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Mises’s Unwitting Affirmation of the Hawtrey-Cassel Explanation of the Great Depression

Published July 3, 2015 Bank of France , Federal Reserve , gold standard , gold-exchange standard , Great Depression , Ludwig von Mises 12 Comments
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In looking up some sources for my previous post on the gold-exchange standard, I checked, as I like to do from time to time, my old copy of The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. Mises published The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912 (in German of course) when he was about 31 years old, a significant achievement. In 1924 he published a second enlarged edition addressing many issues that became relevant in the aftermath the World War and the attempts then underway to restore the gold standard. So one finds in the 1934 English translation of the 1924 German edition a whole section of Part III, chapter 6 devoted to the Gold-Exchange Standard. I noticed that I had dog-eared the section, which presumably means that when I first read the book I found the section interesting in some way, but I did not write any notes in the margin, so I am not sure what it was that I found interesting. I can’t even remember when I read the book, but there are many passages underlined throughout the book, so I am guessing that I did read it from cover to cover. Luckily, I wrote my name and the year (1971) in which I bought the book on the inside of the front cover, so I am also guessing that I read the book before I became aware of the Hawtrey Cassel explanation of the Great Depression. But it seems clear to me that whatever it was that I found interesting about the section on the gold-exchange standard, it didn’t make a lasting impression on me, because I don’t think that I ever reread that section until earlier this week. So let’s go through Mises’s discussion and see what we find.

Wherever inflation has thrown the monetary system into confusion, the primary aim of currency policy has been to bring the printing presses to a standstill. Once that is done, once it has at last been learned that even the policy of raising the objective exchange-value of money has undesirable consequences, and once it is seen that the chief thing is to stabilize the value of money, then attempts are made to establish a gold-exchange standard as quickly as possible.

This seems to be reference to the World War I inflation and the somewhat surprising post-war inflation of 1919, which caused most countries to want to peg their currencies against the dollar, then the only major country with a currency convertible into gold. Mises continues:

This, for example, is what occurred in Austria at the end of 1922 and since then, at least for the time being, the dollar rate in that country has been fixed. But in existing circumstances, invariability of the dollar rate means invariability of the price of gold also. Thus Austria has a dollar-exchange standard and so, indirectly, a gold-exchange standard. That is the currency system that seems to be the immediate aim in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and many other European countries. Nowadays, European aspirations in the sphere of currency policy are limited to a return to the gold standard. This is quite understandable, for the gold standard previously functioned on the whole satisfactorily; it is true that it did not secure the unattainable ideal of a money with an invariable objective exchange value, but it did preserve the monetary system from the influence of governments and changing policies.

Yet the gold-standard system was already undermined before the war. The first step was the abolition of the physical use of gold in individual payments and the accumulation of the stocks of gold in the vaults of the great banks-of-issue. The next step was the adoption of the practice by a series of States of holding the gold reserves of the central banks-of-issue (or the redemption funds that took their place), not in actual gold, but in various sorts of foreign claims to gold. Thus it came about that the greater part of the stock of gold that was used for monetary purposes was gradually accumulated in a few large banks-of-issue; and so these banks became the central reserve-banks of the world, as previously the central banks-of-issue had become central reserve-banks for individual countries.

Mises is leaving out a lot here. Many countries were joining gold standard in the last quarter of the 19th century, when the gold standard became an international system. The countries adopting the gold standard did not have a gold coinage; for them to introduce a gold coinage, as Mises apparently would have been wanted, was then prohibitively costly. But gold reserves were still piling up in many central banks because of laws and regulations requiring central banks to hold gold reserves against banknotes. If gold coinages would have been introduced in addition to the gold gold reserves being accumulated as reserves against banknotes, the spread of gold standard through much of the world in the last quarter of the 19th century would have drastically accentuated the deflationary trends that marked most of the period from 1872 to 1896.

The War did not create this development; it merely hastened it a little.

Actually a lot. But we now come to the key passage.

Neither has the development yet reached the stage when all the newly-produced gold that is not absorbed into industrial use flows to a single centre. The Bank of England and the central banks-of-issue of some other States still control large stocks of gold; there are still several of them that take up part of the annual output of gold. Yet fluctuations in the price of gold are nowadays essentially dependent on the policy followed by the Federal Reserve Board. If the United States did not absorb gold to the extent to which it does, the price of gold would fall and the gold-prices of commodities would rise. Since, so long as the dollar represents a fixed quantity of gold, the United States admits the surplus gold and surrenders commodities for gold to an unlimited extent, a rapid fall in the value of gold has hitherto been avoided.

Mises’s explanation here is rather confused, because he neglects to point out that the extent to which gold was flowing into the Federal Reserve was a function, among other things, of the credit policy adopted by the Fed. The higher the interest rate, the more gold would flow into the Fed and, thus, the lower the international price level. Mises makes it sound as if there was a fixed demand for gold by the rest of the world and the US simply took whatever was left over. That was a remarkable misunderstanding on Mises’s part.

But this policy of the United States, which involves considerable sacrifices, might one day be changed. Variations in the price of gold would then occur and this would be bound to give rise in other gold countries to the question of whether it would not be better in order to avoid further rises in prices to dissociate the currency standard from gold.

Note the ambiguous use of the term “price of gold.” The nominal price of gold was fixed by convertibility, so what Mises meant was the real price of gold, with a fixed nominal price. It would have been less ambiguous if the term “value of gold” had been used here and in the rest of the passage instead of “price of gold.” I don’t know if Mises or his translator was at fault.

Just as Sweden attempted for a time to raise the krone above its old gold parity by closing the Mint to gold, so other countries that are now still on the gold standard or intend to return to it might act similarly. This would mean a further drop in the price of gold and a further reduction of the usefulness of gold for monetary purposes. If we disregard the Asiatic demand for money, we might even now without undue exaggeration say that gold has ceased to be a commodity the fluctuations in the price of which are independent of government influence. Fluctuations in the price of gold are nowadays substantially dependent on the behaviour of one government, viz. that of the United States of America.

By George, he’s got it! The value of gold depends mainly on the Fed! Or, to be a bit more exact, on how much gold is being held by the Fed and by the other central banks. The more gold they hold, the more valuable in real terms gold becomes, which means that, with a fixed nominal price of gold, the lower are the prices of all other commodities. The point of the gold-exchange standard was thus to reduce the world’s monetary demand for gold, thereby limiting the tendency of gold to appreciate and for prices in terms of gold to fall. Indeed, Mises here cites in a footnote none other than the villainous John Maynard Keynes himself (Tract on Monetary Reform) where he also argued that after World War I, the value of gold was determined by government policy, especially that of the Federal Reserve. Mises goes on to explain:

All that could not have been foreseen in this result of a long process of development is the circumstance that the fluctuations in the price of gold should have become dependent upon the policy of one government only. That the United States should have achieved such an economic predominance over other countries as it now has, and that it alone of all the countries of great economic importance should have retained the gold standard while the others (England, France, Germany, Russia, and the rest) have at least temporarily abandoned it – that is a consequence of what took place during the War. Yet the matter would not be essentially different if the price of gold was dependent not on the policy of the United States alone, but on those of four or five other governments as well. Those protagonists of the gold-exchange standard who have recommended it as a general monetary system and not merely as an expedient for poor countries, have overlooked this fact. They have not observed that the gold-exchange standard must at last mean depriving gold of that characteristic which is the most important from the point of view of monetary policy – its independence of government influence upon fluctuations in its value. The gold-exchange standard has not been recommended or adopted with the object of dethroning gold. All that Ricardo wanted was to reduce the cost of the monetary system. In many countries which from the last decade of the nineteenth century onward have wished to abandon the silver or credit-money standard, the gold-exchange standard rather than a gold standard with an actual gold currency has been adopted in order to prevent the growth of a new demand for gold from causing a rise in its price and a fall in the gold-prices of commodities. But whatever the motives may have been by which the protagonists of the gold-exchange standard have been led, there can be no doubt concerning the results of its increasing popularity.

If the gold-exchange standard is retained, the question must sooner or later arise as to whether it would not be better to substitute for it a credit-money standard whose fluctuations were more susceptible to control than those of gold. For if fluctuations in the price of gold are substantially dependent on political intervention, it is inconceivable why government policy should still be restricted at all and not given a free hand altogether, since the amount of this restriction is not enough to confine arbitrariness in price policy within narrow limits. The cost of additional gold for monetary purposes that is borne by the whole world might well be saved, for it no longer secures the result of making the monetary system independent of government intervention. If this complete government control is not desired, there remains one alternative only: an attempt must be made to get back from the gold-exchange standard to the actual use of gold again.

Thus, we see that in 1924 none other than the legendary Ludwig von Mises was explaining that the value of gold had come to depend primarily on the policy decisions of the Federal Reserve and the other leading central banks. He also understood that a process of deflation could have terrible consequences if free-market forces were not operating to bring about an adjustment of market prices to the rising value of gold. Recognizing the potentially disastrous consequences of a scramble for gold by the world’s central banks as they rejoined the gold standard, Hawtrey and Cassel called for central-bank cooperation to limit the increase in the demand for gold and to keep the value of gold stable. In 1924, at any rate, Mises, too, recognized that there could be a destabilizing deflationary increase in the demand for gold by central banks. But when the destabilizing deflationary increase actually started to happen in 1927 when the Bank of France began cashing in its foreign-exchange reserves for gold, triggering similar demands by other central banks in the process of adopting the gold standard, the gold standard started collapsing under the weight  of deflation. But, as far as I know, Mises never said a word about the relationship between gold demand and the Great Depression.

Instead, in the mythology of Austrian business-cycle theory, it was all the fault of the demonic Benjamin Strong for reducing the Fed’s discount rate from 5% to 3.5% in 1927 (and back to only 4% in 1928) and of the duplicitous Montagu Norman for reducing Bank Rate from 5% to 4.5% in 1927-28 rather than follow the virtuous example of the Bank of France in abandoning the cursed abomination of the gold-exchange standard.

Gold Standard or Gold-Exchange Standard: What’s the Difference?

Published July 1, 2015 David Ricardo , gold standard , gold-exchange standard , Keynes 27 Comments
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In recent posts (here and here) I have mentioned both the gold standard and the gold-exchange standard, a dichotomy that suggests that the two are somehow distinct, and I noted that the Genoa Conference of 1922 produced a set of resolutions designed to ensure that the gold standard, whose restoration was the goal of the conference, would be a gold-exchange standard rather than the traditional pre-World War I gold standard. I also mentioned that the great American central banker Benjamin Strong had stated that he was not particularly fond of the gold-exchange standard favored by the Genoa Resolutions. So there seems to be some substantive difference between a gold standard (of the traditional type) and a gold-exchange standard. Wherein lies the difference? And what, if anything, can we infer from that difference about how the two standards operate?

