are just not up to late-19th-century snuff in their capacity to better the lot of the average citizen. To paraphrase, your great-granddaddy's inventions beat the stuffing out of yours.

There has been a lot of commentary about Professor Gordon's body of work'just a few examples from the blogosphere include Paul Krugman, John Cochrane, Free Exchange (at The Economist), Gary Becker, and Thomas Edsall (who includes commentary from a collection of first-rate economists). Most of these posts note the current-day maladies that Gordon offers up to furrow the brow of the growth optimists. Among these are the following:

And inequality in America will continue to grow, driven by poor educational outcomes at the bottom and the rewards of globalization at the top, as American CEOs reap the benefits of multinational sales to emerging markets. From 1993 to 2008, income growth among the bottom 99% of earners was 0.5 points slower than the economy's overall growth rate.

Serious considerations, to be sure, but there is actually a chance that some of the "headwinds" that Gordon emphasizes are signs that something really big is afoot. In fact, Gordon's headwinds remind me of this passage, from a paper by economists Jeremy Greenwood and Mehmet Yorukoglu published about 15 years ago:

A simple story is told here that connects the rate of technological progress to the level of income inequality and productivity growth. The idea is this. Imagine that a leap in the state of technology occurs and that this jump is incarnated in new machines, such as information technologies. Suppose that the adoption of new technologies involves a significant cost in terms of learning and that skilled labor has an advantage at learning. Then the advance in technology will be associated with an increase in the demand for skill needed to implement it. Hence the skill premium will rise and income inequality will widen. In the early phases the new technologies may not be operated efficiently due to a dearth of experience. Productivity growth may appear to stall as the economy undertakes the (unmeasured) investment in knowledge needed to get the new technologies running closer to their full potential. The coincidence of rapid technological change, widening inequality, and a slowdown in productivity growth is not without precedence in economic history.

Greenwood and Yorukoglu go on to assess, in detail, how durable-goods prices, inequality, and productivity actually behaved in the first and second industrial revolutions. They conclude that game-changing technologies have, in history, been initially associated with falling capital prices, rising inequality, and falling productivity. Here is a representative chart, depicting the period (which was rich with technological advance) leading up to Gordon's (undeniably) golden age:

Source: "1974," Jeremy Greenwood and Mehmet Yorukoglu,
Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 46, 1997

Greenwood and Yorukoglu conclude their study with this pointed question:

Plunging prices for new technologies, a surge in wage inequality, and a slump in the advance of labor productivity - could all this be the hallmark of the dawn of an industrial revolution? Just as the steam engine shook 18th-century England, and electricity rattled 19th-century America, are information technologies now rocking the 20th-century economy?

I don't know (and nobody knows) if the dark-before-the-dawn possibility described by Greenwood and Yorukoglu is the apt analogy for where the U.S. (and global) economy sits today. But I will bet you there was some commentator writing in 1870 who sounded an awful lot like Professor Gordon.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed

February 1, 2013 in Economics, Productivity, Technology | Permalink

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Still a Skeptic: Addressing a Few Questions about Nominal GDP Targeting

« Visualizing Improvement | Main

January 18, 2013

Still a Skeptic: Addressing a Few Questions about Nominal GDP Targeting

In a comment to last week's post on inflation versus price-level targeting, David Beckworth asks the following (referring back to an even earlier post on nominal gross domestic product [NGDP] targeting):

You refer back to your previous post on NGDP level targeting, but fail to take note of the comments that respond to your concerns about it. Specifically, see the ones by Andy Harless and Gregor Bush. Would love to see your response to those ones. Do you have a response for them? I am listening if you have one.

Here is an excerpt from the Harless comment...

Most people who advocate NGDP targeting today advocate level path targeting, not growth rate targeting. I don't believe that your "historical justification" applies in this case. Indeed, I think it makes the case for level targeting (of either the price level or NGDP, but there are reasons to prefer the latter) relative to the current system which centers on a growth rate target for the price level (in other words, an inflation target).

...and here is the Bush comment:

Just to add to Andy's point, advocates of NGDP level targeting argue that it's precisely because of uncertainty around estimates [of] potential output [that] NGDP targeting should be adopted. They argue that [as] long as the central bank keeps nominal spending on, say, a 5% trend line, there will be neither demand side recessions (mass unemployment) nor high inflation. In other words, AD will be stable and this will produce a stable macroeconomic environment. Whether inflation is 2% and real output [grows] at 3% or inflation is 3% and real output grows at 2% is of no concern.

