Archive for October, 2013

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part VIII: Credit Money and Banking Systems

Published October 30, 2013 gold standard , Hawtrey , monetary history , monetary policy 7 Comments
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Having argued in chapters 5 through 9 that monetary disturbances could cause significant fluctuations in aggregate expenditure, income, output, and employment, and having argued in chapter 11 that shifts in demand would be unlikely to trigger significant aggregate fluctuations, Hawtrey was satisfied that he had established that monetary disturbances were the most likely cause of such fluctuations. Hawtrey therefore turns his attention in chapter 12 to a consideration of the law and economics of banking and of the two instruments (banknotes and checks) that banks are uniquely able to create. Continuing in this vein in chapter 13, Hawtrey surveys the range of national institutional arrangements then in existence under which banks were then operating.

Hawtrey observes that banks may cause monetary disturbances by providing either too much, or too little, money relative to the amount of money demanded by the public, thereby triggering a cumulative deviation from a point of stability. He then mentions another way in which banks may cause macroeconomic disturbances.

[B]ankers may be tempted to lend imprudently, and when their rashness finds them out, whether they pay the penalty in bankruptcy, or whether they manage to restore their business to a sound footing, in either case a quantity of credit money will have to be annihilated.

Hawtrey characterizes the essence of credit money as the commitment by a banker to pay money on demand “and that the right to obtain money on demand is given in such a form as to be a convenient substitute for cash to the possessor of the right.” For credit money supplied by a bank to be a convenient substitute for cash, the credit money of the bank must be usable and acceptable in payment. Credit money can be made usable and acceptable by way of two instruments: banknotes and checks. Most of chapter 12 is given over to a discussion of the similarities and differences between those two instruments.

A bank-note is a transferable document issued by the banker entitling the holder to obtain on demand a sum specified on its face. The problem of effecting payments is solved by the simple process of handing on the document itself.

Under the cheque system the banker places to his customer’s credit a certain sum, but gives him no transferable documentary evidence of the existence of this sum. But the customer can at any time direct the banker to pay any portion of the money to any third person. The direction is given in writing, and the handing over of the written document or cheque to this third person is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of a payment.

After noting a number of the obvious differences between checks and banknotes, Hawtrey lays down an important principle that in the nineteenth century was denied by the Currency School (who regarded banknotes as uniquely having the status of money and therefore sought quantitative limit on the creation of banknotes but not deposits), but upheld by the Banking School in the famous debates over the Bank Charter Act of 1844.

But for all these differences, there remains the fundamental identity of the right to draw any sum by cheque with the possession of banknotes representing in aggregate value the same sum. Either is simply the possession of so much credit money, and from the point of view of the banker makes the liability to pay that sum on demand. All that has been said in the preceding chapters on the subject of credit money applies impartially to both systems.

And yet in the next breath, Hawtrey seems to acknowledge that, in practice, the principle is not quite so clear cut.

But it does not follow that there are not important practical differences between the two kinds of credit money, even from the point of view from which we are now interested in the subject of banking. The most important of all arise from the fact that notes have a closer resemblance than cheques to cash. Indeed, there is really no hard-and-fast line between cash and notes at all – only a continuous gradation from bullion at one end, through legal tender full-valued coin, legal tender overvalued coin, legal tender inconvertible notes, legal tender convertible notes, finally to convertible notes that are not legal tender.

Ultimately, the points on which Hawtrey lays the most stress in distinguishing banknotes from cheques are that the incentive of a depositor a) to investigate the solvency of his bank is greater than the incentive of the acceptor of a banknote to investigate the solvency of the issuing bank, and b) the incentive of a depositor not to redeem his deposits if there is any question about his banker’s solvency is greater than the incentive of a noteholder not to redeem the banknote if such a question should arise concerning the issuer of a banknote in his possession. These two differential incentives make banknotes an inherently riskier instrument than a bank deposit.

The result is that while the demand of depositors are regulated by the real needs of business, the demands of note-holders are subject to capricious fluctuations which may arise at any time for a loss of confidence in the issuing banks.

Because of the perceived differential in risk associated with banknotes, the creation of banknotes has been subjected to more stringent regulation than the creation of deposits, regulations applying either to the permissible quantity of banknotes issued, or to the requirement that reserves be held against banknotes in the form of particular kinds of assets.

Hawtrey concludes chapter 12 with the following assessment of the role of confidence in a commercial crisis.

It is hardly too much to say that the normal working of the machinery of the money market cannot be understood until the relatively subordinate part played by the impairment of credit, that is to say, by the expectation that banks or other businesses will fail to meet the engagements, is fully realised. A contraction or depression of trade is ordinarily accompanied by a number of failures, especially if it be started by a commercial crisis. But even a crisis cannot be fully explained by a general loss of confidence. A crisis only differs in degree from an ordinary contraction of trade. The manufacture of credit money has so far outstripped the due proportion to the supply of cash that recovery is only possible by means of immediate and drastic steps. The loss of confidence may be very widespread, but it is still only a symptom and not a cause of the collapse.

Hawtrey continues his discussion of banking and credit money in Chapter 13 with a survey of the existing monetary systems in 1913. He begins with the British monetary system, then proceeds to describe the French system, and then the Indian system (which became the prototype for the gold-exchange standard whereby a country could join the gold standard by maintaining a fixed exchange rate against another currency that was fully convertible into gold, e.g., sterling, without engaging in any gold transactions or holding any gold reserves). Hawtrey also gave summary descriptions of the Austria-Hungary and the German monetary systems, before concluding with a lengthier description of the peculiar US monetary system, the only major monetary system then operating without a central bank, as it existed in 1913 just before being drastically changed by the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

.Rather than summarize Hawtrey’s insightful descriptions of the extant monetary systems in 1913 on the eve of the destruction of the classical gold standard, I will close with comments on the following passage in which Hawtrey describes the what was viewed as the responsibility of the central bank at that time.

The responsibility for maintaining the solvency of the banking system as a whole rests almost entirely on the central bank, and the question arises, how is that bank to be guided in exercising that responsibility? How much gold ought to be kept in reserve and how great a change in the amount of the reserve should the central bank acquiesce in before taking steps to correct it?

This is the much discussed gold reserve question. The solution is, of course, a matter of practical experience, upon which it would be useless to dogmatise a priori. The gold reserve of any country is simply a working balance. Like all working balances, however low it falls, it fulfills its function provided it is never exhausted even at the moment of greatest strain. But the moment of greatest strain cannot necessarily be recognized when it comes. In practice, therefore, a standard, more or less arbitrary, is fixed for the gold reserve (e.g., a certain proportion of the liabilities of the central bank), and steps are taken to correct any material departure from the standard chosen. Under this system the standard reserve must be at least of such amount that if it begins to diminish it can stand whatever drain it may be subjected to in the interval before the remedial measures adopted by the central bank have become completely effective.

There are two related issues raised by this passage that are worthy of consideration. Hawtrey’s statement about what constitutes an adequate gold reserve is certainly reasonable; it is also seems cautious inasmuch as he seems to accept that a central bank must never allow its reserve to be exhausted. In other words, the bank must make sure that it in normal times it accumulates a reserve large enough to withstand any conceivable drain on its reserves and to take whatever steps are necessary to protect that reserve once it begins to experience a loss of reserves. That was certainly the dominant view at the time. But Hawtrey eventually came to recommend a different view, which he expressed on many occasions a decade later when he, unlike Keynes, supported the restoration of the international gold standard and supported the decision to restore the prewar dollar-sterling parity. Though supporting that decision, Hawtrey made clear that the decision to restore the gold standard and the prewar dollar-sterling parity should not be considered inviolable. Recognizing the deflationary risks associated with restoring the gold standard and the dollar-sterling parity, Hawtrey.elevated achieving a high level of employment over maintaining the gold standard as the primary duty of the Bank of England. If the two goals were in conflict, it was the gold standard, not high employment, that should yield. The clearest and most dramatic statement of this unorthodox position came in response to questioning by Chairman Hugh Macmillan when Hawtrey testified in 1930 before the Macmillan Committee, when Britain was caught in the downward spiral of the Great Depression. Macmillan asked Hawtrey if the precepts of central banking orthodoxy did not require the Bank of England to take whatever steps were necessary to protect its gold reserve.

MACMILLAN. Suppose . . . without restricting credit . . . that gold had gone out to a very considerable extent, would that not have had very serious consequences on the international position of London?

HAWTREY. I do not think the credit of London depends on any particular figure of gold holding. . . . The harm began to be done in March and April of 1925 [when] the fall in American prices started. There was no reason why the Bank of England should have taken any action at that time so far as the question of loss of gold is concerned. . .

MACMILLAN. . . . the course you suggest would not have been consistent with what one may call orthodox Central Banking, would it?

HAWTREY. I do not know what orthodox Central Banking is.

MACMILLAN. . . . when gold ebbs away you must restrict credit as a general principle?

HAWTREY. . . . that kind of orthodoxy is like conventions at bridge; you have to break them when the circumstances call for it. I think that a gold reserve exists to be used. . . . Perhaps once in a century the time comes when you can use your gold reserve for the governing purpose, provided you have the courage to use practically all of it.

Perhaps Hawtrey already understood the implications of his position in 1913, but a reader of his 1913 statement would not necessarily have grasped the point that he expressed so boldly in 1930.

