Whisper it, but things finally seem to be looking up. Investment is rising, unemployment is falling, and the deficit seems to be coming under control. But it could be a lot better. Real wages will not recover to their pre-crisis peak until 2020. And expected growth of 2.7 per cent this year is well below what we might expect in a real recovery.
The question is, how can we get the strong growth we all want? Tax cuts are nice, but hard to sell as long as the deficit remains large. And calls for business deregulation are often too vague to be useful. But there are clear areas for reform in planning, immigration, and money, and none would threaten the deficit. Reform these areas – the PIMs, we might call them – and real, booming, sustainable growth will come.
Should central banks do emergency lending?
A barnstorming new paper from the Richmond Fed, written by its President Jeffrey Lacker and staff economist Renee Haltom, argues that the Federal Reserve has drifted into doing too much credit policy to the detriment of its traditional goal of overall macroeconomic stabilisation.
In its 100-year history, many of the Federal Reserve’s actions in the nameof financial stability have come through emergency lending once financial crises are underway. It is not obvious that the Fed should be involved in emergency lending, however, since expectations of such lending can increase the likelihood of crises. Arguments in favor of this role often misread history. Instead, history and experience suggest that the Fed’s balance sheet activities should be restricted to the conduct of monetary policy.
The first step in their case is attacking the idea that the Fed was created to be a lender to specific troubled institutions or sectors:
Congress created the Fed to “furnish an elastic currency.”...In other words, the Fed was created to achieve what can be best described as monetary stability. The Fed was designed to smoothly accommodate swings in currency demand, thereby dampening seasonal interest rate movements. The Fed’s design also was intended to eliminate bank panics by assuring the public that solvent banks would be able to satisfy mass requests to convert one monetary instrument (deposits) into another (currency). Preventing bank panics would solve a monetary instability problem.The Fed’s original monetary function is distinct from credit allocation, which is when policymakers choose certain firms or markets to receive credit over others.
They go on to explain further the difference between monetary policy (providing overall nominal stability; making sure that shocks to money demand do not lead to macroeconomic instability & recessions) and credit policy (choosing specific firms to receive support and funds—effectively a form of microeconomic central planning):
Monetary policy consists of the central bank’s actions that expand or contract its monetary liabilities. By contrast, a central bank’s actions constitute credit policy if they alter the composition of its portfolio—by lending, for example—without affecting the outstanding amount of monetary liabilities. To be sure, lending directly to a firm can accomplish both. But in the Fed’s modern monetary policy procedures, the banking system reserves that result from Fed lending are automatically drained through off setting open market operations to avoid driving the federal funds rate below target.
The lending is, thus, effec-tively “sterilized,” and the Fed can be thought of as selling Treasury securities and lending the proceeds to the borrower, an action that is functionally equivalent to fiscal policy.
They go on to explain why Walter Bagehot provides "scant support" for the creditist approach to crisis management, while the facts of the Great Depression do not fit with the creditist story.
Finally, they note that even if there are inherent instabilities in the financial system—something far from proven—many of these are made substantially worse by central bank intervention in credit markets.
Financial institutions don’t have to fund themselves with short-term, demand-able debt. If they choose to, they can include provisions to make contracts more resilient, reducing the incentive for runs. Many of these safeguards already exist: contracts often include limits on risk-taking, liquidity requirements, overcollateralization, and other mechanisms.
Moreover, contractual provisions can explicitly limit investors’ abilities to flee suddenly, for example, by requiring advance notice of withdrawals or allowing borrowers to restrict investor liquidations. Indeed, many financial entities outside the banking sector, such as hedge funds, avoided financial stress by adopting such measures prior to the crisis.Yet, leading up to the crisis, many financial institutions chose funding structures that left them vulnerable to sudden mass withdrawals. Why?
Arguably, precedents established by the government convinced market participants of an implicit government commitment to provide backstop liquidity. Since the 1970s, the government has rescued increasingly large fi nancial institutions and markets in distress. This encourages large, interconnected fi nancial fi rms to take greater risks, including the choice of more fragile and often more profi table funding structures. For example, larger financial firms relied to a greater extent on the short-term credit markets that ended up receiving government support during the crisis. This is the well-known “too big to fail” problem.
