Once again, the estimable Olivier Blanchard is weighing in on the question of inflation, expressing fears about an impending wage-price spiral that cannot be controlled by conventional monetary policy unless the monetary authority is prepared to impose sufficiently tight monetary conditions that would entail substantially higher unemployment than we have experienced since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Little Depression (aka Great Recession). Several months ago, Blanchard, supporting Larry Summers’s warnings that rising inflation was not likely to be transitory and instead would likely remain high and possibly increase over time, I tried to explain why his fears of high and rising inflation were likely exaggerated. Unpersuaded, he now returns to provide a deeper explanation of his belief that, unless the deep systemic forces that cause inflation are addressed politically rather than left, by default, to be handled by the monetary authority, inflation will remain a persistent and vexing problem.
1/8. A point which is often lost in discussions of inflation and central bank policy. Inflation is fundamentally the outcome of the distributional conflict, between firms, workers, and taxpayers. It stops only when the various players are forced to accept the outcome.
I’m sorry to say that Professor Blanchard starts off with a massive overstatement. While I don’t discount the possibility — even the reality — that inflation may sometimes be triggered by the attempt of a particular sector of the economy to increase the relative price of the goods or services that it provides, thereby increasing its share of total income at the expense of other sectors, I seriously question whether this is a typical, or even frequent, source of inflation. For example, oil-price increases in the 1970s and wage increases in France after the May 1968 student uprisings did trigger substantial inflation. Inflation served as a method of (1) mitigating ing adverse macroeconomic effects on output and employment and (2) diluting the size of the resulting wealth transfer from other sectors.
Blanchard continues:
2/8. The source of the conflict may be too hot an economy: In the labor market, workers may be in a stronger position to bargain for higher wages given prices. But, in the goods market, firms may also be in a stronger position to increase prices given wages. And, on, it goes.
Again, I’m sorry to say that I find this remark incomprehensible. Blanchard says “the source of the conflict may be too hot an economy,” and in the very next breath says that in the labor market (as if it made sense to view the labor market, accounting for more than half the nominal income of the economy, as a single homogeneous market with stable supply and demand curves), “workers may be in a strong position to bargain for higher wages given prices,” while in the goods market firms may be in a strong position to bargain for higher prices relative to wages. What kind of bargaining position is Blanchard talking about? Is it real, reflecting underlying economic conditions, or is it nominal, reflecting macroeconomic conditions. He doesn’t seem to know. And if he does know, he’s not saying. But he began by saying that the source of the conflict “may be too hot an economy,” suggesting that the source of the conflict is macroeconomic, not a conflict over shares. So I’m confused. We can only follow him a bit further to see what he may be thinking.
3/8. The source of the conflict may be in too high prices of commodities, such as energy. Firms want to increase prices given wages, to reflect the higher cost of intermediate inputs. Workers want to resist the decrease in the real wage, and ask for higher wages. And on it goes.
Now Blanchard seems to be attributing the conflict to an exogenous — and unexmplained — increase in commodity prices. One sector presumably enjoys an improvement in its bargaining position relative to the rest of the economy, thereby being enabled to increase its share of total income. Rather than consider the appropriate response to such an exercise of raw market power, Blanchard simply assumes that, but doesn’t explain how, this increase in share triggers a vicious cycle of compensating increases in the prices and wages of other sectors, rather than a one-off distributional change to reflect a new balance of economic power. This is a complicated story with interesting macroeconomic implications, but Blanchard doesn’t bother to do more than assert that the disturbance sets in motion an ongoing, possibly unlimited, cycle of price and wage increases.
4/8. The state can play various roles. Through fiscal policy, it can slow down the economy and eliminate the overheating. It can subsidize the cost of energy, limiting the decrease in the real wage and the pressure on nominal wages.
5/8. It can finance the subsidies by increasing taxes on some current taxpayers, say exceptional profit taxes, or through deficits and eventual taxes on future taxpayers (who have little say in the process…)
These two statements from the thread are largely innocuous and contribute little or nothing to an understanding of the cause or causes of inflation or of the policies that might mitigate inflation or its effect,
6/8. But, in the end, forcing the players to accept the outcome, and thus stabilizing inflation, is typically left to the central bank. By slowing down the economy, it can force firms to accept lower prices given wages, and workers to accept lower wages given prices.
It’s not clear to me what constitutes “acceptance” of the outcome. Under any circumstance, the players will presumably still seek to choose and execute what, given the situation in which they find themselves, they regard as an optimal plan. Whether the players can execute the plan that they choose will depend on the plans chosen by other players and on the policies adopted by the central bank and other policy makers. If policy makers adopt a consistent set of policies that are feasible and are aligned with the outcomes expected by the players, then the players will likely succeed in implementing what they regard as optimal plans. If the policies that are followed are not consistent and not feasible, then those policies will not be aligned with the outcomes expected by the players. In the latter case, matters will likely get worse not better.
7/8. It is a highly inefficient way to deal with distributional conflicts. One can/should dream of a negotiation between workers, firms, and the state, in which the outcome is achieved without triggering inflation and requiring a painful slowdown.
I can’t help but observe the vagueness associated with the pronoun “it” and its unidentified antecedent. The outcome of a complex economic process cannot be achieved by a negotiation between workers,firms and the state. Things don’t work that way. Whatever negotiation Professor Blanchard is dreaming about, no negotiation can possibly determine the details of an outcome. What is possible is some agreement on policy goals or targets for inflation and some feasible set of policies aimed at achieving, or coming close to, a target rate of inflation. The key variable over which policy makers have some control is total aggregate demand for the economy measured either as a rate of nominal spending and nominal income over a year or as a rate of growth in spending and income compared to the previous year. Since inflation is itself a rate of change, presumaby the relevant target should be a rate of change in total nominal spending and nominal income. Thus, the appropriate target for policy makers to aim for is the yearly rate of growth in total nominal spending and total nominal income.
Given some reasonable expectation about the rate of technical progress (labor productivity) and the rate of increase in the labor force, a target rate of inflation implies a target rate of increase in total nominal spending and total nominal income. Given expectations about the increase in labor productivity, there is an implied rate of increase in nominal wages that is broadly consistent with the inflation target. But that average rate of increase in nominal wages can hardly be expected to be uniform for all industries and all firms and all workers, and it would be folly, on purely technical reasons, to attempt to enforce such a target in average nominal wage growth. And for legal and political reasons, it would be an even greater folly to try to do so.
Besides announcing the underlying basis for the targeted rate of nominal income growth, and encouraging workers and firms to take those targets seriously when negotiating wage contracts and setting prices, while recognizing that deviations from those targets are often reasonable and appropriate in the light of the specific circumstances in which particular firms and industries and labor unions are operating, policy makers have no constructive role to play in the setting of prices or wages for individual firms industries or labor contracts. But providing useful benchmarks for private agents to use as a basis for forming their own expectations about the future to guide their planning for the future is entirely appropriate and useful.
I should acknowledge that, as I have done previously, that the approach to policy making summarized here is based on the analysis developed by Ralph Hawtrey over the course of more than a half century as both a monetary theorist and a policy advisor, and, especially, as Hawtrey explained over a half-century ago in his final book, Incomes and Money.
8/8. But, unfortunately, this requires more trust than can be hoped for and just does not happen. Still, this way of thinking inflation shows what the problem is, and how to think of the least painful solution.
Insofar as policymakers can show that they are coming reasonably close to meeting their announced targets, they will encourage private actors to take those announced targets seriously when forming their own expectations and when negotiating with counterparties on the terms of their economic relationships. The least painful solutions are those in which economic agents align their expectations with the policy targets announced — and achieved — by policy makers.
UPDATE (2/25/2022): George Selgin informs me that in the final version (his book Floored) of the Cato working paper which I discuss below he modified the argument that I criticize that paying interest on reserves caused banks to raise their lending rates to borrowers and that he now generally agrees with my argument that paying interest on reserves did not cause banks to raise the interest rates they charged borrowers. George also points out that I did misstate his position slightly. He did not argue, as I wrote, that paying interest on reserves caused banks to raise interest rates to borrowers; his argument was that banks would accept a reduced percentage of loan applications at the prevailing rate of interest.
The economic theory of banking has a long and checkered history reflecting an ongoing dialectic between two views of banking. One view, let’s call it the reserve view, is that the circulating bank liabilities, now almost exclusively bank deposits, are created by banks after they receive deposits of currency (either metallic or fiat). Rather than hold the currency in their vaults as “safe deposits,” banks cleverly (or in the view of some, deceitfully or fraudulently) lend out claims to their reserves in exchange for the IOUs of borrowers, from which they derive a stream of interest income.
The alternative view of banking, let’s call it the anti-reserve view (in chapter 7 of my new book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory, I trace the two views David Hume and Adam Smith) bank liabilities are first issued by established money lenders, probably traders or merchants, widely known to be solvent and well-capitalized, whose debts are widely recognized as reliable and safe. Borrowers therefore prefer to exchange their own debt for that of the lenders, which is more acceptable in exchange than their own less reliable debt. Lenders denominate their IOUs in terms of an accepted currency so that borrowers can use the lender’s IOU instead of the currency. To make their IOUs circulate like currency, lenders promise to redeem their IOUs on demand, so they must either hold, or have immediate access to, currency.
These two views of banking lead to conflicting interpretations of the hugely increased reserve holdings of banks since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Under the reserve view, reserves held by banks are the raw material from which deposits are created. Because of the inflationary potential of newly created deposits, a rapid infusion of reserves into the banking system is regarded as an inflationary surge waiting to happen.
On the anti-reserve view, however, causation flows not from reserves to deposits, but from deposits to reserves. Banks do not create deposits because they hold redundant reserves; they hold reserves because they create deposits, the holding of reserves being a the cost of creating deposits. Being a safe asset enabling banks to satisfy instantly, and without advance notice, demands for deposit redemption, reserves are held only as a precaution.
All businesses choose the forms in which to hold the assets best-suited to their operations. Manufactures own structures, buildings and machines used in producing the products they sell as well as holding inventories of finished or semi-finished outputs and inputs into the production process, as well as liquid capital like bank deposits, and other interest or income-generating assets. Banks also hold a variety of real assets (e.g., buildings, vaults, computers and machines) and a variety of financial assets. An important class of those financial assets are promissory notes of borrowers to whom banks have issued loans by creating deposits. In the ordinary course of business, banks accumulate reserves when new or existing customers make deposits, and when net positive clearings with other banks cause an inflow of reserves. The direction and the magnitude of the flow of reserves into, or out of, a bank are not beyond its power to control. Nor does a bank lack other means than increasing lending to reduce its holdings of unwanted reserves.
While reserves are the safest, most liquid, and most convenient asset that banks can hold, non-interest-bearing reserves provide banks with no pecuniary yield, so holding reserves rather than interest-bearing assets, or assets expected to appreciate involve a sacrifice of income that must be offset by the safety, liquidity and convenience provided by reserves. When the Fed began paying interest on reserves in October 2008, the holding of reserves no longer required foregoing a pecuniary yield offered by alternative assets. The next safest and most liquid class of assets available to banks is short-term Treasury notes, which do provide at least a small nominal interest return. Until October 2008, there was an active overnight market for reserves — the Federal Funds market — in which banks with excess reserves could lend to banks with insufficient reserves, thereby enabling the banking system as a whole to minimize the aggregate holding of excess (i.e., not legally required) reserves.
Legally required reserves being unavailable to banks to satisfy redemption demands without incurring a penalty for non-compliance with the legal reserve requirement, required reserves provide banks with little safety or liquidity. So, to obtain the desired safety and liquidity, banks must hold excess reserves. The cost (foregone interest) of holding excess reserves banks can be minimized by holding interest-bearing Treasuries easily exchanged for reserves and by lending or borrowing as needed in the overnight Fed Funds market. In normal conditions, the banking system can operate efficiently with excess reserves equal to only about one percent of total deposits.
