Macroeconomic Resilience

The conventional cure for insufficient aggregate demand and the one that has been preferred throughout the Great Moderation is monetary easing. The argument goes that lower real rates, higher inflation and higher asset prices will increase investment via Tobin’s Q and increase consumption via the wealth effect and reduction in rewards to savings, all bound together in the virtuous cycle of the multiplier. As I discussed in a previous post, QE2 and now Operation Twist are not as unconventional as they seem. They simply apply the logic of interest rate cuts to the entire yield curve rather than restricting central bank interventions to the short-end of the curve as was the norm during the Great Moderation.

But despite asset prices and corporate profits having rebounded significantly from their crisis lows and real rates now negative till the 10y tenor in the United States, a rebound in investment or consumption has not been forthcoming in the current recovery. This lack of responsiveness of aggregate demand to monetary policy is not as surprising as it first seems:

• The responsiveness of consumption to monetary policy is diminished when the consumer is as over-levered as he currently is. The “success” of monetary policy during the Great Moderation was primarily due to consumers’ ability to lever up to maintain consumption growth in the absence of any tangible real wage growth.
• The empirical support for the impact of real rates and asset prices on investment is inconclusive. Drawing on Keynes’ emphasis on the uncertain nature of investment decisions, Shackle was skeptical about the impact of lower interest rates in stimulating business investment. He noted that businessmen when asked rarely noted at the level of interest rates as a critical determinant. In an uncertain environment, estimated profits “must greatly exceed the cost of borrowing if the investment in question is to be made”.

If the problem with reduced real rates was simply that they were likely to be ineffective, there could still be a case for pursuing monetary policy initiatives aimed at reducing real rates. One could argue that even a small positive effect is better than not trying anything. But this unfortunately is not the case. There is ample reason to believe that reduced real rates across the curve have perverse and counterproductive effects, especially when real rates are pushed to negative levels:

• Prolonged periods of negative real rates may trigger increased savings and reduced consumption in an attempt to reach fixed real savings goals in the future, a tendency that may be exacerbated in an ageing population saving for retirement in an era where defined-benefit pensions have disappeared. An investor in a defined-contribution pension plan is unlikely to react to the absence of a truly risk-free investment alternative by taking on more risk or consuming more.
• One of the arguments for how a program such as Operation Twist can provide economic stimulus is summarised here by Brad DeLong: “such policies work, to the extent that they work, by taking duration and other forms of risk onto the government’s balance sheet, leaving the private sector with extra risk-bearing capacity that it can then use to extend loans to risky private borrowers.” But duration is not a risk to a pension fund or life insurer, it is a hedge – one that it cannot shift out of in any meaningful manner without taking on other risks (equity,credit) in the process.
• The ability of incumbent firms to hold their powder dry and hold cash as a defence against disruptively innovative threats is in fact enhanced by policies like ‘Operation Twist’ that flatten the yield curve. Firms find it worthwhile to issue bonds and hold cash due to the low negative carry of doing so when the yield curve is flat, a phenomenon that is responsible for the paradox of high corporate cash balances combined with simultaneous debt issuance.

There is an obvious monetarist objection to this post and to my previous post. Despite the fact that the Fed also views its actions as providing stimulus via “downward pressure on longer-term interest rates”, monetarists view this interest-rate view of monetary policy as fundamentally flawed. So why this interest rate approach rather than the monetarist money supply approach? In my opinion, the modern economy resembles a Wicksellian pure credit economy, a point that Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat have made in a recent paper who point out that

The amount of cash holdings by the public, one form of outside money, is purely demand-determined; as such, it provides no external anchor. And banks’ reserves with the central bank – the other component of outside money – cannot provide an anchor either: Contrary to what is often believed, they do not constrain the amount of inside credit creation. Indeed, in a number of banking systems under normal conditions they are effectively zero, regardless of the level of the interest rate. Critically, the existence of a demand for banks’ reserves, arising from the need to settle transactions, is essential for the central bank to be able to set interest rates, by exploiting its monopoly over their supply. But that is where their role ends. The ultimate constraint on credit creation is the short-term rate set by the central bank and the reaction function that describes how this institution decides to set policy rates in response to economic developments.

In a typically perceptive note written more than a decade ago, Axel Leijonhufvud mapped out and anticipated the evolution of the US monetary system into a pure credit economy during the 20th century:

The situation that Wicksell saw himself as confronting, therefore, was the following. The Quantity Theory was the only monetary theory with any claim to scientific status. But it left out the influence on the price level of credit-financed demand. This omission had become a steadily more serious deficiency with time as the evolution of both “simple” (trade) and “organized” (bank-intermediated) credit practices reduced the role of metallic money in the economy. The issue of small denomination notes had displaced gold coin from circulation and almost all business transactions were settled by check or by giro; the resulting transfers on the books of banks did not involve “money” at all. The famous model of the pure credit economy, which everyone remembers as the original theoretical contribution of Geldzins und Giiterpreise, dealt with the hypothetical limiting case to this historical-evolutionary process……Wicksell’s “Day of Judgment” (if we may call it that) when the real demand for the reserve medium would shrink to epsilon was greatly postponed by regime changes already introduced before or shortly after his death. In particular, governments moved to monopolize the note issue and to impose reserve requirements on banks. The control over the banking system’s total liabilities that the monetary authorities gained in this way greatly reduced the potential for the kind of instability that preoccupied Wicksell. It also gave the Quantity Theory a new lease of life, particularly in the United States.
But although Judgment Day was postponed it was not cancelled….The monetary anchors on which 20th century central bank operating doctrines have relied are giving way. Technical developments are driving the process on two fronts. First, “smart cards” are circumventing the governmental note monopoly; the private sector is reentering the business of supplying currency. Second, banks are under increasing competitive pressure from nonbank financial institutions providing innovative payment or liquidity services; reserve requirements have become a discriminatory tax on banks that handicap them in this competition. The pressure to eliminate reserve requirements is consequently mounting.

Leijonhufvud’s account touches on a topic that is almost always left out in debates on the matter – the assertion that we are in a credit economy is not theoretical, it is empirical. In the environment immediately after WW2, reserves were most certainly a limitation on bank credit. But banks gradually “innovated” their way out of almost all restrictions that central banks and regulators could throw at them. The dominance of shadow-money in our current economic system is a culmination of a long series of bank “innovations” such as the Fed Funds market and the Eurodollar bond market.

As Borio and Disyatat note, in such a credit economy, “through the creation of deposits associated with credit expansion, banks can grant nominal purchasing power without reducing it for other agents in the economy. The banking system can both expand total nominal purchasing power and allocate it at terms different from those associated with full-employment saving-investment equilibrium. In the process, the system is able to stabilise interest rates at an arbitrary level. The quantity of credit adjusts to accommodate the demand at the prevailing interest rate.” In such a economy, the conventional savings-investment framework has very little to say about either market interest rates or the abrupt breakdown in financing that characterises the Minsky Moment. The notion that our economic malaise can be cured by solving the problem of “excess savings” is therefore invalid. In Borio and Disyatat’s words, “Investment, and expenditures more generally, require financing, not saving.” A flatter yield curve therefore encourages incumbent firms to monopolise the limited financing/risk-taking capacity of the system (limited typically by bank capital) simply to increase cash holdings and in effect crowding out small firms and new entrants.

The problem in a credit economy is not so much excess savings but as Borio and Disyatat put it, excess elasticity. Elasticity is defined as

the degree to which the monetary and financial regimes constrain the credit creation process, and the availability of external funding more generally. Weak constraints imply a high elasticity. A high elasticity can facilitate expenditures and production, much like a rubber band that stretches easily. But by the same token it can also accommodate the build-up of financial imbalances, whenever economic agents are not perfectly informed and their incentives are not aligned with the public good (“externalities”). The band stretches too far, and at some point inevitably snaps….In other words, to reduce the likelihood and severity of financial crises, the main policy issue is how to address the “excess elasticity” of the overall system, not “excess saving” in some jurisdictions.

