Freedom Adventure Podcast 471: Volker and the Great Inflation

Published by Freedom Adventure. Click here to listen.

Alex J. Pollock discusses Paul Volker and the great inflation and the similarities to today. Volker raised interest rates to an all time high and defeated run away inflation. His predecessor Arthur Burns anguished over inflation and central bankers are facing a similar anguish today.  We discuss the knowledge problem and how central planners are a menace to society.

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Finance and Philosophy

Boom and Bust

The government is not only spending trillions — it’s losing trillions

Published in The Hill with Paul Kupiec. Also in RealClear Markets.

Lately, no matter if the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars or losing them, it doesn’t mess around with small change.  

The government allocated $4.6 trillion just in COVID relief spending, tens of billions of which have been siphoned off by fraud. And when it comes to losing taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, we’ve calculated that losses tallied at the Federal Reserve and Department of Education together will top $2 trillion. No telling how much it will cost when the government losses accumulate on the $370 billion green energy loan and loan guarantee programs included in the Inflation Reduction Act, but if Obama-era green energy loan guarantee costs are any guide, they will be large. 

Let’s start with Fed. By the end of May of this year, we estimated that the Fed’s mark-to-market loss on its huge portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities had grown to the staggering sum of $540 billion. The Fed’s losses have continued to build and today are, we now estimate, quickly approaching $1 trillion. Thus the Fed’s investing losses match the estimated loss the Department of Education is about to foist on U.S. taxpayers should President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan survive legal challenges.

The government spends trillions of taxpayer dollars here and loses trillions more there, but it hardly seems to make the news. Congress has passed so many new giant spending bills in the past three years, much of it financed on the Fed’s balance sheet, that the public has become desensitized to the magnitude of the taxpayer dollars involved. 

Consider this: One million seconds is about 11.5 days; a billion seconds is about 32 years; a trillion seconds is 32,000 years!

In the footnotes of the Fed’s recently released financial statement of the combined Federal Reserve Banks for the second quarter of 2022, you can find this startling disclosure: The mark-to-market loss on the Fed’s system open market account portfolio on June 30 reached $720 billion, $180 billion more than our end-of-May estimate.

Since June 30, interest rates have continued rising and the market value of the Fed’s massive investment portfolio has shrunk even more. Using the interest rate sensitivity that the market value of the Fed’s portfolio displayed over the first six months of 2022, we estimate that the market value loss since June 30 has increased by $275 billion, bringing the Fed’s total investment portfolio mark-to-market loss to about $995 billion, which is 17 times the Federal Reserve System total capital. 

If interest rates continue to rise, as we expect they will, Fed market value losses will easily exceed $1 trillion. The irony, of course, is that the Fed was buying heavily to build its $8.8 trillion portfolio at top-of-the-market prices the Fed itself created with its extended near zero-interest rate monetary policy. In addition, the Fed is moving toward generating large operating losses, even if it never sells any of its underwater bonds and mortgage securities, because it must finance its long-term fixed rate assets with floating rate liabilities at ever-higher interest rates. The federal budget deficit will be bigger still, and possibly for a very long time because it will be short the billions of dollars of revenue the Treasury has been receiving from the Federal Reserve System’s remitted profits.

In the very same eventful quarter that Fed losses reached almost $1 trillion, President Biden issued an executive order (of dubious legality) that ordered the government to fully forgive, at taxpayer expense, hundreds of billions of dollars of defaulted student loans it had made, and to partially forgive over time billions more in unpaid student loan balances at taxpayer expense. Estimates of the cost to the taxpayer of writing off these loans run up to $1 trillion. 

Considered as a lending program, as it was enacted to be, the federal student loan program is nothing if not an utter and egregious failure. The loss is especially ironic since a decade ago it was claimed that student loans would be a big source of profits for the government and help to offset the cost of Obamacare subsidies.

According to a Congressional Budget Office report in March 2010, the federal government takeover of the student loan program would save $68 billion. These savings, it was claimed, would provide funding for an additional $39 billion of grants and make available the remainder to theoretically pay for Obamacare subsidies. A dozen years after the CBO produced this wildly overoptimistic estimate, the federal government student loan program is costing taxpayers $1 trillion, not generating $68 billion in additional revenues.

Considering the federal government’s propensity for producing unreliable forecasts, simultaneously authorizing trillions in new spending, and losing trillions of taxpayer dollars in off-budget government loans and investments, it certainly makes one doubt the acumen of the federal government as a financial manager.

The Fed’s Mark to Market Loss Approaches $1 trillion, while the write-off of student loans hits $420 billion

Published in the Federalist Society:

In May of this year, Paul Kupiec and I estimated that the Federal Reserve’s mark to market loss on its unprecedented portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities had grown to the staggering amount of $540 billion. Now we have the Fed’s official numbers for the end of June, which by then, it turns out, were much worse than that.

Down in the footnotes of the recently released financial statements of the combined Federal Reserve Banks for the second quarter of 2022, we find this startling disclosure: the mark to market loss on June 30 had increased to $720 billion. That’s a number to get your attention, even in these days of counting in billions, especially when compared to the Fed’s reported total capital on the same date of only $42 billion. The Fed’s mark to market or economic loss at the end of the second quarter was thus 17 times its total capital, making it deeply insolvent on a mark to market basis. (Woe to any bank supervised by the Fed which gets itself in the same situation! Oh yes, we know the Fed will earnestly insist that it is different, but that doesn’t change the fact of the market value losses.)

Since the reporting date at the end of June, interest rates have gone higher, the market value of the Fed’s massive investment portfolio has shrunk even more, and the mark to market loss has gotten even more huge. Using the price sensitivity the Fed’s portfolio displayed in the first six months of 2022, we estimate that the market value loss has during the third quarter increased by $275 billion, bringing it to about $995 billion.

The loss is $995 billion now, we guess, but if interest rates rise further toward more normal levels from their previously suppressed lows, the Fed’s mark to market loss will easily reach and exceed $1 trillion. The irony of course is that the Fed was buying heavily to build its $8.8 trillion portfolio at a market top created by its own actions. In addition, the Fed is moving toward generating operating losses, even if it never sells any of its underwater bonds and mortgage securities, because it must finance its long-term fixed rate assets with floating rate liabilities at ever-higher interest rates. These operating losses will mean the federal budget deficit will be bigger since it will lack the normal contributions from Fed profits, possibly for a long time.

In the very same eventful quarter, President Biden ordered (with dubious legality) the government not to even try to collect on hundreds of billions of dollars of defaulted student loans it had made and instead to write them off. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost to the budget of writing off these bad debts to be $420 billion. One must conclude that, considered as a lending program, as it was enacted to be, the federal student loan program is an utter and egregious failure. It has its own deep irony, since a decade ago the CBO claimed the program would be a big source of profits to the government.

Consider these two losses together—one in the Fed’s investing and one in making government student loans. It certainly makes one doubt the acumen of the federal government as a financial manager.

Mises Institute's Alex Pollock: The Fed’s Tough Year

From Chicago’s Morning Answer. Click here to listen.

Restoring The Fed's Credibility?

Published in Law & Liberty by Andrew Stuttaford.

If any central banker, both literally and figuratively, bestrode, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “the…world like a colossus,” it was the 6-foot-7 Paul Volcker.  But, perversely, the giant shadow he cast helps explain our not-so-transitory inflationary mess.

Alex Pollock offers a brisk, deft analysis of Volcker’s battle against inflation. He sets the stage with a 1979 speech by Arthur Burns, Volcker’s not quite immediate predecessor as Fed Chairman. In what Pollock describes as an “agonizing reappraisal,” Burns conceded (he could hardly do otherwise) that central banks had failed to rein in inflation. Running through his lament was an acknowledgment that the Fed had gone along with “the philosophic and political currents that were transforming American life and culture,” currents that had also swept away traditional notions of fiscal and monetary discipline.