The Fed did not begin paying interest on reserves until October 2008, less than a month after a financial panic and crisis brought the US and the international financial system to the brink of a catastrophic meltdown. The solvency of financial institutions and banks having been impaired by a rapid loss of asset value, distinguishing between solvent and insolvent counterparties became nearly impossible, putting almost any economic activity dependent on credit at risk of being unwound.
In danger of insolvency and desperate for liquidity, banks tried to hoard reserves and increase holdings of Treasury debt. Though yielding minimal interest, Treasury notes serve as preferred collateral in the Fed Funds market, enabling borrowers to offer lenders nearly zero-risk overnight or short-term lending opportunities via repurchase agreements in which Treasury notes are sold spot and repurchased forward at a preset price reflecting an implied interest rate on the loan.
Increased demand for Treasuries raised their prices and reduced their yields, but declining yields and lending rates couldn’t end the crisis once credit markets became paralyzed by pervasive doubts about counterparty solvency. Banks stopped lending to new customers, while hesitating, or even refusing, to renew or maintain credit facilities for existing customers, and were themselves often unable to borrow reserves without posting Treasuries as collateral for repo loans.
After steadfastly refusing to reduce its Fed Fund target rate and ease credit conditions, notwithstanding rapidly worsening economic conditions, during the summer of 2008, an intransigent stance from which it refused to budge even after the financial panic erupted in mid-September. While Treasury yields were falling as the markets sought liquidity and safety, chaotic market conditions caused overnight rates in the Fed Funds market to fluctuate erratically. Finally relenting in October as credit markets verged on collapse, the Fed reduced its Fed Funds target rate by 50 basis points. In the catastrophic conditions of October 2008, the half-percent reduction in the Fed Funds target was hardly adequate.
To prevent a system-wide catastrophe, the Fed began lending to banks on the security of assets of doubtful value or to buy assets — at book, rather than (unknown) market, value – that were not normally eligible to be purchased by the Fed. The resulting rapid expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet and the creation of bank reserves (Fed liabilities) raised fears (shared by the Fed) of potential future inflation.
Fearing that its direct lending to banks and its asset purchases were increasing bank reserves excessively, thereby driving the Fed Funds rate below its target, the Fed sought, and received, Congressional permission to begin paying interest on bank reserves so that banks would hold the newly acquired reserves, rather use the reserves to acquire assets like borrower IOUs, lest total spending and aggregate demand increase. Avoiding such a potentially inflationary increase in aggregate demand had been the chief policy objective of the Fed throughout 2008 even as the economy slid into deep recession just prior to the start of the financial crisis, and the Fed was sticking to that policy.
Struggling to contain a deepening financial crisis while adhering to a commitment to a 2-percent inflation target, the Fed experimented for almost two months with both its traditional Fed Funds target and its new policy of paying interest on bank reserves. The Fed eventually settled on a target for the Fed Funds rate between zero and .25% while paying .25% interest on reserves, thereby making it unnecessary for banks with accounts at the Fed to borrow, and making them unwilling to lend, reserves in the Fed Funds market. Thanks to the massive infusion of reserves into the banking system, the panic was quelled and the immediate financial crisis receded, but the underlying weakness of an economy was aggravated and continued to deepen; the liquidity and solvency problems that triggered the crisis were solved, but the aggregate-demand deficiency was not.
In his excellent historical and analytical account of how and why the Fed adopted its policy of paying interest on reserves, George Selgin credits the idea that had the Fed not paid interest to banks on their reserves, they would have used those reserves to increase lending, thereby providing stimulus to the economy. (Update: as noted above, the argument I criticize was made in Cato Working Paper not in the published version of George’s book, and he informs me that he modified the argument in the published version and now disavows it.) Although I agree with George that paying interest on bank reserves reduced aggregate demand, I disagree with his argument that the reduction in aggregate demand was caused by increased interest charged to borrowers owing to the payment of interest on reserves.
George believes that, by paying interest on reserves, the Fed increased the attractiveness of holding reserves relative to higher-yielding assets like the IOUs of borrowers. And, sure enough, after the Fed began paying interest on reserves, the share of bank loans in total bank assets declined by about the same percentage as the share of reserves in total bank assets.
The logic underlying this argument is that, at the margin, an optimizing bank equates the anticipated yield from holding every asset in its portfolio. If the expected return at margin from bank loans exceeds the expected return from reserves, an optimizing bank will increase its lending until the marginal return from lending no longer exceeds the marginal return from holding reserves. When the Fed began paying interest on reserves, the expected return at the margin from holding reserves increased and exceeded the expected return at the margin from bank loans, giving banks an incentive to increase their holdings of reserves relative to their holdings of bank loans. Presumably this means that banks would try to increase their holdings of bank reserves and reduce their lending.
At least two problems undercut this logic. First, as explained above, the yield from holding an asset can be pecuniary – a yield of interest, of dividends, or appreciation – or a flow of services. Clearly, the yield from holding reserves is primarily the service flow associated with the safety, liquidity and convenience provided by reserves. Before October 2008, reserves provided no pecuniary yield, either in explicit interest or expected appreciation, the optimal quantity of reserves held was such that, at the margin, the safety, liquidity and convenience generated by reserves was just sufficient to match the pecuniary return from the loan assets expected by an optimizing bank.
After the Fed began paying interest on reserves, the combined pecuniary and service return from holding reserves exceeded the return from banks’ loan assets. So, banks therefore chose to increase their holdings of reserves until the expected pecuniary and service yield from reserves no longer exceeded the expected return from loan assets. But as banks increased their reserve holdings, the marginal service flow provided by reserves diminished until the marginal pecuniary plus service yield was again equalized across the assets held in banks’ asset portfolios. But that does not imply that banks reduced their lending or the value of the loan assets in their portfolios compared to the value of loan assets held before interest was paid on reserves; it just means that optimal bank portfolios after the Fed began paying interest on bank reserves contained more reserves than previously.
Indeed, because reserves provided a higher pecuniary yield and more safety, liquidity and convenience than holding Treasuries, banks were willing to add reserves to their portfolios without limit, because holding reserves became costless. The only limit on the holding of bank reserves was the willingness of the Fed to create more reserves by buying additional assets from the private sector. The proceeds of sales would be deposited in the banking system. The yield on the acquired assets would accrue to the Fed, and that yield would be transferred to the banking system by way of interest paid on those reserves.
So, if I don’t think that paying interest on bank reserves caused banks to raise interest rates on loans, why do I think that paying interest on bank reserves reduced aggregate demand and slowed the recovery from the Little Depression (aka Great Recession)?
The conventional story, derived from the reserve view, is that if banks have more reserves than they wish to hold, they try to dispose of their excess reserves by increasing their lending to borrowers. But banks wouldn’t increase lending to borrowers unless the expected profitability of such lending increased; no increase in the quantity of non-interest-bearing reserves of the banks would have increased the profitability of bank lending unless consumer confidence or business optimism increased, neither of which depends in a straightforward way on the quantity of reserves held by banks.
In several published papers on classical monetary theory which were revised and republished in my new book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory (chapters 2-5 and 7 see front matter for original publication information), I described a mechanism of bank lending and money creation. Competitive banks create money by lending, but how much money they create is constrained by the willingness of the public to hold the liabilities (deposits) emitted in the process of lending.
The money-lending, deposit-creation process can be imperfectly described within a partial-equilibrium, marginal-revenue, marginal-cost framework. The marginal revenue from creating money corresponds to the spread between a bank’s borrowing rate (the interest rate paid on deposits) and its lending rate (the interest rate charged borrowers). At the margin, this spread equals the bank’s cost of intermediation, which includes the cost of holding reserves. The cost of intermediation increases as the difference between the yields on Treasuries and reserves increase, and as the quantity of reserves held increases.
So, in the basic model I work with, paying interest on reserves reduces the cost of creating deposits, thereby tending to increase the amount of lending by banks, contrary to Selgin’s argument that paying interest on reserves reduces bank lending by inducing banks to raise interest rates on loans.
But, in a recession — and even more so in a financial crisis or panic — the cost of intermediation increases, causing banks to reduce their lending, primarily by limiting or denying the extension of credit to new and existing customers. Of course, in a recession, businesses and households demand fewer loans to finance spending plans, and instead seek credit with which to meet current obligations coming due. As banks’ costs of intermediation rise, they inevitably curtail lending, increasing the share of reserves in banks’ total assets.
While Selgin attributes the increasing share of reserves in banks’ assets to the payment of interest on reserves, a more plausible explanation of the increase is that it results from the increased intermediation costs associated with recession and a financial crisis, which more than offset the cost reduction from paying interest on reserves.
Although paying interest on reserves was a major innovation, in a sense it was just a continuation of the policy approach adopted by the Fed in 2004 when started gradually raising its Fed Funds target rate to 5.25% in June 2006, where it stood until July 2007. Combined with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2006, the 5.25% Fed Funds target produced a gradual slowdown that led the Fed to reduce its target, but always too little and too late, as the economy slid into recession at the end of 2007. So, the payment of interest on reserves, intended to ensure that the reserves would not trigger a surge in spending, was entirely consistent with the restrictive policy orientation of the Fed before the financial panic and crisis of 2008, which continued during and after the crisis. That policy was largely responsible for the unusually weak economic recovery and expansion in the decade after the crisis, when banks willingly absorbed all the reserves created by the Fed.
The specific point on which I disagree with Selgin is his belief that paying interest on bank reserves discouraged banks from increasing their lending despite the increase in their reserves. I maintain that paying interest on reserves did not discourage banks from lending, but instead altered their incentive to hold reserves versus holding Treasuries. That decision was independent of the banks’ lending decisions. The demand for loans to finance spending plans by businesses and households was declining because of macroeconomic conditions in a recessionary economy during a financial crisis and recession and the subsequent slow recovery.
Had the Fed not paid interest on reserves while purchasing assets to provide liquidity to the banking system, I am doubtful that banks would have provided credit for increased private spending. If no interest were paid on reserves, it seems more likely that banks would have used the additional reserves created by the Fed to purchase Treasuries than to increase lending, driving up their prices and reducing their yields. Instead of receiving interest of .25% on their reserves, banks would have received slightly less interest on short-term Treasuries. So, without interest on reserves, banks would have received less interest income, and incurred slightly more risk, than they actually did. The Fed, on the other hand, would have had a net increase in revenue by not paying more interest to banks than it received from the Treasuries sold by the banks to the Fed.
The only plausible difference between paying interest on reserves and not doing so that I can see is that the Fed, by paying interest on reserves, lent credibility to its commitment to keep inflation at, or below, its 2-percent target. The Fed’s own justification for seeking permission to pay interest on reserves, as Selgin (Floored, p. 18) documented with a passage from Bernanke’s memoir , was that not doing so might result in an inflationary increase in lending by banks trying to shed their excess reserves. Because I believe that expectations of inflation have a tendency to be self-fulfilling, I don’t dismiss the idea that paying interest on reserves helped the Fed anchor inflation expectations at or near its 2-percent inflation target.
Economic conditions after the financial crisis of 2008-09 were characterized by an extreme entrepreneurial pessimism that Ralph Hawtrey called a credit deadlock, conditions akin to, but distinct from, the more familiar Keynesian phenomenon of a liquidity trap. The difference is that a credit deadlock results from pessimism so intense that entrepreneurs (and presumably households as well) are unwilling, regardless of the interest rate on loans, to undertake long-term spending plans (capital investment by businesses or consumer-durables purchases by households) requiring credit financing. In a liquidity trap, such spending plans might be undertaken at a sufficiently low interest rate, but the interest rate cannot fall, bear speculators cashing in their long-term bond holdings as soon as long-term bond prices rise to a level that speculators regard as unsustainable. To me, at least, the Hawtreyan credit deadlock seems a more plausible description of conditions in 2008-09 than the Keynesian liquidity trap.
