We should have listened to Keynes

I meant to blog about Keynes' idea of the bancor and taxing surpluses, but Felix Salmon beat me to it.
He borrows "George Monbiot’s lucid summary of John Maynard Keynes’ proposal":

He proposed a global bank, which he called the International Clearing Union. The bank would issue its own currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange. The bancor would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country’s trade deficit or trade surplus.

Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union, equivalent to half the average value of its trade over a five-year period. To make the system work, the members of the union would need a powerful incentive to clear their bancor accounts by the end of the year: to end up with neither a trade deficit nor a trade surplus. But what would the incentive be?

Keynes proposed that any country racking up a large trade deficit (equating to more than half of its bancor overdraft allowance) would be charged interest on its account. It would also be obliged to reduce the value of its currency and to prevent the export of capital. But – and this was the key to his system – he insisted that the nations with a trade surplus would be subject to similar pressures. Any country with a bancor credit balance that was more than half the size of its overdraft facility would be charged interest, at a rate of 10%. It would also be obliged to increase the value of its currency and to permit the export of capital. If, by the end of the year, its credit balance exceeded the total value of its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated. The nations with a surplus would have a powerful incentive to get rid of it. In doing so, they would automatically clear other nations’ deficits.

Would have been a hell of a good idea. The whole problem with global economic adjustment is the asymmetry between surplus and deficit countries.

Posner becomes a Keynesian

Richard Posner writes in the New Republic about how he became a Keynesian. Worth reading, despite his confusion over the difference between savings and investment. Perhaps the problem is Posner's inability to use the word equilibrium condition. For Keynes point was that savings equals investment in equilibrium and that changes in income bring this about. Without this the article is confusing about passive and active investment and so on.

I need to write more about the contribution of Keynes to understanding this crisis.

The Role of Keynes

David Warsh has an interesting column on Keynes. Read to the bottom to see Lucas's appreciation, which is most interesting.

Meanwhile, Mankiw reviews Skidelsky's new book on Keynes in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). He notes:

In his preface, Mr. Skidelsky says that he is a historian, not an economist. The book bears out the claim, in both its strengths and weaknesses. Mr. Skidelsky is most engaging when he draws on his biographical work. Keynes, we are reminded, had a fascinating life. He was a widely read intellectual who wrote accessibly for the general public. He advised world leaders on the crucial issues of the day and socialized with the artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group. But most of "Keynes" is devoted to ideas, not history, and here Mr. Skidelsky is not playing his strong suit. To economists his discussion of macroeconomic theory will seem pedestrian and imprecise. To laymen it will seem abstract and hard to follow.

I also liked this line:

This brings us to the biggest problem with "Keynes." Mr. Skidelsky admits to being poorly trained in the tools that economists use: "I find mathematics and statistics 'challenging,' as they say, and it is too late to improve. This has, I believe, saved me from important errors of thinking."

Has it, really? Mr. Skidelsky would like to think that his math-aversion allows him to focus on the big ideas rather than being distracted by mere analytic details. But mathematics is, fundamentally, the language of logic. Modern research into Keynes's theories—I have conducted such research myself—tries to put his ideas into mathematical form precisely to figure out whether they logically cohere. It turns out that the task is not easy.

I enjoyed Skidelsky's 3 volumes on Keynes, and I will probably enjoy this book too. But I know the Mankiw is right about Skidelsky's weaknesses, and that is all the more important for the claim that Keynes is what is needed now.

Born Again Keynesians

Posner has an interesting post on his blog criticizing born-again Keynesians, like Paul Krugman for ignoring their Keynes. The point is that uncertainty causes businessmen to hoard, which reduces investment and prevents recovery. His point is that the Obama health care plan, which Krugman, endorses, will create more uncertainty.

Posner quotes Keynes:

Keynes warned President Roosevelt in an open letter of December 31, 1933, about trying to combine far-reaching reform with recovery from an economic depression. He wote that

even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action, before you have had time to put other motives in their place...And it will confuse the thought and aim of yourself and your administration by giving you too much to think about all at once.

The passage that I have italicized deserves particular emphasis (though Keynes's warning that "it will confuse the thought and aim of yourself and your administration by giving you too much to think about all at once" is equally timely) because of the strange turn that the debate over health reform has taken in recent days.

Posner, if you read his book on Failure of Capitalism, is more of Keynesian than most liberal Keynesians.

Economists' Grand Project

John Kay has an interesting column about the grand project of supplying microfoundations for macroeconomics. I think the last part is worth quoting:

Max Planck, the physicist, said he had eschewed economics because it was too difficult. Planck, Keynes observed, could have mastered the corpus of mathematical economics in a few days – it might now have taken him a few weeks. Keynes went on to explain that economic understanding required an amalgam of logic and intuition and a wide knowledge of facts, most of which are not precise: “a requirement overwhelmingly difficult for those whose gift mainly consists in the power to imagine and pursue to their furthest points the implications and prior conditions of comparatively simple facts which are known with a high degree of precision”. On this, as on much else, Keynes was right.

