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Keynes v. Hawtrey on British Monetary Policy after Rejoining the Gold Standard

Published March 20, 2013 gold standard , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Keynes , monetary theory 30 Comments
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The close, but not always cozy, relationship between Keynes and Hawtrey was summed up beautifully by Keynes in 1929 when, commenting on a paper by Hawtrey, “Money and Index Numbers,” presented to the Royal Statistical Society, Keynes began as follows.

There are very few writers on monetary subjects from whom one receives more stimulus and useful suggestion . . . and I think there are few writers on these subjects with whom I personally feel more fundamental sympathy and agreement. The paradox is that in spite of that, I nearly always disagree in detail with what he says! Yet truly and sincerely he is one of the writers who seems to me to be most nearly on the right track!

The tension between these two friendly rivals was dramatically displayed in April 1930, when Hawtrey gave testimony before the Macmillan Committee (The Committee on Finance and Industry) established after the stock-market crash in 1929 to investigate the causes of depressed economic conditions and chronically high unemployment in Britain. The Committee, chaired by Hugh Pattison Macmillan, included an impressive roster of prominent economists, financiers, civil servants, and politicians, but its dominant figure was undoubtedly Keynes, who was a relentless interrogator of witnesses and principal author of the Committee’s final report. Keynes’s position was that, having mistakenly rejoined the gold standard at the prewar parity in 1925, Britain had no alternative but to follow a policy of high interest rates to protect the dollar-sterling exchange rate that had been so imprudently adopted. Under those circumstances, reducing unemployment required a different kind of policy intervention from reducing the bank rate, which is what Hawtrey had been advocating continuously since 1925.

In chapter 5 of his outstanding doctoral dissertation on Hawtrey’s career at the Treasury, which for me has been a gold mine (no pun intended) of information, Alan Gaukroger discusses the work of the Macmillan Committee, focusing particularly on Hawtrey’s testimony in April 1930 and the reaction to that testimony by the Committee. Especially interesting are the excerpts from Hawtrey’s responses to questions asked by the Committee, mostly by Keynes. Hawtrey’s argument was that despite the overvaluation of sterling, the Bank of England could have reduced British unemployment had it dared to cut the bank rate rather than raise it to 5% in 1925 before rejoining the gold standard and keeping it there, with only very brief reductions to 4 or 4.5% subsequently. Although reducing bank rate would likely have caused an outflow of gold, Hawtrey believed that the gold standard was not worth the game if it could only be sustained at the cost of the chronically high unemployment that was the necessary consequence of dear money. But more than that, Hawtrey believed that, because of London’s importance as the principal center for financing international trade, cutting interest rates in London would have led to a fall in interest rates in the rest of the world, thereby moderating the loss of gold and reducing the risk of being forced off the gold standard. It was on that point that Hawtrey faced the toughest questioning.

After Hawtrey’s first day of his testimony, in which he argued to a skeptical committee that the Bank of England, if it were willing to take the lead in reducing interest rates, could induce a world-wide reduction in interest rates, Hawtrey was confronted by the chairman of the Committee, Hugh Macmillan. Summarizing Hawtrey’s position, Macmillan entered into the following exchange with Hawtrey

MACMILLAN. Suppose . . . without restricting credit . . . that gold had gone out to a very considerable extent, would that not have had very serious consequences on the international position of London?

HAWTREY. I do not think the credit of London depends on any particular figure of gold holding. . . . The harm began to be done in March and April of 1925 [when] the fall in American prices started. There was no reason why the Bank of England should have taken ny action at that time so far as the question of loss of gold is concerned. . . . I believed at the time and I still think that the right treatment would have been to restore the gold standard de facto before it was restored de jure. That is what all the other countries have done. . . . I would have suggested that we should have adopted the practice of always selling gold to a sufficient extent to prevent the exchange depreciating. There would have been no legal obligation to continue convertibility into gold . . . If that course had been adopted, the Bank of England would never have been anxious about the gold holding, they would have been able to see it ebb away to quite a considerable extent with perfect equanimity, and might have continued with a 4 percent Bank Rate.

MACMILLAN. . . . the course you suggest would not have been consistent with what one may call orthodox Central Banking, would it?

HAWTREY. I do not know what orthodox Central Banking is.

MACMILLAN. . . . when gold ebbs away you must restrict credit as a general principle?

HAWTREY. . . . that kind of orthodoxy is like conventions at bridge; you have to break them when the circumstances call for it. I think that a gold reserve exists to be used. . . . Perhaps once in a century the time comes when you can use your gold reserve for the governing purpose, provided you have the courage to use practically all of it. I think it is possible that the situation arose in the interval between the return to the gold standard . . . and the early part of 1927 . . . That was the period at which the greater part of the fall in the [international] price level took place. [Gaukroger, p. 298]

Somewhat later, Keynes began his questioning.

KEYNES. When we returned to the gold standard we tried to restore equilibrium by trying to lower prices here, whereas we could have used our influence much more effectively by trying to raise prices elsewhere?

HAWTREY. Yes.

KEYNES . . . I should like to take the argument a little further . . . . the reason the method adopted has not been successful, as I understand you, is partly . . . the intrinsic difficulty of . . . [reducing] wages?

HAWTREY. Yes.

KEYNES. . . . and partly the fact that the effort to reduce [prices] causes a sympathetic movement abroad . . .?

HAWTREY. Yes.

KEYNES. . . . you assume a low Bank Rate [here] would have raised prices elsewhere?

HAWTREY. Yes.

KEYNES. But it would also, presumably, have raised [prices] here?

HAWTREY. . . . what I have been saying . . . is aimed primarily at avoiding the fall in prices both here and abroad. . . .it is possible there might have been an actual rise in prices here . . .

KEYNES. One would have expected our Bank Rate to have more effect on our own price level than on the price level of the rest of the world?

HAWTREY. Yes.

KEYNES. So, in that case . . . wouldn’t dear money have been more efficacious . . . in restoring equilibrium between home and foreign price . . .?

HAWTREY. . . .the export of gold itself would have tended to produce equilibrium. It depends very much at what stage you suppose the process to be applied.

KEYNES. . . . so cheap money here affects the outside world more than it affects us, but dear money here affects us more than it affects the outside world.

HAWTREY. No. My suggestion is that through cheap money here, the export of gold encourages credit expansion elsewhere, but the loss of gold tends to have some restrictive effect on credit here.

KEYNES. But this can only happen if the loss of gold causes a reversal of the cheap money policy?

HAWTREY. No, I think that the export of gold has some effect consistent with cheap money.

In his questioning, Keynes focused on an apparent asymmetry in Hawtrey’s argument. Hawtrey had argued that allowing an efflux of gold would encourage credit expansion in the rest of the world, which would make it easier for British prices to adjust to a rising international price level rather than having to fall all the way to a stable or declining international price level. Keynes countered that, even if the rest of the world adjusted its policy to the easier British policy, it was not plausible to assume that the effect of British policy would be greater on the international price level than on the internal British price level. Thus, for British monetary policy to facilitate the adjustment of the internal British price level to the international price level, cheap money would tend to be self-defeating, inasmuch as cheap money would tend to raise British prices faster than it raised the international price level. Thus, according to Keynes, for monetary policy to close the gap between the elevated internal British price level and the international price level, a dear-money policy was necessary, because dear money would reduce British internal prices faster than it reduced international prices.

Hawtrey’s response was that the export of gold would induce a policy change by other central banks. What Keynes called a dear-money policy was the status quo policy in which the Bank of England was aiming to maintain its current gold reserve. Under Hawtrey’s implicit central-bank reaction function, dear money (i.e., holding Bank of England gold reserves constant) would induce no reaction by other central banks. However, an easy-money policy (i.e., exporting Bank of England gold reserves) would induce a “sympathetic” easing of policy by other central banks. Thus, the asymmetry in Hawtrey’s argument was not really an asymmetry, because, in the context of the exchange between Keynes and Hawtrey, dear money meant keeping Bank of England gold reserves constant, while easy money meant allowing the export of gold. Thus, only easy money would induce a sympathetic response from other central banks. Unfortunately, Hawtrey’s response did not explain that the asymmetry identified by Keynes was a property not of Hawtrey’s central-bank reaction function, but of Keynes’s implicit definitions of cheap and dear money. Instead, Hawtrey offered a cryptic response about “the loss of gold tend[ing] to have some restrictive effect on credit” in Britain.

The larger point is that, regardless of the validity of Hawtrey’s central-bank reaction function as a representation of the role of the Bank of England in the international monetary system under the interwar gold standard, Hawtrey’s model of how the gold standard operated was not called into question by this exchange. It is not clear from the exchange whether Keynes was actually trying to challenge Hawtrey on his model of the international monetary system or was just trying to cast doubt on Hawtrey’s position that monetary policy was, on its own, a powerful enough instrument to have eliminated unemployment in Britain without adopting any other remedial policies, especially Keynes’s preferred policy of public works. As the theoretical source of the Treasury View that public works were incapable of increasing employment without monetary expansion, it is entirely possible that that was Keynes’s ultimate objective. However, with the passage of time, Keynes drifted farther and farther away from the monetary model that, in large measure, he shared with Hawtrey in the 1920s and the early 1930s.

Keynes and Hawtrey: The General Theory

Published March 18, 2013 gold standard , Hawtrey , Keynes 16 Comments
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Before pausing for an interlude about the dueling reviews of Hayek and Hawtrey on each other’s works in the February 1932 issue of Economica, I had taken my discussion of the long personal and professional relationship between Hawtrey and Keynes through Hawtrey’s review of Keynes’s Treatise on Money. The review was originally written as a Treasury document for Hawtrey’s superiors at the Treasury (and eventually published in slightly revised form as chapter six of The Art of Central Banking), but Hawtrey sent it almost immediately to Keynes. Although Hawtrey subjected Keynes’s key analytical result in the Treatise — his fundamental equations, relating changes in the price level to the difference between savings and investment — to sharp criticism, Keynes responded to Hawtrey’s criticisms with (possibly uncharacteristic) good grace, writing back to Hawtrey: “it is very seldom indeed that an author can expect to get as a criticism anything so tremendously useful to himself,” adding that he was “working it out all over again.” What Keynes was working out all over again of course eventually evolved into his General Theory.

Probably because Keynes had benefited so much from Hawtrey’s comments on and criticisms of the Treatise, which he received only shortly before delivering the final draft to the publisher, Keynes began sending Hawtrey early drafts of the General Theory instead of waiting, as he had when writing the Treatise, till the book was almost done. There was thus a protracted period of debate and argument between Keynes and Hawtrey over the General Theory, a process that clearly frustrated and annoyed Keynes, though he never actually terminated the discussion with Hawtrey. “Hawtrey,” Keynes wrote to his wife in 1933, “was very sweet to the last but quite mad. One can argue with him a long time on a perfectly sane and interesting basis and then, suddenly, one is in a madhouse.” On the accuracy of that characterization, I cannot comment, but clearly the two Cambridge Apostles were failing to communicate.

The General Theory was published in February 1936, and hardly a month had passed before Hawtrey shared his thoughts about the General Theory with his Treasury colleagues. (Hawtrey subsequently published the review in his collection of essays Capital and Employment.) Hawtrey began by expressing his doubts about Keynes’s attempt to formulate an alternative theory of interest based on liquidity preference in place of the classical theory based on time preference and productivity.

According to [Keynes], the rate of interest is to be regarded not as the reward of abstaining from consumption or of “waiting”, but as the reward of forgoing liquidity. By tying up their savings in investments people forgo liquidity, and the extent to which they are willing to do so will depend on the rate of interest. Anyone’s “liquidity preference” is a function relating the amount of his resources which he will wish ot retain in the form of money to different sets of circumstances, and among those circumstances will be the rate of interest. . . . The supply of money determines the rate of interest, and the rate of interest so determined governs the volume of capital outlay.

As in his criticism of the fundamental equations of the Treatise, Hawtrey was again sharply critical of Keynes’s tendency to argue from definitions rather than from causal relationships.

[A]n essential step in [Keynes’s] train of reasoning is the proposition that investment an saving are necessarily equal. That proposition Mr. Keynes never really establishes; he evades the necessity doing so by defining investment and saving as different names for the same thing. He so defines income to be the same thing as output, and therefore, if investment is the excess of output over consumption, and saving is the excess of income over consumption, the two are identical. Identity so established cannot prove anything. The idea that a tendency for investment and saving to become different has to be counteracted by an expansion or contraction of the total of incomes is an absurdity; such a tendency cannot strain the economic system, it can only strain Mr. Keynes’s vocabulary. [quoted by Alan Gaukroger “The Director of Financial Enquiries A Study of the Treasury Career of R. G. Hawtrey, 1919-1939.” pp. 507-08]

But despite the verbal difference between them, Keynes and Hawtrey held a common view that the rate of interest might be too high to allow full employment. Keynes argued that liquidity preference could prevent monetary policy from reducing the rate of interest to a level at which there would be enough private investment spending to generate full employment. Hawtrey held a similar view, except that, according to Hawtrey, the barrier to a sufficient reduction in the rate of interest to allow full employment was not liquidity preference, but a malfunctioning international monetary system under a gold-standard, or fixed-exchange rate, regime. For any country operating under a fixed-exchange-rate or balance-of-payments constraint, the interest rate has to be held at a level consistent with maintaining the gold-standard parity. But that interest rate depends on the interest rates that other countries are setting. Thus, a country may find itself in a situation in which the interest rate consistent with full employment is inconsistent with maintaining its gold-standard parity. Indeed all countries on a gold standard or a fixed exchange rate regime may have interest rates too high for full employment, but each one may feel that it can’t reduce its own interest rate without endangering its exchange-rate parity.

