Archive for the 'Brad Delong' Category

Dangerous Metaphors

Published January 5, 2023 Brad Delong , Olivier Blanchard , Paul Krugman 2 Comments
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A couple of days ago, I wrote post gently (I hope) chiding Olivier Blanchard for what seemed to me to be a muddled attempt to attribute inflation to conflicts between various interest groups (labor, capital, creditors, debtors) that the political system is unable, or unwilling, to resolve,leavin, those conflicts to be addressed, albeit implicitly, by the monetary authority. In those circumstances, groups seek to protect, or even advance their interests, by seeking prices increases for their goods or services, triggering a continuing cycle of price and wage increases, aka a wage-price spiral.

My criticism of Blanchard wasn’t that the distributional conflicts that worry him don’t exist — they obviously do — or are irrelevant — they clearly aren’t, but that focusing attention on those conflicts tells us very little about the mechanisms that generate inflation: the macroeconomic policies (monetary or fiscal) under the control of governments and central banks. We live in complex societies consisting of many diverse and independent, yett deeply interrelated and interdependent, agents. Macroeconomic polilcies are adopted and implemented in an economic and social environment shaped by the various, and possibly conflicting, interests of these agents, so it would be absurd to argue that the conflicts and tensions that inevitably arise between those agents do not influence, or even dictate, the policy choices of governments and monetary authorities responsible for adopting and implementing macroeconomic policies.

Because distributional conflicts are inherent in any economy composed of a diverse set of agents pursuing their own inconsistent self-interests, so it seems quixotic to suppose or even imagine that distributional conflicts can be resolved by a formal negotiating process in the way that Blanchard seems to be suggesting. There are too many interests at play, too many conflicts to reconcile, too many terms to negotiate, too many uncertain conditions and too many unforeseen events requiring previously reached agreements to be renegotiated for these deep-seated conflicts to be resolved by any conceivable negotiation process.

The point that I tried to make is that, because it is unrealistic to think that the fundamental conflicts of interest characteristic of any modern economy can be reconciled by negotiation, the monetary authority should aim to adopt a policy on which economic agents can rely on in forming their expectations about the future. The best policy that the monetary authority can hope to achieve is one that aims for total nominal spending and total nominal income to increase at a predictable rate consistent with an inflation rate low enough to be politically uncontroversial. If such a policy is implemented, with nominal spending and income increasing at roughly the target rate, private expectations would likely converge toward that targeted rate, thereby contributing to the mutual consistency of private expectaions that would allow inflation to remain at an acceptably low rate.

Brad Delong kindly noticed my comment about Blanchard on his substack blog and on Twitter, opining that Blanchard and I were not really disagreeing but were talking past each other.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Brad’s take, but I’m not sure that I agree either, because I’m not sure that I understand what Blanchard is actually saying. I actually tried to hint at my uncertainty about what Blanchard’s argument actually is (and whether I disagree with it) by borrowing (with slight modification) the lyric of George and Ira Gershwin’s standard “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” (Or, try out this version.)

Paul Krugman also weighed in, defending Blanchard’s analysis against the argument which he attributes to John Cochrane and to me that inflation is always the result of excessive demand.

Although Blanchard is nobody’s idea of a leftist (OK, Republicans seem to consider anyone more liberal than Attila the Hun a Marxist, but still), he nonetheless got immediate pushback from economists who insisted that inflation is always the result of excessive demand, of too much money chasing too few goods or, what is roughly the same thing, the consequence of an excessively hot economy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/inflation-economy.html?searchResultPosition=1

I’m always grateful to be noticed by Krugman, but I’ll just note in passing that he’s not quite correct in attributing to me the view that inflation is always the consequence of an excessively hot economy; I was simply working with Blanchard’s own framing in his original Twitter thread.

But the point in Krugman’s post that I want to comment on is his football metaphor.

At one level, of course Blanchard is right. Companies that charge higher prices and workers who demand higher wages aren’t doing so because the money supply has increased; they’re trying to increase their incomes (or offset declines in their incomes caused by, say, rising energy prices). And inflation happens when the attempts of firms and workers to claim a bigger share of the economic pie are inconsistent, when the additional purchasing power being demanded exceeds what the economy can deliver.

Reading the discussion, I found myself remembering a remark made way back in the 1970s by William Nordhaus, another eminent economist (and Nobel laureate) who happens to have been my first mentor in the field. Nordhaus compared inflation to what happens in a football stadium when the action on the field is especially exciting. (If you don’t find American football exciting, think of it as a soccer match.) Everyone stands up to get a better view, but this is collectively self-defeating — your view doesn’t improve because the people in front of you are also standing, and you’re less comfortable besides.

Nordhaus’s football metaphor is very apt as far as it goes. You can imagine that inflation starts as the result of an attempt by agents to increase their prices (wages) that turns out to be self-defeating because everyone’s attempt to increase his price or wage relative to everyone else’s turns out to be self-defeating when everyone else does the same thing, so that no one really improves his position compared to everyone else.

