Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin are two of the great economic historians of our time, writing, in the splendid tradition of Charles Kindleberger, profound and economically acute studies of the economic and financial history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most notably they have focused on periods of panic, crisis and depression, of which by far the best-known and most important episode is the Great Depression that started late in 1929, bottomed out early in 1933, but lingered on for most of the 1930s, and they are rightly acclaimed for having emphasized and highlighted the critical role of the gold standard in the Great Depression, a role largely overlooked in the early Keynesian accounts of the Great Depression. Those accounts identified a variety of specific shocks, amplified by the volatile entrepreneurial expectations and animal spirits that drive, or dampen, business investment, and further exacerbated by inherent instabilities in market economies that lack self-stabilizing mechanisms for maintaining or restoring full employment.
That Keynesian vision of an unstable market economy vulnerable to episodic, but prolonged, lapses from full-employment was vigorously, but at first unsuccessfully, disputed by advocates of free-market economics. It wasn’t until Milton Friedman provided an alternative narrative explaining the depth and duration of the Great Depression, that the post-war dominance of Keynesian theory among academic economists seriously challenged. Friedman’s alternative narrative of the Great Depression was first laid out in the longest chapter (“The Great Contraction”) of his magnum opus, co-authored with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States. In Friedman’s telling, the decline in the US money stock was the critical independent causal factor that directly led to the decline in prices, output, and employment. The contraction in the quantity of money was not caused by the inherent instability of free-market capitalism, but, owing to a combination of incompetence and dereliction of duty, by the Federal Reserve.
In the Monetary History of the United States, all the heavy lifting necessary to account for both secular and cyclical movements in the price level, output and employment is done by, supposedly exogenous, changes in the nominal quantity of money, Friedman having considered it to be of the utmost significance that the largest movements in both the quantity of money, and in prices, output and employment occurred during the Great Depression. The narrative arc of the Monetary History was designed to impress on the mind of the reader the axiomatic premise that monetary authority has virtually absolute control over the quantity of money which served as the basis for inferring that changes in the quantity of money are what cause changes in prices, output and employment.
Friedman’s treatment of the gold standard (which I have discussed here, here and here) was both perfunctory and theoretically confused. Unable to reconcile the notion that the monetary authority has absolute control over the nominal quantity of money with the proposition that the price level in any country on the gold standard cannot deviate from the price levels of other gold standard countries without triggering arbitrage transactions that restore the equality between the price levels of all gold standard countries, Friedman dodged the inconsistency repeatedly invoking his favorite fudge factor: long and variable lags between changes in the quantity of money and changes in prices, output and employment. Despite its vacuity, the long-and-variable-lag dodge allowed Friedman to ignore the inconvenient fact that the US price level in the Great Depression did not and could not vary independently of the price levels of all other countries then on the gold standard.
I’ll note parenthetically that Keynes himself was also responsible for this unnecessary and distracting detour, because the General Theory was written almost entirely in the context of a closed economy model with an exogenously determined quantity of money, thereby unwittingly providing with a useful tool with which to propagate his Monetarist narrative. The difference of course is that Keynes, as demonstrated in his brilliant early works, Indian Currency and Finance and A Tract on Monetary Reform and the Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, had a correct understanding of the basic theory of the gold standard, an understanding that, owing to his obsessive fixation on the nominal quantity of money, eluded Friedman over his whole career. Why Keynes, who had a perfectly good theory of what was happening in the Great Depression available to him, as it was to others, was diverted to an unnecessary, but not uninteresting, new theory is a topic that I wrote about a very long time ago here, though I’m not so sure that I came up with a good or even adequate explanation.
So it does not speak well of the economics profession that it took nearly a quarter of a century before the basic internal inconsistency underlying Friedman’s account of the Great Depression was sufficiently recognized to call for an alternative theoretical account of the Great Depression that placed the gold standard at the heart of the narrative. It was Peter Temin and Barry Eichengreen, both in their own separate works (e.g., Lessons of the Great Depression by Temin and Golden Fetters by Eichengreen) and in an important paper they co-authored and published in 2000 to remind both economists and historians how important a role the gold standard must play in any historical account of the Great Depression.
