Delong Explains Recessions

Brad Delong wrote a great post about why recessions happen. First he explains that inflation happens when there is more money than people need for managing market exchanges of goods and services,  and when there is too little money to be able to exchange all the goods and services that are wanted, a recession, or "general glut" happens.

Sometimes when you go the market, you find the money prices that you have to pay higher than you expected—perhaps 10% higher than you expected last year when you made your plans. It seems that, somehow, there is too much spending money chasing too few goods. How is this that this happens? And what should the government do to make sure that it does not happen?

Conversely, we can have the opposite problem—not a glut of money relative to goods, but what early-nineteenth century economists used to call a “general glut” of unsold commodities, idle factories and workshops, and idle workers all across the economy. Economists have important things to say about how to try to prevent these episodes and what to do when they happen to cure them. And this sixth role of economists as public intellectuals in the public square is worth going into in more depth.
Back in the 1820s the question of whether the circular flow of economic activity as mediated by the market system could break down and the economy become afflicted by a "general glut" of commodities was a live theoretical question. Everybody agreed that there could be particular gluts. Cosider what happens should households decide that they want to spend less on electricity to power large-screen video and audio entertainment systems and more on yoga lessons to seek inner peace. The immediate consequence—within the "market day," as late-nineteenth century British economist Alfred Marshall would have put it—of this shift in preferences is excess demand for yoga instructors and excess supply of electric power. Prices of electricity (and of large-screen TVs, and of audio systems) fall as unsold inventories pile up in stores and as generators spin down and stand idle. Yoga instructors, by contrast, find themselves overscheduled, working ten-hour days, and stressed out—and find the prices they can charge for their lessons going through the roof. Workers in electric power distribution and in video and audio production and sales find that they must either accept lower wages or find themselves out on the street without jobs.
Over time the market system provides individuals with changing incentives that resolve the excess-supply excess-demand disequilibrium. Seeing the fortunes to be earned by teaching yoga, more young people learn to properly regulate their svadisthana chakra and teach others to do so. Seeing unemployment and stagnant wages in electrical engineering, fewer people major in EECS. The supply of yoga instructors grows. The supply of electrical engineers shrinks. Wages of yoga instructors fall back towards normal. Wages of electrical engineers rise. And balanced equilibrium is restored. Thus we understand how there can be a glut of a particular commodity—in this case, electric power. And we understand that it is matched by an excess demand for another commodity—in this case, yoga instructor services to properly align your svadisthana chakra.
But can there be a general glut, a glut of everything?
Some economists early in the nineteenth century said yes. Other said that the idea of a "general glut" was logically incoherent. Jean Baptiste Say, for example:

Letters to Mr. Malthus: I shall not attempt, Sir, to add... in pointing out the just and ingenious observations in your book; the undertaking would be too laborious.... [And] I should be sorry to annoy either you or the public with dull and unprofitable disputes. But, I regret to say, that I find in your doctrines some fundamental principles which... would occasion a retrograde movement in a science of which your extensive information and great talents are so well calculated to assist the progress....
What is the cause of the general glut of all the markets in the world, to which merchandize is incessantly carried to be sold at a loss?... Since the time of Adam Smith, political economists have agreed that we do not in reality buy the objects we consume, with the money or circulating coin which we pay for them. We must in the first place have bought this money itself by the sale of productions of our own. To the proprietor of the mines whence this money is obtained, it is a production with which he purchases such commodities as he may have occasion for.... From these premises I had drawn a conclusion... “that if certain goods remain unsold, it is because other goods are not produced; and that it is production alone which opens markets to produce.”...
[W]henever there is a glut, a superabundance, [an excess supply] of several sorts of merchandize, it is because other articles [in excess demand] are not produced in sufficient quantities... if those who produce the latter could provide more... the former would then find the vent which they required...

Yet Say changed his mind. By 1829, in his analysis of the British financial panic and recession of 1825-6, Jean-Baptiste Say was writing that there could indeed be such a thing as a general glut of commodities after all: "every type of merchandise had sunk below its costs of production, a multitude of workers were without work. Many bankruptcies were declared..." The general glut, Say wrote in 1829, had been triggered by a panicked financial flight to quality in financial markets. What was going on? The answer was nailed by John Stuart Mill:

Those who have... affirmed that there was an excess of all commodities, never pretended that money was one of these commodities.... What it amounted to was, that persons in general, at that particular time, from a general expectation of being called upon to meet sudden demands, liked better to possess money than any other commodity. Money, consequently, was in request, and all other commodities were in comparative disrepute.... The result is, that all commodities fall in price, or become unsaleable.... [A]s there may be a temporary excess of any one article considered separately, so may there of commodities generally, not in consequence of over-production, but of a want of commercial confidence...

Note that these financial market excess demands can have any of a wide variety of causes: episodes of irrational panic, the restoration of realistic expectations after a period of irrational exuberance, bad news about future profits and technology, bad news about the solvency of government or of private corporations, bad government policy that inappropriately shrinks asset stocks, et cetera.
It seems as if there is always or almost always something that the government can do to affect asset supplies and demands that promises a welfare improvement over, say, waiting for prolonged nominal deflation to raise the real stock of liquid money, of bonds, or of high-quality AAA assets. Monetary policy open market operations swap AAA bonds for money. Quantitative easing that raises expected inflation diminishes demand for money and for AAA assets by taxing them. Non-standard monetary policy interventions swap risky bonds for AAA bonds or money. Fiscal policy affects both demand for goods and labor and the supply of AAA assets--as long as fiscal policy does not crack the status of government debt as AAA and diminish rather than increasing the supply of AAA assets. Government guarantees transform risky bonds into AAA assets. Et cetera...
And what if there is a glut not of commodities but inflation? Simply apply the same policy tools in reverse.
That is the last of the six things economists have to say in the public square: that the economy does not consistently balance itself at high employment with stable prices. The principle that it does economist have called Say’s Law—even though Say abandoned it by 1829. And it is important for economists to say, loudly, that Say’s Law is not true and theory, and it takes delicate and proper technocratic management to make it work in practice.

