Archive for July, 2015

Krugman’s Second Best

Published July 30, 2015 general equilibrium , macroeconomics , microfoundations , Paul Krugman , Say's Law , theory of second best 18 Comments
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A couple of days ago Paul Krugman discussed “Second-best Macroeconomics” on his blog. I have no real quarrel with anything he said, but I would like to amplify his discussion of what is sometimes called the problem of second-best, because I think the problem of second best has some really important implications for macroeconomics beyond the limited application of the problem that Krugman addressed. The basic idea underlying the problem of second best is not that complicated, but it has many applications, and what made the 1956 paper (“The General Theory of Second Best”) by R. G. Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster a classic was that it showed how a number of seemingly disparate problems were really all applications of a single unifying principle. Here’s how Krugman frames his application of the second-best problem.

[T]he whole western world has spent years suffering from a severe shortfall of aggregate demand; in Europe a severe misalignment of national costs and prices has been overlaid on this aggregate problem. These aren’t hard problems to diagnose, and simple macroeconomic models — which have worked very well, although nobody believes it — tell us how to solve them. Conventional monetary policy is unavailable thanks to the zero lower bound, but fiscal policy is still on tap, as is the possibility of raising the inflation target. As for misaligned costs, that’s where exchange rate adjustments come in. So no worries: just hit the big macroeconomic That Was Easy button, and soon the troubles will be over.

Except that all the natural answers to our problems have been ruled out politically. Austerians not only block the use of fiscal policy, they drive it in the wrong direction; a rise in the inflation target is impossible given both central-banker prejudices and the power of the goldbug right. Exchange rate adjustment is blocked by the disappearance of European national currencies, plus extreme fear over technical difficulties in reintroducing them.

As a result, we’re stuck with highly problematic second-best policies like quantitative easing and internal devaluation.

I might quibble with Krugman about the quality of the available macroeconomic models, by which I am less impressed than he, but that’s really beside the point of this post, so I won’t even go there. But I can’t let the comment about the inflation target pass without observing that it’s not just “central-banker prejudices” and the “goldbug right” that are to blame for the failure to raise the inflation target; for reasons that I don’t claim to understand myself, the political consensus in both Europe and the US in favor of perpetually low or zero inflation has been supported with scarcely any less fervor by the left than the right. It’s only some eccentric economists – from diverse positions on the political spectrum – that have been making the case for inflation as a recovery strategy. So the political failure has been uniform across the political spectrum.

OK, having registered my factual disagreement with Krugman about the source of our anti-inflationary intransigence, I can now get to the main point. Here’s Krugman:

“[S]econd best” is an economic term of art. It comes from a classic 1956 paper by Lipsey and Lancaster, which showed that policies which might seem to distort markets may nonetheless help the economy if markets are already distorted by other factors. For example, suppose that a developing country’s poorly functioning capital markets are failing to channel savings into manufacturing, even though it’s a highly profitable sector. Then tariffs that protect manufacturing from foreign competition, raise profits, and therefore make more investment possible can improve economic welfare.

The problems with second best as a policy rationale are familiar. For one thing, it’s always better to address existing distortions directly, if you can — second best policies generally have undesirable side effects (e.g., protecting manufacturing from foreign competition discourages consumption of industrial goods, may reduce effective domestic competition, and so on). . . .

But here we are, with anything resembling first-best macroeconomic policy ruled out by political prejudice, and the distortions we’re trying to correct are huge — one global depression can ruin your whole day. So we have quantitative easing, which is of uncertain effectiveness, probably distorts financial markets at least a bit, and gets trashed all the time by people stressing its real or presumed faults; someone like me is then put in the position of having to defend a policy I would never have chosen if there seemed to be a viable alternative.

In a deep sense, I think the same thing is involved in trying to come up with less terrible policies in the euro area. The deal that Greece and its creditors should have reached — large-scale debt relief, primary surpluses kept small and not ramped up over time — is a far cry from what Greece should and probably would have done if it still had the drachma: big devaluation now. The only way to defend the kind of thing that was actually on the table was as the least-worst option given that the right response was ruled out.

That’s one example of a second-best problem, but it’s only one of a variety of problems, and not, it seems to me, the most macroeconomically interesting. So here’s the second-best problem that I want to discuss: given one distortion (i.e., a departure from one of the conditions for Pareto-optimality), reaching a second-best sub-optimum requires violating other – likely all the other – conditions for reaching the first-best (Pareto) optimum. The strategy for getting to the second-best suboptimum cannot be to achieve as many of the conditions for reaching the first-best optimum as possible; the conditions for reaching the second-best optimum are in general totally different from the conditions for reaching the first-best optimum.

So what’s the deeper macroeconomic significance of the second-best principle?

I would put it this way. Suppose there’s a pre-existing macroeconomic equilibrium, all necessary optimality conditions between marginal rates of substitution in production and consumption and relative prices being satisfied. Let the initial equilibrium be subjected to a macoreconomic disturbance. The disturbance will immediately affect a range — possibly all — of the individual markets, and all optimality conditions will change, so that no market will be unaffected when a new optimum is realized. But while optimality for the system as a whole requires that prices adjust in such a way that the optimality conditions are satisfied in all markets simultaneously, each price adjustment that actually occurs is a response to the conditions in a single market – the relationship between amounts demanded and supplied at the existing price. Each price adjustment being a response to a supply-demand imbalance in an individual market, there is no theory to explain how a process of price adjustment in real time will ever restore an equilibrium in which all optimality conditions are simultaneously satisfied.

Invoking a general Smithian invisible-hand theorem won’t work, because, in this context, the invisible-hand theorem tells us only that if an equilibrium price vector were reached, the system would be in an optimal state of rest with no tendency to change. The invisible-hand theorem provides no account of how the equilibrium price vector is discovered by any price-adjustment process in real time. (And even tatonnement, a non-real-time process, is not guaranteed to work as shown by the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem). With price adjustment in each market entirely governed by the demand-supply imbalance in that market, market prices determined in individual markets need not ensure that all markets clear simultaneously or satisfy the optimality conditions.

Now it’s true that we have a simple theory of price adjustment for single markets: prices rise if there’s an excess demand and fall if there’s an excess supply. If demand and supply curves have normal slopes, the simple price adjustment rule moves the price toward equilibrium. But that partial-equilibriuim story is contingent on the implicit assumption that all other markets are in equilibrium. When all markets are in disequilibrium, moving toward equilibrium in one market will have repercussions on other markets, and the simple story of how price adjustment in response to a disequilibrium restores equilibrium breaks down, because market conditions in every market depend on market conditions in every other market. So unless all markets arrive at equilibrium simultaneously, there’s no guarantee that equilibrium will obtain in any of the markets. Disequilibrium in any market can mean disequilibrium in every market. And if a single market is out of kilter, the second-best, suboptimal solution for the system is totally different from the first-best solution for all markets.

In the standard microeconomics we are taught in econ 1 and econ 101, all these complications are assumed away by restricting the analysis of price adjustment to a single market. In other words, as I have pointed out in a number of previous posts (here and here), standard microeconomics is built on macroeconomic foundations, and the currently fashionable demand for macroeconomics to be microfounded turns out to be based on question-begging circular reasoning. Partial equilibrium is a wonderful pedagogical device, and it is an essential tool in applied microeconomics, but its limitations are often misunderstood or ignored.

An early macroeconomic application of the theory of second is the statement by the quintessentially orthodox pre-Keynesian Cambridge economist Frederick Lavington who wrote in his book The Trade Cycle “the inactivity of all is the cause of the inactivity of each.” Each successive departure from the conditions for second-, third-, fourth-, and eventually nth-best sub-optima has additional negative feedback effects on the rest of the economy, moving it further and further away from a Pareto-optimal equilibrium with maximum output and full employment. The fewer people that are employed, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to find employment.

This insight was actually admirably, if inexactly, expressed by Say’s Law: supply creates its own demand. The cause of the cumulative contraction of output in a depression is not, as was often suggested, that too much output had been produced, but a breakdown of coordination in which disequilibrium spreads in epidemic fashion from market to market, leaving individual transactors unable to compensate by altering the terms on which they are prepared to supply goods and services. The idea that a partial-equilibrium response, a fall in money wages, can by itself remedy a general-disequilibrium disorder is untenable. Keynes and the Keynesians were therefore completely wrong to accuse Say of committing a fallacy in diagnosing the cause of depressions. The only fallacy lay in the assumption that market adjustments would automatically ensure the restoration of something resembling full-employment equilibrium.

Neo-Fisherism and All That

Published July 24, 2015 expectations , fiat money , John Cochrane , Michael Woodford , Neo-Fisherism , Nick Rowe 64 Comments
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A few weeks ago Michael Woodford and his Columbia colleague Mariana Garcia-Schmidt made an initial response to the Neo-Fisherian argument advanced by, among others, John Cochrane and Stephen Williamson that a central bank can achieve its inflation target by pegging its interest-rate instrument at a rate such that if the expected inflation rate is the inflation rate targeted by the central bank, the Fisher equation would be satisfied. In other words, if the central bank wants 2% inflation, it should set the interest rate instrument under its control at the Fisherian real rate of interest (aka the natural rate) plus 2% expected inflation. So if the Fisherian real rate is 2%, the central bank should set its interest-rate instrument (Fed Funds rate) at 4%, because, in equilibrium – and, under rational expectations, that is the only policy-relevant solution of the model – inflation expectations must satisfy the Fisher equation.

The Neo-Fisherians believe that, by way of this insight, they have overturned at least two centuries of standard monetary theory, dating back at least to Henry Thornton, instructing the monetary authorities to raise interest rates to combat inflation and to reduce interest rates to counter deflation. According to the Neo-Fisherian Revolution, this was all wrong: the way to reduce inflation is for the monetary authority to reduce the setting on its interest-rate instrument and the way to counter deflation is to raise the setting on the instrument. That is supposedly why the Fed, by reducing its Fed Funds target practically to zero, has locked us into a low-inflation environment.

