Archive for the 'Milton Friedman' Category

Axel Leijonhufvud and Modern Macroeconomics

Published June 20, 2022 Alchian , Axel Leijonfuvud , common knowledge , coordination failure , Earl Thompson , Hayek , IS-LM , J. R. Hicks , Keynes , microfoundations , Milton Friedman , neoclassical synthesis , New Classical macroeconomics , New Keynesians , rational expectations , rational expectations equilibrium , Robert Clower , Robert Lucas , search theories , sticky prices , sticky wages , tatonnement , temporary equilibrium , Thomas Sargent , Walrasian equilibrium 10 Comments

For many baby boomers like me growing up in Los Angeles, UCLA was an almost inevitable choice for college. As an incoming freshman, I was undecided whether to major in political science or economics. PoliSci 1 didn’t impress me, but Econ 1 did. More than my Econ 1 professor, it was the assigned textbook, University Economics, 1st edition, by Alchian and Allen that impressed me. That’s how my career in economics started.

After taking introductory micro and macro as a freshman, I started the intermediate theory sequence of micro (utility and cost theory, econ 101a), (general equilibrium theory, 101b), and (macro theory, 102) as a sophomore. It was in the winter 1968 quarter that I encountered Axel Leijonhufvud. This was about a year before his famous book – his doctoral dissertation – Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes was published in the fall of 1968 to instant acclaim. Although it must have been known in the department that the book, which he’d been working on for several years, would soon appear, I doubt that its remarkable impact on the economics profession could have been anticipated, turning Axel almost overnight from an obscure untenured assistant professor into a tenured professor at one of the top economics departments in the world and a kind of academic rock star widely sought after to lecture and appear at conferences around the globe. I offer the following scattered recollections of him, drawn from memories at least a half-century old, to those interested in his writings, and some reflections on his rise to the top of the profession, followed by a gradual loss of influence as theoretical marcroeconomics, fell under the influence of Robert Lucas and the rational-expectations movement in its various forms (New Classical, Real Business-Cycle, New-Keynesian).

Axel, then in his early to mid-thirties, was an imposing figure, very tall and gaunt with a short beard and a shock of wavy blondish hair, but his attire reflecting the lowly position he then occupied in the academic hierarchy. He spoke perfect English with a distinct Swedish lilt, frequently leavening his lectures and responses to students’ questions with wry and witty comments and asides.  

Axel’s presentation of general-equilibrium theory was, as then still the norm, at least at UCLA, mostly graphical, supplemented occasionally by some algebra and elementary calculus. The Edgeworth box was his principal technique for analyzing both bilateral trade and production in the simple two-output, two-input case, and he used it to elucidate concepts like Pareto optimality, general-equilibrium prices, and the two welfare theorems, an exposition which I, at least, found deeply satisfying. The assigned readings were the classic paper by F. M. Bator, “The Simple Analytics of Welfare-Maximization,” which I relied on heavily to gain a working grasp of the basics of general-equilibrium theory, and as a supplementary text, Peter Newman’s The Theory of Exchange, much of which was too advanced for me to comprehend more than superficially. Axel also introduced us to the concept of tâtonnement and highlighting its importance as an explanation of sorts of how the equilibrium price vector might, at least in theory, be found, an issue whose profound significance I then only vaguely comprehended, if at all. Another assigned text was Modern Capital Theory by Donald Dewey, providing an introduction to the role of capital, time, and the rate of interest in monetary and macroeconomic theory and a bridge to the intermediate macro course that he would teach the following quarter.

A highlight of Axel’s general-equilibrium course was the guest lecture by Bob Clower, then visiting UCLA from Northwestern, with whom Axel became friendly only after leaving Northwestern, and two of whose papers (“A Reconsideration of the Microfoundations of Monetary Theory,” and “The Keynesian Counterrevolution: A Theoretical Appraisal”) were discussed at length in his forthcoming book. (The collaboration between Clower and Leijonhufvud and their early Northwestern connection has led to the mistaken idea that Clower had been Axel’s thesis advisor. Axel’s dissertation was actually written under Meyer Burstein.) Clower himself came to UCLA economics a few years later when I was already a third-year graduate student, and my contact with him was confined to seeing him at seminars and workshops. I still have a vivid memory of Bob in his lecture explaining, with the aid of chalk and a blackboard, how ballistic theory was developed into an orbital theory by way of a conceptual experiment imagining that the distance travelled by a projectile launched from a fixed position being progressively lengthened until the projectile’s trajectory transitioned into an orbit around the earth.

Axel devoted the first part of his macro course to extending the Keynesian-cross diagram we had been taught in introductory macro into the Hicksian IS-LM model by making investment a negative function of the rate of interest and adding a money market with a fixed money stock and a demand for money that’s a negative function of the interest rate. Depending on the assumptions about elasticities, IS-LM could be an analytical vehicle that could accommodate either the extreme Keynesian-cross case, in which fiscal policy is all-powerful and monetary policy is ineffective, or the Monetarist (classical) case, in which fiscal policy is ineffective and monetary policy all-powerful, which was how macroeconomics was often framed as a debate about the elasticity of the demand for money curve with respect to interest rate. Friedman himself, in his not very successful attempt to articulate his own framework for monetary analysis, accepted that framing, one of the few rhetorical and polemical misfires of his career.

In his intermediate macro course, Axel presented the standard macro model, and I don’t remember his weighing in that much with his own criticism; he didn’t teach from a standard intermediate macro textbook, standard textbook versions of the dominant Keynesian model not being at all to his liking. Instead, he assigned early sources of what became Keynesian economics like Hicks’s 1937 exposition of the IS-LM model and Alvin Hansen’s A Guide to Keynes (1953), with Friedman’s 1956 restatement of the quantity theory serving as a counterpoint, and further developments of Keynesian thought like Patinkin’s 1948 paper on price flexibility and full employment, A. W. Phillips original derivation of the Phillips Curve, Harry Johnson on the General Theory after 25 years, and his own preview “Keynes and the Keynesians: A Suggested Interpretation” of his forthcoming book, and probably others that I’m not now remembering. Presenting the material piecemeal from original sources allowed him to underscore the weaknesses and questionable assumptions latent in the standard Keynesian model.

Of course, for most of us, it was a challenge just to reproduce the standard model and apply it to some specific problems, but we at least we got the sense that there was more going on under the hood of the model than we would have imagined had we learned its structure from a standard macro text. I have the melancholy feeling that the passage of years has dimmed my memory of his teaching too much to adequately describe how stimulating, amusing and enjoyable his lectures were to those of us just starting our journey into economic theory.

The following quarter, in the fall 1968 quarter, when his book had just appeared in print, Axel created a new advanced course called macrodynamics. He talked a lot about Wicksell and Keynes, of course, but he was then also fascinated by the work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics, assigning Wiener’s book Cybernetics as a primary text and a key to understanding what Keynes was really trying to do. He introduced us to concepts like positive and negative feedback, servo mechanisms, stable and unstable dynamic systems and related those concepts to economic concepts like the price mechanism, stable and unstable equilibria, and to business cycles. Here’s how a put it in On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes:

Cybernetics as a formal theory, of course, began to develop only during the was and it was only with the appearance of . . . Weiner’s book in 1948 that the first results of serious work on a general theory of dynamic systems – and the term itself – reached a wider public. Even then, research in this field seemed remote from economic problems, and it is thus not surprising that the first decade or more of the Keynesian debate did not go in this direction. But it is surprising that so few monetary economists have caught on to developments in this field in the last ten or twelve years, and that the work of those who have has not triggered a more dramatic chain reaction. This, I believe, is the Keynesian Revolution that did not come off.

In conveying the essential departure of cybernetics from traditional physics, Wiener once noted:

Here there emerges a very interesting distinction between the physics of our grandfathers and that of the present day. In nineteenth-century physics, it seemed to cost nothing to get information.

In context, the reference was to Maxwell’s Demon. In its economic reincarnation as Walras’ auctioneer, the demon has not yet been exorcised. But this certainly must be what Keynes tried to do. If a single distinction is to be drawn between the Economics of Keynes and the economics of our grandfathers, this is it. It is only on this basis that Keynes’ claim to have essayed a more “general theory” can be maintained. If this distinction is not recognized as both valid and important, I believe we must conclude that Keynes’ contribution to pure theory is nil.

Axel’s hopes that cybernetics could provide an analytical tool with which to bring Keynes’s insights into informational scarcity on macroeconomic analysis were never fulfilled. A glance at the index to Axel’s excellent collection of essays written from the late 1960s and the late 1970s Information and Coordination reveals not a single reference either to cybernetics or to Wiener. Instead, to his chagrin and disappointment, macroeconomics took a completely different path following the path blazed by Robert Lucas and his followers of insisting on a nearly continuous state of rational-expectations equilibrium and implicitly denying that there is an intertemporal coordination problem for macroeconomics to analyze, much less to solve.

After getting my BA in economics at UCLA, I stayed put and began my graduate studies there in the next academic year, taking the graduate micro sequence given that year by Jack Hirshleifer, the graduate macro sequence with Axel and the graduate monetary theory sequence with Ben Klein, who started his career as a monetary economist before devoting himself a few years later entirely to IO and antitrust.

Not surprisingly, Axel’s macro course drew heavily on his book, which meant it drew heavily on the history of macroeconomics including, of course, Keynes himself, but also his Cambridge predecessors and collaborators, his friendly, and not so friendly, adversaries, and the Keynesians that followed him. His main point was that if you take Keynes seriously, you can’t argue, as the standard 1960s neoclassical synthesis did, that the main lesson taught by Keynes was that if the real wage in an economy is somehow stuck above the market-clearing wage, an increase in aggregate demand is necessary to allow the labor market to clear at the prevailing market wage by raising the price level to reduce the real wage down to the market-clearing level.

This interpretation of Keynes, Axel argued, trivialized Keynes by implying that he didn’t say anything that had not been said previously by his predecessors who had also blamed high unemployment on wages being kept above market-clearing levels by minimum-wage legislation or the anticompetitive conduct of trade-union monopolies.

Axel sought to reinterpret Keynes as an early precursor of search theories of unemployment subsequently developed by Armen Alchian and Edward Phelps who would soon be followed by others including Robert Lucas. Because negative shocks to aggregate demand are rarely anticipated, the immediate wage and price adjustments to a new post-shock equilibrium price vector that would maintain full employment would occur only under the imaginary tâtonnement system naively taken as the paradigm for price adjustment under competitive market conditions, Keynes believed that a deliberate countercyclical policy response was needed to avoid a potentially long-lasting or permanent decline in output and employment. The issue is not price flexibility per se, but finding the equilibrium price vector consistent with intertemporal coordination. Price flexibility that doesn’t arrive quickly (immediately?) at the equilibrium price vector achieves nothing. Trading at disequilibrium prices leads inevitably to a contraction of output and income. In an inspired turn of phrase, Axel called this cumulative process of aggregate demand shrinkage Say’s Principle, which years later led me to write my paper “Say’s Law and the Classical Theory of Depressions” included as Chapter 9 of my recent book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory.

Attention to the implications of the lack of an actual coordinating mechanism simply assumed (either in the form of Walrasian tâtonnement or the implicit Marshallian ceteris paribus assumption) by neoclassical economic theory was, in Axel’s view, the great contribution of Keynes. Axel deplored the neoclassical synthesis, because its rote acceptance of the neoclassical equilibrium paradigm trivialized Keynes’s contribution, treating unemployment as a phenomenon attributable to sticky or rigid wages without inquiring whether alternative informational assumptions could explain unemployment even with flexible wages.

The new literature on search theories of unemployment advanced by Alchian, Phelps, et al. and the success of his book gave Axel hope that a deepened version of neoclassical economic theory that paid attention to its underlying informational assumptions could lead to a meaningful reconciliation of the economics of Keynes with neoclassical theory and replace the superficial neoclassical synthesis of the 1960s. That quest for an alternative version of neoclassical economic theory was for a while subsumed under the trite heading of finding microfoundations for macroeconomics, by which was meant finding a way to explain Keynesian (involuntary) unemployment caused by deficient aggregate demand without invoking special ad hoc assumptions like rigid or sticky wages and prices. The objective was to analyze the optimizing behavior of individual agents given limitations in or imperfections of the information available to them and to identify and provide remedies for the disequilibrium conditions that characterize coordination failures.

For a short time, perhaps from the early 1970s until the early 1980s, a number of seemingly promising attempts to develop a disequilibrium theory of macroeconomics appeared, most notably by Robert Barro and Herschel Grossman in the US, and by and J. P. Benassy, J. M. Grandmont, and Edmond Malinvaud in France. Axel and Clower were largely critical of these efforts, regarding them as defective and even misguided in many respects.

But at about the same time, another, very different, approach to microfoundations was emerging, inspired by the work of Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent and their followers, who were introducing the concept of rational expectations into macroeconomics. Axel and Clower had focused their dissatisfaction with neoclassical economics on the rise of the Walrasian paradigm which used the obviously fantastical invention of a tâtonnement process to account for the attainment of an equilibrium price vector perfectly coordinating all economic activity. They argued for an interpretation of Keynes’s contribution as an attempt to steer economics away from an untenable theoretical and analytical paradigm rather than, as the neoclassical synthesis had done, to make peace with it through the adoption of ad hoc assumptions about price and wage rigidity, thereby draining Keynes’s contribution of novelty and significance.

And then Lucas came along to dispense with the auctioneer, eliminate tâtonnement, while achieving the same result by way of a methodological stratagem in three parts: a) insisting that all agents be treated as equilibrium optimizers, and b) who therefore form identical rational expectations of all future prices using the same common knowledge, so that c) they all correctly anticipate the equilibrium price vector that earlier economists had assumed could be found only through the intervention of an imaginary auctioneer conducting a fantastical tâtonnement process.

This methodological imperatives laid down by Lucas were enforced with a rigorous discipline more befitting a religious order than an academic research community. The discipline of equilibrium reasoning, it was decreed by methodological fiat, imposed a question-begging research strategy on researchers in which correct knowledge of future prices became part of the endowment of all optimizing agents.

While microfoundations for Axel, Clower, Alchian, Phelps and their collaborators and followers had meant relaxing the informational assumptions of the standard neoclassical model, for Lucas and his followers microfoundations came to mean that each and every individual agent must be assumed to have all the knowledge that exists in the model. Otherwise the rational-expectations assumption required by the model could not be justified.

