Posts Tagged 'Hawtrey'

Price Stickiness Is a Symptom not a Cause

Published September 28, 2016 Alfred Marshall , expectations , Franco Modigliani , general equilibrium , incomplete markets , Keynes , rational expectations , sticky prices , sticky wages , temporary equilibrium , wage stickiness 37 Comments
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In my recent post about Nick Rowe and the law of reflux, I mentioned in passing that I might write a post soon about price stickiness. The reason that I thought it would be worthwhile writing again about price stickiness (which I have written about before here and here), because Nick, following a broad consensus among economists, identifies price stickiness as a critical cause of fluctuations in employment and income. Here’s how Nick phrased it:

An excess demand for land is observed in the land market. An excess demand for bonds is observed in the bond market. An excess demand for equities is observed in the equity market. An excess demand for money is observed in any market. If some prices adjust quickly enough to clear their market, but other prices are sticky so their markets don’t always clear, we may observe an excess demand for money as an excess supply of goods in those sticky-price markets, but the prices in flexible-price markets will still be affected by the excess demand for money.

Then a bit later, Nick continues:

If individuals want to save in the form of money, they won’t collectively be able to if the stock of money does not increase.There will be an excess demand for money in all the money markets, except those where the price of the non-money thing in that market is flexible and adjusts to clear that market. In the sticky-price markets there will nothing an individual can do if he wants to buy more money but nobody else wants to sell more. But in those same sticky-price markets any individual can always sell less money, regardless of what any other individual wants to do. Nobody can stop you selling less money, if that’s what you want to do.

Unable to increase the flow of money into their portfolios, each individual reduces the flow of money out of his portfolio. Demand falls in stick-price markets, quantity traded is determined by the short side of the market (Q=min{Qd,Qs}), so trade falls, and some traders that would be mutually advantageous in a barter or Walrasian economy even at those sticky prices don’t get made, and there’s a recession. Since money is used for trade, the demand for money depends on the volume of trade. When trade falls the flow of money falls too, and the stock demand for money falls, until the representative individual chooses a flow of money out of his portfolio equal to the flow in. He wants to increase the flow in, but cannot, since other individuals don’t want to increase their flows out.

The role of price stickiness or price rigidity in accounting for involuntary unemployment is an old and complicated story. If you go back and read what economists before Keynes had to say about the Great Depression, you will find that there was considerable agreement that, in principle, if workers were willing to accept a large enough cut in their wages, they could all get reemployed. That was a proposition accepted by Hawtry and by Keynes. However, they did not believe that wage cutting was a good way of restoring full employment, because the process of wage cutting would be brutal economically and divisive – even self-destructive – politically. So they favored a policy of reflation that would facilitate and hasten the process of recovery. However, there also those economists, e.g., Ludwig von Mises and the young Lionel Robbins in his book The Great Depression, (which he had the good sense to disavow later in life) who attributed high unemployment to an unwillingness of workers and labor unions to accept wage cuts and to various other legal barriers preventing the price mechanism from operating to restore equilibrium in the normal way that prices adjust to equate the amount demanded with the amount supplied in each and every single market.

But in the General Theory, Keynes argued that if you believed in the standard story told by microeconomics about how prices constantly adjust to equate demand and supply and maintain equilibrium, then maybe you should be consistent and follow the Mises/Robbins story and just wait for the price mechanism to perform its magic, rather than support counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies. So Keynes then argued that there is actually something wrong with the standard microeconomic story; price adjustments can’t ensure that overall economic equilibrium is restored, because the level of employment depends on aggregate demand, and if aggregate demand is insufficient, wage cutting won’t increase – and, more likely, would reduce — aggregate demand, so that no amount of wage-cutting would succeed in reducing unemployment.

To those upholding the idea that the price system is a stable self-regulating system or process for coordinating a decentralized market economy, in other words to those upholding microeconomic orthodoxy as developed in any of the various strands of the neoclassical paradigm, Keynes’s argument was deeply disturbing and subversive.

In one of the first of his many important publications, “Liquidity Preference and the Theory of Money and Interest,” Franco Modigliani argued that, despite Keynes’s attempt to prove that unemployment could persist even if prices and wages were perfectly flexible, the assumption of wage rigidity was in fact essential to arrive at Keynes’s result that there could be an equilibrium with involuntary unemployment. Modigliani did so by positing a model in which the supply of labor is a function of real wages. It was not hard for Modigliani to show that in such a model an equilibrium with unemployment required a rigid real wage.

Modigliani was not in favor of relying on price flexibility instead of counter-cyclical policy to solve the problem of involuntary unemployment; he just argued that the rationale for such policies had to be that prices and wages were not adjusting immediately to clear markets. But the inference that Modigliani drew from that analysis — that price flexibility would lead to an equilibrium with full employment — was not valid, there being no guarantee that price adjustments would necessarily lead to equilibrium, unless all prices and wages instantaneously adjusted to their new equilibrium in response to any deviation from a pre-existing equilibrium.

All the theory of general equilibrium tells us is that if all trading takes place at the equilibrium set of prices, the economy will be in equilibrium as long as the underlying “fundamentals” of the economy do not change. But in a decentralized economy, no one knows what the equilibrium prices are, and the equilibrium price in each market depends in principle on what the equilibrium prices are in every other market. So unless the price in every market is an equilibrium price, none of the markets is necessarily in equilibrium.

Now it may well be that if all prices are close to equilibrium, the small changes will keep moving the economy closer and closer to equilibrium, so that the adjustment process will converge. But that is just conjecture, there is no proof showing the conditions under which a simple rule that says raise the price in any market with an excess demand and decrease the price in any market with an excess supply will in fact lead to the convergence of the whole system to equilibrium. Even in a Walrasian tatonnement system, in which no trading at disequilibrium prices is allowed, there is no proof that the adjustment process will eventually lead to the discovery of the equilibrium price vector. If trading at disequilibrium prices is allowed, tatonnement is hopeless.

So the real problem is not that prices are sticky but that trading takes place at disequilibrium prices and there is no mechanism by which to discover what the equilibrium prices are. Modern macroeconomics solves this problem, in its characteristic fashion, by assuming it away by insisting that expectations are “rational.”

Economists have allowed themselves to make this absurd assumption because they are in the habit of thinking that the simple rule of raising price when there is an excess demand and reducing the price when there is an excess supply inevitably causes convergence to equilibrium. This habitual way of thinking has been inculcated in economists by the intense, and largely beneficial, training they have been subjected to in Marshallian partial-equilibrium analysis, which is built on the assumption that every market can be analyzed in isolation from every other market. But that analytic approach can only be justified under a very restrictive set of assumptions. In particular it is assumed that any single market under consideration is small relative to the whole economy, so that its repercussions on other markets can be ignored, and that every other market is in equilibrium, so that there are no changes from other markets that are impinging on the equilibrium in the market under consideration.

Neither of these assumptions is strictly true in theory, so all partial equilibrium analysis involves a certain amount of hand-waving. Nor, even if we wanted to be careful and precise, could we actually dispense with the hand-waving; the hand-waving is built into the analysis, and can’t be avoided. I have often referred to these assumptions required for the partial-equilibrium analysis — the bread and butter microeconomic analysis of Econ 101 — to be valid as the macroeconomic foundations of microeconomics, by which I mean that the casual assumption that microeconomics somehow has a privileged and secure theoretical position compared to macroeconomics and that macroeconomic propositions are only valid insofar as they can be reduced to more basic microeconomic principles is entirely unjustified. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about reconciling macroeconomics with microeconomics; it just means that the validity of proposition in macroeconomics is not necessarily contingent on being derived from microeconomics. Reducing macroeconomics to microeconomics should be an analytical challenge, not a methodological imperative.

So the assumption, derived from Modigliani’s 1944 paper that “price stickiness” is what prevents an economic system from moving automatically to a new equilibrium after being subjected to some shock or disturbance, reflects either a misunderstanding or a semantic confusion. It is not price stickiness that prevents the system from moving toward equilibrium, it is the fact that individuals are engaging in transactions at disequilibrium prices. We simply do not know how to compare different sets of non-equilibrium prices to determine which set of non-equilibrium prices will move the economy further from or closer to equilibrium. Our experience and out intuition suggest that in some neighborhood of equilibrium, an economy can absorb moderate shocks without going into a cumulative contraction. But all we really know from theory is that any trading at any set of non-equilibrium prices can trigger an economic contraction, and once it starts to occur, a contraction may become cumulative.

It is also a mistake to assume that in a world of incomplete markets, the missing markets being markets for the delivery of goods and the provision of services in the future, any set of price adjustments, however large, could by themselves ensure that equilibrium is restored. With an incomplete set of markets, economic agents base their decisions not just on actual prices in the existing markets; they base their decisions on prices for future goods and services which can only be guessed at. And it is only when individual expectations of those future prices are mutually consistent that equilibrium obtains. With inconsistent expectations of future prices, the adjustments in current prices in the markets that exist for currently supplied goods and services that in some sense equate amounts demanded and supplied, lead to a (temporary) equilibrium that is not efficient, one that could be associated with high unemployment and unused capacity even though technically existing markets are clearing.

So that’s why I regard the term “sticky prices” and other similar terms as very unhelpful and misleading; they are a kind of mental crutch that economists are too ready to rely on as a substitute for thinking about what are the actual causes of economic breakdowns, crises, recessions, and depressions. Most of all, they represent an uncritical transfer of partial-equilibrium microeconomic thinking to a problem that requires a system-wide macroeconomic approach. That approach should not ignore microeconomic reasoning, but it has to transcend both partial-equilibrium supply-demand analysis and the mathematics of intertemporal optimization.

