This lecture will describe inflation as a fiscal phenomenon. You have heard that inflation is, anywhere and everywhere, a monetary phenomenon. This lecture will take a more nuanced view.
The conventional wisdom would say that we can run large deficits without causing inflation, as long as we do not monetize those deficits. I am not so sure that this is the case.To say that inflation is a fiscal phenomenon is to claim that inflation has to do with government debt. For example, suppose that no one will lend to the government, so that government debt can only take the form of money. If spending exceeds borrowing, then the government must print money. In this extreme case, there is no difference between saying that inflation is a fiscal phenomenon and inflation is a monetary phenomenon.
The case of “no difference” is actually an important one. It is quite possible for a government to find no willing lenders. Such a government usually wants to spend much more than it takes in through taxes. Therefore, it prints a lot of money. This lowers the purchasing power of money, leading it to need to print more money. Thus, you get hyperinflation. I believe it is a fair statement that every hyperinflation is caused by unsustainable government indebtedness combined with an inability to raise taxes or cut spending to balance the budget. I believe it is a fair statement that hyperinflations end when governments do balance their budgets. Thus, hyperinflation is a fiscal phenomenon.
What about a government deficit that is not so far out of control? In the standard monetary mechanism, a large government deficit could lead to a higher interest rate. Since money does not bear interest, this will cause people to try to go about their business holding less money. This will raise the velocity of money, and hence produce inflation. But that seems like a fairly minimal effect.
In a model where inflation is determined by a Phillips Curve (also known as the aggregate supply curve), a deficit raises aggregate demand, reduces unemployment, and thus creates upward pressure on wages and prices. That view of inflation was popular in the 1960’s, took a beating in the 1970’s, was pretty well purged in the 1980’s, but seems to be making a comeback–when you see someone snort that it makes more sense now to worry about deflation than inflation, you are seeing someone with a Phillips-Curve view of the world, and I do not dismiss such a view.
The U.S. government is planning to run an experiment which requires issuing bonds in massive quantities over the next five years and beyond. The monetarist view is that those bonds can be issued without raising the price level, provided that the Fed does not expand the money supply by purchasing too many of those bonds. I doubt that this view is correct–I give it only about a 10 percent chance. The Phillips Curve view is that those bonds can be issued without raising the price level, provided that the unemployment rate does not fall below its “natural” rate, and we are currently in little danger of that. I give this about a 40 percent chance of being correct.
That leaves me with a 60 percent chance that we will see a dramatic rise in the price level over the next decade, with annual rates of inflation at the peak going above double digits. Issuing bonds amounts to printing interest-bearing government debt, and printing interest-bearing government debt will not turn out to be all that different from printing money.
The financial crisis of 2008 can be described as a big surge in liquidity preference, where that preference was expressed for Treasury securities rather than for money. If you can have liquidity preference that expresses itself in terms of T-bills, then it seems to me that you can have changes in the price level with reference to the dollar quantity of T-bills. I think we can have inflation well in excess of the growth of the usual measures of the money supply, and the experiment we are running will test my hypothesis.
Next, let me make the case for a high inflation forecast from within the Phillips Curve paradigm. The story for the Phillips Curve that I have always preferred is the one that James Tobin gave in his AEA Presidential Address about thirty years ago, called “Inflation and Unemployment.” The idea is that you have two sectors where relative wages are out of whack, and wages are sticky downward in nominal terms. You have a booming sector where wages are fine, but you have a troubled sector where wages are too high. You get unemployment in the sector where wages are too high. If you expand demand in both sectors, the wages in the booming sector go up (hence inflation) and you get more employment at unchanged wages in the troubled sector.
That is a good story for situations where troubled sectors are only mildly troubled (a bit of excess inventory in durable goods). If a troubled sector is deeply troubled, and in fact a lot of capacity needs to exit that sector, then there is not much that can be done about it. In terms of the textbook model, a deeply troubled sector acts like an adverse aggregate supply shock. If you will, the natural rate of unemployment rises. From this perspective, raising aggregate demand may not increase employment by very much in the troubled sector, but it could raise prices in the booming sector.
Right now, it is hard to name a booming sector of the economy (other than government, which does not need to raise wages). However, my guess is that as economic activity picks up, we will see bottlenecks and bidding wars for specialized labor pick up long before full employment. Thus, we will get the inflation of the Tobin Phillips Curve much earlier in the process than folks would like.
