He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands

1.

There are essentially three perspectives on the current state of America’s continually expanding economy and the dilemmas it poses for policymakers.¹ The first, the so-called “new era” view, holds that the spread of computers, the Internet, and other forms of information technology have increased productivity so much that we no longer have to worry about inflation, limits to economic growth, or the business cycle. As more goods are produced per hour of work, spending by consumers and producers will increase but it will not outstrip rising economic productive capacity; prices will remain steady or rise gradually. While this argument surely overstates the case, there is little question that the recent acceleration in productivity has helped keep inflation in check, and that, as Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan believes, it “owes importantly to new information technologies.”²

The second, more traditional view claims that there are well-established limits to how low unemployment can fall, or how fast the economy can grow, without triggering ever-accelerating inflation. These limits are thought to be unemployment rates of 5 to 6 percent, or growth rates of about 3 percent, and we have exceeded them by a large margin. As shown in the chart on page 36, the unemployment rate is just over 4 percent, the lowest it has been since 1970, and the economy has been growing at approximately 4 percent a year since 1996, about a third faster than its average from 1991 to 1998, yet inflation has fallen to less than 2 percent a year. Most conventional economists and other experts who still maintain this position believe that inflation has been kept in check only by special factors such as the Asian financial crisis, falling commodity prices, and the lack of pressure for higher wages for workers, but that these forces are weakening, and the Federal Reserve should act to slow the economy before it is too late.³

The third perspective, articulated most forcefully by Robert Solow in Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy, admits that there are limits to growth and unemployment, but holds that we don’t know what they are. In his view the harm to the economy caused by restricting growth prematurely through higher interest rates is very great, and that caused by a rise in inflation relatively modest. Solow therefore believes that the Fed should not act to restrain inflation until it becomes a visible problem. Fortunately, Greenspan has basically followed a flexible, pragmatic course close to the one Solow recommends.

Greenspan’s power as head of the Federal Reserve—the Fed—is immense, but the institution he heads is not well understood. The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It is essentially a bank both for other banks and for the federal government, with responsibilities to maintain the smooth functioning of the financial system and, through its monetary policies, to promote price stability and economic growth. The financial panic of 1907, in which J.P. Morgan performed many of these functions, underscored the need for such an institution.⁴ The Fed was established in 1913, nine months after his death, and has hardly changed in eighty-five years. The system consists of the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., and twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks located in major cities around the country. The seven governors are chosen by the president to serve staggered fourteen-year terms and have to be confirmed by the Senate. The chairman and vice chairman of the Board are also chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate, for terms of four years. Of all these, only the chairman has become a nationally known figure.

The system resembles a corporation in which the regional reserve banks are the operating subsidiaries. The chairman can be seen as a CEO who dominates the Board of Governors. The board sets broad policy and oversees the operations of the regional banks. Those regional banks carry out the system’s day-to-day activities, such as clearing checks and wiring funds among banks, supervising member banks, and acting as banker for the federal government. When the government wants to raise money to finance its spending, the reserve banks hold auctions of Treasury bonds and other securities and credit the Treasury’s checking account. Almost all of our currency consists of Federal Reserve notes—note the caption above the picture on any bill—which are issued by the reserve banks but must be backed by Treasury and other federal government securities. The Fed earns more than $20 billion a year from the interest it receives on its portfolio of government securities and the fees it charges for its services; after covering its expenses, it remits its profits to the Treasury.⁵

In addition to these routine tasks, the Federal Reserve is responsible for conducting monetary policy, that is, for adjusting the supply of money and credit in order to keep the economy growing rapidly, but without inflation. The goals of monetary policy, “maximum employment” and “stable prices,” were established by Congress but are sufficiently vague that the Fed has considerable leeway in interpreting them. Because it is free to operate without interference from elected officials, the Fed is one of the few government institutions that can be relatively independent of politics. It helps that governors are appointed for very long terms—fourteen years—and that the Fed finances itself and does not depend on congressional appropriations. On the other hand, the Fed’s chairman and vice chairman are appointed for only four years, and while their terms do not coincide with the president’s, some chairmen such as Nixon’s appointee Arthur Burns clearly seemed concerned to help the administration politically.⁶

Inflation “hawks,” such as the editors of The Economist, want the Fed to reduce even the threat of inflation, with less regard for the unemployment this may produce. Others, such as ex-chairman Paul Volcker, think the Fed should aim for “reasonable price stability,” which he defines as “a situation in which ordinary people do not feel they have to take expectations of price increases into account in making their investment plans or running their lives.” Still others, such as populist critics of the Fed like William Greider, “new era” advocates, and the Wall Street Journal’s editors, would have the Fed concentrate on reducing unemployment and stimulating growth, and pay much less attention to inflation.

