NGDP Targeting in the United Kingdom

Something interesting is happening in the United Kingdom. Some government officials there are pushing for the Bank of England to adopt an NGDP target. From the Independent:

Officials in the UK Treasury are “probably” considering whether to change the Bank of England’s inflation-targeting mandate due to the massive economic shock imparted by the coronavirus crisis, according to a former minister.

 Lord Jim O’Neill, who was commercial secretary to the Treasury in 2015, wants the central bank to shift from its current target of keeping inflation at 2 per cent to targeting a steadily rising trend of nominal UK GDP growth instead.

Since the U.K. Treasury determines the monetary policy target for the Bank of England, these rumblings are more than noise. The U.K. Treasury's increased interest in an NGDP target is driven, in part, by the efforts of Jim O'Neil. He has written articles, done interviews, and made a forceful case for this approach to monetary policy. Another prominent voice is Sajid Javid who was recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He also has called for NGDP targeting in a new study. They are not alone, as other members of Parliament also talking about an NGDP target and several UK think tanks are promoting it as well. There seems to be, in short, some real momentum for NGDP targeting in the Boris Johnson government.

If the Bank of England were to get an NGDP target, it would be the first central bank to explicitly do so. The Bank of England was an early adopter of inflation targeting, so it would be fitting for it also to be an early adopter of NGDP targeting. Moreover, moving to this monetary policy framework should not be too hard for the British central bank since it already does something that looks a lot like an NGDP target.

Still, this would be seen as a big change for the central bank and many observers are unsettled by its prospects. Again, from the Independent: 

Lord O’Neill conceded that the idea of moving to nominal GDP targeting would  “scare” many people in the Treasury and the Bank who regard the current inflation-targeting regime as a proven success.

To those observers who are worried, I would encourage you to check out my paper from late last year that summarizes the facts and fears of NGDP targeting. It was written with the Fed in mind, but its lessons are applicable to any central bank. Here, I want to make three points that are specifically directed toward the Bank of England adopting an NGDP target.   

Changes in Potential Real GDP: Much Ado About Nothing

My first point is that changes in potential real GDP should not be a practical concern if the Bank of England were to adopt an NGDP target. Changes to potential real GDP is a common objection to NGDP targeting and in principle a legitimate concern. In practice, however, the magnitudes involved make this a moot concern. 

To illustrate this point, imagine that the Bank of England had been credibly targeting NGDP at 4% a year since the mid-1960s. Also assume that the potential real GDP (y*) evolved as it actually did over this period. The difference between this imagined NGDP target and the actual growth rate of y*, would be the counterfactual trend inflation experienced during this time. The figure below shows the outcome. It reveals that trend inflation in the UK would have ranged from about 1% to 3%. The average inflation rate over the whole period would have been just under 2%. Not a lot to see here. Even if we tweaked the NGDP target up a bit, there would still no runaway inflation. Instead, we end up in a world with longrun inflation well-anchored and a stable growth path for nominal income. 

Now to the extent that changes in potential real GDP do matter, it actually favors NGDP targeting over flexible inflation targeting (FIT). Josh Hendrickson and I show this outcome in a JMCB paper (ungated version) last year. The punchline is that a central bank doing FIT needs to know both potential real GDP (y*) and real GDP (y) in realtime to avoid making mistakes. A central bank doing NGDP targeting does not need to know y* or y in realtime. In fact, it intentionally remains agnostic about them over the shortrun and simply aims to stabilize nominal income. As a result, it is less likely to accidentally make matters worse. This is not just a theoretical argument. Athanasios Orphanides, for example, shows that one reason for the Fed's tepid response to rising inflation in the in the 1970s was bad realtime data on the output gap. In more recent times, one see the Fed's talking up of rate hikes in the fist half of 2008 or the ECB's outright tightening of policy in 2008 and 2011 as manifestations of this problem. 

Concerns about changes in potential real GDP, then, are much ado about nothing under an NGDP target and only meaningfully matter for a FIT. 

NGDP Targeting Would Not Be a Radical Change 

My second point is that the Bank of England adopting an NGDP target would not be a radical change. For it is already producing outcomes that closely mimic an NGDP target. This can be seen in the figure below.

This chart shows that prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the Bank of England had grown NGDP about 4% a year along a stable path. This is exactly what an NGDP level target would look like. Interestingly, former Governor Mark Carney actually wanted the Bank of England to follow an NGDP target when he first arrived. The idea was quickly shot down, but nonetheless he got the outcome he was calling for back in 2012. It is almost as if the Bank of England had a stealth NGDP target under his stewardship. 

Prior to the Great Recession, NGDP was also on a relatively stable path, though during this time it was growing closer to 5%. This too looks similar to an NGDP level target. Both of these NGDP targeting-like experiences, however, end in a sustained trend path drop that is not made up. In other words, the Bank of England's implicit NGDP target is actually a version of a growth rate target rather than a level target. And that is where the recent calls for an NGDP level target are different from what the central bank has been doing.

The Real Change Would Be an Explicit Make-Up Policy

My final point is that the real change being called for is the adoption of a level target. That is, the goal is to move the Bank of England from an implicit NGDP growth rate target to an explicit NGDP level target. This would require the central bank to make up for past misses from its target. Put differently, an NGDP level target would empower the central bank to temporarily run the economy hot until NGDP got back up to its trend growth path. In the case of the United Kingdom, that means growing NGDP faster than the trend 4% growth rate. This faster-than-normal catch-up growth is sometimes called 'make-up' policy and is illustrated below: 

What an NGDP Level Target Might Look Like in the United Kingdom

If the UK Treasury were to announce an NGDP level target for the Bank of England, it could be as simple as restoring NGDP to its trend growth path that existed under Mark Carney. That is, temporarily run NGDP hot to make up for shortfalls below its trend path that occurred during the COVID-19 crisis. After that, simply grow NGDP at 4%. As seen in the first figure, a 4% level target would probably be fine given likely changes in potential real GDP in the United Kingdom. More complicated versions of an NGDP level target are possible, but I would start simple.

