macroblog: How To Characterize Economic Policy In The 90's
リンク: macroblog: How To Characterize Economic Policy In The 90's.
A comment made by pgl in one of yesterday's posts at Angry Bear caught my attention:
And [why is chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers Ed] Lazear opposed to my suggestion of easy money with tight fiscal policy, which was the 1993 approach?
What got me thinking was this: Was the policy in the period referenced by pgl really one of "easy money" and "tight fiscal policy"?
Answering that question requires answering the prior question of what, exactly, do those terms mean. That is not a straightforward task, but let me give it a shot. I'll start by suggesting -- as I have done before -- that a characterization of the stance of monetary policy -- as tight or easy, restrictive or stimulative, contractionary or expansionary -- can be found in the yield curve, or the spread between short-term interest rates and long-term interest rates.
What about fiscal policy? I suppose that what many people have in mind is the government surplus of revenue over expenditure relative to GDP or, alternatively, the "standardized" or "cyclically-adjusted" budget surplus relative to "potential" GDP. As explained by the Congressional Budget Office:
The size of the budget deficit is influenced by temporary factors, such as the effects of the business cycle or one-time shifts in the timing of federal tax receipts and spending, and the longer-lasting impact of such factors as tax and spending legislation, changes in the trend growth rate of the economy, and movements in the distribution and proportion of income subject to taxation. To help separate out those factors, this report presents estimates of two adjusted budget measures: the cyclically adjusted surplus or deficit (which attempts to filter out the effects of the business cycle) and the standardized-budget surplus or deficit (which removes other factors in addition to business-cycle effects).
With that background, here are pictures of the difference between the yield on 10-year (constant-maturity) Treasury securities and the effective federal funds rate...
...and various measures of the government surplus:
Is pgl right? Does it look like, let's say the Clinton years, were a period of tight fiscal policy and easy monetary policy?
You are not surprised, I presume, to see that there is a pretty good case on the fiscal policy characterization -- though it is interesting that the G.H.W Bush years look every bit as good as the Clinton years by the standardized surplus measure. (I haven't checked this carefully, but I suspect this may have something to do with smoothing out expenditures and receipts associated with the activities of the Resolution Trust Association created to manage the aftermath of the S&L crisis of the 80's, as well as adjustments for extraordinary capital gains taxes in the latter 90s.)