In a Hawtreyan credit deadlock, the capacity of monetary policy to increase spending and aggregate demand is largely eliminated. Here’s Hawtrey’s description from the 1950 edition of his classic work Currency and Credit.
If the banks fail to stimulate short-term borrowing, they can create credit by themselves buying securities in the investment market. The market will seek to use the resources thus placed in it, and it will become more favourable to new flotations and sales of securities. But even so and expansion of the flow of money is not ensured. If the money created is to move and to swell the consumers’ income, the favourable market must evoke additional capital outlay. That is likely to take time and conceivably capital outlay may fail to respond. A deficiency of demand for consumable goods reacts on capital outlay, for when the existing capacity of industries is underemployed, there is little demand for capital outlay to extend capacity. . .
The deadlock then is complete, and, unless it is to continue unbroken till some fortuitous circumstance restarts activity, recourse must be had to directly inflationary expedients, such as government expenditures far in excess of revenue, or a deliberate depreciation of the foreign exchange value of the money unit.
In this passage, Hawtrey, originator of the widely reviled “Treasury View” (also see chapters 10-11 of my Studies in the History of Monetary Theory) that denied the efficacy of fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool, acknowledged the efficacy of fiscal policy in a credit deadlock, while monetary policy could be effective only through currency devaluation or depreciation, though I would add that in monetary policy could also be effective by inducing or creating expectations of inflation.
The long, but painfully slow, recovery from the 2008-09 financial crisis lent credence to Hawtrey’s description of credit deadlock, and my own empirical findings of the unusual positive correlation between changes in inflation expectations and changes in the S&P 500 supports the idea that increasing inflation expectations are a means whereby monetary policy can enable an escape from credit deadlock.
UPDATE (9:25am 11/16/2021): Thanks to philipji for catching some problematic passages in my initially posted version. I have also revised the opening paragraph, which was less than clear. Apologies for my sloppy late-night editing before posting.
When I started blogging ten-plus years ago, most of my posts were about monetary policy, because I then felt that the Fed was not doing as much as it could, and should, have been doing to promote a recovery from the Little Depression (aka Great Recession) for which Fed’s policy mistakes bore heavy responsibility. The 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing deep downturn were largely the product of an overly tight monetary policy starting in 2006, and, despite interest-rate cuts in 2007 and 2008, the Fed’s policy consistently erred on the side of tightness because of concerns about rising oil and commodities prices, for almost two months after the start of the crisis. The stance of monetary policy cannot be assessed just by looking at the level of the central bank policy rate; the stance depends on the relationship between the policy rate and the economic conditions at any particular moment. The 2-percent Fed Funds target in the summer of 2008, given economic conditions at the time, meant that monetary policy was tight, not easy.
Although, after the crisis, the Fed never did as much as it could — and should — have to promote recovery, it at least took small measures to avoid a lapse into a ruinous deflation, even as many of the sound-money types, egged on by deranged right-wing scare mongers, warned of runaway inflation.
Slowly but surely, a pathetically slow recovery by the end of Obama’s second term, brought us back to near full employment. By then, my interest in the conduct of monetary policy had given way to a variety of other concerns as we dove into the anni horribiles of the maladministration of Obama’s successor.
Riding a recovery that started seven and a half years before he took office, and buoyed by a right-wing propaganda juggernaut and a pathetically obscene personality cult that broadcast and amplified his brazenly megalomaniacal self-congratulations for the inherited recovery over which he presided, Obama’s successor watched incompetently as the Covid 19 virus spread through the United States, causing the sharpest drop in output and employment in US history.
Ten months after Obama’s successor departed from the White House, the US economy has recovered much, but not all, of the ground lost during the pandemic, employment still below its peak at the start of 2020, and real output still lagging the roughly 2% real growth path along which the economy had been moving for most of the preceding decade.
However, the very rapid increase in output in Q2 2021 and the less rapid, but still substantial, increase in output in Q3 2021, combined with inflation that has risen to the highest rates in 30 years, has provoked ominous warning of resurgent inflation similar to the inflation from the late 1960s till the early 1980s, ending only with the deep 1981-82 recession caused by the resolute anti-inflation policy administered by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker with the backing of the newly elected Ronald Reagan.
It’s worth briefly revisiting that history (which I have discussed previously on this blog here, here, and especially in the following series (1), (2) and (3) from 2020) to understand the nature of the theoretical misunderstanding and the resulting policy errors in the 1970s and 1980s. While I agree that the recent increase in inflation is worrisome, it’s far from clear that inflation is likely, as many now predict, to get worse, although the inflation risk can’t be dismissed.
What I find equally if not more worrisome is that the anti-inflation commentary that we are hearing now from very serious people like Larry Summers in today’s Washington Post is how much it sounds like the inflation talk of 2008, which frightened the Fed, then presided over by a truly eminent economist, Ben Bernanke, into thinking that the chief risk facing the economy was rising headline inflation that would cause inflation expectations to become “unanchored.”
So, rather than provide an economy rapidly sliding into recession, the FOMC, focused on rapid increases in oil and commodity prices, refused to loosen monetary policy in the summer of 2008, even though the pace of growth in nominal gross domestic product (NGDP) had steadily decelerated measured year on year. The accompanying table shows the steady decline in the quarterly year-on-year growth of NGDP in each successive quarter between Q1 2004 and Q4 2008. Between 2004 and 2006, the decline was gradual, but accelerated in 2007 leading to the start of a recession in December 2007.
The decline in the rate of NGDP growth was associated with a gradual increase in the Fed funds target rate from a very low level 1% until Q2 2004, but by Q2 2006, when the rate reached 5%, the slowdown in the growth of total spending quickened. As the rate of spending declined, the Fed eased interest rates in the second half of 2007, but that easing was insufficient to prevent an economy, already suffering financial distress after the the housing bubble burst in 2006, from lapsing into recession.
Although the Fed cut its interest-rate target substantially in March 2008, during the summer of 2008, when the recession was rapidly deteriorating, the FOMC, fearing that inflation expectations would become “unanchored”, given rising headline inflation associated with very large increases in crude-oil prices (which climbed to a record $130 a barrel) and in commodity prices even as the recession was visibly worsening, refused to reduce rates further.
The Fed, to be sure, was confronted with a difficult policy dilemma, but it was a disastrous error to prioritize a speculative concern about the “unanchoring” of long-term inflation expectations over the reality of a fragile and clearly weakening financial system in a contracting economy already clearly in a recession. The Fed made the wrong choice, and the crisis came.
That was then, and now is now. The choices are different, but once again, on one side there is pressure to prioritize the speculative concern about the “unanchoring” of long-term inflation expectations over promoting recovery and increased employment after a a recession and a punishing pandemic. And, once again, the concerns about inflation are driven by a likely transitory increase in the price of crude oil and gasoline prices.
The case for prioritizing fighting inflation was just made by none other than Larry Summers in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Let’s have a look at Summer’s case for fighting inflation now.
Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell’s Jackson Hole speech in late August provided a clear, comprehensive and authoritative statement, enumerated in five pillars, of the widespread team “transitory” view of inflation that prevailed at that time and shaped policy thinking at the central bank and in the administration. Today, all five pillars are wobbly at best.
First, there was a claim that price increases were confined to a few sectors. No longer. In October, prices for commodity goods outside of food and energy rose at more than a 12 percent annual rate. Various Federal Reserve system indexes that exclude sectors with extreme price movements are now at record highs.
Summers has a point. Price increases are spreading throughout the economy. However, that doesn’t mean that increasing oil prices are not causing the prices of many other products to increase as well, inasmuch as oil and other substitute forms of energy are so widely used throughout the economy. If the increase in oil prices, and likely, in food prices, has peaked, or will do so soon, it does not necessarily make sense to fight a war against an enemy that has retreated or is about to do so.
Second, Powell suggested that high inflation in key sectors, such as used cars and durable goods more broadly, was coming under control and would start falling again. In October, used-car prices accelerated to more than a 30 percent annual inflation rate, new cars to a 17 percent rate and household furnishings by an annualized rate of just above 10 percent.
Id.
Again, citing large increases in the price of cars when it’s clear that there are special circumstances causing new car prices to rise rapidly, bringing used-car prices tagging along, is not very persuasive, especially when those special circumstances appear likely to be short-lived. To be sure other durables prices are also rising, but in the absence of a deeper source of inflation, the atmospherics cited by Summers are not that compelling.
Third, the speech pointed out that there was “little evidence of wage increases that might threaten excessive inflation.” This claim is untenable today with vacancy and quit rates at record highs, workers who switch jobs in sectors ranging from fast food to investment banking getting double-digit pay increases, and ominous Employment Cost Index increases.
Id.
Wage increases are usually an indicator of inflation, though, again the withdrawal, permanent or temporary, of many workers from employment in the past two years is a likely cause of increased wages that is independent of an underlying and ongoing inflationary trend.
Fourth, the speech argued that inflation expectations remained anchored. When Powell spoke, market inflation expectations for the term of the next Federal Reserve chair were around 2.5 percent. Now they are about 3.1 percent, up half a percentage point in the past month alone. And consumer sentiment is at a 10-year low due to inflation fears.
Id.
Clearly inflation expectations have increased over the short term for a variety of reasons that we have just been considering. But the curve of inflation expectations still seems to be reverting toward a lower level in the medium term and the long-term.
Fifth, Powell emphasized global deflationary trends. In the same week the United States learned of the fastest annual inflation rate in 30 years, Japan, China and Germany all reported their highest inflation in more than a decade. And the price of oil, the most important global determinant of inflation, is very high and not expected by forward markets to decline rapidly.
Id.
Again, Summers is simply recycling the same argument. We know that there has been a short-term increase in inflation. The question we need to grapple with is whether this short-term inflationary blip is likely to be self-limiting, or will feed on itself, causing inflation expectations to become “unanchored”. Forward prices of oil may not be showing that the price of oil will decline rapidly, but they aren’t showing expectations of further increases. Without further increases in oil prices, it is fair to ask what the source of further, ongoing inflation, that will cause “unanchoring”?
As it has in the past, the threat of “unanchoring”, is doing an awful lot of work. And it is not clear how the work is being done except by way of begging the question that really needs to be answered not begged.
After his windup, Summers offers fairly mild suggestions for his anti-inflation program, and only one of his comments seems mistaken.
Because of inflation, real interest rates are lower, as money is easier than a year ago. The Fed should signal that this is unacceptable and will be reversed.
Id.
The real interest rate about which the Fed should be concerned is the ex ante real interest rate reflecting both the expected yield from real capital and the expected rate of inflation (which may and often does have feedback effects on the expected yield from real capital). Past inflation does not automatically get transformed into an increase in expected inflation, and it is not necessarily the case that past inflation has left the expected yield from real capital unaffected, so Summers’ inference that the recent blip in inflation necessarily implies that monetary policy has been eased could well be mistaken. Yet again, these are judgments (or even guesses) that policymakers have to make about the subjective judgments of market participants. Those are policy judgments that can’t be made simply by reading off a computer screen.
While I’m not overly concerned by Summers’s list of inflation danger signs, there’s no doubt that inflation risk has risen. Yet, at least for now, that risk seems to be manageable. The risk may require the Fed to take pre-emptive measures against inflation down the road, but I don’t think that we have reached that point yet.