If our financial system is a rubber band, the long arc of monetary system evolution from a metallic standard to a credit economy via the Bretton Woods regime has been largely a process of increasing the elasticity of this rubber band (excepting the period of financial repression post-WW2 when the trend reversed temporarily). Snap-backs are inevitable – the question is simply whether the snap-backs are “normal” or catastrophic. What is commonly referred to as the ‘Minsky Moment’ is the almost instantaneous process of the elastic snapping back. As Minsky has documented, the history of macroeconomic interventions post-WW2 has been the history of prevention of even the smallest snap-backs that are inherent to the process of creative destruction. The result is our current financial system which is as taut as it can be, in a state of fragility where any snap-back will be catastrophic.

The natural fix for the system as I have outlined is to allow small pull-backs and disturbances to play themselves out. But we have evolved far past the point where the system can be allowed to fail without any compensating actions. Just like in a forest where fire has been suppressed for too long or a river where floods have been avoided, it is not an option to let nature take its course.

So is there no way out that does not involve a deflationary collapse of the economy? I argue that there is but that this requires a radical change in focus. The deflationary collapse of the current shadow money and credit superstructure and correspondingly much of the incumbent corporate structure adapted to this “taut rubber-band” is inevitable and if anything needs to be encouraged and accelerated. But this does not imply that the macroeconomy should suffer from a deflationary contraction. The effects of this snap-back can be mitigated in a simple and effective manner with a system of direct transfers to individuals as Steve Waldman has outlined. In fact, it is the deflationary collapse of the incumbent system that provides the leeway for significant fiscal intervention to be undertaken without sacrificing the central bank’s inflation targets. This solution also has the benefit of reversing the flow of rents that have exacerbated inequality over the past few decades, as well as tackling the cronyism and demosclerosis that is crippling our system today. Of course, the collapse of incumbent crony interests inherent to this policy approach means that it will not be implemented anytime soon.

Note: hat tip to Yves Smith and Andrew Dittmer for directing me to the Borio-Disyatat paper.

It is widely accepted that in times of financial crisis, central banks should follow Bagehot’s rule which can be summarised as: “Lend without limit, to solvent firms, against good collateral, at ‘high rates’.” However, as I noted a few months ago, the Fed and the ECB seem to be following quite a different rule which is best summarised as: “Lend freely even on junk collateral at ‘low rates’.”

The Fed’s response to allegations that they went beyond their mandate for liquidity provision is instructive. In the Fed’s eyes, the absence of credit losses signifies that the collateral was sound and the fact that nearly all the programs have now closed illustrates that the rate charged was clearly at a premium to ‘normal rates’. This argument gives the Fed a significant amount of flexibility as a rate that is at a premium to ‘normal rates’ can still quite easily be a bargain when offered in times of crisis. Nevertheless, the Fed can point to the absence of losses and claim that it only provided liquidity support. The absence of losses is also used to refute the claim that these programs create moral hazard. However, both these arguments ignore the fact that the creditworthiness of assets and the solvency of the banking system cannot be separated from the central banks’ actions during a crisis. As the Fed’s Brian Madigan notes: “In a crisis, the solvency of firms may be uncertain and even dependent on central bank actions.”

However, the Fed’s response does highlight just how important it is to any central bank that it avoid losses on its liquidity programs – not so much to avoid moral hazard but out of simple self-interest. If a central bank exposes itself to significant losses, it runs a significant reputational and political risk. Given the criticism that central banks receive even for programs which do not lose any money, it is quite conceivable that significant losses may even lead to a reduction in their independent powers. Whether or not these losses have any ‘real’ relevance in a fiat-currency economic system, they are undoubtedly relevant in a political context. The interaction of the central bank’s desire to avoid losses and its ability to influence asset prices and bank solvency has some important implications for its liquidity policy choices – In a nutshell, the central bank strongly prefers to backstop assets whose valuation is largely dependent on “macro” systemic risks. Also, when it embarks upon a program of liquidity provision it will either limit itself to extremely high-quality assets or it will backstop the entire spectrum of risky assets from high-grade to junk. It will not choose an intermediate threshold for its intervention.

The first point is easily explained – by choosing to backstop ‘macro’ assets whose prices and performance are strongly reflexive with respect to credit availability, the program minimises the probability of loss. For example, a decision to backstop housing loans has a significant impact on loan-flow and the ‘real’ housing market. A decision to backstop small-business loans on the other hand can only have a limited impact on the realised business outcomes experienced by small businesses given the idiosyncratic risk inherent in them. The negatively skewed payoff profile of such loans combined with their largely ‘macro’ risk profile makes them the ideal candidates for such programs – such assets are exposed to a tail risk of significant losses in the event of macroeconomic distress, which is the exact scenario that central banks are mandated to mitigate against. The coincidence of such distress with deflationary forces enables central banks to eliminate losses on these assets without risking any overshooting of its inflation mandate. This also explains why central banks are reluctant to explicitly backstop equities even at the index level – the less skewed risk profile of equities means that the risk of losses is impossible to reduce to an acceptable level.

The second point is less obvious – If the central bank can restrict itself to backstopping just extremely low-risk bonds and loans, it will do so. But in most crises, this is rarely enough. At the very least, the central bank is required to backstop average-quality assets which is where the impact of uncertainty is greatest and the line between solvency and liquidity risk is blurriest. But this is not the strategy that minimises the risk of losses to the central bank. The impact on the system from the contagious ripple effects of the losses incurred on the junk assets can cause moderate losses on higher-quality assets. This incentivises the Fed to go far beyond the level of commitment that may be optimal for the economy and backstop almost the entire sphere of “macro” assets even if many of them are junk. In other words, it is precisely the desire of the Fed to avoid any losses that incentivised it to expand the scope of its liquidity programs to as large a scale and scope as it did during the crisis.

These preferences of the central bank have implications for the portfolios that banks will choose to hold – banks will prefer ‘macro’ assets without excessive micro risk as these assets are more likely to be backstopped by the central bank during the crisis. This biases bank portfolios and lending towards large corporations, housing etc. and against small business loans and other idiosyncratic risks. The system also becomes less diverse and more highly correlated. The problem of homogeneity and inordinately high correlation is baked into the structural logic of a stabilised financial system. Such a system also carries a higher risk of asset price bubbles – it may be more ‘rational’ for a bank to hold an overpriced ‘macro’ asset and follow the herd than to invest in an underpriced ‘micro’ asset. Douglas Diamond and Raghuram Rajan identified the damaging effects of the implicit commitment by central banks to reduce rates when liquidity is at a premium: “If the authorities are expected to reduce interest rates when liquidity is at a premium, borrowers will take on more short-term leverage or invest in more illiquid projects, thus bringing about the very states where intervention is needed, even if they would not do so in the absence of intervention.” Similarly, the incentives of the central bank to avoid losses at all costs perversely end up making the financial system less diverse and fragile.

When viewed under this logic, the ECB’s actions also start to make sense and criticisms of its lack of courage seem misguided. In terms of liquidity support extended, the ECB has been at least as aggressive as the Fed. in fact, in terms of the risk of losses that it has chosen to bear, the ECB has been far more aggressive. Despite the losses it faces on its Greek debt holdings,it has nearly doubled its peripheral government bond holdings in recent times. This is despite the fact that the ECB runs a significant risk of losses on its government bond holdings in the absence of massive fiscal transfers from the core to the periphery, a policy for which there is little public or political appetite.

The ECB’s desire for the EFSF to take over the task of backstopping the periphery simply highlights the reality that the task is more fiscal than monetary in nature. Relying on the ECB to pick up the slack rather than constructing the fiscal solution also exacerbates the democratic deficit that is crippling the Eurozone. The ECB is not the first central bank that has pleaded to be relieved of duties that belong to the fiscal domain. Various Fed officials have made the same point regarding the Fed’s credit policies – drawing on Marvin Goodfriend’s research, Charles Plosser summarises this view as follows: “the Fed and the Treasury should agree that the Treasury will take the non-Treasury assets and non-discount window loans from the Fed’s balance sheet in exchange for Treasury securities. Such a new ”accord“ would transfer funding for these special credit programs to the Treasury — which would issue Treasury securities to fund the transfer — thus ensuring that these extraordinary credit policies are under the oversight of the fiscal authority, where such policies rightfully belong.” Of course, the incentives of the government are to preserve the status quo – what better than to let the central bank do the dirty work as well as reserving the right to criticise it for doing so!

