Is The RBA Myopic On Financial Stability?

From The Conversation.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is making an explicit trade-off between inflation and financial stability concerns. And this could be weighing on Australians’ wages.

In the past, the RBA focused more on keeping inflation in check, the usual role of the central bank. But now the bank is playing more into concerns about financial stability risks in explaining why it is persistently undershooting the middle of its inflation target.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the federal Treasurer and Reserve Bank governor signed an updated agreement on what the bank should focus on in setting interest rates. This included a new section on financial stability.

That statement made clear that financial stability was to be pursued without compromising the RBA’s traditional focus on inflation.

The latest agreement, adopted when Philip Lowe became governor of the bank in 2016, means the bank can pursue the financial stability objective even at the expense of the inflation target, at least in the short-term.

While the RBA board has explained its recent steady interest rate decisions partly on the basis of risks to financial stability, this sits uneasily with what the RBA otherwise has to say about underlying fundamentals of our economy.

It correctly blames trends in house prices and household debt on a lack of supply of housing, and not on excessive borrowing. These supply restrictions amplify the response of house prices to changes in demand for housing. RBA research estimates that zoning alone adds 73% to the marginal cost of houses in Sydney.

Restrictions on lending growth by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority since the end of 2014 have been designed to give housing supply a chance to catch-up with demand and to maintain the resilience of households against future shocks.

The RBA argues that it needs to balance financial stability risks against the need to stimulate the economy through lower interest rates. But this has left inflation running below the middle of its target range and helps explain why wages growth has been weak.

The official cash rate has been left unchanged since August 2016, the longest period of steady policy rates on record. The fact that inflation has undershot its target of 2-3% is the most straightforward evidence that monetary policy has been too restrictive.

While long-term interest rates in the US continue to rise, reflecting expectations for stronger economic growth and higher inflation, Australia’s long-term interest rates have languished.

Australian long-term interest rates are below those in the US by the largest margin since the early 1980s. This implies the Australian economy is expected to underperform that of the US in the years ahead.

Inflation expectations (implied by Australia’s long-term interest rates) have been stuck around 2% in recent years, below the Reserve Bank’s desired average for inflation of 2.5%.

Financial markets can be forgiven for thinking the RBA will not hit the middle of its 2-3% target range any time soon. The RBA doesn’t believe it will either, with its deputy governor Guy Debelle repeating the word “gradual” no less than 12 times in a speech when describing the outlook for inflation and wages.

Inflation has been below the midpoint of the target range since the December quarter in 2014. On the RBA’s own forecasts inflation isn’t expected to return to the middle of the target range over the next two years.

The Reserve Bank blames low inflation on slow wages growth, claiming in its most recent statement on monetary policythat “labour costs are a key driver of inflationary pressure”. But this is putting the cart before the horse.

In fact, recently published research shows that it is low inflation expectations that are largely to blame for low wages growth.

Workers and employers look at likely inflation outcomes when negotiating over wages. These expectations are in turn driven by perceptions of monetary policy.

Below target inflation makes Australia less resilient to economic shocks, not least because it works against the objective of stabilising the household debt to income ratio. Subdued economic growth and inflation also gives the economy a weaker starting point if and when an actual shock does occur, potentially exacerbating a future downturn.

When the RBA governor and the federal treasurer renegotiate their agreement on monetary policy after the next election, the treasurer should insist on reinstating the wording of the 2010 statement that explicitly prioritised the inflation target over financial stability risks.

If the RBA continues to sacrifice its inflation target on the altar of financial stability risks, inflation expectations and wages growth will continue to languish and the economy underperform its potential.

Author: Stephen Kirchner, Program Director, Trade and Investment, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

RBA On Inflation Targetting

RBA Deputy Governor Guy Debelle spoke at the RBA Conference 2018 “Twenty-five Years of Inflation Targeting in Australia“.

There are a number of open issues worth considering.  Most obvious is the question of the link between inflation targetting and financial stability.  Would price level targetting offer a better alternative? Some argue this  delivers predictability of the price level over a long horizon. Then there are questions about the correct level to target. More broadly, is it still relevant?

And in addition we would ask, as inflation targetting relies on the CPI dataset, are these telling the full story, or not?

It has been 25 years since Australia adopted an inflation-targeting regime as the framework for monetary policy. At the time of adoption, inflation targeting was in its infancy. New Zealand had announced its inflation target in 1989, followed by Canada and Sweden. The inflation-targeting framework was untested and there was little in the way of academic analysis to provide guidance about the general design and operational principles. Practice was very much ahead of theory.

Now 25 years later, inflation targeting is widely used as the framework for monetary policy. While there are differences in some of the features across countries, the similarities are more pervasive than the differences. And generally, the features of inflation-targeting frameworks have tended to converge over time.

It is interesting to firstly examine how the inflation-targeting framework in Australia has evolved over the 25 years. Secondly, it is also timely to reassess the appropriateness of the regime.

