Archive for the 'D. H. Robertson' Category

Central Banking and the Real-Bills Doctrine

Published December 8, 2023 Adam Smith , D. H. Robertson , gold standard , Great Depression , Lloyd Mints , Ludwig von Mises , Milton Friedman , quantity theory of money , real-bills doctrine , Richard Timberlake , Robert Hetzel , Thomas Humphrey , Uncategorized 9 Comments

            Robert Hetzel, a distinguished historian of monetary theory and of monetary institutions, deployed his expertise in both fields in his recent The Federal Reserve: A New History. Hetzel’s theoretical point departure is that the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 effectively replaced the pre-World War I gold standard, in which the value of the dollar was determined by the value of gold into which a dollar was convertible at a fixed rate, with a fiat-money system. The replacement did not happen immediately upon creation of the Fed; it took place during World War I as the international gold standard collapsed with all belligerent countries suspending the convertibility of their currencies into gold, to allow the mobilization of gold to finance imports of food and war materials. As a result, huge amounts of gold flowed into the US, where of much of those imports originated, and continued after the war when much of the imports required for European reconstruction also originated there, with the US freely supplying dollars in exchange for gold at the fixed price at which the dollar was convertible into gold, causing continued postwar inflation beyond the wartime inflation.

Holding more than half the world’s total stock of monetary gold reserves by 1920, the US could determine the value of gold at any point (within a wide range) of its own choosing. The value of the dollar was therefore no longer constrained by the value of gold, as it had been under the prewar gold standard, because the value of gold was now controlled by the Federal Reserve. That fundamental change was widely acknowledged at the time by economists like Keynes, Fisher, Robertson, Mises, and Hawtrey. But the Fed had little understanding of how to exercise that power. Hetzel explains the mechanisms whereby the power could be exercised, and the large gaps and errors in the Fed’s grasp of how to deploy the mechanisms. The mechanisms were a) setting an interest rate at which to lend reserves (by rediscounting commercial bank assets offered as collateral) to the banking system, and b) buying or selling government securities and other instruments like commercial paper (open-market operations) whereby reserves could be injected into, or withdrawn from, the banking system.

In discussing how the Fed could control the price level after World War I, Hetzel emphasizes the confusion sewed by the real-bills doctrine which provided the conceptual framework for the architects of the Federal Reserve and many of its early officials. Hetzel is not the first to identify the real-bills doctrine as a key conceptual error that contributed to the abysmal policy mistakes of the Federal Reserve before and during the Great Depression. The real-bills doctrine has long been a bete noire of Chicago School economists, (see for example the recent book by Thomas Humphrey and Richard Timberlake, Gold, the Real Bills Doctrine and the Fed), but Chicago School economists since Milton Friedman’s teacher Lloyd Mints have misunderstood both the doctrine (though not in the same way as those they criticize) because they adopt a naive view of the quantity theory the prevents them from understanding how the gold standard actually worked.

Long and widely misunderstood, the real-bills doctrine was first articulated by Adam Smith. But, as I showed in a 1992 paper (reprinted as Chapter 4 of my recent Studies in the History of Monetary Theory), Smith conceived the doctrine as a rule of thumb to be followed by individual banks to ensure that they had sufficient liquidity to meet demands for redemption of their liabilities (banknotes and deposits) should the demand for those liabilities decline. Because individual banks have no responsibility, beyond the obligation to keep their redemption commitments, for maintaining the value of their liabilities, Smith’s version of the real-bills doctrine was orthogonal to the policy question of how a central bank should discharge a mandate to keep the general price level reasonably stable.

Not until two decades after publication of Smith’s great work, during the Napoleonic Wars that confusion arose about what the real-bills doctrine actually means. After convertibility of the British pound into gold was suspended in 1797 owing to fear of a possible French invasion, the pound fell to a discount against gold, causing a general increase in British prices. The persistent discount of the pound against gold was widely blamed on an overissue of banknotes by the Bank of England (whose notes had been made legal tender to discharge debts after their convertibility into gold had been suspended. The Bank Directors responded to charges of overissue by asserting that they had strictly followed Smith’s maxim of lending only on the security of real bills of short duration. Their defense was a misunderstanding of Smith’s doctrine, which concerned the conduct of a bank obligated to redeem its liabilities in terms of an asset (presumably gold or silver) whose supply it could not control, whereas the Bank of England was then under no legal obligation to redeem its banknotes in terms of any outside asset.

Although their response misrepresented Smith’s doctrine, that misrepresentation soon became deeply imbedded in the literature on money and banking. Few commentators grasped the distinction between the doctrine applied to individual banks and the doctrine applied to the system as a whole or to a central bank issuing a currency whose value it can control.

