Interest rates definitely to rise - sometime, maybe

The geniuses in the financial markets – and they must be geniuses because they’re paid far more than we are – think next year will be an absolute ripper. Workers will be getting their first decent pay rise in six years or more. Say, 3 to 4 per cent. Whoopee. Gee, thanks guys.

Find that hard to believe? So do I. It’s the logical implication of the bets they’re making that the Reserve Bank will begin lifting its official interest rate – which has been at almost zero for a year – by the middle of next year and be up to 1 or 1.25 per cent by the end of next year.

For that to happen, the underlying or core rate of inflation, which has been below the bottom of the Reserve’s 2 to 3 per cent target for years and only just a few weeks ago lifted its head to 2.1 per cent, would need to have shot up close to 3 per cent.

And, because the inflation rate doesn’t rise sustainably unless it’s being driven up by rising wages, an inflation rate approaching 3 per cent couldn’t happen without annual pay rises averaging 3 to 4 per cent.

Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has spelt out this relationship between inflation, wages and interest rates almost every time he’s opened his mouth since even before the arrival of the pandemic. He did so again twice last Tuesday and once on Friday.

So pay rises of unheard-of size are the logical implication of the money market’s bets that the Reserve is about to become so desperately worried about soaring wages that it will have raised the official interest rate four or five times in the next 12 months.

Trouble is, I doubt the financial market players are thinking logically. I doubt they’ve thought it through to the extent I just described. The economists who work in the financial markets are well-educated, but this episode makes me wonder whether the guys laying bets in the dealing room even have wages in their mental model of what drives inflation and interest rates.

By the way, I’m not just being disparaging in describing the financial markets as a casino. As Professor John Kay explained in his book Other People’s Money, the buying and selling of currencies, bonds and other real and derivative securities each day in the world’s financial market dwarfs the number of transactions needed by real businesses to conduct their ordinary affairs.

Indeed, Kay told me those genuinely necessary transactions could be put through in about a quarter of an hour a week. So, what are all the remaining transactions? They’re dealers using their bank’s money to trade with dealers from other banks in the hope of making a quick million or two and a fat bonus at the end of the year.

I’m sure these professional gamblers are better at playing poker than you or I would be, but they aren’t trained economists, and they don’t think like economists. Certainly, not like central bank governors.

Because Wall Street has the greatest single influence over what happens in the global financial markets, these guys know more about what’s happening – and likely to happen – in the American economy than their own.

They also have a huge superficial knowledge of what’s been happening in lots of economies in the past few weeks. They know inflation has shot up in the US, Britain and a few other countries, wages have increased somewhat in the US and a few other places, and some minor central banks have started raising their official interest rates.

I think these guys’ mental model of what’s driving interest rates is no more profound than this: prices and wages are rising in the US and other places, rates are already rising around the world, so pretty soon rates will be rising here.

Lowe, the man with his hand on the lever, says he still doesn’t think a rate rise will be needed until 2024, but last week he admitted things could turn out stronger than he expects and make a rise necessary in 2023.

There you are. He’s as good as admitted he’ll have no choice but to start raising rates in a few months’ time. Anyway, that’s what we’re betting on. If we turn out to be wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time, and we won’t lose our jobs. We’ll just lay new bets and keep doing it until we’re right.

Which they will be – one day. Since rates can’t go lower it’s a cert that the next move will be up. Right now, when they’ll be going up is known only to God. In the absence of inside intel, I’d rather put my money on Lowe than on those geniuses.

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Beware of pedlars of supply-side solutions to home affordability

One thing you can be sure of is that if house prices are soaring, governments will be holding inquiries into it. Unfortunately, the other thing you can be sure of is that nothing will come of those inquiries.

Why? Because their purpose is to express the government’s deep concern about the worsening affordability of homeownership – its heart-felt sympathy for young people struggling to buy their first home – not to tackle the problem.

Why? Because policy decisions made by governments – federal and state – over many years have rigged the housing market in favour of people who already own their homes and against those who’d like to own.

Why? Because the number of voting homeowners far exceeds the number of voting would-be homeowners. The established homeowners – and the industries that benefit from the rigged market, such as property developers and real estate agents – get shirty if they think their privileges are threatened.

Labor summoned its courage and promised to act against negative gearing and the deep discount of capital gains tax in the 2016 and 2019 federal elections but, since its shock defeat in 2019, its courage has deserted it.

Speaking of housing inquiries, as we speak Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has a parliamentary committee inquiring into “housing affordability and supply”. As its terms of reference make clear, it’s not actually about housing affordability, but really about blaming rocketing house prices on inadequate supply rather than excessive demand.

Why? Because, with a federal election fast approaching, its real motivation is to shift the blame for increasingly unaffordable house prices away from the feds and on to the states. Whereas most of the policies promoting demand for homeownership are under the influence of the federal government, most of the policies affecting the adequacy of the supply of homes are influenced by the state governments and their creature, local government.

When I wrote about the causes of rocketing house prices last week, I knew I was leaving myself open to attack because I focused solely on factors adding to demand and didn’t get to supply factors before I ran out of space.

True, no analysis of change in any market price is adequate if it doesn’t examine both sides of the market. So let me make amends.

In simple economic theory, if the price of some item rises, the reason should be that demand has outstripped supply. Let supply catch up and the price should return to where it was. If the demand for homes rises by 100, build 100 more homes and the price should be unchanged.

But such thinking is grossly oversimplified – especially when applied to something as complex as the housing market. For a start, the simple model is designed to analyse markets for “commodities” – simple consumer goods or services you buy and soon eat or use up.

Homes, however, are assets that last for decades and have a resale value. Most of that value resides in the land on which the home is built, and the land goes on forever.

This means a home is both a consumption good – it provides its owner or tenant with somewhere to live – and an investment good, which should at least hold its value over time and probably increase in value.

As the Reserve Bank’s submission to the latest inquiry has pointed out, the growth in the number of homes has pretty much kept up with population growth in recent decades, meaning a shortage of places to live can’t explain rising house prices.

In any case, the price of buying a home is an unreliable guide to the price of finding somewhere to live since there are two reasons for buying a home: as a place to live and as an investment (a good place to park your wealth).

The better guide to the cost of finding somewhere to live comes not from the price of houses and units but from the price of renting. And the figures show that (with the possible exception of Sydney), the cost of renting in capital cities has risen only a little faster than other consumer prices.

This fits with our earlier finding that the number of homes has kept pace with population growth. And it leaves little support for the widely aired claims of people from conservative think tanks that house prices have risen because state and local government planning and zoning regulations are limiting the release of land for housing development or the growth of medium and high-density housing.

This argument has been debunked by Dr Cameron Murray of the University of Sydney. Being based on mere modelling, it fails to take account of the empirical fact that zoning regulations have been eased in recent years, specifically to ensure that home building keeps up with population growth.

This has happened over many people’s objections to the growth in high-density housing. But, unless we want our capital cities to keep sprawling outward forever, more high-rise housing is an inevitable consequence of business’s demand for – and almost every economist’s support for – rapid population growth.

All this suggests it’s the strong demand for home ownership, not any inadequacy in the supply of homes that’s driving prices up so rapidly. But what, and why? I think house prices are rising strongly because federal government decisions have made housing more attractive as an investment.

They’ve made home ownership more favourably taxed than other forms of investment, such as shares, art and antiques, or fixed-interest investments. This has always been true, but it’s become more so, first, with the Hawke government’s introduction of a capital gains tax in 1985, while exempting the family home.

But the biggest change came with the Howard government’s move in 1999 from taxing only real capital gains to taxing the full nominal gain but at only half your marginal tax rate. The popularity of negatively geared property investment took off from that time.

Ask yourself this: if the number of homes is pretty much keeping up with growth in the number of households, what happens when some homeowners decide they’d like to own more than one home, maybe many more? They use their superior borrowing-power to outbid the other home owners, existing and would-be.

The supply of land for housing is limited, but not fixed. That’s because cities can sprawl, or you can pack more households onto to the same bit of land by building up. But both solutions add to costs.

The simple demand-versus-supply model assumes the “commodity” in question is “homogeneous” – all the same. But with houses and units, it would be closer to the truth to say every home is different. Even two houses of the same design are different if they’re in different suburbs.

And some homes are in prime positions – on the harbour, near the beach, closer to town. The cheaper it becomes to borrow, the more people will bid prices higher to get the fabulous place they want.

The more governments use high immigration to increase the size of cities, the more competition there is to buy a detached house, and the more people will pay to get a place that’s close to the CBD.

Ever-rising house prices is a demand story more than a supply story.

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Dearer houses: another problem we’re ‘learning to live with’

The poor relation in all our worries – about the pandemic, the economy, climate change – has been housing affordability. While everything else in the economy has been weak, house prices have been rocketing.

I can tell you why they have, and I can say with confidence that house prices can’t keep rising at double-digit rates forever. But I can’t assure you we’ll ever get house prices to rise no faster than we find easy to afford, nor that we’ll ever manage to reverse the steady decline in the proportion of households owning their home.

When I started in this business in 1974, it was at a record 70 per cent. Today it’s down to 65.5 per cent – it’s lowest since 1954 – and almost certain to keep going lower without radical change.

It’s always possible that it’s all a great bubble that one day bursts, bringing house prices crashing down. That, amid all the pain and destruction – all the families being evicted from homes the mortgage payments on which they could no longer afford – the consolation for others would be much more affordable prices.

