Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and other governors at the Fed eventually departed from Reagan’s injunction that monetary policy focus on maintaining stable prices, and started trying to stimulate the economy through old Keynesian policies of easy money. The Bush Treasury supported that, favoring a cheap dollar in response to ubiquitous business lobbyists in Washington more than willing to sacrifice the long term economy to their short term export goals. The central role of the resulting Fed policies in causing the financial crisis was most authoritatively explained by Stanford Economics Professor and monetary policy guru John Taylor in his timely book, Getting Off Track. Taylor begins:
The classic explanation of financial crises, going back hundreds of years, is that they are caused by excesses — frequently monetary excesses — that lead to a boom and an inevitable bust. In the recent crisis we had a housing boom and bust, which in turn led to financial turmoil in the United States and other countries. I begin by showing that monetary excesses were the main cause of the boom and the resulting bust.
Economics Professor Lawrence H. White now of George Mason University elaborates:
In the recession of 2001, the Federal Reserve System…began aggressively expanding the U.S. money supply. Year-over-year growth in the M-2 monetary aggregate rose briefly above 10 percent, and remained above 8 percent entering the second half of 2003. The expansion was accompanied by the Fed repeatedly lowering its target for the federal funds (interbank short term) interest rate. The federal funds rate began 2001 at 6.25 percent and ended the year at 1.75 percent. It was reduced further in 2002 and 2003, in mid-2003 reaching a record low of 1 percent, where it stayed for a year. The real Fed funds rate was negative…for two and a half years. In purchasing power terms, during that period a borrower was not paying but rather gaining in proportion to what he borrowed. Economist Steve Hanke has summarized the result: This set off the mother of all liquidity cycles and yet another massive demand bubble.
From early 2001 until late 2006, as White further explains, “the Fed pushed the actual federal funds rate below the estimated rate that would have been consistent with targeting a 2% inflation.” That estimated rate is determined by what is known in economics as the Taylor Rule. Steve Forbes adds, “In 2004, the Federal Reserve made a fateful miscalculation. It thought the U.S. economy was much weaker than it was and therefore pumped out excess liquidity and kept interest rates artificially low.”
White continues:
The demand bubble thus created went heavily into real estate. From mid-2003 to mid-2007, while the dollar volume of final sales of goods and services was growing at 5 percent to 7 percent, real estate loans at commercial banks were growing at 10-17 percent. Credit fueled demand pushed up the sale prices of existing houses and encouraged the construction of new housing on undeveloped land, in both cases absorbing the increased dollar volume of mortgages. Because real estate is an especially long-lived asset, its market value is especially boosted by low interest rates.
Sustained below-market interest rates distort huge flows of investment into housing in particular because the lower rates most favor the longest term investments.
But low interest rates by themselves do not mean monetary policy is excessively loose. That depends on what market prices are saying, as reflected by the dollar, gold and inflation. The Fed’s loose monetary policies during the Bush Administration, however, also generated sharp declines in the dollar. The dollar was worth 1.15 euros near the start of 2002, but it declined by close to 50% near to 0.6 Euros by the start of 2008. The price of gold soared from $350 near the end of 2002 to almost $1,000 by the start of 2008. Even inflation, defeated 25 years previously, started to come back, increasing from 1.55% at the end of 2001, to as high as 5.6% in July 2008.
The cheap dollar monetary policy further inflated the housing bubble because it generated flight into real assets to escape the depreciating greenback. This also explains why the housing crisis showed up virtually worldwide. The Fed managing the world’s reserve currency effectively exported its weak currency policy globally. Other countries loosen their monetary policies to avoid the negative short term trade implications of appreciating currencies relative to the dollar. Moreover, the dollar’s weakness masks the looseness of their monetary policies, misleading them into even looser policies.
When the Fed finally realized it had to rein in its loose monetary policy, soaring housing prices slowed, flattened out and then tipped into declines. The steep decline in housing prices produced chaos throughout the financial industry in the U.S., and ultimately the world, as widespread financial assets based on housing collapsed in value. As Taylor concluded, “[The] extra-easy [Fed monetary] policy accelerated the housing boom and thereby ultimately led to the housing bust.”
How Our Government Created the Financial Crisis – Peter Ferrara, Forbes
Can Europe Be Saved?
Paul Krugman does an excellent job of summarizing the genesis of the current crisis:
THERE’S SOMETHING peculiarly apt about the fact that the current European crisis began in Greece. For Europe’s woes have all the aspects of a classical Greek tragedy, in which a man of noble character is undone by the fatal flaw of hubris.
Alfredo Falvo/Contrasto/Redux
ROME Students protested planned changes in the university system on Dec. 22 in Italy, where youth unemployment is about 25 percent.
Not long ago Europeans could, with considerable justification, say that the current economic crisis was actually demonstrating the advantages of their economic and social model. Like the United States, Europe suffered a severe slump in the wake of the global financial meltdown; but the human costs of that slump seemed far less in Europe than in America. In much of Europe, rules governing worker firing helped limit job loss, while strong social-welfare programs ensured that even the jobless retained their health care and received a basic income. Europe’s gross domestic product might have fallen as much as ours, but the Europeans weren’t suffering anything like the same amount of misery. And the truth is that they still aren’t.
Yet Europe is in deep crisis — because its proudest achievement, the single currency adopted by most European nations, is now in danger. More than that, it’s looking increasingly like a trap. Ireland, hailed as the Celtic Tiger not so long ago, is now struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Spain, a booming economy until recent years, now has 20 percent unemployment and faces the prospect of years of painful, grinding deflation.
The tragedy of the Euromess is that the creation of the euro was supposed to be the finest moment in a grand and noble undertaking: the generations-long effort to bring peace, democracy and shared prosperity to a once and frequently war-torn continent. But the architects of the euro, caught up in their project’s sweep and romance, chose to ignore the mundane difficulties a shared currency would predictably encounter — to ignore warnings, which were issued right from the beginning, that Europe lacked the institutions needed to make a common currency workable. Instead, they engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the nobility of their mission transcended such concerns.
The result is a tragedy not only for Europe but also for the world, for which Europe is a crucial role model. The Europeans have shown us that peace and unity can be brought to a region with a history of violence, and in the process they have created perhaps the most decent societies in human history, combining democracy and human rights with a level of individual economic security that America comes nowhere close to matching. These achievements are now in the process of being tarnished, as the European dream turns into a nightmare for all too many people. How did that happen?
THE ROAD TO THE EURO
It all began with coal and steel. On May 9, 1950 — a date whose anniversary is now celebrated as Europe Day — Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, proposed that his nation and West Germany pool their coal and steel production. That may sound prosaic, but Schuman declared that it was much more than just a business deal.
For one thing, the new Coal and Steel Community would make any future war between Germany and France “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” And it would be a first step on the road to a “federation of Europe,” to be achieved step by step via “concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” That is, economic measures would both serve mundane ends and promote political unity.
The Coal and Steel Community eventually evolved into a customs union within which all goods were freely traded. Then, as democracy spread within Europe, so did Europe’s unifying economic institutions. Greece, Spain and Portugal were brought in after the fall of their dictatorships; Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism.
In the 1980s and ’90s this “widening” was accompanied by “deepening,” as Europe set about removing many of the remaining obstacles to full economic integration. (Eurospeak is a distinctive dialect, sometimes hard to understand without subtitles.) Borders were opened; freedom of personal movement was guaranteed; and product, safety and food regulations were harmonized, a process immortalized by the Eurosausage episode of the TV show “Yes Minister,” in which the minister in question is told that under new European rules, the traditional British sausage no longer qualifies as a sausage and must be renamed the Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube. (Just to be clear, this happened only on TV.)
The creation of the euro was proclaimed the logical next step in this process. Once again, economic growth would be fostered with actions that also reinforced European unity.
The advantages of a single European currency were obvious. No more need to change money when you arrived in another country; no more uncertainty on the part of importers about what a contract would actually end up costing or on the part of exporters about what promised payment would actually be worth. Meanwhile, the shared currency would strengthen the sense of European unity. What could go wrong?
Red the entire article at NYT:
Can Europe Be Saved?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Is there any way to save Europe’s democracies from sinking together in the ill-conceived currency union?