I apologise for the length of the quotation, but the paper really is excellent. Do read the whole thing.
Inside the Adam Smith Institute
Now that the new Adam Smith website is up, with an exciting plethora of activities and reports scheduled, new readers might like to take stock of what the ASI does, and what motivates us. If labels are used, they might be "free market" and "libertarian," but these are big tents under which disparate people are grouped. The crucial thing is that our free market libertarianism is both consequentialist and empiricist, combining an essentially Hayekian economic outlook with a deep optimism about the world.
In our view actions that enable individuals to advance their happiness by pursuing their own goals are worthy of support, and those that restrict their ability to do that should be opposed. We are more concerned with what results from actions than with the intentions or attitudes of those who initiate those actions. And we are more concerned with changing the world for the better than with promoting theories about it.
As empiricists we make conjectures about the world and its future, and we test their value against experience of real world outcomes. Where the two conflict, it is the conjecture that has to be rejected or modified. We take the view that "an ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory."
While economics and public policy are complex fields that make experiment and testing difficult to perform, we do attempt to test proposals by their results. Several times we have proposed small-scale trials of larger ideas in order to validate the ideas and ascertain any unforeseen drawbacks before they are rolled out more widely.
We recognize, of course, that poor people do not have access to the choices and chances accessible to the rich, and this is why many of our policy initiatives are directed to improving the lot of poorer people in society. We have advocated for many years that the income tax and national insurance thresholds should be set at the level of the minimum wage and indexed to it, so we would not be taxing people on the bottom income level.
Some of our research studies and policy suggestions derive from our recognition that poor people are hurt most by things such as restrictions on international trade and migration, planning controls that prevent cheap housing from being built, education policies that condemn poor children to bad schools and regulatory policies that protect established market players from new entrants.
We propose and back policies that give all parents choice over where their children go to school and which introduce competition into the school system, whether these be by education vouchers, or by allowing the allocation of state funds to schools be determined by the choices parents make. We tend to back the view that welfare is not just about providing the services the state thinks poor people should have, but about equipping people with the means to make their own choices about the mix of services they prefer. Ideas such as a negative income tax could remove the perverse incentives present in the current welfare system.
We recognize that states can cause a great deal of harm when they attempt to direct and micromanage the economy. Many regulations have damaging effects that were not anticipated, and this includes financial regulations that can make financial systems more unstable than they would be without them.
More broadly, we think that the ‘unknown unknowns’ of regulation should lead society to prefer decentralized trial and error to the risk of one big mistake that affects everyone in the same way.
We have argued that the central bank should follow the ‘Hayek rule’ – the stabilization of the level of nominal spending in times of booms and busts along a predictable path. Scott Sumner recently delivered our annual Adam Smith Lecture and explained how the failure of the world’s central banks to do this led to the Great Recession.
In the Adam Smith Institute we have always been very optimistic about technology and society. We see the world becoming increasingly open and tolerant in most (though not all) areas, with technology and entrepreneurship helping to drive that. To us, companies like Uber, Google and Airbnb deserve to be celebrated when they break down barriers to competition and disrupt the existing way of doing things in ways that give consumers a better product for a lower cost. It is this kind of innovative entrepreneurship that moves the world forward and allows today’s luxuries of the very rich to be tomorrow’s household commonplaces.
There is a dark side when new technologies are used by governments to spy on their citizens and control them. If technologies like Bitcoin and other blockchain-based innovations represent a long-term way of evading the worst excesses of government intrusion, they should be defended from government now while they are still in their infancy.
Of course the Institute is not a monolith. It consists of people who sometimes differ, but all of whom are brought together by a desire to give more power and liberty to individuals, so that their regard to their own interest can make them and us richer, freer and happier.