In the post on NGDP targeting I was in fact thinking about level targeting, and Gregor Bush's last sentence gets to'in fact is'the heart of our disagreement. I am just not willing to concede that anchoring long-term inflation by saying something like "2 percent, 3 percent, whatever" is the path to sustaining central bank credibility. Over the longer term, inflation is the only thing that monetary policy can reliably deliver, as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has clearly articulated in its statement of longer-run goals and policy strategy:

The inflation rate over the longer run is primarily determined by monetary policy, and hence the Committee has the ability to specify a longer-run goal for inflation. The Committee judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve's statutory mandate...

The maximum level of employment is largely determined by nonmonetary factors that affect the structure and dynamics of the labor market. These factors may change over time and may not be directly measurable. Consequently, it would not be appropriate to specify a fixed goal for employment; rather, the Committee's policy decisions must be informed by assessments of the maximum level of employment, recognizing that such assessments are necessarily uncertain and subject to revision.

This excerpt does not imply, of course, that the Fed need slavishly pursue a numerical inflation target in the shorter run and, as I have pointed out before, in his last press conference Chairman Bernanke explicitly indicated that the FOMC does not intend to do so:

The Committee... intends to look through purely transitory fluctuations in inflation, such as those induced by short-term variations in the prices of internationally traded commodities, and to focus instead on the underlying inflation trend.

My price-level targeting post, co-authored with Mike Bryan, was exactly making the point that, over the past couple of decades, the FOMC has essentially delivered on a 2 percent longer-term price-level growth objective, while accepting plenty of shorter-term variability.

In the end, it is an open question whether credibility in delivering price stability, hard won in the '80s and early '90s, could be sustained if the FOMC says it does not care so much about the exact level of the average rate of inflation, even in the long run. To be truthful, I can't give you an answer to that question. But neither can the proponents of NGDP targeting. I just don't feel that this is an opportune time for an experiment.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed

 

January 18, 2013 in Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy, GDP, Monetary Policy | Permalink

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Visualizing Improvement

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January 10, 2013

Visualizing Improvement

The December employment report has come and gone without much of a splash. The roundup of commentary at MarketWatch included these observations:

"In short, not especially strong nor weak. While a 150'170K per month trend in payrolls is far from booming, it is strong enough over time to keep the unemployment rate moving down given slowing in the secular trend in labor force growth. Unemployment was flat in December, but it is down 0.4 points in the last six months."
'Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist, High Frequency Economics

"The overall picture is that the labor market remains lackluster. If this state of affairs continues throughout most of this year, as we expect, then it is hard to see the Fed dialing back or stopping its [quantitative-easing] purchases as some officials currently envisage."
'Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist, Capital Economics

Today's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did little to change that impression.

The interest in the Fed's reaction, always acute given the employment half of the Fed's dual mandate from Congress, has been heightened since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced, first in September, that it will continue its asset-purchase programs as long as "the labor market does not improve substantially." But what constitutes substantial improvement is a matter of some art, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear at his press conference following the December meeting:

In assessing the extent of progress, the Committee will be evaluating a range of labor market indicators, including the unemployment rate, payroll employment, hours worked, and labor force participation, among others. Because increases in demand and production are normally precursors to improvements in labor market conditions, we will also be looking carefully at the pace of economic activity more broadly.

A terrific gallery that includes "a range of labor market indicators" is available at the Calculated Risk blog'you might also check out the Cooley-Rupert Economic Snapshot'but here at the Atlanta Fed, we have been experimenting with our own method for summarizing the general state of the labor market. Though this project is very much a work in progress, the idea is to highlight variables that look at employer behavior, signals of employer and employee confidence, measures of labor resource utilization, and leading indicators of labor market conditions.

As a first pass, we've organized a collection of variables we find interesting, grouped in the categories I just described. In the category of employer behavior we include payroll employment (from the BLS's Establishment Payroll Survey, also known as the Current Employment Statistics survey), job vacancies or job openings, and hires (from JOLTS). Variables in the confidence category include hiring plans (from the National Federation of Independent Business's jobs report), job availability (from the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Survey), and quits (from JOLTS). The utilization group contains unemployment (from the BLS's Current Population Survey, or CPS), marginally attached workers (from the CPS), the job finding rate (defined as the ratio of short-term to long-term unemployed as described in work by University of Chicago professor Rob Shimer), and workers who are part-time for economic reasons (from the CPS). Finally, we capture leading indicators with initial claims for unemployment insurance (from the U.S. Department of Labor), difficulty in filling jobs (from the NFIB small business jobs report), and temporary help services employment (from the CES).

