China, Brazil manufacturing, US Construction Spending, coal

Seems a global thing:

No recovery here:

Another price reversal:

GC Newcastle coal futures tumbled by over 30% to $150 per metric ton, the lowest in three months, and are more than 40% below a record high of $269.5 hit on October 5th, as China stepped up policies to boost output ahead of the winter season. China’s average daily output increased by over 1.2 million tonnes to a record at above 11.6 million tonnes on October 18th. As a result, Chinese power plants now have stocks to produce power for 16 days from less than two days’ inventories at the start of October.

Euro area PMI, Japan pmi, Misc. global headlines

Tariff man, aka Agent Orange, doing a number on global economies…

Just went negative:


Services moved up some but the trend still looks down:

Japan appearing to be collapsing as well:

And these recent headlines:

Argentina Leading Economic Index

The economy of Argentina shrank 0.1 percent month-over-month in January 2019, following a 0.3 percent contraction in the previous month. It is the eleventh consecutive decrease in economic activity but the softest since a mild 0.2 percent expansion seen in February last year.

Russia GDP YoY

Russia’s gross domestic product growth slowed to 0.7 percent year-on-year in January 2019, the weakest since a contraction seen in November 2017, from an upwardly revised 2.3 percent in the previous month. Output rose at a softer pace for construction (0.1 percent vs 2.6 percent in December), retail trade (1.6 percent vs 2.3 percent), freight turnover (2.4 percent vs 3.2 percent) and industrial production (1.1 percent vs 2 percent). On the other hand, agriculture activity expanded at a faster 0.7 percent, compared to a 0.1 percent decline in December.

Brazil Business Confidence

The Industrial Entrepreneur Confidence Index in Brazil fell to 64.5 in February 2019 from 64.7 in the previous month. Future expectations deteriorated (69 from 69.9 in January), namely regarding the company’s situation (69.2 from 69.9) and the country’s economic situation (68.5 from 69.8). Meanwhile, the assessment for current conditions improved (55.6 from 54.1), boosted by both the country’s economic situation (57.1 from 54.8) and the company’s situation (55 from 53.7). Among sectors, confidence weakened in construction (63.3 from 63.7) and manufacturing (64.7 from 64.9) while strengthened in mining (66.7 from 65.1).

Housing starts, High end weakness

Falling off, as previously discussed, particularly multi family, which had been the driver:

Housing Starts
er-11-19-1
Highlights
Pulled down by a big drop in multi-family homes, housing starts fell a steep 11.0 percent in October to a 1.060 million annualized rate that is far below Econoday’s low estimate. Starts for multi-family homes, which spiked in September following a springtime jump in permits for this component, fell back 25 percent in the month to a 338,000 annualized rate. Single-family starts fell a much less severe 2.4 percent to 722,000.

And there is important good news in this report. Permits are up, rising 4.1 percent to a 1.150 million rate that hits the Econoday consensus. Single-family permits are up 2.4 percent to a 711,000 rate with multi-family up 6.8 percent to 439,000.

Housing completions fell back in October, down 6 percent to a 965,000 rate that reflects lower work in the Northeast and Midwest. Homes under construction rose 0.9 percent to a recovery best 938,000 rate and are up a very strong 16.4 percent year-on-year, pointing, despite the slip in starts, to ongoing strength for construction spending, at least for October.

But the big drop in starts is definitely a negative for the near-term construction outlook, though the rise in permits points to subsequent strength.

er-11-19-2
er-11-19-3
er-11-19-4
er-11-19-5

Sotheby’s Offers Employees Voluntary Buyouts to Cut Costs

Nov 13 (Bloomberg) — Sotheby’s is offering employees voluntary buyouts to cut costs after a drop in third-quarter revenue grabbed more attention from the company’s investors than its largest ever semiannual auction season.

San Francisco in housing ‘correction’

Nov 5 (CNBC) — San Francisco homes are still some of the priciest in the nation, but sales of those houses are showing significant weakness. September sales were down 19.5 percent in the city from a year ago, according to the California Association of Realtors.

“We’re going through a kind of correction, as we have a lot of new developments being built right now. The supply is definitely on the rise,” said Justin Fichelson, an agent at Climb Real Estate Group in San Francisco. “The market is not going to continue going up like we’ve seen in the past two years, because prices are already high.”

London Mansion Prices Fall 11.5% as Home `Bubble’ May Have Burst

Nov 12 (Bloomberg) — Prices of homes valued at 5 million pounds ($7.6 million) or more fell 11.5 percent on a per square foot basis in the third quarter from a year earlier, according to Richard Barber, a director at broker W.A. Ellis LLP, a unit of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. Sales volumes across all homes in the best parts of central London dropped 14 percent in the period, the realtor said on Thursday.

“The bubble may already have burst” for the most expensive homes, Barber said. Now, “36 percent of all properties currently on the market across prime central London are being marketed at a lower price than they were originally listed at, with the average reduction in price being 8.5 percent.”