This highlights a point that often gets lost in the monetary vs fiscal policy debate. Much of what has been implemented as monetary policy in recent times is not only not ‘neutral’ but is regressive in its distributional effects. In the current paradigm of central bank policy during crises, systemic fragility and inequality is an inescapable structural problem. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to construct a fiscal policy that is close to neutral e.g. Steve Waldman’s excellent idea of simple direct transfers to individuals.

In an earlier post, I compared Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis with Buzz Holling’s work on ecological resilience and briefly touched upon the consequences of wildfire suppression as an example of the resilience-stability tradeoff. This post expands upon the lessons we can learn from the history of fire suppression and its impact on the forest ecosystem in the United States and draws some parallels between the theory and history of forest fire management and macroeconomic management.

Origins of Stabilisation as the Primary Policy Objective and Initial Ease of Implementation

The impetus for both fire suppression and macroeconomic stabilisation came from a crisis. In economics, this crisis was the Great Depression which highlighted the need for stabilising fiscal and monetary policy during a crisis. Out of all the initiatives, the most crucial from a systems viewpoint was the expansion of lender-of-last-resort operations and bank bailouts which tried to eliminate all disturbances at their source. In Minsky’s words: “The need for lender-of-Iast-resort operations will often occur before income falls steeply and before the well nigh automatic income and financial stabilizing effects of Big Government come into play.” (Stabilizing an Unstable Economy pg 46)

SImilarly, the battle for complete fire suppression was won after the Great Idaho Fires of 1910. “The Great Idaho Fires of August 1910 were a defining event for fire policy and management, indeed for the policy and management of all natural resources in the United States. Often called the Big Blowup, the complex of fires consumed 3 million acres of valuable timber in northern Idaho and western Montana…..The battle cry of foresters and philosophers that year was simple and compelling: fires are evil, and they must be banished from the earth. The federal Weeks Act, which had been stalled in Congress for years, passed in February 1911. This law drastically expanded the Forest Service and established cooperative federal-state programs in fire control. It marked the beginning of federal fire-suppression efforts and effectively brought an end to light burning practices across most of the country. The prompt suppression of wildland fires by government agencies became a national paradigm and a national policy” (Sara Jensen and Guy McPherson). In 1935, the Forest Service implemented the ‘10 AM policy’, a goal to extinguish every new fire by 10 AM the day after it was reported.

In both cases, the trauma of a catastrophic disaster triggered a new policy that would try to stamp out all disturbances at the source, no matter how small. This policy also had the benefit of initially being easy to implement and cheap. In the case of wildfires, “the 10 am policy, which guided Forest Service wildfire suppression until the mid 1970s, made sense in the short term, as wildfires are much easier and cheaper to suppress when they are small. Consider that, on average, 98.9% of wildfires on public land in the US are suppressed before they exceed 120 ha, but fires larger than that account for 97.5% of all suppression costs” (Donovan and Brown). As Minsky notes, macroeconomic stability was helped significantly by the deleveraged nature of the American economy from the end of WW2 till the 1960s. Even in interventions by the Federal Reserve in the late 60s and 70s, the amount of resources needed to shore up the system was limited.

Consequences of Stabilisation

Wildfire suppression in forests that are otherwise adapted to regular, low-intensity fires (e.g. understory fire regimes) causes the forest to become more fragile and susceptible to a catastrophic fire. As Holling and Meffe note, “fire suppression in systems that would frequently experience low-intensity fires results in the systems becoming severely affected by the huge fires that finally erupt; that is, the systems are not resilient to the major fires that occur with large fuel loads and may fundamentally change state after the fire”. This increased fragility arises from a few distinct patterns and mechanisms:

Increased Fuel Load: Just like channelisation of a river results in increased silt load within the river banks, the absence of fires leads to a fuel buildup thus making the eventual fire that much more severe. In Minskyian terms, this is analogous to the buildup of leverage and ‘Ponzi finance’ within the economic system.

Change in Species Composition: Species compositions inevitably shift towards less fire resistant trees when fires are suppressed (Allen et al 2002). In an economic system, it is not simply that ‘Ponzi finance’ players thrive but that more prudently financed actors get outcompeted in the cycle. This has critical implications for the ability of the system to recover after the fire. This is an important problem in the financial sector where as Richard Fisher observed, “more prudent and better-managed banks have been denied the market share that would have been theirs if mismanaged big banks had been allowed to go out of business”.

Reduction in Diversity: As I mentioned here, “In an environment free of disturbances, diversity of competing strategies must reduce dramatically as the optimal strategy will outcompete all others. In fact, disturbances are a key reason why competitive exclusion is rarely observed in ecosystems”. Contrary to popular opinion, the post-disturbance environment is incredibly productive and diverse. Even after a fire as severe as the Yellowstone fires of 1988, the regeneration of the system was swift and effective as the ecosystem was historically adapted to such severe fires.

Increased Connectivity: This is the least appreciated impact of eliminating all disturbances in a complex adaptive system. Disturbances perform a critical role by breaking connections within a network. Frequent forest fires result in a “patchy” modularised forest where no one fire can cause catastrophic damage. As Thomas Bonnicksen notes: “Fire seldom spread over vast areas in historic forests because meadows, and patches of young trees and open patches of old trees were difficult to burn and forced fires to drop to the ground…..Unlike the popular idealized image of historic forests, which depicts old trees spread like a blanket over the landscape, a real historic forest was patchy. It looked more like a quilt than a blanket. It was a mosaic of patches. Each patch consisted of a group of trees of about the same age, some young patches, some old patches, or meadows depending on how many years passed since fire created a new opening where they could grow. The variety of patches in historic forests helped to contain hot fires. Most patches of young trees, and old trees with little underneath did not burn well and served as firebreaks. Still, chance led to fires skipping some patches. So, fuel built up and the next fire burned a few of them while doing little harm to the rest of the forest”. Suppressing forest fires converts the forest into one connected whole, at risk of complete destruction from the eventual fire that cannot be suppressed.

In the absence of disturbances, connectivity builds up within the network, both within and between scales. Increased within-scale connectivity increases the severity but between-scale connectivity increases the probability of a disturbance at a lower level propagating up to higher levels and causing systemic collapse. Fire suppression in forests adapted to frequent undergrowth fires can cause an accumulation of ladder fuels which connect the undergrowth to the crown of the forest. The eventual undergrowth ignition then risks a crown fire by a process known as “torching”. Unlike understory fires, crown fires can spread across firebreaks such as rivers by a process known as “spotting” where the wind carries burning embers through the air – the fire can spread in this manner even without direct connectivity. Such fires can easily cause systemic collapse and a state from which natural forces cannot regenerate the forest. In this manner, stabilisation can cause changes which cause a fundamental change in the nature of the system rather than simply an increased severity of disturbances. For example, “extensive stand-replacing fires are in many cases resulting in “type conversions” from ponderosa pine forest to other physiognomic types (for example, grassland or shrubland) that may be persistent for centuries or perhaps even millennia” (Allen 2007).

Long-Run Increase in Cost of Stabilisation and Area Burned: The initial low cost of suppression is short-lived and the cumulative effect of the fragilisation of the system has led to rapidly increasing costs of wildfire suppression and levels of area burned in the last three decades (Donovan and Brown 2007).

Dilemmas in the Management of a Stabilised System

In my post on river flood management, I claimed that managing a stabilised and fragile system is “akin to choosing between the frying pan and the fire”. This has been the case in many forests around the United States for the last few decades and is the condition into which the economies of the developed world are heading into. Once the forest ecosystem has become fragile, the resultant large fire exacerbates the problem thus triggering a vicious cycle. As Thomas Bonnicksen observed, “monster fires create even bigger monsters. Huge blocks of seedlings that grow on burned areas become older and thicker at the same time. When it burns again, fire spreads farther and creates an even bigger block of fuel for the next fire. This cycle of monster fires has begun”. The system enters an “unending cycle of monster fires and blackened landscapes”.