I will just observe parenthetically that it is not strictly true that no one improves his view of the field, because people who are taller than average likely will improve their view of the field, especially if they are sitting behind short people. But that is likely a second-order effect. Similarly, some people raising their prices may be well-positioned to increase their prices more than average, so that they may be net gainers from the process. But again those are likely second-order effects.

But here is where the football metaphor breaks down. Blanchard is not worried about a once and for all increase in the price level, which is what the football metaphor translates into. People standing up in a football game do not keep growing taller once they stand up. The process comes to an end, and is eventually reversed after people sit down again.

But inflation is unpopular because it supposedly is a continuing process of increasing prices. Larry Summers and Blanchard have been invoking the experience of the 1970s in which there was supposedly a self-generating or self-reinforcing wage-price spiral that could only be stopped by a brutal monetary tightening administered by Paul Volcker causing a severe recession with double-digit unemployment. To avoid another such catastrophic recession, Blanchard is urging everyone to be reasonable and not to try to increase prices or wages in a likely futile attempt to gain at the expense of others.

The problem with football metaphor is that it can’t explain how the inflation process can continue if it is not enabled by macroeconomic policies that cause the rate of nominal spending and income to keep increasing. Maybe Blanchard and Krugman believe that total nominal spending and total nominal income can keep increasing even if macroeconomic policies aren’t causing nominal spending and nominal income to increase.

I don’t think that’s what they believe, but if they do believe that, then they should explain how continuing increases in nominal spending and income can be generated without corresponding macroeconomic policies that promote those increases in nominal spending and income. As long as macroeconomic policy is focused on keeping the rate of increase in nominal spending at a rate consistent with the target rate of inflation, inflation will be just as transitory as episodes of standing by fans at football games.

What’s Wrong with Monetarism?

Published April 26, 2016 Brad Delong , free banking , gold standard , Great Depression , Hayek , Keynes , Lucas Critique , Milton Friedman , Monetarism , money multiplier , Paul Krugman , Phillips Curve 37 Comments
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UPDATE: (05/06): In an email Richard Lipsey has chided me for seeming to endorse the notion that 1970s stagflation refuted Keynesian economics. Lipsey rightly points out that by introducing inflation expectations into the Phillips Curve or the Aggregate Supply Curve, a standard Keynesian model is perfectly capable of explaining stagflation, so that it is simply wrong to suggest that 1970s stagflation constituted an empirical refutation of Keynesian theory. So my statement in the penultimate paragraph that the k-percent rule

was empirically demolished in the 1980s in a failure even more embarrassing than the stagflation failure of Keynesian economics.

should be amended to read “the supposed stagflation failure of Keynesian economics.”

Brad DeLong recently did a post (“The Disappearance of Monetarism”) referencing an old (apparently unpublished) paper of his following up his 2000 article (“The Triumph of Monetarism”) in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Paul Krugman added his own gloss on DeLong on Friedman in a post called “Why Monetarism Failed.” In the JEP paper, DeLong argued that the New Keynesian policy consensus of the 1990s was built on the foundation of what DeLong called “classic monetarism,” the analytical core of the doctrine developed by Friedman in the 1950s and 1960s, a core that survived the demise of what he called “political monetarism,” the set of factual assumptions and policy preferences required to justify Friedman’s k-percent rule as the holy grail of monetary policy.

In his follow-up paper, DeLong balanced his enthusiasm for Friedman with a bow toward Keynes, noting the influence of Keynes on both classic and political monetarism, arguing that, unlike earlier adherents of the quantity theory, Friedman believed that a passive monetary policy was not the appropriate policy stance during the Great Depression; Friedman famously held the Fed responsible for the depth and duration of what he called the Great Contraction, because it had allowed the US money supply to drop by a third between 1929 and 1933. This was in sharp contrast to hard-core laissez-faire opponents of Fed policy, who regarded even the mild and largely ineffectual steps taken by the Fed – increasing the monetary base by 15% – as illegitimate interventionism to obstruct the salutary liquidation of bad investments, thereby postponing the necessary reallocation of real resources to more valuable uses. So, according to DeLong, Friedman, no less than Keynes, was battling against the hard-core laissez-faire opponents of any positive action to speed recovery from the Depression. While Keynes believed that in a deep depression only fiscal policy would be effective, Friedman believed that, even in a deep depression, monetary policy would be effective. But both agreed that there was no structural reason why stimulus would necessarily counterproductive; both rejected the idea that only if the increased output generated during the recovery was of a particular composition would recovery be sustainable.