Read the rest here.

Don’t Let Colleges Off the Hook for Loan Debt

Published in The Wall Street Journal:

Mitch Daniels makes many insightful points in his indictment of the utterly failed and, as he says, “bankrupt” system of federal student loans (“Student Loans and the National Debt,” op-ed, Sept. 2). Among the most important is that the colleges “encouraged students to borrow.” The colleges played the same role in this credit disaster as subprime-mortgage brokers did in the housing bubble: inducing excessive debt while sticking somebody else with all the risk.

Alex J. Pollock

Event Sept 14: What’s Next for Crypto: Implications of Deflated Prices and Turmoil in Cryptocurrency Markets

Teleforum hosted by the Federalist Society.

Events of 2022 brought a "crypto winter," with average prices of cryptocurrencies falling about 70% from their 2021 highs, the bankruptcy of several crypto companies, the complete collapse of a popular so-called "stable" coin, unexpected suspensions of withdrawals by some crypto issuers, large losses by individual investors, and heightened efforts toward expanded regulation and legislation.  What does this all mean going forward?  Was this simply the end of another bubble and popular delusion which will now wither?  Or was it the winnowing out of a typical innovative overexpansion, with a more mature ongoing cryptocurrency industry continuing, perhaps one with significant regulation?  This webinar will examine where crypto will go from here.

Featuring:

Bert Ely, Principal, Ely & Company, Inc.

Alexandra Gaiser, Director of Regulatory Affairs, River Financial

Steven Lofchie, Corporate Partner, Fried Frank

J.W. Verret, Associate Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Moderator: Alex Pollock, Senior Fellow, the Mises Institute

Register here.

Federal Reserve Operating Losses and the Federal Budget Deficit

Published in AIER and RealClear Markets by Alex J. Pollock Paul H. Kupiec.

The Federal Reserve remits most of its operating profits to the US Treasury. Federal Reserve remittances are government revenues that directly reduce the federal budget deficit. But what is the budgetary impact of Federal Reserve System losses? The Federal Reserve System has not had an operating loss since 1915, so history provides no guidance as to how these losses will impact the official federal government deficit.

In 2023, the Fed will likely report tens of billions of dollars in operating losses as it raises interest rates to combat raging inflation. Will Fed losses increase the budget deficit as logic dictates they should, or will they be treated as an off-budget expenditure? Given the “transparency” of federal budgetary accounting standards, it is not surprising that a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report suggests Federal Reserve operating losses will be excluded when tallying the official federal budget deficit.

The Federal Reserve earns interest on its portfolio of Treasury and federal government agency securities and receives revenues for the payments system services it provides.  Offsetting Fed revenues are the interest the Fed pays on bank reserve balances and reverse repurchase agreements, dividend payments to Fed member banks, contributions (if any) to the Fed surplus account, and the operating expenses of the Board of Governors, the 12 Federal Reserve district banks and their branches. Since 2012,  expenses also include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Any remaining earnings are transferred to the US Treasury and counted as federal government receipts for federal budget purposes. 

The annual amount of Federal Reserve operating income remitted to the Treasury since 2001 is plotted in Figure 1. Also shown are estimates of the reductions in the reported federal deficits attributable to the remittances. (The Fed reports remittances on a calendar-year basis, while the federal deficit is calculated for a fiscal year ending September 30. The deficit reduction estimates in Figure 1 do not correct for this timing difference.)

Source: Various US Treasury monthly statements, Federal Reserve Annual Board Reports, and the authors’ calculations

In crisis years (2009-2011, 2020-2021) the federal budget deficit is bloated by congressionally appropriated stimulus outlays and reduced tax receipts. In these years, even very large Fed remittances offset only a fraction of the combined federal budget deficit. In years unburdened by massive federal stimulus expenditures, however, Fed remittances offset a substantial portion of the reported deficit.

By the FOMC’s own estimates, short-term policy interest rates will approach 3.5 percent by year-end 2022. As the Fed raises short term interest rates to fight inflation, its interest expense increases. The Fed’s interest expenses and operating expenditures, including about $630 million per year in off-budget funding it is required to provide to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will soon exceed its revenues.

Our back-of-the envelope estimates suggest that the Federal Reserve will begin reporting net operating losses once short-term interest rates reach 2.7 percent, assuming the Fed has no realized losses from selling its SOMA securities. If short-term rates reach 4 percent, our estimates suggest that annualized operating losses could exceed $62 billion. As discussed below, these loss estimates are consistent with the Fed Board of Governors’ own public estimates. 

In 2011, the Federal Reserve announced its official position regarding realized losses on its investment portfolio and system operating losses:

[I]n the unlikely [sic] scenario in which realized losses were sufficiently large enough to result in an overall net income loss for the Reserve Banks, the Federal Reserve would still meet its financial obligations to cover operating expenses. In that case, remittances to the Treasury would be suspended and a deferred asset would be recorded on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

Among financial institutions, the Fed has the unique privilege of setting its own accounting standards, and the Fed has decided that, unlike for all its regulated banks, operating losses will not reduce the Federal Reserve’s reported capital and surplus. The Fed will maintain a positive reserve surplus account in the event it books operating losses by offsetting its operational losses, one-for-one, with an imaginary “deferred asset” account, no matter how large the loss. Unless Congress intervenes, the Fed will not remit any revenues to the US Treasury—even as it continues paying dividends to its member banks—as long as this deferred asset account has a positive balance. 

Instead of issuing a new marketable Treasury security, which would count towards the deficit, the Fed will cover its losses with a nonmarketable receivable called deferred assets recorded on the Fed’s balance sheet. The economic reality, of course, is that Fed losses increase the government’s deficit.

Federal Reserve Board estimates of the system’s potential cumulative operating losses are mirrored in estimates of its deferred asset balance pictured in Figure 2. The Federal Reserve Board’s own estimates suggest that its cumulative operating losses (in the estimated “90 percent interval” case) could approach $200 billion by 2026, Moreover, the Fed projects that it may not resume making any Treasury remittances until 2030 or later. Keep in mind that these projections assume the Fed can reduce inflation with fairly modest increases in short-term interest rates with the expected short-term rate path peaking at less than 4 percent in 2023, before slowly declining toward 2.5 percent in 2026. 

Figure 2: Federal Board of Governors Projection of Treasury Remittances and System Deferred Asset Account Balances 2023-2030

Source: FEDs Notes, 2022

While the Board of Governors fully anticipates operating losses beginning in 2023, the CBO did not get that memo. In its most recent forecast, the CBO projects that the Fed will continue making positive remittances to the Treasury every year between 2022 and 2032. While the CBO forecast anticipates a sharp decline in remittances in 2023 through 2025, it expects a recovery toward 2021 remittance levels thereafter, with the Fed reducing interest rates as inflation returns to targeted levels. 

While the CBO does not project any Fed operating losses, its explanation of budget accounting suggests any such losses would be excluded from budget deficit calculations: “Although it remits earnings to the Treasury (which are recorded as revenues in the federal budget), the Federal Reserve’s receipts and expenditures are not included directly in the federal budget…” Operating losses will be a Federal Reserve expenditure, so this CBO statement would appear to exclude Fed operating losses from the federal deficit calculation. It is strange not to count the Fed’s losses in the budget accounting, considering that the Fed’s profits are counted. Perhaps because the CBO does not anticipate Federal Reserve losses, it has failed to consider them explicitly in its description of deficit accounting. 

Simple accounting logic suggests that if the federal budget deficit is reduced when the Fed earns revenues in excess of expenses and remits these profits to the US Treasury, Fed losses should increase the reported federal budget deficit. This is especially true since Federal Reserve System losses now include the hundreds of millions of dollars of off-budget funding it is required to transfer to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If the current accounting rules remain unchallenged, the Congress could pass new legislation requiring the Federal Reserve to fund any number of activities off-budget without any impact on the reported federal budget deficit.