We've based one prototype for how all of this information might be visualized at once on the following "spider chart":

Here's how to read this chart: Think of each point on the inner orange circle as representing the value of each of our labor-conditions variables in the fourth quarter of 2009. Point A, therefore, would represent the value of "temporary help services employment" in 2009:IVQ, point B would be "payroll employment" in 2009:IVQ, and so on around the circle. (We've chosen 2009:IVQ as a benchmark because that's the last time we experienced two consecutive quarters of negative employment growth. You can thus think of 2009:IVQ as the quarter just before the beginning of the current "jobs recovery.")

The chart's outer dark-red circle represents the value of each of the labor-conditions variables in the first quarter of 2007'the beginning of the last recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research Business Cycle Dating Committee. Moving out from the inner orange circle to outer dark-red circle tracks the progress each variable makes from its value at the end of the recession (i.e. 2009:IVQ) toward its prerecession (i.e. 2007:IVQ) level. For example, being at point C today would mean initial claims for unemployment insurance have fallen by half relative to the amount they increased between 2007:IVQ and 2009:IVQ. ("Improvement," of course, involves lower numbers for bad things, like unemployment and initial claims, and higher numbers for good things, like payroll employment and hires.)

As of the December 2012 employment report, here's where we stand:

The chart tells a familiar, but not too happy, story. Only one of the variables in the collection of employer behavior, employee and employer confidence, and labor resource utilization categories has recovered even half the gap from its prerecession benchmark. The labor resource utilization variables look particularly bad, with one variable'marginally attached workers'actually getting worse over the recovery as a whole. On the brighter side, our leading-indicator variables are looking relatively strong, perhaps portending improvement ahead.

The interpretation of these spider charts comes with several caveats. First, a variable such as the level of payroll employment will eventually exceed its pre-recession level, and grow consistently over time as the population grows. A variable like "hiring plans"'which is the net percentage of firms in the National Federation of Independent Business survey expecting to hire employees in the next three months'cannot grow without bound. Thus, the charts by construction are about visualizing the transition to some fixed benchmark, not a device for monitoring labor markets over the long run.

Second, it is not obvious that 2007:IVQ levels are necessarily the best benchmarks for all (or even any) of the variables we are monitoring. For example, the demographics associated with the aging of the baby-boom generations have arguably slowed the long-term trend in employment growth, meaning that a return to pre-recession payroll jobs will be slow even in circumstance that we would want to characterize as a "substantially" improving labor market.

Finally, signs of labor market improvement sufficient to alter the pace of FOMC asset purchases may be more about momentum or steady progress than about the return to a specific target or threshold. In fact, this chart depicts signs of such progress over the past three years...

...but that progress has been very modest in some cases, notably along labor utilization dimensions.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed

 

January 10, 2013 in Employment | Permalink

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Inflation versus Price-Level Targeting in Practice

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January 07, 2013

Inflation versus Price-Level Targeting in Practice

In last Wednesday's Financial Times, Scott Sumner issued a familiar indictment of "modern central banking practice" for failing to adopt nominal gross domestic product (GDP) targets, for which he has been a major proponent. I have expressed my doubts about nominal GDP targeting on several occasions'most recently a few posts back'so there is no need to rehash them. But this passage from Professor Sumner's article provoked my interest:

Inflation targeting also failed because it targeted the growth rate of prices, not the level. When prices fell in the U.S. in 2009, the Federal Reserve did not try to make up for that shortfall with above target inflation. Instead it followed a "let bygones be bygones" approach.

In principle, there is no reason why a central bank consistently pursuing an inflation target can't deliver the same outcomes as one that specifically and explicitly operates with a price-level target. Misses with respect to targeted inflation need not be biased in one direction or another if the central bank is truly delivering on an average inflation rate consistent with its stated objective.

So how does the Federal Reserve'with a stated 2-percent inflation objective'measure up against a price-level targeting standard? The answer to that question is not so straightforward because, by definition, a price-level target has to be measured relative to some starting point. To illustrate this concept, and to provide some sense of how the Fed would measure up relative to a hypothetical price-level objective, I constructed the following chart.

