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VoxEU Column Economic history Monetary Policy

What really drives inflation

In a recent speech in Jackson Hole, Fed Chair Jay Powell laid out the Fed’s new monetary policy framework.  Under this framework, the Fed will allow inflation to run above its 2% target in order to boost employment following a downturn.  The new framework marks a departure from the perceived wisdom of the 1970s’ Great Inflation.  Under this perceived wisdom, the Fed must respond aggressively to rising inflation or risk losing its credibility and letting inflation spiral out of control.  New research on the Great Inflation challenges this perceived wisdom and offers a new explanation for what really drives inflation.  Instead of Fed credibility, this explanation puts the financial system and how it transmits monetary policy front and centre.  In doing so, it reconciles the 1970s with the current environment and provides a foundation for understanding why the Fed’s new framework is unlikely to trigger runaway inflation.

The Fed’s new framework overturns earlier thinking.  As Powell explained, “The Great Inflation demanded a clear focus on restoring the credibility of the FOMC's commitment to price stability. Chair Paul Volcker brought that focus to bear” (Powell 2020).  In the 1970s, the narrative goes, the Fed failed to raise interest rates fast enough to stave off rising inflation.   This led to a loss of credibility, which allowed inflation to spiral out of control.  Volcker broke the spiral by raising interest rates to unseen levels and keeping them there until Fed credibility was restored.  Inflation came down and stayed down, launching the Great Moderation.  This narrative was formalised in a famous paper by Clarida et al. (2000).

The obvious question arises: won’t the Fed’s new framework squander its hard-won credibility and trigger runaway inflation?  The Fed is now explicitly promising to let inflation run above target unchecked.  Under the perceived wisdom of the Great Inflation, this could lead to an inflation spiral.  With record federal deficits and a massive Fed balance sheet, shouldn’t we worry?  These concerns were echoed in two recent VoxEU columns by Olivier Blanchard (2020) and Charles Goodhart (2020).

In a new paper (Drechsler et al. 2020), we offer a different explanation for the Great Inflation – why it began and why it ended – that provides an answer to this question.  The explanation is simple, yet so far completely overlooked.  It centres on an important law known as Regulation Q.  Regulation Q placed hard ceilings on the interest rates banks were allowed to pay their depositors.  This meant that no matter how high the Fed raised interest rates, it made no difference to most people.  The transmission of monetary policy through the financial system was broken.  This is what made inflation get out of control.  And it was the repeal of Regulation Q at the end of the 1970s that brought inflation to heel.

Figure 1 plots the Regulation Q ceiling rate on the most common type of deposits, savings accounts (other deposits had only slightly different ceilings).  It also plots inflation, the real deposit rate, which subtracts inflation, and the Fed funds rate (the main instrument of monetary policy).1

Figure 1

As the figure shows, Regulation Q first became binding in 1965, when the Fed funds rate rose above the deposit rate ceiling.  This is precisely when inflation first picked up, which is why historians date it as the start of the Great Inflation.2  From then on, depositors always received a below-market rate.  In 1969, the ceiling rate was 4% while the Fed funds rate was 8%.  Inflation was 6%, hence depositors received a real rate of -2%, down from +2% in 1964.  Such a large decline in the real rate creates a powerful incentive to spend rather than save.  The increased desire to spend pushes up prices and creates more inflation.  Given the ceiling, higher inflation lowers the real deposit rate further, which leads to more spending and more inflation – an inflation spiral.  By 1973, the real deposit rate had declined to -6%; and by 1979: to -8%!  It’s no wonder that inflation had accelerated to 14%.

Regulation Q had another important impact on the economy.  The rates on deposits became so unappealing that banks and S&Ls, which depended almost entirely on deposits, became starved for funds.3 Regulation Q had created a credit crunch.  This is illustrated in Figure 2, which plots the real growth rate of deposits alongside inflation and the Fed funds rate.  Also shown is real GDP growth, which captures real economic conditions.

The figure shows a striking pattern: whenever interest rates rose and the deposit rate ceiling became tighter, banks suffered massive contractions of deposits.  The first contraction was in 1965 when Regulation Q first became binding.4 A second contraction took place in 1969, when deposit growth swung from +8% to -4%.  Then in 1973 it swung from +13% to -5%, and in 1979: from +11% to -8%.  The credit crunches thus spiralled with the inflation rate.

