Posts Tagged 'Richard Nixon'

The Road to Incoherence: Arthur Burns and the Agony of Central Banking

Published September 3, 2023 Arthur Burns , incomes policy , J. K. Galbraith , Milton Friedman , Nathan Tankus , Phillips Curve , political business cycles , R. G. Hawtrey , wage and price controls , wage-price guideposts 14 Comments
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UPDATE: My concluding paragraph was inadverently deleted from my post, so even if you’ve already read the post, you may want to go back and read my concluding paragraph.

Last December, Nathan Tankus wrote an essay for his substack site defending Arthur Burns and his record as Fed Chairman in the 1970s when inflation rose to double digits, setting the stage for Volcker’s shock therapy in 1981-82. Tankus believes that Burns has been blamed unfairly for the supposedly dreadful performance of the economy in the 1970s, a decade that probably ranks second for dreadfulness, after the 1930s, in the economic history of the 20th century. Nathan is not the first commentator or blogger I’ve seen over the past 10 years or so to offer a revisionist, favorable, take on Burns’s tenure at the Fed. Here are links to my earlier posts on Burns revisionism (link, link, link)

Nathan properly criticizes the treatment of the 1970s in journalistic mentions to that fraught decade. The decade endured a lot of unpleasantness along with the chronically high inflation that remains its most memorable feature, but it was also a decade of considerable economic growth, and, despite three recessions and rising unemployment, a huge increase in total US employment.

Nathan believes that Burns has been denigrated unfairly as a weak Fed Chairman who either ignored the inflationary forces, or succumbed, despite his conservative, anti-inflationary, political inclinations, to Nixon’s entreaties and pressure tactics, and deployed monetary policy to assist Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. Although the latter charge has at least some validity – it’s no accident that the literature on political business cycles, especially a seminal 1975 paper on that topic by William Nordhaus, a future Nobel laureate, was inspired by the Burns-Nixon episode – it’s not the whole story.

But, what is more important than Burns being cajoled or coerced by Nixon to speed the recovery from the 1969-70 recession, is that Burns was the victim of his own conceptual error in supposing that, if the incomes policy that he favored were adtoped, monetary expansion by the Fed wouldn’t lead to the inflationary consequences that they ultimately did have. Burns’s conceptual failure — whether willful or thoughtless — was to overlook the relationship between aggregate income and inflation. Although his confusion about that critical relationship was then widely, though not universally, held, his failure seems obvious, almost banal. But there were then only a few able to both identify and explain the failure and draw the appropriate policy implications. (In an earlier post about Burns, I’ve discussed Ralph Hawtrey’s final book published in 1966, but likely never noticed by Burns, in which the confusions were clearly dispelled and the appropriate policy implications clearly delineated.)

Nathan attributes the deterioration of Burns’s reputation to the influence of Milton Friedman, who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Burns at Columbia. Friedman, to be sure, was sharply critical of Burns’s performance at the Fed, but the acerbity of Friedman’s criticism also reflects his outrage that Burns had betrayed conservative, or “free-market”, principles by helping to persuade Nixon to adopt wage-and-price controls in 1971. Though I share Friedman’s disapproval of Burns’s role in the adoption of wage-and-price controls, Burns’s monetary-policy can be assessed independently of how one views the merits of the wage-and-price controls sought by Burns.

Here’s how Nathan describes Burns:

The actual Burns was – in his time – a well respected Monetary Policy “Hawk” who believed deeply in restrictive austerity. This was nearly universally acknowledged during his tenure, and then for a few years after. A New York Times article from 1978 about Burns’s successor, George Miller illustrates this well. Entitled “Miller Fights Inflation In Arthur Burns’s Style”, the article argues that Miller tightened monetary policy far more aggressively than the Carter administration expected and spoke in conservative, inflation focused and austere terms. In other words, he was a clone of Arthur Burns.

The reason this has been forgotten is the total victory of one influential dissenter: Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, in real time, pilloried his former mentor as a money supply expanding inflationist. That view deserves its own piece sometime (spoiler: it’s mostly wrong.)

