[Those who believed inflation would be transitory were proven
right, and those who demanded the sacrifice of mass unemployment
proven wrong.]
[[link removed]]

TIME FOR A VICTORY LAP?  
[[link removed]]


 

Joseph E. Stiglitz
January 4, 2024
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Those who believed inflation would be transitory were proven right,
and those who demanded the sacrifice of mass unemployment proven
wrong. _

An employee works on the assembly line at the BMW Spartanburg plant
in Greer, South Carolina, October 19, 2022., Sean Rayford / AP Photo

 

Since the onset of post-pandemic inflation, there have been two
schools of thought about the causes and the cure. One was based on
standard macroeconomics: There had been
excessive _aggregate _demand, fueled by excessively generous relief
money to those struggling during the pandemic. The cure was standard
too: tight monetary policy, until workers felt enough suffering to cry
uncle, accepting declines in living standards and lower real wages,
thereby reducing wage and price pressures.

Larry Summers most forcefully exemplified this position in a speech
[[link removed]] at
the London School of Economics: “We need five years of unemployment
above 5 percent to contain inflation—in other words, we need two
years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent
unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment.”

This became the conventional wisdom, adopted by central bankers:
increase interest rates enough to raise unemployment and lower
inflation to the arbitrarily selected threshold of 2 percent. In
short: Put the burden of adjustment on workers.

The other school of thought focused on the unique characteristics of
the pandemic and the war in Ukraine—the way in which these events
induced changes in where people wanted to live and how they worked, as
well as the extent of supply chain interruptions. Once the pandemic
passed and markets had a chance to adjust, the surge in inflation
would pass.

The debate this school had with those arguing for interest rate
increases was not about whether normalizing interest rates above zero
was a good thing, but whether the Federal Reserve and other central
banks should go beyond that, raising interest rates to in excess of 5
percent, which they have now done. Team Transitory, as some referred
to the group that expected market forces to tame inflation, argued
that the expected benefit of such a rate hike was low, since inflation
would come down on its own, and there were marked downside risks. For
reasons I’ll explain below, from the moment inflation broke out it
was clear that Team Transitory was right.

No one could be sure how fast inflation would come down; some in Team
Transitory had more faith that markets would respond quickly to fill
in the supply shortages than they should have. It took a little longer
than hoped; markets were even more dysfunctional than many thought.
But once the predicted responses took hold, inflation came down more
quickly, without the alleged necessary increase in unemployment. And
no one, _no one_, should think that there is a risk of an
inflationary spiral.

Seldom in history do we see such a quick test of alternative theories.
We’re not fully out of the water and we’re still facing new risks,
which may (to stay with our metaphor) muddy the waters more: Just as
no one could have predicted the Ukraine war in all of its dimensions,
so too for Gaza. But we’re at a place where we in Team Transitory
can rightly claim victory. And credit for this achievement goes not to
the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world. Their
misdiagnosis of the problem, egged on by the other school, which for
symmetry I will label Team Persistence, imposed enormous, continuing
risks on the global economy and those least able to bear the weight.
Rather, the credit goes to the market—it _eventually_ responded to
the supply shortages.

WHERE INFLATION CAME FROM

Inflation is nothing but the increase in the prices of the millions of
goods that make up the consumers’ market basket, so the first
approach to inflation should be to determine where the inflation is
occurring. Looking carefully at the data quickly revealed that the
U.S. inflation was not due to excess aggregate demand but to
specific _sectoral _problems, which, in time, the market could be
expected to correct.

The underlying source of the post-pandemic inflation was the myriad of
unprecedented supply chain interruptions and demand shifts,
exacerbated by the Ukraine war. For example, automobile prices soared
early, not because of a sudden surge in demand caused by money burning
holes in people’s pockets, but because the car companies hadn’t
ordered the computer chips they needed. They had been worried about
an _insufficiency_ of demand. We had the knowledge, the factories,
everything necessary to produce cars except the chips. To be sure, we
could have brought down the demand for cars to meet the limited supply
by killing incomes—Summers’s recipe. But the fix would have been
far worse than the problem, causing a massive amount of systemic
damage.

