Category: real interest rates

The Role of a Rule

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December 31, 2023

by Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter is about the role of a monetary rule and the guiding points that help the Fed steer its policymaking. Since the 2008-9 financial crisis, the Fed has purchased a lot of assets, increasing its balance sheet from less than one trillion dollars at the end of 2007 to almost $8 trillion this month. It has kept the federal funds rate that anchors all other interest rates near zero for ten of the last 15 years. The members on its board of governors serve 14 year terms, affording them an autonomy resistant to political influence. From those board members the President and Senate choose and confirm the Chair and Vice-Chair of the board. The governance structure allows them to set and follow a plan of steady guidance but their actions have resembled those of sailors steering against unpredictable winds. What are the guiding lights?

In the late 1950s, economists and policymakers enthusiastically endorsed the concept of the Phillips Curve. Picture an ellipse, a circle that has been stretched along one axis so that it appears like an egg.

Think of unemployment along the x-axis and inflation along the y-axis. More unemployment stretched the circle, shrinking inflation. More inflation stretched the circle in the y-direction, lessening unemployment. Policymakers could tweak monetary policy to keep these two opposing forces in check. In the 1970s, both inflation and unemployment grew, shattering economic models. Nevertheless, Congress passed legislation in 1978 that essentially handed the economic egg to the Fed. While the central banks of other countries can choose a single policy goal or priority – usually inflation – Congress gave the Fed a twin mandate. It was to conduct monetary policy that kept inflation steady and unemployment low – to squeeze the egg but not break it.

Mindful of its twin mission, the Fed later recognized – rather than adopted – a monetary policy rule, often called a Taylor rule after John B. Taylor (1993), an economist who proposed the interest setting rule as an alternative to discretion. The Fed would use several economic indicators as anchors in policymaking. The Atlanta Fed provides a utility that charts the actual federal funds rate against several alternate versions of a Taylor rule. I’ve included a simple alternative below and the actual funds rate set by the Fed. When the rule calls for a negative interest rate, the Fed is limited by the zero lower bound. Since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the Fed’s monetary policy has varied greatly from the rule. Only in the past few months has the actual rate approached the rule.

In a recent Jackson Hole speech, Chairman Powell said, “as is often the case, we are navigating by the stars under cloudy skies.” What are these guiding points that should anchor the Fed’s monetary policy? I’ll start with r-star, represented symbolically as r*, which serves as the foundation, or intercept, of the rule. Tim Sablick at the Richmond Fed defined it as “the natural rate of interest, or the real interest rate that would prevail when the economy is operating at its potential and is in some form of an equilibrium.” Note that this is the real interest rate after subtracting the inflation rate. The market, including the biggest banks, consider it approximately 2% (see note at end). This is also the Fed’s target rate of inflation, or pi-star, represented as π*. The market knows that the Fed is going to conduct monetary policy to meet its target inflation rate of 2%.

Why does the Fed set a target inflation rate of 2% instead of 0%? The Fed officially set that target rate in 1996. The 2% is a margin of error that was supposed to give the Fed some maneuvering room in setting policy. There was also some evidence that inflation measures did not capture the utility enhancements of product innovation. Thirdly, if the public expects a small amount of inflation, it adjusts its behavior so that the cost is so small that the benefit is greater than the cost (Walsh 2010, 276). Today, most central banks set their target rate at 2%.

The definition of r-star above is anchored on an economy “in some form of equilibrium.” How does the Fed gauge that? One measure is the unemployment rate and here we have another star, U-star, often represented as un, meaning the natural rate of employment. In 1986 Ellen Rissman at the Chicago Fed described it (links to PDF) as “the rate of unemployment that is compatible with a steady inflation rate.” So now we have both unemployment and the interest rate anchored by the inflation rate.

Another part of that r-star definition is an economy “operating at potential.” Included in the Fed’s interest rate decisions is an estimate of the output gap that is produced by economists at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The estimate includes many factors: “the natural rate of unemployment …, various measures of the labor supply, capital services, and productivity.” The CBO builds a baseline projection (links to PDF) of the economy in order to forecast the federal budget outlook and the long term financial health of programs like Social Security. Each of these factors does contribute to price movement but the analysis is complex. A more transparent gauge of an output gap could help steer public expectations of the Fed’s policy responses.

