August 31, 2015
The NYT had an interesting piece noting criticisms from the left and right directed at the Federal Reserve Board over its monetary policy decisions. It concludes with a comment from Princeton University professor and former Fed vice-chair Alan Blinder, saying that the Fed cannot do much to either reduce inequality or government indebtedness.
This is not accurate. From February of 1994 to March of 1995, the Fed made a decision to raise its short-term interest rate from 3.0 percent to 6.0 percent. This was done to slow the economy and the rate of job creation. This was due to the fact the unemployment rate was falling into or below the level that the Fed models showed were consistent with stable inflation. In these models, if the unemployment rate was allowed to fall much below 6.0 percent, the inflation rate would begin to accelerate, leading to a problem of spiraling inflation.
In the summer of 1995, after the economy had slowed, the Fed chair Alan Greenspan pushed the Fed to lower interest rates even though the unemployment was below most estimates of full employment. He insisted that the Fed allow the unemployment continue to fall over the next four years even as it crossed 5.0 percent and eventually 4.0 percent in 1999 and 2000. This period of low unemployment was the only time in the last 40 years in which workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution saw sustained growth in real wages.
This is how Fed policy can affect inequality. If the Fed had not been pushed by Greenspan, who is not an orthodox economist, it likely would have raised interest rates during this period and prevented the low unemployment and real wage growth of this period.
It is also worth noting that the Fed’s policy was also the basis for the budget surpluses at the end of the decade. In 1996, after all the Clinton-Gingrich tax increases and spending had been passed into law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected a deficit for 2000 of close to $250 billion (2.5 percent of GDP). The fact that we had a surplus of roughly the same amount was not due to changes in budget policy, but rather the fact that we had an unemployment rate of 4.0 percent rather than the 6.0 percent projected by CBO. (The tax from capital gains created by the stock bubble also helped.)
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