Some prominent institutional bond investors are shifting their focus away from traditional benchmark indices that weight countries’ debt issues by market capitalization, toward GDP-weighted indices.   PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC, the world’s largest fixed-income investment firm) and the Government Pension Fund of Norway (one of the world’s largest Sovereign Wealth Funds), have both recently made moves in this direction.  

There is a danger that some investors will lose sight of the purpose of a benchmark index.   The benchmark exists to represent the views of the median investor dollar.  For many investors, going with the benchmark is a good guideline - especially those who recognize themselves to be relatively unsophisticated and also those who think they are sophisticated but really aren’t.   This is the implication of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH), for example.  

On the one hand, EMH theorists are often too quick to discount the possibility of ways to beat the benchmark.   To take an example, it should not have been so hard to figure out during the 2003-07 credit-fed boom that countries with high foreign-exchange-denominated debt, particularly in Europe, were not paying a sufficiently high return to compensate for risk.  That mistake described Eastern European countries with low ratios of reserves to short-term debt as well as periphery euro members that lacked their own currency.  It probably resulted from easy money, reach for yield, and pervasive underestimation of risk.  Or, to take another example (admittedly, a tougher call), some of these countries’ deeply discounted bonds would have been good buys in early 2012, after heavy mark-downs.   

On the other hand, most investors would do better if they went with a more passive investment strategy - especially due to high management fees among actively managed funds, exacerbated by excessive turnover.   At a minimum, if one is pursuing an activist strategy such as investing more in low-debt countries, it is helpful to frame it explicitly as a departure from the view of the median investor in order to be clear in your mind as to the nature of the bet you are making.

I can think of four functions of a benchmark index.    First, investors who do not figure that they can systematically beat the median investor need to be able to hold passively a portfolio designed to track a benchmark index consisting median investor holdings.   (See Vanguard.)   The second function is to provide an objective standard by which investors can judge the performance of active portfolio-managers who claim to be able to beat the median investor, within a specific asset class like sovereign debt.  (See Morningstar.)   Third, the same weights that are used in the index can be used to compute an average interest rate or sovereign spread in the market, which can serve as an indicator as to where the median investor is currently, in the risk-on, risk-off spectrum. (See J.P.Morgan’s EMBI — Emerging Market Bond Index.)    

The fourth function of a benchmark index is to help active investors to devise a deliberate strategy to depart from the views of the median investor when they think that the latter is erring in a particular direction.  They may think that the median investor is under-estimating risk in general (spreads too low) or under-estimating the downside in countries with some particular characteristic.   Examples of such characteristics include insufficient currency flexibility, inadequate reserves, too much short-term debt, too much foreign-currency debt, too much bank debt, insufficient openness to FDI, insufficient cost competitiveness, excessive budget deficits, insufficient national saving, political risk, and so forth.

For each of these four functions of a benchmark, the correct way of weighting different countries is by market capitalization.  True, the keeper of the index will need to judge what countries and what bonds are in “the market,” i.e., are fully investable.   But this is true for any index.

The logic behind the movement away from traditional bond market indices is that by construction they give a lot of weight to countries with high debt, some of which may be over-indebted and at risk of default.  At first the logic seems unassailable.  But in theory, if the market is functioning well, it should already have factored in high debt levels:  such countries should pay higher interest rates to compensate for the risk, unless there is some special reason to think they can service their debts easily.

It is important to emphasize that many investors will want to depart from the benchmark in various directions, as indicated under the fourth motive for having a benchmark.  An investor’s belief that countries with high debt/GDP ratios are riskier than the median investor realizes would call for a strategy equivalent to moving from the market-cap benchmark in the direction of the GDP-weighted benchmark.  But one is more likely to think about the strategy clearly if it is explicitly phrased in terms of factoring in debt/GDP ratios, rather than phrased as following a new GDP-weighted index.  Furthermore the phrasing may help an investor realize that he or she might want to modify the strategy if, for example, the country in question can borrow readily in terms of its own currency (think of American exorbitant privilege or Japan’s high domestic holdings of own debt) or if, on the other hand, its debt has a particularly vulnerable maturity or currency structure (think of Hungary).