Indeed, that’s why Friedman has always been regarded with suspicion by laissez-faire dogmatists who correctly judged him to be soft in his criticism of Keynesian doctrines, never having disputed the possibility that “artificially” increasing demand – either by government spending or by money creation — in a deep depression could lead to sustainable economic growth. From the point of view of laissez-faire dogmatists that concession to Keynesianism constituted a total sellout of fundamental free-market principles.

Friedman parried such attacks on the purity of his free-market dogmatism with a counterattack against his free-market dogmatist opponents, arguing that the gold standard to which they were attached so fervently was itself inconsistent with free-market principles, because, in virtually all historical instances of the gold standard, the monetary authorities charged with overseeing or administering the gold standard retained discretionary authority allowing them to set interest rates and exercise control over the quantity of money. Because monetary authorities retained substantial discretionary latitude under the gold standard, Friedman argued that a gold standard was institutionally inadequate and incapable of constraining the behavior of the monetary authorities responsible for its operation.

The point of a gold standard, in Friedman’s view, was that it makes it costly to increase the quantity of money. That might once have been true, but advances in banking technology eventually made it easy for banks to increase the quantity of money without any increase in the quantity of gold, making inflation possible even under a gold standard. True, eventually the inflation would have to be reversed to maintain the gold standard, but that simply made alternative periods of boom and bust inevitable. Thus, the gold standard, i.e., a mere obligation to convert banknotes or deposits into gold, was an inadequate constraint on the quantity of money, and an inadequate systemic assurance of stability.

In other words, if the point of a gold standard is to prevent the quantity of money from growing excessively, then, why not just eliminate the middleman, and simply establish a monetary rule constraining the growth in the quantity of money. That was why Friedman believed that his k-percent rule – please pardon the expression – trumped the gold standard, accomplishing directly what the gold standard could not accomplish, even indirectly: a gradual steady increase in the quantity of money that would prevent monetary-induced booms and busts.

Moreover, the k-percent rule made the monetary authority responsible for one thing, and one thing alone, imposing a rule on the monetary authority prescribing the time path of a targeted instrument – the quantity of money – over which the monetary authority has direct control: the quantity of money. The belief that the monetary authority in a modern banking system has direct control over the quantity of money was, of course, an obvious mistake. That the mistake could have persisted as long as it did was the result of the analytical distraction of the money multiplier: one of the leading fallacies of twentieth-century monetary thought, a fallacy that introductory textbooks unfortunately continue even now to foist upon unsuspecting students.

The money multiplier is not a structural supply-side variable, it is a reduced-form variable incorporating both supply-side and demand-side parameters, but Friedman and other Monetarists insisted on treating it as if it were a structural — and a deep structural variable at that – supply variable, so that it no less vulnerable to the Lucas Critique than, say, the Phillips Curve. Nevertheless, for at least a decade and a half after his refutation of the structural Phillips Curve, demonstrating its dangers as a guide to policy making, Friedman continued treating the money multiplier as if it were a deep structural variable, leading to the Monetarist forecasting debacle of the 1980s when Friedman and his acolytes were confidently predicting – over and over again — the return of double-digit inflation because the quantity of money was increasing for most of the 1980s at double-digit rates.

So once the k-percent rule collapsed under an avalanche of contradictory evidence, the Monetarist alternative to the gold standard that Friedman had persuasively, though fallaciously, argued was, on strictly libertarian grounds, preferable to the gold standard, the gold standard once again became the default position of laissez-faire dogmatists. There was to be sure some consideration given to free banking as an alternative to the gold standard. In his old age, after winning the Nobel Prize, F. A. Hayek introduced a proposal for direct currency competition — the elimination of legal tender laws and the like – which he later developed into a proposal for the denationalization of money. Hayek’s proposals suggested that convertibility into a real commodity was not necessary for a non-legal tender currency to have value – a proposition which I have argued is fallacious. So Hayek can be regarded as the grandfather of crypto currencies like the bitcoin. On the other hand, advocates of free banking, with a few exceptions like Earl Thompson and me, have generally gravitated back to the gold standard.

So while I agree with DeLong and Krugman (and for that matter with his many laissez-faire dogmatist critics) that Friedman had Keynesian inclinations which, depending on his audience, he sometimes emphasized, and sometimes suppressed, the most important reason that he was unable to retain his hold on right-wing monetary-economics thinking is that his key monetary-policy proposal – the k-percent rule – was empirically demolished in a failure even more embarrassing than the stagflation failure of Keynesian economics. With the k-percent rule no longer available as an alternative, what’s a right-wing ideologue to do?

Anyone for nominal gross domestic product level targeting (or NGDPLT for short)?

Repeat after Me: Inflation’s the Cure not the Disease

Published June 4, 2015 Andrew Jalil , Brad Delong , Gisela Rua , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Jack Hirshleifer , liquidity trap , Martin Feldstein , nominal GDP targeting , Paul Krugman , Tony Yates 29 Comments

Last week Martin Feldstein triggered a fascinating four-way exchange with a post explaining yet again why we still need to be worried about inflation. Tony Yates responded first with an explanation of why money printing doesn’t work at the zero lower bound (aka liquidity trap), leading Paul Krugman to comment wearily about the obtuseness of all those right-wingers who just can’t stop obsessing about the non-existent inflation threat when, all along, it was crystal clear that in a liquidity trap, printing money is useless.

