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Die Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

Morgen (21. Mai 2023) im Podcast geht es im Gespräch mit dem US-Ökonomen John H. Cochrane um einen anderen Ansatz der Inflationserklärung: die „Fiscal Theory of the Price Level“ (FTPL). Demnach ist es die Nachhaltigkeit der Staatsfinanzen, die über das Preisniveau entscheidet.

  • Der Kern der Theorie ist eine Erweiterung der guten alten Quantitätstheorie des Geldes.
  • Grundsätzlich besagt FTPL, dass in unserer modernen Welt nicht nur die Menge des im Umlauf befindlichen Geldes für die Inflation von Bedeutung ist, sondern auch die Menge der Anleihen.
  • FTPL erkennt richtig an, dass sowohl Geld als auch Staatsanleihen Verbindlichkeiten in der Bilanz des Staates sind, die durch gegenwärtige und zukünftige Einnahmen aus Steuern und anderen Einnahmequellen gedeckt werden müssen.
  • Die Menge an Geld und/oder Anleihen in der Wirtschaft kann steigen, ohne dass es zu einer Inflation kommt, wenn – und das ist ganz entscheidend! – Anleger davon ausgehen, dass der Staat diese zusätzlichen Verbindlichkeiten durch künftige Staatsüberschüsse decken wird.
  • Um zu beurteilen, ob der Staat alle seine Verbindlichkeiten in der Zukunft glaubhaft zurückzahlen kann, berechnet FTPL die Finanzkapazität des Staates als abgezinsten Barwert künftiger Cashflows.
  • Im Wesentlichen wird der Staat wie ein Unternehmen behandelt, bei dem man statt des Eigenkapitalwerts und der Dividendenzahlungen versucht, den Barwert der Staatsverbindlichkeiten und die dafür gezahlten Zinsen zu erklären.
  • Das Schöne an FTPL ist, dass es gut erklären kann, warum es nach 2008 keine Inflation gab, obwohl die Menge der von den Staaten ausgegebenen Staatsanleihen in die Höhe schoss und obwohl auch der Geldumlauf zunahm.
  • FTPL stellt lediglich fest, dass die Sparmaßnahmen der Regierung nach dem Ende der Finanzkrise die Erwartung geweckt haben, dass die Regierungen in der Lage sein werden, die neuen Schulden durch höhere künftige Steuereinnahmen und geringere Ausgaben auszugleichen.

Das Ganze wirkt schon ziemlich weit hergeholt. Denn wer sitzt schon da und überlegt sich, wie solide der Staat wirtschaftet, um dann mehr oder weniger Geld zu halten?

John H. Cochrane hat immerhin ein ganzes Buch darüber geschrieben. Er selbst empfiehlt allerdings nicht, das Buch zu lesen, weil es voller Formeln ist und sich eher an ein Fachpublikum richtet. Stattdessen soll man einen Aufsatz lesen. Titel: „Fiscal Histories“, erschienen im Journal of Economic Perspectives im Herbst 2022.

Genau das habe ich getan, hier ein paar Auszüge:

  • „Most simply, money is valuable because we need money to pay taxes. If, on average, people have more money than they need to pay taxes, they try to buy things, driving up prices. (…) Thus, as prices and wages rise, your dollar income rises, and the amount of money you must pay in taxes rises. A higher price level soaks up excess money with tax payments. Equivalently, the real value of money, the amount of goods and services a dollar buys, declines as the price level rises. But the real value of taxes does not change (much), so a higher price level lowers the real value of money until it equals the real value of tax payments.“ – bto: Es ist zweifellos in sich konsistent.  
  • „Eventually, all of the money outstanding today and all of the money promised by outstanding government debt must be soaked up by surpluses. Thus, prices adjust until the real value of all government debt, including money, equals the present value of current and future surpluses.“ – bto: Man könnte auch sagen, es spiegelt die künftige Wirtschaftskraft wider.
  • „(…) fiscal theory does not necessarily predict a tight relationship between current debt or deficits and inflation. If the government runs a big deficit, but people trust that deficit will be repaid by higher subse- quent surpluses, then people are happy to hold the extra debt rather than try to spend it, and there is no inflation. That hypothesis is sensible. When a corporation borrows to build a factory, it runs a big deficit, and then slowly pays off the bonds, a long stream of surpluses. Governments that want to borrow, to raise revenue to fight wars or recessions, and do not want to create inflation, will credibly promise repayment. Fiscal theory only predicts inflation when debt is larger than what people think the government will repay.“ – bto: Es ist eine Vertrauensfrage.
  • „Most of all, discount rates matter to present values. When interest rates rise, bond values fall. A higher real interest rate makes the same stream of expected surpluses less valuable. So, higher real interest rates lower the value of debt and act as an inflationary force even with no surplus news. Equivalently, a higher real interest rate means that the government has to pay more to finance its debt. As we shall see, this variation in discount rates or interest costs is central to understanding post–World War II US inflation.“ – bto: Ich denke, die Auswirkung auf das Defizit ist direkter messbar und damit relevanter.
  • „First, which money is inflationary? (…) The government need not control the quantity of checking accounts and other liquid assets. However, in the basic fiscal theory, government debt, which promises money, is just as inflationary as money itself. Reserves and cash are just overnight government debt.“ – bto: Das ist eine wichtige Erkenntnis, die nicht zu fern von der Modern Monetary Theory ist.
  • „What about episodes in which we see inflation or hyperinflation clearly caused by printing money? In these episodes, governments print money to finance intractable fiscal deficits. They are expansions of government debt relative to the government’s ability to repay debt. They are equally inflationary in fiscal theory. Similarly, Milton Friedman once joked that the government could easily cause inflation by dropping money from helicopters. But dropping money from helicopters is a fiscal operation, a transfer payment.“ – bto: Im Kern ist es zusätzliche Nachfrage.
  • „The key question is whether exchanging money for debt causes inflation. If the central bank issues reserves or cash but takes government debt in return, does that inflate? This ‚open market operation‘ is what central banks do. In the monetarist view, yes. In the basic fiscal view, no. People and banks really do not care much about holding Treasury debt directly versus holding interest-paying reserves that are backed by Treasury debt. It’s like taking your $20 bills and giving you two $5s and a $10.“ – bto: Auch das stimmt.  
  • „Fiscal shocks lead to sustained inflation. Monetary policy, tightening interest rates without any change in fiscal policy, alleviates inflation temporarily but eventually makes inflation worse. Sims offers this analysis and calls that pattern ‚stepping on a rake.‘ Thus, the end of inflation in the 1980s was a joint monetary, fiscal, and micro-economic reform. (…) Without budget surpluses to pay a windfall to bondholders and high interest costs on the debt, the disinflation would likely have failed again.“ – bto: … wovon eben die Anleihengläubiger überproportional profitiert haben.
  • „The US public debt/GDP ratio rose from 31 percent in 2001 to 105 percent in 2020. Potential causes include a halving of trend GDP growth in 2000, the recessions of 2000, 2008, and 2020, the allure of low debt service costs, or simple political dysfunction. Long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office point to steady primary deficits of roughly 5 percent of GDP, followed by worse deficits as aging boomers drain Social Security and Medicare. And those projections assume we don’t have another crisis, war, or pandemic. Yet inflation stayed subdued until 2022. Why? Discount rates are the most natural candidate: Real interest rates, and consequently debt-service costs, went on a steady downward trend, becoming negative for the 2010s.“ – bto: Die tiefen Zinsen haben die Schuldentragfähigkeit erhöht.
