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Economics

الاحتياطي الفيدرالي لا يستحق كل اللوم عن التضخم

May 4, 2022 Kenneth Rogoff

كمبريدج ــ تُـلقي جوقة متنامية من التعليقات باللائمة عن الارتفاع الحالي في معدل التضخم في الولايات المتحدة على عاتق بنك الاحتياطي الفيدرالي. لكن قسما كبير من الانتقادات يتسم بقدر مذهل من السذاجة في تناول الضغوط السياسية التي اضطر بنك الاحتياطي الفيدرالي الأميركي وغيرها من البنوك المركزية في مختلف أنحاء العالم إلى التعامل معها في السنوات الأخيرة.

في الولايات المتحدة، بلغت الضغوط على الاحتياطي الفيدرالي أوجها عندما فرض الديمقراطيون، المتلهفون على وضع الأفكار التقدمية موضع التنفيذ، سيطرتهم على البيت الأبيض والكونجرس في يناير/كانون الثاني 2021. صحيح أن الاحتياطي الفيدرالي يتمتع بقدر كبير من الاستقلالية في العديد من الأبعاد، لكنه لا يتمتع بذات القدر من الاستقلال المؤسسي الذي يحظى به البنك المركزي الأوروبي على سبيل المثال.

بدلا من ذلك، يُـعَـد الاحتياطي الفيدرالي صنيعة الكونجرس والذي يمكن من الناحية النظرية أن يتحول جذريا في غضون فترة وجيزة. المهم في الأمر أن مدة ولاية رئيس الاحتياطي الفيدرالي تنتهي دائما بعد عام من فترة ولاية رئيس الولايات المتحدة الجديد، وكانت إدارة الرئيس جو بايدن قادرة أيضا على إجراء العديد من التعيينات الأخرى في مجلس الاحتياطي الفيدرالي. ورغم أن فكرة "تعبئة الاحتياطي الفيدرالي" (إضافة مناصب جديدة لإمالة أغلبية التصويت في البنك المركزي) لم تكتسب أي زخم، فمن المؤكد أن المسؤولين في الاحتياطي الفيدرالي كانوا على عِـلم بالمناقشة التي أجرتها إدارة بايدن حول ما إذا كان من الواجب مقاومة الأغلبية المحافظة في المحكمة العليا الأميركية من خلال زيادة عدد القضاة.

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Kenneth Rogoff

Writing for PS since 2002
245 Commentaries

Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. He is co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2011) and author of The Curse of Cash (Princeton University Press, 2016).

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 9 Comments on this article

Marius Vismantas May 15, 2022

The blame game around inflation is not useful. Quarelling around the current CPI figures outside a longer-term context is more politics than economics. Inflation should be seen as a (small) price to pay for the counterfactual that could have happened but didn't - austerity, job and income losses, massive recession etc. Fiscal and monetary targetting of the pandemic era will - and should - be reassessed and recalibrated for future episodes of helicopter money, to make it more efficient and less unequal - but that does not make the entire approach wrong.
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Mark St. Angelo May 8, 2022

It wasn’t the Left that caused the Fed to expand the money supply and prop up the stock market and the real estate market during the years prior to Biden’s election.
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William Sippel May 8, 2022

Monetarist see everything in terms of monetary policy, while overlooking micro economics and individual markets.

For example, look at the OPEC+ price increases.

Take a look at lumber prices, going back to 2021, and you will find the Trump tariffs and shutdowns of lumber production in the US.

Take a look at supply chain disruption, coupled by low inventories of businesses which tried to reduce costs during the pandemic, and shipping costs. https://blogs.imf.org/2022/03/28/how-soaring-shipping-costs-raise-prices-around-the-world/

Take a look at food commodity prices, and you will see the effect of drought in Brazil, upper midwest, and far west, coupled with meat plant closing and disruptions which caused famers to cut back on their livestock and other animals. Chip and parts shortages On and on and on.

And, then look at the Fed statistics on US capacity utilization. It is not at a level associated with inflation in the past. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCU

And, don't forget Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum which gave domestic producers capacity to raise prices above international levels. Finally, this is world inflation, not US inflation.

Germany inflation is running over 7.4%. and was running at 6.2% before the Ukrainian war. It is international inflation due to micro markets.

