From Crisis to Confidence: Macroeconomics after the Crash

The author

Roger Koppl is Professor of Finance in the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and a faculty fellow in the university’s Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute. Koppl has served on the faculty of the Copenhagen Business School, Auburn University, Fairleigh Dickinson University and Auburn University at Montgomery. He has held visiting positions at George Mason University, New York University and Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Economics. Professor Koppl is a past president of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. He is the editor of Advances in Austrian Economics.

Koppl’s research addresses a variety of topics related to the unifying theme of economic epistemics. He is the author of Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). His research has appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives; the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; Industrial and Corporate Change; Law, Probability and Risk; Criminology & Public Policy; Society, and other scholarly journals. Koppl’s research on forensic science has been featured in Forbes magazine, Reason magazine, Slate, The Huffington Post and other media outlets.

Foreword

Throughout its 60-year history, the IEA has made many contributions to the debate on what has come to be known as macroeconomics. The first Editorial Director, Arthur Seldon, brought to UK audiences the very different perspectives of authors such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

Some of Friedman’s insights, expressed in IEA publications, had a profound practical effect on economic policy around the world. In particular, central banks stopped treating inflation and unemployment as variables that could be traded off against each other – a little more inflation being tolerated for a little less unemployment, for example. This belief that there was no long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment was an important part of the rationale for establishing independent central banks. After all, if there is no benefit from high inflation, why not give responsibility for monetary policy to an independent agency so that politicians will not be tempted to create inflation for short-term gain? That way, the pursuit of low inflation would have more credibility as a policy and the markets would expect both lower and more stable inflation.

Of course, it has always been recognised that the economy does not adjust to shocks overnight and without any frictions. Wages may take time to adjust to lower levels of inflation, investment plans might be affected by the way in which increases in the money supply are transmitted through the system, and so on. This recognition – combined with the generally accepted belief that there was no long-run trade-off between inflation and output – led to the so-called neo-classical/new Keynesian consensus. This, in turn, accelerated the mathematisation of economics courses with university courses often focusing almost exclusively on a narrow category of models which attempted to describe credibility, leads and lags in the system, and so on.

Many students of economics – as well as many journalists and some politicians – see this treatment of economics as unhelpfully narrow, and discussion about the narrowness of many economics courses blossomed after the financial crash of 2008. A student group was set up at the University of Manchester called the Post-Crash Economics Society to make this very point and to request that economics courses be broadened.

Of course, the IEA has always had a wider perspective. It brought the works of F. A. Hayek and other Austrian economists to British academia and public policy circles many years ago. This excellent and timely monograph, From Crisis to Confidence: Macroeconomics after the Crash, is in that Austrian tradition. However, Roger Koppl’s work is not so much an extension of Hayek’s monetary theories as an attempt to help us understand the role that ‘confidence’ or – as Keynes put it – ‘animal spirits’ play in the economy and in the creation of boom and slump conditions.

Keynes talked about animal spirits but did not really provide a theory to explain how they operate. Why should animal spirits be high or low at any particular time? Why would some contrarian investors not take advantage of the fact that other investors have depressed animal spirits? Why will the depressed animal spirits of some investors not ‘cancel out’ the elevated animal spirits of others? Roger Koppl explains this by tying animal spirits in with the theory of ‘Big Players’ whose decisions can overwhelm the decisions of millions of entrepreneurs acting independently. Big Players tend to be organisations such as central banks and regulators whose actions can affect all market participants in a similar way. Koppl also draws on the recent empirical work on policy uncertainty that has been developing in recent years. Big Players may act in a way that suppresses animal spirits or leads them to get out of hand. The only way to deal with this problem is to curtail the influence of Big Players.

This monograph is an important contribution to the debate about the future of the discipline of economics. It seeks to broaden the discipline and thereby to increase its power to explain events such as the financial crash and the long slump that followed. Koppl’s work takes us beyond the narrow perspectives that are often the focus of so many university courses and which form the basis of economic analysis in government and central banks. This Hobart Paper is also an important contribution to the current policy debate as we seek to explain the worst period for productivity in the modern economic history of the UK.

Philip Booth

Editorial and Programme Director

Institute of Economic Affairs

Professor of Insurance and Risk Management

Cass Business School, City University

May 2014

The views expressed in this monograph are, as in all IEA publications, those of the author and not those of the Institute (which has no corporate view), its managing trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff. With some exceptions, such as with the publication of lectures, all IEA monographs are blind peer reviewed by at least two academics or researchers who are experts in the field.

Acknowledgements

For comments and helpful discussion I thank Nicholas A. Bloom, Anthony Evans, Roger Garrison, Steve Horwitz and David Prychitko. I thank two anonymous referees, who provided unusually helpful and penetrating commentary on a preliminary draft. Earlier conversations with Bruno Prior and William J. Luther made an indirect contribution to this monograph, for which I thank them.

