诺奖得主史提格里兹批联准会升息 扼杀经济
诺贝尔经济学奖获得者约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨表示，美国经济需要的是在供给侧进行干预，而不是由美联储来加息，因为这种做法控制不住通胀。
“提高利率并不能解决通胀问题，” 这位哥伦比亚大学教授在瑞士达沃斯世界经济论坛上说，“这不会创造出更多的食物。这种做法只会增加困难，因为大家将无法进行投资。”
美联储几天后就将发布最新的货币政策会议纪要，可能会进一步揭示其日渐激进的紧缩立场，包括本月早些时候加息50个基点时的考虑。斯蒂格利茨认为应该另辟蹊径。
“要做的是在供给侧进行干预，” 他说，“拜登总统试图做的一件事是加大对孩子的照顾，让更多的女性可以进入劳动力市场，从而把受到限制的劳动力供应释放出来。”
这位经济学家认为，无论是在美国还是在全球，食物生产也应该是当务之急。
“我们美国以前是有食物过剩的，我们可以恢复这一点，”他说，“至少努力在全球范围内竭尽所能来增加供应会对解决这个问题有帮助而不是造成萧条。”
他还说，“通过提高利率来扼杀经济，在任何时候都解决不了通胀问题。”
Stiglitz Says Fed Rate Hikes Killing Economy Won't Fix Inflation
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-23/stiglitz-says-us-rate-hikes-killing-economy-won-t-fix-inflation
The US economy needs supply-side interventions rather than interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve that will fail to bring inflation under control, said Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz.
“Raising interest rates is not going to solve the problem of inflation,” the Columbia University professor told Lisa Abramovicz and Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It’s not going to create more food. It’s going to make it more difficult because you aren’t going be able to make the investments.”
Raising interest rates to tame inflation will only cause more pain
Joseph Stiglitz 9 Dec 2022 14.02 GMT
Central banks are set on a path to cause recession – and marginalised people will pay the price
Central banks’ unwavering determination to increase interest rates is truly remarkable. In the name of taming inflation, they have deliberately set themselves on a path to cause a recession – or to worsen it if it comes anyway. Moreover, they openly acknowledge the pain their policies will cause, even if they don’t emphasise that it is the poor and marginalised, not their friends on Wall Street, who will bear the brunt of it. And in the US, this pain will disproportionately befall people of colour.
As a new Roosevelt Institute report that I co-authored shows, any benefits from the extra interest rate-driven reduction in inflation will be minimal, compared with what would have happened anyway. Inflation already appears to be easing. It may be moderating more slowly than optimists hoped a year ago – before Russia’s war in Ukraine – but it is moderating nonetheless, and for the same reasons that optimists had outlined. For example, high auto prices, caused by a shortage of computer chips, would come down as the bottlenecks were resolved. That has been happening, and car inventories have indeed been rising.
Optimists also expected oil prices to decrease, rather than continuing to increase; that, too, is precisely what has happened. In fact, the declining cost of renewables implies that the long-run price of oil will fall even lower than today’s price. It is a shame that we didn’t move to renewables earlier. We would have been much better insulated from the vagaries of fossil fuel prices, and far less vulnerable to the whims of petrostate dictators such as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Saudi Arabia’s own leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known as MBS). We should be thankful that both men failed in their apparent attempt to influence the US 2022 midterm election by sharply cutting oil production in early October.
Is the UK really facing a second winter of discontent?
Yet another reason for optimism has to do with markups – the amount by which prices exceed costs. While markups have risen slowly with the increased monopolisation of the US economy, they have soared since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. As the economy emerges more fully from the pandemic (and, one hopes, from the war) they should decrease, thereby moderating inflation. Yes, wages have been temporarily rising faster than in the pre-pandemic period but that is a good thing. There has been a huge secular increase in inequality, which the recent decrease in workers’ real (inflation-adjusted) wages has only made worse.
The Roosevelt report also dispenses with the argument that today’s inflation is down to excessive pandemic spending, and that bringing it back down requires a long period of high unemployment. Demand-driven inflation occurs when aggregate demand exceeds potential aggregate supply. But that, for the most part, has not been happening. Instead, the pandemic gave rise to numerous sectoral supply constraints and demand shifts that – with adjustment asymmetries – became the primary drivers of price growth.
Consider, for example, that there are fewer Americans today than there were expected to be before the pandemic. Not only did Trump-era Covid-19 policies contribute to the loss of more than a million people in the US (and that is just the official figure) but immigration also declined, owing to new restrictions and a generally less welcoming, more xenophobic environment. The driver of the increase in rents was thus not a large increase in the need for housing but rather the widespread shift to remote work, which changed where people (particularly knowledge workers) wanted to live. As many professionals moved, rents and housing costs increased in some areas and fell in others. But rents where demand increased rose more than those where demand fell decreased; thus, the demand shift contributed to overall inflation.
Well-directed fiscal policies and other, more finely tuned measures have a better chance of taming today’s inflation than do blunt, potentially counterproductive monetary policies. The appropriate response to high food prices, for example, is to reverse a decades-old agricultural price-support policy that pays farmers not to produce, when they should be encouraged to produce more.
Likewise, the appropriate response to increased prices resulting from undue market power is better antitrust enforcement, and the way to respond to poor households’ higher rents is to encourage investment in new housing, whereas higher interest rates do the opposite. If there was a labour shortage (the standard sign of which is increased real wages – the opposite of what we are currently seeing), the response should involve increased provision of childcare, pro-immigration policies, and measures to boost wages and improve working conditions.
After more than a decade of ultra-low interest rates, it makes sense to “normalise” them. But raising interest rates beyond that, in a quixotic attempt to tame inflation rapidly, will not only be painful now; it will leave long-lasting scars, especially on those who are least able to bear the brunt of these ill-conceived policies. By contrast, most of the fiscal and other responses described here would yield long-term social benefits, even if inflation turned out to be more muted than anticipated.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously said: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Just because the US Federal Reserve has a hammer, it shouldn’t go around smashing the economy.
Joseph E Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and a former chief economist of the World Bank.