Investors are reacting to what has turned out to be default risk that was higher than they had expected, among some high-debt countries.  Taking greater note of high debt levels last decade would have warned investors away from countries like Greece and Hungary.   But there is always a danger of fighting the last war.   Middle-income countries have paid down much of their debts over the last decade, attaining debt/GDP ratios far below those of advanced economies.    As the chart shows, major emerging markets have relatively low debts [first bars, for each country] compared to GDP [second bar].  That is, their debt/GDP ratios [third bar] are now much lower than in advanced countries.  (Russia’s sovereign debt is now below 7 per cent of GDP.)  As a result, there is only a limited supply of their bonds left to hold.  If the global investor community switches from market-cap-weighted to GDP-weighted investing, the high demand and low supply of bonds from low debt/GDP countries may drive their interest rates to unnaturally low levels, setting off new credit-fed boom-bust cycles in their economies.  

Of course, as a country’s international debt approaches zero, the keepers of the index might drop it altogether.  But the fall in demand for that country’s remaining international bonds from the investment funds that are following the benchmark could then produce an undesirable discontinuous jump in the interest rate.

Many emerging market countries have paid down debt denominated in dollars or other foreign currencies, while continuing to borrow in their local currencies.  (See the table at bottom.)  Such relatively large countries as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa and Russia, for example, have little dollar-denominated debt left - 3% of GDP or less (shown in the chart as the dark bottom of each first bar).   If an international bond benchmark is to be limited to dollar-denominated debt, then GDP weights could imply a severe imbalance between international investor demand for these countries’ bonds and the small supplies available. 

Accordingly, local currency denominated debt must be included in the most useful benchmarks.  But then a portfolio reallocation away from traditional benchmark indices such as the EMBI would imply a big shift in allocations away from simple credit risk toward currency risk.   True, the ability of emerging market economies to attract foreign investment in their local currencies represents an important strengthening of the global financial system, relative to the currency mismatch and balance sheet vulnerabilities of the 1990s.  Nevertheless, an investor switching from one “benchmark” to the other needs to be aware of the extent to which the reduction in default risk comes at the expense of heighted exposure to currency risk.

In short, it is not crazy for an investor to depart from the market-cap-weighted benchmark in the direction of putting more weight on debt/GDP countries and less weight on high debt/GDP countries.   But the GDP-weighted index should not be mistaken for a neutral benchmark.

[A version of this post originally appeared at Project Syndicate, Feb. 11, 2013.  Comments can be posted there, or at Seeking Alpha.]

Table:  Sovereign debts as a percentage of GDP

         A survey of economists is published in the November 2012 issue of Foreign Policy.  One question was whether we thought that the US unemployment rate would dip below 8.0% before the election.   When the FP conducted the poll at the end of the summer, unemployment was 8.1-8.2%.  Now it’s 7.8%.  Only 8% of the respondents said “yes.”   (I was one.  I basically just extrapolated the trend of the last two years.)   

My fellow economists choose defense spending and agricultural subsidies as the two categories of US federal budget that they think the best to cut.  They rate the euro crisis as the greatest threat to the world economy now and are particularly worried about Spain.   

For a slideshow presentation of the results, see “The FP Survey: The Economy.”   Or in a magazine format:  “If we’re ever going to get out of this slump, what will it take?  We asked more than 60 leading economists to tell us.”   

        Also, here is a recent poll from The Economist, asking similar questions of NBER and NABE economists:   “Asking the Experts,” Oct. 6.

The prices of minerals, hydrocarbons, and agricultural commodities have been on a veritable roller coaster. Although commodity prices are always more variable than those for manufactured goods and services, commodity markets over the last five years have seen extraordinary volatility.

Countries that specialize in the export of oil, copper, iron ore, wheat, coffee, or other commodities have boomed.  But they are highly vulnerable. Dollar commodity prices could plunge at any time, as a result of a new global recession, a hard landing in China, an increase in real interest rates in the United States, fluctuations in climate, or random sector-specific factors.

Countries that have outstanding debt in dollars or other foreign currencies are especially vulnerable. If their export revenues were to plunge relative to their debt-service obligations, the result could be crashes reminiscent of Latin America’s debt crisis in 1982 or the Asian and Russian currency crises of 1997-1998.

