Archive for the 'David Laidler' Category

Hayek’s Rapid Rise to Stardom

Published December 12, 2017 Austrian Business-Cycle Theory , David Laidler , gold standard , Hayek , Larry White , Ludwig von Mises , neutral money 11 Comments
Tags: , ,

For a month or so, I have been working on a paper about Hayek’s early pro-deflationary policy recommendations which seem to be at odds with his own idea of neutral money which he articulated in a way that implied or at least suggested that the ideal monetary policy would aim to keep nominal spending or nominal income constant. In the Great Depression, prices and real output were both falling, so that nominal spending and income were also falling at a rate equal to the rate of decline in real output plus the rate of decline in the price level. So in a depression, the monetary policy implied by Hayek’s neutral money criterion would have been to print money like crazy to generate enough inflation to keep nominal spending and nominal income constant. But Hayek denounced any monetary policy that aimed to raise prices during the depression, arguing that such a policy would treat the disease of depression with the drug that had caused the disease in the first place. Decades later, Hayek acknowledged his mistake and made clear that he favored a policy that would prevent the flow of nominal spending from ever shrinking. In this post, I am excerpting the introductory section of the current draft of my paper.

Few economists, if any, ever experienced as rapid a rise to stardom as F. A. Hayek did upon arriving in London in January 1931, at the invitation of Lionel Robbins, to deliver a series of four lectures on the theory of industrial fluctuations. The Great Depression having started about 15 months earlier, British economists were desperately seeking new insights into the unfolding and deteriorating economic catastrophe. The subject on which Hayek was to expound was of more than academic interest; it was of the most urgent economic, political and social, import.

Only 31 years old, Hayek, director of the Austrian Institute of Business Cycle Research headed by his mentor Ludwig von Mises, had never held an academic position. Upon completing his doctorate at the University of Vienna, writing his doctoral thesis under Friedrich von Wieser, one of the eminent figures of the Austrian School of Economics, Hayek, through financial assistance secured by Mises, spent over a year in the United States doing research on business cycles, and meeting such leading American experts on business cycles as W. C. Mitchell. While in the US, Hayek also exhaustively studied the English-language  literature on the monetary history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the, mostly British, monetary doctrines of that era.

Even without an academic position, Hayek’s productivity upon returning to Vienna was impressive. Aside from writing a monthly digest of statistical reports, financial news, and analysis of business conditions for the Institute, Hayek published several important theoretical papers, gaining a reputation as a young economist of considerable promise. Moreover, Hayek’s immersion in the English monetary literature and his sojourn in the United States gave him an excellent command of English, so that when Robbins, newly installed as head of the economics department at LSE, and having fallen under the influence of the Austrian school of economics, was seeking to replace Edwin Cannan, who before his retirement had been the leading monetary economist at LSE, Robbins thought of Hayek as a candidate for Cannan’s position.

Hoping that Hayek’s performance would be sufficiently impressive to justify the offer of a position at LSE, Robbins undoubtedly made clear to Hayek that if his lectures were well received, his chances of receiving an offer to replace Cannan were quite good. A secure academic position for a young economist, even one as talented as Hayek, was then hard to come by in Austria or Germany. Realizing how much depended on the impression he would make, Hayek, despite having undertaken to write a textbook on monetary theory for which he had already written several chapters, dropped everything else to compose the four lectures that he would present at LSE.

When he arrived in England in January 1931, Hayek actually went first to Cambridge to give a lecture, a condensed version of the four LSE lectures. Hayek was not feeling well when he came to Cambridge to face an unsympathetic, if not hostile, audience, and the lecture was not a success. However, either despite, or because of, his inauspicious debut at Cambridge, Hayek’s performance at LSE turned out to be an immediate sensation. In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter, who, although an Austrian with a background in economics similar to Hayek’s, was neither a personal friend nor an ideological ally of Hayek’s, wrote that Hayek’s theory

on being presented to the Anglo-American community of economists, met with a sweeping success that has never been equaled by any strictly theoretical book that failed to make amends for its rigors by including plans and policy recommendations or to make contact in other ways with its readers loves or hates. A strong critical reaction followed that, at first, but served to underline the success, and then the profession turned away to other leaders and interests.

The four lectures provided a masterful survey of business-cycle theory and the role of monetary analysis in business-cycle theory, including a lucid summary of the Austrian capital-theoretic approach to business-cycle theory and of the equilibrium price relationships that are conducive to economic stability, an explanation of how those equilibrium price relationships are disturbed by monetary disturbances giving rise to cyclical effects, and some comments on the appropriate policies for avoiding or minimizing such disturbances. The goal of monetary policy should be to set the money interest rate equal to the hypothetical equilibrium interest rate determined by strictly real factors. The only policy implication that Hayek could extract from this rarified analysis was that monetary policy should aim not to stabilize the price level as recommended by such distinguished monetary theorists as Alfred Marshall and Knut Wicksell, but to stabilize total spending or total money income.

This objective would be achieved, Hayek argued, only if injections of new money preserved the equilibrium relationship between savings and investment, investments being financed entirely by voluntary savings, not by money newly created for that purpose. Insofar as new investment projects were financed by newly created money, the additional expenditure thereby financed would entail a deviation from the real equilibrium that would obtain in a hypothetical barter economy or in an economy in which money had no distortionary effect. That  interest rate was called by Hayek, following Wicksell, the natural (or equilibrium) rate of interest.

But according to Hayek, Wicksell failed to see that, in a progressive economy with real investment financed by voluntary saving, the increasing output of goods and services over time implies generally falling prices as the increasing productivity of factors of production progressively reduces costs of production. A stable price level would require ongoing increases in the quantity of money to, the new money being used to finance additional investment over and above voluntary saving, thereby causing the economy to deviate from its equilibrium time path by inducing investment that would not otherwise have been undertaken.

As Paul Zimmerman and I have pointed out in our paper on Hayek’s response to Piero Sraffa’s devastating, but flawed, review of Prices and Production (the published version of Hayek’s LSE lectures) Hayek’s argument that only an economy in which no money is created to finance investment is consistent with the real equilibrium of a pure barter economy depends on the assumption that money is non-interest-bearing and that the rate of inflation is not correctly foreseen. If money bears competitive interest and inflation is correctly foreseen, the economy can attain its real equilibrium regardless of the rate of inflation – provided, at least, that the rate of deflation is not greater than the real rate of interest. Inasmuch as the real equilibrium is defined by a system of n-1 relative prices per time period which can be multiplied by any scalar representing the expected price level or expected rate of inflation between time periods.