Given Friedman’s dictum — “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” – it’s no surprise that Friedman blamed the Federal Reserve and Burns for inflation. While confidently asserting on the one hand that changes in the quantity of money cause corresponding changes in prices, Friedman, on the other hand, invoked unexplained long and variable lags between changes in the quantity of money and changes in prices to parry evidence that the supposed correlations were less than clear-cut. So, Friedman’s narrow focus on the quantity of money rather than on total spending – increaes in the quantity of money being as much an effect as a cause of increased nominal spending and income — actually undercut his critique of Fed policy. In what follows I will therefore not discuss the quantity of money, which was, in Friedman’s mind, the key variable that had to be controlled to reduce or stop inflation. Instead, I focus on the behavior of total nominal spending (aka aggregate demand) and total nominal income, which is what monetary policy (perhaps in conjunction with fiscal policy) has some useful capacity to control.

Upon becoming Fed Chairman early in 1970, Burns continued the monetary tightening initiated by his predecessor in 1969 when inflation had risen to 6%. Although the recession caused by that tightening had started only two months before Burns succeeded Martin, inflation hardly declined, notwithstanding a steady rise in unemployment from the 3.4% rate inherited by Nixon in January 1969, at the start of his Presidency, to 4.2% when Burns became Chairman, and to 6.1% at the end of 1970.

The minimal impact of recession on inflation was troubling to Burns, reinforcing his doubts about the efficacy of conventional monetary and fiscal policy tools in an economy that seemed no longer to operate as supposed by textbook theory. It wasn’t long before Burn, in Congressional testimony (5/18/1970) voiced doubts about the efficacy of monetary policy in restraining inflation.

Another deficiency in the formulation of stabilization policies in the United States has been our tendency to rely too heavily on monetary restriction as a device to curb inflation…. severely restrictive monetary policies distort the structure of production. General monetary controls… have highly uneven effects on different sectors of the economy. On the one hand, monetary restraint has relatively slight impact on consumer spending or on the investments of large businesses. On the other hand, the homebuilding industry, State and local construction, real estate firms, and other small businesses are likely to be seriously handicapped in their operations. When restrictive monetary policies are pursued vigorously over a prolonged period, these sectors may be so adversely affected that the consequences become socially and economically intolerable.

We are in the transitional period of cost-push inflation, and we therefore need to adjust our policies to the special character of the inflationary pressures that we are now experiencing. An effort to offset, through monetary and fiscal restraints, all of the upward push that rising costs are now exerting on prices would be most unwise. Such an effort would restrict aggregate demand so severely as to increase greatly the risks of a very serious business recession. . . . There may be a useful… role for an incomes policy to play in shortening the period between suppression of excess demand and restoration of reasonable price stability.

Quoted by R. Hetzel in “Arthur Burns and Inflation” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Quarterly, Winter 1998

The cost-push view of inflation that Burns articulated was not a new one for Burns. He had discussed it in a 1967 lecture at a seminar organized by the American Enterprise Institute concerning the wage-price guideposts, which had been invoked during the Eisenhower administration when he was CEA Chairman, and were continued in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, to discourage labor and business from “excessive” increases in wages and prices.

The seminar consisted of two lectures, one by Burns (presumably offering a “conservative” or Republican view) and another by Paul Samuelson (offering a “liberal” or Democratic view), followed by the responses each to the other, and finally by questions from an audience of economists drawn from Washington-area universities, think-tanks and government agencies, and the responses of Burns and Samuelson. Transcripts of the lectures and the follow-up discusions were included in a volume published by AEI.

Inflation had become a contentious political issue in 1967, Republicans blaming the Johnson Administration for the highest inflation since the early 1950s. Though Burns, while voicing mild criticism of how the guideposts were administered and skepticism about their overall effect on inflation, neither rejected them on principle nor dismissed them as ineffective.

So, Burns did not arrive at the Fed as an ideological opponent of government intervention in the decisions of business and organized labor. Had Milton Friedman participated in the AEI seminar, he would have voiced implacable opposition to the guideposts as ineffective in practice and an arbitrary — extra-legal and therefore especially obnoxious — exercise of government power over the private sector. Burns’s conservatism, unlike Friedman’s, was the conventional Republican pro-business attitude, and, as Nathan himself notes, business wasn’t at all averse to government assistance in resisting union wage demands.

That doesn’t mean that Burns’s views hadn’t changed since 1967 when he voiced tepid support for guideposts as benchmarks for business and labor in setting prices and negotiating labor contracts. But the failure of monetary tightening and a deepening recession to cause more than a minimal slowdown in inflation seems to have shattered Burns’s shaky confidence that monetary policy could control inflation.