Minsky of course understood this end-state very well: “The success of a high-private-investment strategy depends upon the continued growth of relative needs to validate private investment. It also requires that policy be directed to maintain and increase the quasi-rents earned by capital – i.e.,rentier and entrepreneurial income. But such high and increasing quasi-rents are particularly conducive to speculation, especially as these profits are presumably guaranteed by policy. The result is experimentation with liability structures that not only hypothecate increasing proportions of cash receipts but that also depend upon continuous refinancing of asset positions. A high-investment, high-profit strategy for full employment – even with the underpinning of an active fiscal policy and an aware Federal Reserve system – leads to an increasingly unstable financial system, and an increasingly unstable economic performance. Within a short span of time, the policy problem cycles among preventing a deep depression, getting a stagnant economy moving again, reining in an inflation, and offsetting a credit squeeze or crunch….As high investment and high profits depend upon and induce speculation with respect to liability structures, the expansions become increasingly difficult to control; the choice seems to become whether to accomodate to an increasing inflation or to induce a debt-deflation process that can lead to a serious depression”. (John Maynard Keynes pg163–164)

The evolution of the system means that turning back the clock to a previous era of stability is not an option. As Minsky observed in the context of our financial system, “the apparent stability and robustness of the financial system of the 1950s and early 1960s can now be viewed as an accident of history, which was due to the financial residue of World War 2 following fast upon a great depression”. Re-regulation is not enough because it cannot undo the damage done by decades of financial “innovation” in a manner that does not risk systemic collapse.

At the same time, simply allowing an excessively stabilised system to burn itself out is a recipe for disaster. For example, on the role that controlled burns could play in restoring America’s forests to a resilient state, Thomas Bonnicksen observed: “Prescribed fire would come closer than any tool toward mimicking the effects of the historic Indian and lightning fires that shaped most of America’s native forests. However, there are good reasons why it is declining in use rather than expanding. Most importantly, the fuel problem is so severe that we can no longer depend on prescribed fire to repair the damage caused by over a century of fire exclusion. Prescribed fire is ineffective and unsafe in such forests. It is ineffective because any fire that is hot enough to kill trees over three inches in diameter, which is too small to eliminate most fire hazards, has a high probability of becoming uncontrollable”. The same logic applies to a fragile economic system.

In future posts, I will examine potential policy options that can restore system resilience as well as expanding on implications of the above for macro-prudential regulation of the financial sector. I will also examine some simple network models to examine the problem in a more formal manner.

Update: corrected date of Idaho fires from 2010 to 1910 in para 3 thanks to Dean.

“The interaction between the market participants, and for that matter between the market participants and the regulators, is not a game, but a war.”

Rick Bookstaber recently compared the complexity of the financial marketplace to that observed in military warfare. Bookstaber focuses primarily on the interaction between market participants but as he mentions, the same analogy also holds for the interaction between market participants and the regulator. In this post, I analyse the role of the financial market regulator within this context. Bookstaber primarily draws upon the work of John Boyd but I will focus on Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’.

Much like John Boyd, Sun Tzu emphasised the role of deception in war: “All warfare is based on deception”. In the context of regulation, “deception” is best understood as the need for the regulator to be unpredictable. This is not uncommon in other war-like economic domains. Google, for example, must maintain the secrecy and ambiguity of its search algorithms in order to stay one step ahead of the SEO firms’ attempts to game them. An unpredictable regulator may seem like a crazy idea but in fact it is a well-researched option in the central banking policy arsenal. In a paper for the Federal Reserve bank of Richmond in 1999, Jeffrey Lacker and Marvin Goodfriend analysed the merits of a regulator adopting a stance of ‘constructive ambiguity’. They concluded that a stance of constructive ambiguity was unworkable and could not prevent the moral hazard that arose from the central bank’s commitment to backstop banks in times of crisis. The reasoning was simple: constructive ambiguity is not time-consistent. As Lacker and Goodfriend note: “The problem with adding variability to central bank lending policy is that the central bank would have trouble sticking to it, for the same reason that central banks tend to overextend lending to begin with. An announced policy of constructive ambiguity does nothing to alter the ex post incentives that cause central banks to lend in the first place. In any particular instance the central bank would want to ignore the spin of the wheel.” Steve Waldman summed up the time-consistency problem in regulation well when he noted: “Given the discretion to do so, financial regulators will always do the wrong thing.” In fact, Lacker has argued that it was this stance of constructive ambiguity combined with the creditor bailouts since Continental Illinois that the market understood to be an implicit commitment to bailout TBTF banks.

As is clear from the war analogy, a predictable adversary is easily defeated. This of course is why Goodhart’s Law is such a big problem in regulation. Lacker’s suggestion that the regulator follow a “simple decision rule” is fatally flawed for the same reason. Lacker also suggests that “legal constraints limiting policymakers’ actions” could be imposed to mitigate the moral hazard problem. But attempting to lay out a comprehensive list of constraints suffers from the same problem i.e. they can be easily circumvented by a determined regulator. If the relationship between a regulator and the regulated is akin to war, then so is the relationship between the rule-making legislative body and the regulator. Bank bailouts can and have been carried out over the last thirty years under many different guises: explicit creditor bailouts, asset backstops a la Bear Stearns, “liquidity” support via expanded and lenient collateral standards, interest rate cuts as a bank recapitalisation mechanism etc.

Bookstaber asserts quite rightly that the military analogy stems from a view of human rationality that is at odds with both neoclassical and behavioural economics, a point that Gerd Gigerenzer has repeatedly emphasised. Homo economicus relies on a strangely simplistic version of the ‘computational theory of the mind’ that assumes man to be an optimising computer. Behavioural economics then compares the reality of human rationality to this computational ideal and finds man to be an inferior version of a computer, riddled with biases and errors. As Gigerenzer has argued, many heuristics and biases that appear to be irrational or illogical are entirely rational responses to an uncertain world. But clearly deception and unpredictability go beyond simply substituting the rationality of homo economicus with simple heuristics. In the ‘Art of War’, Sun Tzu insists that a successful general must “respond to circumstances in an infinite variety of ways”. Each battle must be fought in its unique context and “when victory is won, one’s tactics are not repeated”. To Sun Tzu, the expert general must be “serene and inscrutable”. In one of the most fascinating passages in the book, he describes the actions and decisions of the expert general: “How subtle and insubstantial, that the expert leaves no trace. How divinely mysterious, that he is inaudible.”

As Robert Wilkinson notes, in order to make any sense of these comments, one needs to appreciate the Taoist underpinnings of the ‘Art of War’. The “infinite variety” of tactics is not the variety that comes from making decisions based on the “spin of a roulette wheel” that Goodfriend and Lacker take to provide constructive ambiguity. It comes from an appreciation of the unique context in which each situation is placed and the flexibility, adaptability and novelty required to succeed. The “inaudibility” refers to the inability to translate such expertise into rules, algorithms or even heuristics. The ‘Taoist adept’ relies on the same intuitive tacit understanding that lies at the heart of what Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus call “expert know-how”¹. In fact, rules and algorithms may paralyse the expert rather than aid him. Hubert/Stuart Dreyfus noticed of expert pilots that “rather  than  being  aware  that  they are  flying  an  airplane,  they  have  the  experience  that  they  are flying.  The  magnitude  and  importance  of  this  change  from  analytic  thought  to  intuitive  response  is  evident  to  any  expert pilot  who  has  had  the  experience  of  suddenly  reflecting  upon  what he is  doing,  with  an  accompanying  degradation  of  his  performance and  the  disconcerting  realization  that  rather  than  simply  flying, he  is  controlling  a  complicated  mechanism.” The same sentiment was expressed rather more succinctly by Laozi when he said:

“Having some knowledge
When walking the Great Tao
Only brings fear.”