The main reason why I think that inflation risk has been overblown is that inflation is a common occurrence in postwar economies, as occurred in the US after both World Wars, and after the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It is widely recognized that war itself is inflationary owing, among other reasons, to the usual practice of governments to finance wartime expenditures by printing money, but inflationary pressures tend to persist even after the wars end.
Why does inflation persist after wars come to an end? The main reason is that, during wartime, resources, labor and capital, are shifted from producing goods for civilian purposes to waging war and producing and transporting supplies to support the war effort. Because total spending, financed by printing money, increases during the war, money income goes up even though the production of goods and services for civilian purposes goes down.
The output of goods and services for civilian purposes having been reduced, the increased money income accruing to the civilian population implies rising prices of the civilian goods and services that are produced. The tendency for prices to rise during wartime is mitigated by the reduced availability of outlets for private spending, people normally postponing much of their non-essential spending while the war is ongoing. Consequently, the public accumulates cash and liquid assets during wartime with the intention of spending the accumulated cash and liquid assets when life returns to normal after the war.
The lack of outlets for private spending is reinforced when, as happened in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the late stages of the Vietnam War, price controls prevent the prices of civilian goods still being produced from rising, so that consumers can’t buy goods – either at all or as much as they would like – that they would willingly have paid for. The result is suppressed inflation until wartime price controls are lifted, and deferred price increases are allowed to occur. As prices rise, the excess cash that had been accumulated while the goods people demanded were unavailable is absorbed by purchases made at the postponed increases in price.
In his last book, Incomes and Money, Ralph Hawtrey described with characteristic clarity the process by which postwar inflation absorbed redundant cash balances accumulated during the World War II when price controls were lifted.
America, like Britain, had imposed price controls during the war, and had accumulated a great amount of redundant money. So long as the price controls continued, the American manufacturers were precluded from checking demand by raising their prices. But the price controls were abandoned in the latter half of 1946, and there resulted a rise of prices reaching 30 per cent on manufactured goods in the latter part of 1947. That meant that American industry was able to defend itself against the excess demand. By the end of 1947 the rise of prices had nearly eliminated the redundant money; that it to say, the quantity of money (currency and bank deposits) was little more than in a normal proportion to the national income. There was no longer over-employment in American industry, and there was no reluctance to take export orders.
Hawtrey, Incomes and Money, p. 7
Responding to Paul Krugman’s similar claim that there was high inflation following World War II, Summers posted the following twitter thread.
@paulkrugman continues his efforts to minimize the inflation threat to the American economy and progressive politics by pointing to the fact that inflation surged and then there was a year of deflation after World War 2.
If this is the best argument for not being alarmed that someone as smart, rhetorically effective and committed as Paul can make, my anxiety about inflation is increased.
Pervasive price controls were removed after the war. Economists know that measured prices with controls are artificial, so subsequent inflation proves little.
Millions of soldiers were returning home and a massive demobilization was in effect. Nothing like the current pervasive labor shortage was present.
Summers is surely correct that the situation today is not perfectly analogous to the post-WWII situation, but post-WWII inflation, as Hawtrey explained, was only partially attributable to the lifting of price controls. He ignores the effect of excess cash balances, which ultimately had to be spent or somehow withdrawn from circulation through a deliberate policy of deflation, which neither Summers nor most economists would think advisable or even acceptable. While the inflationary effect of absorbing excess cash balances is therefore almost inevitable, the duration of the inflation is limited and need not cause inflation expectations to become “unanchored.”
With the advent of highly effective Covid vaccines, we are now gradually emerging from the worst horrors of the Covid pandemic, when a substantial fraction of the labor force was either laid off or chose to withdraw from employment. As formerly idle workers return to work, we are in a prolonged quasi-postwar situation.
Just as the demand for civilian products declines during wartime, the demand for a broad range of private goods declined during the pandemic as people stopped going to restaurants, going on vacations, attending public gathering, and limited their driving and travel. Thus, the fraction of earnings that was saved increased as outlets for private spending became unavailable, inappropriate or undesirable.
As the pandemic has receded, restoring outlets for private spending, pent-up suppressed private demands have re-emerged, financed by households drawing down accumulated cash balances or drawing on credit lines augmented by paying down indebtedness. For many goods, like cars, the release of pent-up private demand has outpaced the increase in supply, leading to substantial price increases that are unlikely to be sustained once short-term supply bottlenecks are eliminated. But such imbalances between rapid increases in demand and sluggish increases in supply does not seem like a reliable basis on which to make policy choices.
So what are we to do now? As always, Ralph Hawtrey offers the best advice. The control of inflation, he taught, ultimately depends on controlling the relationship between the rate of growth in total nominal spending (and income) and the rate of growth of total real output. If total nominal spending (and income) is increasing faster than the increase in total real output, the difference will be reflected in the prices at which goods and services are provided.
In the five years from 2015 to 2019, the average growth rate in nominal spending (and income) was about 3.9%. During that period the average rate of growth in real output was 2.2% annually and the average rate of inflation was 1.7%. It has been reasonably suggested that extrapolating the 3.9% annual growth in nominal spending in the previous five years provides a reasonable baseline against which to compare actual spending in 2020 and 2021.
Actual nominal spending in Q3 2021 was slightly below what nominal GDP would have been in Q3 if it had continued growing at the extrapolated 3.9% growth path in nominal GDP. But for nominal GDP in Q4 not exceed that extrapolated growth path in Q4, Q4 could increase by an annual rate of no more than 4.3%. Inasmuch as spending in Q3 2021 was growing at 7.8%, the growth rate of nominal spending would have to slow substantially in Q4 from its Q3 growth rate.
But it is not clear that a 3.9% growth rate in nominal spending is the appropriate baseline to use. From 2015 to 2019, the average growth rate in real output was only 2.2% annually and the average inflation rate was only 1.7%. The Fed has long announced that its inflation target was 2% and in the 2015 to 2019 period, it consistently failed to meet that target. If the target inflation was 2% rather than 1.7%, presumably the Fed believed that annual growth would not have been less with 2% inflation than with 1.7%, so there is no reason to believe that the Fed should not have been aiming for more than 3.9% growth in total spending. If so a baseline for extrapolating the growth path for nominal spending should certainly not be less than 4.2%, Even a 4.5% baseline seems reasonable, and a baseline as high as 5% does not seem unreasonable.
With a 5% baseline, total nominal spending in Q4 could increase by as much as 5.4% without raising total nominal spending above its target path. But I think the more important point is not whether total spending does or does not rise above its growth path. The important goal is for the growth in nominal spending to decline steadily toward a reasonable growth path of about 4.5 to 5% and for this goal to be communicated to the public in a convincing manner. The 13.4% increase in total spending in Q2, when it appeared that the pandemic might soon be over, was likely a one-off outlier reflecting the release of pent-up demand. The 7.8% increase in Q3 was excessive, but substantially less than the Q2 rate of increase. If the Q4 increase does not continue downward trend in the rate of increase in nominal spending, it will be time to re-evaluate policy to ensure that the growth of spending is brought down to a non-inflationary range.
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.
UPDATE: Re-upping this slightly revised post from July 11, 2011
Paul Krugman recently gave a lecture “Mr. Keynes and the Moderns” (a play on the title of the most influential article ever written about The General Theory, “Mr. Keynes and the Classics,” by another Nobel laureate J. R. Hicks) at a conference in Cambridge, England commemorating the publication of Keynes’s General Theory 75 years ago. Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe, among others, have already commented on his lecture. Coincidentally, in my previous posting, I discussed the views of Sumner and Krugman on the zero-interest lower bound, a topic that figures heavily in Krugman’s discussion of Keynes and his relevance for our current difficulties. (I note in passing that Krugman credits Brad Delong for applying the term “Little Depression” to those difficulties, a term that I thought I had invented, but, oh well, I am happy to share the credit with Brad).
In my earlier posting, I mentioned that Keynes’s, slightly older, colleague A. C. Pigou responded to the zero-interest lower bound in his review of The General Theory. In a way, the response enhanced Pigou’s reputation, attaching his name to one of the most famous “effects” in the history of economics, but it made no dent in the Keynesian Revolution. I also referred to “the layers upon layers of interesting personal and historical dynamics lying beneath the surface of Pigou’s review of Keynes.” One large element of those dynamics was that Keynes chose to make, not Hayek or Robbins, not French devotees of the gold standard, not American laissez-faire ideologues, but Pigou, a left-of-center social reformer, who in the early 1930s had co-authored with Keynes a famous letter advocating increased public-works spending to combat unemployment, the main target of his immense rhetorical powers and polemical invective. The first paragraph of Pigou’s review reveals just how deeply Keynes’s onslaught had wounded Pigou.
When in 1919, he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Mr. Keynes did a good day’s work for the world, in helping it back towards sanity. But he did a bad day’s work for himself as an economist. For he discovered then, and his sub-conscious mind has not been able to forget since, that the best way to win attention for one’s own ideas is to present them in a matrix of sarcastic comment upon other people. This method has long been a routine one among political pamphleteers. It is less appropriate, and fortunately less common, in scientific discussion. Einstein actually did for Physics what Mr. Keynes believes himself to have done for Economics. He developed a far-reaching generalization, under which Newton’s results can be subsumed as a special case. But he did not, in announcing his discovery, insinuate, through carefully barbed sentences, that Newton and those who had hitherto followed his lead were a gang of incompetent bunglers. The example is illustrious: but Mr. Keynes has not followed it. The general tone de haut en bas and the patronage extended to his old master Marshall are particularly to be regretted. It is not by this manner of writing that his desire to convince his fellow economists is best promoted.
Krugman acknowledges Keynes’s shady scholarship (“I know that there’s dispute about whether Keynes was fair in characterizing the classical economists in this way”), only to absolve him of blame. He then uses Keynes’s example to attack “modern economists” who deny that a failure of aggregate demand can cause of mass unemployment, offering up John Cochrane and Niall Ferguson as examples, even though Ferguson is a historian not an economist.
Krugman also addresses Robert Barro’s assertion that Keynes’s explanation for high unemployment was that wages and prices were stuck at levels too high to allow full employment, a problem easily solvable, in Barro’s view, by monetary expansion. Although plainly annoyed by Barro’s attempt to trivialize Keynes’s contribution, Krugman never addresses the point squarely, preferring instead to justify Keynes’s frustration with those (conveniently nameless) “classical economists.”
Keynes’s critique of the classical economists was that they had failed to grasp how everything changes when you allow for the fact that output may be demand-constrained.
Not so, as I pointed out in my first post. Frederick Lavington, an even more orthodox disciple than Pigou of Marshall, had no trouble understanding that “the inactivity of all is the cause of the inactivity of each.” It was Keynes who failed to see that the failure of demand was equally a failure of supply.
They mistook accounting identities for causal relationships, believing in particular that because spending must equal income, supply creates its own demand and desired savings are automatically invested.
Supply does create its own demand when economic agents succeed in executing their plans to supply; it is when, owing to their incorrect and inconsistent expectations about future prices, economic agents fail to execute their plans to supply, that both supply and demand start to contract. Lavington understood that; Pigou understood that. Keynes understood it, too, but believing that his new way of understanding how contractions are caused was superior to that of his predecessors, he felt justified in misrepresenting their views, and attributing to them a caricature of Say’s Law that they would never have taken seriously.
And to praise Keynes for understanding the difference between accounting identities and causal relationships that befuddled his predecessors is almost perverse, as Keynes’s notorious confusion about whether the equality of savings and investment is an equilibrium condition or an accounting identity was pointed out by Dennis Robertson, Ralph Hawtrey and Gottfried Haberler within a year after The General Theory was published. To quote Robertson:
(Mr. Keynes’s critics) have merely maintained that he has so framed his definition that Amount Saved and Amount Invested are identical; that it therefore makes no sense even to inquire what the force is which “ensures equality” between them; and that since the identity holds whether money income is constant or changing, and, if it is changing, whether real income is changing proportionately, or not at all, this way of putting things does not seem to be a very suitable instrument for the analysis of economic change.
