low interest rates

For Bonds, This Time is Different by Krugman

Bloomberg has an interesting piece on how high bond prices and low yields have been shocking investors who relied on old models. Some of this, I suspect, is because many people still — after all these years — haven’t wrapped their minds around the implications of a zero-lower=bound economy and the risks of a low-inflation trap. 

But it’s also true that structural change is happening fast — just not the kind of structural change people like to talk about. Never mind the stuff about skill mismatches and all that. What’s really happening fast is the demographic transition, with Europe very quickly turning Japanese:

And the US, although growing faster, also turning down sharply. 

Add to this the fact that what we thought was normal actually depended on ever-growing household debt, and it becomes clear that historical expectations about normal interest rates are likely to be way off. You don’t have to believe in secular stagnation (although you should take it very seriously) to accept that low rates are very likely the new normal.

Tim Duy on how Fed Policy keeps rates low by Scott Sumner

Garrett pointed me to a very good Tim Duy post on Fed policy:

The Federal Reserve has set reasonably clear expectations that rates will remain low for a long time. That path, however, seems to be a consequence of doing too little now to ensure a stronger recovery. In other words, the Fed seems to be taking a lower-rate future as a given rather than as a result of insufficient policy. Instead of acting to ensure a stronger forecast, they seem more interesting in acting to lock-in the lower path of activity. And that in turn will tend to lock in a low level of long-term rates. This, I think, is the best explanation for the inability of markets to sustain higher rates. It is simply reasonable to expect that the conditions which justify higher long rates will be met with tighter policy sufficient to contain growth to something closer to the current path of output than to current estimates of potential output. 

This is actually pretty close to Milton Friedman’s 1998 claim that rates in Japan were low because money had been tight. Or Nick Rowe’s upward sloping IS curve. Duy doesn’t use the term “tight money”, but the phrase “doing too little now to ensure a stronger recovery” implies money is tighter than Duy and I might consider optimal, and that easier money would eventually lead to higher rates. If you put aside my idiosyncratic definition of “easy” and “tight” money (I use NGDP growth, not interest rates and money growth as policy indicators), my views are actually similar close to those of a mainstream macroeconomist like Tim Duy. The substance of what we are saying on monetary policy and interest rates (and also monetary offset) is very close, once you get beyond framing effects. 

Have our views always been close on these issues? I’m not sure.