“What More Can Central Banks Do? An Interview with Dr. William White”

William White ist immer wieder auf diesen Seiten präsent. Er ist sicherlich einer der besten Experten zur Lage der Weltwirtschaft, der Wirkungen der Zentralbankpolitik und den Folgen der Überschuldung in der Welt. Hier ein Interview vom letzten Februar, in jeder Hinsicht lesenswert:

• “What the central banks did in 2008 was totally appropriate. The markets were basically collapsing. We had a kind of a ‚Minsky moment‘ problem with market illiquidity and the central banks did what they had to do.”
• “(…) in 2010 when Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, made clear in a speech that the objective of monetary policy – and specifically quantitative easing – was basically to stimulate aggregate demand. And since then we have had all the central banks around the world pursuing that objective through increasingly unconventional measures.”
• “(…) the fundamental problem we all face is a problem of too much debt, you know, the headwinds of debt. In a sense it is a problem of insolvency. And relying on central banks to correct this is totally inappropriate, because they can handle problems of illiquidity but they can’t handle problems of insolvency. So I think that the fundamental orientation here is wrong.”
• “(…) because dealing with problems of insolvency, debt reduction, making debt service more bearable and so forth, demands policies that only governments can implement. Moreover, these policies are likely to be technically hard to implement and will also meet stiff political resistance.”
• “(…) what we have been doing is both losing efficacy over time, that is to say that the efficiency of the transmission mechanism seems to me to be getting less and less, while the impact of the associated unintended consequences, the side effects of monetary policy, are becoming more and more evident. In the end this is really going to cause us problems.”
• “The whole point is trying to attract spending from the future into today, what is known as intertemporal reallocation. That is just fine. But if you’re bringing that spending forward, at a certain point when tomorrow becomes today – as indeed it must inevitably do – then that future spending that you might otherwise have done is constrained by the spending that you have already done. And that manifests itself in increasing debt levels, which indeed we have already seen.”
• “There are lots of reasons why lower interest rates might produce lower consumption. For example, think about the people who are saving for an annuity or a pension for when they retire. If the roll-up rate is going down, aside from working longer, the only solution is to save more.”
• “There are all these distributional issues to consider too. You know, all these policies have buoyed asset prices a lot and richer people – the ones who have the financial assets and the big houses whose values have increased the most – have gained the most. Conversely, middle class people whose financial assets are largely in the banks, have lost out. Since richer people tend to have a lower marginal propensity to consume out of both income and wealth, then these redistribution effects could cause the economy to grow more slowly, not more rapidly.”
• Zur Lage in überschuldeten Ländern wie Portugal: “When you get a combination of an economy which is hurting because of debt problems, where the corporate and/or the household sectors are facing these big headwinds of debt, and in addition the banking system becomes challenged, with non-performing loans and the like, the resulting periods of unusually low growth can go on for a decade or more.”
• “If you get a joint problem of this nature associated with too much debt both in and out of the financial system you have a tiger by the tail.”
• “I would say is to have less austerity and more pro-growth spending. Now I qualify each of these things with the recognition that sometimes and in some countries this will not be possible because of confidence effects in market. Nevertheless, European experience does point to the merits of less austerity as opposed to more.”
• “(…) a number of countries following essentially mercantilist policies and it would be much better if they re-orientated themselves domestically so that wages could get a larger share of incomes. In countries like Germany, China, Japan, South Korea, for a long period of time and still continuing, that sort of mercantilist approach basically said that you have to keep wages down. I think that has not been helpful, and that we could do more to encourage wage income and spending in many countries.”
• “We also need many more write-offs – not just debt restructuring but actual reduction of the principal.”
• “The answer to insolvency is not simply to print more money – it may get you out of the problem in the short-run but it simply makes it worse and worse over time. At some point, maybe where we are now, you truly get to the end of a line. You see that what you have been doing is just a short term palliative that is actually making the disease worse.”

Zur Eurokrise:

• “George Soros made the point, in the Financial Times a while back, with an article titled ‚Germany Should Lead or Leave‘. His view is that you could avoid a lot of problems if the Germans left, not the Greeks. When currency unions split up in the past, normally it was the creditors who left. They see the writing on the wall and they are out of it. If anyone leaves it should be the Germans, the Dutch or whoever wants to go along with them. The debtors would keep the euro, minimizing legal battles, and the creditors would have to be cooperative to minimize their losses.”

Zum Helikopter-Geld:

• “If you give people notes, and you’re putting more notes into the economy than they want to hold, the first thing they’ll do is take the notes and deposit them in the banks again. So it really doesn’t make any difference whether a central bank pays for a deficit with notes or through a cheque that is deposited and shows up as increased reserves held by banks at the central bank.”
• “Whether it’s high existing levels of household sector debt, or whether it’s a Ricardian equivalence where they see-through the government and realize that government debt is really their debt and higher taxes down the line. So they might just sit on it and not spend it.”
• “(…) the reserves held in the central bank are not debt. They are not liabilities of government. I think that’s just totally wrong. The central bank is 100% a creature of the government. So if you put the two balance sheets together and net them all out, whether it’s cash issued by the central banks, or whether it’s bank reserves on the liability side of the governments accounts, it’s all government debt.”
• “Everything is fine until inflationary pressures or something else shocks up the interest rates. And the minute they go up, it becomes obvious that government debt service has gone high enough so they will have no recourse but to have the central bank finance still more. And when that happens the writing is on the wall, the currency collapses and the inflation becomes essentially uncontrollable. This is a highly non-linear process that cannot be captured by the econometric models that are in widespread use.”
• “(…) ‚helicopter money‘ is a magic bullet to get us out of a debt problem. My own personal view – and I have to say that I hope I’m wrong – is that it is a highly risky and perhaps even terminally risky policy for countries that already have bad fiscal conditions. We should be thinking about the downsides.”

Sein Fazit:

• “(…) we now have a global problem. This problem of debt and over-indebtedness is now no longer confined to advanced market economies but includes the emerging market economies as well – not least China.”
• “I view the global economy as a complex, adaptive system. And the character of the complexity and the interdependency is such that, if we get a problem anywhere, I think we are going to have a problem everywhere.“
• “(…) everywhere you look it seems to me you can see a potential trigger.”

→ LinkedIn: “What More Can Central Banks Do? An Interview with Dr. William White”, 9. Februar 2016