Open Issues

I have argued that the inflation target has delivered macroeconomic outcomes that have been beneficial for the Australian economy. I think a strong case can be made that it has contributed materially to better economic outcomes than the monetary frameworks that preceded it. I have also noted that the framework in Australia has not changed much over the 25 years of its operation, with the notable exception of communication.

So does that mean that the current configuration of the inflation target is the most appropriate or that even that is the most appropriate framework for monetary policy? What changes could be contemplated? Those questions are going to be addressed in other papers at this conference. But let me raise some here and discuss issues worth considering around each of them.

The first is the role of financial stability in an inflation-targeting framework. The Reserve Bank research conference last year considered this issue at some length. As I said earlier, financial stability is now articulated in the Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy. I talked about this issue at the Bank of England last year and Ben Broadbent is addressing it at this conference. One question that arises is how the financial stability goal interacts with the inflation target. Is it a separate goal that sets up potential trade-offs or is it aligned with the inflation-targeting goal? In the latter case, a potential reconciliation is the time horizon. When it materialises, financial instability is likely to be detrimental to inflation and unemployment/output: the global recession of 2008 and the subsequent slow recovery in a number of economies bears testament to the potential costs of financial instability (although here in Australia we didn’t experience this to as great an extent). So over some time horizon, potentially quite long, the inflation target and financial stability are aligned. But translating this into monetary policy implications over a shorter time horizon is a large challenge, which still seems to me to be far from resolved.

What about alternative regimes? Price level targeting is one that has been considered in some countries, including Canada, and has been proposed in the academic literature. One argument for a price level target is that it delivers predictability of the price level over a long horizon. It is not clear to me that this is something that is much valued by society. By revealed preference, the absence of long-term indexed contracts suggests that the benefits are not perceived to be high. I struggle to think of what contracts require such a degree of certainty. To me the benefits mostly derive from having inflation at a sufficiently low level that it doesn’t affect decisions. That supports an inflation target rather than a price level target. One important difference is that an inflation target allows bygones to be bygones, whereas a price level target does not. In a world where there are costs to disinflation (and particularly deflation), the likely small gains from the full predictability of the price level that comes with a price level target are not likely to offset the costs of occasional disinflations following positive price level shocks. Another challenge is how fast the price level should be returned to its target level. This presents both a communication and operational challenge as the speed is likely to vary with the size of the deviation.

While the argument at the moment is that a price level target allows the central bank to let the economy grow more strongly after a period of unexpectedly low inflation, again I do not think that practically this will deliver better outcomes than a flexible inflation target. That is an empirical question in the end which is worth testing.

The appropriate level of the inflation target is currently being debated in some parts of the world, including the US. The argument for a higher target rate of inflation is that it might reduce the risk of hitting the zero lower bound because a higher inflation rate would result in a higher nominal interest rate structure. In thinking about this, we should ask the question as to whether what we have seen is the realisation of a tail event in the historical distribution of interest rates (for a given level of the real interest rate).? While this event has now lasted quite a long time, if you thought it was a tail event, then you would expect the nominal rate structure to revert back to its historical mean at some point. If it is a tail event, and the world has just been unlucky enough to have experienced a realisation of that tail event, then there would not obviously be a need to raise the inflation target. We also need to question whether the real interest rate structure has shifted lower permanently, because of permanently lower trend growth say, which would also shift down the nominal rate structure and increase the likelihood of hitting the zero lower bound.

Also, as with price level targeting, in thinking about this question, it needs to be taken into account that it is highly beneficial to have the inflation target at a level where it doesn’t materially enter into economic decision-making. Two to three per cent seems to achieve that. We know that some number higher than a 2–3 per cent rate of inflation will materially enter decision-making, because we have had plenty of experience of higher rates of inflation that demonstrates that. How much higher though, we don’t really exactly know.

Another consideration in answering the question of whether the inflation target is at the right level is the range of policy instruments in the tool kit. Over the past decade, this tool kit has expanded in a number of central banks. For example, we now know that the zero lower bound is not at zero. Asset purchases have been utilised and these have included sovereign paper but also assets issued by the private sector. An assessment of the effectiveness of these instruments is still a work in progress. We also need to think about whether they are part of the standard monetary policy tool kit or whether they should only be broken out in case of emergency.

Nominal income targeting is another alternative regime to inflation targeting. I am not convinced that flexible inflation targeting of the sort practiced in Australia is significantly different from nominal income targeting in most states of the world. I also think that there are some quite significant communication challenges with nominal income targeting. Firstly, nominal income is probably more difficult to explain to people than inflation. Secondly, as a very practical matter, nominal income is subject to quite substantial revisions, which poses difficulties both operationally and again in communicating with the public.

Finally, one criticism of inflation targeting more generally is that central banks are fighting the last war. The fact that for a number of years now, inflation globally has been stubbornly low is not obviously the signal to declare victory over inflation and move on. Indeed, the declaration of victory may well be the signal that hostilities are about to resume and that inflation will shift up again. Moreover, even if victory can be declared that doesn’t mean you should go off to fight another war in another place without securing the peace. Inflation targeting can help secure the peace.