Unwilling to junk more than 200 years of received doctrine on the basis, not of a behavioral relationship, but a reduced-form equilibrium condition containing no information about the direction of causality, few monetary economists and no policy makers have become devotees of the Neo-Fisherian Revolution. Nevertheless, the Neo-Fisherian argument has drawn enough attention to elicit a response from Michael Woodford, who is the go-to monetary theorist for monetary-policy makers. The Woodford-Garcia-Schmidt (hereinafter WGS) response (for now just a slide presentation) has already been discussed by Noah Smith, Nick Rowe, Scott Sumner, Brad DeLong, Roger Farmer and John Cochrane. Nick Rowe’s discussion, not surprisingly, is especially penetrating in distilling the WGS presentation into its intuitive essence.

Using Nick’s discussion as a starting point, I am going to offer some comments of my own on Neo-Fisherism and the WGS critique. Right off the bat, WGS concede that it is possible that by increasing the setting of its interest-rate instrument, a central bank could, move the economy from one rational-expectations equilibrium to another, the only difference between the two being that inflation in the second would differ from inflation in the first by an amount exactly equal to the difference in the corresponding settings of the interest-rate instrument. John Cochrane apparently feels pretty good about having extracted this concession from WGS, remarking

My first reaction is relief — if Woodford says it is a prediction of the standard perfect foresight / rational expectations version, that means I didn’t screw up somewhere. And if one has to resort to learning and non-rational expectations to get rid of a result, the battle is half won.

And my first reaction to Cochrane’s first reaction is: why only half? What else is there to worry about besides a comparison of rational-expectations equilibria? Well, let Cochrane read Nick Rowe’s blogpost. If he did, he might realize that if you do no more than compare alternative steady-state equilibria, ignoring the path leading from one equilibrium to the other, you miss just about everything that makes macroeconomics worth studying (by the way I do realize the question-begging nature of that remark). Of course that won’t necessarily bother Cochrane, because, like other practitioners of modern macroeconomics, he has convinced himself that it is precisely by excluding everything but rational-expectations equilibria from consideration that modern macroeconomics has made what its practitioners like to think of as progress, and what its critics regard as the opposite .

But Nick Rowe actually takes the trouble to show what might happen if you try to specify the path by which you could get from rational-expectations equilibrium A with the interest-rate instrument of the central bank set at i to rational-expectations equilibrium B with the interest-rate instrument of the central bank set at i ­+ ε. If you try to specify a process of trial-and-error (tatonnement) that leads from A to B, you will almost certainly fail, your only chance being to get it right on your first try. And, as Nick further points out, the very notion of a tatonnement process leading from one equilibrium to another is a huge stretch, because, in the real world there are “no backs” as there are in tatonnement. If you enter into an exchange, you can’t nullify it, as is the case under tatonnement, just because the price you agreed on turns out not to have been an equilibrium price. For there to be a tatonnement path from the first equilibrium that converges on the second requires that monetary authority set its interest-rate instrument in the conventional, not the Neo-Fisherian, manner, using variations in the real interest rate as a lever by which to nudge the economy onto a path leading to a new equilibrium rather than away from it.

The very notion that you don’t have to worry about the path by which you get from one equilibrium to another is so bizarre that it would be merely laughable if it were not so dangerous. Kenneth Boulding used to tell a story about a physicist, a chemist and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat except a can of food, but nothing to open the can with. The physicist and the chemist tried to figure out a way to open the can, but the economist just said: “assume a can opener.” But I wonder if even Boulding could have imagined the disconnect from reality embodied in the Neo-Fisherian argument.

Having registered my disapproval of Neo-Fisherism, let me now reverse field and make some critical comments about the current state of non-Neo-Fisherian monetary theory, and what makes it vulnerable to off-the-wall ideas like Neo-Fisherism. The important fact to consider about the past two centuries of monetary theory that I referred to above is that for at least three-quarters of that time there was a basic default assumption that the value of money was ultimately governed by the value of some real commodity, usually either silver or gold (or even both). There could be temporary deviations between the value of money and the value of the monetary standard, but because there was a standard, the value of gold or silver provided a benchmark against which the value of money could always be reckoned. I am not saying that this was either a good way of thinking about the value of money or a bad way; I am just pointing out that this was metatheoretical background governing how people thought about money.

Even after the final collapse of the gold standard in the mid-1930s, there was a residue of metalism that remained, people still calculating values in terms of gold equivalents and the value of currency in terms of its gold price. Once the gold standard collapsed, it was inevitable that these inherited habits of thinking about money would eventually give way to new ways of thinking, and it took another 40 years or so, until the official way of thinking about the value of money finally eliminated any vestige of the gold mentality. In our age of enlightenment, no sane person any longer thinks about the value of money in terms of gold or silver equivalents.

But the problem for monetary theory is that, without a real-value equivalent to assign to money, the value of money in our macroeconomic models became theoretically indeterminate. If the value of money is theoretically indeterminate, so, too, is the rate of inflation. The value of money and the rate of inflation are simply, as Fischer Black understood, whatever people in the aggregate expect them to be. Nevertheless, our basic mental processes for understanding how central banks can use an interest-rate instrument to control the value of money are carryovers from an earlier epoch when the value of money was determined, most of the time and in most places, by convertibility, either actual or expected, into gold or silver. The interest-rate instrument of central banks was not primarily designed as a method for controlling the value of money; it was the mechanism by which the central bank could control the amount of reserves on its balance sheet and the amount of gold or silver in its vaults. There was only an indirect connection – at least until the 1920s — between a central bank setting its interest-rate instrument to control its balance sheet and the effect on prices and inflation. The rules of monetary policy developed under a gold standard are not necessarily applicable to an economic system in which the value of money is fundamentally indeterminate.

Viewed from this perspective, the Neo-Fisherian Revolution appears as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the present confused state of monetary theory in which the price level and the rate of inflation are entirely subjective and determined totally by expectations.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black

Published July 17, 2015 Federal Reserve , inflation , Ludwig von Mises , Money Illusion , Say's Law , Uncategorized 7 Comments
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I had not planned to post anything today, but after coming across an article (“What the Fed Really Wants Is to Reduce Real Wages”) by Alex Pollock of AEI on Real Clear Markets this morning, I decided that I could not pass up this opportunity to expose a) a basic, but common and well-entrenched, error in macroeconomic reasoning, and b) the disturbingly hypocritical and deceptive argument in the service of which the faulty reasoning was deployed.

I start by quoting from Pollock’s article.

To achieve economic growth over time, prices have to change in order to adjust resource allocation to changing circumstances. This includes the price of work, or wages. Everybody does or should know this, and the Federal Reserve definitely knows it.

The classic argument for why central banks should create inflation as needed is that this causes real wages to fall, thus allowing the necessary downward adjustment, even while nominal wages don’t fall. Specifically, the argument goes like this: For employment and growth, wages sometimes have to adjust downward; people and politicians don’t like to have nominal wages fall– they are “sticky.” People are subject to Money Illusion and they don’t think in inflation-adjusted terms. Therefore create inflation to make real wages fall.

In an instructive meeting of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee in July, 1996, the transcript of which has been released, the Fed took up the issue of “long-term inflation goals.” Promoting the cause of what ultimately became the Fed’s goal of 2% inflation forever, then-Fed Governor Janet Yellen made exactly the classic argument. “To my mind,” she said, “the most important argument for some low inflation rate is…that a little inflation lowers unemployment by facilitating adjustments in relative pay”-in other words, by lowering real wages. This reflects “a world where individuals deeply dislike nominal pay cuts,” she continued. “I think we are dealing here with a very deep-rooted property of the human psyche”-that is, Money Illusion.

In sum, since “workers resist and firms are unwilling to impose nominal pay cuts,” the Fed has to be able to reduce real wages instead by inflation.

But somehow the Fed never mentions that this is what it does. It apparently considers it a secret too deep for voters and members of Congress to understand. Perhaps it would be bad PR?

This summary of why some low rate of inflation may promote labor-0market flexibility is not far from the truth, but it does require some disambiguation. The first distinction to make is that while Janet Yellen was talking about adjustments in relative pay, presumably adjustments in wages both across different occupations and also across different geographic areas — a necessity even if the overall level of real wages is stable — Pollock simply talks about reducing real wages in general.

But there is a second, more subtle distinction to make here as well, and that distinction makes a big difference in how we understand what the Fed is trying to do. Suppose a reduction in real wages in general, or in the relative wages of some workers is necessary for labor-market equilibrium. To suggest that only reason to use inflation to reduce the need for nominal wage cuts is a belief in “Money Illusion” is deeply misleading. The concept of “Money Illusion” is only meaningful when applied to equilibrium states of the economy. Thus the absence of “Money Illusion” means that the equilibrium of the economy (under the assumption that the economy has a unique equilibrium — itself, a very questionable assumption, but let’s not get diverted from this discussion to an even messier and more complicated one) is the same regardless of how nominal prices are scaled up or down. It is entirely possible to accept that proposition (which seems to follow from fairly basic rationality assumptions) without also accepting that it is irrelevant whether real-wage reductions in response to changing circumstances are brought about by inflation or by nominal-wage cuts.

Since any discussion of changes in relative wages presumes that a transition from one equilibrium state to another equilibrium state is occurring, the absence of Money Illusion, being a property of equilibrium,  can’t tell us anything about whether the transition from one equilibrium state to another is more easily accomplished by way of nominal-wage cuts or by way of inflation. If, as a wide range of historical evidence suggests, real-wage reductions are more easily effected by way of inflation than by way of nominal-wage cuts, it is plausible to assume that minimizing nominal-wage cuts will ease the transition from the previous equilibrium to the new one.

Why is that? Here’s one way to think about it. The resistance to nominal-wage cuts implies that more workers will be unemployed initially if nominal wages are cut than if there is an inflationary strategy. It’s true that the unemployment is transitory (in some sense), but the transitory unemployment will be with reduced demand for other products, so the effect of unemployment of some workers is felt by other sectors adn other workers. This implication is not simply the multiplier effect of Keynesian economics, it is also a direct implication of the widely misunderstood Say’s Law, which says that supply creates its own demand. So if workers are more likely to become unemployed in the transition to an equilibrium with reduced real wages if the real-wage reduction is accomplished via a cut in nominal wages than if accomplished by inflation, then inflation reduces the reduction in demand associated with resistance to nominal-wage cuts. The point is simply that we have to consider not just the final destination, but also the route by which we get there. Sometimes the route to a destination may be so difficult and so dangerous, that we are better off not taking it and looking for an alternate route. Nominal wage cuts are very often a bad route by which to get to a new equilibrium.