How not to Win Friends and Influence People

Published January 31, 2016 Bank of France , David Beckworth , demand for money , expectations , Federal Reserve , financial crisis , Great Depression , Milton Friedman , Paul Krugman , Ted Cruz 30 Comments
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Last week David Beckworth and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a very astute op-ed article in the New York Times explaining how the Fed was tightening its monetary policy in 2008 even as the economy was rapidly falling into recession. Although there are a couple of substantive points on which I might take issue with Beckworth and Ponnuru (more about that below), I think that on the whole they do a very good job of covering the important points about the 2008 financial crisis given that their article had less than 1000 words.

That said, Beckworth and Ponnuru made a really horrible – to me incomprehensible — blunder. For some reason, in the second paragraph of their piece, after having recounted the conventional narrative of the 2008 financial crisis as an inevitable result of housing bubble and the associated misconduct of the financial industry in their first paragraph, Beckworth and Ponnuru cite Ted Cruz as the spokesman for the alternative view that they are about to present. They compound that blunder in a disclaimer identifying one of them – presumably Ponnuru — as a friend of Ted Cruz – for some recent pro-Cruz pronouncements from Ponnuru see here, here, and here – thereby transforming what might have been a piece of neutral policy analysis into a pro-Cruz campaign document. Aside from the unseemliness of turning Cruz into the poster-boy for Market Monetarism and NGDP Level Targeting, when, as recently as last October 28, Mr. Cruz was advocating resurrection of the gold standard while bashing the Fed for debasing the currency, a shout-out to Ted Cruz is obviously not a gesture calculated to engage readers (of the New York Times for heaven sakes) and predispose them to be receptive to the message they want to convey.

I suppose that this would be the appropriate spot for me to add a disclaimer of my own. I do not know, and am no friend of, Ted Cruz, but I was a FTC employee during Cruz’s brief tenure at the agency from July 2002 to December 2003. I can also affirm that I have absolutely no recollection of having ever seen or interacted with him while he was at the agency or since, and have spoken to only one current FTC employee who does remember him.

Predictably, Beckworth and Ponnuru provoked a barrage of negative responses to their argument that the Fed was responsible for the 2008 financial crisis by not easing monetary policy for most of 2008 when, even before the financial crisis, the economy was sliding into a deep recession. Much of the criticism focuses on the ambiguous nature of the concepts of causation and responsibility when hardly any political or economic event is the direct result of just one cause. So to say that the Fed caused or was responsible for the 2008 financial crisis cannot possibly mean that the Fed single-handedly brought it about, and that, but for the Fed’s actions, no crisis would have occurred. That clearly was not the case; the Fed was operating in an environment in which not only its past actions but the actions of private parties and public and political institutions increased the vulnerability of the financial system. To say that the Fed’s actions of commission or omission “caused” the financial crisis in no way absolves all the other actors from responsibility for creating the conditions in which the Fed found itself and in which the Fed’s actions became crucial for the path that the economy actually followed.

Consider the Great Depression. I think it is totally reasonable to say that the Great Depression was the result of the combination of a succession of interest rate increases by the Fed in 1928 and 1929 and by the insane policy adopted by the Bank of France in 1928 and continued for several years thereafter to convert its holdings of foreign-exchange reserves into gold. But does saying that the Fed and the Bank of France caused the Great Depression mean that World War I and the abandonment of the gold standard and the doubling of the price level in terms of gold during the war were irrelevant to the Great Depression? Of course not. Does it mean that accumulation of World War I debt and reparations obligations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and the accumulation of debt issued by German state and local governments — debt and obligations that found their way onto the balance sheets of banks all over the world, were irrelevant to the Great Depression? Not at all.

Nevertheless, it does make sense to speak of the role of monetary policy as a specific cause of the Great Depression because the decisions made by the central bankers made a difference at critical moments when it would have been possible to avoid the calamity had they adopted policies that would have avoided a rapid accumulation of gold reserves by the Fed and the Bank of France, thereby moderating or counteracting, instead of intensifying, the deflationary pressures threatening the world economy. Interestingly, many of those objecting to the notion that Fed policy caused the 2008 financial crisis are not at all bothered by the idea that humans are causing global warming even though the world has evidently undergone previous cycles of rising and falling temperatures about which no one would suggest that humans played any causal role. Just as the existence of non-human factors that affect climate does not preclude one from arguing that humans are now playing a key role in the current upswing of temperatures, the existence of non-monetary factors contributing to the 2008 financial crisis need not preclude one from attributing a causal role in the crisis to the Fed.

So let’s have a look at some of the specific criticisms directed at Beckworth and Ponnuru. Here’s Paul Krugman’s take in which he refers back to an earlier exchange last December between Mr. Cruz and Janet Yellen when she testified before Congress:

Back when Ted Cruz first floated his claim that the Fed caused the Great Recession — and some neo-monetarists spoke up in support — I noted that this was a repeat of the old Milton Friedman two-step.

First, you declare that the Fed could have prevented a disaster — the Great Depression in Friedman’s case, the Great Recession this time around. This is an arguable position, although Friedman’s claims about the 30s look a lot less convincing now that we have tried again to deal with a liquidity trap. But then this morphs into the claim that the Fed caused the disaster. See, government is the problem, not the solution! And the motivation for this bait-and-switch is, indeed, political.

Now come Beckworth and Ponnuru to make the argument at greater length, and it’s quite direct: because the Fed “caused” the crisis, things like financial deregulation and runaway bankers had nothing to do with it.

As regular readers of this blog – if there are any – already know, I am not a big fan of Milton Friedman’s work on the Great Depression, and I agree with Krugman’s criticism that Friedman allowed his ideological preferences or commitments to exert an undue influence not only on his policy advocacy but on his substantive analysis. Thus, trying to make a case for his dumb k-percent rule as an alternative monetary regime to the classical gold standard regime generally favored by his libertarian, classical liberal and conservative ideological brethren, he went to great and unreasonable lengths to deny the obvious fact that the demand for money is anything but stable, because such an admission would have made the k-percent rule untenable on its face as it proved to be when Paul Volcker misguidedly tried to follow Friedman’s advice and conduct monetary policy by targeting monetary aggregates. Even worse, because he was so wedded to the naïve quantity-theory monetary framework he thought he was reviving – when in fact he was using a modified version of the Cambride/Keynesian demand for money, even making the patently absurd claim that the quantity theory of money was a theory of the demand for money – Friedman insisted on conducting monetary analysis under the assumption – also made by Keynes — that quantity of money is directly under the control of the monetary authority when in fact, under a gold standard – which means during the Great Depression – the quantity of money for any country is endogenously determined. As a result, there was a total mismatch between Friedman’s monetary model and the institutional setting in place at the time of the monetary phenomenon he was purporting to explain.

So although there were big problems with Friedman’s account of the Great Depression and his characterization of the Fed’s mishandling of the Great Depression, fixing those problems doesn’t reduce the Fed’s culpability. What is certainly true is that the Great Depression, the result of a complex set of circumstances going back at least 15 years to the start of World War I, might well have been avoided largely or entirely, but for the egregious conduct of the Fed and Bank of France. But it is also true that, at the onset of the Great Depression, there was no consensus about how to conduct monetary policy, even though Hawtrey and Cassel and a handful of others well understood how terribly monetary policy had gone off track. But theirs was a minority view, and Hawtrey and Cassel are still largely ignored or forgotten.

Ted Cruz may view the Fed’s mistakes in 2008 as a club with which to beat up on Janet Yellen, but for most of the rest of us who think that Fed mistakes were a critical element of the 2008 financial crisis, the point is not to make an ideological statement, it is to understand what went wrong and to try to keep it from happening again.

Krugman sends us to Mike Konczal for further commentary on Beckworth and Ponnuru.

Is Ted Cruz right about the Great Recession and the Federal Reserve? From a November debate, Cruz argued that “in the third quarter of 2008, the Fed tightened the money and crashed those asset prices, which caused a cascading collapse.”

Fleshing that argument out in the New York Times is David Beckworth and Ramesh Ponnuru, backing and expanding Cruz’s theory that “the Federal Reserve caused the crisis by tightening monetary policy in 2008.”

But wait, didn’t the Federal Reserve lower rates during that time?

Um, no. The Fed cut its interest rate target to 2.25% on March 18, 2008, and to 2% on April 20, which by my calculations would have been in the second quarter of 2008. There it remained until it was reduced to 1.5% on October 8, which by my calculations would have been in the fourth quarter of 2008. So on the face of it, Mr. Cruz was right that the Fed kept its interest rate target constant for over five months while the economy was contracting in real terms in the third quarter at a rate of 1.9% (and growing in nominal terms at a mere 0.8% rate)

Konczal goes on to accuse Cruz of inconsistency for blaming the Fed for tightening policy in 2008 before the crash while bashing the Fed for quantitative easing after the crash. That certainly is a just criticism, and I really hope someone asks Cruz to explain himself, though my expectations that that will happen are not very high. But that’s Cruz’s problem, not Beckworth’s or Ponnuru’s.

Konczal also focuses on the ambiguity in saying that the Fed caused the financial crisis by not cutting interest rates earlier:

I think a lot of people’s frustrations with the article – see Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg here – is the authors slipping between many possible interpretations. Here’s the three that I could read them making, though these aren’t actual quotes from the piece:

(a) “The Federal Reserve could have stopped the panic in the financial markets with more easing.”

There’s nothing in the Valukas bankruptcy report on Lehman, or any of the numerous other reports that have since come out, that leads me to believe Lehman wouldn’t have failed if the short-term interest rate was lowered. One way to see the crisis was in the interbank lending spreads, often called the TED spread, which is a measure of banking panic. Looking at an image of the spread and its components, you can see a falling short-term t-bill rate didn’t ease that spread throughout 2008.

