by Zero Hedge - November 21st, 2009 5:52 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge
Could it be that the fundamental economic indicator that is gospel not only to Goldman Sachs, but to Ben Bernanke in estimating and determining monetary policy, the output gap, provides a flawed reading of the economy? As a reminder, Ben Bernanke has repeatedly expressed little regard for either commodity inflation or US dollar exchange as having an impact on overall US inflation. As Askari and Hochain state: “according to [Bernanke's] theory, inflation was related only to the output gap. As long as the output gap was negative, that is, if actual gross domestic product was below potential GDP, the economy was at no risk of inflation. Hence, he argued that the central bank had to adopt an aggressive money policy until the output gap closed. Such is the policy prescription from what is called the Taylor Rule or the Phillips Curve. Because potential GDP is not a measured macroeconomic variable, it can be estimated in millions of ways. There are, therefore, millions of ways for estimating an output gap, making the concept difficult to use as a policy tool.” The problem with these millions of estimations, is that especially courtesy of the Greenspan created bubble over the past 20 years, the American economy is, ironically, not a true representation of itself. And thus, the output gap estimates need to be normalized for a “bubble free” GDP environment. It is precisely this issue that none other than the St. Louis Fed addresses in its latest paper: “Has the Recent Real Estate Bubble Biased the Output Gap?” The conclusion is startling: based on a production function output gap normalization (an approach “based on a relation between available productive inputs (such as capital and labor), their current utilization rates, and aggregate production”), Bernanke could be fatally wrong about the economy’s “capacity for inflation” courtesy of the CBO’s overestimated output gap, and that his loose monetary policy could end up being a disastrous precursor to rampant (and not distant) hyperinflation, due to his blatant avoidance of simple logic when interpreting the economic output gap.
Some preliminary observations from St Louis:
The output gap is the difference between actual gross domestic product (GDP) and the economy’s potential output at a given moment in time. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a
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Tags: Bernanke, Economy, GDP, Goldman Sachs, Output gap
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by ilene - June 22nd, 2009 5:40 pm
Here’s an article by Jesse’s Café Américain on inflation and deflation.
There are several fallacies making the rounds of the economic community, often put forward by pundits on the infomercials for corporate America, and also on the internet among well-meaning but badly informed bloggers.
The first of these monetary fallacies is that ‘the output gap will prevent inflation.’ The second is that a lack of net bank lending or other ‘debt destruction’ will require a deflationary outcome. Let’s deal with the output gap theory first.
Output gap is the economic measure of the difference between the actual output of an economy and the output it could achieve when it is most efficient, or at full capacity.
The theory is that when GDP underperforms its potential, with unemployment remaining high, there can be no inflation because demand is weak and median wages will be presumably stagnant. This idea comes from neoliberal monetarist economics, and a misunderstanding of the inflationary experience of the 1970s.
The thought is that sustained inflation is due to a ‘wage-price’ spiral. Higher wages amongst workers cause prices to rise, prompting workers to demand higher wages, thereby fueling inflation. If workers do not have the ability to demand higher wages there can be no inflation.
While this is in part true, it tends to confuse cause and effect.
The cause of a monetary inflation, which is a broadly based inflation across most products and services relatively independent of demand, is often based in a monetary expansion of the currency resulting in a debasement and devaluation.
A monetary expansion is relatively difficult to achieve under an external standard since it must be overt and often deliberative. A gradual inflation is an almost natural outcome under a fiat currency regime because policy-makers can almost never resist the temptation of cheap growth and the personal enrichment that comes with it.
There can be short term non-monetary inflation-deflation cycles that tend to be more product specific in a market that is not under government price controls. But this is not the same as a broad monetary inflation or deflation.
The key difference is the value of the dollar which has little or nothing to do with a business cycle or product demand/supply induced inflation/deflation.
In the modern era the Federal Reserve can increase the money supply
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Tags: Inflation and Deflation, Output gap, Weimar Collapse
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