Let’s begin with some basics. Suppose there’s a pure metallic (gold) currency. All coins that circulate are gold and their value reflects the weight and fineness of the gold, except that the coins are stamped so that they don’t have to be weighed or assayed; they trade at their face value. Inevitably under such systems, there’s a problem with the concurrent circulation of old and worn coins at par with newly minted coins. Because they have the same face value, it is old coins that remain in circulation, while the new coins are hoarded, leading to increasingly overvalued (underweight) coins in circulation. This observation gives rise to Gresham’s Law: bad (i.e., old and worn) money drives out the good (i.e., new full-weight) money. The full-weight coin is the standard, but it tends not to circulate.

When the currency consists entirely of full-weight gold coins, it is redundant to speak of a gold standard. The term “gold standard” has significance only if the coin represents a value greater than the value of its actual metallic content. When underweight coins can circulate at par, because they are easily exchangeable for coins of full weight, the coinage is up to standard. If coins don’t circulate at par, the coinage is debased; it is substandard.

Despite the circulation of gold coins for millenia, the formal idea of a gold standard did not come into being until the eighteenth century, when, because the English mint was consistently overvaluing gold at a ratio relative to silver of approximately 15.5 to 1, while on the Continent, the gold-silver ratio was about 15 to 1, inducing an influx of gold into England. The pound sterling had always been a silver coin, like the shilling (20 shillings in a pound), but by the end of the 17th century, debasement of the silver coinage led to the hoarding and export of full weight silver coins. In the 17th century, the British mint had begun coining a golden guinea, originally worth a pound, but, subsequently, reflecting the premium on gold, guineas traded in the market at a premium.

In 1717, the master of the mint — a guy named Isaac Newton who, in his youth, had made something of a name for himself as a Cambridge mathematician — began to mint a golden pound at a mint price of £3 17 shillings and 10.5 pence (12 pence in a shilling) for an ounce of gold. The mint stopped minting guineas, which continued to circulate, and had an official value of 21 shillings (£1 1s.). In theory the pound remained a weight of silver, but in practice the pound had become a golden coin whose value was determined by the mint price chosen by that Newton guy.

Meanwhile the Bank of England based in London and what were known as country banks (because they operated outside the London metro area) as well as the Scottish banks operating under the Scottish legal regime that was retained after the union of England with Scotland, were all issuing banknotes denominated in sterling, meaning that they were convertible into an equivalent value of metallic (now golden) pounds. So legally the banks were operating under a pound standard not a gold standard. The connection to gold was indirect, reflecting the price at which Isaac Newton had decided that the mint would coin gold into pounds, not a legal definition of the pound.

The pound did not become truly golden until Parliament passed legislation in 1819 (The Resumption Act) after the Napoleonic Wars. The obligation of banks to convert their notes into coinage was suspended in 1797, and Bank of England notes were made legal tender. With the indirect link between gold and paper broken, the value of gold in terms of inconvertible pounds rose above the old mint price. Anticipating the resumption of gold payments, David Ricardo in 1816 penned what he called Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency in which he proposed making all banknotes convertible into a fixed weight of gold, while reducing the metallic content of the coinage to well below their face value. By abolishing the convertibility of banknotes into gold coin, but restricting the convertibility of bank notes to gold bullion, Ricardo was proposing what is called a gold-bullion standard, as opposed to a gold-specie standard when banknotes are convertible into coin. Ricardo reasoned that by saving the resources tied up in a gold coinage, his proposal would make the currency economical, and, by making banknotes convertible into gold, his proposals would ensure that the currency was secure. Evidently too radical for the times, Ricardo’s proposals did not gain acceptance, and a gold coinage was brought back into circulation at the Newtonian mint price.

But as Keynes observed in his first book on economics Indian Currency and Finance published in 1913 just before the gold standard collapsed at the start of World War I, gold coinage was not an important feature of the gold standard as it operated in its heday.

A gold standard is the rule now in all parts of the world; but a gold currency is the exception. The “sound currency” maxims of twenty or thirty years ago are still often repeated, but they have not been successful, nor ought they to have been, in actually influencing affairs. I think that I am right in saying that Egypt is now the only country in the world in which actual gold coins are the principle medium of exchange.

The reasons for this change are easily seen. It has been found that the expense of a gold circulation is insupportable, and that large economics can be safely effected by the use of some cheaper substitute; and it has been found further that gold in the pockets of the people is not in the least available at a time of crisis or to meet a foreign drain. For these purposes the gold resources of a country must be centralized.

This view has long been maintained by economists. Ricardo’s proposals for a sound and economical currency were based on the principle of keeping gold out of actual circulation. Mill argued that “gold wanted for exportation is almost invariably drawn from the reserves of banks, and is never likely to be taken from the outside circulation while the banks remain solvent.” . . .

A preference for a tangible gold currency is no longer more than a relic of a time when Governments were less trustworthy in these matters than they are now, and when it was the fashion to imitate uncritically the system which had been established in England and had seemed to work so well during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. (pp. 71-73)

Besides arguing against the wastefulness of a gold coinage, Keynes made a further argument about the holding of gold reserves as a feature of the gold standard, namely that, as a matter of course, there are economic incentives (already recognized by Ricardo almost a century earlier) for banks to economize on their holdings of gold reserves with which to discharge their foreign obligations by holding foreign debt instruments which also serve to satisfy foreign claims upon themselves while also generating a pecuniary return. A decentralized informal clearinghouse evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, in which banks held increasing amounts of foreign instruments with which to settle mutual claims upon each other, thereby minimizing the need for actual gold shipments to settle claims. Thus, for purposes of discharging foreign indebtedness, the need for banks to hold gold reserves became less urgent. The holding of foreign-exchange reserves and the use of those reserves to discharge foreign obligations as they came due is the defining characteristic of what was known as the gold-exchange standard.

To say that the Gold-Exchange Standard merely carries somewhat further the currency arrangements which several European countries have evolved during the last quarter of a century is not, of course, to justify it. But if we see that the Gold-Exchange Standard is not, in the currency world of to-day, anomalous, and that it is in the main stream of currency evolution, we shall have a wider experience, on which to draw in criticising it, and may be in a better position to judge of its details wisely. Much nonsense is talked about a gold standard’s properly carrying a gold currency with it. If we mean by a gold currency a state of affairs in which gold is the principal or even, in the aggregate, a very important medium of exchange, no country in the world has such a thing. [fn. Unless it be Egypt.] Gold is an international, but not a local currency. The currency problem of each country is to ensure that they shall run no risk of being unable to put their hands on international currency when they need it, and to waste as small a proportion of their resources on holdings of actual gold as is compatible with this. The proper solution for each country must be governed by the nature of its position in the international money market and of its relations to the chief financial centres, and by those national customs in matters of currency which it may be unwise to disturb. It is as an attempt to solve this problem that the Gold Exchange Standard ought to be judged. . . .

The Gold-Exchange Standard arises out of the discovery that, so long as gold is available for payments of international indebtedness at an approximately constant rate in terms of the national currency, it is a matter of comparative indifference whether it actually forms the national currency.

The Gold-Exchange Standard may be said to exist when gold does not circulate in a country to an appreciable extent, when the local currency is not necessarily redeemable in gold, but when the Government or Central Bank makes arrangements for the provision of foreign remittances in gold at a fix, ed maximum rate in terms of the local currency, the reserves necessary to provide these remittances being kept to a considerable extent abroad. . . .

Its theoretical advantages were first set forth by Ricardo at the time of the Bullionist Controversy. He laid it down that a currency is in its most perfect state when it consists of a cheap material, but having an equal value with the gold it professes to represent; and he suggested that convertibility for the purposes of the foreign exchanges should be ensured by the tendering on demand of gold bars (not coin) in exchange for notes, — so that gold might be available for purposes of export only, and would be prevented from entering into the internal circulation of the country. (pp. 29-31)

The Gold-Exchange Standard in the form in which it has been adopted in India is justly known as the Lindsay scheme. It was proposed and advocated from the earliest discussions, when the Indian currency problem first became prominent, by Mr. A. M. Lindsay, Deputy-Secretary of the Bank of Bengal, who always maintained that “they must adopt my scheme despite themselves.” His first proposals were made in 1876 and 1878. They were repeated in 1885 and again in 1892, when he published a pamphlet entitled Ricardo’s Exchange Remedy. Finally he explained his views in detail to the Committee of 1898.

Lindsay’s scheme was severely criticized both by Government officials and leading financiers. Lord Farrer described it as “far too clever for the ordinary English mind with its ineradicable prejudice for an immediately tangible gold backing of all currencies.” Lord Rothschild, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Sir Samuel Montagu (the late Lord Swythling) all gave evidence before the Committee that any system without a visible gold currency would be looked on with distrust. Mr. Alfred de Rothschild went so far as to say that “in fact a gold standard without a gold currency seemed to him an utter impossibility.” Financiers of this type will not admit the feasibility of anything until it has been demonstrated to them by practical experience. (pp. 34-35)

Finally, as to the question of what difference, aside from convenience, does it make whether a country operates on a full-fledged honest to goodness gold standard or a cheap imitation gold-exchange standard, I conclude with another splendid quotation from Keynes.

But before we pass to these several features of the Indian system, it will be worth while to emphasise two respects in which this system is not peculiar. In the first place a system, in which the rupee is maintained at 1s. 4d. by regulation, does not affect the level of prices differently from the way in which it would be affected by a system in which the rupee was a gold coin worth 1s 4d., except in a very indirect and unimportant way to be explained in a moment. So long as the rupee is worth 1s. 4d. in gold, no merchant or manufacturer considers of what material it is made when he fixes the price of his product. The indirect effect on prices, due to the rupee’s being silver, is similar to the effect of the use of any medium of exchange, such as cheques or notes, which economises the use of gold. If the use of gold is economised in any country, gold throughout the world is less valuable – gold prices, that is to say, are higher. But as this effect is shared by the whole world, the effect on prices in any country of economies in the use of gold made by that country is likely to be relatively slight. In short, a policy which led to a greater use of gold in India would tend, by increasing the demand for gold in the world’s markets, somewhat to lower the level of world prices as measured in gold; but it would not cause any alteration worth considering in the relative rates of exchange of Indian and non-Indian commodities.