Luxury-Jet Market Value Seen Slipping for First Time Since 2009

Nov 15 (Bloomberg) — Global long-term spending on private jets is starting to slow for the first time since 2009 as slumping commodity prices sap demand in emerging markets, according to an industry forecast.

Deliveries for the 11 years ending in 2025 will be valued at $270 billion, Honeywell International Inc. said Sunday in its annual survey of the luxury-aircraft market. That’s down 3.6 percent from last year’s comparable projection, and snapped a streak of gains since the last U.S. recession ended.

The decline reflects weakness in Brazil, Russia, India and China, the group known as the BRIC countries, and the impact of political conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, according to Brian Sill, chief of Honeywell’s business and general aviation unit. Delays in some new plane models are also pushing back demand, he said.

Jet shipments will drop 2.6 percent to 9,200 planes, according to Honeywell, whose forecast had predicted fluctuations in deliveries but no drop in the planes’ list value in the post-recession years. Large planes that had spearheaded the recovery are now seeing slower growth.

Layoffs, Claims, Trade

Challenger Job-Cut Report
eco-release-2-5-1
Highlights
In perhaps the first warning of serious trouble from the oil patch, Challenger’s layoff count starts off the year with an elevated reading, at 53,041 for the highest reading since February 2013 and the highest January reading since 2012. Readings in December and November were much lower, at 32,640 and 35,940.

The energy sector represented roughly 40 percent of January’s cuts, at 20,193. Cuts in the energy sector were minimal in the fourth-quarter, averaging only 1,330 per month. The sector seeing the second largest number of cuts in January is retail, at 6,699 in downsizing following the holidays.

Jobless Claims
eco-release-2-5-2
Highlights
The jobs market is healthy based on jobless claims where initial claims, though up 11,000, came in at a much lower-than-expected 278,000 in the January 31 week, keeping the bulk of the improvement from the prior week’s revised 42,000 fall. The 4-week week average, down a sizable 6,500 in the week to 292,750, is trending right at the month-ago level in a comparison that points to another healthy monthly employment report for tomorrow.

Continuing claims, reported with a 1-week lag, are also at healthy levels though the month-ago comparison is less favorable. Continuing claims in the January 24 week rose 6,000 to 2.400 million while the 4-week average, though down 22,000, is at a 2.421 million level that is slightly above the month-ago trend. The unemployment rate for insured workers is holding at a recovery low of 1.8 percent.
eco-release-2-5-3

Negative productivity/jump in unit labor costs = over hiring given actual output?

Productivity and Costs
eco-release-2-5-4
Highlights
Nonfarm productivity growth for the fourth quarter declined an annualized 1.8 percent, following a 3.7 percent jump in the third quarter. Expectations were for a 0.2 percent rise. Unit labor costs increased 2.7 percent after falling an annualized 2.3 percent in the third quarter. Analysts projected a 1.2 percent gain.

Output growth softened to 3.2 percent in the fourth quarter, following a 6.3 percent jump the prior quarter. Compensation growth posted at 0.9 percent annualized after 1.3 percent the quarter before.

Year-on-year, productivity was unchanged in the fourth quarter, down from 1.3 percent in the third quarter. Year-ago unit labor costs were up 1.9 percent, compared to up 0.9 percent in the third quarter.

International Trade
eco-release-2-5-5
Highlights
The U.S. trade balance for December widened instead of narrowing as expected. Lower oil prices actually cut into petroleum exports.

In December, the U.S. trade gap grew to $46.6 billion from a revised $39.8 billion in November. Analysts forecast the deficit to narrow to $37.9 billion. Exports were down 0.8 percent after declining 1.1 percent the month before. Imports rebounded 2.2 percent after falling 1.8 percent in November.

Expansion in the overall gap was led by the goods excluding petroleum gap which increased to $49.7 billion from $46.3 billion in November.

The petroleum goods trade gap posted at $14.7 billion from $11.6 billion in November. Petroleum imports were up 7.7 percent while exports decreased 11.6 percent.

The services surplus was essentially unchanged at $19.5 billion.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the December figures show surpluses, in billions of dollars, with
with South and Central America ($2.6), Brazil ($0.4), and United Kingdom ($0.1). Deficits were recorded, in billions of dollars, with China ($30.4), European Union ($12.7), Germany ($5.6), Mexico ($5.6), Japan ($5.4), Canada ($3.3), South Korea ($2.7), OPEC ($2.3), India ($2.1), Italy ($2.1), France ($1.1), and Saudi Arabia ($1.0).

Overall, the December number will likely lower estimates for fourth quarter GDP growth. But the good news is that the import numbers suggest that demand is moderately healthy.

eco-release-2-5-6

eco-release-2-5-7

eco-release-2-5-8

Brazil

So just maybe the high rates are supporting the inflation?

