A lot of bucks, but how much bang? – Financial crisis

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Richard Clarida
16 March 2009

“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in control of a delicate machine, the workings of which we do not understand” - John Maynard Keynes, “The Great Slump of 1930”, published December 1930.

I recently had the privilege of participating on a panel that was part of the Russia Forum, an annual conference held in Moscow that brings together market makers, policymakers, and academic experts to discuss the state of global markets, geopolitics, and the many and varied ways that Russia factors into these complex domains. The topic assigned to our panel, not surprisingly, was the global financial crisis – causes, consequences, and policy responses. Although each speaker had his own, unique perspective, a cohesive, urgent theme did emerge, or so it seemed to me, from the two-and-half-hour session that included probing questions from a number of the audience members assembled for the event.

That theme suggests the title I’ve chosen for this column; there are, at last, a ‘lot of bucks’ now committed by policymakers to address the global recession and the global financial crisis, but there is real doubt about how much ‘bang’ we can expect from these bucks.

In the US, President Obama has just signed a nearly 800 billion dollar stimulus package and the Fed has cut the Federal Funds rate to zero. Monetary policy in the rest of the G7, while lagging behind the US, will follow the US lead and soon come close to zero. (In the case of the ECB, the policy rate may end up at 1%, but the effective interbank rate has been trading well below the official policy rate in recent weeks so a policy rate of 1% could translate into an effective interbank rate of nearly zero). Likewise for fiscal deficits – they are rising globally and headed higher, propelled by a combination of discretionary actions and automatic stabilisers.

To date, however, these traditional policies have been insufficient for the scale and scope of the task. Recall that the Obama stimulus package is actually the second such US effort in the last 12 months. The 2008 edition was deemed to be a failure because a big chunk of the rebate checks were saved or used to pay down debt and not spent. The Obama package includes tax cuts and credits that will provide a boost to disposable income, but how much of these will be spent rather than saved or used to pay down debt? The package also includes a substantial increase in infrastructure spending, as well as transfers to the states, but the infrastructure spending is back-loaded to 2010 and later, and the transfers to states will most likely just enable states to maintain public employment, not expand it appreciably.

A lot of bucks, but how much bang? | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

Related articles by Zemanta

• Book reviews: Baker's "Plunder and Blunder," Akerlof's and Shiller's "Animal Spirits" (dailykos.com)
• How To Spend (and Not Spend) One Trillion Dollars (time.com)