As noted in my previous post on this, Tyler Cowen and I have converged: we agree that Bernanke’s and Friedman’s views on the causes of the Great Depression differed and that, although there is some ambiguity, there is no clear evidence that Friedman would have favored the Paulson-Bernanke bailouts.
I’d like to advance the discussion beyond what Bernanke and Friedman believed and discuss, instead, what should have been done, specifically, whether the bailout was a good idea.
I believe that monetary policy alone, without any targeted bailouts, could have prevented Tyler’s “very dire” scenario of “subsequent contagion,” “even more financial institutions insolvent,” and economic collapse. In my view, the key was to prevent sudden deflation caused by either a reduction in the growth of the money supply or by an increase in money demand. Without a serious secondary deflation, bank failures would have remained few, the bank failures that occurred would not have had the serious effects that Tyler projects would have followed without targeted bailouts, and the economy would have been better off than with the policy actually pursued.
The Cowen-Bernanke view is that the financial sector is so central to the economy–more so than any other sector–that bailing out intermediaries takes primacy over increasing the money supply. That’s the only way to understand why Bernanke used monetary policy to sterilize the bailout of Bear Stearns back in the spring of 2008.
In my view, the panic probably wouldn’t have been as serious if Bernanke had started expanding the base before October, and if his October expansion had not been accompanied with the deflationary step of paying interest on reserves.
My confidence in the efficacy of pure monetary policy, I gather, is similar to that of Scott Sumner on his blog. The difference is that Scott believes that monetary policy, if expansionary enough to counter not only sudden deflation but also any decline in the growth of nominal GDP, could have prevented the current recession almost entirely. My view is more modest; I believe monetary policy can prevent sudden deflation and cut off financial panics, but I am very skeptical of using it to fine tune the business cycle.
Also, note that we had some pretty big crises during the Greenspan era. The three were the stock market crash of 1987, an all-time record for a one-day percentage decline, the Y2K fear of late 1999, and the 9/11 crash. In all three cases, Greenspan’s policy was to provide lots of liquidity. And it worked.
1. There was no recession due to the 1987 crash.
2. There was a short recession in 2001 after Greenspan, in early 2000, had reversed the increase in the money supply that he engineered in late 1999, but it was short and shallow.
3. There was no recession after 9/11.
So I think the burden of proof is on those who think that the losses to financial intermediaries would have, without a bailout and without offsetting monetary policy, led to a longer, deeper recession than the one we’re in.
READER COMMENTS
Joao Marcus M Nunes
Sep 9 2009 at 4:35pm
DH
Scott Sumner does not say Fed could have prevented the current recession, only that it made it worse, much worse! It was responsible for INTENSIFYING the recession.
Marcus
David C
Sep 9 2009 at 9:54pm
You say that different choices in monetary policy could have solved the problem on their own, but I think there’s a more important question that you’re avoiding. If you assume that the FED’s strategy was exactly the same, would we sitll have been better off without a bank bailout? Since Congress has no control over FED policy, this was essentially the question being asked of them when they voted on the bill.
Bob Murphy
Sep 10 2009 at 10:02am
For the record, many economists (not just Austrians anymore) think that Greenspan’s handling of the dot-com crash sowed the seeds for our current mess.
I realize there are a lot more subtleties involved, and of course David and Scott are very good economists, but if we step back and think about it, they are saying: The way to make the economy richer is to print up green pieces of paper. I disagree.
Don the libertarian Democrat
Sep 10 2009 at 9:00pm
It sounds to me that the following can not have occurred after Lehman according to your view:
http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/file/Commdocs/hearings/2009/Oversight/10sep/Bookstaber_Testimony.pdf
“One of them, which I have written about repeatedly, is the liquidity crisis cycle. An exogenous shock occurs in a highly leveraged market, and the resulting forced selling leads to a cascading cycle downward in prices. This then propagates to other markets as those who need to liquidate find the market that is under pressure no longer can support their liquidity needs. Thus there is contagion based not on economic linkages, but based on who is under pressure and what else they are holding. This cycle evolves unrelated to historical relationships, out of the reach of VaR-types of models, but that does not mean it is beyond analysis.”
I called this a Calling Run because I’m no expert. But this is a central insight to understanding this crisis, and what happened after Lehman.
To many of us, this is what actually occurred in the markets and it was only arrested by the actions of the Fed and Govt. But I’m not even sure what constitutes evidence in your view, since the testimony of the people doing this wouldn’t seem to matter in your view.
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