What are the implications of low inflation everywhere?
By R.A. | LONDON
AS UNPLEASANT as global economic conditions look just now we can at least be thankful that things aren't anywhere near as bad as they were in 2009, to say nothing of 1931. Neither are those sorts of nasty scenarios a risk. Right?
There are lots of reasons to think the world will keep trucking along in coming years as it has over the last two. Yet the risk of a new and painful downturn, though still small, is growing. That growing risk is due to the surprising and disconcerting re-emergence of monetary phenomena that haven't really been seen since the gold standard of the 1930s.
It is easy enough to see how the gold standard as practiced between the first and second world wars got the global economy into serious trouble. In its idealised form, the standard was supposed to work in a rather elegant way. Economies on the standard pegged their currencies to gold and consequently to all other gold-standard currencies. Should a country develop a big balance of payments deficit, adjustment ought to occur automatically. To pay for imports in excess of exports gold needs to flow out of the deficit economy. Because all the money in circulation in an economy should be backed by gold at some ratio, gold outflows force the central bank to pull money out of the economy, generating deflation. Falling prices raise the competitiveness of the deficit economy, and eventually the deficit closes and the gold outflows stop. The adjustment is made easier by a parallel process in the surplus economy; gold inflows allow an expansion of the monetary supply and inflation, which reduces competitiveness and stems the gold inflow.
There is a potential problem in this dynamic, however. Gold stocks can only fall so far; eventually an economy plum runs out of gold and has to leave the system. But stocks can rise indefinitely. And they might well do if the surplus central bank doesn't adhere to the "rules of the game" and chooses to sterilise gold inflows rather than expand the money supply in step with them. A country that broke the rules (because it didn't want to accept higher inflation or to dampen its economy's competitive position) would squeeze the world economy in two ways: by pulling gold out of the global monetary system, and by forcing the full burden of adjustment onto deficit economies.
Now in practice, economies routinely violated the rules of the game. But before the first world war these violations didn't destroy the world economy for a few reasons. First, overall gold stocks were rising thanks to new mines, so there was a built-in inflationary bias in the system. Second, gold stocks were relatively well balanced across the rich world, and so most economies could handle a drain for some time without triggering fears of looming devaluations. And third, there was a healthy level of cooperation among central banks, which generally refrained from taking steps that might destabilise the system (like raising interest rates well above levels in deficit economies).
The short-lived interwar gold standard, on the other hand, was a mess. Britain went back on gold with an overvalued currency and too little in gold reserves. France, by contrast, returned to gold with an undervalued currency and sucked in enormous quantities of gold as a result; from 1927 to 1932 its share of global gold reserves soared from 7% to 27%. Neither did surplus economies do all that much to help those in deficit; French inflows continued because it did not allow very much inflation. On the contrary, surplus economies sometimes raised rates in response to rate increases in deficit countries, specifically in order to protect against gold outflows. The result was global deflationary pressure. This squeezed economies and debtors, leading to banking panics that reinforced deflation and turned the Depression into the worst economic cataclysm of the modern industrial era.
After the second world war, the world once again tried to set up a system of fixed exchange rates and once again failed (you can read more about the world's troubled monetary history here). The breakdown in the system that occurred in the 1970s came as a result of inflationary pressures rather than deflationary stresses, however, and was consequently much less damaging to the world economy: a lesson today's policy makers would do well to heed.
Since then, the global monetary system has evolved into a mixed system. The euro zone is like the gold standard only more so. A few economies practice a free currency float—including, notably, America, whose currency is the dominant constituent of global foreign-exchange reserves. And much of the world uses a "managed" float, in which central banks occasionally intervene to dampen big moves or otherwise nudge the exchange rate.
An interesting question is whether the global system could fall into a trap like that which destroyed the interwar gold standard. Conventional wisdom says no. Relatively few central banks are stuck defending hard currency pegs, and they therefore have free reign to combat deflationary pressure. Exchange rates are mostly free to adjust to close global imbalances, reducing the need for deflation in deficit economies to restore competitiveness. The big exception, on the latter point, is the euro area, where internal rebalancing does require an adjustment in relative labour costs. Yet this should—should—be manageable since the European Central Bank is free to make monetary policy and the single currency's external exchange rate is perfectly flexible. When a major financial crisis struck in 2008 markets began to fear a bout of serious deflation. Yet central banks quickly and aggressively responded. As serious as the global recession was, it came nowhere close to the severity of the Depression.
And yet. Watching the economic events of the last few years unfold I am struck by two key threats. The first is the widespread constraint of the zero lower bound on interest rates. In textbook models a negative shock in one economy should not drag down others with floating exchange rates against that economy, because their independent central banks can offset the contractionary pressure. Yet since interest rates fell to near zero in 2008-9 monetary policy in most rich economies does not seem to have fully offset shocks. Whether this failure is down to central bank impotence or discomfort with stimulus at the zero lower bound, the upshot is clear: monetary policy is not fully offsetting the ill winds that blow in from abroad.
That brings us to a second point: the breakdown in monetary cooperation. In 2008-9 global central banks were united in their determination to keep the world out of depression. Even China, while it could not be said to have cooperated with rich-world central banks, worked hard to keep its economy running hot. That, in turn, gave the world a source of inflationary pressure.
We are no longer in that world. China now appears to have excess capacity and its inflation rate is tumbling. And there is no other large economy working to provide inflationary pressure, to voluntarily overheat to fend off deflation and ease adjustment in other economies. America, the most likely candidate for such a role, has a central bank that is trimming its accommodation even as inflation is below target and falling.
That leaves the world in a very dicey position. A disturbingly large number of central banks are in a spot in which they cannot easily offset deflationary shocks. And the central banks in best position to provide an inflationary impulse are manifestly refusing to do so. They are not adhering to the "rules of the game", presumably because they believe that in a world of (mostly) flexible exchange rates there is no need to do so. Yet the constraint of the zero lower bound suggests that there is, because deflationary pressure in one economy propagates thanks to insufficient monetary response. Someone needs to lead the way in pulling the world economy off of the zero lower bound. But the economies that look most capable of achieving this—and this first and foremost means America—are adding to the disinflationary gale rather than leaning against it.
The world economy is still less brittle than it was in the 1930s and could conceivably get its act together, but there may not be much time because of the dangerously weak link that is the euro zone. Deflationary pressure there stresses a political and economic union that is not well equipped to manage the challenge. And a euro zone break-up, should it occur, would probably generate an economic calamity to rival the Depression.
Central bankers have been patting themselves on the back over the last few years for having steered the world clear of a second Depression. Well, chaps: mission not yet accomplished.