In a paper presented at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole conference in Wyoming, Ed Leamer (2007, 3) suggested that the Fed substitute “housing starts and the change in housing starts” for the output gap in constructing a monetary policy rule. At that time in August 2007, housing starts had declined 40% from their high in January 2006. Being interest rate sensitive, homebuilders had responded strongly to a 4% increase in the Fed’s key federal funds rate. Despite that reaction, the Fed kept interest rates at a 5% plateau until September 2007. By the time, the Fed “got the message” and began lowering rates, the damage had been done. Six months after Leamer delivered this paper, the investment firm Bear Sterns went bankrupt. The Fed engineered a rescue by absorbing the firm’s toxic mortgage assets and selling the rest to JP Morgan Chase. Six months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the domino effect of their derivative positions sparked the global financial crisis.

I have suggested using the All-Transactions House Price Index as a substitute for the output gap. A long-term average of annual changes in this index is about 4.5%. The index is a summation of economic expectations by mortgage companies who base their loan amounts on home appraisals, banks who underwrite HELOC loans to homeowners and loans to homebuilders. The index indirectly captures employment trends among homeowners and their expectations of their own finances. Any change that is more than a chosen long-term average would indicate the need for a tightening monetary policy. Anything less would call for a more accommodative policy. Either of these housing indicators would be a transparent gauge that would help guide the public’s expectations of monetary policy.

Although the Fed considers the Taylor rule in setting its key interest rate, the rate setting committee uses discretion. Why have a rule only to abandon it in times of political or economic stress? The rule may not operate well under severe conditions like the pandemic. A rule may be impractical to implement. A Taylor rule variation called for a federal funds rate of 8% in 2021. This would have required a severe tightening that forced the interest rate up 7% in less than a year. The Fed did that in 1979-80 and again in 1980-81. Both times it caused a recession. The second recession was the worst since the 1930s Depression. An economy as large as the U.S. cannot adjust to such a rapid rate increase.

How strictly should a rule be followed? Some of us want rule making to be as rigid as lawmaking. A rule should apply in all circumstances regardless of consequences. Many Republican lawmakers felt that way when they voted against a bailout package in September 2008. Some of us regard a rule as an advisory, not a straitjacket constraint of policy options. Each of us has a slightly different preference for adherence to rules.

See you all in the New Year!

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Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash

Keywords: housing starts, house price index, stars, output gap, unemployment, interest rate, inflation

All-Transactions House Price Index is FRED Series USSTHPI. The annual change is near the long-term average of 4.5%, down from a high of 20% in 2022.

Housing starts are FRED Series HOUST. The output gap is a combination of two series, real GDP GDPC1, and real potential GDP, GDPPOT.

A gauge of long-term inflation expectations is the 10-year breakeven rate, FRED Series T10YIE. The 20-year average is 2.08%. The series code is T=Treasury, 10Y = 10 year, IE = Inflation Expectations. The T5YIE is a 5-year breakeven rate.

Leamer, E. (2007). Housing Is the Business Cycle. https://doi.org/10.3386/w13428

Taylor, J. B. (1993). Discretion versus policy rules in practice. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 39, 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2231(93)90009-l

Walsh, C. E. (2010). Monetary theory and policy. MIT press.

The Outcome of Income

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October 13th, 2013

“Use words not fists” a parent might say to a child.  For the second weekend during the government show down – I mean shut down, the children – er, representatives – in Washington have taken that to heart.  In a contest of dueling podiums, members of each party in both houses of Congress assure the public that their party is the reasonable one.  On Thursday, the market shot up on the news that – no, not a deal – but the likelihood that the two parties might talk to each other instead of mouthing platitudes and principles at their separate podiums.  About three weeks ago, speculative talk of a government shut down began to surface and where was the market after Friday’s close?  Back where it started three weeks ago and just 1.5% below the high on September 19th.

 In the Washington Irving tale, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for twenty years only to wake up to a new United States of America.  In this version of the tale, an investor goes to sleep for three weeks, wakes up and there’s a whole new United States of Closed For Remodeling.  In a townhome association I belonged to many years ago, the tenants argued for several months over the choice of roofing contractor, color and style of roof for the townhomes.  A large Federal government may take a while longer.   In fact, it has been years since the Congress passed an actual budget.  The Treasury department used up the debt limit last May and has been running on fumes since then, grateful that the housing loan agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been paying back some of the cash they “borrowed” from the taxpayers a few years back.