In the second place, although it is true that the maintenance of the rupee at or near 1s. 4d. is due to regulation, it is not true, when once 1s. 4d. rather than some other gold value has been determined, that the volume of currency in circulation depends in the least upon the policy of the Government or the caprice of an official. This part of the system is as perfectly automatic as in any other country. (pp. 11-13)

The Great, but Misguided, Benjamin Strong Goes Astray in 1928

Published June 24, 2015 Bank of France , Cassel , gold standard , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Irving Fisher , Keynes , Ron Batchelder 59 Comments
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In making yet further revisions to our paper on Hawtrey and Cassel, Ron Batchelder and I keep finding interesting new material that sheds new light on the thinking behind the policies that led to the Great Depression. Recently I have been looking at the digital archive of Benjamin Strong’s papers held at the Federal Reserve Bank. Benjamin Strong was perhaps the greatest central banker who ever lived. Milton Friedman, Charles Kindleberger, Irving Fisher, and Ralph Hawtrey – and probably others as well — all believed that if Strong, Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1914 to 1928 and effectively the sole policy maker for the entire system, had not died in 1928, the Great Depression would have been avoided entirely or, at least, would have been far less severe and long-lasting. My own view had been that Strong had generally understood the argument of Hawtrey and Cassel about the importance of economizing on gold, and, faced with the insane policy of the Bank of France, would have accommodated that policy by allowing an outflow of gold from the immense US holdings, rather than raise interest rates and induce an inflow of gold into the US in 1929, as happened under his successor, George Harrison.

Having spent some time browsing through the papers, I am sorry — because Strong’s truly remarkable qualities are evident in his papers — to say that the papers also show to my surprise and disappointment that Strong was very far from being a disciple of Hawtrey or Cassel or of any economist, and he seems to have been entirely unconcerned in 1928 about the policy of the Bank of France or the prospect of a deflationary run-up in the value of gold even though his friend Montague Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, was beginning to show some nervousness about “a scramble for gold,” while other observers were warning of a deflationary collapse. I must admit that, at least one reason for my surprise is that I had naively accepted the charges made by various Austrians – most notably Murray Rothbard – that Strong was a money manager who had bought into the dangerous theories of people like Irving Fisher, Ralph Hawtrey and J. M. Keynes that central bankers should manipulate their currencies to stabilize the price level. The papers I have seen show that, far from being a money manager and a price-level stabilizer, Strong expressed strong reservations about policies for stabilizing the price level, and was more in sympathy with the old-fashioned gold standard than with the gold-exchange standard — the paradigm promoted by Hawtrey and Cassel and endorsed at the Genoa Conference of 1922. Rothbard’s selective quotation from the memorandum summarizing Strong’s 1928 conversation with Sir Arthur Salter, which I will discuss below, gives a very inaccurate impression of Strong’s position on money management.

Here are a few of the documents that caught my eye.

On November 28 1927, Montague Norman wrote Strong about their planned meeting in January at Algeciras, Spain. Norman makes the following suggestion:

Perhaps the chief uncertainty or danger which confronts Central Bankers on this side of the Atlantic over the next half dozen years is the purchasing power of gold and the general price level. If not an immediate, it is a very serious question and has been too little considered up to the present. Cassel, as you will remember, has held up his warning finger on many occasions against the dangers of a continuing fall in the price level and the Conference at Genoa as you will remember, suggested that the danger could be met or prevented, by a more general use of the “Gold Exchange Standard”.

This is a very abstruse and complicated problem which personally I do not pretend to understand, the more so as it is based on somewhat uncertain statistics. But I rely for information from the outside about such a subject as this not, as you might suppose, on McKenna or Keynes, but on Sir Henry Strakosch. I am not sure if you know him: Austrian origin: many years in Johannesburg: 20 years in this country: a student of economics: a gold producer with general financial interests: perhaps the main stay in setting up the South African Reserve Bank: a member of the Financial Committee of the League and of the Indian Currency Commission: full of public spirit, genial and helpful . . . and so forth. I have probably told you that if I had been a Dictator he would have been a Director here years ago.

This is a problem to which Strackosch has given much study and it alarms him. He would say that none of us are paying sufficient attention to the possibility of a future fall in prices or are taking precautions to prepare any remedy such as was suggested at Genoa, namely smaller gold reserves through the Gold Exchange Standard, and that you, in the long run, will feel any trouble just as much as the rest of the Central Bankers will feel it.

My suggestion therefore is that it might be helpful if I could persuade Strakoosch too to come to Algeciras for a week: his visit could be quite casual and you would not be committed to any intrigue with him.

I gather from the tone of this letter and from other indications that the demands by the French to convert their foreign exchange to gold were already being made on the Bank of England and were causing some degree of consternation in London, which is why Norman was hoping that Strakosch might persuade Strong that something ought to be done to get the French to moderate their demands on the Bank of England to convert claims on sterling into gold. In the event, Strong met with Strakosch in December (probably in New York, not in Algeciras, without the presence of Norman). Not long thereafter Strong’s health deteriorated, and he took an extended leave from his duties at the bank. On March 27, 1928 Strong sent a letter to Norman outlining the main points of his conversation with Strakosch:

What [Strakosch] told me leads me to believe that he holds the following views:

  • That there is an impending shortage of monetary gold.
  • That there is certain to be a decline in the production by the South African mines.
  • That in consequence there will be a competition for gold between banks of issue which will lead to high discount rates, contracting credit and falling world commodity prices.
  • That Europe is so burdened with debt as to make such a development calamitous, possibly bankrupting some nations.
  • That the remedy is an extensive and formal development of the gold exchange standard.

From the above you will doubtless agree with me that Strakosch is a 100% “quantity” theory man, that he holds Cassel’s views in regard to the world’s gold position, and that he is alarmed at the outlook, just as most of the strict quantity theory men are, and rather expects that the banks of issue can do something about it.

Just as an aside, I will note that Strong is here displaying a rather common confusion, mixing up the quantity theory with a theory about the value of money under a gold standard. It’s a confusion that not only laymen, but also economists such as (to pick out a name almost at random) Milton Friedman, are very prone to fall into.

What he tells me is proposed consists of:

  • A study by the Financial Section of the League [of Nations] of the progress of economic recovery in Europe, which, he asserts, has closely followed progress in the resumption of gold payment or its equivalent.
  • A study of the gold problem, apparently in the perspective of the views of Cassel and others.
  • The submission of the results, with possibly some suggestions of a constructive nature, to a meeting of the heads of the banks of issue. He did not disclose whether the meeting would be a belated “Genoa resolution” meeting or something different.

What I told him appeared to shock him, and it was in brief:

  • That I did not share the fears of Cassel and others as to a gold shortage.
  • That I did not think that the quantity theory of prices, such for instance as Fisher has elaborate, “reduction ad absurdum,” was always dependable if unadulterated!
  • That I thought the gold exchange standard as now developing was hazardous in the extreme if allowed to proceed very much further, because of the duplication of bank liabilities upon the same gold.
  • That I much preferred to see the central banks build up their actual gold metal reserves in their own hands to something like orthodox proportions, and adopt their own monetary and credit policy and execute it themselves.
  • That I thought a meeting of the banks of issue in the immediate future to discuss the particular matter would be inappropriate and premature, until the vicissitudes of the Dawes Plan had developed further.
  • That any formal meeting of the banks of issue, if and when called, should originate among themselves rather than through the League, that the Genoa resolution was certainly no longer operative, and that such formal meeting should confine itself very specifically at the outset first to developing a sound basis of information, and second, to devising improvement in technique in gold practice

I am not at all sure that any formal meeting should be held before another year has elapsed. If it is held within a year or after a year, I am quite certain that it I attended it I could not do so helpfully if it tacitly implied acceptance of the principles set out in the Genoa resolution.

Stratosch is a fine fellow: I like him immensely, but I would feel reluctant to join in discussions where there was likelihood that the views so strongly advocated by Fisher, Cassel, Keynes, Commons, and others would seem likely to prevail. I would be willing at the proper time, if objection were not raised at home, to attend a conference of the banks of issue, if we could agree at the outset upon a simple platform, i.e., that gold is an effective measure of value and medium of exchange. If these two principles are extended, as seems to be in Stratosch’s mind, to mean that a manipulation of gold and credit can be employed as a regulator of prices at all times and under all circumstances, then I fear fundamental differences are inescapable.

And here is a third document in a similar vein that is also worth looking at. It is a memorandum written by O. E. Moore (a member of Strong’s staff at the New York Fed) providing a detailed account of the May 25, 1928 conversation between Strong and Sir Arthur Salter, then head of the economic and financial section of the League of Nations, who came to New York to ask for Strong’s cooperation in calling a new conference (already hinted at by Strakosch in his December conversation with Strong) with a view toward limiting the international demand for gold. Salter handed Strong a copy of a report by a committee of the League of Nations warning of the dangers of a steep increase in the value of gold because of increasing demand and a declining production.

Strong responded with a historical rendition of international monetary developments since the end of World War I, pointing out that even before the war was over he had been convinced of the need for cooperation among the world’s central banks, but then adding that he had been opposed to the recommendation of the 1922 Genoa Conference (largely drafted by Hawtrey and Cassel).

Governor Strong had been opposed from the start to the conclusions reached at the Genoa Conference. So far as he was aware, no one had ever been able to show any proof that there was a world shortage of gold or that there was likely to be any such shortage in the near future. . . . He was also opposed to the permanent operation of the gold exchange standard as outlined by the Genoa Conference, because it would mean by virtue of the extensive credits which the exchange standard countries would be holding in the gold centers, that they would be taking away from each of those two centers the control of their own money markets. This was an impossible thing for the Federal Reserve System to accept, so far as the American market was concerned, and in fact it was out of the question for any important country, it seemed to him, to give up entirely the direction of its own market. . . .

As a further aside, I will just observe that Strong’s objection to the gold exchange standard, namely that it permits an indefinite expansion of the money supply, a given base of gold reserves being able to support an unlimited expansion of the quantity of money, is simply wrong as a matter of theory. A country running a balance-of-payments deficit under a gold-exchange standard would be no less subject to the constraint of an external drain, even if it is holding reserves only in the form of instruments convertible into gold rather than actual gold, than it would be if it were operating under a gold standard holding reserves in gold.

Although Strong was emphatic that he could not agree to participate in any conference in which the policies and actions of the US could be determined by the views of other countries, he was open to a purely fact-finding commission to ascertain what the total world gold reserves were and how those were distributed among the different official reserve holding institutions. He also added this interesting caveat:

Governor Strong added that, in his estimation, it was very important that the men who undertook to find the answers to these questions should not be mere theorists who would take issue on controversial points, and that it would be most unfortunate if the report of such a commission should result in giving color to the views of men like Keynes, Cassel, and Fisher regarding an impending world shortage of gold and the necessity of stabilizing the price level. . . .

Governor Strong mentioned that one thing which had made him more wary than ever of the policies advocated by these men was that when Professor Fisher wrote his book on “Stabilizing the Dollar”, he had first submitted the manuscript to him (Governor Strong) and that the proposal made in that original manuscript was to adjust the gold content of the dollar as often as once a week, which in his opinion showed just how theoretical this group of economists were.