Microfoundations (aka Macroeconomic Reductionism) Redux

Published October 25, 2013 Alchian , Keynes , macroeconomics 31 Comments
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In two recent blog posts (here and here), Simon Wren-Lewis wrote sensibly about microfoundations. Though triggered by Wren-Lewis’s posts, the following comments are not intended as criticisms of him, though I think he does give microfoundations (as they are now understood) too much credit. Rather, my criticism is aimed at the way microfoundations have come to be used to restrict the kind of macroeconomic explanations and models that are up for consideration among working macroeconomists. I have written about microfoundations before on this blog (here and here)  and some, if not most, of what I am going to say may be repetitive, but obviously the misconceptions associated with what Wren-Lewis calls the “microfoundations project” are not going to be dispelled by a couple of blog posts, so a little repetitiveness may not be such a bad thing. Jim Buchanan liked to quote the following passage from Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics:

Hence an amount of repetition which to some will probably appear tedious. I do not, however, much regret this almost unavoidable result; for only by varied iteration can alien conceptions be forced on reluctant minds.

When the idea of providing microfoundations for macroeconomics started to catch on in the late 1960s – and probably nowhere did they catch on sooner or with more enthusiasm than at UCLA – the idea resonated, because macroeconomics, which then mainly consisted of various versions of the Keynesian model, seemed to embody certain presumptions about how markets work that contradicted the presumptions of microeconomics about how markets work. In microeconomics, the primary mechanism for achieving equilibrium is the price (actually the relative price) of whatever good is being analyzed. A full (or general) microeconomic equilibrium involves a set of prices such that each of markets (whether for final outputs or for inputs into the productive process) are in equilibrium, equilibrium meaning that every agent is able to purchase or sell as much of any output or input as desired at the equilibrium price. The set of equilibrium prices not only achieves equilibrium, the equilibrium, under some conditions, has optimal properties, because each agent, in choosing how much to buy or sell of each output or input, is presumed to be acting in a way that is optimal given the preferences of the agent and the social constraints under which the agent operates. Those optimal properties don’t always follow from microeconomic presumptions, optimality being dependent on the particular assumptions (about preferences, production and exchange technology, and property rights) adopted by the analyst in modeling an individual market or an entire system of markets.

The problem with Keynesian macroeconomics was that it seemed to overlook, or ignore, or dismiss, or deny, the possibility that a price mechanism is operating — or could operate — to achieve equilibrium in the markets for goods and for labor services. In other words, the Keynesian model seemed to be saying that a macoreconomic equilibrium is compatible with the absence of market clearing, notwithstanding that the absence of market clearing had always been viewed as the defining characteristic of disequilibrium. Thus, from the perspective of microeconomic theory, if there is an excess supply of workers offering labor services, i.e., there are unemployed workers who would be willing to be employed at the same wage that currently employed workers are receiving, there ought to be market forces that would reduce wages to a level such that all workers willing to work at that wage could gain employment. Keynes, of course, had attempted to explain why workers could only reduce their nominal wages, not their real wages, and argued that nominal wage cuts would simply induce equivalent price reductions, leaving real wages and employment unchanged. The microeconomic reasoning on which that argument was based hinged on Keynes’s assumption that nominal wage cuts would trigger proportionate price cuts, but that assumption was not exactly convincing, if only because the percentage price cut would seem to depend not just on the percentage reduction in the nominal wage, but also on the labor intensity of the product, Keynes, habitually and inconsistently, arguing as if labor were the only factor of production while at the same time invoking the principle of diminishing marginal productivity.

At UCLA, the point of finding microfoundations was not to create a macroeconomics that would simply reflect the results and optimal properties of a full general equilibrium model. Indeed, what made UCLA approach to microeconomics distinctive was that it aimed at deriving testable implications from relaxing the usual informational and institutional assumptions (full information, zero transactions costs, fully defined and enforceable property rights) underlying conventional microeconomic theory. If the way forward in microeconomics was to move away from the extreme assumptions underlying the perfectly competitive model, then it seemed plausible that relaxing those assumptions would be fruitful in macroeconomics as well. That led Armen Alchian and others at UCLA to think of unemployment as largely a search phenomenon. For a while that approach seemed promising, and to some extent the promise was fulfilled, but many implications of a purely search-theoretic approach to unemployment don’t seem to be that well supported empirically. For example, search models suggest that in recessions, quits increase, and that workers become more likely to refuse offers of employment after the downturn than before. Neither of those implications seems to be true. A search model would suggest that workers are unemployed because they are refusing offers below their reservation wage, but in fact most workers are becoming unemployed because they are being laid off, and in recessions workers seem likely to accept offers of employment at the same wage that other workers are getting. Now it is possible to reinterpret workers’ behavior in recessions in a way that corresponds to the search-theoretic model, but the reinterpretation seems a bit of a stretch.

Even though he was an early exponent of the search theory of unemployment, Alchian greatly admired and frequently cited a 1974 paper by Donald Gordon “A Neoclassical Theory of Keynesian Unemployment,” which proposed an implicit-contract theory of employer-employee relationship. The idea was that workers make long-term commitments to their employers, and realizing their vulnerability, after having committed themselves to their employer, to exploitation by a unilateral wage cut imposed by the employer under threat of termination, expect some assurance from their employer that they will not be subjected to a unilateral demand to accept a wage cut. Such implicit understandings make it very difficult for employers, facing a reduction in demand, to force workers to accept a wage cut, because doing so would make it hard for the employer to retain those workers that are most highly valued and to attract new workers.

Gordon’s theory of implicit wage contracts has a certain similarity to Dennis Carlton’s explanation of why many suppliers don’t immediately raise prices to their steady customers. Like Gordon, Carlton posits the existence of implicit and sometimes explicit contracts in which customers commit to purchase minimum quantities or to purchase their “requirements” from a particular supplier. In return for the assurance of having a regular customer on whom the supplier can count, the supplier gives the customer assurance that he will receive his customary supply at the agreed upon price even if market conditions should change. Rather than raise the price in the event of a shortage, the supplier may feel that he is obligated to continue supplying his regular customers at the customary price, while raising the price to new or occasional customers to “market-clearing” levels. For certain kinds of supply relationships in which customer and supplier expect to continue transacting regularly over a long period of time, price is not the sole method by which allocation decisions are made.

Klein, Crawford and Alchian discussed a similar idea in their 1978 article about vertical integration as a means of avoiding or mitigating the threat of holdup when a supplier and a customer must invest in some sunk asset, e.g., a pipeline connection, for the supply relationship to be possible. The sunk investment implies that either party, under the right circumstances, could threaten to holdup the other party by threatening to withdraw from the relationship leaving the other party stuck with a useless fixed asset. Vertical integration avoids the problem by aligning the incentives of the two parties, eliminating the potential for holdup. Price rigidity can thus be viewed as a milder form of vertical integration in cases where transactors have a relatively long-term relationship and want to assure each other that they will not be taken advantage of after making a commitment (i.e., foregoing other trading opportunities) to the other party.

The search model is fairly easy to incorporate into a standard framework because search can be treated as a form of self-employment that is an alternative to accepting employment. The shape and position of the individual’s supply curve reflects his expectations about future wage offers that he will receive if he chooses not to accept employment in the current period. The more optimistic the worker’s expectation of future wages, the higher the worker’s reservation wage in the current period. The more certain the worker feels about the expected future wage, the more elastic is his supply curve in the neighborhood of the expected wage. Thus, despite its empirical shortcomings, the search model could serve as a convenient heuristic device for modeling cyclical increases in unemployment because of the unwillingness of workers to accept nominal wage cuts. From a macroeconomic modeling perspective, the incorrect or incomplete representation of the reason for the unwillingness of workers to accept wage cuts may be less important than the overall implication of the model, which is that unanticipated aggregate demand shocks can have significant and persistent effects on real output and employment. For example in his reformulation of macroeconomic theory, Earl Thompson, though he was certainly aware of Donald Gordon’s paper, relied exclusively on a search-theoretic rationale for Keynesian unemployment, and I don’t know (or can’t remember) if he had a specific objection to Gordon’s model or simply preferred to use the search-theoretic approach for pragmatic modeling reasons.

At any rate, these comments about the role of search models in modeling unemployment decisions are meant to illustrate why microfoundations could be useful for macroeconomics: by adding to the empirical content of macromodels, providing insight into the decisions or circumstances that lead workers to accept or reject employment in the aftermath of aggregate demand shocks, or why employers impose layoffs on workers rather than offer employment at reduced wages. The spectrum of such microeconomic theories of employer-employee relationships have provided us with a richer understanding of what the term “sticky wages” might actually be referring to, beyond the existence of minimum wage laws or collective bargaining contracts specifying nominal wages over a period of time for all covered employees.

In this context microfoundations meant providing a more theoretically satisfying, more micreconomically grounded explanation for a phenomenon – “sticky wages” – that seemed somehow crucial for generating the results of the Keynesian model. I don’t think that anyone would question that microfoundations in this narrow sense has been an important and useful area of research. And it is not microfoundations in this sense that is controversial. The sense in which microfoundations is controversial is whether a macroeconomic model must show that aggregate quantities that it generates can be shown to consistent with the optimizing choices of all agents in the model. In other words, the equilibrium solution of a macroeconomic model must be such that all agents are optimizing intertemporally, subject to whatever informational imperfections are specified by the model. If the model is not derived from or consistent with the solution to such an intertemporal optimization problem, the macromodel is now considered inadequate and unworthy of consideration. Here’s how Michael Woodford, a superb economist, but very much part of the stifling microfoundations consensus that has overtaken macroeconomics, put in his paper “The Convergence in Macroeconomics: Elements of the New Synthesis.”

