by Robert J. Shiller
The International Monetary Fund’s October World Economic Outlook proclaimed that, “Strong public policies have fostered a rebound of industrial production, world trade, and retail sales.” The IMF, along with many national leaders, seem ready to give full credit to these policies for engineering what might be the end of the global economic recession.
National leaders and international organizations do deserve substantial credit for what has been done to bring about signs of recovery since the spring. The international coordination of world economic policies, as formalized in the recent G-20 statement, is unprecedented in history.
But one also suspects that world leaders have been too quick to claim so much credit for their policies. After all, recessions generally tend to come to an end on their own, even before there were government stabilization policies. For example, in the United States, the recessions of 1857-8, 1860-61, 1865-7, 1882-85, 1887-88, 1890-91, 1893-94, 1895-97, 1899-1900, 1902-04, 1907-8, and 1910-12 all ended without help from the Federal Reserve, which opened its doors only in 1914.
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Yale Q6 Fall 2009 Q&A with Dr. Shiller
Decades of economic research have assumed people pursue their goals in a rational manner, discounting the effects of emotion, bias, error, and other irrational forces. Robert Shiller argues that economists need to take a closer look at how people make decisions.
Q: How important is it to understand what people are thinking and feeling when you are trying to understand the economy as a whole?
That's been a controversial question in economics for a long time. Milton Friedman wrote a collection of essays in 1953 called Essays in Positive Economics, in which he argued that you shouldn't try to infer what people are thinking because people really can't tell you what they're thinking. If you ask people why they did something, they will give you a conventional answer or mislead you. The idea was that the essence of economics is to look at the constraints that people have and assume that people are behaving rationally, subject to those constraints, and interpret economic data as reflecting that rational behavior. That is the defining characteristic of economics as a discipline — as opposed to psychology as a discipline — that, in understanding something as massive as the economy, it's best to look at people's actions, not their ostensible reasons. There is some appeal to that. I just wish it were more right.
I can get enthusiastic talking about this theory because, in some respects, it is good. To give an example, suppose you are trying to understand the seasonality of food prices — why they go up in the winter and down in the summer. Well, it's pretty obvious that it has something to do with the weather as a constraint, but you better think it through, because we live in a global economy, and when it's winter up here, it's summer down south. Obviously they'll ship food from one hemisphere to another. That puts a limit on seasonality. This is pure economics, and I'm sure it's right, because the seasons occur year after year after year, and you have people whose job is to ship fruits and vegetables and food around. They're going to find the best pattern of shipping, given all the costs. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to ignore that. Thinking that people get emotional in the summer, or something like that, would probably be wrong.
Q: How important is it to understand what people are thinking and feeling when you are trying to understand the economy as a whole?
That's been a controversial question in economics for a long time. Milton Friedman wrote a collection of essays in 1953 called Essays in Positive Economics, in which he argued that you shouldn't try to infer what people are thinking because people really can't tell you what they're thinking. If you ask people why they did something, they will give you a conventional answer or mislead you. The idea was that the essence of economics is to look at the constraints that people have and assume that people are behaving rationally, subject to those constraints, and interpret economic data as reflecting that rational behavior. That is the defining characteristic of economics as a discipline — as opposed to psychology as a discipline — that, in understanding something as massive as the economy, it's best to look at people's actions, not their ostensible reasons. There is some appeal to that. I just wish it were more right.
I can get enthusiastic talking about this theory because, in some respects, it is good. To give an example, suppose you are trying to understand the seasonality of food prices — why they go up in the winter and down in the summer. Well, it's pretty obvious that it has something to do with the weather as a constraint, but you better think it through, because we live in a global economy, and when it's winter up here, it's summer down south. Obviously they'll ship food from one hemisphere to another. That puts a limit on seasonality. This is pure economics, and I'm sure it's right, because the seasons occur year after year after year, and you have people whose job is to ship fruits and vegetables and food around. They're going to find the best pattern of shipping, given all the costs. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to ignore that. Thinking that people get emotional in the summer, or something like that, would probably be wrong.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
A Bounce? Indeed. A Boom? Not Yet.
by Robert J. Shiller in the NY Times:
THE sudden rise in home prices suggests that the psychology of the market has shifted substantially. But what should we expect in the months ahead? Not necessarily that we’re entering a new housing boom. To a large extent, where we’re heading depends on what home buyers are thinking.