Here Strong was displaying the condescending attitude toward academic theorizing characteristic of men of affairs, especially characteristic of brilliant and self-taught men of affairs. Whether such condescension is justified is a question for which there is no general answer. However, it is clear to me that Strong did not have an accurate picture of what was happening in 1928 and what dangers were lying ahead of him and the world in the last few months of his life. So the confidence of Friedman, Kindelberger, Fisher, and Hawtrey in Strong’s surpassing judgment does not seem to me to rest on any evidence that Strong actually understood the situation in 1928 and certainly not that he knew what to do about it. On the contrary he was committed to a policy that was leading to disaster, or at least, was not going to avoid disaster. The most that can be said is that he was at least informed about the dangers, and if he had lived long enough to observe that the dangers about which he had been warned were coming to pass, he would have had the wit and the good sense and the courage to change his mind and take the actions that might have avoided catastrophe. But that possibility is just a possibility, and we can hardly be sure that, in the counterfactual universe in which Strong does not die in 1928, the Great Depression never happened.

Trying to Make Sense of the Insane Policy of the Bank of France and Other Catastrophes

Published June 18, 2015 Bank of France , Cassel , counter-insurgency , Earl Thompson , gold standard , Great Depression , Hawtrey 18 Comments
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In the almost four years since I started blogging I have occasionally referred to the insane Bank of France or to the insane policy of the Bank of France, a mental disorder that helped cause the deflation that produced the Great Depression. The insane policy began in 1928 when the Bank of France began converting its rapidly growing stockpile of foreign-exchange reserves (i.e., dollar- or sterling-denominated financial instruments) into gold. The conversion of foreign exchange was precipitated by the enactment of a law restoring the legal convertibility of the franc into gold and requiring the Bank of France to hold gold reserves equal to at least 35% of its outstanding banknotes. The law induced a massive inflow of gold into the Bank of France, and, after the Federal Reserve recklessly tightened its policy in an attempt to stamp out stock speculation on Wall Street, thereby inducing an inflow of gold into the US, the one-two punch knocked the world economy into just the deflationary tailspin that Hawtrey and Cassel, had warned would result if the postwar restoration of the gold standard were not managed so as to minimize the increase in the monetary demand for gold.

In making a new round of revisions to our paper on Hawtrey and Cassel, my co-author Ron Batchelder has just added an interesting footnote pointing out that there may have been a sensible rationale for the French gold policy: to accumulate a sufficient hoard of gold for use in case of another war with Germany. In World War I, belligerents withdrew gold coins from circulation, melted them down, and, over the next few years, exported the gold to neutral countries to pay for food and war supplies. That’s how the US, remaining neutral till 1917, wound up with a staggering 40% of the world’s stock of monetary gold reserves after the war. Obsessed with the military threat a re-armed Germany would pose, France insisted that the Versailles Treaty impose crippling reparations payments. The 1926 stabilization of the franc and enactment of the law restoring the gold standard and imposing a 35% reserve requirement on banknotes issued by the Bank of France occurred during the premiership of the staunchly anti-German Raymond Poincaré, a native of Lorraine (lost to Prussia in the war of 1870-71) and President of France during World War I.

A long time ago I wrote a paper “An Evolutionary Theory of the State Monopoly over Money” (which was reworked as chapter two of my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform and was later published in Money and the Nation State) in which, relying on an argument made by Earl Thompson, I suggested that historically the main reason for the nearly ubiquitous state involvement in supplying money was military not monetary: monopoly control over the supply of money enables the sovereign to quickly gain control over resources in war time, thereby giving states in which the sovereign controls the supply of money a military advantage over states in which the sovereign has no such control. Subsequently, Thompson further developed the idea to explain the rise of the gold standard after the Bank of England was founded in 1694, early in the reign of William and Mary, to finance rebuilding of the English navy, largely destroyed by the French in 1690. As explained by Macaulay in his History of England, the Bank of England, by substantially reducing the borrowing costs of the British government, was critical to the survival of the new monarchs in their battle with the Stuarts and Louis XIV. See Thompson’s article “The Gold Standard: Causes and Consequences” in Business Cycles and Depressions: An Encyclopedia (edited by me).

Thompson’s article is not focused on the holding of gold reserves, but on the confidence that the gold standard gave to those lending to the state, especially during a wartime suspension of convertibility, owing to an implicit commitment to restore the gold standard at the prewar parity. The importance of that implicit commitment is one reason why Churchill’s 1925 decision to restore the gold standard at the prewar parity was not necessarily as foolish as Keynes (The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill), along with almost all subsequent commentators, judged it to have been. But the postwar depreciation of the franc was so extreme that restoring the convertibility of the franc at the prewar parity became a practical impossibility, and the new parity at which convertibility was restored was just a fifth of its prewar level. Having thus reneged on its implicit commitment to restore the gold standard at the prewar parity, impairing its ability to borrow, France may have felt it had no alternative but to accumulate a ready gold reserve from which to draw when another war against Germany came. This is just theoretical speculation, but it might provide some clues for historical research into the thinking of French politicians and bankers in the late 1920s as they formulated their strategy for rejoining the gold standard.

However, even if the motivation for France’s gold accumulation was not simply a miserly desire to hold ever larger piles of shiny gold ingots in the vaults of the Banque de France, but was a precautionary measure against the possibility of a future war with Germany – and we know only too well that the fear was not imaginary – it is important to understand that, in the end, it was almost certainly the French policy of gold accumulation that paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power and all that entailed. Without the Great Depression and the collapse of the German economy, Hitler might well have remained an outcast on the margins of German politics.

The existence of a legitimate motivation for the insane policy of the Bank of France cannot excuse the failure to foresee the all too predictable consequences of that policy – consequences laid out plainly by Hawtrey and Cassel already in 1919-20, and reiterated consistently over the ensuing decade. Nor does the approval of that policy by reputable, even eminent, economists, who simply failed to understand how the gold standard worked, absolve those who made the wrong decisions of responsibility for their mistaken decisions. They were warned about the consequences of their actions, and chose to disregard the warnings.

All of this is sadly reminiscent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I don’t agree with those who ascribe evil motives to the Bush administration for invading Iraq, though there seems little doubt that the WMD issue was largely pretextual. But that doesn’t mean that Bush et al. didn’t actually believe that Saddam had WMD. More importantly, I think that Bush et al. sincerely thought that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein would, after the supposed defeat of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, establish a benign American dominance in the region, as World War II had done in Japan and Western Europe.

The problem is not, as critics like to say, that Bush et al. lied us into war; the problem is that they stupidly fooled themselves into thinking that they could just invade Iraq, unseat Saddam Hussein, and that their job would be over. They fooled themselves even though they had been warned in advance that Iraq was riven by internal ethnic, sectarian, religious and political divisions. Brutally suppressed by Hussein and his Ba’athist regime, those differences were bound to reemerge once the regime was dismantled. When General Eric Shinseki’s testified before Congress that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed to maintain peace and order after Hussein was ousted, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld could only respond with triumphalist ridicule at the idea that more troops would be required to maintain law and order in Iraq after Hussein was deposed than were needed to depose him. The sophomoric shallowness of the response to Shinseki by those that planned the invasion still shocks and appalls.

It’s true that, after the Republican loss in the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush, freeing himself from the influence of Dick Cheney and replacing Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, and Gen. George Casey with Gen. David Petraeus as commander of US forces in Iraq, finally adopted the counter-insurgency strategy (aka the “surge”) so long resisted by Cheney and Rumsfeld, thereby succeeding in putting down the Sunni/Al-Qaeda/Baathist insurgency and in bringing the anti-American Shi’ite militias to heel. I wrote about the success of the surge in December 2007 when that provisional military success was still controversial. But, as General Petraeus conceded, the ultimate success of the counter-insurgency strategy depended on implementing a political strategy to reconcile the different elements of Iraqi society to their government. We now know that even in 2008 Premier Nouri al-Maliki, who had been installed as premier with the backing of the Bush administration, was already reversing the limited steps taken during the surge to achieve accommodation between Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites, while consolidating his Shi’ite base by reconciling politically with the pro-Iranian militants he had put down militarily.

The failure of the Iraqi government to consolidate and maintain the gains made in 2007-08 has been blamed on Obama’s decision to withdraw all American forces from Iraq after the status of forces agreement signed by President Bush and Premier al-Maliki in December 2008 expired at the end of 2011. But preserving the gains made in 2007-08 depended on a political strategy to reconcile the opposing ethnic and sectarian factions of Iraqi society. The Bush administration could not implement such a strategy with 130,000 troops still in Iraq at the end of 2008, and the sovereign Iraqi government in place, left to its own devices, had no interest in pursuing such a strategy. Perhaps keeping a larger US presence in Iraq for a longer time would have kept Iraq from falling apart as fast as it has, but the necessary conditions for a successful political outcome were never in place.

So even if the motivation for the catastrophic accumulation of gold by France in the 1928-29 was merely to prepare itself to fight, if need be, another war against Germany, the fact remains that the main accomplishment of the gold-accumulation policy was to bring to power a German regime far more dangerous and threatening than the one that would have otherwise confronted France. And even if the motivation for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to defeat and discredit Islamic terrorism, the fact remains that the invasion, just as Osama bin Laden had hoped, was to create the conditions in which Islamic terrorism could grow into a worldwide movement, attracting would-be jihadists to a growing number of local conflicts across the world. Although bin Laden was eventually killed in his Pakistani hideout, the invasion of Iraq led to rise of an even more sophisticated, more dangerous, and more threatening opponent than the one the invasion was intended to eradicate. Just as a misunderstanding of the gold standard led to catastrophe in 1928-29, the misconception that the threat of terrorism can be eliminated by military means has been leading us toward catastrophe since 2003. When will we learn?

PS Despite some overlap between what I say above and what David Henderson said in this post, I am not a libertarian or a non-interventionist.

Optimistic Thoughts about Productivity Growth and Secular Stagnation

Published June 10, 2015 Uncategorized 14 Comments
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The world, for all kinds of reasons, seems to be in a rather deplorable state, and the trendlines are not necessarily pointed in the right direction either. I won’t go through the whole, or even a partial, list of what is depressing me these days, but there is one topic that comes up a lot in the economics blogosphere, secular stagnation, about which I can conjure up some reasons for optimism.

What a lot of people are depressed about is the unusually low rate of growth in labor productivity that we have seen in the current recovery from the Little Depression. Although the rate of job creation has picked up over the past 15 months or so, averaging over 200,000 new jobs a month, the minimal increases in labor productivity mean that output growth has been much slower than usually observed in previous recoveries from steep downturns. The slow increase in labor productivity and the corresponding weakness of the recovery have been widely cited as evidence that we have entered into an era of secular stagnation.