But it is now accepted that one should know how to render one’s growth model and one’s business-cycle model consistent with one another in principle, on those occasions when it is necessary to make such connections. Similarly, microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis are no longer considered to involve fundamentally different principles, so that it should be possible to reconcile one’s views about household or firm behavior, or one’s view of the functioning of individual markets, with one’s model of the aggregate economy, when one needs to do so.

In this respect, the methodological stance of the New Classical school and the real business cycle theorists has become the mainstream. But this does not mean that the Keynesian goal of structural modeling of short-run aggregate dynamics has been abandoned. Instead, it is now understood how one can construct and analyze dynamic general-equilibrium models that incorporate a variety of types of adjustment frictions, that allow these models to provide fairly realistic representations of both shorter-run and longer-run responses to economic disturbances. In important respects, such models remain direct descendants of the Keynesian macroeconometric models of the early postwar period, though an important part of their DNA comes from neoclassical growth models as well.

Woodford argues that by incorporating various imperfections into their general equilibrium models, e.g.., imperfectly competitive output and labor markets, lags in the adjustment of wages and prices to changes in market conditions, search and matching frictions, it is possible to reconcile the existence of underutilized resources with intertemporal optimization by agents.

The insistence of monetarists, New Classicals, and early real business cycle theorists on the empirical relevance of models of perfect competitive equilibrium — a source of much controversy in past decades — is not what has now come to be generally accepted. Instead, what is important is having general-equilibrium models in the broad sense of requiring that all equations of the model be derived from mutually consistent foundations, and that the specified behavior of each economic unit make sense given the environment created by the behavior of the others. At one time, Walrasian competitive equilibrium models were the only kind of models with these features that were well understood; but this is no longer the case.

Woodford shows no recognition of the possibility of multiple equilibria, or that the evolution of an economic system and time-series data may be path-dependent, making the long-run neutrality propositions characterizing most DSGE models untenable. If the world – the data generating mechanism – is not like the world assumed by modern macroeconomics, the estimates derived from econometric models reflecting the worldview of modern macroeconomics will be inferior to estimates derived from an econometric model reflecting another, more accurate, world view. For example, if there are many possible equilibria depending on changes in expectational parameters or on the accidental deviations from an equilibrium time path, the idea of intertemporal optimization may not even be meaningful. Rather than optimize, agents may simply follow certain simple rules of thumb. But, on methodological principle, modern macroeconomics treats the estimates generated by any alternative econometric model insufficiently grounded in the microeconomic principles of intertemporal optimization as illegitimate.

Even worse from the perspective of microfoundations are the implications of something called the Sonnenchein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem, which, as I imperfectly understand it, says something like the following. Even granting the usual assumptions of the standard general equilibrium model — continuous individual demand and supply functions, homogeneity of degree zero in prices, Walras’s Law, and suitable boundary conditions on demand and supply functions, there is no guarantee that there is a unique stable equilibrium for such an economy. Thus, even apart from the dependence of equilibrium on expectations, there is no rationally expected equilibrium because there is no unique equilibrium to serve as an attractor for expectations. Thus, as I have pointed out before, as much as macroeconomics may require microfoundations, microeconomics requires macrofoundations, perhaps even more so.

Now let us compare the methodological demand for microfoundations for macroeconomics, which I would describe as a kind of macroeconomic methodological reductionism, with the reductionism of Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics reduced the Keplerian laws of planetary motion to more fundamental principles of gravitation governing the motion of all bodies celestial and terrestrial. In so doing, Newtonian physics achieved an astounding increase in explanatory power and empirical scope. What has the methodological reductionism of modern macroeconomics achieved? Reductionsim was not the source, but the result, of scientific progress. But as Carlaw and Lipsey demonstrated recently in an important paper, methodological reductionism in macroeconomics has resulted in a clear retrogression in empirical and explanatory power. Thus, methodological reductionism in macroeconomics is an antiscientific exercise in methodological authoritarianism.

OMG!

Published October 18, 2013 Uncategorized 11 Comments

I just read this review/essay (“Lead Poisoning: The Ignored Scandal”) by Helen Epstein of the book Lead Wars: The Political Science and the Fate of America’s Children by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, in the March 21, 2013 issue of the New York Review of Books.. The story it tells is so outrageous – and on so many different levels — that it makes you want to cry, and to cry out in horror and disgust. And lest you think that it is an old story, think again.

In 1990, Leslie Hanes, another young black single woman, moved into an apartment that was supposed to have been fully stripped of lead paint years earlier. In 1992, she gave birth to a daughter, Denisa, and in the spring of the following year, she too joined the toddler lead study.3 The day before Hanes signed the consent form, the contractor found that her apartment was not in fact lead-free. The remaining lead paint was removed, but by the following September Denisa’s blood lead level had more than tripled and was now six times higher than that currently considered safe by the Centers for Disease Control.

Denisa’s mother was not informed of the blood test result for another three months, by which time it was nearly Christmas. The research assistant who told her about it wished her happy holidays and advised her to wash her front steps more carefully and to keep eighteen-month-old Denisa from putting her hands in her mouth. When Denisa eventually entered school, she had trouble keeping up and had to repeat second grade. This came as a surprise to her mother, a former high school honors student. As Hanes told The Washington Post‘s Manuel Roig-Franzia in 2001, sometimes Denisa came home crying because she thought she was stupid. “No, baby, you’re not stupid,” Leslie told her. “We just have to work harder.”

The effects of putting children at high risk of lead poisoning are tragic and appalling.

Long before the Baltimore toddler study was even conceived, millions of children had their growth and intelligence stunted by lead-contaminated consumer products—and some five million preschool children are still at risk today. One expert even estimated that America’s failure to address the lead paint problem early on may well have cost the American population, on average, five IQ points—enough to double the number of retarded children and halve the number of gifted children in the country. Not only would our nation have been more intelligent had its leaders banned lead paint early on, it might have been safer too, since lead is known to cause impulsivity and aggression. Blood lead levels in adolescent criminals tend to be several times higher than those of noncriminal adolescents, and there is a strong geographical correlation between crime rates and lead exposure in US cities.

In 2000, the two mothers sued the Johns Hopkins–affiliated Kennedy Krieger Institute, which employed the scientists. The mothers’ cases were thrown out by a lower court, but after an appeals court remanded the case to be heard, the mothers reached an undisclosed settlement with the institute. The ninety-six-page appeals court judgment compared the Baltimore lead study to the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were denied treatment with penicillin for decades so that US Public Health Service researchers could study the course of the disease.

The toxic effects of lead poisoning were known long ago

The problem began in the early twentieth century when a spate of lead-poisoning cases in children occurred across the United States. The symptoms—vomiting, convulsions, bleeding gums, palsied limbs, and muscle pain so severe “as not to permit of the weight of bed-clothing,” as one doctor described it—were recognizable at once because they resembled the symptoms of factory workers poisoned in the course of enameling bathtubs or preparing paint and gasoline additives. One Dupont factory was even nicknamed “the House of the Butterflies” because so many workers had hallucinations of insects flying around. Many victims had to be taken away in straitjackets; some died.

By the 1920s, it was known that one common cause of childhood lead poisoning was the consumption of lead paint chips. Lead paint was popular in American homes because its brightness appealed to the national passion for hygiene and modernism, but the chips taste sweet, and it could be difficult to keep small children away from them. Because of its well-known dangers, many other countries banned interior lead paint during the 1920s and 1930s, including Belgium, France, Austria, Tunisia, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, Spain, and Yugoslavia.

In 1922, the League of Nations proposed a worldwide lead paint ban, but at the time, the US was the largest lead producer in the world, and consumed 170,000 tons of white lead paint each year. The Lead Industries Association had grown into a powerful political force, and the pro-business, America-first Harding administration vetoed the ban. Products containing lead continued to be marketed to American families well into the 1970s, and by midcentury lead was everywhere: in plumbing and lighting fixtures, painted toys and cribs, the foil on candy wrappers, and even cake decorations. Because most cars ran on leaded gasoline, its concentration in the air was also increasing, especially in cities.

Lead paint was the most insidious danger of all because it can cause brain damage even if it isn’t peeling. Lead dust drifts off walls, year after year, even if you paint over it. It’s also almost impossible to get rid of. Removal of lead paint with electric sanders and torches creates clouds of dust that may rain down on the floor for months afterward, and many children have been poisoned during the process of lead paint removal itself. Even cleaning lead-painted walls with a rag can create enough dust to poison a child. Gut renovating the entire house solves the problem, but this too may contaminate the air around the house for months.

The sheer magnitude and duration of those effects is mind-boggling, and the suffering has not ended.

There is no way of knowing how many children were harmed over the past century by America’s decision not to ban lead from consumer products early on, but the number is somewhere in the millions. The most accurate national survey of lead poisoning was probably the 1976–1980 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which found that 4 percent of all children under six—roughly 780,000—had blood lead concentrations exceeding thirty micrograms per deciliter, which was then thought to be the limit of safety.

Black children, the survey found, were six times more likely to have elevated lead than whites. The number of children with lead levels over five micrograms per deciliter—or for that matter over one or two—was obviously much higher, but there’s no way of knowing how high it was. The 1985 leaded gasoline ban and the gradual renovation of slum housing have since reduced the number of poisoned children, so that today, the CDC estimates that some 500,000 children who are between one and five years old have lead levels over five micrograms per deciliter.

As the scale and horror of the lead paint problem came to light, the lead companies played down the bad news. When popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal began publicizing the dangers of lead poisoning in the 1930s and 1940s, lead and paint manufacturers placed cartoons in National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post celebrating the joy that lead paint brought into children’s lives. Advertisements for Dutch Boy paint—which contained enough lead in one coat of a two-by-two-inch square to kill a child—depicted their tow-headed mascot painting toys with Father Christmas smiling over his shoulder.