Volcker and the Great Inflation: Reflections for 2022

Published in Law & Liberty and also in RealClear Markets.

The celebrated Paul Volcker (1927-2019) became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board 43 years ago on August 6, 1979. The 20th-century Great Inflation, stoked by the Federal Reserve and the other central banks of the day, was in full gallop in the U.S and around the world. In the month he started as Chairman, U.S. inflation continued its double-digit run—that August suffered a year-over-year inflation rate of 11.8%. On August 15, the Federal Reserve raised its fed funds mid-target range to 11%, but that was less than the inflation rate, so a nominal 11% was still a negative real interest rate. How bad could it get? For the year 1979, the December year-over-year inflation was an even more awful 13.3%. At that compound rate, the cost of living would double in about five years.

Everybody knew they had an inflationary disaster on their hands, but what could be done? They had already tried “WIN” (“Whip Inflation Now”) buttons, but inflation was whipping them instead. In this setting, “The best professional judgment among leading economists was that Americans should view the problem of inflation as being…intractable,” wrote Volcker’s biographer, William Silber. Leading Wall Street forecaster Henry Kaufman, for example, was pessimistic in 1980, opining “that he had ‘considerable doubt’ that the Fed could accomplish its ultimate objective, which is to tame inflation. He added for good measure that the Fed no longer had ‘credibility in the real world.”

Those days are now most relevant. Although Silber could write in 2012, “Inflation is ancient history to most Americans,” today it is upon us once again. What can we re-learn?

From Burns to Volcker

In September 1979, Arthur Burns, who had been Fed Chairman from 1970 to 1978, gave a remarkable speech entitled “The Anguish of Central Banking.” Discussing “the reacceleration of inflation in the United States and in much of the rest of the word,” “the chronic inflation of our times,” and “the world wide disease of inflation,” he asked, “Why, in particular, have central bankers, whose main business one might suppose is to fight inflation, been so ineffective?”

We may observe to the contrary that they had been very effective—but in producing inflation instead of controlling it, just as their 21st-century successors were effective in producing first the asset price inflation of the Everything Bubble, which is now deflating, and then destructive goods and services inflation, much to their own surprise. In both centuries, inflation was not an outside force attacking them, as politicians and central bankers both then and now like to portray it, but an endogenous effect of government and central bank behavior.

In what one might imagine as a tragic dramatic soliloquy, Burns uttered this cri de coeur: “And yet, despite their antipathy to inflation and the powerful weapons they could wield against it, central bankers have failed so utterly in this mission in recent years. In this paradox lies the anguish of central banking.”

I suspect the central bankers of 2022 in their hearts are feeling a similar anguish. Their supporting cast of government economists should be, too. “Economists at both the Federal Reserve and the White House were blindsided,” as Greg Ip wrote. “Having failed to anticipate the steepest inflation in 40 years,” he mused, “you would think the economics profession would be knee-deep in postmortems”—or some confessions of responsibility. But no such agonizing reappraisals as Burns’ speech seem forthcoming.

Reflecting that “Economic life is subject to all sorts of surprises [which] could readily overwhelm and topple a gradualist timetable,” in 1979 Burns announced that “I have reluctantly come to believe that fairly drastic therapy will be needed to turn the inflationary psychology around.” This was correct except for the modifier “fairly.” But, Burns confessed, “I am not at all sure that many of the central bankers of the world…would be willing to risk the painful economic adjustments that I fear are ultimately unavoidable.”

In our imagined drama of the time, enter Volcker, who was willing. He proceeds with firm steps to center stage. Burns fades out.

“If Congress had doubts about Volcker’s intentions,” says Allan Meltzer’s A History of the Federal Reserve, “they should have been dispelled by his testimony of September 5 [1979]”—one month after he took office. “Unlike the Keynesians, he considered the costs [of inflation] higher than the costs of reducing inflation.” Said Volcker to Congress, “Our current economic difficulties…will not be resolved unless we deal convincingly with inflation.”

In a television interview later that month, he was equally clear: “I don’t think we can stop fighting inflation. That is the basic, continuing problem that we face in this economy, and I think until we straighten out the inflation problem, we’re going to have problems of economic instability. So it’s not a choice….”

But what would it take to put into reverse the effects of years of undisciplined money printing, which accompanied oil supply and price shocks and other bad luck? Under the cover of restricting the growth in the money supply, Volcker’s strategy involved letting interest rates rise in 1980-81 to levels unparalleled, then or since, and to become strongly positive in real terms. Fed funds rates rose to over 20%. Ten-year Treasury notes to over 15%. Thirty-year fixed rate mortgage rates rose to over 18%. The prime rate reached 21.5%.

It is not clear whether Volcker ever took seriously the monetarist doctrine of focusing on the money supply, which he later abandoned, or simply used it as a pragmatic way to do what he wanted, which was to stop the runaway inflation. It is clear that he firmly rejected the Keynesian Phillips Curve approach of trying to buy employment with inflation. That had led central banks into inflationary adventures and resulted in simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment—the “stagflation” of the late 1970s, to which many think we risk returning in 2022.

The Double Dip Recessions

The Volcker program triggered a sharp recession from January 1980, five months after he arrived, to July 1980, and then a very deep and painful recession from July 1981 to November 1982—“double dip recessions.” Both hit manufacturing, goods production, and housing particularly hard, and generated the hard times of the “rust belt.” In 1982, unemployment rose to 10.8%, worse than the “Great Recession” peak unemployment of 10.0% in 2009.

“The 1981-82 recession was the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression,” says the Federal Reserve History. “The nearly 11% unemployment reached in late 1982 remains the apex of the post-World War II era [until surpassed in the Covid crisis of 2020]…manufacturing, construction and the auto industries were particularly affected.”

There were thousands of business bankruptcies. “The business failure rate has accelerated rapidly,” wrote the New York Times in September 1982, “coming ever closer to levels not seen since the Great Depression.” The total of over 69,000 business bankruptcies in 1982 was again worse than in the “Great Recession” year of 2009, which had 61,000.

The extreme interest rates wiped out savings and loan institutions, formerly the backbone of American mortgage finance, by the hundreds. The savings and loan industry as a whole was insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. So, in 1981, was the government’s big mortgage lender, Fannie Mae. A friend of mine who had a senior position with the old Federal Home Loan Bank Board recalls a meeting with Volcker at the time: “He was telling us he was going to crush the savings and loans.” There were securities firm and bank failures and then the massive defaults on the sovereign debt of “less developed countries” (“LDCs” in the jargon of the time), starting in August 1982. These defaults put the solvency of the entire American banking system in question.

This was a really dark and serious downer, but Volcker was firm about what he was convinced was the long-run best interest of the country. Was it debatable? Certainly.

There was plenty of criticism. Volcker wrote: “There were, of course, many complaints. Farmers once surrounded the Fed’s Washington building with tractors. Home builders, forced to shut down, sent sawed-off two-by-fours with messages…. Economists predictably squabbled.… Community groups protested at our headquarters….My speeches were occasionally interrupted by screaming protestors, once by rats let loose in the audience….” And “the Fed insisted I agree to personal security escort protection.”

In the government, Congressman Henry Reuss “reminded Volcker that the Constitution gave the monetary power to Congress”—as it does. “Congressman Jack Kemp called for Volcker’s resignation.” At the U.S. Treasury, “Secretary Donald Regan, a frequent critic, considered legislation restoring the Treasury Secretary to the [Federal Reserve] Board.” “Senator [Robert] Byrd introduced his bill to restrict Federal Reserve independence by requiring it to lower interest rates.” Inside the Federal Reserve Board, Governor Nancy Teeters, citing failures, the economy, high long-term interest rates, and high unemployment, objected in May 1982, “We are in the process of pushing the economy not just into recession, but into depression…I think we’ve undertaken an experiment and we have succeeded in our attempt to bring down prices…But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve had it.”

The minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee consistently display the intense uncertainty which marked the entire disinflationary project. “Volcker expressed his uncertainty frequently,” Meltzer observes, as he told the FOMC, for example: “I don’t know what is going to happen in the weeks or months down the road, either to the economy or to the aggregates or these other things,” or as he told Congress, “How limited our ability is to project future developments.” To his perseverance, add honesty. The same deep uncertainty will mark the Fed’s debates and actions in 2022 and always.

The 1982 recession finally ended in November. Inflation in December 1982 was 3.8% year-over-year. The fed funds rate was 8.8%. The year 1982 also saw the start of the two-decade bull market in stocks, and the 40-year bull market in bonds.

Meltzer speculated that the recession was more costly and “probably lasted longer than necessary.” Could a less severe recession have achieved the same disinflation? About such counterfactuals we can never know, but the current Fed must certainly hope so.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan reappointed Volcker as Fed Chairman. In 1984, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, the economy was booming, and inflation was 3.9%.

When Volcker left office in August 1987, inflation was still running at 4%, far from zero, but far below the 13% of 1979 when he had arrived as Fed Chairman. Real GDP growth was strong; fed funds were 6.6%. “The Great Inflation was over, and markets recognized that it was over.” Endemic inflation, however, was not over.

Volcker’s victory over runaway inflation was not permanent, because the temptation to governments and their central banks of excessive printing, monetization of government deficits, and levying inflation taxes is permanent.

Volcker’s Legacy

On top of the pervasive uncertainty, the Federal Reserve worried constantly during the Volcker years, as it must now, about its own credibility. Meltzer believed Volcker’s lasting influence was to “restore [the Federal Reserve] System credibility for controlling inflation.” But a generation after Volcker, the Fed committed itself to perpetual inflation at the rate of 2% forever. At the 2% target rate, prices would quintuple in an average lifetime. That is obviously not the “stable prices” called for in the Federal Reserve Act, but the Fed kept assuring everybody it was “price stability.” Volcker made clear his disagreement with this 2% target, writing of it in 2018, “I know of no theoretical justification. … The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation.”

The classic monetary theorist Irving Fisher had warned, as have many others, that “Irredeemable paper money has almost invariably proved a curse to the country employing it.” Silber reflects that “The 1970s nearly confirmed Irving Fisher’s worst fears.” I would delete the word “nearly” from that last sentence.

The inflationary problems of Volcker’s days and ours are fundamentally linked to the demise of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, when the United States reneged on its international commitment to redeem dollars in gold. This put the whole world on pure fiat money instead, with fateful results. According to Brendan Brown, “Volcker considered the suspension of gold convertibility…’the single most important event of his career.’”  Indeed, it created the situation which put him on the road to future greatness. Ironically, Volcker began as a strong supporter of the Bretton Woods system, but then helped dismantle it. Of course, he was always an ardent anti-inflationist. “Nothing is more urgent than the United States getting its inflation under control,” he had already written in a formal Treasury presentation in 1969.

“Inflation undermines trust in government,” Volcker said. That it does, and such loss of trust is justified, then and now. Putting the thought another way, Volcker deeply believed that “Trust in our currency is fundamental to good government.” Throughout his life, he did his best to make the U.S. dollar trustworthy.

In retrospect, Volcker became “an American financial icon.” He elicits comments such as this one: “I knew Paul Volcker (who slew the Great Inflation). Volcker stopped inflation in the 1980s….” Or: “Volcker was the Federal Reserve knight who killed inflation.” Or: “Volcker and his FOMC…did what they thought was necessary, generating enormous pain but finally stamping out inflation. I hope Jerome Powell will find his inner Volcker.” As we have seen, Volcker didn’t actually stop or kill or stamp out inflation, but he brought it down from runaway to endemic.

His successor as Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, said “We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Chairman Volcker and the Federal Open Market Committee for…restoring the public’s faith in our nation’s currency.”

In 1990, Volcker spoke in the same Per Jacobsson Lecture series which had been the site of Arthur Burn’s anguish eleven years before. A similar audience of central bankers and finance ministers this time was treated to “The Triumph of Central Banking?” This included “my impression that central banks are in exceptionally good repute these days.”

However, he pointed out the question mark. “I might dream of a day of final triumph of central banking, when central banks are so successful in achieving and maintaining price and financial stability that currencies will be freely interchangeable at stable exchange rates” (shades of his earlier commitment to Bretton-Woods). “But that is not for my lifetime—nor for any of yours.” About that he was right, and also right about a more important point: “I think we are forced to conclude that even the partial victory over inflation is not secure.” There he was wiser than his many eulogists, as is obvious in 2022.

In discussions of the current inflation, including similarities to the 1970s, references to Volcker are frequent and laudatory. For example, “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has taken of late to praising legendary Paul Volcker, as a signal of his new inflation-fighting determination.” Or “Powell tried to engage in some plain speaking, by telling the American people that inflation was creating ‘significant hardship’ and that rates would need to rise ‘expeditiously’ to crush this. He also declared ‘tremendous admiration’ for his predecessor Paul Volcker, who hiked rates to tackle inflation five decades ago, even at the cost of a recession.”

No Permanent Victories

With the model of Volcker in mind, will we now experience parallels to the 1981-82 recession, as well? This is the debate about whether a “soft landing” is possible from where the central banks have gotten us now. If we repeat the pattern of the 1980s, it will not be a soft landing and the cost of suppressing inflation will again be high, but worth it in the longer run. It should rightly be thought of as the cost of the previous central bank and government actions that brought the present inflation upon us.

Silber concluded that in the 1980s, “Volcker rescued the experiment in fiat currency from failure.” But experimentation with fiat currency possibilities has continued, including the creation of a giant portfolio of mortgage securities on the Fed’s own balance sheet, for example. When politicians and central bankers are hearing the siren song of “just print up some more money”—a very old idea recently called modern in “modern” monetary theory— in whatever guise it may take, who will provide the needed discipline, as Volcker did? Under various versions of the gold standard, it might be a matter of “what” provides monetary discipline, but in the fiat currency world of Volcker’s time and now, it is always and only a question of “who.”

Volcker wrote that “Bill Martin [William McChesney Martin, Fed Chairman 1951-70]… is famous for his remark that the job of the central bank is to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.” Unfortunately, Volcker continued, “the hard fact of life is that few hosts want to end the party prematurely. They wait too long and when the risks are evident, the real damage is done”—then it is already too late and the problem has become a lot harder. Like now.

As has been truly said, “In Washington, there are no permanent victories.” Volcker’s victory over runaway inflation was not permanent, because the temptation to governments and their central banks of excessive printing, monetization of government deficits, and levying inflation taxes is permanent. In 2021-22, we are back to disastrously high inflation, recognize the need to address it, and feel the costs of doing so. And Chairman Powell is citing Chairman Volcker.

But are there factors, four decades later, making the parallels less close? For example, international investor Felix Zulauf “thinks the Powell Fed is quite different from the Volcker Fed, and not just because of the personalities. It’s in a different situation and a different financial zeitgeist [and different political zeitgeist]. He doesn’t think the Fed, or any other central bank can get away with imposing the kind of pain Volcker did and will stop as soon as this year.” (italics added)

Suppose that is right—what then? Then the pain will come from continued inflation instead. There is now no avoiding pain, which will come in one way or the other.

A similar, though more strident, argument from June 2022 is this: “It will be politically impossible to raise rates enough to stop inflation. … Volcker raised rates to 19%. There is no way the Fed is going anywhere near that.…You may recall the Fed not long ago said they…were just talking about raising rates.” And echoing Henry Kaufman in 1980, “None of them has any credibility anymore.”

We must admit that the current fed funds rate of 1.75% with an inflation of 8.5%, for a real fed funds rate of negative 6.75%, is hardly Volckeresque. Indeed, there is nothing Volkeresque yet. Interest rates in 1980-81 went far higher than most people imagined possible—perhaps they will again go higher than now thought possible and maybe we will even see positive real interest rates again.