Under the gold standard in the 1920s and 1930s, Hawtrey argued, interest rates were chronically too high to allow full employment, and no country was willing to risk unilaterally reducing its own interest rates, lest it provoke a balance-of-payments crisis. After the 1929 crash, even though interest rates came down, they came down too slowly to stimulate a recovery, because no country would cut interest rates as much and as fast as necessary out of fear doing so would trigger a currency crisis. From 1925, when Britain rejoined the gold standard, to 1931 when Britain left the gold standard, Hawtrey never stopped arguing for lower interest rates, because he was convinced that credit expansion was the only way to increase output and employment. The Bank of England would lose gold, but Hawtrey argued that the point of a gold reserve was to use it when it was necessary. By emitting gold, the Bank of England would encourage other countries to ease their monetary policies and follow England in reducing their interest rates. That, at any rate, is what Hawtrey hoped would happen. Perhaps he was wrong in that hope; we will never know. But even if he was, the outcome would certainly not have been any worse than what resulted from the policy that Hawtrey opposed.

To the contemporary observer, the sense of déjà vu is palpable.

Hayek v. Hawtrey on the Trade Cycle

Published March 13, 2013 Austrian Business-Cycle Theory , Great Depression , Hawtrey , Hayek , monetary theory 22 Comments
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While searching for material on the close and multi-faceted relationship between Keynes and Hawtrey which I am now studying and writing about, I came across a remarkable juxtaposition of two reviews in the British economics journal Economica, published by the London School of Economics. Economica was, after the Economic Journal published at Cambridge (and edited for many years by Keynes), probably the most important economics journal published in Britain in the early 1930s. Having just arrived in Britain in 1931 to a spectacularly successful debut with his four lectures at LSE, which were soon published as Prices and Production, and having accepted the offer of a professorship at LSE, Hayek began an intense period of teaching and publishing, almost immediately becoming the chief rival of Keynes. The rivalry had been more or less officially inaugurated when Hayek published the first of his two-part review-essay of Keynes’s recently published Treatise on Money in the August 1931 issue of Economica, followed by Keynes’s ill-tempered reply and Hayek’s rejoinder in the November 1931 issue, with the second part of Hayek’s review appearing in the February 1932 issue.

But interestingly in the same February issue containing the second installment of Hayek’s lengthy review essay, Hayek also published a short (2 pages, 3 paragraphs) review of Hawtrey’s Trade Depression and the Way Out immediately following Hawtrey’s review of Hayek’s Prices and Production in the same issue. So not only was Hayek engaging in controversy with Keynes, he was arguing with Hawtrey as well. The points at issue were similar in the two exchanges, but there may well be more to learn from the lower-key, less polemical, exchange between Hayek and Hawtrey than from the overheated exchange between Hayek and Keynes.

So here is my summary (in reverse order) of the two reviews:

Hayek on Trade Depression and the Way Out.

Hayek, in his usual polite fashion, begins by praising Hawtrey’s theoretical eminence and skill as a clear expositor of his position. (“the rare clarity and painstaking precision of his theoretical exposition and his very exceptional knowledge of facts making anything that comes from his pen well worth reading.”) However, noting that Hawtrey’s book was aimed at a popular rather than a professional audience, Hayek accuses Hawtrey of oversimplification in attributing the depression to a lack of monetary stimulus.

Hayek proceeds in his second paragraph to explain what he means by oversimplification. Hayek agrees that the origin of the depression was monetary, but he disputes Hawtrey’s belief that the deflationary shocks were crucial.

[Hawtrey’s] insistence upon the relation between “consumers’ income” and “consumers’ outlay” as the only relevant factor prevents him from seeing the highly important effects of monetary causes upon the capitalistic structure of production and leads him along the paths of the “purchasing power theorists” who see the source of all evil in the insufficiency of demand for consumers goods. . . . Against all empirical evidence, he insists that “the first symptom of contracting demand is a decline in sales to the consumer or final purchaser.” In fact, of course, depression has always begun with a decline in demand, not for consumers’ goods but for capital goods, and the one marked phenomenon of the present depression was that the demand for consumers’ goods was very well maintained for a long while after the crisis occurred.