I don’t deny that secular stagnation is a reasonable inference to be drawn from the persistently low increases in labor productivity during this recovery, but it does seem to me that a less depressing, though perhaps partial, explanation for low productivity growth may be available. My suggestion is that the 2008-09 downturn was associated with major sectoral shifts that caused an unusually large reallocation of labor from industries like construction and finance to other industries so that an unusually large number of workers have had to find new jobs doing work different from what they were doing previously. In many recessions, laid-off workers are either re-employed at their old jobs or find new jobs doing basically the same work that they had been doing at their old jobs. When workers transfer from one job to another similar job, there is little reason to expect a decline in their productivity after they are re-employed, but when workers are re-employed doing something very different from what they did before, a significant drop in their productivity in their new jobs is likely, though there may instances when, as workers gain new skills and experience in their new jobs, their productivity will rise rapidly.

In addition, the number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) since the 2000-09 downturn has been unusually high. Workers who remain unemployed for an extended period of time tend to suffer an erosion of skills, causing their productivity to drop when they are re-employed even if they are able to find a new job in their old occupation. It seems likely that the percentage of long-term unemployed workers that switch occupations is larger than the percentage of short-term unemployed workers that switch occupations, so the unusually high rate of long-term unemployment has probably had a doubly negative effect on labor productivity.

I would even hazard a guess that the low rate of productivity growth in the 1970s may have also, at least in part, been skills-related, though for somewhat different reasons. The 1970s were a period of rapid growth in the labor force because of an influx of women and baby boomers, which continued throughout the 1980s. The influx of first-time workers into the labor force may have had something to do with slowdown in productivity growth in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the 1950s and 1960s, though the increase in the absolute size of the labor force was also a factor in holding down the rate of productivity growth. When the labor-force participation rate peaked in the 1990s, the rate of productivity growth increased.

I am not a labor economist, but a quick internet search seems to indicate that a strong empirical connection between labor-force composition and productivity growth has not been found. But another factor, the increase in energy prices, also had a skills aspect, the adjustment to increased energy prices having led to the adoption of new technologies and new methods of production that presumably required new skills different from those that workers had previously acquired. And the new technologies adopted in response to a sudden increase in energy prices had to go through a period of implementation and debugging and improvement during which measured productivity likely declined. Technological transformations require many workers to learn new skills and adapt to new technologies. The time spent learning how to do new things in new ways and figuring out how to do them better and more efficiently may have caused the measured productivity of such workers to drop, thereby slowing down the overall rate of productivity growth.

At any rate, if the anomalous decline in productivity in the expansion following the 2008-09 downturn has been caused, even if only in part, by a loss of skills by workers who were induced to change jobs or occupations or who experienced long periods of unemployment, that decline in unlikely to be permanent, so that the rate of productivity growth and the rate of growth in real GDP can be expected to pick up somewhat over time. Stagnation may therefore not be as long-lasting as some people fear.

Maybe that’s not such a great reason for optimism, but for now at least, it’s the best that I can muster.

Repeat after Me: Inflation’s the Cure not the Disease

Published June 4, 2015 Andrew Jalil , Brad Delong , Gisela Rua , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Jack Hirshleifer , liquidity trap , Martin Feldstein , nominal GDP targeting , Paul Krugman , Tony Yates 29 Comments

Last week Martin Feldstein triggered a fascinating four-way exchange with a post explaining yet again why we still need to be worried about inflation. Tony Yates responded first with an explanation of why money printing doesn’t work at the zero lower bound (aka liquidity trap), leading Paul Krugman to comment wearily about the obtuseness of all those right-wingers who just can’t stop obsessing about the non-existent inflation threat when, all along, it was crystal clear that in a liquidity trap, printing money is useless.

I’m still not sure why relatively moderate conservatives like Feldstein didn’t find all this convincing back in 2009. I get, I think, why politics might predispose them to see inflation risks everywhere, but this was as crystal-clear a proposition as I’ve ever seen. Still, even if you managed to convince yourself that the liquidity-trap analysis was wrong six years ago, by now you should surely have realized that Bernanke, Woodford, Eggertsson, and, yes, me got it right.

But no — it’s a complete puzzle. Maybe it’s because those tricksy Fed officials started paying all of 25 basis points on reserves (Japan never paid such interest). Anyway, inflation is just around the corner, the same way it has been all these years.

Which surprisingly (not least to Krugman) led Brad DeLong to rise to Feldstein’s defense (well, sort of), pointing out that there is a respectable argument to be made for why even if money printing is not immediately effective at the zero lower bound, it could still be effective down the road, so that the mere fact that inflation has been consistently below 2% since the crash (except for a short blip when oil prices spiked in 2011-12) doesn’t mean that inflation might not pick up quickly once inflation expectations pick up a bit, triggering an accelerating and self-sustaining inflation as all those hitherto idle balances start gushing into circulation.

That argument drew a slightly dyspeptic response from Krugman who again pointed out, as had Tony Yates, that at the zero lower bound, the demand for cash is virtually unlimited so that there is no tendency for monetary expansion to raise prices, as if DeLong did not already know that. For some reason, Krugman seems unwilling to accept the implication of the argument in his own 1998 paper that he cites frequently: that for an increase in the money stock to raise the price level – note that there is an implicit assumption that the real demand for money does not change – the increase must be expected to be permanent. (I also note that the argument had been made almost 20 years earlier by Jack Hirshleifer, in his Fisherian text on capital theory, Capital Interest and Investment.) Thus, on Krugman’s own analysis, the effect of an increase in the money stock is expectations-dependent. A change in monetary policy will be inflationary if it is expected to be inflationary, and it will not be inflationary if it is not expected to be inflationary. And Krugman even quotes himself on the point, referring to

my call for the Bank of Japan to “credibly promise to be irresponsible” — to make the expansion of the base permanent, by committing to a relatively high inflation target. That was the main point of my 1998 paper!

So the question whether the monetary expansion since 2008 will ever turn out to be inflationary depends not on an abstract argument about the shape of the LM curve, but about the evolution of inflation expectations over time. I’m not sure that I’m persuaded by DeLong’s backward induction argument – an argument that I like enough to have used myself on occasion while conceding that the logic may not hold in the real word – but there is no logical inconsistency between the backward-induction argument and Krugman’s credibility argument; they simply reflect different conjectures about the evolution of inflation expectations in a world in which there is uncertainty about what the future monetary policy of the central bank is going to be (in other words, a world like the one we inhabit).

Which brings me to the real point of this post: the problem with monetary policy since 2008 has been that the Fed has credibly adopted a 2% inflation target, a target that, it is generally understood, the Fed prefers to undershoot rather than overshoot. Thus, in operational terms, the actual goal is really less than 2%. As long as the inflation target credibly remains less than 2%, the argument about inflation risk is about the risk that the Fed will credibly revise its target upwards.

With the both Wickselian natural real and natural nominal short-term rates of interest probably below zero, it would have made sense to raise the inflation target to get the natural nominal short-term rate above zero. There were other reasons to raise the inflation target as well, e.g., providing debt relief to debtors, thereby benefitting not only debtors but also those creditors whose debtors simply defaulted.

Krugman takes it for granted that monetary policy is impotent at the zero lower bound, but that impotence is not inherent; it is self-imposed by the credibility of the Fed’s own inflation target. To be sure, changing the inflation target is not a decision that we would want the Fed to take lightly, because it opens up some very tricky time-inconsistency problems. However, in a crisis, you may have to take a chance and hope that credibility can be restored by future responsible behavior once things get back to normal.

In this vein, I am reminded of the 1930 exchange between Hawtrey and Hugh Pattison Macmillan, chairman of the Committee on Finance and Industry, when Hawtrey, testifying before the Committee, suggested that the Bank of England reduce Bank Rate even at the risk of endangering the convertibility of sterling into gold (England eventually left the gold standard a little over a year later)

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.

Of course the best evidence for the effectiveness of monetary policy at the zero lower bound was provided three years later, in April 1933, when FDR suspended the gold standard in the US, causing the dollar to depreciate against gold, triggering an immediate rise in US prices (wholesale prices rising 14% from April through July) and the fastest real recovery in US history (industrial output rising by over 50% over the same period). A recent paper by Andrew Jalil and Gisela Rua documents this amazing recovery from the depths of the Great Depression and the crucial role that changing inflation expectations played in stimulating the recovery. They also make a further important point: that by announcing a price level target, FDR both accelerated the recovery and prevented expectations of inflation from increasing without limit. The 1933 episode suggests that a sharp, but limited, increase in the price-level target would generate a faster and more powerful output response than an incremental increase in the inflation target. Unfortunately, after the 2008 downturn we got neither.

Maybe it’s too much to expect that an unelected central bank would take upon itself to adopt as a policy goal a substantial increase in the price level. Had the Fed announced such a goal after the 2008 crisis, it would have invited a potentially fatal attack, and not just from the usual right-wing suspects, on its institutional independence. Price stability, is after all, part of dual mandate that Fed is legally bound to pursue. And it was FDR, not the Fed, that took the US off the gold standard.

But even so, we at least ought to be clear that if monetary policy is impotent at the zero lower bound, the impotence is not caused by any inherent weakness, but by the institutional and political constraints under which it operates in a constitutional system. And maybe there is no better argument for nominal GDP level targeting than that it offers a practical and civilly reverent way of allowing monetary policy to be effective at the zero lower bound.

Paul Krugman on Tricky Urban Economics

Published May 29, 2015 intangible infrastructural capital , Jane Jacobs , Paul Krugman , urban renewal 11 Comments
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Paul Krugman has a post about a New Yorker piece by Tim Wu discussing the surprising and disturbing increase in vacant storefronts in the very prosperous and desirable West Village in Lower Manhattan. I agree with most of what Krugman has to say, but I was struck by what seemed to me to be a misplaced emphasis in his post. My comment is not meant so much as a criticism, as an observation on the complexity of the forces that affect life in the city, which makes it tricky to offer any sort of general ideological prescriptions for policy. Krugman warns against adopting a free-market ideological stance – which is fine – but fails to observe that statist interventionism has had far more devastating effects on urban life. We should be wary of both extremes.

Krugman starts off his discussion with the following statement, with which, in principle, I don’t take issue, but is made so emphatically that it suggests the opposite mistake of the one that Krugman warns against.

First, when it comes to things that make urban life better or worse, there is absolutely no reason to have faith in the invisible hand of the market. External economies are everywhere in an urban environment. After all, external economies — the perceived payoff to being near other people engaged in activities that generate positive spillovers — is the reason cities exist in the first place. And this in turn means that market values can very easily produce destructive incentives. When, say, a bank branch takes over the space formerly occupied by a beloved neighborhood shop, everyone may be maximizing returns, yet the disappearance of that shop may lead to a decline in foot traffic, contribute to the exodus of a few families and their replacement by young bankers who are never home, and so on in a way that reduces the whole neighborhood’s attractiveness.