Chairman Powell was a Fed Governor and Chairman while the wind of the present inflation was being sown, and he is there to reap the whirlwind. Will the Fed under his leadership tame it and at what cost, as all the maladjustments and the financial dependence of both the government and private actors on negative real rates and cheap leverage during the last decade must now be corrected?

We might imagine a hypothetical case in which Paul Volcker was 40 years younger, and with his unyielding commitment to trustworthy money and his insistence that achieving it is worth the cost, had become the new Fed Chairman in 2022. We can speculate about what he would be and could be doing now.

But in the real case, just as Volcker did beginning in 1979, Chairman Powell has now stepped to center stage in the current drama. We cannot yet say whether his future valedictory lecture will be about the Anguish or the Triumph of central banking.

SHEFFIELD: Democrats And The Fed — A Tale Of Two Realities

Published in the Daily Caller:

“We estimate that at the end of May, the Federal Reserve had an unrecognized mark-to-market loss of about $540 billion on its $8.8 trillion portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities,” American Enterprise Institute scholars Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock wrote in late June. “This loss, which will only get larger as interest rates increase, is more than 13 times the Federal Reserve System’s consolidated capital of $41 billion … according to the Federal Reserve Act, Fed losses should impact its shareholders, who are the commercial bank members of the 12 district Federal Reserve banks.”

Surprised Again!: The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble Paperback

Published by Paul Dry Books.

by Alex J. Pollock and Howard B. Adler

Order here.

About every ten years, we are surprised by a financial crisis. In 2020, we were Surprised Again! by the financial panic of the spring triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Not one of the more than two dozen official systemic risk studies diligently developed in 2019 had even hinted at this financial crisis as a possibility, or at the frightening economic contraction which resulted from the political responses to control the virus. In response came the unprecedented government fiscal and monetary expansions and bailouts. Later 2020 brought a second big surprise: the appearance of an amazing boom in asset prices, including stocks, houses and cryptocurrencies.

Alex Pollock and Howard Adler lived through this historic instability while managing analytical support offices for the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Committee. Their book lays out the many elements of the panic, the massive elastic currency operations which rode to the rescue, financing the bust with unprecedented government debt, the second surprise of the boom in asset prices, including a renewed apparent bubble in house prices financed by government guarantees, as well as considering key leveraged sectors such as commercial real estate, student loans, pension funds, banks, and the government itself. It reflects philosophically on how to understand these events in retrospect and prospect.

The Fed’s Tough Year

Published in Law & Liberty and republished in RealClear Markets.

The powerful and prestigious Federal Reserve is having a tough year in 2022 in at least three ways:

• It has failed with inflation forecasting and performance;

• It has giant mark-to-market losses in its own investments and looming operating losses;

• It is under political pressure to do things it should not be doing and that should not be done at all.

Forecasting Inflation

As everybody knows, the Fed’s overoptimistic inflation forecasts for the runaway inflation year of 2021 were deeply embarrassing. Then the Fed did it again for 2022, with another wide miss. In December 2021, it projected 2022 Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation at 2.6%, while the reality through June was 6.8%, with Consumer Price Index inflation much higher than that. It would be hard to give the Fed anything other than a failing grade in its supposed area of expertise.

The Fed’s interest rate forecast for 2022 was three federal funds target rate increases of 0.25%, so that its target rate would reach 0.9% by the end of 2022. It forecast the rate at 2% by the end of 2024. Instead, by July 2022, it already reached 2.5%.

In short, the Federal Reserve cannot reliably forecast economic outcomes, or what the results of its own actions will be, or even what its own actions will be. Of course, neither can anybody else.

It is essential to understand that we cannot expect any special economic or financial insight from the Federal Reserve. This is not because of any lack of intelligence or diligence, or not having enough computers or PhDs on the payroll, but of the fundamental and inevitable uncertainty of the economic and financial future. Like everybody else, the Fed has to make decisions in spite of this, so it will unavoidably make mistakes.

We should recall how Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, accurately described his extended “QE” strategy in 2012 as “a shot in the proverbial dark.” That was an honest admission, although unfortunately he admitted it only within the Fed, not to the public.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (their central bank) described the bank’s recent inflation forecasting errors as “embarrassing.” Such a confession would also be becoming in the Federal Reserve, especially when the mistakes have been so obvious. The current fed funds rate of 2.5% may sound high today, if you have become used to short-term rates near zero and you have no financial memory. But it is historically low, and as many have pointed out, it is extremely low in real terms. Compared to CPI inflation of 8.5%, it is a real interest rate of negative 6%.

Savers will be glad to be able to have the available interest rates on their savings rise from 0.1% to over 2%, but they are still rapidly losing purchasing power and having their savings effectively expropriated by the government’s inflation.

Although in July and August 2022 (as I write), securities prices have rallied from their lows, the 2022 increases in interest rates have let substantial air out of the Everything Bubble in stocks, speculative stocks in particular, SPACs, bonds, houses, mortgages, and cryptocurrencies that the Fed and its fellow central banks so assiduously and so recklessly inflated.

A Mark-to-Market Insolvent Fed

Nowhere are shrunken asset prices more apparent than in the Fed’s own hyper-leveraged balance sheet, which runs at a ratio of assets to equity of more than 200. As of March 31, 2022, the Fed disclosed, deep in its financial statement footnotes, a net mark-to-market (MTM) loss of $330 billion on its investments. Since then, the interest rates on 5 and 10-year Treasury notes are up about an additional one-half percent. With an estimated duration of 5 years on the Fed’s $8 trillion of long-term fixed rate investments in Treasury and mortgage securities, this implies an additional loss of about $200 billion in round numbers, bringing the Fed’s total MTM loss to over $500 billion.

Compare this $500 billion loss to the Fed’s total capital of $41 billion. The loss is 12 times the Fed’s total capital, rendering the Fed technically insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. Does a MTM insolvency matter for a fiat currency-printing central bank? An interesting question—most economists argue such insolvency is not important, no matter how large. What do you think, candid Reader?

The Fed’s first defense of its huge MTM loss is that the loss is unrealized, so if it hangs on to the securities long enough it will eventually be paid at par. This would be a stronger argument in an unleveraged balance sheet, which did not have the Fed’s $5 trillion of floating rate liabilities. With the Fed’s leverage, however, the unrealized losses suggest that it has operating losses to come, if the higher short-term interest rates implied by current market prices come to pass.

The Fed’s second defense is that it has changed its accounting so that realized losses on securities or operating losses will not affect its reported retained earnings or capital. Instead, the resulting debits will be hidden in a dubious “deferred asset” account. Just change the accounting! (This is exactly what the insolvent savings and loans did in the 1980s, with terrible consequences.)

What fun it is to imagine what any senior Federal Reserve examiner would tell a bank holding company whose MTM losses were 12 times its capital. And what any such examiner would say if the bank proposed to hide realized losses in a “deferred asset” account instead of reducing its capital!

Here is a shorthand way to think about the dynamics of how Fed operating losses would arise from their balance sheet: The Fed has about $8 trillion in long-term, fixed-rate assets. It has about $3 trillion in non-interest-bearing liabilities and capital. Thus, it has a net position of $5 trillion of fixed rate assets funded by floating rate liabilities. (In other words, inside the Fed is the financial equivalent of a giant 1980s savings and loan.)

Given this position, it is easy to see that pro forma, for each 1% rise in short-term interest rates, the Fed’s annual earnings will be reduced by about $50 billion. What short-term interest rate would it take to wipe out the Fed’s profits? The answer is 2.7%. If their deposits and repo borrowings cost 2.7%, the Fed’s profits and its contribution to the U.S. Treasury will be zero. If they cost more than 2.7%, as is called for in the Fed’s own projections, the Fed starts making operating losses.