Some clues are found in the annual home-buyer surveys that Karl Case, the Wellesley economics professor, and I have run for years. For the surveys, we canvas recent home buyers in four cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Boston; the surveys are now being conducted under the auspices of the Yale School of Management. We have just received the 2009 results, with responses from June and July.
This year’s survey coincides nicely with the upturn in home prices, the sharpest change in direction we have ever seen. The data show that the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 10-City Composite Home Price Index for the United States rose 3.6 percent between April and July. While that is not a whopping increase, it followed a decline of 4.8 percent in the previous period, between January and April.
The suddenness of this shift surprised me. In my column in June, I wrote that home prices might well continue to decline for years. As of that time, the S.& P./Case-Shiller price index had fallen every month for almost three years. Add to that the prospect of continuing high unemployment and a weak economy for years to come, and the prospects for home prices did not seem rosy.
Read the full article
THE sudden rise in home prices suggests that the psychology of the market has shifted substantially. But what should we expect in the months ahead? Not necessarily that we’re entering a new housing boom. To a large extent, where we’re heading depends on what home buyers are thinking.
Some clues are found in the annual home-buyer surveys that Karl Case, the Wellesley economics professor, and I have run for years. For the surveys, we canvas recent home buyers in four cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Boston; the surveys are now being conducted under the auspices of the Yale School of Management. We have just received the 2009 results, with responses from June and July.
This year’s survey coincides nicely with the upturn in home prices, the sharpest change in direction we have ever seen. The data show that the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 10-City Composite Home Price Index for the United States rose 3.6 percent between April and July. While that is not a whopping increase, it followed a decline of 4.8 percent in the previous period, between January and April.
The suddenness of this shift surprised me. In my column in June, I wrote that home prices might well continue to decline for years. As of that time, the S.& P./Case-Shiller price index had fallen every month for almost three years. Add to that the prospect of continuing high unemployment and a weak economy for years to come, and the prospects for home prices did not seem rosy.
Read the full article
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Q&A: Shiller Sees 5 Years of Stagnant Home Prices
From the Wall Street Journal:
Robert Shiller, the Yale University economist who famously predicted the housing bust, was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics today. In this interview, he talks about the state of the housing market and the implications of low interest rates.
Is the slump in U.S. home prices bottoming out?
Shiller: The situation has definitely changed. With our numbers — the S&P/Case Shiller home price index — going up sharply. It looks like a major turnaround. We’ve been watching that for three months now, and we have some concern that it could be an aberration and temporary. But, at this point, it seems to be evident in just about every city in the U.S. That suggests it’s real. But it probably isn’t the beginning of a major boom, just because the economy is in such bad shape. There’s also a chance that it will reverse. It’s still only three months old, so it’s very hard to be sure at this point. The most likely scenario is that it won’t continue at this high rate of increase, but that it will neither go down a lot, nor up a lot.
So the index will move sideways for a while?
Shiller: Yes, for a while, meaning five years.
What are the main factors driving U.S. house prices? What could push them up, or cause another slump?
Shiller: The main factor is the world economic crisis and the efforts of governments around the world to stimulate the economy. Parts of those efforts have been directed at the housing market. In the U.S., there is an 8,000 dollar first-time home buyer’s tax credit which expires at the end of November. That’s a reason for concern, as it comes to an end. Also, the Federal Reserve has a plan to buy $1.25 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities to support the housing market. They are most of the way through the program and anticipate phasing it out at some time in 2010 - that’s another thing that will go away. We’ve yet to see how the housing market will continue. Part of the problem is that people are buying now rather than later. When later comes, there could be a downturn in the market.
Read full interview
Robert Shiller, the Yale University economist who famously predicted the housing bust, was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics today. In this interview, he talks about the state of the housing market and the implications of low interest rates.
Is the slump in U.S. home prices bottoming out?
Shiller: The situation has definitely changed. With our numbers — the S&P/Case Shiller home price index — going up sharply. It looks like a major turnaround. We’ve been watching that for three months now, and we have some concern that it could be an aberration and temporary. But, at this point, it seems to be evident in just about every city in the U.S. That suggests it’s real. But it probably isn’t the beginning of a major boom, just because the economy is in such bad shape. There’s also a chance that it will reverse. It’s still only three months old, so it’s very hard to be sure at this point. The most likely scenario is that it won’t continue at this high rate of increase, but that it will neither go down a lot, nor up a lot.
So the index will move sideways for a while?
Shiller: Yes, for a while, meaning five years.
What are the main factors driving U.S. house prices? What could push them up, or cause another slump?
