Rogoff, Reinhart, and minding your "D'oh"s and "Duh"s

"D'oh!" according to the Oxford English Dictionary (really!) is self--and-past-referential (think "eureka" with a self-deprecating slant) while "duh" refers, insultingly, to others without any sense of time.  In the words of Matt Groening, "so, you might say 'D'oh!' when you've been stupid, and 'Duh!' when you think someone else is being stupid, but then duh!, everyone knows that, right?"

Timing, as the saying goes, is everything.  In Carmen Reinhart's and Kenneth Rogoff's experience timing is the difference between enjoying bestselling author status and wearing a (metaphoric) dunce cap.  Examining centuries of history and most major trading nations of earth, This Time Is Different, their impressively researched, financial perspective on financial crises won them great fame, credibility and, I assume, money.    Based on the same data and premise- too much debt is bad- their paper,  "Growth in a Time of Debt", merely narrowed its focus to the public sector.   Their timing, and tone, with the benefit of hindsight, couldn't have been worse. 

Why?    

It's as simple as the difference between "D'oh" and "duh" and an interesting mental habit known as confirmation bias.

As evidenced by the wild who, how and why speculations following the Boston Marathon bombing, people's search for meaning in the face of disaster often leads inside rather than out.  Upset when the unthinkable becomes real, the threatened mind redoubles its efforts confirming other assumed aspects of "reality."  Those fearful of radical Islam before the bombing weren't surprised when first a Saudi National, and then Chechen immigrants were labelled suspects.  Their bias confirmed, no further questions needed to be asked.

This mental habit has its virtues. Imagine feeling the need to thoroughly examine a table's stability before putting a coffee mug down?  or a road's stability before driving?  A quick biased glance usually suffices for most.  Expertise in a field depends, in part, on informed bias.  An experienced auto mechanic (at least back when human diagnostics were the norm) usually narrowed down problems after a few questions, glances and a listen (whether they used this information to save you money is another matter entirely).

Sometimes, however, even well-informed bias misses warning signs hindsight, informed by consequence, can't ignore.  Homer Simpson's famous "D'oh!" got laughs because we've all been there.

For Reinhart and Rogoff, however, the crisis of 2008 wasn't a "D'oh" but a "duh" event.  Their bias wasn't a revelation occasioned by the crisis, its roots, as I'll soon explain, are much older than that.  The revelation was that others, influential others, didn't share their bias and maybe they could change that.

Years before This Time is Different was conceived Mr. Rogoff revealed his bias in a letter to Joseph Stiglitz just dripping with "duh": You seem to believe that if a distressed government issues more currency, its citizens will suddenly think it more valuable. You seem to believe that when investors are no longer willing to hold a government's debt, all that needs to be done is to increase the supply and it will sell like hot cakes. We at the IMF—no, make that we on the Planet Earth—have considerable experience suggesting otherwise. We earthlings have found that when a country in fiscal distress tries to escape by printing more money, inflation rises, often uncontrollably. Uncontrolled inflation strangles growth, hurting the entire populace but, especially the indigent. The laws of economics may be different in your part of the gamma quadrant, but around here we find that when an almost bankrupt government fails to credibly constrain the time profile of its fiscal deficits, things generally get worse instead of better.
 
Ouch!

In book form, their bias won them fame and fortune by eliciting "Doh"s.  Unlike the letter excerpt above with its reference to different laws in your part of the gamma quadrant, their book modestly hoped to give future policy makers and investors a bit more pause. 

That same bias, in the follow-up paper more closely resembled the letter in tone than the book.  In Congressional testimony, Carmen Reinhart wasn't sharing their bias to give pause, but to form policy.  Stripped of some nuance, and thus more actionable (politicians dream of such one-handed economists) correlation became dissent quashing causation. 

A unilateral causal pattern from growth to debt, however, does not accord with the evidence. Public debt surges are associated with a higher incidence of debt crises. In the current context, even a cursory reading of the recent turmoil in Greece and other European countries can be importantly traced to the adverse impacts of high levels of government debt (or potentially guaranteed debt) on county risk and economic outcomes.

There is scant evidence to suggest that high debt has little impact on growth.

Duh (ok, she didn't say that)

Another thing she didn't say was: In most instances, with enough pain and suffering, a determined debtor country can usually repay foreign creditors. The question most leaders face is where to draw the line. The decision is not always a completely rational one. Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceauşescu single-mindedly insisted on repaying, in the span of a few years, the debt of $ 9 billion owed by his poor nation to foreign banks during the 1980s debt crisis. Romanians were forced to live through cold winters with little or no heat, and factories were forced to cut back because of limited electricity.  
Reinhart, Carmen M.; Rogoff, Kenneth (2009-09-11). This Time Is Different


I copied the above from their book and am not surprised Reinhart didn't share it with Congress.  The story didn't fit what she was trying to sell.  In the event, Ceausecu's policy of austerity led not only to revolution, but his own execution.  That tale would have made for bad "optics" as they say in Washington.

 
Switching tone from "D'oh" to "duh" has its perils as explained here:  Duh is more derisive than doh. Perhaps because the word is associated with Homer Simpson, doh has a humorous quality about it. Duh is sometimes deployed with humorous intent, but more often for the purpose of mocking oneself or another. Put another way, saying duh in the wrong place at the wrong time could ignite a bar brawl. To my knowledge, no physical violence has ever been sparked by the word doh.

Dissenting economists, who'd previously been civil, dropped the gloves. Preferring to brawl in words and numbers rather than fists, the growing number of dissenters increased their scrutiny of the data.  Hell, it seems, hath no fury like an economist duh-ed.  Like Joe Wilson  fighting "stove-piped" data and the 16 words the dissenters' charges of cherry picked data, un-reproducible results, and excel coding errors started flying.  The damage, however, had been done.  Austerity in policy circles became a "duh".  I hope the bias doesn't lead to self-fulfillment.

In the event the US might have muddled through but for this, don't assume I'm laying the blame entirely on their, no doubt, well meaning shoulders.  To me, their bias was a catalyst which ignited another more commonly held bias.

Money not only matters, it matters a lot.

Hoping to give pause to austerity cheerleaders I'll offer a dissenting opinion (most likely to a chorus of "duhs" from the dissenting economists noted above).  It's not so much the size of the debt, it's what you do with it that matters.  Duration, source and relation of debt to current growth shouldn't be ignored but, in my view, the use of debt generated funds and the context of time and place are at least as important considerations.  While nothing is guaranteed in such matters, debt incurred to build hoped to be productive capital shouldn't incite as much worry as debt incurred to buy sports cars and vacation homes (or debt incurred to pay banks to hide the true level of debt).

What we in the US have been doing with debt sourced funds is a study for another time.  What we will do with it in the future is still unwritten.