The cost of housing has also been a persistent problem. But again, it
was not a matter of _aggregate demand_, of macroeconomics, but of
pandemic-induced shifts in patterns of demand. After all, a major
determinant of the demand for housing is the size of the population,
and unfortunately, due to the pandemic more than one million Americans
died. Fewer people by itself should have led to _lower_ demand
and _lower _costs of housing. But the pandemic led people to want to
live in different places. The advantages of cities seemed diminished,
those of resort, rural, and suburban communities increased. It was
obviously impossible to move houses from one place to the other, and
construction takes time. Subsequently, there were shortages in some
places, leading to price increases, and surpluses in others, resulting
in price declines. But price adjustments are asymmetric, with the
former exceeding (in absolute value) the latter, so that read in
aggregate statistics as a surge in the average price of housing. (Of
course, there were multiple other longer-term forces affecting prices,
varying from place to place: In some places, Airbnb seemed to
be driving up prices
[[link removed]];
in others, construction had been down even before the pandemic for a
variety of reasons.)

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on September 7, 2022. Tom
Williams / CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

Something else happened. Students of the American economy have noted
the significant increases in market power in many sectors in the last
two decades. Supply shortages increase market power, and predictably,
this led to an increase in markups. Again, while one might expect a
continuation of the slow secular increase in market power, careful
economists predicted that the part of the inflation puzzle due to
supply chain bottlenecks would disappear fairly quickly, leading
markups to decrease.

One more example: The war in Ukraine, which broke out just as pandemic
disruptions were winding down, led to large increases in the price of
oil, energy, and food. Again, anyone believing in markets would
anticipate over time _disinflationary _adjustments to the war,
indeed _deflationary _adjustments. (Deflation is a fall in prices;
disinflation is a reduction in the rate of inflation.) Not only
wouldn’t the rates of increase in prices be sustained, but prices
could be expected to decline with a global realignment of the
world’s energy system, especially as new energy sources were brought
online and as new conservation measures were taken—predicted
adjustments which actually occurred.

The anticipation of disinflationary pressures was especially strong,
given that the backstop price of renewable energy was so much lower
than the market price. As for food, the U.S. and Europe had for half a
century paid their farmers not to produce. If there was a real food
shortage, they could consider paying their farmers to produce. As it
was, the food shortage, like so much else, proved temporary, and there
was no need to reverse a long-standing agricultural policy that makes
no sense but has become an accepted part of our political reality.
Once again, the disinflationary force was predictable.

DIFFERENCES IN PREDICTIONS

Remember, inflation is the _rate of increase in prices_, so for the
price of food or cars or oil to continue to be a source of inflation,
its price would have to continue to increase—there would have to be
greater and greater shortages, not the one-time jump in prices as the
pandemic shortage arose. No one on Team Persistence ever explained
why, for example, there would be growing shortages of oil so the rate
of increase in its price could continue, rising from $80 a barrel, for
example, to $120, and then from $120 to $180. As we suggested,
economic theory and simple common sense predicted just the
opposite—and that is what happened.

Of course, no one then (or now) could be sure. No one knew, or could
know, how long or how bad the pandemic or the war would be, or how
much government support there would be and how long it would last. No
one then could have predicted the war in Gaza, new potential shortages
created by difficulties going through the Suez Canal, or food
shortages exacerbated by climate change.

Standard economics predicted that individuals and firms would respond
to this extreme uncertainty with precautionary behavior: Investment
would be postponed and savings would increase. Among responsible
macroeconomists, this increased anxiety over an _insufficiency_ of
aggregate demand. Responding to _sectoral _price increases by
lowering still further aggregate demand was accordingly particularly
problematic.

Barring new disasters, the presumption that price increases would be
tamed seemed strong. Ironically, with hindsight, even
Summers _now _agrees
[[link removed]],
writing in the _Financial Times_ that “one should always have been
aware that a substantial part of the increase in inflation was
transitory.”

