Benoît Coeuré: The economic consequences of low interest rates
Public lecture by Mr Benoît Coeuré, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central
Bank, at the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies, Geneva, 9 October
2013.
* * *
I wish to thank Giovanni Lombardo and Oreste Tristani for their contributions to these remarks. I remain solely
responsible for the opinions contained herein. Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a pleasure to be here at the ICMB.
In recent years, monetary policy interest rates have been reduced to exceptionally low levels.
The main reason for maintaining highly accommodative monetary conditions has been to
avert the risk of an economic depression and to counter deflationary pressures. At the same
time, given the financial disruptions which led to what is now widely called "the Great
Recession", the reduction of interest rates has helped to offset the excessive increase in
borrowing costs caused by the widening of financial spreads. From this perspective,
monetary policy actions have favoured borrowers.
Over the same period, returns on safe financial assets have been very depressed. This has
implied that on the one hand, savers in search of safe investment opportunities have found
themselves having to accept extremely low rates of return - possibly negative when
corrected for inflation - while on the other hand low rates have boosted asset prices and,
hence, have favoured households and firms with a positive net wealth. Yet, given the length
of the economic slowdown and the persistence of the low interest rate environment, the
media on both sides of the Atlantic have been reporting on the difficult investment climate for
savers.1
The correlation between these two facts - low monetary policy interest rates and low returns
on safe financial assets - may suggest a causal explanation. After all, low nominal yields on
safe, long-term bonds are the result of current and expected low interest rates as well as of a
term premium. It is tempting to conclude that, facing a choice between helping borrowers and
supporting lenders, central banks have chosen the first group. The reduction of monetary
policy interest rates would thus be seen as aiming to reduce borrowing costs for consumers
and firms. Savers would simply have to suffer the collateral damage from a policy aimed at
other objectives.
In my remarks today, I wish to argue that this conclusion is unwarranted.
Specifically, I will maintain that persistently low asset returns or, more generally, poor
investment opportunities are simply one of the many manifestations of a deep recession. In
such an environment, looser monetary policy conditions are not the result of a desire to
favour borrowers, but rather the necessary response to bring the economy back on to a
sustainable growth path in an environment of price stability. Far from helping savers, higher
monetary policy interest rates would only have depressed the economy further, delayed the
recovery and contributed to downside risks to price stability. Asset returns would have been
dampened for longer and savers would have suffered for longer.
Policy rates at historically low levels
Let me start by summarising the facts.
The key ECB policy rates are at a historical low. After being cut to 1% in May 2009, the
interest rate on the main refinancing operation (MRO) has remained at low levels over the
past four years. It currently stands at 50 basis points. The deposit facility rate is at zero and
the marginal lending facility rate is at 100 basis points, which implies that our interest rate
corridor is also unprecedentedly narrow.
Even if the MRO rate stands at 50 basis points, the effective cost of funds for some banks
has fallen even further. Banks in countries under stress have faced higher borrowing costs,
on both retail and wholesale sources of funding, and in some cases have become altogether
unable to raise funds in the interbank market. They have therefore had to rely on the ECB for
their liquidity needs. The ensuing increase in the overall amount of liquidity available in the
system has led to a fall in the overnight rate on unsecured borrowing- the refinancing rate for
banks perceived as safe. The average overnight rate, or EONIA rate, has hovered around
levels very close to the rate on the deposit facility over the past four years. It currently stands
below 10 basis points.
At the same time, returns on long-term safe assets have never been so low since the
creation of Economic and Monetary Union. For example, ten-year German government
bonds pay a nominal interest rate of just above 170 basis points. This is partly the result of a
slight downward trend in euro area safe asset returns over the past decade, and mostly the
consequence of the worsening sovereign debt crisis in 2011, when risk-free real rates were
pushed into negative territory as investors adjusted their portfolios towards the few assets
which were perceived as safe. Since long-term euro area inflation expectations are well
anchored at just below 2%, consistent with our definition of price stability, these low nominal
rates translate into expected real returns on safe assets that are slightly negative.
