Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said
low central bank interest rates didn’t cause the housing bubble of the past decade and that better regulation would have been more effective in curbing the boom.
“The best response to the housing bubble would have been regulatory, rather than monetary,” Bernanke said yesterday in remarks to the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta. The Fed’s efforts to constrain the bubble were “too late or were insufficient,” which means that regulatory actions “must be better and smarter,” he said.
Scholars such as Allan Meltzer, a historian of the central bank, have criticized the Fed for helping fuel the housing boom by keeping interest rates too low for too long. The bursting of the housing bubble led to the worst recession since the Great Depression and the loss of more than 7 million U.S. jobs.
“It sounds a little bit like a mea culpa,” said Randall Wray, an economics professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, who was in Atlanta and didn’t attend Bernanke’s speech. “The Fed played a role by promoting the most dangerous financial innovations used by institutions to fuel the housing bubble.”
Policy ‘Appropriate’
Bernanke devoted most of his speech to rebutting criticism that the Fed’s rate policy fueled the housing bubble. Monetary policy after the 2001 recession “appears to have been reasonably appropriate, at least in relation to” a formula based on the so-called “Taylor Rule.” In addition, Bernanke said Fed research shows the rise in housing prices had little to do with monetary policy or the broader economy.
John Taylor, a Stanford University economist and former Treasury undersecretary, created a shorthand formula that suggests how a central bank should set rates if inflation or growth veers from goals.
Under former Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Fed lowered its benchmark rate to 1.75 percent from 6.5 percent in 2001 and cut it to 1 percent in June 2003. The central bank left the federal funds rate for overnight interbank lending at 1 percent for a year before raising it in quarter-point increments from 2004 to 2006.
Rates Slashed
Bernanke, 56, joined the Fed as a governor in 2002 and supported all of the interest-rate decisions under Greenspan before being appointed chairman in 2006. After the financial crisis struck, he cut the federal funds rate almost to zero in December 2008 from 5.25 percent in September 2007.
The standard Taylor Rule would have recommended that the Fed raise the rate to a range of 7 percent to 8 percent through the first three quarters of 2008, “a policy decision that probably would not have garnered much support among monetary specialists,” Bernanke said. A variation of the rule used by the Fed focused on anticipated rates of inflation, not actual rates, he said.
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Bernanke Says Regulation Came ‘Too Late’ to Curb Housing Bubble
The Fed and the Crisis: A Reply to Ben Bernanke By John B. Taylor
In his recent speech, the Fed chairman denied that too-low interest rates were responsible. Does this mean we're headed for a new boom-bust cycle?
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke spent most of his speech to the American Economic Association on Jan. 3 responding to the critique that easy monetary policy during 2002-2005 contributed to the housing boom, to excessive risk taking, and thereby to the financial crisis.
In his speech, Mr. Bernanke's main response to this critique was to propose alternatives to the standard Taylor rule—and then to use the alternatives to rationalize the Fed's policy in 2002-2005.
In one alternative, which addresses what he describes as his "most significant concern regarding the use of the standard Taylor rule," he put the Fed's forecasts of future inflation into the Taylor rule rather than actual measured inflation. Because the Fed's inflation forecasts were lower than current inflation during this period, this alternative obviously gives a lower target interest rate and seems to justify the Fed's decisions at the time.
There are several problems with this procedure. First, the Fed's forecasts of inflation were too low. Inflation increased rather than decreased in 2002-2005. Second, as shown by economists Athanasios Orphanides and Volker Wieland, who previously served on the Federal Reserve Board staff, if one uses the average of private sector inflation forecasts rather than the Fed's forecasts, the interest rate would still have been judged as too low for too long.
Third, Mr. Bernanke cites no empirical evidence that his alternative to the Taylor rule improves central-bank performance. He mentions that forecasts avoid overreacting to temporary movements in inflation—but so does the simple averaging of broad price indices as in the Taylor rule. Indeed, his alternative is not well defined because one does not know whose forecasts to use. Moreover, the appropriate response to an increase in actual inflation would be different from the appropriate response to an increase in forecast inflation.
There are other questionable points. Mr. Bernanke's speech raises doubts about the Taylor rule by showing that another version of the rule would have called for very high interest rates in the first few months of 2008. But using the standard Taylor rule, with the GDP price index as the measure of inflation, interest rates would not be so high, as I testified at the House Financial Services Committee in February 2008.
These technical arguments are important, but one should not lose sight of the forest through the trees. You do not have to rely on the Taylor rule to see that monetary policy was too loose. The real interest rate during this period was persistently less than zero, thereby subsidizing borrowers. Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, reported in a speech on Jan. 7 that during the past decade "real interest rates—the nominal interest rate adjusted for inflation—remained at negative levels for approximately 40 percent of the time. The last time this occurred was during the 1970s, preceding a time of turbulence."
Inflation was increasing, even excluding skyrocketing housing prices. Yet even when inflation is low, the damage of boom-bust monetary policy can be severe as Milton Friedman stressed in his strong criticism of the Fed in the 1950s and 1960s. Stepping back from the fray, an objective observer of all this evidence would have to at least admit the possibility that monetary policy was too easy and a possible contributor to the crisis.
Not admitting the possibility raises concerns. One is that if such a large deviation from standard policy is rationalized away, it might happen again. Indeed, some analysts are worried now about
the Fed holding interest rates too low for too long, causing another boom-bust and a shorter expansion.
Another concern is that, rather than trying to be vigilant and avoid causing bubbles, the Fed will try to burst them with interest rates. Indeed, one of the lines from Mr. Bernanke's speech most picked up by Fed watchers is that "we must remain open to using monetary policy as a supplementary tool for addressing those risks." We have very limited ability to fine tune monetary policy in such an interventionist way.
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The Fed and the Crisis: A Reply to Ben Bernanke
