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The Marie Antoinette Rule
The biggest surprise of the day on Tuesday did not come from new Fed Chairman Janet Yellen, nor from the fact that she didn’t offer dovish surprises. Many observers had expected that after a mildly weak recent equity market and slightly soft Employment data, Yellen (who has historically been, admittedly, quite a dove) would hold out the chance that the “taper” may be delayed. But actually, she seemed to suggest that nothing has changed about the plan to incrementally taper Fed purchases of Treasuries and mortgages. I had thought that would be the likely outcome, and said so yesterday when I supposed “she will be reluctant to be a dove right out of the gate.”
The surprise came in the market reaction. Since there had been no other major (equity) bullish influences over the last week, I assumed that the stock market rally had been predicated on the presumption that Yellen would give some solace to the bulls. When she did not, I thought stocks would have difficulty – and on that, I was utterly wrong. Now, whether that means the market thinks Yellen is lying, or whether there is some other reason stocks are rallying, or whether they are rallying for no reason whatsoever, I haven’t a clue.
I do know though that the DJ-UBS commodity index reached its highest closing level in five months, and that commodities are still comfortably ahead of stocks in 2014 even with this latest equity rally. This rally has been driven by energy and livestock, with some precious metals improvements thrown in. So, lest we be tempted to say that the rally in commodities is confirming some underlying economic strength, reflect that industrial metals remain near 5-year lows (see chart, source Bloomberg, of the DJUBS Industrial Metals Subindex).
One of the reasons I write these articles is to get feedback from readers, who forward me all sorts of articles and observations related to inflation. Even though I have access to many of these same sources, I don’t always see every article, so it’s helpful to get a heads up this way. A case in point is the article that was on Business Insider yesterday, detailing another quirky inflation-related report from Goldman Sachs.http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-fed-should-target-wage-growth-2014-2
Now, I really like much of what Jan Hatzius does, but on inflation the economics team at Goldman is basically adrift. It may be that the author of this article doesn’t have the correct story, but if he does then here is the basic argument from Goldman: the Fed shouldn’t target inflation or employment, but rather on wage growth, because wage growth is a better measure of the “employment gap” and will tie unemployment and inflation together better.
The reason the economists need to make this argument is because “price inflation is not very responsive to the employment gap at low levels of inflation,” which is a point I have made often and most recently in my December “re-blog” series.
But, as has happened so often with Goldman’s economists when it comes to inflation, they take a perfectly reasonable observation and draw a nonsensical conclusion from it. The obvious conclusion, given the absolute failure of the “employment gap” to forecast core price inflation over the last five years, is that the employment gap and price inflation are not particularly related. The experimental evidence of that period makes the argument that they are – which is a perversion of Phillips’ original argument, which related wages and unemployment – extremely difficult to support. Hatzius et. al. clearly now recognize this, but they draw the wrong conclusion.
There is no need to tie unemployment and inflation together …unless you are a member of the bow-tied set, and really need to calibrate parameters for the Taylor Rule. So it isn’t at all a concern that they aren’t, unless you really want your employment gap models to spit out useful forecasts. Okay, so if you can’t forecast prices, then use the same models and call it a wage forecast!
But the absurdity goes a bit farther. By suggesting that the Fed set policy on the basis of wage inflation, these economists are proposing a truly abhorrent policy of raising interest rates simply because people are making more money. Wage inflation is a good thing; end product price inflation is a bad thing. Under the Goldman rule, if wages were rising smartly but price inflation was subdued, then the Fed should tighten. But why tighten just because real wages are increasing at a solid pace? That is, after all, one of society’s goals! If the real wage increase came about because of an increase in productivity, or because of a decrease in labor supply, then it does not call for a tightening of monetary policy. In such cases, it is eminently reasonable that laborers take home a larger share of the real gains from manufacture and trade.
On the other hand, if low nominal wage growth was coupled with high price inflation, the Goldman rule would call for an easing of monetary policy…even though that would tend to increase price inflation while doing nothing for wages. In short, the Goldman rule should probably be called the Marie Antoinette rule. It will tend to beat down wage earners.
Whether or not the Goldman rule is an improvement over the Taylor Rule is not necessarily the right question either, because the Taylor Rule is not the right policy rule to begin with. Returning to the prior point: the employment gap has not demonstrated any useful predictive ability regarding inflation. Moreover, monetary policy has demonstrated almost no ability to make any impact on the unemployment rate. The correct conclusion here is a policy rule should not have an employment gap term. The Federal Reserve should be driven by prospective changes in the aggregate price level, which are in turn driven in the long run almost entirely by changes in the supply of money. So it isn’t surprising that the Goldman rule can improve on the Taylor rule – there are a huge number of rules that would do so.