RBC Austrian Thought

Russ Roberts wrote:

Love that word—stimulus. It sounds so scientific. ...Sounds like the perfect prescription for an ailing economy.
But if politicians know how to stimulate the economy, why wait for a recession? If you can make the economy grow, why wait for bad times?
...Maybe we don't know how to make a $14 trillion economy move very quickly. And if we did, it would take a lot more than an injection of even 125 billion dollars.
There's that scientific language again—an injection. The politicians are always going to inject some amount of money into the hands of consumers and into the economy, like a doctor giving a lifesaving blood transfusion. But where does the economic injection come from? It has to come from inside the system. It's not an outside stimulus like the chest paddles or the transfusion. It means taking money from someone or somewhere inside the system and giving it to someone else.
The standard stimulus package doesn't change incentives. It's a check from the government. The hope is that the receiver will spend it. But when you just send out checks from the government, whoever gets stimulated is likely to be offset by someone who gets unstimulated.
The money has to come from somewhere. If you raise taxes to fund the plan, the people who are taxed are poorer and they'll spend less. If you borrow money to fund the plan, the people who buy the government bonds have less money to spend and that offsets the stimulus. It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing—the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper.
And even the people who get the money often save more of it than they spend.
That's why stimulus schemes based on giving people money have a poor track record... Usually, the only thing that gets stimulated is a politician's approval rating.
I'm not saying that economy policy is irrelevant. Economic policy matters because it affects the long-run growth of the economy. I'm all for policies that make us more productive or innovative by changing incentives. But those policies take time. There's little any economic doctor can do to move our $14 trillion organism of an economy in the next few months.
Politicians who work in the Oval Office—or those who seek to work there—would be wise to remember that patience is a virtue. Focus on the policies that lead to growth over time. Expecting results overnight is bound to lead to disappointment.

1. Roberts asks, "if politicians know how to stimulate the economy, why wait for a recession? If you can make the economy grow, why wait for bad times?" How would you answer him? 
2. Roberts asks, "But where does the economic injection come from?  It has to come from inside the system."  Is it possible to create an injection into GDP from within the circular flow of the economy during bad times? 
3. Roberts says that with an economic stimulus, "the only thing that gets stimulated is a politician's approval rating." Why would approval ratings increase if a stimulus does nothing?  
4. Evaluate the following quote:  "But when you just send out checks from the government, whoever gets stimulated is likely to be offset by someone who gets unstimulated.  The money has to come from somewhere. If you raise taxes to fund the plan, the people who are taxed are poorer and they'll spend less. If you borrow money to fund the plan, the people who buy the government bonds have less money to spend and that offsets the stimulus. It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing—the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper.  Does that make sense?  How does a recession happen if the money is always there anyhow? 

Financialization of the Macroeconomy

Bruce Bartlett writes about the financialization of American macroeconomics and the instability it creates:

Ozgur Orhangazi of Roosevelt University has found that investment in the real sector of the economy falls when financialization rises....Adair Turner, formerly Britain’s top financial regulator, [suggests] that the financial sector’s gains have been more in the form of economic rents — basically something for nothing — than the return to greater economic value.

Another way that the financial sector leeches growth from other sectors is by attracting a rising share of the nation’s “best and brightest” workers, depriving other sectors like manufacturing of their skills.

The rising share of income going to financial assets also contributes to labor’s falling share....This phenomenon is a major cause of rising income inequality, which itself is an important reason for inadequate growth.

Kevin Drum asks a really big question:

The finance industry doesn't grow because some fundamental feature of the modern economy demands it. In fact, it's really more mysterious than it seems. After all, we know why, say, the car industry grew during the 20th century: because more people wanted cars. Likewise, we know why the tech industry is growing now: because more people want to surf the net and play video games.

So why has finance grown? Because the world needs more finance? Up to a point, sure: availability of capital is a key requirement for economic growth in a modern mixed economy. But we passed that point quite a while ago. Capital has been freely and easily available in America and most of the developed world for decades. So again: Why the continued growth?

Relatedly, at VoxEU, Sheila Bair recently posted 12 answers to important questions about finance and ways to regulate finance.  It is worth a read. She argues for higher capital ratios.

Krugman has a great primer on austerity and the great recession

Krugman has a great primer on austerity and the great recession.  He uses some remarkable graphs to make his case that this time austerity is bigger than ever and the results are Keynesian. 

Good monetary policy raises inflation during recessions

Moneybox notes that Ben Bernanke has the worst economic record on inflation since the great depression, but he thinks he is one of the best!

Testifying before Congress recently, Ben Bernanke bragged, "my inflation record is the best of any Federal Reserve chairman in the postwar period, or at least one of the best, about 2 percent average inflation."