That takes care of the error in macroeconomic reasoning, but let’s follow Pollock a bit further to get to the hypocrisy and deception.

This classic argument for inflation is of course a very old one. As Ludwig von Mises discussed clearly in 1949, the first reason for “the engineering of inflation” is: “To preserve the height of nominal wage rates…while real wage rates should rather sink.” But, he added pointedly, “neither the governments nor the literary champions of their policy were frank enough to admit openly that one of the main purposes of devaluation was a reduction in the height of real wage rates.” The current Fed is not frank enough to admit this fact either. Indeed, said von Mises, “they were anxious not to mention” this. So is the current Fed.

Nonetheless, the Fed feels it can pontificate on “inequality” and how real middle class incomes are not rising. Sure enough, with nominal wages going up 2% a year, if the Fed achieves its wish for 2% inflation, then indeed real wages will be flat. But Federal Reserve discussions of why they are flat at the very least can be described as disingenuous.

Actually, it is Pollock who is being disingenuous here. The Fed does not have a policy on real wages. Real wages are determined for the most part in free and competitive labor markets. In free and competitive labor markets, the equilibrium real wage is determined independently of the rate of inflation. Remember, there’s no Money Illusion. Minimizing nominal-wage cuts is not a policy aimed at altering equilibrium real wages, which are whatever market forces dictate, but of minimizing the costs associated with the adjustments in real wages in response to changing economic conditions.

I know that it’s always fun to quote Ludwig von Mises on inflation, but if you are going to quote Mises about how inflation is just a scheme designed to reduce real wages, you ought to at least be frank enough to acknowledge that what Mises was advocating was cutting nominal wages instead.

And it is worth recalling that even Mises recognized that nominal wages could not be reduced without limit to achieve equilibrium. In fact, Mises agreed with Keynes that it was a mistake for England in 1925 to restore sterling convertibility into gold at the prewar parity, because doing so required further painful deflation and nominal wage cuts. In other words, even Mises could understand that the path toward equilibrium mattered. Did that mean that Mises was guilty of believing in Money Illusion? Obviously not. And if the rate of deflation can matter to employment in the transition from one equilibrium to another, as Mises obviously conceded, why is it inconceivable that the rate of inflation might also matter?

So Pollock is trying to have his cake and eat it. He condemns the Fed for using inflation as a tool by which to reduce real wages. Actually, that is not what the Fed is doing, but, let us suppose that that’s what the Fed is doing, what alternative does Pollock have in mind? He won’t say. In other words, he’s the pot.

Exposed: Milton Friedman’s Cluelessness about the Insane Bank of France

Published July 16, 2015 Bank of France , Emile Moreau , Federal Reserve , gold standard , Great Depression , Hayek , Milton Friedman , price-specie-flow mechanism 16 Comments
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About a month ago, I started a series of posts about monetary policy in the 1920s, (about the Bank of France, Benjamin Strong, the difference between a gold-exchange standard and a gold standard, and Ludwig von Mises’s unwitting affirmation of the Hawtrey-Cassel explanation of the Great Depression). The series was not planned, each post being written as new ideas occurred to me or as I found interesting tidbits (about Strong and Mises) in reading stuff I was reading about the Bank of France or the gold-exchange standard.

Another idea that occurred to me was to look at the 1991 English translation of the memoirs of Emile Moreau, Governor of the Bank of France from 1926 to 1930; I managed to find a used copy for sale on Amazon, which I got in the mail over the weekend. I have only read snatches here and there, by looking up names in the index, and we’ll see when I get around to reading the book from cover to cover. One of the more interesting things about the book is the foreward to the English translation by Milton Friedman (and one by Charles Kindleberger as well) to go along with the preface to the 1954 French edition by Jacques Rueff (about which I may have something to say in a future post — we’ll see about that, too).

Friedman’s foreward to Moreau’s memoir is sometimes cited as evidence that he backtracked from his denial in the Monetary History that the Great Depression had been caused by international forces, Friedman insisting that there was actually nothing special about the initial 1929 downturn and that the situation only got out of hand in December 1930 when the Fed foolishly (or maliciously) allowed the Bank of United States to fail, triggering a wave of bank runs and bank failures that caused a sharp decline in the US money stock. According to Friedman it was only at that point that what had been a typical business-cycle downturn degenerated into what Friedman like to call the Great Contraction.

Friedman based his claim that domestic US forces, not an international disturbance, had caused the Great Depression on the empirical observation that US gold reserves increased in 1929; that’s called reasoning from a quantity change. From that fact, Friedman inferred that international forces could not have caused the 1929 downturn, because an international disturbance would have meant that the demand for gold would have increased in the international centers associated with the disturbance, in which case gold would have been flowing out of, not into, the US. In a 1985 article in AER, Gertrude Fremling pointed out an obvious problem with Friedman’s argument which was that gold was being produced every year, and some of the newly produced gold was going into the reserves of central banks. An absolute increase in US gold reserves did not necessarily signify a monetary disturbance in the US. In fact, Fremling showed that US gold reserves actually increased proportionately less than total gold reserves. Unfortunately, Fremling failed to point out that there was a flood of gold pouring into France in 1929, making it easier for Friedman to ignore the problem with his misidentification of the US as the source of the Great Depression.

With that introduction out of the way, let me now quote Friedman’s 1991 acknowledgment that the Bank of France played some role in causing the Great Depression.

Rereading the memoirs of this splendid translation . . . has impressed me with important subtleties that I missed when I read the memoirs in a language not my own and in which I am far from completely fluent. Had I fully appreciated those subtleties when Anna Schwartz and I were writing our A Monetary History of the United States, we would likely have assessed responsibility for the international character of the Great Depression somewhat differently. We attributed responsibility for the initiation of a worldwide contraction to the United States and I would not alter that judgment now. However, we also remarked, “The international effects were severe and the transmission rapid, not only because the gold-exchange standard had rendered the international financial system more vulnerable to disturbances, but also because the United States did not follow gold-standard rules.” Were I writing that sentence today, I would say “because the United States and France did not follow gold-standard rules.”

I find this minimal adjustment by Friedman of his earlier position in the Monetary History totally unsatisfactory. Why do I find it unsatisfactory? To begin with, Friedman makes vague references to unnamed but “important subtleties” in Moreau’s memoir that he was unable to appreciate before reading the 1991 translation. There was nothing subtle about the gold accumulation being undertaken by the Bank of France; it was massive and relentless. The table below is constructed from data on official holdings of monetary gold reserves from December 1926 to June 1932 provided by Clark Johnson in his important book Gold, France, and the Great Depression, pp. 190-93. In December 1926 France held $711 million in gold or 7.7% of the world total of official gold reserves; in June 1932, French gold holdings were $3.218 billion or 28.4% of the world total.

monetary_gold_reservesWhat was it about that policy that Friedman didn’t get? He doesn’t say. What he does say is that he would not alter his previous judgment that the US was responsible “for the initiation of a worldwide contraction.” The only change he would make would be to say that France, as well as the US, contributed to the vulnerability of the international financial system to unspecified disturbances, because of a failure to follow “gold-standard rules.” I will just note that, as I have mentioned many times on this blog, references to alleged “gold standard rules” are generally not only unhelpful, but confusing, because there were never any rules as such to the gold standard, and what are termed “gold-standard rules” are largely based on a misconception, derived from the price-specie-flow fallacy, of how the gold standard actually worked.

My goal in this post was not to engage in more Friedman bashing. What I wanted to do was to clarify the underlying causes of Friedman’s misunderstanding of what caused the Great Depression. But I have to admit that sometimes Friedman makes it hard not to engage in Friedman bashing. So let’s examine another passage from Friedman’s foreward, and see where that takes us.

Another feature of Moreau’s book that is most fascinating . . . is the story it tells of the changing relations between the French and British central banks. At the beginning, with France in desperate straits seeking to stabilize its currency, [Montagu] Norman [Governor of the Bank of England] was contemptuous of France and regarded it as very much of a junior partner. Through the accident that the French currency was revalued at a level that stimulated gold imports, France started to accumulate gold reserves and sterling reserves and gradually came into the position where at any time Moreau could have forced the British off gold by withdrawing the funds he had on deposit at the Bank of England. The result was that Norman changed from being a proud boss and very much the senior partner to being almost a supplicant at the mercy of Moreau.

What’s wrong with this passage? Well, Friedman was correct about the change in the relative positions of Norman and Moreau from 1926 to 1928, but to say that it was an accident that the French currency was revalued at a level that stimulated gold imports is completely — and in this case embarrassingly — wrong, and wrong in two different senses: one strictly factual, and the other theoretical. First, and most obviously, the level at which the French franc was stabilized — 125 francs per pound — was hardly an accident. Indeed, it was precisely the choice of the rate at which to stabilize the franc that was a central point of Moreau’s narrative in his memoir, a central drama of the tale told by Moreau, more central than the relationship between Norman and Moreau, being the struggle between Moreau and his boss, the French Premier, Raymond Poincaré, over whether the franc would be stabilized at that rate, the rate insisted upon by Moreau, or the prewar parity of 25 francs per pound. So inquiring minds can’t help but wonder what exactly did Friedman think he was reading?

The second sense in which Friedman’s statement was wrong is that the amount of gold that France was importing depended on a lot more than just its exchange rate; it was also a function of a) the monetary policy chosen by the Bank of France, which determined the total foreign-exchange holdings held by the Bank of France, and b) the portfolio decisions of the Bank of France about how, given the exchange rate of the franc and given the monetary policy it adopted, the resulting quantity of foreign-exchange reserves would be held.

Let’s follow Friedman a bit further in his foreward as he quotes from his own essay “Should There Be an Independent Monetary Authority?” contrasting the personal weakness of W. P. G. Harding, Governor of the Federal Reserve in 1919-20, with the personal strength of Moreau:

Almost every student of the period is agreed that the great mistake of the Reserve System in postwar monetary policy was to permit the money stock to expand very rapidly in 1919 and then to step very hard on the brakes in 1920. This policy was almost surely responsible for both the sharp postwar rise in prices and the sharp subsequent decline. It is amusing to read Harding’s answer in his memoirs to criticism that was later made of the policies followed. He does not question that alternative policies might well have been preferable for the economy as a whole, but emphasizes the treasury’s desire to float securities at a reasonable rate of interest, and calls attention to a then-existing law under which the treasury could replace the head of the Reserve System. Essentially he was saying the same thing that I heard another member of the Reserve Board say shortly after World War II when the bond-support program was in question. In response to the view expressed by some of my colleagues and myself that the bond-support program should be dropped, he largely agreed but said ‘Do you want us to lose our jobs?’

