by Daniel Alpert

It is highly likely that this week will see the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee elect to increase the Fed Funds policy rate of interest for the first time since June of 2006, and after slashing the rate to the lowest level in history—approaching the so-called zero lower bound.

But the return journey to interest rate policy rate normalcy will be a long and winding one. The ability to influence longer term interest rates, over which the Fed has no direct control, will be even more limited (in fact, after the Fed’s move and any interim market volatility, long term market interest rates are likely to fall if the global economy maintains it present trend).

Yet it is very clear that the policy makers at the Fed are quite anxious to regain the control over monetary policy that they very much lack at the zero lower bound—if only to be able to do something when a new recession emerges.

Here, then, are the four routes that the Fed may choose to head down in order to achieve interest rate normalization, and my opinion of how effective (or ineffective) each policy is likely to be if implemented.

The Policy Rates—Fed Funds and the Discount Rate

How it Works:
The Federal Reserve Banks are the banks to the banking industry. When a bank is short of liquidity (generally overnight) it can obtain loans from the Fed, based on the quality of its balance sheet and/or the pledge of specific assets (discounting). The Fed sets a target rate for each of these policy rates and, in normal times, these rates often act as a benchmark for banks’ own short term lending to clients, as banks lend at a margin to their own cost of funding.

Effectiveness in Current Environment:
When lending activity is brisk, and bank liquidity is tighter, the Fed Funds rate (and, to a far lesser extent, the discount rate, as discounting is far less common) can have a substantial impact on market interest rates. But today, banks are awash in surplus liquidity. Even if a bank needs an overnight injection of liquidity, it can easily find that from another bank, happy to lend the money rather than leave it idle. The banking system in the aggregate has over $2 trillion of excess reserves (vs. mandatory reserves), most of which is on deposit at the Fed itself. So raising the Fed Funds rate will have no real effectiveness other than psychological.

Paying Banks Interest on Bank Reserves

How it Works:
Prior to the financial crisis, whatever small amounts (less than $200 billion) that the banking industry had on deposit at the Fed earned no interest. In the distress of the crisis, in one of the many ways that the Fed bailed out the banking system, the Fed commenced paying interest on reserves at 25bps per annum. In theory, of course, paying interest to banks to have their funds sit idle is contractionary. But income was far more important to banks in the crisis and reserves were building at a frantic pace relative to lending opportunities. If the Fed were to tighten by increasing interest paid on reserves, it could – in theory – slow (or raise the cost of) market lending.

Effectiveness in Current Environment:
Here we get into a “through the looking glass” sort of policy world. Why, with the economy less than robust, would the Fed want to discourage or limit bank lending in the first place? Yet, the whole purpose of monetary tightening is to do exactly that in order to lessen the chance of the economy overheating in the future (as well as, at the zero bound at which we now find ourselves, to enable the Fed to regain control of monetary levers). But here too there is a problem in assuming that such a move would be effective. There simply isn’t a lot of loan demand by creditworthy borrowers. Sure, there are plenty of non-creditworthy borrowers out there who would love to have money, but lending to them is (at least post-financial crisis) not the business of banking. So paying more interest on reserves (while certainly welcome by the banks) is unlikely to force up market rates all that much.

Reverse Repurchase Agreements

How it Works:
As most everyone knows, the Fed was on a five-year-plus buying binge to acquire U.S. Treasury and Mortgage Backed Bond Securities, beginning in 2009. It now owns trillions of dollars of government debt and government-guaranteed debt. The easiest way to force interest rates higher (which would be traumatic at this time) would be to simply dump those securities back into the market (see next slide). Instead, the Fed can pull money (cash) out of the system by “borrowing” against the securities it holds on a short term basis to banks and non-banks with excess cash. As it offers more of these securities for overnight or short term “repo” it would at some point push the rates it pays on the repo contract higher, because it will reduce the availability of excess cash laying around

Effectiveness in Current Environment:
At this time, reverse repos constitute the Fed’s greatest hope for managing interest rate policy. They have the advantage of being flexible and very reversible if things go downhill in the economy. The NY Fed’s open market operations unit can offer fewer or more repo contracts each day to adjust market interest rates. Furthermore, since the Fed owns securities of varying maturities, it can play up and down the yield curve, in theory. The problem is, this has never been done before in scale and no one knows how it will really play out, or—of greater importance, perhaps—how the market will work to “game” the Fed’s repo activity in order to better profit from it.