Catherine Rampell's numbers show that Bernanke has, in fact, delivered the lowest inflation of any postwar Fed chair, coming in at an average of 2 percent. On the other hand, Floyd Norris notes that unemployment under Bernanke has been second-highest of any postwar Federal Reserve chairman. Now if you ignore the "postwar" qualifier, the picture looks different. Several Depression-era Fed chairs had less inflation and more unemployment than Bernanke. And putting those Depression-era bankers into the mix serves to highlight how absurd Bernanke's boast is. No sensible person would look at America's economic performance in the 1929-1933 period and say "man, they did a great job of fighting inflation."

It is true that inflation was very low—indeed, negative—for most of this period, but that simply goes to show they were doing a terrible job.

Suppose Ben Bernanke resolved to deliver enough aggregate demand to get the inflation rate up to its Greenspan-era average of 2.6 percent. Unless you believe there is literally zero slack or excess capacity in the economy, that would create some extra jobs and real growth. And was inflation so terrible in the Greenspan years? Nope. At the time, Greenspan-level inflation was considered a historic victory in the war on inflation.

Moneybox later points out that there are many prominent media voices calling for higher inflation on both the political right and the left, but almost no voices in positions of political power including at the Fed. 

I regularly give Ben Bernanke a hard time for the excessively tight monetary policy he's run at the Federal Reserve, and his most recent congressional testimony has been the chance for more of that. But in Bernanke's defense I should say that the really striking thing about his appearance is the utter and total lack of influence of dovish monetary policy views on Capitol Hill.

If you read a lot of economics coverage on the Internet, you'll be struck by the amazing success of "dovish" monetary policy views. I've been pushing them here at Slate, Ryan Avent pushes them at the Economist, Matt O'Brien pushes them at The Atlantic, Tim Fernholz and Miles Kimball push them at Quartz, Josh Barro and the Stevenson/Wolfers team push them at Bloomberg, Ramesh Ponnuru pushes them at National Review, Ezra Klein pushes them on Wonkblog, Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen have both pushed them in the New York Times, etc. It's not like an overwhelming consensus or anything, but normally a political stance with this much representation in the media could find at least one significant politician to stand up for it. But while we have Obama's former Council of Economic Advisors Chair and the chief economist at Goldman Sachs on our side, we seem to have zero members of congress.

This is not an excuse for the Fed's too-tight policies ...but it's probably a reason for it. If nobody in congress objects to crucifying mankind upon a cross of 2 percent [core inflation] targeting then realistically it seems unlikely to stop.

Broken Windows and Depreciation

Barry Ritholtz shows a graph that America's durable goods are getting old. That means that they will need to be replaced and when people start replacing durable goods, 'savings' decreases.  One of the many ways that people 'save' during a recession is by putting off purchases of durable goods but eventually their goods break and they finally shell out to replace them.  This is a 'natural' way for the economy to recover.  But it is just like what would happen if someone went around breaking them.  Moneybox: 

waiting for a "natural" economic recovery rather than relying on "artificial" stimulus in the form of fiscal or monetary policy is really just a slow motion version of creating economic growth via the broken windows fallacy. If five percent of America's cars, fridges, toasters, washing machines, and blenders vanished suddenly tomorrow that would be "good for the economy" in the sense that boosting orders for consumer durable goods would lead to a higher GDP growth rate. But the purpose of having an economy is to make people better off, and you clearly don't make people better off by destroying their appliances.

By the same token, even a steep recession will generally come to an end sooner or later. Cars and trucks and buildings and appliances will get old and need to be replaced, in effect raising the "natural rate of interest" and bringing intended savings and desired investment into equilibrium. But this happens by impoverishing the country, just as much as running around smashing windows would.
 

 

 

Models of Inflation

Inflation was too high in the 1970s and early 1980s because mainstream economists had a poor understanding of when inflation is beneficial and when it is harmful and of how to control it.  Today inflation is too low because mainstream economists have a poor understanding of the costs and benefits of inflation and how to control it.  In some ways, we are in the mirror image of the problems of the 1970s. 
Lowering inflation is simple.  Just restrict the money supply and communicate expectations clearly.  Raising inflation is also simple.  Just expand the money supply and communicate expectations clearly.  The important think in both cases is for the central bank to clearly communicate that it will keep doing whatever it takes to bring inflation to the approximate level that it wants.  Today it seems amazing that economists did not understand this in the 1970s and someday it will seem amazing that many prominent economists do not understand this today. 

Supply Shocks

Moneybox explains why Casey Mulligan is wrong about the current recession being due to a supply shock:

Casey Mulligan thinks the recession wasn't caused by a demand shock but is instead a "redistribution recession" caused by the fact that shifts in labor market incentives have made it less worthwhile to work. John Quiggin says we can no this is wrong by looking at the international data, since there's a curious coincidence in timing of the fall in employment in the United States, Iceland, Estonia, United Kingdom, Japan, etc. that seems hard to explain by Barack Obama's Medicaid policies.

But I think there's an easier way to tell that it's wrong, and that's by looking at the inflation data above.

Imagine we passed a law putting the top federal income tax rate up to 75 percent and lowering the threshold for the top bracket to $100,000 for a single person and $200,000 for a married couple and used the revenue to finance a progam that pays you a cash grant of $10,000 a year if you don't have a job but gives you nothing if you're employed. It's pretty obvious that a policy along these lines really would cause some affluent people to downshift their careers and would cause some low wage workers to just quit and live off a combination of the 10 grand and under the table earnings. But in response you'd also see inflation. With some affluent professionals working shorter hours or quitting their jobs to launch the cupcake factories of their dreams, the price of hiring the services of the remaining affluent professionals would be bid up. Similarly, many minimum wage employers would have to raise nominal wages to compete with the increased appeal of not working.