The early Lucasian models did assume a certain kind of informational imperfection or ambiguity about whether observed price changes were relative changes or absolute changes, which would be resolved only after a one-period time lag. However, the observed serial correlation in aggregate time series could not be rationalized by an informational ambiguity resolved after just one period. This deficiency in the original Lucasian model led to the development of real-business-cycle models that attribute business cycles to real-productivity shocks that dispense with Lucasian informational ambiguity in accounting for observed aggregate time-series fluctuations. So-called New Keynesian economists chimed in with ad hoc assumptions about wage and price stickiness to create a new neoclassical synthesis to replace the old synthesis but with little claim to any actual analytical insight.

The success of the Lucasian paradigm was disheartening to Axel, and his research agenda gradually shifted from macroeconomic theory to applied policy, especially inflation control in developing countries. Although my own interest in macroeconomics was largely inspired by Axel, my approach to macroeconomics and monetary theory eventually diverged from Axel’s, when, in my last couple of years of graduate work at UCLA, I became close to Earl Thompson whose courses I had not taken as an undergraduate or a graduate student. I had read some of Earl’s monetary theory papers when preparing for my preliminary exams; I found them interesting but quirky and difficult to understand. After I had already started writing my dissertation, under Harold Demsetz on an IO topic, I decided — I think at the urging of my friend and eventual co-author, Ron Batchelder — to sit in on Earl’s graduate macro sequence, which he would sometimes offer as an alternative to Axel’s more popular graduate macro sequence. It was a relatively small group — probably not more than 25 or so attended – that met one evening a week for three hours. Each session – and sometimes more than one session — was devoted to discussing one of Earl’s published or unpublished macroeconomic or monetary theory papers. Hearing Earl explain his papers and respond to questions and criticisms brought them alive to me in a way that just reading them had never done, and I gradually realized that his arguments, which I had previously dismissed or misunderstood, were actually profoundly insightful and theoretically compelling.

For me at least, Earl provided a more systematic way of thinking about macroeconomics and a more systematic critique of standard macro than I could piece together from Axel’s writings and lectures. But one of the lessons that I had learned from Axel was the seminal importance of two Hayek essays: “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” and, especially “Economics and Knowledge.” The former essay is the easier to understand, and I got the gist of it on my first reading; the latter essay is more subtle and harder to follow, and it took years and a number of readings before I could really follow it. I’m not sure when I began to really understand it, but it might have been when I heard Earl expound on the importance of Hicks’s temporary-equilibrium method first introduced in Value and Capital.

In working out the temporary equilibrium method, Hicks relied on the work of Myrdal, Lindahl and Hayek, and Earl’s explanation of the temporary-equilibrium method based on the assumption that markets for current delivery clear, but those market-clearing prices are different from the prices that agents had expected when formulating their optimal intertemporal plans, causing agents to revise their plans and their expectations of future prices. That seemed to be the proper way to think about the intertemporal-coordination failures that Axel was so concerned about, but somehow he never made the connection between Hayek’s work, which he greatly admired, and the Hicksian temporary-equilibrium method which I never heard him refer to, even though he also greatly admired Hicks.

It always seemed to me that a collaboration between Earl and Axel could have been really productive and might even have led to an alternative to the Lucasian reign over macroeconomics. But for some reason, no such collaboration ever took place, and macroeconomics was impoverished as a result. They are both gone, but we still benefit from having Duncan Foley still with us, still active, and still making important contributions to our understanding, And we should be grateful.

Hayek and the Lucas Critique

Published May 23, 2022 Alvin Hansen , Hayek , Herbert Tout , intertemporal equilibrium , Keynes , Lucas Critique , microfoundations , Milton Friedman , natural rate of unemployment , Phillips Curve , Robert Lucas 3 Comments

In March I wrote a blog post, “Robert Lucas and the Pretense of Science,” which was a draft proposal for a paper for a conference on Coordination Issues in Historical Perspectives to be held in September. My proposal having been accepted I’m going to post sections of the paper on the blog in hopes of getting some feedback as a write the paper. What follows is the first of several anticipated draft sections.

Just 31 years old, F. A. Hayek rose rapidly to stardom after giving four lectures at the London School of Economics at the invitation of his almost exact contemporary, and soon to be best friend, Lionel Robbins. Hayek had already published several important works, of which Hayek ([1928], 1984) laying out basic conceptualization of an intertemporal equilibrium almost simultaneously with the similar conceptualizations of two young Swedish economists, Gunnar Myrdal (1927) and Erik Lindahl [1929] 1939), was the most important.

Hayek’s (1931a) LSE lectures aimed to provide a policy-relevant version of a specific theoretical model of the business cycle that drew upon but was a just a particular instantiation of the general conceptualization developed in his 1928 contribution. Delivered less than two years after the start of the Great Depression, Hayek’s lectures gave a historical overview of the monetary theory of business-cycles, an account of how monetary disturbances cause real effects, and a skeptical discussion of how monetary policy might, or more likely might not, counteract or mitigate the downturn then underway. It was Hayek’s skepticism about countercyclical policy that helped make those lectures so compelling but also elicited such a hostile reaction during the unfolding crisis.

The extraordinary success of his lectures established Hayek’s reputation as a preeminent monetary theorist alongside established figures like Irving Fisher, A. C. Pigou, D. H. Robertson, R. G. Hawtrey, and of course J. M. Keynes. Hayek’s (1931b) critical review of Keynes’s just published Treatise on Money (1930), published soon after his LSE lectures, provoking a heated exchange with Keynes, himself, showed him to be a skilled debater and a powerful polemicist.

Hayek’s meteoric rise was, however, followed by a rapid fall from the briefly held pinnacle of his early career. Aside from the imperfections and weaknesses of his own theoretical framework (Glasner and Zimmerman 2021), his diagnosis of the causes of the Great Depression (Glasner and Batchelder [1994] 2021a, 2021b) and his policy advice (Glasner 2021) were theoretically misguided and inappropriate to the deflationary conditions underlying the Great Depression).

Nevertheless, Hayek’s conceptualization of intertemporal equilibrium provided insight into the role not only of prices, but also of price expectations, in accounting for cyclical fluctuations. In Hayek’s 1931 version of his cycle theory, the upturn results from bank-financed investment spending enabled by monetary expansion that fuels an economic boom characterized by increased total spending, output and employment. However, owing to resource constraints, misalignments between demand and supply, and drains of bank reserves, the optimistic expectations engendered by the boom are doomed to eventual disappointment, whereupon a downturn begins.

I need not engage here with the substance of Hayek’s cycle theory which I have criticized elsewhere (see references above). But I would like to consider his 1934 explanation, responding to Hansen and Tout (1933), of why a permanent monetary expansion would be impossible. Hansen and Tout disputed Hayek’s contention that monetary expansion would inevitably lead to a recession, because an unconstrained monetary authority would not be forced by a reserve drain to halt a monetary expansion, allowing a boom to continue indefinitely, permanently maintaining an excess of investment over saving.

Hayek (1934) responded as follows:

[A] constant rate of forced saving (i.e., investment in excess of voluntary saving) a rate of credit expansion which will enable the producers of intermediate products, during each successive unit of time, to compete successfully with the producers of consumers’ goods for constant additional quantities of the original factors of production. But as the competing demand from the producers of consumers’ goods rises (in terms of money) in consequence of, and in proportion to, the preceding increase of expenditure on the factors of production (income), an increase of credit which is to enable the producers of intermediate products to attract additional original factors, will have to be, not only absolutely but even relatively, greater than the last increase which is now reflected in the increased demand for consumers’ goods. Even in order to attract only as great a proportion of the original factors, i.e., in order merely to maintain the already existing capital, every new increase would have to be proportional to the last increase, i.e., credit would have to expand progressively at a constant rate. But in order to bring about constant additions to capital, it would have to do more: it would have to increase at a constantly increasing rate. The rate at which this rate of increase must increase would be dependent upon the time lag between the first expenditure of the additional money on the factors of production and the re-expenditure of the income so created on consumers’ goods. . . .

But I think it can be shown . . . that . . . such a policy would . . . inevitably lead to a rapid and progressive rise in prices which, in addition to its other undesirable effects, would set up movements which would soon counteract, and finally more than offset, the “forced saving.” That it is impossible, either for a simple progressive increase of credit which only helps to maintain, and does not add to, the already existing “forced saving,” or for an increase in credit at an increasing rate, to continue for a considerable time without causing a rise in prices, results from the fact that in neither case have we reason to assume that the increase in the supply of consumers’ goods will keep pace with the increase in the flow of money coming on to the market for consumers’ goods. Insofar as, in the second case, the credit expansion leads to an ultimate increase in the output of consumers’ goods, this increase will lag considerably and increasingly (as the period of production increases) behind the increase in the demand for them. But whether the prices of consumers’ goods will rise faster or slower, all other prices, and particularly the prices of the original factors of production, will rise even faster. It is only a question of time when this general and progressive rise of prices becomes very rapid. My argument is not that such a development is inevitable once a policy of credit expansion is embarked upon, but that it has to be carried to that point if a certain result—a constant rate of forced saving, or maintenance without the help of voluntary saving of capital accumulated by forced saving—is to be achieved.

Friedman’s (1968) argument why monetary expansion could not permanently reduce unemployment below its “natural rate” closely mirrors (though he almost certainly never read) Hayek’s argument that monetary expansion could not permanently maintain a rate of investment spending above the rate of voluntary saving. Generalizing Friedman’s logic, Lucas (1976) transformed it into a critique of using econometric estimates of relationships like the Phillips Curve, the specific target of Friedman’s argument, as a basis for predicting the effects of policy changes, such estimates being conditional on implicit expectational assumptions which aren’t invariant to the policy changes derived from those estimates.

Restated differently, such econometric estimates are reduced forms that, without identifying restrictions, do not allow the estimated regression coefficients to be used to predict the effects of a policy change.

Only by specifying, and estimating, the deep structural relationships governing the response to a policy change could the effect of a potential policy change be predicted with some confidence that the prediction would not prove erroneous because of changes in the econometrically estimated relationships once agents altered their behavior in response to the policy change.

In his 1974 Nobel Lecture, Hayek offered a similar explanation of why an observed correlation between aggregate demand and employment provides no basis for predicting the effect of policies aimed at increasing aggregate demand and reducing unemployment if the likely changes in structural relationships caused by those policies are not taken into account.

[T]he very measures which the dominant “macro-economic” theory has recommended as a remedy for unemployment, namely the increase of aggregate demand, have become a cause of a very extensive misallocation of resources which is likely to make later large-scale unemployment inevitable. The continuous injection . . . money at points of the economic system where it creates a temporary demand which must cease when the increase of the quantity of money stops or slows down, together with the expectation of a continuing rise of prices, draws labour . . . into employments which can last only so long as the increase of the quantity of money continues at the same rate – or perhaps even only so long as it continues to accelerate at a given rate. What this policy has produced is not so much a level of employment that could not have been brought about in other ways, as a distribution of employment which cannot be indefinitely maintained . . . The fact is that by a mistaken theoretical view we have been led into a precarious position in which we cannot prevent substantial unemployment from re-appearing; not because . . . this unemployment is deliberately brought about as a means to combat inflation, but because it is now bound to occur as a deeply regrettable but inescapable consequence of the mistaken policies of the past as soon as inflation ceases to accelerate.

Hayek’s point that an observed correlation between the rate of inflation (a proxy for aggregate demand) and unemployment cannot be relied on in making economic policy was articulated succinctly and abstractly by Lucas as follows:

In short, one can imagine situations in which empirical Phillips curves exhibit long lags and situations in which there are no lagged effects. In either case, the “long-run” output inflation relationship as calculated or simulated in the conventional way has no bearing on the actual consequences of pursing a policy of inflation.

[T]he ability . . . to forecast consequences of a change in policy rests crucially on the assumption that the parameters describing the new policy . . . are known by agents. Over periods for which this assumption is not approximately valid . . . empirical Phillips curves will appear subject to “parameter drift,” describable over the sample period, but unpredictable for all but the very near future.

The lesson inferred by both Hayek and Lucas was that Keynesian macroeconomic models of aggregate demand, inflation and employment can’t reliably guide economic policy and should be discarded in favor of models more securely grounded in the microeconomic theories of supply and demand that emerged from the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s and eventually becoming the neoclassical economic theory that describes the characteristics of an efficient, decentralized and self-regulating economic system. This was the microeconomic basis on which Hayek and Lucas believed macroeconomic theory ought to be based instead of the Keynesian system that they were criticizing. But that superficial similarity obscures the profound methodological and substantive differences between them.

Those differences will be considered in future posts.

References

Friedman, M. 1968. “The Role of Monetary Policy.” American Economic Review 58(1):1-17.

Glasner, D. 2021. “Hayek, Deflation, Gold and Nihilism.” Ch. 16 in D. Glasner Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glasner, D. and Batchelder, R. W. [1994] 2021. “Debt, Deflation, the Gold Standard and the Great Depression.” Ch. 13 in D. Glasner Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glasner, D. and Batchelder, R. W. 2021. “Pre-Keynesian Monetary Theories of the Great Depression: Whatever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel?” Ch. 14 in D. Glasner Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glasner, D. and Zimmerman, P. 2021.  “The Sraffa-Hayek Debate on the Natural Rate of Interest.” Ch. 15 in D. Glasner Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hansen, A. and Tout, H. 1933. “Annual Survey of Business Cycle Theory: Investment and Saving in Business Cycle Theory,” Econometrica 1(2): 119-47.

Hayek, F. A. [1928] 1984. “Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movements in the Value of Money.” In R. McCloughry (Ed.), Money, Capital and Fluctuations: Early Essays (pp. 171–215). Routledge.

Hayek, F. A. 1931a. Prices and Produciton. London: Macmillan.

Hayek, F. A. 1931b. “Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. Keynes.” Economica 33:270-95.

Hayek, F. A. 1934. “Capital and Industrial Fluctuations.” Econometrica 2(2): 152-67.

Keynes, J. M. 1930. A Treatise on Money. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

Lindahl. E. [1929] 1939. “The Place of Capital in the Theory of Price.” In E. Lindahl, Studies in the Theory of Money and Capital. George, Allen & Unwin.

Lucas, R. E. [1976] 1985. “Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique.” In R. E. Lucas, Studies in Business-Cycle Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Myrdal, G. 1927. Prisbildningsproblemet och Foranderligheten (Price Formation and the Change Factor). Almqvist & Wicksell.

Wherein I Try to Calm Professor Blanchard’s Nerves

Published March 15, 2022 expectations , Federal Reserve , Milton Friedman , Monetarism , nominal GDP targeting , Olivier Blanchard , Paul Volcker 10 Comments
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Olivier Blanchard is rightly counted among the most eminent macroeconomists of our time, and his pronouncements on macroeconomic matters should not be dismissed casually. So his commentary yesterday for the Peterson Institute of International Economics, responding to a previous policy brief, by David Reifschneider and David Wilcox, arguing that the recent burst of inflation is likely to recede, bears close attention.

