February 04, 2013
The cause for complaint this morning is Japan where the new Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, has plans for an ambitious new stimulus program. This makes Samuelson unhappy since he is much more fond of the sort of austerity that has given Greece a 26 percent unemployment rate or now threatens the United Kingdom with a triple dip recession.
Samuelson tells us that Abe’s plan won’t work because it doesn’t address the structural problems in Japan’s economy, especially in its service sector. Samuelson notes that Japan has had several stimulus programs over the last two decades. He tells readers:
“The lesson is that huge budget deficits and ultra-low interest rates — the basics of stimulus — have limits and can be self-defeating. To use a well-worn metaphor: Stimulus becomes a narcotic. People feel better for a while, but the effect wears off. The economy then needs a new fix. Too many fixes may spawn new problems (examples: excessive debt, asset “bubbles,” inflation). That’s already happened in Japan.”
Yes, this is where we can see that Samuelson is badly confused. Japan did have asset bubbles, but that was back in the 1980s. At the that time the country was not pursuing any stimulus at all. In fact, it had balanced budgets and a very low debt to GDP ratio.
As far as inflation, here again someone has to introduce Samuelson to the data. Japan’s problem is the opposite of inflation. Its consumer price level in 2012 was about 3 percent lower than it had been in 2000, implying an average annual rate of deflation of 0.3 percent.
In fact one of the most intriguing ways that Abe hopes to boost the economy is to have the central bank deliberately target a higher rate of inflation, committing itself to buy as many assets as necessary to raise the inflation rate to 2.0 percent. It is difficult to understand how Samuelson could think Japan has a problem with inflation.
Whether Japan’s debt is “excessive” can be debated, but it certainly does not have an excessive interest burden. Its interest burden is currently around 1.0 percent of GDP. It would be even lower if the interest paid to the central bank, and refunded to Japan’s treasury, were subtracted.
This low burden is possible because the interest rate on Japan’s debt is extremely low, with short-term debt getting near zero interest and long-term interest rates hovering near 1.0 percent. Samuelson wrongly imagines that the government would face a disaster if interest rates rose. In fact, it would be able to buy up its long-term debt at huge discounts and quickly reduce its debt to GDP ratio.
(Bond prices move inversely to interest rates, so if interest rates on 10-year treasury bonds rose to 3 percent, Japan’s central bank could buy them back for around half of their current price. There would be no real reason to do this, but it would placate the sort of ignorant people who tend to dominate economic policy debates and get obsessed about debt to GDP ratios.)
It is undoubtedly true that Japan, like all countries, has serious structural problems. The real issue is whether these would be more easily addressed in an economy that is growing at a healthy pace or whether structural reform is somehow advanced by stagnation and high unemployment. The latter view has been tested extensively in the last five years throughout the euro zone, the U.K., and perhaps now in the United States. Thus far it has been shown wrong everywhere.
Comments