And, as Matt O’Brien noted, Bear Stearns failed before the passive tightening started.

The problem with this criticism is that it assumes that the only way that the Fed can be effective is by altering the interest rate that it effectively sets on overnight loans. It ignores the relationship between the interest rate that the Fed sets and total spending. That relationship is not entirely obvious, but almost all monetary economists have assumed that there is such a relationship, even if they can’t exactly agree on the mechanism by which the relationship is brought into existence. So it is not enough to look at the effect of the Fed’s interest rate on Lehman or Bear Stearns, you also have to look at the relationship between the interest rate and total spending and how a higher rate of total spending would have affected Lehman and Bear Stearns. If the economy had been performing better in the second and third quarters, the assets that Lehman and Bear Stearns were holding would not have lost as much of their value. And even if Lehman and Bear Stearns had not survived, arranging for their takeover by other firms might have been less difficult.

But beyond that, Beckworth and Ponnuru themselves overlook the fact that tightening by the Fed did not begin in the third quarter – or even the second quarter – of 2008. The tightening may have already begun in as early as the middle of 2006. The chart below shows the rate of expansion of the adjusted monetary base from January 2004 through September 2008. From 2004 through the middle of 2006, the biweekly rate of expansion of the monetary base was consistently at an annual rate exceeding 4% with the exception of a six-month interval at the end of 2005 when the rate fell to the 3-4% range. But from the middle of 2006 through September 2008, the bi-weekly rate of expansion was consistently below 3%, and was well below 2% for most of 2008. Now, I am generally wary of reading too much into changes in the monetary aggregates, because those changes can reflect either changes in supply conditions or demand conditions. However, when the economy is contracting, with the rate of growth in total spending falling substantially below trend, and the rate of growth in the monetary aggregates is decreasing sharply, it isn’t unreasonable to infer that monetary policy was being tightened. So, the monetary policy may well have been tightened as early as 2006, and, insofar as the rate of growth of the monetary base is indicative of the stance of monetary policy, that tightening was hardly passive.

adjusted_monetary_base

(b) “The Federal Reserve could have helped the recovery by acting earlier in 2008. Unemployment would have peaked at, say, 9.5 percent, instead of 10 percent.”

That would have been good! I would have been a fan of that outcome, and I’m willing to believe it. That’s 700,000 people with a job that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. The stimulus should have been bigger too, with a second round once it was clear how deep the hole was and how Treasuries were crashing too.

Again, there are two points. First, tightening may well have begun at least a year or two before the third quarter of 2008. Second, the economy started collapsing in the third quarter of 2008, and the run-up in the value of the dollar starting in July 2008, foolishly interpreted by the Fed as a vote of confidence in its anti-inflation policy, was really a cry for help as the economy was being starved of liquidity just as the demand for liquidity was becoming really intense. That denial of liquidity led to a perverse situation in which the return to holding cash began to exceed the return on real assets, setting the stage for a collapse in asset prices and a financial panic. The Fed could have prevented the panic, by providing more liquidity. Had it done so, the financial crisis would have been avoided, and the collapse in the real economy and the rise in unemployment would have been substantially mitigate.

c – “The Federal Reserve could have stopped the Great Recession from ever happening. Unemployment in 2009 wouldn’t have gone above 5.5 percent.”

This I don’t believe. Do they? There’s a lot of “might have kept that decline from happening or at least moderated it” back-and-forth language in the piece.

Is the argument that we’d somehow avoid the zero-lower bound? Ben Bernanke recently showed that interest rates would have had to go to about -4 percent to offset the Great Recession at the time. Hitting the zero-lower bound earlier than later is good policy, but it’s still there.

I think there’s an argument about “expectations,” and “expectations” wouldn’t have been set for a Great Recession. A lot of the “expectations” stuff has a magic and tautological quality to it once it leaves the models and enters the policy discussion, but the idea that a random speech about inflation worries could have shifted the Taylor Rule 4 percent seems really off base. Why doesn’t it go haywire all the time, since people are always giving speeches?

Well, I have shown in this paper that, starting in 2008, there was a strong empirical relationship between stock prices and inflation expectations, so it’s not just tautological. And we’re not talking about random speeches; we are talking about the decisions of the FOMC and the reasons that were given for those decisions. The markets pay a lot of attention to those reason.

And couldn’t it be just as likely that since the Fed was so confident about inflation in mid-2008 it boosted nominal income, by giving people a higher level of inflation expectations than they’d have otherwise? Given the failure of the Evans Rule and QE3 to stabilize inflation (or even prevent it from collapsing) in 2013, I imagine transporting them back to 2008 would haven’t fundamentally changed the game.

The inflation in 2008 was not induced by monetary policy, but by adverse supply shocks, expectations of higher inflation, given the Fed’s inflation targeting were thus tantamount to predictions of further monetary tightening.

If your mental model is that the Federal Reserve delaying something three months is capable of throwing 8.7 million people out of work, you should probably want to have much more shovel-ready construction and automatic stabilizers, the second of which kicked in right away without delay, as part of your agenda. It seems odd to put all the eggs in this basket if you also believe that even the most minor of mistakes are capable of devastating the economy so greatly.

Once again, it’s not a matter of just three months, but even if it were, in the summer of 2008 the economy was at a kind of inflection point, and the failure to ease monetary policy at that critical moment led directly to a financial crisis with cascading effects on the real economy. If the financial crisis could have been avoided by preventing total spending from dropping far below trend in the third quarter, the crisis might have been avoided, and the subsequent loss of output and employment could have been greatly mitigated.

And just to be clear, I have pointed out previously that the free market economy is fragile, because its smooth functioning depends on the coherence and consistency of expectations. That makes monetary policy very important, but I don’t dismiss shovel-ready construction and automatic stabilizers as means of anchoring expectations in a useful way, in contrast to the perverse way that inflation targeting stabilizes expectations.

Imagination and Identity

Published February 26, 2015 Hawtrey , Keynes , savings-investment identity 17 Comments
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Before continuing my summary of the key points of Richard Lipsey’s important paper, “The Foundations of the Theory of National Income,” I want to clear up a point that the deliberately provocative title may have obscured. The accounting identities that I am singling out for criticism are the identities between income and expenditure (and output) and between savings and investment. It is true that, as Scott Sumner points out in a comment on my previous post, every theory has to define its terms in some way or another, so there is no point in asserting that a definition is wrong. Scott believes that I am a saying that it is wrong to define investment and savings as the same thing, but I am not saying that. I am saying that, in the context of the basic income-expenditure theory of national income, it makes the theory incoherent, so that there is a mismatch between the definition and the theory.

It is also true that sometimes identities follow directly from basic definitions. Such identities are like conservation laws in physics. For example, purchases must equal sales, because purchasing and selling are reciprocal activities; to assert that purchases are, or could be, unequal to sales would be self-contradictory. Keynes, when ridiculed by Hawtrey for asserting that a) savings and investment are equal by definition, and b) that the equality of savings and investment is achieved by variations in income, responded by comparing the equality of savings and investment to the equality of purchases and sales. Purchases are necessarily equal to sales, but prices adjust to achieve equality between desired purchases and desired sales.

The problem with Keynes’s response to Hawtrey is that to assert that purchases are unequal to sales is to misconstrue in a really fundamental way the meaning of the terms “purchase” and “sales.” But when it comes to national-income accounting, the identity of “investment” and “savings” does not follow immediately from the meaning of those terms. It must be derived from the meaning of two other terms: income and expenditure. So the question becomes whether the act of spending (i.e., expenditure) necessarily entails an immediate and corresponding accrual of income, in the same way that the act of purchasing necessarily entails the act of selling. To assert that expenditure and income are identical is then to assert that any expenditure necessarily and simultaneously entails a corresponding accrual of income.

Before pursuing this line of thought further, let’s just pause for a moment to recall the context for this discussion. We are talking about a fairly primitive model of an economy in which there are households that are units of consumption and providers of factor services. Households purchase consumption goods and provide factor services to business firms. Business firms are units of production that combine factor services provided by households with raw materials purchased from other business firms, and new or existing capital goods produced now or previously by other business firms, to produce raw materials, consumption goods, and capital goods. Raw materials and capital goods are sold to other business firms and consumption goods are sold to households. Business firms are owned by households, so profits earned by business firms are remitted, along with payments for factor services, to households. But although the flow of payments from households to business firms corresponds to a flow of payments from business firms to households, the two flows, which can be measured separately, are, at not identical, or at least not obviously so. When I bought a tall Starbucks coffee just now at a Barnes & Noble cafe, my purchase of $1.98 was exactly and necessarily matched by a sale by Barnes & Noble to the guy who writes for the Uneasy Money blog. But expenditure of $1.98 by the Uneasy Money blogger to Barnes & Noble did not trigger an immediate and corresponding flow of $1.98 to households from Barnes & Noble.

Now I grant that it is possible for income so to be defined that every act of expenditure involves a corresponding accrual of income to providers of factor services to the firm, and of profit to owners of the firm. But expenditure entails simultaneous accrual of income only by virtue of an imputation of income to providers of factor services and of profit to owners of firms. Mere imputation does not and cannot constitute an actual flow of payments by firms to households. The identity between purchases and sales is entailed by the definition of “purchase” and “sales,’ but the supposed identity between expenditure and income is entailed by nothing but an act of imagination. I am not criticizing imagination, which may often provide us with an excellent grasp of reality. But imagination, no matter how well attuned to reality, does not and cannot establish identity.