Two Types of People?
Investors have learned the same wrong lessons over the last couple of years that they learned in the run-up to 2000, evidently. I remember that in the latter part of 1999, every mild equity market setback was met immediately with buying – the thought was that you had to jump quickly on the train before it left the station again. There was no thought about whether the bounce was real, or whether it “made sense”; for quite a number of them in a row, the bounce was absolutely real and the train really did leave the station.
Then, the train reached the end of the line and rolled backwards down the mountain, gathering speed and making it very difficult to jump off. I remember getting a call from my broker at the time, recommending Lucent at around $45 – quite the discount from the $64 high. I noted that I was a value investor and I didn’t see value in that stock, and to not call me again until he had a decent value idea. He next called with a recommendation later that year, with a stock that had just hit $30…a real bargain! And, as it turned out, that stock was also Lucent. The lesson he had learned was that any stock at a discount from the highs was a “value” stock. (Lucent ended up bottoming at about $0.55 in late 2002 and was eventually acquired by Alcatel in 2006).
This lesson appears to have been learned as well. On Thursday and Friday a furious rally took stocks up, erasing a week and a half of decline. This happened despite the fact that Friday’s Employment number was just about the worst possible number for equities: weak enough to indicate that the December figure was not just about seasonal adjustment, but represented real weakness, but nowhere near weak enough to influence the Federal Reserve to consider pausing the recent taper. We will confirm this fact tomorrow, before the market open, when new Fed Chairman Janet Yellen delivers the Monetary Policy Report (neé Humphrey-Hawkins) testimony to the House Financial Services Committee (her comments to be released at 8:30ET). While I believe that Yellen will be very reluctant to raise rates any time soon, and likely will seize on signs of recession to stop the taper in its tracks, she will be reluctant to be a dove right out of the gate.
And that might upset the apple cart tomorrow, if I’m right.
I have been fairly clear recently that I see a fairly significant risk of market volatility to come, both on the fixed-income side but especially on the equity side. I think stocks are substantially overvalued and could fall markedly even without any important change in the underlying economic dynamics. But there is actually good news which should be considered along with that fact: when markets were last egregiously overpriced, financial institutions were also substantially more-levered than they are today. The chart below (source: Federal Reserve) shows that as a percentage of GDP, domestic financial institutions are about one third less levered than they were at the 2008 peak.
Now, this exaggerates the deleveraging to some extent – households, for example, appear to have deleveraged by about 20% on this chart, but the actual nominal amount of debt outstanding has only declined from about $14 trillion to about $13.1 trillion. Corporate entities have actually put on more debt (which made sense for a while but probably doesn’t now that equity is so highly valued relative to earnings), but in terms of a percentage of GDP they are at least not any more levered than they were in 2008.
The implication of this fact is some rare good news: since the banking system has led the deleveraging, the systemic risk that could follow on the heels of a significant market decline is likely to be much less, at least among U.S. domestic financial institutions. So, in principal, while it was clear that a decline in equity and real estate prices in 2007-2008 would eventually cause damage to the real economy as the financial damage was amplified through the financial system, this is less true today. We can, in other words, have some reasonable market movements without having that automatically lead to recession. The direct wealth effect of equity price movements is very small, on the order of a couple of percent. It’s the indirect effects that we have to worry about, and the good news is that those indirect effects are smaller now – although I wouldn’t say those risks are absent.
Now for the bad news. The bad news is that significant market volatility – say, a 50% decline in stock prices – would likely be met with “help” from the federal government and monetary authorities. It is that help which likely would hurt the economy by increasing business uncertainty further. It is probably not a coincidence that the last couple of months, which correspond to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, have led to some weaker growth figures. Whether change is perceived as positive or negative, it’s the constant changing of the rules – and especially now that these rules are increasingly changed by executive fiat without the moderating influence of Congress (I never thought I would write that) – that damages business confidence.
In other words, I wouldn’t be concerned about the direct economic effect of a 50% decline in equity prices; but I would be concerned if such a decline led to meddling from the Fed, the Congress, or the White House.
While investors learned the hard lessons after 2000 and 2008 about the wisdom of automatically buying dips, they eventually forgot those lessons. But that makes them almost infinitely smarter than policymakers, who have refused to learn the obvious lesson of the last few years: your ministrations do little to help, and most likely hurt. So, maybe it really is true that there are two types of people: those who listen to everybody, and those who listen to nobody. The former become investors, and the latter enter government service!