The basic point is surely correct; urban environments are highly susceptible, owing to their high population density, to both congestion and pollution, on the one hand, and to positive spillovers, on the other, and cities require a host of public services and amenities provided, more or less indiscriminately, to large numbers of people. Market incentives, to the exclusion of various kinds of collective action, cannot be relied upon to cope with congestion and pollution or to provide public services and amenities. But it is equally true that cities cannot function well without ample scope for private initiative and market exchange. The challenge for any city is to find a reasonable balance between allowing individuals to organize their lives, and pursue their own interests, as they see fit, and providing an adequate supply of public services and amenities, while limiting the harmful effects that individuals living in close proximity inevitably have on each other. It is certainly fair to point out that unfettered market forces alone can’t produce good outcomes in dense urban environments, and understandable that Krugman, a leading opponent of free-market dogmatism, would say so, but he curiously misses an opportunity, two paragraphs down, to make an equally cogent point about the dangers of going too far in the other direction.

Curiously, the missed opportunity arises just when, in the spirit of even-handedness and objectivity, Krugman acknowledges that increasing income equality does not necessarily enhance the quality of urban life.

Politically, I’d like to say that inequality is bad for urbanism. That’s far from obvious, however. Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities right in the middle of the great postwar expansion, an era of widely shared economic growth, relatively equal income distribution, empowered labor — and collapsing urban life, as white families fled the cities and a combination of highway building and urban renewal destroyed many neighborhoods.

This just seems strange to me. Krugman focuses on declining income equality, as if that was what was driving the collapse in urban life, while simultaneously seeming to recognize, though with remarkable understatement, that the collapse coincided with white families fleeing cities and neighborhoods being destroyed by highway building and urban renewal, as if the highway building and the urban renewal were exogenous accidents that just then happened to be wreaking havoc on American urban centers. But urban renewal was a deliberate policy adopted by the federal government with the explicit aim of improving urban life, and Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities precisely to show that large-scale redevelopment plans adopted to “renew” urban centers were actually devastating them. And the highway building that Krugman mentions was an integral part of a larger national plan to build the interstate highway system, a system that, to this day, is regarded as one of the great accomplishments of the federal government in the twentieth century, a system that subsidized the flight of white people to the suburbs facilitated the white flight lamented by Krugman. The collapse of urban life did not just happen; it was the direct result of policies adopted by the federal government.

In arguing for his fiscal stimulus package, Barack Obama, who ought to have known better, invoked the memory of the bipartisan consensus supporting the Interstate Highway Act. May God protect us from another such bipartisan consensus. I found the following excerpt from a book by Eric Avila The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, which is worth sharing:

In this age of divided government, we look to the 1950s as a golden age of bipartisan unity. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, often invokes the landmark passage of the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act to remind the nation that Republicans and Democrats can unite under a shared sense of common purpose. Introduced by President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, the Federal Aid Highway Act, originally titled the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act, won unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans alike, uniting the two parties in a shared commitment to building a national highway infrastructure. This was big government at its biggest, the single largest federal expenditure in American history before the advent of the Great Society.

Yet although Congress unified around the construction of a national highway system, the American people did not. Contemporary nostalgia for bipartisan support around the Interstate Highway Act ignores the deep fissures that it inflicted on the American city after World War II: literally, by cleaving the urban built environment into isolated parcels of race and class, and figuratively, by sparking civic wars over the freeway’s threat to specific neighborhoods and communities. This book explores the conflicted legacy of that megaproject: even as the interstate highway program unified a nation around a 42,800-mile highway network, it divided the American people, as it divided their cities, fueling new social tensions that flared during the tumultuous 1960s.

Talk of a “freeway revolt” permeates the annals of American urban history. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of scholars and journalists introduced this term to describe the groundswell of grassroots opposition to urban highway construction. Their account saluted the urban women and men who stood up to state bulldozers, forging new civic strategies to rally against the highway-building juggernaut and to defeat the powerful interests it represented. It recounted these episodic victories with flair and conviction, doused with righteous invocations of “power to the people.” In the afterglow of the sixties, a narrative of the freeway revolt emerged: a grass- roots uprising of civic-minded people, often neighbors, banding together to defeat the technocrats, the oil companies, the car manufacturers, and ultimately the state itself, saving the city from the onslaught of automobiles, expressways, gas stations, parking lots, and other civic detriments. This story has entered the lore of the sixties, a mythic “shout in the street” that proclaimed the death of the modernist city and its master plans.

By and large, however, the dominant narrative of the freeway revolt is a racialized story, describing the victories of white middle-class or affluent communities that mustered the resources and connections to force concessions from the state. If we look closely at where the freeway revolt found its greatest success—Cambridge, Massachusetts; Lower Manhattan; the French Quarter in New Orleans; Georgetown in Washington D.C.; Beverly Hills, California; Princeton, New Jersey; Fells Point in Baltimore—we discover what this movement was really about and whose interests it served. As bourgeois counterparts to the inner-city uprising, the disparate victories of the freeway revolt illustrate how racial and class privilege structure the metropolitan built environment, demonstrating the skewed geography of power in the postwar American city.

One of my colleagues once told me a joke: if future anthropologists want to find the remains of people of color in a postapocalypse America, they will simply have to find the ruins of the nearest freeway. Yet such collegial jocularity contained a sobering reminder that the victories associated with the freeway revolt usually did not extend to urban communities of color, where highway construction often took a disastrous toll. To greater and lesser degrees, race—racial identity and racial ideology—shaped the geography of highway construction in urban America, fueling new patterns of racial inequality that exacerbated an unfolding “urban crisis” in postwar America. In many southern cities, local city planners took advantage of federal moneys to target black communities point-blank; in other parts of the nation, highway planners found the paths of least resistance, wiping out black commer- cial districts, Mexican barrios, and Chinatowns and desecrating land sacred to indigenous peoples. The bodies and spaces of people of color, historically coded as “blight” in planning discourse, provided an easy target for a federal highway program that usually coordinated its work with private redevelop- ment schemes and public policies like redlining, urban renewal, and slum clearance.

One of my favorite posts in the nearly four years that I’ve been blogging was one with a horrible title: “Intangible Infrastructural Capital.” My main point in that post was that the huge investment in building physical infrastructure during the years of urban renewal and highway building was associated with the mindless destruction of vastly more valuable intangible infrastructure: knowledge, expectations (in both the positive and normative senses of that term), webs of social relationships and hierarchies, authority structures and informal mechanisms of social control that held communities together. I am neither a sociologist nor a social psychologist, but I have no doubt that the tragic dispersal of all those communities took an enormous physical, economic, and psychological toll on the displaced, forced to find new places to live, new environments to adapt to, often in new brand-new dysfunctional communities bereft of the intangible infrastructure needed to preserve social order and peace. But don’t think that it was only cities that suffered. The horrific interstate highway system was also a (slow, but painful) death sentence for hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns, whose economic viability was undermined by the superhighways.

And what about all those vacant storefronts in the West Village? Tim Wu suggests that the owners are keeping the properties off the market in hopes of finding a really lucrative tenant, like maybe a bank branch. Maybe the city should tax properties kept vacant for more than two months by the owner after having terminated a tenant’s lease.

Is Finance Parasitic?

Published May 22, 2015 Ayn Rand , financial innovation , information asymmetry , Jack Hirshleifer , Luigi Zingales 15 Comments
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We all know what a parasite is: an organism that attaches itself to another organism and derives nourishment from the host organism and in so doing weakens the host possibly making the host unviable and thereby undermining its own existence. Ayn Rand and her all too numerous acolytes were and remain obsessed with parasitism, considering every form of voluntary charity and especially government assistance to the poor and needy a form of parasitism whereby the undeserving weak live off of and sap the strength and the industry of their betters: the able, the productive, and the creative.

In earlier posts, I have observed that a lot of what the financial industry does is not really productive of net benefits to society, the gains of some coming at the expense of others. This insight was developed by Jack Hirshleifer in his classic 1971 paper “The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward to Inventive Activity.” Financial trading to a large extent involves nothing but the exchange of existing assets, real or financial, and the profit made by one trader is largely at the expense of the other party to the trade. Because the potential gain to one side of the transaction exceeds the net gain to society, there is a substantial incentive to devote resources to gaining any small, and transient informational advantage that can help a trader buy or sell at the right time, making a profit at the expense of another. The social benefit from these valuable, but minimal and transitory, informational advantages is far less than the value of the resources devoted to obtaining those informational advantages. Thus, much of what the financial sector is doing just drains resources from the rest of society, resource that could be put to far better and more productive use in other sectors of the economy.

So I was really interested to see Timothy Taylor’s recent blog post about Luigi Zingales’s Presidential Address to the American Finance Association in which Zingales, professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Business School, lectured his colleagues about taking a detached and objective position about the financial industry rather than acting as cheer-leaders for the industry, as, he believes, they have been all too inclined to do. Rather than discussing the incentive of the financial industry to over-invest in research in search of transient informational advantages that can be exploited, or to invest in billions in high-frequency trading cables to make transient informational advantages more readily exploitable, Zingales mentions a number of other ways that the finance industry uses information advantages to profit at expense of the rest of society.

A couple of xamples from Zingales.

Financial innovations. Every new product introduced by the financial industry is better understood by the supplier than the customer or client. How many clients or customers have been warned about the latent defects or risks in the products or instruments that they are buying? The doctrine of caveat emptor almost always applies, especially because the customers and clients are often considered to be informed and sophisticated. Informed and sophisticated? Perhaps, but that still doesn’t mean that there is no information asymmetry between such customers and the financial institution that creates financial innovations with the specific intent of exploiting the resulting informational advantage it gains over its clients.

As Zingales points out, we understand that doctors often exploit the informational asymmetry that they enjoy over their patients by overtreating, overmedicating, and overtesting their patients. They do so, notwithstanding the ethical obligations that they have sworn to observe when they become doctors. Are we to assume that the bankers and investment bankers and their cohorts in the financial industry, who have not sworn to uphold even minimal ethical standards, are any less inclined than doctors to exploit informational asymmetries that are no less extreme than those that exist between doctors and patients?

Another example. Payday loans are a routine part of life for many low-income people who live from paycheck to paycheck, and are in constant danger of being drawn into a downward spiral of overindebtedness, rising interest costs and financial ruin. Zingales points out that the ruinous effects of payday loans might be mitigated if borrowers chose installment loans instead of loans due in full at maturity. Unsophisticated borrowers seems to prefer single-repayment loans even though such loans in practice are more likely to lead to disaster than installment loans. Because total interest paid is greater under single payment loans, the payday-loan industry resists legislation requiring that payday loans be installment loans. Such legislation has been enacted in Colorado with favorable results. Zingales sums up the results of recent research about payday loans.