Unlike the preceding recessions in which increased (but still low) inflation quickly led to monetary tightening, the 1969-70 recession began only after inflation had risen steadily for five years from less than 2% in 1965 to 6% in 1969. It’s actually not surprising — it, at least, shouldn’t have been — that, after rising steadily for five years and becoming ingrained in public expectations, inflation would become less responsive to monetary tightening and recession than it had been before becoming ingrained in expectations. Nevertheless, the failure of a recession induced by monetary tightening to curtail inflation seems to have been considered by Burns proof that inflation is not a purely monetary phenomenon.

The further lesson drawn by Burns from the minimal decline in inflation after a year of monetary tightening followed by a recession and rising unemployment was that persistent inflation reflects the power of big business and big labor to keep raising prices and wages regardless of market conditions. The latter lesson became the basis of his approach to the inflation problem. Inflation control had to reckon with the new reality that, even if restrictive monetary and fiscal policies were adopted, it was big business and big labor that controlled pricing and inflation.

While the rationale that Burns offered for an incomes policy differed little from the rationale for the wage-price guideposts to which Burns had earlier paid lip-service, in articulating the old rationale, perhaps to provide the appearance of novelty, Burns found it useful to package the rationale in a new terminology — the vague British catchphrase “incomes policy” covering both informal wage-price guideposts and mandatory wage-price controls. The phrase helped him justify shifting monetary policy from restraint to stimulus, even though inflation was still unacceptably high, by asserting that responsibility for controlling inflation was merely being transferred, not abandoned, to another government entity with the legal power and authority to exercise that control.

It’s also noteworthy that both Burns’s diagnosis of inflation and the treatment that he recommended were remarkably similar to the diagnosis and treatment advanced in a 1967 best-selling book, The New Industrial State, by the famed Harvard economist and former adviser to President Kennedy, J. K. Galbraith.

Despite their very different political views and affiliations, Burns and Galbraith, both influenced by the Institutionalist School of economics, were skeptical of the standard neoclassical textbook paradigm. Galbraith argued that big corporations make their plans based on the prices and wages that they can impose on their smaller suppliers and smaller customers (especially, in Galbraith’s view, through the skillful deployment of modern advertising techniques) while negotiating pricing terms with labor unions and other large suppliers and with their large customers. (For more on Galbraith see this post.)

Though more sympathetic to big business and less sympathetic to big labor than Galbraith, Burns, by 1970, seems to have fully internalized, whether deliberately or inadvertently, the Galbrathian view of inflation.

Aside from his likely sincere belief that conventional anti-inflationary monetary and fiscal policy were no longer effective in an economy dominated by big business and big labor, Burns had other more political motivations for shifting his policy preferences toward direct controls over wages and prices. A full account of his thinking would require closer attention to the documentary record than I have undertaken, but, Burns was undoubtedly under pressure from Nixon to avoid a recession in the 1972 election year like the one precipitated by the Fed in 1960 when the Fed moved to suppress a minor uptick in inflation following its possibly excessive monetary stimulus after the 1957-58 recession. Burns had warned Nixon in 1960 that a looming recession might hurt his chances in the upcoming election, and Nixon thereafter blamed his 1960 loss on the Fed and on the failure of the Eisenhower adminisration to increase spending to promote recovery. Moreover, the disastrous (for Republicans) losses in the 1958 midterm elections were widely attributed to the 1957-58 recession. Substantial GOP losses in the 1970 midterms, plainly attributable to the 1970 recession, further increased Nixon’s anxiety and his pressure on Burns to hasten a recovery through monetary expansion to ensure Nixon’s reelection.

But it’s worth taking note of a subtle difference between the rationale for wage-price guideposts and the rationale for an incomes policy. While wage-price guideposts were aimed solely at individual decisions about wages and prices, the idea of an incomes policy had a macroeconomic aspect: reconciling the income demands of labor and business in a way that ensured consistency between the flow of aggregate income and low inflation. According to Burns, reconciling those diverse and conflicting income demands with low inflation required an incomes policy to prevent unrestrained individual demands for increased wages and prices from expanding the flow of income so much that inflation would be the necessary result.