These differences over monetary policy cut across traditional political lines. Greenspan was in his youth a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle, a proponent of the gold standard, a director of domestic policy research for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Gerald Ford.⁷ Still, he has been relatively “dovish” on inflation, willing to accept the risk that full employment will not necessarily cause a dangerous rise in prices; so far he has been proven right. Clinton’s recent appointee Laurence Meyer, on the other hand, is one of the Fed’s most hawkish members, together with conservative economists William Poole and Jerry Jordan, presidents, respectively, of the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and Cleveland; from all reports they believe interest rates should be substantially raised before inflation actually picks up.

No matter how these policy differences are resolved, the Fed almost always conducts monetary policy through “open market operations,” that is, by buying or selling in the open market US government securities such as short-term Treasury bills, intermediate-term notes, or long-term bonds. When it buys these securities, as it did last fall when the global financial crisis threatened the American economy, money flows into the banking system and interest rates fall; when it sells them, money flows out of circulation and into the Fed’s coffers, and interest rates rise. On June 29 and again on August 24, the Fed issued orders to its trading desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to sell just enough government securities so that interest rates would rise by a quarter of a percent. These actions by the Fed reversed two thirds of the rate reductions it enacted last fall to calm the financial markets.⁸

The Fed is highly respected now because the economy has done relatively well for almost two decades, particularly when compared to the 1970s, and because monetary policy was instrumental in getting it back on track. As shown in the accompanying chart,

Chart

particularly difficult problems with inflation began to develop in the mid-1960s when spending for the Vietnam War increased markedly but few measures were taken to slow down the rest of the economy. (Fearful of the political repercussions of higher interest rates or tax increases, Lyndon Johnson simply asserted that we could have both “guns” and “butter.”) From less than 2 percent a year in 1965, the rate of inflation rose to almost 6 percent in 1970, and then more than doubled to over 12 percent in 1980, stimulated in part by the sudden decision of the OPEC cartel to raise oil prices in 1973 and 1979.

The unemployment rate also doubled during the 1970s, rising to about 8 percent in 1980. This was contrary to our experience in the 1950s and 1960s, when inflation rose at the same time that unemployment fell, largely because increased spending strained the economy’s capacity to produce and kept up the demand for workers. Unemployment peaked at more than 10 percent in late 1982, at the end of the most severe recession since the Great Depression. By then, inflation had receded below 4 percent, where it stayed for most of the 1980s, even as the unemployment rate dropped to less than 6 percent. Since the relatively mild recession of 1990-1991, inflation has fallen to less than 2 percent and unemployment to just over 4 percent.

Paul Volcker became chairman of the Fed in August 1979 and was largely responsible for the turnaround in the economy and, as a consequence, the high reputation of the Federal Reserve. Its two preceding chairmen, G. William Miller and, before him, Arthur Burns, did little to contain the buildup of inflation during the 1970s. Miller was appointed by Jimmy Carter in early 1978 and served only eighteen months before Volcker replaced him. Miller had little experience in making economic policy and was burdened by the problems he had inherited from Burns. Before Richard Nixon appointed him chairman in 1970, Burns had been a professor of economics (and mentor to Alan Greenspan in the 1950s) at Columbia University, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a highly regarded student of the business cycle. He had also served as an economic adviser to President Eisenhower. According to William Greider’s Secrets of the Temple, Burns did not try hard enough to reduce inflation because he was playing politics. First he collaborated with “the economic pump priming that helped Richard Nixon win a landslide victory in 1972,” and then he tried to ingratiate himself with Carter in the hope that he would be reappointed in 1978.⁹

The Fed under Volcker began to raise interest rates aggressively in early November 1980, just after Ronald Reagan’s election, and it kept them very high for almost two years before relaxing its policy in August 1982. The federal funds rate—the interest rate on overnight loans between banks—surged, rising six percentage points by the end of 1980. It remained above 15 percent for almost a year, much of the time near 20 percent. High interest rates stifled spending and pushed the economy into the most severe recession since the 1930s. The weak economy, combined with other factors such as the OPEC cartel’s decision to ease pressure on oil prices because sales were declining, choked off inflation.