The eurozone is in dire need of nominal income targeting
It may well be that, in the US and UK, nominal GDP is growing in line with long-term market expectations.* It may well be that, though we will not bring aggregate demand back to its pre-recession trend, most of the big costs of this policy have been paid. And so it may be that my pet policy: nominal income/GDP targeting, is only a small improvement over the current framework here in the UK or in the US. But there is one place that direly needs my medicine. As a whole, the Eurozone is currently seeing very low inflation, but plenty of periphery countries are already suffering from deflation. And this is not the Good Deflation of productivity improvements (can be identified because it comes at the same time as real output growth) but the Bad Deflation of demand dislocation. The European Central Bank could deal with a lot of these problems simply by adopting a nominal GDP target.
When it comes to macroeconomics, the best analysis we really have is complicated econometric models on the one side, and highly stylised theoretical models on the other. Both are useful, and both can tell us something, but they rely on suspending quite a substantial amount of disbelief and making a lot of simplifying assumptions. You lose a lot of people on the way to a detailed theoretical argument, while the empirical evidence we have is really insufficient to conclusively answer the sort of questions I'm posing.
In general, I think that very complex models help us make sense of detailed specifics, but that "workhorse" basic theoretical models can essentially tell us what's going on here. Unemployment is a real variable, not one directly controlled by a central bank, and a bad thing for the central bank to target. But in the absence of major changes in exogenous productivity, labour regulation, cultural norms around labour, migration and so on, there is a pretty strong relationship between aggregate demand and unemployment. Demand dislocation is almost always the reason for short-run employment fluctuations.
Unemployment rose everywhere in 2008-9. But it nudged down only marginally post-crisis in the Eurozone, whereas in the UK and US it soon began to steadily fall toward its pre-crisis rate (the red line, though not on this graph, has tracked the green one very closely). In the meantime the Eurozone rate has risen up to 12%. This is not at all surprising, given the almost complete flattening off of aggregate demand in the Eurozone—this means a constantly-widening gap with the pre-recession trend (something like 20% below it now).
Although intuitively we'd expect expectations to steadily adjust to the new likely schedule, three factors mean this takes a while: firstly the ECB is very unclear about what it is going to do (and perhaps unsure itself), secondly some plans are set over long horizons, and thirdly the lacklustre central-bank response to the 2007-8 financial crisis is unprecedented in the post-war period.
1. We have a huge literature on the costs of policy uncertainty—the variance of expected outcomes has an effect on firms' willingness to hire, invest, produce, independent of the mean expected outcome.
2. Many firms invest over long horizons. It may have become clear at some point in 2011, when the ECB raised interest rates despite the ongoing stagnation and weak recovery, that the macro planners, in their wisdom, were aiming for a lower overall growth path and perhaps a lower overall growth rate in nominal variables. And so, after 2011 firm plans started to adjust to this new reality. But many plans will have been predicated on an entirely different 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and so on. And as mentioned before, the gulf between what was expected for the mid-2010s back in 2007 and what actually happened is actually widening.
3. Thirdly, and finally, the period 2008-2010 is unprecedented and will have slowed down firm adjustment substantially. As mentioned above, even if firms set plans with a fairly short-term horizon (a few years) they wouldn't have been able to adjust to the new normal in 2008, 2009 and 2010 unless they really expected the ECB's policy of not only not returning to trend level, but not even return to trend rate!
All of these three issues are convincingly resolved by nominal income targeting. It's very certain—indeed the best version would have some sort of very-hard-to-stop computer doing it. It promises to keep up to trend. And it is very stable over long horizons.
Recent evidence reinforces the view, implicit in our models, that (unconventional) monetary policy is highly effective at the zero lower bound, even through the real interest rate channel (!) All the ECB needs to do is announce a nominal income target.
*This reminds me: isn't it about time we had an NGDP futures market so we could make claims here with any kind of confidence?
QE boosts equities by boosting fundamentals
Many people suggest that the recovery in equity prices since 2009-2010, seen around round the world but particularly in the American Nasdaq, S&P500 and DJIA, does not represent a general economic improvement. Instead, they believe that these numbers are simply being buoyed by new money pumped into the system. I don't think this argument holds, and I will attempt to explain why. First let's consider why we think people hold equities. Essentially, people hold equities because they expect a given real return for a given risk profile. In our simplest model, people hold portfolios of assets based on their risk tolerance, their subjective judgements over probabilities, and their preferences. Adding in banks, insurers, pension funds and so on makes the overall picture more realistic, but doesn't change our theory much. People pick financial intermediaries that hold the assets according to our preferences—the intermediaries add value through scale, or through providing a payments system and settling accounts.