A Keynesian Postscript on the Bright and Shining, Dearly Beloved, Depression of 1920-21

Published February 5, 2015 1920-21 Depression , Bank of France , gold standard , Great Depression , James Grant , Keynes 3 Comments
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In his latest blog post Paul Krugman drew my attention to Keynes’s essay The Great Slump of 1930. In describing the enormity of the 1930 slump, Keynes properly compared the severity of the 1930 slump with the 1920-21 episode, noting that the price decline in 1920-21 was of a similar magnitude to that of 1930. James Grant, in his book on the Greatest Depression, argues that the Greatest Depression was so outstanding, because, in contrast to the Great Depression, there was no attempt by the government in 1920-21 to cushion the blow. Instead, the powers that be just stood back and let the devil take the hindmost.

Keynes had a different take on the difference between the Greatest Depression and the Great Depression:

First of all, the extreme violence of the slump is to be noticed. In the three leading industrial countries of the world—the United States, Great Britain, and Germany—10,000,000 workers stand idle. There is scarcely an important industry anywhere earning enough profit to make it expand—which is the test of progress. At the same time, in the countries of primary production the output of mining and of agriculture is selling, in the case of almost every important commodity, at a price which, for many or for the majority of producers, does not cover its cost. In 1921, when prices fell as heavily, the fall was from a boom level at which producers were making abnormal profits; and there is no example in modern history of so great and rapid a fall of prices from a normal figure as has occurred in the past year. Hence the magnitude of the catastrophe.

In diagnosing what went wrong in the Great Depression, Keynes largely, though not entirely, missed the most important cause of the catastrophe, the appreciation of gold caused by the attempt to restore an international gold standard without a means by which to control the monetary demand for gold of the world’s central banks — most notoriously, the insane Bank of France. Keynes should have paid more attention to Hawtrey and Cassel than he did. But Keynes was absolutely on target in explaining why the world more easily absorbed and recovered from a 40% deflation in 1920-21 than it was able to do in 1929-33.

Nick Rowe Goes Bonkers over Milton Friedman

Published January 22, 2015 J. K. Galbraith , Milton Friedman , Nick Rowe 26 Comments
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Nick Rowe, usually a very cool guy, recently wrote a gushing post about the awesomeness of Milton Friedman. How uncool of him. As followers of this blog may know, even though I like free markets, am skeptical of big government programs, believe that the business cycle is largely a monetary phenomenon, I am not a fan of Milton Friedman. So I am going to offer some comments about Nick’s panegyric to Friedman.

I can’t think of any economist living today who has had as much influence on economics and economic policy as Milton Friedman had, and still has. Neither on the right, nor on the left.

Bob Lucas and Ned Prescott have not had as much influence on modern macroeconomics as Milton Friedman? I am less of a fan of  Lucas and Prescott than I am of Friedman, but surely Nick can’t be serious.

If you had a time machine, went back to (say) 1985, picked up Milton Friedman, brought him forward to 2015, and showed him the current debate over macroeconomic policy, he could immediately join right in. Is there anything important that would be really new to him?

We are all Friedman’s children and grandchildren. The way that New Keynesians approach macroeconomics owes more to Friedman than to Keynes: the permanent income hypothesis; the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve; the idea that the central bank is responsible for inflation and should follow a transparent rule. The first two Friedman invented; the third pre-dates Friedman, but he persuaded us it was right. Using the nominal interest rate as the monetary policy instrument is non-Friedmanite, but the new-fangled “Quantitative Easing” is just a silly new name for Friedmanite base-control.

Certainly Friedman looms large, and New Keynesianism is indeed a way of rationalizing the price and wage stickiness that Friedman, like so many others, relied on to account for the correlation between downward cyclical movements in nominal GDP, or in its rate of growth, and real GDP. To be sure the permanent-income hypothesis was a great achievement, for it wasn’t just Friedman’s, but the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve was anticipated by far too many people (including David Hume) for Friedman to be given very much credit. He certainly gave an influential statement of the reasoning behind the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve, but that hardly counts as a breakthrough. So of the three key elements of New Keynesianism for which Nick credits Friedman only one was (co-)invented by Friedman; the other two were promoted by Friedman, and he certainly influenced the profession, but they were ideas already out there, when he picked them up. And just what does Nick mean by “Friedmanite base-control?” That Friedman invented open-market operations? Good grief!

Then Nick waxes nostalgic:

We easily forget how daft the 1970’s really were, and some ideas were much worse than pet rocks. (Marxism was by far the worst, of course, and had a lot of support amongst university intellectuals, though not much in economics departments.) When inflation was too high, and we wanted to bring inflation down, many (most?) macroeconomists advocated direct controls on prices and wages.

And governments in Canada, the US, the UK (there must have been more) actually implemented direct controls on prices and wages to bring inflation down. Milton Friedman actually had to argue against price and wage controls and against the prevailing wisdom that inflation was caused by monopoly power, monopoly unions, a grab-bag of sociological factors, and had nothing to do with monetary policy.

Many economists unfortunately either supported, or did not forthrightly oppose, wage and price controls when they were imposed successively in the US, UK and Canada in the early 1970s. And Friedman was certainly right to oppose them, and deserves credit for speaking out eloquently against them. But their failure became palpable to most economists, and it is not as if Friedman required any special insight to see the underlying fallacy that Nick nicely articulates. He was just straightforwardly applying Econ 101.

Imagine if I argued today: “Inflation is dangerously low. In order to increase inflation, governments should pass a law saying that all firms must raise all prices and wages by a minimum of 2% a year, unless they apply for and get special permission from the Prices and Incomes Board to raise them by less.” What are the chances my policy proposal would be accepted?

I hope zero, but are we indebted to Friedman for any argument against wage and price controls that was not understood by economists long before Friedman appeared on the scene?

Friedman had a mountain to move, and he moved it. And because he already moved it, we simply cannot have a Friedman today.

Great men like Friedman require a great job to do, or else they can’t become great men. They also require an aristocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy, where only a few voices can get heard, or else they can’t become one of the few voices. The internet actually makes it harder to create great public intellectuals, which is probably a good thing, simply because it’s harder to stand out as great, when there’s lots of competition.

The right won the economics debate; left and right are just haggling over details. The big debate is no longer about economics (sadly for me); and it won’t be held on the pages of the New York Times or in the economics journals.

Actually I agree with Nick that Friedman was a great man and a great economist. He did make a difference, but the difference was not mainly the result of any important theoretical discoveries or contributions, his theory of the consumption function being his main theoretical contribution. Otherwise, he was a great applied and empirical economist, specializing in US monetary history, but his knowledge of the history of monetary theory was sketchy, causing him to make huge blunders in describing the quantity theory of money as a theory of the demand for money, and in suggesting that his 1956 restatement of the quantity theory was inspired by an imagined Chicago oral tradition, when, in fact, his restatement was a reworking of the Cambridge theory of the demand for money that Keynes had turned into his theory of liquidity preference. He hardly cited the work of earlier monetary theorists, aside from Keynes and Irving Fisher, completely ignoring the monetary theory of Hawtrey and Hawtrey’s monetary explanation of the Great Depression, which preceded Friedman’s by some 30 years. Friedman also wrote a famous paper repackaging a slightly dumbed down version of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science as the methodology of positive economics, without acknowledging Popper, an omission that he seems never to have been called on. But his industriousness and diligence were epic, he had a fine intellect and a true mastery of microeconomic theory, coupled with great empirical and statistical insight when applying theory. His ability to express himself cogently and forcefully in writing and in speech was remarkable, and he had a gift for strategic simplification, which unfortunately often led him to convenient oversimplification. Nor do I doubt that he was sincerely motivated by an idealistic dedication to his conception of free-market principles, which he expounded and defended tirelessly.

Nick seems to believe that because hardly any younger economists recognize then name J. K. Galbraith, and because no one any longer advocates imposing wage and price controls to control or speed up inflation, it is obvious that the right won the economics debate. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but I do think it is more complicated than that, the terms right and left being far too limited to portray a complex reality. Galbraith believed that the book he published in 1967 The New Industrial State was going to demonstrate the market economics was a snare and a delusion, because both the Soviet Union and the US were moving toward an economic system dominated by huge enterprises that engaged in long-term planning and were able to impose their plans on unwilling consumers and workers. The most devastating review of Galbraith’s book was published in the June 1968 edition of The Economic Journal by James Meade, an eminent British economist who had been a close disciple of Keynes at Cambridge, and was a kind of market socialist, or a self-described LibLaberal. The entire essay is worth reading, but I just want to highlight a few excerpts from it.

This argument for a national indicative plan is strangely overlooked by Professor Galbraith. Indeed, there is a great hiatus in his analysis of the economic system as a whole or, perhaps more accurately, in his implied analysis of what the economic system as a whole would be like when virtually the whole of it was controlled by large modern corporations. Professor Galbraith asserts that each modern corporation plans ahead the quantities of the various products which it will produce and the prices at which it will sell them; he assumes we will discuss this assumption later that as a general rule each corporation through its advertising and other sales activi-ties can so mould consumers’ demands that these planned quantities are actually sold at these planned prices. But he never explains why and by what mechanism these individual plans can be expected to build up into a coherent whole. . . .

In short, if all individual plans are to be simultaneously fulfilled they must in the first instance be consistent. But Professor Galbraith never considers this problem. It is a strange oversight in a modern professional economist-to overlook the problem of general, as contrasted with particular, equilibrium. (pp. 377-78)

Professor Galbraith writes always as if planning meant deciding in advance what should be produced and sold, in what quantities, at what cost and at what prices, and then taking effective steps to ensure that quantities and prices of inputs and outputs developed in precisely this way, and as if the market mechanism meant taking no thought for the morrow, taking no initiative in planning ahead the introduction of new products and processes, but just waiting for consumers to come to the firm and order a new car of such-and-such a bespoke design. It is by silly contrasts of this kind that Professor Galbraith pokes fun at his professional colleagues. (p. 382)

In the modern complex economy there are two major forces at work. One of these is that which Professor Galbraith rightly emphasises, namely the increased need for careful forward planning in a system which involves the commitment of large resources to inflexible uses over long periods of time.