I’m still not sure why relatively moderate conservatives like Feldstein didn’t find all this convincing back in 2009. I get, I think, why politics might predispose them to see inflation risks everywhere, but this was as crystal-clear a proposition as I’ve ever seen. Still, even if you managed to convince yourself that the liquidity-trap analysis was wrong six years ago, by now you should surely have realized that Bernanke, Woodford, Eggertsson, and, yes, me got it right.

But no — it’s a complete puzzle. Maybe it’s because those tricksy Fed officials started paying all of 25 basis points on reserves (Japan never paid such interest). Anyway, inflation is just around the corner, the same way it has been all these years.

Which surprisingly (not least to Krugman) led Brad DeLong to rise to Feldstein’s defense (well, sort of), pointing out that there is a respectable argument to be made for why even if money printing is not immediately effective at the zero lower bound, it could still be effective down the road, so that the mere fact that inflation has been consistently below 2% since the crash (except for a short blip when oil prices spiked in 2011-12) doesn’t mean that inflation might not pick up quickly once inflation expectations pick up a bit, triggering an accelerating and self-sustaining inflation as all those hitherto idle balances start gushing into circulation.

That argument drew a slightly dyspeptic response from Krugman who again pointed out, as had Tony Yates, that at the zero lower bound, the demand for cash is virtually unlimited so that there is no tendency for monetary expansion to raise prices, as if DeLong did not already know that. For some reason, Krugman seems unwilling to accept the implication of the argument in his own 1998 paper that he cites frequently: that for an increase in the money stock to raise the price level – note that there is an implicit assumption that the real demand for money does not change – the increase must be expected to be permanent. (I also note that the argument had been made almost 20 years earlier by Jack Hirshleifer, in his Fisherian text on capital theory, Capital Interest and Investment.) Thus, on Krugman’s own analysis, the effect of an increase in the money stock is expectations-dependent. A change in monetary policy will be inflationary if it is expected to be inflationary, and it will not be inflationary if it is not expected to be inflationary. And Krugman even quotes himself on the point, referring to

my call for the Bank of Japan to “credibly promise to be irresponsible” — to make the expansion of the base permanent, by committing to a relatively high inflation target. That was the main point of my 1998 paper!

So the question whether the monetary expansion since 2008 will ever turn out to be inflationary depends not on an abstract argument about the shape of the LM curve, but about the evolution of inflation expectations over time. I’m not sure that I’m persuaded by DeLong’s backward induction argument – an argument that I like enough to have used myself on occasion while conceding that the logic may not hold in the real word – but there is no logical inconsistency between the backward-induction argument and Krugman’s credibility argument; they simply reflect different conjectures about the evolution of inflation expectations in a world in which there is uncertainty about what the future monetary policy of the central bank is going to be (in other words, a world like the one we inhabit).

Which brings me to the real point of this post: the problem with monetary policy since 2008 has been that the Fed has credibly adopted a 2% inflation target, a target that, it is generally understood, the Fed prefers to undershoot rather than overshoot. Thus, in operational terms, the actual goal is really less than 2%. As long as the inflation target credibly remains less than 2%, the argument about inflation risk is about the risk that the Fed will credibly revise its target upwards.

With the both Wickselian natural real and natural nominal short-term rates of interest probably below zero, it would have made sense to raise the inflation target to get the natural nominal short-term rate above zero. There were other reasons to raise the inflation target as well, e.g., providing debt relief to debtors, thereby benefitting not only debtors but also those creditors whose debtors simply defaulted.

Krugman takes it for granted that monetary policy is impotent at the zero lower bound, but that impotence is not inherent; it is self-imposed by the credibility of the Fed’s own inflation target. To be sure, changing the inflation target is not a decision that we would want the Fed to take lightly, because it opens up some very tricky time-inconsistency problems. However, in a crisis, you may have to take a chance and hope that credibility can be restored by future responsible behavior once things get back to normal.