Brazil Central Bank Signals Further Increase in Interest Rates (WSJ) “Advances achieved in the fight against inflation…aren’t enough yet,” the bank’s monetary-policy committee said in minutes from last week’s meeting, when its policy rate, known as Selic, was raised to 12.25% from 11.75%. The central bank began raising borrowing costs in April 2013, when the Selic stood at a historic low of 7.25% and annual inflation was 6.49%. Brazil’s annual inflation was 6.41% in 2014, above the central bank’s 4.5% target and just below the 6.5% maximum tolerated. The central bank now forecasts a 9.3% increase in controlled prices this year, up from 6% previously. Economic growth, however, will be “below potential” in 2015, the bank said.

Brazil inflation

Maybe somehow the higher interest rates set by the CB support the higher rates of inflation?

;)
Brazil’s Inflation Rises Even Amid Low Growth (WSJ) Brazil’s official IPCA consumer-price index rose 6.41% in 2014. The IPCA rose 5.91% in 2013. Annual inflation was driven up by an 8% increase in food prices and a 8.8% surge in housing-related prices. Inflation also accelerated in December, with the IPCA rising 0.78% versus 0.51% rise in November. The central bank raised its benchmark interest rate, called Selic, to 11.75% in December, the latest in a series of increases since April 2013, when the rate was 7.25%. The Central Bank of Brazil has a tolerance band for annual inflation of between 2.5% and 6.5%.

mtg purch apps, adp

Weaker, and down 8% year over year, even with much lower rates.

MBA Purchase Applications
mba-1-2
Highlights
Mortgage application activity fell sharply in the 2 weeks to January 2, down 5.0 percent for purchase applications and down 12.0 percent for refinancing applications. The trend for purchase applications, which offers an indication on underlying home purchases, is clearly negative, at a year-on-year minus 8.0 percent.

The declines come despite low mortgage rates with the average 30-year rate down slightly in the 2-week period to 4.01 percent for conforming loans ($417,000 or less). Note that today’s report covers not the usual 1-week period but, due to a holiday for MBA, a 2-week period.
mba-graph-1-2

Remember, this is now a forecast of Friday’s number, and not the ‘core’ ADP employment itself.

ADP Employment Report
adp-dec
Highlights
ADP’s estimate for private payroll growth for December is 241,000 vs the Econoday consensus for 235,000 and against ADP’s upwardly revised 227,000 for November (initial estimate 208,000). Turning to government data, the corresponding Econoday consensus for Friday’s jobs report is 238,000 vs November’s 314,000.

Imports down, but exports down as well, which could be a trend as surveys have been indicating deceleration.

International Trade
trade-balance-nov
Highlights
The U.S. trade balance again narrowed and more than expected. And again, improvement was largely due to lower oil prices.

In November, the U.S. trade gap narrowed to $39.0 billion from a revised $42.2 billion in October. Market expectations were for the deficit to narrow to $41.5 billion. Exports were down 1.0 percent after gaining 1.6 percent the month before. But imports declined a sharp 2.2 percent after rising 0.7 percent in October.

Shrinkage in the overall gap was led by the petroleum goods trade gap which dropped to $11.4 billion from $15.2 billion in October. Petroleum imports were down 11.9 percent while exports rose 5.9 percent.

The goods excluding petroleum gap increased to $45.7 billion from $45.2 billion in October. The services surplus was essentially unchanged at $40.4 billion.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the November figures show surpluses, in billions of dollars, with South and Central America ($4.3) and Brazil ($0.6). Deficits were recorded, in billions of dollars, with China ($29.8), European Union ($12.7), Germany ($6.3), Japan ($5.6), Mexico ($4.4), South Korea ($2.9), Italy ($2.3), India ($1.7), France ($1.6), OPEC ($1.6), Canada ($1.4), Saudi Arabia ($1.3), and United Kingdom ($0.2).

Overall, the November number will likely bump up estimates for fourth quarter GDP growth.

OPEC leader vows not to cut oil output even if price hits $20

The Saudis never ‘cut production’

They just set price and let the world buy what it wants at their price.

No one seems to know that.

As no one ever asks if they are going to raise price.

OPEC leader vows not to cut oil output even if price hits $20

“It is not in the interest of Opec producers to cut their production, whatever the price is,” he told the Middle East Economic Survey.

“Whether it goes down to $20, $40, $50, $60, it is irrelevant.”

In the MEES interview, Mr Naimi said Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers would be able to withstand a long period of low crude prices, largely because their production costs were so low — at only about $4-$5 a barrel.


But he said the pain will be much greater for other oil regions, such as offshore Brazil, west Africa and the Arctic, whose costs are much
higher.

“So sooner or later, however much they hold out, in the end, their financial affairs will limit their production,” he said.

“We want to tell the world that high efficiency producing countries are the ones that deserve market share,” said Mr Naimi added. “If the
price falls, it falls . . . Others will be harmed greatly before we feel any pain.”

