Time isn’t a very interesting idea to a physicist. There is the unchangeable past and the unpredictable future. “Now” isn’t a definable concept. It’s not even fixed – you can bend it. Time is a sort of illusionary bi-product spit out as the universe goes from a state of order to one of chaos. Why politicians and central bankers would want to start messing with it is a mystery.
Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, and the Monetary Policy Committee have been lured into the time game. They expect one of their trigger points, unemployment, to drop below 7 percent in 2016 at which point they’ll have a look at what they might – or might not do. In the world of the Bank of England this constitutes “delivering a measure of certainty”. The previous governor, Sir Mervyn King, just used to say “I don’t know” when faced with demands for definiteness.
With unemployment currently at 7.8 per cent three years seems a long and unambitious timescale to set yourself such a meager target. Carney says that to achieve the 7 per cent unemployment rate a million jobs will have to be created – 750,000 new ones and 250,000 to compensate for planned reductions in public jobs and that is what will take the time. Markets disagree and have pumped up their rate increase expectation to as early as next summer. Somebody is wrong.
Perversely, if you were Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, or a Conservative Party election campaign organizer, you might be pretty happy with the idea that unemployment wasn’t going to fall any time soon. The reason is simple – over the years the multiple of house prices to earnings has risen for about 3.5 to 6.5 for England as a whole (your main electoral battle ground) and the electorate has become twice as sensitive to interest rate movements today as they were twenty years ago (see graph). Get interest rate policy wrong and it could have electoral consequences.
By mapping where house prices are highest relative to earnings it’s easy to show that above average interest rate sensitivity lies almost exclusively in Conservative-held boundaries; the East, South East and South West (see second graph). London is the exception but suffers the double whammy of being both the most leveraged part of the country AND dominated by Labour. You’ll get no votes from Londoners for increasing interest rates too soon.
Also the higher house price-to-earnings regions are associated with areas with higher salaries which already carry the highest level of taxation. Those earning up to £50,000 a year now have total deductions (National Insurance and Income Tax) of about 20 per cent whilst if you earn between £50,000 – 100,000 this rises to 32 per cent. In the £100,000 to 200,000 bracket your annual deductions bill averages 40 per cent of gross salary. By linking housing costs (i.e. an interest only mortgage) to where you are on the income scales it can be shown that for every 0.5 per cent interest rate increase could lead an equivalent of between 2 per cent and 4 per cent increase income tax. Increasing interest rates in that sense hits traditional Conservative voters harder than potential converts from the Liberal Democrats of even Labour.
None of this should come as a surprise to people but the extent of the apparent hyper-sensitivity of the electorate to interest movements is going to be more economically and politically important at the next general election than it has ever been before. The MPC will have to be doubly sure they have a self-sustaining economic cycle, embedded in a stable global background, before increasing interest rates. It may even be why they have set their earliest revue date to beyond the next general election. In that sense Mark Carney has been right to dampen the enthusiasm the markets have shown for marginally stronger UK data recently whilst if you were Conservative Party Chairman you would be praying that not too many jobs are created too quickly especially before the General Election in 2015.
Source: HM Land Registry
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