How big might these losses be? In the Fed staff’s own recent projections, in its most likely case, the projected operating losses add up to $60 billion. This is 150% of the Fed’s total capital. In the pessimistic case, losses total $180 billion, over 4 times its capital, and the Fed makes no payments to the Treasury until 2030.

In such cases, should the Fed’s shareholders, who are the commercial banks, be treated like normal shareholders and have their dividends cut? Or might, as is clearly provided in the Federal Reserve Act, the shareholders be assessed for a share of the losses? These outcomes would certainly be embarrassing for the Fed and would be resisted.

The central bank of Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), did pass on its dividends in 2013, after suffering losses. The SNB Chairman gave a speech at the time, saying in effect, “Sorry! But that’s the way it is.” Under its chartering act, the SNB—completely unlike the Fed—must mark its investment portfolio to market in its official profit and loss statement. Accordingly, in 2022 so far, the SNB has reported a net loss of $31 billion for the first quarter and a net loss of $91 billion for the first six months of this year.

The Swiss are a serious people, and also serious, it seems, when it comes to central bank accounting and dividends.

In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta did pass its dividend once, in 1915. As we learn from the Bank’s own history, “Like many a struggling business, it suspended its dividend that year.” Could it happen again? If the losses are big and continuing, should it?

A third Fed defense is that its “mandate is neither to make profits nor to avoid losses.” On the contrary, the Fed is clearly structured to make seigniorage profits for the government from its currency monopoly. While not intended by the Federal Reserve Act to be a profit maximizer, it was also not intended to run large losses or to run with negative capital. Should we worry about the Fed’s financial issues, or should we say, “Pay no attention to the negative capital behind the curtain!”

The Fed is obviously unable to guarantee financial stability. No one can do that. Moreover, by trying to promote stability, it can cause instability.

What the Fed Can and Can’t Do Well

The Federal Reserve is also suffering from a push from the current administration and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to take on a politicized agenda, which it probably can’t do well and more importantly, should not do at all.

This would include having the Fed practice racial preferences, that is, racial discrimination, and as the Wall Street Journal editors wrote, “Such racial favoritism almost certainly violates the Constitution. So does the [House] bill’s requirement that public companies disclose the racial, gender identity and sexual orientation of directors and executives.” The bill would “politicize monetary policy and financial regulation.” A lot of bad ideas.

Moreover, the Federal Reserve already has more mandates than it can accomplish, and its mandates should be reduced, not increased.

As has been so vividly demonstrated in 2021 and 2022, the Fed cannot accurately forecast economic outcomes, and cannot know what the results of its own actions, or its “shots in the proverbial dark,” will be.

Meanwhile, it is painfully failing to provide its statutory mandate of stable prices. Note that the statute directs the goal of “stable prices,” not the much more waffly term the Fed has adopted, “price stability.” It has defined for itself that “price stability” means perpetual inflation at 2% per year.

The Fed cannot “manage the economy.” No one can.

And the Fed is obviously unable to guarantee financial stability. No one can do that, either. Moreover, by trying to promote stability, it can cause instability, an ironic Minskian result—Hyman Minsky was the insightful theorist of financial fragility who inspired the slogan, “stability creates instability.”

There are two things the Fed demonstrably does very well.

The first is financing the government. Financing the government of which it is a part is the real first mandate of all central banks, especially, but not only, during wars, going back to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. As the history of the Atlanta Fed puts it so clearly:

During the war [World War I], the Fed was introduced to a role that would become familiar…as the captive finance company of a U.S. Treasury with huge financing needs and a compelling desire for low rates.

This statement is remarkably candid: “the captive finance company of [the] U.S. Treasury.” True historically, true now, and why central banks are so valuable to governments.

The second thing the Fed does well is emergency funding in a crisis by creating new money as needed. This was its original principal purpose as expressed by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913: “to furnish an elastic currency,” as they called it then. This it can do with great success in financial crises, as shown most recently in 2020, and of course during wars, although not without subsequent costs.

However, the Fed is less good at turning off the emergency actions when the crisis is over. Its most egregious blunder in this respect in recent years was its continuing to stoke runaway house price inflation by buying hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage securities, continuing up to the first quarter of 2022. This has severe inflationary consequences as the cost of shelter drives up the CPI and erodes the purchasing power of households. Moreover, it now appears the piper of house price inflation is exacting its payment, as higher mortgage rates are resulting in falling sales and by some accounts, the beginning of a housing recession.

Among the notions for expanding the Fed’s mandates, the worst of all is to turn the Fed into a government lending bank, which would allocate credit and make loans to constituencies favored by various politicians. As William McChesney Martin, the Fed Chairman 1951-1970, so rightly said when this perpetual bad idea was pushed by politicians in his day, it would “violate a fundamental principle of sound monetary policy, in that it would attempt to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize programs benefitting special sectors of the economy.”

It is a natural and permanent temptation of politicians to want to do just that—to use the money printing power of the central bank to give money to their political supporters without the need for legislative approval or appropriation, and to surreptitiously finance it by imposing an inflation tax without legislation.

One way to achieve this worst outcome would be to have the Fed issue a “central bank digital currency” (CBDC) that allows everybody to have a deposit account with the Fed, which might then become a deposit monopolist as well as a currency monopolist.

Should that happen, the Fed would by definition have to have assets to employ its vastly expanded deposit liabilities. What assets would those be? Well, loans and securities. The Fed would become a government lending bank.

The global experience with such government banks is that they naturally lend based on politics, which is exactly what the politicians want, with an inevitable bad ending.

On top of that, with a CBDC in our times of Big Data, the Fed could and probably in time would choose to know everybody’s personal financial business. This could and perhaps would be used to create an oppressive “social credit system” on the model of China which could control credit allocation, loans, and payments. Given the urge to power of any government and of its bureaucratic agencies, that outcome is certainly not beyond imagining, and is, in my view, likely.

The current push to expand the Fed’s mandates is consistent with Shull’s Paradox, which states that the more blunders the Fed makes, the more powers and prestige it gets. But we should be reducing the Fed’s powers and mandates, not increasing them. Specifically:

• The Fed should not hold mortgage securities or mortgages of any kind. It should take its mortgage portfolio not just to a smaller size, but to zero. Zero was just where it was from 1914 to 2008 and where it should return.

• The Fed should not engage in subsidizing political constituencies and the proposed politicized agenda should be scrapped.

• Congress should definitively take away the Fed’s odd notion that the Fed can by itself, without Congressional approval, set a national inflation target and thereby commit the country and the world to perpetual inflation.

• Congress should repeat its instruction to the Fed to pursue stable prices. As Paul Volcker wrote in his autobiography, “In the United States, we have had decades of good growth without inflation,” and “The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation and its close cousin of extreme speculation and risk taking.”

• The Fed should be required to have sound accounting for its own financial statements, with no hiding losses in the former savings and loan style allowed. This requires taking away from the Fed the power to set its own accounting standards, which nobody else has.

• The Fed should be prohibited from buying TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities), because this allows it to manipulate apparent market inflation expectations.

• The funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau expenses out of Fed profits should be terminated. This is an indefensible use of the Fed to take away the power of the purse from Congress and to subsidize a political constituency. It would be especially appropriate to end this payment if the Fed is making big losses.

• Finally, and most important of all, we must understand the inherent limitations of what the Federal Reserve can know and do. There is no mystique. We must expect it to make mistakes, and sometimes blunders, just like everybody else.

Knowing this, perhaps the 2020s will give us the opportunity to reverse Shull’s Paradox.

This paper is based on the author’s remarks at the American Enterprise Institute conference, “Is It Time to Rethink the Federal Reserve?” July 26, 2022.

Event Aug 24: Rethinking the Role of the Fed

Hosted by the Federalist Society:

Sponsors:

Pittsburgh Lawyers Chapter

Rivers Club
301 Grant St Suite 411
Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Register

Please join the Pittsburgh Lawyers Chapter for a luncheon event featuring Alex Pollock and Winthrop Watson.

