Krugman: No exit

While Human Action is no real fan of Krugman’s work - he encouraged inflating the US housing bubble in 2002 and as Marc Faber will tell you at the peak of the Nasdaq bubble Krugman told him it would never decline - sometimes he does say sensible things.

From his NY Times blog this week:

No exit

The latest Fed minutes, together with the forecast, are out. What do they tell us?

Well, the Fed expects unemployment to come down only very gradually — over 9 percent at the end of 2010, over 8 percent at the end of 2011, around 7 percent at the end of 2012. Inflation, meanwhile is expected to remain consistently below the Fed’s target.

Which raises the question, why is anyone talking about an “exit strategy”? On the Fed’s own forecasts, the economy will remain seriously depressed three years from now.

If we apply the Rudebusch version of the Taylor rule to the mean Fed forecasts, I get the following for what the Fed funds rate should be:

End 2009: -6.3%
End 2010: -5.4%
End 2011: -3.3%
End 2012: -0.6%

Yep: three years from now, we’re still in a liquidity trap, with no reason to raise rates above zero and a continuing need for quantitative easing and fiscal expansion.

As far as I can tell, what’s going on in monetary policy debate is a policy in search of a justification. Many central bankers just hate, absolutely hate, being in the position of being so accommodating; yet economic analysis offers no justification for tightening. So they’re inventing new policy doctrines on the fly to justify doing what they want to do.

It’s a familiar story: see Japan’s premature exit from the ZIRP in 2000, and also see 1937 — which was a monetary as well as fiscal bungle.

The truth is that policy should be piling on, not looking for the exit. But central bankers can’t wait to pull away the punchbowl, even though the party hasn’t started, and shows no signs of starting for years to come.

Now don’t get us wrong, Krugman couldn’t be more wrong in his economic assessment.  The US (and the dollar) needs higher interest rates, not lower.  Why we’re so admiring of our Nobel Laureate is that while he’s economically wrong, he’s politically spot on.  Why?  Because keeping rates at 0% or thereabouts is exactly what the Fed is likely to do for a very long time, because any other course of action would simply cause way too much short term pain and way too much dislocation in the job market for any politician to even begin to contemplate.

We don’t reckon central bankers really want to pull the punchbowl away.  They keep saying they want to because they’re doing their outright best to manage inflation expectations.  What this means for South Africa is a strong Rand (below R7/$ in 2010 and very possibly below R6/$) and rising equities, particularly precious metal miners. It’s really a repeat of 2002-2007, that will end considerably more spectacularly.

Spectacularly badly that is.