See below

dutch_boys_hobby

The companies also hired a public relations firm to influence stories in The Wall Street Journal and other conservative news outlets, which characterized Needleman as part of a leftist plot to increase government spending on housing and other social programs. So, just as the tobacco industry deliberately obfuscated the dangers of cigarettes until skyrocketing smoking-related Medicaid costs finally led state governments to sue the companies, and just as oil company–backed scientists now downplay the dangers of greenhouse gases, the lead industry also lied to Americans for decades, and the government did nothing to stop it.

During the 1980s, government officials finally agreed that the lead paint crisis was real, but they were conflicted about how to deal with it. In 1990, the Department of Health and Human Services developed a plan to remove lead from the nation’s homes over fifteen years at a cost of $33 billion—a large sum, but half the estimated cost of doing nothing, which would incur a greater need for special education programs, Medicaid and welfare payments for brain-damaged and disabled lead-poisoning victims, and other expenses. But the plan was opposed by the lead industry, realtors, landlords, insurance companies, and even some private pediatricians who objected to the extra bother of screening children. The plan was soon shelved, and instead, the EPA, looking for a cheaper way around the problem, commissioned the Baltimore toddler study.

Since then, the US government has spent less than $2 billion on lead abatement. This money has supported a number of exemplary state and nonprofit programs that work in inner cities, but it’s a tiny fraction of what’s needed, and about twenty times less than US spending on the global AIDS crisis since 2004 alone. It’s worth asking why both Republican and Democratic administrations appear to have cared so little about this threat to America’s children.

And the horror continues

Lead-poisoning prevention once had its partisans too, but they were marginal and rapidly stifled. During the 1960s, the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords set up community health clinics and carried out screening programs for tuberculosis and sickle cell anemia as well as lead poisoning. The historian Alondra Nelson’s excellent Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (2011) describes how these groups maintained that new civil rights laws and Great Society programs alone would never meet the needs of the poor unless the poor themselves had a voice in shaping them. The Panthers espoused violence and called for a separate black country. They certainly weren’t right about everything, but when it came to lead poisoning, they probably were.

By the early 1980s, the movements to achieve social justice led by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers had largely subsided, and with them, grassroots advocacy for the health of poor black children. Some scientists continued to raise the alarm about lead poisoning, including Herbert Needleman, Jane Lin-Fu of the US Children’s Bureau, Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and Ellen Silbergeld, the editor of the journal Environmental Research, but they lacked a strong social movement to take up their findings and fight for children at risk. Although there were some desultory campaigns against lead poisoning, neither the powerful women’s health movement nor environmental groups took up the issue in a sustained manner. The Obama administration has invested no more in this problem than George W. Bush’s did. Lead poisoning isn’t even on the CDC’s priority list of “winnable public health battles.”

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part VII: International Adjustment to a Demand Shift

Published October 18, 2013 David Hume , gold standard , Hawtrey , monetary theory , price-specie-flow mechanism 2 Comments
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In this installment, I will provide a very quick overview of Hawtrey’s chapters 10 and 11, and point out a minor defect in his argument about the international adjustment process. Having explained the international adjustment process to a monetary disturbance in chapter 9, Hawtrey uses the next two chapters to give a brief, but highly insightful, account of the process of economic growth, expanding human settlement into new geographic locations, thereby showing an acute sense of the importance of geography and location in economic development, and of the process by which newly extracted gold is exported from gold-producing to gold-importing areas, even though, under the gold standard, the value of gold is the same all over the world (chapter 10). Hawtrey then examines the process of adjustment to a reduction in the demand for a product exported by a particular country. Hawtrey explains the adjustment processes first under the assumption that the exchange rate is allowed to adjust (all countries being assumed to have inconvertible fiat currencies). and, then, under the assumption that all money is convertible into gold and exchange rates are fixed (at least within the limits of gold import and export points).

The analysis is pretty straightforward. Starting from a state of equilibrium, if the worldwide demand for one of country A’s export products (say hats) declines, with the increased expenditure shared among all other commodities, country A will experience a balance-of-payments deficit, requiring a depreciation of the exchange rate of the currency of country exchange against other currencies. In the meantime, country A’s hat producers will have to cut output, thus laying off workers. The workers are unlikely to accept an offer of reduced wages from country A hat producers, correctly reasoning that they may be able to find work elsewhere at close to their old wage. In fact the depreciation of country A’s currency will offer some incentive to country A’s other producers to expand output, eventually reabsorbing the workers laid off by country A’s hat producers. The point is that a demand shift, though leading to a substantial reduction in the output and employment of one industry, does not trigger the wider contraction in economic activity characteristic of cyclical disturbances. Sectoral shifts in demand don’t normally lead to cyclical downturns.

Hawtrey then goes through the analysis under the assumption that all countries are on the gold standard. What happens under the gold standard, according to Hawtrey, is that the balance-of-payments deficit caused by the demand shift requires the export of gold to cover the deficit. The exported gold comes out of the gold reserves held by the banks. When banks see that their gold reserves are diminishing, they in turn raise interest rates as a way of stemming the outflow of gold. The increase in the rate of interest will tend to restrain total spending, which tends to reduce imports and encourage exports. Hawtrey goes through a somewhat abstruse numerical example, which I will spare you, to show how much the internal demand for gold falls as a result of the reduction in demand for country A’s hats. This all seems generally correct.

However, there is one point on which I would take issue with Hawtrey. He writes:

But even so equilibrium is not yet reached. For the export of hats has been diminished by 20 percent, and if the prices ruling in other industries are the same, relatively to those ruling abroad, as before, the imports of those commodities will be unchanged. There must therefore be a further export of gold to lower the general level of prices and so to encourage exports and discourage imports. (pp. 137-38)

Here is an example of the mistaken reasoning that I pointed out in my previous post, a failure to notice that the prices of all internationally traded commodities are fixed by arbitrage (at least as a first approximation) not by the domestic quantity of gold. The export of gold does nothing to reduce the prices of the products of the other industries in country A, which are determined in international markets. Given the internationally determined prices for those goods, equilibrium will have to be restored by the adjustment of wages in country A to make it profitable for country A’s exporting industries and import-competing industries to increase their output, thereby absorbing the workers displaced from country A’s hat industry. As I showed in my previous post, Hawtrey eventually came to understand this point. But in 1913, he had still not freed himself from that misunderstanding originally perpetrated by David Hume in his famous essay “Of the Balance of Trade,” expounding what came to be known as the price-specie-flow mechanism.

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part VI: Monetary Equilibrium under the Gold Standard

Published October 15, 2013 gold standard , Hawtrey , Milton Friedman , purchasing power parity 10 Comments
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In Chapter 9 of Good and Bad Trade, Hawtrey arrives at what he then regarded as the culmination of the earlier purely theoretical discussions of the determination of prices, incomes, and exchange rates under a fiat currency, by positing that the currencies of all countries were uniformly convertible into some fixed weight of gold.

We have shown that the rate of exchange tends to represent simply the ratio of the purchasing power of the two units of currency, and that when this ratio is disturbed, the rate of exchange, subject to certain fluctuations, follows it.

But having elucidated this point we can now pass to the much more important case of the international effects of a fluctuation experienced in a country using metal currency common to itself and its neighbours. Practiaclly all the great commercial nations of the world have now adopted gold as their standard of legal tender, and this completely alters the problem. (p. 102)

Ah, what a difference a century makes! At any rate after providing a detailed and fairly painstaking account of the process of international adjustment in response to a loss of gold in one country, explaining how the loss of gold would cause an increase in interest rates in the country that lost gold which would induce lending by other countries to the country experiencing monetary stringency, and tracing out further repercussions on the movement of exchange rates (within the limits set by gold import and export points, reflecting the cost of transporting gold) and domestic price levels, Hawtrey provides the following summary of his analysis

Gold flows from foreign countries ot the area of stringency in response to the high rate of interest, more quickly from the nearer and more slowly from the more distant countries. While this process is at work the rates of interests in foreign countries are raised, more in the nearer and less in the more distant countries. As soon as the bankers’ loans have been brought into the proper proportion to the stock of gold, the rate of interest reverts to the profit rate in the area of stringency, but the influx of gold continues from each foreign country until the average level of prices there has so far fallen that its divergence from the average level of prices in the area of stringency is no longer great enough to cover the cost of sending the gold.

So long as any country is actually exporting gold the rate of interest will there be maintained somewhat above the profit rate, so as to diminish the total amount of bankers’ loans pari passu with the stock of gold.

At the time when the export of gold ceases from any foreign country the rate of exchange in that country on the area of stringency is at the export specie point; and the exchange will remain at this point indefinitely unless some new influence arises to disturb the equilibrium. In fact, the whole economic system will, the absence of such influence, revert to the stable conditions from which it started. (p. 113)

In subsequent writings, Hawtrey modified his account of the adjustment process in an important respect. I have not identified where and when Hawtrey first revised his view of the adjustment process, but, almost twenty years later in his book The Art of Central Banking, there is an exceptionally clear explanation of the defective nature of the account of the international adjustment mechanism provided in Good and Bad Trade. Iin the course of an extended historical discussion of how the Bank of England had used its lending rate as an instrument of policy in the nineteenth and earl twentieth centuries (a discussion later expanded upon in Hawtrey’s A Century of Bank Rate), Hawtrey quoted the following passage from the Cunliffe Report of 1918 recommending that England quickly restore the gold standard at the prewar parity. The passage provides an explanation of how, under the gold standard, the Bank of England, faced with an outflow of its gold reserves, could restore an international equilibrium by raising Bank Rate. The explanation in the Cunliffe Report deploys essentially the same reasoning reflected above in the quotation from p. 113 of Good and Bad Trade.