Why might electronic money printing (which we call "quantitative easing" or QE) affect equity prices?
Well, firstly, we might not expect an effect from quantitative easing under one circumstance. QE increases the amount of narrow money we have—that is the number of notes, coins and bank reserves in the system. Generally we think broad money—which includes bank accounts people can debit or write checks on, and is much, much larger—is what interacts directly with the real economy. The ratio of broad money to narrow money is called the money multiplier, and usually a rise in narrow money leads to an even bigger rise in broad money—but this multiplier is not stable. It's at least possible (although not historically typical) that a rise in narrow money could be completely counteracted by a fall in the money multiplier.
But assuming this doesn't happen, there are three reasons why QE might boost equity prices. First would be because it increases inflation and the future price level. If prices rise, cash is worth less, so relative to a given nominal amount of cash, all things being equal a given equity is worth more. In other terms, the firms' nominal expected returns would rise.
The second reason is that in a depressed economy monetary easing like QE may boost real growth, which we would expect to raise any given company's expected real returns. It might also reduce the risk of very bad economic outcomes. Since equities are riskier than bonds, gilts and cash they pay a risk premium to those who hold them—a higher return (lower price) to compensate for this. If risky outcomes in general become less likely, these risk premia might narrow, making equities more desirable and expensive.
The third reason QE might raise stock prices is because it increases overall social wealth, and thus may lead to greater risk-tolerance overall, if people are willing to bear more risk as they get wealthier, and thus shift towards riskier assets like equities.
In each of these three, the jump in equity prices comes from fundamental factors. One could certainly drive up stocks by creating lots of inflation, but we can easily check if that's what's happening by looking at inflation. Any real/relative growth in equities would refute that explanation. In contrast, real growth, reduced risk and shifted preferences due to extra wealth are all legitimate reasons for higher equity prices.
Accounts of why QE buoys stocks without improving fundamentals (and hence part of the argument that stock indices are not good proxies for economic health) tend to rely on a narrative that QE "flows into equities". But as explained, people try to hold their wealth in the portfolio that fits closest to their preferences. If QE money did "flow into equities" then people would now be holding more of their wealth in stocks than they wanted to—they would rapidly rebalance their portfolio. Typically people needn't even do this themselves, because their pension fund will do so for them. QE has to improve the fundamental factors in order to boost equities.
What's a neutral monetary policy?
The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond alerted me to a newish paper from one of my favourite economists, Robert Hetzel, entitled "The Monetarist-Keynesian Debate and the Phillips Curve: Lessons from the Great Inflation"—needless to say it's highly interesting and informative. One bit in particular prompted me to write this screed on neutrality in central banking and monetary policy.
In the Keynesian tradition, cyclical fluctuations arise from real shocks in the form of discrete shifts in the degree of investor optimism and pessimism about the future large enough to overwhelm the stabilising properties of the price system and, by extension, to overwhelm the monetary stimulus evidenced by cyclically low interest rates.
In the quantity theory [monetarist] tradition, cyclical fluctations rise from central bank behaviour that frustrates the working of the price system through monetary shocks that require changes in individual relative prices to reach, on average, a new price level in a way uncoordinated by a common set of expectations.
In the real-business-cycle [new classical] tradition, cyclical fluctuations arise from productivity shocks passed on to the real economy through a well-functioning price system devoid of monetary non-neutralities and nominal price stickiness.
From each of these perspectives, we can derive some sort of definition of monetary/central bank neutrality, as well as an idea of what policy the central bank should operate. It strikes me that only one view is plausible, but before I make the case for that view, I will make the case for a particular theory of "meta-neutrality", i.e. a way that we should think about neutrality, whatever our perspective. I think this is something that everyone should be able to agree on, but I think that once we've agreed on it one view becomes inescapable.