  • „Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of over 200 percent, yet slight deflation. Why? Among other reasons, Japan has had very low real interest rates for three decades.“ – bto: Und die Frage ist doch schon: Darf man das?
  • „What happens to inflation if interest rates stay at or near zero for many years, and are expected to remain at zero for more years? In these episodes, nothing. The pattern of inflation following the 2008 recession was nearly identical to that following the 2000 recession. If anything, inflation at the long zero bound was less volatile than in the earlier period.“ – bto: Die tiefen Zinsen sollten doch eigentlich die Inflation erhöhen…
  • „Starting in 2009, central banks embarked on just such a massive ‚quantitative easing‘ program. Bank reserves held at the Fed rose from roughly $10 billion in 2007 to over $2,700 billion by August 2014, an 27,000 percent increase. The monetarist prediction is clear: hyperinflation. It did not happen. Inflation trundled along a bit less than 2 percent. It is hard to see any effect of quantitative easing in plots of inflation or long-term interest rates. Instead, we learn that money and bonds are perfect substitutes after all when they pay the same rate of interest. Yes, economists continue to debate whether quantitative easing had a few tenths of a percentage point effect on long-term interest rates, but for our purposes the debate is over. A 27,000 percent increase in bank reserves is an atom bomb. If you’re debating whether somebody heard a firecracker, it was a dud.“ – bto: Stimmt. Es war eine massive Intervention und das Ergebnis nichts.
  • „(…) a budget deficit is only inflationary if people do not expect it to be repaid by subsequent surpluses. So we must explore why people apparently did not expect the new debt of 2020–2021 to be repaid, in full or in part, and tried to spend it, where they held the new debt of 2008–2020. (…) First, politicians and administration officials in 2020–2021 did not emphasize repayment, (…) Second (…)  it is unlikely that the 2020s will see an additional 3 percentage point or so decline in real interest rates. Third, the 2020–2021 deficits were much larger than the 2008–2009 era stimulus. (…)  Finally, creating bank reserves and sending checks to people may be more quickly inflationary than borrowing in Treasury markets and spending. Who gets debt matters to how quickly it is spent. Whether the additional debt is in the form of Treasury debt or bank reserves may also matter to expectations of repayment.“ – bto: Es wurden also die Erwartungen deutlich verändert.
  • „How will the current inflation be contained?  (…) Monetary policy can give us lower inflation now, but at the cost of higher inflation later—a form of Sargent and Wallace’s ‚unpleasant arithmetic.‘ Postponing inflation is still useful: A smaller but longer lasting inflation is desirable in many economic models, as it reduces the disruptive effects of inflation.“ – bto: Es geht aber nur über eine Stabilisierung der Staatsfinanzen.
  • „(…)  from a single fiscal shock will eventually die off on its own, even if the Fed does nothing, so long as fiscal policy does not get worse. As inflation did not spiral downward at the zero bound, it does not spiral upward now. This prediction comes also from rational expectations more than fiscal theory per se, but it contravenes conventional wisdom which says the Fed must raise nominal interest rates above inflation to stabilize the latter, and its slowness to act has added greatly to inflation.“ – bto: Die Fed hatte so gesehen recht, als sie von einer vorübergehenden Inflation sprach.
  • „(…) debt that is viewed as sustainable because of low interest costs is fundamentally unstable. If investors get scared and demand higher real interest rates, interest costs rise, and the debt becomes unsustainable. Inflation surges, seemingly out of nowhere, or far out of proportion to the initial shock. Abundant fiscal space, a background of healthy long-run surpluses, and financing deficits with long-term debt, which passes higher rates more slowly to interest costs, would squelch these worries. But the US government no longer has that fiscal space.“ – bto: … und erst recht nicht Europa mit den noch geringeren Wachstumsraten.
  • „Thus foreign or indexed debt act like corporate debt, which must be repaid to avoid default. Domestic currency and nominal (non-indexed) debt act like corporate equity, whose value can fall to meet lower expected profits. (…) We can then think of the choice between domestic and foreign currency debt, or nominal versus indexed debt, as we think of a corporation’s choice between debt and equity. Nominal debt, like corporate equity, allows the government to share the risks of fiscal stress, to let inflation or currency devaluation avoid the pain of formal default. On this basis, for example, Sims argues that Mexico should not adopt the US dollar. The same argument lies behind the view that countries like Greece should not join the euro.“ – bto: Interessante Analogie.
  • „The statement that the real value of government debt is equal to the expected present value of surpluses is an ingredient of a theory, not a complete theory by itself. How ‚fiscal theory‘ behaves depends on how one fills out the rest of an economic model.“ – bto: Ich fand es dennoch interessant.