For the housing market to one day go from boom to bust is almost certain. It’s happened plenty of times before. It’s a myth that house prices always go up and never down.

But in my experience, they’ve never fallen far, nor for very long. They take a breather for a couple of years before resuming their upward march at a more sedate pace. Until the next boom.

Why am I so confident that, over any period longer than a decade, house prices will be higher? I could say it’s because Australians are obsessed by the desire to own their home, and then gradually turn it into their mansion. But Aussies aren’t different to people in other rich countries.

So I’ll just say housing – along with education, healthcare and other things – is a “superior good”. As our incomes rise over time, we spend an increasing proportion of them on our housing.

This is mainly why house prices keep rising. One consequence of the rise of the two-income family was that a higher proportion of their joint income went on housing. What we hope we’d achieve by this was a better house – bigger, better located or better appointed.

It’s true that newly built houses are bigger and better than they used to be, and established houses are always being remodelled and extended. But when lots of people are trying to get a better place at the same time, a lot of the extra borrowing and spending just bids up the price.

It’s much the same story with the fall in interest rates. From their peak of 17.5 per cent in 1989, mortgage rates are now down to about 3 per cent.

Why? Primarily because the inflation rate’s fallen from 9 per cent to less than 2 per cent, but also because the advanced countries have never got their economies working properly since the global financial crisis, and have been using ever-lower interest rates to get things moving.

(Note that, unlike normal people, economists use the word “inflation” to refer only to the prices of ordinary goods and services, never to the prices of assets such as houses.)

The point is, every time interest rates have fallen a bit over the past 30 years people have used the opportunity to borrow more in an effort to buy a first home or move to a better one. Again, when too many people do this at the same time, house prices are bid even higher.

The main reason house prices have soared during the pandemic is that the Reserve Bank has acted to protect the economy by cutting its official interest rate virtually to zero, and we’ve responded the way we always do to lower rates.

So, much of the seeming benefit of lower interest rates ends up as higher house prices – to the benefit of existing home owners and the expense of young aspiring first-home buyers.

The good news for first-home buyers is that, with rates having hit the bottom, this is the last time house prices will soar simply because rates have been cut. So double-digit rises in house prices can’t last.

The bad news for would-be and recent actual first-home buyers – which won’t come for a couple of years yet – is that the next move in rates can only be up.

The rules of the home-ownership game are rigged in favour of existing home owners. That’s because they far outnumber aspiring home owners. And they’re not willing to give up their tax and other privileges to help the younger generation.

Except, of course, their own kids. The Bank of Mum and Dad has played a big part in making seemingly unaffordable house prices able to be afforded – by some.

The ever-rising proportion of Australians who’ll never own their homes are mainly those who failed to pick the right parents. Want proof of the widening gap between the rich and the rest? Look no further than home ownership.

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Morrison's surprise investment in a better class of economic debate

When he was appointed chair of the Productivity Commission, Michael Brennan looked to be just another political appointment by a government that disrespected the public service and was busily installing its own men – and I do mean men – to plum jobs and key positions.

Three years later it’s clear that, whatever Scott Morrison’s motives in insisting he be appointed, Brennan is his own man, with his own inquiring and “well-furnished” mind. His disposition is conservative and he’s expert in the neo-classical orthodoxy of economics.

He’s what Treasury-types used to call an “economic rationalist”. But Brennan is no narrow-minded dogmatist who, having discovered the truth, sees no need to look further. He’s learnt from behavioural economics and is interested even in “evolutionary economics”.

Brennan’s appointment to head the Productivity Commission coincided with the early departure of John Fraser as secretary to the Treasury and then-treasurer Morrison’s decision to replace Fraser with the chief of staff in his own office, Philip Gaetjens.

Fraser, you recall, had been hand-picked for Treasury secretary by Tony Abbott, after his first act as prime minister had been to sack the existing secretary, Dr Martin Parkinson, and several other top econocrats.

The fact that Brennan had previously worked for Liberal ministers, federal and state, and had once run for Liberal preselection, framed his appointment as political. What this misses, however, is that Brennan is his father’s son.

Geoff Brennan, an economics professor at the Australian National University, won an international reputation for his contribution to the theory of public choice. All professors have sharp minds; Brennan’s is sharper than most.

In all its previous incarnations, going back to the pre-Whitlam Tariff Board, the Productivity Commission has been a bastion of economic orthodoxy. Its influence on elite thinking played a big part in the transformation of the economy under Hawke and Keating.

It’s usually been led by neo-classical, rationalist warriors. Brennan fits the bill, but he’s far more open-minded, widely read and persuasive than his predecessors.

In a speech last week, Brennan noted that the commission will soon release research on working from home: what it might mean for cities, for our work health and safety regime, the workplace relations system; what it might mean for productivity.

“We analyse these things from an economic perspective,” he explained, “and our starting point is a fairly conventional neo-classical framework.

“The conventional economic framework is useful because it helps us think through the forces acting on wages, rents, productivity and – importantly – overall wellbeing. But I do think that to really understand the path of digital technology and its economic impact you really need to combine those traditional neo-classical insights with the insights gleaned from a more evolutionary approach.”

Eh? What?

“The evolutionary approach to economics – of which [Professor] Jason Potts [of RMIT University] is a leading practitioner – eschews that narrow profit maximising assumption in favour of the more realistic view that firms face uncertainty – both about the state of things and the future – and do their best to navigate their way through the fog.

“The evolutionary approach stresses the importance of variety – the idea that different firms make different bets based on their subjective hypotheses about what will work; with these experiments submitted to the test of the market and society.

“It stresses that variety can foster novelty. It is not an aberration, but that it’s actually fundamentally important – particularly in the early stages of a new technology.”

None of Brennan’s predecessors at the commission would ever have said anything like that. Recognise that the neo-classical model is just one way of trying to understand how the economy works, and that there are other, quite different ways of analysing economic activity that could add to our understanding of how it ticks? Never.

In an earlier speech, Brennan gave a warning about the relaxed approach of some to the massive build up in deficit and debt since the pandemic. All his predecessors would have shared that concern. But they would never have expressed the warning in such a well-reasoned way.

The new conventional wisdom among economists (to which I subscribe) is that high public debt doesn’t necessarily have to be paid back. It will decline in relative terms – relative to the size of the economy, gross domestic product – so long as nominal GDP grows at a faster rate than the rate of interest on the public debt – and, of course, so long as you’re not adding to the debt.

Brennan’s warning: “The risk in the public debate is that this insight – that GDP growth tends to exceed interest rates – is taken to imply something altogether different and much bigger: that debt and deficit no longer matter at all.

“That we can afford the next and the next ‘one-off’ rise in debt on the grounds that growth rates will continue to outpace bond yields . . .”

Brennan outlines various reasons for not being seduced by this life-was-meant-to-easy view, but focuses on the micro-economic case for caution. He notes, as economists do, that hidden behind the amounts of mere money being spent is the use of “real resources” in the economy. We can print as much money as we want, but what can’t be produced from thin air are the land and raw materials, capital equipment and labour that money is used to buy.

And there are physical limits on the extent to which real resources – as opposed to money – can be borrowed from the future. Real resources bought by the government are no longer available to be used by business for investment and innovation.

True. Good point. Surprise, surprise there’s no free lunch. But this tells me we should be trying a lot harder to ensure the money governments spend isn’t spent wastefully. We should spend on things governments are prepared to ask taxpayers to pay for.

What doesn’t follow is neo-classical economics’ implicit assumption that spending decisions made by the private sector are always superior to the things governments spend on.

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Afterpay tells us we're suckers for the illusion of 'free'

There’s more to be learnt - sorry, there are more “learnings” – from the phenomenal success of Aussie “fintech” start-up Afterpay before it drifts off into corporate history. Learnings about human nature, public policy and what switched-on economists call “market design”.

Economists need to do more thinking about the way markets are – and should be – designed. The sub-discipline of market design recognises that, increasingly in the real world – especially the digital world – markets don’t work in the simple, transparent, what-you-pay-is-what-you-get way assumed by economics textbooks.

This means there’s more scope for “market failure” – market forces not delivering the benefits that economic theory promises they will.

Afterpay’s first “learning” is that, far from being “rational” – carefully calculating – consumers (and taxpayers) are hugely attracted by the illusion that something is free. Afterpay’s success seems explained by Millennials being greatly attracted by its promise to let them BNPL - buy now, pay later - without charging any interest.

It seems young people are turning away from credit cards and their very high interest rates in favour of BNPL. When you think about it, however, you see there isn’t much difference between a credit card and an Afterpay BNPL interest-free loan.

A standard credit card is also an interest-free BNPL loan provided you pay it off at the end of the month, in full and on the dot. Fail to manage that, however, and you soon see how high credit card interest rates are.

(Warning to all lawyers and judges: apparently, your legal learning robs you of the ability to understand the argument that follows. To a lawyer, any payment to a lender can’t be a payment of interest unless it’s wearing a label that says “interest” and is expressed as a percentage of the amount lent. You’d all make good Millennials.)

With an Afterpay BNPL loan, it’s only interest-free if you make four equal fortnightly repayments on time. If you’re late with a repayment, you’re charged a $10 late fee. And if you’re more than a week late you’re charged another $7.

The usurious nature of these charges is disguised by their small absolute size (but the amount borrowed is also pretty small) and by our practice of expressing interest rates on an annual basis (this loan is only for eight weeks, not 52).