The Bank Directors argued that because they scrupulously followed the real-bills doctrine, an overissue of banknotes was not possible. The discount against gold must therefore have been occasioned by some exogenous cause beyond the Bank’s control. This claim could have been true only in part. Even if the Bank did not issue more banknotes than it would have had convertibility not been suspended, so that the discount of the pound against gold was not necessarily the result of any action committed by the Bank, that does not mean that the Bank could not have prevented or reversed the discount by taking remedial or countervailing measures.

The discount against gold might, for example, have occurred, even with no change in the lending practices of the Bank, simply because public confidence in the pound declined after the suspension of convertibility, causing the demand for gold bullion to increase, raising the price of gold in terms of pounds. The Bank could have countered such a self-fulfilling expectation of pound depreciation by raising its lending rate or otherwise restricting credit thereby withdrawing pounds from circulation, preventing or reversing the discount. Because it did not take such countermeasures the Bank did indeed bear some responsibility for the discount against gold.

Although it is not obvious that the Bank ought to have responded in that way to prevent or reverse the discount, the claim of the Bank Directors that, by following the real-bills doctrine, they had done all that they could have done to avoid the rise in prices was both disingenuous and inaccurate. The Bank faced a policy question: whether to tolerate a rise in prices or prevent or reverse it by restricting credit, perhaps causing a downturn in economic activity and increased unemployment. Unwilling either to accept responsibility for their decision or to defend it, the Bank Directors invoked the real-bills doctrine as a pretext to deny responsibility for the discount. An alternative interpretation would be that the Bank Directors’ misunderstanding of the situation they faced was so comprehensive that they were oblivious to the implications of the policy choices that an understanding of the situation would have forced upon them.

The broader lesson of the misguided attempt by the Bank Directors to defend their conduct during the Napoleonic Wars is that the duty of a central bank cannot be merely to maintain its own liquidity; its duty must also encompass the liquidity and stability of the entire system. The liquidity and stability of the entire system depends chiefly on the stability of the general price level. Under a metallic (silver or gold) standard, central banks had very limited ability to control the price level, which was determined primarily in international markets for gold and silver. Thus, the duty of a central bank under a metallic standard could extend no further than to provide liquidity to the banking system during the recurring periods of stress or even crisis that characterized nineteenth-century banking systems.

Only after World War I did it become clear, at least to some economists, that the Federal Reserve had to take responsibility for stabilizing the general price level (not only for itself but for all countries on the restored gold standard), there being no greater threat to the liquidity—indeed, the solvency—of the system than a monetarily induced deflation in which bank assets depreciate faster than liabilities. Unless a central bank control the price level it could not discharge its responsibility to provide liquidity to the banking system. However, the misunderstanding of the real-bills doctrine led to the grave error that, by observing the real-bills doctrine, a central bank was doing all that was necessary and all that was possible to ensure the stability of the price level. However, the Federal Reserve, beguiled by its misunderstanding of the real-bills doctrine and its categorical misapplication to central banking, therefore failed abjectly to discharge its responsibility to control the price level. And the Depression came.

Krugman on Mr. Keynes and the Moderns

Published July 28, 2021 A. C. Pigou , D. H. Robertson , Frederick Lavington , gold standard , Gustav Cassel , Keynes , Paul Krugman , R. G. Hawtrey , Robert Barro , Scott Sumner , sticky prices , Uncategorized 10 Comments
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UPDATE: Re-upping this slightly revised post from July 11, 2011

Paul Krugman recently gave a lecture “Mr. Keynes and the Moderns” (a play on the title of the most influential article ever written about The General Theory, “Mr. Keynes and the Classics,” by another Nobel laureate J. R. Hicks) at a conference in Cambridge, England commemorating the publication of Keynes’s General Theory 75 years ago. Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe, among others, have already commented on his lecture. Coincidentally, in my previous posting, I discussed the views of Sumner and Krugman on the zero-interest lower bound, a topic that figures heavily in Krugman’s discussion of Keynes and his relevance for our current difficulties. (I note in passing that Krugman credits Brad Delong for applying the term “Little Depression” to those difficulties, a term that I thought I had invented, but, oh well, I am happy to share the credit with Brad).