It just so happens that in 1925, Keynes, in one of his greatest pieces of sustained, and almost crushing sarcasm, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, offered an explanation of high unemployment exactly the same as that attributed to Keynes by Barro. Churchill’s decision to restore the convertibility of sterling to gold at the prewar parity meant that a further deflation of at least 10 percent in wages and prices would be necessary to restore equilibrium. Keynes felt that the human cost of that deflation would be intolerable, and held Churchill responsible for it.
Of course Keynes in 1925 was not yet the Keynes of The General Theory. But what historical facts of the 10 years following Britain’s restoration of the gold standard in 1925 at the prewar parity cannot be explained with the theoretical resources available in 1925? The deflation that began in England in 1925 had been predicted by Keynes. The even worse deflation that began in 1929 had been predicted by Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel soon after World War I ended, if a way could not be found to limit the demand for gold by countries, rejoining the gold standard in aftermath of the war. The United States, holding 40 percent of the world’s monetary gold reserves, might have accommodated that demand by allowing some of its reserves to be exported. But obsession with breaking a supposed stock-market bubble in 1928-29 led the Fed to tighten its policy even as the international demand for gold was increasing rapidly, as Germany, France and many other countries went back on the gold standard, producing the international credit crisis and deflation of 1929-31. Recovery came not from Keynesian policies, but from abandoning the gold standard, thereby eliminating the deflationary pressure implicit in a rapidly rising demand for gold with a more or less fixed total supply.
Keynesian stories about liquidity traps and Monetarist stories about bank failures are epiphenomena obscuring rather than illuminating the true picture of what was happening. The story of the Little Depression is similar in many ways, except the source of monetary tightness was not the gold standard, but a monetary regime that focused attention on rising price inflation in 2008 when the appropriate indicator, wage inflation, had already started to decline.
UPDATE: I’m re-upping my introductory blog post, which I posted ten years ago toady. It’s been a great run for me, and I hope for many of you, whose interest and responses have motivated to keep it going. So thanks to all of you who have read and responded to my posts. I’m adding a few retrospective comments and making some slight revisions along the way. In addition to new posts, I will be re-upping some of my old posts that still seem to have relevance to the current state of our world.
What the world needs now, with apologies to the great Burt Bachrach and Hal David, is, well, another blog. But inspired by the great Ralph Hawtrey and the near great Scott Sumner, I decided — just in time for Scott’s return to active blogging — to raise another voice on behalf of a monetary policy actively seeking to promote recovery from what I call the Little Depression, instead of the monetary policy we have now: waiting for recovery to arrive on its own. Just like the Great Depression, our Little Depression was caused mainly by overly tight money in an environment of over-indebtedness and financial fragility, and was then allowed to deepen and become entrenched by monetary authorities unwilling to commit themselves to a monetary expansion aimed at raising prices enough to make business expansion profitable.
That was the lesson of the Great Depression. Unfortunately that lesson, for reasons too complicated to go into now, was never properly understood, because neither Keynesians nor Monetarists had a fully coherent understanding of what happened in the Great Depression. Although Ralph Hawtrey — called by none other than Keynes “his grandparent in the paths of errancy,” and an early, but unacknowledged, progenitor of Chicago School Monetarism — had such an understanding, Hawtrey’s contributions were overshadowed and largely ignored, because of often irrelevant and misguided polemics between Keynesians and Monetarists and Austrians. One of my goals for this blog is to bring to light the many insights of this perhaps most underrated — though competition for that title is pretty stiff — economist of the twentieth century. I have discussed Hawtrey’s contributions in my book on free banking and in a paper published years ago in Encounter and available here. Patrick Deutscher has written a biography of Hawtrey.
What deters businesses from expanding output and employment in a depression is lack of demand; they fear that if they do expand, they won’t be able to sell the added output at prices high enough to cover their costs, winding up with redundant workers and having to engage in costly layoffs. Thus, an expectation of low demand tends to be self-fulfilling. But so is an expectation of rising prices, because the additional output and employment induced by expectations of rising prices will generate the demand that will validate the initial increase in output and employment, creating a virtuous cycle of rising income, expenditure, output, and employment.
The insight that “the inactivity of all is the cause of the inactivity of each” is hardly new. It was not the discovery of Keynes or Keynesian economics; it is the 1922 formulation of Frederick Lavington, another great, but underrated, pre-Keynesian economist in the Cambridge tradition, who, in his modesty and self-effacement, would have been shocked and embarrassed to be credited with the slightest originality for that statement. Indeed, Lavington’s dictum might even be understood as a restatement of Say’s Law, the bugbear of Keynes and object of his most withering scorn. Keynesian economics skillfully repackaged the well-known and long-accepted idea that when an economy is operating with idle capacity and high unemployment, any increase in output tends to be self-reinforcing and cumulative, just as, on the way down, each reduction in output is self-reinforcing and cumulative.
But at least Keynesians get the point that, in a depression or deep recession, individual incentives may not be enough to induce a healthy expansion of output and employment. Aggregate demand can be too low for an expansion to get started on its own. Even though aggregate demand is nothing but the flip side of aggregate supply (as Say’s Law teaches), if resources are idle for whatever reason, perceived effective demand is deficient, diluting incentives to increase production so much that the potential output expansion does not materialize, because expected prices are too low for businesses to want to expand. But if businesses can be induced to expand output, more than likely, they will sell it, because (as Say’s Law teaches) supply usually does create its own demand.
[Comment after 10 years: In a comment, Rowe asked why I wrote that Say’s Law teaches that supply “usually” creates its own demand. At that time, I responded that I was just using “usually” as a weasel word. But I subsequently realized (and showed in a post last year) that the standard proofs of both Walras’s Law and Say’s Law are defective for economies with incomplete forward and state-contingent markets. We actually know less than we once thought we did!]
Keynesians mistakenly denied that, by creating price-level expectations consistent with full employment, monetary policy could induce an expansion of output even in a depression. But at least they understood that the private economy can reach an impasse with price-level expectations too low to sustain full employment. Fiscal policy may play a role in remedying a mismatch between expectations and full employment, but fiscal policy can only be as effective as monetary policy allows it to be. Unfortunately, since the downturn of December 2007, monetary policy, except possibly during QE1 and QE2, has consistently erred on the side of uneasiness.
With some unfortunate exceptions, however, few Keynesians have actually argued against monetary easing. Rather, with some honorable exceptions, it has been conservatives who, by condemning a monetary policy designed to provide incentives conducive to business expansion, have helped to hobble a recovery led by the private sector rather than the government which they profess to want. It is not my habit to attribute ill motives or bad faith to people whom I disagree with. One of the finest compliments ever paid to F. A. Hayek was by Joseph Schumpeter in his review of The Road to Serfdom who chided Hayek for “politeness to a fault in hardly ever attributing to his opponents anything but intellectual error.” But it is a challenge to come up with a plausible explanation for right-wing opposition to monetary easing.
[Comment after 10 years: By 2011 when this post was written, right-wing bad faith had already become too obvious to ignore, but who could then have imagined where the willingness to resort to bad faith arguments without the slightest trace of compunction would lead them and lead us.]
In condemning monetary easing, right-wing opponents claim to be following the good old conservative tradition of supporting sound money and resisting the inflationary proclivities of Democrats and liberals. But how can claims of principled opposition to inflation be taken seriously when inflation, by every measure, is at its lowest ebb since the 1950s and early 1960s? With prices today barely higher than they were three years ago before the crash, scare talk about currency debasement and future hyperinflation reminds me of Ralph Hawtrey’s famous remark that warnings that leaving the gold standard during the Great Depression would cause runaway inflation were like crying “fire, fire” in Noah’s flood.
The groundlessness of right-wing opposition to monetary easing becomes even plainer when one recalls the attacks on Paul Volcker during the first Reagan administration. In that episode President Reagan and Volcker, previously appointed by Jimmy Carter to replace the feckless G. William Miller as Fed Chairman, agreed to make bringing double-digit inflation under control their top priority, whatever the short-term economic and political costs. Reagan, indeed, courageously endured a sharp decline in popularity before the first signs of a recovery became visible late in the summer of 1982, too late to save Reagan and the Republicans from a drubbing in the mid-term elections, despite the drop in inflation to 3-4 percent. By early 1983, with recovery was in full swing, the Fed, having abandoned its earlier attempt to impose strict Monetarist controls on monetary expansion, allowed the monetary aggregates to grow at unusually rapid rates.
However, in 1984 (a Presidential election year) after several consecutive quarters of GDP growth at annual rates above 7 percent, the Fed, fearing a resurgence of inflation, began limiting the rate of growth in the monetary aggregates. Reagan’s secretary of the Treasury, Donald Regan, as well as a variety of outside Administration supporters like Arthur Laffer, Larry Kudlow, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, began to complain bitterly that the Fed, in its preoccupation with fighting inflation, was deliberately sabotaging the recovery. The argument against the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy in 1984 was not without merit. But regardless of the wisdom of the Fed tightening in 1984 (when inflation was significantly higher than it is now), holding up the 1983-84 Reagan recovery as the model for us to follow now, while excoriating Obama and Bernanke for driving inflation all the way up to 1 percent, supposedly leading to currency debauchment and hyperinflation, is just a bit rich. What, I wonder, would Hawtrey have said about that?
In my next posting I will look a little more closely at some recent comparisons between the current non-recovery and recoveries from previous recessions, especially that of 1983-84.
Sometimes you get into a Twitter argument when you least expect to. It was after 11pm two Saturday nights ago when I saw this tweet by Gabriel Mathy (@gabriel_mathy)
Friedman says if there had been no Fed, there would have been no Depression. That’s certainly wrong, even if your position is that the Fed did little to nothing to mitigate the Depression (which is reasonable IMO)
Chiming in, I thought to reinforce Mathy’s criticism of Friedman, I tweeted the following:
Friedman totally misunderstood the dynamics of the Great Depression, which was driven by increasing demand for gold after 1928, in particular by the Bank of France and by the Fed. He had no way of knowing what the US demand for gold would have been if there had not been a Fed
I got a response from Mathy that I really wasn’t expecting who tweeted with seeming annoyance
There already isn’t enough gold to back the gold standard by the end of World War I, it’s just a matter of time until a negative shock large enough sent the world into a downward spiral (my emphasis). Just took a few years after resumption of the gold standard in most countries in the mid-20s. (my emphasis)
I didn’t know exactly what to make of Mathy’s assertion that there wasn’t enough gold by the end of World War I. The gold standard was effectively abandoned at the outset of WWI and the US price level was nearly double the prewar US price level after the postwar inflation of 1919. Even after the deflation of 1920-21, US prices were still much higher in 1922 than they were in 1914. Gold production fell during World War I, but gold coins had been withdrawn from circulation and replaced with paper or token coins. The idea that there is a fixed relationship between the amount of gold and the amount of money, especially after gold coinage had been eliminated, has no theoretical basis.
So I tweeted back:
The US holdings of gold after WWI were so great that Keynes in his Tract on Monetary Reform [argued] that the great danger of a postwar gold standard was inflation because the US would certainly convert its useless holding of gold for something more useful
To which Mathy responded
The USA is not the only country though. The UK had to implement tight monetary policies to back the gold standard, and eventually had to leave the gold standard. As did the USA in 1931. The Great Depression is a global crisis.
Mathy’s response, I’m afraid, is completely wrong. Of course, the Great Depression is a global crisis. It was a global crisis, because, under the (newly restored) gold standard, the price level in gold-standard countries was determined internationally. And, holding 40% of the world’s monetary reserves of gold at the end of World War I, the US, the largest and most dynamic economy in the world, was clearly able to control, as Keynes understood, the common international price level for gold-standard countries.
