Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
I'm not arguing that financial regulation doesn't have a role, but that interest rates have an even greater role.  The affordability of mortgages has been damaged more by people losing jobs and large parts of their income rather than the relatively minor interest rate increases to date.  Interest rates also effect perceptions of value.  If can get a mortgage for a house for the same price as I can rent one, why wouldn't I get the mortgage and end up owning the house in the end.

Yes, at the margins there were problems with 100% mortgages and people getting mortgages 5 times their combined incomes - and this should have been regulated. But overall mortgage demand wouldn't have been anything like it was had interest rates been higher.

If interest rates are as irrelevant as you claim, why is it virtually the only policy tool the ECB actually uses on an ongoing basis?

Index of Frank's Diaries

by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Mon Sep 12th, 2011 at 07:06:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
If interest rates are as irrelevant as you claim, why is it virtually the only policy tool the ECB actually uses on an ongoing basis?

Because neoclassical monetarism says that the only thing the central bank should or could worry about is inflation, that inflation is due to the growth of the money supply, and that the size of the money supply is controlled by setting the interest rate.

Economics is politics by other means

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Sep 13th, 2011 at 02:35:43 AM EST
[ Parent ]
But if (as you seem to suggest here) housing prices and mortgage loads were not unreasonable relative to incomes, given continued full employment, then there wasn't a housing bubble. Real estate prices appreciating to take into account improving incomes isn't a bubble - it's catch-up. It's only a bubble if it is unsustainable given full employment and prevailing nominal wages (e.g. because people take out mortgages that only make sense if they can sell the house for more than they bought it for).

Otherwise it's just a government failing to apply sufficient countercyclical fiscal policy when the catch-up period ends, and the private sector has to take some time to figure out what to do with all the people it previously employed to work in the catch-up.

The affordability of mortgages has been damaged more by people losing jobs and large parts of their income rather than the relatively minor interest rate increases to date.

If people are not being bankrupted by rising interest rates, then how would higher interest rates in the past have prevented them from going bankrupt today?

If interest rates are as irrelevant as you claim, why is it virtually the only policy tool the ECB actually uses on an ongoing basis?

Because the ECB believes that money supply drives inflation. (In the real world, it's the other way around.)

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue Sep 13th, 2011 at 06:33:05 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series