In my earlier posting, I mentioned that Keynes’s, slightly older, colleague A. C. Pigou responded to the zero-interest lower bound in his review of The General Theory. In a way, the response enhanced Pigou’s reputation, attaching his name to one of the most famous “effects” in the history of economics, but it made no dent in the Keynesian Revolution. I also referred to “the layers upon layers of interesting personal and historical dynamics lying beneath the surface of Pigou’s review of Keynes.” One large element of those dynamics was that Keynes chose to make, not Hayek or Robbins, not French devotees of the gold standard, not American laissez-faire ideologues, but Pigou, a left-of-center social reformer, who in the early 1930s had co-authored with Keynes a famous letter advocating increased public-works spending to combat unemployment, the main target of his immense rhetorical powers and polemical invective.  The first paragraph of Pigou’s review reveals just how deeply Keynes’s onslaught had wounded Pigou.

When in 1919, he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Mr. Keynes did a good day’s work for the world, in helping it back towards sanity. But he did a bad day’s work for himself as an economist. For he discovered then, and his sub-conscious mind has not been able to forget since, that the best way to win attention for one’s own ideas is to present them in a matrix of sarcastic comment upon other people. This method has long been a routine one among political pamphleteers. It is less appropriate, and fortunately less common, in scientific discussion.  Einstein actually did for Physics what Mr. Keynes believes himself to have done for Economics. He developed a far-reaching generalization, under which Newton’s results can be subsumed as a special case. But he did not, in announcing his discovery, insinuate, through carefully barbed sentences, that Newton and those who had hitherto followed his lead were a gang of incompetent bunglers. The example is illustrious: but Mr. Keynes has not followed it. The general tone de haut en bas and the patronage extended to his old master Marshall are particularly to be regretted. It is not by this manner of writing that his desire to convince his fellow economists is best promoted.

Krugman acknowledges Keynes’s shady scholarship (“I know that there’s dispute about whether Keynes was fair in characterizing the classical economists in this way”), only to absolve him of blame. He then uses Keynes’s example to attack “modern economists” who deny that a failure of aggregate demand can cause of mass unemployment, offering up John Cochrane and Niall Ferguson as examples, even though Ferguson is a historian not an economist.

Krugman also addresses Robert Barro’s assertion that Keynes’s explanation for high unemployment was that wages and prices were stuck at levels too high to allow full employment, a problem easily solvable, in Barro’s view, by monetary expansion. Although plainly annoyed by Barro’s attempt to trivialize Keynes’s contribution, Krugman never addresses the point squarely, preferring instead to justify Keynes’s frustration with those (conveniently nameless) “classical economists.”

Keynes’s critique of the classical economists was that they had failed to grasp how everything changes when you allow for the fact that output may be demand-constrained.

Not so, as I pointed out in my first post. Frederick Lavington, an even more orthodox disciple than Pigou of Marshall, had no trouble understanding that “the inactivity of all is the cause of the inactivity of each.” It was Keynes who failed to see that the failure of demand was equally a failure of supply.

They mistook accounting identities for causal relationships, believing in particular that because spending must equal income, supply creates its own demand and desired savings are automatically invested.

Supply does create its own demand when economic agents succeed in executing their plans to supply; it is when, owing to their incorrect and inconsistent expectations about future prices, economic agents fail to execute their plans to supply, that both supply and demand start to contract. Lavington understood that; Pigou understood that. Keynes understood it, too, but believing that his new way of understanding how contractions are caused was superior to that of his predecessors, he felt justified in misrepresenting their views, and attributing to them a caricature of Say’s Law that they would never have taken seriously.

And to praise Keynes for understanding the difference between accounting identities and causal relationships that befuddled his predecessors is almost perverse, as Keynes’s notorious confusion about whether the equality of savings and investment is an equilibrium condition or an accounting identity was pointed out by Dennis Robertson, Ralph Hawtrey and Gottfried Haberler within a year after The General Theory was published. To quote Robertson:

(Mr. Keynes’s critics) have merely maintained that he has so framed his definition that Amount Saved and Amount Invested are identical; that it therefore makes no sense even to inquire what the force is which “ensures equality” between them; and that since the identity holds whether money income is constant or changing, and, if it is changing, whether real income is changing proportionately, or not at all, this way of putting things does not seem to be a very suitable instrument for the analysis of economic change.

It just so happens that in 1925, Keynes, in one of his greatest pieces of sustained, and almost crushing sarcasm, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, offered an explanation of high unemployment exactly the same as that attributed to Keynes by Barro. Churchill’s decision to restore the convertibility of sterling to gold at the prewar parity meant that a further deflation of at least 10 percent in wages and prices would be necessary to restore equilibrium.  Keynes felt that the human cost of that deflation would be intolerable, and held Churchill responsible for it.