The 1981-1982 recession was as severe as it was because inflation had become deeply imbedded in the economy and was hard to dislodge. When negotiating wages, for example, workers insisted on a large “inflation premium” to protect themselves against expected price increases. So did the lenders who set mortgage rates. For the rate of inflation to fall, it was necessary to break the inflationary cycle in which a prolonged period of accelerating inflation created expectations of larger price increases in the future, which, in turn, became incorporated in wage bargains and other contracts.

The recession that followed the Fed’s tightening in November 1980 broke the cycle but caused much hardship. It reduced jobs and spending, convincing businesses and consumers that, in the future, prices would no longer rise as rapidly as before. The recession lasted sixteen months, from July 1981 to November 1982, five months longer than the average postwar recession. During this time the economy, according to some estimates, produced about 10 percent less than it would have if it had grown at its long-term pace instead of contracting. Many workers and businesses never fully recovered what they lost. Entire industries suffered. Nevertheless, even liberal economists such as Nobel laureate James Tobin, who has been critical of the Fed’s emphasis on controlling inflation at the expense of economic growth, think that Volcker did well under the circumstances. “I hope that history will give Paul and his colleagues the praise that they deserve,” he wrote in 1994, “not only for fighting the war against inflation but also for knowing when to stop, when to declare victory. They reversed course in the summer of 1982, probably averting an accelerating contraction of economic activity in the United States and financial disasters worldwide.”¹⁰

In Changing Fortunes, his book about economic policy in the 1980s, Volcker recalls sensing “substantial support in the country for a tough stand against inflation, for all the pain and personal dislocation that seemed to imply.” “In the end,” he concluded, “there is only one excuse for pursuing such strongly restrictive monetary policies. That is the simple conviction that over time the economy will work better, more efficiently, and more fairly, with better prospects and more saving, inan environment of reasonable price stability.”¹¹

Greider and other critics think that Volcker’s policies were unnecessarily harsh, that he was too slow to ease monetary policy in 1982, and that the Fed would have sought a better balance between inflation and unemployment had it been more “democratic,” more directly accountable to elected government officials. Such an argument is hard to reject outright: we don’t know what would have happened if Volcker had not raised interest rates, and we can’t conduct a controlled experiment to find out. Even so, Greider’s case is inconsistent and weak. He also argues that inflation in the 1970s was not contained largely because Arthur Burns was guilty of the most crass “political collusion in the Federal Reserve’s history”—i.e., that Burns was all too accountable to elected officials.

Moreover, even if the Fed waited too long to relax its tight money policy in 1982, that delay, in fact, accounted, as one analyst put it, for only a “modest fraction” of the cost of the recession, and the risks of relaxing too soon were high. “Perhaps that is true,” Volcker writes about this charge, “but those arguments do not impress me very much. It’s not that our policies were perfection but that the far greater error at that point would have been to fail to follow through long enough to affect fundamental attitudes and really put inflationary expectations to rest.”¹² What seems clear both from such statements and from the economic record is that although its officials do not say so, the Federal Reserve often acts as an institutionalized social psychologist anticipating, interpreting, and trying to influence the inner fears and calculations of American workers, consumers, and businessmen.

As the economy improved during the 1980s and 1990s, evaluating monetary policy became, ironically, more difficult. When Volcker took over the Fed, the economy had what seemed to be the worst possible combination—high unemployment and high inflation—and there were no clear alternatives to the deeply restrictive policies he instituted. In the prosperous environment that Greenspan inherited, and has fostered, the main question is subtler: Could the economy have grown more rapidly without a lot more inflation? Because we don’t know the answer, and probably can never know it, Robert Solow argues in Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy, we should try to find out, by pushing the economy as far toward full employment as it can go without setting off higher and higher inflation. “Monetary policy,” he writes, “could afford to go in for a trial-and-error approach to finding a fair balance between the dangers of inflation and the benefits of high output and employment.”