In closing, it is worth noting that NGDP targeting is not a new idea. It was highly talked about in the 1980s, but gave way to inflation targeting in the 1990s. The United Kingdom's adoption of an NGDP level target would simply put monetary policy in advanced economies back on its original journey. Bon voyage to the Bank of England!

Related Links

The Financial Stability Case for NGDP Targeting

NGDP Targeting in the United Kingdom - Scott Sumner

Extensions to the NGDP Gap

The monetary policy program at the Mercatus Center recently released a new measure called the NGDP gap. We created it as an alternative way to gauge the stance of monetary policy and have provided a website that will update the measure as new data become available. In this post, I will briefly summarize the NGDP Gap and then highlight a few extensions that some readers may find useful. 

Summary of the NGDP Gap 

As mentioned above, the NGDP Gap provides a cross check on the stance of monetary policy. Its use does not require the Fed to adopt a NGDP target, but it does draw upon the fact that NGDP is comprised of both real GDP and the price level and therefore captures both elements of the Fed’s dual mandate. Moreover, since NGDP is a nominal variable it can be shaped by the Fed over the medium to long run. 

The basic idea behind this measure is to construct a benchmark growth path for nominal GDP (NGDP) where monetary policy is neither expansionary nor contractionary. Deviations of actual NGDP from this neutral level of NGDP provide a way to assess the stance of monetary policy. These deviations, in percent form, are called the NGDP gap. 

The NGDP gap can also be called the nominal income gap since NGDP equals NGDI. In fact, the construction of the neutral level of NGDP can be most easily understood from a nominal income perspective. To see this, consider that people make many economic decisions based on forecasts of their nominal incomes. Examples include households’ decisions to take out mortgages and car loans or firms’ decisions to finance with debt and commit to multiyear contracts on plants, raw materials, and labor. Sometimes, however, actual nominal incomes may turn out very different from what people expected and, as a result, may be disruptive for households and firms that are not able to quickly adjust their economic plans. These disruptions can be minimized by maintaining nominal income on the growth path expected by the public.

The neutral level of NGDP, then, is the public’s expected growth path of nominal income. Both this measure and the NGP Gap are shown below up through 2020:Q1 and come from a NGDP Fact Sheet we will be publishing each quarter. 

To be clear, non-zero NGDP gap outcomes need not be the result of Fed policy but of monetary conditions more generally. For example, the current NGDP gap exists because of the severe nominal income shortfall that has emerged from the COVID-19 shock. Consequently, the job of the Fed and U.S. Treasury during this crisis is to close this gap and avoid the secondary spillover effects (e.g. mass insolvency) this shortfall could create. Failure to close it would indicate a failure of countercyclical policy. This measure, then, provides a useful guide for the economic relief efforts during the pandemic. 

Extension I: Blue Chip Forecast Version

A key goal of this project was to provide a measure that is relatively simple to calculate and uses publicly available data. To that end, the neutral level of NGDP is based off of forecasts from the Philadelphia Fed's Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and BEA data on NGDP. There is no use of r-star or u-star and therefore no "navigating by the stars" in this measure. The neutral level of NGDP is just an averaging of NGDP level forecasts from accessible data sources. Below is the formula for the neutral level of NGDP:

where NGDP_t^* is the neutral level and NGDP_t-i^{SPF forecast(t)} are NGDP level forecasts for period t coming from the past 20 quarters. NGDP_t^*, in short, is just a rolling average of NGDP level forecasts for a particular period. The difference between it and actual NGDP is the NGDP gap. 

Given the five-year (20 quarter) window in creating NGDP_t^*, there is a need for long-term NGDP forecasts. They are available in the SPF, but begin only in 1992 and therefore limit our series to a start date of 1997. 

The Blue Chip forecast database provides a long-term NGDP forecast that goes back further than the SPF. Alexander Schibuola and Andrew Martinez (2020) use it to construct an even longer time series of the NGDP gap. It is shown in the figure below along with the SPF version we use at Mercatus. The two NGDP gaps are very similar. 

Interestingly, Schibuola and Martinez use the data to construct a forecasted NGDP gap and it is disturbingly large. Even the recovery looks nasty. 

The use of Blue Chip data is a nice extension of the NGDP gap. However, we still plan to use the SPF version as our baseline version since the data is free and we can show the underlying calculations to the public. Eventually, we plan to provide the Blue Chip version as a complement to our baseline SPF version, but since it uses proprietary data only the final measure will be available. 

Extension II: Precision Version

Schibuola and Martinez also provide another useful extension of the NGDP gap that looks at its precision. They motivate this by noting two potential issues: (1) the forecasters in the SPF sample change over time and (2) individual forecasts in the SPF may be very different. Accounting for these two issues they produce the following chart that shows the range of individual forecasts for a semi-fixed sample of forecasters in the SPF. 

The median of the semi-fixed sample provides a very similar result to the overall median of all the forecasters. Also, the range of forecasts provides a way to better think about the stance of monetary policy. For example, one could make the case that monetary policy was neutral in 2019 since the range of estimates span both sides of 0 percent. 

Extension III: NGDP Targeting Application

As noted above, the use of the NGDP gap does not require the adoption of a NGDP target by the Fed. Nonetheless, a closer look at the forecasts used in constructing the neutral level of NGDP reveal that it could be used by the Fed as the target growth path for a NGDP target. For it would amount to a NGDP level target that slowly changes the target NGDP growth path based on changes to forecasts of potential real GDP.

To see why this is the case, note that we use a combination of short-run and long-run forecasts of NGDP to construct the neutral level estimate of NGDP. The SPF provides distinct quarterly NGDP forecasts for five quarters out: t+1 to t+5. After that, we use the average annual NGDP forecast over the next 10 years adjusted to a quarterly basis for quarters t+6 to t+20. This is seen in the table below. 