Hayek’s comment seems to me to misinterpret Hawtrey slightly. Hawtrey wrote “a decline in sales to the consumer or final purchaser,” which could refer to a decline in the sales of capital equipment as well as the sales of consumption goods, so Hawtrey’s assertion was not necessarily inconsistent with Hayek’s representation about the stability of consumption expenditure immediately following a cyclical downturn. It would also not be hard to modify Hawtrey’s statement slightly; in an accelerator model, with which Hawtrey was certainly familiar, investment depends on the growth of consumption expenditures, so that a leveling off of consumption, rather than an actual downturn in consumption, would suffice to trigger the downturn in investment which, according to Hayek, was a generally accepted stylized fact characterizing the cyclical downturn.

Hayek continues:

[W]hat Mr. Hawtrey, in common with many other English economists [I wonder whom Hayek could be thinking of], lacks is an adequate basic theory of the factors which affect [the] capitalistic structure of production.

Because of Hawtrey’s preoccupation with the movements of the overall price level, Hayek accuses Hawtrey of attributing the depression solely “to a process of deflation” for which the remedy is credit expansion by the central banks. [Sound familiar?]

[Hawtrey] seems to extend [blame for the depression] on the policy of the Bank of England even to the period before 1929, though according to his own criterion – the rise in the prices of the original factors of production [i.e., wages] – it is clear that, in that period, the trouble was too much credit expansion. “In 1929,” Mr. Hawtrey writes, “when productive activity was at its highest in the United States, wages were 120 percent higher than in 1913, while commodity prices were only 50 percent higher.” Even if we take into account the fact that the greater part of this rise in wages took place before 1921, it is clear that we had much more credit expansion before 1929 than would have been necessary to maintain the world-wage-level. It is not difficult to imagine what would have been the consequences if, during that period, the Bank of England had followed Mr. Hawtrey’s advice and had shown still less reluctance to let go. But perhaps, this would have exposed the dangers of such frankly inflationist advice quicker than will now be the case.

A remarkable passage indeed! To accuse Hawtrey of toleration of inflation, he insinuates that the 50% rise in wages from 1913 to 1929, was at least in part attributable to the inflationary policies Hawtrey was advocating. In fact, I believe that it is clear, though I don’t have easy access to the best data source C. H. Feinstein’s “Changes in Nominal Wages, the Cost of Living, and Real Wages in the United Kingdom over Two Centuries, 1780-1990,” in Labour’s Reward edited by P. Schoillers and V. Zamagni (1995). From 1922 to 1929 the overall trend of nominal wages in Britain was actually negative. Hayek’s reference to “frankly inflationist advice” was not just wrong, but wrong-headed.

Hawtrey on Prices and Production

Hawtrey spends the first two or three pages or so of his review giving a summary of Hayek’s theory, explaining the underlying connection between Hayek and the Bohm-Bawerkian theory of production as a process in time, with the length of time from beginning to end of the production process being a function of the rate of interest. Thus, reducing the rate of interest leads to a lengthening of the production process (average period of production). Credit expansion financed by bank lending is the key cyclical variable, lengthening the period of production, but only temporarily.

The lengthening of the period of production can only take place as long as inflation is increasing, but inflation cannot increase indefinitely. When inflation stops increasing, the period of production starts to contract. Hawtrey explains:

Some intermediate products (“non-specific”) can readily be transferred from one process to another, but others (“specific”) cannot. These latter will no longer be needed. Those who have been using them, and still more those who have producing them, will be thrown out of employment. And here is the “explanation of how it comes about at certain times that some of the existing resources cannot be used.” . . .

The originating cause of the disturbance would therefore be the artificially enhanced demand for producers’ goods arising when the creation of credit in favour of producers supplements the normal flow savings out of income. It is only because the latter cannot last for ever that the reaction which results in under-employment occurs.

But Hawtrey observes that only a small part of the annual capital outlay is applied to lengthening the period of production, capital outlay being devoted mostly to increasing output within the existing period of production, or to enhancing productivity through the addition of new plant and equipment embodying technical progress and new inventions. Thus, most capital spending, even when financed by credit creation, is not associated with any alteration in the period of production. Hawtrey would later introduce the terms capital widening and capital deepening to describe investments that do not affect the period of production and those that do affect it. Nor, in general, are capital-deepening investments the most likely to be adopted in response to a change in the rate of interest.