Blanchard does not reject the analysis of Reifschneider and Wilcox outright, but he argues that they overlook factors that could cause inflation to remain high unless policy makers take more aggressive action to bring inflation down than is recommended by Reifschneider and Wilcox. Rather than go through the details of Blanchard’s argument, I address the two primary concerns he identifies: (1) the potential for inflation expectations to become unanchored, as they were in the 1970s and early 1980s, by persistent high inflation, and (2) the potential inflationary implications of wage catchup after the erosion of real wages by the recent burst of inflation.

Unanchored Inflation Expectations and the Added Cost of a Delayed Response to Inflation

Blanchard cites a forthcoming book by Alan Blinder on soft and hard landings from inflation in which Blinder examines nine Fed tightening episodes in which tightening was the primary cause of a slowdown or a recession. Based on the historical record, Blinder is optimistic that the Fed can manage a soft landing if it needs to reduce inflation. Blanchard doesn’t share Blinder’s confidence.

[I]n most of the episodes Blinder has identified, the movements in inflation to which the Fed reacted were too small to be of direct relevance to the current situation, and the only comparable episode to today, if any, is the episode that ended with the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s.

I find that a scary comparison. . . .

[I]t shows what happened when the Fed got seriously “behind the curve” in 1974–75. . . . It then took 8 years, from 1975 to 1983, to reduce inflation to 4 percent.

And I find Blanchard’s comparison of the 1975-1983 period with the current situation problematic. First, he ignores the fact that the 1975-1983 episode did not display a steady rate of inflation or a uniform increase in inflation from 1975 until Volcker finally tamed it by way of the brutal 1981-82 recession. As I’ve explained previously in posts on the 1970s and 1980s (here, here, and here), and in chapters 7 and 8 of my book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory the 1970s inflation was the product of a series of inflationary demand-side and supply-shocks and misguided policy responses by the Fed, guided by politically motivated misconceptions, with little comprehension of the consequences of its actions.

It would be unwise to assume that the Fed will never embark on a similar march of folly, but it would be at least as unwise to adopt a proposed policy on the assumption that the alternative to that policy would be a repetition of the earlier march. What commentary on the 1970s largely overlooks is that there was an enormous expansion of the US labor force in that period as baby boomers came of age and as women began seeking and finding employment in steadily increasing numbers. The labor-force participation rate in the 1950s and 1960s fluctuated between about 58% to about 60%, mirroring fluctuations in the unemployment rate. Between 1970 and 1980 the labor force participation rate rose from just over 60% to just over 64% even as the unemployment rate rose from about 5% to over 7%. The 1970s were not, for the most part, a period of stagflation, but a period of inflation and strong growth interrupted by one deep recession (1974-75) and bookended by two minor recessions (1969-70) and (1979-80). But the rising trend of unemployment during the decade was largely attributable not to stagnation but to a rapidly expanding labor force and a rising labor participation rate.

The rapid increase in inflation in 1973 was largely a policy-driven error of the Nixon/Burns collaboration to ensure Nixon’s reelection in 1972 without bothering to taper the stimulus in 1973 after full employment was restored just in time for Nixon’s 1972 re-election. The oil shock of 1973-74 would have justified allowing a transitory period of increased inflation to cushion the negative effect of the increase in energy prices and to dilute the real magnitude of the nominal increase in oil prices. But the combined effect of excess aggregate demand and a negative supply shock led to an exaggerated compensatory tightening of monetary policy that led to the unnecessarily deep and prolonged recession in 1974-75.

A strong recovery ensued after the recession which, not surprisingly, was associated with declining inflation that fell below 5% in 1976. However, owing to the historically high rate of unemployment, only partially attributable to the previous recession, the incoming Carter administration promoted expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, which Arthur Burns, hoping to be reappointed by Carter to another term as Fed Chairman, willingly implemented. Rather than continue on the downward inflationary trend inherited from the previous administration, inflation resumed its upward trend in 1977.

Burns’s hopes to be reappointed by Carter were disappointed, but his replacement G. William Miller made no effort to tighten monetary policy to reverse the upward trend in inflation. A second oil shock in 1979 associated with the Iranian Revolution and the taking of US hostages in Iran caused crude oil prices over the course in 1979 to more than double. Again, the appropriate monetary-policy response was not to tighten monetary policy but to accommodate the price increase without causing a recession.

However, by the time of the second oil shock in 1979, inflation was already in the high single digits. The second oil shock, combined with the disastrous effects of the controls on petroleum prices carried over from the Nixon administration, created a crisis atmosphere that allowed the Reagan administration, with the cooperation of Paul Volcker, to implement a radical Monetarist anti-inflation policy. The policy was based on the misguided presumption that keeping the rate of growth of some measure of the money stock below a 5% annual rate would cure inflation with little effect on the overall economy if it were credibly implemented.

Volcker’s reputation was such that it was thought by supporters of the policy that his commitment would be relied upon by the public, so that a smooth transition to a lower rate of inflation would follow, and any downturn would be mild and short-lived. But the result was an unexpectedly deep and long-lasting recession.

The recession was needlessly prolonged by the grave misunderstanding of the causal relationship between the monetary aggregates and macroeconomic performance that had been perpetrated by Milton Friedman’s anti-Keynesian Monetarist counterrevolution. After triggering the sharpest downturn of the postwar era, the Monetarist anti-inflation strategy adopted by Volcker was, in the summer of 1982, on the verge of causing a financial crisis before Volcker announced that the Fed would no longer try to target any of the monetary aggregates, an announcement that triggered an immediate stock-market boom and, within a few months, the start of an economic recovery.

Thus, Blanchard is wrong to compare our current situation to the entire 1975-1983 period. The current situation, rather, is similar to the situation in 1973, when an economy, in the late stages of a recovery with rising inflation, was subjected to a severe supply shock. The appropriate response to that supply shock was not to tighten monetary policy, but merely to draw down the monetary stimulus of the previous two years. However, the Fed, perhaps shamed by the excessive, and politically motivated, monetary expansion of the previous two years, overcompensated by tightening monetary policy to counter the combined inflationary impact of its own previous policy and the recent oil price increase, immediately triggering the sharpest downturn of the postwar era. That is the lesson to draw from the 1970s, and it’s a mistake that the Fed ought not repeat now.

The Catch-Up Problem: Are Rapidly Rising Wages a Ticking Time-Bomb

Blanchard is worried that, because price increases exceeded wage increases in 2021, causing real wages to fall in 2021, workers will rationally assume, and demand, that their nominal wages will rise in 2022 to compensate for the decline in real wages, thereby fueling a further increase in inflation. This is a familiar argument based on the famous short-run Phillips-Curve trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Reduced unemployment resulting from the real-wage reduction associated with inflation will cause inflation to increase.

This argument is problematic on at least two levels. First, it presumes that the Phillips Curve represents a structural relationship, when it is merely a reduced form, just as an observed relationship between the price of a commodity and sales of that commodity is a reduced form, not a demand curve. Inferences cannot be made from a reduced form about the effect of a price change, nor can inferences about the effect of inflation be made from the Phillips Curve.

But one needn’t resort to a somewhat sophisticated argument to see why Blanchard’s fears that wage catchup will lead to a further round of inflation are not well-grounded. Blanchard argues that business firms, having pocketed windfall profits from rising prices that have outpaced wage increases, will grant workers compensatory wage increases to restore workers’ real wages, while also increasing prices to compensate themselves for the increased wages that they have agreed to pay their workers.

I’m sorry, but with all due respect to Professor Blanchard, that argument makes no sense. Evidently, firms have generally enjoyed a windfall when market conditions allowed them to raise prices without raising wages. Why, if wages finally catch up to prices, will they raise prices again? Either firms can choose, at will, how much profit to make when they set prices or their prices are constrained by market forces. If Professor Blanchard believes that firms can simply choose how much profit they make when they set prices, then he seems to be subscribing to Senator Warren’s theory of inflation: that inflation is caused by corporate greed. If he believes that, in setting prices, firms are constrained by market forces, then the mere fact that market conditions allowed them to increase prices faster than wages rose in 2021 does not mean that, if market conditions cause wages to rise at a faster rate than they did in 2022, firms, after absorbing those wage increases, will automatically be able to maintain their elevated profit margins in 2022 by raising prices in 2022 correspondingly.

The market conditions facing firms in 2022 will be determined by, among other things, the monetary policy of the Fed. Whether firms are able to raise prices in 2022 as fast as wages rise in 2022 will depend on the monetary policy adopted by the Fed. If the Fed’s monetary policy aims at gradually slowing down the rate of increase in nominal GDP in 2022 from the 2021 rate of increase, firms overall will not easily be able to raise prices as fast as wages rise in 2022. But why should anyone expect that firms that enjoyed windfall profits from inflation in 2021 will be able to continue enjoying those elevated profits in perpetuity?

Professor Blanchard posits simple sectoral equations for the determination of the rate of wage increases and for the rate of price increases given the rate of wage increases. This sort of one-way causality is much too simplified and ignores the fundamental fact all prices and wages and expectations of future prices and wages are mutually determined in a simultaneous system. One can’t reason from a change in a single variable and extrapolate from that change how the rest of the system will adjust.

The Rises and Falls of Keynesianism and Monetarism

Published January 9, 2022 Alfred Marshall , Arrow-Debrew-McKenzie model , Carl Menger , common knowledge , comparative statics , Erik Lindahl , general equilibrium , Great Depression , Keynes , Leon Walras , macroeconomics , Milton Friedman , Monetarism , partial equilibrium , sticky prices , sticky wages , supply-demand analysis , tatonnement , W. S. Jevons , Walrasian equilibrium 16 Comments

The following is extracted from a paper on the history of macroeconomics that I’m now writing. I don’t know yet where or when it will be published and there may or may not be further installments, but I would be interested in any comments or suggestions that readers might have. Regular readers, if there are any, will probably recognize some familiar themes that I’ve been writing about in a number of my posts over the past several months. So despite the diminished frequency of my posting, I haven’t been entirely idle.

Recognizing the cognitive dissonance between the vision of the optimal equilibrium of a competitive market economy described by Marshallian economic theory and the massive unemployment of the Great Depression, Keynes offered an alternative, and, in his view, more general, theory, the optimal neoclassical equilibrium being a special case.[1] The explanatory barrier that Keynes struggled, not quite successfully, to overcome in the dire circumstances of the 1930s, was why market-price adjustments do not have the equilibrating tendencies attributed to them by Marshallian theory. The power of Keynes’s analysis, enhanced by his rhetorical gifts, enabled him to persuade much of the economics profession, especially many of the most gifted younger economists at the time, that he was right. But his argument, failing to expose the key weakness in the neoclassical orthodoxy, was incomplete.

The full title of Keynes’s book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money identifies the key elements of his revision of neoclassical theory. First, contrary to a simplistic application of Marshallian theory, the mass unemployment of the Great Depression would not be substantially reduced by cutting wages to “clear” the labor market. The reason, according to Keynes, is that the levels of output and unemployment depend not on money wages, but on planned total spending (aggregate demand). Mass unemployment is the result of too little spending not excessive wages. Reducing wages would simply cause a corresponding decline in total spending, without increasing output or employment.

If wage cuts do not increase output and employment, the ensuing high unemployment, Keynes argued, is involuntary, not the outcome of optimizing choices made by workers and employers. Ever since, the notion that unemployment can be involuntary has remained a contested issue between Keynesians and neoclassicists, a contest requiring resolution in favor of one or the other theory or some reconciliation of the two.

Besides rejecting the neoclassical theory of employment, Keynes also famously disputed the neoclassical theory of interest by arguing that the rate of interest is not, as in the neoclassical theory, a reward for saving, but a reward for sacrificing liquidity. In Keynes’s view, rather than equilibrate savings and investment, interest equilibrates the demand to hold the money issued by the monetary authority with the amount issued by the monetary authority. Under the neoclassical theory, it is the price level that adjusts to equilibrate the demand for money with the quantity issued.

Had Keynes been more attuned to the Walrasian paradigm, he might have recast his argument that cutting wages would not eliminate unemployment by noting the inapplicability of a Marshallian supply-demand analysis of the labor market (accounting for over 50 percent of national income), because wage cuts would shift demand and supply curves in almost every other input and output market, grossly violating the ceteris-paribus assumption underlying Marshallian supply-demand paradigm. When every change in the wage shifts supply and demand curves in all markets for good and services, which in turn causes the labor-demand and labor-supply curves to shift, a supply-demand analysis of aggregate unemployment becomes a futile exercise.

Keynes’s work had two immediate effects on economics and economists. First, it immediately opened up a new field of research – macroeconomics – based on his theory that total output and employment are determined by aggregate demand. Representing only one element of Keynes’s argument, the simplified Keynesian model, on which macroeconomic theory was founded, seemed disconnected from either the Marshallian or Walrasian versions of neoclassical theory.

Second, the apparent disconnect between the simple Keynesian macro-model and neoclassical theory provoked an ongoing debate about the extent to which Keynesian theory could be deduced, or even reconciled, with the premises of neoclassical theory. Initial steps toward a reconciliation were provided when a model incorporating the quantity of money and the interest rate into the Keynesian analysis was introduced, soon becoming the canonical macroeconomic model of undergraduate and graduate textbooks.

Critics of Keynesian theory, usually those opposed to its support for deficit spending as a tool of aggregate demand management, its supposed inflationary bias, and its encouragement or toleration of government intervention in the free-market economy, tried to debunk Keynesianism by pointing out its inconsistencies with the neoclassical doctrine of a self-regulating market economy. But proponents of Keynesian precepts were also trying to reconcile Keynesian analysis with neoclassical theory. Future Nobel Prize winners like J. R. Hicks, J. E. Meade, Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, James Tobin, and Lawrence Klein all derived various Keynesian propositions from neoclassical assumptions, usually by resorting to the un-Keynesian assumption of rigid or sticky prices and wages.

What both Keynesian and neoclassical economists failed to see is that, notwithstanding the optimality of an economy with equilibrium market prices, in either the Walrasian or the Marshallian versions, cannot explain either how that set of equilibrium prices is, or can be, found, or how it results automatically from the routine operation of free markets.

The assumption made implicitly by both Keynesians and neoclassicals was that, in an ideal perfectly competitive free-market economy, prices would adjust, if not instantaneously, at least eventually, to their equilibrium, market-clearing, levels so that the economy would achieve an equilibrium state. Not all Keynesians, of course, agreed that a perfectly competitive economy would reach that outcome, even in the long-run. But, according to neoclassical theory, equilibrium is the state toward which a competitive economy is drawn.