All credit is due to Temin and Eichengreen for having brought to the critical role of the gold standard in the Great Depression to the attention of economists who had largely derived their understanding of what had caused the Great Depression from either some variant of the Keynesian narrative or of Friedman’s Monetarist indictment of the Federal Reserve System. But it’s unfortunate that neither Temin nor Eichnegreen gave sufficient credit to either R. G. Hawtrey or to Gustav Cassel for having anticipated almost all of their key findings about the causes of the Great Depression. And I think that what prevented Eichengreen and Temin from realizing that Hawtrey in particular had anticipated their explanation of the Great Depression by more than half a century was that they did not fully grasp the key theoretical insight underlying Hawtrey’s explanation of the Great Depression.
That insight was that the key to understanding the common world price level in terms of gold under a gold standard is to think in terms of a given world stock of gold and to think of total world demand to hold gold consisting of real demands to hold gold for commercial, industrial and decorative uses, the private demand to hold gold as an asset, and the monetary demand for gold to be held either as a currency or as a reserve for currency. The combined demand to hold gold for all such purposes, given the existing stock of gold, determines a real relative price of gold in terms of all other commodities. This relative price when expressed in terms of a currency unit that is convertible into gold corresponds to an equivalent set of commodity prices in terms of those convertible currency units.
This way of thinking about the world price level under the gold standard was what underlay Hawtrey’s monetary analysis and his application of that analysis in explaining the Great Depression. Given that the world output of gold in any year is generally only about 2 or 3 percent of the existing stock of gold, it is fluctuations in the demand for gold, of which the monetary demand for gold in the period after the outbreak of World War I was clearly the least stable, that causes short-term fluctuations in the value of gold. Hawtrey’s efforts after the end of World War I were therefore focused on the necessity to stabilize the world’s monetary demands for gold in order to avoid fluctuations in the value of gold as the world moved toward the restoration of the gold standard that then seemed, to most monetary and financial experts and most monetary authorities and political leaders, to be both inevitable and desirable.
In the opening pages of Golden Fetters, Eichengreen beautifully describes backdrop against which the attempt to reconstitute the gold standard was about to made after World War I.
For more than a quarter of a century before World War I, the gold standard provided the framework for domestic and international monetary relations. . . The gold standard had been a remarkably efficient mechanism for organizing financial affairs. No global crises comparable to the one that began in 1929 had disrupted the operation of financial markets. No economic slump had so depressed output and employment.
The central elements of this system were shattered by . . . World War I. More than a decade was required to complete their reconstruction. Quickly it became evident that the reconstructed gold standard was less resilient that its prewar predecessor. As early as 1929 the new international monetary system began to crumble. Rapid deflation forced countries to producing primary commodities to suspend gold convertibility and depreciate their currencies. Payments problems spread next to the industrialized world. . . Britain, along with United State and France, one of the countries at the center of the international monetary system, was next to experience a crisis, abandoning the gold standard in the autumn of 1931. Some two dozen countries followed suit. The United States dropped the gold standard in 1933; France hung on till the bitter end, which came in 1936.
The collapse of the international monetary system is commonly indicted for triggering the financial crisis that transformed a modes economic downturn gold standard into an unprecedented slump. So long as the gold standard was maintained, it is argued, the post-1929 recession remained just another cyclical contraction. But the collapse of the gold standard destroyed confidence in financial stability, prompting capital flight which undermined the solvency of financial institutions. . . Removing the gold standard, the argument continues, further intensified the crisis. Having suspended gold convertibility, policymakers manipulated currencies, engaging in beggar thy neighbor depreciations that purportedly did nothing to stimulate economic recovery at home while only worsening the Depression abroad.
The gold standard, then, is conventionally portrayed as synonymous with financial stability. Its downfall starting in 1929 is implicated in the global financial crisis and the worldwide depression. A central message of this book is that precisely the opposite was true. (Golden Fetters, pp. 3-4).
That is about as clear and succinct and accurate a description of the basic facts leading up to and surrounding the Great Depression as one could ask for, save for the omission of one important causal factor: the world monetary demand for gold.
Eichengreen was certainly not unaware of the importance of the monetary demand for gold, and in the pages that immediately follow, he attempts to fill in that part of the story, adding to our understanding of how the gold standard worked by penetrating deeply into the nature and role of the expectations that supported the gold standard, during its heyday, and the difficulty of restoring those stabilizing expectations after the havoc of World War I and the unexpected post-war inflation and subsequent deep 1920-21 depression. Those stabilizing expectations, Eichengreen argued, were the result of the credibility of the commitment to the gold standard and the international cooperation between governments and monetary authorities to ensure that the international gold standard would be maintained notwithstanding the occasional stresses and strains to which a complex institution would inevitably be subjected.