The importance of personality is strikingly revealed by the contrast between Harding’s behavior and that of Emile Moreau in France under much more difficult circumstances. Moreau formally had no independence whatsoever from the central government. He was named by the premier, and could be discharged at any time by the premier. But when he was asked by the premier to provide the treasury with funds in a manner that he considered inappropriate and undesirable, he flatly refused to do so. Of course, what happened was that Moreau was not discharged, that he did not do what the premier had asked him to, and that stabilization was rather more successful.

Now, if you didn’t read this passage carefully, in particular the part about Moreau’s threat to resign, as I did not the first three or four times that I read it, you might not have noticed what a peculiar description Friedman gives of the incident in which Moreau threatened to resign following a request “by the premier to provide the treasury with funds in a manner that he considered inappropriate and undesirable.” That sounds like a very strange request for the premier to make to the Governor of the Bank of France. The Bank of France doesn’t just “provide funds” to the Treasury. What exactly was the request? And what exactly was “inappropriate and undesirable” about that request?

I have to say again that I have not read Moreau’s memoir, so I can’t state flatly that there is no incident in Moreau’s memoir corresponding to Friedman’s strange account. However, Jacques Rueff, in his preface to the 1954 French edition (translated as well in the 1991 English edition), quotes from Moreau’s own journal entries how the final decision to stabilize the French franc at the new official parity of 125 per pound was reached. And Friedman actually refers to Rueff’s preface in his foreward! Let’s read what Rueff has to say:

The page for May 30, 1928, on which Mr. Moreau set out the problem of legal stabilization, is an admirable lesson in financial wisdom and political courage. I reproduce it here in its entirety with the hope that it will be constantly present in the minds of those who will be obliged in the future to cope with French monetary problems.

“The word drama may sound surprising when it is applied to an event which was inevitable, given the financial and monetary recovery achieved in the past two years. Since July 1926 a balanced budget has been assured, the National Treasury has achieved a surplus and the cleaning up of the balance sheet of the Bank of France has been completed. The April 1928 elections have confirmed the triumph of Mr. Poincaré and the wisdom of the ideas which he represents. The political situation has been stabilized. Under such conditions there is nothing more natural than to stabilize the currency, which has in fact already been pegged at the same level for the last eighteen months.

“But things are not quite that simple. The 1926-28 recovery from restored confidence to those who had actually begun to give up hope for their country and its capacity to recover from the dark hours of July 1926. . . . perhaps too much confidence.

“Distinguished minds maintained that it was possible to return the franc to its prewar parity, in the same way as was done with the pound sterling. And how tempting it would be to thereby cancel the effects of the war and postwar periods and to pay back in the same currency those who had lent the state funds which for them often represented an entire lifetime of unremitting labor.

“International speculation seemed to prove them right, because it kept changing its dollars and pounds for francs, hoping that the franc would be finally revalued.

“Raymond Poincaré, who was honesty itself and who, unlike most politicians, was truly devoted to the public interest and the glory of France, did, deep in his heart, agree with those awaiting a revaluation.

“But I myself had to play the ungrateful role of representative of the technicians who knew that after the financial bloodletting of the past years it was impossible to regain the original parity of the franc.

“I was aware, as had already been determined by the Committee of Experts in 1926, that it was impossible to revalue the franc beyond certain limits without subjecting the national economy to a particularly painful readaptation. If we were to sacrifice the vital force of the nation to its acquired wealth, we would put at risk the recovery we had already accomplished. We would be, in effect, preparing a counterspeculation against our currency that would come within a rather short time.

“Since the parity of 125 francs to one pound has held for long months and the national economy seems to have adapted itself to it, it should be at this rate that we stabilize without further delay.

“This is what I had to tell Mr. Poincaré at the beginning of June 1928, tipping the scales of his judgment with the threat of my resignation.” [my emphasis]

So what this tells me is that the very act of personal strength that so impressed Friedman about Moreau was not about some imaginary “inappropriate” request made by Poincaré (“who was honesty itself”) for the Bank to provide funds to the treasury, but about whether the franc should be stabilized at 125 francs per pound, a peg that Friedman asserts was “accidental.” Obviously, it was not “accidental” at all, but it was based on the judgment of Moreau and his advisers (including two economists of considerable repute, Charles Rist and his student Pierre Quesnay) as attested to by Rueff in his preface, of which we know that Friedman was aware.

Just to avoid misunderstanding, I would just say here that I am not suggesting that Friedman was intentionally misrepresenting any facts. I think that he was just being very sloppy in assuming that the facts actually were what he rather cluelessly imagined them to be.

Before concluding, I will quote again from Friedman’s foreword:

Benjamin Strong and Emile Moreau were admirable characters of personal force and integrity. But in my view, the common policies they followed were misguided and contributed to the severity and rapidity of transmission of the U.S. shock to the international community. We stressed that the U.S. “did not permit the inflow of gold to expand the U.S. money stock. We not only sterilized it, we went much further. Our money stock moved perversely, going down as the gold stock went up” from 1929 to 1931. France did the same, both before and after 1929.

Strong and Moreau tried to reconcile two ultimately incompatible objectives: fixed exchange rates and internal price stability. Thanks to the level at which Britain returned to gold in 1925, the U.S. dollar was undervalued, and thanks to the level at which France returned to gold at the end of 1926, so was the French franc. Both countries as a result experienced substantial gold inflows. Gold-standard rules called for letting the stock of money rise in response to the gold inflows and for price inflation in the U.S. and France, and deflation in Britain, to end the over-and under-valuations. But both Strong and Moreau were determined to preven t inflation and accordingly both sterilized the gold inflows, preventing them from providing the required increase in the quantity of money. The result was to drain the other central banks of the world of their gold reserves, so that they became excessively vulnerable to reserve drains. France’s contribution to this process was, I now realize, much greater than we treated it as being in our History.

These two paragraphs are full of misconceptions; I will try to clarify and correct them. First Friedman refers to “the U.S. shock to the international community.” What is he talking about? I don’t know. Is he talking about the crash of 1929, which he dismissed as being of little consequence for the subsequent course of the Great Depression, whose importance in Friedman’s view was certainly far less than that of the failure of the Bank of United States? But from December 1926 to December 1929, total monetary gold holdings in the world increased by about $1 billion; while US gold holdings declined by nearly $200 million, French holdings increased by $922 million over 90% of the increase in total world official gold reserves. So for Friedman to have even suggested that the shock to the system came from the US and not from France is simply astonishing.

Friedman’s discussion of sterilization lacks any coherent theoretical foundation, because, working with the most naïve version of the price-specie-flow mechanism, he imagines that flows of gold are entirely passive, and that the job of the monetary authority under a gold standard was to ensure that the domestic money stock would vary proportionately with the total stock of gold. But that view of the world ignores the possibility that the demand to hold money in any country could change. Thus, Friedman, in asserting that the US money stock moved perversely from 1929 to 1931, going down as the gold stock went up, misunderstands the dynamic operating in that period. The gold stock went up because, with the banking system faltering, the public was shifting their holdings of money balances from demand deposits to currency. Legal reserves were required against currency, but not against demand deposits, so the shift from deposits to currency necessitated an increase in gold reserves. To be sure the US increase in the demand for gold, driving up its value, was an amplifying factor in the worldwide deflation, but total US holdings of gold from December 1929 to December 1931 rose by $150 million compared with an increase of $1.06 billion in French holdings of gold over the same period. So the US contribution to world deflation at that stage of the Depression was small relative to that of France.

Friedman is correct that fixed exchange rates and internal price stability are incompatible, but he contradicts himself a few sentences later by asserting that Strong and Moreau violated gold-standard rules in order to stabilize their domestic price levels, as if it were the gold-standard rules rather than market forces that would force domestic price levels into correspondence with a common international level. Friedman asserts that the US dollar was undervalued after 1925 because the British pound was overvalued, presuming with no apparent basis that the US balance of payments was determined entirely by its trade with Great Britain. As I observed above, the exchange rate is just one of the determinants of the direction and magnitude of gold flows under the gold standard, and, as also pointed out above, gold was generally flowing out of the US after 1926 until the ferocious tightening of Fed policy at the end of 1928 and in 1929 caused a sizable inflow of gold into the US in 1929.

In thrall to the crude price-specie-flow fallacy, Friedman erroneously assumes that inflation rates under the gold standard are governed by the direction and size of gold flows, inflows being inflationary and outflows deflationary. That is just wrong; national inflation rates were governed by a common international price level in terms of gold (and any positive or negative inflation in terms of gold) and whether prices in the local currency were above or below their gold equivalents, market forces operating to equalize the prices of tradable goods. Domestic monetary policies, whether or not they conformed to supposed gold standard rules, had negligible effect on national inflation rates. If the pound was overvalued, there was deflationary pressure in Britain regardless of whether British monetary policy was tight or easy, and if the franc was undervalued there was inflationary pressure in France regardless of whether French monetary policy was tight or easy. Tightness or ease of monetary policy under the gold standard affects not the rate of inflation, but the rate at which the central bank gained or lost foreign exchange reserves.

However, when, in the aggregate, central banks were tightening their policies, thereby tending to accumulate gold, the international gold market would come under pressure, driving up the value of gold relative goods, thereby causing deflationary pressure among all the gold standard countries. That is what happened in 1929, when the US started to accumulate gold even as the insane Bank of France was acting as a giant international vacuum cleaner sucking in gold from everywhere else in the world. Friedman, even as he was acknowledging that he had underestimated the importance of the Bank of France in the Monetary History, never figured this out. He was obsessed, instead with relatively trivial effects of overvaluation of the pound, and undervaluation of the franc and the dollar. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

Of course, Friedman was not alone in his cluelessness about the Bank of France. F. A. Hayek, with whom, apart from their common belief in the price-specie-flow fallacy, Friedman shared almost no opinions about monetary theory and policy, infamously defended the Bank of France in 1932.

France did not prevent her monetary circulation from increasing by the very same amount as that of the gold inflow – and this alone is necessary for the gold standard to function.