But that’s not all. As Milton Friedman didn’t win his Nobel prize for discovering, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the borrower using either a credit card or BNPL manages to repay their loan without incurring any penalty, the lender still has to receive the equivalent of an interest payment to make the transaction worth funding.

In the case of both credit cards and Afterpay loans, this is achieved by a “merchant fee” paid by the retailer that made the sale. The fee is a percentage of the amount lent although, in the case of Afterpay, it’s a huge 4 to 6 per cent plus a flat 30c. (My guess is the 30c is there to fool lawyers into thinking the fee couldn’t possibly be payment of interest).

Whatever the reason, Afterpay has managed to convince the lawyers that, since BNPL obviously has nothing to do with borrowing and lending, it cannot be subject to the Credit Act, meaning Afterpay is not subject to the “responsible lending obligation” and so escapes the expensive obligation to do credit checks and verify the borrower’s ability to repay the debt. (We’re assured, however, that Afterpay and its many imitators are subjecting themselves to a voluntary code of conduct.)

This raises another “learning” right there. Almost invariably, the many market disrupters produced by the digital revolution – including Uber and Airbnb – amount to the combination of a genuine, productivity-enhancing innovation (something every economist wants to encourage) and a trumped-up claim that, because we’re so new and different, none of the regulation that shackles the existing industry applies to us.

“Their workers are employees, ours aren’t. The firms we’re disrupting have to provide employee super contributions, annual and sick leave, and workers compensation insurance, as well as comply with health and safety requirements, but we don’t.”

This, of course, is why we’re developing a two-class workforce, where those unfortunate enough to be able to find work only in the “gig economy” have badly paid, precarious employment with bad conditions and few rights.

The thought that this regression to feudal conditions for some should be allowed to persist in an economy as rich as ours is utterly repugnant. And to respond to it by introducing a universal basic income is an admission of defeat.

But before we leave Afterpay, there’s another learning. Using merchant fees to hide the interest cost of BNPL schemes, whether credit cards or Afterpay-style, involves an arrangement that’s both inefficient and unfair. It encourages retailers to recover the effective interest cost by raising their prices to all their customers, thus obliging those who pay cash or with a debit card to subsidise those who choose to BNPL.

Afterpay prohibits retailers from recouping the cost by asking those who choose BNPL to pay a surcharge. Just as Visa and Mastercard used to prohibit retailers from imposing a surcharge on those who choose to pay by credit card.

For obvious reasons, the promoters of supposedly interest-free loans want the true cost of this free lunch to remain hidden. The Reserve Bank – which has oversight of payment system regulation – laboured for years to get the prohibition on credit-card surcharges outlawed, and finally succeeded.

These days, credit-card surcharges have become common. My guess is that these surcharges, not just the advent of Afterpay and its imitators, help explain the big shift from credit to debit cards. This is just what the Reserve wanted to see.

But it’s utterly inconsistent for the authorities to stop the banks from banning surcharges while allowing Afterpay to ban them. Maybe they’re applying some kind of infant-industry argument. Let them get established, then rope them into the regulatory fold.

Final learning: look around and you find our human susceptibility to the illusion of “free” in lots of places. Starting close to home, free-to-air television and – until Google and Facebook stole our business model – almost-free newspapers and websites were so much a part of the furniture that it was easy to forget that the cost of all the advertising they carried was buried in the cost of most of the things we buy.

The internet still carries a host of free sites with interesting and useful information, even if the legacy newspaper companies have finally moved to making most of their money via subscriptions.

Then there are Google and Facebook, for whom the market-design people have invented a new bit of jargon. They are “multi-sided platforms” whose ostensibly free services are paid for by selling to advertisers the myriad information the platforms have gathered about the preferences, actions and locality of their users.

But our love of the supposedly free – our preference for having the true cost of things hidden from our sight – applies just as much to us as taxpayers. It took the Liberals a long time to realise how much voters loved Medicare, and didn’t want it fiddled with. Why the great love? Bulk billing. The way it makes visits to GPs and hospitals appear free.

Despite all their speeches on the evils of higher taxes, the Libs (like Labor) have never needed to be told of the one tax increase we don’t mind because we don’t see it: bracket creep. When it comes to kidding ourselves, we’re past masters.

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If Afterpay's interest-free loans sound too good to be true . . .

If you’ll forgive a bean-counter’s lament, it’s a pity our success at the Olympics overshadowed our much rarer, more valuable, commercial success, when two young Aussie entrepreneurs sold their business, Afterpay, to the American financial technology giant, Square, owned by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, for $39 billion – making it our biggest-ever company takeover. Oh the honour, the glory, the recognition for poor little Australia!

Yes, I am laying it on a bit thick. It’s certainly a big deal but, as my mum used to say, I hae ma doots about how pleased we should be to see Afterpay and its ilk inflicted on our own young people, let alone young people around the world.

But welcome to the mysterious world of “fintech” – the application of the internet and digital technology to the formerly boring world of paying for things, borrowing money and moving it around.

We’re witnessing the migration to online retailing, we’ve seen Uber shake up – or shake down – the taxi industry, seen Airbnb do over the hotel industry, seen the digital disruption of the media moguls, and now it’s the banks’ turn in the firing line.

All these innovations have taken off because, whatever they’ve done to the careers and livelihoods of people working in the affected industries, they’ve brought benefits – often just greater convenience – that consumers find attractive.

The global tech behemoths – particularly Apple, with its Apple Pay – are moving in on the banks’ territory, while a host of start-up businesses are thinking of new ways to provide a financial service the banks don’t. The big banks are unlikely to take this lying down, but so far they haven’t done much.

This is where Afterpay comes in. In 2014, Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen came up with a new way to BNPL – buy now, pay later; get with it – without having to pay interest. You buy something from a retailer – usually for a modest sum, say $1000 or less – then pay off the purchase price in four equal fortnightly instalments.

That’s it. No more to pay. Unlike the old practice of buying things on lay-by, with BNPL you get your hands on the purchase at the beginning, not the end.

The scheme has proved really popular with people under the age of 30 – who seem to have an aversion to using credit cards and the high interest rates that go with them. So you don’t just have one BNPL loan, you probably have several.

The idea’s been so popular that Afterpay’s had a number of competitors spring up, each with slightly different repayment rules. At first it was assumed Afterpay would be hit by last year’s lockdown but, but with everyone stuck at home and buying things online, its business has exploded.

You might imagine it’s making huge profits – especially considering what the Americans are prepared to pay for it – but that’s often not the way success works in the digital startup space, where the emphasis is on funding rapid expansion. Afterpay has yet to declare a profit – or a dividend. But don’t look at the profit, feel the rocketing share price.

By now, however, I trust your bulldust detector is flashing. They lend you money, but they don’t charge interest? There must be a catch. Two, in fact. The first is that Afterpay charges the retailer a “merchant fee” of 4 to 6 per cent of the value of the transaction, plus 30c.

So, it’s the retailer that pays the interest – in the first instance, anyway. And when you remember we think in terms of annual interest rates, 4 to 6 per cent on a loan for just eight weeks is a pretty steep rate.

How does the retailer cover the cost of the “merchant fee”? By raising the prices it charges – to the extent that competition allows. This could well mean customers who don’t use Afterpay help cover the costs of those who do.

But the second way Afterpay recoups the equivalent of interest is by charging a flat $10 fee for a late fortnightly payment. If the payment is still outstanding after a week, a further $7 is charged. On a $150 fortnightly repayment, $10 would be a quite hefty penalty interest rate.

But whereas all this looks and smells like interest payments to a bean-counter like me, it doesn’t to a lawyer. So the BNPL game isn’t subject to the Credit Act that regulates other lenders, including its responsible lending obligation, which requires the lender to perform credit checks and verify a customer’s income and ability to repay.

Someone who borrowed no more than they could afford to repay would come to no harm. But not all of us are so self-controlled and worldly-wise. Especially when we’re young.

I suspect the authorities are pleased to see the fintechs putting our hugely profitable banks under competitive pressure, and will leave it a while before they bring the innovators into the regulated fold. Until then, some poor people may learn financial literacy the hard way.

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Don't believe the boys who cry 'interest rates to rise'

Heard the talk that a rise in interest rates is getting closer? So’s Christmas. Here’s my advice: the greatest likelihood is that a rise is still years away. But between now and then you’ll keep hearing stories that it’s on the way. Ignore them.

Why? Because though nature abhors a vacuum, it doesn’t do so as much as the financial markets and the financial media do. They form an unholy alliance because both make their living speculating about changes in interest rates.

They cannot abide a situation where rates don’t change for years on end. So they keep trying to convince themselves something’s about to happen. The financial markets jump at shadows and, whenever they do, the media breathlessly report this worrying development.

The plain truth is, no one knows what the future holds – not even me. But all of us crave to know what’s coming, and keep searching for the person who may be able to tell us. The traders in the financial markets – who do infinitely more buying and selling of securities and currencies than is required to meet the needs of their business customers – earn a well-buttered crust by betting with each other on what’s coming down the pipe.

The media make their living partly by catering to their customers’ unquenchable curiosity about the future. Any interesting opinion will do, though they know that bad news sells better than good. A rise in rates would be bad news for people with mortgages, but good news for people living on their savings in retirement. But the people who choose what news we’re told about can’t imagine they’ll be old themselves one day.

Although no one but God knows for certain what will happen to interest rates, you’d think the person likely to be best informed on the subject is the person with most influence over interest rates in Australia, the boss of our central bank, Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe.

For more than a year, Lowe has kept telling us – and the markets – that the Reserve is “unlikely” to raise the official interest rate “until 2024 at the earliest”. But there was much excitement last week when he changed this to saying the Reserve’s “central scenario” is that a rise won’t be needed “before 2024″ – that is, not for another two and a half to three years.

What this means is that, whereas it couldn’t see any likelihood a rise would be needed until 2025, it can now see a “range of plausible scenarios” where “further positive surprises” could make a rise appropriate some time during 2024.

The further surprises would mean that annual growth in wages exceed 3 per cent earlier that in the Reserve’s “central scenario”. Although its target is annual inflation of 2 to 3 per cent, and its statutory duty is to achieve full employment (something it now sees as necessary to get inflation back up into the target zone), wage growth of 3 per cent-plus is a key indicator because “history teaches that sustained [my emphasis] changes to the inflation rate are accompanied by sustained [ditto] changes in growth in labour costs”.

Our annual rate of wage growth hasn’t exceeded 3 per cent since March 2013 – more than eight years ago, long before the pandemic – so you see why the Reserve’s “central scenario” is that getting back to it is likely to take several years yet.

For much of this year, however, the financial markets have thought they knew better that the Reserve governor. And nothing he said last week persuaded them he might know more about his likely decisions than they did.

There was little change in futures market prices showing they expect a rate rise in a year’s time – July 2022 – and another in the first half of 2023.

Why do the markets think they know better? Well, because the world’s national financial markets are now so highly integrated, traders probably spend more time thinking about the global market leader, the US economy and Wall Street, than they do about our economy. And they’re always tempted to follow a simple decision rule: whatever the US Federal Reserve is doing, we’ll be doing soon enough.

They may be right in believing rising inflation pressures in the US will lead the Fed to start raising interest rates sooner than sometime in 2024 at the earliest. But what they miss is the big differences between our circumstances and the Yanks’ when it comes to prices and wages.

None of the advanced economies were roaring ahead before the arrival of the pandemic, but the US was travelling a lot faster than we were. So we have a lot more ground to make up than they do. Although most advanced economies have long had inflation rates below their central banks’ target range, ours has been a lot further below than the Americans’.

That’s probably because, over recent years, their market for labour has been a lot “tighter” than ours. Their rate of wage growth has been much less weak than ours has.

A big reason for this is that, in our labour market, the increased demand for workers has been more closely matched by an increase in the supply of workers, whereas theirs hasn’t been. Our rate of working-age people already participating in the labour force has risen to near-record highs, whereas theirs has been much lower.

A lot of the increase in our supply of labour has come from our relatively higher levels of immigration. This has ceased to be true since we closed our borders – which does a lot to explain why employment and unemployment have bounced back to their pre-pandemic levels much earlier than we were expecting – so one of Lowe’s uncertainties is how long this strange form of stimulus will last.

The American financial markets began worrying about the risk of rising inflation earlier this year. This is partly because President Biden has been applying huge amounts of budgetary stimulus, and because of rising commodity prices and reports of shortages of the supply of semiconductors and other things, caused by the pandemic’s disruption.

By contrast, our government is busy ending its big stimulus programs. And supply shortages are temporary. Increases in prices don’t become a lasting increase in the rate of inflation unless they lead to higher wages. That’s what Lowe means when he stresses that he won’t be putting up interest rates until enough time has passed to convince him the increases in inflation and wages are “sustained”.

The final thing to remember is that one reason the financial markets are so quick to jump to conclusions about what lies ahead is that, because they lay new bets every day, they know they can jump to a different conclusion in a few weeks’ time. To them, it’s all part of the fun of being a professional gambler.

If you actually enjoy worrying that interest rates may rise – all the thrills and spills along the way – then be the media’s guest. But if you have better things to do and just want a credible view about the future that doesn’t change any more often than it has to, feel free to ignore the markets’ fun and games.

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Treasury boss confident big government debt is manageable

Whether they realise it or not – probably not – the people up in arms about the size of the federal public debt and criticising Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg for not doing more to get it down in last week’s budget are saying they should have made the same error the major economies made early in their recovery from the Great Recession.

If you’ve heard Frydenberg saying he won’t “pivot to austerity policies”, you’ve heard him vowing not to make the mistake the Americans, and particularly the Brits and Europeans, made in 2010.

After they’d borrowed heavily in response to the global financial crisis, their recoveries had hardly begun before they looked back at their mountainous debt and panicked, slashing government spending and whacking up taxes.

This policy of “austerity”, as critics dubbed it, proved disastrous. It stunted their recoveries and meant they didn’t reduce their deficits and debts much at all.

This is why, to prevent the budget’s support for the still-recovering private sector falling precipitately over the coming four financial years to June 2025, Morrison and Frydenberg decided to use most, but not all, of an unexpected improvement in forecast budget deficits to increase spending and cut taxes.

Even so, the net debt in June 2024 is now estimated to be $46 billion lower than expected in last October’s budget, as independent economist Saul Eslake has pointed out.

In a speech to the Australian Business Economists this week, Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy defended the government’s two-phase economic strategy.

According to the budget papers, phase one is to promote economic growth through “discretionary fiscal [budgetary] policy and the operation of [the budget’s] automatic stabilisers” so as to “ensure a strong and sustained recovery to drive down the unemployment rate”.

We will remain in the first phase of the strategy “until the recovery is secured” and growth has driven unemployment “down to pre-pandemic levels or lower”.

“Only once the economic recovery is secured will the government transition towards [phase two and] the medium-term objective of stabilising and then reducing debt as a share of gross domestic product,” the budget papers say.

But some economists – the most well-credentialled of whom is former Treasury secretary Dr Ken Henry – are concerned this willingness to live with unusually high levels of deficit and debt for many years, and without mention of any effort to return the budget to surplus – which would reduce the debt in dollar terms, not just relative to GDP - is complacent and risky.

But, with one proviso, Kennedy argues strongly that the presently projected paths of our budget deficit, our debt and the interest bill on the debt aren’t particularly risky.

When I get to that proviso you’ll see that Kennedy and his old boss aren’t so far apart. And remember this: Henry is now free to give the government advice in public, whereas the Westminster system requires Kennedy to give all his frank advice in private, not in speeches to economists.

Starting with the budget deficit, Kennedy says it grew hugely in 2020, partly because the lockdown caused tax collections to collapse and the number of people getting the dole to leap (this being the operation of the budget’s “automatic stabilisers”), but also because of the unprecedented degree of “emergency support” provided to businesses and workers.

The deficit’s expected to peak at $161 billion (equivalent to 7.8 per cent of GDP) in the financial year soon to end, then fall to $57 billion (2.4 per cent of GDP) in 2024-25. This “relatively quick” fall happens mainly because all the emergency support was temporary.

“At this stage, [a hint that policies could change, and probably will] the deficit is expected to persist through the medium term,” Kennedy says, by which he means that, seven years later in 2031-32 (the “medium term”), the projected deficit is still 1.3 per cent.

Budget statement 3 (page 100) shows that’s about the projected size of the“structural” budget deficit – the deficit that’s left after taking account of the cyclical factors affecting the budget – by then.

Kennedy explains this as representing the government’s structural (lasting) increases in spending on what it calls “essential services” – particularly aged care, disability care and the tiny permanent increase in the rate of the dole – in this year’s budget.

Such a structural deficit isn’t huge, but its existence is a tacit admission that, if government spending isn’t going to be cut, taxes should be increased.

Turning to the projected path of the net debt, Kennedy says the budget projections suggest the government is on track to stabilise and begin reducing the debt as a share of GDP in the medium term (the next 10 years), given the present economic outlook “and policy settings” (hint, hint).

The net debt is expected to be 34 per cent of GDP at June 2022, rising to almost 41 per cent at June 2025, before improving to 37 per cent at June 2032. (Eslake reminds us all this is less than half the average for the advanced economies.)

Finally, “debt servicing costs” - fancy talk for the interest payments on the debt. As a proportion of GDP – that is, comparing the interest payments with the size of the nation’s income – net interest payments are projected to “remain low by historical standards at around 1 per cent over the medium term”.

Two eye-opening graphs in Eslake’s first-rate budget analysis show 1 per cent is much lower than we were paying throughout the last quarter of the 20th century (in the late 1980s it was above 2.5 per cent). And, in inflation-adjusted dollars per head of population, it’s much lower than we were paying in both the late ’80s and the late ’90s.

Responding to Henry’s concerns, Kennedy says “there remains fiscal space [room] to respond again with fiscal policy if the need arose”. But here’s the proviso Kennedy adds: “there will come a time where it is prudent to accelerate the rebuilding of our fiscal buffers”.

That’s as frank as Treasury secretaries get in public.

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QE is a lobster pot: easy get it, hard to get out unscathed

Since the global financial crisis and more so since the coronacession, the normal way things work in financial markets has been turned on its head. Standard monetary policy (the manipulation of interest rates) has stopped working so, led by the US Federal Reserve, the biggest rich economies have plunged into “quantitative easing” (QE) and other “unconventional policies” which, frankly, are weird and wonderful.

Heading our response to this topsy-turvy world has been Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe. There’s never a shortage of smarties thinking they could do a much better job than the governor – whoever he happens to be – but Lowe’s getting a double dose of second-guessing. I don’t envy him – I’m just glad it’s him making the impossible calls, not me.