Given such a drastic reduction in fees paid to lenders, it is entirely relevant to consider what happened to the payday lending supply In fact, supply of loans increased. The explanation relies upon the elimination of two inefficiencies. First, less bankruptcies. Second, the reduction of excessive entry in the sector. Half of Colorado’s stores closed in the three years following the reform, but each remaining stores served 80 percent more customers, with no evidence of a reduced access to funds. This result is consistent with Avery and Samolyk (2010), who find that states with no rate limits tend to have more payday loan stores per capita. In other words, when payday lenders can charge very high rates, too many lenders enter the sector, reducing the profitability of each one of them. Similar to the real estate brokers, in the presence of free entry, the possibility of charging abnormal profit margins lead to too many firms in the industry, each operating below the optimal scale (Flannery and Samolyk, 2007), and thus making only normal profits. Interestingly, the efficient outcome cannot be achieved without mandatory regulation. Customers who are charged the very high rates do not fully appreciate that the cost is higher than if they were in a loan product which does not induce the spiral of unnecessary loan float and thus higher default. In the presence of this distortion, lenders find the opportunity to charge very high fees to be irresistible, a form of catering products to profit from cognitive limitations of the customers (Campbell, 2006). Hence, the payday loan industry has excessive entry and firms operating below the efficient scale. Competition alone will not fix the problem, in fact it might make it worse, because payday lenders will compete in finding more sophisticated ways to charge very high fees to naïve customers, exacerbating both the over-borrowing and the excessive entry. Competition works only if we restrict the dimension in which competition takes place: if unsecured lending to lower income people can take place only in the form of installment loans, competition will lower the cost of these loans.

One more example of my own. A favorite tactic of the credit-card industry is to offer customers zero-interest rate loans on transferred balances. Now you might think that banks were competing hard to drive down the excessive cost of borrowing incurred by many credit card holders for whom borrowing via their credit card is their best way of obtaining unsecured credit. But you would be wrong. Credit-card issuers offer the zero-interest loans because, a) they typically charge a 3 or 4 percent service charge off the top, and b) then include a $35 penalty for a late payment, and then c), under the fine print of the loan agreement, terminate the promotional rate on the transferred balance, increasing the interest rate on the transferred balance to some exorbitant level in the range of 20 to 30 percent. Most customers, especially if they haven’t tried a balance-transfer before, will not even read the fine print to know that a single late payment will result in a penalty and loss of the promotional rate. But even if they are aware of the fine print, they will almost certainly underestimate the likelihood that they will sooner or later miss an installment-payment deadline. I don’t know whether any studies have looked into the profitability of promotional rates for credit card issuers, but I suspect, given how widespread such offers are, that they are very profitable for credit-card issuers. Information asymmetry strikes again.

A New Paper on the Short, But Sweet, 1933 Recovery Confirms that Hawtrey and Cassel Got it Right

Published May 15, 2015 Anna Schwartz , Cassel , Daniel Nelson , expectations , Gisela Rua , gold standard , Great Depression , inflation , Milton Friedman 9 Comments
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In a recent post, the indispensable Marcus Nunes drew my attention to a working paper by Andrew Jalil of Occidental College and Gisela Rua of the Federal Reserve Board. The paper is called “Inflation Expectations and Recovery from the Depression in 1933: Evidence from the Narrative Record. “ Subsequently I noticed that Mark Thoma had also posted the abstract on his blog.

 Here’s the abstract:

This paper uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business analysts, we show that inflation expectations increased dramatically. Second, using an event-studies approach, we identify the impact on financial markets of the key events that shifted inflation expectations. Third, we gather new evidence—both quantitative and narrative—that indicates that the shift in inflation expectations played a causal role in stimulating the recovery.

There’s a lot of new and interesting stuff in this paper even though the basic narrative framework goes back almost 80 years to the discussion of the 1933 recovery in Hawtrey’s Trade Depression and The Way Out. The paper highlights the importance of rising inflation (or price-level) expectations in generating the recovery, which started within a few weeks of FDR’s inauguration in March 1933. In the absence of direct measures of inflation expectations, such as breakeven TIPS spreads, that are now available, or surveys of consumer and business expectations, Jalil and Rua document the sudden and sharp shift in expectations in three different ways.

First, they show document that there was a sharp spike in news coverage of inflation in April 1933. Second, they show an expectational shift toward inflation by a close analysis of the economic reporting and commentary in the Economist and in Business Week, providing a fascinating account of the evolution of FDR’s thinking and how his economic policy was assessed in the period between the election in November 1932 and April 1933 when the gold standard was suspended. Just before the election, the Economist observed

No well-informed man in Wall Street expects the outcome of the election to make much real difference in business prospects, the argument being that while politicians may do something to bring on a trade slump, they can do nothing to change a depression into prosperity (October 29, 1932)

 On April 22, 1933, just after FDR took the US of the gold standard, the Economist commented

As usual, Wall Street has interpreted the policy of the Washington Administration with uncanny accuracy. For a week or so before President Roosevelt announced his abandonment of the gold standard, Wall Street was “talking inflation.”

 A third indication of increasing inflation is drawn from the five independent economic forecasters which all began predicting inflation — some sooner than others  — during the April-May time frame.

Jalil and Rua extend the important work of Daniel Nelson whose 1991 paper “Was the Deflation of 1929-30 Anticipated? The Monetary Regime as Viewed by the Business Press” showed that the 1929-30 downturn coincided with a sharp drop in price level expectations, providing powerful support for the Hawtrey-Cassel interpretation of the onset of the Great Depression.

Besides persuasive evidence from multiple sources that inflation expectations shifted in the spring of 1933, Jalil and Rua identify 5 key events or news shocks that focused attention on a changing policy environment that would lead to rising prices.

1 Abandonment of the Gold Standard and a Pledge by FDR to Raise Prices (April 19)

2 Passage of the Thomas Inflation Amendment to the Farm Relief Bill by the Senate (April 28)

3 Announcement of Open Market Operations (May 24)

4 Announcement that the Gold Clause Would Be Repealed and a Reduction in the New York Fed’s Rediscount Rate (May 26)

5 FDR’s Message to the World Economic Conference Calling for Restoration of the 1926 Price Level (June 19)

Jalil and Rua perform an event study and find that stock prices rose significantly and the dollar depreciated against gold and pound sterling after each of these news shocks. They also discuss the macreconomic effects of shift in inflation expectations, showing that a standard macro model cannot account for the rapid 1933 recovery. Further, they scrutinize the claim by Friedman and Schwartz in their Monetary History of the United States that, based on the lack of evidence of any substantial increase in the quantity of money, “the economic recovery in the half-year after the panic owed nothing to monetary expansion.” Friedman and Schwartz note that, given the increase in prices and the more rapid increase in output, the velocity of circulation must have increased, without mentioning the role of rising inflation expectations in reducing that amount of cash (relative to income) that people wanted to hold.

Jalil and Rua also offer a very insightful explanation for the remarkably rapid recovery in the April-July period, suggesting that the commitment to raise prices back to their 1926 levels encouraged businesses to hasten their responses to the prospect of rising prices, because prices would stop rising after they reached their target level.

The literature on price-level targeting has shown that, relative to inflation targeting, this policy choice has the advantage of removing more uncertainty in terms of the future level of prices. Under price-level targeting, inflation depends on the relationship between the current price level and its target. Inflation expectations will be higher the lower is the current price level. Thus, Roosevelt’s commitment to a price-level target caused market participants to expect inflation until prices were back at that higher set target.

A few further comments before closing. Jalil and Rua have a brief discussion of whether other factors besides increasing inflation expectations could account for the rapid recovery. The only factor that they mention as an alternative is exit from the gold standard. This discussion is somewhat puzzling inasmuch as they already noted that exit from the gold standard was one of five news shocks (and by all odds the important one) in causing the increase in inflation expectations. They go on to point out that no other country that left the gold standard during the Great Depression experienced anywhere near as rapid a recovery as did the US. Because international trade accounted for a relatively small share of the US economy, they argue that the stimulus to production by US producers of tradable goods from a depreciating dollar would not have been all that great. But that just shows that the macroeconomic significance of abandoning the gold standard was not in shifting the real exchange rate, but in raising the price level. The fact that the US recovery after leaving the gold standard was so much more powerful than it was in other countries is because, at least for a short time, the US sought to use monetary policy aggressively to raise prices, while other countries were content merely to stop the deflation that the gold standard had inflicted on them, but made no attempt to reverse the deflation that had already occurred.

Jalil and Rua conclude with a discussion of possible explanations for why the April-July recovery seemed to peter out suddenly at the end of July. They offer two possible explanations. First passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in July was a negative supply shock, and second the rapid recovery between April and July persuaded FDR that further inflation was no longer necessary, with actual inflation and expected inflation both subsiding as a result. These are obviously not competing explanations. Indeed the NIRA may have itself been another reason why FDR no longer felt inflation was necessary, as indicated by this news story in the New York Times

The government does not contemplate entering upon inflation of the currency at present and will issue cheaper money only as a last resort to stimulate trade, according to a close adviser of the President who discussed financial policies with him this week. This official asserted today that the President was well satisfied with the business improvement and the government’s ability to borrow money at cheap rates. These are interpreted as good signs, and if the conditions continue as the recovery program broadened, it was believed no real inflation of the currency would be necessary. (“Inflation Putt Off, Officials Suggest,” New York Times, August 4, 1933)

If only . . .

Cluelessness about Strategy, Tactics and Discretion

Published May 5, 2015 Ben Bernanke , Henry Simons , John Taylor , Milton Friedman , Ronald Dworkin 16 Comments
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In his op-ed in the weekend Wall Street Journal, John Taylor restates his confused opposition to what Ben Bernanke calls the policy of constrained discretion followed by the Federal Reserve during his tenure at the Fed, as vice-chairman under Alan Greenspan from 2003 to 2005 and as Chairman from 2005 to 2013. Taylor has been arguing for the Fed to adopt what he calls the “rules-based monetary policy” supposedly practiced by the Fed while Paul Volcker was chairman (at least from 1981 onwards) and for most of Alan Greenspan’s tenure until 2003 when, according to Taylor, the Fed abandoned the “rules-based monetary rule” that it had followed since 1981. In a recent post, I explained why Taylor’s description of Fed policy under Volcker was historically inaccurate and why his critique of recent Fed policy is both historically inaccurate and conceptually incoherent.

Taylor denies that his steady refrain calling for a “rules-based policy” (i.e., the implementation of some version of his beloved Taylor Rule) is intended “to chain the Fed to an algebraic formula;” he just thinks that the Fed needs “an explicit strategy for setting the instruments” of monetary policy. Now I agree that one ought not to set a policy goal without a strategy for achieving the goal, but Taylor is saying that he wants to go far beyond a strategy for achieving a policy goal; he wants a strategy for setting instruments of monetary policy, which seems like an obvious confusion between strategy and tactics, ends and means.