So Hayek’s assumption that the real equilibrium requires a rate of deflation equal to the rate of increase in factor productivity is an arbitrary and unfounded assumption reflecting his failure to see that the real equilibrium of the economy is independent of the price levels in different time periods and rates of inflation between time periods, when prices levels and rates of inflation are correctly anticipated. If inflation is correctly foreseen, nominal wages will rise commensurately with inflation and real wages with productivity increases, so that the increase in nominal money supplied by banks will not induce or finance investment beyond voluntary savings. Hayek’s argument was based on a failure to work through the full implications of his equilibrium method. As Hayek would later come to recognize, disequilibrium is the result not of money creation by banks but of mistaken expectations about the future.

Thus, Hayek’s argument mistakenly identified monetary expansion of any sort that moderated or reversed what Hayek considered the natural tendency of prices to fall in a progressively expanding economy, as the disturbing and distorting impulse responsible for business-cycle fluctuations. Although he did not offer a detailed account of the origins of the Great Depression, Hayek’s diagnosis of the causes of the Great Depression, made explicit in various other writings, was clear: monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve during the 1920s — especially in 1927 — to keep the US price level from falling and to moderate deflationary pressure on Britain (sterling having been overvalued at the prewar dollar-sterling parity when Britain restored gold convertibility in March 1925) distorted relative prices and the capital structure. When distortions eventually become unsustainable, unprofitable investment projects would be liquidated, supposedly freeing those resources to be re-employed in more productive activities. Why the Depression continued to deepen rather than recover more than a year after the downturn had started, was another question.

Despite warning of the dangers of a policy of price-level stabilization, Hayek was reluctant to advance an alternative policy goal or criterion beyond the general maxim that policy should avoid any disturbing or distorting effect — in particular monetary expansion — on the economic system. But Hayek was incapable of, or unwilling to, translate this abstract precept into a definite policy norm.

The simplest implementation of Hayek’s objective would be to hold the quantity of money constant. But that policy, as Hayek acknowledged, was beset with both practical and conceptual difficulties. Under a gold standard, which Hayek, at least in the early 1930s, still favored, the relevant area within which to keep the quantity of money constant would be the entire world (or, more precisely, the set of countries linked to the gold standard). But national differences between the currencies on the gold standard would make it virtually impossible to coordinate those national currencies to keep some aggregate measure of the quantity of money convertible into gold constant. And Hayek also recognized that fluctuations in the demand to hold money (the reciprocal of the velocity of circulation) produce monetary disturbances analogous to variations in the quantity of money, so that the relevant policy objective was not to hold the quantity of money constant, but to change the quantity of money proportionately (inversely) with the demand to hold money (the velocity of circulation).

Hayek therefore suggested that the appropriate criterion for the neutrality of money might be to hold total spending (or alternatively total factor income) constant. With constant total spending, neither an increase nor a decrease in the amount of money the public desired to hold would lead to disequilibrium. This was a compelling argument for constant total spending as the goal of policy, but Hayek was unwilling to adopt it as a practical guide for monetary policy.

In the final paragraph of his final LSE lecture, Hayek made his most explicit, though still equivocal, policy recommendation:

[T]he only practical maxim for monetary policy to be derived from our considerations is probably . . . that the simple fact of an increase of production and trade forms no justification for an expansion of credit, and that—save in an acute crisis—bankers need not be afraid to harm production by overcaution. . . . It is probably an illusion to suppose that we shall ever be able entirely to eliminate industrial fluctuations by means of monetary policy. The most we may hope for is that the growing information of the public may make it easier for central banks both to follow a cautious policy during the upward swing of the cycle, and so to mitigate the following depression, and to resist the well-meaning but dangerous proposals to fight depression by “a little inflation “.

Thus, Hayek concluded his series of lectures by implicitly rejecting his own idea of neutral money as a policy criterion, warning instead against the “well-meaning but dangerous proposals to fight depression by ‘a little inflation.’” The only sensible interpretation of Hayek’s counsel of “resistance” is an icy expression of indifference to falling nominal spending in a deep depression.

Larry White has defended Hayek against the charge that his policy advice in the depression was liquidationist, encouraging policy makers to take a “hands-off” approach to the unfolding economic catastrophe. In making this argument, White relies on Hayek’s neutral-money concept as well as Hayek’s disavowals decades later of his early pro-deflation policy advice. However, White omitted any mention of Hayek’s explicit rejection of neutral money as a policy norm at the conclusion of his LSE lectures. White also disputes that Hayek was a liquidationist, arguing that Hayek supported liquidation not for its own sake but only as a means to reallocate resources from lower- to higher-valued uses. Although that is certainly true, White does not establish that any of the other liquidationists he mentions favored liquidation as an end and not, like Hayek, as a means.

Hayek’s policy stance in the early 1930s was characterized by David Laidler as a skepticism bordering on nihilism in opposing any monetary- or fiscal-policy responses to mitigate the suffering of the general public caused by the Depression. White’s efforts at rehabilitation notwithstanding, Laidler’s characterization seems to be on the mark. The perplexing and disturbing question raised by Hayek’s policy stance in the early 1930s is why, given the availability of his neutral-money criterion as a justification for favoring at least a mildly inflationary (or reflationary) policy to promote economic recovery from the Depression, did Hayek remain, during the 1930s at any rate, implacably opposed to expansionary monetary policies? Hayek’s later disavowals of his early position actually provide some insight into his reasoning in the early 1930s, but to understand the reasons for his advocacy of a policy inconsistent with his own theoretical understanding of the situation for which he was offering policy advice, it is necessary to understand the intellectual and doctrinal background that set the boundaries on what kinds of policies Hayek was prepared to entertain. The source of that intellectual and doctrinal background was David Hume and the intermediary through which it was transmitted was none other than Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises.

