Sunday, September 21, 2008

Why the Cost of the Bailout Doesn’t Matter, part 1

Let’s suppose that, as some people seem to insist, the government will not recover a cent from the distressed assets it buys in the big bailout. What will the bailout cost the taxpayers?

As I argued in my previous post, it will not cost today’s taxpayers anything. But what will it cost future taxpayers? I suggested in my last post that perhaps the government could roll over its debt indefinitely, and no taxpayers would ever have to pay it off. That might sound ridiculous at first blush. You will say, perhaps, that investors will be unwilling to refinance the debt once they catch on to the government’s strategy of rolling it over forever. I would agree, if the result of the rolling over the debt were a debt-to-revenue ratio that went up over time. In that case, investors would see that the rollover strategy was unsustainable, and they would refuse to lend. But, I will argue, we should not expect that to be the case. In all likelihood, provided that the primary deficit (i.e. deficit before interest payments) can be brought under control in subsequent years, the debt-to-revenue ratio will fall over time.

The key to my argument is that the long-term growth rate of the economy should be higher than the (expected long-term average) interest rate paid by the government. In that case, revenues will keep rising at a growth rate that is higher than the interest rate, so if you discount those revenues at the interest rate, the present value of the stream will be infinite. Thus the government effectively has infinite assets, so whatever debt it takes on, it can keep rolling over that debt and financing the interest payments with new debt, and the debt will still be a smaller and smaller multiple of revenues every year.* (This works as long as the new debt is a one-time thing. If the government keeps running large primary deficits year after year, then its debt may grow more quickly than its revenues, and that would be unsustainable.)

But will the growth rate be higher than the interest rate? Yes, I will argue, it normally will be. My argument relies on the premise that most capital income is reinvested. It’s reasonable to expect that most capital income will be reinvested, since people saving for retirement will typically reinvest their capital income and then add some new savings, whereas retired people will consume their capital income to an extent likely to roughly offset the extra saving by younger people. (OK, I'm working on a better argument, and I'm sure there is one that somebody has written a paper about -- probably a paper I read years ago and then forgot. Actually several arguments, each of which has produced several papers, all of which I either have not read or have forgotten. But let this argument do for now. In any case, to me, it seems intuitively likely that most capital income will be reinvested.)

If capital income is reinvested, then the growth rate of capital (due to that reinvestment) will be equal to the return on capital (which provides that income). In a steady state, by definition, the growth rate of capital has to equal the growth rate of labor. The economy will always tend toward that steady state because, if capital is growing faster than labor, then the amount of capital per worker is growing, which means that the return on capital must be falling (since over time, every unit of capital has less and less labor to work with and therefore becomes less productive), which means that the growth rate of capital must be falling, so it will eventually fall to the growth rate of labor. (That argument applies in reverse if capital is growing more slowly than labor.)

So here’s why the growth rate will be higher than the interest rate. The overall return on capital, as discussed above, should roughly equal the growth rate. At the level of the whole economy, there is a capital structure, where some capital is risky and has a high return, while some is safe and has a low return. Since government bonds are the safest type of capital asset, they have the lowest return. That means that the average return on capital across the economy must be higher than the return on government bonds. Since the average return on capital roughly equals the growth rate, that growth rate must be higher than the return on government bonds. Thus the growth rate is higher than the interest rate paid by the government.

Consequently, the government, in effect, has, in the capitalized stream of future tax revenues, an infinitely valuable asset, which it can put up as collateral for anything it wishes to borrow, no matter how much. It will only be a problem if the borrowing is perceived as part of an ongoing pattern, in which case the government’s asset will no longer be infinitely valuable (since future revenues have to be sufficient to pay off not only the current debt and its interest, but also all future primary borrowing, which, in the “ongoing pattern” case, is expected to be too much for the expected revenue stream to ever pay off).

Maybe you think that we are in the “ongoing pattern” case, since the government has been running fairly large deficits for several years now. Personally, however, I believe that these primary deficits will, at least in the short run, come under control. We will either have a Democratic president who promises policies to raise tax revenues, or we will have a Republican president who will be working with a Democratic congress and will thus have great difficulty extending the expiring tax cuts or instituting major new expenditures. In the longer run, we do have to worry about the effect that an aging population and rising health care costs will have on entitlement programs. I’m worried about that, but I’m not much more worried than I was a week ago.