But there is a second and equally important trend, which he entirely neglects: namely, the increased need in the modern industrial economy for a price mechanism, that is to say for reliance on a system of prices as a signaling device to indicate to producers and consumers what is and what is not scarce. This increased need for a price mechanism arises because in the modern industrial system input-output relationships have become so complex and the differentiation between products (many of which are the technically sophisticated inputs of other productive processes) has become so manifold that simple quantitative planning without a price or market mechanism becomes increasingly clumsy and inefficient. Moreover, this increased need for a signaling system through prices is occurring at a time when advances in mathematical economics and in the electronic and other technologies for measuring and metering have made a great extension of the price mechanism possible. Public authorities begin to make serious quantitative cost-benefit studies where previously pure hunches would have had to serve; and we nowadays seriously consider as, for example, in electronic metering devices for charging for the use of road space by motor vehicles-extensions of the use of pricing which would previously have been considered technologically impossible.

The particular brand of conventional wisdom which Professor Galbraith promotes in his recent book overlooks all these increased needs and opportunities for the use of the price mechanism. But many of the planned socialist societies are not falling into this error. Experiments which they are making in such devices as setting the maximisation of profit as the success criterion for the managers of socialised plants, in the direct use of the free market as in Yugoslavia, and generally in an increased reliance on price-mechanism indicators for many decentralised decisions constitute an undoubtedly significant development. The use of the price mechanism is, of course, not the same thing as the use of a market mechanism. A completely planned socialist economy could theoretically be run without any markets at all but with a complete system of “shadow prices” to measure relative scarcities and to be used as the decisive indicators for the adjustments to be made in the economy’s quantitative planned inputs and outputs. But in many, though not of course in all, cases an actual market mechanism will be found to be institutionally the best way of operating a price mechanism. There are many degrees and forms of such extensions of the market; for example, in some cases the prices at which transactions take place might be centrally controlled and adjusted, while in others they might be freely determined by supply and demand in the market. But in one form or an-other increased reliance on a price mechanism does imply increased reliance at least on something closely analogous to a market mechanism.

Professor Galbraith expressly denies that recent developments in the socialist countries have any significant connections with the use of the market as a controlling device. This denial would, by the uncouth, be called drivel-if I may be permitted to use Professor Galbraith’s own expression. But he has to hold this view simply because the socialist countries continue to plan while he, drawing no distinction between the price mechanism and a market mechanism, believes that one can have either planning or a market-price mechanism but not both. In fact, “planning and the price mechanism” not “planning or the price mechanism” should be a central theme of every modern economist’s work. (pp. 391-92)

In his 1977 Nobel Lecture, as Marcus Nunes informed us a few days ago, Meade explicitly advocated targeting nominal GDP writing as follows:

I have told this particular story simply to make the point that the choice between fiscal action and monetary action must often depend upon basic policy issues which should certainly be the responsibility of the government rather than of any independent monetary authority. Perhaps the best compromise is an independent monetary authority charged so to manage the money supply and the market rate of interest as to maintain the growth of total money income on its 5-per-cent-per-annum target path, after taking into account whatever fiscal policies the government may adopt.

So let me ask Nick the following: Was Meade right or left? And was he on the winning side or the losing side?

Currency Wars: The Next Generation

Published October 22, 2014 currency manipulation , currency war , exchange rate protection , Hawtrey 18 Comments
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I saw an interesting news story on the Bloomberg website today. The title sums it up pretty well. “Currency Wars Evolve With Goal of Avoiding Deflation.” Just as Lars Christensen predicted recently, nervous — and misguided — talk about currency wars is spreading fast. Here’s what it says on Bloomberg:

Currency wars are back, though this time the goal is to steal inflation, not growth.

Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega popularized the term “currency war” in 2010 to describe policies employed at the time by major central banks to boost the competitiveness of their economies through weaker currencies. Now, many see lower exchange rates as a way to avoid crippling deflation.

Now, as I have pointed out many times (e.g., here, here, and most recently here), “currency war” in the sense used by Mantega, also known as “currency manipulation” or “exchange-rate protection” involves the simultaneous application of exchange-rate intervention by the monetary authority to reduce the nominal exchange rate together with a tight monetary policy aimed at creating a chronic domestic excess demand for money, thereby forcing domestic households and businesses to restrict expenditure to build up their holdings of cash to desired levels, resulting in a chronic balance of payments surplus and the steady accumulation of foreign-exchange reserves by the central bank. So the idea that quantitative easing had anything to do with “currency war” in this sense was a nonsensical notion based on a complete failure to understand the difference between a nominal and a real exchange rate.

“This beggar-thy-neighbor policy is not about rebalancing, not about growth,” David Bloom, the global head of currency strategy at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, which does business in 74 countries and territories, said in an Oct. 17 interview. “This is about deflation, exporting your deflationary problems to someone else.”

Bloom puts it in these terms because, when one jurisdiction weakens its exchange rate, another’s gets stronger, making imported goods cheaper. Deflation is a both a consequence of, and contributor to, the global economic slowdown that’s pushing the euro region closer to recession and reducing demand for exports from countries such as China and New Zealand.

Well, by definition of an exchange rate (a reciprocal relationship) between two currencies, if one currency appreciates the other depreciates correspondingly. If the euro depreciates relative to the dollar, prices of the same goods will rise measured in euros and fall measured in dollars. The question is what has been causing the euro to depreciate relative to the dollar. The notion of a currency war is meaningless if the change in exchange rates is not at least in part being driven by a deliberate policy choice. So what kind of policy choices are we talking about?

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said last month he’d welcome a lower exchange rate to help meet his inflation target and may extend the nation’s unprecedented stimulus program to achieve that. Like his Japanese counterpart, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has acknowledged the need for a weaker euro to avoid deflation and make exports more competitive, though he’s denied targeting the exchange rate specifically.

After the Argentine peso, which is plunging following a debt default and devaluation, the yen will be the biggest loser among major currencies by the end of 2015, according to median strategist forecasts compiled by Bloomberg as of yesterday. A 6 percent decline is predicted, which would build on a 5.5 percent slide since June.

The euro is also expected to be among the 10 biggest losers, with strategists seeing a 4.8 percent drop. The yen traded at 107.21 per dollar 10:18 a.m. in New York, while the euro bought $1.2658.

Notice that there is no mention of the monetary policy that goes along with the exchange-rate target. Since the goal of the monetary policy is to produce inflation, one would imagine that the mechanism is monetary expansion. If the Japanese and the Europeans want their currencies to depreciate against the dollar, they can intervene in foreign-exchange markets and buy up dollars with newly printed euros or yen. That would tend to cause euros and yen to depreciate against the dollar, but would also tend to raise prices of goods in terms of euros and yen. How does that export deflation to the US?

At 0.3 percent in September, annual inflation in the 18-nation bloc remains a fraction of the ECB’s target of just under 2 percent. Gross-domestic-product growth flat-lined in the second quarter, while Germany, Europe‘s biggest economy, reduced its 2014 expansion forecast this month to 1.2 percent from 1.8 percent.

Disinflationary pressures in the euro area are starting to spread to its neighbors and biggest trading partners. The currencies of Switzerland, Hungary (HUCPIYY), Denmark, the Czech Republic and Sweden are forecast to fall from 3.8 percent to more than 6 percent by the end of next year, estimates compiled by Bloomberg show, partly due to policy makers’ actions to stoke prices.

“Deflation is spilling over to central and eastern Europe,” Simon Quijano-Evans, the London-based head of emerging-markets research at Commerzbank AG, said yesterday by phone. “Weaker exchange rates will help” them tackle the issue, he said.

Hungary and Switzerland entered deflation in the past two months, while Swedish central-bank Deputy Governor Per Jansson last week blamed his country’s falling prices partly on rate cuts the ECB used to boost its own inflation. A policy response may be necessary, he warned.

If the Swedish central bank thinks that it is experiencing deflation, it has tools with which to prevent deflation from occurring. It is bizarre to suggest that a rate cut by ECB could be causing deflation in Sweden.

While not strictly speaking stimulus measures, the Swiss, Danish and Czech currency pegs — whether official or unofficial — have a similar effect by limiting gains versus the euro.

The Swedes could very easily adopt a similar currency peg to avoid any appreciation of the Swedish krona against the euro.

Measures like these are necessary because, even after a broad-based dollar rally, eight of the Group of 10 developed-nation currencies remain overvalued versus the dollar, according to a purchasing-power parity measure from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.

If these currencies are overvalued relative to the dollar, according to a PPP measure, they are under deflationary pressure even at current exchange rates. That means that exchange rate depreciation via monetary expansion is essential to counteracting deflationary pressure.

The notion that exchange-rate depreciation to avoid deflation is a beggar-thy-neighbor policy or a warlike act could not be more wrong. If exchange-rate depreciation by one country causes retaliation by other countries that try to depreciate their currencies even more, that would be a virtuous cycle, not a vicious one.

In his book Trade Depression and the Way Out, Hawtrey summed it up beautifully over 80 years ago, as I observed in this post.

In consequence of the competitive advantage gained by a country’s manufacturers from a depreciation of its currency, any such depreciation is only too likely to meet with recriminations and even retaliation from its competitors. . . . Fears are even expressed that if one country starts depreciation, and others follow suit, there may result “a competitive depreciation” to which no end can be seen.