Keynesian policy could therefore be rationalized as an instrument for reversing departures from equilibrium and ensuring that such departures are relatively small and transitory. Notwithstanding Keynes’s explicit argument that wage cuts cannot eliminate involuntary unemployment, the sticky-prices-and-wages story was too convenient not to be adopted as a rationalization of Keynesian policy while also reconciling that policy with the neoclassical orthodoxy associated with the postwar ascendancy of the Walrasian paradigm.

The Walrasian ascendancy in neoclassical theory was the culmination of a silent revolution beginning in the late 1920s when the work of Walras and his successors was taken up by a younger generation of mathematically trained economists. The revolution proceeded along many fronts, of which the most important was proving the existence of a solution of the system of equations describing a general equilibrium for a competitive economy — a proof that Walras himself had not provided. The sophisticated mathematics used to describe the relevant general-equilibrium models and derive mathematically rigorous proofs encouraged the process of rapid development, adoption and application of mathematical techniques by subsequent generations of economists.

Despite the early success of the Walrasian paradigm, Kenneth Arrow, perhaps the most important Walrasian theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, drew attention to the explanatory gap within the paradigm: how the adjustment of disequilibrium prices is possible in a model of perfect competition in which every transactor takes market price as given. The Walrasian theory shows that a competitive equilibrium ensuring the consistency of agents’ plans to buy and sell results from an equilibrium set of prices for all goods and services. But the theory is silent about how those equilibrium prices are found and communicated to the agents of the model, the Walrasian tâtonnement process being an empirically empty heuristic artifact.

In fact, the explanatory gap identified by Arrow was even wider than he had suggested or realized, for another aspect of the Walrasian revolution of the late 1920s and 1930s was the extension of the equilibrium concept from a single-period equilibrium to an intertemporal equilibrium. Although earlier works by Irving Fisher and Frank Knight laid a foundation for this extension, the explicit articulation of intertemporal-equilibrium analysis was the nearly simultaneous contribution of three young economists, two Swedes (Myrdal and Lindahl) and an Austrian (Hayek) whose significance, despite being partially incorporated into the canonical Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie version of the Walrasian model, remains insufficiently recognized.

These three economists transformed the concept of equilibrium from an unchanging static economic system at rest to a dynamic system changing from period to period. While Walras and Marshall had conceived of a single-period equilibrium with no tendency to change barring an exogenous change in underlying conditions, Myrdal, Lindahl and Hayek conceived of an equilibrium unfolding through time, defined by the mutual consistency of the optimal plans of disparate agents to buy and sell in the present and in the future.

In formulating optimal plans that extend through time, agents consider both the current prices at which they can buy and sell, and the prices at which they will (or expect to) be able to buy and sell in the future. Although it may sometimes be possible to buy or sell forward at a currently quoted price for future delivery, agents planning to buy and sell goods or services rely, for the most part, on their expectations of future prices. Those expectations, of course, need not always turn out to have been accurate.

The dynamic equilibrium described by Myrdal, Lindahl and Hayek is a contingent event in which all agents have correctly anticipated the future prices on which they have based their plans. In the event that some, if not all, agents have incorrectly anticipated future prices, those agents whose plans were based on incorrect expectations may have to revise their plans or be unable to execute them. But unless all agents share the same expectations of future prices, their expectations cannot all be correct, and some of those plans may not be realized.

The impossibility of an intertemporal equilibrium of optimal plans if agents do not share the same expectations of future prices implies that the adjustment of perfectly flexible market prices is not sufficient an optimal equilibrium to be achieved. I shall have more to say about this point below, but for now I want to note that the growing interest in the quiet Walrasian revolution in neoclassical theory that occurred almost simultaneously with the Keynesian revolution made it inevitable that Keynesian models would be recast in explicitly Walrasian terms.

What emerged from the Walrasian reformulation of Keynesian analysis was the neoclassical synthesis that became the textbook version of macroeconomics in the 1960s and 1970s. But the seemingly anomalous conjunction of both inflation and unemployment during the 1970s led to a reconsideration and widespread rejection of the Keynesian proposition that output and employment are directly related to aggregate demand.

Indeed, supporters of the Monetarist views of Milton Friedman argued that the high inflation and unemployment of the 1970s amounted to an empirical refutation of the Keynesian system. But Friedman’s political conservatism, free-market ideology, and his acerbic criticism of Keynesian policies obscured the extent to which his largely atheoretical monetary thinking was influenced by Keynesian and Marshallian concepts that rendered his version of Monetarism an unattractive alternative for younger monetary theorists, schooled in the Walrasian version of neoclassicism, who were seeking a clear theoretical contrast with the Keynesian macro model.

The brief Monetarist ascendancy following 1970s inflation conveniently collapsed in the early 1980s, after Friedman’s Monetarist policy advice for controlling the quantity of money proved unworkable, when central banks, foolishly trying to implement the advice, prolonged a needlessly deep recession while central banks consistently overshot their monetary targets, thereby provoking a long series of embarrassing warnings from Friedman about the imminent return of double-digit inflation.

[1] Hayek, both a friend and a foe of Keynes, would chide Keynes decades after Keynes’s death for calling his theory a general theory when, in Hayek’s view, it was a special theory relevant only in periods of substantially less than full employment when increasing aggregate demand could increase total output. But in making this criticism, Hayek, himself, implicitly assumed that which he had himself admitted in his theory of intertemporal equilibrium that there is no automatic equilibration mechanism that ensures that general equilibrium obtains.

Sic Transit Inflatio Mundi

Published December 19, 2021 Federal Reserve , Larry Summers , Milton Friedman , Monetarism 6 Comments

Larry Summers continues to lead the charge for a quick, decisive tightening of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve to head off an inflationary surge that, he believes, is about to overtake us. Undoubtedly one of the most capable economists of his generation, Summers also had a long career as a policy maker at the highest levels, so his advice cannot be casually dismissed. Even aside from Summers’s warning, the current economic environment fully justifies heightened concern caused by the recent uptick in inflation.

I am, nevertheless, not inclined to share Summers’s confidence in his oft-repeated predictions of resurgent inflation unless monetary policy is substantially tightened soon to prevent current inflation from being entrenched into the expectations of households and businesses. Summers’s’ latest warning came in a Washington Post op-ed following the statement by the FOMC and by Chairman Jay Powell that Fed policy would shift to give priority to maintaining price stability.

After welcoming the FOMC statement, Summers immediately segued into a critique of the Fed position on every substantive point.

There have been few, if any, instances in which inflation has been successfully stabilized without recession. Every U.S. economic expansion between the Korean War and Paul A. Volcker’s slaying of inflation after 1979 ended as the Federal Reserve tried to put the brakes on inflation and the economy skidded into recession. Since Volcker’s victory, there have been no major outbreaks of inflation until this year, and so no need for monetary policy to engineer a soft landing of the kind that the Fed hopes for over the next several years.

The not-very-encouraging history of disinflation efforts suggests that the Fed will need to be both skillful and lucky as it seeks to apply sufficient restraint to cause inflation to come down to its 2 percent target without pushing the economy into recession. Unfortunately, several aspects of the Open Market Committee statement and Powell’s news conference suggest that the Fed may not yet fully grasp either the current economic situation or the implications of current monetary policy.

Summers cites the recessions between the Korean War and the 1979-82 Volcker Monetarist experiment to support his anti-inflationary diagnosis and remedy. But none of the three recessions in the 1950s during the Eisenhower Presidency was needed to cope with any significant inflationary threat. There was no substantial inflation in the US during the 1950s, never reaching 3% in any year between 1953 and 1960, and rarely exceeding 2%.

Inflation during the late 1960 and 1970s was caused by a combination of factors, including both excess demand fueled by Vietnam War spending and politically motivated monetary expansion, plus two oil shocks in 1973-74 and 1979-80, an economic environment with only modest similarity to the current economic situation.

But the important lesson from the disastrous Volcker-Friedman recession is that most of the reduction in inflation following Volcker’s decisive move to tighten monetary policy in early 1981 did not come until a year and a half later, when with the US unemployment rate above 10%, Volcker finally abandoned the futile and counterproductive Monetarist policy of making the monetary aggregates policy instruments. Had it not been for the Monetarist obsession with controlling the monetary aggregates, a recovery could have started six months to a year earlier than it did, with inflation continuing on the downward trajectory as output and employment expanded.

The key point is that falling output, in and of itself, tends to cause rising, not falling, prices, so that postponing the start of a recovery actually delays, rather than hastens, the reduction of inflation. As I explained in another post, rather than focusing onthe monetary aggregates, monetary policy ought to have aimed to reduce the rate of growth of total nominal spending from well over 12% in 1980-81 to a rate of about 7%, which would have been consistent with the informal 4% inflation target that Volcker and Reagan had set for themselves.

The appropriate lesson to take away from the Volcker-Friedman recession of 1981-82 is therefore that a central bank can meet its inflation target by reducing the rate of increase in total nominal spending and income to the rate, given anticipated real expansion of capacity and productivity, consistent with its inflation target. The rate of growth in nominal spending and income cannot be controlled with a degree of accuracy, but rates of increase in spending above or below the target rate of increase provide the central bank with real time indications of whether policy needs to be tightened or loosened to meet the inflation target. That approach would avoid the inordinate cost of reducing inflation associated with the Volcker-Friedman episode.

A further aggravating factor in the 1981-82 recession was that interest rates had risen to double-digit levels even before Volcker embarked on his Monetarist anti-inflation strategy, showing how deeply embedded inflation expectations had become in the plans of households and businesses. By contrast, interest rates have actually been falling for months, suggesting that Summers’s warnings about inflation expectations becoming entrenched are overstated.

The Fed forecast calls for inflation to significantly subside even as the economy sustains 3.5 percent unemployment — a development without precedent in U.S. economic history. The Fed believes this even though it regards the sustainable level of unemployment as 4 percent. This only makes sense if the Fed is clinging to the idea that current inflation is transitory and expects it to subside of its own accord.

Summers’s factual assertion that the US unemployment rate has never fallen, without inflationary stimulus, to 3.5%, an argument predicated on the assumption that the natural (or non-accelerating- inflation rate of unemployment) is firmly fixed at 4% is not well supported by the data. In 2019 and early 2020, the unemployment rate dropped to 3.5% without evident inflationary pressure. In the late 1990s unemployment also dropped below 4% without inflationary pressure. So, the expectation that a 3.5% unemployment rate could be restored without inflationary pressure may be optimistic, but it’s hardly unprecedented.

Summers suggests that the Fed is confused because it expects the unemployment rate to fall back to the 3.5% rate of 2019 even while supposedly regarding a 4%, not a 3.5%, rate of unemployment as sustainable. According to Summers, reaching a 3.5% rate of unemployment would be possible only if the current increase in the inflation rate is temporary. But the bond market seems to share that view with the Fed given the recent decreases in the yields on Treasury bonds of 5 to 30 years duration. But Summers takes a different view.

In fact, there is solid reason to think inflation may accelerate. The consumer price index’s shelter component, which represents one-third of the index, has gone up by less than 4 percent, even as private calculations without exception suggest increases of 10 to 20 percent in rent and home prices. Catch-up is likely. More fundamentally, job vacancies are at record levels and the labor market is still heating up, according to the Fed forecast. This portends acceleration rather than deceleration in labor costs — by far the largest cost for the business sector.

Projecting how increases in rent and home prices that have already occurred will affect reported inflation in the future is a tricky exercise. It is certain that those effects will show up in the future, but those effects are already baked into those future inflation reports, so they provide an uneasy basis on which to conduct monetary policy. Insofar as inflation is a problem, it is a problem not because of short-term fluctuations in prices in specific goods, even home prices and rents, or whole sectors of the economy, but because of generalized and potentially continuing long-term trends affecting the whole structure of prices.

The current number of job vacancies reflects both the demand for, and the supply of, labor. The labor-force participation rate is still well below the pre-pandemic level, reflecting the effect of withdrawal from the labor force by workers afraid of contracting the COVID virus, or unable to find day care for children, or deterred from seeking by other pandemic-related concerns from seeking or accepting employment. Under such circumstances, the re-allocations associated with high job-vacancy rates are likely to enhance the efficiency and productivity of the workers that are re-employed, and need not exacerbate inflationary pressures.

Presumably, the Fed has judged that current aggregate-demand increases have less to do with observed inflation than labor-supply constraints or other supply-side bottlenecks whose effects on prices are likely self-limiting. This judgment is neither obviously right nor obviously wrong. But, for now at least, it is not unreasonable for the Fed to remain cautious before making a drastic policy change, neither committing itself to an immediate tightening, as Summers is proposing, nor doubling down on a commitment to its current accommodative stance.

Meanwhile, the pandemic-related bottlenecks central to the transitory argument are exaggerated. Prices for more than 80 percent of goods in the CPI have increased more than 3 percent in the past year.With the economy’s capacity growing 2 percent a year and the Fed’s own forecast calling for 4 percent growth in 2022, price pressures seem more likely to grow than to abate.

This argument makes no sense. We have, to be sure, gone through a period of actual broad-based inflation, so pointing out that 80% of goods in the CPI have increased in price by more than 3% in the past year is unsurprising. The bottleneck point is that supply constraints have prevented the real economy from growing as fast as nominal spending has grown. As I’ve pointed out recently, there’s an overhang of cash and liquid assets, accumulated rather than spent during the pandemic, which has amplified aggregate-demand growth since the economy began to recover from the pandemic, opening up previously closed opportunities for spending. The mismatch between the growth of demand and the growth of supply has been manifested in rising inflation. If the bottleneck theory of inflation is true, then the short-term growth potential of the economy is greater than the 2% rate posited by Summers. As bottlenecks are removed and workers that withdrew from the labor force during the pandemic are re-employed, the economy could easily grow faster than Summers is willing to acknowledge. Summers simply assumes, but doesn’t demonstrate, his conclusion.

This all suggests that policy will need to restrain demand to restore price stability.

No, it does not suggest that at all. It only suggests the possibility that demand may have to be restrained to keep prices stable. Recent inflation may have been a delayed response to an expansive monetary policy designed to prevent a contraction of demand during the pandemic. A temporary increase in inflation does not necessarily call for an immediate contractionary response. It’s too early to tell with confidence whether preventing future inflation requires, as Summers asserts, monetary policy to be tightened immediately. That option shouldn’t be taken off the table, but the Fed clearly hasn’t done so.