In other words you'd see exactly what you'd see from any other kind of supply shock—a reduction in real output (fewer willing workers) combined with an acceleration in the price level (scarcity) rather than what we actually saw (see above) which is a collapse in the price level at the exact same time as the collapse in output.

Something to recall is that although "supply-side economics" came to just be code for "let's cut taxes" there's an actual reason that phrase came into currency in the late-1970s namely that we were precisely facing a combination of high unemployment and high inflation. That high inflation was an excellent indicator that boosting demand would not be effective in boosting output. So even if you think the specific proposed supply-side remedy was cranky, it was smart to seize the "supply side" label.

But that's not the situation we've been facing.

 

Krugman expounds on this theme:

Mulligan’s ...claim that increased use of the social safety net is a cause rather than a result of the depressed economy [is wrong]. As one of his commenters points out, this amounts to the claim that soup kitchens caused the Great Depression. Quiggin [link] does an admirable job of refuting this claim. I would, however, add one more point. If you really believe that the problem is that excessive generosity to the downtrodden is reducing the incentive to work, so that what we really have is a supply problem rather than a demand problem, you should expect to see upward pressure on wages.
What we actually see:

 The textbook AS-AD model and labor supply models support the analysis that we are not in a supply shock.  In real terms, wages are declining. 


Note that the austerians and their fellow travellers (like Cochrine) have completely forgotten their ideology when it comes to analysis of the “fiscal cliff”.  This is a only problem under a purely Keynesian analysis.  The cliff is the idea that the government will suddenly almost balance its budget!  Everyone is scared that this dramatic Keynesian shock will plunge the nation into recession, but if austerians were consistent, they would be proclaiming it is exactly what is needed to restore confidence. 

Hurricanes and Broken Windows

Note that the US is not technically in a recession.  But this is more of a problem with the official definition of a recession than with the following analysis.  
Moneybox:

On the question of hurricanes and short-term macroeconomic indicators, here's how I would put it. Right now the American economy is [operating below capacity]. Recessions shouldn't happen. The planned saving behavior of firms and households ought to be balanced by the planned investment behavior of firms and households, creating a situation in which roughly all available resources are employed.

When that fails to happen—a recession—it's an indication that the interest rate is too high. A lower interest rate would, at the margin, decrease desire to save and increase desire to invest and bring the system closer to equilibrium. Cut the interest rate low enough and you've restored balance, creating a situation in which roughly all available resources are employed.

But suppose that interest rates are zero. What happens then?

Well, then you've got a recession. The recession could be cured by unorthodox monetary policy or by fiscal policy measures, but it hasn't been. So you're left hoping that the marginal product of capital will increase, thus bringing savings and investment back into equilibrium. An exciting new technological discovery could make that happen. And so could a hurricane. If there are already a bunch of perfectly good cranes in town, then nobody wants to invest in new cranes, and the crane factory sits idle. But if a hurricane wrecks a bunch of cranes, then the marginal value of a new hurricane goes up, and people want to invest in new cranes.

Now before everyone starts screaming "broken windows fallacy," take note: This is a terrible solution to unemployment. By reducing society's stock of capital goods and consumer durables, the hurricane spurs new production into being. But it's also making us poorer.

The point I want to make about this isn't that hurricanes are "good for the economy." The important point is that suffering through a downturn without adequate fiscal and monetary stimulus amounts to rebalancing the economy through a slow-motion hurricane. We will, eventually, return to full employment. But we're getting there by allowing the per capita stock of capital goods (as it happens, mostly houses) and durables to deteriorate year after year. Eventually this will lead us to a rebalancing, but it's a form of rebalancing via impoverishment. Stimulus is much better.

Fiscal Multipliers

Moneybox summarizes an IMF report:

Kate Mackenzie at FT Alphaville gives us the latest from International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard who wrote a little box in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook report arguing that fiscal austerity has been more damaging than the pre-crisis consensus in the economics profession would have suggested. Here's Blanchard:

The main finding, based on data for 28 economies, is that the multipliers used in generating growth forecasts have been systematically too low since the start of the Great Recession, by 0.4 to 1.2, depending on the forecast source and the specifics of the estimation approach. Informal evidence suggests that the multipliers implicitly used to generate these forecasts are about 0.5. So actual multipliers may be higher, in the range of 0.9 to 1.7.

This is part of an ongoing transformation at the IMF over the past decade to becoming a major international opponent of the kind of harsh austerity regimes that the IMF was known for in the mid-to-late 1990s.
The research issue here is that, methodologically speaking, it's difficult to know what "the" fiscal policy multiplier is supposed to be. A lot of good research has been done on the macroeconomic impact of deficit financed military spending. But such spending isn't meant to stimulate a depressed economy and in fact is often paired with monetary policy or other measures specifically designed to strangle domestic consumption (wage and price controls, rationing) and prevent total economy-wide spending from expanding. A country with a depressed economy and a central bank that wants to see total economy-wide spending go up but isn't willing to forcefully deploy tools beyond interest rates to make that happen can see a much bigger fiscal impact. Conversely, a country whose fiscal authorities are trying to paddle upstream in the face of a central bank that wants less demand and less inflation isn't going to get anywhere.
Back to Mackenzie, the bottom line is that we need less budget cutting from countries that have cheap borrowing costs:

And the IMF is urging that countries who have ‘room to maneuvre’ such as the UK, France and the Netherlands, should “smooth their planned adjustment over 2013 and beyond” if growth falls significantly below the IMF’s increasingly gloomy forecasts.