Featuring:

• Alex Pollock, Senior Fellow, the Mises Institute

• Winthrop Watson, President/CEO, Federal Home Loan Bank Pittsburgh

More information here.

Letter: Money, machines and fundamental mistakes

Published in the Financial Times:

In his interesting letter (Letter, August 3), Konstantinos Gravas says that “money is a machine” and repeats the thought in several ways. To the contrary, money is not a machine. Financial markets are not machines. Economies are not machines. The mechanistic metaphor when applied to money, markets and economies is a source of fundamental mistakes.

All of these are complex, uncertain, recursive, reflexive, expectational, unpredictable, intertwined, interacting events, not machines. We don’t have a good name for these fascinating and often surprising worlds in which we live and interact.

FA Hayek in 1968 proposed the name “catallaxy,” to express that they are composed of ongoing exchanges, based on the Greek word “to exchange.” This did not catch on.

My suggestion is to name them “interactivities.” A key aspect of interactivities is that no one is outside them, looking down in divine fashion. Everyone, including central banks, regulators and experts of every kind, is inside the interactivity, subject to its fundamental uncertainty.

SHEFFIELD: Democrats’ Rosy Economic Picture Has Become A Nightmare As Recession Finally Hits

Published in the Daily Caller.

Under Powell’s watch, banks will win and everyday people lose, as AEI economists Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock report: “For the first time in its 108-year history, the Federal Reserve System faces massive and growing mark-to-market losses and is projected to post large operating losses in the near future … Because they are now paid interest on their reserve balances and receive guaranteed dividends on their Federal Reserve stock, member banks will monetarily benefit from the Fed’s policy to fight inflation while the public bears Federal Reserve system losses. Meanwhile, the public at large will also face the costs of higher interest rates, reduced growth and employment and losses in their investment and retirement account balances.”

Mises Institute's Alex Pollock explains why economics is not a science

On Chicago’s Morning Answer radio. Listen here.

The Fed Cannot Go Bankrupt; However, It Can Bankrupt the Country

Published by the Mises Institute.

07/13/2022 Patrick Barron

A recent essay on the Mises Wire triggered quite a bit of discussion among a group of Austrian school economists. Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock's "Who Owns Federal Reserve Losses and How Will They Impact Monetary Policy?" became the focal point for a wide-ranging discussion of monetary issues that got to the heart of our monetary and overall economic future.

The Fed Cannot Go Bankrupt

The article itself is a fairly straightforward explanation of how the Fed works, and provides several options that the Fed might pursue in a rising interest rate environment. The authors contend that the Fed has intervened itself into a corner, where losses probably will increase as the Fed raises rates. David Howden opined that this might not happen, as the Fed will roll over its mostly short-term, low-yielding investments into higher-earning assets, which will tend to protect its net interest income and provide an operating profit. Furthermore, the Fed is not required to mark its low-yielding investments to market. Were it required to do so, the Fed's true financial weakness would be revealed.

The Fed Ignores the Rule of Law

But what can or will be done about it? Early in their essay, Kupiec and Pollock conclude that nothing will be done, despite the provisions of the law that created the Fed over one hundred years ago. The losses will not go away; they simply will be transferred to the unwitting public through loss of purchasing power. Per Kupiec and Pollock:

"Innovations" in accounting policies adopted by the Federal Reserve Board in 2011 suggest that the Board intends to ignore the law and monetize Federal Reserve losses, thereby transferring them indirectly through inflation to anyone holding Federal Reserve notes, dollar denominated cash balances and fixed-rate assets.

The "innovation" in accounting policies centers around the Fed's newly minted "deferred asset" account, to which underwater assets will be transferred. Per Kupiec and Pollock:

Today, the Federal Reserve Board's official position is that, should it face operating losses, it would not reduce its book capital surplus, but instead would just create the money needed to meet operating expenses and offset the newly printed money by creating an imaginary "deferred asset" (Section 11.96) on its balance sheet.

If the Fed were subject to the rule of law, either it would have stopped money printing years ago or its creditors would have forced it to close its doors. Yet the rule of law is completely ignored. Per Kupiec and Pollock:

The Federal Reserve Board's proposed treatment of system operating losses is wildly inconsistent with the treatment prescribed by the Federal Reserve Act.

The Keynesians running our economic life may be reassured that the Fed cannot fail in a technical sense, but the public should be appalled. The continual monetization of the federal budget threatens the complete loss of the dollar's purchasing power—to wit, a Weimar Republic–style catastrophe.

Unlawful Monetary Debasement Causes Capital Destruction

Today's monetary leaders fail to understand the true nature of money and, therefore, cannot conceive that there are real consequences to their outlandish irresponsibility in monetizing government debt and brazenly dismissing the rule of law. As the facilitator of monetary debasement, borne by the general public, the Fed fosters the destruction of societal capital.

The federal government does not have to answer to the law nor the public for its irresponsible and destructive spending. The purpose of insolvency is to force an institution, whether public or private, to stop destroying capital. Austrian school economists understand that capital must be created by hard work, innovation, frugality, and, most of all, savings. The market allocates scarce capital to those enterprises that create things worth more than those scarce inputs.

The Solution Is a "Return to Sound Money"

In 1953 Ludwig von Mises added a relatively short final chapter to his 1913 masterpiece The Theory of Money and Credit. Chapter 3 of part 4 is titled "The Return to Sound Money." It is as relevant today as it was almost seventy years ago. Mises explains how the US in particular could anchor the dollar to its gold reserves. The Fed would be eliminated and replaced by little more than a board that would monitor all dollars to make sure they are backed 100 percent by gold.

Mises was a master in presenting what self-serving Keynesian scholars try to hide in a fog of deception; i.e., that money can and should be subject to the rule of law, as are all other economic goods in society. I daresay that there is no single reform that comes closer to fostering peace, freedom, and prosperity than a "return to sound money."

Biden’s Pension Bailout Is a Giveaway to Unions

Most plans were insolvent long before the pandemic.

Published in The Wall Street Journal.

By Howard B. Adler and Alex J. Pollock

President Biden boasted last week about his administration’s bailout of union multiemployer pension plans, enacted in the American Rescue Plan supposedly to address pandemic-related problems. “Millions of workers will have the dignified retirement they earned and they deserve,” he said July 6 in Cleveland. In fact, the American taxpayer will bear the cost of union plans that were insolvent long before the pandemic. The bailout all but guarantees future insolvency or another bailout and constitutes a massive giveaway to labor unions.

Multiemployer pension plans are a creation of unions. They are defined-benefit retirement plans, maintained under collective-bargaining agreements, in which more than one employer contributes to the plan. These plans are typically found in industries such as trucking, transportation and mining, in which union members do work for multiple companies.

As of 2019, there were 2,450 multiemployer plans with 15 million participants and beneficiaries. Many were insolvent well before the Covid pandemic. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. estimated total unfunded liabilities of PBGC-guaranteed multiemployer plans at $757 billion for 2018. According to 2019 projections, 124 multiemployer pension plans declared that they would likely run out of money over the next 20 years.

Read the rest here.

AEI Event July 26: Is It Time to Rethink the Federal Reserve?

Via the American Enterprise Institute.

The Federal Reserve is having a bad year. As the Fed struggles to control inflation, it is also being asked to expand its policy remit to include climate change. Moreover, the House of Representatives just passed a bill requiring the Fed to adopt new policy goals of equal employment and wealth outcomes for targeted interest groups beyond its existing goals of price stability and full employment. How will these efforts to “rethink the Fed” affect monetary policy, credit availability, and economic growth?

Join AEI as a panel of experts discusses monetary policy, the Fed’s dual role as central banker and regulator, its independence, and recent congressional and executive branch efforts to further expand its legislative mandates.