The bluntness of Mr Naimi’s message took even seasoned Opec observers by surprise. “I’m more bearish than most people looking at the
oil price, but even I am stunned how aggressive his comments are about this radical departure from policy,” said Yasser Elguindi of
Medley Global Advisors.

Comments on Stanlely Fisher’s ‘Lessons from Crises, 1985-2014’

Lessons from Crises, 1985-2014

Stanley Fischer[1]


It is both an honor and a pleasure to receive this years SIEPR Prize. Let me list the reasons. First, the prize, awarded for lifetime contributions to economic policy, was started by George Shultz. I got my start in serious policy work in 1984-85, as a member of the advisory group on the Israeli economy to George Shultz, then Secretary of State. I learned a great deal from that experience, particularly from Secretary Shultz and from Herb Stein, the senior member of the two-person advisory group (I was the other member). Second, it is an honor to have been selected for this prize by a selection committee consisting of George Shultz, Ken Arrow, Gary Becker, Jim Poterba and John Shoven. Third, it is an honor to receive this prize after the first two prizes, for 2010 and for 2012 respectively, were awarded to Paul Volcker and Marty Feldstein. And fourth, it is a pleasure to receive the award itself.

When John Shoven first spoke to me about the prize, he must have expected that I would speak on the economic issues of the day and I would have been delighted to oblige. However, since then I have been nominated by President Obama but not so far confirmed by the Senate for the position of Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Accordingly I shall not speak on current events, but rather on lessons from economic crises I have seen up close during the last three decades and about which I have written in the past starting with the Israeli stabilization of 1985, continuing with the financial crises of the 1990s, during which I was the number two at the IMF, and culminating (I hope) in the Great Recession, which I observed and with which I had to deal as Governor of the Bank of Israel between 2005 and 2013.

This is scheduled to be an after-dinner speech at the end of a fine dinner and after an intensive conference that started at 8 a.m. and ran through 6 p.m. Under the circumstances I shall try to be brief. I shall start with a list of ten lessons from the last twenty years, including the crises of Mexico in 1994-95, Asia in 1997-98, Russia in 1998, Brazil in 1999-2000, Argentina in 2000-2001, and the Great Recession. I will conclude with one or two-sentence pieces of advice I have received over the years from people with whom I had the honor of working on economic policy. The last piece of advice is contained in a story from 1985, from a conversation with George Shultz.


I. Ten lessons from the last two decades.[2]


Lesson 1: Fiscal policy also matters macroeconomically. It has always been accepted that fiscal policy, in the sense of the structure of the tax system and the composition of government spending, matters for the behavior of the economy. At times in the past there has been less agreement about whether the macroeconomic aspects of fiscal policy, frequently summarized by the full employment budget deficit, have a significant impact on the level of GDP. As a result of the experience of the last two decades, it is once again accepted that cutting government spending and raising taxes in a recession to reduce the budget deficit is generally recessionary. This was clear from experience in Asia in the 1990s.[3] The same conclusion has been reached following the Great Recession.

Who would have thought?…

At the same time, it needs to be emphasized that there are circumstances in which a fiscal contraction can be expansionary particularly for a country running an unsustainable budget deficit.

Unsustainable?
He doesn’t distinguish between floating and fixed fx policy. At best this applies to fixed fx policy, where fx reserves would be exhausted supporting the peg/conversion. And as a point of logic, with floating fx this can only mean an unsustainable inflation, whatever that means.

More important, small budget deficits and smaller rather than larger national debts are preferable in normal times in part to ensure that it will be possible to run an expansionary fiscal policy should that be needed in a recession.

Again, this applies only to fixed fx regimes where a nation might need fx reserves to support conversion at the peg. With floating fx nominal spending is in no case revenue constrained.

Lesson 2: Reaching the zero interest lower bound is not the end of expansionary monetary policy. The macroeconomics I learned a long time ago, and even the macroeconomics taught in the textbooks of the 1980s and early 1990s, proclaimed that more expansionary monetary policy becomes either impossible or ineffective when the central bank interest rate reaches zero, and the economy finds itself in a liquidity trap. In that situation, it was said, fiscal policy is the only available expansionary tool of macroeconomic policy.

Now the textbooks should say that even with a zero central bank interest rate, there are at least two other available monetary policy tools. The first consists of quantitative easing operations up and down the yield curve, in particular central bank market purchases of longer term assets, with the intention of reducing the longer term interest rates that are more relevant than the shortest term interest rate to investment decisions.

Both are about altering the term structure of rates. How about the lesson that the data seems to indicate the interest income channels matter to the point where the effect is the reverse of what the mainstream believes?

That is, with the govt a net payer of interest, lower rates lower the deficit, reducing income and net financial assets credited to the economy. For example, QE resulted in some $90 billion of annual Fed profits returned to the tsy that otherwise would have been credited to the economy. That, with a positive yield curve, QE functions first as a tax.