Many developing countries have made progress since the 1990’s in shifting from dollar-denominated debt toward foreign direct investment and other types of capital inflows, or in paying down their liabilities altogether. But some commodity exporters still seek ways to borrow that won’t expose them to excessive risk.

Commodity bonds may offer a neat way to circumvent these risks. Exporters of any particular commodity should issue debt that is denominated in terms of the price of that commodity, rather than in dollars or any other currency. Jamaica, for example, would issue alumina bonds; Nigeria would issue oil bonds; Sierra Leone would issue iron-ore bonds; and Mongolia would issue copper bonds. Investors would be able to buy Guatemala’s coffee bonds, Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa bonds, Liberia’s rubber bonds, Mali’s cotton bonds; and Ghana’s gold bonds.

The advantage of such bonds is that in the event of a decline in the world price of the underlying commodity, the country’s debt-to-export ratio need not rise. The cost of debt service adjusts automatically, without the severe disruption that results from loss of confidence, crisis, debt restructuring, and so forth.

The idea is not new. (The oldest reference I know is Lessard & Williamson, 1985.)  So, why has it not been tried before? When one asks finance ministers in commodity-exporting debtor countries, they frequently reply that they fear insufficient demand for commodity bonds.

That is a surprising proposition, given that commodity bonds have an obvious latent market, rooted in real economic fundamentals. After all, steel companies have an inherent need to hedge against fluctuations in the price of iron ore, just as airlines and utilities have an inherent need to hedge against fluctuations in the price of oil.  Each of these commodities is an important input for major corporations. Surely there is at least as much natural demand for commodity bonds as there is for credit-default swaps and some of the bizarrely complicated derivatives that are currently traded!

It takes liquidity to make a market successful, and it can be difficult to get a new one started until it achieves a certain critical mass. The problem may be that there are not many investors who want to take a long position on oil and Nigerian credit risk simultaneously.

A multilateral agency such as the World Bank could play a critical role in launching a market in commodity bonds. The fit would be particularly good in those countries where the Bank is already lending money.

Here is how it would work. Instead of denominating a loan to Nigeria in terms of dollars, the Bank would denominate it in terms of the price of oil; it would then turn around and lay off its exposure to the world oil price by issuing that same quantity of bonds denominated in oil. If the Bank lends to multiple oil-exporting countries, the market for oil bonds that it creates would be that much larger and more liquid. It can serve an additional important pooling function in cases where there are different grades or varieties of the product (as with oil or coffee), and where prices can diverge enough to make an important difference to the exporters.  The Bank could link the bond it issues to an oil price index, a weighted average of various product grades.

An alternative for some commodity exporters is to hedge their risk by selling on the futures market. But an important disadvantage of derivatives is their short maturity. A West African country with newly discovered oil reserves needs to finance exploration, drilling, and pipeline construction, which means that it needs to hedge at a time horizon of 10-20 years, not 90 days.

Another disadvantage of derivatives is that they require a high degree of sophistication –both technical and political. In the event of an increase in a commodity’s price, a finance minister who has done a perfect job ex ante of hedging export-price risk on the futures market will suddenly find himself accused ex post of having gambled away the national patrimony. This principal-agent problem is much diminished in the case of commodity bonds.

If the international financial wizards can get together and act on this idea now, commodity exporters might be able to avoid calamity the next time the world price of their product takes a plunge.  The World Bank should take up the cause.

In the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean and a teenage rival race two cars to the edge of a cliff in a game of chicken.  Both intend to jump out at the last moment.  But the other guy miscalculates, and goes over the cliff with the car.

This is the game that is being played out in Washington this month over the debt ceiling.  The chance is at least 1/4 that the result will be similarly disastrous.    

It is amazing that the financial markets continue to view the standoff with equanimity.   Interest rates on US treasury bonds remain very low, 3% at the ten-year maturity.   Evidently it is still considered a sign of sophistication to say “This is just politics as usual.  They will come to an agreement in the end.”  Probably they will.  But maybe not.   (I’d put a ½ probability on an agreement that raises the debt limit, but just muddles through in terms of the genuine long term fiscal problem.  That leaves at most a ¼ probability of a genuine long-term solution of the sort that President Obama apparently proposed last week - described as worth $4 trillion over ten years.)

My advice to investors is to shift immediately out of US treasuries and into high-rated corporate bonds.  If the worst happens, you will probably save yourself from a big capital loss within the next month.  If not, there is no harm done.