The tight monetary policy imposed on the UK resulted from its decision to rejoin the gold standard at the prewar dollar parity. Had the US followed a modestly inflationary monetary policy, allowing an outflow of gold during the 1920s rather than inducing an inflow, deflation would not have been imposed on the UK.
But instead of that response, I replied as follows:
The US didn’t leave till 1933 when FDR devalued. I agree that individual countries, worried about losing gold, protected their reserves by raising interest rates. Had they all reduced rates together, the conflict between individual incentives and common interest could have been avoided.
Mathy then kept the focus on the chronology of the Great Depression, clarifying that he meant that in 1931 the US, like the UK, tightened monetary policy to remain on the gold standard, not that the US, like the UK, also left the gold standard in 1931:
The USA tightens in 1931 to stay on the gold standard. And this sets off a wave of bank failures.
Fair enough, but once the situation deteriorated after the crash and the onset of deflation, the dynamics of the financial crisis made managing the gold standard increasingly difficult, given the increasingly pessimistic expectations conditioned by deepening economic contraction and deflation. While an easier US monetary policy in the late 1920s might have avoided the catastrophe and preserved the gold standard, an easier monetary policy may, at some point, have become inconsistent with staying on the gold standard.
So my response to Mathy was more categorical than was warranted.
Again, the US did not have to tighten in 1931 to stay on the gold standard. I agree that the authorities might have sincerely thought that they needed to tighten to stay on the gold standard, but they were wrong if that’s what they thought.
Mathy was having none of it, unleashing a serious snark attack
You know better I guess, despite collapsing free gold amidst a massive speculative attack
What I ought to have said is that the gold standard was not worth saving if doing so entailed continuing deflation. If I understand him, Mathy believes that deflation after World War I was inevitable and unavoidable, because there wasn’t enough gold to sustain the gold standard after World War I. I was arguing that if there was a shortage of gold, it was because of the policies followed, often in compliance with legal gold-cover requirements, that central banks, especially the Bank of France, which started accumulating gold rapidly in 1928, and the Fed, which raised interest rates to burst a supposed stock-market bubble, were following. But as I point out below, the gold accumulation by the Bank of France far exceeded what was mandated by legal gold-cover requirements.
My point is that the gold shortage that Mathy believes doomed the gold standard was not preordained; it could have been mitigated by policies to reduce, or reverse, gold accumulation. France could have rejoined the gold standard without accumulating enormous quantities of gold in 1928-29, and the Fed did not have to raise interest rates in 1928-29, attracting additional gold to its own already massive holdings just as France was rapidly accumulating gold.
When France formally rejoined the gold standard in July 1928, the gold reserves of the Bank of France were approximately equal to its foreign-exchange holdings and its gold-reserve ratio was 39.5% slightly above the newly established legal required ratio of 35%. In subsequent years, the gold reserves of the Bank of France steadily increased while foreign exchange reserves declined. At the close of 1929, the gold-reserve ratio of the Bank of France stood at 47.3%, while its holdings of foreign exchange hardly changed. French gold holdings increased in 1930 by slightly more than in 1929, with foreign-exchange holdings almost constant; the French gold-reserve ratio at the end of 1930 was 53.2%. The 1931 increase in French gold reserves, owing to a 20% drop in foreign-exchange holdings, was even larger than in 1930, raising the gold-reserve ratio to 60.5% at the end of 1931.
Once deflation and the Great Depression started late in 1929, deteriorating rapidly in 1930, salvaging the gold standard became increasingly unlikely, with speculators becoming increasingly alert to the possibility of currency devaluation or convertibility suspension. Speculation against a pegged exchange rate is not always a good bet, but it’s rarely a bad one, any change in the pegged rate being almost surely in the direction that speculators are betting on.
But, it was still at least possible that, if gold-cover requirements for outstanding banknotes and bank reserves were relaxed or suspended, central banks could have caused a gold outflow sufficient to counter the deflationary expectations then feeding speculative demands for gold. Gold does not have many non-monetary uses, so a significant release of gold from idle central-bank reserves might have caused gold to depreciate relative to other real assets, thereby slowing, or even reversing, deflation.
Of course, deflation would not have stopped unless the deflationary expectations fueling speculative demands for gold were reversed. Different expectational responses would have led to different outcomes. More often than not, inflationary and deflationary expectations are self-fulfilling. Because expectations tend to be mutually interdependent – my inflationary expectations reinforce your inflationary expectations and vice versa — the notion of rational expectation in this context borders on the nonsensical, making outcomes inherently unpredictable. Reversing inflationary or deflationary expectations requires policy credibility and a willingness by policy makers to take policy actions – even or especially painful ones — that demonstrate their resolve.
In 1930 Ralph Hawtrey testified to the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, he recommended that the Bank of England reduce interest rates to counter the unemployment and deflation. That testimony elicited the following exchange between Hugh Pattison Macmillan, the chairman of the Committee and Hawtrey:
MACMILLAN: Suppose . . . without restricting credit . . . that gold had gone out to a very considerable extent, would that not have had very serious consequences on the international position of London?
HAWTREY: I do not think the credit of London depends on any particular figure of gold holding. . . . The harm began to be done in March and April of 1925 [when] the fall in American prices started. There was no reason why the Bank of England should have taken any action at that time so far as the question of loss of gold is concerned. . . . I believed at the time and I still think that the right treatment would have been to restore the gold standard de facto before it was restored de jure. That is what all the other countries have done. . . . I would have suggested that we should have adopted the practice of always selling gold to a sufficient extent to prevent the exchange depreciating. There would have been no legal obligation to continue convertibility into gold . . . If that course had been adopted, the Bank of England would never have been anxious about the gold holding, they would have been able to see it ebb away to quite a considerable extent with perfect equanimity, . . and might have continued with a 4 percent Bank Rate.
MACMILLAN: . . . the course you suggest would not have been consistent with what one may call orthodox Central Banking, would it?
HAWTREY: I do not know what orthodox Central Banking is.
MACMILLAN: . . . when gold ebbs away you must restrict credit as a general principle?
HAWTREY: . . . that kind of orthodoxy is like conventions at bridge; you have to break them when the circumstances call for it. I think that a gold reserve exists to be used. . . . Perhaps once in a century the time comes when you can use your gold reserve for the governing purpose, provided you have the courage to use practically all of it.
Hawtrey’s argument lay behind this response of mine to Mathy:
What else is a gold reserve is for? That’s like saying you can’t fight a fire because you’ll drain the water tank. But I agree that by 1931 there was no point in defending the gold standard and the US should have made clear the goal was reflation to the 1926 price level as FDR did in 1933.
Mathy responded:
If the Fed cuts discount rates to 0%, capital outflow will eventually exhaust gold reserves. So do you recommend a massive OMO in 1929? What specifically is the plan?
In 1927, the Fed reduced its discount rate to 3.5%; in February 1928, it was raised the rate to 4%. The rate was raised again in August 1928 and to 6% in September 1929. The only reason the Fed raised interest rates in 1928 was a misguided concern with rising stock prices. A zero interest rate was hardly necessary in 1929, nor were massive open-market operations. Had the Fed kept its interest rate at 4%, and the Bank of France not accumulated gold rapidly in 1928-29, the history of the world might well have followed a course much different from the one actually followed.
In another exchange, Mathy pointed to the 1920s adoption of the gold-exchange standard rather than a (supposedly) orthodox version of the gold standard as evidence that there wasn’t enough gold to support the gold standard after World War I. (See my post on the difference between the gold standard and the gold-exchange standard.)
Mathy: You seem to be implying there was plentiful free gold [i.e., gold held by central banks in excess of the amount required by legal gold-cover requirements] in the world after WW1 so that gold was not a constraint. How much free gold to you reckon there was?
Glasner: All of it was free. Legal reserve requirements soaked up much but nearly all the free gold
Mathy: All of it was not free, and countries suffered speculative attacks before their real or perceived minimum backings of gold were reached
Glasner: All of it would have been free but for the legal reserve requirements. Of course countries were subject to speculative attacks, when the only way for a country to avoid deflation was to leave the gold standard.
Mathy: You keep asserting an abundance of free gold, so let’s see some numbers. The lack of free gold led to the gold exchange standard where countries would back currencies with other currencies (themselves only partially backed by gold) because there wasn’t enough gold.
Glasner: The gold exchange standard was a rational response to the WWI inflation and post WWI deflation and it could have worked well if it had not been undermined by the Bank of France and gold accumulation by the US after 1928.
Mathy: Both you and [Douglas] Irwin assume that the gold inflows into France are the result of French policy. But moving your gold to France, a country committed to the gold standard, is exactly what a speculative attack on another currency at risk of leaving the gold standard looks like.
Mathy: What specific policies did the Bank if France implement in 1928 that caused gold inflows? We can just reason from accounting identities, assuming that international flows to France are about pull factors from France rather than push factors from abroad.
Mathy: So lay out your counterfactual- how much gold should the US and France have let go abroad, and how does this prevent the Depression?
Glasner: The increase in gold monetary holdings corresponds to a higher real value of gold. Under the gold standard that translates into [de]flation. Alternatively, to prevent gold outflows central banks raised rates which slowed economic activity and led to deflation.
Mathy: So give me some numbers. What does the Fed do specifically in 1928 and what does France do specifically in 1928 that avoid the debacle of 1929. You can take your time, pick this up Monday.
Mathy: The UK was suffering from high unemployment before 1928 because there wasn’t enough gold in the system. The Bank of England had been able to draw gold “from the moon” with a higher bank rate. After WW1, this was no longer possible.
Glasner: Unemployment in the UK steadily fell after 1922 and continued falling till ’29. With a fixed exchange rate against the $, and productivity in the US rising faster than in the UK, the UK needed more US inflation than it got to reach full employment. That has nothing to do with what happened after 1929.
Mathy: UK unemployment rises 1925-1926 actually, that’s incorrect and it’s near double digits throughout the 1920s. That’s not good at all and the problems start long before 1928.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and I will try to at least touch on the main points. Mathy questions whether there was enough free gold available in the 1920s, while also acknowledging that the gold-exchange standard was instituted in the 1920s precisely to avoid the demands on monetary gold reserves that would result from restoring gold coinage and imposing legal gold-cover requirements on central-bank liabilities. So, if free-gold reserves were insufficient before the Great Depression, it was because of the countries that restored the gold standard and also imposed legal gold-cover requirements, notably the French Monetary Law enacted in June 1928 that imposed a minimum 35% gold-cover requirement when convertibility of the franc was restored.
It’s true that there were speculative movements of gold into France when there were fears that countries might devalue their currencies or suspend gold convertibility, but those speculative movements did not begin until late 1930 or 1931.
Two aspects of the French restoration of gold convertibility should be mentioned. First, France pegged the dollar/franc exchange rate at $0.0392, with the intention of inducing a current-account surplus and a gold inflow. Normally that inflow would have been transitory as French prices and wages rose to the world level. But the French Monetary Law allowed the creation of new central-bank liabilities only in exchange for gold or foreign exchange convertible into gold. So French demand for additional cash balances could be satisfied only insofar as total spending in France was restricted sufficiently to ensure an inflow of gold or convertible foreign exchange. Hawtrey explained this brilliantly in Chapter two of The Art of Central Banking.
Mathy suggests that the gold-standard was adopted by countries without enough gold to operate a true gold standard, which he thinks proves that there wasn’t enough free gold available. What resort to the gold-exchange standard shows is that countries without enough gold were able to join the gold standard without first incurring the substantial cost of accumulating (either by direct gold purchases or by inducing large amounts of gold inflows by raising domestic interest rates); it does not prove that the gold-exchange standard system was inherently unstable.