So how to explain the earlier view that to bring down inflation would
require the enormous pain? In 2022, as the economy reopened, the labor
market experienced a shock. There was a burst of people switching
jobs, upgrading their skills and careers, and a major reallocation of
workers to go with the sectoral changes of the reopening. This
contributed to high nominal wage growth, though wages didn’t keep up
with prices. It was also based on the premise that there was still a
strong non-transitory element, with insufficient disinflationary
pressures able, by themselves, to tame inflation. There was especially
a worry of inflation perpetuating itself, through a wage-price spiral
or an increase in inflationary expectations. Wage-price dynamics would
result in the “sectoral” price increases discussed earlier seeping
into non-transitory inflation.

Here again, the evidence was against Team Persistence _even early in
the post-pandemic era_. First, estimates of wage-price
dynamics _today _show that the pass-throughs of wages to prices and
prices to wages are so weak that inflation dampens rather than
spiraling out of control. This is not a surprise: Workers might like
wages to increase when prices increase, or when their expectations of
inflation increase, but they have little bargaining power.

Inflationary expectations throughout remained dampened, and rightly
so: Those in the market largely belonged to Team Transitory, because
they had a grasp of what was going on.

The evidence is now in. Over the past six months, core prices in the
U.S. have increased at an annualized rate of just 1.9 percent, below
the desired 2 percent target. Overall inflation in November was
negative 0.1 percent (using the personal consumption expenditures
index). The sources of inflation were transitory, as predicted by Team
Transitory. Wage-price dynamics were not explosive, as predicted by
Team Transitory.

DIFFERENCES IN POLICY

The draconian policy measures suggested by many on Team Persistence
were based not only on the premise of insufficient disinflationary
sectoral forces, but on a simplistic application of macroeconomics
101. In one standard version, the Phillips Curve states that changes
in the rate of inflation increase as the rate of unemployment falls,
so disinflation requires an increase in the rate of unemployment.
Economists have long been skeptical that this relationship was
sufficiently stable to be relied upon, especially when relative prices
change dramatically, as is the case here.

Team Persistence worried that the fact that inflation had not
increased as unemployment fell in the years after the Great Recession
implied that it would take a large increase in unemployment to get
inflation down. And they worried too that, as individuals re-examined
their relationship to work and their work-life balance, the labor
market had fundamentally shifted, significantly increasing the
“natural unemployment rate,” the rate at which inflation neither
increased nor decreased, with some arguing that it had increased by
1.3 percent. If so, unemployment would have to incrase significantly
just to prevent ever-increasing inflation.

In the U.S., there was much talk about the Great Resignation. It was
clear that the pandemic was a major perturbation to the labor market,
especially because U.S. policy (unlike that of so many other
countries) did little to try to maintain workers’ connections with
their firms. But no one knew whether there were permanent changes to
the labor market, and if not, how long it would take for the market to
return to something akin to normal.

All of which meant that, _even if there were a substantial
non-transitory element _(as suggested by Team Persistence), _no
one_ knew what it would take to bring down inflation. If labor
markets returned to pre-pandemic conditions quickly and worker
bargaining power continued to be eviscerated as it had been in the
past, then wage disinflation could set in with just small increases in
unemployment.

There was still another element of uncertainty: Not only is the
Phillips Curve itself unstable, but there is uncertainty about its
shape. Even though there was less disinflation than many expected
after the Great Recession, if somehow there was a decline in the
natural rate of unemployment (the rate above which inflation fell) and
disinflation increased rapidly with increases in the gap between the
actual unemployment rate and the natural rate, then inflation might be
brought down with little cost. (This is referred to as a nonlinear
Phillips Curve.)

Again, the evidence is now in, and again, Team Transitory was right.
Wage inflation was brought down quickly without the predicted
“necessary” increase in unemployment; labor force participation
for those 25–54, at 83.3 percent, is approaching a two-decade high.
The idea that the natural unemployment rate would have fallen, so that
there was scope for a nonlinear Phillips Curve to bring down inflation
with little increase in unemployment, seems hard to take seriously.
And as Mike Konczal noted
[[link removed]],
“Inflation has fallen at such a speed that it is no longer in the
range predicted by a persistent Phillips Curve model” based on data
over the past 50 years.