The game is not symmetric.  The Republicans are the ones who are miscalculating.   Evidently they are confident of prevailing:  they rejected the President’s offer, even though he was willing to cut entitlement programs.

The situation is complicated because there are a number of different people crammed into the Republican car.    There is one guy who is obsessed with the theory that, come August 3, the federal government could retain its top credit rating if it continued to service its debt by ceasing payment on its other bills.  But this would mean failing to honor legal obligations that have already been incurred (paying suppliers for paper clips that have already been bought, paying soldiers their wages for last month’s service, sending social security recipients their checks, etc.).  This is like observing that the cliff is not a 90 degree drop-off, but only 110 degrees.   It doesn’t matter: the car would still go crashing into the ocean far below.   The government’s credit would still be downgraded and global investors would still demand higher interest rates to hold US treasuries, probably on a long-term basis. 

There are other guys (and gals) in the car who are even more delusional.   They are dead set on a policy of immediately eliminating the budget deficit (e.g., those opposed to raising the debt ceiling no matter what, or those campaigning for a balanced budget amendment), and doing it primarily by cutting nondefense discretionary spending.  This is literally impossible, arithmetically.  But they honestly don’t know this.   It is as if they were insisting that the car can fly.   Sometimes it can be a good bargaining position to adopt a very extreme position.  But if you are demanding that the car flies, you are not going to get your way no matter how determined you are. 

It seems likely that the man in the driver’s seat - House Speaker John Boehner - does realize that his fellow passengers don’t have the facts quite right.   But there is also a game of chicken going on within the Republican car.  The crazies have said they will oppose in the next Republican primary election any congressman who votes to raise the debt ceiling or to raise tax revenues.   (Yes, they think they would support someone who would eliminate the budget deficit primarily by cutting non-defense discretionary spending; but remember, this is arithmetically impossible.)   The guy who is riding shot-gun in the car - the one who believes the car can fly — is trying to put his foot on top of Boehner’s on the accelerator pedal.   

It seems to me that Boehner, too, is miscalculating.  Given that the car can’t fly, the crazy guy is probably going to oppose him in the primaries no matter what he does.   So I don’t see what his plan is.   But whatever it is, he has made it clear that he doesn’t plan to agree to any increase in tax revenues.   

As a result the Republican leadership is in the remarkable situation of refusing to agree to Obama’s offer to solve the problem so long as the solution includes raising tax revenue, even if it is via such measures as ending distortionary subsidies for ethanol, oil companies, and corporate jets.

If I had to guess:   The financial markets will wake up just before August 3.   US bond prices will finally fall.  The market reaction will shock the Republican leadership into action.  (Precedents include the delayed congressional passage of the unpopular TARP legislation in the fall of 2008 and the delayed passage of an unpopular IMF quota increase 10 years earlier.)   They will finally make the small but necessary concessions on tax revenues.   But by then it might be too late.

         December 31 is technically the end of the first decade of the 21^st century.  It is perhaps an appropriate time to review one’s predictions.    It seems to me that I got some things right over the last decade.  Indulge me while I review the predictions that came true, before turning to those that did not work out as well.

Stock market peak     At the end of the 1990s, I felt that the dizzying ascent of equity prices could not continue into the new decade, that there was “…a bubble component in the stock market”  (Nov. 20, 1999).   This was four months before the bubble burst in 2000.  So far so good.

The Euro        Also at the start of the decade, I thought the european currency was undervalued.   My prophesy: “… there will be a major appreciation of the euro against the dollar” (June 21, 2000).  Over the next eight years the euro in fact rose 60% in value.    (But ”I don’t mean to express an optimistic forecast regarding European economics or governance…. Europeans have made many mistakes, the leaders and public alike.” 2006.)

TIPS           I recommended Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities to my blog readers, early in what turned out to be a period of steep rise in their value.  (Feb. 2009.)

            The big economic story  of the decade of course was its second recession, the worst in 70 years, and the severe financial crisis that caused it.    A number of economists got important parts of the 2007-09 crisis right ahead of time (although nobody got all of it right).   I give credit in particular to Krugman, Shiller, Gramlich, Rajan, Borio and White at the BIS, Rogoff, and Roubini.  A 2009 paper identifies 12 commentators as having warned that the US housing market would end in a serious recession.