In this vein, I am reminded of the 1930 exchange between Hawtrey and Hugh Pattison Macmillan, chairman of the Committee on Finance and Industry, when Hawtrey, testifying before the Committee, suggested that the Bank of England reduce Bank Rate even at the risk of endangering the convertibility of sterling into gold (England eventually left the gold standard a little over a year later)

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

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

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

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

Of course the best evidence for the effectiveness of monetary policy at the zero lower bound was provided three years later, in April 1933, when FDR suspended the gold standard in the US, causing the dollar to depreciate against gold, triggering an immediate rise in US prices (wholesale prices rising 14% from April through July) and the fastest real recovery in US history (industrial output rising by over 50% over the same period). A recent paper by Andrew Jalil and Gisela Rua documents this amazing recovery from the depths of the Great Depression and the crucial role that changing inflation expectations played in stimulating the recovery. They also make a further important point: that by announcing a price level target, FDR both accelerated the recovery and prevented expectations of inflation from increasing without limit. The 1933 episode suggests that a sharp, but limited, increase in the price-level target would generate a faster and more powerful output response than an incremental increase in the inflation target. Unfortunately, after the 2008 downturn we got neither.

Maybe it’s too much to expect that an unelected central bank would take upon itself to adopt as a policy goal a substantial increase in the price level. Had the Fed announced such a goal after the 2008 crisis, it would have invited a potentially fatal attack, and not just from the usual right-wing suspects, on its institutional independence. Price stability, is after all, part of dual mandate that Fed is legally bound to pursue. And it was FDR, not the Fed, that took the US off the gold standard.

But even so, we at least ought to be clear that if monetary policy is impotent at the zero lower bound, the impotence is not caused by any inherent weakness, but by the institutional and political constraints under which it operates in a constitutional system. And maybe there is no better argument for nominal GDP level targeting than that it offers a practical and civilly reverent way of allowing monetary policy to be effective at the zero lower bound.

Milton Friedman, Monetarism, and the Great and Little Depressions

Published March 31, 2015 1920-21 Depression , Brad Delong , Cassel , gold standard , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Keynes , Little Depression , Milton Friedman , Monetarism 25 Comments
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Brad Delong has a nice little piece bashing Milton Friedman, an activity that, within reasonable limits, I consider altogether commendable and like to engage in myself from time to time (see here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here, here and here). Citing Barry Eichengreen’s recent book Hall of Mirrors, Delong tries to lay the blame for our long-lasting Little Depression (aka Great Recession) on Milton Friedman and his disciples whose purely monetary explanation for the Great Depression caused the rest of us to neglect or ignore the work of Keynes and Minsky and their followers in explaining the Great Depression.

According to Eichengreen, the Great Depression and the Great Recession are related. The inadequate response to our current troubles can be traced to the triumph of the monetarist disciples of Milton Friedman over their Keynesian and Minskyite peers in describing the history of the Great Depression.

In A Monetary History of the United States, published in 1963, Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz famously argued that the Great Depression was due solely and completely to the failure of the US Federal Reserve to expand the country’s monetary base and thereby keep the economy on a path of stable growth. Had there been no decline in the money stock, their argument goes, there would have been no Great Depression.

This interpretation makes a certain kind of sense, but it relies on a critical assumption. Friedman and Schwartz’s prescription would have worked only if interest rates and what economists call the “velocity of money” – the rate at which money changes hands – were largely independent of one another.

What is more likely, however, is that the drop in interest rates resulting from the interventions needed to expand the country’s supply of money would have put a brake on the velocity of money, undermining the proposed cure. In that case, ending the Great Depression would have also required the fiscal expansion called for by John Maynard Keynes and the supportive credit-market policies prescribed by Hyman Minsky.

I’m sorry, but I find this criticism of Friedman and his followers just a bit annoying. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons, but I will focus on one: it perpetuates the myth that a purely monetary explanation of the Great Depression originated with Friedman.

Why is it a myth? Because it wasn’t Friedman who first propounded a purely monetary theory of the Great Depression. Nor did the few precursors, like Clark Warburton, that Friedman ever acknowledged. Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel did — 10 years before the start of the Great Depression in 1919, when they independently warned that going back on the gold standard at the post-World War I price level (in terms of gold) — about twice the pre-War price level — would cause a disastrous deflation unless the world’s monetary authorities took concerted action to reduce the international monetary demand for gold as countries went back on the gold standard to a level consistent with the elevated post-War price level. The Genoa Monetary Conference of 1922, inspired by the work of Hawtrey and Cassel, resulted in an agreement (unfortunately voluntary and non-binding) that, as countries returned to the gold standard, they would neither reintroduce gold coinage nor keep their monetary reserves in the form of physical gold, but instead would hold reserves in dollar or (once the gold convertibility of sterling was restored) pound-denominated assets. (Ron Batchelder and I have a paper discussing the work of Hawtrey and Casssel on the Great Depression; Doug Irwin has a paper discussing Cassel.)

After the short, but fierce, deflation of 1920-21 (see here and here), when the US (about the only country in the world then on the gold standard) led the world in reducing the price level by about a third, but still about two-thirds higher than the pre-War price level, the Genoa system worked moderately well until 1928 when the Bank of France, totally defying the Genoa Agreement, launched its insane policy of converting its monetary reserves into physical gold. As long as the US was prepared to accommodate the insane French gold-lust by permitting a sufficient efflux of gold from its own immense holdings, the Genoa system continued to function. But in late 1928 and 1929, the Fed, responding to domestic fears about a possible stock-market bubble, kept raising interest rates to levels not seen since the deflationary disaster of 1920-21. And sure enough, a 6.5% discount rate (just shy of the calamitous 7% rate set in 1920) reversed the flow of gold out of the US, and soon the US was accumulating gold almost as rapidly as the insane Bank of France was.

