Since 2008 mainstreamers' theoretical—and central bankers' policy—focus on interest rates as a solution to growing instability has become almost a fetish. Interest rate manipulation is viewed increasingly as the end-all solution to all the global economy's woes. Forget fiscal stimulus. Forget income inequality. Forget unsustainable and increasingly unserviceable levels of debt. Ignore the major changes in labor markets that are crushing wage earners, or the structural changes in financial markets that are rewarding investors in financial securities with unprecedented gains in income and wealth. Just lower interest rates to zero and, if necessary, push them into negative territory. And if seven years of the same is not enough, then another seven is necessary.
Mainstream economics erroneously believes that focusing on interest rates and their money determinants represents analysis of financial variables. But interest rates are not financial variables. Moreover, interest rates are not fundamental, but intermediate variables. They are proxies for changes in more fundamental forces. These forces may reflect real variables like money, technological change, cost of physical capital, expected rates of return on investment. But interest rates may reflect financial variables as well. Nevertheless, while mainstream economists may sometimes consider various real causes determining interest rates, they continue to ignore financial determinants of those rates.
Mainstreamers' preoccupation with real determinants of interest rates goes back at least to the early 20th century, when economists like Wicksell, Fisher and others debated what drove changes in interest rates—beyond just the previous simplistic 19th century economic notion of money supply and demand. Was it money that determined interest rates? Money demand? Money supply? Money velocity? Or did rates instead follow changes in real investment. Was it interest rates that determined real investment or real investment that determined interest rates? Whichever side of the debate taken, interest rates were viewed associated primarily with real variables—whether money, real asset investment, waves of new technologies, cost of replacement of physical capital, and so on. The same preoccupation with interest rates determined by real variables applies to mainstream economics today.
But focusing on real variables has failed to explain why interest rates have had little effect on restoring economic stability and, in fact, are contributing now to instability. As interest rates approached the zero bound after 2008, and descended into negative territory in recent years, real economic growth has continued to slow and stagnate nonetheless. No less than $10 trillion in bonds and other securities are now in negative rate territory, with more being considered or on the way. And not only has real economic growth been slowing, but global trade is stalling, productivity has nearly collapsed, real asset investment growth rates are declining, and the drift toward deflation in real goods and services long term continues. Something is wrong with the mainstream theory interpretation of interest rates—as well as the central bankers' policies built upon the theory.
At the same time as instability in the real economy is rising, so too is instability on the financial side. Highly correlated with the collapse of interest rates, financial asset prices have escalated and repeatedly created asset bubbles globally—which suggests strongly that low rates have been servicing financial markets more and real investment less. But that evidence has been largely disregarded by mainstream economics.
To explain why the linkage between low rates, on the one hand, and real investment and economic growth has broken down, mainstreamers would have to focus their analysis at a more fundamental level and consider financial forces as well real at that level. They would have to explain how the effect of low interest rates has been distorted by financial forces that have become increasingly influential in the 21st century.
But mainstreamers have no financial tools in their box to do that kind of analysis. They pay little attention to the linkages between financial forces and interest rates because their toolbox is composed of pliers, hammer, wrenches and such, when perhaps what is missing is a software machine-learning algorithm tool that might show how financial forces today are eclipsing real forces in determining the impact of interest rates on economic stability.
Those mainstream economists who have been growing uncomfortable with the historical record contradicting the theory have attempted to explain the failure by what they call 'secular stagnation'. But secular stagnation theory is itself an analysis based primarily on real variables as well. Like contemporary interest rate theory, it also disregards the role of financial forces and variables. Once again we get refusal to consider the financial side.
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