If you have been reading the financial press over the past week, you know that the global economy’s chances are looking a lot more uncertain these days. What you may not know, however, is that this more recent upswing in uncertainty and volatility is part of a much broader pattern in the global economy—one that poses some real challenges for how policymakers do their job.
Stephen Poloz, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, just released a working paper in which he suggests that the economic climate has become so profoundly uncertain since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 that it resists formal modeling.
Because of this, the Bank will no longer engage in the policy of ‘forward guidance’, in which it provides markets with a clear long-term commitment to its current very low interest rate policy. The Bank is changing this policy not because it is any less committed to low interest rates in the medium term, but because it does not want to give the markets a false sense of security about the predictability of the future. Instead, Poloz suggests that policymakers should do a better job of communicating the uncertainties facing the economy and the Bank itself as it formulates its policies.
Why should we care about this seemingly minor change in the Bank of Canada’s policy? Because it underlines just how much our governance practices are going to have to change in order to cope with the increasing uncertainty of the current economic and political dynamics.
It’s ironic that this warning is coming from the Bank of Canada. Central banks do not like change. They are just about the most conservative government institutions around.
Since the late 1970s, central bankers have been wedded to the idea that the most straightforward monetary policies are the best—ideally taking the form of a simple rule that can be expressed as a quantitative target, like the Bank of Canada’s inflation target. Economists argue that such policy rules are stabilizing because they avoid giving too much discretion to central bankers, thus reducing uncertainty about the Bank’s plans and increasing the credibility of their commitment to low inflation.
Yet these simple rules are effective only as long as the models that they are based on can accurately capture an economy’s dynamics and needs. If the economy is too complex and uncertain for such straightforward forms of quantification, then simple rules are at best misleading, and at worst destabilizing.
Poloz’s recent paper suggests that he recognizes some of these dilemmas—and the importance of coming to terms with them quickly in the current period of economic volatility.
The Bank of Canada’s Governor is not alone in recognizing these uncertainties. Janet Yellen, the current Chair of the United States Federal Reserve Board, has also pointed to the limits of simple rules in guiding central bank policy in the current context. Her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, referenced Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of ‘unknown unknowns’ to describe the extreme uncertainty that faced market participants during the recent financial crisis.
Yet, with this paper, Poloz seems to go further than his American counterparts in recognizing the implications of these unknown unknowns. In the same speech cited above, Bernanke argued that the failures of the global financial crisis were failures of engineering and management, and not of the underlying science of economics.
Poloz, by contrast, describes the work of monetary policymaking as a “craft” (not a science), and suggests that it is too complex to be treated as a form of engineering. The uncertainty that we are dealing with today, he suggests, “simply does not lend itself as easily to either mathematical or empirical analysis, or any real sort of formalization.”
This is a remarkable departure from the kind of numbers-driven rhetoric that we have heard from the Harper government in recent years.
The Canadian government has been increasingly preoccupied with measuring results, in health care, international development, and across government-funded programs. Last May, when announcing additional funds for the health of mothers and children in developing countries, Stephen Harper argued, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Poloz’s paper suggests that, on the contrary, because of the sheer complexity and uncertainty of the current global order, we have no alternative but to find ways of managing what we can’t measure. As I argue in my recent book, rather than using ever-more dubious indicators and targets to drive policy on everything from health to the economy, we need to find better ways of assessing, communicating and managing the true complexity of the policy challenges that we face.
This will not be an easy task, either technically or politically. It will take time to educate a public—not to mention a market—that has become used to simplified pronouncements.
The less we can rely on objective measurements and simple rules, the more careful we have to be about ensuring democratic accountability for policy decisions—through the political process and through an informed and active media.
And perhaps the biggest challenge that this new reality presents is the need for our politicians to heed Poloz’s suggestion that they not only recognize the inescapability of “uncertainty, and the policy errors it can foster,” but that they wear them “like an ill-fitting suit . . . that is, with humility.”
Humility tends to be in scarce supply in political circles these days. That too will need to change if we’re going to develop the kinds of creative policy tools that we need to manage the uncertain times to come.
First posted on the CIPS Blog.
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