What this means is that three-fourths of each NGDP neutral level estimate is being shaped by a long-term forecast of NGDP. This long-term forecast, in turn, is the sum of a 10-year average GDP deflator inflation forecast and a 10-year average real GDP growth rate forecast. The long-term inflation forecast is determined by the Fed's inflation target while the long-term real GDP growth rate forecast is shaped by expected changes in the potential real GDP growth rate. 

Consequently, as the neutral level of NGDP series moves through time, it can be seen as a rolling average of expected changes to potential real GDP growth plus the Fed's inflation target. This is the kind of NGDP level target some advocates, like Jeff Frankel, would like to see implemented.  

The figure below shows the neutral level of NGDP constructed with the Blue Chip data, complements of Schibuola and Martinez. This version allows us to see a hypothetical NGDP level target from late 1987 to present based on the neutral level measure of NGDP. 

Again, the original intent of the neutral level of NGDP and the NGDP gap is simply to provide a crosscheck against other measures of the stance of monetary policy. The discussion of a NGDP level target is simply an extension of this work. 

Here's hoping, though, that the Fed and Treasury keep this measure front and central in their efforts to provide economic relief during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Is Low Inflation Really a Mystery?

Over the past decade, inflation has persistently undershot the Fed's inflation target. The Fed's preferred measure of inflation, the core PCE deflator, has average 1.56 percent over this time compared to a target of 2 percent. The Fed officially begin inflation targeting in 2012, but was implicitly targeting 2 percent long before that time. So below-target inflation has been happening for close to a decade and for many observers it is a mystery.

There have been a spate of articles as to why the Fed has not been able to hit its inflation target. Some have wondered if the Fed really understands or even controls the inflation rate. Even Fed officials have been perplexed by the low inflation since it cannot be explained by their Phillips curve models. As a result, they sometimes attribute the persistently low inflation to developments such as falling oil prices, demographics, global competition, changes in labor’s share of income, safe asset shortage, and even the rise of Amazon.

These explanations, however, are not satisfactory since the Fed should be able to determine the inflation rate over the medium to long-run. That is, the Fed should be able to respond over time to developments that might cause inflation to drift off target. The Fed should be, in theory, the final arbiter of the trend inflation rate.

So why has inflation been so low? In my view, the answer is simple: the Fed is getting the inflation it wants. There is no mystery. One does not get a decade of trend inflation that is below target by accident. Instead, revealed preferences tell us inflation is where it is because the FOMC allowed it to be there.  Put differently, the Fed has chosen not to fully offset the shocks and secular forces listed above that have pushed inflation down. This is a policy choice.

Fed officials and others may disagree, but the revealed preference argument is hard to ignore. Moreover, there are other reason to believe that the low inflation is, in fact, the desired outcome of the FOMC. They are presented below.

SEP Core Inflation Forecasts

The first reason to believe the low inflation is a desired outcome comes from the FOMC itself. The FOMC's Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) provides a central tendency forecasts for core PCE inflation. The FOMC's definition of the SEP is as follows (my emphasis):

Each participant’s projections are based on his or her assessment of appropriate monetary policy.

The SEP, in other words, reveals FOMC members forecasts of economic variables conditional on the Fed doing monetary policy right. And up until recently, doing monetary policy right was not overshooting 2 percent inflation in the following year, as seen in the figure below. Even now, 2 is still seen largely as a ceiling. There is nothing symmetric about 2 percent in these SEP forecasts.

Most FOMC members, therefore, have treated 2 percent as a ceiling over the past decade. This is "appropriate" monetary policy for them. Keep in mind, that at this forecast horizon most of them also believe they have meaningful influence on inflation. Both of these observations point to the low inflation as a choice.

Textual Analysis

The second reason to believe that low inflation is a desired outcome comes from a recent study by the San Francisco Fed. It is titled "Taking the Fed at its Word: Direct Estimation of Central Bank Objectives using Text Analytics" and the abstract reads (my emphasis):

We directly estimate the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) loss function, including the implicit inflation target, from the tone of the language used in FOMC transcripts, minutes, and members’ speeches. Direct estimation is advantageous because it requires no knowledge of the underlying macroeconomic structure nor observation of central bank actions. We find that the FOMC had an implicit inflation target of approximately 1.5 percent on average over our baseline 2000 - 2013 sample period.

Fed officials, via their words, actually want 1.5 inflation on average. And shocker of all shockers, they are very close to getting that just that rate of inflation since 2009. 

The Neel Kashkari Counterfactual

The third reason to believe low inflation is a desired outcome comes from imagining a counterfactual FOMC. Imagine a FOMC that has twelve members that are all clones of Neel Kashkari, as seen below. In this FOMC, where interest rates were not raised over the past few years--and maybe even lowered--do we really think inflation would be the same? I find that hard to believe.

To be clear, I do think there are important secular forces pushing down trend inflation, like the demand for safe assets. But again, the Fed should be able to offset such pressures if it chose to do so. The real question, then, is why the Fed has settled for trend inflation near 1.5 percent. That is a question for a different post. This post is simply a retort to all those who think the low inflation is a mystery. Folks, it is not a mystery. It is a choice.

It is worth nothing that this choice is actually more than a choice for trend inflation. It is implicitly a choice for lower trend aggregate demand (AD) growth. As seen below, aggregate demand growth was averaging 5.6 percent in the decades before the crisis. Since the recovery started, it has averaged about 3.6 percent. That is a 2 percentage point decline in the trend. The red line in the figure shows what a naive autoregressive forecast would have predicted over the past decade conditional on past nominal expenditure history. There has been a sizable AD shortfall.

In my view, it is this dearth of aggregate demand growth rather than the low inflation that is a problem. The slowdown in AD growth has arguably contributed to problems like hysteresis and populism. If so, this policy choice has been costly.

P.S. Adam Ozimek gives us estimates of how costly this AD shortfall has been.

