Price-Level Movements, Fixed Nominal Contracts, and Debtor-Creditor Equity

RecentlyDavid Beckworth andMartin Sandbu, among others, have drawn attention toan interesting paper by James Bullard and Riccardo DiCecio unveiled in Norway earlier this year. In it, Bullard and DiCecio investigate a model economy possessing both a large private credit market and “Non-state contingent nominal contracting (NSCNC).” They conclude that, in such an economy, NGDP targeting is the “optimal monetary policy for the masses.”Here is David Beckworth ’s intuitive explanation for that finding:The basic idea is that in a world of fixed-price nominal debt contracts (i.e. the real world), a NGDP level target provides better risk sharing among creditors and debtors against economic shocks than does a price stability target.This is because a NGDP level target makes inflation countercyclical. During recessions, inflation rises and causes creditors to bear some of the unexpected pain by lowering the real debt payments they receive from debtors. During booms, inflation falls and allows creditors to share in some of the unexpected gain by increasing the real debt payments they receive from debtors. Debtors, in other words, bear less risk during recessions but also share unexpected gains during expansions.NGDP level targeting, in other words, causes a fixed-price nominal debt world to look and feel a lot like an equity-world. In a similar spirit, some observers have called for a risk-sharing mortgages as a way to avoid another Great Recession. The point of this paper is t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs