Again, consider the math: Let’s say the Fed’s projected policy path, as conveyed through its latest “dot plot,” is correct and the central bank takes the nominal federal funds rate from zero to around 1% by the end of 2022. Couple that with a judicious assessment of the disinflation trajectory – not too slow, not too fast – that foresees year-end CPI inflation moving back into the 3-4% zone. That would still leave the real federal funds rate in negative territory at -2% to -3% at the end of this year.
That’s the catch in all this. In the current easing cycle, the Fed first pushed the real federal funds rate below zero in November 2019. That means a likely -2% to -3% rate in December 2022 would mark a 38-month period of extraordinary monetary accommodation, during which the real federal funds rate averaged -3.1%.
Historical perspective is important here. There have been three earlier periods of extraordinary monetary accommodation worth noting: In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble a generation ago, the Fed under Alan Greenspan ran a negative real funds rate averaging -1.1% for 31 consecutive months. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen teamed up to sustain a -1.9% average real funds rate for a whopping 62 months. And then, as post-crisis sluggishness persisted, Yellen partnered with Jerome Powell for 37 straight months to hold the real funds rate at -0.9%.
Today’s Fed is playing with fire. The -3.1% real federal funds rate of the current über-accommodation is more than double the -1.4% average of those three earlier periods. And yet today’s inflation problem is far more serious, with CPI increases likely to average 5% from March 2021 through December 2022, compared with the 2.1% average that prevailed under the earlier regimes of negative real funds rates.
All this underscores what could well be the riskiest policy bet the Fed has ever made. It has injected record stimulus into the economy during a period when inflation is running at well over twice the pace it did during its three previous experiments with negative real funds rates. I deliberately left out a fourth comparison: the -1.7% real federal funds rate under Burns in the early 1970s. We know how that ended. And I also left out any mention of the Fed’s equally aggressive balance-sheet expansion.
By now, it is passé to warn that the Fed is “behind the curve.” In fact, the Fed is so far behind that it can’t even see the curve. Its dot plots, not only for this year but also for 2023 and 2024, don’t do justice to the extent of monetary tightening that most likely will be required as the Fed scrambles to bring inflation back under control. In the meantime, financial markets are in for a very rude awakening.
Stephen S. Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale's School of Management. He is the author of "Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China."