Uneasy Money

In my three previous posts (here, here, and here) about intertemporal equilibrium, I have been emphasizing that the defining characteristic of an intertemporal equilibrium is that agents all share the same expectations of future prices – or at least the same expectations of those future prices on which they are basing their optimizing plans – over their planning horizons. At a given moment at which agents share the same expectations of future prices, the optimizing plans of the agents are consistent, because none of the agents would have any reason to change his optimal plan as long as price expectations do not change, or are not disappointed as a result of prices turning out to be different from what they had been expected to be.

The failure of expected prices to be fulfilled would therefore signify that the information available to agents in forming their expectations and choosing optimal plans conditional on their expectations had been superseded by newly obtained information. The arrival of new information can thus be viewed as a cause of disequilibrium as can any difference in information among agents. The relationship between information and equilibrium can be expressed as follows: differences in information or differences in how agents interpret information leads to disequilibrium, because those differences lead agents to form differing expectations of future prices.

Now the natural way to generalize the intertemporal equilibrium model is to allow for agents to have different expectations of future prices reflecting their differences in how they acquire, or in how they process, information. But if agents have different information, so that their expectations of future prices are not the same, the plans on which agents construct their subjectively optimal plans will be inconsistent and incapable of implementation without at least some revisions. But this generalization seems incompatible with the equilibrium of optimal plans, prices and price expectations described by Roy Radner, which I have identified as an updated version of Hayek’s concept of intertemporal equilibrium.

The question that I want to explore in this post is how to reconcile the absence of equilibrium of optimal plans, prices, and price expectations, with the intuitive notion of market clearing that we use to analyze asset markets and markets for current delivery. If markets for current delivery and for existing assets are in equilibrium in the sense that prices are adjusting in those markets to equate demand and supply in those markets, how can we understand the idea that  the optimizing plans that agents are seeking to implement are mutually inconsistent?

The classic attempt to explain this intermediate situation which partially is and partially is not an equilibrium, was made by J. R. Hicks in 1939 in Value and Capital when he coined the term “temporary equilibrium” to describe a situation in which current prices are adjusting to equilibrate supply and demand in current markets even though agents are basing their choices of optimal plans to implement over time on different expectations of what prices will be in the future. The divergence of the price expectations on the basis of which agents choose their optimal plans makes it inevitable that some or all of those expectations won’t be realized, and that some, or all, of those agents won’t be able to implement the optimal plans that they have chosen, without at least some revisions.

In Hayek’s early works on business-cycle theory, he argued that the correct approach to the analysis of business cycles must be analyzed as a deviation by the economy from its equilibrium path. The problem that he acknowledged with this approach was that the tools of equilibrium analysis could be used to analyze the nature of the equilibrium path of an economy, but could not easily be deployed to analyze how an economy performs once it deviates from its equilibrium path. Moreover, cyclical deviations from an equilibrium path tend not to be immediately self-correcting, but rather seem to be cumulative. Hayek attributed the tendency toward cumulative deviations from equilibrium to the lagged effects of monetary expansion which cause cumulative distortions in the capital structure of the economy that lead at first to an investment-driven expansion of output, income and employment and then later to cumulative contractions in output, income, and employment. But Hayek’s monetary analysis was never really integrated with the equilibrium analysis that he regarded as the essential foundation for a theory of business cycles, so the monetary analysis of the cycle remained largely distinct from, if not inconsistent with, the equilibrium analysis.

I would suggest that for Hayek the Hicksian temporary-equilibrium construct would have been the appropriate theoretical framework within which to formulate a monetary analysis consistent with equilibrium analysis. Although there are hints in the last part of The Pure Theory of Capital that Hayek was thinking along these lines, I don’t believe that he got very far, and he certainly gave no indication that he saw in the Hicksian method the analytical tool with which to weave the two threads of his analysis.

I will now try to explain how the temporary-equilibrium method makes it possible to understand  the conditions for a cumulative monetary disequilibrium. I make no attempt to outline a specifically Austrian or Hayekian theory of monetary disequilibrium, but perhaps others will find it worthwhile to do so.

As I mentioned in my previous post, agents understand that their price expectations may not be realized, and that their plans may have to be revised. Agents also recognize that, given the uncertainty underlying all expectations and plans, not all debt instruments (IOUs) are equally reliable. The general understanding that debt – promises to make future payments — must be evaluated and assessed makes it profitable for some agents to specialize in in debt assessment. Such specialists are known as financial intermediaries. And, as I also mentioned previously, the existence of financial intermediaries cannot be rationalized in the ADM model, because, all contracts being made in period zero, there can be no doubt that the equilibrium exchanges planned in period zero will be executed whenever and exactly as scheduled, so that everyone’s promise to pay in time zero is equally good and reliable.