The second consists of central bank interventions in particular markets whose operation has become significantly impaired by the crisis. Here one thinks for instance of the Feds intervening in the commercial paper market early in the crisis, through its Commercial Paper Funding Facility, to restore the functioning of that market, an important source of finance to the business sector. In these operations, the central bank operates as market maker of last resort when the operation of a particular market is severely impaired.

The most questionable and subsequently overlooked ‘bailout’- the Fed buying, for example, GE commercial paper when it couldn’t fund itself otherwise, with no ‘terms and conditions’ as were applied to select liquidity provisioning to member banks, AIG, etc. And perhaps worse, it was the failure of the Fed to provide liquidity (not equity, which is another story/lesson) to its banking system on a timely basis (it took months to get it right) that was the immediate cause of the related liquidity issues.

However, and perhaps the most bizarre of what’s called unconventional monetary policy, the Fed did provide unlimited $US liquidity to foreign banking systems with its ‘swap lines’ where were, functionally, unsecured loans to foreign central banks for the further purpose of bringing down Libor settings by lowering the marginal cost of funds to foreign banks that otherwise paid higher rates.

Lesson 3: The critical importance of having a strong and robust financial system. This is a lesson that we all thought we understood especially since the financial crises of the 1990s but whose central importance has been driven home, closer to home, by the Great Recession. The Great Recession was far worse in many of the advanced countries than it was in the leading emerging market countries. This was not what happened in the crises of the 1990s, and it was not a situation that I thought would ever happen. Reinhart and Rogoff in their important book, This Time is Different,[4] document the fact that recessions accompanied by a financial crisis tend to be deeper and longer than those in which the financial system remains operative. The reason is simple: the mechanisms that typically end a recession, among them monetary and fiscal policies, are less effective if households and corporations cannot obtain financing on terms appropriate to the state of the economy.

The lesson should have been that the private sector is necessarily pro cyclical, and that a collapse in aggregate demand that reduces the collateral value of bank assets and reduces the income required to support the credit structure triggers a downward spiral that can only be reversed with counter cyclical fiscal policy.

In the last few years, a great deal of work and effort has been devoted to understanding what went wrong and what needs to be done to maintain a strong and robust financial system. Some of the answers are to be found in the recommendations made by the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision and the Financial Stability Board (FSB). In particular, the recommendations relate to tougher and higher capital requirements for banks, a binding liquidity ratio, the use of countercyclical capital buffers, better risk management, more appropriate remuneration schemes, more effective corporate governance, and improved and usable resolution mechanisms of which more shortly. They also include recommendations for dealing with the clearing of derivative transactions, and with the shadow banking system. In the United States, many of these recommendations are included or enabled in the Dodd-Frank Act, and progress has been made on many of them.

Everything except the recognition of the need for immediate and aggressive counter cyclical fiscal policy, assuming you don’t want to wait for the automatic fiscal stabilizers to eventually turn things around.

Instead, what they’ve done with all of the above is mute the credit expansion mechanism, but without muting the ‘demand leakages’/’savings desires’ that cause income to go unspent, and output to go unsold, leaving, for all practical purposes (the export channel isn’t a practical option for the heaving lifting), only increased deficit spending to sustain high levels of output and employment.

Lesson 4: The strategy of going fast on bank restructuring and corporate debt restructuring is much better than regulatory forbearance. Some governments faced with the problem of failed financial institutions in a recession appear to believe that regulatory forbearance giving institutions time to try to restore solvency by rebuilding capital will heal their ills. Because recovery of the economy depends on having a healthy financial system, and recovery of the financial system depends on having a healthy economy, this strategy rarely works.

The ‘problem’ is bank lending to offset the demand leakages when the will to use fiscal policy isn’t there.

And today, it’s hard to make the case that us lending is being constrained by lack of bank capital, with the better case being a lack of credit worthy, qualifying borrowers, and regulatory restrictions- called ‘regulatory overreach’ on some types of lending as well. But again, this largely comes back to the understanding that the private sector is necessarily pro cyclical, with the lesson being an immediate and aggressive tax cut and/or spending increase is the way go.

This lesson was evident during the emerging market crises of the 1990s. The lesson was reinforced during the Great Recession, by the contrast between the response of the U.S. economy and that of the Eurozone economy to the low interest rate policies each implemented. One important reason that the U.S. economy recovered more rapidly than the Eurozone is that the U.S. moved very quickly, using stress tests for diagnosis and the TARP for financing, to restore bank capital levels, whereas banks in the Eurozone are still awaiting the rigorous examination of the value of their assets that needs to be the first step on the road to restoring the health of the banking system.

The lesson remaining unlearned is that with a weaker banking structure the euro zone can implement larger fiscal adjustments- larger tax cuts and/or larger increases in public goods and services.

Lesson 5: It is critical to develop now the tools needed to deal with potential future crises without injecting public funds.