From the perspective of a saver, these returns are obviously very low, compared with
average historical conditions. Over the very long run, real rates are determined by investors'
time preference rate and expectations about the trend growth rate of the economy. At more
intermediate maturities, however, returns on safe assets are affected by current and
expected future monetary policy conditions, with the addition of term premia mainly reflecting
the maturity of the assets and the expected volatility of inflation. Expectations of persistently
low short-term policy rates will tend to lower yields at medium-term maturities. As long as
inflation expectations remain well anchored, real medium- to long-term yields will also tend to
edge down. Monetary policy is therefore contributing to keeping real yields at low levels
along a good part of the yield curve.
Real interest rates during a prolonged economic downturn
But are interest rates currently excessive low? To answer this question, one needs to define
a benchmark. In practice, this is a very difficult task, both conceptually and in terms of
quantitative measurement. Indeed, the overall assessment of the risks to price stability in all
central banks can be understood as a way of operationalizing this task, through extensive
analytical information and a good deal of judgement.
Theory, however, offers some guidance on how to think of a benchmark for the neutral level
of interest rates within simple modelling frameworks. This is a useful starting point for my
discussion.
The natural starting point for an economist is the Wicksellian natural rate of interest: the
"certain rate of interest on loans which is neutral in respect to commodity prices, and tends
neither to raise nor to lower them".2 A more precise definition of the natural rate of interest
has been provided in the context of dynamic economic models.3 In this context, the natural
rate of interest is the short-term real interest rate which would prevail in an ideal "real
economy", where nominal variables play no role. In such an economy, monetary policy would
have no reason to exist. All economic variables would be determined independently of the
actions of the central bank.
In this ideal world, a prolonged economic contraction would be accompanied by an initial fall,
and then by a gradual recovery of the natural rate of interest. The level and the persistence
of the natural rate of interest are linked to the pace of the economic recovery. Various
economic forces would contribute to this outcome. On the one hand, the contraction would
be associated with a persistent fall in the profitability of new investment. Expected returns on
all investment opportunities would therefore tend to remain low. On the other hand,
uncertainty would also tend to increase during the recession. As a result, precautionary
saving would also increase, exerting further downward pressure on the natural interest rate.4
Investment in new projects would also be discouraged in this situation of greater uncertainty.5
All in all, the demand for new borrowing in the economy would fall and, other things being
equal, the excess supply of funds would exert further downward pressure on the real interest
rate.
More specifically, compared with the rates of return which can be earned under normal
conditions, the low interest rate would be disadvantageous for savers and lenders, and
relatively more favourable for borrowers, also in this ideal economy. These conditions,
however, would not be the result of a special monetary policy objective favouring one
economic group over the other, but rather part of the automatic rebalancing of the economy
after the recession. Of course, relative advantages would be reversed during economic
expansions, when real interest rates would become higher, to the relative benefit of savers
as opposed to borrowers. On average, over many expansions and recessions, lenders and
borrowers would be treated symmetrically.
Let me emphasise that the scenario I just described is related to an ideal economy.
Nevertheless, the described scenario mimics quite well actual developments since the Great
Recession. From a qualitative perspective, therefore, a low-interest-rate environment is fully
warranted in the real world as well. Had we at the ECB not pursued a policy of low interest
rates, we would have impaired the fragile recovery of the European economy and delayed
the return of real rates to levels motivated by genuine, sustainable growth.
It remains unclear, though, whether actual interest rates in the real world are excessively low
from a quantitative perspective. How can we assess whether this is the case?
Once again, the theoretical natural rate benchmark can help to answer this question. An
economy in which nominal variables play no role is in fact equivalent to an economy in which
inflation is always constant at zero. The natural rate benchmark therefore indicates the ideal
interest rate setting for a central bank aiming to maintain price stability in a monetary
economy. Taking a Wicksellian perspective, policy interest rates below the natural level
would produce inflationary pressures, while higher rates would push the economy into
deflation.