The Trouble with IS-LM (and its Successors)

Published August 22, 2014 Bertil Ohlin , David Laidler , expectations , IS-LM , Keynes , macroeconomics , Roger Backhouse , Stockholm School 14 Comments
Tags: , , ,

Lately, I have been reading a paper by Roger Backhouse and David Laidler, “What Was Lost with IS-LM” (an earlier version is available here) which was part of a very interesting symposium of 11 papers on the IS-LM model published as a supplement to the 2004 volume of History of Political Economy. The main thesis of the paper is that the IS-LM model, like the General Theory of which it is a partial and imperfect distillation, aborted a number of promising developments in the rapidly developing, but still nascent, field of macroeconomics in the 1920 and 1930s, developments that just might, had they not been elbowed aside by the IS-LM model, have evolved into a more useful and relevant theory of macroeconomic fluctuations and policy than we now possess. Even though I have occasionally sparred with Scott Sumner about IS-LM – with me pushing back a bit at Scott’s attacks on IS-LM — I have a lot of sympathy for the Backhouse-Laidler thesis.

The Backhouse-Laidler paper is too long to summarize, but I will just note that there are four types of loss that they attribute to IS-LM, which are all, more or less, derivative of the static equilibrium character of Keynes’s analytic method in both the General Theory and the IS-LM construction.

1 The loss of dynamic analysis. IS-LM is a single-period model.

2 The loss of intertemporal choice and expectations. Intertemporal choice and expectations are excluded a priori in a single-period model.

3 The loss of policy regimes. In a single-period model, policy is a one-time affair. The problem of setting up a regime that leads to optimal results over time doesn’t arise.

4 The loss of intertemporal coordination failures. Another concept that is irrelevant in a one-period model.

There was one particular passage that I found especially impressive. Commenting on the lack of any systematic dynamic analysis in the GT, Backhouse and Laidler observe,

[A]lthough [Keynes] made many remarks that could be (and in some cases were later) turned into dynamic models, the emphasis of the General Theory was nevertheless on unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon.

Dynamic accounts of how money wages might affect employment were only a little more integrated into Keynes’s formal analysis than they were later into IS-LM. Far more significant for the development in Keynes’s thought is how Keynes himself systematically neglected dynamic factors that had been discussed in previous explanations of unemployment. This was a feature of the General Theory remarked on by Bertil Ohlin (1937, 235-36):

Keynes’s theoretical system . . . is equally “old-fashioned” in the second respect which characterizes recent economic theory – namely, the attempt to break away from an explanation of economic events by means of orthodox equilibrium constructions. No other analysis of trade fluctuations in recent years – with the possible exception of the Mises-Hayek school – follows such conservative lines in this respect. In fact, Keynes is much more of an “equilibrium theorist” than such economists as Cassel and, I think, Marshall.

Backhouse and Laidler go on to cite the Stockholm School (of which Ohlin was a leading figure) as an example of explicitly dynamic analysis.

As Bjorn Hansson (1982) has shown, this group developed an explicit method, using the idea of a succession of “unit periods,” in which each period began with agents having plans based on newly formed expectations about the outcome of executing them, and ended with the economy in some new situation that was the outcome of executing them, and ended with the economy in some new situation that was the outcome of market processes set in motion by the incompatibility of those plans, and in which expectations had been reformulated, too, in the light of experience. They applied this method to the construction of a wide variety of what they called “model sequences,” many of which involved downward spirals in economic activity at whose very heart lay rising unemployment. This is not the place to discuss the vexed question of the extent to which some of this work anticipated the Keynesian multiplier process, but it should be noted that, in IS-LM, it is the limit to which such processes move, rather than the time path they follow to get there, that is emphasized.

The Stockholm method seems to me exactly the right way to explain business-cycle downturns. In normal times, there is a rough – certainly not perfect, but good enough — correspondence of expectations among agents. That correspondence of expectations implies that the individual plans contingent on those expectations will be more or less compatible with one another. Surprises happen; here and there people are disappointed and regret past decisions, but, on the whole, they are able to adjust as needed to muddle through. There is usually enough flexibility in a system to allow most people to adjust their plans in response to unforeseen circumstances, so that the disappointment of some expectations doesn’t become contagious, causing a systemic crisis.

But when there is some sort of major shock – and it can only be a shock if it is unforeseen – the system may not be able to adjust. Instead, the disappointment of expectations becomes contagious. If my customers aren’t able to sell their products, I may not be able to sell mine. Expectations are like networks. If there is a breakdown at some point in the network, the whole network may collapse or malfunction. Because expectations and plans fit together in interlocking networks, it is possible that even a disturbance at one point in the network can cascade over an increasingly wide group of agents, leading to something like a system-wide breakdown, a financial crisis or a depression.

But the “problem” with the Stockholm method was that it was open-ended. It could offer only “a wide variety” of “model sequences,” without specifying a determinate solution. It was just this gap in the Stockholm approach that Keynes was able to fill. He provided a determinate equilibrium, “the limit to which the Stockholm model sequences would move, rather than the time path they follow to get there.” A messy, but insightful, approach to explaining the phenomenon of downward spirals in economic activity coupled with rising unemployment was cast aside in favor of the neater, simpler approach of Keynes. No wonder Ohlin sounds annoyed in his comment, quoted by Backhouse and Laidler, about Keynes. Tractability trumped insight.

Unfortunately, that is still the case today. Open-ended models of the sort that the Stockholm School tried to develop still cannot compete with the RBC and DSGE models that have displaced IS-LM and now dominate modern macroeconomics. The basic idea that modern economies form networks, and that networks have properties that are not reducible to just the nodes forming them has yet to penetrate the trained intuition of modern macroeconomists. Otherwise, how would it have been possible to imagine that a macroeconomic model could consist of a single representative agent? And just because modern macroeconomists have expanded their models to include more than a single representative agent doesn’t mean that the intellectual gap evidenced by the introduction of representative-agent models into macroeconomic discourse has been closed.

Uneasy Money Marks the Centenary of Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade

Published September 10, 2013 David Laidler , Hawtrey , Keynes 9 Comments
Tags: , , ,

As promised, I am beginning a series of posts about R. G. Hawtrey’s book Good and Bad Trade, published 100 years ago in 1913. Good and Bad Trade was not only Hawtrey’s first book on economics, it was his first publication of any kind on economics, and only his second publication of any kind, the first having been an article on naval strategy written even before his arrival at Cambridge as an undergraduate. Perhaps on the strength of that youthful publication, Hawtrey’s first position, after having been accepted into the British Civil Service, was in the Admiralty, but he soon was transferred to the Treasury where he remained for over forty years till 1947.

Though he was a Cambridge man, Hawtrey had studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge. He was deeply influenced by the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, an influence most clearly evident in one of Hawtrey’s few works of economics not primarily concerned with monetary theory, history or policy, The Economic Problem. Hawtrey’s mathematical interests led him to a correspondence with another Cambridge man, Bertrand Russell, which Russell refers to in his Principia Mathematica. However, Hawtrey seems to have had no contact with Alfred Marshall or any other Cambridge economist. Indeed, the only economist mentioned by Hawtrey in Good and Bad Trade was none other than Irving Fisher, whose distinction between the real and nominal rates of interest Hawtrey invokes in chapter 5. So Hawtrey was clearly an autodidact in economics. It is likely that Hawtrey’s self-education in economics started after his graduation from Cambridge when he was studying for the Civil Service entrance examination, but it seems likely that Hawtrey continued an intensive study of economics even afterwards, for although Hawtrey was not in the habit of engaging in lengthy discussions of earlier economists, his sophisticated familiarity with the history of economics and of economic history is quite unmistakable. Nevertheless, it is a puzzle that Hawtrey uses the term “natural rate of interest” to signify more or less the same idea that Wicksell had when he used the term, but without mentioning Wicksell.

In his introductory chapter, Hawtrey lays out the following objective:

My present purposed is to examine certain elements in the modern economic organization of the world, which appear to be intimately connected with [cyclical] fluctuations. I shall not attempt to work back from a precise statistical analysis of the fluctuations which the world has experienced to the causes of all the phenomena disclosed by such analysis. But I shall endeavor to show what the effects of certain assumed economic causes would be, and it will, I think, be found that these calculated effects correspond very closely with the observed features of the fluctuations.

The general result up to which I hope to work is that the fluctuations are due to disturbances in the available stock of “money” – the term “money” being take to cover every species of purchasing power available for immediate use, both legal tender money and credit money, whether in the form of coin, notes, or deposits at banks. (p. 3)

In the remainder of this post, I will present a quick overview of the entire book, and, then, as a kind of postscript to my earlier series of posts on Hawtrey and Keynes, I will comment on the fact that it seems quite clear that it was Hawtrey who invented the term “effective demand,” defining it in a way that does not appear significantly different from the meaning that Keynes attached to it.

Hawtrey posits that the chief problem associated with the business cycle is that workers are unable to earn an income with which to sustain themselves during business-cycle contractions. The source of this problem in Hawtrey’s view is some sort of malfunction in the monetary system, even though money, when considered from the point of view of an equilibrium, seems unimportant, inasmuch as any set of absolute prices would work just as well as another, provided that relative prices were consistent with equilibrium.

In chapter 2, Hawtrey explains the idea of a demand for money and how this demand for money, together with any fixed amount of inconvertible paper money will determine the absolute level of prices and the relationship between the total amount of money in nominal terms and the total amount of income.

In chapter 3, Hawtrey introduces the idea of credit money and banks, and the role of a central bank.

In chapter 4, Hawtrey discusses the organization of production, the accumulation of capital, and the employment of labor, explaining the matching circular flows: expenditure on goods and services, the output of goods and services, and the incomes accruing from that output.

Having laid the groundwork for his analysis, Hawtrey in chapter 5 provides an initial simplified analysis of the effects of a monetary disturbance in an isolated economy with no banking system.

Hawtrey continues the analysis in chapter 6 with a discussion of a monetary disturbance in an isolated economy with a banking system.

In chapter 7, Hawtrey discusses how a monetary disturbance might actually come about in an isolated community.

In chapter 8, Hawtrey extends the discussion of the previous three chapters to an open economy connected to an international system.

In chapter 9, Hawtrey drops the assumption of an inconvertible paper money and introduces an international metallic system (corresponding to the international gold standard then in operation).

Having completed his basic model of the business cycle, Hawtrey, in chapter 10, introduces other sources of change, e.g., population growth and technological progress, and changes in the supply of gold.

In chapter 11, Hawtrey drops the assumption of the previous chapters that there are no forces leading to change in relative prices among commodities.

In chapter 12, Hawtrey enters into a more detailed analysis of money, credit and banking, and, in chapter 13, he describes international differences in money and banking institutions.

In chapters 14 and 15, Hawtrey traces out the sources and effects of international cyclical disturbances.

In chapter 16, Hawtey considers financial crises and their relationship to cyclical phenomena.

In chapter 17, Hawtrey discusses banking and currency legislation and their effects on the business cycle.

Chapters 18 and 19 are devoted to taxation and public finance.

Finally in chapter 20, Hawtrey poses the question whether cyclical fluctuations can be prevented.

After my series on Hawtrey and Keynes, I condensed those posts into a paper which, after further revision, I hope will eventually appear in the forthcoming Elgar Companion to Keynes. After I sent it to David Laidler for comments, he pointed out to me that I had failed to note that it was actually Hawtrey who, in Good and Bad Trade, introduced the term “effective demand.”

The term makes its first appearance in chapter 1 (p. 4).

The producers of commodities depend, for their profits and for the means of paying wages and other expenses, upon the money which they receive for the finished commodities. They supply in response to a demand, but only to an effective demand. A want becomes an effective demand when the person who experiences the want possesses (and can spare) the purchasing power necessary ot meet the price of the thing which will satisfy it. A man may want a hat, but if he has no money [i.e., income or wealth] he cannot buy it, and his want does not contribute to the effective demand for hats.

Then at the outset of chapter 2 (p. 6), Hawtrey continues:

The total effective demand for all finished commodities in any community is simply the aggregate of all money incomes. The same aggregate represents also the total cost of production of all finished commodities.

Once again, Hawtrey, in chapter 4 (pp. 32-33), returns to the concept of effective demand

It was laid down that the total effective demand for all commodities si simply the aggregate of all incomes, and that the same aggregate represents the total cost of production of all commodities.