This was exactly the scenario against which Hawtrey and Cassel had been warning since 1919. They saw it happening, and watched in horror while their warnings were disregarded as virtually the whole world plunged blindly into a deflationary abyss. Keynes had some inkling of what was going on – he was an old friend and admirer of Hawtrey and had considerable regard for Cassel – but, for reasons I don’t really understand, Keynes was intent on explaining the downturn in terms of his own evolving theoretical vision of how the economy works, even though just about everything that was happening had already been foreseen by Hawtrey and Cassel.

More than a quarter of a century after the fact, and after the Keynesian Revolution in macroeconomics was well established, along came Friedman, woefully ignorant of pre-Keynesian monetary theory, but determined to show that the Keynesian explanation for the Great Depression was wrong and unnecessary. So Friedman came up with his own explanation of the Great Depression that did not even begin until December 1930 when the Fed allowed the Bank of United States to fail, triggering, in Friedman’s telling, a wave of bank failures that caused the US money supply to decline by a third by 1933. Rather than see the Great Depression as a global phenomenon caused by a massive increase in the world’s monetary demand for gold, Friedman portrayed it as a largely domestic phenomenon, though somehow linked to contemporaneous downturns elsewhere, for which the primary explanation was the Fed’s passivity in the face of contagious bank failures. Friedman, mistaking the epiphenomenon for the phenomenon itself, ignorantly disregarded the monetary theory of the Great Depression that had already been worked out by Hawtrey and Cassel and substituted in its place a simplistic, dumbed-down version of the quantity theory. So Friedman reinvented the wheel, but did a really miserable job of it.

A. C. Pigou, Alfred Marshall’s student and successor at Cambridge, was a brilliant and prolific economic theorist in his own right. In his modesty and reverence for his teacher, Pigou was given to say “It’s all in Marshall.” When it comes to explaining the Great Depression, one might say as well “it’s all in Hawtrey.”

So I agree that Delong is totally justified in criticizing Friedman and his followers for giving such a silly explanation of the Great Depression, as if it were, for all intents and purposes, made in the US, and as if the Great Depression didn’t really start until 1931. But the problem with Friedman is not, as Delong suggests, that he distracted us from the superior insights of Keynes and Minsky into the causes of the Great Depression. The problem is that Friedman botched the monetary theory, even though the monetary theory had already been worked out for him if only he had bothered to read it. But Friedman’s interest in the history of monetary theory did not extend very far, if at all, beyond an overrated book by his teacher Lloyd Mints A History of Banking Theory.

As for whether fiscal expansion called for by Keynes was necessary to end the Great Depression, we do know that the key factor explaining recovery from the Great Depression was leaving the gold standard. And the most important example of the importance of leaving the gold standard is the remarkable explosion of output in the US beginning in April 1933 (surely before expansionary fiscal policy could take effect) following the suspension of the gold standard by FDR and an effective 40% devaluation of the dollar in terms of gold. Between April and July 1933, industrial production in the US increased by 70%, stock prices nearly doubled, employment rose by 25%, while wholesale prices rose by 14%. All that is directly attributable to FDR’s decision to take the US off gold, and devalue the dollar (see here). Unfortunately, in July 1933, FDR snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (or depression from the jaws of recovery) by starting the National Recovery Administration, whose stated goal was (OMG!) to raise prices by cartelizing industries and restricting output, while imposing a 30% increase in nominal wages. That was enough to bring the recovery to a virtual standstill, prolonging the Great Depression for years.

I don’t say that the fiscal expansion under FDR had no stimulative effect in the Great Depression or that the fiscal expansion under Obama in the Little Depression had no stimulative effect, but you can’t prove that monetary policy is useless just by reminding us that Friedman liked to assume (as if it were a fact) that the demand for money is highly insensitive to changes in the rate of interest. The difference between the rapid recovery from the Great Depression when countries left the gold standard and the weak recovery from the Little Depression is that leaving the gold standard had an immediate effect on price-level expectations, while monetary expansion during the Little Depression was undertaken with explicit assurances by the monetary authorities that the 2% inflation target – in the upper direction, at any rate — was, and would forever more remain, sacred and inviolable.

Hey, Look at Me; I Turned Brad Delong into an Apologist for Milton Friedman

Published September 7, 2014 Brad Delong , gold standard , Hayek , Milton Friedman , price-specie-flow mechanism , Uncategorized 5 Comments
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It’s always nice to be noticed, so I can hardly complain if Brad Delong wants to defend Milton Friedman on his blog against my criticism of his paper “Real and Pseudo Gold Standards.” I just find it a little bit rich to see Friedman being defended against my criticism by the arch-Keynesian Brad Delong.