“Quantitative Tightening”

How it Works:
As alluded to above, the Fed—in theory—could simply sell back to the market the enormous volume of government securities it acquired post-financial crisis. This would be a blunt instrument of the highest order. If they sell enough securities, it would push interest rates higher by draining cash from the system.

Effectiveness in Current Environment:
This method is anathema in the Fed’s current thinking. It could only be reversed by a resumption of quantitative easing and would push interest rates much higher and very rapidly. This is a supply and demand issue. The Fed holds the largest inventory of U.S. government bonds on the planet and if the market believes that inventory is going to be dumped, the price of bonds will plummet, driving interest rates higher and the economy of the U.S., if not the world, into a nose dive.

Daniel Alpert is the Managing Partner of Westwood Capital, LLC and a fellow in economics at The Century Foundation.

by Josh Ryan-Collins

The theoretical and policy arguments for monetary reform are becoming more accepted by economists and establishment figures. The financial crisis blew apart the idea that deregulated private money creation by commercial banks leads to more efficient outcomes and allocation of capital, as has been noted by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and Lord Adair Turner, amongst others. Yet there are few examples of how public money creation – and its variants – can support economic growth without causing negative side effects, not least inflation.

In a new working paper, I examine the case of the Bank of Canada (the Canadian central bank) in the 1935-1975 period, perhaps the most interesting example of public money creation in the 20th century in the English speaking world. Throughout this period the Bank of Canada engaged in significant direct or indirect monetary financing of government debt. In other words, the central bank created new money that was credited to the government’s account either via purchase of government bonds or direct lending. On average, about one-fifth of government debt was financed and held by the central bank, with all interest returning to the state (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Monetary financing and consumer price inflation in Canada, 1935-2012[1]

This monetary financing supported the Canadian state to recover from the Great Depression, fight World War II, enable post-war reconstruction and, in the 30 years following the war, enjoy the longest period of economic growth and high employment in its history. The Bank also created one of the worlds’ largest industrial development banks for the financing of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), eventually providing a quarter of all loans to SMEs, again funded via public money creation.

It is a remarkable story and one few economists or economic historians have examined. Even more remarkable is the fact that this vast monetisation program did not prove to be inflationary. continue reading…

Don’t miss this post by Scott Fullwiler at New Economic Perspectives.

Fullwiler is reacting to Clive Crook’s Bloomberg column advocating “helicopter drops” (having the Fed simply send checks to households). Helicopter drops or “helicopter money” proposals are widely cast as monetary policy operations (Crook describes helicopter money as a monetary-fiscal “hybrid”) and defended as either preferable to fiscal stimulus or as the only remaining option in light of political obstacles to increasing government spending (to wit, the GOP Congress/Dem White House combination).

For Fullwiler, this way of framing helicopter money is problematic — and relies on a skewed understanding of our policy options:

I find it completely counterproductive to have a theory of macroeconomics in which we define fiscal policy and monetary policy based on who is acting. If the US Congress and Treasury choose to send $1 trillion to households without raising taxes, it’s called fiscal policy. But if the Fed does the exact same thing, it’s apparently called monetary policy. I think this only confuses our understanding of the macroeconomic policy mix and makes it more difficult to have an economics profession that can give good policy advice.

[…]

It seems much clearer to simply say that (a) the act of creating a deficit—raising the net financial wealth of the non-government sector—is fiscal policy, and (b) the act of announcing and then supporting an interest rate target with security sales (or purchases, or interest on reserves)—which has no effect on the net financial wealth of the non-government sector—is monetary policy. In the case of (a), whether the Treasury or the Fed cuts the checks, it’s fiscal policy, and with (b), whether the Treasury or the Fed sells securities, it’s monetary policy.

In other words, fiscal policy is about managing the net financial assets of the non-government sector relative to the state of the economy, and monetary policy is about managing interest rates (and through it, to the best of its abilities, bank lending and deposit creation) relative to the state of the economy. This is in fact how Randy Wray explained both in his 1998 book; it’s also how Warren Mosler explained them in his 1996 paper. That is, from the beginning, MMT has labeled monetary and fiscal policies by their functions, not by who was doing what.