Nothing is neutral with respect to everything. In one of my favourite ever essays, Scott Alexander makes a very similar point about "safe spaces" (nothing can be a safe space for everything—safe spaces for, e.g. a safe space for a disadvantaged group cannot also be a safe space for no-holds-barred rational discussion). In the same way, a monetary policy that is neutral with respect to real interest rates might conceivably have to achieve this by non-neutrality with respect to say, exchange rates. So the interesting question is what economic variables monetary policy must be neutral with respect to for us to call it "neutral" with no qualifiers.
But what we really want to be neutral to is the microeconomic working of the price system and markets generally, which is a bit more complex than any particular macroeconomic variable we could point to. One way around the question is by thinking about what might be non-neutral to the workings of the price system. One answer is: menu and shoe-leather costs, typically associated with high inflation, but more accurately linked to high aggregate demand (nominal GDP) growth.
Both impose restrictions on price adjustment, especially if they are unexpected and hence not "priced in".Menu costs will stop firms re-pricing things as often as would be optimal, impeding price adjustment, whileshoe-leather costs (from the high nominal interest rates associated with high inflation and high NGDP growth) will stop people from holding as much cash as they otherwise would, distorting their consumption decisions.
On the other side, unexpectedly low NGDP growth, combined with "money illusion" in borrowers ("sticky debts") and workers ("sticky wages"), could cause other microeconomic problems—markets won't clear until people's information, expectations and plans have adjusted, i.e. until people realise that the fall in prices/wages is not a relative price adjustment but a fall in overall prices/NGDP.
Overall this suggests we should call a policy neutral without qualifiers not when it is perfectly neutral (which is impossible) but when it is the "neutrality maximising policy". In the words of David Beckworth "neither too stimulative nor too contractionary and is pushing the economy toward its full potential" or in the words of Alan Greenspan one that "would keep the economy at its production potential over time".
That is, one that balances the distortionary costs of high (particularly unexpectedly high) NGDP growth with the costs of low (particularly unexpectedly low) NGDP growth. Empirically, menu cost and shoe leather problems have never been large in the USA and UK when NGDP is ticking along at about 5%. By contrast, NGDP growth less than 2.5% is almost always consonant with stagnation, while NGDP growth of less than zero always means a recession—much bigger costs. This suggests policy, far from being unprecedentedly easy in the lacklustre post-recession recovery, was if anything on the tight side of neutral.
Two crucial final points:
1. Identifying the conditions that we'd want to see in the macroeconomy for a (relatively) undistorted microeconomy does not mean endorsing a particular monetary arrangement or regime. Whether we have a central bank or not, we'd want stable NGDP growth.
2. This 5% level is contingent on society-wide expectations. If long-term expectations held by borrowers, lenders, firms, consumers and workers were for 0% NGDP growth (e.g. the 19th Century), then 0% NGDP growth would be more likely to be the neutrality-maximising monetary policy.
Three steps forward
Seven things we'd like to see in Budget 2014 (but probably won't)
Here are seven things we'd like to see at this year's budget:
1. Personal allowance and employee National Insurance thresholds should be merged and set at the NMW level (approx. £13,000/year after the NMW is raised to £6.50/hour). The government should legislate to keep the tax & NI thresholds at at least at the NMW level. It is crucial that the National Insurance contributions threshold be raised as well as the income tax threshold.
2. The corporation tax cut planned for 2015 should be brought forward by a year (to 20% this year), with a commitment reduce it further by 2.5% per annum for the next three years to 12.5%. In the long-run it should be abolished altogether as it is a stealth tax on income (workers’ wages bear approximately 60% of the tax) and a distortionary tax on capital.
3. The Chancellor should go forward with plans to merge Income Tax and National Insurance. Employers’ National Insurance Contributions should be included on workers’ wage slips to highlight that this is a stealth tax on wages.
4. Help to Buy should be wound down ahead of schedule to reduce house prices in London and the South East. To create jobs and encourage construction the Chancellor should endorse radical planning reform that would allow more houses to be built.
5. Subsidies (“financial relief”) to energy intensive industries should be ended with the money saved paying for a broad reduction in green energy taxes to reduce consumers’ energy bills.
6. The ring-fence of NHS spending should be abolished. If savings can be made in the education, policing and welfare budgets, they can be made in the healthcare budget as well.