What parts of the crisis did I get right?

Severity of recession             After the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, I predicted that spending growth and deficits would rise rather than fall, and that the legacy of high debt would mean that the next recession would be longer and more severe than past recessions:

 ”Good economic logic does not support the idea that Bush fiscal policies caused the weak economy of the last three years. Good economic logic supports, rather, a causal link between Bush fiscal policies and the next recession. The future downturn is likely to be far worse than the recent one…They also created long-range uncertainty that makes planning difficult (nobody from either party expects the relevant tax law to remain as it is currently written)… It is impossible to say when the next recession will come. But when it does, it is likely to be worse than the 2001 recession. Why? Precisely because we will enter it at a time when the budget deficit and national debt are already alarmingly high…Thus when the next recession hits, we will not have luxury of being able to cut taxes and increase spending as George II has done. … The resulting pain will make the economic travails of George II’s first term pale in comparison…”  (Oct. 30, 2003.  Also Dec.2003 and Nov.2004).    
That seems to me precisely what has happened.

Budget deficits   At the start of the decade:  “We need to think about using our budget surplus to provide for the retirement of the baby boom generation, not to blow it on a big tax cut” (May 16, 2001).  But of course the Administration chose the latter policy.   Like many others, I continued throughout the decade to warn that fiscal policy was irresponsible.  The “White House forecast of cutting budget deficit in half by 2009 will not be met,” and “Further, the much more serious deterioration will start after 2009.”  (May 24, 2006.)   Indeed.

Market underestimation of risk        I was dubious of the “Great Moderation.”   By 2006, I was warning frequently of serious risks facing the economy, arguing that even though the odds of each sort of possible setback were small in any given year, the cumulative probability that at least one of them would hit the economy over the next couple of years was relatively high.  (May 24, 2006.)  The markets were underestimating this risk:
 ”How can the implied volatility in options prices be so low?  Perhaps investors are judging risk solely from the statistics of recent history, and not from a forward-looking open-eyed consideration of the risks facing the global economy.”  (Nov. 2006.)    “The implicit volatilities in options prices are substantially too low, and will rise.  … market estimates of risk are lower than they should be.  … the market is basing its perception of risk on recent history, not on a forward-looking assessment of the risks facing the US and global economies.    Such risks include further falls in housing or rises in oil, a hard landing for the dollar, and geopolitical risks arising from the Middle East.”   (Jan.12, 2007. And again, May 14, 2007.)     
The VIX (the CBOE index of market-expected volatility) was close to 10 when that was written.  It was to go as high as 80 when the full financial crisis hit in 2008.

The carry trade “should be reversing.” (Jan.12, 2007.)    Market perceptions of risk had “fallen to irrational lows, as reflected in the low interest rates at which governments of developing countries, unqualified American homebuyers and high-risk businesses could borrow money.” (Nov.19, 2007, and Jan. 2008.)   

International crises    When asked “Have financial developments made the International Monetary Fund obsolete?” my answer was “The IMF is by no means obsolete. …. It is foolhardy to think, just because emerging market spreads have been very low recently, that there will be no more crises in the future.”    (March 1, 2007)   I identified Hungary and other Eastern European countries as particularly vulnerable.  (Jan. 2008.)

The coming financial crash       The comments I made at a Cato conference held in November 2006, shortly before the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit in 2007, look good now:

 ”The Greenspan Fed probably erred by providing too much liquidity in 2001-2004….If the Fed erred in keeping interest rates so low so long after the 2001 recession, what cost are we paying? None yet; but dangers lie in the future. It is not that I am especially worried about inflation at the moment. … what cost do I fear might come from the extraordinarily easy monetary policy of 2001-04? As the Bank for International Settlements points out, some of the biggest financial crashes and some of the longest recession periods have followed liquidity-fed booms that never did show up as goods inflation, but rather as asset inflation…”     (In Responding to Crises, Cato Journal, Spring 2007.)