Instruments are the means by which a policy is implemented. Setting a policy goal can be considered a strategic decision; setting a policy instrument a tactical decision. But Taylor is saying that the Fed should have a strategy for setting the instruments with which it implements its strategic policy.  (OED, “instrument – 1. A thing used in or for performing an action: a means. . . . 5. A tool, an implement, esp. one used for delicate or scientific work.”) This is very confused.

Let’s be very specific. The Fed, for better or for worse – I think for worse — has made a strategic decision to set a 2% inflation target. Taylor does not say whether he supports the 2% target; his criticism is that the Fed is not setting the instrument – the Fed Funds rate – that it uses to hit the 2% target in accordance with the Taylor rule. He regards the failure to set the Fed Funds rate in accordance with the Taylor rule as a departure from a rules-based policy. But the Fed has continually undershot its 2% inflation target for the past three years. So the question naturally arises: if the Fed had raised the Fed Funds rate to the level prescribed by the Taylor rule, would the Fed have succeeded in hitting its inflation target? If Taylor thinks that a higher Fed Funds rate than has prevailed since 2012 would have led to higher inflation than we experienced, then there is something very wrong with the Taylor rule, because, under the Taylor rule, the Fed Funds rate is positively related to the difference between the actual inflation rate and the target rate. If a Fed Funds rate higher than the rate set for the past three years would have led, as the Taylor rule implies, to lower inflation than we experienced, following the Taylor rule would have meant disregarding the Fed’s own inflation target. How is that consistent with a rules-based policy?

It is worth noting that the practice of defining a rule in terms of a policy instrument rather than in terms of a policy goal did not originate with John Taylor; it goes back to Milton Friedman who somehow convinced a generation of monetary economists that the optimal policy for the Fed would be to target the rate of growth of the money supply at a k-percent annual rate. I have devoted other posts to explaining the absurdity of Friedman’s rule, but the point that I want to emphasize now is that Friedman, for complicated reasons which I think (but am not sure) that I understand, convinced himself that (classical) liberal principles require that governments and government agencies exercise their powers only in accordance with explicit and general rules that preclude or minimize the exercise of discretion by the relevant authorities.

Friedman’s confusions about his k-percent rule were deep and comprehensive, as a quick perusal of Friedman’s chapter 3 in Capitalism and Freedom, “The Control of Money,” amply demonstrates. In practice, the historical gold standard was a mixture of gold coins and privately issued banknotes and deposits as well as government banknotes that did not function particularly well, requiring frequent and significant government intervention. Unlike, a pure gold currency in which, given the high cost of extracting gold from the ground, the quantity of gold money would change only gradually, a mixed system of gold coin and banknotes and deposits was subject to large and destabilizing fluctuations in quantity. So, in Friedman’s estimation, the liberal solution was to design a monetary system such that the quantity of money would expand at a slow and steady rate, providing the best of all possible worlds: the stability of a pure gold standard and the minimal resource cost of a paper currency. In making this argument, as I have shown in an earlier post, Friedman displayed a basic misunderstanding of what constituted the gold standard as it was historically practiced, especially during its heyday from about 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, believing that the crucial characteristic of the gold standard was the limitation that it imposed on the quantity of money, when in fact the key characteristic of the gold standard is that it forces the value of money – regardless of its material content — to be equal to the value of a specified quantity of gold. (This misunderstanding – the focus on control of the quantity of money as the key task of monetary policy — led to Friedman’s policy instrumentalism – i.e., setting a policy rule in terms of the quantity of money.)

Because Friedman wanted to convince his friends in the Mont Pelerin Society (his egregious paper “Real and Pseudo Gold Standards” was originally presented at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society), who largely favored the gold standard, that (classical) liberal principles did not necessarily entail restoration of the gold standard, he emphasized a distinction between what he called the objectives of monetary policy and the instruments of monetary policy. In fact, in the classical discussion of the issue by Friedman’s teacher at Chicago, Henry Simons, in an essay called “Rules versus Authorities in Monetary Policy,” Simons also tried to formulate a rule that would be entirely automatic, operating insofar as possible in a mechanical fashion, even considering the option of stabilizing the quantity of money. But Simons correctly understood that any operational definition of money is necessarily arbitrary, meaning that there will always be a bright line between what is money under the definition and what is not money, even though the practical difference between what is on one side of the line and what is on the other will be slight. Thus, the existence of near-moneys would make control of any monetary aggregate a futile exercise. Simons therefore defined a monetary rule in terms of an objective of monetary policy: stabilizing the price level. Friedman did not want to settle for such a rule, because he understood that stabilizing the price level has its own ambiguities, there being many ways to measure the price level as well as theoretical problems in constructing index numbers (the composition and weights assigned to components of the index being subject to constant change) that make any price index inexact. Given Friedman’s objective — demonstrating that there is a preferable alternative to the gold standard evaluated in terms of (classical) liberal principles – a price-level rule lacked the automatism that Friedman felt was necessary to trump the gold standard as a monetary rule.

Friedman therefore made his case for a monetary rule in terms of the quantity of money, ignoring Simons powerful arguments against trying to control the quantity of money, stating the rule in general terms and treating the selection of an operational definition of money as a mere detail. Here is how Friedman put it:

If a rule is to be legislated, what rule should it be? The rule that has most frequently been suggested by people of a generally liberal persuasion is a price level rule; namely, a legislative directive to the monetary authorities that they maintain a stable price level. I think this is the wrong kind of a rule [my emphasis]. It is the wrong kind of a rule because it is in terms of objectives that the monetary authorities do not have the clear and direct power to achieve by their own actions. It consequently raises the problem of dispersing responsibilities and leaving the authorities too much leeway.

As an aside, I note that Friedman provided no explanation of why such a rule would disperse responsibilities. Who besides the monetary authority did Friedman think would have responsibility for controlling the price level under such a rule? Whether such a rule would give the monetary authorities “too much leeway” is of course an entirely different question.

There is unquestionably a close connection between monetary actions and the price level. But the connection is not so close, so invariable, or so direct that the objective of achieving a stable price level is an appropriate guide to the day-to-day activities of the authorities. (p. 53)

Friedman continues:

In the present state of our knowledge, it seems to me desirable to state the rule in terms of the behavior of the stock of money. My choice at the moment would be a legislated rule instructing the monetary authority to achieve a specified rate of growth in the stock of money. For this purpose, I would define the stock of money as including currency outside commercial banks plus all deposits of commercial banks. I would specify that the Reserve System shall see to it [Friedman’s being really specific there, isn’t he?] that the total stock of money so defined rises month by month, and indeed, so far as possible day by day, at an annual rate of X per cent, where X is some number between 3 and 5. (p. 54)

Friedman, of course, deliberately ignored, or, more likely, simply did not understand, that the quantity of deposits created by the banking system, under whatever definition, is no more under the control of the Fed than the price level. So the whole premise of Friedman’s money supply rule – that it was formulated in terms of an instrument under the immediate control of the monetary authority — was based on the fallacy that quantity of money is an instrument that the monetary authority is able to control at will.

I therefore note, as a further aside, that in his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed, Taylor responded to Bernanke’s observation that the Taylor rule becomes inoperative when the rule implies an interest-rate target below zero. Taylor disagrees:

The zero bound is not a new problem. Policy rule design research took that into account decades ago. The default was to move to a stable money growth regime not to massive asset purchases.

Taylor may regard the stable money growth regime as an acceptable default rule when the Taylor rule is sidelined at the zero lower bound. But if so, he is caught in a trap of his own making, because, whether he admits it or not, the quantity of money, unlike the Fed Funds rate, is not an instrument under the direct control of the Fed. If Taylor rejects an inflation target as a monetary rule, because it grants too much discretion to the monetary authority, then he must also reject a stable money growth rule, because it allows at least as much discretion as does an inflation target. Indeed, if the past 35 years have shown us anything it is that the Fed has much more control over the price level and the rate of inflation than it has over the quantity of money, however defined.

This post is already too long, but I think that it’s important to say something about discretion, which was such a bugaboo for Friedman, and remains one for Taylor. But the concept of discretion is not as simple as it is often made out to be, especially by Friedman and Taylor, and if you are careful to pay attention to what the word means in ordinary usage, you will see that discretion does not necessarily, or usually, refer to an unchecked authority to act as one pleases. Rather it suggests that a certain authority to make a decision is being granted to a person or an official, but the decision is to be made in light of certain criteria or principles that, while not fully explicit, still inform and constrain the decision.

The best analysis of what is meant by discretion that I know of is by Ronald Dworkin in his classic essay “Is Law a System of Rules?” Dworkin discusses the meaning of discretion in the context of a judge deciding a “hard case,” a case in which conflicting rules of law seem to be applicable, or a case in which none of the relevant rules seems to fit the facts of the case. Such a judge is said to exercise discretion, because his decision is not straightforwardly determined by the existing set of legal rules. Legal positivists, against whom Dworkin was arguing, would say that the judge is able, and called upon, to exercise his discretion in deciding the case, meaning, that by deciding the case, the judge is simply imposing his will. It is something like the positivist view that underlies Friedman’s intolerance for discretion.

Countering the positivist view, Dworkin considers the example of a sergeant ordered by his lieutenant to take his five most experienced soldiers on patrol, and reflects on how to interpret an observer’s statement about the orders: “the orders left the sergeant a great deal of discretion.” It is clear that, in carrying out his orders, the sergeant is called upon to exercise his judgment, because he is not given a metric for measuring the experience of his soldiers. But that does not mean that when he chooses five soldiers to go on patrol, he is engaging in an exercise of will. The decision can be carried out with good judgment or with bad judgment, but it is an exercise of judgment, not will, just as a judge, in deciding a hard case, is exercising his judgment, on a more sophisticated level to be sure than the sergeant choosing soldiers, not just indulging his preferences.

If the Fed is committed to an inflation target, then, by choosing a setting for its instrumental target, the Fed Funds rate, the Fed is exercising judgment in light of its policy goals. That exercise of judgment in pursuit of a policy goal is very different from the arbitrary behavior of the Fed in the 1970s when its decisions were taken with no clear price-level or inflation target and with no clear responsibility for hitting the target.

Ben Bernanke has described the monetary regime in which the Fed’s decisions are governed by an explicit inflation target and a subordinate commitment to full employment as one of “constrained discretion.” When using this term, Taylor always encloses it in quotations markets, apparently to suggest that the term is an oxymoron. But that is yet another mistake; “constrained discretion” is no oxymoron. Indeed, it is a pleonasm, the exercise of discretion usually being understood to mean not an unconstrained exercise of will, but an exercise of judgment in the light of relevant goals, policies, and principles.

PS I apologize for not having responded to comments recently. I will try to catch up later this week.

About Me

David Glasner
Washington, DC

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

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

Follow me on Twitter @david_glasner

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