I’m not suggesting that financial markets regulation would work well if only we could hire “expert” regulators. The regulatory capture and the revolving door between the government and Wall Street that is typical of late-stage Olsonian demosclerosis means that the real relationship between the regulator and the regulated is anything but adversarial. I’m simply asserting that there is no magical regulatory recipe or formula that will prevent Wall Street from gaming and arbitraging the system. This is the unresolvable tension in financial markets regulation: Discretionary policy falls prey to the time-consistency problem. The alternative, a systematic and predictable set of rules, is the worst possible way to fight a war.

1. This Taoist slant to Hubert Dreyfus’ work is not a coincidence. Dreyfus was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger who, although he never acknowledged it, was almost certainly influenced by Taoist thought [↩]

STABILITY AS THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF CRONY CAPITALISM

The core insight of the Minsky-Holling resilience framework is that stability and stabilisation breed fragility and loss of system resilience . TBTF protection and the moral hazard problem is best seen as a subset of the broader policy of stabilisation, of which policies such as the Greenspan Put are much more pervasive and dangerous.

By itself, stabilisation is not sufficient to cause cronyism and rent seeking. Once a system has undergone a period of stabilisation, the system manager is always tempted to prolong the stabilisation for fear of the short-term disruption or even collapse. However, not all crisis-mitigation strategies involve bailouts and transfers of wealth to the incumbent corporates. As Mancur Olson pointed out, society can confine its “distributional transfers to poor and unfortunate individuals” rather than bailing out incumbent firms and still hope to achieve the same results.

To fully explain the rise of crony capitalism, we need to combine the Minsky-Holling framework with Mancur Olson’s insight that extended periods of stability trigger a progressive increase in the power of special interests and rent-seeking activity. Olson also noted the self-preserving nature of this phenomenon.  Once rent-seeking has achieved sufficient scale, “distributional coalitions have the incentive and..the power to prevent changes that would deprive them of their enlarged share of the social output”.

SYSTEMIC IMPACT OF CRONY CAPITALISM

Crony capitalism results in a homogenous, tightly coupled and fragile macroeconomy. The key question is: Via which channels does this systemic malformation occur? As I have touched upon in some earlier posts [1,2], the systemic implications of crony capitalism arise from its negative impact on new firm entry. In the context of the exploration vs exploitation framework, absence of new firm entry tilts the system towards over-exploitation¹ .

Exploration vs Exploitation: The Importance of New Firm Entry in Sustaining Exploration

In a seminal article, James March distinguished between “the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties. Exploration includes things captured by terms such as search, variation, risk taking, experimentation, play, flexibility, discovery, innovation. Exploitation includes such things as refinement, choice, production, efficiency, selection, implementation, execution.” True innovation is an act of exploration under conditions of irreducible uncertainty whereas exploitation is an act of optimisation under a known distribution.

The assertion that dominant incumbent firms find it hard to sustain exploratory innovation is not a controversial one. I do not intend to reiterate the popular arguments in the management literature, many of which I explored in a previous post. Moreover, the argument presented here is more subtle: I do not claim that incumbents cannot explore effectively but simply that they can explore effectively only when pushed to do so by a constant stream of new entrants. This is of course the “invisible foot” argument of Joseph Berliner and Burton Klein for which the exploration-exploitation framework provides an intuitive and rigorous rationale.

Let us assume a scenario where the entry of new firms has slowed to a trickle, the sector is dominated by a few dominant incumbents and the S-curve of growth is about to enter its maturity/decline phase. To trigger off a new S-curve of growth, the incumbents need to explore. However, almost by definition, the odds that any given act of exploration will be successful is small. Moreover, the positive payoff from any exploratory search almost certainly lies far in the future. For an improbable shot at moving from a position of comfort to one of dominance in the distant future, an incumbent firm needs to divert resources from optimising and efficiency-increasing initiatives that will deliver predictable profits in the near future. Of course if a significant proportion of its competitors adopt an exploratory strategy, even an incumbent firm will be forced to follow suit for fear of loss of market share. But this critical mass of exploratory incumbents never comes about. In essence, the state where almost all incumbents are content to focus their energies on exploitation is a Nash equilibrium.

On the other hand, the incentives of any new entrant are almost entirely skewed in favour of exploratory strategies. Even an improbable shot at glory is enough to outweigh the minor consequences of failure² . It cannot be emphasised enough that this argument does not depend upon the irrationality of the entrant. The same incremental payoff that represents a minor improvement for the incumbent is a life-changing event for the entrepreneur. When there exists a critical mass of exploratory new entrants, the dominant incumbents are compelled to follow suit and the Nash equilibrium of the industry shifts towards the appropriate mix of exploitation and exploration.

The Crony Capitalist Boom-Bust Cycle: A Tradeoff between System Resilience and Full Employment

Due to insufficient exploratory innovation, a crony capitalist economy is not diverse enough. But this does not imply that the system is fragile either at firm/micro level or at the level of the macroeconomy. In the absence of any risk of being displaced by new entrants, incumbent firms can simply maintain significant financial slack³. If incumbents do maintain significant financial slack, sustainable full employment is impossible almost by definition.  However, full employment can be achieved temporarily in two ways: Either incumbent corporates can gradually give up their financial slack and lever up as the period of stability extends as Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) would predict, or the household or government sector can lever up to compensate for the slack held by the corporate sector.

Most developed economies went down the route of increased household and corporate leverage with the process aided and abetted by monetary and regulatory policy. But it is instructive that developing economies such as India faced exactly the same problem in their “crony socialist” days. In keeping with its ideological leanings pre-1990, India tackled the unemployment problem via increased government spending. Whatever the chosen solution, full employment is unsustainable in the long run unless the core problem of cronyism is tackled. The current over-leveraged state of the consumer in the developed world can be papered over by increased government spending but in the face of increased cronyism, it only kicks the can further down the road. Restoring corporate animal spirits depends upon corporate slack being utilised in exploratory investment, which as discussed above is inconsistent with a cronyist economy.

Micro-Fragility as the Key to a Resilient Macroeconomy and Sustainable Full Employment

At the appropriate mix of exploration and exploitation, individual incumbent and new entrant firms are both incredibly vulnerable. Most exploratory investments are destined to fail as are most firms, sooner or later. Yet due to the diversity of firm-level strategies, the macroeconomy of vulnerable firms is incredibly resilient. At the same time, the transfer of wealth from incumbent corporates to the household sector via reduced corporate slack and increased investment means that sustainable full employment can be achieved without undue leverage. The only question is whether we can break out of the Olsonian special interest trap without having to suffer a systemic collapse in the process.

1. It cannot be emphasized enough that absence of new firm entry is simply the channel through which crony capitalism malforms the macroeconomy. Therefore, attempts to artificially boost new firm entry are likely to fail unless they tackle the ultimate cause of the problem which is stabilisation [↩]
2. It is critical that the personal consequences of firm failure are minor for the entrepreneur – this is not the case for cultural and legal reasons in many countries around the world but is largely still true in the United States. [↩]
3. It could be argued that incumbents could follow this strategy even when new entrants threaten them. This strategy however has its limits – an extended period of standing on the sidelines of exploratory activity can degrade the ability of the incumbent to rejoin the fray. As Brian Loasby remarked : “For many years, Arnold Weinberg chose to build up GEC’s reserves against an uncertain technological future in the form of cash rather than by investing in the creation of technological capabilities of unknown value. This policy, one might suggest, appears much more attractive in a financial environment where technology can often be bought by buying companies than in one where the market for corporate control is more tightly constrained; but it must be remembered that some, perhaps substantial, technological capability is likely to be needed in order to judge what companies are worth acquiring, and to make effective use of the acquisitions. As so often, substitutes are also in part complements.” [↩]

In an earlier post, I drew an analogy between Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) and the ecologist Buzz Holling’s work on the resilience-stability tradeoff in ecosystems. Extended periods of stability reduce system resilience in complex adaptive systems such as ecologies and economies. By extension, policies that focus on stabilisation cause a loss of system resilience. Holling and Meffe called this the Pathology of Natural Resource Management which they described as follows: “when the range of natural variation in a system is reduced, the system loses resilience.That is, a system in which natural levels of variation have been reduced through command-and-control activities will be less resilient than an unaltered system when subsequently faced with external perturbations.” This pathology is as relevant to macroeconomic systems as it is to ecosystems and I briefly drew an analogy between forest fire management and economic management in the earlier post. In this post, I analyse the dilemmas faced in river flood management and their relevance to macroeconomic management.