The raising of the discount rate had the immediate effect of retaining money here which would otherwise have been remitted abroad, and of attracting remittances from abroad to take advantage of the higher rate, thus checking the outflow of gold and even reversing the stream.

If the adverse conditions of the exchanges was due not merely to seasonal fluctuations but to circumstances tending to create a permanently adverse trade balance, it is obvious that the procedure above described would not have been sufficient. It would have resulted in the creation of a volume of short-dated indebtedness to foreign countries, which would have been in the end disastrous to our credit and the position of London as the financial centre of the world. But the raising of the Bank’s discount rate and the steps taken to make it effective in the market necessarily led to a general rise of interest rates and a restriction of credit. New enterprises were therefore postponed, and the demand for constructional materials and other capital goods was lessened. The consequent slackening of employment also diminished the demand for consumable goods, while holders of stocks of commodities carried largely with borrowed money, being confronted with an increase in interest charges, if not with actual difficulty in renewing loans, and with the prospect of falling prices, tended to press their goods on a weak market. The result was a decline in general prices in the home market which, by checking imports and stimulating exports, corrected the adverse trade balance which was the primary cause of the difficulty. (Interim Report of the Cunliffe Committee, sections 4-5)

Hawtrey took strong issue with the version of the adjustment process outlined in the Cunliffe Report, though acknowledging that ithe Cunliffe Report did in some sense reflect the orthodox view of how variations in Bank Rate achieved an international adjustment.

This passage expresses very fairly the principle on which the Bank of England had been regulating credit from 1866 to 1914. They embody the art of central banking as it was understood in the half-century preceding the war. In view of the experience which has been obtained, the progress made in theory and the changes which have occurred since 1914, the principles of the art require reconsideration at the present day.

The Cunliffe Committee’s version of the effect of Bank rate upon the trade balance was based on exactly the same Ricardian theory of foreign trade as Horsely Palmer’s. It depended on adjustments of the price level. But the revolutionary changes in the means of communication during the past hundred years have unified markets to such a degree that for any of the commodities which enter regularly into international trade there is practically a single world market and a single world price. That does not mean absolutely identical prices for the same commodity at different places, but prices differing only by the cost of transport from exporting to the importing centres. Local divergences of prices form this standard are small and casual, and are speedily eliminated so long as markets work freely.

In Ricardo’s day, relatively considerable differences of price were possible between distant centres. The merchant could never have up-to-date information at one place of the price quotations at another. When he heard that the price of a commodity at a distant place had been relatively high weeks or months before, he was taking a risk in shipping a cargo thither, because the market might have changes for the worse before the cargo arrived. Under such conditions, it might well be that a substantial difference of price level was required to attract goods from one country to another.

Nevertheless it was fallacious ot explain the adjustment wholly in terms of the price level. There was, even at that time, an approximation to a world price. When the difference of price level attracted goods from one country to another, the effect was to diminish the difference of price level, and probably after an interval to eliminate it altogether (apart from cost of transport). When that occurred, the importing country was suffering an adverse balance, not on account of an excess price level, but on account of an excess demand at the world price level. Whether there be a difference of price level or not, it is this difference of demand that is the fundamental factor.

In Horsely Palmer‘s day the accepted theory was that the rate of discount affected the price level because it affected the amount of note issue and therefore the quantity of currency. That did not mean that the whole doctrine depended on the quantity theory of money. All that had currency so far tended to cause a rise or fall of the price level that any required rise or fall of prices could be secured by an appropriate expansion or contraction of the currency that is a very different thing from saying that the rise or fall of the price level would be exactly proportional to the expansion or contraction of the currency.

But it is not really necessary to introduce the quantity of currency into the analysis at all. What governs demand in any community is the consumers’ income (the total of all incomes expressed in terms of money) and consumers’ outlay (the total of all disbursements out of income, including investment).

The final sentence seems to be somewhat overstated, but in the context of a gold standard, in which the quantity of currency is endogenously determined, the quantity of currency is determined not determining. After noticing that Hawtrey anticipated Cassel in formulating the purchasing power parity doctrine, I looked again at the excellent paper by McCloskey and Zecher “The Success of Purchasing Power Parity” in the NBER volume A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard 1821-1931, edited by Bordo and Schwartz, a sequel to their earlier paper, “How the Gold Standard Worked” in The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments, edited by Johnson and Frenkel. The paper on purchasing power parity makes some very powerful criticisms of the Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz, some of which Friedman responded to in his formal discussion of the paper. But clearly the main point on which McCloskey and Zecher took issue with Friedman and Schwartz was whether an internationally determined price level under the gold standard tightly constrained national price levels regardless of the quantity of local money. McCloskey and Zecher argued that it did, while Friedman and Schwartz maintained that variations in the quantity of national money, even under the gold standard, could have significant effects on prices and nominal income, at least in the short to medium term. As Friedman put it in his comment on McCloskey and Zecher:

[W]hile the quantity of money is ultimately an endogenous variable [under fixed exchange rates], there can be and is much leeway in the short run, before the external forces overwhelm the independent internal effects. And we have repeatedly been surprised in our studies by how much leeway there is and for how long – frequently a number of years.

I’ll let Friedman have the last word on this point, except to note that Hawtrey clearly would have disagreed with him post, at least subsequently to his writing Good and Bad Trade.

Richard Lipsey and the Phillips Curve

Published October 13, 2013 Friedman , Phillips Curve , R. G. Lipsey , Robert Lucas 12 Comments
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Richard Lipsey has had an extraordinarily long and productive career as both an economic theorist and an empirical economist, making numerous important contributions in almost all branches of economics. (See, for example, the citation about Lipsey as a fellow of the Canadian Economics Association.) In addition, his many textbooks have been enormously influential in advocating that economists should strive to make their discipline empirically relevant by actually subjecting their theories to meaningful empirical tests in which refutation is a realistic possibility not just a sign that the researcher was insufficiently creative in theorizing or in performing the data analysis.

One of Lipsey’s most important early contributions was his 1960 paper on the Phillips Curve “The Relationship between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wages in the United Kingdom 1862-1957: A Further Analysis” in which he extended W A. Phillips’s original results, and he has continued to write about the Phillips Curve ever since. Lipsey, in line with his empiricist philosophical position, has consistently argued that a well-supported empirical relationship should not be dismissed simply because of a purely theoretical argument about how expectations are formed. In other words, the argument that adjustments in inflation expectations would cause the short-run Phillips curve relation captured by empirical estimates of the relationship between inflation and unemployment may well be valid (as was actually recognized early on by Samuelson and Solow in their famous paper suggesting that the Phillips Curve could be interpreted as a menu of alternative combinations of inflation and unemployment from which policy-makers could choose) in some general qualitative sense. But that does not mean that it had to be accepted as an undisputable axiom of economics that the long-run relationship between unemployment and inflation is necessarily vertical, as Friedman and Phelps and Lucas convinced most of the economics profession in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

A few months ago, Lipsey was kind enough to send me a draft of the paper that he presented at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society; the paper is called “The Phillips Curve and the Tyranny of an Assumed Unique Macro Equilibrium.” Here is the abstract of the paper.

To make the argument that the behaviour of modern industrial economies since the 1990s is inconsistent with theories in which there is a unique ergodic macro equilibrium, the paper starts by reviewing both the early Keynesian theory in which there was no unique level of income to which the economy was inevitably drawn and the debate about the amount of demand pressure at which it was best of maintain the economy: high aggregate demand and some inflationary pressure or lower aggregate demand and a stable price level. It then covers the rise of the simple Phillips curve and its expectations-augmented version, which introduced into current macro theory a natural rate of unemployment (and its associated equilibrium level of national income). This rate was also a NAIRU, the only rate consistent with stable inflation. It is then argued that the current behaviour of many modern economies in which there is a credible policy to maintain a low and steady inflation rate is inconsistent with the existence of either a unique natural rate or a NAIRU but is consistent with evolutionary theory in which there is perpetual change driven by endogenous technological advance. Instead of a NAIRU evolutionary economies have a non-inflationary band of unemployment (a NAIBU) indicating a range of unemployment and income over with the inflation rate is stable. The paper concludes with the observation that the great pre-Phillips curve debates of the 1950s that assumed that there was a range within which the economy could be run with varying pressures of demand, and varying amounts of unemployment and inflationary pressure, were not as silly as they were made to seem when both Keynesian and New Classical economists accepted the assumption of a perfectly inelastic, long-run Phillips curve located at the unique equilibrium level of unemployment.

Back in January, I wrote a post about the Lucas Critique in which I pointed out that his “proof” that the Phillips Curve is vertical in his celebrated paper on econometric policy evaluation was no proof at all, but simply a very special example in which the only disequilibrium permitted in the model – a misperception of the future price level – would lead an econometrician to estimate a negatively sloped relation between inflation and employment even though under correct expectations of inflation the relationship would be vertical. Allowing for a wider range of behavioral responses, I suggested, might well change the relation between inflation and output even under correctly expected inflation. In his new paper, Lipsey correctly points out that Friedman and Phelps and Lucas, and subsequent New Classical and New Keynesian theoreticians, who have embraced the vertical Phillips Curve doctrine as an article of faith, are also assuming, based on essentially no evidence, that there is a unique macro equilibrium. But, there is very strong evidence to suggest that, in fact, any deviation from an initial equilibrium (or equilibrium time path) is likely to cause changes that, in and of themselves, cause a change in conditions that will propel the system toward a new and different equilibrium time path, rather than return to the time path the system had been moving along before it was disturbed. See my post of almost a year ago about a paper, “Does history matter?: Empirical analysis of evolutionary versus stationary equilibrium views of the economy,” by Carlaw and Lipsey.)