7. The Bank of England’s mandate should be revised, with the Bank instructed to target the level of nominal spending (nominal GDP) in the economy along a predetermined trend. This would reduce inflation in boom periods and prevent deep recessions by stabilising aggregate demand.
Interest rates are set in the market place
The London housing market is booming. According to Nationwide, prices rose 14.9% over 2013. According to Halifax, they climbed 9.4%. According to the Land Registry they were up 11.2%. The Office for National Statistics hasn't quite got data for the whole year yet, but their numbers show prices up 11.6% in London in the 12 months to November 2013. No doubt Rightmove, LSL, Hometrack and all of the many other indices echo this finding. While we at the ASI have pointed out how the government has jacked up demand with the Help to Buy scheme (some have quipped it might more accurately be termed "Help to Sell") the Bank of England and Treasury have dialled down the housing element of the Funding for Lending Scheme in response to worries about a bubble and unaffordability.
But however much these schemes are artificially adding to demand, it is certainly clear that London houses—a desirable place for natives and people across the world to live—face a huge demand and are in limited supply. Since this is clear, I have been loath to call the situation a "bubble"—a bubble seems bound to pop, but tight supply and ample demand suggests a situation where prices will remain high (see an excellent post from my colleague Sam for more detail). However, it was recently pointed out to me that since a high fraction of UK mortgages track the Bank of England's base rate, a jump in rates, something we'd expect as soon as UK economic growth is back on track, could make mortgages much less affordable, clamping down on the demand for housing.
This didn't chime with my instincts—it would be extremely costly for lenders to vary mortgage rates with Bank Rate so exactly while giving few benefits to consumers—so I set out to check the Bank of England's data to see if it was in fact the case. What I found was illuminating: despite the prevalence of tracker mortgages the spread between the average rate on both new and existing mortgage loans and Bank Rate varies drastically. For example, it was almost one percentage point in January 2004, fell to 0.5pp by July, rose to around 0.6pp where it stayed until July 2006 when it crashed to nearly zero in a year, before rising to 1pp in October 2008 and then almost 3.5pp in April 2009. Since then it has steadily trended down to around 2.5pp. There are lots of interesting and obvious stories to tell here, hearkening back to my piece about the confusion between interest rates as a stance of monetary policy and interest rates as the actual cost of borrowing firms and consumers face, but what is clear is that tracker mortgages be damned, interest rates are set in the marketplace.
What this means is that the fact the Bank's base rate will almost certainly be hiked in the next couple of years if economic growth continues at its current healthy pace is not a reason to worry that London's housing bubble will pop. Indeed, the only way London house prices are likely to drop from their current stratospheric levels is if we get a good honest bit of planning deregulation. Moving the green belt out just one mile would allow us to build one million houses, after all. And it could add percentage points of pure supply-side driven growth to GDP and living standards.
An alternative ‘Agenda for Hope’
Owen Jones has written a nine-point ‘Agenda for Hope’ that he argues would create a fairer society. Well, maybe. I’m not convinced by many of them. Then again, it would be quite surprising if I was.
But it got me thinking about what my nine-point agenda would be — not quite my 'perfect world' policies, but some fairly bold steps that I could just about imagine happening in the next couple of decades. Unlike Owen’s policies, few of these are likely to win much public support. On the other hand, most of the political elite would think these are just as wacky as Owen's too.
Nine policies to make people richer and freer (and hopefully happier):
1) The removal of political barriers to who can work and reside in the UK. Removing all barriers to trade would increase global GDP by between 0.3% and 4.1%. Completely removing barriers to migration, though, could increase global GDP by between 67% and 147.3%. Those GDP benefits would mostly accrue to the poorest people in the world. We can’t remove these barriers everywhere but we can show the rest of the world how it’s done. Any step towards this would be good – I suggest we start by dropping the net migration cap and allowing any accredited educational institution to award an unlimited number of student visas.
2) A strict rule for the Bank of England to target nominal GDP instead of inflation, replacing the discretion of the Monetary Policy Committee. Even more harmful than the primary bust in recessions is what Hayek called the ‘secondary deflation’ that comes about as people, fearing a drop in their future nominal earnings, hold on to more of their money. That reduces the total level of nominal spending in the economy which, since prices and wages are sticky in the short run, leads to unemployment and a fall in economic output. NGDP targeting prevents those ‘secondary deflations’ and would make economic busts much less common and harmful. In the long run, we should scrap the central bank altogether and replace it with competition in currencies (see point 9, below).