It follows that a simple gauge of whether the level of actual policy interest rates is consistent
with an ideal natural level, or instead excessively high or low, is to look at inflation
expectations. The latest ECB Staff macroeconomic projections for the euro area foresee a
rate of annual inflation in 2014 of only 1.3%, down from 1.5% in 2013 - both rates somewhat
below our own definition of price stability, which is below, but close to, 2%. Inflation
projections therefore do not support the hypothesis that ECB policy interest rates are
excessively low.
If anything, our staff estimates that real output in the euro area will contract by 0.4% in 2013,
and return to a timid 1% growth in 2014, justify an easing bias to future monetary policy
decisions.
Such a bias is an integral part of the design of the recent and unanimous Governing Council
decision to provide forward guidance. While our MRO rate is still strictly above its zero lower
bound, giving us some scope for further reductions if deemed appropriate in the light of
incoming economic and monetary data, our forward guidance is primarily intended to reduce
uncertainty about future policy decisions. This act of policy transparency strengthens the
effectiveness of our accommodative policy stance by exerting downward pressure on
medium-term interest rate expectations.6
Heterogeneity across countries
I have so far argued that ECB policy interest rates are appropriate for the euro area economy
as a whole, and not specifically geared to improving funding conditions for borrowers. In
particular, ECB policy decisions over the past five years were dictated by the inflation outlook
for the euro area, in line with past historical regularities in our interest rate settings.7
The euro area average, however, is neither representative of the conditions prevailing in all
Member States, nor of the distribution of funding costs across borrowers within countries.
Especially since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis, borrowing costs for private lenders
have become increasingly heterogeneous across countries and sectors. Profitable firms
located in stressed euro area economies have faced increasing funding costs as the
sovereign debt crisis has escalated, with small and medium-sized firms hit harder. Only in
some euro area countries have firms been able to take full advantage of the decline in key
ECB interest rates. At the ECB, we have referred to this situation as "financial fragmentation"
- that is, a type of financial disruption characterised by fault lines shaped by national borders,
with ramifications within national borders, capital repatriation and sharp increases in the
home bias in all market segments. Financial fragmentation results in renationalisation of
savings, which in turn prevents euro area households and companies from reaping the full
benefits of the single market for goods and services.
For example, a consequence of this fragmentation is that the average cost of borrowing for
non-financial corporations in Germany in the first quarter of 2013 was slightly more than
2.5% per year, while it was about 4% in Italy. This gap also reflects the limited pass-through
of our policy decisions in stressed countries: the 75 basis point reduction in MRO between
the third quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2013 brought about a 100 basis point
reduction in the average cost of borrowing for non-financial corporations in Germany but only
a 50 basis point reduction in Italy.8
Within countries, our interest rate cuts have also benefited different firms to different extents,
increasing the heterogeneity of borrowing costs. For example, in Germany since January
2012 the interest rate on new loans to non-financial corporations (over 5 years' duration) has
dropped by about 81 basis points for smaller loans (up to €1 million) and by about 56 basis
points for larger loans (down to 280 and 283 basis points respectively). For Italy, the
reductions amount to about 29 basis points and 140 basis points respectively (down to 577
and 353 basis points respectively). So while larger firms in stressed countries are
experiencing improvements in their financing costs, smaller and medium-sized firms in these
countries are still lagging behind.
This picture of heterogeneity within and across countries can be linked to the difficulties
encountered by banks during the financial crisis. The dramatic fall in asset values
experienced during the crisis has worsened the balance sheet of financial intermediaries,
leading to a sharp contraction in credit in a number of euro area countries. The ensuing
deflationary pressure has further exacerbated the balance sheet contraction through the
Fisher effect on the real value of outstanding liabilities of banks.9
There is a two-way relationship between financial fragmentation and the heterogeneity in
economic fundamentals across the euro area.