This competitive depreciation is an entirely imaginary danger. The benefit that a country derives from the depreciation of its currency is in the rise of its price level relative to its wage level, and does not depend on its competitive advantage. If other countries depreciate their currencies, its competitive advantage is destroyed, but the advantage of the price level remains both to it and to them. They in turn may carry the depreciation further, and gain a competitive advantage. But this race in depreciation reaches a natural limit when the fall in wages and in the prices of manufactured goods in terms of gold has gone so far in all the countries concerned as to regain the normal relation with the prices of primary products. When that occurs, the depression is over, and industry is everywhere remunerative and fully employed. Any countries that lag behind in the race will suffer from unemployment in their manufacturing industry. But the remedy lies in their own hands; all they have to do is to depreciate their currencies to the extent necessary to make the price level remunerative to their industry. Their tardiness does not benefit their competitors, once these latter are employed up to capacity. Indeed, if the countries that hang back are an important part of the world’s economic system, the result must be to leave the disparity of price levels partly uncorrected, with undesirable consequences to everybody. . . .

The picture of an endless competition in currency depreciation is completely misleading. The race of depreciation is towards a definite goal; it is a competitive return to equilibrium. The situation is like that of a fishing fleet threatened with a storm; no harm is done if their return to a harbor of refuge is “competitive.” Let them race; the sooner they get there the better.

The only small quibble that I have with Hawtrey’s discussion is his assertion that a fall in the real wage is necessary to restore equilibrium. A temporary fall in real wages may be part of the transition to equilibrium, but that doesn’t mean that the real wage at the end of the transition must be less than it was at the start of the process.

Explaining Post-Traumatic-Inflation Stress Disorder

Published September 9, 2014 gold standard , inflation , Paul Krugman , Steve Waldman 22 Comments
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Paul Krugman and Steve Waldman having been puzzling of late about why inflation is so viscerally opposed by the dreaded one percent (even more so by the ultra-dreaded 0.01 percent). Here’s how Krugman phrased the conundrum.

One thought I’ve had and written about is that the one percent (or actually the 0.01 percent) like hard money because they’re rentiers. But you can argue that this is foolish — that they have much more to gain from asset appreciation than they have to lose from the small chance of runaway inflation. . . .

But maybe the 1% doesn’t make the connection?

Steve Waldman, however, doesn’t take the one percent — and certainly not the 0.01 percent — for the misguided dunces that Krugman suggests they are. Waldman sees them as the cunning, calculating villains that we all (notwithstanding his politically correct disclaimer that the rich aren’t bad people) know they really are.

Soft money types — I’ve heard the sentiment from Scott Sumner, Brad DeLong, Kevin Drum, and now Paul Krugman — really want to see the bias towards hard money and fiscal austerity as some kind of mistake. I wish that were true. It just isn’t. Aggregate wealth is held by risk averse individuals who don’t individually experience aggregate outcomes. Prospective outcomes have to be extremely good and nearly certain to offset the insecurity soft money policy induces among individuals at the top of the distribution, people who have much more to lose than they are likely to gain.

That’s all very interesting. Are the rich opposed to inflation because they are stupid, or because they are clever? Krugman thinks it’s the former, Waldman the latter. And I agree; it is a puzzle.

But what about the poor and the middle class? Has anyone seen any demonstrations lately by the 99 percent demanding that the Fed increase its inflation target? Did even one Democrat in the Senate – not even that self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders — threaten to vote against confirmation of Janet Yellen unless she promised to raise the Fed’s inflation target? Well, maybe that just shows that the Democrats are as beholden to the one percent as the Republicans, but I suspect that the real reason is because the 99 percent hate inflation just as much as the one percent do. I mean, don’t the 99 percent realize that inflation would increase total output and employment, thereby benefitting ordinary workers generally?

Oh, you say, workers must be afraid that inflation would reduce their real wages. That’s a widely believed factoid about inflation — that inflation is biased against workers, because wages adjust more slowly than other prices to changes in demand. Well, that factoid is not necessarily true, either in theory or in practice. That doesn’t mean that inflation might not be associated with reduced real wages, but if it is, it would mean that inflation is facilitating a market adjustment in real wages that would tend to increase total output and total employment, thereby increasing aggregate wages paid to workers. That is just the sort of tradeoff between a prospective upside from growth-inducing inflation and a perceived downside from inflation redistribution. In other words, the attitudes of the one percent and of the 99 percent toward inflation don’t seem all that different.

And aside from the potential direct output-expanding effect of inflation, there is also the redistributional effect from creditors to debtors. A lot of underwater homeowners could have sold their homes if a 10- or 20-percent increase in the overall price level had kept nominal home prices from falling below nominal mortgage indebtedness. Inflation would have been the simplest and easiest way to avoid a foreclosure crisis and getting stuck in a balance-sheet recession. Why weren’t underwater homeowners out their clamoring for some inflationary relief?

I have not done a historical study, but I cannot think of any successful political movement or campaign that has ever been carried out on a platform of increasing inflation. Even FDR, who saved the country from ruin by taking the US off the gold standard in 1933, did not say that he would do so when running for office.

Nor has anyone ever stated the case against inflation more eloquently than John Maynard Keynes, hardly a spokesman for the interests of rentiers.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. (Economic Consequences of the Peace)

One might say that when Keynes wrote this he was still very much of an orthodox Marshallian economist, who only later outgrew his orthodox prejudices when he finally saw the light and wrote the General Theory. But Keynes was actually quite explicit in the General Theory that he favored a monetary policy aiming at price-level stabilization. If Keynes favored inflation it was only in the context of counteracting a massive deflation. Similarly, Ralph Hawtrey, who famously likened opposition to monetary stimulus, out of fear of inflation, during the Great Depression to crying “fire, fire” during Noah’s Flood, favored a monetary regime aiming at stable money wages, a regime that over the long term would generate a gradually falling output price level. So I fail to see why anyone should be surprised that a pro-inflationary policy would be a tough sell even when unemployment is high.

But, in thinking about all this, I believe it may help to distinguish between two types of post-traumatic-inflation stress disorder. One is a kind of instinctual aversion to inflation, which I think is widely shared by people from all kinds of backgrounds, beliefs, and economic status. After arguing and pleading for higher inflation for over three years on this blog, I am a little bit embarrassed to make this admission, but I suffer from this type of post-traumatic-inflation stress disorder myself. I know that it’s weird, but every month when the CPI is announced, and the monthly change is less than 2%, I just get a warm fuzzy feeling inside of me. I know (or at least believe) that people will suffer because inflation is not higher than a measly 2%, but I can’t help getting that feeling of comfort and well-being when I hear that inflation is low. That just seems to be the natural order of things. And I don’t think that I am the only one who feels that way, though I probably suffer more guilt than most for not being able to suppress the feeling.

But there is another kind of post-traumatic-inflation stress disorder. This is a purely intellectual disorder brought on by excessive exposure to extreme libertarian dogmas associated with pop-Austrianism and reading too many (i.e., more than zero) novels by Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, one of the two major political parties seems to have been captured this group of ideologues, and anti-inflationary dogma has become an article of faith rather than a mere disposition. It is one thing to have a disposition or a bias in favor of low inflation; it is altogether different to make anti-inflationism a moral or ideological crusade. I think most people, whether they are in the one percent or the 99 percent are biased in favor of low inflation, but most of them don’t oppose inflation as a moral or ideological imperative. Now it’s true that that the attachment of a great many people to the gold standard before World War I was akin to a moral precept, but at least since the collapse of the gold standard in the Great Depression, most people no longer think about inflation in moral and ideological terms.

Before anti-inflationism became a moral crusade, it was possible for people like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who were disposed to favor low inflation, to accommodate themselves fairly easily to an annual rate of inflation of 4 percent. Indeed, it was largely because of pressure from Democrats to fight inflation by wage and price controls that Nixon did the unthinkable and imposed wage and price controls on August 15, 1971. Reagan, who had no interest in repeating that colossal blunder, instead fought against Paul Volcker’s desire to bring inflation down below 4 percent for most of his two terms. Of course, one doesn’t know to what extent the current moral and ideological crusade against inflation would survive an accession to power by a Republican administration. It is always easier to proclaim one’s ideological principles when one doesn’t have any responsibility to implement them. But given the current ideological commitment to anti-inflationism, there was never any chance for a pragmatic accommodation that might have used increased inflation as a means of alleviating economic distress.

Sterilizing Gold Inflows: The Anatomy of a Misconception

Published September 1, 2014 Bank of France , David Hume , Federal Reserve , gold standard , Great Depression , Hayek , Milton Friedman , price-specie-flow mechanism , quantity theory of money , Samuelson , sterilization 16 Comments
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In my previous post about Milton Friedman’s problematic distinction between real and pseudo-gold standards, I mentioned that one of the signs that Friedman pointed to in asserting that the Federal Reserve Board in the 1920s was managing a pseudo gold standard was the “sterilization” of gold inflows to the Fed. What Friedman meant by sterilization is that the incremental gold reserves flowing into the Fed did not lead to a commensurate increase in the stock of money held by the public, the failure of the stock of money to increase commensurately with an inflow of gold being the standard understanding of sterilization in the context of the gold standard.