How much tightening is required? No one knows, and the Fed is right to insist that it will monitor the economy and adjust. We do know, however, that monetary policy is far looser today — in a high-inflation, low-unemployment economy — than it was about a year ago when inflation was below the Fed’s target and unemployment was around 8 percent. With relatively constant nominal interest rates, higher inflation and the expectation of future inflation have led to dramatic reductions in real interest rates over the past year. This is why bubbles are increasingly pervasive in asset markets ranging from crypto to beachfront properties and meme stocks to tech start-ups.

Summers, again, is just assuming, not demonstrating, his own preferred conclusion. A year ago, high unemployment was caused by the unique confluence of essentially simultaneous negative demand and supply shocks. The unprecedented coincidence of two simultaneous shocks posed a unique policy challenge to which the Fed has so far responded with remarkable skill. But the unfamiliar and challenging economic environment remains murky, and premature responses to unclear conditions may not yield the anticipated results. Undaunted by any doubt in his own reading of an opaque situation, Summers self-assurance is characteristic and impressive, but his argument is less than compelling.

The implication is that restoring monetary policy to a normal posture, let alone to applying restraint to the economy, will require far more than the three quarter-point rate increases the Fed has predicted for next year. This point takes on particular force once it is recognized that, contrary to Powell’s assertion, almost all economists believe there is a lag of about a year between the application of a rate change and its effect. Failure to restore policy neutrality next year means allowing two more years of highly inflationary monetary policy.

All of this suggests that even with its actions this week, the Fed remains well behind the curve in its commitment to fighting inflation. If its statements reflect its convictions, this is a matter of serious concern.

The idea that there is a one-year lag between applying a policy and its effect is hardly credible. The problem is not the length of the lag, but the uncertain effects of policy in a given set of circumstances. The effects of a change in the money stock or a change in the policy rate may not be apparent if they are offset by other changes. The ceteris-paribus proviso that qualifies every analysis of the effects of monetary policy is rarely satisfied in the real world; almost every policy action by the central bank is an uncertain bet. Under current circumstances, the Fed response to the recent increase in inflation seems eminently sensible: signal that the Fed is anticipating the likelihood that monetary policy will have to be tightened if the current rate of increase in nominal spending remains substantially above the rate consistent with the Fed’s average inflation target of 2%, but wait for further evidence before deciding about the magnitude of any changes in the Fed’s policy instruments.

The Demise of Bretton Woods Fifty Years On

Published August 15, 2021 Bretton Woods , Charles de Gaulle , exchange rate protection , gold standard , Great Depression , Gustav Cassel , Max Corden , Milton Friedman , R. G. Hawtrey 8 Comments
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Today, Sunday, August 15, 2021, marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the gold window at the US Treasury, at which a small set of privileged entities were at least legally entitled to demand redemption of dollar claims issued by the US government at the official gold price of $35 an ounce. (In 1971, as in 2021, August 15 fell on a Sunday.) When I started blogging in July 2011, I wrote one of my early posts about the 40th anniversary of that inauspicious event. My attention in that post was directed more at the horrific consequences of Nixon’s decision to combine a freeze on wages and price with the closing of the gold window, which was clearly far more damaging than the largely symbolic effect of closing the gold window. I am also re-upping my original post with some further comments, but in this post, my attention is directed solely on the closing of the gold window.

The advent of cryptocurrencies and the continuing agitprop aiming to restore the gold standard apparently suggest to some people that the intrinsically trivial decision to do away with the final vestige of the last remnant of the short-lived international gold standard is somehow laden with cosmic significance. See for example the new book by Jeffrey Garten (Three Days at Camp David) marking the 50th anniversary.

About 10 years before the gold window was closed, Milton Friedman gave a lecture at the Mont Pelerin Society which he called “Real and Pseudo-Gold Standards“, which I previously wrote about here. Many if not most of the older members of the Mont Pelerin Society, notably (L. v. Mises and Jacques Rueff) were die-hard supporters of the gold standard who regarded the Bretton Woods system as a deplorable counterfeit imitation of the real gold standard and longed for restoration of that old-time standard. In his lecture, Friedman bowed in their direction by faintly praising what he called a real gold standard, which he described as a state of affairs in which the quantity of money could be increased only by minting gold or by exchanging gold for banknotes representing an equivalent value of gold. Friedman argued that although a real gold standard was an admirable monetary system, the Bretton Woods system was nothing of the sort, calling it a pseudo-gold standard. Given that the then existing Bretton Woods system was not a real gold standard, but merely a system of artificially controlling the price of a particular commodity, Friedman argued that the next-best alternative would be to impose a quantitative limit on the increase in the quantity of fiat money, by enacting a law that would prohibit the quantity of money from growing by more than some prescribed amount or by some percentage (k-percent per year) of the existing stock percent in any given time period.

While failing to win over the die-hard supporters of the gold standard, Friedman’s gambit was remarkably successful, and for many years, it actually was the rule of choice among most like-minded libertarians and self-styled classical liberals and small-government conservatives. Eventually, the underlying theoretical and practical defects in Friedman’s k-percent rule became sufficiently obvious to cause even Friedman, however reluctantly, to abandon his single-minded quest for a supposedly automatic non-discretionary quantitative monetary rule.

Nevertheless, Friedman ultimately did succeed in undermining support among most right-wing conservative, libertarian and many centrist or left-leaning economists and decision makers for the Bretton Woods system of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates anchored by a fixed dollar price of gold. And a major reason for his success was his argument that it was only by shifting to flexible exchange rates and abandoning a fixed gold price that the exchange controls and restrictions on capital movements that were in place for a quarter of a century after World Was II could be lifted, a rationale congenial and persuasive to many who might have otherwise been unwilling to experiment with a system of flexible exchange rates among fiat currencies that had never previously been implemented.

Indeed, the neoliberal economic and financial globalization that followed the closing of the gold window and freeing of exchange rates after the demise of the Bretton Woods system, whether one applauds or reviles it, can largely be attributed to Friedman’s influence both as an economic theorist and as a propagandist. As much as Friedman deplored the imposition of wage and price controls on August 15, 1971, he had reason to feel vindicated by the closing of the gold window, the freeing of exchange rates, and, eventually, the lifting of all capital controls and the legalization of gold ownership by private individuals, all of which followed from the Camp David meeting.

But, the objective economic situation confronted by those at Camp David was such that the Bretton Woods System could not be salvaged. As I wrote in my 2011 post, the Bretton Woods system built on the foundation of a fixed gold price of $35 an ounce was not a true gold standard because a free market in gold did not exist and could not be maintained at the official price. Trade in gold was sharply restricted, and only privileged central banks and governments were legally entitled to buy or sell gold at the official price. Even the formal right of the privileged foreign governments and central banks was subject to the informal, but unwelcome and potentially dangerous, disapproval of the United States.

The gold standard is predicated on the idea that gold has an ascertainable value, so that if money is made exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate, money and gold will have an identical value owing to arbitrage transactions. Such arbitrage transactions can occur only if, and so long as, no barriers prevent effective arbitrage. The unquestioned convertibility of a unit of currency into gold ensured that arbitrage would constrain the value of money to equal the value of gold. But under Bretton Woods the opportunities for arbitrage were so drastically limited that the value of the dollar was never clearly equal to the value of gold, which was governed by, pardon the expression, fiat rather than by free-market transactions.

The lack of a tight link between the value of gold and the value of the dollar was not a serious problem as long as the value of the dollar was kept essentially stable and there was a functioning (albeit not freely) gold market. After its closure during World War II, the gold market did not function at all until 1954, so the wartime and postwar inflation and the brief Korean War inflation did not undermine the official gold price of $35 an ounce that had been set in 1934 and was maintained under Bretton Woods. Even after a functioning, but not entirely free, gold market was reopened in 1954, the official price was easily sustained until the late 1960s thanks to central-bank cooperation, whose formalization through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was one of the positive achievements of Bretton Woods. The London gold price was hardly a free-market price, because of central bank intervention and restrictions imposed on access to the market, but the gold holdings of the central banks were so large that it had always been in their power to control the market price if they were sufficiently determined to do so. But over the course of the 1960s, their cohesion gradually came undone. Why was that?

The first point to note is that the gold standard evolved over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first as a British institution, and much later as an international institution, largely by accident from a system of simultaneous gold and silver coinages that were closely but imperfectly linked by a relative price of between 15 to 16 ounces of silver per ounce of gold. Depending on the precise legal price ratio of silver coins to gold coins in any particular country, the legally overvalued undervalued metal would flow out of that country and the undervalued overvalued metal would flow into that country.

When Britain undervalued gold at the turn of the 18th century, gold flowed into Britain, leading to the birth of the British of gold standard. In most other countries, silver and gold coins were circulating simultaneously at a ratio of 15.5 ounces of silver per ounce of gold. It was only when the US, after the Civil War, formally adopted a gold standard and the newly formed German Reich also shifted from a bimetallic to a gold standard that the increased demand for gold caused gold to appreciate relative to silver. To avoid the resulting inflation, countries with bimetallic systems based on a 15.5 to 1 silver/gold suspended the free coinage of silver and shifted to the gold standard further raising the silver/gold price ratio. Thus, the gold standard became an international not just a British system only in the 1870s, and it happened not by design or international consensus but by a series of piecemeal decisions by individual countries.

The important takeaway from this short digression into monetary history is that the relative currency values of the gold standard currencies were largely inherited from the historical definitions of the currency units of each country, not by deliberate policy decisions about what currency value to adopt in establishing the gold standard in any particular country. But when the gold standard collapsed in August 1914 at the start of World War I, the gold standard had to be recreated more or less from scratch after the War. The US, holding 40% of the world’s monetary gold reserves was in a position to determine the value of gold, so it could easily restore convertibility at the prewar gold price of $20.67 an ounce. For other countries, the choice of the value at which to restore gold convertibility was really a decision about the dollar exchange rate at which to peg their currencies.

Before the war, the dollar-pound exchange rate was $4.86 per pound. The postwar dollar-pound exchange rate was just barely close enough to the prewar rate to make restoring the convertibility of the pound at the prewar rate with the dollar seem doable. Many including Keynes argued that Britain would be better with an exchange rate in the neighborhood of $4.40 or less, but Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was persuaded to restore convertibility at the prewar parity. That decision may or may not have been a good one, but I believe that its significance for the world economy at the time and subsequently has been overstated. After convertibility was restored at the prewar parity, chronically high postwar British unemployment increased only slightly in 1925-26 before declining modestly until with the onset of the Great Deflation and Great Depression in late 1929. The British economy would have gotten a boost if the prewar dollar-pound parity had not been restored (or if the Fed had accommodated the prewar parity by domestic monetary expansion), but the drag on the British economy after 1925 was a negligible factor compared to the other factors, primarily gold accumulation by the US and France, that triggered the Great Deflation in late 1929.

The cause of that deflation was largely centered in France (with a major assist from the Federal Reserve). Before the war the French franc was worth about 20 cents, but disastrous French postwar economic policies caused the franc to fall to just 2 cents in 1926 when Raymond Poincaré was called upon to lead a national-unity government to stabilize the situation. His success was remarkable, the franc rising to over 4 cents within a few months. However, despite earlier solemn pledges to restore the franc to its prewar value of 20 cents, he was persuaded to stabilize the franc at just 3.92 cents when convertibility into gold was reestablished in June 1928, undervaluing the franc against both the dollar and the pound.

Not only was the franc undervalued, but the Bank of France, which, under previous governments had been persuaded or compelled to supply francs to finance deficit spending, was prohibited by the new Monetary Law that restored convertibility at the fixed rate of 3.92 cents from increasing the quantity of francs except in exchange for gold or foreign-exchange convertible into gold. While protecting the independence of the Bank of France from government fiscal demands, the law also prevented the French money stock from increasing to accommodate increases in the French demand for money except by way of a current account surplus, or a capital inflow.

Meanwhile, the Bank of France began converting foreign-exchange reserves into gold. The resulting increase in French gold holdings led to gold appreciation. Under the gold standard, gold appreciation is manifested in price deflation affecting all gold-standard countries. That deflation was the direct and primary cause of the Great Depression, which led, over a period of five brutal years, to the failure and demise of the newly restored international gold standard.

These painful lessons were not widely or properly understood at the time, or for a long time afterward, but the clear takeaway from that experience was that trying to restore the gold standard again would be a dangerous undertaking. Another lesson that was intuited, if not fully understood, is that if a country pegs its exchange rate to gold or to another currency, it is safer to err on the side of undervaluation than overvaluation. So, when the task of recreating an international monetary system was undertaken at Bretton Woods in July 1944, the architects of the system tried to adapt it to the formal trappings of the gold standard while eliminating the deflationary biases and incentives that had doomed the interwar gold standard. To prevent increasing demand for gold from causing deflation, the obligation to convert cash into gold was limited to the United States and access to the US gold window was restricted to other central banks via the newly formed international monetary fund. Each country could, in consultation with the IMF, determine its exchange rate with the dollar.

Given the earlier experience, countries had an incentive to set exchange rates that undervalued their currencies relative to the dollar. Thus, for most of the 1950s and early 1960s, the US had to contend with a currency that was overvalued relative to the currencies of its principal trading partners, Germany and Italy (the two fastest growing economies in Europe) and Japan (later joined by South Korea and Taiwan) in Asia. In one sense, the overvaluation was beneficial to the US, because access to low-cost and increasingly high-quality imports was a form of repayment to the US of its foreign-aid assistance, and its ongoing defense protection against the threat of Communist expansionism , but the benefit came with the competitive disadvantage to US tradable-goods industries.

When West Germany took control of its economic policy from the US military in 1948, most price-and-wage controls were lifted and the new deutschmark was devalued by a third relative to the official value of the old reichsmark. A further devaluation of almost 25% followed a year later. Great Britain in 1949, perhaps influenced by the success of the German devaluation, devalued the pound by 30% from old parity of $4.03 to $2.80 in 1949. But unlike Germany, Britain, under the postwar Labour government, attempting to avoid postwar inflation, maintained wartime exchange controls and price controls. The underlying assumption at the time was that the Britain’s balance-of-payments deficit reflected an overvalued currency, so that devaluation would avoid repeating the mistake made two decades earlier when the dollar-pound parity had overvalued the pound.

That assumption, as Ralph Hawtrey had argued in lonely opposition to the devaluation, was misguided; the idea that the current account depends only, or even primarily, on the exchange rate abstracts from the monetary forces that affect the balance of payments and the current account. Worse, because British monetary policy was committed to the goal of maximizing short-term employment, the resulting excess supply of cash inevitably increased domestic spending, thereby attracting imports and diverting domestically produced products from export markets and preventing the devaluation from achieving the goal of improving the trade balance and promoting expansion of the tradable-goods sector.

