2.2 Policy considerations
What should the local authorities do in dealing with such an environment?
In particular, should they prevent the emergence of local bubbles altogether,
or should they, on the contrary, wait until after a crash has taken place to intervene? These are the questions we address in Caballero and Krishnamurthy
(2001, 2006a).
It turns out that the same financial underdevelopment that limits the
number of assets produced by the economy and gives value to bubbles, biases
the private sector incentive toward undertaking an excessive number of risky
investments.1 In this context, once domestic bubbles develop, the private
sector reallocates too many resources toward them, overexposing the economy
to a deep crash.
This excessive risk taking justifies intervention. An important question
is whether policies should focus on preventing excessive risk taking or on improving
the handling of a crisis should one occur. While optimal policy typically
involves elements of both, the optimal package overweights prevention
in emerging markets (relative to developed economies) since the government
has limited options once in a crisis, as it often finds itself involved in the
turmoil and deprived of credit.2
There are two broad categories of potential policy interventions. Those
that address the excessive risk taking but not the underlying shortage of
sound assets, and those that address the shortage itself. Among the former
are measures such as imposing liquidity ratios on financial intermediaries or
sterilizing capital inflows. However, these are not free of their own limitations.
The former policy requires the ability to monitor financial intermediaries,
whose individual incentives to go around the system and take excessive
risks rise as competitors are bound by regulation. The latter policy is costly
for the government and requires that it has sufficient credibility to create a
large amount of financial assets, which is often a constraint. More importantly,
neither of these policies addresses the fundamental shortage of assets
and, worse, they risk exacerbating the problem if overdone.
Monetary policy can also be used as an incentive (rather than as a palliative)
mechanism. In Caballero and Krishnamurthy (2005), we show that by modifying the inflation targeting rule so that it automatically rewards
prudent behavior in the event of a crash, monetary policy improves private
sector risk management practices. This can be done, for example, by having
an explicit rule that overweights nontradables, so that the private sector
anticipates that the central bank will let the exchange rate fluctuate more
freely in the event of a crisis, and hence discourages excessive reallocation
from dollar-assets to speculative peso assets. However, this strategy may
also backfire if domestic derivative markets are limited, and the additional
exchange rate volatility depresses non-speculative investment and domestic
intermediation. Moreover, there is some circularity in the problem, since
well-functioning derivative markets require collateral assets, but it is their
scarcity that is the root problem behind the fragility monetary policy is
seeking to alleviate.
Ultimately, the long term solution to the problem is financial development,
as sound assets crowd out the reason for the emergence of speculative
bubbles. If the government has enough taxation credibility, then it should begin
by developing the domestic public bond market. Absent this credibility,
public debt is just another speculative bubble.