Yes, it seems the value of immediate and aggressive fiscal adjustments remains unlearned.

This problem arose during both the crises of the 1990s and the Great Recession but in different forms. In the international financial crises of the 1990s, as the size of IMF packages grew, the pressure to bail in private sector lenders to countries in trouble mounted both because that would reduce the need for official financing, and because of moral hazard issues. In the 1980s and to a somewhat lesser extent in the 1990s, the bulk of international lending was by the large globally active banks. My successor as First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, Anne Krueger, who took office in 2001, mounted a major effort to persuade the IMF that is to say, the governments of member countries of the IMF to develop and implement an SDRM (Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism). The SDRM would have set out conditions under which a government could legally restructure its foreign debts, without the restructuring being regarded as a default.

The lesson is that foreign currency debt is to be avoided, and that legal recourse in the case of default should be limited.

Recent efforts to end too big to fail in the aftermath of the Great Recession are driven by similar concerns by the view that we should never again be in a situation in which the public sector has to inject public money into failing financial institutions in order to mitigate a financial crisis. In most cases in which banks have failed, shareholders lost their claims on the banks, but bond holders frequently did not. Based in part on aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act, real progress has been made in putting in place measures to deal with the too big to fail problem. Among them are: the significant increase in capital requirements, especially for SIFIs (Systemically Important Financial Institutions) and the introduction of counter-cyclical capital buffers for banks; the requirement that banks hold a cushion of bail-in-able bonds; and the sophisticated use of stress tests.

The lesson is that the entire capital structure should be explicitly at full risk and priced accordingly.

Just one more observation: whenever the IMF finds something good to say about a countrys economy, it balances the praise with the warning Complacency must be avoided. That is always true about economic policy and about life. In the case of financial sector reforms, there are two main concerns that the statement about significant progress raises: first, in designing a system to deal with crises, one can never know for sure how well the system will work when a crisis situation occurs which means that we will have to keep on subjecting the financial system to tough stress tests and to frequent re-examination of its resiliency; and second, there is the problem of generals who prepare for the last war the financial system and the economy keep evolving, and we need always to be asking ourselves not only about whether we could have done better last time, but whether we will do better next time and one thing is for sure, next time will be different.

And in any case an immediate and aggressive fiscal adjustment can always sustain output and employment. There is no public purpose in letting a financial crisis spill over to the real economy.

Lesson 6: The need for macroprudential supervision. Supervisors in different countries are well aware of the need for macroprudential supervision, where the term involves two elements: first, that the supervision relates to the financial system as a whole, and not just to the soundness of each individual institution; and second, that it involves systemic interactions. The Lehman failure touched off a massive global financial crisis, a reflection of the interconnectedness of the financial system, and a classic example of systemic interactions. Thus we are talking about regulation at a very broad level, and also the need for cooperation among regulators of different aspects of the financial system.

The lesson are that whoever insures the deposits should do the regulation, and that independent fiscal adjustments can be immediately and aggressively employed to sustain output and employment in any economy.

In practice, macroprudential policy has come to mean the deployment of non-monetary and non-traditional instruments of policy to deal with potential problems in financial institutions or a part of the financial system. For instance, in Israel, as in other countries whose financial system survived the Great Recession without serious damage, the low interest rate environment led to uncomfortably rapid rates of increase of housing prices. Rather than raise the interest rate, which would have affected the broader economy, the Bank of Israel in which bank supervision is located undertook measures whose effect was to make mortgages more expensive. These measures are called macroprudential, although their effect is mainly on the housing sector, and not directly on interactions within the financial system. But they nonetheless deserve being called macroprudential, because the real estate sector is often the source of financial crises, and deploying these measures should reduce the probability of a real estate bubble and its subsequent bursting, which would likely have macroeconomic effects.

And real effects- there would have been more houses built. The political decision is the desire for real housing construction.

The need for surveillance of the financial system as a whole has in some countries led to the establishment of a coordinating committee of regulators. In the United States, that group is the FSOC (Financial Stability Oversight Council), which is chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury. In the United Kingdom, a Financial Policy Committee, charged with the responsibility for oversight of the financial system, has been set up and placed in the Bank of England. It operates under the chairmanship of the Governor of the Bank of England, with a structure similar but not identical to the Bank of Englands Monetary Policy Committee.

Lesson 7: The best time to deal with moral hazard is in designing the system, not in the midst of a crisis.

Agreed!
Moral hazard is about the future course of events.

At the start of the Korean crisis at the end of 1997, critics including friends of mine told the IMF that it would be a mistake to enter a program with Korea, since this would increase moral hazard. I was not convinced by their argument, which at its simplest could be expressed as You should force Korea into a greater economic crisis than is necessary, in order to teach them a lesson. The issue is Who is them? It was probably not the 46 million people living in South Korea at the time. It probably was the policy-makers in Korea, and it certainly was the bankers and others who had invested in South Korea. The calculus of adding to the woes of a country already going through a traumatic experience, in order to teach policymakers, bankers and investors a lesson, did not convince the IMF, rightly so to my mind.