I think this is a much more useful taxonomy because it makes clear from the start that (1) the currency-issuing government isn’t constrained while (2) the interest rate on the national debt is a policy variable. All kinds of human suffering the past 6+ years may have been avoided if those two basic points were widely understood.

Read it.

Fullwiler spoke at the last Minsky conference on issues related to central bank operations (actual, vs. textbook): you can hear his remarks here; slides here.

Levy Research Associate Éric Tymoigne contributed to a debate in the Wall Street Journal over the viability of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Here’s Éric:

Bitcoins are an odd sort of commodity. They are not financial instruments. The value fluctuates widely, in line with changing views regarding the overall usefulness of the bitcoin payment system and the speculative manias surrounding such views. There is no financial logic behind bitcoins’ face value. In other words, if you like to gamble, this is a perfect asset. If you are looking for an alternative monetary instrument, look elsewhere.

The bitcoin system has two components: the means of payment themselves, and an online ledger, called the block chain, which is a record of all bitcoins that have been created and who holds them. The ledger is the main innovation. It provides an open, decentralized, fast, cheap and supposedly secure means of completing transactions.

But as an alleged alternative currency, bitcoin is unacceptable. Its volatility and lack of liquidity pose risks far beyond most traditional currencies.

Read the WSJ debate and the rest of Tymoigne’s contribution here: “Do Cryptocurrencies Such as Bitcoin Have a Future?”

See also Tymoigne’s earlier posts at New Economic Perspectives:

“The Fair Price of a Bitcoin is Zero”

“Bitcoin System: Some Additional Problems“

If one were asked to describe the formal economic and political processes that have shaped the condition of the eurozone since the eruption of the euro crisis in late 2009 in a terse and peremptory way, he or she might boldly and truly say this: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policies spearhead the unraveling of the European project while European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi seeks to keep the (neoliberal) game going.”

Indeed, there is little doubt that Germany’s neo-mercantilism is the driving force leading a sizable segment of the eurozone’s economy on the path to stagnation and decline, while the ECB has been trying hard to carry out the role of a traditional central bank by fulfilling its duty as a lender of last resort in order to save the euro and preserve the eurozone.

The ECB intervened in the euro crisis in May 2010 by buying up government bonds from Greece (even when a 110 billion euros bailout package had been approved for Greece), Spain, Portugal, and Ireland under its Securities Market Program. By 2011, the ECB was buying up Spanish and Italian bonds by the bucketload in order to force a drop in the bond yields of the two largest peripheral economies of the eurozone. With the end of the crisis in the periphery nowhere in sight, but Mario Draghi having already pledged in July 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro, in early September of that year the ECB introduced a new government bond purchasing program, known as the Outright Monetary Transactions (OTM) program.

Leaving aside the question as to whether or not ECB’s OTM program is legal (Advocate General Pedro Cruz Villalón opined in mid-January 2015 that while “the OTM programme is an unconventional monetary policy measure . . . it is compatible with the TFEU [Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union]”), the condition was that OTM would be attached to an appropriate European Financial Stability Facility/European Stability Mechanism (EFSF/ESM) macroeconomic adjustment program. In other words, the imposition of austerity, privatization, and market liberalization was a conditionality in the event of the implementation of the OTM program, which raises an important question: Is the ECB seeking to enforce an economic policy measure rather than just a monetary policy measure? continue reading…

The ECB is to be congratulated on finally defying its German masters, who have long kept the euro’s guardian of stability in captivity. For a number of years, Germany’s unholy triangle of power over the land of the euro – Berlin, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe – has enforced a diktat that undermined both the euro economy and democracy, causing a deep socioeconomic crisis, the rise of nationalism, and anti-EU sentiments across the continent. At last, the ECB has liberated itself from the scourge of hyperinflation scaremongering that is the self-serving conviction – and declaration of intellectual bankruptcy – of the Germany political elite. It is fitting that the chance for a revival of democratic values and European solidarity is knocking on Athens’ door this weekend.

In the markets’ perception, Mario Draghi over-delivered yesterday on his famous “whatever-it-takes” promise made at the height of the euro crisis in the summer of 2012. The euro and bond yields are down, stocks are up, party time is here. Things are going according to plan and everyone financial is in high spirits.

