Pensions campaigner Ros Altmann recently launched an eye-catching attack on the Bank of England for paying generous pensions to its own staff while undermining everyone else’s retirement plan.
I don’t see it myself. To start with the most obvious point, it’s far from clear that the Bank really is destroying pensions. It is true that low interest rates make future obligations loom larger in today’s company accounts. This creates a problem for any pension scheme. But, on the other side of the equation, low interest rates have boosted the value of shares, bonds and property and thus the value of most pension schemes. Would pension schemes really be better off had the Bank of England stiffened interest rates in 2008 and tried to engineer a rerun of the Great Depression?
This takes us to a very strange place indeed. Currently, members of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) set interest rates without having a strong personal incentive to follow any particular policy. I would have thought that was a desirable state of affairs, but perhaps not. An alternative — presumably the alternative that critics would prefer — is that whenever the MPC cuts interest rates, its members know that they will feel the financial consequences personally.
But we can’t stop by linking senior Bank of England pensions to interest rates. If we are to pay the MPC by results, we must do so in a way that reflects the broader consequences of their actions. Consider unemployment. The MPC is not officially responsible for supporting the job market, but the US Federal Reserve is. And everyone knows the MPC considers the state of the wider economy when setting rates. As the Bank’s chief economist Andy Haldane recently commented: “I sympathise with savers but jobs must come first.”
That is what he says now, but what would Haldane do under the new incentive scheme? He and his colleagues may ignore the labour market unless they have some skin in the game. Perhaps we should draw inspiration from the Roman practice of decimation, where some soldiers in a mutinous cohort would be executed according to the drawing of lots. Execution is harsh, but one could easily make the 100 most senior Bank staff participate in an unemployment lottery. If the unemployment rate is 5 per cent, then five of them — chosen at random — must be punished. If the unemployment rate is 10 per cent, then 10 senior Bank staff will taste the consequences. An appropriate punishment? They shall be condemned to carry out their duties, unpaid, from a queue in the job centre.
Once one starts to spell out exactly how Bank of England staff should be rewarded for each policy triumph or penalised for each misstep, it becomes clear that the whole idea is nonsense. Central bankers will not do a better job if given direct financial incentives to pursue certain policies, and it is quite likely that they will do a worse job. Yes, incentives matter — but they often matter for all the wrong reasons.
The Wells Fargo scandal is a recent example: the bank put pressure on its employees to cross-sell financial products to customers. In response to the pressure, some staff simply opened accounts or set up credit cards for customers without their knowledge. The whole thing is depressingly unsurprising.
The basic principle for any incentive scheme is this: can you measure everything that matters? If you can’t, then high-powered financial incentives will simply produce short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness or outright fraud. If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability.
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It would be nice to think that independent central banks could get on with a difficult job without being dragged into politics — but of course that is impossible. Ros Altmann isn’t the first person to try to take a debate about central bank policy into the personal realm. Donald Trump recently announced that Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen should be ashamed of herself; in the previous US presidential campaign, Governor Rick Perry accused her predecessor Ben Bernanke of treason. Senior Brexit campaigners made similar attacks on Mark Carney.
Central bankers no doubt find such personal attacks vexatious — but they should take comfort in them. When Paul Volcker ran the US Federal Reserve, his policies so enraged building contractors that they mailed pieces of two-by-four to his office; farmers blockaded the Federal Reserve with their tractors. Yet Volcker is now the most respected Fed chairman in history. Effective central bankers inevitably annoy a lot of people; that is why the job is too important to be entrusted to politicians.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times.
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