Other countries, like Germany and Italy, combined currency undervaluation with monetary restraint, allowing only monetary expansion that was occasioned by current-account surpluses. This became the classic strategy, later called exchange-rate protection by Max Corden, of combining currency undervaluation with tight monetary policy. British attempts to use monetary policy to promote both (over)full employment subject to the balance-of-payments constraint imposed by an exchange rate pegged to the dollar proved unsustainable, while Germany, Italy, France (after De Gaulle came to power in 1958 and devalued the franc) found the combination of monetary restraint and currency undervaluation a successful economic strategy until the United States increased monetary expansion to counter chronic overvaluation of the dollar.

Because the dollar was the key currency of the world monetary system, and had committed itself to maintain the $35 an ounce price of gold, the US, unlike other countries whose currencies were pegged to the dollar, could not adjust the dollar exchange rate to reduce or alleviate the overvaluation of the dollar relative to the currencies of its trading partners. Mindful of its duties as supplier of the world’s reserve currency, US monetary authorities kept US inflation close to zero after the 1953 Korean War armistice.

However, that restrained monetary policy led to three recessions under the Eisenhower administration (1953-54, 1957-58, and 1960-61). The latter recessions led to disastrous Republican losses in the 1958 midterm elections and to Richard Nixon’s razor-thin loss in 1960 to John Kennedy, who had campaigned on a pledge to get the US economy moving again. The loss to Kennedy was a lesson that Nixon never forgot, and he was determined never to allow himself to lose another election merely because of scruples about US obligations as supplier of the world’s reserve currency.

Upon taking office, the Kennedy administration pressed for an easing of Fed policy to end the recession and to promote accelerated economic expansion. The result was a rapid recovery from the 1960-61 recession and the start of a nearly nine-year period of unbroken economic growth at perhaps the highest average growth rate in US history. While credit for the economic expansion is often given to the across-the-board tax cuts proposed by Kennedy in 1963 and enacted in 1964 under Lyndon Johnson, the expansion was already well under way by mid-1961, three years before the tax cuts became effective.

The international aim of monetary policy was to increase nominal domestic spending and to force US trading partners with undervalued currencies either to accept increased holdings of US liabilities or to revalue their exchange rates relative to the dollar to diminish their undervaluation relative to the dollar. Easier US monetary policy led to increasing complaints from Europeans, especially the Germans, that the US was exporting inflation and to charges that the US was taking advantage of the exorbitant privilege of its position as supplier of the world’s reserve currency.

The aggressive response of the Kennedy administration to undervaluation of most other currencies led to predictable pushback from France under de Gaulle who, like many other conservative and right-wing French politicians, was fixated on the gold standard and deeply resented Anglo-American monetary pre-eminence after World War I and American dominance after World War II. Like France under Poincaré, France under de Gaulle sought to increase its gold holdings as it accumulated dollar-denominated foreign exchange. But under Bretton Woods, French gold accumulation had little immediate economic effect other than to enhance the French and Gaullist pretensions to grandiosity.

Already in 1961 Robert Triffin predicted that the Bretton Woods system could not endure permanently because the growing world demand for liquidity could not be satisfied by the United States in a world with a relatively fixed gold stock and a stable or rising price level. The problem identified by Triffin was not unlike that raised by Gustav Cassel in the 1920s when he predicted that the world gold stock would likely not increase enough to prevent a worldwide deflation. This was a different problem from the one that actually caused the Great Depression, which was a substantial increase in gold demand associated with the restoration of the gold standard that triggered the deflationary collapse of late 1929. The long-term gold shortage feared by Cassel was a long-term problem distinct from the increase in gold demand caused by the restoration of the gold standard in the 1920s.

The problem Triffin identified was also a long-term consequence of the failure of the international gold stock to increase to provide the increased gold reserves that would be needed for the US to be able to credibly commit to maintaining the convertibility of the dollar into gold without relying on deflation to cause the needed increase in the real value of gold reserves.

Had it not been for the Vietnam War, Bretton Woods might have survived for several more years, but the rise of US inflation to over 4% in 1968-69, coupled with the 1969-70 recession in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce inflation, followed by a weak recovery in 1971, made it clear that the US would not undertake a deflationary policy to make the official $35 gold price credible. Although de Gaulle’s unexpected retirement in 1969 removed the fiercest opponent of US monetary domination, confidence that the US could maintain the official gold peg, when the London gold price was already 10% higher than the official price, caused other central banks to fear that they would be stuck with devalued dollar claims once the US raised the official gold price. Not only the French, but other central banks were already demanding redemption in gold of the dollar claims that they were holding.

An eleventh-hour policy reversal by the administration to save the official gold price was not in the cards, and everyone knew it. So all the handwringing about the abandonment of Bretton Woods on August 15, 1971 is either simple foolishness or gaslighting. The system was already broken, and it couldn’t be fixed at any price worth pondering for even half an instant. Nixon and his accomplices tried to sugarcoat their scrapping of the Bretton Woods System by pretending that they were announcing a plan that was the first step toward its reform and rejuvenation. But that pretense led to a so-called agreement with a new gold-price peg of $38 an ounce, which lasted hardly a year before it died not with a bang but a whimper.

What can we learn from this story? For me the real lesson is that the original international gold standard was, to borrow (via Hayek) a phrase from Adam Ferguson: “the [accidental] result of human action, not human design.” The gold standard, as it existed for those 40 years, was not an intuitively obvious or well understood mechanism working according to a clear blueprint; it was an improvised set of practices, partly legislated and partly customary, and partially nothing more than conventional, but not very profound, wisdom.

The original gold standard collapsed with the outbreak of World War I and the attempt to recreate it after World War I, based on imperfect understanding of how it had actually functioned, ended catastrophically with the Great Depression, a second collapse, and another, even more catastrophic, World War. The attempt to recreate a new monetary system –the Bretton Woods system — using a modified feature of the earlier gold standard as a kind of window dressing, was certainly not a real gold standard, and, perhaps, not even a pseudo-gold standard; those who profess to mourn its demise are either fooling themselves or trying to fool the rest of us.

We are now stuck with a fiat system that has evolved and been tinkered with over centuries. We have learned how to manage it, at least so far, to avoid catastrophe. With hard work and good luck, perhaps we will continue to learn how to manage it better than we have so far. But to seek to recreate a system that functioned fairly successfully for at most 40 years under conditions not even remotely likely ever again to be approximated, is hardly likely to lead to an outcome that will enhance human well-being. Even worse, if that system were recreated, the resulting outcome might be far worse than anything we have experienced in the last half century.

What’s so Great about Supply-Demand Analysis?

Published June 16, 2021 comparative statics , general equilibrium , Milton Friedman , partial equilibrium , supply-demand analysis , Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Just about the first thing taught to economics students is that there are demand curves for goods and services and supply curves of goods and services. Demand curves show how much customers wish to buy of a particular good or service within a period of time at various prices that might be charged for that good or service. The supply curve shows how much suppliers of a good or service would offer to sell at those prices.

Economists assume, and given certain more basic assumptions can (almost) prove, that customers will seek to buy less at higher prices for a good or service than at lower prices. Similarly, they assume that suppliers of the good or service offer to sell more at higher prices than at lower prices. Reflecting those assumptions, demand curves are downward-sloping and supply curve are upward-sloping. An upward-sloping supply curve is likely to intersect a downward-sloping demand curve at a single point, which corresponds to an equilibrium that allows customers to buy as much as they want to and suppliers to sell as much as they want to in the relevant time period.

This analysis is the bread and butter of economics. It leads to the conclusion that, when customers can’t buy as much as they would like, the price goes up, and, when suppliers can’t sell as much as they would like, the price goes down. So the natural tendency in any market is for the price to rise if it’s less than the equilibrium price, and to fall if it’s greater than the equilibrium price. This is the logic behind letting the market determine prices.

It can also be shown, if some further assumptions are made, that the intersection of the supply and demand curves represents an optimal allocation of resources in the sense that the total value of output is maximized. The necessary assumptions are, first, that the demand curve measures the marginal value placed on additional units of output, and, second, that the supply curve measures the marginal cost of producing additional units of output. The intersection of the supply and the demand curves corresponds to the maximization of the total value of output, because the marginal cost represents the value of output that could have been produced if the resources devoted to producing the good in question had been shifted to more valuable uses. When the supply curve rises above the demand curve it means that the resources would produce a greater value if devoted to producing something else than the value of the additional output of the good in question.

There is much to be said for the analysis, and it would be wrong to dismiss it. But it’s also important to understand its limitations, and, especially, the implicit assumptions on which it relies. In a sense, supply-demand analysis is foundational, the workhorse model that is the first resort of economists. But its role as a workhorse model does not automatically render analyses untethered to supply and demand illegitimate.

Supply-demand analysis has three key functions. First, it focuses attention on the idea of an equilibrium price at which all buyers can buy as much as they would like, and all sellers can sell as much as they would like. In a typical case, with an upward sloping supply curve and a downward-sloping demand curve, there is one, and only one, price with that property.

Second, as explained above, there is a sense in which that equilibrium price, aside from enabling the mutual compatibility of buyers’ and sellers’ plans to buy or to sell, has optimal properties.

Third, it’s a tool for predicting how changes in market conditions, like imposing a sales or excise tax, affect customers and suppliers. It compares two equilibrium positions on the assumption that only one parameter changes and predicts the effect of the parameter change by comparing the new and old equilibria. It’s the prototype for the comparative-statics method.

The chief problem with supply-demand analysis is that it requires a strict ceteris-paribus assumption, so that everything but the price and the quantity of the good under analysis remains constant. For many reasons, that assumption can’t literally be true. If the price of the good rises (falls), the real income of consumers decreases (increases). And if the price rises (falls), suppliers likely pay more (less) for their inputs. Changes in the price of one good also affect the prices of other goods, which, in turn, may affect the demand for the good under analysis. Each of those consequences would cause the supply and demand curves to shift from their initial positions. How much the ceteris-paribus assumption matters depends on how much of their incomes consumers spend on the good under analysis. The more they spend, the less plausible the ceteris paribus assumption.

But another implicit assumption underlies supply-demand analysis: that the economic system starts from a state of general equilibrium. Why must this assumption be made? The answer is that it‘s implied by the ceteris-paribus assumption that all other prices remain constant. Unless other markets are in equilibrium, it can’t be assumed that all other prices and incomes remain constant; if they aren’t, then prices for other goods, and for inputs used to produce the product under analysis, will change, violating the ceteris-paribus assumption. Unless the prices (and wages) of the inputs used to produce the good under analysis remain constant, the supply curve of the product can’t be assumed to remain unchanged.

On top of that, Walras’s Law implies that if one market is in disequilibrium, then at least one other market must also be in disequilibrium. So an internal contradiction lies at the heart of supply-demand analysis. The contradiction can be avoided, but not resolved, only by assuming that the market being analyzed is so minute relative to the rest of the economy, or so isolated from all other markets, that a disturbance in that market that changes its equilibrium position either wouldn’t disrupt the existing equilibrium in all other markets, or that the disturbances to the equilibria in all the other markets are so small that they can be safely ignored.

But we’re not done yet. The underlying general equilibrium on which the partial equilibrium (supply-demand) analysis is based, exists only conceptually, not in reality. Although it’s possible to prove the existence of such an equilibrium under more or less mathematically plausible assumptions about convexity and the continuity of the relevant functions, it is less straightforward to prove that the equilibrium is unique, or at least locally stable. If it is not unique or locally stable, there is no guarantee that comparative statics is possible, because a displacement from an unstable equilibrium may cause an unpredictable adjustment violates the ceteris-paribus assumption.

Finally, and perhaps most problematic, comparative statics is merely a comparison of two alternative equilibria, neither of which can be regarded as the outcome of a theoretically explicable, much less practical, process leading from initial conditions to the notional equilibrium state. Accordingly, neither is there any process whereby a disturbance to – a parameter change in — an initial equilibrium would lead from the initial equilibrium to a new equilibrium. That is what comparative statics means: the comparison of two alternative and disconnected equilibria. There is no transition from one to the other merely a comparison of the difference between them attributable to the change in a particular parameter in the initial conditions underlying the equilibria.

Given all the assumptions that must be satisfied for the basic implications of conventional supply-demand analysis to be unambiguously valid, that analysis obviously cannot provide demonstrably true predictions. As just explained, the comparative-statics method in general and supply-demand analysis in particular provide no actual predictions; they are merely conjectural comparisons of alternative notional equilibria.

The ceteris paribus assumption is often dismissed as making any theory tautological and untestable. If an ad hoc assumption introduced when observations don’t match the predictions derived from a given theory is independently testable, it adds to the empirical content of the theory, as demonstrated by the ad hoc assumption of an eighth planet (Neptune) in our solar system when predictions about the orbits of the seven known planets did not accord with their observed orbits.

Friedman’s famous methodological argument that only predictions, not assumptions, matter is clearly wrong. Economists have to be willing to modify assumptions and infer the implications that follow from modified or supplementary assumptions rather than take for granted that assumptions cannot meaningfully and productively affect the implications of a general analytical approach. It would be a travesty if physicists maintained the no-friction assumption, because it’s just a simplifying assumption to make the analysis tractable. That approach is a prescription for scientific stagnation.

The art of economics is to identify the key assumptions that ought to be modified to make a general analytical approach relevant and fruitful. When they are empirically testable, ad hoc assumptions that modify the ceteris paribus restriction constitute scientific advance.

But it’s important to understand how tenuous the connection is between the formalism of supply-demand analysis and of the comparative-statics method and the predictive power of that analysis and that method. The formalism stops far short of being able to generate clear and unambiguous conditions. The relationship between the formalism and the real world is tenuous and the apparent logical rigor of the formalism must be supplemented by notable and sometimes embarrassing doses of hand-waving or question-begging.

And it is also worth remembering the degree to which the supposed rigor of neoclassical microeconomic supply-demand formalism depends on the macroeconomic foundation of the existence (and at least approximate reality) of a unique or locally stable general equilibrium.