A new home under construction in Brick, New Jersey, July 10, 2023.
Wayne Parry / AP Photo

THE EXCESSIVE DEMAND THEORY WAS WRONG

Team Persistence blamed inflation on excessive aggregate demand caused
by pandemic spending, especially from the American Rescue Plan. I’ve
explained why we should have expected high levels of precautionary
behavior, which would mute consumption and investment. One cannot just
pretend that the pandemic was like any other ordinary event. A
responsible economist would look to the data to see what was happening
to each of the components of aggregate demand (consumption,
investment, government expenditures, and net exports) and the total,
to see if there was a surge, with a timing and magnitude that could
account for the timing and level of inflation.

When one undertakes that exercise, as I did with my Roosevelt
Institute colleague Ira Regmi
[[link removed]],
we showed that aggregate demand was almost consistently below
pre-pandemic trends and Congressional Budget Office estimates of
aggregate supply. Neither the timing nor magnitude of the short
periods when real aggregate demand exceeded putative supply could
account for observed inflation. The excess aggregate demand story
simply had no legs. And our analysis explained precisely why: One
could see in the data the buildup of precautionary balances and a
slowdown in investment and other components of aggregate demand.

There were other reasons for being skeptical of the Team Persistence
theory. The U.S. had a much larger fiscal package as a percentage of
GDP. If one believed in the aggregate demand theory, the U.S. should
have seen a much larger increase in inflation, and the inflation
should have been particularly larger in non-traded sectors where
increases in demand were limited by _domestic _supply, not by the
much larger global supply. Again, a look at the data shows that that
was not so. Europe’s inflation was also related to
distinctive _sectoral _problems, particularly related to the pricing
of gas and electricity. Countries like Spain that had better
electricity price regulatory systems had better inflation
performance—reinforcing our claim of the advantages of the sectoral
approach to understanding inflation.

INTERPRETING THE SUCCESS

Team Persistence has not conceded defeat so easily. They claim that it
is only because they were so resolute, because they put so much
pressure on central banks to raise interest rates fast and furiously,
that this near-victory was obtained. At best, their claims are
unproved, and at worst, just wrong.

It was not because of Fed action that the prices of cars, oil, food,
or the host of other goods affected by supply-side interruptions came
down, but because the underlying shortages were at least partially
resolved. Mike Konczal’s Roosevelt Institute paper
[[link removed]] shows
that the overwhelming part of the reduction in prices can be explained
by supply-side increases—just as we noted earlier that the increase
in inflation was attributable to supply-side interruptions and
demand-side shifts.

This is not to deny that increases in interest rates and reductions in
credit availability do lower aggregate demand, and in doing
so _add _to the disinflationary pressures. But their actions were
not at the center of what happened; they cannot be given credit.
Indeed, with U.S. GDP growing in the third quarter at 4.9 percent,
it’s hard to believe that it was a weak economy that brought down
inflation.

Indeed, in many ways the Fed made things worse. It was more difficult
to make the investments required to alleviate shortages. Higher
interest rates made housing less affordable and less abundant. But
higher interest rates made matters worse for other reasons as well.

Standard models of pricing by imperfectly competitive firms (and as we
have already noted, many key markets are far from fully competitive)
suggest that raising interest rates leads to higher prices, as firms
with market power focus more on the immediate gains that they reap
from higher prices.

Earlier, I questioned the importance of expectations as a determinant
of inflationary dynamics. But more importantly, inflationary
expectations are determined by what is actually going on in the
economy, not just by central bankers. Market participants were well
aware of the disinflationary forces we’ve discussed—seemingly more
aware than Team Persistence at the time—and even before the Fed and
other central bankers acted, inflationary expectations were muted. (Of
course, in a kind of circular reasoning, Team Persistence might claim
that they were muted only because market participants _knew_ that
central bankers would act.)