Why did some countries restoring the gold standard not have enough gold? First, much of the world’s stock of gold reserves had been shipped to the US during World War I when countries were importing food, supplies and war material from the US paid with gold, or, promising to repay after the war, on credit. Second, wartime and immediate postwar inflation required increased quantities of cash to conduct transactions and satisfy liquidity demands. Third, legislated gold-cover requirements in the US, and later in France and other countries rejoining the gold standard, obligated monetary authorities to accumulate gold.
Those gold-cover requirements, forcing countries to accumulate additional gold to satisfy any increased demand by the public for cash, were an ongoing, and unnecessary, cause of rising demand for gold reserves as countries rejoined the gold standard in the 1920s, imparting an inherent deflationary bias to the gold standard. The 1922 Genoa Accords attempted to cushion this deflationary bias by allowing countries to rejoin the gold standard without making their own currencies directly convertible into gold, but by committing themselves to a fixed exchange rate against those currencies – at first the dollar and subsequently pound sterling – that were directly convertible into gold. But the accords were purely advisory and provided no effective mechanism to prevent the feared increase in the monetary demand for gold. And the French never intended to rejoin the gold standard except by making the franc convertible directly into gold.
Mathy asks how much gold I think that the French and the US should have let go to avoid the Great Depression. This is an impossible question to answer, because French gold accumulation in 1928-29, combined with increased US interest rates in 1928-29, which caused a nearly equivalent gold inflow into the US, triggered deflation in the second half of 1929 that amplified deflationary expectations, causing a stock market crash, a financial crisis and ultimately the Great Depression. Once deflation got underway, the measures needed to calm the crisis and reverse the downturn became much more extreme than those that would have prevented the downturn in the first place.
Had the Fed kept its discount rate at 3.5 to 4 percent, had France not undervalued the franc in setting its gold peg, and had France created a mechanism for domestic credit expansion instead of making an increase in the quantity of francs impossible except through a current account surplus, and had the Bank of France been willing to accumulate foreign exchange instead of requiring its foreign-exchange holdings to be redeemed for gold, the crisis would not have occurred.
Here are some quick and dirty estimates of the effect of French policy on the availability of free gold. In July 1928 when France rejoined the gold standard and enacted the Monetary Law drafted by the Bank of France, the notes and demand deposits against which the Bank was required to gold reserves totaled almost ff76 billion (=$2.98 billion). French gold holdings in July 1928 were then just under ff30 billion (=$1.17 billion), implying a reserve ratio of 39.5%. (See the discussion above.)
By the end of 1931, the total of French banknotes and deposits against which the Bank of France was required to hold gold reserves was almost ff114 billion (=$4.46 billion). French gold holdings at the end of 1931 totaled ff68.9 billion (=$2.7 billion), implying a gold-reserve ratio of 60.5%. If the French had merely maintained the 40% gold-reserve ratio of 1928, their gold holdings in 1931 would have been approximately ff45 billion (=$1.7 billion).
Thus, from July 1929 to December 1931, France absorbed $1 billion of gold reserves that would have otherwise been available to other central banks or made available for use in non-monetary applications. The idea that free gold was a constraint on central bank policy is primarily associated with the period immediately before and after the British suspension of the gold standard in September 1931, which occasioned speculative movements of gold from the US to France to avoid a US suspension of the gold standard or a devaluation. From January 1931 through August 1931, the gold holdings of the Bank of France increased by just over ff3 billion (=$78 million). From August to December of 1931 French gold holdings increased by ff10.3 billion (=$404 million).
So, insofar as a lack of free gold was a constraint on US monetary expansion via open market purchases in 1931, which is the only time period when there is a colorable argument that free gold was a constraint on the Fed, it seems highly unlikely that that constraint would have been binding had the Bank of France not accumulated an additional $1 billion of gold reserves (over and above the increased reserves necessary to maintain the 40% gold-reserve ratio of July 1928) after rejoining the gold standard. Of course, the claim that free gold was a binding constraint on Fed policy in the second half of 1931 is far from universally accepted, and I consider the claim to be pretextual.
Finally, I concede that my assertion that unemployment fell steadily in Britain after the end of the 1920-22 depression was not entirely correct. Unemployment did indeed fall substantially after 1922, but remained around 10 percent in 1924 — there are conflicting estimates based on different assumptions about how to determine whom to count as unemployed — when the pound began appreciating before the restoration of the prewar parity. Unemployment continued rising rise until 1926, but remained below the 1922 level. Unemployment then fell substantially in 1926-27, but rose again in 1928 (as gold accumulation by France and the US led to a rise in Bank rate), without reaching the 1926 level. Unemployment fell slightly in 1929 and was less than the 1924 level before the crash. See Eichengreen “Unemployment in Interwar Britain.”
I agree that unemployment had been a serious problem in Britain before 1928. But that wasn’t because sufficient gold was lacking in the system. Unemployment was a British problem caused by an overvalued exchange rate; it was not a systemic gold-standard problem.
Before World War I, when the gold standard was largely a sterling standard (just as the postwar gold standard became a dollar standard), the Bank of England had been able to “draw gold from the moon” by raising Bank rate. But the gold that had once been in the moon moved to the US during World War I. What Britain required was a US discount rate low enough to raise the world price level, thereby reducing deflationary pressure on Britain caused by overvaluation of sterling. Instead of keeping the discount rate at 3.5 – 4%, and allowing an outflow of gold, the Fed increased its discount rate, inducing a gold inflow and triggering a worldwide deflationary catastrophe. Between 1929 to 1931, British unemployment nearly doubled because of that catastrophe, not because Britain didn’t have enough gold. The US had plenty of gold and suffered equally from the catastrophe.
About six weeks ago, I was contacted by Jay Pocklington, who leads the Hawtrey Study Group, one of many study groups conducted under the auspices of the Young Scholars Initiative, of The Institute for New Economic Thinking. Jay asked if I would be willing to participate in a zoom conversation with the group about Hawtrey and my interest in, and my engagement with, his work. I was of course happy to accept the invitation, and the conversation took place about two weeks ago on May 26.
The timing was very convenient, because I had just finished working through all of the sixteen essays (both previously published and never published) to be included in a forthcoming volume to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. My limited blogging activity in recent months has been partly due to my need to work on the essays before submitting them for publication. Earlier versions of several of the essays in the volume originally appeared as, or were developed from, posts on this blog, whose tenth anniversary is about to occur four weeks hence. The working title of the volume is Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications.
Before the zoom conversation, I shared a draft of the introductory chapter, which lists eight key ideas that underlie, and are recurrent themes in, the subsequent chapters and explains how those ideas stem from my training as an aspiring young economist at the storied UCLA economics department. The first part of the zoom conversation was prompted by that introductory chapter.
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)
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.
Here is another section from my work in progress on the Smithian and Humean traditions in monetary economics. The discussion starts with a comparison of the negative view David Hume took toward banks and the positive view taken by Adam Smith which was also discussed in the previous post on the price-specie-flow mechanism. This section discusses how Smith, despite viewing banks positively, also understood that banks can be a source of disturbances as well as of efficiencies, and how he addressed that problem and how his followers who shared a positive view toward banks addressed the problem. Comments and feedback are welcome and greatly appreciated.
Hume and Smith had very different views about fractional-reserve banking and its capacity to provide the public with the desired quantity of money (banknotes and deposits) and promote international adjustment. The cash created by banks consists of liabilities on themselves that they exchange for liabilities on the public. Liabilities on the public accepted by banks become their assets, generating revenue streams with which banks cover their outlays including obligations to creditors and stockholders.
The previous post focused on the liability side of bank balance sheets, and whether there are economic forces that limit the size of those balance sheets, implying a point of equilibrium bank expansion. Believing that banks have an unlimited incentive to issue liabilities, whose face value exceeds their cost of production, Hume considered banks dangerous and inflationary. Smith disagreed, arguing that although bank money is a less costly alternative to the full-bodied money preferred by Hume, banks don’t create liabilities limitlessly, because, unless those liabilities generate corresponding revenue streams, they will be unable to redeem those liabilities, which their creditors may require of them, at will. To enhance the attractiveness of those liabilities and to increase the demand to hold them, competitive banks promise to convert those liabilities, at a stipulated rate, into an asset whose value they do not control. Under those conditions, banks have neither the incentive nor the capacity to cause inflation.
I turn now to a different topic: whether Smith’s rejection of the idea that banks are systematically biased toward overissuing liabilities implies that banks require no external control or intervention. I begin by briefly referring to Smith’s support of the real-bills doctrine and then extend that discussion to two other issues: the lender of last resort and the scope of banking.
A Real-Bills Doctrine
I have argued elsewhere that, besides sketching the outlines of Fullarton’s argument for the Law of Reflux, Adam Smith recommended that banks observe a form of the real-bills doctrine, namely that banks issue sight liabilities only in exchange for real commercial bills of short (usually 90-days) duration. Increases in the demand for money cause bank balance sheets to expand; decreases cause them to contract. Unlike Mints (1945), who identified the Law of Reflux with the real-bills doctrine, I suggested that Smith viewed the real-bills doctrine as a pragmatic policy to facilitate contractions in the size of bank balance sheets as required by the reflux of their liabilities. With the discrepancy between the duration of liabilities and assets limited by issuing sight liabilities only in exchange for short-term bills, bank balance sheets would contract automatically thereby obviating, at least in part, the liquidation of longer-term assets at depressed prices.
On this reading, Smith recognized that banking policy ought to take account of the composition of bank balance sheets, in particular, the sort of assets that banks accept as backing for the sight liabilities that they issue. I would also emphasize that on this interpretation, Smith did not believe, as did many later advocates of the doctrine, that lending on the security of real bills is sufficient to prevent the price level from changing. Even if banks have no systematic incentive to overissue their liabilities, unless those liabilities are made convertible into an asset whose value is determined independently of the banks, the value of their liabilities is undetermined. Convertibility is how banks anchor the value of their liabilities, thereby increasing the attractiveness of those liabilities to the public and the willingness of the public to accept and hold them.
But Smith’s support for the real-bills doctrine indicates that, while understanding the equilibrating tendencies of competition on bank operations, he also recognized the inherent instability of banking caused by fluctuations in the value and liquidity of their assets. Smith’s support for the real-bills doctrine addressed one type of instability: the maturity mismatch between banks’ assets and liabilities. But there are other sources of instability, which may require further institutional or policy measures beyond the general laws of property and contract whose application and enforcement, in Smith’s view, generally sufficed for the self-interested conduct of private firms to lead to socially benign outcomes.
In the remainder of this section, I consider two other methods of addressing the vulnerability of bank assets to sudden losses of value: (1) the creation or empowerment of a lender of last resort capable of lending to illiquid, but solvent, banks possessing good security (valuable assets) as collateral against which to borrow, and (2) limits beyond the real-bills doctrine over the permissible activities undertaken by commercial banks.
B Lender of Last Resort
Although the real-bills doctrine limits the exposure of bank balance sheets to adverse shocks on the value of long-term liabilities, even banks whose liabilities were issued in exchange for short-term real bills of exchange may be unable to meet all demands for redemption in periods of extreme financial distress, when debtors cannot sell their products at the prices they expected and cannot meet their own obligations to their creditors. If banks are called upon to redeem their liabilities, banks may be faced with a choice between depleting their own cash reserves, when they are most needed, or liquidating other assets at substantial, if not catastrophic, losses.