What Burns and most other advocates of incomes policies overlooked is that incomes are generated from the spending decisions of households, business firms and the government. Those spending decisions are influenced by the monetary- and fiscal-policy choices of the monetary and fiscal authorities. Any combination of monetary- and fiscal-policy choices entails corresponding flows of total spending and total income. For any inflation target, there is a set of monetary- and fiscal-policy combinations that entails flows of total spending and total income consistent with that target.

Burns’s fallacy (and that of most incomes-policy supporters) was to disregard the relationship between total spending and monetary- and fiscal-policy choices. The limits on wage increases imposed by an incomes policy can be maintained only if a monetary- and fiscal-policy combination consistent with those limits is chosen. Burns’s fallacy is commonly known as the fallacy of composition: the idea that what is true for one individual in a group must be true for the group as a whole. For example, one spectator watching a ball game can get a better view of the game by standing up, but if all spectators stand up together, none of them gets a better view.

Wage increases for one worker or for workers in one firm can be limited to the percentage specified by the incomes policy, but the wage increases for all workers can’t be limited to the percentage specified by the incomes policy unless the chosen monetary- and fiscal-policy combination is consistent with that percentage.

If aggregate nominal spending and income exceed the nominal income consistent with the inflation target, only two outcomes are possible. The first, and more likely, outcome is that the demand for labor associated with the actual increase in aggregate demand will overwhelm the prescribed limit on wage increases. If it’s in the interest of workers to receive wage increases exceeding the permitted increase — and it surely is — and if it’s also in the interest of employers trying to increase output because demand for their output increases by more than expected, making it profitable to hire additional workers at increased wages, it’s hard to imagine that wages wouldn’t increase by more than the incomes policy allows. Indeed, since price increases are typically allowed only if costs increase, there’s an added incentive for firms to agree to wage increases to make price increases allowable.

Second, even if the limits on wage increases were not exceeded, those limits imply an income transfer from workers to employers. The implicit income redistribution might involve some reduction in total spending and in aggregate demand, but, ultimately, as long as the total spending and total income associated with the chosen monetary- and fiscal-policy combination exceeds the total income consistent with the inflation target, excess demands for goods will either cause domestic prices to rise or induce increased imports at increased prices, thereby depreciating the domestic currency and raising the prices of imported final goods and raw materials. Those increased prices and costs will be a further source of inflationary pressure on prices and on wages, thereby increasing inflation above the target or forcing the chosen monetary- and fiscal-policy combination to be tightened to prevent further currency depreciation.

To recapitulate, Burns actually had the glimmering of an insight into the problem of reducing inflation in an economy in which most economic agents make plans and decisions based on their inflationary expectations. When people make plans and commitments in expectation of persistent future inflation, reducing, much less stopping, inflation is hard, because doing so must disappoint their expectations, rendering the plans and commitments based on those expectations costly, or even impossible, to fulfill. The promise of an incomes policy is that, by gradually reducing inflation and facilitating the implementation of the fiscal and monetary policies necessary to reduce inflation, it can reduce expectations of inflation, thereby reducing the cost of reducing inflation by monetary and fiscal restraint.

But instead of understanding that an incomes policy aimed at reducing inflation by limiting the increases in wages and prices to percentages consistent with reduced inflation could succeed only if monetary and fiscal policies were also amed at slowing the growth of total spending and total income to rates consistent with the inflation target, Burns conducted a monetary policy with little attention to its consistency with explicit or implicit inflation targets. The failure to reduce the growth of aggregate spending and income rendered the incomes policy unfeasible, thereby ensuring the incomes policy aiming to reduce inflation would fail. The failure to grasp the impossibility of controlling wage-and-pricing decisions at the micro level without controlling aggregate spending and income at the macro level was the fatal conceptual mistake that guaranteed Burns’s failure as Fed Chairman. Perhaps Burns’s failure was tragic, but failure it was.

