Is the US Fed making accurate assessments of its interest rate policies?

Barry Eichengreen writes: For much of the year, investors have been fixated on when the Fed will achieve “liftoff” – that is, when it will raise interest rates by 25 basis points, or 0.25%, as a first step toward normalizing monetary conditions. Markets have soared and plummeted in response to small changes in Fed statements perceived as affecting the likelihood that liftoff is imminent.

But, in seeking to gauge changes in US monetary conditions, investors have been looking in the wrong place. Since mid-August, when Chinese policymakers startled the markets by devaluing the renminbi by 2%, China’s official intervention in foreign-exchange markets has continued, in order to prevent the currency from falling further. The Chinese authorities have been selling foreign securities, mainly United States Treasury bonds, and buying up renminbi.

This is the opposite of what China did when the renminbi was strong. Back then, China bought US Treasury bonds to keep the currency from rising and eroding the competitiveness of Chinese exporters. As a result, it accumulated an astounding $4 trillion of foreign reserves.

And what was true of China was also true of other emerging-market countries receiving capital inflows. These countries’ foreign reserves, mainly held in US securities, topped $8 trillion at their peak last year.

The effects of these purchases attracted considerable attention.  Although no one outside official Chinese circles knows the exact magnitude of China’s foreign-exchange intervention, informed guesses suggest that it has been running at roughly $100 billion a month since mid-August. Observers believe that roughly 60% of China’s liquid reserves are in US Treasury bills. Given that reserve managers prefer to avoid unbalancing their carefully composed portfolios, they probably have been selling Treasuries at a rate of roughly $60 billion a month.

The effects are analogous – but opposite – to those of quantitative easing. Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has examined the impact of foreign purchases and sales of US government securities on ten-year Treasury yields. His estimates imply that foreign sales at a rate of $60 billion per month raise yields by ten basis points. Given that China has been at it for 2.5 months, this implies that the equivalent of a 25-basis-point increase in interest rates has already been injected into the market.

Some would object that the renminbi is weak because China is experiencing capital outflows by private investors, and that some of this private money also flows into US financial markets. This is technically correct, but it is already factored into the changes in interest rates described above.

Another objection is that QE operates not just through the so-called portfolio channel – by changing the mix of securities in the market – but also through the expectations channel. It signals that the authorities are seriously committed to making the future different from the past. But if Chinese intervention is just a one-off event, and there are no expectations of it continuing, then this second channel shouldn’t be operative, and the impact will be smaller than that of QE.

The problem is that no one knows how long capital outflows from China will persist or how long the Chinese authorities will continue to intervene.

Stephen S. Roach writes:  Fixated on inflation targeting in a world without inflation, central banks have lost their way. With benchmark interest rates stuck at the dreaded zero bound, monetary policy has been transformed from an agent of price stability into an engine of financial instability. A new approach is desperately needed.

The US Federal Reserve exemplifies this policy dilemma. After the Federal Open Market Committee decided in September to defer yet again the start of its long-awaited normalization of monetary policy, its inflation doves are openly campaigning for another delay.

For the inflation-targeting purists, the argument seems impeccable. The headline consumer-price index (CPI) is near zero, and “core” or underlying inflation – the Fed’s favorite indicator – remains significantly below the seemingly sacrosanct 2% target. With a long-anemic recovery looking shaky again, the doves contend that there is no reason to rush ahead with interest-rate hikes.

The Fed’s presumption that the US will soon approach full employment has caused the so-called dual mandate to collapse into one target: getting inflation back to 2%.

Here, the Fed is making a fatal mistake, as it relies heavily on a timeworn inflation-forecasting methodology that filters out the “special factors” driving the often volatile prices of goods like food and energy.

This approach failed spectacularly when it was adopted in the 1970s, causing the Fed to underestimate virulent inflation. And it is failing today, leading the Fed consistently to overestimate underlying inflation. Indeed, with oil prices having plunged by 50% over the past year, the Fed stubbornly maintains that faster price growth – and the precious inflation rate of 2% – is just around the corner.

Missing from this logic is an appreciation of the new and powerful global forces that are bearing down on inflation.  Rather than recognize a seemingly chronic shortfall of global aggregate demand amid a supply glut and a deflationary profusion of technological innovations and new supply chains – the Fed  would rather attribute low inflation to successful inflation targeting, and the Great Moderation that it presumably spawned.

Unable to disentangle the global and domestic pressures suppressing inflation, a price-targeting Fed has erred consistently on the side of easy money.

This is apparent in the fact that, over the last 15 years, the real federal funds rate – the Fed’s benchmark policy rate, adjusted for inflation – has been in negative territory more than 60% of the time, averaging -0.6% since May 2001. From 1990 to 2000, by contrast, the real federal funds rate averaged 2.2%. In short, over the last decade and a half, the Fed has gone well beyond a powerful disinflation in setting its policy interest rate.

Over the same 15-year period, financial markets have become unhinged, with a profusion of asset and credit bubbles leading to a series of crises that almost pushed the world economy into the abyss in 2008-2009. But rather than recognize, let alone respond to, pre-crisis excesses, the Fed has remained agnostic about them, pointing out that bubble-spotting is, at best, an imperfect science.

That is hardly a convincing reason for central banks to remain fixated on inflation targeting.

Today’s enemy is financial instability. On that basis alone, the case for monetary-policy normalization has never been more compelling.