フィッシャーに学ぶ

●Enrique G. Mendoza, “Crisis lessons from Irving Fisher: Fix the debt-deflation disease, not its symptoms”（VOX, February 12, 2009）

In a seminal 1933 article, Mr. Irving Fisher offered a very different and innovative view. He focused on the meltdown of financial markets, the devastating effects of a downward spiral connecting the deflation of assets and goods prices, the process of deleveraging by households and firms, and contraction of economic activity.

Until about eighteen months ago, this was just one more of many unsettled economic questions that academic economists love to dwell on, largely because we don’t have a lot of data on Great Depressions to test our theories and because intellectual arrogance prevented us from taking seriously 1990s meltdowns in emerging markets and the Nordic countries as harbingers of what could happen to the US. Today, as we go through the catastrophic process of Fisher’s debt-deflation mechanism, there is no doubt that Fisher was right and the rest are just stories. If anything, we are left wishing prices were rigid!

But declaring a winner in the Great Depression debate is unimportant. The critical issue is to use the diagnosis that Fisher offered in his article – and what we have learned about debt deflations since then – to guide policy making. In this climate of hiring gurus for an ever-growing number of “top” economist posts in the US government, I would be very happy if we could just hire Irving Fisher!

Here are the lessons I learned after reading Fisher’s piece again and reflecting on our current dilemmas from its perspective.

Lesson 1 : Fiscal stimulus is a band-aid. We need – now and for the next two years –massive government spending to support the unemployed and prevent the implosion of state and local governments. Beyond that, spending will not stimulate anything, and it has nothing to do with the causes of the crisis or with putting an end to it. It is the strong pain killer that the economy needs for the infection that afflicts it, but it is just a pain killer, not a cure.・・・

（略）

Lesson 2 : Deflation must be halted and reversed, and the credit system restarted. Today, as in the early 1930s, these two parts of the puzzle are tightly interrelated, as Fisher explained. Deflation will not stop if the collapse of the credit system is not contained, and the collapse of the credit system will not stop until the deflation of asset and goods prices is controlled. ・・・

（略）

・・・The worst outcome would be a full repeat of the Great Depression. The worst of the Great Depression was not so much the initial economic collapse, as dramatic as that was, but its persistence for several years. This is what we still have time to avoid and where our energy should be invested. The political spin about pushing for reforms and bailouts to “avert disaster” needs to be corrected, so that everyone’s expectations are not biased towards thinking that a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus means back to business as usual. The emergency is real and present, but not to escape catastrophe. All the numbers we have about employment, production, world trade, the financial system, etc. show that we are already in a catastrophe. The emergency is to avoid the persistence of the stagnation that occurred during the Depression. The emergency is to prevent most of the next decade from looking like 2008.

Lesson 3 : Prevention. We got into this mess because financial development advanced way ahead of not only regulators and government officials, but the actors in financial markets themselves, including the geniuses who created the innovative financial products that we have now come to know (and fear) by their acronyms – CDOs, MBSs, CMOs, and the greatest villain of all, CDSs!

Preventing the next debacle, however, requires careful thinking. Imposing regulations and controls that would return the financial system to its 1960s structure would be a major mistake. The challenge is to identify where things went very wrong and plug the deep holes that exist while preserving the enormous potential that the securitisation of financial assets has for enhancing efficiency and standards of living worldwide. ・・・

So I end with the lesson that the master himself gave to conclude his article:

“Finally, I would emphasise the important corollary, of the debt-deflation theory, that great depressions are curable and preventable through reflation and stabilisation.” (Fisher, 1933, p. 350)

最後に引用されているフィッシャーの言葉、「デット・デフレーション理論から導かれる重要なコロラリーを強調しておこう。コロラリー；大不況からの脱却ならびに大不況の予防にはリフレーション政策と経済安定化政策が有効である」。

（追記）

Economist 誌でもフィッシャーの負債デフレ理論の話題が取り上げられていたようだ。night_in_tunisiaさんのブログエントリーと併せて読むと吉。

●The Economist, “Irving Fisher, the forgotten economist | Out of Keynes's shadow”（February 12, 2009）

●night_in_tunisia, “"The Economisit" on リフレーション”（徒然なる数学な日々, 2009年2月14日）

ついでにフィッシャーの論文「大不況の負債デフレ理論」のリンクも貼っておこう（Mendozaさんの記事でもリンク貼ってあるけれども）。

●Irving Fisher（1933）, “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions（pdf）”（Econometrica, vol.1(4), pp.337-357）

（追々記）Mendoza氏が今般の金融危機との絡みでフィッシャーの「大不況の負債デフレ理論」論文から引き出した3つの教訓。

　1．財政出動は対症療法に過ぎず、危機の根本的な解決策ではない。
　　　財政出動は危機の根本的な原因（＝デフレーションと信用市場の機能不全）を解決するものではない。
　2．危機の根本的な解決にはフロー・ストック両面のデフレーションの反転ならびに信用システムの機能回復とが必要である。
　　　信用市場の混乱が解決されることなくデフレーションの問題を解決することはできず、またデフレーションの問題が解決されることなく信用市場の
　　　混乱が解決されることはない。
　3．金融市場発の危機が再度到来しないよう予防策を講じる必要がある。　
　　　証券化の弊害だけをあげつらって金融市場の規制・監督を強化すればよいというような単純な話ではない。サブプライム危機に端を発する今般の
　　　金融危機には「政府の失敗」も絡んでいる点を忘れてはいけない。