Let’s now look at the results of Burns’s monetary policies. The chart below shows the annual rates of change in nominal GDP and real GDP from Q1-1968 to Q1-1980

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1249697#

To give Burns his due, the freeze and the cost-of-living council that replaced it 90 days afterwards was a splendid political success, igniting an immediate stock-market boom and increasing Nixon’s popularity with both Democrats and Republicans notwithstanding Nixon’s repudiation of his repeated pledges never to impose wage-and-price controls. Burns continued — though erratically — the monetary easing that he began at the end of 1970, providing sufficient stimulus to reduce unemployment, which had barely budged from the peak rate of 6.1% in December 1970 to 6.0% in September 1971. While the decline in the unemployment rate was modest, to 5.6% in October 1972, the last official report before the election, total US employment between June 1970 (when US employment was at its cyclical trough) and October 1972 increased by 5%, reflecting both cyclical recovery and the beginning of an influx of babyboomers and women into the labor force.

The monetary stimulus provided by the Fed between the end of the recession in November 1970 and October 1972 can be inferred from the increase in total spending and income (as measured by nominal GDP) from Q1-1971 and Q3-1972. In that 7-quarter period, total spending and income increased by 18.6% (corresponding to an annual rate of 10.6%). Because the economy in Q4-1970 was still in a recession, nominal spending and income could increase at a faster rate during the recovery while inflation was declining than would have been consistent with the inflation target if maintained permanently.

But as the expansion continued, with employment and output expanding rapidly, the monetary stimulus should have been gradually withdrawn to slow the growth of total spending and income to a rate consistent with a low inflation target. But rather than taper off monetary stimulus, the Fed actually allowed total spending and income growth to accelerate in the next three quarters (Q4-1972 through Q2-1973) to an annual rate of 12.7%.

Inflation, which at first had shown only minimal signs of increasing as output and employment expanded rapidly before the 1972 election, not surprisingly began to accelerate rapidly in the first half of 1973. (The chart below provides three broadly consistent measures of inflation (Consumer Price Index, Personal Consumption Expenditures, and GDP implicit price deflator at quarterly intervals). The chart shows that all three measures show inflation rising rapidly in the first hals of 1973, with inflation in Q2-1973 in a range between 6.3% and 8.6%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1247181&rn=117

Burns rejected criticisms that the Fed was responsible for resurgent inflation, citing a variety of special factors like rising commodity prices as the cause of rising inflation. But, having allowed the growth of total spending and income to accelerate from Q4-1972 and Q2-1973, in violation of the rationale for the incomes policy that he had recommended, Burns had no credible defense of the Fed’s monetary policy.

With inflation approaching double digit levels – the highest in over 20 years – Burns and the Fed had already begun to raise interest rates in the first half of 1973, but not until the third quarter did rates rise enough to slow the growth of total spending and income. A belated tightening was, of course, in order, but, as if to compensate for its tardiness, the Fed, as it has so often been wont to do, tightened too aggressively, causing the growth of total spending to decline from 11% in Q2 1973 to less than 5% in Q3 1973, a slowdown that caused real GDP to fall, and the unemployment rate, having just reached its lowest point (4.6%) since April 1970, a rate not matched again for two decades, to start rising.

Perhaps surprised by the depth of the third-quarter slowdown, the Fed eased policy somewhat in the fourth quarter until war broke out between Egypt, Syria and Israel, soon followed by a cutback in overall oil production by OPEC and a selective boycott by Arab oil producers of countries, like the US, considered supportive of Israel. With oil prices quadrupling over the next few months, the cutback in oil production triggered a classic inflationary supply shock.

It’s now widely, though not universally, understood that the optimal policy response to a negative supply shock is not to tighten monetary policy, but to allow the price level to increase permanently and inflation to increase transitorily, with no attempt to reverse th price-level and inflation effects. But, given the Fed’s failure to prevent inflation from accelerating in the first half of 1973, the knee-jerk reaction of Burns and the Fed was to tighten monetary policy again after the brief relaxation in Q4-1973, as if previous mistakes could be rectified by another in the opposite direction.

The result was, by some measures, the deepest recession since 1937-38 with unemployment rising rapidly to 9% by May 1975. Because of the negative supply shock, most measures of inflation, despite monetary tightening, were above 10% for almost all of 1974. While the reduction in nominal GDP growth during the recession was only to 8%, which, under normal conditions, would have been excessive, the appropriate target for NGDP growth, given the severity of the supply shock that was causing both labor and capital to be idled, would, at least initially, have been closer to the pre-recession rate of 12.7% than to 8%. The monetary response to a supply shock should take into account that, at least during the contraction and even in the early stages of a recovery, monetary expansion, by encouraging the reemployment of resources, thereby moderating the decline in output, can actually be disinflationary.