In short, we can have inflation that consists of too many T-bills chasing too few goods.
READER COMMENTS
Tom
Jun 4 2009 at 6:06pm
“I believe it is a fair statement that hyperinflations end when governments do balance their budgets. Thus, hyperinflation is a fiscal phenomenon.”
This is very bad logic. If I run a deficit of $1 trillion this month and print money to pay it off how has the hyperinflation ended by balancing the budget when next month I run another trillion dollar deficit and print another one trillion to pay it off? I can balance the budget each month by printing money but inflation will only get worse each month. If the US balanced its budget each year by printing money the hyperinflation would only be just beginning.
Tom
Jun 4 2009 at 6:11pm
“For example, suppose that no one will lend to the government, so that government debt can only take the form of money. If spending exceeds borrowing, then the government must print money. In this extreme case, there is no difference between saying that inflation is a fiscal phenomenon and inflation is a monetary phenomenon.”
But it is the government printing money that is causing the inflation not the generation of government debt. If the public will lend to the government to pay off its fiscal deficit then this will not cause inflation. So it is the printing of money that is inflationary not the fiscal phenomenon of running a deficit.
Tom
Jun 4 2009 at 7:12pm
“The monetarist view is that those bonds can be issued without raising the price level, provided that the Fed does not expand the money supply by purchasing too many of those bonds. I doubt that this view is correct–I give it only about a 10 percent chance.”
The problem with this is that the Fed is buying more than just bonds these days. Look at the Fed balance sheet. It has more than doubled in over a year. You have a too narrow point of view (or believe that monetarist have a too narrow point of view) to only look at the Fed purchase of bonds to understand if the price level will rise.
It is the Fed purchase of ANYTHING (and it has been buying many many things other than bonds) which can cause an increase in the price level. So just because the Fed is not buying bonds is not a reason to suppose the price level will not rise if the Fed is buying everything else under the sun.
david
Jun 5 2009 at 2:00am
Again:
Bill Woolsey
Jun 5 2009 at 6:54am
Kling’s version of monetarism is that the demand for money is a fixed proportion of income, or, equivalently, velocity, the average number of times a dollar is spent on final goods and services, is constant.
A more correct version of monetarism (or monetary disequilibrium theory) is that inflation is always due to the money supply growing more quickly than the demand for money. Applying this to negative growth rates, it is possible for a shrinking money demand unmatched by a shrinking quantity of money to cause inflation.
And so, you need to claim that a growing quantity of govenrment bonds will reduce the demand for money. This is, of course, possible to some degree. To the degree it causes inflation, it remains the responsibility of the monetary authority. It is failing to adjust (downward) the quantity of money to meet the demand.
Debts and deficits are only inflationary if the monetary authority fails to provide nominal stability.
By the way, the increase in the demand for govenrent bonds is not deflationary per se. The effect is higher bond prices and lower interest rates. However, if some kind of bond hits the zero lower bond, then any remaining shortage of those bonds at that price/yield combination is shunted over to zero-interest currency. (Under current condtions, it is is actually low interest balances at the Federal Reserve.) If the quantity of money doesn’t rise to meet that demand, it is deflationary.
However, a further complication is created if the way the monetary authority increases the quantity of money is by purchasing the particular government bonds that are in shortage at the zero nominal bound. That reduces the quanttiy of those, exacerbates the shortgage, and shifts more excess demand to money. And so, the increase in the quantity of money is matched by an increase in demand.
This scenario is trully challenging to the monetarist approach. While I think the best way to understand it is though a monetary disequilibrium analysis (as above,) it is a process that invoves the demand for money adjusting to changes in the supply. _If_ the demand for money always ajusted to the quantity of money, then monetary disequilibrium theory would fail to provide any information. But, if it is a special case, then it does provide some information. In the current situation, it looks like that if government bonds did hit the zero bound with a remaining excess demand, then other sorts of assets need to be pruchased by the central bank to meet the demand for money.
This is all an artifact of the govennment issuing zero interest currency. In a deposit only monetary system, there would be no zero negative bound and excess demands for certain (or all) government bonds would simply drive their yields below zero. And, perhaps, deposit interest rates would be less than zero too.
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