The question is what Mario’s QE bazooka will really do beyond the markets – for the real economy, that is. The markets are not worried about that issue at this point. Or perhaps some are thinking ahead like this: if growth stays weak, there will be even more QE coming, so all is good in any case. In case you didn’t follow the Q&A carefully yesterday, there was another important course change – or return to hardcore German dogma – on exhibit in what Mario Draghi had to say. continue reading…

When French president François Hollande pre-announced the ECB Governing Council’s long-awaited adoption of “quantitative easing” at its meeting tomorrow, German chancellor Angela Merkel was quick to respond by pointing out that this was still the independent ECB’s decision alone. It was good of her to do so. For in recent times one could not help getting the impression that the German political elite had forgotten all about that precious centerpiece of German monetary orthodoxy: that the independence of the central bank was the most important safeguard of solidity in the world.

Against the background of an ill-informed German public and an ideology-stricken German media landscape that excels in nothing more than keeping alive hyperinflation phobia even as the land of the euro is at acute risk of sinking ever deeper into the morass of deflation, Germany’s body politic got carried away with their self-righteous assumption that it was in everyone’s best interest to accept the reality of German hegemony over Euroland in all matters of economic policy, including monetary policy. Yesterday’s Financial Times quoted the former ECB governing council member Athanasios Orphanides on what would appear to be a rather intolerable (since illegal) state of affairs: “It is as if it’s accepted that the euro area’s modus operandi is to clear things with Germany, and for the ECB to constrain its actions to what is best for Germany … This is inconsistent with and violates the [EU] treaty.”

So if the ECB finally goes ahead tomorrow with some kind of QE, ignoring German resistance, what will QE actually do for Euroland? continue reading…

Wolfgang Münchau is one of those rare sensible voices in the international media reporting on the euro crisis. He has been consistently right in his gloomy assessments of euro crisis management in recent years. He is also correct in pointing out that the observed deflationary trend in the eurozone is not primarily due to any recent oil price shock but mainly driven by the chosen deflationary intra-area “rebalancing” path: with German wage-price inflation well below the 2-percent stability norm, everybody else is forced into deflation to restore their competitiveness. (See here: “Beware what you wish for when it comes to ECB measures”)

But Münchau got it pretty wrong in his FT column this week suggesting that so-called helicopter drops of money would constitute monetary policy. Milton Friedman famously used the helicopter analogy in pushing his monetarist mantra, but he forgot to mention that central banks are not in the business of running money-dropping helicopters. Friedman’s story went like this:

“In our hypothetical world in which paper money is the only medium of circulation, consider first a stationary situation in which the quantity of money has been constant for a long time, and so have other conditions. Individual members of the community are subject to enough uncertainty that they find cash balances useful to cope with unanticipated discrepancies between receipts and expenditures. … Under those circumstances, it is clear that the price level is determined by how much money there is—how many pieces of paper of various denominations. If the quantity of money had settled at half the assumed level, every dollar price would be halved; at double the assumed level, every price would be doubled. … Let us suppose, then, that one day a helicopter flies over our hypothetical long- stationary community and drops additional money from the sky equal to the amount already in circulation. … The money will, of course, be hastily collected by members of the community. … If everyone simply decided to hold on to the extra cash, nothing more would happen. … But people do not behave in that way. … It is easy to see what the final position will be. People‘s attempts to spend more than they receive will be frustrated, but in the process these attempts will bid up the nominal value of goods and services. The additional pieces of paper do not alter the basic conditions of the community. They make no additional productive capacity available. … Hence, the final equilibrium will be a nominal income [that has doubled] … with precisely the same flow of real goods and services as before” (Friedman 1969, p. 4).

However, as Keynes acutely observed, a central bank is a “dealer in money and debts.” A central bank issues its monetary liabilities by buying debts and/or making loans. Handing out banknotes or making transfers into deposits to the public for free constitutes not monetary policy, not even unconventional monetary policy, but plain and simple fiscal policy. And who would want unelected central bankers to be in charge of taking such a decision; even if it may well be the right one?

