Typography

Cross section of a banknote with a cotton paper core surrounded by two layers of polymer [ Source ]   Central bankers are at their most comfortable when engaging in technical debates over the finer points of monetary policy. But over the next few years they may be forced out of their comfort zone into a thorny philosophical debate over anonymity and financial censorship. They are poorly equipped for such a debate. When central bankers monopolized the issuance of banknotes in the 1800s and early 1900s, little did they know that a hundred years later anonymity would become an important public good . And because banknotes are the only generally-accepted way for law-abiding citizens to make uncensored anonymous payments, central bankers effectively became—by accident rather than design—the sole purveyors of these vital services.* Banknotes are anonymous because it is very difficult to link banknotes to identities, say by monitoring usage of notes via a note's serial number. As for ...

Narayana Kocherlakota, formerly the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and now a prolific economics blogger, penned a recent article on the abolition of cash. Kocherlakota makes the point that if you don't like government meddling in the proper functioning of free markets, then you shouldn't be a big fan of central bank-issued banknotes. For markets to clear, it may be occasionally necessary for nominal interest rates to fall well below zero. Cash sets a lower limit to interest rates, thus preventing this rebalancing from happening. I pretty much agree with Kocherlakota's framing of the point. In fact, it's an angle I've taken before, both here and in A Libertarian Case for Abolishing Cash . Yes, my libertarian and other free-marketer readers, you didn't misread that. There is a decent case for removing banknotes that is entirely consistent with libertarian principles. If you think usury laws are distortionary because they impose a ceiling on int...

The Federal Reserve may be in a bit of a bind. With the Bank of Japan reducing rates to -0.1%, many commentators are calling on the Fed to reverse its policy of rate normalization and follow Japan into negative territory.  The problem is this. Thanks to the rules laid out in the Federal Reserve Act, the Fed may lack the technical means to dive into negative rate waters. Let me restate this in different terms. If the Federal Reserve were to reduce the rate at which it pays interest on reserves (IOR) to -0.25% or so, the overnight rate may not follow very far. Monetary policy is useless, or at least less effective than it would otherwise be. Not only would monetary policy lose some of its potency when IOR falls below 0%, but an unapproved fiscal transfer from the Fed to another set of government institutions could occur. This is because negative IOR has the potential to provide a large subsidy to a narrow range of governments sponsored-entities that are allowed to keep 0%-yielding depos...

Rai at the Bank of Canada - part of Canada's foreign reserves As I pointed out in my previous post , all sorts of economists have incorporated the example of Yap stones into their monetary discourse. One of the more peculiar uses of these stones can be found in neo-chartalist L. Randall Wray's Understanding Modern Money (1998). In Chapter 4 of his book, Wray claims that an economy becomes monetized by the introduction of state-issued tokens (what I call coupon instruments ). To provide empirical support for his claim, Wray repeats the story about German administrators marking all Yap stones with paint (see previous post , #9). The Germans did so in order to motivate the Yapese to build roads. After all, in order to get the state to remove these markings from their valuable stones, the Yapese were required to provide their labour. The implications of Wray's chapter are that instead of requiring labour, the German government could just as easily have required payment in gove...

Noah Smith asks what would happen if the Fed kept interest rates at zero forever. Specifically: Suppose that the Fed targets only one interest rate, a short-term nominal interest rate, and that its only tool is Open Market Operations (it cannot provide any "forward guidance" or communicate with the public at all). Suppose that at date T, the Fed decides to keep the interest rate at zero in perpetuity, and remains unwaveringly committed to this decision for all time > T. He asks this because Nayarana Kocherlakota, head of the Minneapolis Fed, once said , somewhat counter-intuitively, that over the long run, a low fed funds rate must lead to consistent—but low—levels of deflation. This seems odd at first blush because we've been conditioned to assume that low interest rates lead to inflation, not deflation. I'm going to try and give an answer that financial types will understand. The spoiler is... over the short term we'd have inflation, but Kocherlakota is prob...