Economics One

The effects of exchange market interventions are frequently estimated by looking at what happened on the day of the announcement of the intervention or of the intervention itself. But my observation—based in part on experience running the international division of the U.S. Treasury and engaging in financial diplomacy with Japan and other countries—is that announcement effects can be very misleading as an estimate of the overall effect of interventions because the impacts can wear off with no announcement or reverse interventions. The recent experience with the September 14 announcement of an exchange market intervention by the Bank of Japan is an important case in point as clearly indicated by this chart of the yen-dollar exchange rate. The yen did noticeably depreciate against the dollar on the day that the intervention was announced and took place, but that has already been reversed.

This is one of the reasons why I think it is unwise to rely on announcement effects to assess the impact of central bank asset purchase programs as in Gagnon et al. Better to look over longer periods of time where you can control for other factors as in this paper with Johannes Stroebel.

I recently had the pleasure of reading, and then writing a review of, Allan Meltzer’s monumental A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2 which is published in Book 1 and Book 2. The lesson from this thorough 2,112-page history (volumes 1 and 2 together) deserves careful consideration by policymakers today.

It is a history of policy successes and policy failures. The failures are the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Inflation of the 1970s, and the Great Recession of recent years. The successes are the Great Disinflation of the early 1980s and the Great Moderation which succeeded it. What caused these successes and failures? Meltzer focuses on two types of policy errors: (1) succumbing to “political interferences or pressure” and (2) basing policy on “mistaken beliefs.” Failure comes from making one or both of these errors; success comes from avoiding them.

He argues that the Great Depression was mainly the second source of error: mistaken beliefs about the real bills doctrine. The Great Inflation was a combination of both types of errors, but failure to resist political pressure dominated because when beliefs changed in the 1970s, policies did not. The Great Disinflation was marked by an absence of both types of errors as Paul Volcker regained independence and restored basic monetary fundamentals about the impact of changes in the money supply and interest rates. The Great Moderation was a period where independence was solidified and rules-based policy, grounded in fundamentals, was followed. The Great Recession was a return to a combination of both kinds of errors, a departure from rules-based policies that worked in the Great Moderation and a loss of independence as the Fed engaged in fiscal and credit allocation policy.

Meltzer’s historical research thus leads him to conclude from the past that “Discretionary policy failed in 1929-33, in 1965-80, and now,” and to recommend for the future that “The lesson should be less discretion and more rule-like behavior.” While I registered some disagreements with parts of Meltzer’s history in my review article, I think his overall conclusion and recommendation are largely correct.

New empirical research establishes a strong relationship between very low interest rates set by the Fed, as in the period 2002-2005, and a risk-taking search for yield. This policy-induced lessening of risk aversion has been emphasized by Raghu Rajan and others as a key factor bringing on the financial crisis. The new empirical support for this view is reported in the working paper “Risk, Uncertainty and Monetary Policy” by Geert Bekaert, Marie Hoerova, and Marco Lo Duca.

The basic evidence is the pattern of correlations over time which can found by looking carefully through the following bar graphs and table drawn from the paper.

Last June the central bank of Norway hosted a fascinating conference in Oslo on the use of monetary policy rules in small open economies. The Norges Bank is a remarkably transparent central bank. As with the Swedish Riksbank, it announces not only its most recent interest rate decision, but also the likely path for its interest rate decisions in the future. While some have criticized publishing future interest rate forecasts, the experiences in Norway and Sweden show that there are advantages of such increased transparency. For example, consider the debate at the Risksbank earlier this month about the path of interest rates in the next two years. The Riksbank minutes (which provide much more detail than FOMC minutes) reveal a substantive debate between some, such as Deputy Governor Lars Svensson, who preferred an interest rate path in which rates were held low for a long time and others who wanted to increase rates more rapidly.