Agenda

10:00 a.m.
Introduction:
Paul H. Kupiec, Senior Fellow, AEI

10:15 a.m.
Panel Discussion
Panelists:
Gerald P. Dwyer, BB&T Scholar, Clemson University
Alex J. Pollock, Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
George Selgin, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute

Moderator:
Paul Kupiec, Senior Fellow, AEI

11:40 a.m.
Q&A

12:00 p.m.
Adjournment

Contact Information

Event: Bea Lee | Beatrice.Lee@aei.org
Media: MediaServices@aei.org | 202.862.5829

Related

Who Owns Federal Reserve Losses, and How Will They Affect Monetary Policy?
Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock | AEI Economic Policy Working Paper Series | June 17, 2022

The Fed Is Raising Interest Rates to Make Up for Its Own Inaction
George Selgin | Cato Institute | June 15, 2022

Government Debt and Inflation: Reality Intrudes
Gerald P. Dwyer | American Institute for Economic Research | March 22, 2022

The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages
Alex J. Pollock | Mises Institute | January 8, 2022

The government triangle at the heart of U.S. housing finance

Published by Housing Finance International.

The U.S. central bank’s great 21st century monetization of residential mortgages, with $2.7 trillion of mortgage securities on the books of the Federal Reserve, is a fundamental expansion of the role of the government in the American housing finance system.

In Economics in One Lesson (1946), Henry Hazlitt gave a classic description of those whose private interests are served by government policies carried out at the expense of everybody else. “The group that would benefit by such policies,” Hazlitt wrote, “having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case,” with “endless pleadings of self-interest.”

Such pleadings have characterized the U.S. housing and mortgage lending industries over many decades, in Hazlitt’s day and in ours, with notable success, and resulted in the massive involvement and interventions of the U.S. government in housing finance. Through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the U.S. government guarantees about $8 trillion of mortgage debt. That’s $8 trillion. This sum is about 70% of the $11 trillion of mortgages in the country. Does it make sense for the U.S. government to guarantee 70% of the whole market? It does not. But so it has evolved in the politics of U.S. housing.

As part of this evolution, U.S. mortgage finance has become dominated by a tightly linked government triangle. The first leg of the triangle is composed of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie (with its associated Federal Housing Administration). This leg we may call the Government Housing Complex.

The second leg in the government mortgage triangle is the United States Treasury. The Treasury is fully liable for all the obligations of the 100% government-owned Ginnie. The Treasury is also the majority owner of both Fannie and Freddie and effectively guarantees all their obligations, too. Through clever financial lawyering, it is not a legal guarantee, however, because that would require the honest inclusion of all Fannie and Freddie’s debt in the calculation of the total U.S. government debt. Unsurprisingly, this is not politically desired.

The same politically undesired, but honest, accounting result would follow if, on top of owning 100% of Fannie and Freddie’s $270 billion of senior preferred stock, the Treasury controlled 80% of their common stock. Government accounting rules require that at 80% the entity's debt must be consolidated into the government debt. That is why Treasury controls 79.9%, not 80%, of their common stock, which is done through warrants with an exercise price that rounds to zero. This is historically consistent, since to get Fannie’s debt off the government’s books was the main reason for its 1968 restructuring it into a so-called “government-sponsored enterprise,” so that President Lyndon Johnson’s federal deficit did not look as big.

The Federal Reserve didn’t used to be, but it has become the third leg of the government mortgage triangle, as the single biggest funder of mortgages by far. Its $2.7 trillion of mortgage securities holdings are limited to those guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie. But those guarantees are only credible because they are in turn backed by the credit of the Treasury.

However, there is another curious circle here. How can the Treasury, which runs huge continuing deficits and runs up its debt year after year, be thought such a good credit? It turns out that an essential support of the credit of the Treasury is the readiness of the Federal Reserve always to buy government debt by printing up the money to do so. This is why having a fiat currency central bank of its own is so very useful to any government. The intertwined credit of the Treasury and of the Federal Reserve are intriguingly dependent on each other, and they both support the credit of the government mortgage complex of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie.

In this sense, it is helpful to think of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury as one thing – one combined government financing operation, whose financial statements should be consolidated. In such consolidated statements, the $5.8 trillion of Treasury debt owned by the Federal Reserve would be a consolidating elimination. With this approach, we could see the reality more clearly. The Federal Reserve buys and monetizes Treasury debt. Consolidate the statements. The Treasury bonds disappear. What is really happening? The consolidated government prints up money and spends it. In order to spend, it is taxing by monetary inflation, without the need to vote on taxes and without the need for the legislature to act at all.

We should then bring Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie into the consolidation. The government mortgage complex issues mortgage securities, then the Federal Reserve buys and monetizes them. Consolidate the statements, and the mortgage securities held by the Federal Reserve also disappear as a consolidating elimination. What reality is left? The consolidated government prints up “free” money and uses it to make mortgage loans, inflating the price of houses. This arrangement suits housing lobbyists, to be sure, and the proponents of “modern monetary theory” who wish to have no limits on the government’s ability to spend. Of course, this theory is an illusion. The reality, and the most fundamental of all economic principles is: Nothing is free. Free printed money becomes very expensive indeed when it turns into destructive inflation.

In principle, a fiat currency central bank can buy and monetize not just bonds and mortgages, but any asset. For example, the Swiss National Bank (the central bank) includes a large portfolio of U.S. stocks in its investments. It recently reported a net loss of $33 billion for the first quarter of 2022, caused by its $37 billion in investment losses. In the U.S. case, the Federal Reserve in the Covid financial crisis, in cooperation with the Treasury, devised ways to buy corporate debt and even the debt of the nearly insolvent state of Illinois as investments for the central bank.

Further back in history, in the 1960s, some members of the U.S. Congress thought, with the encouragement of the savings & loan industry, that the Federal Reserve ought to buy bonds to provide money to housing. Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin resisted, arguing that this would “violate a fundamental principle of sound monetary policy, in that it would attempt to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize programs benefitting special sectors of the economy.”

That was the right answer, consistent with Economics in One Lesson. But it did not please the politicians. Senator William Proxmire pointedly threatened the Fed:

“You recognize, I take it” he said to the Fed Vice Chairman in 1968, “that the Federal Reserve Board is a creature of the Congress? [That] the Congress can create it, abolish it, and so forth?... What would Congress have to do to indicate that it wishes…greater support to the housing market?”

A new Federal Reserve Chairman, Arthur Burns, arrived in 1971, and decided it would be a good idea to “demonstrate a cooperative attitude.” So, the Federal Reserve began to buy the bonds (not mortgages) of federal housing and other government agencies. It ended up buying the bonds of Fannie Mae, the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Federal Farm Credit Banks, the Federal Land Banks, the Federal Intermediate Credit Banks, the Banks of Cooperatives, and – believe it or not – the debt of the Washington DC subway system. There were suggestions it ought to buy the debt of New York City, when it nearly went bankrupt in 1975.

The Federal Reserve fortunately managed to get out of this program starting in 1978, but the liquidation of the portfolio lasted until the 1990s. Will it be able to get out of its vastly bigger mortgage program now?

In 1978, Hazlitt wrote in The Inflation Crisis, And How to Resolve It: “Inflation, not only in the United States but throughout the world, has… not only continued, but spread and accelerated. The problems it presents, in a score of aspects, have become increasingly grave and urgent.”

In 2022, with U.S. inflation is running at over 8%, here we are again.

As the Federal Reserve now moves to address the inflation, interest rates on the standard American 30-year fixed rate mortgage have gone from their suppressed level of 3% in 2021 to about 5½% in May 2022. Although historically speaking, that is still rather low, it will make many houses unaffordable for those who need a mortgage loan to buy. The interest expense for the same-sized mortgage for the same-priced house has increased by about 80%. How much higher might mortgage interest rates go? With higher mortgage rates, how quickly will the runaway house price inflation end? Will that be followed by a fall in U.S. house prices from their current bubble heights? We are waiting to see.