Quartz #13—>John Taylor is Wrong: The Fed is Not Causing Another Recession

Link to the Column on Quartz

Here is the full text of my 13th Quartz column, “John Taylor is Wrong: The Fed is not causing another recession,” now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on January 29, 2013. Links to all my other columns can be found here.

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© January 29, 2013: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2014. All rights reserved.

In his Wall Street Journal editorial headlined “Fed Policy is a Drag on the Economy“ this morning, Stanford economist John Taylor makes the remarkable claim that the US Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep interest rates down by asset purchases now—and promises of asset purchases in the future—is like rent control. If this were true, then the Fed’s actions to lower interest rates could be contractionary and could cause another recession. But it is just wrong.

The Fed’s actions to lower interest rates are more like  encouraging the construction of more apartments—by granting building permits more readily—in an effort to keep rents down. That makes all the difference. The Fed’s actions are stimulative because the Fed is acting within the framework of supply and demand bringing markets to equilibrium. While the Fed is intervening in asset markets, contrary to Taylor’s claim, it is not doing anything to take away the role of interest rates to equate supply and demand. So when the Fed brings interest rates down, people will build more houses and factories, and buy more machines and consumer durables than they otherwise would.

This column is the two-paragraph précis of my post “Contra John Taylor.”

Twitter provided some reviews of these two pieces that I liked. Here are a few:

Paul Krugman cited “Contra John Taylor.” in his column “Calvinist Monetary Economics,” writing

Actually, as Miles Kimball points out, [John Taylor is] committing a basic microeconomic fallacy — a fallacy you usually identify with Econ 101 freshmen early in the semester…