But in the spirit of friendly disagreement in which Brad criticizes my criticism, I shall return the compliment and offer some criticisms of my own of Brad’s valiant effort to defend the indefensible.

So let me try to parse what Brad is saying and see if Brad can help me find sense where before I could find none.

I think that Friedman’s paper has somewhat more coherence than David does. From Milton Friedman’s standpoint (and from John Maynard Keynes’s) you need microeconomic [I think Brad meant to say macroeconomic] stability in order for private laissez-faire to be for the best in the best of possible worlds. Macroeconomic stability is:

  1. stable and predictable paths for total spending, the price level, and interest rates; hence
  2. a stable and predictable path for the velocity of money; hence
  3. (1) then achieved by a stable and predictable path for the money stock; and
  4. if (3) is secured by institutions, then expectations of (3) will generate the possibility of (1) and (2) so that if (3) is actually carried out then eppur si muove…

I agree with Brad that macroeconomic stability can be described as a persistent circumstance in which the paths for total spending, the price level, and (perhaps) interest rates are stable and predictable. I also agree that a stable and predictable path for the velocity of money is conducive to macroeconomic stability. But note the difference between saying that the time paths for total spending, the price level and (perhaps) interest rates are stable and predictable and that the time path for the velocity of money is stable and predictable. It is, at least possibly the case, that it is within the power of an enlightened monetary authority to provide, or that it would be possible to construct a monetary regime that could provide, stable and predictable paths for total spending and the price level. Whether it is also possible for a monetary authority or a monetary regime to provide a stable and predictable path for interest rates would depend on the inherent variability in the real rate of interest. It may be that variations in the real rate are triggered by avoidable variations in nominal rates, so that if nominal rates are stabilized, real rates will be stabilized, too. But it may be that real rates are inherently variable and unpredictable. But it is at least plausible to argue that the appropriate monetary policy or monetary regime would result in a stable and predictable path of real and nominal interest rates. However, I find it highly implausible to think that it is within the power of any monetary authority or monetary regime to provide a stable and predictable path for the velocity of money. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that in order to provide stability and predictability in the paths for total spending, the price level, and interest rates, the monetary authority or the monetary regime would have to tolerate substantial variations in the velocity of money associated with changes in the public’s demand to hold money. So the notion that a stable and predictable path for the money stock is a characteristic of macroeconomic stability, much less a condition for monetary stability, strikes me as a complete misconception, a misconception propagated, more than anyone else, by Milton Friedman, himself.

Thus, contrary to Brad’s assertion, a stable and predictable path for the money stock is more likely than not to be a condition not for macroeconomic stability, but of macroeconomic instability. And to support my contention that a stable and predictable path for the money stock is macroeconomically destabilizing, let me quote none other than F. A. Hayek. I quote Hayek not because I think he is more authoritative than Friedman – Hayek having made more than his share of bad macroeconomic policy calls (e.g. his 1932 defense of the insane Bank of France) – but because in his own polite way he simply demolished the fallacy underlying Friedman’s fetish with a fixed rate of growth in the money stock (Full Empoyment at Any Price).

I wish I could share the confidence of my friend Milton Friedman who thinks that one could deprive the monetary authorities, in order to prevent the abuse of their powers for political purposes, of all discretionary powers by prescribing the amount of money they may and should add to circulation in any one year. It seems to me that he regards this as practicable because he has become used for statistical purposes to draw a sharp distinction between what is to be regarded as money and what is not. This distinction does not exist in the real world. I believe that, to ensure the convertibility of all kinds of near-money into real money, which is necessary if we are to avoid severe liquidity crises or panics, the monetary authorities must be given some discretion. But I agree with Friedman that we will have to try and get back to a more or less automatic system for regulating the quantity of money in ordinary times. The necessity of “suspending” Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 three times within 25 years after it was passed ought to have taught us this once and for all.

He was briefer and more pointed in a later comment (Denationalization of Money).

As regards Professor Friedman’s proposal of a legal limit on the rate at which a monopolistic issuer of money was to be allowed to increase the quantity in circulation, I can only say that I would not like to see what would happen if it ever became known that the amount of cash in circulation was approaching the upper limit and that therefore a need for increased liquidity could not be met.

And for good measure, Hayek added this footnote quoting Bagehot:

To such a situation the classic account of Walter Bagehot . . . would apply: “In a sensitive state of the English money market the near approach to the legal limit of reserve would be a sure incentive to panic; if one-third were fixed by law, the moment the banks were close to one-third, alarm would begin and would run like magic.

In other words if 3 is secured by institutions, all hell breaks loose.