Lipsey concludes his paper with a quotation from his article “The Phillips Curve” published in the volume Famous Figures and Diagrams in Economics edited by Mark Blaug and Peter Lloyd.

Perhaps [then] Keynesians were too hasty in following the New Classical economists in accepting the view that follows from static [and all EWD] models that stable rates of wage and price inflation are poised on the razor’s edge of a unique NAIRU and its accompanying Y*. The alternative does not require a long term Phillips curve trade off, nor does it deny the possibility of accelerating inflations of the kind that have bedevilled many third world countries. It is merely states that industrialised economies with low expected inflation rates may be less precisely responsive than current theory assumes because they are subject to many lags and inertias, and are operating in an ever-changing and uncertain world of endogenous technological change, which has no unique long term static equilibrium. If so, the economy may not be similar to the smoothly functioning mechanical world of Newtonian mechanics but rather to the imperfectly evolving world of evolutionary biology. The Phillips relation then changes from being a precise curve to being a band within which various combinations of inflation and unemployment are possible but outside of which inflation tends to accelerate or decelerate. Perhaps then the great [pre-Phillips curve] debates of the 1940s and early 1950s that assumed that there was a range within which the economy could be run with varying pressures of demand, and varying amounts of unemployment and inflation[ary pressure], were not as silly as they were made to seem when both Keynesian and New Classical economists accepted the assumption of a perfectly inelastic, one-dimensional, long run Phillips curve located at a unique equilibrium Y* and NAIRU.”

A New Paper Shows Just How Right Hawtrey and Cassel Were

Published October 10, 2013 Cassel , Federal Reserve , gold standard , Great Depression , James Caton , monetary history , monetary policy 5 Comments
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I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email a couple of weeks ago from someone I don’t know, a graduate student in economics at George Mason University, James Caton. He sent me a link to a paper (“Good as Gold?: A Quantitative Analysis of Hawtrey and Cassel’s Theory of Gold Demand and the Gold Price Level During the Interwar Period”) that he recently posted on SSRN. Caton was kind enough to credit me and my co-author Ron Batchelder, as well as Doug Irwin (here and here) and Scott Sumner, for reviving interest in the seminal work of Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel on the interwar gold standard and the key role in causing the Great Depression played by the process of restoring the gold standard after it had been effectively suspended after World War I began.

The thesis independently, but cooperatively, advanced by Hawtrey and Cassel was that under a gold standard, fluctuations in the gold price level were sensitive to variations in the demand for gold reserves by the central banks. The main contribution of Caton’s paper is to provide econometric evidence of the tight correlation between variations in the total gold holdings of the world’s central banks and the gold price level in the period between the end of World War I (1918) to the start of Great Depression (1930-32). Caton uses a variation on a model used by Scott Sumner in his empirical work on the Great Depression to predict changes in the value of gold, and, hence, changes in the gold price level of commodities. If central banks in the aggregate are adding to their gold reserves at a faster rate than the rate at which the total world stock of gold is growing, then gold would be likely to appreciate, and if central banks are adding to their gold reserves at a slower rate than that at which the world stock is growing, then gold would be likely to depreciate.

So from the published sources, Caton constructed a time series of international monetary gold holdings and the total world stock of gold from 1918 to 1932 and regressed the international gold price level on the international gold reserve ratio (the ratio of monetary gold reserves to the total world stock of gold). He used two different measures of the world gold price level, the Sauerback-Statist price index and the gold price of silver. Based on his regressions (calculated in both log-linear and log-quadratic forms and separately for the periods 1918-30, 1918-31, 1918-32), he compared the predicted gold price level against both the Sauerback-Statist price index and the gold price of silver. The chart below shows his result for the log-linear regression estimated over the period 1918-30.

Caton_Regressions

Pretty impressive, if you ask me. Have a look yourself.

Let me also mention that Caton’s results also shed important light on the puzzling behavior of the world price level immediately after the end of World War I. Unlike most wars in which the wartime inflation comes to an abrupt end after the end of the war, inflation actually accelerated after the end of the war. The inflation did not actually stop for almost two years after the end of the war, when a huge deflation set in. Caton shows that the behavior of the price level was largely determined by the declining gold holdings of the Federal Reserve after the war ended. Unnerved by the rapid inflation, the Fed finally changed policy, and began accumulating gold rapidly in 1920 by raising the discount rate to an all-time high of 7 percent. Although no other countries were then on the gold standard, other countries, unwilling, for the most part, to allow their currencies to depreciate too much against the dollar, imported US deflation.

Jim is also a blogger. Check out his blog here.

Update: Thanks to commenter Blue Aurora for pointing out that I neglected to provide a link to Jim Caton’s paper.  Sorry about that. The link is now embedded.

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part V: Did Hawtrey Discover PPP?

Published October 8, 2013 Cassel , Hawtrey , monetary theory , purchasing power parity 2 Comments
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The first seven chapters of Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade present an admirably succinct exposition of the theory of a fiat monetary system with a banking system that issues a credit money convertible into the fiat money supplied by the government. Hawtrey also explains how cyclical fluctuations in output, employment and prices could arise in such a system, given that the interest rates set by banks in the course of their lending operations inevitably deviate, even if for no more than very short periods of time, from what he calls their natural levels. See the wonderful quotation (from pp. 76-77) in my previous post about the inherent instability of the equilibrium between the market rate set by banks and the natural rate.

In chapter 7, Hawtrey considers an international system of fiat currencies, each one issued by the government of a single country in which only that currency (or credit money convertible into that currency) is acceptable as payment. Hawtrey sets as his objective an explanation of the exchange rates between pairs of such currencies and the corresponding price levels in those countries. In summing up his discussion (pp. 90-93) of what determines the rate of exchange between any two currencies, Hawtrey makes the following observation

Practically, it may be said that the rate of exchange equates the general level of prices of commodities in one country with that in the other. This is of course only approximately true, since the rate of exchange is affected only by those commodities which are or might be transported between the two countries. If one of the two countries is at a disadvantage in the production of commodities which cannot be imported, or indeed in those which can only be imported at a specially heavy cost, the general level of prices, calculated fairly over all commodities, will be higher in that country than in the other. But, subject to this important qualification, the rate of exchange under stable conditions does represent that ratio between the units of currency which makes the price-levels and therefore the purchasing powers of the two units equal. (pp. 92-93)

That, of course, is a terse, but characteristically precise, statement of the purchasing power parity doctrine. What makes it interesting, and possibly noteworthy, is that Hawtrey made it 100 years ago, in 1913, which is five years before Hawtrey’s older contemporary, Gustav Cassel, who is usually credited with having originated the doctrine in 1918 in his paper “Abnormal Deviations in International Exchanges” Economic Journal 28:413-15. Here’s how Cassel put it:

According to the theory of international exchanges which I have tried to develop during the course of the war, the rate of exchange between two countries is primarily determined by the quotient between the internal purchasing power against goods of the money of each country. The general inflation which has taken place during the war has lowered this purchasing power in all countries, though in a very different degree, and the rates of exchanges should accordingly be expected to deviate from their old parity in proportion to the inflation in each country.

At every moment the real parity between two countries is represented by this quotient between the purchasing power of the money in the one country and the other. I propose to call this parity “the purchasing power parity.” As long as anything like free movement of merchandise and a somewhat comprehensive trade between two countries takes place, the actual rate of exchange cannot deviate very much from this purchasing power parity. (p. 413)

Hawtrey proceeds, in the rest of the chapter, to explain how international relationships would be affected by a contraction in the currency of one country. The immediate effects would be the same as those described in the case of a single closed economy. However, in an international system, the effects of a contraction in one country would create opportunities for international transactions, both real and financial, that would involve both countries in the adjustment to the initial monetary disturbance originating in one of them.

Hawtrey sums up the discussion about the adjustment to a contraction of the currency of one country as follows:

From the above description, which is necessarily rather complicated, it will be seen that the mutual influence of two areas with independent currency systems is on the whole not very great Indeed, the only important consequence to either of a contraction of currency in the other, is the tendency for the first to lend money to the second in order to get the benefit of the high rate of interest. This hastens the movement towards ultimate equilibrium in the area of stringency. At the same time it would raise the rate of interest slightly in the other country But as this rise in the rate of interest is due to an enhanced demand for loans, it will not have the effect of diminishing the total stock of bankers’ money. (p. 99)

He concludes the chapter with a refinement of the purchasing power parity doctrine.