Lowe’s having to respond to forces way beyond his control. We’ve seen official interest rates around the world fall to zero because of a lasting global imbalance between saving and investment (or, alternatively, because the US Fed stuffed up). With interest rates already so low, further rate cuts ceased to have much effect in encouraging borrowing and spending on consumption and investment goods.

Undeterred, the Fed leapt into QE - buying longer-dated second-hand government bonds with created money - and soon was joined by the Europeans, Brits and Japanese. This did little to stimulate demand for goods and services, but did inflate the prices of houses, shares and other assets, as well as lowering your exchange rate relative to everyone else’s.

The Europeans went even further down the crazy paving to “negative” interest rates (where the lenders pay the borrowers to borrow their money) and now the Americans are considering it.

Lowe resisted cutting our official interest rate to zero and engaging in QE, until the pandemic prompted the big boys to do yet more of it. His hesitation revealed his scepticism about the benefits and risks of QE, though he did want to keep the Reserve at the demand management top table.

In any case, he didn’t think he could go on letting the big boys devalue their currencies at the expense of our industries’ international price competitiveness – especially when the return to top-dollar iron ore prices was pushing up our “commodity currency”. Had he not acted, exporters and importers would be screaming abuse and unemployment would be worse.

But this has plunged Lowe into a world of second-guessers. Some smarties are criticising him for not cutting the official rate to zero early enough and not doing much more QE. But others – businessman Andrew Mohl, in the Financial Review, for instance - are making the opposite criticism: why is he engaging in behaviour every ex-central banker knows is bad policy and highly risky?

I think the RBA old boys’ association’s fears about QE make more sense than the critique of the shoulda-done-double brigade. But everyone needs to remember Lowe had little choice but to join the big boys’ high-risk game, where they’ll worry about the fallout later.

It’s a delusion that, in the years before the arrival of the virus, growth would have been much stronger had Lowe acted earlier and harder. These critics conveniently ignore the obvious truth – which Lowe quietly but continually spoke of - that growth was weak not because he wasn’t trying hard enough to stimulate it, but because the elected government had its policy arm (the budget; fiscal policy) pushing in the opposite direction as it sought the glory of a budget surplus.

The shoulda-done-double brigade refuse to accept that monetary policy has lost its potency partly because fixing the economy with monetary policy is their only expertise and way of earning a living, and partly because their Smaller Government political inclination makes them disapproving of using increased government spending – though never tax cuts – to stimulate demand.

The RBA old boys’ association (and they are all boys) is right that we ought to be thinking a lot more about the reasons “unconventional” measures have formerly been verboten. QE doesn’t do what monetary policy’s supposed to, but does foster asset-price inflation, does risk boom and bust in asset markets, does favour the better-off, and does foster “beggar-thy-neighbour” exchange-rate contests.

The most immediate and worrying aspect of this is what it’s doing and will do to house prices and the affordability of home ownership. It’s literally true, but not good enough, for Lowe to say the Reserve doesn’t, and shouldn’t, target house prices. Saying the stability of the housing market isn’t the Reserve’s department won’t, and shouldn’t, save the central bank from copping most of the blame should something go badly wrong. (Little blame will go to the distortions caused by tax policy and local planning rules.)

People have been predicting a collapse in house prices for decades, but the more house prices are allowed to move out of line with household incomes – and the more highly geared the nation’s households become - the greater the risk the Jeremiahs’ prophecies come to pass.

It makes no sense for the people living on a big island to bid the prices of their fairly fixed stock of houses higher and higher and higher, then tell themselves how much richer they all are. Is this prudent central banking?

The equanimity with which some people contemplate negative interest rates is remarkable. Sometimes I think too much maths can make economists mad. The arithmetic works the same whether you put a minus sign or a plus sign in front of an interest rate, but the humans don’t. It’s not much better when you think paying oldies a zero interest rate on their savings a matter of no consequence.

When central bankers manipulate interest rates to encourage or discourage borrowing and spending, they are knowingly distorting prices and behaviour in the financial markets. Conventionally, they have minimised their distortion of market signals by limiting themselves to affecting short-term and variable interest rates.

But QE takes their distortion further out along the maturity “yield curve”, interfering with the market’s ability to decide how much more a saver should be paid for tying up their money for 10 years rather than one. When you move to negative interest rates, you rob pension and insurance funds of the ability to match their financial assets with their long-term liabilities.

One of the signals the market should be sending via longer-term yields (interest rates) on government bonds is the inflation rate it’s expecting down the track. This, by the way, explains why the Reserve is wise to buy only second-hand government bonds – that is, buy them at a market-set price – rather than buying them direct from the government, even though it’s buying them with newly created money either way.

As the economy’s CCO – chief confidence officer – Lowe is in no position to bang on about the costs and risks involved as the big boys force us further down the crazy paving of unconventional monetary policy. It’s the more academically inclined outside monetary experts who should be urging caution rather than criticising Lowe for not doing double.

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Funding the budget by printing money is closer than you think

Many people are alarmed by “modern monetary theory”, the seemingly radical idea that the government should cover its budget deficit simply by creating money. But in his new book, Reset, Professor Ross Garnaut, one of our most respected economists, has joined the young turks.

And that’s not all. Last Monday I wrote about the things Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe doesn’t feel he can say out loud in this era of unconventional “monetary policy” (the manipulation of interest rates). Something else he doesn’t want to say is that the Reserve is funding the budget deficit already.

(By the way, what follows ignores the present flurry in bond markets, where some players have leapt to the conclusion that inflation’s about to take off. I wish. Don’t worry, the market will return to reality soon enough.)

Until Garnaut’s intervention, this issue has seemed divided between two groups. One is younger economics graduates who think of this revolutionary new idea that the federal government shouldn’t bother borrowing to finance its budget deficits but simply print all the money it needs – thus avoiding all that debt and interest payments – as a breakthrough that would transform the management of our economy and hasten our return to full employment.

The rival group is older, more experienced economists – and a lot of ordinary citizens – who see it as a dangerous, even crazy, idea that would surely end in disaster. It would be the primrose path of indiscipline that led to ever-rising inflation, maybe even hyper-inflation – a dollar that was worth next-to-nothing – and unemployment that was worse, not better.

Ostensibly, the opponents of modern monetary theory (MMT) are led by Lowe, as boss of our central bank. At his appearance before a parliamentary committee last month, he replied to a question from Greens leader Adam Bandt that he would “push back” against any assertion the Reserve was “financing the government”. (Note the curious wording: not that it should, but that it already was.)

Debate between the two sides has established that MMT is neither as modern and revolutionary as its proponents imagine, nor as crackpot as many of its critics imagine. The fact is, until as recently as the mid-1980s, it was common practice for national governments (including ours) to cover their budget deficits partly by borrowing from the public and partly by “borrowing” from the central bank – which would create the money the government wanted.

This was when the developed economies were struggling with high inflation, and Milton Friedman’s “monetarists” were telling people that adding to the supply of money would inevitably lead to inflation.

So all the governments (including the Hawke-Keating government) decided to fund their deficits solely by selling government bonds to the public. Ironically, this meant the banking system (not an individual bank, but the system as a whole) could and did continue creating money, but the government – despite being the issuer and backer of the currency – couldn’t.

The monetarist dogma that creating money inevitably leads to inflation turned out to be wrong. It’s inflationary only if it causes the demand for the “real resources” – land, labour and physical capital – used to produce goods and services to exceed the supply of real resources. Until you reach that point, the creation of more money – whether by the banking system or the government – should give you stronger demand and more jobs without causing problems.

So the real reason for worry about MMT isn’t the theory, but the practice. If you give a bunch of vote-buying politicians a licence to spend as much as they like up to a certain point, how could you be sure they’d stop, and revert to borrowing, when they reached that point?

It’s this that Lowe is really on about, though he doesn’t want to say so.

Since last year he’s had little choice but to join the other, bigger economies in resorting to “quantitative easing” (QE) – the central bank buying second-hand government bonds, so as to lower the “yields” (interest rates) on such bonds, but paying for them merely by crediting the bond sellers’ bank accounts.

In particular, since March last year the Reserve has guaranteed that it would buy sufficient bonds to stop the yield on three-year Australian government bonds rising above 0.25 per cent (later lowered to 0.1 per cent). In practice, because the market believed the Reserve would honour its promise, it hasn’t had to actually buy all that many bonds – until last week.

Then, last November, the Reserve went further into QE, announcing it would buy $100 billion worth of second-hand federal and state government bonds with maturities of five to 10 years so as to force their yields down, too. The Reserve estimates that these purchases have lowered yields by about 0.3 percentage points.

Last month it decided to buy another $100 billion worth. Under questioning by Labor’s Dr Andrew Leigh at the parliamentary committee, Lowe and his deputy, Dr Guy Debelle, revealed that $80 billion of the first $100 billion had gone on federal (as opposed to state) government bonds, which represented about 10 per cent of the feds’ entire stock of bonds outstanding.

The further $100 billion would take the Reserve’s holding of the feds’ total debt to 20 per cent. If there was yet another $100 billion purchase after the second, that would take its holding to 30 per cent. With the Reserve buying second-hand bonds at the steady rate of $5 billion a week, it was buying more than the new bonds the government was issuing to fund its huge budget deficit, Debelle revealed.