For our purposes, a particular kind of financial intermediary — banks — are of primary interest. The role of a bank is to assess the quality of the IOUs offered by non-banks, and select from the IOUs offered to them those that are sufficiently reliable to be accepted by the bank. Once a prospective borrower’s IOU is accepted, the bank exchanges its own IOU for the non-bank’s IOU. No non-bank would accept a non-bank’s IOU, at least not on terms as favorable as those on which the bank offers in accepting an IOU. In return for the non-bank IOU, the bank credits the borrower with a corresponding amount of its own IOUs, which, because the bank promises to redeem its IOUs for the numeraire commodity on demand, is generally accepted at face value.

Thus, bank debt functions as a medium of exchange even as it enables non-bank agents to make current expenditures they could not have made otherwise if they can demonstrate to the bank that they are sufficiently likely to repay the loan in the future at agreed upon terms. Such borrowing and repayments are presumably similar to the borrowing and repayments that would occur in the ADM model unmediated by any financial intermediary. In assessing whether a prospective borrower will repay a loan, the bank makes two kinds of assessments. First, does the borrower have sufficient income-earning capacity to generate enough future income to make the promised repayments that the borrower would be committing himself to make? Second, should the borrower’s future income, for whatever reason, turn out to be insufficient to finance the promised repayments, does the borrower have collateral that would allow the bank to secure repayment from the collateral offered as security? In making both kinds of assessments the bank has to form an expectation about the future — the future income of the borrower and the future value of the collateral.

In a temporary-equilibrium context, the expectations of future prices held by agents are not the same, so the expectations of future prices of at least some agents will not be accurate, and some agents won’tbe able to execute their plans as intended. Agents that can’t execute their plans as intended are vulnerable if they have incurred future obligations based on their expectations of future prices that exceed their repayment capacity given the future prices that are actually realized. If they have sufficient wealth — i.e., if they have asset holdings of sufficient value — they may still be able to repay their obligations. However, in the process they may have to sell assets or reduce their own purchases, thereby reducing the income earned by other agents. Selling assets under pressure of obligations coming due is almost always associated with selling those assets at a significant loss, which is precisely why it usually preferable to finance current expenditure by borrowing funds and making repayments on a fixed schedule than to finance the expenditure by the sale of assets.

Now, in adjusting their plans when they observe that their price expectations are disappointed, agents may respond in two different ways. One type of adjustment is to increase sales or decrease purchases of particular goods and services that they had previously been planning to purchase or sell; such marginal adjustments do not fundamentally alter what agents are doing and are unlikely to seriously affect other agents. But it is also possible that disappointed expectations will cause some agents to conclude that their previous plans are no longer sustainable under the conditions in which they unexpectedly find themselves, so that they must scrap their old plans replacing them with completely new plans instead. In the latter case, the abandonment of plans that are no longer viable given disappointed expectations may cause other agents to conclude that the plans that they had expected to implement are no longer profitable and must be scrapped.

When agents whose price expectations have been disappointed respond with marginal adjustments in their existing plans rather than scrapping them and replacing them with new ones, a temporary equilibrium with disappointed expectations may still exist and that equilibrium may be reached through appropriate price adjustments in the markets for current delivery despite the divergent expectations of future prices held by agents. Operation of the price mechanism may still be able to achieve a reconciliation of revised but sub-optimal plans. The sub-optimal temporary equilibrium will be inferior to the allocation that would have resulted had agents all held correct expectations of future prices. Nevertheless, given a history of incorrect price expectations and misallocations of capital assets, labor, and other factors of production, a sub-optimal temporary equilibrium may be the best feasible outcome.

But here’s the problem. There is no guarantee that, when prices turn out to be very different from what they were expected to be, the excess demands of agents will adjust smoothly to changes in current prices. A plan that was optimal based on the expectation that the price of widgets would be $500 a unit may well be untenable at a price of $120 a unit. When realized prices are very different from what they had been expected to be, those price changes can lead to discontinuous adjustments, violating a basic assumption — the continuity of excess demand functions — necessary to prove the existence of an equilibrium. Once output prices reach some minimum threshold, the best response for some firms may be to shut down, the excess demand for the product produced by the firm becoming discontinuous at the that threshold price. The firms shutting down operations may be unable to repay loans they had obligated themselves to repay based on their disappointed price expectations. If ownership shares in firms forced to cease production are held by households that have predicated their consumption plans on prior borrowing and current repayment obligations, the ability of those households to fulfill their obligations may be compromised once those firms stop paying out the expected profit streams. Banks holding debts incurred by firms or households that borrowers cannot service may find that their own net worth is reduced sufficiently to make the banks’ own debt unreliable, potentially causing a breakdown in the payment system. Such effects are entirely consistent with a temporary-equilibrium model if actual prices turn out to be very different from what agents had expected and upon which they had constructed their future consumption and production plans.