Hawtrey attributed fluctuations in employment to fluctuations in effective demand inasmuch as wages and prices would not adjust immediately to a change in total spending.

Here is how Keynes defines aggregate demand in the General Theory (p. 55)

[T]he effective demand is simply the aggregate income or (proceeds) which the entrepreneurs expect to receive, inclusive of the income which they will hand on to the other factors of production, from the amount of current employment which they decide to give. The aggregate demand function relates various hypothetical quantities of employment to the proceeds which their outputs are expected to yield; and the effective demand is the point on the aggregate demand function which becomes effective because, taken in conjunction with the conditions of supply, it corresponds to the level of employment which maximizes the entrepreneur’s expectation of profit.

So Keynes in the General Theory obviously presented an analytically more sophisticated version of the concept of effective demand than Hawtrey did over two decades earlier, having expressed the idea in terms of entrepreneurial expectations of income and expenditure and specifying a general functional relationship (aggregate demand) between employment and expected income. Nevertheless, the basic idea is still very close to Hawtrey’s. Interestingly, Hawtrey never asserted a claim of priority on the concept, whether it was because of his natural reticence or because he was unhappy with how Keynes made use of the idea, or perhaps some other reason, I would not venture to say. But perhaps others would like to weigh in with some speculations of their own.

Liquidity Trap or Credit Deadlock

Published April 22, 2013 credit deadlock , David Laidler , Hawtrey , Keynes , liquidity preference 21 Comments
Tags: , , ,

In earlier posts in my series about Hawtrey and Keynes, I’ve mentioned the close connection between Hawtrey’s concept of a “credit deadlock” and the better-known Keynesian concept of a “liquidity trap,” a term actually coined by J. R. Hicks in his classic paper summarizing the Keynesian system by way of the IS-LM model. As I’ve previously noted, the two concepts, though similar, are not identical, a characteristic of much of their work on money and business cycles. Their ideas, often very similar, almost always differ in some important way, often leading to sharply different policy implications. Keynes recognized the similarities in their thinking, acknowledging his intellectual debt to Hawtrey several times, but, on occasion, Keynes could not contain his frustration and exasperation with what he felt was Hawtrey’s obstinate refusal to see what he was driving at.

In this post, commenter GDF asked me about the credit deadlock and the liquidity trap:

Would you mind explaining your thoughts apropos of differences between Hawtrey’s credit deadlock theory and Keynes’ liquidity trap. It seems to me that modern liquidity trapists like Krugman, Woodford etc. have more in common with Hawtrey than Keynes in the sense that they deal with low money demand elasticity w.r.t. the short rate rather than high money demand elasticity w.r.t. the long rate.

To which I answered:

My view is that credit deadlock refers to a situation of extreme entrepreneurial pessimism, which I would associate with negative real rates of interest. Keynes’s liquidity trap occurs at positive real rates of interest (not the zero lower bound) because bear bond speculators will not allow the long-term rate to fall below some lower threshold because of the risk of suffering a capital loss on long-term bonds once the interest rate rises. Hawtrey did not think much of this argument.

Subsequently in this post, commenter Rob Rawlings suggested that I write about the credit deadlock and provided a link to a draft of a paper by Roger Sandilands, “Hawtreyan ‘Credit Deadlock’ or Keynesian ‘Liquidity Trap’? Lessons for Japan from the Great Depression” (eventually published as the final chapter in the volume David Laidler’s Contributions to Economics, edited by Robert Leeson, an outstanding collection of papers celebrating one of the greatest economists of our time). In our recent exchange of emails about Hawtrey, Laidler also drew my attention to Sandilands’s paper.

Sandilands’s paper covers an extremely wide range of topics in both the history of economics (mainly about Hawtrey and especially the largely forgotten Laughlin Currie), the history of the Great Depression, and the chronic Japanese deflation and slowdown since the early 1990s. But for this post, the relevant point from Sandilands’s paper is the lengthy quotation with which he concludes from Laidler’s paper, “Woodford and Wicksell on Interest and Prices: The Place of the Pure Credit Economy in the Theory of Monetary Policy.”

To begin with, a “liquidity trap” is a state of affairs in which the demnd for money becomes perfectly elastic with respect to a long rate of interest at some low positive level of the latter. Until the policy of “quantitative easing” was begun in 2001, the ratio of the Japanese money stock to national income, whether money was measured by the base, M1, or any broader aggregate, rose slowly at best, and it was short, not long, rates of interest that were essentially zero. Given these facts, it is hard to see what the empirical basis for the diagnosis of a liquidity trap could have been. On the other hand, and again before 2001, the empirical evidence gave no reason to reject the hypothesis that a quite separate and distinct phenomenon was at work, namely a Hawtreyan “credit deadlock”. Here the problem is not a high elasticity of the economy’s demand for money with respect to the long rate of interest, but a low elasticity of its demand for bank credit with respect to the short rate, which inhibits the borrowing that is a necessary prerequisite for money creation. The solution to a credit deadlock, as Hawtrey pointed out, is vigorous open market operations to bring about increases in the monetary base, and therefore the supply of chequable deposits, that mere manipulation of short term interest rates is usually sufficient to accomplish in less depressed times.

Now the conditions for a liquidity trap might indeed have existed in Japan in the 1990s. Until the credit deadlock affecting its monetary system was broken by quantitative easing in 2001 . . . it was impossible to know this. As it has happened, however, the subsequent vigorous up-turn of the Japanese economy that began in 2002 and is still proceeding is beginning to suggest that there was no liquidity trap at work in that economy. If further evidence bears out this conclusion, a serious policy error was made in the 1990s, and that error was based on a theory of monetary policy that treats the short interest rate as the central bank’s only tool, and characterizes the transmission mechanism as working solely through the influence of interest rates on aggregate demand.

That theory provided no means for Japanese policy makers to distinguish between a liquidity trap, which is a possible feature of the demand for money function, and a credit deadlock which is a characteristic of the money supply process, or for them to entertain the possibility that variations in the money supply might affect aggregate demand by channels over and above any effect on market rates of interest. It was therefore a dangerously defective guide to the conduct of monetary policy in Japan, as it is in any depressed economy.