But let us follow Brad a bit further in his quixotic quest to make Friedman seem sensible.

Now there are two different institutional setups that can produce (3):

  1. a monetarist central bank committed to targeting a k% growth rate of the money stock via open-market operations; or
  2. a gold standard in which a Humean price-specie flow mechanism leads inflating countries to lose and deflating countries to gain gold, tightly coupled to a banking system in which there is a reliable and stable money multiplier, and thus in which the money stock grows at the rate at which the world’s gold stock grows (plus the velocity trend).

Well, I have just – and not for the first time — disposed of 1, and in my previous post, I have disposed of 2. But having started to repeat myself, why not continue.

There are two points to make about the Humean price-specie-flow mechanism. First, it makes no sense, as Samuelson showed in his classic 1980 paper, inasmuch as it violates arbitrage conditions which do not allow the prices of tradable commodities to differ by more than the costs of transport. The Humean price-specie-flow mechanism presumes that the local domestic price levels are determined by local money supplies (either gold or convertible into gold), but that is simply not possible if arbitrage conditions obtain. There is no price-specie-flow mechanism under the gold standard, there is simply a movement of money sufficient to eliminate excess demands or supplies of money at the constant internationally determined price level. Domestic money supplies are endogenous and prices are (from the point of view of the monetary system) exogenously determined by the value of gold and the exchange rates of the local currencies in terms of gold. There is therefore no stable money multiplier at the level of a national currency (gold or convertible into gold). Friedman’s conception a pure [aka real] gold standard was predicated on a fallacy, namely the price-specie-flow mechanism. No gold standard in history ever operated as Friedman supposed that it operated. There were a few attempts to impose by statutory requirement a 100% (or sometime lower) marginal reserve requirement on banknotes, but that was statutory intervention, not a gold standard, which, at any operational level, is characterized by a fixed exchange rate between gold and the local currency with no restriction on the ability of economic agents to purchase gold at the going market price. the market price, under the gold standard, always equaling (or very closely approximating) the legal exchange rate between gold and the local currency.

Friedman calls (2) a “pure gold standard”. Anything else that claims to be a gold standard is and must be a “pseudo gold standard”. It might be a pseudo gold standard either because something disrupts the Humean price-specie flow mechanism–the “rules of the game” are not obeyed–so that deficit countries do not reliably lose and surplus countries do not reliably gain gold. It might be a pseudo gold standard because the money multiplier is not reliable and stable–because the banking system does not transparently and rapidly transmute a k% shift in the stock of gold into a k% shift in the money stock.

Friedman’s calling (2) “a pure [real] gold standard,” because it actualizes the Humean price-specie-flow-mechanism simply shows that Friedman understood neither the gold standard nor the price-specie-flow mechanism. The supposed rules of the game were designed to make the gold standard function in a particular way. In fact, the evidence shows that the classical gold standard in operation from roughly 1880 to 1914 operated with consistent departures from the “rules of the game.” What allows us to call the monetary regime in operation from 1880 to 1914 a gold standard is not that the rules of the game were observed but that the value of local currencies corresponded to the value of the gold with which they could be freely exchanged at the legal parities. No more and no less. And even Friedman was unwilling to call the gold standard in operation from 1880 to 1914 a pseudo gold standard, because if that was a pseudo-gold standard, there never was a real gold standard. So he was simply talking nonsense when he asserted that during the 1920s there a pseudo gold standard in operation even though gold was freely exchangeable for local currencies at the legal exchange rates.

Or, in short, to Friedman a gold standard is only a real gold standard if it produces a path for the money stock that is a k% rule. Anything else is a pseudo gold standard.

Yes! And that is what Friedman said, and it is absurd. And I am sure that Harry Johnson must have told him so.

The purpose of the paper, in short, is a Talmudic splitting-of-hairs. The point is to allow von Mises and Rueff and their not-so-deep-thinking latter-day followers (paging Paul Ryan! Paging Benn Steil! Paging Charles Koch! Paging Rand Paul!) to remain in their cloud-cuckoo-land of pledging allegiance to the gold standard as a golden calf while at the same time walling them off from and keeping them calm and supportive as the monetarist central bank does its job of keeping our fiat-money system stable by making Say’s Law true enough in practice.

As such, it succeeds admirably.

Or, at least, I think it does…

Have I just given an unconvincing Straussian reading of Friedman–that he knows what he is doing, and that what he is doing is leaving the theoretical husk to the fanatics von Mises and Rueff while keeping the rational kernel for himself, and making the point that a gold standard is a good monetary policy only if it turns out to mimic a good monetarist fiat-money standard policy? That his apparent confusion is simply a way of accomplishing those two tasks without splitting Mont Pelerin of the 1960s into yet more mutually-feuding camps?

I really sympathize with Brad’s effort to recruit Friedman into the worthy cause of combating nonsense. But you can’t combat nonsense with nonsense.

 

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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