Thus, like Friedman, Hayek completely ignored the effect that the monumental accumulation of gold by the Bank of France had on the international value of gold. That Friedman accused the Bank of France of violating the “gold-standard rules” while Hayek denied the accusation simply shows, notwithstanding the citations by the Swedish Central Bank of the work that both did on the Great Depression when awarding them their Nobel Memorial Prizes, how far away they both were from an understanding of what was actually going on during that catastrophic period.

Le Boche Payera Tout

Published July 12, 2015 Angela Merkel , Keynes , World War I 25 Comments

Despite the belated acquiescence of the Greek government to Eurozone demands that further austerity measures be imposed, the latest news updates from Brussels continue to sound ominous, Eurozone officials now insisting on even tougher measures than previously demanded as evidence that Greece is finally getting serious about carrying out its commitments to bring its finances under control. All participants in this tragicomedy have plenty to answer for, but as I, along with many others, have said before, the primary blame rests with the policy of the European Central Bank, which, obeying the dictates of Mrs. Merkel and her government, has a policy that has allowed nominal GDP in the Eurozone to grow by just 5% since 2011, an average rate of growth of only 1% a year. For Greece, this policy has meant a catastrophic fall in nominal GDP since 2008 of about a third. No country could survive such a sustained reduction in its nominal GDP without irreparable damage to its economy.

The responsibility of successive Greek governments for the current disaster is palpable and universally recognized, but the responsibility of the ECB and its German masters for the damage to the Greek tragedy is equally palpable, but scarcely mentioned, at least outside of Greece. What is even less mentioned is how contrary this policy has been to Germany’s own self-interest, because, in devastating the Greek economy through the – dare I say it, yes I will say it – INSANE policy of the European Central Bank, Germany has, in what might easily be construed as a policy of deliberate and sadistic torture, doled out to Greece just enough in the way of loans to prevent its default over the past five years, even as it has systematically destroyed the capacity of Greece to repay the very loans that Germany has extended to Greece.

It is worth recalling that just over 90 years ago, another European country was in the midst of a debt crisis, a crisis that country had brought upon itself by its own irresponsible — indeed reckless and even criminal – policies. In case you don’t already know which European country I am referring to – and even if you don’t know, you should be able to guess – I am referring to Germany, which, in its pursuit of its goal of European domination and a colonial empire to match, if not, overshadow those of Britain and France, provoked the start of World War I, leading to the deaths of 17 million military personnel and civilians. The outrage against Germany after the War was such that, after the collapse of the German government and the flight of Kaiser Wilhelm, the subsequent Versailles Treaty of 1919 imposed punitive terms on Germany, obligating Germany to pay war reparations to the allies, primarily France on whose soil the Western front was largely fought.

In what was his most famous work until he wrote the General Theory, J. M. Keynes, who was on the British delegation to Versailles conference, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in which he accused the allies of imposing a Carthaginian Peace on Germany, because the burden of reparations was beyond the realistic capacity of Germany to bear, thereby making Keynes a kind of national hero in Germany (“sic transit gloria mundi,” as they say). The next decade seemed to confirm Keynes’s warning, because Germany was either unable or unwilling to make the reparations payments required of it, and the United States and the rest of the world, by raising tariffs throughout the 1920s, showed little inclination to accept the trade deficits that would have been required if Germany had made the reparations payments it was obligated to pay. As if to demonstrate its incapacity to pay its debts, Germany in 1923 opted for a hyperinflationary meltdown of its economy — the political equivalent of a hunger strike — in a kind of passive-aggressive show of defiance toward its debt obligations.

Meanwhile, the prospect of receiving reparations payments proved to be equally unsettling on the chief prospective beneficiaries of those payments, the French. While most of the rest of Europe was struggling to restore their currencies back to gold convertibility, by adopting austerity measures aimed at reducing public expenditures and raising revenues, the French felt that they could adopt afford to increase public expenditures, because after all, “le Boche payera tout” (the Hun will pay it all), “Boche” being a French slang term of endearment for Germans that has somehow come to be translated in English as “Hun.”

The notion that it would be the Germans who could be made to pay for their self-indulgent extravagance had a poisonous effect on the French economy in the mid-1920s, causing a rapid inflation, and capital flight, which not halted until Raymond Poincare formed a national unity government in 1926 and Emile Moreau was appointed Governor of the Bank of France, together managing to halt the inflation and stabilize the franc, setting the stage for their own disastrous gold accumulation policy starting in 1927, thereby precipitating, with a huge assist from the Federal Reserve Board, the Great Depression.

There are really two points that I want to make by recounting this sad history of the aftermath of World War I. First, one might have expected that, having once been victimized by the demands of its European neighbors that it pay the debt obligations it owed them, the Germans might have some feeling of empathy or understanding for the national suffering imposed when creditor nations try to collect debt obligations beyond the capacity of the debtor nation to repay. But there is hardly any sign of such an awareness in Germany today. Rather the attitude seems to be “the Greeks must pay whatever the cost.”

Now one might say, in defense of the Germans, that the debts incurred by the Greeks were voluntarily undertaken, while the debts imposed on Germany were imposed against the will of the Germans. But that seems to me to be a distorted view of the war reparations imposed on Germany. The German nation went to war enthusiastically in 1914 in hopes of achieving European, if not world, domination, the same ambition that led to another war enthusiastically supported by the German nation only 20 years after the end of the previous war. The war reparations imposed on Germany after World War I may have been excessive, given the economic realities of the situation, but there is no reason to think that, given the appalling suffering caused by German aggression in World War I, the war reparations imposed upon them were less legitimate obligations than the current debts owed by the Greeks to the Germans.

The second point that I would make is that there is certainly nothing noble or uplifting about the French attitude “le Boche payera tout.” Indeed, the attitude was both irresponsible and ultimately self-defeating, for two reasons. First, there was never a realistic way of compelling the Germans to pay, and second, even if the Germans could have been compelled to pay, the consequence would likely have been damaging to the French economy, because transfer payments on a large scale tend to undermine incentives to produce (the “Dutch disease”). Nevertheless, there was a certain selfish logic underlying the French attitude that is not hard to understand.

However, the current German attitude that the Greeks must pay whatever the cost is, at a very deep level, irrational. Forcing the Greeks into national bankruptcy or to leave the Euro will only guarantee that the Greeks will never pay the Germans back what is owed to them. If the Germans want to be repaid, the only possible way for that to be accomplished is to ease the current debt burden sufficiently to allow a reconstruction of the Greek economy, thereby enabling the Greeks to produce enough to service their debt obligations. As long as Greek nominal GDP is growing less rapidly than their debt obligations, that will never happen. That simple truth seems beyond the power of German comprehension.

What are the Germans even thinking? Who knows what they could possibly be thinking? Maybe Donald Trump could tell us. Or consider the fable of the scorpion and the frog:

A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion says, “Because if I do, I will die too.”

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp “Why?”

Replies the scorpion: “It’s my nature…”

In Praise of Israel Kirzner

Published July 9, 2015 Arrow-Debrew-McKenzie model , Austrian Business-Cycle Theory , Deirdre McCloskey , general equilibrium , Hayek , Ludwig von Mises 9 Comments
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Over the holiday weekend, I stumbled across, to my pleasant surprise, the lecture given just a week ago by Israel Kirzner on being awarded the 2015 Hayek medal by the Hayek Gesellschaft in Berlin. The medal, it goes without saying, was richly deserved, because Kirzner’s long career spanning over half a century has produced hundreds of articles and many books elucidating many important concepts in various areas of economics, but especially on the role of competition and entrepreneurship (the title of his best known book) in theory and in practice. A student of Ludwig von Mises, when Mises was at NYU in the 1950s, Kirzner was able to recast and rework Mises’s ideas in a way that made them more accessible and more relevant to younger generations of students than were the didactic and dogmatic pronouncements so characteristic of Mises’s own writings. Not that there wasn’t and still isn’t a substantial market niche in which such didacticism and dogmatism is highly prized, but there are also many for whom those features of the Misesian style don’t go down quite so easily.

But it would be very unfair, and totally wrong, to think of Kirzner as a mere popularizer of Misesian doctrines. Although in his modesty and self-effacement, Kirzner made few, if any, claims of originality for himself, his application of ideas that he learned from, or, having developed them himself, read into, Mises, Kirzner’s contributions in their own way were not at all lacking originality and creativity. In a certain sense, his contribution was, in its own way, entrepreneurial, i.e., taking a concept or an idea or an analytical tool applied in one context and deploying that concept, idea, or tool in another context. It’s worth mentioning that a reverential attitude towards one’s teachers and intellectual forbears is not only very much characteristic of the Talmudic tradition of which Kirzner is also an accomplished master, but it’s also characteristic, or at least used to be, of other scholarly traditions, notably Cambridge, England, where such illustrious students of Alfred Marshall as Frederick Lavington and A. C. Pigou viewed themselves as merely elaborating on doctrines that had already been expounded by Marshall himself, Pigou having famously said of his own voluminous work, “it’s all in Marshall.”

But rather than just extol Kirzner’s admirable personal qualities, I want to discuss what Kirzner said in his Hayek lecture. His main point was to explain how, in his view, the Austrian tradition, just as it seemed to be petering out in the late 1930s and 1940s, evolved from just another variant school of thought within the broader neoclassical tradition that emerged late in the 19th century from the marginal revolution started almost simultaneously around 1870 by William Stanley Jevons in England, Carl Menger in Austria, and Leon Walras in France/Switzerland, into a completely distinct school of thought very much at odds with the neoclassical mainstream. In Kirzner’s view, the divergence between Mises and Hayek on the one hand and the neoclassical mainstream on the other was that Mises and Hayek went further in developing the subjectivist paradigm underlying the marginal-utility theory of value introduced by Jevons, Menger, and Walras in opposition to the physicalist, real-cost, theory of value inherited from Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and other economists of the classical school.

The marginal revolution shifted the focus of economics from the objective physical and technological forces that supposedly determine cost, which, in turn, supposedly determines value, to subjective, not objective, mental states or opinions that characterize preferences, which, in turn, determine value. And, as soon became evident, the new subjective marginalist theory of value implied that cost, at bottom, is nothing other than a foregone value (opportunity cost), so that the classical doctrine that cost determines value has it exactly backwards: it is really value that determines cost (though it is usually a mistake to suppose that in complex systems causation runs in only one direction).

