With the entire world in the worst crisis faced since World War II, many engage in magical thinking.
Soon, as if waking up from a bad dream, everything will suddenly be back to normal. It won’t be. This will be a long slog that will change some “institutions,” as economists use the term, permanently. What we can do to fix this is limited, but not zero. The question is how we can best minimize damage to our economy and our society.
As of the end of last week, the House, Senate and Trump administration remained mired over a second COVID-19 relief bill. It isn’t even a “deadlock” over one or two key points of contention despite agreement on almost everything else. It is, at its core, a key fundamental debate. The GOP majority in the Senate is all over the map and will not or cannot work with the Republican administration for a coherent plan to contrast that of the House Democrats. So discussions of an economic package needs be very generic, especially with regard to total money appropriated.
What should be the criteria for these decisions? One group says we are in a situation like the day after Pearl Harbor. It’s an unprecedented, brutal crisis. We need to shovel money out the Treasury’s door. Arguing about details at this point is less important. Perhaps this a bit of an exaggeration, but ex-Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen have called for high levels of spending. So has Ken Rogoff, perhaps the economist whose work I most admire and who co-wrote one of the best books on financial crises.
At the other end, some argue that our national debt already is at an unprecedented peacetime high, as are the annual budget deficits that create more debt. Moreover, the Federal Reserve is already past the safe limits of new money creation. That many members of Congress in this camp strongly supported the very legislation that created such deficits and debt is an irony lost on them. Some economists may agree with this austere view, but few of any prominence have asserted it publicly.
Then there are moderates in the middle who assert that we, like the mythical Argonauts, have to steer a course between the six-headed monster of the pandemic that may devour us and our economy, and the rock of financial ruin that would rip the economic bottom out from under our us.
Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago argues this in a recent essay, “Should Governments Spend Away?” Rajan, another economist I admire, wrote one of the best books analyzing the financial debacle a decade ago and went on to head India’s central bank. He certainly does not oppose spending, but argues for caution.
We’ll end up following this last camp. But what navigation marks should guide us?
It is important that our nation produce the goods and services that we, the people of this country, need to satisfy our needs and wants. We must use as many resources as we can as efficiently as we can. We should seek to maximize the present value of our national output over at least the next decade. “Present value” means that we reduce both long-term spending and output to the value of dollars at the same point in time as near-term spending and output.
So let’s analyze the hazards we face.
The near-term danger of the “we just can’t spend money we don’t have” argument is that too much labor and physical capital will remain idle, producing nothing for us. “Physical capital” refers to factories, stores, machines, mills, airplanes, trucks and so on. This is what we’re seeing now. Output will be low and so will incomes. In addition to people not being able to buy food, it means cars and houses repossessed by lenders, stores and other small businesses closed down and perhaps in bankruptcy. Rental property owners will not get the rent needed to service mortgages. There will be a cascade of defaults, failures and deprivation.
This echoes the prescription of Andrew Mellon, treasury secretary for the three GOP presidents from 1921 through 1932. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” was his prescription for dealing with the unfolding Great Depression. This was economic suicide and caused much death and suffering.
Yet the other extreme poses dangers also, especially in the longer term. Our country has remained economically dominant in the world since 1940. The dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. The U.S. Treasury Bond remains the world standard for safe investment and there are willing lenders for any debt we choose to take on. Thus we have become complacent, if not lazy and wasteful, believing that “deficits don’t matter.” The reef of financial disaster remains far away in our collective view.
The Modern Monetary Theory crowd is correct in that as long as we still can borrow in dollars, we cannot go “bankrupt” in the sense of an airline or pedicure salon. We can just stiff all those we borrowed money from. The problem is that simply repudiating payment of our bonds, or letting the Federal Reserve create so much money, would eventually mean the purchasing power of a paid-off T-Bond would buy nothing more than a Happy Meal.
Consider the experience of Great Britain, which was the dominant global economic power for more than a century. The pound sterling was the unrivaled global reserve currency, just as the dollar has been since WWII. But by 1918, at the end of the First World War, Britain was nearly tapped out.
The dollar took over as the dominant world reserve currency. Twenty-seven years later, in 1945, at the end of WWII, the United Kingdom no longer could sell sterling bonds in international markets. Any more money creation by the Bank of England would have sent the pound into free-fall internationally. Britain had to send celebrity economist John Maynard Keynes to beg for loans from us. And while France was entering its “glorious thirty” years of economic growth and West Germany secured its similar Wirtschaftswunder, the U.K. economy entered decades of stagnation.
Lesson for us? It can happen. More about this subject in a future column.
St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.
"current" - Google News
August 10, 2020 at 01:03AM
https://ift.tt/2Cgmlqk
Real World Economics: Current crisis is fundamental, existential - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
"current" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3b2HZto
https://ift.tt/3c3RoCk
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Real World Economics: Current crisis is fundamental, existential - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press"
Post a Comment