A Risk Sharing View of Monetary Policy

I have a new working paper titled "Better Risk Sharing Through Monetary Policy? The Financial Stability Case for a Nominal GDP Target". I presented this paper at the recent Cato Monetary Policy Conference. Here is the abstract:

A series of papers have shown that a monetary regime targeting nominal GDP (NGDP)

can reproduce the distribution of risk that would exist if there were widespread use of state contingentdebt securities (Koenig, 2013; Sheedy, 2014; Azariadis et al., 2016, Bullard and DiCecia, 2018). This paper empirically evaluates this view by exploiting an implication of the theory: those countries whose NGDP stayed closest to its expected pre-crisis growth path during the crisis should have experienced the least financial instability. This paper constructs an NGDP gap measure for 21 advanced economies that is used to test this implication. The results strongly suggest that there is a meaningful role for NGDP in promoting financial and economic stability.

And an excerpt:

The key insight of Koenig (2013), Sheedy (2014), Azariadis et al. (2016), and Bullard and DiCecia (2018) is that in a world of incomplete markets where there is non-state contingent nominal contracting, an NGDP target can reproduce the risk distribution that would occur if there were complete markets and state contingent nominal debt contracting. An NGDP target, in other words, can make up for the lack of insurance against future risks that could affect debtors’ ability to repay their debt. Conversely, an NGDP target can also make up for the lack of insurance against potential returns a creditor might miss out on because their funds are locked up in a fixed-price nominal loan. Bullard and Dicecia (2018) show that this result holds even when the heterogeneity among debtors and creditors modeled approximates that of the actual income, financial wealth, and consumption inequality in the United States. They note this makes NGDP targeting “monetary policy for the masses.” 

This paper uses what I call a 'sticky-forecast' of NGDP as a benchmark path. Here is the intuition for the measure:

The idea behind the sticky forecast path for NGDP is twofold. First, the public makes many economic decisions based on a forecast of their nominal incomes. For example, households may take out a 30-year mortgage based on an implicit forecast of their nominal income over this horizon. The actual realization of nominal income may turn out to be very different than expected, but the households may not be able to quickly adjust their plans given sticky debt contracts and other commitments that constrain them. Therefore, the consequences of previous forecasts are often binding on them and slow to change even if their nominal income forecasts have been updated. Second, in addition to these old forecasts and decisions whose influence lingers, new forecasts and new decisions are being made each quarter for subsequent periods that will also have lingering effects. Together, this means future periods have many overlapping and different forecast applied to them that only gradually adjust.

The sticky-forecast path of NGDP can be viewed, in other words, as the neutral level of NGDP given the public's expectations of nominal income leading up to each period. The gap between it and actual NGDP is the "NGDP gap" and provides a measure of the stance of monetary policy.

Here is a note that further explains its construction for the United States using quarterly data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. The note also shows how the sticky-forecast measure can be used as cross-check on the stance of U.S. monetary policy. The figures below illustrate its use. The first figure shows the sticky-forecast path of NGDP along with the actual NGDP series.

This next figure show the NGDP Gap, the percent deviation between these two series. As noted above, this can seen as the stance of monetary policy. Interestingly, it provides results very similar to Taylor rules. The NGDP Gap indicates that currently the monetary conditions are still a bit tight, but close to neutral. 

Will Australia Be the First Country to Try NGDPLT?

There is a new Brookings paper by Warwick J. McKibbin and Augustus J. Panton titled Twenty-five Years of InflationTargeting in Australia: Are There Better Alternatives for the Next 25Years? Here is how they answer the question in their title:

This paper surveys alternative monetary frameworks and evaluates whether the current inflation targeting framework followed by the RBA for the past 25 years is likely to be the most appropriate framework for the next 25 years. While flexible inflation targeting has appeared to work well in Australia in the past decades, the nature of future shocks suggests that some form of nominal income targeting is worth considering as an evolutionary change in Australia’s framework for monetary policy.

Put differently, this Brookings paper argues that inflation targeting is a monetary regime whose time has come and gone. I completely agree. 

What is interesting, though, is that they are making this case for Australia whose economy has had a remarkable 27-year expansion. This is attributable, in part, to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) who has successfully navigated through numerous shocks including the bursting of the tech bubble, the global financial crisis, commodity price collapse, and periodic bouts of China panic. The last time there was a recession in Australia it was in the early 1990s.

Along these lines, it is worth highlighting again that Australia, if any country, should have experienced a so-called 'balance sheet' recession in 2008-2009. It had a housing boom and a surge in household debt that exceeded the United States as seen below. It also faced a large negative commodity price shock in late 2008-early 2009. And yet there was no Great Recession in Australia. 

Australia, in short, was the balance sheet recession that never happened. The reason the Australian economy faired so well is because is because the RBA never hit the ZLB and, in so doing, kept aggregate nominal income on it trend growth path. Thus, there was less financial stress created for nominal debt contracts holders. So, unlike the Fed and the ECB, the RBA saw its nominal GDP stay roughly on course during and right after the global financial crisis. And that made all the difference in the world.

This gets us back to the new Brookings paper. So why do the authors argue for an explicit nominal GDP level target (NGDPLT) when the RBA's inflation target has been implicitly doing the same? The authors argue that going forward the biggest shocks likely to hit the Australian economy will be large supply shocks:

There are three main areas where future shocks can be anticipated. The first is climate change and climate policy responses. The second is the emergence of a fourth industrial revolution or a new Renaissance due to the rapid adoption of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. The third is the growth of larger emerging economies into the world economy following the experience of China.

The authors note an explicit NGDPLT is better suited to handle such shocks and thus their call for the RBA to adopt it. I agree completely on the supply shock motivation. I would, however, submit another reason for the RBA to explicitly adopt a NGDPLT in Australia. 