However, as the neoclassical research program evolved, the subjective character of the underlying theory was increasingly de-emphasized, a de-emphasis that was probably driven by two factors: 1) the profoundly paradoxical nature of the idea that value determines cost, not the reverse, and b) the mathematicization of economics and the increasing adoption, in the Walrasian style, of functional representations of utility and production, leading to the construction of models of economic equilibrium that, under appropriate continuity and convexity assumptions, could be shown to have a theoretically determinate and unique solution. The false impression was created that economics was an objective science like physics, and that economics should aim to create objective and deterministic scientific representations (models) of complex economic systems that could then yield quantitatively precise predictions, in the same way that physics produced models of planetary motion yielding quantitatively precise predictions.

What Hayek and Mises objected to was the idea, derived from the functional approach to economic theory, that economics is just a technique of optimization subject to constraints, that all economic problems can be reduced to optimization problems. And it is a historical curiosum that one of the chief contributors to this view of economics was none other than Lionel Robbins in his seminal methodological work An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, written precisely during that stage of his career when he came under the profound influence of Mises and Hayek, but before Mises and Hayek adopted the more radically subjective approach that characterizes their views in the late 1930s and 1940s. The critical works are Hayek’s essays reproduced as The Counterrevolution of Science and his essays “Economics and Knowledge,” “The Facts of the Social Sciences,” “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” and “The Meaning of Competition,” all contained in the remarkable volume Individualism and Economic Order.

What neoclassical economists who developed this deterministic version of economic theory, a version wonderfully expounded in Samuelson Foundations of Economic Analysis and ultimately embodied in the Arrow-Debreu general-equilibrium model, failed to see is that the model could not incorporate in an intellectually satisfying or empirically fruitful way the process of economic growth and development. The fundamental characteristic of the Arrow-Debreu model is its perfection. The solution of the model is Pareto-optimal, and cannot be improved upon; the entire unfolding of the model from beginning to end proceeds entirely according to a plan (actually a set of perfectly consistent and harmonious individual plans) with no surprises and no disappointments relative to what was already foreseen and planned — in detail — at the outset. Nothing is learned in the unfolding and execution of those detailed, perfectly harmonious plans that was not already known at the beginning, whatever happens having already been foreseen. If something truly new would have been learned in the course of the unfolding and execution of those plans, the new knowledge would necessarily have been surprising, and a surprise would necessarily have generated some disappointment and caused some revision of a previously formulated plan of action. But that is precisely what the Arrow-Debreu model, in its perfection, disallows. And that is what, from the perspective of Mises, Hayek, and Kirzner, is exactly wrong with the entire development of neoclassical theory for the past 80 years or more.

The specific point of the neoclassical paradigm on which Kirzner has focused his criticism is the inability of the neoclassical paradigm to find a place for the entrepreneur and entrepreneurial activity in its theoretical apparatus. Profit is what is earned by the entrepreneur, but in full general equilibrium, all income is earned by factors of production, so profits have been exhausted and the entrepreneur euthanized.

Joseph Schumpeter, who was torn between his admiration for the Walrasian general equilibrium system and his Austrian education in economics, tried to reintroduce the entrepreneur as the disruptive force behind the process of creative destruction, the role of the entrepreneur being to disrupt the harmonious equilibrium of the Walrasian system by innovating – introducing either new techniques of production or new consumer products. Kirzner, however, though not denying that disruptive Schumpeterian entrepreneurs may come on the scene from time to time, is focused on a less disruptive, but more pervasive and more characteristic type of entrepreneurship, the kind that is on the lookout for – that is alert to – the profit opportunities that are always latent in the existing allocation of resources and the current structure of input and output prices. Prices in some places or at some times may be high relative to other places and other times, so the entrepreneurial maxim is: buy cheap and sell dear.

Not so long ago, someone noticed that used book prices on Amazon are typically lower at the end of the semester or the school year, when students are trying to unload the books that they don’t want to keep, than they are at the beginning of the semester, when students are buying the books that they will have to read in the new semester. By buying the books students are selling at the end of the school year and selling them at the beginning of the school year, the insightful entrepreneur reduces the cost to students of obtaining the books they use during the school year. That bit of insight and alertness is classic Kirznerian entrepreneurship in action; it was rewarded by a profit, but the activity was equilibrating, not disruptive, reducing the spread between prices for the same, or very similar, commodities paid by buyers or received by sellers at different times of the year.

Sometimes entrepreneurship involves recognizing that a resource or a factor of production is undervalued in its current use. Shifting the resource from a relatively low-valued use to a higher-value use generates a profit for the alert entrepreneur. Here, again, the activity is equilibrating not disruptive. And as others start to catch on, the profit earned on the spread between the value of the resource in its old and new uses will be eroded by the competition of copy-cat entrepreneurs and of other entrepreneurs with an even better idea derived from an even more penetrating insight.

Here is another critical point. Rarely does a new idea come into existence and cause just one change. Every change creates a new and different situation, potentially creating further opportunities to be taken advantage of by other alert and insightful individuals. In an open competitive system, there is no reason why the process of discovery and adaptation should ever come to an end state in which new insights can no longer be made and change is no longer possible.

However, it also the case that knowledge or information is often imperfect and faulty, and that incentives are imperfectly aligned with actual benefits, so that changes can be profitable even though they lead to inferior outcomes. Margarine can be substituted for butter, and transfats for saturated fats. Big mistake. But who knew? And processed carbohydrates can replace fats in low-fat diets. Big mistake. But who knew?

I myself had the pleasure of experiencing first-hand, on a very small scale to be sure, but still in a very inspiring way, this sort of unplanned, serendipitous connection between my stumbling across Kirzner’s Hayek lecture and, then, after starting to write this post a couple of days ago, doing a Google search on Kirzner plus something else (can’t remember what) and seeing a link to Deirdre McCloskey’s paper “A Kirznerian Economic History of the Modern World” in which McCloskey, in somewhat over-the-top style, waxed eloquent about the long and circuitous evolution of her views from the strict neoclassicism in which she was indoctrinated at Harvard and later at Chicago to Kirznerian Austrianism. McCloskey observes in her wonderful paean to Kirzner that growth theory (which is now the core of modern macroeconomics) is utterly incapable of accounting for the historically unique period of economic growth over the past 200 years in what we now refer to as the developed world.

I had faced repeatedly 1964 to 2010 the failure of oomph in the routine, Samuelsonian arguments, such as accumulation inspired by the Protestant ethic, or trade as an engine of growth, or Marxian exploitation, or imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, or factor-biased induced technical change, or Unified Growth Theory. My colleagues at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, Al Harberger and Bob Fogel, pioneered the point that Harberger Triangles of efficiency gain are small (Harberger 1964; Fogel 1965). None of the allocative, capital-accumulation explanations of economic growth since Adam Smith have worked scientifically, which I show in depressing detail in Bourgeois Dignity. None of them have the quantitative force and the distinctiveness to the modern world and the West to explain the Great Fact. No oomph.

What works? Creativity. Innovation. Discovery. The Austrian core. And where did discovery come from? It came from the releasing of the West from ancient constraints on the dignity and liberty of the bourgeoisie, producing an intellectual and engineering explosion of ideas. As the banker and science writer Matt Ridley has recently described it (2010; compare Storr 2008), ideas started breeding, and having baby ideas, who bred further. The liberation of the Jews in the West is a good emblem for the wider story. A people of the book began to be allowed into commercial centers in Holland and then England, and allowed outside the shtetl and the ghetto, and into the universities of Berlin and Manchester. They commenced innovating on a massive, breeding-reactor scale, in good ways (Rothschild, Einstein) and in bad (Marx, Freud).

Ridley explains how the evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen proposed in 1973 a Red Queen Hypothesis that would explain why commercial and mechanical ideas, when first allowed to evolve, had to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Economists would call it the dissipation of initial rents, in the second and third acts of the economic drama. Once breeding ideas were set free in the seventeenth century they created more and more opportunities for Kirznerian alertness. The opportunities were alertly taken up, and persuasively argued for, and at length routinized. The idea of the steam engine had babies with the idea of rails and the idea of wrought iron, and the result was the railroads. The new generation of ideas-in view of the continuing breeding of ideas going on in the background-created by their very routinization still more Kirznerian opportunities. Railroads once they were routine led to Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. And the routine then created prosperous people, such as my grandfather the freight conductor on the Milwaukee Road or my great-grandfather the postal clerk on the Chicago & Western Indiana or my other great-grandfather who invented the ring on telephones (which extended the telegraph, which itself had made tight scheduling of trains possible). Some became prosperous enough to take up the new ideas, and all became prosperous enough under the Great Fact to buy them. If there was no dissipation of the rents to alertness, and no ultimate gain of income to hoi polloi, no third act, no Red Queen effect, then innovation would not have a justification on egalitarian grounds-as in the historical event it surely did have. The Bosses would engorge all the income, as Ricardo in the early days of the Great Fact had feared. But in the event the discovery of which Kirzner and the Austrian tradition speaks enriched in the third act mainly the poor-your ancestors, and Israel’s, and mine.

It is the growth and diffusion of knowledge (both practical and theoretical, but especially the former), not the accumulation of capital, that accounts for the spectacular economic growth of the past two centuries. So, all praise to the Austrian economist par excellence, Israel Kirzner. But just to avoid any misunderstanding, I will state for the record, that my admiration for Kirzner does not mean that I have gone wobbly on the subject of Austrian Business Cycle Theory, a subject on which Kirzner has been, so far as I know, largely silent — yet further evidence – as if any were needed — of Kirzner’s impeccable judgment.

Mises’s Unwitting Affirmation of the Hawtrey-Cassel Explanation of the Great Depression

Published July 3, 2015 Bank of France , Federal Reserve , gold standard , gold-exchange standard , Great Depression , Ludwig von Mises 12 Comments
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In looking up some sources for my previous post on the gold-exchange standard, I checked, as I like to do from time to time, my old copy of The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. Mises published The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912 (in German of course) when he was about 31 years old, a significant achievement. In 1924 he published a second enlarged edition addressing many issues that became relevant in the aftermath the World War and the attempts then underway to restore the gold standard. So one finds in the 1934 English translation of the 1924 German edition a whole section of Part III, chapter 6 devoted to the Gold-Exchange Standard. I noticed that I had dog-eared the section, which presumably means that when I first read the book I found the section interesting in some way, but I did not write any notes in the margin, so I am not sure what it was that I found interesting. I can’t even remember when I read the book, but there are many passages underlined throughout the book, so I am guessing that I did read it from cover to cover. Luckily, I wrote my name and the year (1971) in which I bought the book on the inside of the front cover, so I am also guessing that I read the book before I became aware of the Hawtrey Cassel explanation of the Great Depression. But it seems clear to me that whatever it was that I found interesting about the section on the gold-exchange standard, it didn’t make a lasting impression on me, because I don’t think that I ever reread that section until earlier this week. So let’s go through Mises’s discussion and see what we find.