That such advice should be necessary, or considered “radical,” shows the undue influence of the theory of the “nairu”—the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment. The nairu is also called by some economists the “natural” rate of unemployment, a label that Solow thinks “intends deliberately to claim more for that state of the economy than anyone has ever seriously argued it deserves.” Milton Friedman, also a Nobel laureate in economics, and E.S. Phelps developed the nairu theory in the late 1960s, and it caught hold during the ensuing decade, in part because of the severe inflation and inept monetary policy of the 1970s. The nairu is basically the lowest unemployment rate the country can have without inflation continuously increasing. Most economists used to think that as the economy approached its capacity to produce, inflation would rise gradually as goods and services became scarce and unemployment fell. This tendency of inflation to rise as employment falls was famously described in a graph by the English economist A.W. Phillips, which is called the Phillips curve. The natural rate theory is essentially a scary version of the Phillips curve. It claims that if unemployment falls below this rate, then the rate of inflation will not simply rise but will rise continuously—“accelerate.” If the theory were true, limiting employment temporarily would be a small price to pay for not risking ever-accelerating inflation. Solow shows, however, that the doctrine is “theoretically and empirically as soft as a grape.”¹³

Until a few years ago, he points out, economists thought that the natural rate of unemployment was about 6 percent. The Fed probably thought so too because early in 1994, when the unemployment rate had fallen to about 6.5 percent but inflation was also declining, it raised interest rates in a “preemptive strike” against a probable rise in inflation. It is now clear, however, that the Fed’s fears were unwarranted. Its actions, which raised short-term interest rates by about three percentage points in the course of a year, were harmful, slowing economic growth, if only temporarily. To its credit, the Fed recognized its error and reversed course beginning in early 1995 by reducing interest rates. The unemployment rate has continued to fall, to about 4 percent, but inflation has fallen as well, to under 2 percent. Economists soon recognized that they had overestimated the effects of high employment; they have adjusted their estimates of the natural rate downward by about one percentage point.¹⁴

After this experience we can question whether the “natural rate” is a useful concept. Economists still can’t say just why their earlier estimates of a “natural rate” were exaggerated. Moreover, Solow shows that there is substantial evidence that inflation rises only modestly when the unemployment rate falls below the estimated natural rate. According to one calculation he cites, inflation increases 0.3 percent a year for each year that the unemployment rate is one percentage point below it. So, for example, if the estimated natural rate for a particular year is 5 percent and the unemployment rate is 4 percent, then the rate of inflation would increase by 0.3 percent above the previous year. (About 1.5 million more people are employed when the unemployment rate is 4 percent rather than 5 percent.) Because the costs of pushing the unemployment rate too low “may be small compared with the loss from running the economy a few percentage points below its potential,” Solow concludes,

monetary policy can afford to be exploratory. Part of its job is to feel its way to the neutral [natural] rate of unemployment, slowly and unsurely. The large body of work on these issues does not support the various popular metaphors of sudden catastrophe and subsequent irreversibility: the slippery slope, the yawning cliff, the genie that has escaped from the bottle.¹⁵

2.

On how “exploratory” monetary policy should be, and on the Fed’s actions in 1994, Alan Blinder has a somewhat different view. Blinder has been a professor of economics at Princeton since 1971, with time out for government service. He was a member of the Clinton administration’s Council of Economic Advisers between 1992 and June 1994, when he became vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In February 1996 he returned to Princeton because, according to many reports, he felt he would have had neither the influence nor the collegial relationships that he wanted with Chairman Greenspan, the other governors, and the senior Fed staff.¹⁶ In his new book, Central Banking in Theory and Practice, first delivered as the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures at the London School of Economics in 1996, Blinder gives an unusually forthright account of the difficulties that central bankers must overcome in making monetary policy.

When he joined the Fed, Blinder was considered “soft” on inflation. Ten years earlier, for example, in Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society, he argued that the consequences of moderate inflation were “more like a bad cold than a cancer on society.” Of course the bad consequences of hyperinflation could be “monumental,” Blinder wrote, “but the costs of moderate inflation… seem meager at best.” Furthermore, “the myth that the inflationary demon, unless exorcised, will inevitably grow is just that—a myth.”¹⁷

This is the same point that Solow makes in arguing that monetary policy should be exploratory, and in criticizing the Fed for raising interest rates unnecessarily in 1994. Blinder, for his part, takes seriously the Fed’s mandate to promote low unemployment as well as stable prices, and admits that recent experience has undermined earlier estimates of the natural rate. But he is convinced that the Fed was right to raise interest rates in 1994. Only because the Fed succeeded in controlling inflation, he argues, does it appear that inflation would not have risen sharply in any case, and that its policies were unnecessary. “A successful stabilization policy based on preemptive strikes will appear to be misguided,” he writes, “and may therefore leave the central bank open to severe criticism”—criticism that he thinks is both unjustified and unavoidable. Our experience over the last three or four years, however, when both inflation and unemployment fell significantly, undermines Blinder’s view that the preemptive strike of 1994 was necessary.

