Global imbalances: Strategic prospects for the US and the world
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Time to Bail Out: Alternatives to the Bush-Paulson Plan
While serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan advocated unsupervised securitization, subprime lending, option ARMs, credit-default swaps, and all manner of financial alchemy in the belief that markets "work" to reduce and spread risk, and to allocate it to those best able to assess and bear it--in his view, markets would stabilize in the absence of nasty government intervention. But as Greenspan now admits, he could never have imagined the outcome: a financial and economic crisis of biblical proportions. The problem is, market forces are not stabilizing. Left to their own devices, Wall Street wizards gleefully ran right off the cliff, and took the rest of us with them for good measure. The natural instability of market processes was recognized long ago by John Maynard Keynes, and convincingly updated by Hyman P. Minsky throughout his career. Minsky's theory explained the transformation of the economy over the postwar period from robust to fragile. He pointed his finger at managed money--huge pools of pension funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, money market funds--that are outside traditional banking and therefore largely underregulated and undersupervised. With a large appetite for risk, managed money sought high returns promised by Wall Street's financial engineers, who innovated highly complex instruments that few people understood. In this new Policy Note, President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Research Scholar L. Randall Wray take a look back at Wall Street's path to Armageddon, and propose some alternatives to the Bush-Paulson plan to "bail out" both the Street and the American homeowner. Under the existing plan, Treasury would become an owner of troubled financial institutions in exchange for a capital injection--but without exercising any ownership rights, such as replacing the management that created the mess. The bailout would be used as an opportunity to consolidate control of the nation's financial system in the hands of a few large (Wall Street) banks, with government funds subsidizing purchases of troubled banks by "healthy" ones. But it is highly unlikely that relieving banks of some of their bad assets, or injecting some equity into them, will increase their willingness to lend. Resolving the liquidity crisis is the best strategy, the authors say, and keeping small-to-medium-size banks open is the best way to ensure access to credit once the economy recovers. A temporary suspension of the collection of payroll taxes would put more income into the hands of households while lowering the employment costs for firms, fueling spending and employment. The government should assume a more active role in helping homeowners saddled with mortgage debt they cannot afford, providing low-cost 30-year loans directly to all comers; in the meantime, a moratorium on foreclosures is necessary. And federal grants to support local spending on needed projects would go a long way toward rectifying our $1.6 trillion public infrastructure deficit. Can the Treasury afford all these measures? The answer, the authors say, is yes--and it is a bargain if one considers the cost of not doing it. It is obvious that there exist unused resources today, as unemployment rises and factories are idled due to lack of demand. Markets are also voting with their dollars for more Treasury debt. This does not mean the Treasury should spend without restraint--whatever rescue plan is adopted should be well planned and targeted, and of the proper size. The point is that setting arbitrary budget constraints is neither necessary nor desired--especially in the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression.
A Post-Keynesian macroeconomic policy mix as an alternative to the New Consensus approach
In a Post-Keynesian (PK) model we show that inflation targeting monetary policies, as the main stabilisation tool proposed by the New Consensus Model (NCM), in the short run are only adequate for certain values of the model parameters, but are either unnecessary, counterproductive, or limited in their effectiveness for other values. Taking into account medium-run cost and distribution effects of interest rate variations renders monetary policies completely inappropriate as an economic stabiliser. Based on these results we argue that the NCM macroeconomic policy assignment should be replaced by a PK assignment. Enhancing employment without increasing inflation will be possible if macroeconomic policies are coordinated along the following lines: The central bank targets distribution between rentiers, on the hand, and firms and employees, on the other hand, and sets low real interest rates, wage bargaining parties target inflation and fiscal policies are applied for short- and medium-run real stabilisation purposes.