Shiller: The main factor is the world economic crisis and the efforts of governments around the world to stimulate the economy. Parts of those efforts have been directed at the housing market. In the U.S., there is an 8,000 dollar first-time home buyer’s tax credit which expires at the end of November. That’s a reason for concern, as it comes to an end. Also, the Federal Reserve has a plan to buy $1.25 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities to support the housing market. They are most of the way through the program and anticipate phasing it out at some time in 2010 - that’s another thing that will go away. We’ve yet to see how the housing market will continue. Part of the problem is that people are buying now rather than later. When later comes, there could be a downturn in the market.
Read full interview
Sunday, September 27, 2009
In defence of financial innovation
by Robert Shiller at FT.com:
Many appear to think that the increasing complexity of financial products is the source of the world financial crisis. In response to it, many argue that regulators should actively discourage complexity.
The June 2009 US Treasury white paper seemed to say this. The paper said that a new consumer financial protection agency be “authorised to define standards for ‘plain vanilla’ products that are simpler and have straightforward pricing,” and “require all providers and intermediaries to offer these products prominently, alongside whatever other lawful products they choose to offer”.
The July 2009, HM Treasury white paper “Reforming Financial Markets” similarly advocated “improving access to simple, transparent products so that there is always an easy-to-understand option for consumers who are not looking for potentially complex or sophisticated products.”
They do have a point. Unnecessary complexity can be a problem that regulators should worry about, if the complexity is used to obfuscate and deceive, or if people do not have good advice on how to use them properly. Complexity was indeed used that way in this crisis by some banks who created special purpose vehicles (to evade bank capital requirements) and by some originators of complex mortgage securities (to fool the ratings agencies and ultimate investors).
Read full commentary
Many appear to think that the increasing complexity of financial products is the source of the world financial crisis. In response to it, many argue that regulators should actively discourage complexity.
The June 2009 US Treasury white paper seemed to say this. The paper said that a new consumer financial protection agency be “authorised to define standards for ‘plain vanilla’ products that are simpler and have straightforward pricing,” and “require all providers and intermediaries to offer these products prominently, alongside whatever other lawful products they choose to offer”.
The July 2009, HM Treasury white paper “Reforming Financial Markets” similarly advocated “improving access to simple, transparent products so that there is always an easy-to-understand option for consumers who are not looking for potentially complex or sophisticated products.”
They do have a point. Unnecessary complexity can be a problem that regulators should worry about, if the complexity is used to obfuscate and deceive, or if people do not have good advice on how to use them properly. Complexity was indeed used that way in this crisis by some banks who created special purpose vehicles (to evade bank capital requirements) and by some originators of complex mortgage securities (to fool the ratings agencies and ultimate investors).
Read full commentary
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Bubble, bubble, toil and financial trouble
By Robert J. Shiller
THE widespread failure of economists to forecast the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 has much to do with faulty models. This lack of sound models meant that economic policy makers and central bankers received no warning of what was to come.
As George Akerlof and I argue in our recent book "Animal Spirits," the current financial crisis was driven by speculative bubbles in the housing market, the stock market, and energy and other commodities markets.
Bubbles are caused by feedback loops: rising speculative prices encourage optimism, which encourages more buying, and hence further speculative price increases - until the crash comes.
But you won't find the word "bubble" in most economics treatises or textbooks. Likewise, a search of working papers produced by central banks and economics departments in recent years yields few instances of "bubbles" even being mentioned.
Indeed, the idea that bubbles exist has become so disreputable in much of the economics and finance profession that bringing them up in an economics seminar is like bringing up astrology to a group of astronomers.
Read full article
THE widespread failure of economists to forecast the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 has much to do with faulty models. This lack of sound models meant that economic policy makers and central bankers received no warning of what was to come.
As George Akerlof and I argue in our recent book "Animal Spirits," the current financial crisis was driven by speculative bubbles in the housing market, the stock market, and energy and other commodities markets.
Bubbles are caused by feedback loops: rising speculative prices encourage optimism, which encourages more buying, and hence further speculative price increases - until the crash comes.
But you won't find the word "bubble" in most economics treatises or textbooks. Likewise, a search of working papers produced by central banks and economics departments in recent years yields few instances of "bubbles" even being mentioned.
Indeed, the idea that bubbles exist has become so disreputable in much of the economics and finance profession that bringing them up in an economics seminar is like bringing up astrology to a group of astronomers.
Read full article
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