To Maria, who brings joy.

Summary

Since US output peaked in December 2007 growth has been anaemic and output remains below potential. In addition, US unemployment has been persistently high. It increased from 4.4 per cent in May of 2007 to 10 per cent in October 2009 and was still at 6.7 per cent at the beginning of 2014. The post-crash period is quite unlike typical post-war recession periods after which employment has generally recovered within about two years. This pattern has been followed in many EU countries too.

The background to the long slump was a boom followed by a bust. Although the Federal Reserve seems to have pursued conventional monetary policy rules until 2002, from that point interest rates were kept too low for too long. This was an important policy mistake during the boom period.

As well as mistakes in monetary policy, several complementary government failures ensured that the boom manifested itself disproportionately in the housing sector and encouraged excess risk taking in financial markets. The central underlying fact in the boom period, however, was loose monetary policy.

Standard neo-classical macroeconomics does not have an adequate explanation for the slow pace of recovery from the financial crash. Many other economists continue to argue that the problem is a deficiency of ‘aggregate demand’. These economists want us to ‘stimulate’ our way out of the slump. However, repeated stimulatory measures have not effected a complete recovery. In the UK, for example, government borrowing has led the national debt to double in five years while output is still below potential.

Arguably, the financial crisis itself should have been sufficient to call into question the standard neo-classical and new-Keynesian economic paradigms. HM Queen Elizabeth II asked economists at the LSE why nobody saw the crisis coming. This was a good question and the answer she received was inadequate.

One aspect of economic theory which has been neglected is the concept of ‘animal spirits’ or ‘confidence’. Keynes, and others before him, discussed the importance of these ideas without ever developing a proper theory or explaining why and how confidence or animal spirits might affect the economy.

The state of confidence determines whether banks are willing to lend because the costs and risks that banks perceive are made up of both objective and subjective elements. If a weak state of confidence leads banks to over-estimate the costs and risks of lending, then banks will lend less than they otherwise would. Other economic actors are also affected by the state of confidence.

Confidence is undermined by policy uncertainty and the ability for ‘Big Players’ to unduly influence the economic system. Big Players include governments, monetary authorities and regulators, though there can also be Big Players in the private sector. Policy uncertainty increased after the financial crash and the evidence suggests that this affected investment and growth. For example, Baker et al. (2013) show that the increase in policy uncertainty in the US from 2006 to 2011 probably caused a persistent fall in real industrial production reaching as high as 2.5 per cent at one point. Also, after the crash, the UK suffered a productivity shock unprecedented in its industrial history. This was coincident with the top 100 British businesses increasing their cash holdings by over £42bn (34 per cent) in the five years to the autumn of 2013.

Recent regulatory developments such as the Dodd–Frank Act violate the principle of the rule of law and therefore undermine confidence and increase policy uncertainty. For example, the Dodd–Frank Act will almost certainly be subject to arbitrariness in its implementation and firms will not be able to plan in advance knowing the legal consequences of their actions.

In order to restore and maintain confidence, we need an economic constitution. This constitution needs three elements. Firstly, there must be long-term fiscal discipline: investors must know that they can plan for the long term without either taxation or borrowing getting out of hand. Secondly, the role of Big Players must be reduced. Finally, we need monetary competition and regulatory competition. Regulation should not be the responsibility of state bodies with considerable discretionary power.

Introduction

The state of confidence, as they term it, is a matter to which practical men always pay the closest and most anxious attention. But economists have not analysed it carefully and have been content, as a rule, to discuss it in general terms.

J. M. Keynes

To investigate in what conditions what type of expectations is likely to have a stabilising or destabilising influence is no doubt one of the next tasks of dynamic theory. We submit that it cannot be successfully tackled unless expectations are made the subject of causal explanation.

Ludwig M. Lachmann

Economic thought and policy are both moving towards command and control. There is a reason for this dangerous trend. The Great Recession, as the current crisis has been called, looks to many observers like a failure of markets brought on by insufficient regulation. In a common view, financial market deregulation brought on an irrational frenzy of excess capitalism and unrestrained greed. It was ‘bankers gone wild’ as Paul Krugman (2012) has put it. If bankers go wild, we need sober regulators to control them. But if I am right to think the interventionist turn is mistaken, then we need to know why. We need to know what has gone wrong with the economy and what has gone wrong with economics. If intervention and ‘stimulus’ are not the answer, what is?

It is worth noting the background at the time of writing because in some countries there is a degree of optimism that the crisis is over. However, though growth has resumed in the US and the UK, other countries still stagnate – especially in the euro zone. And, even in those countries that are growing again, there are concerns about long-term secular stagnation. Furthermore, none of the major crisis countries are close to trend national income levels again: recovery has been anaemic.

The stakes are high because, if we respond to the crisis and anaemic growth by ‘more regulation’, things can go wrong. We took an interventionist turn in