POLICYMAKING UNDER DEEP UNCERTAINTY

I’ve explained the deep uncertainty that policymakers faced as
inflation suddenly rose—uncertainty about the depth and duration of
all the underlying disturbances to the economy and the shortages to
which they give rise. Given the uniqueness of the events sparking
post-pandemic inflation, economists advocating draconian measures like
mass unemployment should have relied less on hypotheses and
assumptions and more on a review of the evidence, and most
importantly, a careful analysis of the consequences of _what if they
were wrong? What if Team Transitory was right, or mostly so? _But
humility was apparently in short supply.

On the downside, the risks of raising interest rates were
considerable, both domestically and internationally, especially coming
off a long period of near-zero interest rates. Many countries, firms,
households, and financial institutions were deeply in debt, which
could easily be managed when interest rates were zero, but not when
they are at 5 percent. Within the U.S., we saw inklings of some of the
other risks posed by rapid and large changes in interest rates, as the
prices of interest-sensitive assets change markedly, with the
bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank, the third-largest bank bankruptcy
in American history, costing an estimated $20 billion
[[link removed]].
It was overleveraged in long-term, seemingly safe U.S. government
bonds, but their price fell as interest rates increased. We managed to
avoid this and other bank bankruptcies triggering systemic effects,
but only because of strong and unprecedented interventions by
government. Globally, a host of countries sit on the edge of default.

Because monetary policy acts with long and variable lags—effects
typically continue well beyond a year—_if _the pandemic lasted
longer and households and firms continued to be as cautious in their
spending as they had been, tightening credit could well have led to a
significant recession. Central bankers wouldn’t know whether they
had raised interest rates too high until it was too late.

There are enormous costs to the kinds of unemployment, even if
temporary, advocated by the Fed and Summers. Targeting an average
unemployment rate of just 5 percent implies an unemployment rate of
some disadvantaged groups much, much higher—in recent months,
African American youth unemployment has been running at three to six
times the average rate
[[link removed]]. Such high rates
would almost certainly leave long-term collateral damage.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks to the press, December 13,
2023, in Washington. Graeme Sloan / SIPA USA via AP Images

All of this might be unnecessary if the alternative hypotheses of the
sectoral origins of inflation turn out to be correct.

What Team Persistence and financial pundits were worried about was
explosive inflation of the kind Argentina is going through now. But
such concerns were simply not relevant to the U.S. As we already
noted, workers simply don’t have the bargaining power to demand wage
increases commensurate with price increases. And, as the economy
normalizes, market power should decrease, implying markups decrease,
implying, in turn, that wage increases won’t be fully passed through
into price increases.

The United States is boasting of a soft landing, and I am optimistic
that that will be the case. But if it does occur, it will be because
of two offsetting mistakes: an over-tight monetary policy offsetting a
more robust economy than was expected. The American Rescue Plan was a
great bill that not only protected the vulnerable, but provided a
macroeconomic cushion of spending during a difficult recovery and
reopening, giving the United States the best GDP numbers of peer
countries coming out of the pandemic. Similarly, going forward, the
Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) produced not only a needed impetus for
the green transition, but strong fiscal support for the economy, with
tax credits and other subsidies that were originally estimated at
under $400 billion, but are now estimated at two to three times that
number
[[link removed]].

Other countries are not so lucky: They don’t have the fiscal space
to offset the major drag on the economy of tighter monetary policy.
The anticipated global slowdown will, of course, have reverberations
back in the U.S.

THERE WERE BETTER ALTERNATIVE POLICIES

Some aspects of these economic debates may seem almost theological. As
I’ve noted, many pundits, especially in the financial world, believe
everything hinges on key macro variables. While inflation couldn’t
be blamed on inflationary expectations, these pundits worried that
expectations might explode at any day, so resolute action by the
central bankers was required.

Of course, tighter monetary policy wouldn’t have solved any
underlying problem with the supply of food, oil, housing, or cars; as
we’ve noted, quite the reverse. But by killing the economy, there
would be no excess demand, and by definition (in their minds) no
inflation. To be sure, it might have reduced inflationary pressures in
some sectors. But some firms, where there is market power, would still
have passed on the price increases in their inputs and some would have
even increased markups more because of the higher interest rates. At
best, inflation would have been slain but only at the cost
of _very _high levels of unemployment—precisely what Summers was
calling for.