Of course Keynes in 1925 was not yet the Keynes of The General Theory. But what historical facts of the 10 years following Britain’s restoration of the gold standard in 1925 at the prewar parity cannot be explained with the theoretical resources available in 1925? The deflation that began in England in 1925 had been predicted by Keynes. The even worse deflation that began in 1929 had been predicted by Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel soon after World War I ended, if a way could not be found to limit the demand for gold by countries, rejoining the gold standard in aftermath of the war. The United States, holding 40 percent of the world’s monetary gold reserves, might have accommodated that demand by allowing some of its reserves to be exported. But obsession with breaking a supposed stock-market bubble in 1928-29 led the Fed to tighten its policy even as the international demand for gold was increasing rapidly, as Germany, France and many other countries went back on the gold standard, producing the international credit crisis and deflation of 1929-31. Recovery came not from Keynesian policies, but from abandoning the gold standard, thereby eliminating the deflationary pressure implicit in a rapidly rising demand for gold with a more or less fixed total supply.

Keynesian stories about liquidity traps and Monetarist stories about bank failures are epiphenomena obscuring rather than illuminating the true picture of what was happening.  The story of the Little Depression is similar in many ways, except the source of monetary tightness was not the gold standard, but a monetary regime that focused attention on rising price inflation in 2008 when the appropriate indicator, wage inflation, had already started to decline.

Imagining the Gold Standard

Published December 29, 2016 Bank of France , D. H. Robertson , gold standard , Great Depression , Larry White 8 Comments

The Marginal Revolution University has posted a nice little 10-minute video conversation between Scott Sumner and Larry about the gold standard and fiat money, Scott speaking up for fiat money and Larry weighing in on the side of the gold standard. I thought that both Scott and Larry acquitted themselves admirably, but several of the arguments made by Larry seemed to me to require either correction or elaboration. The necessary corrections or elaborations do not strengthen the defense of the gold standard that Larry presents so capably.

Larry begins with a defense of the gold standard against the charge that it caused the Great Depression. As I recently argued in my discussion of a post on the gold standard by Cecchetti and Schoenholtz, it is a bit of an overreach to argue that the Great Depression was the necessary consequence of trying to restore the international gold standard in the 1920s after its collapse at the start of World War I. Had the leading central banks at the time, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and especially the Bank of France, behaved more intelligently, the catastrophe could have been averted, allowing the economic expansion of the 1920s to continue for many more years, thereby averting subsequent catastrophes that resulted from the Great Depression. But the perverse actions taken by those banks in 1928 and 1929 had catastrophic consequences, because of the essential properties of the gold-standard system. The gold standard was the mechanism that transformed stupidity into catastrophe. Not every monetary system would have been capable of accomplishing that hideous transformation.

So while it is altogether fitting and proper to remind everyone that the mistakes that led to catastrophe were the result of choices made by policy makers — choices not required by any binding rules of central-bank conduct imposed by the gold standard — the deflation caused by the gold accumulation of the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve occurred only because the gold standard makes deflation inevitable if there is a sufficiently large increase in the demand for gold. While Larry is correct that the gold standard per se did not require the Bank of France to embark on its insane policy of gold accumulation, it should at least give one pause that the most fervent defenders of that insane policy were people like Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Charles Rist, who were also the most diehard proponents of maintaining the gold standard after the Great Depression started, even holding up the Bank of France as a role model for other central banks to emulate. (To be fair, I should acknowledge that Hayek and Robbins, to Mises’s consternation, later admitted their youthful errors.)

Of course, Larry would say that under the free-banking system that he favors, there would be no possibility that a central bank like the Bank of France could engage in the sort of ruinous policy that triggered the Great Depression. Larry may well be right, but there is also a non-trivial chance that he’s not. I prefer not to take a non-trivial chance of catastrophe.

Larry, I think, makes at least two other serious misjudgments. First, he argues that the instability of the interwar gold standard can be explained away as the result of central-bank errors – errors, don’t forget, that were endorsed by the most stalwart advocates of the gold standard at the time – and that the relative stability of the pre-World War I gold standard was the result of the absence of the central banks in the US and Canada and some other countries while the central banks in Britain, France and Germany were dutifully following the rules of the game.

As a factual matter, the so-called rules of the game, as I have observed elsewhere (also here), were largely imaginary, and certainly never explicitly agreed upon or considered binding by any monetary authority that ever existed. Moreover, the rules of the game were based on an incorrect theory of the gold standard reflecting the now discredited price-specie-flow mechanism, whereby differences in national price levels under the gold standard triggered gold movements that would be deflationary in countries losing gold and inflationary in countries gaining gold. That is a flatly incorrect understanding of how the international adjustment mechanism worked under the gold standard, because price-level differences large enough to trigger compensatory gold flows are inconsistent with arbitrage opportunities tending to equalize the prices of all tradable goods. And finally, as McCloskey and Zecher demonstrated 40 years ago, the empirical evidence clearly refutes the proposition that gold flows under the gold standard were in any way correlated with national price level differences. (See also this post.) So it is something of a stretch for Larry to attribute the stability of the world economy between 1880 and 1914 either to the absence of central banks in some countries or to the central banks that were then in existence having followed the rules of the game in contrast to the central banks of the interwar period that supposedly flouted those rules.