Monetarism v. Hawtrey and Cassel

Published March 31, 2021 Anna Schwartz , gold standard , Great Depression , Gustav Cassel , Milton Friedman , Monetarism , R. G. Hawtrey , Ron Batchelder , Uncategorized 45 Comments

The following is an updated and revised version of the penultimate section of my paper with Ron Batchelder “Pre-Keynesian Theories of the Great Depressison: What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel?” which I am now preparing for publication. The previous version is available on SSRN.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, empirical studies of the effects of money and monetary policy by Milton Friedman, his students and followers, rehabilitated the idea that monetary policy had significant macroeconomic effects. Most importantly, in research with Anna Schwartz Friedman advanced the seemingly remarkable claim that the chief cause of the Great Depression had been a series of policy mistakes by the Federal Reserve. Although Hawtrey and Cassel, had also implicated the Federal Reserve in their explanation of the Great Depression, they were unmentioned by Friedman and Schwartz or by other Monetarists.[1]

The chief difference between the Monetarist and the Hawtrey-Cassel explanations of the Great Depression is that Monetarists posited a monetary shock (bank failures) specific to the U.S. as the primary, if not sole, cause of the Depression, while Hawtrey and Cassel considered the Depression a global phenomenon reflecting a rapidly increasing international demand for gold, bank failures being merely an incidental and aggravating symptom, specific to the U.S., of a more general monetary disorder.

Arguing that the Great Depression originated in the United States following a typical business-cycle downturn, Friedman and Schwartz (1963) attributed the depth of the downturn not to the unexplained initial shock, but to the contraction of the U.S. money stock caused by the bank failures. Dismissing any causal role for the gold standard in the Depression, Friedman and Schwartz (359-60) acknowledged only its role in propagating, via PSFM, an exogenous, policy-driven, contraction of the U.S. money stock to other gold-standard countries. According to Friedman and Schwartz, the monetary contraction was the cause, and deflation the effect.

But the causation posited by Friedman and Schwartz is the exact opposite of the true causation. Under the gold standard, deflation (i.e., gold appreciation) was the cause and the decline in the quantity of money the effect. Deflation in an international gold standard is not a local phenomenon originating in any single country; it occurs simultaneously in all gold standard countries.

To be sure the banking collapse in the U.S. exacerbated the catastrophe. But the collapse was the localized effect of a more general cause: deflation. Without deflation, neither the unexplained 1929 downturn nor the subsequent banking collapse would have occurred. Nor was an investment boom in the most advanced and most productive economy in the world unsustainable as posited, with no evidence of unsustainability other than the subsequent economic collapse, by the Austrian malinvestment hypothesis.

Friedman and Schwartz based their assertion that the monetary disturbance that caused the Great Depression occurred in the U.S. on the observation that, from 1929 to 1931, gold flowed into, not out of, the U.S. Had the disturbance occurred elsewhere, they argued, gold would have flowed out of, not into, the U. S.

Table 1 shows the half-year changes in U.S., French, and world gold reserves starting in June 1928, when the French monetary law re-establishing the gold standard was enacted.

TABLE 1: Gold Reserves in US, France, and the World June 1928-December 1931 (measured in dollars)
Date World ReservesUS ReservesUS Share (percent)French ReservesFrench Share (percent)
June 19289,7493,73238.31,13611.7
Dec. 192810,0573,74637.21,25412.4
2nd half 1928 change31214-1.11180.7
June 192910,1263,95639.11,43614.2
1st half 1929 change692101.91821.8
Dec. 192910,3363,90037.71,63315.8
2nd half 1929 change210-56-1.41971.6
June 193010,6714,17839.21,72716.2
1st half 1930 change3352781.5940.4
Dec. 193010,9444,22538.72,10019.2
2nd half 1930 change 27347-0.53733.0
June 193111,264459340.82,21219.6
1st half 1931 change3203682.11120.4
Dec. 193111,3234,05135.82,69923.8
2nd half 1931 change59-542-5.04874.2
June 1928-Dec. 1931 change1,574319-2.51,56312.1
Source: H. C. Johnson, Gold, France and the Great Depression

In the three-and-a-half years from June 1928 (when gold convertibility of the franc was restored) to December 1931, gold inflows into France exceeded gold inflows into the United States. The total gold inflow into France during the June 1928 to December 1931 period was $1.563 billion compared to only $319 billion into the United States.

However, much of the difference in the totals stems from the gold outflow from the U.S. into France in the second half of 1931, reflecting fears of a possible U.S. devaluation or suspension of convertibility after Great Britain and other countries suspended the gold standard in September 1931 (Hamilton 2012). From June 1928 through June 1931, the total gold inflow into the U.S. was $861 billion and the total gold inflow into France was $1.076 billion, the U.S. share of total reserves increasing from 38.3 percent to 40.6 percent, while the total French share increased from 11.7 percent to 19.6 percent.[2]

In the first half of 1931, when the first two waves of U.S. bank failures occurred, the increase in U.S. gold reserves exceeded the increase in world gold reserves. The shift by the public from holding bank deposits to holding currency increased reserve requirements, an increase reflected in the gold reserves held by the U.S. The increased U.S. demand for gold likely exacerbated the deflationary pressures affecting all gold-standard countries, perhaps contributing to the failure of the Credit-Anstalt in May 1931 that intensified the European crisis that forced Britain off the gold standard in September.

The combined increase in U.S. and French gold reserves was $1.937 billion compared to an increase of only $1.515 billion in total world reserves, indicating that the U.S. and France were drawing reserves either from other central banks or from privately held gold stocks. Clearly, both the U.S. and France were exerting powerful deflationary pressure on the world economy, before and during the downward spiral of the Great Depression.[3]

Deflationary forces were operating directly on prices before the quantity of money adjusted to the decline in prices. In some countries the adjustment of the quantity of money was relatively smooth; in the U.S. it was exceptionally difficult, but, not even in the U.S., was it the source of the disturbance. Hawtrey and Cassel understood that; Friedman did not.

In explaining the sources of his interest in monetary theory and the role of monetary policy, Friedman (1970) pointedly distinguished between the monetary tradition from which his work emerged and the dominant tradition in London circa 1930, citing Robbins’s (1934) Austrian-deflationist book on the Great Depression, while ignoring Hawtrey and Cassel. Friedman linked his work to the Chicago oral tradition, citing a lecture by Jacob Viner (1933) as foreshadowing his own explanation of the Great Depression, attributing the loss of interest in monetary theory and policy by the wider profession to the deflationism of LSE monetary economists. Friedman went on to suggest that the anti-deflationism of the Chicago monetary tradition immunized it against the broader reaction against monetary theory and policy, that the Austro-London pro-deflation bias provoked against monetary theory and policy.

Though perhaps superficially plausible, Friedman’s argument ignores, as he did throughout a half-century of scholarship and research, the contributions of Hawtrey and Cassel and especially their explanation of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, Friedman’s outsized influence on economists trained after the Keynesian Revolution distracted their attention from contributions outside the crude Keynesian-Monetarist dichotomy that shaped his approach to monetary economics.

Eclectics like Hawtrey and Cassel were neither natural sources of authority, nor obvious ideological foils for Friedman to focus upon. Already forgotten, providing neither convenient targets, nor ideological support, Hawtrey and Cassel, could be easily and conveniently ignored.

[1] Meltzer (2001) did mention Hawtrey, but the reference was perfunctory and did not address the substance of his and Cassel’s explanation of the Great Depression.

[2] By far the largest six-month increase in U.S. gold reserves was in the June-December 1931 period coinciding with the two waves of bank failures at the end of 1930 and in March 1931 causing a substantial shift from deposits to currency which required an increase in gold reserves owing to the higher ratio of required gold reserves against currency than against bank deposits.

[3] Fremling (1985) noted that, even during the 1929-31 period, the U.S. share of world gold reserves actually declined. However, her calculation includes the extraordinary outflow of gold from the U.S. in the second half of 1931. The U.S. share of global gold reserves rose from June 1928 to June 1931.

On the Price Specie Flow Mechanism

Published January 30, 2021 Bank of France , David Hume , gold standard , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Hayek , Ludwig von Mises , Milton Friedman , price-specie-flow mechanism , sterilization 14 Comments

I have been working on a paper tentatively titled “The Smithian and Humean Traditions in Monetary Theory.” One section of the paper is on the price-specie-flow mechanism, about which I wrote last month in my previous post. This section develops the arguments of the previous post at greater length and draws on a number of earlier posts that I’ve written about PSFM as well (e.g., here and here )provides more detailed criticisms of both PSFM and sterilization and provides some further historical evidence to support some of the theoretical arguments. I will be grateful for any comments and feedback.

The tortured intellectual history of the price-specie-flow mechanism (PSFM) received its still classic exposition in a Hume (1752) essay, which has remained a staple of the theory of international adjustment under the gold standard, or any international system of fixed exchange rates. Regrettably, the two-and-a-half-century life span of PSFM provides no ground for optimism about the prospects for progress in what some are pleased to call without irony economic science.

PSFM describes how, under a gold standard, national price levels tend to be equalized, with deviations between the national price levels in any two countries inducing gold to be shipped from the country with higher prices to the one with lower prices until prices are equalized. Premised on a version of the quantity theory of money in which (1) the price level in each country on the gold standard is determined by the quantity of money in that country, and (2) money consists entirely in gold coin or bullion, Hume elegantly articulated a model of disturbance and equilibration after an exogenous change in the gold stock in one country.

Viewing banks as inflationary engines of financial disorder, Hume disregarded banks and the convertible monetary liabilities of banks in his account of PSFM, leaving to others the task of describing the international adjustment process under a gold standard with fractional-reserve banking. The task of devising an institutional framework, within which PSFM could operate, for a system of fractional-reserve banking proved to be problematic and ultimately unsuccessful.

For three-quarters of a century, PSFM served a purely theoretical function. During the Bullionist debates of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, triggered by the suspension of the convertibility of the pound sterling into gold in 1797, PSFM served as a theoretical benchmark not a guide for policy, it being generally assumed that, when convertibility was resumed, international monetary equilibrium would be restored automatically.

However, the 1821 resumption was followed by severe and recurring monetary disorders, leading some economists, who formed what became known as the Currency School, to view PSFM as a normative criterion for ensuring smooth adjustment to international gold flows. That criterion, the Currency Principle, stated that the total currency in circulation in Britain should increase or decrease by exactly as much as the amount of gold flowing into or out of Britain.[1]

The Currency Principle was codified by the Bank Charter Act of 1844. To mimic the Humean mechanism, it restricted, but did not suppress, the right of note-issuing banks in England and Wales, which were allowed to continue issuing notes, at current, but no higher, levels, without holding equivalent gold reserves. Scottish and Irish note-issuing banks were allowed to continue issuing notes, but could increase their note issue only if matched by increased holdings of gold or government debt. In England and Wales, the note issue could increase only if gold was exchanged for Bank of England notes, so that a 100-percent marginal gold reserve requirement was imposed on additional banknotes.

Opposition to the Bank Charter Act was led by the Banking School, notably John Fullarton and Thomas Tooke. Rejecting the Humean quantity-theoretic underpinnings of the Currency School and the Bank Charter Act, the Banking School rejected the quantitative limits of the Bank Charter Act as both unnecessary and counterproductive, because banks, obligated to redeem their liabilities directly or indirectly in gold, issue liabilities only insofar as they expect those liabilities to be willingly held by the public, or, if not, are capable of redeeming any liabilities no longer willingly held. Rather than the Humean view that banks issue banknotes or create deposits without constraint, the Banking School held Smith’s view that banks issue money in a form more convenient to hold and to transact with than metallic money, so that bank money allows an equivalent amount of gold to be shifted from monetary to real (non-monetary) uses, providing a net social savings. For a small open economy, the diversion (and likely export) of gold bullion from monetary to non-monetary uses has negligible effect on prices (which are internationally, not locally, determined).

The quarter century following enactment of the Bank Charter Act showed that the Act had not eliminated monetary disturbances, the government having been compelled to suspend the Act in 1847, 1857 and 1866 to prevent incipient crises from causing financial collapse. Indeed, it was precisely the fear that liquidity might not be forthcoming that precipitated increased demands for liquidity that the Act made it impossible to accommodate. Suspending the Act was sufficient to end the crises with limited intervention by the Bank. [check articles on the crises of 1847, 1857 and 1866.]

It may seem surprising, but the disappointing results of the Bank Charter Act provided little vindication to the Banking School. It led only to a partial, uneasy, and not entirely coherent, accommodation between PSFM doctrine and the reality of a monetary system in which the money stock consists mostly of banknotes and bank deposits issued by fractional-reserve banks. But despite the failure of the Bank Charter Act, PSFM achieved almost canonical status, continuing, albeit with some notable exceptions, to serve as the textbook model of the gold standard.

The requirement that gold flows induce equal changes in the quantity of money within a country into (or from) which gold is flowing was replaced by an admonition that gold flows lead to “appropriate” changes in the central-bank discount rate or an alternative monetary instrument to cause the quantity of money to change in the same direction as the gold flow. While such vague maxims, sometimes described as “the rules of the game,” gave only directional guidance about how to respond to change in gold reserves, their hortatory character, and avoidance of quantitative guidance, allowed monetary authorities latitude to avoid the self-inflicted crises that had resulted from the quantitative limits of the Bank Charter Act.

Nevertheless, the myth of vague “rules” relating the quantity of money in a country to changes in gold reserves, whose observance ensured the smooth functioning of the international gold standard before its collapse at the start of World War I, enshrined PSFM as the theoretical paradigm for international monetary adjustment under the gold standard.

That paradigm was misconceived in four ways that can be briefly summarized.

  • Contrary to PSFM, changes in the quantity of money in a gold-standard country cannot change local prices proportionately, because prices of tradable goods in that country are constrained by arbitrage to equal the prices of those goods in other countries.
  • Contrary to PSFM, changes in local gold reserves are not necessarily caused either by non-monetary disturbances such as shifts in the terms of trade between countries or by local monetary disturbances (e.g. overissue by local banks) that must be reversed or counteracted by central-bank policy.
  • Contrary to PSFM, changes in the national price levels of gold-standard countries were uncorrelated with gold flows, and changes in national price levels were positively, not negatively, correlated.
  • Local banks and monetary authorities exhibit their own demands for gold reserves, demands exhibited by choice (i.e., independent of legally required gold holdings) or by law (i.e., by legally requirement to hold gold reserves equal to some fraction of banknotes issued by banks or monetary authorities). Such changes in gold reserves may be caused by changes in the local demands for gold by local banks and the monetary authorities in one or more countries.

Many of the misconceptions underlying PSFM were identified by Fullarton’s refutation of the Currency School. In articulating the classical Law of Reflux, he established the logical independence of the quantity convertible money in a country from by the quantity of gold reserves held by the monetary authority. The gold reserves held by individual banks, or their deposits with the Bank of England, are not the raw material from which banks create money, either banknotes or deposits. Rather, it is their creation of banknotes or deposits when extending credit to customers that generates a derived demand to hold liquid assets (i.e., gold) to allow them to accommodate the demands of customers and other banks to redeem banknotes and deposits. Causality runs from creating banknotes and deposits to holding reserves, not vice versa.

