The time has come to start weighing in on presidential candidate Donald Trump’s statements on economic policy. Today, we examine his comments about U.S. government debt. After saying that he is the “king of debt” and that he “loves debt,” Mr. Trump recently went on suggest that if interest rates were to rise, he would seek to “make a deal” on U.S. Treasury debt. In his words, “I could see long-term renegotiations where we borrow long term at very low rates.” He also called this action: “refinance debt with longer term.”
Mr. Trump appears to assume that his sensibilities as real estate mogul and dealmaker can be directly applied to government debt management policy. They cannot. Treasury securities bear absolutely no resemblance to the debt issued by Trump Entertainment Resorts, which went bankrupt in 1991, 2004, 2009, and 2014...
To borrow a phrase, a crisis as deep as the 2007-2008 collapse of U.S. housing finance is a terrible thing to waste. Yet, nearly eight years after investors shunned their debt, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain in federal conservatorship. And there is no end in sight to the government’s dominant role in housing finance: securitizations by the GSEs and federal agencies still accounted for nearly 70% of originations in 2015 (with qualifying loan-to-value ratios as high as 97%). Despite this extensive government intervention in mortgage finance, the U.S. home ownership rate fell to 63.6% last year, its lowest level since 1966.
To say that U.S. housing finance is both inefficient and risky seems a dramatic understatement...
A highly leveraged financial system is one prone to collapse. This notion underlies modern financial regulation: the control of systemic risk requires controlling leverage. And, it is what drives proposals for high capital requirements and to tax leverage. But, as is always the case with regulation, the devil is in the details. For one thing, we need a way to measure leverage. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult task. Second, while risk varies positively with leverage, risk-taking can increase without increasing leverage, so we need to think about all major forms of risk-taking that can threaten financial stability...
Despite mixed evidence, concerns about a decline of bond market liquidity persist. The typical worry is that a sudden decline in bond demand will cause prices to plunge and have serious knock-on effects.
Naturally, the issue merits attention: episodes in which market liquidity disappears rapidly can be disruptive (witness the flash crashes and flash rallies in various equity and bond markets in recent years). However, these incidents tend to be fleeting. Instead, from the perspective of financial stability, funding liquidity is the greater source of vulnerability...
Some time ago, we wrote about how the Fed and the ECB’s governance and communication were converging. Our focus was on the policy, governance and communications framework, including the 2% inflation objective, the voting rotation, post-meeting press conference, prompt publication of meeting minutes, and the like.
But important differences are built into the legal design of these two systems. Perhaps the most important one is the contrasting roles of the regional Federal Reserve Banks and that of the National Central Banks (NCBs)...
The primary task of the central bank is to avert catastrophe, making sure that nothing really bad happens. This risk management approach imparts a natural asymmetry to policymakers’ words and deeds. Sometimes, it calls for bold, aggressive action. Others times, it means cautious plodding. Everyone agrees that 2008 was a clear case of the former. Most Federal Reserve officials argue that the current circumstance exemplifies the latter...
Last week, a Federal District Court overturned the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s (FSOC) designation of MetLife—the nation’s largest insurer by assets—as a systemically important financial intermediary (SIFI). Until the Court unseals this decision, we won’t know why. If the ruling is based on narrow grounds that the FSOC can readily address, it will have little impact on long-run prospects for U.S. financial stability.
However, if the Court has materially raised the hurdle to SIFI designation—and if its ruling holds up on appeal—“too big to fail” nonbanks could again loom large in future financial crises, making them both more likely and more damaging...
The financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted two distinct types of regulatory reforms. The first uses capital and liquidity requirements to make financial institutions resilient in the face of severe macroeconomic events. The second concerns market infrastructure and the ability to trade securities and derivatives or to use them as collateral. Here, the emphasis is on both information collection through trade reporting—who is buying or selling what to whom--and on shifting transactions from over-the-counter (OTC) markets to central clearing.
This post examines central clearing of OTC derivatives and highlights its importance for financial stability...
Modern economies are built by businesses that take risk. As Edison’s defense suggests, successful risk-takers need scope to experiment without distraction. Economies lacking institutions to support risk-taking are prone to stagnation.
By securing economic and financial stability, central banks play a key role in promoting the risk-taking that is fundamental to innovation and capital formation. On rare occasions, it is officials’ bold willingness to do “whatever it takes” that does the job. More often, it is a series of moderate, gradual actions. Yet, even then, the understanding that the central bank has the broad capacity to act—and, when necessary, to do so without limit—is a key factor underpinning the stability of the system...
Some days the tone of the financial news matches that of the sports page. Adversaries appear to be locked in an epic battle, with the official sector setting regulations in an attempt to keep the system safe on one side, and financiers pushing for rules that ensure profitability on the other. The skirmish over the level of large bank capital requirements and the clash over whether municipal bonds can be used to meet liquidity requirements are just two recent examples. (See our earlier posts here and here.)
Following the day-to-day struggle can make it hard to see who is winning. But if history is any guide, the financiers will prevail—to the benefit of their owners and managers—at the expense of systemic fragility.
Can we change this? Can we create a system with greater balance between the authorities and the institutions?
Over the past two decades, the FOMC has made enormous strides in promoting transparency. In sharp contrast to most of its previous history, the Fed now emphasizes that transparency enhances the effectiveness of monetary policy.
Yet, central bank communication is a work in progress. And, as the new USMPF report argues, there remains scope for improvement. In our view, the simplest and most useful change that the authors recommend, and that the Fed could implement—immediately and without cost—is to “connect the dots:” that is, to link (while maintaining anonymity) the published interest rate forecasts of each FOMC participant that appear in the quarterly “dot plot” (found in the Summary of Economic Projections, or SEP) to that same person’s projections of inflation, unemployment, and economic growth.