As explained in the minutes, the debate was in part over forecasts of monetary policy rate decisions abroad: “Given statements made by the Federal Reserve and the ECB, …low policy-rate expectations must be regarded as very realistic. The differential between Swedish and foreign interest rates is currently moderate. If the repo-rate was to become credible and policy-rate expectations for Sweden were to shift up to the repo-rate path, the expected differential in relation to other countries would be considerable. This would trigger substantial capital flows and lead to a dramatic appreciation of the krona. Both higher market rates and a stronger krona would entail a drastic tightening of actual monetary policy.”

More light is shed on the effect of lower interest rates abroad on policy by the experience of the Norges Bank; the effects can be illustrated using charts from their Monetary Policy Reports. Consider the decision to lower the path of interest rates in Norway earlier this year. The lower path is shown by the red line in this picture:

The Norges Bank explained this change with their useful (and very transparent) “interest rate accounting” bar chart. Observe that a big reason for the rate cut was that foreign interest rates were expected to be lower.

Further evidence is shown in the Norges Bank efforts to use monetary policy rules in their decision-making. As shown in the third graph, their interest rate path is lower than a Taylor Rule without the foreign interest rate and about the same as a policy rule in which the foreign interest rate is added to a Taylor Rule. Whether such adjustments are good or bad was the subject of my keynote address at the conference, but whatever the answer, we should be grateful for their high level of transparency which helps us research the question.

For years economists and policymakers in the United State have been expressing fears that America would enter a Japanese-style deflation and thereby experience a lost decade like Japan in the 1990s. One of the earliest examples was the October 1999 Woodstock Vermont conference (later published in the Journal of Money Credit and Banking) on how to avoid deflation, which may have been an impetus to the Fed’s decision to hold interest rates so low in the period from 2003-2005. In his recently published history of the Federal Reserve Volume 2, Allan Meltzer reports, based on conversations at the time, that “Chairman Alan Greenspan believed and said that the country faced risk of deflation” during this period. Concerns about deflation are clearly on the minds of members of the FOMC as they meet next week.

It was therefore very helpful and quite refreshing that Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa’s chose to address this issue in a speech this week at the Bank of Japan, Uniqueness or Similarity? Japan’s Post-Bubble experience in Monetary Policy Studies. Hearing from a person in a top leadership position who can reflect on the experience of dealing with deflation is very useful right now. I heard the speech in person and can report that many in the audience (including me) were very positive about the interesting ideas, the clarity of the exposition, and the many helpful charts. The most discussed chart, reproduced here, suggested an eerie similarity between the United States and Japan.

Other interesting points in the speech were that the recent Japanese-style deflation has been remarkably mild compared to the Great Depression and that “Empirical studies on Japan mostly show that quantitative easing produced significant effects on stabilizing the financial system, while it had limited effects on stimulating economic activity and prices.”

I am writing from Tokyo where I have spent a few days at the Bank of Japan. This week marked the first exchange market intervention by the Bank of Japan since March 16, 2004, a day I remember well because it was the last day of a massive exchange market intervention by Japan amounting to $320 billion and now called the Great Intervention. As U.S. Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs, I worked closely with the Japanese on the start and the exit from the Great Intervention.

Some have asked me to compare this week’s intervention with the start of that earlier intervention because the earlier one was closely related to the Bank of Japan’s quantitative easing, a subject which is back on the table. Indeed, some are speculating that the recent intervention might be the start of another large dose of quantitative easing, not only in Japan but elsewhere. Today’s Financial Times front page story, Monetary Easing Fears Lift Gold To Record High reports that “Traders said Tokyo’s intervention in the yen market, which injected fresh liquidity into the Japanese economy, was a sign that central banks were prepared to begin a new round of quantitative easing. Traders said the Federal Reserve could follow suit next week at its monthly interest rate setting meeting, and that gold would probably benefit from it.”

