Os cantos escuros da macroeconomia

Uma excelente peça de Olivier Blanchard, do FMI, sobre o que sabíamos (ou pensavamos saber) sobre macroeconomia e tudo o que aprendemos nos últimos anos: Where danger lurks.

If the financial system had been less opaque, if capital ratios had been higher, there might still have been a housing bust in the United States in 2007–2008. But the effects would have been limited – a mild US recession at the worst, rather than a global economic crisis.


Macroeconomic policy also has an essential role to play. If nominal rates had been higher before the crisis, monetary policy’s margin for manoeuvre would have been larger. If inflation and nominal interest rates had been, say, 2 percentage points higher before the crisis, central banks would have been able to decrease real interest rates by 2 more percentage points before hitting the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. These additional 2 percentage points are not negligible. Their effects would have been roughly equivalent to the effects of the unconventional monetary policies that central banks pursued when the zero bound was reached – purchasing private sector assets and long-term government bonds to lower long-term interest rates rather than using the standard technique of manipulating a short-term policy rate. (Harvard Professor Kenneth S Rogoff, former head of the IMF’s Research Department, has suggested solutions other than higher inflation, such as the replacement of cash with electronic money, which could pay negative nominal interest. That would remove the zero bound constraint.)


But this answer skirts a harder question: How should we modify our benchmark models – the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that we use, for example, at the IMF to think about alternative scenarios and to quantify the effects of policy decisions? The easy and uncontroversial part of the answer is that the DSGE models should be expanded to better recognise the role of the financial system – and this is happening. But should these models be able to describe how the economy behaves in the dark corners?



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