It is important to notice that as soon as the assumption of stable conditions is abandoned the rate of exchange ceases to represent the ratio of the purchasing powers of the two units of currency which it relates. A difference between the rates of interest in the two countries concerned displaces the rate of exchange from its normal position of equality with this ratio, in the same direction as if the purchasing power of the currency with the higher rate of interest had been increased. Such a divergence between the rates of interest would only occur in case of some financial disturbance, and though such disturbances, great or small, are bound to be frequent, the ratio of purchasing powers may still be taken (subject to the qualification previously explained) to be the normal significance of the rate of exchange. (p. 101)

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part IV: The Inherent Instability of Credit

Published October 4, 2013 Hawtrey , monetary theory , Uncategorized 6 Comments

I don’t have a particularly good memory for specific facts or of books and articles that I have read, even ones that I really enjoyed or thought were very important. If I am lucky, I can remember on or two highlights or retain some general idea of what the book or article was about. So I often find myself surprised when reading something for the second time when I come across a passage that I had forgotten and experience the shock and awe of discovery while knowing, and perhaps even remembering, that I had read this all before once upon a time. That is just the experience I had when reading chapter 7 (“Origination of Monetary Disturbances in an Isolated Community”) of Good and Bad Trade. I think that I read Good and Bad Trade for the first time in the spring of 2009. On the whole, I would say that I was less impressed with it than I was with some other books of his that I had read (especially The Art of Central Banking and The Gold Standard in Theory and Practice), but reading chapter 7 a second time really enhanced my appreciation for how insightful Hawtrey was and how well he explained the underlying causes for what he called, in one of his great phrases “the inherent instability of credit.” He starts of chapter 7 with the following deceptively modest introductory paragraphs.

In the last two chapters we have postulated a perfectly arbitrary change in the quantity of legal tender currency in circulation. However closely the consequences traced from such an arbitrary change may correspond with the phenomena we have set out to explain, we have accomplished nothing till we have shown that causes which will lead to those consequences actually occur. . . .

At the present stage, however it is already possible to make a preliminary survey of the causes of fluctuations with the advantage of an artificial simplification of the problem. And at the outset it must be recognized that arbitrary changes in the quantity of legal tender currency in circulation cannot be of much practical importance. Such changes rarely occur. . . .

But what we are looking for is the origination of changes not necessarily in the quantity of legal tender currency but in the quantity of purchasing power, which is based on the quantity of credit money. . . . For example, if the banker suddenly came to the conclusion that the proportion of reserves to liabilities previously maintained was too low, and decided to increase, this would necessitate a reduction in deposits exactly similar to the reduction which in the last chapter we supposed them to make in consequence of a reduction in the actual stock of legal tender currency. Or there might casual variations in their reserves. These reserves simply consist of that portion of the existing supply of cash [i.e., currency] which happens for the moment not to be in the pockets, tills, cashboxes, etc., of the public. The amount of money which any individual carries about with him at any time is largely a matter of chance, and consequently there may very well be variations in the cash in circulation and therefore contrary variations in the reserves, which are really in the nature of casual variations . . . (pp. 73-74)

After explaining that the amount of cash (i.e., currency) held by the public tends to fluctuate cyclically because increasing employment and increasing wage payments involve an increasing demand for currency (most workers having been paid with currency not by check, and certainly not by electronic transfer, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), so that banks would generally tend to experience declining reserves over the course of the business cycle, Hawtrey offered another reason why banks would be subject to cyclical disturbances affecting their reserve position.

[W]henever the prevailing rate of profit deviates from the rate of interest charged on loans the discrepancy between them at once tends to be enlarged. If trade is for the moment stable and the market rate of interest is equal to the profit rate, and if we suppose that by any cause the profit rate is slightly increased, there will be an increased demand for loans at the existing market rate. But this increased demand for loans leads to an increase in the aggregate amount of purchasing power, which in turn still further increases the profit rate. This process will continue with ever accelerated force until the bankers intervene to save their reserves by raising the rate of interest up to and above the now enhanced profit rate. A parallel phenomenon occurs when the profit rate, through some chance cause, drops below the market rate; the consequent curtailment of loans and so of purchasing power leads at once to a greater and growing fall in profits, until the bankers intervene by reducing the rate of interest. It appears, therefore, that the equilibrium which the bankers have to maintain in fixing the rate of interest is essentially “unstable,” in the sense that if the rate of interest deviates from its proper value by any amount, however small, the deviation will tend to grow greater and greater until steps are taken to correct it. This of itself shows that the money market must be subject to fluctuations. A flag in a steady breeze could theoretically remain in equilibrium if it were spread out perfectly flat in the exact direction of the breeze. But it can be shown mathematically that that position is “unstable,” that if the flag deviates from it to any extent, however small, it will tend to deviate further. Consequently the flag flaps. (pp. 76-77)

Hawtrey also mentions other economic forces tending to amplify fluctuations, forces implicated in the general phenomenon of credit.

Credit money is composed of the obligations of bankers, and if a banker cannot meet his obligations the credit money dependent upon him is wholly or partly destroyed. Again, against his obligations the banker holds equivalent assets, together with a margin. These assets are composed chiefly of two items, legal tender currency and loans to traders. The solvency of the banker will depend largely on the reality of these assets, and the value of the loans will depend in turn on the solvency of the borrowers. (p. 77)

Hawtrey describes one of the principal assets held by English commercial banks in his day, the mercantile bill, with which a dealer or wholesaler making an order from a manufacturer obligates himself to pay for the ordered merchandise upon delivery at some fixed time, say 120 days, after the order is placed. The IOU of the dealer, the bill, can be immediately presented by the manufacturer to his banker who will then advance the funds to the manufacturer with which to cover the costs of producing the order for the dealer. When the order is filled four months hence, the dealer will pay for the order and the manufacturer will then be able to discharge his obligation to his banker.

The whole value of the manufacturer’s efforts in producing the goods depends upon there being an effective demand for them when they are completed. It is only because the dealer anticipates that this effective demand for them will be forthcoming that he gives the manufacturer the order. The dealer, in fact, is taking the responsibility of saying how £10,000 worth of the productive capacity of the country shall be employed. The manufacturer, in accepting the order, and the banker in discounting the bill, are both endorsing the opinion of the dealer. The whole transaction is based ultimately on an expectation of a future demand, which must be more or less speculative. But the banker is doubly insured against the risk. Both the dealer and the manufacturer are men of substance. If the dealer cannot dispose of the goods for £10,000, he is prepared to bear the loss himself. He expects some of his ventures to fail, and others to bring him more than he counted on. Take the rough with the smooth he will probably make a profit. . . . And if the dealer becomes insolvent, there is still the manufacturer to save the banker from loss. . . . Where bills are not used a banker may lend on the sole credit of a dealer or manufacturer, relying on the value of the business to which he lends as the ultimate security for the loan.

Now if a contraction of credit money occurs, the consequent slackening of demand, and fall in the prices of commodities, will lead to a widespread disappointment of dealers’ expectations. At such a time the weakest dealers are likely to be impaired. An individual or company in starting a manufacturing business would usually add to the capital they can provide themselves, further sums borrowed in the form of debentures secured on the business and yielding a fixed rate of interest. . . . But when the general level of prices is falling, the value of the entire business will be falling also, while the debenture and other liabilities, being expressed in money, will remain unchanged. . . . [D]uring the period of falling prices, the expenses of production resist the downward tendency, and the profits are temporarily diminished and may be entirely obliterated or turned into an actual loss. A weak business cannot bear the strain, and being unable to pay its debenture interest and having no further assets on which to borrow, it will fail. If it is not reconstructed but ceases operations altogether, that will of course contribute to the general diminution of output. Its inability to meet its engagements will at the same time inflict loss on the banks. But at present we are considering credit, and credit depends on the expectation of future solvency. A business which is believed to be weak will have difficulty in borrowing, because bankers fear that it may fail. At a time of contracting trade the probability of any given business failing will be increased. At the same time the probability of any particular venture for which it may desire to borrow resulting in a loss instead of a profit will likewise be increased. Consequently at such a time credit will be impaired, but this will be the consequence, not the cause of the contracting trade. (pp. 79-80)

Finally, Hawtrey directs our attention to the credit of bankers.

We have already seen that the banker’s estimate of the proper proportion of his reserve to his liabilities is almost entirely empirical, and that an arbitrary change in the proportion which he thinks fit to maintain between them will carry with it an increase or decrease, as the case may be, in the available amount of purchasing power in the community. If a banker really underestimates the proper amount of reserve, and does not correct his estimate, he may find himself at a moment of strain with his reserve rapidly melting away and no prospect of the process coming to an end before the reserve is exhausted. His natural remedy is to borrow from other banks; but this he can only do if they believe his position to be sound. If they will not lend, he must try to curtail his loans. But if has been lending imprudently, he will find that on his refusing to renew loans the borrowers will in some cases become bankrupt and his money will be lost. It is just when a banker has been lending imprudently that his fellow-bankers will refuse to lend to him, and thus the same mistake cuts him off simultaneously from the two possible remedies. (pp. 81-82)

Interestingly, though he explains how it is possible that credit may become unstable, leading to cumulative fluctuations in economic activity, Hawtrey concludes this chapter by arguing that without changes in aggregate purchasing power (which, in Hawtrey’s terminology, means the total quantity of fiat and credit money). The problem with that formulation is that what Hawtrey has just shown is that the quantity of credit money fluctuates with the state of credit, so to say that economic activity will not fluctuate much if aggregate purchasing power is held stable is to beg the question. The quantity of credit money will not remain stable unless credit remains stable, and if credit is unstable, which is what Hawtrey has just shown, the quantity of credit money will not remain stable.

Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade, Part III: Banking and Interest Rates

Published October 1, 2013 Hawtrey , monetary theory , natural rate of interest 11 Comments
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In my previous installment in this series, I began discussing Hawtrey’s analysis of a banking system that creates credit money convertible into a pure fiat money. I noted what seem to me to be defects in Hawtrey’s analysis, mainly related to his incomplete recognition of all the incentives governing banks when deciding how much money to create by making loans. Nevertheless, it is worth following Hawtrey, even with the gap, as he works his way through his analysis .