His point is that the effort to reduce every argument to a single model causes us to ignore behavior that is crucial to the stuff we want to explain.

Back to Keynes II

Greg Mankiw seems to agree with me about the current relevance of Keynes. So does Tyler Cowan. He is creating a discussion of the General Theory at Marginal Revolution.

Back to Keynes

It is hard right now not to think about the economics of John Maynard Keynes. We appear to be in an environment where the lessons of the General Theory are once again relevant.

Given the developments in macroeconomics in the last 25 years it is a bit hard to type those words. Yet is surely seems to ring true today. After all, our current economic crisis is not the result of some external shock -- indeed, the boom continued while oil prices sky-rocketed. The crisis is related not to external events but to the unraveling of a bubble. In essence, it is essentially a failure of coordination. As investors fear for the future they rush for security. T-bill rates fall to near zero, lending to the private sector decreases dramatically, and income and employment start to spiral downwards. That is why so many now call for a severe dose of fiscal stimulus (see, for example, this article by Paul Krugman).

As my colleague Neil Wallace mentioned to me today, what is striking about our current situation is that unlike, say, Katrina -- which had serious, real destructive effects for both capital and labor but had little impact on the overall economy -- our current dilemma seems to stem directly from fear and expectations. Fear of the future has had very serious real effects. "Animal spirits," or the lack thereof, is the important factor. Investment is on strike right now and we seem to be in a liquidity trap where credit expansion is ineffective at combating the slump.

The return to the economics of Keynes at this moment makes me think about the "corridor hypothesis" that my former teacher Axel Leijonhufvud proposed. He argued that in normal times the market system works well to bring us back to equilibrium. Within the corridor of stability it is like a thermostat -- a negative feedback device. The problems that Keynes wrote about occur when we are outside the corridor. Then we cannot rely on the market to automatically restore equilibrium. That is where the economics of Keynes is relevant. Unfortunately, for us, we now appear to be in that situation.

I suppose that during a long period of stability it is not surprising that we ignore the lessons about effective demand failures. The lessons seem archaic. Now the same lessons seem very relevant. Good fortune allowed us to ignore the economics of Keynes for a while. Perhaps the consequence of assuming that those lessons were no longer applicable is the reason that we recklessly created an environment that caused us to leave the corridor.

New Bretton Woods?

Sebastian Mallaby discusses the possibility of a new Bretton Woods agreement. He points out that it will be important how China reacts to the situation:

Today it is the rising power that pursues mercantilist policies via its exchange rate. China's leadership, which sits atop an astonishing $2 trillion in foreign-currency savings, could trade a promise to help recapitalize Western finance for an expanded role within the IMF. But China may simply not be interested. The future of the global monetary system depends on whether China aspires to play the role of Roosevelt -- or whether it prefers to be a modern Churchill.

But I wonder about another problem. The Bretton Woods agreement had the benefit of having the century's greatest economist, John Maynard Keynes, essentially running the show. He led the British delegation. There are plenty of good economists today, but any new agreement is going to be led by Presidents and Prime Ministers. Who will be the Keynes of the new agreement?

Keynesian Recession Coming

It looks like we are in for a real Keynesian recession. The liquidity crisis seems to have led to a stop to bank lending, so we are approaching a liquidity trap. Demand is now falling, witness the drop in retail sales announced today which shook the markets, and this is a sign that the recession is already underway. If monetary policy is ineffective due to bank's unwillingness to lend, we are in the almost classic "Keynesian type" recession of old textbooks.

The relevance of Keynes to our current experience was highlighted by Robert Skidelsky in this column. He is perhaps correct when he writes that

To understand how markets can generate their own hurricanes we need to return to John Maynard Keynes.

But I think he overstates his case considerably when he argues that " mainstream theory has no explanation of why things have gone so horribly wrong." In particular, he expresses the view that is prevalent now that economists focus on efficient markets blinded them to

Greed, ignorance, euphoria, panic, herd behavior, predation, financial skulduggery and politics -- the forces that drive boom-bust cycles -- only exist off the balance sheet of their models.

This is factually incorrect. We have models of bubbles and herd behavior. But more important it ignores the point that much of the problems we have now are the result of ignoring market efficiency. When investors believed they could earn extra return for no extra risk they were not basing their behavior on efficiency. The carry trade is an example of profiting from the absence of efficiency. The problems we now face are that markets caught up. The excess returns they were earning were just a compensation for the losses that are now incurred. If savers and investors had assumed that they could not earn extra return for no extra risk they would have been in index funds not CDO's. They would not have been fooled by ratings from ratings agencies.