A Case Study of River Flood Management: River Kosi

The Kosi is one of the most flood-prone rivers in India. The brunt of its fury is borne by the northern Indian state of Bihar and the Kosi is aptly also known as the “Sorrow of Bihar”. Like many other flood-prone rivers, the root cause lies in the extraordinary amount of silt that the Kosi carries from the Himalayas to the plains of Bihar. The silt deposition raises the river bed and gravity causes the river to seek out a new course – in this manner, it has been estimated that the river Kosi may have moved westwards by an incredible 210 km in the last 250 years. During the 1950s, in an effort to provide “permanent salvation from floods” the Indian government embarked on a program of building embankments on the river to curb the periodic shifting of the Kosi’s course – the embankments were aimed at converting the unpredictable behaviour of the river into something more predictable and by extension, more manageable. It was assumed that the people of Bihar would benefit from a stabilised and predictable river.

Unfortunately, the reality of the flood management program on the river Kosi has turned out to be anything but beneficial. The culmination of the failure of the program was the 2008 Bihar flood which was one of the most disastrous floods in the history of the state. So what went wrong? Was this just a result of an extraordinary natural event? Most certainly not – As Dinesh Mishra notes, in 2008 the Kosi carried only  1/7th of the capacity of the embankments and at various points of time since the 50s, the river had carried far greater quantities of water without causing anywhere near the damage it caused in 2008. This was a disaster caused by the loss of system resilience, highlighted by the inability of the system to “withstand even modest adverse shocks” after prolonged periods of stability.

So what caused this loss of system resilience? As Dinesh Mishra explains: “By building embankments on either side of a river and trying to confine it to its channel, its heavy silt and sand load is made to settle within the embanked area itself, raising the river bed and the flood water level. The embankments too are therefore raised progressively until a limit is reached when it is no longer possible to do so. The population of the surrounding areas is then at the mercy of an unstable river with a dangerous flood water level , which could any day flow over or make a disastrous breach.” As expected, the eventual breach was catastrophic – the course of the Kosi moved more than 120 kilometres eastwards in a matter of weeks. In the absence of the embankments, such a dramatic shift would have taken decades. With the passage of time, a progressively greater degree of resources were required to maintain system stability and the eventual failure was a catastrophic one rather than a moderate one.

As the above analysis highlights, the stabilisation did not merely substitute a series of regular moderately damaging outcomes for an occasional catastrophic outcome (although this alone would be a cause for concern if a catastrophic outcome was capable of triggering systemic collapse). In fact, the stabilisation transformed the system into a state where eventually even minor and frequently observed disturbances would trigger a catastrophic outcome. As Jon Stewart put it, even “regular storms” would topple a fragile boat. When faced with the possibility of a catastrophic outcome, the managing agency has two choices, neither of which are attractive.

Either it can continue to stabilise the system using ever-increasing resources in an effort to avoid the catastrophic outcome. But this option must only be followed if the managing agency has infinite resources or if there is some absolute limit to this vicious cycle of cost escalation that is within the resource capabilities of the agency. Or it can allow the catastrophic outcome to occur in an effort to restore the system to its unstabilised state. But this option risks systemic collapse – it is not just the unprecedented nature of the outcome that we have to fear from, but the very fact that the adaptive agents of the complex system may have lost the ability to deal with even the occasional moderate failures that the unstabilised system would throw up. In other words, once the system has lost resilience, managing it is akin to choosing between the frying pan and the fire.

For example, in the pre-embankment era when the Kosi was allowed to meander and change course in a natural manner, the villagers on its banks had a deep understanding of the river’s patterns and its vagaries. The floods sustained the fertility of the soil and ensured that groundwater resources were plentiful. This is not to deny that the Kosi caused damage but because the people had adapted to its regular flooding patterns, systemic damage only occured during the proverbial 100-year flood. This highlights an important lesson in complex adaptive systems: The impact of disturbances cannot be analysed in isolation to the adaptive capacities of the agents in the system. If disturbances are regular and predictable, agents will likely be adapted to them and conversely, prolonged periods of stability will render agents vulnerable to even the smallest disturbance.

The problems of managing floods on the river Kosi are not unique – many rivers around the world pose similar challenges. For example, the Yellow River, aptly named the “Sorrow of China” and the Mississippi river basin, the story of which was captured so well by John McPhee. So is there any way to avoid this evolutionary arms race against nature? Are we to conclude that the only sustainable strategy is to avoid any intervention in the complex adaptive system? Not necessarily - interventions on the system must avoid tampering with the fundamental patterns and evolutionary dynamics of the system. Indeed the best example of river management that works with the natural flow of the river rather than against it is the Dutch government’s aptly named “Room for the River” project in the Rhine river valley. Instead of building higher dikes, the Dutch have chosen to build lower dikes that allow the Rhine to flood over a larger area thus easing the pressure on the dike system as a whole. This program has been adopted despite the fact that many farmers need to be relocated out of the newly expanded flood zones of the river.

Macroeconomic Parallels

Axel Leijonhufvud’s “Corridor Hypothesis” postulates that a macroeconomy will adapt well to small shocks but “outside of a certain zone or “corridor” around its long-run growth path, it will only very sluggishly react to sufficiently large, infrequent shocks.” The adaptive nature of the macroeconomy implies that stability and by extension stabilisation reduces the width of the corridor to the point where even a small shock is enough to push the system outside the corridor. Just as embankments induced fragility in the river Kosi, bailouts and other economic transfers to specific firms and industries induce fragility into the macroeconomic system. Economic policy must allow the “river” of the macroeconomy to flow in a natural manner and restrict its interventions to insuring individual economic agents against the occasional severe flood.

This sentiment was also expressed by that great evolutionary macroeconomist of our time, Mancur Olson. In his final work “Power and Prosperity”, Olson notes: “subsidizing industries, firms and localities that lose money…at the expense of those that make money…is typically disastrous for the efficiency and dynamism of the economy, in a way that transfers unnecessarily to poor individuals…A society that does not shift resources from the losing activities to those that generate a social surplus is irrational, since it is throwing away useful resources in a way that ruins economic performance without the least assurance that it is helping individuals with low incomes. A rational and humane society, then, will confine its distributional transfers to poor and unfortunate individuals.” Olson understood the damage inflicted by rent-seeking not only from a systemic perspective but from a perspective of social justice. The logical consequence of micro-stabilisation is a crony capitalist economy - rents invariably flow to the strong and the result is a sluggish and an inegalitarian economic system, not unlike many developing economies. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not limiting handouts to the poor that defines a free and dynamic economy but limiting rents that flow to the privileged.

On the Damage Done by the Greenspan Put Variant of Monetary Policy

Clearly, some fiscal policies aimed at firm and industry stabilisation harm the economic system. But what about monetary policy? Isn’t monetary policy close-to-neutral and therefore exempt from the above criticism? On the contrary – the Greenspan Put variant of monetary policy damages macroeconomic resilience as well as being inegalitarian and unjust. Monetary policy during the Greenspan-Bernanke era has focused on stabilising incumbent banks and helping them shore up their capital in response to every economic shock, as well as a focus on asset prices as a transmission channel of monetary policy i.e. the Greenspan Put. Unlike a river system where the buildup of silt is a clear indicator of growing fragility, there are no clear signs of loss of system resilience in a macroeconomy. However, we can infer loss of macroeconomic resilience from the ever-increasing resources that are required to maintain system stability. Just as the embankments of the Kosi were raised higher and higher to combat even a minor flood, the resources needed to stabilise the financial system have grown over the last 25 years. In the early 90s, bank capital could be rebuilt by a few years of low rates but now we need a panoply of “liquidity” facilities, near-zero rates and quantitative easing aimed at compressing the entire yield curve to achieve the same result.