Agreed!
Nor did they need an IMF program!

But the question then arises: Can you ever deal with moral hazard? The answer is yes, by building a system that will as far as possible enable policymakers to deal with crises in a way that does not create moral hazard in future crisis situations. That is the goal of financial sector reforms now underway to create mechanisms and institutions that will put an end to too big to fail.

There was no too big to fail moral hazard issue. The US banks did fail when shareholders lost their capital. Failure means the owners lose and are financially punished, and new owners with new capital have a go at it.

Lesson 8: Dont overestimate the benefits of waiting for the situation to clarify.


Early in my term as Governor of the Bank of Israel, when the interest rate decision was made by the Governor alone, I faced a very difficult decision on the interest rate. I told the advisory group with whom I was sitting that my decision was to keep the interest rate unchanged and wait for the next monthly decision, when the situation would have clarified. The then Deputy Governor, Dr. Meir Sokoler, commented: It is never clear next time; it is just unclear in a different way. I cannot help but think of this as the Tolstoy rule, from the first sentence of Anna Karenina, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is not literally true that all interest rate decisions are equally difficult, but it is true that we tend to underestimate the lags in receiving information and the lags with which policy decisions affect the economy. Those lags led me to try to make decisions as early as possible, even if that meant that there was more uncertainty about the correctness of the decision than would have been appropriate had the lags been absent.

The lesson is to be aggressive with fiscal adjustments when unemployment/the output gap starts to rise as the costs of waiting- massive quantities of lost output and negative externalities, particularly with regard to the lives of those punished by the government allowing aggregate demand to decline- are far higher than, worst case, a period of ‘excess demand’ that can also readily be addressed with fiscal policy.

Lesson 9: Never forget the eternal verities lessons from the IMF. A country that manages itself well in normal times is likely to be better equipped to deal with the consequences of a crisis, and likely to emerge from it at lower cost.

Thus, we should continue to believe in the good housekeeping rules that the IMF has tirelessly promoted. In normal times countries should maintain fiscal discipline and monetary and financial stability. At all times they should take into account the need to follow sustainable growth-promoting macro- and structural policies. And they need to have a decent regard for the welfare of all segments of society.

Yes, at all times they should sustain full employment policy as the real losses from anything less far exceed any other possible benefits.

The list is easy to make. It is more difficult to fill in the details, to decide what policies to
follow in practice. And it may be very difficult to implement such measures, particularly when times are good and when populist pressures are likely to be strong. But a country that does not do so is likely to pay a very high price.

Lesson 10.

In a crisis, central bankers will often find themselves deciding to implement policy actions they never thought they would have to undertake and these are frequently policy actions that they would have preferred not to have to undertake. Hence, a few final words of advice to central bankers (and to others):

Lesson for all bankers:
Proposals for the Banking System, Treasury, Fed, and FDIC

Never say never


II. The Wisdom of My Teachers

:(

Feel free to distribute, thanks.

Over the years, I have found myself remembering and repeating words of advice that I first heard from my teachers, both academics and policymakers. Herewith a selection:


1. Paul Samuelson on econometric models: I would rather have Bob Solow than an econometric model, but Id rather have Bob Solow with an econometric model than Bob Solow without one.

2. Herb Stein: (a) After listening to my long description of what was happening in the Israeli economy in 1985: Yes, but what do we want them to do?”

(b) The difference between a growth rate of 2% and a growth rate of 3% is 50%.

(c) If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
3. Michel Camdessus (former head of the IMF):

(a) At 7 a.m., in his office, on the morning that the U.S. government turned to the IMF to raise $20 billion by 9:30 a.m: Gentlemen, this is a crisis, and in a crisis you do not panic

(b) When the IMF was under attack from politicians or the media, in response to my asking Michel, what should we do?, his inevitable answer was We must do our job.

(c) His response when I told him (his official title was Managing Director of the IMF) that life would be much easier for all of us if he would only get himself a cell phone: Cell phones are for deputy managing directors.

(d) On delegation: In August, when he was in France and I was acting head of the IMF in Washington, and had called him to explain a particularly knotty problem and ask him for a decision, You have more information than me, you decide.

4. George Shultz: This event happened in May 1985, just before Herb Stein and I were due to leave for Israel to negotiate an economic program which the United States would support with a grant of $1.5 billion. I was a professor at MIT, and living in the Boston area. Herb and I spoke on the phone about the fact that we had no authorization to impose any conditions on the receipt of the money. Herb, who lived in Washington, volunteered to talk to the Secretary of State to ask him for authorization to impose conditions. He called me after his meeting and said that the Secretary of State was not willing to impose any conditions on the aid.