Similarly, If the rate of interest were to rise, making the most roundabout processes unprofitable, it does not follow that such processes will have to be scrapped.

A piece of equipment may have been installed, of which the yield, in terms of labour saved, is 4 percent on its cost. If the market rate of interest rises to 5 percent, it would no longer be profitable to install a similar piece. But that does not mean that, once installed, it will be left idle. The yield of 4 percent is better than nothing. . . .

When the scrapping of plant is hastened on account of the discovery of some technically improved process, there is a loss not only of interest but of the residue of depreciation allowance that would otherwise have accumulated during its life of usefulness. It is only when the new process promises a very suitable gain in efficiency that premature scrapping is worthwhile. A mere rise in the rate of interest could never have that effect.

But though a rise in the rate of interest is not likely to cause the scrapping of plant, it may prevent the installation of new plant of the kind affected. Those who produce such plant would be thrown out of employment, and it is this effect which is, I think, the main part of Dr. Hayek’s explanation of trade depressions.

But what is the possible magnitude of the effect? The transition from activity to depression is accompanied by a rise in the rate of interest. But the rise in the long-term rate is very slight, and moreover, once depression has set in, the long-term rate is usually lower than ever.

Changes are in any case perpetually occurring in the character of the plant and instrumental goods produced for use in industry. Such changes are apt to throw out of employment any highly specialized capital and labour engaged in the production of plant which becomes obsolete. But among the causes of obsolescence a rise in the rate of interest is certainly one of the least important and over short periods it may safely be said to be quite negligible.

Hawtrey goes on to question Hayek’s implicit assumption that the effects of the depression were an inevitable result of stopping the expansion of credit, an assumption that Hayek disavowed much later, but it was not unreasonable for Hawtrey to challenge Hayek on this point.

It is remarkable that Dr. Hayek does not entertain the possibility of a contraction of credit; he is content to deal with the cessation of further expansion. He maintains that at a time of depression a credit expansion cannot provide a remedy, because if the proportion between the demand for consumers’ goods and the demand for producers’ goods “is distorted by the creation of artificial demand, it must mean that part of the available resources is again led into a wrong direction and a definite and lasting adjustment is again postponed.” But if credit being contracted, the proportion is being distorted by an artificial restriction of demand.

The expansion of credit is assumed to start by chance, or at any rate no cause is suggested. It is maintained because the rise of prices offers temporary extra profits to entrepreneurs. A contraction of credit might equally well be assumed to start, and then to be maintained because the fall of prices inflicts temporary losses on entrepreneurs, and deters them from borrowing. Is not this to be corrected by credit expansion?

Dr. Hayek recognizes no cause of under-employment of the factors of production except a change in the structure of production, a “shortening of the period.” He does not consider the possibility that if, through a credit contraction or for any other reason, less money altogether is spent on intermediate products (capital goods), the factors of production engaged in producing these products will be under-employed.

Hawtrey then discusses the tension between Hayek’s recognition that the sense in which the quantity of money should be kept constant is the maintenance of a constant stream of money expenditure, so that in fact an ideal monetary policy would adjust the quantity of money to compensate for changes in velocity. Nevertheless, Hayek did not feel that it was within the capacity of monetary policy to adjust the quantity of money in such a way as to keep total monetary expenditure constant over the course of the business cycle.

Here are the concluding two paragraphs of Hawtrey’s review:

In conclusion, I feel bound to say that Dr. Hayek has spoiled an original piece of work which might have been an important contribution to monetary theory, by entangling his argument with the intolerably cumbersome theory of capital derived from Jevons and Bohm-Bawerk. This theory, when it was enunciated, was a noteworthy new departure in the metaphysics of political economy. But it is singularly ill-adapted for use in monetary theory, or indeed in any practical treatment of the capital market.

The result has been to make Dr. Hayek’s work so difficult and obscure that it is impossible to understand his little book of 112 pages except at the cost of many hours of hard work. And at the end we are left with the impression, not only that this is not a necessary consequence of the difficulty of the subject, but that he himself has been led by so ill-chosen a method of analysis to conclusions which he would hardly have accepted if given a more straightforward form of expression.