Now what it makes the most sense to do depends on circumstances. In Germany where unemployment is very low already and public services are quite good, it seems like a VAT cut to let Germans enjoy higher living standards (and perhaps buy more goods from southern Europe) would be ideal. In the US we should be avoiding a disastrous payroll tax hike and probably creating slush funds for our budget-strapped state and local governments.

If The Fed Could Not Raise Inflation

Moneybox:

John Cochrane has become well known in recent years for his conservative political views, but the opinion he expresses in today's NYT forum about inflation is strangely widespread across ideological lines. He says that not only would it be unwise for the Federal Reserve to try to create inflation, it would be impossible as well:

The fact is, the Fed is basically powerless to create more inflation right now -- or to do anything about growth. Interest rates can't go below zero, and buying one kind of bond while selling another has minuscule effects.

I've heard this from economists like Jamie Galbraith on the left and Lawrence Summers in the middle as well, and I don't buy it at all. The problem is that there's a huge logical gap between the sentences. It is true that those particular things don't create much inflation. But what if the Fed did other things? For example, consider the "minuscule effects" of quantitative easing. Those aren't zero effects. In fact, inflation expectations have risen when the Fed has announced rounds of easing.

Have they risen a lot? No. Presumably because the Fed doesn't want them to rise a lot. But suppose the Fed announced a big new round of Quantitative Easing and said "the purpose of this bond buying is to raise inflation expectations above 3 percent"? Suppose they said "the purpose of this bond buying is to raise inflation expectations above 3 percent and we'll keep on buying bonds until it happens?"

I think that small tweak in strategy gets you from "miniscule effects" to bigger effects. The issue is that the Fed gets what it wants. If it wants to raise inflation expectations a little, it gets a small effect. If it wants a bigger effect it needs to communicate that fact, and it'll get the effect.

The other way to look at it is not in terms of a policy recommendation, but it terms of what might be possible if the Cochrane viewpoint were correct. The Fed could, on that view, simply buy all the outstanding debt in the country and then tear it all up. Wouldn't that be a bonanza? Yes it would be "unfair" since the highly indebted would benefit more than the prudent. But virtually everyone has at least some debt or owns shares in companies that have debt, and absolutely everyone is implicitly responsible for different forms of public sector debt. And we're not talking about a Universal Jubilee at the expense of creditors here. Every creditor would be paid in full by the Federal Reserve, and every debtor would receive complete relief from debts. Wouldn't that be lovely? But of course it's a fantasy. If you did that there would be tons be inflation.

So I'm not saying we should do that. What I'm saying instead is that Cochrane is wrong. But what I'm saying more broadly is that if you do think the Fed can't create inflation, that's a view with some wild implications for the world beyond boring monetary policy conversations.

Sticky Wages - Unemployment & Recessions

Sticky wages = downward nominal wage rigidity. This creates the market failure of unemployment. Classical economists (and RBC-theorists) thought that if wages fell during a recession, then there would not be any unemployment because this is what a simple labor supply and demand graph shows.  It would cure unemployment, but it would do nothing to cure the recession; it would just spread the wealth around.  A better solution would cure the recession AND reduce unemployment.  Lowering wages would cure unemployment, but it would make the recession worse by lowering the incomes of most people which would create even more bankruptcies and money hoarding.  It is extremely hard to lower nominal wages, but you can solve the unemployment problem by lowering real wages which is much easier. If you want to lower real wages, the best way to accomplish that is through monetary policy.  There are two good options:
1.  Currency devaluation effectively lowers wages compared with the rest of the world.  This is a targeted inflation which raises the prices of all foreign goods (lowers the prices of domestic goods for export) and thereby increases demand for exports. 
2. General inflation also works to lower real wages (IF there is a recession) and it also lowers real interest rates which solves the problem of hoarding money, underinvestment, and excessive debt. 
Krugman comments:

I keep running into comments along the lines of “Well, if you think sticky wages are the problem, why aren’t you calling for wage cuts?”
This is a category error. It confuses the question “What do we need to make sense of what we see?” with the question “What is the problem?” So let me talk about that.
When Keynes argued against the “classical economists”, he was to a large degree arguing against the view that there is no such thing as involuntary unemployment — a view often defended, then and now, by an appeal to the usual logic of supply and demand. If we’re looking at the market for, say, wheat, and there’s an excess supply — sellers want to sell more than buyers want to buy — we expect to see the price fall rapidly to clear the market. So if there were really a large excess supply of labor, shouldn’t we be seeing wages plummeting?
And the answer is no — wages (and many prices) don’t behave like that. It’s an interesting question why, one that has to be answered in terms of psychology and sociology, but it’s simply a fact that actual cuts in nominal wages happen only rarely and under great pressure. So wage stickiness is an essential part of a demand-side story about what’s going on with the economy; it’s how you answer the question of why wages aren’t falling.
But that’s not at all the same thing as saying that excessive wages are the problem. ...[W]e are in a liquidity trap, and balance sheet effects [bankruptcy and household debt] are very important. So there is no reason to believe that cutting wages would be helpful; on the contrary, falling wages would worsen the balance-sheet problem, a point some of us have been making for quite a while.
So when I emphasize nominal wage rigidity, I am defending an analysis of how the economy works, which is not at all the same thing as saying that this rigidity is the problem. On the contrary, for the US (though not for countries like Spain), wage stickiness is if anything good for us right now, helping stave off destructive deflation.

a sovereign debt crisis?