Housing          Of the various asset markets, housing was the area where policy had most clearly gone awry.    I had long thought “that some people were being pushed to buy houses who couldn’t afford it, that (mirabile dictu) there was such a thing as too high a rate of national homeownership, and that the default rate would shoot up as soon as real interest rates rose or house prices stopped rising.”   (March 26, 2007.)    “Many people bought houses they could not afford unless prices continued to rise rapidly or real interest rates remained extraordinarily low, which predictably did not happen.”  (April 28, 2007.)     

The start of the recession     “[A]t the time of writing [Jan. 2008], the United States appeared to be poised on the brink of recession….A coming recession may be more severe and long-lasting than the last one in 2001….”   By May 2008 I had figured out that a recession was indeed probably underway– at a time when some Administration officials were still ruling it out and indeed GDP figures appeared to show positive growth in the first part of that year.   

Banking crisis resolution       When the Obama Administration announced its revised form of the Bush Administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, I argued that maybe they actually knew what they were doing and that the plan should be given a chance to work.  (March 23, 2009.)  I felt pretty isolated.  Others attacked the plan, from both left and right.  They expected Tim Geithner’s stress tests to be phony.  The critics were sure that the taxpayer would end up paying hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.  They wanted either to nationalize the banks or leave everything to the free market.  As things developed, however, financial collapse was averted without nationalization and the banks have since repaid the Treasury with interest.   

The trough      Financial markets stabilized in the first half of 2009.  Turnarounds in the rates of growth and job loss led me to believe in the summer of 2009 that the economy had probably hit bottom by then.   This turns out in fact to have been the case: The record shows that the recession ended that June.

Predictions gone wrong          Needless to say, I got plenty wrong in the decade as well.   For one thing, I kept expecting U.S. long-term interest rates to rise, because of the alarming long-term fiscal profile. Yet the bond market correction never came.   For another thing, based on econometric estimation of reserve currency holdings, Menzie Chinn and I projected that the euro might eventually rival the dollar in international currency use by 2015 or 2022.    It now seems unlikely.   I certainly thought that the sort of financial crisis that began in the U.S. in 2007-08 would be accompanied by a fall in the dollar.  Yet flows into the U.S. showed that the dollar is still a safe haven.  For this reason I abandoned my euro-bullishness, even before the mismanaged Greek crisis in early 2010.

My most spectacularly wrong predictions were all in the area of politics.  I had thought that if any presidential candidate gained the White House without winning the popular vote, his entire term would be consumed by divisive efforts to reform the Electoral College.   (This did not happen after January 2001.)   I had thought that if a high-casualty international terrorist attack hit the U.S. (September 11, 2001), American foreign policy would thereafter become ruled less by jingoism and more by expertise.  (Not!)   In 2008 I suspected that a Democrat who was perceived as a northern liberal could not be elected president.   (Wrong again.)  

In the coming decade, I resolve to eschew political forecasts, and stick to economics.

[Comments can be posted on the Belfer site.]

     Robert Zoellick put a few sentences about gold toward the end of a column in today’s FT that are drawing a lot of attention.   I doubt very much if the World Bank President has in mind a return to the gold standard, but goldbugs and critics alike are talking as if he does.

      Even if one placed overwhelming weight on the objective of price stability — enough weight to contemplate a rigid straightjacket for monetary policy — gold would not be a suitable anchor.   The economy would be hostage to the vagaries of the world gold market, as it was in the 19^th century:   suffering inflation during periods of gold discoveries and deflation during periods of gold drought.   This is well-known.   I am confident Zoellick understands it.   (He and I were in the same macroeconomics seminar at Swarthmore College in the 1970s.)

      I think he is making another point.  The world is moving away from a monetary system in which the dollar is the overwhelmingly dominant international reserve asset.  The dollar’s share of international reserves has been declining ever since Richard Nixon unilaterally ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971.   The dollar’s unique role is not an eternal god-given constant of the universe, any more than it was for pound sterling.  The US currency of course replaced the pound in the first half of the 20^th century, with a lag of 25 years or more after the US surpassed the UK economically.

      Will some asset replace the dollar, then?  No, not a single asset.  But we are probably moving to a system where there will be as many as a half dozen international reserve assets.  First, there is the euro.  Despite the serious troubles facing it this year, the euro has been a competitor for the dollar since it came into being 11 years ago.  Both the yen and the Swiss franc have to some extent played safe haven roles during the last three years of global financial turmoil.  The pound is not out completely.   Some day the renminbi will be added to the roster of major international currencies, when China’s financial markets are sufficiently developed and open.    Even the SDR (special drawing right) came back from the dead in 2009.