In his opening statement to the committee, Lowe insisted that “the RBA does not, and will not, directly finance governments. The bonds we own will have to be repaid in the same way as if they were owned by others.

“We are lowering the cost of finance for governments – as we are for all borrowers – but we are not providing direct finance. There remains a strong separation between monetary and fiscal [budgetary] policy,” he said.

That last sentence is the key to why Lowe is drawing such fine distinctions. Fiscal policy is controlled by the politicians, whereas monetary policy is controlled by the Reserve, which is independent of the elected government.

The Reserve is buying all these second-hand bonds of its own volition, and doing so because it believes QE is part of monetary policy’s best contribution to getting people back in jobs. It’s not acting under any directive from the government to fund its deficit directly. So the problem of the pollies continuing to spend beyond the point where this becomes inflationary doesn’t arise.

All true. But Lowe can’t suspend the truth that money is “fungible” – all dollars are interchangeable. Funding the deficit indirectly rather than directly may be important from the perspective of good governance, but from the perspective of the economic effect, they’re the same.

Back to the views of Professor Garnaut: “The fiscal deficits should be mainly funded directly or indirectly by the Reserve Bank, at least until full employment is in sight.”

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Here's the unspeakable truth about the fall in interest rates

In these unprecedented times, Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe is having trouble explaining his actions and motivations because there are various things someone with his degree of influence feels he can’t admit. But I’m under no such constraint. So let me have a go at giving you the message he won’t.

Despite Lowe’s reticence, he’s a fundamentally honest person and if you study what he’s saying – and avoiding saying – you can join the dots.

Long before the coronavirus appeared on the horizon early last year, the rich economies had been caught in a low-growth trap caused by a global imbalance between how much people wanted to borrow and invest, and how much other people wanted to save and lend. Around the world, interest rates were heading close to zero.

With our economy growing at a rate well below its “potential” to produce more goods and services, Lowe slowly and reluctantly cut our official interest rate. He was reluctant because he knew that, with rates already so low and households already so much in debt, cutting rates further would do little to help.

But also because, with the official rate already down to 0.75 per cent, he was perilously close to running out of ammunition, while the Morrison government was totally focused on getting the budget back to surplus and so reluctant to use the budget to stimulate growth.

He didn’t want to follow the other, bigger central banks into the unconventional, uncharted and unhinged territory of “quantitative easing” (QE) – central banks buying second-hand government bonds and paying for them merely by creating money, so as to lower longer-term public and private sector interest rates – much less engineer “negative” interest rates (where the lender pays the borrower to borrow).

By the Reserve’s board meeting early last March, it was clear the virus would slow the economy a bit, so Lowe cut the official rate to 0.5 per cent. Within a fortnight it had become clear the pandemic was a much bigger deal.

So, after an emergency meeting, Lowe announced another cut, taking the official rate down to 0.25 per cent, the level he’d long told us was its “effective lower bound”. He also embarked on various forms of QE, including guaranteeing to buy sufficient second-hand Commonwealth bonds to keep the “yield” (interest rate) on three-year bonds at about 0.25 per cent.

The next big move came last November, when Lowe lowered the official rate’s effective lower bound to 0.1 per cent, lowered the target for the yield on three-year bonds similarly, and decided to buy $100 billion-worth of second-hand bonds with maturities of five to 10 years, so as to force their yields down, too.

Then, earlier this month, Lowe announced a decision to spend a further $100 billion buying longer-dated bonds once the first $100 billion had gone. But, he insisted, the board had “no appetite” to push interest rates “into negative territory”.

So what do all these moves prove?

It’s understandable that Lowe should want to maintain public confidence that the independent authority which has had most influence over the day-to-day management of the economy for the past three decades, the Reserve, is at the helm, actively wielding an instrument that’s still highly effective in keeping us on course.

To this end, he has denied that monetary policy (the manipulation of interest rates) has run out of fire power. As he’s stepped further and further into unconventional measures, he’s suppressed his former reservations about their effectiveness and possible adverse side-effects, and striven to give the impression that everything’s under control and going fine. Monetary policy is playing an important part in getting the jobless back to work.

The reality is different. Movements in interest rates – whether achieved by conventional or unconventional means – affect different aspects of the economy via different mechanisms, or “channels”.

The most front-of-mind channel – “intertemporal substitution” – tells us a cut in the cost of credit encourages households to borrow more and spend it on consumption, while encouraging businesses to borrow more for investment in expansion. But if you read his words carefully, Lowe never claims his measures are causing this to happen – because it’s unlikely much of it is.

Rather, he alludes to the “cash flow” channel, saying lower rates are lowering the interest bills of households and businesses with existing debts, thereby leaving them with more money to spend on other things. True – but not terribly powerful, particularly since most people with home loans leave their monthly payments unchanged and thus pay off their mortgage a bit faster, a form of saving.

In his evidence to a parliamentary committee earlier this month, Lowe vigorously denied that the Reserve was “targeting the dollar” or that he saw signs of “currency manipulation” by other central banks (also known as “competitive devaluations”). Strictly true – but misleading.

Lowe isn’t “targeting the dollar” at a particular level or as a goal in its own right. But he cares deeply about the level of our currency’s rate of exchange against the currencies of our trading partners because this greatly affects the international price competitiveness of our export and import-competing industries, and thus how much they produce and how many people they employ.

When discussing the benefits his recent interest-rate moves have brought us, Lowe never fails to mention that they’ve caused our exchange rate to be “lower than otherwise”. That’s true – but it’s not a lot to show for all the Reserve’s lever-pulling. Lowe isn’t actually denying that monetary policy is much less effective in boosting demand than it used to be.

There’s little evidence that QE does much to increase demand for goods and services – as opposed to demand for assets such as shares and houses (probably with adverse consequences for the distribution of income and wealth). But it does seem clear that QE gives you a lower exchange rate.

Trouble is, when the Americans use QE to make their exchange rate more competitive, this makes other countries’ exchange rates less competitive. So the Europeans and Japanese defend themselves and start doing it too.

Get it? Now all the big boys are doing it – and keep doing more – Lowe’s had little choice but to do it too. Had he resisted getting into the unknown waters of unconventional measures, our dollar would be a lot higher and hugely uncompetitive.

Which means almost everything he’s done over the past year hasn’t been making things better for the economy so much as stopping things getting worse. And it also suggests that, however much Lowe lacks an “appetite” for moving to negative interest rates, if the big boys choose to go further down that path, he’ll have little choice but to join them.

There are other issues on which Lowe has felt the need to be less than frank, but they’re for another day.

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Flogging the monetary-policy horse harder won't help

It didn’t quite hit the headlines, but when Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe appeared before the House of Reps economics committee a week or so ago, he came under intense questioning from the Parliament’s most highly qualified economist, Labor’s Dr Andrew Leigh.

In my never-humble opinion, Leigh had the wrong end of the stick.

One criticism was that the board of the Reserve Bank is dominated by “amateurs” – business men and women appointed by successive federal governments. According to Leigh, pretty much every other central bank has its decisions on monetary policy (whether to raise or lower interest rates) made by committees of outside monetary experts, who are well equipped to challenge the bank’s own technical analysis.

This is a chestnut I’ve been hearing for decades. It smacks of the old cultural cringe: Australia is out of line with the big boys in America and Europe, therefore we’re doing it wrong. The people in our financial markets spend so much time studying the mighty US economy that their line’s always the same: whatever the Yanks are doing we should be doing.

Sorry, not convinced. It sounds to me like a commercial message from the economists’ union. Why give those plum appointments to businesspeople when you could be giving them to us? When you leave the “technical analysis” just to the hundreds of economists working in the Reserve, you risk them suffering from “group think”, we’re told.

And you’d escape group think by having a committee dominated by professional economists? Economics is the only profession that doesn’t suffer from “model blindness” – the inability to see factors that have been assumed away in the way of thinking about issues that’s been drummed into them since first year uni?

I don’t think so. It’s inter-disciplinary analysis that might improve the decisions, but that’s something most economists hate. After reading Kay and King’s Radical Uncertainty, I’m happier than ever with the idea that the governor and his minions should be put through their paces by people chosen for their real-world experience, not their membership of the economists’ club.

Leigh was on stronger ground when he asked why governments had stopped including a union boss along with all the businesspeople.

But Leigh’s main criticism was that the Reserve had been “too timid in focusing on getting inflation up into the target band”. For the “amateurs” reading this, he meant why hadn’t the Reserve cut the official interest rate earlier and harder since the global financial crisis, so as to get demand growing faster, creating more employment, lifting real wages and the inflation rate in the process.

After his board’s February meeting, Lowe announced that it would be doing $100 billion more “quantitative easing” (buying second-hand government bonds with created money, so as to lower longer-term public and private interest rates). Leigh asked why he hadn’t been more purposeful and announced $200 billion in purchases.

When you’re looking for things to criticise, saying that whatever’s just been done should have been done earlier or bigger is the easiest one in the book. Various other dissident economists are saying what Leigh’s saying.

But, as so often with economists, they’re not drawing attention to the assumptions – explicit and implicit – that lie behind their policy recommendations. Their key assumption here is that cutting interest rates is still as effective in encouraging borrowing and spending as the textbooks say it is.

If households are saving more than we’d like, the reason is that interest rates are too high; if businesses aren’t investing enough, the reason is that rates are too high. So, although interest rates have been at record lows for years, just a couple more cuts (achieved by conventional or unconventional means) would do the trick and get the economy growing strongly.