I pause here to observe that inflation need not increase just because unemployment is falling. That is an inference often mistakenly drawn from the Phillips Curve relationship between unemployment and inflation. It is a naive and vulgar misunderstanding of the Phillips Curve to assume that dcelining unemployment is always and everywhere inflationary. The kernel of truth in that inference is that monetary expansion tends to be inflationary when the economy operates at close to full employment without sufficient slack to allow output to increase in proportion to an increase in aggregate spending. However, when the economy is operating with slack and is far from full employment, the inference is invalid and counter-productive.

Burns eventually did loosen monetary policy to promote recovery in the second half of 1975, output expanding rapidly even as inflation declined to the mid-single digits while unemployment fell from 9% in May 1975 to 7.7% in October 1976. But, just as it did after the 1972 Presidential election, growth of NGDP actually increased after the 1976 Presidential election.

In the seven quarters from Q1-1975 through Q3-1976, nominal GDP grew at an average annual rate of 10.2%, with inflation fallng from a 7.7% to 9.4% range in Q1-1975 to a 5.3% to 6.5% range in Q3-1976; in the four quarters from Q4-1976 through Q3-1977, nominal GDP grew at an average rate of 10.9%, with inflation remaining roughly unchanged (in the 5% to 6.2% range). Burns may have been trying to accommodate the desires of the Carter Administration to promote a rapid reduction in unemployment as Carter had promised as a Presidential candidate. Unemployment in March 1977 stood at 7.4% no less than it was in May 1976. While the unemployment rate was concerning, unemployment rates in the 1970s reflected the influx of baby boomers and women lacking work experience into work force, which tended to increase measured unemployment despite rapid job growth. Between May 1976 and March 1977, for example, an average of over 200,000 new jobs a month were filled despite an unchanged unemployment rate.

As it became evident, towards the end of 1977 that Burns would not be reappointed Chairman, and someone else more amentable to providing further monetary stimulus would replace him, the dollar started falling in foreign-exchange markets, almost 7% between September 1977 and March 1978, a depreciation that provoked a countervailing monetary tightening and an increase in interest rates by the Fed. The depreciation and the tightening were reflected in reduced NGDP growth and increased inflation in Q4 1977 and Q1 1978 just as Burns was being replaced by his successor G. William Miller in March 1978.

So, a retrospective on Burns’s record as Fed Chairman provides no support for a revisionist rehabilitation of that record. Not only did Burns lack a coherent theoretical understanding of the effects of monetary policy on macroeconomic performance, which, to be fair, didn’t set him apart from his predecessors or successors, but he allowed himself to be beguiled by the idea of an incomes policy as an alternative to monetary policy as a way to control inflation. Had he properly understood the rationale of an incomes policy, he would have realized that it could serve a useful function only insofar as it supplemented, not replaced, a monetary policy aiming to reduce the growth of aggregate demand to a rate consistent with reducing inflation. Instead, Burns viewed the incomes policy as a means to eliminate the upward pressure of wage increases on costs, increases that, for the most part, merely compensated workers for real-wage reductions resulting from previous unanticipated inflation. But the cause of the cost-push phenomenon that was so concerning to Burns is aggregate-demand growth, which either raises prices or encourages output increases that make it profitable for businesses to incur those increased costs. Burns’s failure to grasp these causal relationships led him to a series of incoherent policy decisions that gravely damaged the US economy.

Cleaning Up After Burns’s Mess

Published May 8, 2019 Hayek , Milton Friedman , Paul Volcker , R. G. Hawtrey 12 Comments
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In my two recent posts (here and here) about Arthur Burns’s lamentable tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System from 1970 to 1978, my main criticism of Burns has been that, apart from his willingness to subordinate monetary policy to the political interests of he who appointed him, Burns failed to understand that an incomes policy to restrain wages, thereby minimizing the tendency of disinflation to reduce employment, could not, in principle, reduce inflation if monetary restraint did not correspondingly reduce the growth of total spending and income. Inflationary (or employment-reducing) wage increases can’t be prevented by an incomes policy if the rate of increase in total spending, and hence total income, isn’t controlled. King Canute couldn’t prevent the tide from coming in, and neither Arthur Burns nor the Wage and Price Council could slow the increase in wages when total spending was increasing at a rate faster than was consistent with the 3% inflation rate that Burns was aiming for.