As I mentioned earlier, such a stabilisation policy may be credible if there is a limit to the costs of stabilisation. For example, the rents that can be extracted by any small, isolated sector of the economy are limited. Unfortunately, and this is a point that cannot be emphasised enough, there is no limit to the rents that can be extracted by the financial sector. Every commitment by the Central Bank to insure the financial sector against bad outcomes will be arbitraged for all its worth until the cost of maintaining the commitment becomes so prohibitive that it is no longer tenable. Of course, as long as the stabilising policy is in operation it appears to be a “free lunch” – the costs of programs such as the TARP appear to be limited and well worth their macroeconomic benefits just like flood protection appears to be a successful choice in the long period of calm before the eventual disaster. The loss of resilience and rent extraction is exacerbated as other financial market players are encouraged to mimic banks and take on similarly negatively skewed bets such as investing the proceeds from securities lending in “safe” assets.

In my last post, I noted the connection between inequality and rents emanating from the moral hazard subsidy but the larger culprit is the toxic combination of Greenspan Put monetary policy and a dynamically uncompetitive cronyist financial sector. Even if the sector were more competitive it is inevitable that monetary policy focused on shoring up asset prices will benefit the primary asset-holders in the economy, which in itself is a regressive transfer of wealth to the rich. The idea that supporting asset prices is the best way to support the wider economy is not far away from the notion of trickle-down economics (or as Will Rogers put it: “money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.”).

Finally, although it goes without saying that even a fiat currency-issuing central bank does not have infinite resources, the move over the last century from a gold standard to a fiat money regime does have some important implications for system resilience. In evolving from a decentralised gold standard monetary system to a fiat-currency issuing central bank regime, the flexibility and resources at the monetary authority’s disposal have increased significantly. In the hands of a responsible central bank the ability to issue a fiat currency is beneficial, but in an excessively stabilised economy, it allows the process of stabilisation to be maintained for far longer than it would otherwise be. And just like in the case of the river Kosi, the longer the period of the stabilisation the more catastrophic are the results of the inevitable normal disturbance.

There are two schools of thought on the primary cause of our current unemployment problem: Some claim that the unemployment is cyclical (low aggregate demand) whereas others think it’s structural (mismatch in the labour market). The “Structuralists” point to the apparent shift in the Beveridge curve and the increased demand in healthcare and technology whereas the “Cyclicalists” point to the fall in employment across all other sectors. So who’s right? In my opinion, neither explanation is entirely satisfactory. This post is an expansion of some thoughts I touched upon in my last post that describe the “persistent unemployment” problem as a logical consequence of a dynamically uncompetitive “Post Minsky Moment” economy.

Narayana Kocherlakota explains the mismatch thesis as follows: “Firms have jobs, but can’t find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can’t find appropriate jobs. There are many possible sources of mismatch—geography, skills, demography—and they are probably all at work….the Fed does not have a means to transform construction workers into manufacturing workers.” Undoubtedly this argument has some merit – the real question is how much of our current unemployment can be attributed to the mismatch problem? Kocherlakota draws on work done by Robert Shimer and extrapolates from the Beveridge curve relationship since 2000 to arrive at a implied unemployment rate of 6.3% if mismatch were not a bigger problem and the Beveridge curve relationship had not broken down. Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs on the other hand attributes as little as 0.75% of the current unemployment problem to structural reasons. Murat Tasci and Dave Lindner however conclude that the recent behaviour of the Beveridge curve is not anomalous when viewed in the context of previous post-war recessions. Shimer himself was wary of extrapolating too much from the limited data set from 2000 (see pg 12-13 here)  This would imply that Kocherlakota’s estimate is an overestimate even if Jan Hatzius’ may be an underestimate.

Incorporating Uncertainty into the Mismatch Argument

It is likely therefore that there is a significant pool of unemployment that cannot be justified by the simple mismatch argument. But this does not mean that the “recalculation” thesis is not valid. The simple mismatch argument ignores the uncertainty involved in the “Post-Minsky Moment economy” – it assumes that firms have known jobs that remain unfilled whereas in reality, firms need to engage in a process of exploration that will determine the nature of jobs consistent with the new economic reality before they search for suitable workers. The problem we face right now is of firms unwilling to take on the risk inherent in such an exploration. The central message in my previous posts on evolvability and organisational rigidity is that this process of exploration is dependent upon the maintenance of a dynamically competitive economy rather than a statically competitive economy. Continuous entry of new firms is of critical importance in maintaining a dynamically competitive economy that retains the ability to evolve and reconfigure itself when faced with a dramatic change in circumstances.

The “Post Minsky Moment” Economy

In Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis, the long period of stability before the crash creates a homogeneous and fragile ecosystem – the fragility arises due to the fragility of the individual firms as well the absence of diversity. Post the inevitable crash, the system inevitably regains some of its robustness via the slack built up by the incumbent firms, usually in the form of financial liquidity. However, so long as this slack at firm level is maintained, the macro-system cannot possibly revert to a state where it attains conventional welfare optima such as full employment. The conventional Keynesian solution suggests that the state pick up the slack in economic activity whereas some assume that sooner or later, market forces will reorganise to utilise this firm-level slack. This post is an attempt to partially refute both explanations – As Burton Klein often noted, there is no hidden hand that can miraculously restore the “animal spirits” of an economy or an industry once it has lost its evolvability. Similarly, Keynesian policies that shore up the position of the incumbent firms can cause fatal damage to the evolvability of the macro-economy.

Corporate Profits and Unemployment

This thesis does not imply that incumbent firms leave money on the table. In fact, incumbents typically redouble their efforts at static optimisation – hence the rise in corporate profits. Some may argue that this rise in profitability is illusory and represents capital consumption i.e. short-term gain at the expense of long-term loss of competence and capabilities at firm level. But in the absence of new firm entry, it is unlikely that there is even a long-term threat to incumbents’ survival i.e. firms are making a calculated bet that loss of evolvability represents a minor risk. It is only the invisible foot of the threat of new firms that prevents incumbents from going down this route.

Small Business Financing Constraints as a Driver of Unemployment

The role of new firms in generating employment is well-established and my argument implies that incumbent firms will effectively contribute to solving the unemployment problem only when prodded to do so by the hidden foot of new firm entry. The credit conditions faced by small businesses remain extremely tight despite funding costs for big incumbent firms having eased considerably since the peak of the crisis. Of course this may be due to insufficient investment opportunities – some of which may be due to dominant large incumbents in specific sectors. But a more plausible explanation lies in the unevolvable and incumbent-dominated state of our banking sector. Expanding lending to new firms is an act of exploration and incumbent banks are almost certainly content with exploiting their known and low-risk sources of income instead. One of Burton Klein’s key insights was how only a few key dynamically uncompetitive sectors can act as a deadweight drag on the entire economy and banking certainly fits the bill.

Amongst economic commentators, Raghuram Rajan has stood out recently for his consistent calls to raise interest rates from “ultra-low to the merely low”. Predictably, this suggestion has been met with outright condemnation by many economists, both of Keynesian and monetarist persuasion. Rajan’s case against ultra-low rates utilises many arguments but this post will focus on just one of these arguments that is straight out of the “resilience” playbook. In 2008, Raghu Rajan and Doug Diamond co-authored a paper, the conclusion of which Rajan summarises in his FT article: “the pattern of Fed policy over time builds expectations. The market now thinks that whenever the financial sector’s actions result in unemployment, the Fed will respond with ultra-low rates and easy liquidity. So even as the Fed has maintained credibility as an inflation fighter, it has lost credibility in fighting financial adventurism. This cannot augur well for the future.”