The alternative prescription followed naturally from the diagnosis of
inflation. It focused on addressing the underlying causes of
inflation: if there is a labor shortage, provide better working
conditions, child care, family leave policies, and so forth that make
work more attractive. If there is an energy shortage, and if firms are
hesitant to invest because they fear falling energy prices, government
can provide a price guarantee. True, that shifts risk from the private
sector to the public, but it’s a justifiable shift if one is worried
about the macroeconomic effects of inflation and energy shortages. The
IRA seems to be showing that modest subsidies can generate large
results. We’ve also seen that at least part of our inflation is a
result of the exercise of market power; stronger competition policies,
especially in key sectors, could curb market power, thus markups, thus
prices and inflation.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

The events of the past three years have been truly remarkable and
unprecedented. There aren’t even case studies to which we could turn
to evaluate alternative courses of action. We have to bring to bear
what knowledge we have about consumer and firm behavior, not in
pandemics—we don’t have such data—but in the presence of
uncertainty. This is an area in which there has been too little
research, which is just one among many of the failures of modern
macroeconomics. But we know that there will be an increase in
precautionary behavior, with more savings and less investment.

With extremes of uncertainty, these will have first-order effects.
Markets fail to provide the insurance individuals need—whoever heard
of pandemic insurance?—so governments have to step into the breach.
Governments around the world did, with enormous social benefits.
Though we can’t be sure of the counterfactual, I believe there would
have been enormous suffering if governments did not act strongly.

We’ve seen the enormous downside risks posed by the excessive
tightening of monetary policy. On the other hand, the supply-side
measures such as family leave and child care have large social
benefits _whatever turns out to be the case concerning inflation_. If
they help dampen inflation, so much the better.

Many economists seem to have strong antibodies toward governments
doing what they should, especially through fiscal policy, and look for
fault. (They seem to have more confidence in the bankers, former
private equity professionals, and others running the Federal Reserve
and central banks. Why that should be the case after the disastrous
performance leading up to the 2008 crisis is a mystery.) No government
does everything perfectly—no human institution is infallible. Money
might have been better targeted, but that would have taken time, and
in the pandemic, time was of the essence. All in all, the program of
the Biden administration was on target. It did not cause the
inflation. And those who blame inflation on excessive fiscal spending
are not only just wrong; the policies that their unfounded theories
have led to have imposed enormous risks on the global economy. As
seems so often the case, it is those at the bottom—both in the U.S.
and around the world—who were asked to bear those risks.

Team Persistence used standard textbook macroeconomics as the basis
for simplistic monetary policies, and gave succor to those who would
risk a hard landing and sacrifice the well-being of ordinary workers
at the altar of the inflation holy grail of 2 percent, a figure made
up out of thin air some 30 years ago. Thankfully, they were quickly
proved wrong, before the full force of their misguided policies could
take hold. Team Transitory, even if it was not listened to as much as
it should have been, provided a needed warning, and may have curbed
some of the excesses to which central bankers otherwise might have
been prone.

This is not the first time that simplistic macro models misled policy:
The disastrous shock therapy as Russia transitioned from communism to
a market economy led to a 30 percent decline in GDP and shortening of
life spans, not the soaring of living standards that had been
promised. A straight line can be drawn between those policies and
where Russia is today, once again demonstrating that economic policies
can have large political consequences.

Good economic policy requires, as in this inflationary episode, a
balance of micro- and macroeconomic policy. Flawed privatizations
contributed to the Russian debacle. The deregulation of derivatives
and the financial sector more broadly set the stage for the financial
crisis of 2008.

Hopefully, in our next dramatic macro episode—and if history is our
guide, there will be many of these—less attention will be paid to
Team Persistence and those who rely on overly simplistic and
unreliable macroeconomic relations, and more attention will be paid to
those with more subtle and comprehensive analyses of the economic
situation.

_JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ is University Professor at Columbia University,
chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, co-recipient of the 2001
Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, and former chairman of President
Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers._

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