The stability of the prewar gold standard was instead the result of two very different factors: credibility and cooperation. Credibility is the confidence invested by the public in the government’s commitment to a policy. The credibility of the gold standard derived from the priority attached by governments to the maintenance of to the maintenance of balance-of-payments equilibrium. In the core countries – Britain, France and Germany – there was little doubt that the authorities would take whatever steps were required to defend the central bank’s gold reserves and maintain the convertibility of the currency into gold. If one of these central banks lost gold reserves and its exchange rate weakened, fund would flow in from abroad in anticipation of the capital gains investors in domestic assets would reap once the authorities adopted measures to stem reserve losses and strengthen the exchange rate. . . The exchange rate consequently strengthened on its own, and stabilizing capital flows minimized the need for government intervention. The very credibility of the official commitment to gold meant that this commitment was rarely tested. (p. 5)
But credibility also required cooperation among the various countries on the gold standard, especially the major countries at its center, of which Britain was the most important.
Ultimately, however, the credibility of the prewar gold standard rested on international cooperation. When the stabilizing speculation and domestic intervention proved incapable of accommodating a disturbance, the system was stabilized through cooperation among governments and central banks. Minor problems could be solved by tacit cooperation, generally achieved without open communication among the parties involved. . . Under such circumstances, the most prominent central bank, the Bank of England, signaled the need for coordinated action. When it lowered its discount rate, other central banks usually responded in kind. In effect, the Bank of England provided a focal point for the harmonization of national monetary policies. . .
Major crises in contrast typically required different responses from different countries. The country losing gold and threatened by a convertibility crisis had to raise interest rates to attract funds from abroad; other countries had to loosen domestic credit conditions to make funds available to the central bank experiencing difficulties. The follow-the-leader approach did not suffice. . . . Such crises were instead contained through overt, conscious cooperation among central banks and governments. . . Consequently, the resources any one country could draw on when its gold parity was under attack far exceeded its own reserves; they included the resources of the other gold standard countries. . . .
What rendered the commitment to the gold standard credible, then, was that the commitment was international, not merely national. That commitment was achieved through international cooperation. (pp. 7-8)
Eichengreen uses this excellent conceptual framework to explain the dysfunction of the newly restored gold standard in the 1920s. Because of the monetary dislocation and demonetization of gold during World War I, the value of gold had fallen to about half of its prewar level, thus to reestablish the gold standard required not only restoring gold as a currency standard but also readjusting – sometimes massively — the prewar relative values of the various national currency units. And to prevent the natural tendency of gold to revert to its prewar value as gold was remonetized would require an unprecedented level of international cooperation among the various countries as they restored the gold standard. Thus, the gold standard was being restored in the 1920s under conditions in which neither the credibility of the prewar commitment to the gold standard nor the level of international cooperation among countries necessary to sustain that commitment was restored.
An important further contribution that Eichengreen, following Temin, brings to the historical narrative of the Great Depression is to incorporate the political forces that affected and often determined the decisions of policy makers directly into the narrative rather than treat those decisions as being somehow exogenous to the purely economic forces that were controlling the unfolding catastrophe.
The connection between domestic politics and international economics is at the center of this book. The stability of the prewar gold standard was attributable to a particular constellation of political as well as economic forces. Similarly, the instability of the interwar gold standard is explicable in terms of political as well as economic changes. Politics enters at two levels. First, domestic political pressures influence governments’ choices of international economic policies. Second, domestic political pressures influence the credibility of governments’ commitments to policies and hence their economic effects. . . (p. 10)
The argument, in a nutshell, is that credibility and cooperation were central to the smooth operation of the classical gold standard. The scope for both declined abruptly with the intervention of World War I. The instability of the interwar gold standard was the inevitable result. (p. 11)
Having explained and focused attention on the necessity for credibility and cooperation for a gold standard to function smoothly, Eichengreen then begins his introductory account of how the lack of credibility and cooperation led to the breakdown of the gold standard that precipitated the Great Depression, starting with the structural shift after World War I that made the rest of the world highly dependent on the US as a source of goods and services and as a source of credit, rendering the rest of the world chronically disposed to run balance-of-payments deficits with the US, deficits that could be financed only by the extension of credit by the US.