Laidler is making two important points in this quotation. First, he is distinguishing, a bit more fully than I did in my reply above to GDF, between a credit deadlock and a liquidity trap. The liquidity trap is a property of the demand for money, premised on an empirical hypothesis of Keynes about the existence of bear speculators (afraid of taking capital losses once the long-term rate rises to its normal level) willing to hold unlimited amounts of money rather than long-term bonds, once long-term rates approach some low, but positive, level. But under Keynes’s analysis, there would be no reason why the banking system would not supply the amount of money demanded by bear speculators. In Hawtrey’s credit deadlock, however, the problem is not that the demand to hold money becomes perfectly elastic when the long-term rate reaches some low level, but that, because entrepreneurial expectations are so pessimistic, banks cannot find borrowers to lend to, even if short-term rates fall to zero. Keynes and Hawtrey were positing different causal mechanisms, Keynes focusing on the demand to hold money, Hawtrey on the supply of bank money. (I would note parenthetically that Laidler is leaving out an important distinction between the zero rate at which the central bank is lending to banks and the positive rate — sufficient to cover intermediation costs – at which banks will lend to their customers. The lack of borrowing at the zero lower bound is at least partly a reflection of a disintermediation process that occurs when there is insufficient loan demand to make intermediation by commercial banks profitable.)

Laidler’s second point is an empirical judgment about the Japanese experience in the 1990s and early 2000s. He argues that the relative success of quantitative easing in Japan in the early 2000s shows that Japan was suffering not from a liquidity trap, but from a credit deadlock. That quantitative easing succeeded in Japan after years of stagnation and slow monetary growth suggests to Laidler that the problem in the 1990s was not a liquidity trap, but a credit deadlock. If there was a liquidity trap, why did the unlimited demand to hold cash on the part of bear speculators not elicit a huge increase in the Japanese money supply? In fact, the Japanese money supply increased only modestly in the 1990s. The Japanese recovery in the early 200s coincided with a rapid increase in the money supply in response to open-market purchases by the Bank of Japan.  Quantitative easing worked not through a reduction of interest rates, but through the portfolio effects of increasing the quantity of cash balances in the economy, causing an increase in spending as a way of reducing unwanted cash balances.

How, then, on Laidler’s account, can we explain the feebleness of the US recovery from the 2007-09 downturn, notwithstanding the massive increase in the US monetary base? One possible answer, of course, is that the stimulative effects of increasing the monetary base have been sterilized by the Fed’s policy of paying interest on reserves. The other answer is that increasing the monetary base in a state of credit deadlock can stimulate a recovery only by changing expectations. However, long-term expectations, as reflected in the long-term real interest rates implicit in TIPS spreads, seem to have become more pessimistic since quantitative easing began in 2009. In this context, a passage, quoted by Sandilands, from the 1950 edition of Hawtrey’s Currency and Credit seems highly relevant.

If the banks fail to stimulate short-term borrowing, they can create credit by themselves buying securities in the investment market. The market will seek to use the resources thus placed in it, and it will become more favourable to new flotations and sales of securities. But even so and expansion of the flow of money is not ensured. If the money created is to move and to swell the consumers’ income, the favourable market must evoke additional capital outlay. That is likely to take time and conceivably capital outlay may fail to respond. A deficiency of demand for consumable goods reacts on capital outlay, for when the existing capacity of industries is underemployed, there is little demand for capital outlay to extend capacity. . .

The deadlock then is complete, and, unless it is to continue unbroken till some fortuitous circumstance restarts activity, recourse must be had to directly inflationary expedients, such as government expenditures far in excess of revenue, or a deliberate depreciation of the foreign exchange value of the money unit.

David Laidler on Hawtrey and the Treasury View

Published April 16, 2013 David Laidler , fiscal policy , Hawtrey , monetary policy , Treasury view Leave a Comment
Tags: , , ,

My recent post on Hawtrey and the Treasury View occasioned an exchange of emails with David Laidler about Hawtrey, the Treasury View. and the gold standard. As usual, David made some important points that I thought would be worth sharing. I will try to come back to some of his points in future posts, but for now I will just refer to his comments about Hawtrey and the Treasury View.

David drew my attention to his own discussion of Hawtrey and the Treasury View in his excellent book Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution (especially pp. 112-28). Here are some excerpts.

It is well known that Hawtrey was a firm advocate of using the central bank’s discount rate – bank rate, as it is called in British terminology – as the principal instrument of monetary policy, and this might at first sight seem to place him in the tradition of Walter Bagehot. However, Hawtrey’s conception of the appropriate target for policy was very different from Bagehot’s, and he was well aware of the this difference. Bagehot had regarded the maintenance of gold convertibility as the sine qua non of monetary policy, and as Hawtrey told reader of his Art of Central Banking, “a central bank working the gold standard must rectify an outflow of gold by a restriction of credit and an inflow of gold by a relaxation of credit. Under Hawtrey’s preferred scheme, on the other hand,

substantially the plan embodied in the currency resolution adopted at the Genoa Conference of 1922, . . . the contral banks of the world [would[ regulated credit with a view to preventing undue fluctuations in the purchasing power of gold.

More generally he saw the task of central banking as being to mitigate that inherent instability of credit which was the driving force of economic fluctuations, by ensuring, as far as possible, that cumulative expansions and contractions of bank deposits were eliminated, or, failing that, when faced by depression, to bring about whatever degree of monetary expansion might be required to restore economic activity to a satisfactory level. (pp. 122-23)

Laidler links Hawtrey’s position about the efficacy of central bank policy in moderating economic fluctuations to Hawtrey’s 1925 paper on public-works spending and employment, the classic statement of the Treasury View.

Unlike the majority of his English . . . contemporaries, Hawtrey thus had few doubts about the ultimate powers of conventional monetary policy to stimulate the economy, even in the most depressed circumstances. In parallel with that belief . . . he was skeptical about the powers of government-expenditure programs to have any aggregate effects on income and employment, except to the extent that they were financed by money creation. Hawtrey was, in fact, the originator of the particular version of “the Treasury view” of those matters that Hicks . . . characterized in terms of a vertical-LM-curve version of the IS-LM framework.