The U.S policy toward the Great Intervention by Japan was part of a strategy to support Japanese efforts to increase money growth to levels achieved before the start of their deflation. So it did relate to quantitative easing. By not registering objections to the intervention, the U.S. made it easier for Japan to increase money growth. The strategy worked this way: When the Bank of Japan intervenes and buys dollars in the currency markets at the instruction of the Finance Ministry, it pays for the dollars with yen. Unless the Bank of Japan offsets—sterilizes—this increase in yen by selling (rather than buying) other assets, such as Japanese government bonds, the Japanese money supply increases. In the past, U.S. Administrations had leaned heavily against the Japanese intervening in the markets to drive down the yen. By adopting a more tolerant position toward the intervention—especially if it went unsterilized—we could help to increase the money supply in Japan. So when Zembei Mizoguchi, the vice Minister at the Japan’s Ministry of Finance, discussed the possibility in late 2002 that currency intervention was going to increase, I did not object, as the U.S. Treasury usually does.

After a few months into 2003, the unprecedented nature of the intervention became clear to everyone. The Japanese would not publicly announce their daily interventions, but the markets began to sense it, and at the end of each month the Japanese would report on the monthly totals. I had arranged for the Japanese to email me personally whenever they intervened in the market, and to call me about very large interventions. When I read email on my Blackberry in the early morning I would frequently find messages from Tokyo like “small intervention during Tokyo trading hours; 1.2 billion dollars purchased,” and I was awakened by quite a few late night or very early morning calls from Tokyo too.

By the summer of 2003, the data began to show that the Japanese economy was finally turning the corner. Though it was too early to be sure about the recovery in Japan, it seemed to me that the Japanese could soon begin to exit from their unusual exchange rate policy of massive intervention. For the next few months we worked with the Japanese on an exit strategy. By early February 2004, the Japanese decided to complete the exit and Zembei called me to outline their exit strategy: They would intervene even more heavily in the next month and then stop. The idea seemed strange to me, but the Japanese had never tried to mislead me, so I knew that this was indeed their strategy.

Intervention did increase and it was not until March 5, 2004 that we really saw the beginning of the end of the intervention. At 8:30 that morning, Washington time, the U.S. Labor Department released their monthly employment report. Employment for the month of February was up by only 21,000 jobs, much less than we or the market had anticipated. News like this would normally have a negative impact on the dollar because weaker jobs data would lower the chances of an interest rate increase by the Fed, thereby making the dollar slightly less attractive to investors seeking higher interest rates. But the dollar did not weaken and on March 5 the Japanese had purchased $11.2 billion dollars that day which made the dollar appreciate rather than depreciate as one would expect. They were not simply smoothing the market, they were working against it. Zembei had told me that they were going to do more intervention before they did less, but this was simply excessive. He was working against market fundamentals. I called him over the weekend to complain that this type of intervention was completely unwarranted and I was as forceful as a friend and ally could be. Zembei acknowledged that they were still intervening heavily now, but the March 5 dollar buy was part of the exit plan. I argued that the exit period had gone on long enough.

Zembei did soon stop intervening, after another week of heavy dollar purchases, but nothing that equaled March 5. The last purchase of dollars occurred on March 16 when the Japanese bought “only” $615 million. On the 17th my Blackberry reported no intervention, and again on the 18th. There was no intervention for the rest of March and the rest of the 2004, and all the way through 2005 and now through September 14, 2010. The yen did not strengthen much in the months after the Great Intervention ended.

My assessment, based on this experience, is that the recent intervention is not, and should not, be a repeat of the Great Intervention. While that intervention was not sterilized and quantitative easing occurred, many at the Bank of Japan did not think it was so successful. Moreover, the need for more liquidity in the Japanese banking system is not so obvious now. And the protectionist pressures in the United States are greater now, especially with the very weak U.S. economy. Complaints in the U.S. congress about the recent intervention are already greater than what we heard during the Great Intervention at the time.

In any case, I hope this perspective on the Great Intervention from a U.S. Treasury official at the time is useful. It is drawn in part from my book Global Financial Warriors.