We have observed sharp cross-country dispersion in the cumulated changes in real GDP
since the start of the crisis. In 2012 the level of real GDP was around 20% lower than in 2007
in the country most affected, while it was around 10% higher in the country least affected by
the crisis. European labour markets offer a similar, well-known picture. The diverging
distribution of economic and financial conditions within the euro area has mainly been
exacerbated by the ailing fiscal conditions at national level. In particular, banks' funding costs
have remained persistently high in some countries despite cuts in the ECB's policy rate, in
part reflecting fundamental- as well as non-fundamental risks associated with large sovereign
debt. In stressed countries, the limited and costly availability of credit has further hampered
hiring and investment, while in the other countries, borrowing conditions have been
favourable, making the fault line even deeper.
Lenders in stressed countries as well as savers in all countries have suffered from the
consequences of financial fragmentation. The ensuing flight to safety has led to soaring
yields and lending rates in stressed countries. But the resulting excess demand for safe
assets has also squeezed yields in core countries. Therefore, financial fragmentation has
negatively affected both borrowers in stressed peripheral countries and savers in the core
euro area.
Furthermore, a key ingredient in conducting a single monetary policy for several countries is
capital mobility. Through capital mobility, real ex ante returns, expressed in terms of the
same consumption units, are equalised across countries. When this condition holds, there is
only one reference Wicksellian natural rate against which we can assess the neutrality of our
policy stance. When financial markets are fragmented, the efficient allocation of capital
across countries is impaired and monetary policy ceases to have a single reference rate to
pursue: the natural rate itself is fragmented.
In this light, the ECB, acting within its mandate, has had to re-establish the allocative
efficiency of financial markets. Consequently, we have implemented a number of
nonstandard monetary policy measures specifically designed to offset financial impairments.
Such measures have had their effects, mainly by boosting the ability of the financial
intermediation sector to provide funds to households and firms. The revitalisation of local
financial conditions has significantly reduced euro-area financial fragmentation, thus
repairing the transmission channel of standard monetary policy. By lowering short-term
interest rates and signalling, through forward guidance, our willingness to keep rates low for
an extended period of time, we are aiming to reactivate the real economy and to avoid the
deflationary pressures that can undermine the fragile recovery of the financial intermediaries.
In this respect, it has been argued that reducing fragmentation can imply a redistribution of
risk in times of crisis, and further, that it is the redistribution of risks that makes monetary
policy effective.10 For example, by relaxing collateral requirements for their lending
programmes, central banks can insure against a tail event in which the borrower and the
collateral fail to cover the borrowed amount. The main insight here is that the redistribution of
risk is not a zero-sum game, but that the overall risk in the economy, in our case in the
monetary union, can be reduced. I agree with this view, but I would like to stress that the
redistribution of risks is only a means to an end - achieving price stability. And any such
insurance provided by the central bank should come with appropriate safeguards to mitigate
moral hazard, or we would be trading short term stability against long term instability.
In terms of impact on our balance sheet, our main non-standard measure is represented by
the unlimited provision of liquidity at maturities up to three years and the enlargement of the
set of eligible collateral within our risk control framework. Banks' recourse to ECB's unlimited
provision of liquidity has been particularly intense in countries under pressure in sovereign
bond markets. This measure has helped to ease bank funding constraints. In countries facing
stress in sovereign bond markets, this has made it possible for banks to ease lending
standards and foster better credit conditions for borrowers.