And although household debt is at record highs, this wouldn’t inhibit people’s willingness to load themselves up with more. Leigh and his mates seem to be having trouble with the concept of “diminishing returns” – that the third ice cream you eat never tastes as good as the first.

Though Lowe can’t or won’t admit it, the obvious truth is that, in the world economy’s present circumstances – “secular stagnation” and all that - monetary policy has pretty much run out of puff. Which explains why he’s been moving into unconventional monetary policy so reluctantly and why, for the whole of his term, he’s been pressing the government to make more use of its budget (fiscal policy) to get the economy moving.

Some of Lowe’s critics, being monetary specialists, have (like the Reserve itself) a vested interest in continuing to flog the monetary policy horse. Other’s deny the effectiveness and legitimacy of using fiscal policy to manage demand, as part of their commitment to Smaller Government.

But perhaps the most revealing exchange came when Leigh accused the Reserve of failing to act on what its own econometric model of the Australian economy, MARTIN, (as in Martin Place) would be telling it. The reply from Lowe’s deputy, Dr Guy Debelle (whose PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a match for Leigh’s from Harvard) was dismissive.

“I would just note that macro models don’t do a very good job of modelling the financial sector [of the economy]. They failed pretty poorly in 2007 [the global financial crisis] when macro discovered finance. I think there’s an issue around transmission [the paths through which a change in interest rates leads to changes in other economic variables] which these models don’t take into account,” Debelle said.

“They’re linear. Actually, they assume that financial markets don’t exist, broadly speaking.”

I find it reassuring that our econocrats understand how primitive econometric models of the economy are, and don’t take their results too seriously.

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Why we're stuck with low interest rates for a long time

When it comes to interest rates, we’re living in the strangest of times, with rates lower than ever.

Savers are getting next to no reward for lending their money. Does this make sense? Not really. But we’re moving through uncharted waters and aren’t sure how we’ll get out of them, nor what happens next.

When Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe appeared before Parliament’s economics committee last Friday, he was asked whether we get the interest rates the world forces on us, or whether our authorities are free to set the rates they want.

Lowe’s answer was “we have the freedom, but we don’t”. Huh? “It’s complicated,” he explained.

Sure is. What he could have said is that we have some freedom, but not much. Were we to set our interest rates at a very different level to those in the rest of the world, there’d be a price for us to pay.

His own explanation was as clear as mud: we don’t have freedom in a structural sense, but we still have freedom in a cyclical sense.

Let me have a go. Remember that, as part of the process of globalisation over the past 40 years, the rich countries’ national financial markets are now so closely integrated with each other that each country exists in what’s pretty much a single global market, producing a single long-term real interest rate.

Purely by virtue of its big share of the global market, the things an economy as big as the US does can influence the level of the global interest rate. But nothing a middle-size economy like ours does is big enough to move the world rate. We are, as economists say, a “price taker”. We’re free only to take it or leave it.

The market price of something (including the price of borrowing money – the rate of interest) is set by the interaction of demand and supply: how much of it the buyers want to buy, relative to how much the sellers want to sell.

Lowe explained that the reason the “world equilibrium interest rate” has fallen so close to zero since the global financial crisis of 2008 is that, around the world, there’s been an increased desire by people to save, but a reduced desire to invest. That is, savers want to lend a lot more money than investors want to borrow, so interest rates have fallen sharply.

I think by now most economists accept this as the best explanation for the amazing low to which interest rates have fallen. It’s what Lowe means by “structural”. Just why saving is so much greater and investment so much smaller are questions economists are still debating.

Note that this explanation laughs at the standard view in neo-classical economics that saving increases when interest rates are higher, while investment increases when interest rates are lower.

Nor does it fit with the view that the “natural” rate of interest should reflect the rate of business profitability. Although the profits of some businesses have been hard hit by the pandemic, before it arrived – and even since, for most businesses – profitability has been high.

An alternative, minority view – pushed by economists at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the central bankers’ central bank – is that world interest rates have fallen so low because of the Americans’ excessive use of “quantitative easing” (central banks buying second-hand bonds and paying for them with money they’ve just created) after the global financial crisis and then, once the US economy had recovered, their failure to sell those bonds back to the market and so push interest rates back up.

An economy where households are saving too much of their incomes, and businesses don’t want to invest in expansion, is an economy that’s growing too slowly and not creating many new jobs. The solution, Lowe said, was to give people confidence to spend (and so get their rate of saving down) and give firms the confidence to invest.

How is he doing this? By cutting the official interest rate as close to zero as possible, and using quantitative easing to lower longer-term government and private sector interest rates. Really? Sounds to me like hoping to recover from a hangover by having another drink.

But back to the point. If interest rates ought to be higher to give savers a decent reward on the money they lend, why can’t our central bank set our interest rates higher than those being paid in other parts of the world?

Well, it can. We do retain that freedom. But because our financial markets are just part of the global market, what that would do is push up our exchange rate.

Why? Because financial institutions around the world would shift money into Australian dollars so as to get into our market and take advantage of our higher interest rates. When the demand for “the Aussie” exceeds the supply, the price goes up.

Such a rise in our currency’s rate of exchange against other currencies would reduce the international price competitiveness of our export and import-competing industries, thus reducing our economy’s growth and job opportunities.

That’s the price we’d pay for stepping out of line.

Lowe told the committee that the two main factors that drive the value of our dollar are world commodity prices and relative interest rates – that is, the level of our interest rates relative to other countries’ rates.

The prices we receive for the commodities we export (particularly iron ore) are up but, he said, the Aussie hadn’t appreciated (risen) by as much as you’d expect from past relationships. Why not? Because our lower official interest rates and quantitative easing have narrowed the interest rate “differential” between our rates and the rest of the world.

So, although rising commodity prices have caused our exchange rate to go higher, our quantitative easing has nevertheless caused the dollar to be “lower than it otherwise would be”. Ah. That’s the game he’s playing.

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Start of the end for ratings agencies' dubious influence

Walt Secord, Labor’s Treasury spokesman in NSW, and Michael O’Brien, Liberal Opposition Leader in Victoria, should be condemned for their attempts to score cheap political points when Standard & Poor’s downgraded its AAA credit ratings of both state governments last week. Fortunately, the politicians’ unprincipled carping fell flat.

Both men wanted to have their cake and eat it. Neither was prepared to criticise their government’s big spending to alleviate the state’s pandemic-driven high unemployment – nor admit that, had their party been in power, it would have done the same – but both wanted to portray the consequent downgrade as proof positive of their political opponents’ financial incompetence.

But the deeper truth is that the financial markets and economists have stopped caring about the august pronouncements of the three big American ratings agencies.

Their decline has three causes. First was their loss of credibility following their role in the global financial crisis of 2008. Not only did these supposed paragons of financial precaution fail to foresee the looming collapse, but they actually contributed to it by selling triple-A ratings to the promoters of private-sector securities subsequently discovered to be “toxic debt”.

Just as the scandal surrounding the collapse of Enron in 2001 led to the demise of its auditor, Arthur Andersen, formerly the big public accounting firm with its nose highest in the air, so the financial crisis showed the world that when one for-profit business is paid to report on the affairs of another for-profit business, only an innocent would expect the audit or prospectus report or modelling exercise or credit rating to be genuinely independent.

The second development contributing to the decline of the ratings agencies is the emergence of what the Americans call "secular stagnation" and others call being caught in a "low-growth trap" – where aggregate demand can’t keep up with aggregate supply, and the supply of "loanable funds" exceeds the demand for borrowed funds.

Two side effects of this long-term structural shift of particular relevance to the credit-rating industry are the fall of inflation rates to negligible levels, and the fall of the global real "neutral" official interest rate to a level somewhere near zero.

Especially with the rich world’s central banks – these days, including our Reserve Bank – so heavily into "quantitative easing" (that is, buying government bonds so as to force down their interest-rate "yields"), all this means super-low interest rates, increased private investor demand for government bonds (because there's so little else to invest in), and central banks doing all they can to stop the interest rates on government bonds (including state government bonds) from being driven up by investors.

Third, it’s hard to see how a national government with a floating currency, which borrows only in that currency, could ever default on its debt. (Nor is it easy to see our federal government standing by while one of our state governments defaults on its debt.)

Now do you see why – at least as applies to government securities – events have overtaken the ratings agencies? They’re doing a job that no longer needs to be done, and making assessments of the supposed risk of default on state government bonds that won’t be defaulted on.

This is why our top econocrats have stopped caring about the actions of the rating agencies.

Reserve Bank deputy governor Dr Guy Debelle said recently: "There is the possibility of a ratings downgrade from higher debt, but that really only has a political dimension not a financial dimension, as government bond rates would likely be little changed.

"In any case, a ratings agency should not be the determinant of [budgetary] policy. Fiscal policy should be set to be the most beneficial for the Australian economy and people."

Treasury Secretary Dr Steven Kennedy said recently: "I don’t think there is any significant implications for Australia from a ratings agency downgrade. It is an important tick of confidence to have the rating agencies’ assessment … but frankly the actual impact on the economy I think would be negligible."

Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe said in August: "I think preserving the credit ratings is not particularly important; what’s important is that we use the public balance sheet in a time of crisis to create jobs for people."

And more recently: "A downgrade of credit ratings doesn’t concern me. The AAA credit rating had more political symbolism than economic importance."