Smith’s version of the real-bills doctrine addressed one aspect of balance-sheet risk, but the underlying problem is deeper and more complicated than the liquidity issue that concerned Smith. The assets accepted by banks in exchange for their liabilities are typically not easily marketable, so if those assets must be shed quickly to satisfy demands for payment, banks’ solvency may be jeopardized by consequent capital losses. Limiting portfolios to short-term assets limits exposure to such losses, but only when the disturbances requiring asset liquidation affect only a relatively small number of banks. As the number of affected banks increases, their ability to counter the disturbance is impaired, as the interbank market for credit starts to freeze up or break down entirely, leaving them unable to offer short-term relief to, or receive it from, other momentarily illiquid banks. It is then that emergency lending by a lender of last resort to illiquid, but possibly still solvent, banks is necessary.
What causes a cluster of expectational errors by banks in exchanging their liabilities for assets supplied by their customers that become less valuable than they were upon acceptance? Are financial crises that result in, or are caused by, asset write downs by banks caused by random clusters of errors by banks, or are there systematic causes of such errors? Does the danger lie in the magnitude of the errors or in the transmission mechanism?
Here, too, the Humean and Smithian traditions seem to be at odds, offering different answers to problems, or, if not answers, at least different approaches to problems. Focusing on the liability side of bank balance sheets, the Humean tradition emphasizes the expansion of bank lending and the consequent creation of banknotes or deposits as the main impulse to macroeconomic fluctuations, a boom-bust or credit cycle triggered by banks’ lending to finance either business investment or consumer spending. Despite their theoretical differences, both Austrian business-cycle theory and Friedmanite Monetarism share a common intellectual ancestry, traceable by way of the Currency School to Hume, identifying the source of business-cycle fluctuations in excessive growth in the quantity of money.
The eclectic Smithian tradition accommodates both monetary and non-monetary business-cycle theories, but balance-sheet effects on banks are more naturally accommodated within the Smithian tradition than the Humean tradition with its focus on the liabilities not the assets of banks. At any rate, more research is necessary before we can decide whether serious financial disturbances result from big expectational errors or from contagion effects.
The Great Depression resulted from a big error. After the steep deflation and depression of 1920-22, followed by a gradual restoration of the gold standard, fears of further deflation were dispelled and steady economic expansion, especially in the United States, resulted. Suddenly in 1929, as France and other countries rejoined the gold standard, the fears voiced by Hawtrey and Cassel that restoring the gold standard could have serious deflationary consequences appeared increasingly more likely to be realized. Real signs of deflation began to appear in the summer of 1929, and in the fall the stock market collapsed. Rather than use monetary policy to counter incipient deflation, policy makers and many economists argued that deflation was part of the solution not the problem. And the Depression came.
It is generally agreed that the 2008 financial crisis that triggered the Little Depression (aka Great Recession) was largely the result of a housing bubble fueled by unsound mortgage lending by banks and questionable underwriting practices in packaging and marketing of mortgage-backed securities. However, although the housing bubble seems to have burst the spring of 2007, the crisis did not start until September 2008.
It is at least possible, as I have argued (Glasner 2018) that, despite the financial fragility caused by the housing bubble and unsound lending practices that fueled the bubble, the crisis could have been avoided but for a reflexive policy tightening by the Federal Reserve starting in 2007 that caused a recession starting in December 2007 and gradually worsening through the summer of 2008. Rather than ease monetary policy as the recession deepened, the Fed, distracted by rising headline inflation owing to rising oil prices that summer, would not reduce its interest-rate target further after March 2008. If my interpretation is correct, the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Little Depression (aka Great Recession) were as much caused by bad monetary policy as by the unsound lending practices and mistaken expectations by lenders.
It is when all agents are cash constrained that a lender of last resort that is able to provide the liquidity that the usual suppliers of liquidity cannot provide, but are instead demanding, is necessary to avoid a systemic breakdown. In 2008, the Fed was unwilling to satisfy demands for liquidity until the crisis had deteriorated to the point of a worldwide collapse. In the nineteenth century, Thornton and Fullarton understood that the Bank of England was uniquely able to provide liquidity in such circumstances, recommending that it lend freely in periods of financial stress.
That policy was not viewed favorably either by Humean supporters of the Currency Principle, opposed to all forms of fractional-reserve banking, or by Smithian supporters of free banking who deplored the privileged central-banking position granted to the Bank of England. Although the Fed in 2008 acknowledged that it was both a national and international lender of last resort, it was tragically slow to take the necessary actions to end the crisis after allowing it to spiral nearly out of control.
While cogent arguments have been made that a free-banking alternative to the lender-of-last-resort services of the Bank of England might have been possible in the nineteenth century,[2] even a free-banking system would require a mechanism for handling periods of financial stress. Free-banking supporters argue that bank clearinghouses have emerged spontaneously in the absence of central banks, and could provide the lender-of-last resort services provided by central banks. But, insofar as bank clearinghouses would take on the lender-of-last-resort function, which involves some intervention and supervision of bank activities by either the clearinghouse or the central bank, the same anticompetitive or cartelistic objections to the provision of lender-of-last-resort services by central banks also would apply to the provision of those services by clearinghouses. So, the tension between libertarian, free-market principles and lender-of-last-resort services would not necessarily be eliminated bank clearinghouses instead of central banks provided those services.
This is an appropriate place to consider Walter Bagehot’s contribution to the lender-of-last-resort doctrine. Building on the work of Thornton and Fullarton, Bagehot formulated the classic principle that, during times of financial distress, the Bank of England should lend freely at a penalty rate to banks on good security. Bagehot, himself, admitted to a certain unease in offering this advice, opining that it was regrettable that the Bank of England achieved a pre-eminent position in the British banking system, so that a decentralized banking system, along the lines of the Scottish free-banking system, could have evolved. But given the historical development of British banking, including the 1844 Bank Charter Act, Bagehot, an eminently practical man, had no desire to recommend radical reform, only to help the existing system operate as smoothly as it could be made to operate.
But the soundness of Bagehot’s advice to lend freely at a penalty rate is dubious. In a financial crisis, the market rate of interest primarily reflects a liquidity premium not an expected real return on capital, the latter typically being depressed in a crisis. Charging a penalty rate to distressed borrowers in a crisis only raises the liquidity premium. Monetary policy ought to aim to reduce, not to increase, that premium. So Bagehot’s advice, derived from a misplaced sense of what is practical and prudent and financially sound, rather than from sound analysis, was far from sound.
Under the gold standard, or under any fixed-exchange-rate regime, a single country has an incentive to raise interest rates above the rates of other countries to prevent a gold outflow or attract an inflow. Under these circumstances, a failure of international cooperation can lead to competitive rate increases as monetary authorities scramble to maintain or increase their gold reserves. In testimony to the Macmillan Commission in 1930, Ralph Hawtrey masterfully described the obligation of a central bank in a crisis. Here is his exchange with the Chairman of the Commission Hugh Macmillan:
MACMILLAN: Suppose . . . without restricting credit . . . that gold had gone out to a very considerable extent, would that not have had very serious consequences on the international position of London?
HAWTREY: I do not think the credit of London depends on any particular figure of gold holding. . . . The harm began to be done in March and April of 1925 [when] the fall in American prices started. There was no reason why the Bank of England should have taken ny action at that time so far as the question of loss of gold is concerned. . . . I believed at the time and I still think that the right treatment would have been to restore the gold standard de facto before it was restored de jure. That is what all the other countries have done. . . . I would have suggested that we should have adopted the practice of always selling gold to a sufficient extent to prevent the exchange depreciating. There would have been no legal obligation to continue convertibility into gold . . . If that course had been adopted, the Bank of England would never have been anxious about the gold holding, they would have been able to see it ebb away to quite a considerable extent with perfect equanimity, . . and might have continued with a 4 percent Bank Rate.
MACMILLAN: . . . the course you suggest would not have been consistent with what one may call orthodox Central Banking, would it?
HAWTREY: I do not know what orthodox Central Banking is.
MACMILLAN: . . . when gold ebbs away you must restrict credit as a general principle?
HAWTREY: . . . that kind of orthodoxy is like conventions at bridge; you have to break them when the circumstances call for it. I think that a gold reserve exists to be used. . . . Perhaps once in a century the time comes when you can use your gold reserve for the governing purpose, provided you have the courage to use practically all of it.
Hawtrey here was echoing Fullarton’s insight that there is no rigid relationship between the gold reserves held by the Bank of England and the total quantity of sight liabilities created by the British banking system. Rather, he argued, the Bank should hold an ample reserve sufficient to satisfy the demand for gold in a crisis when a sudden and temporary demand for gold had to be accommodated. That was Hawtrey’s advice, but not Bagehot’s, whose concern was about banks’ moral hazard and imprudent lending in the expectation of being rescued in a crisis by the Bank of England. Indeed, moral hazard is a problem, but in a crisis it is a secondary problem, when, as Hawtrey explained, alleviating the crisis, not discouraging moral hazard, must be the primary concern of the lender of last resort.
C Scope of Banking
Inclined to find remedies for financial distress in structural reforms limiting the types of assets banks accept in exchange for their sight liabilities, Smith did not recommend a lender of last resort.[3] Another method of reducing risk, perhaps more in tune with the Smithian real-bills doctrine than a lender of last resort, is to restrict the activities of banks that issue banknotes and deposits.
In Anglophone countries, commercial banking generally evolved as separate and distinct from investment banking. It was only during the Great Depression and the resulting wave of bank failures that the combination of commercial and investment banking was legally prohibited by the Glass-Steagall Act, eventually repealed in 1999. On the Continent, where commercial banking penetrated less deeply into the fabric of economic and commercial life than in Anglophone countries, commercial banking developed more or less along with investment banking in what are called universal banks.
Whether the earlier, and more widespread, adoption of commercial banking in Anglophone countries than on the Continent advanced the idea that no banking institution should provide both commercial- and investment-banking services is not a question about which I offer a conjecture, but it seems a topic worthy of study. The Glass-Steagall Act, which enforced that separation after being breached early in the twentieth century, a breach thought by some to have contributed to US bank failures in the Great Depression, was based on a presumption against combining and investment-banking in a single institution. But even apart from the concerns that led to enactment of Glass-Steagall, limiting the exposure of commercial banks, which supply most of the cash held by the public, to the balance-sheet risk associated with investment-banking activities seems reasonable. Moreover, the adoption of government deposit insurance after the Great Depression as well as banks’ access to the discount window of the central bank may augment the moral hazard induced by deposit insurance and a lender of last resort, offsetting potential economies of scope associated with combining commercial and investment banking.
Although legal barriers to the combination of commercial and investment banking have long been eliminated, proposals for “narrow banking” that would restrict the activities undertaken by commercial banks continue to be made. Two different interpretations of narrow banking – one Smithian and one Humean – are possible.
The Humean concern about banking was that banks are inherently disposed to overissue their liabilities. The Humean response to the concern has been to propose 100-percent reserve banking, a comprehensive extension of the 100-percent marginal reserve requirement on the issue of banknotes imposed by the Bank Charter Act. Such measures could succeed, as some supporters (Simons 1936) came to realize, only if accompanied by a radical change the financial practices and arrangements on which all debt contracts are based. It is difficult to imagine that the necessary restructuring of economic activity would ever be implemented or tolerated.
The Humean concern was dismissed by the Smithian tradition, recognizing that banks, even if unconstrained by reserve requirements, have no incentive to issue liabilities without limit. The Smithian concern was whether banks could cope with balance-sheet risks after unexpected losses in the value of their assets. Although narrow banking proposals are a legitimate and possibly worthwhile response to that concern, the acceptance by central banks of responsibility to act as a lender of last resort and widespread government deposit insurance to dampen contagion effects have taken the question of narrowing or restricting the functions of money-creating banks off the table. Whether a different strategy for addressing the systemic risks associated with banks’ creation of money by relying solely on deposit insurance and a lender of last resort is a question that still deserves thoughtful attention.
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.
Uneasy Money 