Sufficiently large differences between expected and actual prices in a given period may result in discontinuities in excess demand functions once prices reach critical thresholds, thereby violating the standard continuity assumptions on which the existence of general equilibrium depends under the fixed-point theorems that are the lynchpin of modern existence proofs. C. J. Bliss made such an argument in a 1983 paper (“Consistent Temporary Equilibrium” in the volume Modern Macroeconomic Theory edited by  J. P. Fitoussi) in which he also suggested, as I did above, that the divergence of individual expectations implies that agents will not typically regard the debt issued by other agents as homogeneous. Bliss therefore posited the existence of a “Financier” who would subject the borrowing plans of prospective borrowers to an evaluation process to determine if the plan underlying the prospective loan sought by a borrower was likely to generate sufficient cash flow to enable the borrower to repay the loan. The role of the Financier is to ensure that the plans that firms choose are based on roughly similar expectations of future prices so that firms will not wind up acting on price expectations that must inevitably be disappointed.

I am unsure how to understand the function that Bliss’s Financier is supposed to perform. Presumably the Financier is meant as a kind of idealized companion to the Walrasian auctioneer rather than as a representation of an actual institution, but the resemblance between what the Financier is supposed to do and what bankers actually do is close enough to make it unclear to me why Bliss chose an obviously fictitious character to weed out business plans based on implausible price expectations rather than have the role filled by more realistic characters that do what their real-world counterparts are supposed to do. Perhaps Bliss’s implicit assumption is that real-world bankers do not constrain the expectations of prospective borrowers sufficiently to suggest that their evaluation of borrowers would increase the likelihood that a temporary equilibrium actually exists so that only an idealized central authority could impose sufficient consistency on the price expectations to make the existence of a temporary equilibrium likely.

But from the perspective of positive macroeconomic and business-cycle theory, explicitly introducing banks that simultaneously provide an economy with a medium of exchange – either based on convertibility into a real commodity or into a fiat base money issued by the monetary authority – while intermediating between ultimate borrowers and ultimate lenders seems to be a promising way of modeling a dynamic economy that sometimes may — and sometimes may not — function at or near a temporary equilibrium.

We observe economies operating in the real world that sometimes appear to be functioning, from a macroeconomic perspective, reasonably well with reasonably high employment, increasing per capita output and income, and reasonable price stability. At other times, these economies do not function well at all, with high unemployment and negative growth, sometimes with high rates of inflation or with deflation. Sometimes, these economies are beset with financial crises in which there is a general crisis of solvency, and even apparently solvent firms are unable to borrow. A macroeconomic model should be able to account in some way for the diversity of observed macroeconomic experience. The temporary equilibrium paradigm seems to offer a theoretical framework capable of accounting for this diversity of experience and for explaining at least in a very general way what accounts for the difference in outcomes: the degree of congruence between the price expectations of agents. When expectations are reasonably consistent, the economy is able to function at or near a temporary equilibrium which is likely to exist. When expectations are highly divergent, a temporary equilibrium may not exist, and even if it does, the economy may not be able to find its way toward the equilibrium. Price adjustments in current markets may be incapable of restoring equilibrium inasmuch as expectations of future prices must also adjust to equilibrate the economy, there being no market mechanism by which equilibrium price expectations can be adjusted or restored.

This, I think, is the insight underlying Axel Leijonhufvud’s idea of a corridor within which an economy tends to stay close to an equilibrium path. However if the economy drifts or is shocked away from its equilibrium time path, the stabilizing forces that tend to keep an economy within the corridor cease to operate at all or operate only weakly, so that the tendency for the economy to revert back to its equilibrium time path is either absent or disappointingly weak.

The temporary-equilibrium method, it seems to me, might have been a path that Hayek could have successfully taken in pursuing the goal he had set for himself early in his career: to reconcile equilibrium-analysis with a theory of business cycles. Why he ultimately chose not to take this path is a question that, for now at least, I will leave to others to try to answer.