Thursday, February 7, 2013

"The Myth Of The Money Multiplier"

The headline is deliberately provocative but if this 2010 paper is not falsifiable there are going to be some feathers ruffled by the facts rather than the headline.
From EconoSpeak:
Something unusal happened yesterday in my weekly department macroeconomics seminar at James Madison University.  Someone had us discuss a paper that changed the minds of pretty much everybody in the room who did not already agree with the paper, which includes a highly diverse group ranging from Austrian, Old Monetarist, New Classical, New Keynesian, Old Keynesian, Post Keynesian, and some generally eclectic pragmatists.  The paper is from the Fed Bd of Govs in 2010, by Seth Carpenter and Selva Demiralp, still unpublished as near as I can tell, and is entitled, "Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?"  Their answer is not only "no," which I at least have thought was true since 2007 or so, but that the answer has been  "no" probably since the mid-1980s and certainly since the mid-1990s.  It is available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2010/201041/201041pap.pdf .
(the folks at the Fed's Research and Stats Division call their paper "Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?")

The story can be seen pretty much in figures and charts in the back.  Prior to 1984, there was a clear correlation between reserves, loans, and M2.  After then, while loans and M2 continued to go along in a pretty close lockstep, reserves simply have flopped around all over the place.  This seems to have coincided with various things: a definite move to targeting interest rates and apparently following a Taylor rule (although not more recently on the latter), the change in Regulation Q, globalization, a broadening of sources of funds for banks, and particularly more interbank lending and lessening of reliance on reserves and the Fed's reserve base.  Apparently up to the mid-90s, small umdercapitalized banks still were tied to reserves in their lending, but after then that broke down too, with their appearing to be a shift to relying more on large deposits, mostly from other banks and also the shadow banking system....MORE 
There aren't many citations of the paper:
Changes in central bank procedures during the subprime crisis and their repercussions on monetary theory 

IS THERE A STOCK MARKET CHANNEL FOR BANK LENDING IN THE EURO AREA?

The St. Louis Fed's RePEc has a few more.

At the time the paper started to circulate Pragmatic Capitalism had some extended quotes from MMT'er Warren Mosler that begins:
Did Hell freeze over and I missed it??
While Steve Keen caught up to it in October 2012.