Focusing on the difference between the supposedly rule-based behavior of central banks under the classical gold standard and the discretionary behavior of central banks in the interwar period, Larry misses the really critical difference between the two periods. The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of peace and stability after the end of the Civil War in America and the short, and one-sided, Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The rapid expansion of the domain of the gold standard between 1870 and 1880 was accomplished relatively easily, but not without significant deflationary pressures that lasted for almost two decades. A gold standard had been operating in Britain and those parts of the world under British control for half a century, and gold had long been, along with silver, one of the two main international monies and had maintained a roughly stable value for at least half a century. Once started, the shift from silver to gold caused a rapid depreciation of silver relative to gold, which itself led the powerful creditor classes in countries still on the silver standard to pressure their governments to shift to gold.

After three and a half decades of stability, the gold standard collapsed almost as soon as World War I started. A non-belligerent for three years, the US alone remained on the gold standard until it prohibited the export of gold upon entry into the war in 1917. But, having amassed an enormous gold hoard during World War I, the US was able to restore convertibility easily after the end of the War. However, gold could not be freely traded even after the war. Restrictions on the ownership and exchange of gold were not eliminated until the early 1920s, so the gold standard did not really function in the US until a free market for gold was restored. But prices had doubled between the start of the war and 1920, while 40% of the world’s gold reserves were held by the US. So it was not the value of gold that determined the value of the U.S. dollar; it was the value of the U.S. dollar — determined by the policy of the Federal Reserve — that determined the value of gold. The kind of system that was operating under the classical gold standard, when gold had a clear known value that had been roughly maintained for half a century or more, did not exist in the 1920s when the world was recreating, essentially from scratch, a new gold standard.

Recreating a gold standard after the enormous shock of World War I was not like flicking a switch. No one knew what the value of gold was or would be, because the value of gold itself depended on a whole range of policy choices that inevitably had to be made by governments and central banks. That was just the nature of the world that existed in the 1920s. You can’t just assume that historical reality away.

Larry would like to think and would like the rest of us to think that it would be easy to recreate a gold standard today. But it would be just as hard to recreate a gold standard today as it was in the 1920s — and just as perilous. As Thomas Aubrey pointed out in a comment on my recent post on the gold standard, Russia and China between them hold about 25% of the world’s gold reserves. Some people complain loudly about Chinese currency manipulation now. How would you like to empower the Chinese and the Russians to manipulate the value of gold under a gold standard?

The problem of recreating a gold standard was beautifully described in 1922 by Dennis Robertson in his short classic Money. I have previously posted this passage, but as Herbert Spencer is supposed to have said, “it is only by repeated and varied iteration that alien conceptions can be forced upon reluctant minds.” So, I will once again let Dennis Robertson have the final word on the gold standard.

We can now resume the main thread of our argument. In a gold standard country, whatever the exact device in force for facilitating the maintenance of the standard, the quantity of money is such that its value and that of a defined weight of gold are kept at an equality with one another. It looks therefore as if we could confidently take a step forward, and say that in such a country the quantity of money depends on the world value of gold. Before the war this would have been a true enough statement, and it may come to be true again in the lifetime of those now living: it is worthwhile therefore to consider what, if it be true, are its implications.

The value of gold in its turn depends on the world’s demand for it for all purposes, and on the quantity of it in existence in the world. Gold is demanded not only for use as money and in reserves, but for industrial and decorative purposes, and to be hoarded by the nations of the East : and the fact that it can be absorbed into or ejected from these alternative uses sets a limit to the possible changes in its value which may arise from a change in the demand for it for monetary uses, or from a change in its supply. But from the point of view of any single country, the most important alternative use for gold is its use as money or reserves in other countries; and this becomes on occasion a very important matter, for it means that a gold standard country is liable to be at the mercy of any change in fashion not merely in the methods of decoration or dentistry of its neighbours, but in their methods of paying their bills. For instance, the determination of Germany to acquire a standard money of gold in the [eighteen]’seventies materially restricted the increase of the quantity of money in England.