Wherever inflation has thrown the monetary system into confusion, the primary aim of currency policy has been to bring the printing presses to a standstill. Once that is done, once it has at last been learned that even the policy of raising the objective exchange-value of money has undesirable consequences, and once it is seen that the chief thing is to stabilize the value of money, then attempts are made to establish a gold-exchange standard as quickly as possible.

This seems to be reference to the World War I inflation and the somewhat surprising post-war inflation of 1919, which caused most countries to want to peg their currencies against the dollar, then the only major country with a currency convertible into gold. Mises continues:

This, for example, is what occurred in Austria at the end of 1922 and since then, at least for the time being, the dollar rate in that country has been fixed. But in existing circumstances, invariability of the dollar rate means invariability of the price of gold also. Thus Austria has a dollar-exchange standard and so, indirectly, a gold-exchange standard. That is the currency system that seems to be the immediate aim in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and many other European countries. Nowadays, European aspirations in the sphere of currency policy are limited to a return to the gold standard. This is quite understandable, for the gold standard previously functioned on the whole satisfactorily; it is true that it did not secure the unattainable ideal of a money with an invariable objective exchange value, but it did preserve the monetary system from the influence of governments and changing policies.

Yet the gold-standard system was already undermined before the war. The first step was the abolition of the physical use of gold in individual payments and the accumulation of the stocks of gold in the vaults of the great banks-of-issue. The next step was the adoption of the practice by a series of States of holding the gold reserves of the central banks-of-issue (or the redemption funds that took their place), not in actual gold, but in various sorts of foreign claims to gold. Thus it came about that the greater part of the stock of gold that was used for monetary purposes was gradually accumulated in a few large banks-of-issue; and so these banks became the central reserve-banks of the world, as previously the central banks-of-issue had become central reserve-banks for individual countries.

Mises is leaving out a lot here. Many countries were joining gold standard in the last quarter of the 19th century, when the gold standard became an international system. The countries adopting the gold standard did not have a gold coinage; for them to introduce a gold coinage, as Mises apparently would have been wanted, was then prohibitively costly. But gold reserves were still piling up in many central banks because of laws and regulations requiring central banks to hold gold reserves against banknotes. If gold coinages would have been introduced in addition to the gold gold reserves being accumulated as reserves against banknotes, the spread of gold standard through much of the world in the last quarter of the 19th century would have drastically accentuated the deflationary trends that marked most of the period from 1872 to 1896.

The War did not create this development; it merely hastened it a little.

Actually a lot. But we now come to the key passage.

Neither has the development yet reached the stage when all the newly-produced gold that is not absorbed into industrial use flows to a single centre. The Bank of England and the central banks-of-issue of some other States still control large stocks of gold; there are still several of them that take up part of the annual output of gold. Yet fluctuations in the price of gold are nowadays essentially dependent on the policy followed by the Federal Reserve Board. If the United States did not absorb gold to the extent to which it does, the price of gold would fall and the gold-prices of commodities would rise. Since, so long as the dollar represents a fixed quantity of gold, the United States admits the surplus gold and surrenders commodities for gold to an unlimited extent, a rapid fall in the value of gold has hitherto been avoided.

Mises’s explanation here is rather confused, because he neglects to point out that the extent to which gold was flowing into the Federal Reserve was a function, among other things, of the credit policy adopted by the Fed. The higher the interest rate, the more gold would flow into the Fed and, thus, the lower the international price level. Mises makes it sound as if there was a fixed demand for gold by the rest of the world and the US simply took whatever was left over. That was a remarkable misunderstanding on Mises’s part.

But this policy of the United States, which involves considerable sacrifices, might one day be changed. Variations in the price of gold would then occur and this would be bound to give rise in other gold countries to the question of whether it would not be better in order to avoid further rises in prices to dissociate the currency standard from gold.

Note the ambiguous use of the term “price of gold.” The nominal price of gold was fixed by convertibility, so what Mises meant was the real price of gold, with a fixed nominal price. It would have been less ambiguous if the term “value of gold” had been used here and in the rest of the passage instead of “price of gold.” I don’t know if Mises or his translator was at fault.

Just as Sweden attempted for a time to raise the krone above its old gold parity by closing the Mint to gold, so other countries that are now still on the gold standard or intend to return to it might act similarly. This would mean a further drop in the price of gold and a further reduction of the usefulness of gold for monetary purposes. If we disregard the Asiatic demand for money, we might even now without undue exaggeration say that gold has ceased to be a commodity the fluctuations in the price of which are independent of government influence. Fluctuations in the price of gold are nowadays substantially dependent on the behaviour of one government, viz. that of the United States of America.

By George, he’s got it! The value of gold depends mainly on the Fed! Or, to be a bit more exact, on how much gold is being held by the Fed and by the other central banks. The more gold they hold, the more valuable in real terms gold becomes, which means that, with a fixed nominal price of gold, the lower are the prices of all other commodities. The point of the gold-exchange standard was thus to reduce the world’s monetary demand for gold, thereby limiting the tendency of gold to appreciate and for prices in terms of gold to fall. Indeed, Mises here cites in a footnote none other than the villainous John Maynard Keynes himself (Tract on Monetary Reform) where he also argued that after World War I, the value of gold was determined by government policy, especially that of the Federal Reserve. Mises goes on to explain:

All that could not have been foreseen in this result of a long process of development is the circumstance that the fluctuations in the price of gold should have become dependent upon the policy of one government only. That the United States should have achieved such an economic predominance over other countries as it now has, and that it alone of all the countries of great economic importance should have retained the gold standard while the others (England, France, Germany, Russia, and the rest) have at least temporarily abandoned it – that is a consequence of what took place during the War. Yet the matter would not be essentially different if the price of gold was dependent not on the policy of the United States alone, but on those of four or five other governments as well. Those protagonists of the gold-exchange standard who have recommended it as a general monetary system and not merely as an expedient for poor countries, have overlooked this fact. They have not observed that the gold-exchange standard must at last mean depriving gold of that characteristic which is the most important from the point of view of monetary policy – its independence of government influence upon fluctuations in its value. The gold-exchange standard has not been recommended or adopted with the object of dethroning gold. All that Ricardo wanted was to reduce the cost of the monetary system. In many countries which from the last decade of the nineteenth century onward have wished to abandon the silver or credit-money standard, the gold-exchange standard rather than a gold standard with an actual gold currency has been adopted in order to prevent the growth of a new demand for gold from causing a rise in its price and a fall in the gold-prices of commodities. But whatever the motives may have been by which the protagonists of the gold-exchange standard have been led, there can be no doubt concerning the results of its increasing popularity.

If the gold-exchange standard is retained, the question must sooner or later arise as to whether it would not be better to substitute for it a credit-money standard whose fluctuations were more susceptible to control than those of gold. For if fluctuations in the price of gold are substantially dependent on political intervention, it is inconceivable why government policy should still be restricted at all and not given a free hand altogether, since the amount of this restriction is not enough to confine arbitrariness in price policy within narrow limits. The cost of additional gold for monetary purposes that is borne by the whole world might well be saved, for it no longer secures the result of making the monetary system independent of government intervention. If this complete government control is not desired, there remains one alternative only: an attempt must be made to get back from the gold-exchange standard to the actual use of gold again.

Thus, we see that in 1924 none other than the legendary Ludwig von Mises was explaining that the value of gold had come to depend primarily on the policy decisions of the Federal Reserve and the other leading central banks. He also understood that a process of deflation could have terrible consequences if free-market forces were not operating to bring about an adjustment of market prices to the rising value of gold. Recognizing the potentially disastrous consequences of a scramble for gold by the world’s central banks as they rejoined the gold standard, Hawtrey and Cassel called for central-bank cooperation to limit the increase in the demand for gold and to keep the value of gold stable. In 1924, at any rate, Mises, too, recognized that there could be a destabilizing deflationary increase in the demand for gold by central banks. But when the destabilizing deflationary increase actually started to happen in 1927 when the Bank of France began cashing in its foreign-exchange reserves for gold, triggering similar demands by other central banks in the process of adopting the gold standard, the gold standard started collapsing under the weight  of deflation. But, as far as I know, Mises never said a word about the relationship between gold demand and the Great Depression.

Instead, in the mythology of Austrian business-cycle theory, it was all the fault of the demonic Benjamin Strong for reducing the Fed’s discount rate from 5% to 3.5% in 1927 (and back to only 4% in 1928) and of the duplicitous Montagu Norman for reducing Bank Rate from 5% to 4.5% in 1927-28 rather than follow the virtuous example of the Bank of France in abandoning the cursed abomination of the gold-exchange standard.

Gold Standard or Gold-Exchange Standard: What’s the Difference?

Published July 1, 2015 David Ricardo , gold standard , gold-exchange standard , Keynes 27 Comments
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In recent posts (here and here) I have mentioned both the gold standard and the gold-exchange standard, a dichotomy that suggests that the two are somehow distinct, and I noted that the Genoa Conference of 1922 produced a set of resolutions designed to ensure that the gold standard, whose restoration was the goal of the conference, would be a gold-exchange standard rather than the traditional pre-World War I gold standard. I also mentioned that the great American central banker Benjamin Strong had stated that he was not particularly fond of the gold-exchange standard favored by the Genoa Resolutions. So there seems to be some substantive difference between a gold standard (of the traditional type) and a gold-exchange standard. Wherein lies the difference? And what, if anything, can we infer from that difference about how the two standards operate?