Of course, the eurozone fiscal authorities may in principle agree on a fiscal expansion – if they somehow manage to overcome both the legal hurdles they have set themselves and, probably more important, successfully crawl out of the intellectual hole they have dug for themselves. Similarly, under today’s outright deflationary conditions, it has, at last, become conceivable that even the ECB might embark on a “largish”-scale purchase of government debts purely with its monetary policy mandate of maintaining price stability in view; which is crucial for legal reasons, as Wednesday’s preliminary ruling by the European Court of Justice reminded us.

Fiscal expansion paired with QE may seem equivalent to a helicopter drop. But it is not. continue reading…

The Advocate General (AG) has spoken on the ECB’s OMT program today. Apparently the markets were more concerned about the latest U.S. retail sales numbers than delighted about the “okay in principle provided that” signal sent from Luxembourg to the German triangle of euro power (Frankfurt, Berlin, and Karlsruhe).

First of all, in the AG’s view, OMT constitutes monetary policy but not economic policy. That was one of the critical issues. The German Constitutional Court (GCC) had preliminarily concluded that the ECB may be stepping outside the monetary policy domain, for which it enjoys exclusive competence. In its previous judgment on the Pringle case the ECJ found that the ESM constitutes economic policy, which remains primarily a national responsibility in Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, and does not encroach on the ECB’s territory. On OMT the opposite verdict was reached, based on the following evaluation:

“in order for a measure of the ECB actually to form part of monetary policy, it must specifically serve the primary objective of maintaining price stability and it must also take the form of one of the monetary policy instruments expressly provided for in the Treaties and not be contrary to the requirement for fiscal discipline and the principle that there is no shared financial liability. If there are isolated economic-policy aspects to the measure at issue, the latter will be compatible with the ECB’s mandate only as long as it serves to ‘support’ economic policy measures and is subordinate to the ECB’s overriding objective” (AG 2015, No. 132).

In other words, the AG sides with the ECB’s argument that OMT is about “unblocking” the monetary transmission mechanism, and hence monetary policy, rather than a measure designed to facilitate the funding of certain member states, which would make it economic policy instead. OMT is judged to be an unconventional monetary policy instrument designed to meet the exceptional challenges of the day.

“Despite the efforts of the European Union (‘the Union’) and the Member States, the risk premia for bonds of various euro-area States rose sharply in the summer of 2012. In the face of investors’ doubts about the survival of monetary union, the representatives of the Union and of the States of the euro area repeatedly stressed that the single currency was irreversible. It was at that time that the President of the ECB, in words that were subsequently repeated over and over again, stated that he would, within his mandate, do whatever it took to preserve the euro” (AG 2015, No. 20).

While the objective of “preserving the euro” would seem to go well beyond the supposedly narrow monetary mandate of maintaining price stability, the ECB, in a way, merely promised to back up with money what the political leaders had declared to be their ultimate economic policy objective: the irreversibility of the common currency. This would seem to also make it an incident of ECB “support” of the union’s general economic policy: supportive words on words of support. A less generous observer might be tempted to say that failure on the part of the political authorities to establish sound institutions and policies that would foster area-wide prosperity and the sustainability of the common currency gets temporarily plastered over by the threat of meeting speculative attacks by throwing central bank money at it.

The AG has interesting things to say on market speculation. continue reading…

by Scott Fullwiler

Tim Worstall has a post decrying the dangers of MMT ever being used in the real world—even as he recognizes or at least suggests that it might be the correct description of how the monetary system works—and is particularly concerned about Stephanie Kelton’s new appointment as Chief Economist on the Senate Budget Committee. (Note: Randy Wray also posted a critique of Mr. Worstall’s post.)

Mr. Worstall’s main issue is one we’ve heard hundreds of times before—because MMT explains that currency-issuing governments operating under flexible exchange rates and without debt in a foreign currency do not actually have budget constraints, this opens the door to all sorts of problems if put into practice. We can’t trust our government with this information, in other words—it must be required to match spending with revenues over some period (whether each year, over the business cycle, etc.) or at least plan over some period of time to not allow the debt ratio to rise beyond a modest level.**

Mr. Worstall notes the frequently heard MMT argument that the point of taxes is to regulate the economy—and takes particular issue with the view that taxes can be increased/decreased in real time. Note, though, that this is simply a metaphorical or simplified explanation—it blends the Chartalist argument that “taxes drive money” with the functional finance view of using the outcomes of the government budget position as the criterion by which to judge it (rather than the state of the budget position itself). It is not intended as a literal point—no MMTer has ever made a specific proposal for raising/lowering income tax rates in real time to manage the economy. (Though Ray Fair does offer a sales tax proposal and shows that it would be stabilizing here—I simulated it along with the Job Guarantee and another transfer payment rule here.)