3) Significant planning reform that abolished the Town and Country Planning Act (which includes the legislation ‘protecting’ the Green Belt from most development) and decentralised planning decisions to individuals through tradable development rights (TDRs). This would give locals an incentive to allow new developments because they would be compensated by the developers directly, allowing for a reasonably efficient price system to emerge and making new development much, much easier. The extra economic activity from the new home building alone would probably add a couple of points to GDP growth.
4) Legalisation of most recreational drugs and the medicalisation of the most harmful ones. I think Transform’s outline is pretty good: let cannabis be sold like alcohol and tobacco to adults by licensed commercial retailers; MDMA, cocaine and amphetamines sold by pharmacies in limited quantities; and extremely dangerous drugs like heroin sold with prescriptions for use in supervised consumption areas. The sooner this happens, the sooner producers will be answerable to the law and deaths from ‘bad batches’ of drugs like ecstasy will be a thing of the past. Better yet, this would bring an end to drug wars like Mexico's, which has killed around 100,000 people in the past ten years.
5) Reform of the welfare system along the lines of a Negative Income Tax or Basic Income Guarantee. As it is, the welfare system disincentivises work and creates dependency without doing much for the working poor. A Negative Income Tax would only look at people’s incomes (not whether they were in work or not in work), reducing perverse incentives and topping up the wages of the poorest earners. This would strengthen the bargaining position of low-skilled workers and would remove much of the risks to workers associated with employment deregulation. Of course, the first thing we should do is raise the personal allowance and National Insurance threshold to the minimum wage rate to give poor workers a de facto 'Living Wage'.
6) A Singaporean-style healthcare system to replace the NHS. In Singapore, people have both a health savings account and optional catastrophic health insurance. They pay a portion of their earnings into the savings account (poor people receive money from the state for this), which pays for day-to-day trips to the doctor, prescriptions, and so on. The government co-pays for many expenses but the personal cost disincentivises frivolous visits to the doctor. For very expensive treatments, optional catastrophic health insurance kicks in. This is far from being a pure free market system but it is miles better (cheaper and with better health outcomes) than the NHS. (By the way, if you really like the NHS we could still call this an ‘NHS’ and still get the superior system.)
7) A school voucher system and significant reform of the state education and free schools sectors. This would include the abolition of catchement areas and proximity-based admission, simplification of the free schools application process, and expansion of the free schools programme to allow profit making firms to operate free schools. These reforms, outlined in more detail in two ASI reports, would increase the number of places available to children and increase competition among schools to drive up standards.
8) Intellectual property reform. As both Alex Tabarrok and Matt Ridley have pointed out, our IP (patent and copyright) law is too restrictive and seems to be stifling new innovation. Firms use patents as barriers to entry, suing new rivals whose products are too similar to their own. In industries where development costs are high but imitation costs are low, like pharmaceuticals, patents may be necessary to incentivise innovation, but in industries like software development where development can be cheaper than imitation, patents can be a terrible drag on progress. Tabarrok recommends that we try to tailor patent length in accordance with these differences; as a sceptic about our ability to know, well, anything, I’d prefer to leave it to private contracts and common law courts to discover.
9) Last but not least, the removal of the thicket of financial regulation and the promise of bailouts for insolvent banks. Known as ‘free banking’, this system of laissez-faire finance has an extremely strong record of stability – though bank panics still occurred in free banking systems, they were much less severe and rarely systemic. Only once the government started to intervene in the financial system to provide complete stability did things really begin to go wrong: deposit insurance, branch-banking restrictions, and other prudent-seeming regulations led to extremely bad unforeseen consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 probably owes more to asset requirements like the Basel accords, which heavily incentivised banks to hold ‘safe’ mortgage debt over ‘risky’ business debt, than anything else. Incidentally, the idea that having a large number of local banks is somehow better than having a few large banks is totally wrong: during the Great Depression, 9,000 of America's small, local banks failed; at the same time not one of Canada’s large banks failed. The small banks were more vulnerable because, unlike the big banks, they were undiversified.