Now, perhaps you will try a reductio ad absurdum by saying, “If any amount of one-time borrowing can be financed by rolling over the debt indefinitely, why stop at $700 billion? Why not borrow $700 trillion? Or $700 quadrillion?” It does get absurd when the numbers get ridiculously high, because it gets to the point where the debt will be huge relative to revenues and it will take a ridiculously long time before revenues catch up. In other words, mathematically speaking, the present value formula (which gives the value of the government’s revenue stream) is not very useful if it takes many centuries for the cumulative sum to come close to its theoretical limit. But with the national debt already well into the trillions, and with investors obviously willing to refinance the current debt at very low interest rates, I seriously doubt that another $700 billion – or even another $2 trillion, should it come to that – will make the difference between a reasonable level of debt and an unreasonable one.

Yes, Virginia, when it comes to financing government bailouts of financial assets, there is a Santa Claus. I should make clear, though, that Santa Claus is not omnipotent. He can come down the chimney and deliver a financial bailout on Christmas Eve, but he can’t make something out of nothing. If the government were to attempt some type of bailout that involved the production of large quantities of real goods and services, Santa Claus could only help to the extent that the economy had slack resources (as it does now and likely still will in the immediate future, but probably only a few hundred billion dollars worth, at most). When the economy runs out of resources, no bailout can make more of them.



*See Michael R. Darby, “Some Pleasant Monetarist Arithmetic,” for a more precise version of this argument in a different context.

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What if the government loses it AAA rating? Which is plausible, since the deficit would skyrocket.

Sun Sep 21, 01:30:00 PM EDT  
Blogger knzn said...

Theoretically, the government has the power to compel the Fed to buy its bonds, so I've never understood this business of rating US government bonds. They'll get paid somehow. The real issue is whether the government will face a situation where the only way to deal with its debt is to inflate the currency. In any case, as I have argued in the post above, there is no reason for investors to demand significantly higher interest rates.

Sun Sep 21, 01:53:00 PM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As I argued in my previous post, it will not cost today’s taxpayers anything. But what will it cost future taxpayers? I suggested in my last post that perhaps the government could roll over its debt indefinitely, and no taxpayers would ever have to pay it off.

The fact that they never pay it off doesn't mean it doesn't cost them.

Have the government spend a trillion dollars on whatever, then add it to the national debt -- fund it with a perpetual bond like consols, so it explicitly will only be serviced, never paid off. The interest rate on long govt bonds is say 5%, that's $50 billion a year forever. That is paid with taxes.

That stream of taxes discounted to present value is $1 trillion. So the $1 trillion of borrowing still costs the taxpayers of the future $1 trillion of taxes, even if it is never paid off.

One might also then place this borrowing cost in the context of the actual real projected future fiscal picture -- it is unrealistic to consider it as a stand-alone issue.

E.g., There's $40 trillion+ of unfunded entitlement obligations at present value that will start coming "on budget" in just a few years. Forget 75-year projections, CBO projects that to stay even with the rising cash cost of these income taxes will have to go up > 50% just by 2030 (or we'll need an equivalent increase of other taxes), or the deficit will compound up so fast it will crash the economy in the 2040s, with annual deficits > 20% of GDP.

Sure, that can and presumably will be fixed with a mix of future tax increases and benefit cuts (on an unprecedented scale) -- but considering how the right loves tax increases, and the left loves benefit cuts, and how a mob of AARPers literally attacked Dan Rostenkowski in the street when Congress asked them to pay a tiny tad more for their retirement benefits ... that isn't going to be easy. And adding another $700 billion or whatever on top to service is going to make it that much less easy.

Also, the Social Security Trustees, CBO and like parties project GDP growth will drop from the historical 3.3% average to about 2.1% in the 2020s, due to the demographic drop in the growth rate of the work force. That's going to make it less easy to service all these costs yet.

So in the larger context of all this, if the govt winds up making a serious net transfer to the financial industry, I don't see how there is going to be anything free about it to the taxpayers.

And it's going to make dealing with a projected 50% income tax increase "or else" by 2030 even more difficult politically.

Sun Sep 21, 10:36:00 PM EDT  
Blogger knzn said...

The interest rate on long govt bonds is say 5%, that's $50 billion a year forever. That is paid with taxes.

No. My whole point is that you can pay that interest by issuing additional bonds. As long as the interest rate is less than the growth rate, capitalizing the interest on outstanding debt still allows the debt-to-revenue ratio to fall.