In Greece, Italy, and Spain there is a problem, but the market is charging less and less to loan other rich governments money:

IMF: Balance-Sheet Recessions

The IMF has been famous for imposing austerity upon economies in economic crises in the past two decades.  RortyBomb says, "One has good reason to dread hearing the policies the IMF recommends for a country in a crisis. Maximal labor "flexiblity"? Cat food for old people? Picking government functions out of a hat to privatize?"  IMF privatization, deregulation, and austerity policies didn't work out too well in the Asian and  Latin American financial crises so the IMF has completely reversed their thinking for dealing with the present recession. 
RortyBomb summarizes their latest report:
"1. A run-up in household debt and leverage explains the economic collapse across countries."
 This means a balance-sheet recession.  That is where consumers increase their debt to savers (the elites and elderly) and then they try to pay it down which reduces consumption because the savers don't spend more just because the borrowers are spending less.  
"2. Financial crises are not a driver of prolongued recessions. If anything they are a symptom."
The recession caused the financial crises: 
recession+debt -> financial crisis
not  
financial crisis -> recession & debt 
"4. Foreclosures are a problem."  
It is amazing that most economists have ignored this part of the problem of this financial crisis.  The slow foreclosure process destroys housing value and suppresses home values which makes indebted homeowners feel poor and spend less.   
"5. Demand demand-side stimulus. Across the board. Now."

Temporary macroeconomic policy stimulus...simulations of policy models developed at six policy institutions suggest that, in the current environment, a temporary (two-year) transfer of 1 percent of GDP to financially constrained households would raise GDP by 1.3 percent and 1.1 percent in the United States and the European Union, respectively...Monetary stimulus can also provide relief to indebted households by easing the debt service burden...A social safety net can automatically provide targeted transfers to households with distressed balance sheets and a high marginal propensity to consume, without the need for additional policy deliberation...

Support for household debt restructuring: Finally, the government may choose to tackle the problem of household debt directly by setting up frameworks for voluntary out-of-court household debt restructuring—including write-downs—or by initiating government-sponsored debt restructuring programs. Such programs can help restore the ability of borrowers to service their debt, thus preventing the contractionary effects of unnecessary foreclosures and excessive asset price declines.

Two Articles On Inequality and One Defending RBC

First, Galbraith makes the old Keynsian argument that inequality makes the economy unstable.  Note that this is not a particularly mainstream Keynesian view and, for example, Krugman does not buy it. Interestingly, although Raghuram Rajan comes from the other end of the political spectrum from Galbraith, he seems to agree for somewhat different reasons. 
Another article is about Edward Conard who just wrote a book claiming that inequality is the best thing ever and that we need more inequality in the US.  He is a really rich Wall Street guy who seems like a character out of Margin Call, but he got a bunch of book endorsements from smart people, and he has some interesting things to say. 
The last article is a rare defense of RBC in the popular media. I almost never see a defender of RBC attempt to explain it to lay people because it does not make any sense, so this is a gem.  The author argues that fluctuations in technology (including the weather as a kind of technology) cause recessions by making the economy less productive during recessions when the technology (weather) turns bad. Thus the 2008 recession happened because we suddenly became less productive.  RBC does a great job of describing recessions in primitive agricultural economies where the weather really does mostly determine output because bad weather really does make agruculture less productive, but weather is a poor analogy for technology.  How could there be a great forgetting of productive technology that works  like a massive drought and makes us less productive than we were a year before?    RBC is vague on the specific cause of any recessions and does nothing to explain the housing bubble. RBC theorists never specify what specific technology decline (or adverse weather) caused the 2008 recession.  Instead, they often resort to vague mentions of 'confidence' which is an area that Keynesians have actually studied extensively as Cassidy discusses in his book, How Markets Fail.
Even though I disagree with each of the three articles, each author is smart in his own way and there are grains of truth in each argument:

1. Gailbraith: Inequality of borrowing is part of the core Keynesian story.  During a recession, some people have too much money and are not spending it and others have too little and cannot spend it and so there is a shortage of spending.  Inequality can contribute to economic instability via political channels if nothing else.  Highly inequal societies usually have poor economic growth. 
2. Conard: Too little material inequality can also be a problem as in the case of Cuba and North Korea. On the other hand, you can argue that these countries are not very equal in a more important dimension than market goods.  They have extremely high political inequality because the political elites have absolute power whereas everyone else has less political power than an impoverished voter in a democracy. 
3. RBC Guy:  It works well for explaining recessions in ancient Greece, Robinson Caruso, and to a lesser extent during the 1970s oil shocks. 

SR vs. LR Unemployment and Economic Growth

Moneybox:

Short business cycle downturns like the ones the United States had in the 1950s and 1960s shouldn't have any real long-term consequences even if they're severe. But prolonged spells of mass unemployment provoke things like the current trend of European employers reducing investment in skills training since if there's going to be a surplus of potential workers and a deficit of potential customers, high-investment firms are going to lose out unless they hit incredible home runs.