The RBA in the past has done a great job keeping nominal income on its trend growth path. However, in recent years it has actually slipped a bit and now it is now below trend. An flexible inflation target, apparently, is not enough to always keep aggregate demand growth stable. Moving to an explicit NGDPLT would put the focus on this emerging gap and force the RBA to take corrective actions. 

New Zealand was the first country to adopt inflation targeting. It was the avant-garde of this new monetary regime in the early 1990s. So maybe a smaller economy like Australia needs to do  same with NGDPLT before other larger economies try it. Here is hoping the RBA is willing to try it. 

Optimal Monetary Policy For the Masses: the James Bullard and Larry Summers View

James Bullard and Ricardo DiCecio have a new paper where they model wealth, income, and consumption inequality.  They also incorporate fixed-price nominal debt contracts.  They then derive the optimal monetary policy for the masses in such a model. Here is what they find:

This paper builds upon the risk-sharing view of NGDP targeting. The basic idea is that in a world of fixed-price nominal debt contracts (i.e. the real world), a NGDP level target provides better risk sharing among creditors and debtors against economic shocks than does a price stability target.  

This is because a NGDP level target makes inflation countercyclical. During recessions, inflation rises and causes creditors to bear some of the unexpected pain by lowering the real debt payments they receive from debtors. During booms, inflation falls and allows creditors to share in some of the unexpected gain by increasing the real debt payments they receive from debtors. Debtors, in other words, bear less risk during recessions but also share unexpected gains during expansions. 

NGDP level targeting, in other words, causes a fixed-price nominal debt world to look and feel a lot like an equity-world. In a similar spirit, some observers have called for a risk-sharing mortgages as a way to avoid another Great Recession. The point of this paper is that the same benefit that such risk-sharing mortgages would bring can be had by having a central bank target the growth path of NGDP.

Larry Summers is also worried about the masses and is therefore rethinking the Fed's 2 percent inflation target: 

My conclusion, therefore, is that in our current framework the economy is singularly brittle. We do not have a basis for assuming that monetary policy will be able, as rapidly as necessary, to lift us out of the next recession. This has a substantial cost likely in the range of at least $1 trillion over the next decade. This suggests the suboptimality of our current monetary policy framework... 

If I had to choose one framework today, I would choose a nominal GDP target of 5 to 6 percent. And I would make that choice for two reasons. First, it would attenuate the issues around explicitly announcing a higher inflation target, which I think are a little bit problematic on political economy grounds. Second, a nominal GDP target has an additional advantage in its implicit response to changing conditions. Arithmetically a nominal GDP target has the property that the expected rate of inflation rises as the expected real growth in GDP declines. This is desirable. If growth in underlying real GDP declines, neutral real interest rates are likely to decline as well. In this case allowing higher inflation to make possible even more negative real rates reduces the risk of policy impotence.

Sounds good to me, but are there any real world examples of NGDP level targeting? Probably the best example of a country following something like a NGDP level target has been Israel over the past decade. The Bank of Israel officially targets an inflation range of 1-3 percent, but in practice has made inflation so countercyclical that effectively it has been doing a NGDP level target. The figure below shows this countercyclical nature using the GDP deflator:

Note that both inflation overshooting and undershooting have been tolerated. The GDP deflator has been as hight as 6 percent and almost as low as 1 percent. Overall, its inflation rate has averaged about 2 percent, right in the center of the 1-3 percent target range. So this approach provides both a nominal anchor and short-run inflation flexibility for Israel.  

As consequence of making Israeli inflation countercyclical, the growth path of NGDP has been kept stable: 

This is what monetary policy for the masses looks like!

Do Changes in Potential Output and Data Revisions Make NGDP Targeting Impractical?

It's Back...

Over the past few months there has been increasing chatter about the need for a new framework for U.S. monetary policy. The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), for example, recently had its Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy conference where, among other things, Ben Bernanke called for the Fed to adopt a temporary price-level target. PIIE also launched Angel Ubide's new book  on reforming monetary policy. Similarly, at the AEA meetings there was a session titled Monetary Policy in 2018 and Beyond where Christina Romer again made the case for a NGDP level target. Likewise, the Brookings Institute held a recent conference on whether the Fed should abandon its 2 percent inflation target. There, Jeff Frankel shared the arguments for a NGDP level target and Larry Summers endorsed it. Others at the conference, like San Francisco Fed President John Williams called for a price level target.

I am glad this conversation is happening. It is not new--some of us have been having it since 2009--but I get the sense that it is gaining traction. The turnover at the Fed and the opportunity it creates for new thinking makes this conversation about new monetary policy frameworks incredibly important now. 

As this conversation continues to grow, so will the interest in the options available including nominal GDP level targeting (NGDPLT). Obviously, I have much to say here, but for now I want to respond to two critiques often applied to NGDPLT: (1) changes in potential output and (2) data revisions make NGDPLT an impractical rule to implement. I think these concerns are misplaced as explained below.

Critique 1: Changes in Potential Output: A Feature or a Bug for NGDPLT?

Since NGDP growth is approximately the sum of real GDP growth and inflation, many observers are concerned that changes in potential output will cause wide swings in inflation. Here, for example, is Goodhardt et al. (2013):

[A]ny overestimation of the sustainable real rate of growth... could force [a central bank], subject to a level nominal GDP target, to soon have to aim for a significantly higher rate of inflation. Is that really what is now wanted? Bring back the stagflation of the 1970s...?

Put differently, some worry that a NGDP target will not provide a stable nominal anchor. For these folks this is a bug in NGDPLT. This concern is unwarranted for several reasons.

First, a NGDPLT target does provide a nominal anchor. It pins down the long-run growth path of nominal income. Put differently, it approximately stabilizes the growth path of nominal wages. Yes, it will allow more flexibility with inflation but as argued later that may be a good development.

Second, on a practical level, a NGDP target would never have generated 1970s-type swings in inflation given the actual history of potential output growth. The figure below illustrates this point. It assumes a 5% NGDP target and takes the year-on-year growth rate of the CBO's potential real GDP measure (blue line) as given. The trend inflation rate (black line) implied by this counterfactual monetary policy is plotted in the figure.