      And, yes, gold too has re-joined the world monetary system.  Gold was seen as an anachronism as recently as a couple of years ago.  The world’s central banks had been gradually selling off their stocks.   But all that changed in 2009.  The People’s Bank of China, the Reserve Bank of India and other central banks in Asia have bought gold.  Understandably, they want to diversify their reserves.    It appears that central banks have stopped selling gold even among advanced countries and that aggregate gold reserves have risen over the last year.   This is a multiple reserve asset system.      

[For those interested in gold and other mineral commodities, I have some relevant writings.  Others' views on Zoellick are at the New York Times.]

The National Journal asks for reactions to a recent blog post by Greg Mankiw regarding the reasons why US investment has fallen sharply. 

I agree with Greg that the dominant empirical fact about investment is its procyclical volatility (the main reason investment has been depressed for the last two years is that the economy has been depressed), and also that the recent credit crunch made it worse.   But I don’t agree with a third item on his list: “the policy environment seems adverse to business.”   As in many areas, it is when we get to the politics that I disagree. 

Greg cites trade policy, fiscal imbalances, and energy costs, in support of his proposition that the current policy environment is anti-business.    Let’s consider each of the three.

Trade.  I wasn’t happy in September when the White House put tariffs on imports of Chinese tires.  But President Obama, despite the pressures of the most severe recession since the 1930s, has yet to succumb to any protectionist measures as big or as blatantly in violation of international trade agreements as were Ronald Reagan’s quotas on Japanese auto imports or George W. Bush’s tariffs on steel imports, in response to the 1981-82 and 2001 recessions, respectively.  (Greg, of course, was the Chair of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.)

Budget.   Most of us think that the $787 billion fiscal stimulus and the distasteful banking rescues were necessary responses to the recession.   But let’s address the serious question of the bleak longer term fiscal outlook. It is known to those who look carefully at the budget numbers that Obama’s recent actions are a distant 4th on the list of contributors.   (OMB, CBO, GAO and respected private economists.)   #1 in the long term (by far) are the future costs of Social Security and Medicare, the approach of which we have been watching for several decades.    #2 are the effects of Bush’s tax cuts and spending increases (including foreign wars and the expansion of Medicare benefits, among other things).    Substantially smaller is #3, the loss of tax revenues from the recession that began December 2007.   A distant #4, as I say, is the recent fiscal stimulus.  (The banking layouts are being repaid, usually with a high return for the Treasury – as the Administration had predicted, to critics’ ridicule.)   I believe that as the recovery becomes better established Obama will, as he says, take much more serious steps than his predecessor in the direction of long-run fiscal consolidation.   But only time will tell. 

Energy costs.  Greg Mankiw in fact believes that a system of energy taxes or cap-and-trade would increase the efficiency of the economy, even though it would raise the relative price of energy.  (This is all the more true if the comparison is to past policies of subsidizing oil and other fossil fuels.)   Greg founded the Pigou Club on this principle, and I heartily congratulate him for it. 

I am skeptical that investment is currently depressed by perceptions of an anti-business climate.    But if the average businessperson does in fact have the perception that recent Democratic administrations have been worse for business than Republican administrations, I suggest setting aside campaign rhetoric and looking at actual history.   Start with the fact that, in the graph in Greg’s blog post, investment growth was substantially higher during the Clinton Administration than during the Reagan or Bush Administrations.   Investment will recover when the economy does.

“Should Central Banks Target Asset Prices?”   That is the question addressed by the current symposium in The International Economy (2009, no.4).

My answer: 

Alan Greenspan was right to raise the question “How do we know when ‘irrational exuberance’ has unduly escalated stock prices?”, which is what he actually said in 1996.    But he was wrong to conclude subsequently that monetary policy should ignore asset prices (or even that it should take asset prices into account only to the extent that they contain information about future inflation, as the Inflation Targeters would have it).    More specifically,
(1) Identifying in real time that we were in a stock market bubble by 2000 and a real estate bubble by 2006 was not in fact harder than the Fed’s usual job, forecasting inflation 18 months ahead;
(2) Central bankers do have tools that can often prick bubbles; and
(3) The “Greenspan put” policy of mopping up the damage only after run-ups abruptly end probably contributed to the magnitude of the bubbles ex ante, while yet being insufficient ex post to prevent the crisis from becoming the worst recession since the 1930s.    All three points run contrary to what was conventional wisdom among monetary economists and central bankers a mere two years ago.