Of course “commensurateness” is in the eye of the beholder. Because Friedman felt that, given the size of the gold inflow, the US money stock did not increase “enough,” he argued that the gold standard in the 1920s did not function as a “real” gold standard would have functioned. Now Friedman’s denial that a gold standard in which gold inflows are sterilized is a “real” gold standard may have been uniquely his own, but his understanding of sterilization was hardly unique; it was widely shared. In fact it was so widely shared that I myself have had to engage in a bit of an intellectual struggle to free myself from its implicit reversal of the causation between money creation and the holding of reserves. For direct evidence of my struggles, see some of my earlier posts on currency manipulation (here, here and here), in which I began by using the concept of sterilization as if it actually made sense in the context of international adjustment, and did not fully grasp that the concept leads only to confusion. In an earlier post about Hayek’s 1932 defense of the insane Bank of France, I did not explicitly refer to sterilization, and got the essential analysis right. Of course Hayek, in his 1932 defense of the Bank of France, was using — whether implicitly or explicitly I don’t recall — the idea of sterilization to defend the Bank of France against critics by showing that the Bank of France was not guilty of sterilization, but Hayek’s criterion for what qualifies as sterilization was stricter than Friedman’s. In any event, it would be fair to say that Friedman’s conception of how the gold standard works was broadly consistent with the general understanding at the time of how the gold standard operates, though, even under the orthodox understanding, he had no basis for asserting that the 1920s gold standard was fraudulent and bogus.

To sort out the multiple layers of confusion operating here, it helps to go back to the classic discussion of international monetary adjustment under a pure gold currency, which was the basis for later discussions of international monetary adjustment under a gold standard (i.e, a paper currency convertible into gold at a fixed exchange rate). I refer to David Hume’s essay “Of the Balance of Trade” in which he argued that there is an equilibrium distribution of gold across different countries, working through a famous thought experiment in which four-fifths of the gold held in Great Britain was annihilated to show that an automatic adjustment process would redistribute the international stock of gold to restore Britain’s equilibrium share of the total world stock of gold.

The adjustment process, which came to be known as the price-specie flow mechanism (PSFM), is widely considered one of Hume’s greatest contributions to economics and to monetary theory. Applying the simple quantity theory of money, Hume argued that the loss of 80% of Britain’s gold stock would mean that prices and wages in Britain would fall by 80%. But with British prices 80% lower than prices elsewhere, Britain would stop importing goods that could now be obtained more cheaply at home than they could be obtained abroad, while foreigners would begin exporting all they could from Britain to take advantage of low British prices. British exports would rise and imports fall, causing an inflow of gold into Britain. But, as gold flowed into Britain, British prices would rise, thereby reducing the British competitive advantage, causing imports to increase and exports to decrease, and consequently reducing the inflow of gold. The adjustment process would continue until British prices and wages had risen to a level equal to that in other countries, thus eliminating the British balance-of-trade surplus and terminating the inflow of gold.

This was a very nice argument, and Hume, a consummate literary stylist, expressed it beautifully. There is only one problem: Hume ignored that the prices of tradable goods (those that can be imported or exported or those that compete with imports and exports) are determined not in isolated domestic markets, but in international markets, so the premise that all British prices, like the British stock of gold, would fall by 80% was clearly wrong. Nevertheless, the disconnect between the simple quantity theory and the idea that the prices of tradable goods are determined in international markets was widely ignored by subsequent writers. Although Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and J. S. Mill avoided the fallacy, but without explicit criticism of Hume, while Henry Thornton, in his great work The Paper Credit of Great Britain, alternately embraced it and rejected it, the Humean analysis, by the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, had become the established orthodoxy.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a famous series of controversies over the Bank Charter Act of 1844, in which two groups of economists the Currency School in support and the Banking School in opposition argued about the key provisions of the Act: to centralize the issue of Banknotes in Great Britain within the Bank of England and to prohibit the Bank of England from issuing additional banknotes, beyond the fixed quantity of “unbacked” notes (i.e. without gold cover) already in circulation, unless the additional banknotes were issued in exchange for a corresponding amount of gold coin or bullion. In other words, the Bank Charter Act imposed a 100% marginal reserve requirement on the issue of additional banknotes by the Bank of England, thereby codifying what was then known as the Currency Principle, the idea being that the fluctuation in the total quantity of Banknotes ought to track exactly the Humean mechanism in which the quantity of money in circulation changes pound for pound with the import or export of gold.

The doctrinal history of the controversies about the Bank Charter Act are very confused, and I have written about them at length in several papers (this, this, and this) and in my book on free banking, so I don’t want to go over that ground again here. But until the advent of the monetary approach to the balance of payments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the thinking of the economics profession about monetary adjustment under the gold standard was largely in a state of confusion, the underlying fallacy of PSFM having remained largely unrecognized. One of the few who avoided the confusion was R. G. Hawtrey, who had anticipated all the important elements of the monetary approach to the balance of payments, but whose work had been largely forgotten in the wake of the General Theory.

Two important papers changed the landscape. The first was a 1976 paper by Donald McCloskey and Richard Zecher “How the Gold Standard Really Worked” which explained that a whole slew of supposed anomalies in the empirical literature on the gold standard were easily explained if the Humean PSFM was disregarded. The second was Paul Samuelson’s 1980 paper “A Corrected Version of Hume’s Equilibrating Mechanisms for International Trade,” showing that the change in relative price levels — the mechanism whereby international monetary equilibrium is supposedly restored according to PSFM — is irrelevant to the adjustment process when arbitrage constraints on tradable goods are effective. The burden of the adjustment is carried by changes in spending patterns that restore desired asset holdings to their equilibrium levels, independently of relative-price-level effects. Samuelson further showed that even when, owing to the existence of non-tradable goods, there are relative-price-level effects, those effects are irrelevant to the adjustment process that restores equilibrium.

What was missing from Hume’s analysis was the concept of a demand to hold money (or gold). The difference between desired and actual holdings of cash imply corresponding changes in expenditure, and those changes in expenditure restore equilibrium in money (gold) holdings independent of any price effects. Lacking any theory of the demand to hold money (or gold), Hume had to rely on a price-level adjustment to explain how equilibrium is restored after a change in the quantity of gold in one country. Hume’s misstep set monetary economics off on a two-century detour, avoided by only a relative handful of economists, in explaining the process of international adjustment.

So historically there have been two paradigms of international adjustment under the gold standard: 1) the better-known, but incorrect, Humean PSFM based on relative-price-level differences which induce self-correcting gold flows that, in turn, are supposed to eliminate the price-level differences, and 2) the not-so-well-known, but correct, arbitrage-monetary-adjustment theory. Under the PSFM, the adjustment can occur only if gold flows give rise to relative-price-level adjustments. But, under PSFM, for those relative-price-level adjustments to occur, gold flows have to change the domestic money stock, because it is the quantity of domestic money that governs the domestic price level.

That is why if you believe, as Milton Friedman did, in PSFM, sterilization is such a big deal. Relative domestic price levels are correlated with relative domestic money stocks, so if a gold inflow into a country does not change its domestic money stock, the necessary increase in the relative price level of the country receiving the gold inflow cannot occur. The “automatic” adjustment mechanism under the gold standard has been blocked, implying that if there is sterilization, the gold standard is rendered fraudulent.

But we now know that that is not how the gold standard works. The point of gold flows was not to change relative price levels. International adjustment required changes in domestic money supplies to be sure, but, under the gold standard, changes in domestic money supplies are essentially unavoidable. Thus, in his 1932 defense of the insane Bank of France, Hayek pointed out that the domestic quantity of money had in fact increased in France along with French gold holdings. To Hayek, this meant that the Bank of France was not sterilizing the gold inflow. Friedman would have said that, given the gold inflow, the French money stock ought to have increased by a far larger amount than it actually did.

Neither Hayek nor Friedman understood what was happening. The French public wanted to increase their holdings of money. Because the French government imposed high gold reserve requirements (but less than 100%) on the creation of French banknotes and deposits, increasing holdings of money required the French to restrict their spending sufficiently to create a balance-of-trade surplus large enough to induce the inflow of gold needed to satisfy the reserve requirements on the desired increase in cash holdings. The direction of causation was exactly the opposite of what Friedman thought. It was the desired increase in the amount of francs that the French wanted to hold that (given the level of gold reserve requirements) induced the increase in French gold holdings.

But this doesn’t mean, as Hayek argued, that the insane Bank of France was not wreaking havoc on the international monetary system. By advocating a banking law that imposed very high gold reserve requirements and by insisting on redeeming almost all of its non-gold foreign exchange reserves into gold bullion, the insane Bank of France, along with the clueless Federal Reserve, generated a huge increase in the international monetary demand for gold, which was the proximate cause of the worldwide deflation that began in 1929 and continued till 1933. The problem was not a misalignment between relative price levels, which is sterilization supposedly causes; the problem was a worldwide deflation that afflicted all countries on the gold standard, and was avoidable only by escaping from the gold standard.

At any rate, the concept of sterilization does nothing to enhance our understanding of that deflationary process. And whatever defects there were in the way that central banks were operating under the gold standard in the 1920s, the concept of sterilization averts attention from the critical problem which was the increasing demand of the world’s central banks, especially the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve, for gold reserves.

Misunderstanding (Totally!) Competitive Currency Devaluations

Published August 11, 2014 exchange rate protection , gold standard , Great Depression , Hawtrey , monetary policy 14 Comments
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Before becoming Governor of the Resesrve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan professor was Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Business School. Winner of the Fischer Black Prize in 2003, he is the author numerous articles in leading academic journals in economics and finance, and co-author (with Luigi Zingales) of a well-regarded book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists that had some valuable insights about financial-market dysfunction. He is obviously no slouch.

Unfortunately, based on recent reports, Goverenor Rajan is, despite his impressive resume and academic credentials, as Marcus Nunes pointed out on his blog, totally clueless about the role of monetary policy and the art of central banking in combating depressions. Here is the evidence provided by none other than the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper whose editorial page espouses roughly the same view as Rajan, summarizing Rajan’s remarks.

Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan warned Wednesday that the global economy bears an increasing resemblance to its condition in the 1930s, with advanced economies trying to pull out of the Great Recession at each other’s expense.