In this counterfactual, the inflation trend rate averages 1.97 over the entire 1960-2017 period. At most, it temporarily hits just above 4 percent right after the crisis. There is no 1970s inflation. Fears that a NGDPLT will bring back 1970s-type inflation is a red herring.

Interestingly, this counterfactual would have led to lower inflation in periods of high-trend real GDP growth periods like the 1960s and led to higher inflation in low-trend GDP growth periods like the present. To the extent there is hysteresis and potential real GDP is not truly exogenous to monetary policy, the counterfactual higher inflation (as a symptom of higher nominal demand) may have actually reduced the collapse in potential output over the past decade.¹ In any event, a NGDPLT since 1960 would not have led to soul-crushing swings in inflation that some claim.

What many observers miss is that with a NGDPLT target the central bank does not need to worry itself over the latest changes to potential output. As the chart shows above, these changes happen fairly regularly. A NGDPLT lets these potential output changes be absorbed through reasonably-sized changes in the inflation rate. Inflation flexibility provided by a NGDPLT is a virtue here.²

Monetary policy, as it is currently practiced, does not have freedom. Most inflation-targeting central banks loosely follow something like a Taylor rule where they need to know the output gap in real time. That requires knowing both real GDP and potential real GDP in real time--an impossible task.

A NGDPLT acknowledges this ignorance and says to simply focus on stabilizing nominal demand. Potential output changes are therefore a feature rather than a bug for NGDPLT.

Critique 2: Data Revisions Make NGDP an Impractical Framework

There are two replies to this. First, as noted above, inflation targeting as it currently practiced requires real-time knowledge of both real GDP and potential real GDP.  This Taylor-rule framework is therefore is also subject to data revisions. Moreover, it subject to two of them. A NGDPLT target, on the other hand, only faces one variable subject to data revisions. So if data revisions make NGDPLT impractical even more so for the current inflation targeting framework.

Second, as Josh Hendrickson and I show in a recent paper, the Fed's forecast of NGDP for the current period is not biased (i.e. the forecast error is stationary). That means even if there are data revisions to the official statistics, the Fed can rely on its forecasts of NGDP to avoid this challenge. Below is chart from our paper that captures this ability of the Fed:

We also show in the paper that the Fed's forecast of the potential GDP is biased (i.e. the forecast error has a unit root). Consequently, the data revision argument against NGDP is not a convincing one, while it is a serious one for flexible inflation targeting.

For me, then, I do not worry about the above two critiques. The real issue with NGDPLT, in my view, is how to credibly implement it. But that is a topic for another post.

Update
As commentator John notes, these problems could also be addressed by Scott Sumner's NGDP futures contracts idea. I would also note that directly targeting a monthly nominal wage index in the manner outline by George Selgin would be another fix.

Related Links
NGDPLT and the Problem of Permanent vs Temporary Monetary Base Injections 
NGDPLT and the Eurozone Crisis

¹ A forceful case for hysteresis in the U.S. economy is made by Reifschneider, Wascher, and Willcox (2013), J.W. Mason (2017), and Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Ulate (2017).

²There are other reasons why the countercyclical inflation created by a NGPDLT would be beneficial. It would lead to better risk-sharing between creditors and debtors as shown in Koenig (2013), Sheedy (2014), and Bullard et al. (2015).

The Knowledge Problem In Monetary Policy

I have a new working paper with Josh Hendrickson titled Nominal GDP Targeting and the Taylor Rule on an Even Playing Field. Using a standard New Keynesian model, Josh and I show one of the advantages of a nominal GDP target is that it is more robust to the knowledge problem facing central bankers than is the standard approach that implicitly invokes some kind of Taylor rule.

Here is an excerpt from the paper on the knowledge problem:

One of the key challenges facing monetary policy authorities is the knowledge problem. As first noted by Hayek (1945), this problem arises because the information needed for optimal economic planning is distributed among many individual firms and households and therefore outside the knowledge of a central planning authority. This observation, when specifically applied to central banking, means that the information required to make activist countercyclical policies work is not available. Consequently, monetarists like Friedman (1953, 1968), Brunner (1985), and Meltzer (1987) argued early on against central bank discretion and instead called for simple rules that committed monetary authorities to stable money and nominal income growth. 

The knowledge problem was later shown by Orphanides (2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2004) to apply not only to central banks that conduct discretionary monetary policy but also to ones that follow a “constrained discretionary” approach to monetary policy. That is, even central banks that follow some kind of Taylor rule in a flexible inflation-targeting regime are susceptible to the knowledge problem...

The biggest information challenge comes from attempting to measure the output gap in real time. The output gap is the difference between the economy’s actual and potential level of output and is subject to two big measurement problems. First, real-time output data generally get revised and often on the same order of magnitude as the estimated output gap itself. Second, potential output estimates are based on trends that rely on ever-changing endpoints. Orphanides finds the latter problem to be the biggest contributor to real-time misperceptions of the output gap. This means that even if real-time data improved such that there were fewer revisions, there would still be a sizable problem measuring the real-time output gap.  

To illustrate these problems, figure 1 replicates Orphanides’s (2002b) construction of real-time output gap measures using vintage real output data and compares them to final output gap measures using the Hodrick-Prescott and Baxter-King filters… 

The top panel in figure 1 shows both the real-time and final output gap measures. To help discern how different these measures are, the second row plots the real-time output gap misperceptions, or the difference between the real-time and final output gaps. Both the HodrickPrescott and the Baxter-King filters reveal sizable measurement problems, particularly in the 1970s. The Hodrick-Prescott filter shows real-time output gap misperceptions reaching as much as 5 percentage points, while the Baxter-King filter shows up to 2 percentage points in the 1970s.  