As Claudio Borio and Bill White at the BIS pointed out before the financial crisis, many of the worst economic collapses of the last 100 years have occurred after excessively easy monetary policy had shown up in asset prices but not in inflation: US 1929, Japan1990, East Asia 1997, and now the US 2007.

A final point: “Targeting asset prices” is the wrong phrase.  The word “target” (for example, with respect to the money supply, exchange rate, or inflation) implies a number, or at least a numerical range.   I don’t know anyone who thinks that the central bank should contemplate setting a numerical range for the stock market.   Rather, the claim, which I think the evidence now supports, is that central bankers would be well advised to monitor prices of equities and real estate and to speak out, and eventually to act, on those rare occasions when asset prices get very far out of line.

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Everyone asks for tips: Where can I put my money?   Stocks or bonds have done very badly over the last  year, needless to say, and one cannot be confident that they have hit bottom.  Should one just leave everything in banks and money market funds?   Surely there must be something else worth buying?
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“What should I invest in?” We economists get asked this question all the time. Many members of the profession believe that Efficient Markets theory forbids us from giving an answer – beyond recommending “a well-diversified portfolio.” Perhaps a few of us won’t countenance a question that ends with a preposition. But the rest of us would like to be helpful. Even so, the past year has been a difficult time to give an answer.

One can no longer recommend euros or commodities, as the (somewhat predictable) appreciations there have already taken place, over the last five years. As for equities, corporate bonds, and housing, they have all been measurably overvalued for awhile. Even if one believed that the corrections in those three markets were now largely complete, it would be hard to predict that their rates of return on average over the next 25 years will be anywhere near as great as over the preceding 25 years. But, complains the investor, I have to hold something.

One US asset class strikes me as undervalued relative to the rest: municipal bonds. AAA-rated munis of each maturity pay a higher yield than Treasuries of the same maturity. The differential is as high as 50 basis points for the 2-year and 30-year maturities. Yet state and local bonds are tax-exempt while treasuries and corporate bonds are not. Thus the differential in after-tax rates of return is even larger. (I am only recommending munis for the taxable part of the portfolio of a taxed investor, of course. Put equities in the tax-exempt part.)

The obvious reason why state and local governments might have to pay more to attract investors is risk of default. But it is likely that investors fear default on munis more widely than they should. Default is rare, notwithstanding the long memories left by financial troubles in New York City and Orange County in decades past. (Furthermore, when there is a default, holders of munis usually enjoy a higher recovery rate than holders of corporate bonds.)

Why the misperception on the part of investors? Academic research seems to regard the discrepancy between after-tax returns on munis and corporate bonds as an unresolved puzzle.

But perhaps the answer lies in something so crude as the different rating scales that are applied to municipal versus corporate bonds. The front page of today’s New York Times (”Does Wall Street underrate Main Street?“) reports that state and local officials “complain that ratings firms assign municipal borrowers low credit scores compared with corporations. Taxpayers ultimately pay the price, the officials say, in the form of higher fees and interest costs on public debt. ‘Taxpayers are paying billions of dollars in increased costs because of the dual standard used by the rating bureaus,’ said Bill Lockyer, treasurer of California, who is leading a nationwide campaign to change the way the bonds are rated. ”

Moody’s is completely explicit about the difference in yardsticks. A state bond with a rating of A1, which is four notches below Aaa, would be rated Aaa if it were a corporate bond with the same default risk. A corporate bond rated Ba has a 20 per cent history of defaulting within ten years, whereas a municipal bond with the apparently-same rating of Ba has a default history under 1 per cent.

This is all familiar to knowledgeable investors. But not all investors are knowledgeable. I wonder if this elementary difference in labeling is enough to affect behavior?

In any case, next time I get asked at a cocktail party what to invest in – after the usual disclaimers, including the point that as the economy slows down defaults on state, local, and corporate bonds alike are bound to rise — I am going to say “munis.”