But, before we try to follow Hawtrey, it will be helpful to think about where he is heading. In his analysis of a pure fiat money system, all — actually not quite all, but almost all — of the analytical work was done by considering how a difference between the amount of fiat money people want to hold and the greater or lesser amount that they actually do hold is resolved. If they hold less money than they want, total spending decreases as people try (unsuccessfully in the aggregate) to build up their cash balances, and if they hold more money than they want, spending increases as people try (unsuccessfully in the aggregate) to part with their excess cash hoaldings. Reaching a new equilibrium entails an adjustment of the ratio of total spending to the stock of fiat money that characterized the initial equilibrium. There may be an interest rate in such an economy, but a change in the interest rate plays no part in the adjustment process that restores equilibrium after a monetary shock (i.e., a change in the stock of fiat money). Hawtrey aims to compare (and contrast) this adjustment process with the adjustment process to a change in the quantity of fiat money when not all money is fiat money — when there is also credit money (created by banks and convertible into fiat money) circulating along with fiat money.

In analyzing a monetary disturbance to a credit-money system, Hawtrey takes as his starting point a banking system in equilibrium, with banks and individuals holding just the amount of currency, reserves and deposits that they want to hold. He then posits a reduction in the total stock of currency.

The first effect of the contraction of the currency is that the working balance of cash in the hands of individual members of the community will be diminished. The precise proportion in which this diminution is shared between bankers and other people does not matter, for those who have banking accounts will quickly draw out enough cash to restore their working balances. As soon as this process is completed we have two effects; first, that the greater part, indeed practically the whole, of the currency withdrawn comes out of the banks’ reserves, and secondly, that the total amount of purchasing power in the community (i.e., currency in circulation plus bank balances) is diminished by the amount of currency withdrawn. One consequence of the existence of a banking system is that a given diminution in the stock of currency produces at this stage much less than a proportional diminution in the total of purchasing power. (pp. 58-59)

Hawtrey goes on to explain this point with a numerical example. Suppose total purchasing power (i.e., the sum of currency plus deposits) were £1 billion of which £250 million were currency and £750 million deposits. If the stock of currency were reduced by 10%, the amount of currency would fall to £225 million, with total stock of purchasing power falling to £975 million. (Note by the way, that Hawtrey’s figure for total purchasing power, or the total stock of money, does not correspond to the usual definition of the money stock in which only currency held by the public, not by the banking system, are counted.) At any rate, the key point for Hawtrey is that under a fiat currency with a banking system, the percentage decrease (10%) in the stock of currency is not equal to the percentage decrease in the total stock of money (2.5%), so that a 10% reduction in the stock of currency, unlike the pure fiat currency case, would not force down the price level by 10% (at least, not without introducing other variables into the picture). Having replenished their holdings of currency by converting deposits into currency, the total cash holdings of the public are only slightly (2.5%) less than the amount they would like to hold, so that only a 2.5% reduction in total spending would seem to be necessary to restore the kind of monetary equilibrium on which Hawtrey was focused in discussing the pure fiat money case. A different sort of disequilibrium involving a different adjustment process had to be added to his analytical landscape.

The new disequilibrium introduced by Hawtrey was that between the amount of currency held by the banks as reserves against their liabilities (deposits) and the amount of currency that they are actually holding. Thus, even though banks met the demands of their depositors to replenish the fiat currency that, by assumption, had been taken from their existing cash balances, that response by the banks, while (largely) eliminating one disequilibrium, also created another one: the banks now find that their reserves, given the amount of liabilities (deposits) on their balance sheets, are less than they would like them to be. Hawtrey is thus positing the existence of a demand function by the banks to hold reserves, a function that depends on the amount of liabilities that they create. (Like most banking theorists, Hawtrey assumes that the functional relationship between bank deposits and banks’ desired reserves is proportional, but there are obviously economies of scale in holding reserves, so that the relationship between bank deposits and desired reserves is certainly less than proportional.) The means by which banks can replenish their reserves, according to Hawtrey, again following traditional banking theory, is to raise the interest rate that they charge borrowers. Here, again, Hawtrey was not quite on the mark, overlooking the possibility that banks could offer to pay interest (or to increase the rate that they were already paying on deposits) as a way of reducing the tendency of depositors to withdraw deposits in exchange for currency.

The special insight brought by Hawtrey to this analysis is that a particular group of entrepreneurs (traders and merchants), whose largest expense is the interest paid on advances from banks to finance their holdings of inventories, are highly sensitive to variations in the bank lending rate, and adjust the size of their inventories accordingly. And since it is the manufacturers to whom traders and merchants are placing orders, the output of factories is necessarily sensitive to the size of the inventories that merchants and traders are trying to hold. Thus, if banks, desiring to replenish their depleted reserves held against deposits, raise interest rates on loans, it will immediately reduce the size of inventories that merchants and traders want to hold, causing them to diminish their orders to manufacturers. But as manufacturers reduce output in response to diminished orders from merchants, the incomes of employees and others providing services and materials to the manufacturers will also fall, so that traders and merchants will find that they are accumulating inventories because their sales to dealers and retailers are slackening, offsetting the effect of their diminished orders to manufacturers, and, in turn, causing merchants and traders to reduce further their orders from manufacturers.

As this process works itself out, prices and output will tend to fall (at least relative to trend), so that traders and merchants will gradually succeed in reducing their indebtedness to the banks, implying that the total deposits created by the banking system will decrease. As their deposit liabilities decline, the amount of reserves that the banks would like to hold declines as well, so that gradually this adjustment process will restore an equilibrium between the total quantity of reserves demanded by the banking system and the total quantity of reserves that is made available to the banks (i.e., the total quantity of currency minus the amount of currency that the public chooses to hold as cash). However, the story does not end with the restoration of equilibrium for the banking system. Despite equilibrium in the banking system, total spending, output, and employment will have fallen from their original equilibrium levels. Full equilibrium will not be restored until prices and wages fall enough to make total spending consistent with a stock of currency 10% less than it was in the original equilibrium. Thus, in the end, it turns out that a 10% reduction in the quantity of currency in a monetary system with both fiat money and credit money will cause a 10% reduction in the price level when a new equilibrium is reached. However, the adjustment process by which a new equilibrium is reached, involving changes not only in absolute prices and wages, but in interest rates, is more complicated than the adjustment process in a pure fiat money system.

Hawtrey summed up his analysis in terms of three interest rates. First, the natural rate “which represented the actual labour-saving value of capital at the level of capitalisation reached by industry. This ratio of labour saved per annum to labour expended on first cost is a physical property of the capital actually in use, and under perfectly stable monetary conditions is equal to the market rate of interest.” Second the market rate which “diverges from the natural rate according to the tendency of prices. When prices are rising them market rate is higher, and when falling lower, than the natural rate, and this divergence is due to the fat that the actual profits of business show under those conditions corresponding movements.” Third, there is the profit rate, “which represents the true profits of business prevailing for the time being,” and does not necessarily coincide with the market rate.

The market rate is in fact the bankers’ rate, and is greater or less than the profit rate, according as the bankers wish to discourage or encourage borrowing. . . .

Consequently, for the banker’s purposes, a “high” rate of interest is one which is above the profit rate, and it is only when the rate of interest is equal to the profit rate that there is no tendency towards either an increase or decrease in temporary borrowing. In any of the three cases the rate of interest may be either above or below the natural rate. If the natural rate is 4% and the profit rate in consequence is only 2%, a market rate of 3% is “high,” and will result in a curtailment of borrowing. If prices are rising and the profit rate is 6%, a market rate of 5% is “low,” and will be compatible with an increased borrowing.

In the case we are now considering we assumed the disturbance to be a departure from perfectly stable conditions, in which the market rate of interest would be identical with the “natural” rate. On the contraction of the currency occurring the bankers raised the market rate above the natural rate. But at the same time the fall of prices began, and there must consequently be a fall of the profit rate below the natural rate. As we now see, the market rate may actually fall below the natural rate, and so long as it remains above the profit rate it will still be a “high” rate of interest.

When the restoration of the bank reserves is completed the market rate will drop down to equality with the profit rate, and they will remain equal to one another and below the natural rate until the fall of prices has gone far enough to re-establish equilibrium. (pp. 66-67)

Although it seems to me that Hawtrey, in focusing exclusively on the short-term lending rate of banks to explain the adjustment of the banking system to a disturbance, missed an important aspect of the overall picture (i.e., the deposit rate), Hawtrey did explain the efficacy of a traditional tool of monetary policy, the short-term lending rate of the banking system (the idea of a central bank having not yet been introduced at this stage of Hawtrey’s exposition). And he did so while avoiding the logical gap in the standard version of the natural-rate-market-rate theory as developed by both Thornton and Wicksell (see section 3 of my paper on Ricardo and Thornton here) explaining why changes in the bank rate could affect aggregate demand without assuming, as do conventional descriptions of the adjustment process, that the system was adjusting to an excess demand for or an excess supply of bank deposits.

About Me

David Glasner
Washington, DC

I am an economist in the Washington DC area. My research and writing has been mostly on monetary economics and policy and the history of economics. In my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform, I argued for a non-Monetarist non-Keynesian approach to monetary policy, based on a theory of a competitive supply of money. Over the years, I have become increasingly impressed by the similarities between my approach and that of R. G. Hawtrey and hope to bring Hawtrey’s unduly neglected contributions to the attention of a wider audience.

My new book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications has been published by Palgrave Macmillan

Follow me on Twitter @david_glasner

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