Orphanides (2004) sees these large measurement errors as a key contributor to the unmooring of inflation in the 1970s. He shows that, if the real-time estimates of the output gap and inflation from the 1970s are plugged into a Taylor rule like equation... the result is pretty close to the actual monetary policy that occurred during this time. The Great Inflation, in other words, was not the result of the Federal Reserve failing to properly respond to the economic developments of the time. It was the result of the Federal Reserve failing to properly measure the output gap.  

Interestingly, figure 1 also indicates that the Great Moderation period of 1984–2007 was characterized by relatively smaller real-time output gap misperceptions. These findings raise questions about the claims of Taylor (1999), Clarida, Galí, and Gertler (2000), and others who see the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee after Chairman Paul Volker’s term as more disciplined in its response to inflation. They suggest, instead, that Walsh (2009, 216) may be correct in his assessment that the success of targeting inflation has more to do with the “good luck” coming from a “benign economic environment” than from improved monetary policy.

Below is Figure 1:

There is much more to the paper. Read it the rest here.

P.S. Here is an earlier post on the knowledge problem facing central bankers when they try to divine changes in the inflation rate. 

The Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme Approach to Central Banking

Over at FT Alphaville, I argue the Fed is not ready for the next recession:

Whether or not a recession actually occurs, one thing is certain. The Fed in its current form is not well equipped to handle another downturn. The Fed’s inability over the past seven years to create a strong recovery from the last recession speaks to this weakness. The Fed tried everything from pushing interest rates to zero percent to buying up trillions of dollars of government bonds and yet it was still not able to generate the spending needed to get the economy back to full health.

          [...]

The real reason for this failure is the Fed’s firm commitment to low inflation. Like a governor placed on a truck’s engine to control its speed, a commitment to low inflation helps prevent the economy from growing too fast. Normally, this is a good thing. But sometimes it can backfire. A truck driver may need to temporarily go faster to make up for lost time after being stuck in traffic. Similarly, an economy may need to temporarily speed up to get back to its full potential after a recession. Neither can happen with a rigid adherence to the speed limit. 

I go on to argue that a nominal GDP level target (NGDPLT) is the answer, but with a twist: make it more credible by having a treasury backstop. The beauty of this arrangement is that since it throws the entire weight of the consolidated government balance sheet behind the NGDPLT, it increases the target's credibility and means the treasury backstop will rarely, if ever, have to be used. 

Nick Rowe likes to say that central banking is like Chuck Norris walking into a room and telling everyone to get out. They fear Chuck Norris and so will leave the room without him ever having to throw a punch. Chuck Norris is using expectation management just like a central bank does to shape behavior. Recall the market reaction to Mario Draghi saying "whatever it takes" in 2012 or Ben Bernanke doing his "taper talk" in 2013. These are examples of Chuck Norris the central banker at work.

Now imagine Chuck Norris the central banker comes to the room with his friend Jean-Claude Van Damme the treasury secretary. Chuck Norris still walks into the room alone and tells everyone to get out. This time, though, he mentions that his buddy Jean-Claude is waiting outside and has his back. Now the folks inside the room go from being fearful to truly terrified and flee out of the room. Jean Claude never has to go into the room. Just knowing he is outside is enough for the people in the room. That is the idea of an explicit treasury backstop to the Fed's NGDPLT. It will add credibility, but probably never have to be used.

P.S. Scott Sumner was on Reddit yesterday answering questions. One question that was asked is where are the models for Market Monetarism. There are no models for Market Monetarism. There is, however, serious model-based work being done on NGDP targeting. I thought I would list some of the recent ones below, including my work with Josh Hendrickson:  

(1)    Kevin Sheedy:  Debt and Incomplete Financial Markets: A Case for Nominal GDP Targeting
(2)    James Bullard: Optimal Policy at the Zero Lower Bound
(3)    Eric Sims et al.: On the Desirability of Nominal GDP Targeting 
(4)    Evan Koenig: Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Distribution of Risk
(5)    Michael Belongia and Peter Ireland: A "Working" Solution to the Problem of NGDP Targeting
(6)    Josh Hendrickson & David Beckworth: Nominal GDP Targeting versus the Taylor Rule on an Even Playing Field
(7)    Josh Hencrickson &   David Beckworth:  The Supply of Transaction Assets, Nominal Income, and Monetary Policy Transmission

A Partial Solution to Income Inequality

I want to come back to one of the points from my last post. There I noted the global economy was hit by a series of large positive supply shocks beginning in the mid-1990s: the rapid advances in technology and the opening up of Asia. The former raised productivity while the latter increased the world's labor supply. Both pushed up the return to capital and put downward pressure on global inflation. 

This run of positive supply shocks continued into the 2000s--productivity growth peaked between 2002 and 2004--but was interrupted by the Great Recession. It now appears to be returning to full stride. This time, though, the supply shocks are not coming from further increases in the global supply of labor, but from further technological advances. The increased digitization, automation, and overall smart-machining of our economy is and will continue to bring huge productivity gains. For example, by the end of 2016 there will be 30 U.S. cities with driverless cars, artificial intelligence will be diagnosing illness, and 3D printers will be making practically everything including themselves. And oh yea, robots will be delicately picking fruit. These examples highlight what Erik Brynjfolsson and Andrea McAfee call the second machine age where we will see rapid productivity growth that will reinforce the high return to capital.

How the world handles this second machine age over the next few decades will be, in my view, one of the biggest economic challenges going forward. Rapid technological advances are ultimately good for long-run growth, but in the short run they can be very disruptive to many jobs and industries. This has always been true, but the pace and size of these disruptive supply shocks are likely to increase. It is true that we do not see much evidence in the data yet for this process, but I chalk that up to measurement problems and that we are only the cusp of these changes. In any event, I suspect that this issue will make the present-day concerns over secular stagnation, liquidity traps, saving gluts, and the Japanification of Europe look quaint. 