The same logic should apply to "hard" capital investments as well. When I was in Paris last fall, I was interested to see that Parisian McDonaldses have computer kiosks where customers can place orders without taking up the time of a human cashier. Rival fast food chains like KFC and Quick didn't yet seem to be using this technology and McDonalds was only employing it to a limited extent. If France was facing a high-demand tight labor market scenario for the future presumably McDonalds would double-down on this bet and rivals would either match their productivity-enhancing capital investments or else be displaced by McDonaldses high productivity model. But instead France has had, and looks scheduled to continue to have, a long period of depressed demand and elevated unemployment. Firms have little reason to spend money insuring themselves against workers quitting in search of higher wages and little reason to believe that increased output will actually be purchased.

NGDP targeting is better than inflation targeting.

Most central banks currently have inflation targets (which perversely seem to keep ratcheting downward).  NGDP targeting is better than inflation targeting. Why? Moneybox:

Immunity to the "zero lower bound" problem is one reason, but the more important reason is that an NGDP targeting central bank would respond better to supply shocks than would an inflation targeting central bank. Consider, for example, the possibility that a terrorist attack in Kuwait disrupts world oil supplies. This is going to contract aggregate demand in the United States because as oil gets suddenly more expensive, the dollar value of our imports from non-disrupted countries will soar but those countries aren't going to immediately start importing more foreign goods in response. But the more expensive oil is also going to push the price level way up. Inflation targeting tempts the central bank to respond to this surge in inflation with tighter money even as the economy is being rocked by a fall in demand. An NGDP targeting central bank, by contrast, is able to say "steady as she goes." For the duration of the negative supply shock the country will experience an unusually large amount of inlation and an unusually small amount of real growth, which will suck, but the suckiness won't be compounded by tight money regime. Conversely, an NGDP targeting central bank will simply take a positive supply shock as welcome news. Real growth rises and inflation falls leading to a nice pleasant span of unusually rapid real wage growth. Everyone applauds. An inflation targeting central bank, by contrast, is going to greet the good news with a weird kind of panic as if improved technology or a natural resource boom is some kind of deflationary crisis.

Oil Prices and Recessions

Kevin Drum:

Jim Hamilton, an economist at UC San Diego who has done extensive work on the economics of oil spikes, has just published a summary of the current state of oil macroeconomics called "Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth." His conclusion: "The historical record surely dictates that we take seriously the possibility that the world could soon reach a point from which a continuous decline in the annual flow rate of production could not be avoided."
Translation: peak oil might not be far away, and we should take it pretty seriously. And Hamilton's research suggests strongly that when peak oil does arrive, it's not going to be pretty:

Coping with a final peak in world oil production could look pretty similar to what we observed as the economy adapted to the production plateau encountered over 2005-2009. That experience appeared to have much in common with previous historical episodes that resulted from temporary geopolitical conflict, being associated with significant declines in employment and output. If the future decades look like the last 5 years, we are in for a rough time.
Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

"Pretty similar" to 2005-09 means a big spike in oil prices that causes a big recession. The chart on the right shows what he means. The green line shows expected economic growth. The dashed line shows the Great Recession. And the red line? That's his estimate of the effect of the huge spike in oil prices in 2007-08. If Hamilton is right, then the oil spike is responsible for about two-thirds of the Great Recession all by itself. The housing and credit bubbles are only responsible for a fairly small piece of it.
But even if Hamilton is wrong about the precise trajectory of the 2008 meltdown, the evidence is now clear that oil spikes have a very significant effect on the economy. And as the production of oil starts to plateau, oil prices are going to spike a lot. In fact, they're likely to spike every time the global economy starts to grow.

New Monetarism vs. Friedman vs. Hayek vs. Keynes

Here is some intellectual history by a conservative economist who greatly admires Hayek and even thinks that Hayek's macroeconomic theories have some merit even if they are weaker than many others.  I predict/hope that this is a sign of where a new macroeconomic consensus may be heading.  Conservative economists are promoting NGDP targeting and liberals have no problem with it even though many would also like more government spending during a liquidity-trap recession.  The thing that surprised me the most during the 2008 recession is how little conservative economists promoted tax cuts as a fiscal stimulus like they did in the 2001 and 1990 recessions.   David Glasner:

First, it was the Keynes v. Hayek rap video, and then came the even more vulgar and tasteless Keynes v. Hayek sequel video reducing the two hyperintellectuals to prize fighters.

See the rest at Medianism.org

IS-LM

Brad Delong has an excellent summary of Keynesian Macro:

The Changing Multiplier Since 1925...

The largest shifts in economists’s views of what the value of the multiplier is over the last eighty or so years have been the result not of changing views about the structure of demand, but rather of changing views about the conduct of monetary policy.
The IS-LM framework remains the best way to summarize the issues. (See David Romer (2012), Short Run Fluctuations.) With the long-term risky real interest rates on the vertical axis and the level of real GDP on the horizontal axis, the IS curve summarizes the flow-of-funds through financial markets equilibrium condition--or, if you prefer, the representative agent's Euler equation (for they are the same thing, or rather the second is a very special representative-agent version of the general theory that is the first). But that by itself does not pin down the economy's path. Another condition is needed, a monetary policy condition.
Decompose the long-term real risky interest rate that you need for the flow-of-funds equilibrium condition into four pieces: a risk premium; a term premium; an inflation component; and the short term safe nominal interest rate that comes out of the money market, and equilibrates money supply to money demand.
In the years since Hicks laid out this framework in 1937, the economy has transitted through five different monetary policy regimes.
In not historical but rather logical logical sequence:
First in logical order is monetary dominance: the monetary authority has a view of what level of real spending right now is consistent with its long-run inflation target, and it pushes the money stock wherever it needs to in order to hit that target. Real GDP will be set by the monetary authority as a function of inflation and perhaps other variables according to its monetary policy rule.
On the IS-LM diagram under this monetary policy régime, the counterpart curve to the IS curve is not an LM curve but rather an MP curve, a monetary policy curve. And this monetary policy curve is vertical. Under such a monetary policy regime, the multiplier μ is zero. Whatever effect expansionary fiscal policy has on the IS curve will show up 100% as a change in interest rates and 0% as a change in output levels. This was the monetary policy regime that the Clinton administration believed it was operating under when it proposed a substantial deficit-reduction package in the late winter of 1993, even though the unemployment rate was less than a year past its recession peak.
Figure 3A.1: Monetary Dominance: μ=0