As argued bazillions of times, the real point MMT is making is that the government’s budget constraint is the wrong constraint—the correct constraint is whether or not a particular budget position will raise inflation beyond an official target rate (say, 2%, which seems to be the choice of most central bankers).

Let me explain to Mr. Worstall and others how this could work rather easily—just as the CBO and OMB now evaluate government budget proposals regarding their effects on the budget stance, the CBO and OMB could instead shift focus on evaluating these proposals against the inflation target (I argued the same thing here, printable version here). Much like how policy makers supposedly take estimates of effects on the budget position rather seriously in making budget conditions, they could replace these with projections of inflationary effects. An inflation constraint provides more fiscal space than a budget constraint, but in no way does it provide unlimited fiscal space (again, as we’ve always argued).

We could add quite a bit of detail here if we want, but I’ll just say a few more things. First, it’s quite clear that economists don’t have much expertise modeling how to use the government’s budget stance to manage the macroeconomy via a functional finance rule—but this is largely because they have come to view monetary policy as the main macroeconomic policy tool, not because it’s not possible.

Note, though, that functional finance isn’t less specific than, say, the Taylor Rule—Taylor’s Rule says to adjust the interest rate to manage the macroeconomy; functional finance says to manage the budget position to do this. Consider the never ending debate among policy makers at the Fed, Fed watchers, and economists on what the Fed should do next, when it should do it, how it should communicate what it’s going to do, and so on. If Taylor’s Rule were really that useful, we wouldn’t need most of this debate and there wouldn’t be so much disagreement among the various parties.

Second, concerns that government policymaking is necessarily less “efficient” than monetary policy are unpersuasive to me (even aside from my view that monetary policy traditionally understood as manipulations of the overnight rate isn’t a good idea). What if some of the thousands of economists currently working on understanding monetary policy started to try and understand how to build automatic stabilizers? They might help us understand which taxes (or tweaks to them, like indexing marginal tax rates to the inflation target rather than inflation) or spending priorities (or tweaks, like indexing spending to the target rate) are most consistent with functional finance—we don’t need to adjust tax rates in real time as much as build in a significant amount of stabilization automatically (i.e., more than we already have). MMT has its own proposal—the Job Guarantee—which we have argued in dozens if not hundreds of publications possesses macroeconomically significant stabilization properties if well designed.

For sure, times like the last several years may call for more than just automatic stabilizers (or it may instead call for better financial regulation to avoid a speculative bubble and then a deep recession in the first place). However, while I am under no illusions that we could ever get totally rid of some of the messy politics of fiscally-driven stabilization, it’s not as if monetary policy even when set by a small group of “experts” (like the FOMC) has been apolitical (and, as noted above, it’s been highly contentious among even the true believers in monetary policy which strategy is/was the appropriate one).

In sum, let’s stop pretending that replacing a budget constraint with an inflation constraint is so hard. It involves a change in perspective, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn’t give license to policy makers to do whatever they want. It does mean CBO will finally be doing something useful with its deficit projections—namely, building models to understand how deficits will affect the macroeconomy (while its current practice is to assume an economy at full employment and warn of impending financial ruin as a result of deficits). Stephanie’s appointment gives reason to hope at least a little that this change might actually one day be possible, for the benefit of all of us (including Mr. Worstall).

**The latter is actually what neoclassical economics argues—contrary to popular understanding, there are no economic theories that require the government to ever balance its budget. What they argue is that the government must eventually keep its debt ratio at a modest level, which does allow modest deficits on average forever. What this does require is primary surpluses (i.e., budget position before accounting for debt service) to offset primary deficits if the interest on the national debt is above the economy’s growth rate. In fact, though, this condition hasn’t been met on average in the post WWII period; only the 1979-2000 period saw average interest on the national debt rise above the economy’s growth rate.

(cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives)