I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by the near universal cry for more action from the Fed. My friend and fellow blogger Marshall Auerback has quipped that it’s as if every mainstream progressive received the same White House
memo. I imagine it looked something like this:
Message received! Krugman, Baker, Yglesias, Hayes — everyone seems to have gotten the memo. Ordinarily, they insist, the Fed could reach into its tool kit and deliver a powerful shot of economic adrenaline that would set off a frenzy of borrowing and spending. But that typically potent transmission mechanism is said to be broken because borrowing costs are already essentially zero. The curse of the so-called Zero Bound! What to do? The Fed must move into uncharted territory. It must “do more.”
And so instead of building a powerful, unrelenting case for further fiscal easing, mainstream progressives are focused on the Fed, demanding that it do just as much to promote growth and employment as it does to promote price stability. How? By following Krugman’s advice and “credibly committing to a higher inflation target,” which, it is argued, will stimulate spending by lowering the real rate of interest. It’s a policy recommendation that only an economist (or someone with enough credit hours to be dangerous) could conjure up. I almost hope the Fed tries it so that we can banish this proposal to the wasteland of failed policy recommendations (along with QE1, QE2 and Operation Twist). But millions of Americans are suffering and so I really do not want to see us pursue a losing policy just because the alternative looks like a political nonstarter.
In any event, we’re in a balance sheet recession. We should be encouraging the private sector to borrow less, not taunting people with negative interest rates and encouraging them to leverage up. And we should recognize that the government’s deficit is the key to helping the private sector de-leverage.
Reducing the government’s deficit means cutting the non-government’s surplus, which frustrates their efforts to pay down debt.
We need rising incomes to support a recovery that can be sustained by private sector spending, and the Fed isn’t the agency we should be looking to for help on this front.
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