Second in logical order is the Friedman rule: the monetary authority has a smoothly growing target for the money stock, and it takes steps to hit that target. If the Friedman rule is credible, expectations of inflation will not vary: shifts in the inflation premium will not tilt what is now an LM curve up or down on the IS-LM diagram as real GDP increases or decreases. However, under the Friedman rule the LM curve is not vertical: it has a positive slope. Higher nominal interest rates raise the velocity of money. A more prosperous economy makes bankruptcy less likely and reduces the risk premium. In this monetary policy regime, the government purchases multiplier exists: μ is not zero. However, μ is likely to be small because of the likelihood of substantial interest-rate, and perhaps price-level crowding out. How much crowding-out there would be was the subject of debate between Tobin and Friedman, with Tobin stating that it was an empirical issue, and Friedman claiming the multiplier was too small to matter unless the interest elasticity of money demand was near infinity.
Figure 3A.2: Friedman Rule: μ Small
 Third in logical sequence comes the gold standard: the monetary base is fixed but the money supply is elastic because banks respond to higher demand for loans and deposits by taking more risks. A Friedman rule central-bank is not passive: it is strongly leaning against the wind, cutting the monetary base in the boom and increasing the monetary base in the slump. A gold standard central bank is almost an oxymoron: if it is actively managing the monetary base, it is not really a gold standard anymore. Under a true gold standard the LM curve is no longer quite an LM curve—although it is also not right to call it an MP curve either. Whatever it is, the fact of an elastic money supply makes it even flatter than the Friedman-rule LM curve.
Figure 3A.3: Gold Standard: μ Moderate

Fourth in logical sequence is a central bank that targets the real rate of interest: call this the “constant monetary conditions” multiplier. This is the multiplier that would be estimated by cross-state fiscal-policy regressions in the United States, or cross-country fiscal-policy regressions in a monetary union, were there neither demand spillovers nor cross-jurisdiction factor mobility to bias the estimated coefficient one way or another.
Figure 3A.4: Real Interest Rate Targeting: μ Larger Still
 Note that a monetary authority that targets the real rate of interest is likely to be pursuing a policy in which nominal interest rates are rather strongly procyclical. Inflation will surely rise with higher levels of real GDP. Risk spreads are likely to fall as well. Both of these must be compensated for by rising nominal interest rates if the monetary authority is truly going to pursue a policy that keeps the real interest rate constant. The multiplier μ under such a monetary policy rule is likely to be rather large: there is neither investment-based nor export-based interest-rate crowding out, since the purpose of the policy is to ensure that the interest rate does not move.
Fifth and last in logical sequence is when the monetary authority finds itself in a liquidity trap, at the zero-nominal interest rate lower bound. In this case the MP monetary policy curve slopes not upward but downward. As output increases and as expectations of inflation rise, the short-term safe real interest rate declines. An economy with higher output is one with fewer bankruptcies and lower risk premia: spreads fall as well, and the short-term real risky interest rate declines even more along this MP curve.
Figure 3A.5: Zero Lower Bound: μ Large 
Under all the other monetary policy régimes the monetary authority could, if it thought wise, shift the MP or LM curve to provide further monetary expansion. Under monetary dominance it would simply change its near-future real GDP target. Under the Friedman rule it would boost the money stock growth rate. Under a gold standard it could sell some of its own gold holdings or change the gold parity. Under a constant real interest rate régime it could change the target real interest rate.
But at the zero nominal lower bound the monetary authority’s available tools are much weaker, and active monetary policy seems likely to be of limited effectiveness. The monetary authority can promise higher inflation in the future—but how is it to make that promise effective and credible, especially in a political and technocratic environment averse to even moderate inflation? Quantitative easing to boost the money stock can always be reversed if the assets purchased by the monetary authority as it issues more cash are traded in thick markets. And if the monetary authority issues cash and wishes to demonstrate that the transaction will not be unwound by using the cash to purchase assets that cannot easily be sold off —bridges, highway interchanges, and the human capital of twelve-year-olds, for example—that looks a lot more like fiscal than monetary policy, albeit a fiscal policy conducted by the monetary authority.
The monetary authority can attempt to reduce risk and duration premia directly by taking default and duration risk onto its own balance sheet, but portfolio balance considerations suggest that the power of such non-standard monetary policy tools is likely to be small.
The flip side of the likely limited power of change in the monetary authority’s policy rule at the zero nominal lower bound is that the fiscal policy multiplier μ appears likely to be at its largest. The fact that the monetary policy régime produces an MP curve that slopes “the wrong way” means that equilibrium levels are fragile in the sense that small shocks can cause the economy to jump a long way—in either direction.