Monetary Policy at the Zero Bound

I am a financial economist and I’ve been through most phases of my career one that applies the trade in banking. That’s because my first economics specialty was monetary economics. I still have my original copy of Patinkin’s Money, Interest and Price sitting next to my dad’s original copy of Keyne’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. My grandfather was one of the first Fed lifer’s having been in charge of the bond area in the Kansas City District for both world wars. My ex-husband’s first job out of college was with that Fed. I worked for the Atlanta District Fed before retreating back to academia. So, in this day and age, with all the unpopularity that entails, I have to confess to being a banker of sorts. I hope you won’t hold that against me.

Today, there is more evidence that this is not my Grandfather’s Fed and it’s not completely the Fed I worked for either during the Greenspan years. When I was there, the emphasis was consolidating functions to various branches and realizing that check clearing and wire transfers, the main source of revenues for the branches, were being taken up by big money center banks and clearing houses. Clinton was President and the economy was good so there wasn’t much dithering about the technical things done up there at the desk in NYC. I just had my staff transmit the bond sells every Tuesday (even on Mardi Gras) dutifully.

Much consolidation has taken place and many traditional Fed services have been privatized. Oh, and then there’s that one other difference, Ben Bernanke and his realization that traditional monetary policy is pretty useless when interest rates are close to zero. Welcome to the world of Monetary Policy at the Zero Bound which is actually something we talked about last fall. I’m going to point you again to Ben Bernanke’s treatise again because it explains a lot of what we’re going to discuss. It’s written for wonks, but if you read the first few pages, you’ll get the basic idea.

The Fed’s upcoming retreat from its current position has been a topic of much discussion and speculation. That’s because every one has some concern that they will be accommodating for way too long and it may lead to another Bubble or to general inflation (instead of price increases in a specific market like housing). That’s pretty much the consensus of what happened post 9/11 when Greenspan left interest rates extremely low and we developed a speculation crazed housing market. For some reason, he popped the bubble of excessive exuberance during the Clinton years and the Tech stock run-ups, but let the mortgage market baste in low interest rates for way too long. My guess is that he was more accommodating to Republicans because he himself was one of them, but that’s a discussion for his biographer and just a source of speculation for me.

So, Ben used his platform as the second most powerful man in the US today to reduce the information asymmetry surrounding the Fed’s exit strategy. Again, if you check the link to his academic paper above, you’ll see that’s one of the things he believes is necessary when monetary policy hits the zero bound. He basically calls this “using communications policies to shape public expectations about the future course of interest rates” and that’s exactly what he’s doing in today’s Op-Ed piece in the WSJ.

I’m not sure how many people wrote and edited this piece, but it is a brilliant discourse that explains in a very succinct and clear way what the FED will do in the coming recovery to ensure that we won’t get inflation. He also reassures that they won’t reverse the course of any improvement either as was done in 1937 to cause a double dip depression. This Op-ed is historic in nature, although I’m sure only those of us steeped in Fed lore, culture and history will realize what’s going on here. Ben is opening up the some what secret world of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to those with the need to know.

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