Hawtrey had presented at least the bare bones of that doctrine in Good and Bad Trade (1913), but his definitive exposition is to be found in his 1925 Economica paper. . . . [T]hat exposition was cast in terms of a system in which, given the levels of money wages and prices, the levels of output and employment were determined by the aggregate rate of low of expenditure on public works can be shown to imply an increase in the overall level of effective demand, the consequences must be an equal reduction in the expenditure of some other sector. . . .

That argument by Hawtrey deserves more respect than it is usually given. His conclusions do indeed follow from the money-growth-driven income-expenditure system with which he analysed the cycle. They follow from an IS-LM model when the economy is operating where the interest sensitivity of the demand for money in negligible, so that what Hicks would later call “the classical theory” is relevant. If, with the benefit of hindsight, Hawtrey might be convicted of over-generalizing from a special case, his analysis nevertheless made a significant contribution in demonstrating the dangers inherent in Pigou’s practice of going “behind the distorting veil of money” in order to deal with such matters. Hawtrey’s view, that the influence of public-works expenditures on the economy’s overall rate of flow of money expenditures was crucial to their effects on employment was surely valid. (pp.125-26)

Laidler then observes that no one else writing at the time had identified the interest-sensitivity of the demand for money as the relevant factor in judging whether public-works expenditure could increase employment.

It is true that the idea of a systematic interest sensitivity of the demand for money had been worked out by Lavington in the early 1920s, but it is also true that none of Hawtrey’s critics . . . saw its critical relevance to this matter during that decade and into the next. Indeed, Hawtrey himself came as close as any of them did before 1936 to developing a more general, not to say correct, argument about thte influence of the monetary system on the efficacy of public-works expenditure. . . . And he argued that once an expansion got under way, increased velocity would indeed accompany it. However, and crucially, he also insisted that “if no expansion of credit at all is allowed, the conditions which produce increased rapidity of circulation cannot begin to develop.”

Hindsight, illuminated by an IS-LM diagram with an upward-sloping LM curve, shows that the last step of his argument was erroneous, but Hawtrey was not alone in holding such a position. The fact is that in the 1920s and early 1930s, many advocates of public-works expenditures were careful to note that their success would be contingent upon their being accommodated by appropriate monetary measures. For example, when Richard Kahn addressed that issue in his classic article on the employment multiplier, he argued as follows:

It is, however, important to realize that the intelligent co-operation of the banking system is being taken for granted. . . . If the increased circulation of notes and the increased demand for working capital that may result from increased employment are made the occasion for a restriction of credit, then any attempt to increase employment . . . may be rendered nugatory. (pp. 126-27)

Thus, Laidler shows that Hawtrey’s position on the conditions in which public-works spending could increase employment was practically indistinguishable from Richard Kahn’s position on the same question in 1931. And I would emphasize once again that, inasmuch as Hawtrey’s 1925 position was taken when the Bank of England policy was setting its lending rate at the historically high level of 5% to encourage an inflow of gold and allow England to restore the gold standard at the prewar parity, Hawtrey was correct, notwithstanding any tendency of public-works spending to increase velocity, to dismiss public-works spending as a remedy for unemployment as long as bank rate was not reduced.

The Wisdom of David Laidler

Published September 11, 2012 David Laidler , expectations , Fisher equation , Friedman , Monetarism , monetary policy , monetary theory 24 Comments

Michael Woodford’s paper for the Jackson Hole Symposium on Monetary Policy wasn’t the only important paper on monetary economics to be posted on the internet last month. David Laidler, perhaps the world’s greatest expert on the history of monetary theory and macroeconomics since the time of Adam Smith, has written an important paper with the somewhat cryptic title, “Two Crises, Two Ideas, and One Question.” Most people will figure out pretty quickly which two crises Laidler is referring to, but you will have to read the paper in order to figure out which two ideas and which question, Laidler has on his mind. Actually, you won’t have to read the paper if you keep reading this post, because I am about to tell you. The two ideas are what Laidler calls the “Fisher relation” between real and nominal interest rates, and the idea of a lender of last resort. The question is whether a market economy is inherently stable or unstable.

How does one weave these threads into a coherent narrative? Well, to really understand that you really will just have to read Laidler’s paper, but this snippet from the introduction will give you some sense of what he is up to.

These two particular ideas are especially interesting, because in the 1960s and ’70s, between our two crises, they feature prominently in the Monetarist reassessment of the Great Depression, which helped to establish the dominance in macroeconomic thought of the view that, far from being a manifestation of deep flaws in the very structure of the market economy, as it had at first been taken to be, this crisis was the consequence of serious policy errors visited upon an otherwise robustly self-stabilizing system. The crisis that began in 2007 has re-opened this question.

The Monetarist counterargument to the Keynesian view that the market economy is inherently subject to wide fluctuations and has no strong tendency toward full employment was that the Great Depression was caused primarily by a policy shock, the failure of the Fed to fulfill its duty to act as a lender of last resort during the US financial crisis of 1930-31. Originally, the Fisher relation did not figure prominently in this argument, but it eventually came to dominate Monetarism and the post-Monetarist/New Keynesian orthodoxy in which the job of monetary policy was viewed as setting a nominal interest rate (via a Taylor rule) that would be consistent with expectations of an almost negligible rate of inflation of about 2%.

This comfortable state of affairs – Monetarism without money is how Laidler describes it — in which an inherently stable economy would glide along its long-run growth path with low inflation, only rarely interrupted by short, shallow recessions, was unpleasantly overturned by the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis, producing the steepest downturn since 1937-38. That downturn has posed a challenge to Monetarist orthodoxy inasmuch as the sudden collapse, more or less out of nowhere in 2008, seemed to suggest that the market economy is indeed subject to a profound instability, as the Keynesians of old used to maintain. In the Great Depression, Monetarists could argue, it was all, or almost all, the fault of the Federal Reserve for not taking prompt action to save failing banks and for not expanding the money supply sufficiently to avoid deflation. But in 2008, the Fed provided massive support to banks, and even to non-banks like AIG, to prevent a financial meltdown, and then embarked on an aggressive program of open-market purchases that prevented an incipient deflation from taking hold.