But alas for the best made pigeon-holes! If we assert that at the present day the quantity of money in every gold standard country, and therefore its value, depends on the world value of gold, we shall be in grave danger of falling once more into Alice’s trouble about the thunder and the lightning. For the world’s demand for gold includes the demand of the particular country which we are considering; and if that country be very large and rich and powerful, the value of gold is not something which she must take as given and settled by forces outside her control, but something which up to a point at least she can affect at will. It is open to such a country to maintain what is in effect an arbitrary standard, and to make the value of gold conform to the value of her money instead of making the value of her money conform to the value of gold. And this she can do while still preserving intact the full trappings of a gold circulation or gold bullion system. For as we have hinted, even where such a system exists it does not by itself constitute an infallible and automatic machine for the preservation of a gold standard. In lesser countries it is still necessary for the monetary authority, by refraining from abuse of the elements of ‘play’ still left in the monetary system, to make the supply of money conform to the gold position: in such a country as we are now considering it is open to the monetary authority, by making full use of these same elements of ‘play,’ to make the supply of money dance to its own sweet pipings.

Now for a number of years, for reasons connected partly with the war and partly with its own inherent strength, the United States has been in such a position as has just been described. More than one-third of the world’s monetary gold is still concentrated in her shores; and she possesses two big elements of ‘play’ in her system — the power of varying considerably in practice the proportion of gold reserves which the Federal Reserve Banks hold against their notes and deposits (p. 47), and the power of substituting for one another two kinds of common money, against one of which the law requires a gold reserve of 100 per cent and against the other only one of 40 per cent (p. 51). Exactly what her monetary aim has been and how far she has attained it, is a difficult question of which more later. At present it is enough for us that she has been deliberately trying to treat gold as a servant and not as a master.

It was for this reason, and for fear that the Red Queen might catch us out, that the definition of a gold standard in the first section of this chapter had to be so carefully framed. For it would be misleading to say that in America the value of money is being kept equal to the value of a defined weight of gold: but it is true even there that the value of money and the value of a defined weight of gold are being kept equal to one another. We are not therefore forced into the inconveniently paradoxical statement that America is not on a gold standard. Nevertheless it is arguable that a truer impression of the state of the world’s monetary affairs would be given by saying that America is on an arbitrary standard, while the rest of the world has climbed back painfully on to a dollar standard.

HT: J. P. Koning

Keynes on the Theory of Interest

Published October 22, 2015 D. H. Robertson , Hawtrey , Irving Fisher , Keynes 124 Comments
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In my previous post, I asserted that Keynes used the idea that savings and investment (in the aggregated) are identically equal to dismiss the neoclassical theory of interest of Irving Fisher, which was based on the idea that the interest rate equilibrates savings and investment. One of the commenters on my post, George Blackford, challenged my characterization of Keynes’s position.

I find this to be a rather odd statement for when I read Keynes I didn’t find anywhere that he argued this sort of thing. He often argued that “an act of saving” or “an act of investing” in itself could not have an direct effect on the rate of interest, and he said things like: “Assuming that the decisions to invest become effective, they must in doing so either curtail consumption or expand income”, but I don’t find him saying that savings and investment could not determine the rate of interest are identical.

A quote from Keynes in which he actually says something to this effect would be helpful here.

Now I must admit that in writing this characterization of what Keynes was doing, I was relying on my memory of how Hawtrey characterized Keynes’s theory of interest in his review of the General Theory, and did not look up the relevant passages in the General Theory. Of course, I do believe that Hawtrey’s characterization of what Keynes said to be very reliable, but it is certainly not as authoritative as a direct quotation from Keynes himself, so I have been checking up on the General Theory for the last couple of days. I actually found that Keynes’s discussion in the General Theory was less helpful than Keynes’s 1937 article “Alternative Theories of the Rate of Interest” in which Keynes responded to criticisms by Ohlin, Robertson, and Hawtrey, of his liquidity-preference theory of interest. So I will use that source rather than what seems to me to be the less direct and more disjointed exposition in the General Theory.

Let me also remark parenthetically that Keynes did not refer to Fisher at all in discussing what he called the “classical” theory of interest which he associated with Alfred Marshall, his only discussion of Fisher in the General Theory being limited to a puzzling criticism of the Fisher relation between the real and nominal rates of interest. That seems to me to be an astonishing omission, perhaps reflecting a deplorable Cambridgian provincialism or chauvinism that would not deign to acknowledge Fisher’s magisterial accomplishment in incorporating the theory of interest into the neoclassical theory of general equilibrium. Equally puzzling is that Keynes chose to refer to Marshall’s theory (which I am assuming he considered an adequate proxy for Fisher’s) as the “classical” theory while reserving the term “neo-classical” for the Austrian theory that he explicitly associates with Mises, Hayek, and Robbins.

