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Lawrence Summers (c) WEF
On Thursday, I moderated a fascinating lunch-time discussion on “secular
stagnation” with Lawrence Summers, former US treasury secretary,
who has recently propounded this idea.
Other participants were Motoshige Itoh of Tokyo university, Edmund Phelps, Nobel laureate, director of the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University, Adam Posen, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Helene Rey of the London Business School and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard. This was a notably heavy-weight panel.
The discussion was rich and complex. But here are some conclusions.
First, since the crisis in 2007 and 2008, the equilibrium long-run real interest rate in the high-income countries has been ultra-low and the equilibrium real short rate has been negative. There is no disagreement on this. This was an obvious indicator of sustained and chronic weakness of demand.
Second, the main instrument we have used to deal with condition this has been hyper-aggressive monetary policy. But this creates substantial problems (in some views, at least, including mine): it distributes income towards both the financial sector and the rich, while also generating bubbles.
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