As a result, self-identifying Monetarists have split into two camps. I will call one camp the Market Monetarists, with whom I identify even though I am much less of a fan of Milton Friedman, the father of Monetarism, than most Market Monetarists, and, borrowing terminology adopted in the last twenty years or so by political conservatives in the US to distinguish between old-fashioned conservatives and neoconservatives, I will call the old-style Monetarists, paleo-Monetarists. The paelo-Monetarists are those like Alan Meltzer, the late Anna Schwartz, Thomas Humphrey, and John Taylor (a late-comer to Monetarism who has learned quite well how to talk to the Monetarist talk). For the paleo-Monetarists, in the absence of deflation, the extension of Fed support to non-banking institutions and the massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet cannot be justified. But this poses a dilemma for them. If there is no deflation, why is an inherently stable economy not recovering? It seems to me that it is this conundrum which has led paleo-Monetarists into taking the dubious position that the extreme weakness of the economic recovery is a consequence of fiscal and monetary-policy uncertainty, the passage of interventionist legislation like the Affordable Health Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Bill, and the imposition of various other forms of interventionist regulations by the Obama administration.

Market Monetarists, on the other hand, have all along looked to monetary policy as the ultimate cause of both the downturn in 2008 and the lack of a recovery subsequently. So, on this interpretation, what separates paleo-Monetarists from Market Monetarists is whether you need outright deflation in order to precipitate a serious malfunction in a market economy, or whether something less drastic can suffice. Paleo-Monetarists agree that Japan in the 1990s and even early in the 2000s was suffering from a deflationary monetary policy, a policy requiring extraordinary measures to counteract. But the annual rate of deflation in Japan was never more than about 1% a year, a far cry from the 10% annual rate of deflation in the US between late 1929 and early 1933. Paleo-Monetarists must therefore explain why there is a radical difference between 1% inflation and 1% deflation. Market Monetarists also have a problem in explaining why a positive rate of inflation, albeit less than the 2% rate that is generally preferred, is not adequate to sustain a real recovery from starting more than four years after the original downturn. Or, if you prefer, the question could be restated as why a 3 to 4% rate of increase in NGDP is not adequate to sustain a real recovery, especially given the assumption, shared by paleo-Monetarists and Market Monetarists, that a market economy is generally stable and tends to move toward a full-employment equilibrium.

Here is where I think Laidler’s focus on the Fisher relation is critically important, though Laidler doesn’t explicitly address the argument that I am about to make. This argument, which I originally made in my paper “The Fisher Effect under Deflationary Expectations,” and have repeated in several subsequent blog posts (e.g., here) is that there is no specific rate of deflation that necessarily results in a contracting economy. There is plenty of historical experience, as George Selgin and others have demonstrated, that deflation is consistent with strong economic growth and full employment. In a certain sense, deflation can be a healthy manifestation of growth, allowing that growth, i.e., increasing productivity of some or all factors of production, to be translated into falling output prices. However, deflation is only healthy in an economy that is growing because of productivity gains. If productivity is flagging, there is no space for healthy (productivity-driven) deflation.

The Fisher relation between the nominal interest rate, the real interest rate and the expected rate of deflation basically tells us how much room there is for healthy deflation. If we take the real interest rate as given, that rate constitutes the upper bound on healthy deflation. Why, because deflation greater than real rate of interest implies a nominal rate of interest less than zero. But the nominal rate of interest has a lower bound at zero. So what happens if the expected rate of deflation is greater than the real rate of interest? Fisher doesn’t tell us, because in equilibrium it isn’t possible for the rate of deflation to exceed the real rate of interest. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a disequilibrium in which the expected rate of deflation is greater than the real rate of interest. We (or I) can’t exactly model that disequilibrium process, but whatever it is, it’s ugly. Really ugly. Most investment stops, the rate of return on cash (i.e., expected rate of deflation) being greater than the rate of return on real capital. Because the expected yield on holding cash exceeds the expected yield on holding real capital, holders of real capital try to sell their assets for cash. The only problem is that no one wants to buy real capital with cash. The result is a collapse of asset values. At some point, asset values having fallen, and the stock of real capital having worn out without being replaced, a new equilibrium may be reached at which the real rate will again exceed the expected rate of deflation. But that is an optimistic scenario, because the adjustment process of falling asset values and a declining stock of real capital may itself feed pessimistic expectations about the future value of real capital so that there literally might not be a floor to the downward spiral, at least not unless there is some exogenous force that can reverse the downward spiral, e.g., by changing price-level expectations.  Given the riskiness of allowing the rate of deflation to come too close to the real interest rate, it seems prudent to keep deflation below the real rate of interest by a couple of points, so that the nominal interest rate doesn’t fall below 2%.

But notice that this cumulative downward process doesn’t really require actual deflation. The same process could take place even if the expected rate of inflation were positive in an economy with a negative real interest rate. Real interest rates have been steadily falling for over a year, and are now negative even at maturities up to 10 years. What that suggests is that ceiling on tolerable deflation is negative. Negative deflation is the same as inflation, which means that there is a lower bound to tolerable inflation.  When the economy is operating in an environment of very low or negative real rates of interest, the economy can’t recover unless the rate of inflation is above the lower bound of tolerable inflation. We are not in the critical situation that we were in four years ago, when the expected yield on cash was greater than the expected yield on real capital, but it is a close call. Why are businesses, despite high earnings, holding so much cash rather than using it to purchase real capital assets? My interpretation is that with real interest rates negative, businesses do not see a sufficient number of profitable investment projects to invest in. Raising the expected price level would increase the number of investment projects that appear profitable, thereby inducing additional investment spending, finally inducing businesses to draw down, rather than add to, their cash holdings.

So it seems to me that paleo-Monetarists have been misled by a false criterion, one not implied by the Fisher relation that has become central to Monetarist and Post-Monetarist policy orthodoxy. The mere fact that we have not had deflation since 2009 does not mean that monetary policy has not been contractionary, or, at any rate, insufficiently expansionary. So someone committed to the proposition that a market economy is inherently stable is not obliged, as the paleo-Monetarists seem to think, to take the position that monetary policy could not have been responsible for the failure of the feeble recovery since 2009 to bring us back to full employment. Whether it even makes sense to think about an economy as being inherently stable or unstable is a whole other question that I will leave for another day.

HT:  Lars Christensen

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

Archives

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 3,263 other subscribers
Follow Uneasy Money on WordPress.com