Just so. Although the ratings agencies have lost their economic credibility and usefulness, state governments remained fearful of the fuss their political opponents would make over a downgrade. But their opponents’ failure to gain traction last week spells the beginning of the end for the agencies’ unhealthy influence over government spending and borrowing.

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Reserve Bank suffering relevance deprivation syndrome

I’m sorry to say it, and it’s certainly not the done thing to say, but the Reserve Bank looks to me like that emperor with a serious wardrobe deficiency.

Apart from the nation’s allegedly “self-funded” retirees – whose angry letters to Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe must by now be absolutely blistering – no one wants to question last week’s decision to make what must surely be the smallest-ever cut in the official interest rate, and engage in a bit more of what central bankers prefer to call “quantitative easing” or “balance-sheet expansion” rather than use those verboten words Printing Money.

I guess there’s no reason any borrower would object to paying lower interest rates, no matter how microscopic the reduction. Nor are the nation’s treasuries and governments likely to object to having their own interest bills cut a fraction.

As for the experts in the financial markets, their vested interest lies in having the central bank stay as busy as possible, organising events where they can lay bets. An inactive Reserve is a central bank that’s not helping them justify their lucrative but unproductive existence. “Negative interest rates? Might be a fun day out. Bring it on.”

But I’ve heard from a lot of retired central bankers who disapprove of the Reserve’s scraping of the barrel. And last week Dr Mike Keating, a former top econocrat, also questioned the wisdom of keeping on keeping on.

Some other people have seen the Reserve’s decision to, in Lowe’s words, “do what we reasonably can, with the tools that we have, to support the recovery” as a sign it judged last month’s budget not to have done enough.

Maybe, but I doubt its motives are so noble. Alternatively, Lowe’s reference to “doing what we can” with “the tools we have” could be taken as a tacit admission that his tools can’t do much.

As Treasury Secretary Dr Steven Kennedy made clear last week, monetary policy’s “scope . . . to provide sufficient stimulus is limited and has necessitated the large levels of fiscal support”. His speech was devoted to making sure his financial-markets audience – and the rest of us – understood that the headquarters of short-term management of the macro economy has now shifted from Martin Place, Sydney to Parkes Place, Canberra.

No, I think what we’re seeing is our most well-resourced economic regulator (well-resourced because it prints its own banknotes) desperately trying to look busy and relevant because it’s lost its main reason for existence, but can’t be shut down or even sent on “furlough” – the latest euphemism for being put on unpaid leave, in the hope the need for your services will return.

No country could leave itself bereft of a central bank. The Reserve can’t be shut down because one of its infrequent but vital roles is to flood the financial markets with liquidity whenever they become dysfunctional (as happened in the global financial crisis and, in a smaller way, in the early days of the pandemic).

But the fact remains that the Reserve’s primary function – the short-term stabilisation of demand - has gone away and isn’t likely to come back in my lifetime (another 20 years, max). That is, its problem is structural (long-lasting) not cyclical (temporary).

Your modern, independent central bank was designed to respond to the problem of high and rising inflation. And during the 1980s (and, in Australia, 1990s) its ability to do so was clearly demonstrated.

But, as former Reserve governor Ian Macfarlane has reminded us, inflation rates in the advanced economies have been falling for the past 30 years, and now seem entrenched below the central banks’ targets. And, as Treasury’s Kennedy reminded us last week, the global (real) neutral interest rate has been falling for 40 years.

Central banks need independence of the politicians so they can raise interest rates to fight inflation. They don’t need it to lower rates. But with inflation having gone away as a problem, it’s now 10 years since the Reserve last raised rates (and even that proved unnecessary and had to be unwound).

When nominal interest rates were high, cutting rates in big licks did seem effective in helping revive growth and employment. But with interest rates now so low and getting lower in the 12 years of weak Australian and advanced-country growth since the financial crisis, there’s little reason to believe cutting rates is effective in reducing unemployment and underemployment.

Last week Lowe insisted that an official interest rate down at 0.1 per cent does not mean the Reserve has “run out of firepower” – by which he meant that there’s still plenty of money he can print.

True. But, as Reserve assistant governor Dr Chris Kent has explained, the dominant purpose of the money-printing is to lower “risk-free” (government bond) interest rates further out along the maturity curve beyond the official overnight cash rate.

And this doesn’t provide a reason to believe slightly lower interest rates will induce households and firms to borrow and spend in a way that fractionally higher rates didn’t. Whatever people’s reasons for not spending, the high cost of borrowing isn’t one of them.

The old jibe that cutting interest rates to induce growth is like “pushing on a string” for once seems apposite.

Remembering the retired Reserve bankers’ point that it chose to limit its intervention in financial markets to short-term and variable interest rates for good reason – to limit monetary policy’s distortion of private sector choices - one thing we can be more confident of is that printing money and cutting rates when few people want to borrow for consumption or real investment will be effective in inflating bubbles in the prices of assets such as houses and shares.

How this would leave the unemployed better off is hard to see. Risking our heavily indebted household sector becoming more so doesn’t seem a great idea.

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We're edging towards a change in economic management

We must be in a recession because I’m getting a lot more letters from readers telling me they’ve figured out how to fix the economy in a way the economists haven’t been smart enough to discover.

Their solutions can be weird and wonderful, but a lot of them boil down to a simple proposition: if the economy’s in recession and unemployment’s high because people aren’t spending enough money, why doesn’t the government just print a lot of money and spend it itself?

But here’s the scoop: the idea that, rather than borrowing to fund their budget deficits – thus incurring big debts and interest bills – governments should just create the money they need has been anathema to economists for the past 40 years, but this may be changing.

There is a growing debate among economists, between the proponents of what they call “modern monetary theory” and more conventional economists and econocrats over whether governments should just create the money they need.

The defenders of the conventional wisdom have had to concede a lot of ground. Whereas a decade ago MMT was lightly dismissed as a crackpot idea, as this radical idea has gained more attention its opponents have had to admit it would be perfectly possible to do. They just think it would be a really bad thing to do.

Trick is, the “unconventional policy” of “quantitative easing” – where the central bank buys second-hand government bonds and other securities and pays for them merely by crediting the seller’s bank account – is quite similar to what the radicals are seeking.

All the major advanced economies – the US, the Eurozone, Britain and Japan - began doing this in big licks in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, once their official interest rates were so close to zero that they could be pushed no lower.

And now, once this coronacession had prompted our Reserve Bank to drop our official rate to its “effective lower bound” of 0.25 per cent in March, it too has resorted to quantitative easing, promising to buy as many second-hand bonds as necessary to keep the interest rate on three-year government bonds no higher than 0.25 per cent.

So, how exactly would what the Reserve is already doing be very different to what the MMT advocates say it should be doing?

The greatest proponent of MMT is an Australian, Professor Bill Mitchell, from my alma mater, the University of Newcastle. Internationally, its highest profile salesperson is Professor Stephanie Kelton, of Stony Brook University in New York, author of the big-selling The Deficit Myth.

Our leading commentator on the debate is Dr Stephen Grenville, a former deputy governor of the Reserve. And our most vocal opponent of MMT is present Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe.

Those opponents are right to say there’s nothing new about “modern” monetary policy. In the days before the loss of faith in simple Keynesianism, it was common for governments to fund their budgets partly by selling bonds to the Reserve Bank, rather than to the public.

So the fatwah on governments “printing money” dates back only as far as Milton Friedman and his monetarists’ semi-successful attack on Keynesian orthodoxy in the late 1970s, when all the developed economies had a big problem with high inflation.

Friedman argued that inflation was “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” which governments could control by limiting the supply of money. Governments eventually realised that the quantity of money was “demand-determined” and that setting targets for growth in the money supply didn’t work. They switched to using the manipulation of interest rates to target the inflation rate.

As sensible economists always knew, it was never true that creating money always leads to greater inflation. It does so only when the demand for “real resources” – land, labour and physical capital – exceeds the supply of real resources. Only then do you have “too much money chasing too few goods”.

This has been confirmed by the failure of all the money created by quantitative easing since the global financial crisis to cause much, if any inflation, contrary to the predictions of the world’s few remaining monetarists.

The opponents are also right to say, quoting Friedman’s most famous aphorism, that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and it’s a delusion to imagine MMT offers one.

As Lowe argued vigorously at his appearance before the Parliament’s economics committee earlier this month, in reply to questions from Greens leader Adam Bandt, it may seem that by creating money rather than borrowing it you’re avoiding a lot of debt and interest payments but, in reality, all you’re doing is delaying and hiding the bill to the government and its taxpayers.

It’s also a delusion (as the leading proponents of MMT acknowledge) that governments would be free to create (or “print”, to use a misleading metaphor) as much money as they needed, without restraint. The restraint is the same one it always was: the limited supply of real resources.

While ever the demand for real resources – the things we use to produce goods and services – is falling short of the supply of those resources, creating money should lead to increased demand for them (provided you do it more effectively than the big central banks did it after the financial crisis).

But once demand was growing faster than the supply of real resources, any further money you created would simply cause inflation. This is what’s really worrying the opponents of MMT (and me). If you let the politicians off the leash to spend as much as they liked up to a point, how would you ever get them to stop once that point was reached?

While ever all we’re doing is quantitative easing, the independent central banks do the deciding, not the politicians. Which brings us to Lowe’s “advanced negotiating position”: why risk letting the pollies start creating money when the government can borrow from the public at interest rates that are pathetically low. And Lowe’s promising to keep them low for as long as necessary.

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