Figure 2

As we saw in 2008, credit crunches are devastating for the economy.  It is no surprise then that in the figure real GDP growth is highly correlated with deposit growth.  Whenever inflation rose and deposits fell, GDP plummeted.  This happened in 1965, 1969, 1973, and 1979.  The pattern is the same as with deposits and inflation: each contraction was worse than the one before.  Regulation Q thus naturally explains the other characteristic feature of the period: the combination of rising inflation and falling GDP, a phenomenon known as ‘stagflation’.

What ended the stagflation?  While banks and especially S&Ls had initially supported Regulation Q believing it raised their profits and stabilised their funding costs, by the end of the 1970s Regulation Q had few friends.  One reason was the prospect of competition from Money Market Funds, which were just starting out.5 Congress responded by repealing Regulation Q in several steps.  The first was the introduction of Money Market Certificates (deregulated time deposits with denominations over $10,000) in late 1978.  They were followed by Small Saver Certificates (no minimum denomination) in late 1979.  Within a couple of years, a vast amount of funds: $462 billion, a proportion of GDP equal to $3.5 trillion today, poured into these new deregulated deposit products.  Regulation Q was effectively over.

Figure 3 shows the dramatic impact of the repeal of Regulation Q.  Within a year of their introduction, deregulated deposits had raised the deposit rate by 7% above the old ceiling.  The real deposit rate jumped from -8% in 1979 to 0% in 1980.  As the incentive to spend receded, inflation began to drop.  It actually did so slightly before Volcker’s credibility-restoring rate hike, which came at the end of 1980.  With inflation dropping, the real deposit rate rose even higher: to +7% in 1981.  The spiral was going in reverse.  By 1982, inflation was below 4%. Deposit rates closely tracked the Fed funds rate.  Monetary policy transmission was restored, setting the stage for the Great Moderation.

Figure 3

What are the lessons of this for today and for the Fed’s new framework?  The first is that since Regulation Q is no longer on the books, there is no reason to expect a rerun of the 1970s. The second lesson is that the precise policy rule of the Fed (the so-called Taylor coefficient) and its impact on Fed credibility are not that important.  Chair Powell is then right to tolerate somewhat higher inflation in exchange for more jobs.

The third lesson is that whatever the Fed’s policy, a well-functioning financial system has to be around to transmit it.  As Regulation Q shows, this does not just mean avoiding bank failures.  Although we no longer have a rate ceiling to worry about, we do have a rate floor: the zero lower bound.  And just as the ceiling prevented rates from going up, which gave us high inflation, the floor prevents rates from going down, giving us persistently low inflation.  Looked at this way, the new normal is not so different after all.

References

Blanchard, O (2020), "Is there deflation or inflation in our future?", VoxEU.org, 24 April.

Burger, A E (1969), "A historical analysis of the credit crunch of 1966", Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, September 1969.

Clarida, R, J Galí and M Gertler (2000), "Monetary policy rules and macroeconomic stability: evidence and some theory", The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115(1): 147-180.

Drechsler, I, A Savov and P Schnabl (2020), "The Financial Origins of the Rise and Fall of American Inflation".

Goodhart, C A E (2020), "Inflation after the pandemic: Theory and practice", VoxEU.org, 13 June.

Meltzer, A (2005), "Origins of the Great Inflation", Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, March (2005): 145-176.

Powell, J H (2020), "New Economic Challenges and the Fed's Monetary Policy Review", at "Navigating the Decade Ahead: Implications for Monetary Policy", an economic policy symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 27–28.

Endnotes

1 Inflation and the Fed funds rate are annualized over the following year at every point in time.

2 The initial uptick in inflation is often attributed to rising deficits from the Vietnam War.  This and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 can be thought of as sparks that got the Great Inflation going (Meltzer 20050.  Yet they are one-off events and not large enough to explain the sustained acceleration of inflation throughout the period (the inflation spiral).  This is why the standard explanation in the literature is the loss of Fed credibility and its restoration under Volcker.  Volcker in particular would not have been needed if the Great Inflation was due to such transitory shocks.

3 S&Ls or Savings and Loan Institutions, were thrifts that raised deposits to make mortgage loans.  They became insolvent when Regulation Q was lifted and their funding costs skyrocketed.  This led to the famous S&L crisis.

4 Interestingly, it was at this time that the term “credit crunch’’ was coined (Burger 1969).

5 Regulation Q thus arguably gave rise to the shadow banking industry.  It also gave rise to the Eurodollar market, which helped large investors find ways around Regulation Q.  Even Freddie Mac was created in 1970 to relieve the credit crunch in mortgages caused by Regulation Q.

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