The misconceptions inherent in PSFM and the resulting misunderstanding of gold flows under the gold standard led to a further misconception known as sterilization: the idea that central banks, violating the obligations imposed by “the rules of the game,” do not allow, or deliberately prevent, local money stocks from changing as their gold holdings change. The misconception is the presumption that gold inflows ought necessarily cause increases in local money stocks. The mechanisms causing local money stocks to change are entirely different from those causing gold flows. And insofar as those mechanisms are related, causality flows from the local money stock to gold reserves, not vice versa.

Gold flows also result when monetary authorities transform their own asset holdings into gold. Notable examples of such transformations occurred in the 1870s when a number of countries abandoned their de jure bimetallic (and de facto silver) standards to the gold standard. Monetary authorities in those countries transformed silver holdings into gold, driving the value of gold up and silver down. Similarly, but with more catastrophic consequences, the Bank of France, in 1928 after France restored the gold standard, began redeeming holdings of foreign-exchange reserves (financial claims on the United States or Britain, payable in gold) into gold. Following the French example, other countries rejoining the gold standard redeemed foreign exchange for gold, causing gold appreciation and deflation that led to the Great Depression.

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

I pause to note for the record Friedman’s assertion that the United States and France did not follow “gold-standard rules.” Warming up to the idea, he then accused them of sterilization.

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

Strong and Moreau tried to reconcile two ultimately incompatible objectives: fixed exchange rates and internal price stability. Thanks to the level at which Britain returned to gold in 1925, the U.S. dollar was undervalued, and thanks to the level at which France returned to gold at the end of 1926, so was the French franc. Both countries as a result experienced substantial gold inflows. Gold-standard rules called for letting the stock of money rise in response to the gold inflows and for price inflation in the U.S. and France, and deflation in Britain, to end the over-and under-valuations. But both Strong and Moreau were determined to prevent inflation and accordingly both sterilized the gold inflows, preventing them from providing the required increase in the quantity of money.

Friedman’s discussion of sterilization is at odds with basic theory. Working with a naïve version of PSFM, he imagines that gold flows passively respond to trade balances independent of monetary forces, and that the monetary authority under a gold standard is supposed to ensure that the domestic money stock varies roughly in proportion to its gold reserves. Ignoring the international deflationary dynamic, he asserts that the US money stock perversely declined from 1929 to 1931, while its gold stock increased. With a faltering banking system, the public shifted from holding demand deposits to currency. Gold reserves were legally required against currency, but not against demand deposits, so the shift from deposits to currency entailed an increase gold reserves. To be sure the increased US demand for gold added to upward pressure on value of gold, and to worldwide deflationary pressure. But US gold holdings rose by only $150 million from December 1929 to December 1931 compared with an increase of $1.06 billion in French gold holdings over the same period. Gold accumulation by the US and its direct contribution to world deflation during the first two years of the Depression was small relative to that of France.

Friedman also erred in stating “the common policies they followed were misguided and contributed to the severity and rapidity of transmission of the U.S. shock to the international community.” The shock to the international community clearly originated not in the US but in France. The Fed could have absorbed and mitigated the shock by allowing a substantial outflow of its huge gold reserves, but instead amplified the shock by raising interest rates to nearly unprecedented levels, causing gold to flow into the US.

After correctly noting the incompatibility between fixed exchange rates and internal price stability, Friedman contradicts himself by asserting that, in seeking to stabilize their internal price levels, Strong and Moreau violated the gold-standard “rules,” as if it were rules, not arbitrage, that constrain national price to converge toward a common level under a gold standard.

Friedman’s assertion that, after 1925, the dollar was undervalued and sterling overvalued was not wrong. But he misunderstood the consequences of currency undervaluation and overvaluation under the gold standard, a confusion stemming from the underlying misconception, derived from PSFM, that foreign exchange rates adjust to balance trade flows, so that, in equilibrium, no country runs a trade deficit or trade surplus.

Thus, in Friedman’s view, dollar undervaluation and sterling overvaluation implied a US trade surplus and British trade deficit, causing gold to flow from Britain to the US. Under gold-standard “rules,” the US money stock and US prices were supposed to rise and the British money stock and British prices were supposed to fall until undervaluation and overvaluation were eliminated. Friedman therefore blamed sterilization of gold inflows by the Fed for preventing the necessary increase in the US money stock and price level to restore equilibrium. But, in fact, from 1925 through 1928, prices in the US were roughly stable and prices in Britain fell slightly. Violating gold-standard “rules” did not prevent the US and British price levels from converging, a convergence driven by market forces, not “rules.”

The stance of monetary policy in a gold-standard country had minimal effect on either the quantity of money or the price level in that country, which were mainly determined by the internationally determined value of gold. What the stance of national monetary policy determines under the gold standard is whether the quantity of money in the country adjusts to the quantity demanded by a process of domestic monetary creation or withdrawal or by the inflow or outflow of gold. Sufficiently tight domestic monetary policy restricting the quantify of domestic money causes a compensatory gold inflow increasing the domestic money stock, while sufficiently easy money causes a compensatory outflow of gold reducing the domestic money stock. Tightness or ease of domestic monetary policy under the gold standard mainly affected gold and foreign-exchange reserves, and, only minimally, the quantity of domestic money and the domestic price level.

However, the combined effects of many countries simultaneously tightening monetary policy in a deliberate, or even inadvertent, attempt to accumulate — or at least prevent the loss — of gold reserves could indeed drive up the international value of gold through a deflationary process affecting prices in all gold-standard countries. Friedman, even while admitting that, in his Monetary History, he had understated the effect of the Bank of France on the Great Depression, referred only the overvaluation of sterling and undervaluation of the dollar and franc as causes of the Great Depression, remaining oblivious to the deflationary effects of gold accumulation and appreciation.

It was thus nonsensical for Friedman to argue that the mistake of the Bank of France during the Great Depression was not to increase the quantity of francs in proportion to the increase of its gold reserves. The problem was not that the quantity of francs was too low; it was that the Bank of France prevented the French public from collectively increasing the quantity of francs that they held except by importing gold.

Unlike Friedman, F. A. Hayek actually defended the policy of the Bank of France, and denied that the Bank of France had violated “the rules of the game” after nearly quadrupling its gold reserves between 1928 and 1932. Under his interpretation of those “rules,” because the Bank of France increased the quantity of banknotes after the 1928 restoration of convertibility by about as much as its gold reserves increased, it had fully complied with the “rules.” Hayek’s defense was incoherent; under its legal obligation to convert gold into francs at the official conversion rate, the Bank of France had no choice but to increase the quantity of francs by as much as its gold reserves increased.

That eminent economists like Hayek and Friedman could defend, or criticize, the conduct of the Bank of France during the Great Depression, because the Bank either did, or did not, follow “the rules of the game” under which the gold standard operated, shows the uselessness and irrelevance of the “rules of the game” as a guide to policy. For that reason alone, the failure of empirical studies to find evidence that “the rules of the game” were followed during the heyday of the gold standard is unsurprising. But the deeper reason for that lack of evidence is that PSFM, whose implementation “the rules of the game” were supposed to guarantee, was based on a misunderstanding of the international-adjustment mechanism under either the gold standard or any fixed-exchange-rates system.

Despite the grip of PSFM over most of the profession, a few economists did show a deeper understanding of the adjustment mechanism. The idea that the price level in terms of gold directly constrained the movements of national price levels across countries was indeed recognized by writers as diverse as Keynes, Mises, and Hawtrey who all pointed out that the prices of internationally traded commodities were constrained by arbitrage and that the free movement of capital across countries would limit discrepancies in interest rates across countries attached to the gold standard, observations that had already been made by Smith, Thornton, Ricardo, Fullarton and Mill in the classical period. But, until the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments became popular in the 1970s, only Hawtrey consistently and systematically deduced the implications of those insights in analyzing both the Great Depression and the Bretton Woods system of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates following World War II.

The inconsistencies and internal contradictions of PSFM were sometimes recognized, but usually overlooked, by business-cycle theorists when focusing on the disturbing influence of central banks, perpetuating mistakes of the Humean Currency School doctrine that attributed cyclical disturbances to the misbehavior of local banking systems that were inherently disposed to overissue their liabilities.

White and Hogan on Hayek and Cassel on the Causes of the Great Depression

Published December 26, 2020 gold standard , Great Depression , Gustav Cassel , Hayek , Larry White , Milton Friedman , price-specie-flow mechanism , R. G. Hawtrey 23 Comments
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Lawrence White and Thomas Hogan have just published a new paper in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (“Hayek, Cassel, and the origins of the great depression”). Since White is a leading Hayek scholar, who has written extensively on Hayek’s economic writings (e.g., his important 2008 article “Did Hayek and Robbins Deepen the Great Depression?”) and edited the new edition of Hayek’s notoriously difficult volume, The Pure Theory of Capital, when it was published as volume 11 of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, the conclusion reached by the new paper that Hayek had a better understanding than Cassel of what caused the Great Depression is not, in and of itself, surprising.

However, I admit to being taken aback by the abstract of the paper:

We revisit the origins of the Great Depression by contrasting the accounts of two contemporary economists, Friedrich A. Hayek and Gustav Cassel. Their distinct theories highlight important, but often unacknowledged, differences between the international depression and the Great Depression in the United States. Hayek’s business cycle theory offered a monetary overexpansion account for the 1920s investment boom, the collapse of which initiated the Great Depression in the United States. Cassel’s warnings about a scarcity gold reserves related to the international character of the downturn, but the mechanisms he emphasized contributed little to the deflation or depression in the United States.

I wouldn’t deny that there are differences between the way the Great Depression played out in the United States and in the rest of the world, e.g., Britain and France, which to be sure, suffered less severely than did the US or, say, Germany. It is both possible, and important, to explore and understand the differential effects of the Great Depression in various countries. I am sorry to say that White and Hogan do neither. Instead, taking at face value the dubious authority of Friedman and Schwartz’s treatment of the Great Depression in the Monetary History of the United States, they assert that the cause of the Great Depression in the US was fundamentally different from the cause of the Great Depression in many or all other countries.

Taking that insupportable premise from Friedman and Schwartz, they simply invoke various numerical facts from the Monetary History as if those facts, in and of themselves, demonstrate what requires to be demonstrated: that the causes of the Great Depression in the US were different from those of the Great Depression in the rest of the world. That assumption vitiated the entire treatment of the Great Depression in the Monetary History, and it vitiates the results that White and Hogan reach about the merits of the conflicting explanations of the Great Depression offered by Cassel and Hayek.

I’ve discussed the failings of Friedman’s treatment of the Great Depression and of other episodes he analyzed in the Monetary History in previous posts (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here). The common failing of all the episodes treated by Friedman in the Monetary History and elsewhere is that he misunderstood how the gold standard operated, because his model of the gold standard was a primitive version of the price-specie-flow mechanism in which the monetary authority determines the quantity of money, which then determines the price level, which then determines the balance of payments, the balance of payments being a function of the relative price levels of the different countries on the gold standard. Countries with relatively high price levels experience trade deficits and outflows of gold, and countries with relatively low price levels experience trade surpluses and inflows of gold. Under the mythical “rules of the game” under the gold standard, countries with gold inflows were supposed to expand their money supplies, so that prices would rise and countries with outflows were supposed to reduce their money supplies, so that prices fall. If countries followed the rules, then an international monetary equilibrium would eventually be reached.

That is the model of the gold standard that Friedman used throughout his career. He was not alone; Hayek and Mises and many others also used that model, following Hume’s treatment in his essay on the balance of trade. But it’s the wrong model. The correct model is the one originating with Adam Smith, based on the law of one price, which says that prices of all commodities in terms of gold are equalized by arbitrage in all countries on the gold standard.

As a first approximation, under the Smithean model, there is only one price level adjusted for different currency parities for all countries on the gold standard. So if there is deflation in one country on the gold standard, there is deflation for all countries on the gold standard. If the rest of the world was suffering from deflation under the gold standard, the US was also suffering from a deflation of approximately the same magnitude as every other country on the gold standard was suffering.

The entire premise of the Friedman account of the Great Depression, adopted unquestioningly by White and Hogan, is that there was a different causal mechanism for the Great Depression in the United States from the mechanism operating in the rest of the world. That premise is flatly wrong. The causation assumed by Friedman in the Monetary History was the exact opposite of the actual causation. It wasn’t, as Friedman assumed, that the decline in the quantity of money in the US was causing deflation; it was the common deflation in all gold-standard countries that was causing the quantity of money in the US to decline.

To be sure there was a banking collapse in the US that was exacerbating the catastrophe, but that was an effect of the underlying cause: deflation, not an independent cause. Absent the deflationary collapse, there is no reason to assume that the investment boom in the most advanced and most productive economy in the world after World War I was unsustainable as the Hayekian overinvestment/malinvestment hypothesis posits with no evidence of unsustainability other than the subsequent economic collapse.

So what did cause deflation under the gold standard? It was the rapid increase in the monetary demand for gold resulting from the insane policy of the Bank of France (disgracefully endorsed by Hayek as late as 1932) which Cassel, along with Ralph Hawtrey (whose writings, closely parallel to Cassel’s on the danger of postwar deflation, avoid all of the ancillary mistakes White and Hogan attribute to Cassel), was warning would lead to catastrophe.

It is true that Cassel also believed that over the long run not enough gold was being produced to avoid deflation. White and Hogan spend inordinate space and attention on that issue, because that secular tendency toward deflation is entirely different from the catastrophic effects of the increase in gold demand in the late 1920s triggered by the insane policy of the Bank of France.

The US could have mitigated the effects if it had been willing to accommodate the Bank of France’s demand to increase its gold holdings. Of course, mitigating the effects of the insane policy of the Bank of France would have rewarded the French for their catastrophic policy, but, under the circumstances, some other means of addressing French misconduct would have spared the world incalculable suffering. But misled by an inordinate fear of stock market speculation, the Fed tightened policy in 1928-29 and began accumulating gold rather than accommodate the French demand.

And the Depression came.

About Me

David Glasner
Washington, DC

I am an economist in the Washington DC area. My research and writing has been mostly on monetary economics and policy and the history of economics. In my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform, I argued for a non-Monetarist non-Keynesian approach to monetary policy, based on a theory of a competitive supply of money. Over the years, I have become increasingly impressed by the similarities between my approach and that of R. G. Hawtrey and hope to bring Hawtrey’s unduly neglected contributions to the attention of a wider audience.

My new book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications has been published by Palgrave Macmillan

Follow me on Twitter @david_glasner

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