On Pegging the Interest Rate

Back in 2010, Narayana Kocherlakota was subjected to a great deal of criticism about his comment that the FOMCs decision to peg the interest rate at zero for an extended period of time would ultimately lead to deflation. Economists, especially those in the blogosphere, became near apoplectic that Kocherlakota, a distinguished scholar and voting member of the FOMC, would say something so seemingly egregious. Criticism largely came from two camps. The first camp, mostly filled with New Keynesians, argued that this was wrong because what mattered was the market interest rate relative to the natural rate. The second camp, mostly those whose views are consistent with Monetarism, suggested that this was preposterous because Friedman’s 1968 speech to the American Economic Association taught us that attempts to peg the interest rate would lead to inflation, not deflation.

Steve Williamson has taken a lot of flak from fellow economics bloggers because he has relentlessly defended this statement over the years. So last week I did a radical thing, I talked to Steve about this very controversy. In doing so, Steve confirmed what I believed to be his view all along and one that I think is correct: Kocherlakota was correct in his statement AND so was Milton Friedman. To understand why, we need to think about the Fisher equation and the behavior of monetary aggregates.

The entire debate centers around the Fisher equation:

where is the nominal interest rate, is the real interest rate, and is expected inflation. In the long run, we tend to think of the real interest rate as being determined by real factors, like productivity and preferences. The reason that the Fisher equation is important is because to understand Friedman’s point, we need to understand the effects of monetary policy in the short run and the long run. Thus, we need to understand both the liquidity effect of monetary policy and the Fisher effect.

Suppose, for example, that the central bank increased the rate of money growth. The liquidity effect implies that the short term interest rate would initially decline. However, over time, the Fisher effect implies that expectations of future inflation would increase and push the nominal interest rate higher. Thus, Friedman’s point was as follows. Suppose the current nominal interest rate was 3% and the central bank wanted to peg the nominal interest rate at 2%, in the short run they could achieve this by increasing money growth (i.e. through the liquidity effect). However, the Fisher effect would ultimately push the nominal interest rate higher. Thus, the only way that the central bank could achieve this interest rate peg would be through continuously increasing the rate of money growth to produce lower rates through the liquidity effect. The result of this sort of policy would then be one of ever-increasing rates of money growth and inflation. This result was largely viewed as unsustainable and therefore central banks could not peg the interest rate in this manner.

Kocherlakota’s point was that pegging the nominal interest rate would ultimately lead to deflation. This sounds contradictory to Friedman because he arrives at the opposite conclusion. However, the two points are actually two sides of the same coin. What Kocherlakota is effectively (or perhaps not so effectively, given the outcry) saying is that if the central bank wanted to peg the interest rate at a particular level, then this would require that the central bank start reducing money growth. In fact, for the case in which the central bank kept the nominal interest rate pegged at zero, a positive real interest rate would imply that the central bank would have to pursue a negative rate of money growth to maintain the target.

Thus, Kocherlakota is taking the objective of holding the interest rate constant as given and asking how it is that the central bank can maintain this policy. Friedman, on the other hand, is thinking about how the central bank is likely to try to pursue this policy.

What both Kocherlakota’s argument and Friedman’s argument have in common are what is important. The common element of the argument is that if the Federal Reserve adopts an interest rate peg over a long period of time, the ability to maintain that peg is dependent on the rate of money growth. The central bank can either adopt the rate of money growth consistent with the interest rate peg or they cannot maintain the interest rate peg.

What seemed to confuse people about this entire issue is that their understanding of Federal Reserve policy clearly contradicted any prediction of deflation. Nonetheless, this is the wrong way to interpret Kocherlakota’s argument. The argument he was making was essentially that if the Federal Reserve chose to leave the interest rate at zero for an extended period of time, this would imply that eventually they would have to pursue a policy that was deflationary. If they didn’t pursue that type of policy, they couldn’t maintain their peg of the nominal interest rate. In addition, since we don’t expect the Federal Reserve to pursue a policy consistent with negative rates of money growth, the statement should be seen as a criticism of the Federal Reserve’s original attempt at forward guidance which suggested that the FOMC would keep the interest rate at zero for an extended period of time.

There is an important lesson to be learned from this controversy and debate. The lesson is that even though policy is conducted with the federal funds rate as an intermediate target or with interest on reserves as an instrument, it is still necessary to know the underlying path of the money supply associated with this interest rate policy.