Keynes and Hawtrey: The Treatise on Money and Discovering the Multiplier

Published March 10, 2013 Hawtrey , Keynes , monetary policy , monetary theory , multiplier 13 Comments
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In my previous post on Keynes and Hawtrey, I tried to show the close resemblance between their upbringing and education and early careers. It becomes apparent that Keynes’s brilliance, and perhaps also his more distinguished family connections, had already enabled Keynes to begin overshadowing Hawtrey, four years his senior, as Keynes was approaching his thirties, and by 1919, when Hawtrey was turning 40, Keynes, having achieved something close to superstardom with the publication of The Econoomic Consequences of the Peace, had clearly eclipsed Hawtrey as a public figure, though as a pure monetary theoretician Hawtrey still had a claim to be the more influential of the two. For most of the 1920s, their relative standing did not change greatly, Hawtrey writing prolifically for economics journals as well as several volumes on monetary theory and a general treatise on economics, but without making much of an impression on broader public opinion, while Keynes, who continued to write primarily for a non-professional, though elite, audience, had the much higher public profile.

In the mid-1920s Keynes began writing his first systematic work on monetary theory and policy, the Treatise on Money. The extent to which Keynes communicated with Hawtrey about the Treatise in the five or six years during which he was working on it is unknown to me, but Keynes did send Hawtrey the proofs of the Treatise (totaling over 700 pages) in installments between April and July 1930. Hawtrey sent Keynes detailed comments, which Keynes later called “tremendously useful,” but, except for some minor points, Keynes could not incorporate most of the lengthy comments, criticisms or suggestions he received from Hawtrey before sending the final version of the Treatise to the publisher on September 14. Keynes did not mention Hawtrey in the preface to the Treatise, in which D. H. Robertson, R. F. Kahn, and H. D. Henderson were acknowledged for their assistance. Hawtrey would be mentioned along with Kahn, Joan Robinson, and Roy Harrod in the preface to the General Theory, but Hawtrey’s role in the preparation of the General Theory will be the subject of my next installment in this series. Hawtrey published his comments on the Treatise in his 1932 volume The Art of Central Banking.

Not long after the Treatise was published, and almost immediately subjected to critical reviews by Robertson and Hayek, among others, Keynes made it known that he was dissatisfied with the argument of the Treatise, and began work on what would eventually evolve into the General Theory. Hawtrey’s discussion was especially notable for two criticisms.  First Hawtrey explained that Keynes’s argument that an excess of investment over saving caused prices to rise was in fact a tautology entailed by Keynes’s definition of savings and investment.

[T]he fundamental equations disclose . . . that the price level is composed of two terms, one of which is cost per unit and the other is the difference between price and cost per unit.

Thus the difference between saving and investment is simply another name for the windfall gains or losses or for the difference between prices and costs of output. Throughout the Treatise Mr. Keynes adduces a divergence between saving and investment as the criterion of a departure from monetary equilibrium. But this criterion is nothing more or less than a divergence between prices and costs. Though the criterion ostensibly depends on two economic activities, “investment” and “saving,” it depends in reality not on them but on movements of the price level relative to costs.

That does not mean that the price level may not be influenced by changes in investment or in saving in some sense. But Mr. Keynes’s formula does not record such changes till their effect upon the price level is an accomplished fact. (p. 336)

Hawtrey’s other important criticism was his observation that Keynes assumed that a monetary disequilibrium would manifest itself exclusively in price changes and not at all in changes in output and employment. In fact this criticism followed naturally from Hawtrey’s criticism of Keynes’s definitions of savings and investment, from which the fundamental equations were derived, as not being grounded in the decisions of consumers and entrepreneurs.

With regard to savings, the individual consumers decide what they shall spend (or refrain from spending) on consumption. The balance of their earnings is “savings.” But the balance of their incomes (earnings plus windfall gains) is “investment.” Their decisions determine the amount of investment just as truly and in just the same way as they determine the amount of savings.

For all except entrepreneurs, earnings and income are the same. For entrepreneurs they differ if, and only if, there is a windfall gain or loss. But if there is a windfall gains, the recipients must decide what to do with it exactly as with any other receipt. If there is a windfall loss, the victims are deemed, according to Mr. Keynes’s definition of saving, to “save” the money they do not receive. But this is the result of the definition, not of any “decision.” (p. 345)

Preferring the more natural definition of savings as unconsumed income and of investment as capital outlay, Hawtrey proceeded to suggest an alternative analysis of an increase in saving by consumers. In the alternative analysis both output and prices could vary. It was Hawtrey therefore who provided the impetus for a switch to output and employment, not just prices, as equilibrating variable to a monetary disequilibrium.