Blinder is at his best discussing what we know and don’t know about how monetary policy affects the economy. By controlling the costs of borrowing, and thus of spending, by businesses and consumers, the Fed wants to push unemployment as low as possible without causing serious inflation; but we really don’t know with any precision just how much a rise or fall in short-term or long-term rates will affect spending, or how long it may take to do so, or how much inflation and unemployment change when spending changes. Moreover, since monetary policy affects the economy over long periods of time, it is even possible that before the policy begins to work, conditions may change in a way that makes the policy obsolete. Because the judgments required are so difficult, and may be influenced by political pressure, Milton Friedman thinks that “discretionary” monetary policy is more likely to be harmful than helpful. About forty years ago he suggested that we would be better off if monetary policy was set by a rule requiring that the money supply grow year by year at a modest and relatively stable rate, perhaps the average rate of productivity growth.

This proposal was never tried, in part because most experts, like Blinder, are not as pessimistic as Friedman about the Fed’s ability to hit on the right policies, but also because it would not be possible to adjust monetary policy based on Friedman’s rule to specific circumstances, particularly economic crises. Nevertheless, Blinder admits, “there is at least an outside chance that Friedman could be right.”

3.

What is clear is how often the economists in both the US and other developed countries have gone wrong in their search for the magic formula for economic policy. The inflation of the 1970s not only led them to accept the dubious natural rate doctrine, but also suggested that central bankers had been tolerant of inflation and had to be pressed to fight it more resolutely. A single-minded desire to reduce inflation, with little concern for unemployment, it was then thought, would make the Fed and other central banks more credible opponents of inflation and thus reduce the costs to the economy of restraining it. Some believed that a committed, credible central bank could reduce inflation without much increasing unemployment because firms and workers would understand that it was no longer necessary for them to raise wages or prices in anticipation of higher inflation in the future.

The main problem with these speculations is that they don’t match reality. Since the 1970s, central banks have reduced inflation significantly in almost all developed countries, but they have done so in different ways. In the United States, as we have seen, the Fed reduced inflation without abandoning its mandate to also maintain low unemployment. What changed when Paul Volcker was appointed chairman in August 1979 was simply the quality of the chairman’s leadership and economic judgment, particularly about the measures necessary to alter the “expectations” of the public. On the other hand, the Bundesbank, the German central bank, which is required only to “safeguard the currency” and not to limit unemployment, has been very successful at controlling inflation; in fact, it is considered the world’s premier inflation fighter. But Germany’s economy has suffered far more than the American economy during periods when inflation has been reduced. It now has double-digit unemployment and feeble economic growth, at least partly because of overly restrictive monetary policy.¹⁸

Like Volcker’s, Greenspan’s record at the Fed has been successful because of his pragmatism, flexibility, and shrewd judgment rather than rules or theories. Perhaps his approach reflects his brief early career as a musician (in the Harry Jerome swing band that also included Leonard Garment, later a law partner and political aide to Richard Nixon), or his longer one as head of his own economic consulting firm.¹⁹ In making decisions, he appears to rely more on detailed economic data such as the volume of freight shipments or help-wanted advertising than on abstract theories or economic models. We don’t really know, since Greenspan has never written in detail about how he arrives at decisions.

He is also willing to change his policies when they are not working. In 1987, for example, the Fed contributed to the October stock market crash by raising interest rates in the preceding months. Yet Greenspan was able to limit the effects of the crash by immediately lowering interest rates, and then raising them once the danger had passed. Similarly, even though the Fed may have contributed to the 1990- 1991 recession by raising interest rates in 1990 in an attempt to lower inflation, and may not have reversed itself fast enough, the recession was relatively mild.²⁰ And last fall, when the Asian crisis threatened US financial markets, the Fed quickly lowered interest rates notwithstanding Greenspan’s earlier fears about “irrational exuberance” in the stock market²¹ ; he then surprised the markets with a second rate cut when it became clear that the first was not enough.