Consider the first point on the graph, corresponding to the year 1993. (I somewhat arbitrarily chose 1993 as roughly the beginning of an era in which the Fed, intentionally or not, began operating as if it had an implicit long-run inflation target of about 2 percent.) This point on the graph answers the following question:

By what percent would the actual level of the personal consumption expenditure price index differ from a price-level target that grew by 2 percent per year beginning in 1993?

The succeeding points in the chart answer that same question for the years 1994 through 2009.

Here's the story as I see it:

1. If you accept that the Fed, for all practical purposes, adopted a 2 percent inflation objective sometime in the early to mid-1990s, there arguably really isn't much material distinction between its inflation-targeting practices and what would have likely happened under a regime that targeted price-level growth at 2 percent per annum. The actual price level today differs by only about 1/2 to 1 1/2 percentage points from what would be implied by such a price-level target.

   Hitting a single numerical target for the price level at any particular time is of course not realistic, so an operational price-level targeting regime would have to include a description of the bounds around the target that defines success with respect to the objective. Different people may have different views on that, but I would count being within 1 1/2 percentage points of the targeted value over a 20-year period as a clear victory.

2. If you date the hypothetical beginning of price-level targeting sometime in the first half of the 2000s, then the price level would have deviated above that implied by a price-level target by somewhat more. There certainly would be no case for easing to get back to the presumed price-level objective.

3. A price-level target would start to give a signal that easing is in order only if you choose the reference date for the target during the Great Recession'2008 or 2009.

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea of price-level targeting, and I believe that an effective inflation-targeting regime would not "let bygones be bygones" in the long run. I also believe that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has effectively implemented the equivalent price-level target outcomes via its flexible inflation-targeting approach over the past 15 to 20 years (as suggested in point number 1 above).

In fact, the FOMC has found ample scope for stimulus in the context of that flexible inflation targeting approach (which honors the requirements of the Fed's dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment). I just don't think it is necessary or helpful to recalibrate an existing implicit price-level target by restarting history yesterday.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director and

Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist, both of the Atlanta Fed

January 7, 2013 | Permalink

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What the FOMC Said: More Clarification

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January 02, 2013

What the FOMC Said: More Clarification

UC San Diego professor Jim Hamilton is in my opinion one of the blogosphere's best commentators on Fed policy, and his most recent post at Econbrowser has a nice, concise retrospective on U.S. monetary policy over the past four years. But in the nobody's perfect category, there is one bit that I think requires a correction:

At the most recent FOMC meeting, the Fed signaled that QE3 purchases will continue as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5% and inflation below 2.5%.

Actually, those thresholds apply to the period of time that the members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) currently expect the federal funds rate target to remain near its zero lower bound. They do not apply to the duration of the FOMC's asset-purchase programs.

Once again, I will turn to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's words at his last post-meeting press conference:

Unlike the explicitly quantitative criteria associated with the Committee's forward guidance about the federal funds rate, which I will discuss in a moment, the criteria the Committee will use to make decisions about the pace and extent of its asset purchase program are qualitative; in particular, continuation of asset purchases is tied to our seeing substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market. Because we expect to learn more over time about the efficacy and potential costs of asset purchases in the current economic context, we believe that qualitative guidance is more appropriate at this time.

The Chairman goes on to explicitly discuss the 6.5 percent/2.5 percent thresholds on the forward guidance regarding the funds rate, and he circles back to the distinction between that guidance and the "QE3 purchases":

It's worth noting that the goals of the FOMC's asset purchases and of its federal funds rate guidance are somewhat different. The goal of the asset purchase program is to increase the near-term momentum of the economy by fostering more-accommodative financial conditions, while the purpose of the rate guidance is to provide information about the future circumstances under which the Committee would contemplate reducing accommodation. I would emphasize that a decision by the Committee to end asset purchases, whenever that point is reached, would not be a turn to tighter policy. While in that circumstance the Committee would no longer be increasing policy accommodation, its policy stance would remain highly supportive of growth. Only at some later point would the Committee begin actually removing accommodation through rate increases. Moreover, as I have discussed today, the decisions to modify the asset purchase program and to undertake rate increases are tied to different criteria.

The separate moving pieces of interest rate policy and the Fed's asset purchase program are subtle, and I admit at times confusing. But as monetary policy moves forward, it is important to keep the distinctions front and center.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

January 2, 2013 in Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy | Permalink

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