Because of the shut down there have been few government reports.  Commodities traders have been buying and selling in the dark,  guesstimating what the weekly and monthly government reports on the sales and production of corn and other commodities would have been if there had been an actual report.  We can only hope that traders have been fairly accurate.  If there are some notable surprises, duck.

There have been some private reports, one of them the monthly manufacturing and services reports from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM).  I updated the combined weighted index (CWI) that I have been showing the past few months.  Unlike the environment during the August 2011 budget negotiations, business activity shows strength this year and the resilience of the S&P500 index reflects that underlying strength.  Although 10 of 14 trading days were down, the index lost only about 4% from the recent high.

The CWI has been in expansion territory since the summer of 2009, which coincided with the NBER’s official call of the recession’s end.  You’ll notice that there is a rolling wave like movement to the index since then, an ebb and flow of strong and not so strong growth.  Since this is a coincident indicator of the fundamental strengths in the economy, it might not be a good predictor of short term market swings but has been a reliable predictor for the longer term investor.   Despite the recent highs in the market index, the market has been in a downtrend since the highs of thirteen years ago.  It is approaching the high set in 2007, a sign of renewed optimism.

The Federal Reserve recently posted up Census Bureau median household – not individual – income figures for the past thirty years.  Continuing on our theme from last week – the story we tell depends on how we adjust for inflation.  In this case, neither story is particularly cheerful.  Median household income adjusted for inflation using the Personal Consumption Expenditure measure has fallen  to 1998 levels, declining 7% from 2007 levels.

In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics changed their methodology for computing the cost of owning a home, or owner equivalent rent.  Over the years, some economists and financial writers have made the case that the official measure of inflation, the CPI, overstates inflation.  This tells an even bleaker story: a decline of almost 9% from 2007 levels, an annual growth rate over 28 years  of just 1/4% per year.

Now, let’s compare the two.  Does the CPI overstate income by 5% or does the PCE Deflator understate inflation by the same amount?

The methodology influences many people in this country, from seniors on Social Security to working people who rely on cost of living increases.  Yet there will be more debate about whether the manager of a baseball team should put in a fastball pitcher who sometimes struggles with accuracy or go with a pitcher who throws less hard but has good location and change up.  There are political consultants who spend late night hours trying to figure out how to present the problem to the public so that they can understand it and get passionate about it.

The slow growth in household incomes arises because there is a greater supply of people who want work than employers offering work that people can or want to do.  Slow growth in the economy means less demand for labor, which puts downward pressure on the wages that workers can demand.  Smoothing the quarterly percent change in GDP growth for the past thirty years gives a clear picture of this less than robust growth.

While that may be the chief reason for slow income growth, the negative real interest rate of the past five years has played some role, I think.  When the economy is in a recessionary funk,  the Federal Reserve keeps the interest rate low to spur growth.  In the past two recessions, the Fed kept interest rates low for a considerable period of time after GDP growth began to rise.  Now it is easy to look in the rear view mirror at GDP growth, which is revised several times and may be revised again a year later as more information becomes available.  The Federal Reserve has to guess what the growth is and lately they have been overestimating the growth in the economy.

As long as the Fed keeps interest rates low, banks can make easy, safe profits in the spread between buying Treasury bonds and borrowing from the Fed and other banks.  There is less incentive for banks to take the additional risk of investing in business loans.  Although climbing up from the trough of several years ago, business loans in real dollars are still below the levels of mid 2008.

During the past twenty-five years, the rise and fall of commercial loans has become more pronounced.  Have the banks become that much more cautious at each recession, are businesses circling the wagons at the first hint of a downturn, and what part do low interest rates play?

This past week President Obama confirmed his pick of Janet Yellen as the new chairwoman of the Federal Reserve.  Larry Summers had been Mr. Obama’s first choice but Summers withdrew after learning that he would have a difficult confirmation process.  Although very smart, Summers is not a concensus builder.  Many in Congress and the market preferred Yellen to Summers.  Ms. Yellen takes a dovish stance, meaning that she is likely to further the current policy of low interest rates for the near future.  A cautious investor might want to rethink rolling over that 5 year CD that comes up for renewal in the next few months.  Rates are currently 1.5 – 2%, so that after inflation an investor is losing a little money.