It has been pointed out above that a difference between savings and investment [as defined by Keynes] cannot be regarded as the cause of a windfall loss or gain, for it is the windfall loss or gain. To find a causal sequence, we must turn to the decisions relating to consumption and capital outlay. When we do so, we find the windfall loss or gain to be one only among several consequences, and neither the earliest, nor necessarily the most important.

Throughout the Treatise Mr. Keynes refers to these decisions, and bases his argument upon them. And I think it is true to say that almost everywhere what he says may be interpreted as applying to the modified analysis which we have arrived at just as well as to that embodied in his fundamental equations. (p. 349)

To a large extent, Hawtrey’s criticisms of Keynes were criticisms of Keynes’s choice of definitions and the formal structure of his model rather than of the underlying theoretical intuition motivating Keynes’s theoretical apparatus. Hawtrey made this point in correcting Keynes’s misinterpretation of Hawtrey’s own position.

Mr. Keynes attributes to me (rather tentatively, it is true) acceptance of the view of “Bank rate as acting directly on the quantity of bank credit and so on prices in accordance with the Quantity Equation” (vol. 1., p. 188). But the passage which he quotes from my Currency and Credit contains no reference, explicit or implicit, to the quantity equation. Possibly I have misled him by using the expression “contraction of credit” for what I have sometimes called more accurately a “retardation of the creation of credit.”

The doctrine that I have consistently adhered to, that an acceleration or retardation of the creation of credit acts through changes in consumers’ income and outlay on the price level and on productive activity, and not through changes in the unspent margin [Hawtrey’s term of holdings of cash], is, I think, very close to Mr. Keynees’s theory. (p. 363)

In drawing attention to his belief “that an acceleration or retardation of the creation of credit acts through changes in consumers’ income and outlay . . . not through changes in the unspent margin,” Hawtrey emphasized that his monetary theory was not strictly speaking a quantity-theoretic monetary theory, as Keynes had erroneously suggested. Rather, he shared with Keynes the belief that there is a tendency for changes in expenditure and income to be cumulative. It was Hawtrey’s belief that the most reliable method by which such changes in income and expenditure could be realized was by way of changes in the short-term interest rate, which normally cause businesses and traders to alter their desired stocks of unfinished goods, working capital and inventories. Those changes, in turn, lead to increases in output and income and consumer outlay, which trigger further increases, and so on. In short, as early as 1913, Hawtrey had already sketched out in Good and Bad Trade the essential concept of a multiplier process initiated by changes in short-term interest rates, by way of their effect on desired stocks of working capital and inventories.

Thus, it is a complete misunderstanding of Hawtrey to suggest that, in the words of Peter Clarke (The Keynesian Revolution in the Making  pp. 242-43) that he was “the man who, having stumbled upon [the multiplier], painstakingly suppressed news of its discovery in his subsequent publications.” The multiplier analysis was not stumbled upon, nor was it suppressed. Rather, Hawtrey simply held that, under normal conditions, unless supported by credit expansion (i.e., a lower bank rate), increased government spending would be offset by reduced spending elsewhere producing no net increase in spending and therefore no multiplier effect. In fact, Hawtrey in 1931 in his Trade Depression and the Way Out (or perhaps only in the second 1933 edition of that book) conceded that under conditions of what he called a “credit deadlock” in which businesses could not be induced to borrow to increase spending, monetary policy would not be effective unless it was used to directly finance government spending. In Keynesian terminology, the situation was described as a liquidity trap, and we no refer to it as the zero lower bound. But the formal analysis of the multiplier was a staple of Hawtrey’s cycle theory from the very beginning. It was just kept in the background, not highlighted as in the Keynesian analysis. But it was perfectly natural for Hawtrey to have explained how Keynes could use it in his commentary on the Treatise.

UPDATE (03/12/13): In reading the excellent doctoral thesis of Alan Gaukroger about Hawtrey’s career at the British Treasury (to view and download the thesis click here) to which I refer in my reply to Luis Arroyo’s comment, I realized that Hawtrey did not introduce the terms “consumers’ income” and “consumers’ outlay” in Good and Bad Trade as I asserted in the post.  Those terms were only introduced six years later in Currency and Credit. I will have to reread the relevant passages more carefully to determine to what extent the introduction of the new terms in Currency and Credit represented an actual change in Hawtrey’s conceptual framework as opposed to the introduction of a new term for an a concept that he had previously worked out.

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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