In parallel to the unlimited provision of liquidity to banks, we have designed our Outright
Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme to rule out self-fulfilling, deflationary equilibria
associated with unjustified fears of currency redenomination. The OMT programme has
successfully contributed to the normalisation of Europe's financial market and largely
restored the attractiveness of a broader set of saving opportunities. Thanks to the
introduction of the OMT, the strong divergence in funding costs across countries has been to
some extent reduced. The reduction in sovereign risk premia towards levels consistent with
economic fundamentals can generate positive dynamics; first and foremost by improving the
balance sheet of sovereign bondholders (in particular banks). These bondholders, in turn, will
see their creditworthiness increase and, at the same time, be able to invest in riskier, yet
more profitable, projects. Therefore, while our non-standard measures were designed for the
euro area as a whole, their use has varied among counterparties and across countries. In
this regard, our non-standard measures have helped restore the distributional neutrality of
our monetary policy by mitigating distortions in certain asset classes or sectors. Their impact
has prevented extreme economic outcomes for certain sectors and countries. However,
permitting cross-country divergences to linger bears the risk of turning temporary wounds
into permanent scars, thus undermining the effectiveness of a single monetary policy for our
monetary union in the long run.
That said, there is only so much that the central bank can do. Many sources of financial
impairment have a structural nature, having to do with lack of convergence across
economies, exposure of banks to sovereign credit risk and vice-versa, and regulatory and
supervisory ring fencing. The ECB cannot support the solvency of profligate sovereigns, nor
can it build up the capital of banks that have extended unprofitable loans, or the own funds of
companies whose business models have become outdated. This is about generating and
allocating of capital in the economy, a task that does not belong to the central bank remit and
which ultimately determines the natural rate of interest and the distribution of wealth between
borrowers and savers.
Conclusions
Let me now conclude.
Five years of financial crisis and economic contraction have had far reaching implications for
the euro area.
First, the deep recession in the euro area has been manifested in low asset returns or, more
generally, poor investment opportunities. In such an environment, looser monetary policy
conditions are the necessary response to bring the economy back on to a sustainable growth
path in an environment of price stability. Far from helping savers, higher monetary policy
interest rates would only have depressed the economy further, delayed the recovery and
contributed to downside risks to price stability. Additionally, asset returns would have been
dampened for longer with negative implications to the net wealth of savers.
Second, borrowers in stressed countries as well as savers in all countries have suffered from
the consequences of financial fragmentation. The ensuing flight to safety has led to
(i) soaring yields and lending rates in stressed peripheral countries, and (ii) squeezed yields
As a result, financial fragmentation has negatively affected both borrowers
in core countries.
in stressed peripheral countries and lenders in the core euro area. Therefore, non-standard
monetary policies, which aim at improving the transmission of monetary policy by reducing
financial fragmentations in the euro area, have mitigated the negative implications of financial
fragmentation on both borrowers and lenders.
Third, the economic contraction has been accompanied by rising unemployment and lower
incomes. Undoubtedly, the pain has not been evenly shared. The distribution of income has
widened in the euro area as well as in other OECD countries, with poorer households and
young people being hit harder.11
However, it is not the mandate of the ECB, or of any modern central bank, to address rising
inequalities or to steer the distribution of income, whether between rich and poor or between
lenders and borrowers. Our mandate is to preserve price stability. This is our contribution to
the efficient working of our market economy. In the current phase of the European business
cycle, characterised by disruptions and fragmentation in euro area financial markets, our
mandate is best served by tackling the malfunctioning of markets and ensuring a
homogeneous and smooth transmission of monetary policy across sectors and countries.
Any re-distributional effect of our policies must be read as a means to an end that is price
stability.12 These effects are bound to be temporary, as such are the real effects of monetary
policy interventions. In the long run, real rates are determined by natural economic forces, by
productivity-enhancing public intervention and by the quality of our market institutions that
are beyond the reach of monetary authorities.
Looking forward, the welfare of euro area savers will depend on efforts to reduce financial
fragmentation by building a proper banking union, with its supervision and resolution arms,
by strengthening euro area governance and by enforcing rules that ensure that member
countries run sustainable policies. It will depend on efforts to lift productivity by investing in
technologies and skills - more than on any decision the ECB has taken and will take in the
future.
Thank you for your attention.