[I]f U.S. lending were interrupted, the underlying weakness of other countries’ external positions . . . would be revealed. As they lost gold and foreign exchange reserves, the convertibility of their currencies into gold would be threatened. Their central banks would be forced to restrict domestic credit, their fiscal authorities to compress public spending, even if doing so threatened to plunge their economies into recession.
This is what happened when U.S. lending was curtailed in the summer of 1928 as a result of increasingly stringent Federal Reserve monetary policy. Inauspiciously, the monetary contraction in the United States coincided with a massive flow of gold to France, where monetary policy was tight for independent reasons. Thus, gold and financial capital were drained by the United States and France from other parts of the world. Superimposed on already weak foreign balances of payments, these events provoked a greatly magnified monetary contraction abroad. In addition they caused a tightening of fiscal policies in parts of Europe and much of Latin America. This shift in policy worldwide, and not merely the relatively modest shift in the United States, provided the contractionary impulse that set the stage for the 1929 downturn. The minor shift in American policy had such dramatic effects because of the foreign reaction it provoked through its interactions with existing imbalances in the pattern of international settlements and with the gold standard constraints. (pp. 12-13)
Eichengreen then makes a rather bold statement, with which, despite my agreement with, and admiration for, everything he has written to this point, I would take exception.
This explanation for the onset of the Depression, which emphasizes concurrent shifts in economic policy in the Unites States and abroad, the gold standard as the connection between them, and the combined impact of U.S. and foreign economic policies on the level of activity, has not previously appeared in the literature. Its elements are familiar, but they have not been fit together into a coherent account of the causes of the 1929 downturn. (p. 13)
I don’t think that Eichengreen’s claim of priority for his explanation of the onset of the 1929 downturn can be defended, though I certainly wouldn’t suggest that he did not arrive at his understanding of what caused the Great Depression largely on his own. But it is abundantly clear from reading the writings of Hawtrey and Cassel starting as early as 1919, that the basic scenario outlined by Eichengreen was clearly spelled out by Hawtrey and Cassel well before the Great Depression started, as papers by Ron Batchelder and me and by Doug Irwin have thoroughly documented. Undoubtedly Eichengreen has added a great deal of additional insight and depth and done important quantitative and documentary empirical research to buttress his narrative account of the causes of the Great Depression, but the basic underlying theory has not changed.
Eichengreen is not unaware of Hawtrey’s contribution and in a footnote to the last quoted paragraph, Eichengreen writes as follows.
The closest precedents lie in the work of the British economists Lionel Robbins and Ralph Hawtrey, in the writings of German historians concerned with the causes of their economy’s precocious slump, and in Temin (1989). Robbins (1934) hinted at many of the mechanism emphasized here but failed to develop the argument fully. Hawtrey emphasized how the contractionary shift in U.S. monetary policy, superimposed on an already weak British balance of payments position, forced a draconian contraction on the Bank of England, plunging the world into recession. See Hawtrey (1933), especially chapter 2. But Hawtrey’s account focused almost entirely on the United States and the United Kingdom, neglecting the reaction of other central banks, notably the Bank of France, whose role was equally important. (p. 13, n. 17)
Unfortunately, this footnote neither clarifies nor supports Eichengreen’s claim of priority for his account of the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression. First, the bare citation of Robbins’s 1934 book The Great Depression is confusing at best, because Robbins’s explanation of the cause of the Great Depression, which he himself later disavowed, is largely a recapitulation of the Austrian business-cycle theory that attributed the downturn to a crisis caused by monetary expansion by the Fed and the Bank of England. Eichengreen correctly credits Hawtrey for attributing the Great Depression, in almost diametric opposition to Robbins, to contractionary monetary policy by the Fed and the Bank of England, but then seeks to distinguish Hawtrey’s explanation from his own by suggesting that Hawtrey neglected the role of the Bank of France.
Eichengreen mentions Hawtrey’s account of the Great Depression in his 1933 book, Trade Depression and the Way Out, 2nd edition. I no longer have a copy of that work accessible to me, but in the first edition of this work published in 1931, Hawtrey included a brief section under the heading “The Demand for Gold as Money since 1914.”
