Saturday, July 5, 2014

The absurdity of Central Bank targeting

I have in this graph the personal consumption expenses, the dollar deflator and the effective federal funds rate.
What is the effective federal funds rate?
It is the rate at which banks lend to each other overnight, computed here as a yearly interest rate. It is what the central bank targets, in the sens that the central bank will interfere in the overnight lending market ot make the rate what it wants.  The mandate the Fed has is to make that rate set so that consumer inflation and employment of stable over the entire country. However, it is simply clueless about the relationship between the overnight lending rate and uniform inflation, so its operations are a crap shoot.

Think a minute what that means.  We have a 20 trillion dollar economy, from the loggers of Oregon to the tourist traps in Florida to traders in New York city and house flippers in Los Angeles.  What is the likelihood that all these disparate economies will always have the same employment rate and inflation rate at the same time? Zip, none, never happen.

So what happens?

First, interbank lending dries up, it will never return. Then, over time all these separate economies crash together, or they all become dependents of government. The entire idea is stupid and was arranged by none other than Congress.

So central banking never works in a distributed economy?
I dunno, but targeting by central banks is fairly stupid.  If the central bank is in a distributed economy, like ours, it should defer to the neutral position as best it can. I always supposed it should simply aim to keep the yield curve fairly smooth at the short end, but I haven't though about it lately.  perhaps it should target the variance in unemployment and inflation, keeping the variance within range.

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