We agreed this was a problem and he said to me, Why dont you try. A meeting was hastily arranged and next morning I arrived at the Secretary of States office, all ready to deliver a convincing speech to him about the necessity of conditionality. He didnt give me a chance to say a word. You want me to impose conditions on Israel? I said yes. He said I wont. I asked why not. He said Because the Congress will give them the money even if they dont carry out the program and I do not make threats that I cannot carry out.

This was convincing, and an extraordinarily important lesson. But it left the negotiating team with a problem. So I said, That is very awkward. Were going to say To stabilize the economy you need to do the following list of things. And they will be asking themselves, and if we dont? Is there anything we can say to them?

The Secretary of State thought for a while and said: You can tell them that if they do not carry out the program, I will be very disappointed.

We used that line repeatedly. The program was carried out and the program succeeded.

Thank you all very much.

[1] Council on Foreign Relations. These remarks were prepared for presentation on receipt of the SIEPR (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research) Prize at Stanford University on March 14, 2014. The Prize is awarded for lifetime contributions to economic policy. I am grateful to Dinah Walker of the Council on Foreign Relations for her assistance.

[2] I draw here on two papers I wrote based on my experience in the IMF: Ten Tentative Conclusions from the Past Three Years, presented at the annual meeting of the Trilateral Commission in 1999, in Washington, DC; and the Robbins Lectures, The International Financial System: Crises and Reform Several other policy-related papers from that period appear in my book: IMF Essays from a Time of Crisis (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004). For the period of the Great Recession, I draw on Central bank lessons from the global crisis, which I presented at a conference on Lessons of the Global Crisis at the Bank of Israel in 2011.

[3] This point was made in my 1999 statement Ten Tentative Conclusions referred to above, and has of course received a great deal of focus in analyses of the Great Recession.

[4] Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time is Different, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009.

Emerging market currencies

Seems no one is pointing out how this is all looking a lot like ‘catch up’ vs last year’s yen move?

As previously discussed, the proactive yen move from under 80 to over 100 vs the dollar- a 30% or so pay cut for domestic workers in terms of prices of imports- was an internationally deflationary impulse.

It’s called ‘currency wars’ with the exporters pushing hard on their govts to do whatever it takes to keep them ‘competitive’. And all, at least to me, shamelessly thinly disguised as anything but. And, in fact, it’s not ‘wrong’ to call it ‘dollar appreciation’ rather than EM currency depreciation given the deflationary bias of US (and EU) fiscal and monetary (rate cuts/QE reduce interest income for the economy) policy.

This is a highly deflationary force for the US (and EU) via import prices and lost export pricing power, also hurting earnings translations and, in general weakening US domestic demand, as increased domestic oil output doesn’t reduce net imports as much as would otherwise be the case.

And while I’m not saying energy independence is a ‘bad thing’ note that the UK has been largely ‘energy independent’ for quite a while, so there’s obviously more to it.

The optimal policy move for the US is fiscal relaxation- like my proposed FICA suspension- to get us back to full employment and optimize our real terms of trade. (and not to forget the federally funded transition job for anyone willing and able to work to facilitate the transition from unemployment to private sector employment as the economy booms).

But unfortunately Congress is going the other way and making it all that much worse.

Emerging market currencies take a battering

By Katrina Bishop

January 24 (CNBC) — Emerging market currencies continued to take a beating on Friday — with Turkey’s lira hitting a new record low against the dollar yet again — amid growing concerns about the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary guidance.

On Friday, the dollar strengthened to 2.3084 against Turkey’s currency. Investors also piled out of the South African rand and Argentina’s peso, and both the Indian rupee and the Indonesian rupiah fell to two-week lows against the dollar. Meanwhile, the Australian dollar fell to $0.8681 – its lowest level in three-and-a-half years.

“The market is in panic mode. We have huge psychological fear that is going to emerging markets, despite a global environment that hasn’t changed that much,” Benoit Anne, head of global emerging market strategy at Societe Generale, told CNBC.

“My bias at this stage — although it’s a bold one — is that this is all about the credibility of the Fed with respect to its forward guidance. This fear that the Fed is going to tighten quicker than expected is translating into emerging markets.”

The U.S. central bank has promised that it will not raise interest rates until unemployment hits 6.5 percent – but some analysts are concerned that rate hikes could come sooner than expected.

U.S. monetary policy has always had a significant on emerging markets, and the Fed’s bond-buying program boosted risk sentiment, causing investors to turn their back on so-called “safe havens” and pile into assets seen as riskier – such as emerging market currencies.

Speculation of Fed tapering in 2013 hit emerging markets hard, with currencies including India, Turkey, Russia and Brazil coming under intense pressure in 2013.
But Anne added these recent moves were likely to be more temporary.

“It’s a matter of weeks rather than the whole year 2014 as a total write off for emerging markets,” he said. “Although it will take the Fed re-establishing its credibility towards forward guidance before we see respite in emerging markets.”