Now, if only there was a think tank to try and make these dreams a reality.
What's the true free market monetary policy?
Let's imagine we are in a world where central banks are given key roles in the macroeconomy, and have been for decades or even centuries in almost every country. In this imaginary world, studies into the relative efficacy of free banking regimes have been undeservedly overlooked, and the orthodoxy among major economists, even ones otherwise sympathetic to free markets is that they are a bad idea. Major policymakers, let's imagine, are completely unaware of the free banking alternative, and most even use the term to mean something completely different. Proposals to enact free banking have not been mentioned in law making chambers for decades or centuries, if at all. It has not been in any party's policy platform for a similar period of time, in this imaginary world.
What's interesting about this imaginary world is that it is in fact our world. Economists like George Selgin, Larry White, Kevin Dowd (among many others) have done very convincing research about the benefits of free banking. And free banking may one day become a real prospect, perhaps in a new state or a charter city. But free banking has lost the battle for the time being, and abolishing the central bank and government intervention in money is as unlikely as abolishing the welfare state. Now one might say that if free banking is a desirable policy, it is worth continuing to wage the intellectual war for the benefit of future generations, who could benefit from the scholarship. Work done now could end up influencing and improving future monetary policy.
I do not discount the possibility this is true. At the same time, free banking is a meta-policy, not a policy—a way of choosing what monetary regime to enact, rather than a specific monetary regime. After all, it is at least possible that free banks could together target consumer prices, the GDP deflator, the money base, the money supply measured by M2, nominal income/NGDP. And for each of these different measures there are an infinite number of theoretical growth paths, and a large number of realistically plausible growth paths they could aim for. Now, free bankers say that the market will make a good decision, and I can buy that. But let's say we're constrained to choose a policy without the aid of the market mechanism: can we say there are better or worse central plans?
The answer is: of course we can! Old-school monetarism, targeting money supply aggregates, was a failure even according to Milton Friedman, whereas CPI targeting, for all its flaws, delivered 66 quarters of unbroken growth and a period so decent they named it the Great Moderation. The interwar gold standard brought us the stagnation of the 1920s (in the UK) and coming off us brought us our relatively pleasant experience of the Great Depression. Literally the order in which countries came off the gold standard is the order they got out of the Great Depression. And even though the classical gold standard worked pretty well, few of its benefits would obtain if we went back. Some central plans (the interwar gold standard, M2 targeting) don't work, some work a bit (the classical gold standard, CPI) and arguably some work pretty well (NGDP targeting is one in this category, according to Friedman, Hayek and I). If we are stuck with central planning, then why not have a good central plan?
And just because I'm allowing the term "central planning" to describe NGDP targeting, we needn't describe it as "government intervention in money". I don't think they are really the same thing. "Government intervention in money" brings to mind rapid inflation, wild swings in the macroeconomic environment; in short the exact circumstances that NGDP-targeting aims to avoid. Targeting aggregate demand keeps the overall macro environment stable—a truly neutral monetary policy—allowing firms and households to make long-term plans, and preventing recessions like the last one, caused as it almost certainly was by drastic monetary tightening. Indeed, as monetary policy determines the overall path of aggregate demand, we might easily call "sound money" policies aiming for zero inflation or a frozen base as dangerous government meddling—they allow the actually important measures like nominal income to fluctuate drastically.
Consider an analogy: school vouchers. Many libertarians may favour a system where parents can spend as little or as much as they want on schooling (considering distributional concerns separately), rather than having central planners decide on the voucher-set minimum. But we usually see a voucher system as an improvement on the status quo—parents may not be able to fully control how much is spent on their children's education but at least they can pick their school. Popular and successful schools grow to accommodate demand, while unpopular and unsuccessful schools can be wound down more quickly. Libertarians may see this as a way from the ideal situation, but none would therefore denounce the policy. The analogy isn't perfect, but I like to see NGDP targeting as similar to school vouchers, versus status quo schooling as the CPI target. Libertarians shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good.