"How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" – Henry James


There are a few lone voices willing to utter heresy. I am an avid follower of Ilusion Monetaria, a blog by ex-Bank of Spain economist (and monetarist) Miguel Navascues here.
Dr Navascues calls a spade a spade. He exhorts Spain to break free of EMU oppression immediately. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard)

miércoles, 22 de abril de 2015

Funeral por la regla de Taylor

Genial y contundente smash ball de Tony Yates a John Taylor y su famosa "Regla de Taylor". Por razones ignotas, Taylor pretende que la crisis advino porque la FED no se atuvo firmemente a su regla sobre el tipo de interés oficial, regla que tan bien había funcionado hasta el 2000. (Abro inmediatamente un link a tan sabroso blog de Tony Yates, al que no conocía.) 

Para el que no esté enterado. Regla de Taylor. Ecuación que pretende deteeminar el tipo se interés óptimo de la FED en cada momento, según la inflación del IPC y la distancia del PIB al PIB potencial.

La respuesta de Yates es apabuyante. De ella entresaco un par de párrafos, que vienen a ser la explicación alternativa y plausible de la crisis. Claro que para aceptarla hay que salir del bucle melancólico en el que están inmersos los economistas que creen que la economía es auto-ajustable, y que todo depende de unas décimas de puntos porcentuales en el tipo de interés para mantener el rumbo estable. La lista de razones de falta de regulación financiera (es decir, razones no monetarias), para explicar la crisis son tan evidentes que hay que estar zumbado para excluirlas por la simple razón de que no encajan bien en el modelo matemático.
11. For reasons that escape me, John Taylor seems to relegate the misunderstanding of finance, and financial regulation, to the status of a detail in the list of likely causes of the financial crisis. Yet there are so many reasons to believe that this was its primary causes. Not least that in the models we know and love, real, low-frequency problems generally have real causes. John also has to contend with the freshwater economists on this matter, since they – mostly believing in flexible prices – would view monetary policy as the detail. To give a few examples, we are asked to believe that keeping interest rates a few tens of basis points below what JT argues – controversially – should have been the case, was responsible and not: politically motivated subsidies for sub-prime lending; failures in credit ratings of sub-prime securities; failures in the regulation of retail banks with new, aggressive wholesale funding models, and lax lending standards; failures in the regulation of investment banking functions which had unappreciated and systemic importance; instability caused by the failure of institutions to internalise the effects of their fire sales on the system as a whole once the crisis had begun; and by Knightian uncertainty over things like the value of asset backed securities and who was exposed to what. The impact of the export of vast flows of savings ‘uphill’, from emerging market countries, on asset prices, asset pricing models, regulatory capacity and so on. This is a short extract from a very long list of causal factors unrelated to monetary policy. But the general idea should be plain.
For me, it’s ironic that John calls his talk ‘a monetary policy for the future’. John does not seem to have absorbed the lessons of the recent past. The crisis has reopened questions about the appropriate macro model and the macro policy conduct within it that were previously thought to be settled. That there should be closer adherence to this old answer to monetary policy questions is a conclusion that I think very few indeed will draw.

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