Here is how Keynes described his liquidity-preference theory:

The liquidity-preference theory of the rate of interest which I have set forth in my General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money makes the rate of interest to depend on the present supply of money and the demand schedule for a present claim on money in terms of a deferred claim on money. This can be put briefly by saying that the rate of interest depends on the demand and supply of money. . . . (p. 241)

The theory of the rate of interest which prevailed before (let us say) 1914 regarded it as the factor which ensured equality between saving and investment. It was never suggested that saving and investment could be unequal. This idea arose (for the first time, so far as I am aware) with certain post-war theories. In maintaining the equality of saving and investment, I am, therefore, returning to old-fashioned orthodoxy. The novelty in my treatment of saving and investment consists, not in my maintaining their necessary aggregate equality, but in the proposition that it is, not the rate of interest, but the level of incomes which (in conjunction with certain other factors) ensures this equality. (pp. 248-49)

As Hawtrey and Robertson explained in their rejoinders to Keynes, the necessary equality in the “classical” system between aggregate savings and aggregate investment of which Keynes spoke was not a definitional equality but a condition of equilibrium. Plans to save and plans to invest will be consistent in equilibrium and the rate of interest – along with all the other variables in the system — must be such that the independent plans of savers and investors will be mutually consistent. Keynes had no basis for simply asserting that this consistency of plans is ensured entirely by way of adjustments in income to the exclusion of adjustments in the rate of interest. Nor did he have a basis for asserting that the adjustment to a discrepancy between planned savings and planned investment was necessarily an adjustment in income rather than an adjustment in the rate of interest. If prices adjust in response to excess demands and excess supplies in the normal fashion, it would be natural to assume that an excess of planned savings over planned investment would cause the rate of interest to fall. That’s why most economists would say that the drop in real interest rates since 2008 has been occasioned by a persistent tendency for planned savings to exceed planned investment.

Keynes then explicitly stated that his liquidity preference theory was designed to fill the theoretical gap left by his realization that a change income not in the interest rate is what equalizes savings and investment (even while insisting that savings and investment are necessarily equal by definition).

As I have said above, the initial novelty lies in my maintaining that it is not the rate of interest, but the level of incomes which ensures equality between saving and investment. The arguments which lead up to this initial conclusion are independent of my subsequent theory of the rate of interest, and in fact I reached it before I had reached the latter theory. But the result of it was to leave the rate of interest in the air. If the rate of interest is not determined by saving and investment in the same way in which price is determined by supply and demand, how is it determined? One naturally began by supposing that the rate of interest must be determined in some sense by productivity-that it was, perhaps, simply the monetary equivalent of the marginal efficiency of capital, the latter being independently fixed by physical and technical considerations in conjunction with the expected demand. It was only when this line of approach led repeatedly to what seemed to be circular reasoning, that I hit on what I now think to be the true explanation. The resulting theory, whether right or wrong, is exceedingly simple-namely, that the rate of interest on a loan of given quality and maturity has to be established at the level which, in the opinion of those who have the opportunity of choice -i.e. of wealth-holders-equalises the attractions of holding idle cash and of holding the loan. It would be true to say that this by itself does not carry us very far. But it gives us firm and intelligible ground from which to proceed. (p. 250)

Thus, Keynes denied forthrightly the notion that the rate of interest is in any way determined by the real forces of what in Fisherian terms are known as the impatience to spend income and the opportunity to invest it. However, his argument was belied by his own breathtakingly acute analysis in chapter 17 of the General Theory (“The Properties of Interest and Money”) in which, applying and revising ideas discussed by Sraffa in his 1932 review of Hayek’s Prices and Production he introduced the idea of own rates of interest.

The rate of interest (as we call it for short) is, strictly speaking, a monetary phenomenon in the special sense that it is the own-rate of interest (General Theory, p. 223) on money itself, i.e. that it equalises the advantages of holding actual cash and a deferred claim on cash. (p. 245)

The huge gap in Keynes’s reasoning here is that he neglected to say at what rate of return “the advantages of holding actual cash and a deferred claim on cash” or, for that matter, of holding any other real asset are equalized. That’s the rate of return – the real rate of interest — for which Irving Fisher provided an explanation. Keynes simply ignored — or forgot about — it, leaving the real rate of interest totally unexplained.