One widely-held concern about large positive supply shocks is that they will shift income from labor to capital. This concern can be seen in this The Economist's discussion of the Asian supply shock back in 2005:

China's impact on the world economy can best be understood as what economists call a “positive supply-side shock”. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, reckons that the entry into the world economy of China, India and the former Soviet Union has, in effect, doubled the global labour force (China accounts for more than half of this increase). This has increased the world's potential growth rate, helped to hold down inflation and triggered changes in the relative prices of labour, capital, goods and assets. 

The new entrants to the global economy brought with them little capital of economic value. So, with twice as many workers and little change in the size of the global capital stock, the ratio of global capital to labour has fallen by almost half in a matter of years: probably the biggest such shift in history. And, since this ratio determines the relative returns to labour and capital, it goes a long way to explain recent trends in wages and profits.

The trends, of course, being the higher share of income going to capital and the slow growth of real wages. It is a natural consequence, the article argues, of the higher returns to capital generated by such supply shocks. The rapid technological advances, therefore, will only reinforce these developments since they too raise the return to capital. Woe is the labor share of income.

Another related concern is that that this growth in global capacity will not be matched by sufficient demand given the declining share of income going to labor. There will be a persistent demand shortage as argued Dan Alpert in his "Age of Oversupply". He worries there will be a persistent global glut.

So what should be done? Left-of-center solutions range from more government spending to make up for the spending shortfall to a basic income policy to offset the decline in labor's share of income. One of the more interesting proposals, in my view, from the left is to have the federal government invest in the SP500 on behalf of its citizens. Any earnings from this investment would be distributed among households. This would make everyone a capitalist and thereby empower them to benefit from the gains of the second machine age.

Eric Lonegran and Mark Blyth, for example, argue the U.S. government should create a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) to do just that. They would have the federal government sell more treasury securities to fund the SWF which would then invest the funds in a stock market index fund. The earnings would be sent to its shareholders, U.S. taxpayers. From a macro-finance perspective this is a clever idea, but from a political-economy perspective I worry that investing decisions would become very political and messy. 

So let me propose another solution, one that allows markets to support growth in labor's share of income. It is a very simple solution: let the price level reflect changes in productivity while stabilizing nominal income growth. Put differently, central banks should aim to stabilize the growth of nominal wages, but ignore changes in the price level. This would allow real wages to more closely follow the rapid productivity growth.

To see how this would work recall the large positive supply shocks from Asia and technology that culminated in the productivity boom of 2002-2004. Both of these developments raised the return to capital and put downward pressure on inflation. All else equal, the higher return to capital should have resulted in a higher market-clearing or 'natural interest rate' while the downward drift in inflation should have supported the growth of real wages. Instead, the Fed offset the decline in inflation by lowering its target interest rate. Given the Fed's monetary superpower status, this lowering of short-term interest rates was replicated across much of the world. So just as the fundamentals of the global economy were pointing to higher real interest rates and lower inflation, the Fed and other central banks moved in the opposite direction to keep inflation stable. These actions served to raise firm's profits while reducing labor's share of income.¹

Here's why. A permanent rise in productivity means lower per unit production costs for firms. In turn, this means greater profit margins for a given sales price. Firms will respond to this development by building more plants. This expands the productive capacity of the economy and causes, given competitive pressures, firms to lower their sales prices in an attempt to gain market share. Their profit margins, though, should remain relatively stable because the drop in their output prices is matched by a drop in their unit costs of production.

Note that all firms are lowering to varying degrees their output price because of this process. Consequently, the price level, an average of firms’ output prices, will also fall. This spreads the benefits of the productivity gains to all workers through higher real wages. And with these higher real wages workers can provide the demand needed for full employment.

Now imagine central banks respond to this productivity-driven deflation by easing monetary policy, as they would under inflation targeting. Sales prices are stabilized, but given sticky input prices like wages this action also leads to expanded profit margins. So instead of allowing the productivity gains to be shared with labor through a gently falling price level, monetary policy has instead served to increase the share of income going  to capital. 

This, in my view, explains a meaningful amount--though not all--of the growth in capital income since the mid-1990s. And my fear is that in the second machine age with rapid productivity growth this trend will worsen. Below is a figure from a recent paper of mine that lends support to this interpretation:

Now I want to be clear. I am not advocating the malign deflation that comes form a collapse of aggregate demand, as seen in the 1930s. What I am talking about is allowing productivity shocks to be gently reflected in the price level while stabilizing aggregate demand growth. This is a benign form of deflation and yes, it has happened.

Under this kind of deflation, the standard problems associated with deflation--the zero lower bound (ZLB), financial intermediation, and real debt burdens--are less of an issue. The higher productivity growth implies a higher real interest rate that should counter the downward pressure on the nominal interest rate and therefore minimize the chance of hitting the ZLB. Financial intermediation should not be adversely affected either, since the burden of any unanticipated increase in real debt coming from the benign deflation would be offset by a corresponding unanticipated increase in real incomes. Collateral values, meanwhile, should not decline but increase given expectations of higher future earnings from the productivity growth. 

By keeping output price growth stable, inflation targeting inadvertently contributes to the rising share of income going to capital in periods of rising productivity. So what kind of monetary policy would stabilize aggregate demand growth and allow changes in productivity growth to be reflected in the price level and thus in real wages? The answer is a NGDP target. Under this rule, the Fed would aim to stabilize the growth of total dollar spending (or equivalently nominal income) and quit worrying about changes in inflation. Some like George Selgin would further focus the Fed target explicitly on the expected growth of nominal wages. Either way, the Fed would let productivity be reflected in the price level.

So a partial solution to the growing income inequality between labor and capital income is to have monetary policy adopt a NGDP target of some kind.  For those who have little faith in monetary policy hitting a NGDP target this approach can be operationalized with the help of fiscal policy. 

¹Since output prices have been stabilized, workers are still getting the real wage they were expecting ex-ante. Hence, there is not the same motivation to ask for a wage increase allowing this condition to persist for awhile. Workers, however, will begin to grumble as they see the increased share of income going to capital as is now the case.