Let’s begin with some basics. Suppose there’s a pure metallic (gold) currency. All coins that circulate are gold and their value reflects the weight and fineness of the gold, except that the coins are stamped so that they don’t have to be weighed or assayed; they trade at their face value. Inevitably under such systems, there’s a problem with the concurrent circulation of old and worn coins at par with newly minted coins. Because they have the same face value, it is old coins that remain in circulation, while the new coins are hoarded, leading to increasingly overvalued (underweight) coins in circulation. This observation gives rise to Gresham’s Law: bad (i.e., old and worn) money drives out the good (i.e., new full-weight) money. The full-weight coin is the standard, but it tends not to circulate.

When the currency consists entirely of full-weight gold coins, it is redundant to speak of a gold standard. The term “gold standard” has significance only if the coin represents a value greater than the value of its actual metallic content. When underweight coins can circulate at par, because they are easily exchangeable for coins of full weight, the coinage is up to standard. If coins don’t circulate at par, the coinage is debased; it is substandard.

Despite the circulation of gold coins for millenia, the formal idea of a gold standard did not come into being until the eighteenth century, when, because the English mint was consistently overvaluing gold at a ratio relative to silver of approximately 15.5 to 1, while on the Continent, the gold-silver ratio was about 15 to 1, inducing an influx of gold into England. The pound sterling had always been a silver coin, like the shilling (20 shillings in a pound), but by the end of the 17th century, debasement of the silver coinage led to the hoarding and export of full weight silver coins. In the 17th century, the British mint had begun coining a golden guinea, originally worth a pound, but, subsequently, reflecting the premium on gold, guineas traded in the market at a premium.

In 1717, the master of the mint — a guy named Isaac Newton who, in his youth, had made something of a name for himself as a Cambridge mathematician — began to mint a golden pound at a mint price of £3 17 shillings and 10.5 pence (12 pence in a shilling) for an ounce of gold. The mint stopped minting guineas, which continued to circulate, and had an official value of 21 shillings (£1 1s.). In theory the pound remained a weight of silver, but in practice the pound had become a golden coin whose value was determined by the mint price chosen by that Newton guy.

Meanwhile the Bank of England based in London and what were known as country banks (because they operated outside the London metro area) as well as the Scottish banks operating under the Scottish legal regime that was retained after the union of England with Scotland, were all issuing banknotes denominated in sterling, meaning that they were convertible into an equivalent value of metallic (now golden) pounds. So legally the banks were operating under a pound standard not a gold standard. The connection to gold was indirect, reflecting the price at which Isaac Newton had decided that the mint would coin gold into pounds, not a legal definition of the pound.

The pound did not become truly golden until Parliament passed legislation in 1819 (The Resumption Act) after the Napoleonic Wars. The obligation of banks to convert their notes into coinage was suspended in 1797, and Bank of England notes were made legal tender. With the indirect link between gold and paper broken, the value of gold in terms of inconvertible pounds rose above the old mint price. Anticipating the resumption of gold payments, David Ricardo in 1816 penned what he called Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency in which he proposed making all banknotes convertible into a fixed weight of gold, while reducing the metallic content of the coinage to well below their face value. By abolishing the convertibility of banknotes into gold coin, but restricting the convertibility of bank notes to gold bullion, Ricardo was proposing what is called a gold-bullion standard, as opposed to a gold-specie standard when banknotes are convertible into coin. Ricardo reasoned that by saving the resources tied up in a gold coinage, his proposal would make the currency economical, and, by making banknotes convertible into gold, his proposals would ensure that the currency was secure. Evidently too radical for the times, Ricardo’s proposals did not gain acceptance, and a gold coinage was brought back into circulation at the Newtonian mint price.

But as Keynes observed in his first book on economics Indian Currency and Finance published in 1913 just before the gold standard collapsed at the start of World War I, gold coinage was not an important feature of the gold standard as it operated in its heday.

A gold standard is the rule now in all parts of the world; but a gold currency is the exception. The “sound currency” maxims of twenty or thirty years ago are still often repeated, but they have not been successful, nor ought they to have been, in actually influencing affairs. I think that I am right in saying that Egypt is now the only country in the world in which actual gold coins are the principle medium of exchange.

The reasons for this change are easily seen. It has been found that the expense of a gold circulation is insupportable, and that large economics can be safely effected by the use of some cheaper substitute; and it has been found further that gold in the pockets of the people is not in the least available at a time of crisis or to meet a foreign drain. For these purposes the gold resources of a country must be centralized.

This view has long been maintained by economists. Ricardo’s proposals for a sound and economical currency were based on the principle of keeping gold out of actual circulation. Mill argued that “gold wanted for exportation is almost invariably drawn from the reserves of banks, and is never likely to be taken from the outside circulation while the banks remain solvent.” . . .

A preference for a tangible gold currency is no longer more than a relic of a time when Governments were less trustworthy in these matters than they are now, and when it was the fashion to imitate uncritically the system which had been established in England and had seemed to work so well during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. (pp. 71-73)

Besides arguing against the wastefulness of a gold coinage, Keynes made a further argument about the holding of gold reserves as a feature of the gold standard, namely that, as a matter of course, there are economic incentives (already recognized by Ricardo almost a century earlier) for banks to economize on their holdings of gold reserves with which to discharge their foreign obligations by holding foreign debt instruments which also serve to satisfy foreign claims upon themselves while also generating a pecuniary return. A decentralized informal clearinghouse evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, in which banks held increasing amounts of foreign instruments with which to settle mutual claims upon each other, thereby minimizing the need for actual gold shipments to settle claims. Thus, for purposes of discharging foreign indebtedness, the need for banks to hold gold reserves became less urgent. The holding of foreign-exchange reserves and the use of those reserves to discharge foreign obligations as they came due is the defining characteristic of what was known as the gold-exchange standard.

To say that the Gold-Exchange Standard merely carries somewhat further the currency arrangements which several European countries have evolved during the last quarter of a century is not, of course, to justify it. But if we see that the Gold-Exchange Standard is not, in the currency world of to-day, anomalous, and that it is in the main stream of currency evolution, we shall have a wider experience, on which to draw in criticising it, and may be in a better position to judge of its details wisely. Much nonsense is talked about a gold standard’s properly carrying a gold currency with it. If we mean by a gold currency a state of affairs in which gold is the principal or even, in the aggregate, a very important medium of exchange, no country in the world has such a thing. [fn. Unless it be Egypt.] Gold is an international, but not a local currency. The currency problem of each country is to ensure that they shall run no risk of being unable to put their hands on international currency when they need it, and to waste as small a proportion of their resources on holdings of actual gold as is compatible with this. The proper solution for each country must be governed by the nature of its position in the international money market and of its relations to the chief financial centres, and by those national customs in matters of currency which it may be unwise to disturb. It is as an attempt to solve this problem that the Gold Exchange Standard ought to be judged. . . .

The Gold-Exchange Standard arises out of the discovery that, so long as gold is available for payments of international indebtedness at an approximately constant rate in terms of the national currency, it is a matter of comparative indifference whether it actually forms the national currency.

The Gold-Exchange Standard may be said to exist when gold does not circulate in a country to an appreciable extent, when the local currency is not necessarily redeemable in gold, but when the Government or Central Bank makes arrangements for the provision of foreign remittances in gold at a fix, ed maximum rate in terms of the local currency, the reserves necessary to provide these remittances being kept to a considerable extent abroad. . . .

Its theoretical advantages were first set forth by Ricardo at the time of the Bullionist Controversy. He laid it down that a currency is in its most perfect state when it consists of a cheap material, but having an equal value with the gold it professes to represent; and he suggested that convertibility for the purposes of the foreign exchanges should be ensured by the tendering on demand of gold bars (not coin) in exchange for notes, — so that gold might be available for purposes of export only, and would be prevented from entering into the internal circulation of the country. (pp. 29-31)

The Gold-Exchange Standard in the form in which it has been adopted in India is justly known as the Lindsay scheme. It was proposed and advocated from the earliest discussions, when the Indian currency problem first became prominent, by Mr. A. M. Lindsay, Deputy-Secretary of the Bank of Bengal, who always maintained that “they must adopt my scheme despite themselves.” His first proposals were made in 1876 and 1878. They were repeated in 1885 and again in 1892, when he published a pamphlet entitled Ricardo’s Exchange Remedy. Finally he explained his views in detail to the Committee of 1898.

Lindsay’s scheme was severely criticized both by Government officials and leading financiers. Lord Farrer described it as “far too clever for the ordinary English mind with its ineradicable prejudice for an immediately tangible gold backing of all currencies.” Lord Rothschild, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Sir Samuel Montagu (the late Lord Swythling) all gave evidence before the Committee that any system without a visible gold currency would be looked on with distrust. Mr. Alfred de Rothschild went so far as to say that “in fact a gold standard without a gold currency seemed to him an utter impossibility.” Financiers of this type will not admit the feasibility of anything until it has been demonstrated to them by practical experience. (pp. 34-35)

Finally, as to the question of what difference, aside from convenience, does it make whether a country operates on a full-fledged honest to goodness gold standard or a cheap imitation gold-exchange standard, I conclude with another splendid quotation from Keynes.

But before we pass to these several features of the Indian system, it will be worth while to emphasise two respects in which this system is not peculiar. In the first place a system, in which the rupee is maintained at 1s. 4d. by regulation, does not affect the level of prices differently from the way in which it would be affected by a system in which the rupee was a gold coin worth 1s 4d., except in a very indirect and unimportant way to be explained in a moment. So long as the rupee is worth 1s. 4d. in gold, no merchant or manufacturer considers of what material it is made when he fixes the price of his product. The indirect effect on prices, due to the rupee’s being silver, is similar to the effect of the use of any medium of exchange, such as cheques or notes, which economises the use of gold. If the use of gold is economised in any country, gold throughout the world is less valuable – gold prices, that is to say, are higher. But as this effect is shared by the whole world, the effect on prices in any country of economies in the use of gold made by that country is likely to be relatively slight. In short, a policy which led to a greater use of gold in India would tend, by increasing the demand for gold in the world’s markets, somewhat to lower the level of world prices as measured in gold; but it would not cause any alteration worth considering in the relative rates of exchange of Indian and non-Indian commodities.

In the second place, although it is true that the maintenance of the rupee at or near 1s. 4d. is due to regulation, it is not true, when once 1s. 4d. rather than some other gold value has been determined, that the volume of currency in circulation depends in the least upon the policy of the Government or the caprice of an official. This part of the system is as perfectly automatic as in any other country. (pp. 11-13)

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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