I wish these folks would explore individual markets and international commodities. But, they don't. They want you to wear their monetarist glasses and overlook the reality outside of it.
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Thaomas H May 8, 2022

Yes the Fed DOES deserve all the blame for inflation; that is it's JOB to take the rap for inflation. And Summers in February was not arguing, as he should, that the Fed policy was too expansive, but that fiscal policy was too expansive. The question is how BLAMEworthy was the Fed (it knew or should have know its policy instrument settings were going to cause inflation) as opposed to misestimating how much inflation its policy instrument settings were going to have. I BLAME the Fed for not starting to adjust tis policy instruments in September when TIPS expectations started to move significantly away from target inflation. Would that have been unpopular? Maybe. That's the reason Members of the Board have fixed terms.
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Mirek Fatyga May 5, 2022

it is deeply disappointing that Mr Rogoff, yet again, is joining the chorus of blaming the "radical Left" for the inflation.

Rather than putting the blame where it belongs, which is first neoliberal and now increasingly authoritarian, extremist Right. I might add in the interest of fairness that external conditions, pressure on resources due to population growth, play a role as well.

It was, after all, the Right that dictated economic policy for half a century now. It was the Right that led us down the path of destroying the income of labor and replacing it with debt. All the blame for this should not, indeed, be placed on the Federal Reserve, but a lot of it should. Remember Alan Greenspan?

It was also the Right, aided and abated by Bill Clinton, that deregulated finance to a point of loss of control, unleashing periodic avalanches of counterfeit currency in a form of openly fraudulent credit.

Remember Trump tax cut? Remember that the Fed tried to "normalize" interest rates in the wake of short sugar high only to be twitter-bullied into submission by the King of Debt in the White House?

In my opinion this article firmly puts Mr Rogoff on the side of being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. The problem is partisan and ideological carnival barking. The solution is actual economic analysis and putting carnival barkers back in the box, sealing the box and then, once and for all, at least for a generation, throwing the box away on a trash heap of history.
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F Ahmed May 5, 2022

What matters is what's done at the moment, standing up for what you believe is righteous. If Fed got cold feet, it must now take it on the chin.
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vic lai May 5, 2022

The Fed does not deserve all the inflation cure either.
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One-size-fits-all (or "killing-almost-everyone") contractionary monetary policies, in the form of the Fed's coming consecutive and non-trivial interest rate hikes and accelerating quantitative tightening, can and will continue to be easily implemented by the Fed, without much interference from the Congress, but doing so may also
(i) precariously pierce the country's steaming stock-bond-housing bubbles all at the same time, pushing the country once again into a prolonged balance-sheet economic recession, and so lengthening the specter-like secular stagnation symphony always lurking in the shadows of the global economic environment,
(ii) massively crop up US DXY, aggravating the perennial lack-of-Euro-Dollar problem in the global financial system,
(iii) fail to ameliorate the worsening domestic inflation problems in America.
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The Biden administration can consider using differential fiscal policies to mitigate the country's inflation problems caused mainly by the global pandemic and aggravated by the Ukraine War :
(a) to help arrest the trend of falling GDP growth rate just reported this quarter, avoid distributing free-money en masse to the American public and corporations this time, so that demand-pull inflation won't rear its ugly head once again in the country,
(b) instead, (electronic) consumption coupons that have to be used within a certain period should be given to the public, and the coupons can cater to the needs of the specified merchandise and service sectors of the domestic economy (the citizens can no longer use the free money to reduce their debts and so fail to increase consumption of their own),
(c) non-trivial government subsidies (or no-interest loans) can be given to the affected American supply sectors, like the energy and food sectors, to help reduce both their costs of production and hence the pressure of cost-push inflation in the domestic economy,
(iv) the (central) government's much increased deficit spending to finance the above increased government expenditures can be financed by MMT, say in the form of a smaller size of quantitative tightening than planned (ie, the Fed's renewing much more matured treasuries than planned), or even in the form of new QEs.
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The increased deficit spending by the central government requires the Treasury Department to issue more bills and bonds.
The increased supply of US treasuries this time can also help resolve the lack-of-good-collateral and hence lack-of-Euro-dollar problem in the global Eurodollar (repo) markets, thereby mitigating the current global recessionary trend.
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As the old Chinese saying goes, governing a big country is like carefully frying a small fish, an intricate feminine act much finer and delicate than the Fed's traditional one-size-fits-all manlike strive.
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May 5, 2022

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الاحتياطي الفيدرالي لا يستحق كل اللوم عن التضخم

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