The difference: competitive monetary policy easing has now taken the place of competitive currency devaluations as the favored tool for playing a zero-sum game that is bound to end in disaster. Now, as then, “demand shifting” has taken the place of “demand creation,” the Indian policymaker said.

A clear symptom of the major imbalances crippling the world’s financial market is the over valuation of the euro, Mr. Rajan said.

The euro-zone economy faces problems similar to those faced by developing economies, with the European Central Bank’s “very, very accommodative stance” having a reduced impact due to the ultra-loose monetary policies being pursued by other central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England.

The notion that competitive currency devaluations in the Great Depression were a zero-sum game is fallacy, an influential fallacy to be sure, but a fallacy nonetheless. And because it is – and was — so influential, it is a highly dangerous fallacy. There is indeed a similarity between the current situation and the 1930s, but the similarity is not that monetary ease is a zero-sum game that merely “shifts,” but does not “create,” demand; the similarity is that the fallacious notion that monetary ease does not create demand is still so prevalent.

The classic refutation of the fallacy that monetary ease only shifts, but does not create, demand was provided on numerous occasions by R. G. Hawtrey. Almost two and a half years ago, I quoted a particularly cogent passage from Hawtrey’s Trade Depression and the Way Out (2nd edition, 1933) in which he addressed the demand-shift fallacy. Hawtrey refuted the fallacy in responding to those who were arguing that Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard in September 1931 had failed to stimulate the British economy, and had damaged the world economy, because prices continued falling after Britain left the gold standard. Hawtrey first discussed the reasons for the drop in the world price level after Britain gave up the gold standard.

When Great Britain left the gold standard, deflationary measures were everywhere resorted to. Not only did the Bank of England raise its rate, but the tremendous withdrawals of gold from the United States involved an increase of rediscounts and a rise of rates there, and the gold that reached Europe was immobilized or hoarded. . . .

In other words, Britain’s departure from the gold standard led to speculation that the US would follow Britain off the gold standard, implying an increase in the demand to hoard gold before the anticipated increase in its dollar price. That is a typical reaction under the gold standard when the probability of a devaluation is perceived to have risen. By leaving gold, Britain increased the perceived probability that other countries, and especially the US, would also leave the gold standard.

The consequence was that the fall in the price level continued [because an increase in the demand to hold gold (for any reason including speculation on a future increase in the nominal price of gold) must raise the current value of gold relative to all other commodities which means that the price of other commodities in terms of gold must fall — DG]. The British price level rose in the first few weeks after the suspension of the gold standard [because the value of the pound was falling relative to gold, implying that prices in terms of pounds rose immediately after Britain left gold — DG], but then accompanied the gold price level in its downward trend [because after the initial fall in the value of the pound relative to gold, the pound stabilized while the real value of gold continued to rise — DG]. This fall of prices calls for no other explanation than the deflationary measures which had been imposed [alarmed at the rapid fall in the value of gold, the Bank of England raised interest rates to prevent further depreciation in sterling — DG]. Indeed what does demand explanation is the moderation of the fall, which was on the whole not so steep after September 1931 as before.

Yet when the commercial and financial world saw that gold prices were falling rather than sterling prices rising, they evolved the purely empirical conclusion that a depreciation of the pound had no effect in raising the price level, but that it caused the price level in terms of gold and of those currencies in relation to which the pound depreciated to fall.

Here Hawtrey identified precisely the demand-shift fallacy evidently now subscribed to by Governor Rajan. In other words, when Britain left the gold standard, Britain did nothing to raise the international level of prices, which, under the gold standard, is the level of prices measured in terms of gold. Britain may have achieved a slight increase in its own domestic price level, but only by imposing a corresponding reduction in the price level measured in terms of gold. Let’s see how Hawtrey demolishes the fallacy.

For any such conclusion there was no foundation. Whenever the gold price level tended to fall, the tendency would make itself felt in a fall in the pound concurrently with the fall in commodities. [Hawtrey is saying that if the gold price level fell, while the sterling price level remained constant, the value of sterling would also fall in terms of gold. — DG] But it would be quite unwarrantable to infer that the fall in the pound was the cause of the fall in commodities.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the depreciation of any currency, by reducing the cost of manufacture in the country concerned in terms of gold, tends to lower the gold prices of manufactured goods. . . . [In other words, the cost of production of manufactured goods, which include both raw materials – raw materials often being imported — and capital equipment and labor, which generally are not mobile, is unlikely to rise as much in percentage terms as the percentage depreciation in the currency. — DG]

But that is quite a different thing from lowering the price level. For the fall in manufacturing costs results in a greater demand for manufactured goods, and therefore the derivative demand for primary products is increased. [That is to say, if manufactured products become relatively cheaper as the currency depreciates, the real quantity of manufactured goods demanded will increase, and the real quantity of inputs used to produce the increased quantity of manufactured goods must also increase. — DG] While the prices of finished goods fall, the prices of primary products rise. Whether the price level as a whole would rise or fall it is not possible to say a priori, but the tendency is toward correcting the disparity between the price levels of finished products and primary products. That is a step towards equilibrium. And there is on the whole an increase of productive activity. The competition of the country which depreciates its currency will result in some reduction of output from the manufacturing industry of other countries. But this reduction will be less than the increase in the country’s output, for if there were no net increase in the world’s output there would be no fall of prices. [Thus, even though there is some demand shifting toward the country that depreciates its currency because its products become relatively cheaper than the products of non-depreciating currencies, the cost reduction favoring the output of the country with a depreciating currency could not cause an overall reduction in prices elsewhere if total output had not increased. — DG]

Hawtrey then articulates the policy implication of the demand-shift fallacy.

In consequence of the competitive advantage gained by a country’s manufacturers from a depreciation of its currency, any such depreciation is only too likely to meet with recriminations and even retaliation from its competitors. . . . Fears are even expressed that if one country starts depreciation, and others follow suit, there may result “a competitive depreciation” to which no end can be seen.

This competitive depreciation is an entirely imaginary danger. The benefit that a country derives from the depreciation of its currency is in the rise of its price level relative to its wage level, and does not depend on its competitive advantage. [There is a slight ambiguity here, because Hawtrey admitted above that there is a demand shift. But there is also an increase in demand, and it is the increase in demand, associated with a rise of its price level relative to its wage level, which does not depend on a competitive advantage associated with a demand shift. — DG] If other countries depreciate their currencies, its competitive advantage is destroyed, but the advantage of the price level remains both to it and to them. They in turn may carry the depreciation further, and gain a competitive advantage. But this race in depreciation reaches a natural limit when the fall in wages and in the prices of manufactured goods in terms of gold has gone so far in all the countries concerned as to regain the normal relation with the prices of primary products. When that occurs, the depression is over, and industry is everywhere remunerative and fully employed. Any countries that lag behind in the race will suffer from unemployment in their manufacturing industry. But the remedy lies in their own hands; all they have to do is to depreciate their currencies to the extent necessary to make the price level remunerative to their industry. Their tardiness does not benefit their competitors, once these latter are employed up to capacity. Indeed, if the countries that hang back are an important part of the world’s economic system, the result must be to leave the disparity of price levels partly uncorrected, with undesirable consequences to everybody. . . .

The picture of an endless competition in currency depreciation is completely misleading. The race of depreciation is towards a definite goal; it is a competitive return to equilibrium. The situation is like that of a fishing fleet threatened with a storm; no harm is done if their return to a harbor of refuge is “competitive.” Let them race; the sooner they get there the better. (pp. 154-57)

Hawtrey’s analysis of competitive depreciation can be further elucidated by reconsidering it in the light of Max Corden’s classic analysis of exchange-rate protection, which I have discussed several times on this blog (here, here, and here). Corden provided a deep analysis of the conditions under which exchange-rate depreciation confers a competitive advantage. For internationally traded commodities, it is hard to see how any advantage can be derived from currency manipulation. A change in the exchange rate would be rapidly offset by corresponding changes in the prices of the relevant products. However, factors of production like labor, land, and capital equipment, tend to be immobile so their prices in the local currency don’t necessarily adjust immediately to changes in exchange rate of the local currency. Hawtrey was clearly assuming that labor and capital are not tradable so that international arbitrage does not induce immediate adjusments in their prices. Also, Hawtrey’s analysis begins from a state of disequilibrirum, while Corden’s starts from equilibrium, a very important difference.

However, even if prices of non-tradable commodities and factors of production don’t immediately adjust to exchange-rate changes, there is another mechanism operating to eliminate any competitive advantage, which is that the inflow of foreign-exchange reserves into a country with an undervalued currency (and, thus, a competitive advantage) will normally induce monetary expansion in that country, thereby raising the prices of non-tradables and factors of production. What Corden showed was that a central bank willing to tolerate a sufficiently large expansion in its foreign-reserve holdings could keep its currency undervalued, thereby maintaining a competitive advantage for its country in world markets.

But the corollary to Corden’s analysis is that to gain competitive advantage from currency depreciation requires the central bank to maintain monetary stringency (a chronic excess demand for money thus requiring a corresponding export surplus) and a continuing accumulation of foreign exchange reserves. If central banks are pursuing competitive monetary easing, which Governor Rajan likens to competitive exchange-rate depreciation aimed at shifting, not expanding, total demand, he is obviously getting worked up over nothing, because Corden demonstrated 30 years ago that a necessary condition for competitive exchange-rate depreciation is monetary tightness, not monetary ease.

My Paper on Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade

Published December 17, 2013 Uncategorized 7 Comments
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I have just posted my paper “Hawtrey’s Good and Bad Trade: A Centenary Retrospective” based on a series of blog posts this fall on SSRN. Here is a link to download the paper.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2369028

Comments on the paper will be gratefully accepted either as comments to this post or via email at uneasymoney@hotmail.com

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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