3.3 Policy implications
The way out of the current juncture is ultimately one of financial development
in the regions of the world that have limited capacity to generate
store-of-value instruments relative to their demands.5 Financial development
also reduces the incentive and space for inefficient risk-shifting in emerging
markets.
But this process of financial development is slow. In the meantime, the
world must learn to operate in a high-valuations environment. Failing to understand
that some of the observed “anomalies” are symptoms and marketbased
solutions can have dire consequences if policymakers start chasing bubbles,
“global imbalances” and low real interest rates.
For instance, if the government attempts to and succeeds at bursting
an equilibrium bubble, the immediate impact of destroying these assets is to create an excess demand for financial assets and a corresponding excess
supply of goods. In the short run, the real interest may drop to zero if the
economy comes to a halt, but the relief from this adjustment is minor if
capitalizable dividends are small relative to the bubble they are supposed
to replace. The rest of the adjustment falls on the real value of nominal
assets. However, in reality the value of these assets is too small to offset
a significant crash in asset values. For example, even a relatively minor
correction such as that experienced by the US stock market at the beginning
of the millennia is about twice the size of all the nominal liabilities issued by
the U.S. government and held by the private sector. Reasonable increases
in the supply of these assets will not suffice, and a sharp decline in the
price level becomes the main escape valve of the economy. Complementing
this environment with price inertia and a Phillips curve naturally yields a
protracted and costly deflationary episode while the economy waits for the
Pigou-mechanism to make up for the lost assets.6
Instead, policies should focus on managing the risks associated to high
valuation equilibria. There are two main dimensions along which speculative
equilibria bring about risks: Aggregate and location. The former refers to
the size of the collection of all speculative valuations in the economy. It
turns out that inflation targeting should suffice to control excessive bubbles
at the aggregate level. If valuations grow too much, then the economy enters
a region of excess supply of assets and excess demand for goods; inflationary
pressures build and hence automatically trigger monetary policy tightening.
Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the same argument does not apply for
deflationary pressures as crashes are often more abrupt than booms. The
good news is that if speculative valuations are the result of a shortage of
assets, then they are likely to be less prone to crashes absent some strange
shock or misguided policy intervention.
Note, however, that while the value of the aggregate bubble is pinned
down, there is nothing that determines its location. This observation hints
at several policy conclusions: First, chasing a bubble in an asset-shortage
environment is likely to move it around rather than eliminate it in the aggregate.
This can be costly, as it forces the economy to experience crashes
and disruptive reallocations without the reward of a more stable bubbleless
economy. Second, monetary policy is not a good instrument to address location problems. These must be dealt with more sector/investment specific
instruments, perhaps in the form of a combination of policy induced caps
and backing. Third, since high valuations must develop, it is better that
they take place in non-resource consuming activities. In this sense, bubbles
on land and gold are better than a speculative boom on some industrial
activity.7 Although the ideal is probably that the bubble spreads across a
wide variety of assets, thus reducing the cost-impact on sectors that use land,
commodities, etc., as inputs of production. Fourth, taking the previous argument
to the limit, the impact of loose monetary policy on intermediaries’
lending practices has the virtue of creating multiple bubbly assets and hence
preventing excessive concentration of bubbles. Of course this effect must be
traded off against the more conventional risk-shifting concern. But the point
is that there is a trade-off, rather than just a bad effect, as it would be in an
environment without an asset shortage.
In summary, the policy conclusion is that in an environment with asset
shortages, it is important to recognize that speculative valuations are part of
the equilibrium. In this context, the best policy is to minimize the resource
misallocation they may cause and to protect their stability. The latter can
be achieved by fostering the spreading of the aggregate bubble across many
assets (i.e., foster an extensive rather than an intensive margin), by not
chasing them indiscriminately, and by providing some sort of implicit or
explicit backing to some of the speculative assets. The good news is that in
a world of low interest rates, even a pledge of a small share of the tax receipts
can back a large amount of assets, as long as the total revenue from these
taxes grows in tandem with the economy.