So in your example, every year you issue $50 billion more of perpetual bonds (well, actually $50 billion the first year, then $52.5 billion the second year, and so on). Your debt has grown by 5% (in nominal terms, I assume, otherwise that interest rate is unreasonably high), but your revenue has grown by, perhaps, 6% (again, reasonable in nominal terms). So creditors will see that your ability to pay your debts has actually improved despite capitalizing your interest, and you can keep providing the same government services without raising taxes (assuming that the primary budget was balanced).

Sun Sep 21, 10:53:00 PM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think it would be more accurate to say that the government could *hypothetically* afford it.

I did notice that you have a PhD in economics and I did find the scenario you posited a reasonable thought exercise.

When it comes to applicability to our present circumstances - not so much.

You already noted the "ongoing pattern" problem, but I think you dismiss it too casually. Even though we had a budget surplus 8 years ago, our national debt is nearly double what it was then. Even if the deficit is brought under control again voluntarily, the "tragedy of the commons" problem combined with the fact that future generations don't vote today makes it unlikely that it will stay that way. Unless and until the costs become prohibitive.

Another problem I see with the line of thinking you articulated is that aside from the structural deficit ex-bailouts, if the $700b headline number (as the proposal is structured the real number is more likely north of $1.5t) is squandered, we'll need much more again.

So, while I certainly think the government can get away with squandering trillions more, and I do see your point that under circumstances I consider to be negligibly likely that could be sustained, I don't think it (or we) can really *afford* it in any meaningful sense of the word.

I'm glad you brought up the subject - I think it's gotten precious little attention.

Mon Sep 22, 07:34:00 AM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The interest rate on long govt bonds is say 5%, that's $50 billion a year forever. That is paid with taxes."

No. My whole point is that you can pay that interest by issuing additional bonds. As long as the interest rate is less than the growth rate, capitalizing the interest on outstanding debt still allows the debt-to-revenue ratio to fall.

Which is a long, long, way from our real world, which is why I included the other data about current budget projections.

*If* the national debt and deficit are at sustainable levels and on a sustainable course, *then* a single lump-sum addition to the debt in whatever manner, so long as it doesn't start increasing the debt-to-GDP ratio from that level, can be carried indefinitely, sure.

But in the real world CBO on current law is projecting deficits reaching 20% of GDP and rising fast by the 2040s, with "the end" coming as a result. Moodys and S&P project that if we stay on that course the credit rating of the US will start falling in 2017, and S&P projects it will hit "junk" by 2027.

Of course, we can expect those events to be averted by major (politically traumatic) tax increases & spending cuts by then, totalling say a necessary $X trillion.

But in that context, adding on an extra $700 billion to the debt today only accelerates its run to unsustainability, so we get there that much faster, and increases the fiscal gap to be closed on the other end -- with the final tax increases/spending cuts needed to preserve the credit rating of the US rising from $X trillion to $X.7 trillion.

Nothing free about that.

Thu Sep 25, 05:47:00 PM EDT  
Blogger knzn said...

You seem to be mixing stock variables and flow variables. Debt is a stock variable. Tax increases and spending cuts are flow variables. (They're sometimes reported as stock variables, when they say something like, "$50 billion in additional spending over 5 years," but I think that's a nonsensical way to think about them.)

The problem with entitlements (the main reason for the ugly projections) is that the flows become unsustainable. The flows will have to change in such a way that we don't end up running excessive primary deficits year after year. The spending cuts and/or tax increases that would be necessary to balance the primary budget are the same with our without the additional debt.

It's true that the additional debt would reduce the size of the sustainable primary deficit, so if our intention is to run the largest sustainable primary deficit, then the debt makes a difference. I would recommend balancing the primary budget in any case, because that gives us the capacity to borrow more money in case of a nonrecurring emergency. Even without the additional debt, the cuts and/or tax increases necessary to bring the primary deficit down to a sustainable level will be huge. The cuts and/or tax increases necessary to balance the primary budget will be a little more huge. I don't think the difference between "huge" and "a little more huge" is going to be the sticking point.

Overall, the extra borrowing today makes a difference only if we manage our budget badly in the future. If we balance the primary budget in the future -- which is just as hard without as with the debt -- then the debt is still free.

As for that bond rating business, I don't understand it. US Treasury bonds are denominated in dollars. Congress, which authorizes the spending and borrowing, also has ultimate authority over the creation of dollars. The chance that the Fed would allow the Treasury to default is negligible. The chance that Congress would allow the Fed to allow the Treasury to default is even more negligible. Why would a bond get a junk rating when it has near zero chance of default?

Thu Sep 25, 06:39:00 PM EDT  
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