Much like he accused the Austrians, Paul Krugman accuses Rajan of being a “liquidationist”. This is not a coincidence – Rajan and Diamond’s thesis is quite explicit about its connections to Austrian Business Cycle Theory: “a central bank that promises to cut interest rates conditional on stress, or that is biased towards low interest rates favouring entrepreneurs, will induce banks to promise higher payouts or take more illiquid projects. This in turn can make the illiquidity crisis more severe and require a greater degree of intervention, a view reminiscent of the Austrian theory of cycles.” But as the summary hints, Rajan and Diamond’s thesis is fundamentally different from ABCT. The conventional Austrian story identifies excessive credit inflation and interest rates below the “natural” rate of interest as the driver of the boom/bust cycle but Rajan and Diamond’s thesis identifies the anticipation by economic agents of low rates and “liquidity” facilities every time there is an economic downturn as the driver of systemic fragility. The adaptation of banks and other market players to this regime makes the eventual bust all the more likely. As Rajan and Diamond note: “If the authorities are expected to reduce interest rates when liquidity is at a premium, banks will take on more short-term leverage or illiquid loans, thus bringing about the very states where intervention is needed.”

Rajan and Diamond’s thesis is limited to the impact of such policies on banks but as I noted in a previous post, market players also adapt to this implicit commitment from the central bank to follow easy money policies at the first hint of economic trouble. This thesis is essentially a story of the Greenspan-Bernanke era and the damage that the Greenspan Put has caused. It also explains the dramatically diminishing returns inherent in the Greenspan Put strategy as the stabilising policies of the central bank become entrenched in the expectations of market players and crucially banks – in each subsequent cycle, the central bank has to do more and more (lower rates, larger liquidity facilities) to achieve less and less.

This post is the first in a series that takes an ecological and dynamic approach to analysing market/macroeconomic regimes and transitions between these regimes.

Normal, Pre-Crisis and Crisis Regimes

In a post on market crises, Rick Bookstaber identified three regimes that any model of the market must represent (normal, pre-crisis and crisis) and analysed the statistical properties (volatility,correlation etc) of each of these regimes. The framework below however characterises each regime by the varying combinations of positive and negative feedback processes and the variations and regime shifts are determined by the adaptive and evolutionary processes operating within the system.

1. Normal regimes are resilient regimes. They are characterised by a balanced and diverse mix of positive and negative feedback processes. For every momentum trader who bets on the continuation of a trend, there is a contrarian who bets the other way.

2. Pre-crisis regimes are characterised by an increasing dominance of positive feedback processes. An unusually high degree of stability or a persistent trend progressively weeds out negative feedback processes from the system thus leaving it vulnerable to collapse even as a result of disturbances that it could easily absorb in its previously resilient normal state. Such regimes can arise from bubbles but this is not necessary. Pre-crisis only implies that a regime change into the crisis regime is increasingly likely – in ecological terms, the pre-crisis regime is fragile and has suffered a significant loss of resilience.

3. Crisis regimes are essentially transitional  - the disturbance has occurred and the positive feedback processes that dominated the previous regime have now reversed direction. However, the final destination of this transition is uncertain – if the system is left alone, it will undergo a discontinuous transition to a normal regime. However, if sufficient external stabilisation pressures are exerted upon the system, it may revert to the pre-crisis regime or even stay in the crisis regime for a longer period. It’s worth noting that I define a normal regime only by its resilience and not by its desirability – even a state of civilizational collapse can be incredibly resilient.

“Critical Transitions” from the Pre-Crisis to the Crisis Regime

In fragile systems even a minor disturbance can trigger a discontinuous move to an alternative regime – Marten Scheffer refers to such moves as “critical transitions”. Figures a,b,c and d below represent a continuum of ways in which the system can react to changing external conditions (ref Scheffer et al) . Although I will frequently refer to “equilibria” and “states” in the discussion below, these are better described as “attractors” and “regimes” given the dynamic nature of the system – the static terminology is merely a simplification.

In Figure a, the system state reacts smoothly to perturbations – for example, a large external change will trigger a large move in the state of the system. The dotted arrows denote the direction in which the system moves when it is not on the curve i.e. in equilibrium.  Any move away from equilibrium triggers forces that bring it back to the curve. In Figure b, the transition is non-linear and a small perturbation can trigger a regime shift – however a reversal of conditions of an equally small magnitude can reverse the regime shift. Clearly, such a system does not satisfactorily explain our current economic predicament where monetary and fiscal intervention far in excess of the initial sub-prime shock have failed to bring the system back to its previous state.

Figure c however may be a more accurate description of the current state of the economy and the market – for a certain range of conditions, there exist two alternative stable states separated by an unstable equilibrium (marked by the dotted line). As the dotted arrows indicate, movement away from the unstable equilibrium can carry the system to either of the two alternative stable states. Figure d illustrates how a small perturbation past the point F2 triggers a “catastrophic” transition from the upper branch to the lower branch – moreover, unless conditions are reversed all the way back to the point F1, the system will not revert back to the upper branch stable state. The system therefore exhibits “hysteresis” – i.e. the path matters. The forward and backward switches occur at different points F2 and F1 respectively, which implies that reversing such transitions is not easy. A comprehensive discussion of the conditions that will determine the extent of hysteresis is beyond the scope of this post – however it is worth mentioning that cognitive and organisational rigidity in the absence of sufficient diversity is a sufficient condition for hysteresis in the macro-system.

Before I apply the above framework to some events in the market, it is worth clarifying how the states in Figure d correspond to those chosen by Rick Bookstaber. The “normal” regime refers to the parts of the upper and lower branch stable states that are far from the points F1 and F2 i.e. the system is resilient to a change in external conditions. As I mentioned earlier, normal does not equate to desirable – the lower branch could be a state of collapse. If we designate the upper branch as a desirable normal state and the lower branch as an undesirable one, then the zone close to point F2 on the upper branch is the pre-crisis regime. The crisis regime is the short catastrophic transition from F2 to the lower branch if the system is left alone. If forces external to the system are applied to prevent a transition to the lower branch, then the system could either revert back to the upper branch or even stay in the crisis regime on the dotted line unstable equilibrium for a longer period.

The Magnetar Trade revisited

In an earlier post, I analysed how the infamous Magnetar Trade could be explained with a framework that incorporates catastrophic transitions between alternative stable states. As I noted: “The Magnetar trade would pay off in two scenarios – if there were no defaults in any of their CDOs, or if there were so many defaults that the tranches that they were short also defaulted alongwith the equity tranche. The trade would likely lose money if there were limited defaults in all the CDOs and the senior tranches did not default. Essentially, the trade was attractive if one believed that this intermediate scenario was improbable…Intermediate scenarios are unlikely when the system is characterised by multiple stable states and catastrophic transitions between these states. In adaptive systems such as ecosystems or macroeconomies, such transitions are most likely when the system is fragile and in a state of low resilience. The system tends to be dominated by positive feedback processes that amplify the impact of small perturbations, with no negative feedback processes present that can arrest this snowballing effect.”

In the language of critical transitions, Magnetar calculated that the real estate and MBS markets were in a fragile pre-crisis state and no intervention would prevent the rapid critical transition from F2 to the lower branch.

“Schizophrenic” Markets and the Long Crisis

Recently, many commentators have noted the apparently schizophrenic nature of the markets, turning from risk-on to risk-off at the drop of a hat. For example, John Kemp argues that the markets are “trapped between euphoria and despair” and notes the U-shaped distribution of Bank of England’s inflation forecasts (table 5.13). Although at first glance this sort of behaviour seems irrational, it may not be – As PIMCO’s Richard Clarida notes: “we are in a world in which average outcomes – for growth, inflation, corporate and sovereign defaults, and the investment returns driven by these outcomes – will matter less and less for investors and policymakers. This is because we are in a New Normal world in which the distribution of outcomes is flatter and the tails are fatter. As such, the mean of the distribution becomes an observation that is very rarely realized”

Richard Clarida’s New Normal is analogous to the crisis regime (the dotted line unstable equilibrium in Figures c and d). Any movement in either direction is self-fulfilling and leads to either a much stronger economy or a much weaker economy. So why is the current crisis regime such a long one? As I mentioned earlier, external stabilisation (in this case monetary and fiscal policy) can keep the system from collapsing down to the lower branch normal regime – the “schizophrenia” only indicates that the market may make a decisive break to a stable state sooner rather than later.