Although the main concern of monetary policy has shifted from a spreading financial crisis to a potential buildup in inflation, Greenspan continues to work in a nondogmatic way. At the same time, the Fed has slowly become more open and forthright, even if it has not gone as far or as fast as Blinder would like.²² Early this year, for example, it decided to make clear statements of its policies and prompt announcements of changes in the likely direction of future policy. As a result, when the Fed raised interest rates slightly at the end of June and again in late August, restoring two thirds of the rate cuts it made last fall to contain the financial panic, it also reassured the financial markets by saying it was neutral about future hikes. The statements about its likely actions were probably more important than the actual increases of one quarter of a point in the federal funds rate, which were so small and so widely anticipated that the financial markets discounted them well in advance.

Greenspan and Blinder agree about the different proposals to make use of federal budget surpluses, projected to be about $3 trillion over the next decade—or $1 trillion excluding accumulated Social Security funds. Although not directly matters of monetary policy, the debate over fiscal measures that now divides Washington would clearly affect the Federal Reserve. Both the roughly $800 billion in tax cuts favored by the Republicans and the additional $800 billion in government expenditures proposed by the administration would stimulate spending and thus raise the risk of rising inflation. For this reason, Greenspan told the House Banking Committee in his semiannual report on monetary policy this July that he would prefer “to let the surpluses run”—i.e., stay in the federal treasury—and use them to pay off debt.

Blinder is even more emphatic. He has, on the whole, supported liberal reforms. But, he wrote recently, “more spending is just about the last thing our economy needs right now…. Should it weaken and should unemployment rise, a large tax cut or dose of public spending could be called for. But not now.” Both Republican “supply-siders” such as former Congressman Jack Kemp and liberal Democrats such as economist Barry Bluestone or former labor secretary Robert Reich, on the other hand, simply deny the inflationary risk. Whether they favor tax cuts or increased public investment, they assert that their proposals will raise productivity sufficiently to eliminate the inflationary threat. In this regard, they are very much like the advocates of a “new era.”²³

Greenspan also recently ruled out using monetary policy to deflate stock prices, which may be dangerously high. The positions he has taken would seem to exclude—in my view reasonably—as too risky such measures as raising either interest rates or margin requirements in order to cool the stock market. “Bubbles generally are perceptible only after the fact,” he told the Joint Economic Committee in mid-June, and, if they burst, “the consequences need not be catastrophic for the economy” if monetary policy responds appropriately, as it did when the stock market crashed in 1987, but failed to do in 1929. “While the stock market crash of 1929 was destabilizing,” he continued, “most analysts attribute the Great Depression to ensuing failures of policy.” Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz consider the Fed’s failure to provide enough cheap credit to contain the banking panic and economic contraction that followed the market crash its greatest error. “The detailed story of every banking crisis in our history,” they concluded in their Monetary History of the United States, “shows how much depends on the presence of one or more outstanding individuals willing to assume responsibility and leadership.”²⁴

Although Greenspan has resisted raising interest rates to deflate stock prices, he admitted at the Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in late August that he was concerned about the potential impact of the stock market on the economy. Not only has borrowing to buy stocks—“leverage”—contributed to the market’s rise, but large-scale borrowing against stock gains has helped drive up spending and economic growth. There is a risk that if the market continues to rise and stimulate spending, inflation will become more serious. Because borrowing is so high in relation to income, there also is a risk that if the stock market crashes, spending will also fall significantly, as debtors scramble to repay loans, producing a serious recession.

Whether the Fed would act quickly and forcefully enough to prevent either danger—inflation or recession—is not clear. Greenspan’s record and good sense are reassuring but his past successes do not guarantee future results. Moreover, if the stock market falters and threatens the economy, there may come a point, as in Japan, when lower interest rates no longer stimulate spending sufficiently. In that case, we would have to rely on tax cuts or increased government spending to get the economy back on track. But as we have seen, and Solow emphasizes, reaching a political consensus on fiscal measures is likely to be “contentious and slow.” That is why the Fed has to remain independent of politics. Notwithstanding all the analyses of the experts, this means relying to a large extent on the intuitions of the Fed chairman on how Americans will invest and spend their money.