Not long ago, nearly everyone thought that nominal interest rates could not go below zero. Now, we have negative policy rates in the euro area and Japan, while in Sweden and Switzerland, the lowest controlled rate is below -1%. And government securities worth trillions of dollars bear negative rates, too.
When we first wrote about negative rates a year ago, we argued that the effective lower bound (ELB, rather than ZLB) for nominal rates was determined by the transactions costs of storing and transferring cash. We reasoned that the ELB might be in the range of -0.50% (minus one-half percent). Below that, we thought, there would be a move into cash, facilitated by banks and others who efficiently manage the notes for clients.
But, at the negative rates that we have seen so far, cash in circulation has not spiked. So, how much further can nominal interest rates fall? And what role should negative interest rates play in the future?
A recent op-ed in a major Chinese English-language newspaper, The People’s Daily, asserts that George Soros “has declared ‘war’ on China, claiming he had sold short Asian currencies.” For those who observed firms like those of Mr. Soros profiting from the collapse of the British pound in 1992, a speculative attack on China’s currency, the RMB, merits close attention.
There are surely parallels to that earlier episode where Soros' firm is reputed to have made $1 billion in a couple of days. Yet, it would be difficult to overlook the enormous differences. Perhaps most important, the United Kingdom was committed to maintaining the free flow of capital across its borders. This is in stark contrast to China, where policymakers have been tightening capital controls in recent months....
“We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim, doveryai, no proveryai—trust, but verify.” President Ronald Reagan at the signing of the INF Treaty, December 8, 1987.
In July 2010, central bank governors and supervisors from the 28 jurisdictions that make up the Basel Committee membership were hammering out the agreement on new capital and liquidity requirements now known as Basel III. There was a large sticking point. Some members were standing firm on their desire to have higher capital requirements. Others felt that this would make credit more expensive and less plentiful.
Had agreement not been reached, those insisting on more capital might have said: “Go ahead, be permissive. But if you let your banks operate with low levels of capital, we’ll restrict our banks from doing business with them.” Fortunately, it didn’t come to that....
If you haven’t seen The Big Short, you should. The acting is superb and the story enlightening: a few brilliant outcasts each discover just how big the holes are that eventually bury the U.S. financial system in the crisis of 2007-2009. If you’re like most people we know, you’ll walk away delighted by the movie and disturbed by the reality it captures. [Full disclosure: one of us joined a panel organized by the film’s economic consultant to view and discuss it with the director.]
But we're not film critics, The movie—along with some misleading criticism—prompts us to clarify what we view as the prime causes of the financial crisis. The financial corruption depicted in the movie is deeply troubling (we've written about fraud and conflicts of interest in finance here and here). But what made the U.S. financial system so fragile a decade ago, and what made the crisis so deep, were practices that were completely legal. The scandal is that we still haven't addressed these properly....
Narayana Kocherlakota, Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics, University of Rochester; former President, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Has the experience of the crisis changed your view of the central bank policy toolkit?
Former President Kocherlakota: Yes. I’m going to focus on the U.S. experience—with which I am most familiar—aside from one comment later that relates to Europe.
I would divide the U.S. response to the crisis into two pieces. One is the liquidity interventions that the Federal Reserve undertook, largely under the rubric of Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, beginning in 2008 and then moving on into the fall of 2008 and 2009. I was not President of FRB Minneapolis yet, so my comments are really those of an economist observing those interventions from the outside....
Eight years after the financial crisis began, the regulatory reforms it spawned continue apace. Over the past year, regulators introduced total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC) and the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) to make banks more resilient. And, with an eye toward strengthening market function, authorities continue to push for central clearing of derivatives (CCPs).
Overlapping with these goals—and extending to nonbanks—is the recent move to establish standards for margin requirements in securities transactions: that is, the maximum amount that someone can borrow when using a given security as collateral...
Charles Bean, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics; former Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy, Bank of England; former Chief Economist, Bank of England.
Has the experience of the crisis changed your view of the central bank policy toolkit?
Former Deputy Governor Bean: Most certainly. First, the natural real safe rate of interest has been persistently depressed by a combination of high savings, weak investment and portfolio shifts in favor of safer assets. That means prolonged periods when policy rates are at their (near) zero lower bound are more likely, necessitating greater reliance on unconventional monetary policies instead.
Last week, our friend, Harvard Professor John Y. Campbell, delivered the American Economic Association’s 2016 Ely Lecture, the group’s most prominent invited lecture. His topic—a central challenge for policymakers and practitioners alike—is how to make modern finance work better for consumers who lack understanding of the opportunities and risks they face. Professor Campbell discussed how we can take the lessons from behavioral finance and household finance—a relatively new field that he helped establish—to help households manage the choices that they face. The ultimate goal is to foster decisions consistent with economic rationality (hence his title, “Restoring Rational Choice: The Challenge of Consumer Finance”) while minimizing the costs of government intervention.
We take this opportunity to highlight a few important points from Professor Campbell’s presentation (text here and webcast here)...
Switzerland is an amazing place, not least the skiing, the chocolate, and the punctual trains. The latter is part of the country’s exquisitely maintained infrastructure: there are no potholes, and no deferred maintenance of train tracks, tunnels, airports, or public buildings. Few countries go so far, but many can take a lesson: it pays to maintain infrastructure at least so that it doesn’t fail.
We bring this up now because financial markets are telling us that it’s a very good time to build and repair infrastructure: real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates have fallen so low that it has become exceptionally cheap to finance the improvement and repair of neglected roads, bridges, transport hubs, and public utilities. Yet, in the United States, we are doing less public investment than ever: net government investment has fallen to what is probably a record low...
