Ego Inflation
Page 3 of 3
|
|
I fear I had some small hand in this idea. Thirty years ago, as a young staffer on the House Banking Committee, I organized the first regular hearings on the conduct of monetary policy -- what later became the Humphrey-Hawkins process -- in which the Fed chair comes before Congress every six months. Before the H-H hearings, the Fed never wanted to speak to the American people. The chairman was typically an ineloquent bureaucrat whose name the public hardly knew. Fed governorships were sinecures. The Humphrey-Hawkins hearings started as a way for Congress to open things up, against vigorous resistance. They have since become a national theater of which the chairman is invariably the star. They have given the Federal Reserve a public presence that would have astounded central bankers anywhere in the world a generation ago.
As a result, both monetary policy and the Fed chairmen themselves are of a higher caliber than when I was a boy economist. (Arthur Burns, the first one I had to deal with, was insecure and a bit of a bully.) Federal Reserve governors -- the other members of the board -- are also better, and the Federal Open Market Committee, which decides interest-rate changes, has become a place for serious people. I'd like to build on this progress by putting the FOMC meetings on live TV. (Fed-Span, how about it?)
But even such transparency wouldn't mean that the public would come to think and act just as the Fed chairman might like. First of all, the general public is busy; people do not waste that much time following the economic news. But even if they did, rational workers wouldn't heed the Fed's signal. Everyone is always better off, individually, taking a wage increase than forgoing it, for then the cost of a tight policy is shifted to someone else. There is, in other words, a fatal lack of solidarity in our system.
And do oil companies -- which recently posted record profits on the strength of record prices -- care about the threat of higher interest rates? Of course not. They know that burden will hit elsewhere: on businesses planning investments, on households deciding whether to buy a new house or a new car. What would oil companies fear? Sales from the strategic reserve, mandatory conservation, a windfall profits tax, even (gasp) price ceilings to curb speculation. Not to worry, though, Bush won't do any of that.
Thus, in the face of an oil price shock, raising interest rates to counter inflation doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to do it immediately (as Greenspan has been doing) because that adds to the inflation. It doesn't make sense to do it later, unless you're prepared to put the economy through a recession in order to "wring inflation out of the system." And it doesn't make sense to do it as a signal because everyone who can run the red light will do so.
Of late, oil prices have begun to fall, so this all might seem academic. But oil supply shocks are likely to revisit us with greater and greater frequency. And so Dr. Bernankenstein has a problem. He can unleash his monster, drive up interest rates, and make things worse. Or he can stand down, demonstrating to instant critics that he lacks the courage of his convictions.
How Bernanke manages such dilemmas will probably determine his fate. As a former professor appointed by a failing president, he hasn't got a lot of ready-made mystique. He may feel pressured to implement his pet theory to prove that he is brave and decisive. But that's a mug's game. If you need to prove it, then you aren't. What Bernanke really needs to prove is that he doesn't have anything to prove. And it may be that the key to showing character, spine, and judgment -- all those good things -- will lie in not following through on his ideas. Indeed, the path of true wisdom may require finding a creative excuse to do nothing at all.
James K. Galbraith teaches economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. He previously served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including executive director of the Joint Economic Committee.
Photo: AP/Wide World Photos