[S]ince 1914 arbitrary changes in monetary policy and in the demand for gold as money have been greater and more numerous than ever before. Frist came the general abandonment of the gold standard by the belligerent countries in favour of inconvertible paper, and the release of hundreds of millions of gold. By 1920 the wealth value of gold had fallen to two-fifths of what it had been in 1913. The United States, which was almost alone at that time in maintaining a gold standard, thereupon started contracting credit and absorbing gold on a vast scale. In June 1924 the wealth value of gold was seventy per cent higher than at its lowest point in 1920, and the amount of gold held for monetary purposes in the United States had grown from $2,840,000,000 in 1920 to $4,488,000,000.
Other countries were then beginning to return to the gold standard, Gemany in 1924, England in 1925, besides several of the smaller countries of Europe. In the years 1924-8 Germany absorbed over £100,000,000 of gold. France stabilized her currency in 1927 and re-established the gold standard in 1928, and absorbed over £60,000,000 in 1927-8. But meanwhile, the Unitd States had been parting with gold freely and her holding had fallen to $4,109,000,000 in June 1928. Large as these movements had been, they had not seriously disturbed the world value of gold. . . .
But from 1929 to the present time has been a period of immense and disastrous instability. France has added more than £200,000,000 to her gold holding, and the United Statesmore than $800,000,000. In the two and a half years the world’s gold output has been a little over £200,000,000, but a part of this been required for the normal demands of industry. The gold absorbed by France and America has exceeded the fresh supply of gold for monetary purposes by some £200,000,000.
This has had to be wrung from other countries, and much o of it has come from new countries such as Australia, Argentina and Brazil, which have been driven off the gold standard and have used their gold reserves to pay their external liabilities, such as interest on loans payable in foreign currencies. (pp. 20-21)
The idea that Hawtrey neglected the role of the Bank of France is clearly inconsistent with the work that Eichengreen himself cites as evidence for that neglect. Moreover in Hawtrey’s 1932 work, The Art of Central Banking, his first chapter is entitled “French Monetary Policy” which directly addresses the issues supposedly neglected by Hawtrey. Here is an example.
I am inclined therefore to say that while the French absorption of gold in the period from January 1929 to May 1931 was in fact one of the most powerful causes of the world depression, that is only because it was allowed to react an unnecessary degree upon the monetary policy of other countries. (p. 38)
In his foreward to the 1962 reprinting of his volume, Hawtrey mentions his chapter on French Monetary Policy in a section under the heading “Gold and the Great Depression.”
Conspicuous among countries accumulating reserves foreign exchange was France. Chapter 1 of this book records how, in the course of stabilizing the franc in the years 1926-8, the Bank of France accumulated a vast holding of foreign exchange [i.e., foreign bank liabilities payable in gold], and in the ensuing years proceeded to liquidate it [for gold]. Chapter IV . . . shows the bearing of the French absorption of gold upon the starting of the great depression of the 1930s. . . . The catastrophe foreseen in 1922 [!] had come to pass, and the moment had come to point to the moral. The disaster was due to the restoration of the gold standard without any provision for international cooperation to prevent undue fluctuations in the purchasing power of gold. (pp. xiv-xv)
Moreover, on p. 254 of Golden Fetters, Eichengreen himself cites Hawtrey as one of the “foreign critics” of Emile Moreau, Governor of the Bank of France during the 1920s and 1930s “for failing to build “a structure of credit” on their gold imports. By failing to expand domestic credit and to repel gold inflows, they argued, the French had violated the rules of the gold standard game.” In the same paragraph Eichengreen also cites Hawtrey’s recommendation that the Bank of France change its statutes to allow for the creation of domestically supplied money and credit that would have obviated the need for continuing imports of gold.
Finally, writers such as Clark Johnson and Kenneth Mouré, who have written widely respected works on French monetary policy during the 1920s and 1930s, cite Hawtrey extensively as one of the leading contemporary critics of French monetary policy.
PS I showed Barry Eichengreen a draft of this post a short while ago, and he agrees with my conclusion that Hawtrey, and presumably Cassel also, had anticipated the key elements of his explanation of how the breakdown of the gold standard, resulting largely from the breakdown of international cooperation, was the primary cause of the Great Depression. I am grateful to Barry for his quick and generous response to my query.
Uneasy Money 