D.H. Robertson on Why the Gold Standard after World War I Was Really a Dollar Standard

Published December 17, 2014 1920-21 Depression , D. H. Robertson , gold standard 14 Comments
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In a recent post, I explained how the Depression of 1920-21 was caused by Federal Reserve policy that induced a gold inflow into the US thereby causing the real value of gold to appreciate. The appreciation of gold implied that, measured in gold, prices for most goods and services had to fall. Since the dollar was equal to a fixed weight of gold, dollar prices also had to fall, and insofar as other countries kept their currencies from depreciating against the dollar, prices in terms of other currencies were also falling. So in 1920-21, pretty much the whole world went into a depression along with the US. The depression stopped in late 1921 when the Fed decided to allowed interest rates to fall sufficiently to stop the inflow of gold into the US, thereby halting the appreciation of gold.

As an addendum to my earlier post, I reproduce here a passage from D. H. Robertson’s short classic, one of the Cambridge Economic Handbooks, entitled Money, originally published 92 years ago in 1922. I first read the book as an undergraduate – I think when I took money and banking from Ben Klein – which would have been about 46 years ago. After seeing Nick Rowe’s latest post following up on my post, I remembered that it was from Robertson that I first became aware of the critical distinction between a small country on the gold standard and a large country on the gold standard. So here is Dennis Robertson from chapter IV (“The Gold Standard”), section 6 (“The Value of Money and the Value of Gold”) (pp. 65-67):

We can now resume the main thread of our argument. In a gold standard country, whatever the exact device in force for facilitating the maintenance of the standard, the quantity of money is such that its value and that of a defined weight of gold are kept at an equality with one another. It looks therefore as if we could confidently take a step forward, and say that in such a country the quantity of money depends on the world value of gold. Before the war this would have been a true enough statement, and it may come to be true again in the lifetime of those now living: it is worthwhile therefore to consider what, if it be true, are its implications.

The value of gold in its turn depends on the world’s demand for it for all purposes, and on the quantity of it in existence in the world. Gold is demanded not only for use as money and in reserves, but for industrial and decorative purposes, and to be hoarded by the nations of the East : and the fact that it can be absorbed into or ejected from these alternative uses sets a limit to the possible changes in its value which may arise from a change in the demand for it for monetary uses, or from a change in its supply. But from the point of view of any single country, the most important alternative use for gold is its use as money or reserves in other countries; and this becomes on occasion a very important matter, for it means that a gold standard country is liable to be at the mercy of any change in fashion not merely in the methods of decoration or dentistry of its neighbours, but in their methods of paying their bills. For instance, the determination of Germany to acquire a standard money of gold in the [eighteen]’seventies materially restricted the increase of the quantity of money in England.

But alas for the best made pigeon-holes! If we assert that at the present day the quantity of money in every gold standard country, and therefore its value, depends on the world value of gold, we shall be in grave danger of falling once more into Alice’s trouble about the thunder and the lightning. For the world’s demand for gold includes the demand of the particular country which we are considering; and if that country be very large and rich and powerful, the value of gold is not something which she must take as given and settled by forces outside her control, but something which up to a point at least she can affect at will. It is open to such a country to maintain what is in effect an arbitrary standard, and to make the value of gold conform to the value of her money instead of making the value of her money conform to the value of gold. And this she can do while still preserving intact the full trappings of a gold circulation or gold bullion system. For as we have hinted, even where such a system exists it does not by itself constitute an infallible and automatic machine for the preservation of a gold standard. In lesser countries it is still necessary for the monetary authority, by refraining from abuse of the elements of ‘play’ still left in the monetary system, to make the supply of money conform to the gold position: in such a country as we are now considering it is open to the monetary authority, by making full use of these same elements of ‘play,’ to make the supply of money dance to its own sweet pipings.

Now for a number of years, for reasons connected partly with the war and partly with its own inherent strength, the United States has been in such a position as has just been described. More than one-third of the world’s monetary gold is still concentrated in her shores; and she possesses two big elements of ‘play’ in her system — the power of varying considerably in practice the proportion of gold reserves which the Federal Reserve Banks hold against their notes and deposits (p. 47), and the power of substituting for one another two kinds of common money, against one of which the law requires a gold reserve of 100 per cent and against the other only one of 40 per cent (p. 51). Exactly what her monetary aim has been and how far she has attained it, is a difficult question of which more later. At present it is enough for us that she has been deliberately trying to treat gold as a servant and not as a master.

It was for this reason, and for fear that the Red Queen might catch us out, that the definition of a gold standard in the first section of this chapter had to be so carefully framed. For it would be misleading to say that in America the value of money is being kept equal to the value of a defined weight of gold: but it is true even there that the value of money and the value of a defined weight of gold are being kept equal to one another. We are not therefore forced into the inconveniently paradoxical statement that America is not on a gold standard. Nevertheless it is arguable that a truer impression of the state of the world’s monetary affairs would be given by saying that America is on an arbitrary standard, while the rest of the world has climbed back painfully on to a dollar standard.

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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