The Globalisation of Inflation

The BIS has published an important working paper looking at the consequences of managing inflation given the rise of global value chains. As a result it questions the traditional approach used by central banks to attempt to manage inflation targets.  The monetary policy implications of a greater role for global factors in determining domestic inflation are farreaching, as clearly these factors are beyond the control of individual central banks. Such implications cannot be ignored.

At the heart of the globalisation of inflation (GI) hypothesis is the view that the factors influencing domestic inflation have become increasingly global. One implication of this hypothesis is that global, and not just domestic, measures of economic slack should be relevant determinants of domestic inflation and that their role should have increased with global economic integration. This more “globe-centric” view of the inflation process stands in contrast to traditional, “country-centric”, characterisations, in which a Phillips curve relates a purely domestic output gap to domestic inflation.

Because of its far-reaching implications for our understanding of inflation and the conduct of monetary policy, the GI hypothesis has attracted considerable attention.

While it is generally agreed that domestic inflation rates have been co-moving more closely, the correct interpretation of this finding hinges on the validity of the GI hypothesis. Proponents argue that tighter comovements reflect, in particular, the growing structural integration of goods and labour markets. This would, for instance, propagate national cost shocks more widely and strongly. By contrast, sceptics place greater weight on common policies. The empirical evidence so far has not yielded conclusive results.

The industrial organisation underpinning the expansion of GVCs has evolved. Initially, GVCs arose from firms’ foreign direct investment and within-firm trade across geographic borders. Growth in net international asset positions went hand-in-hand with the increase in international input-output linkages. Over time, however, outsourcing and offshoring have taken on greater prominence. Advances in technology have enabled international supply chains to expand. It is now possible to coordinate and track just-in-time production through international supply chains from start to finish, ie through all the different production stages, and by different firms located in geographically distant world regions. As a result, today’s GVCs include international manufacturing giants, such as Apple, that do not own most of the manufacturing plants in their supply chains.

These developments represent a challenge to the classical assumptions behind the traditional country-centric view of trade and inflation determination.

To assess this hypothesis, we evaluate the extent to which various proxies for GVCs explain the relative importance of global and domestic measures of slack in influencing domestic inflation. We do so in a panel setting, thereby exploring the relevance of GVCs both across countries and over time. To track the growth of GVCs, we consider total trade and its major components, focusing in particular on intermediate goods and services. To measure the influence of global and domestic slack on inflation, we rely on the published estimates of Bianchi and Civelli (2015) – estimates that are in the spirit of the analysis of Borio and Filardo (2007). That recent paper provides estimates that capture greater time variation (annual estimates for each country) and cover a wider range of countries than the earlier paper. We exclude the GFC period and its aftermath owing to the powerful balance sheet dynamics that appear to dominate the typical cyclical forces.

We find that GVCs are a key to explaining the influence of global factors on domestic inflation. There is statistically significant evidence that the growth of international input-output linkages explains the increasing sensitivity of domestic inflation to global factors. This is the case both across countries and over time. The growth of GVCs is associated with both a reduction of the impact of domestic slack on domestic inflation and an increase in that of its global counterpart. Moreover, once the role of GVCs is taken into account, we find that the conventional measure of trade openness so extensively used in the literature, based on the aggregate volume of trade in goods and services, has only limited explanatory power for the link between globalisation and domestic inflation.

Our evidence supports the view that the rise of GVCs has been a key factor behind the growing importance of the global output gap in determining domestic inflation.

We also find that controlling for the impact of GVCs, conventional measures of trade openness only have limited explanatory power. It is natural to think that a reason for this close link is the increased crossborder competition generated by the expansion of GVCs. The more easily measurable channel of this competition is through price pressures from inputs that are actually imported at all stages of the production process. The much harder-tomeasure, but possibly even more important, channel works through the inputs that could potentially be imported at the various production stages (ie through the contestability of markets for goods and services). Unfortunately, our analysis cannot distinguish between the two.20 But more detailed GVC measures based on increasingly available intermediate trade data could eventually shed further light on these channels and help refine the analysis.

Our findings point to the need for further theoretical and empirical research on the globalisation of inflation hypothesis, especially on the role of GVCs. On the theoretical side, this raises questions about approaches that model inflation as largely a country-centric phenomenon and derive the corresponding policy implications. On the empirical side, questions remain about whether it would be possible to develop more informative measures of global slack that would reflect differences in the sectoral value-added content of trade rather than simply in its economy-wide content. For example, Auer et al (2016) provide a quantification of one specific channel of interest, finding that most of the international co-movement in producer price inflation can be attributed to input-output linkages. There is also a need to extend the analysis carried out in this paper to a consideration of
alternative measures of domestic and global slack. The monetary policy implications of a greater role for global factors in determining domestic inflation would be farreaching, as clearly these factors are beyond the control of individual central banks. Such implications cannot be ignored.

Note: BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.