In this post, I’m going to discuss how the mess left behind by Burns, upon his departure from the Fed in 1978, had to be cleaned up. The mess got even worse under Burns’s successor, G. William Miller. The clean up didn’t begin until Carter appointed Paul Volcker in 1979 when it became obvious that the monetary policy of the Fed had failed to cope with problems left behind by Burns. After unleashing powerful inflationary forces under the cover of the wage-and-price controls he had persuaded Nixon to impose in 1971 as a precondition for delivering the monetary stimulus so desperately desired by Nixon to ensure his reelection, Burns continued providing that stimulus even after Nixon’s reelection, when it might still have been possible to taper off the stimulus before inflation flared up, and without aborting the expansion then under way. In his arrogance or ignorance, Burns chose not to adjust the policy that had already accomplished its intended result.

Not until the end of 1973, after crude oil prices quadrupled owing to a cutback in OPEC oil output, driving inflation above 10% in 1974, did Burns withdraw the monetary stimulus that had been administered in increasing doses since early 1971. Shocked out of his complacency by the outcry against 10% inflation, Burns shifted monetary policy toward restraint, bringing down the growth in nominal spending and income from over 11% in Q4 1973 to only 8% in Q1 1974.

After prolonging monetary stimulus unnecessarily for a year, Burn erred grievously by applying monetary restraint in response to the rise in oil prices. The largely exogenous rise in oil prices would most likely have caused a recession even with no change in monetary policy. By subjecting the economy to the added shock of reducing aggregate demand, Burns turned a mild recession into the worst recession since 1937-38 recession at the end of the Great Depression, with unemployment peaking at 8.8% in Q2 1975. Nor did the reduction in aggregate demand have much anti-inflationary effect, because the incremental reduction in total spending occasioned by the monetary tightening was reflected mainly in reduced output and employment rather than in reduced inflation.

But even with unemployment reaching the highest level in almost 40 years, inflation did not fall below 5% – and then only briefly – until a year after the bottom of the recession. When President Carter took office in 1977, Burns, hoping to be reappointed to another term, provided Carter with a monetary expansion to hasten the reduction in unemployment that Carter has promised in his Presidential campaign. However, Burns’s accommodative policy did not sufficiently endear him to Carter to secure the coveted reappointment.

The short and unhappy tenure of Carter’s first appointee, G. William Miller, during which inflation rose from 6.5% to 10%, ended abruptly when Carter, with his Administration in crisis, sacked his Treasury Secretary, replacing him with Miller. Under pressure from the financial community to address the seemingly intractable inflation that seemed to be accelerating in the wake of a second oil shock following the Iranian Revolution and hostage taking, Carter felt constrained to appoint Volcker, formerly a high official in the Treasury under both Kennedy and Nixon, then serving as President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, who was known to be the favored choice of the financial community.

A year after leaving the Fed, Burns gave the annual Per Jacobson Lecture to the International Monetary Fund. Calling his lecture “The Anguish of Central Banking,” Burns offered a defense of his tenure, by arguing, in effect, that he should not be blamed for his poor performance, because the job of central banking is so very hard. Central bankers could control inflation, but only by inflicting unacceptably high unemployment. The political authorities and the public to whom central bankers are ultimately accountable would simply not tolerate the high unemployment that would be necessary for inflation to be controlled.

Viewed in the abstract, the Federal Reserve System had the power to abort the inflation at its incipient stage fifteen years ago or at any later point, and it has the power to end it today. At any time within that period, it could have restricted money supply and created sufficient strains in the financial and industrial markets to terminate inflation with little delay. It did not do so because the Federal Reserve was itself caught up in the philosophic and political currents that were transforming American life and culture.

Burns’s framing of the choices facing a central bank was tendentious; no policy maker had suggested that, after years of inflation had convinced the public to expect inflation to continue indefinitely, the Fed should “terminate inflation with little delay.” And Burns was hardly a disinterested actor as Fed chairman, having orchestrated a monetary expansion to promote the re-election chances of his benefactor Richard Nixon after securing, in return for that service, Nixon’s agreement to implement an incomes policy to limit the growth of wages, a policy that Burns believed would contain the inflationary consequences of the monetary expansion.

However, as I explained in my post on Hawtrey and Burns, the conceptual rationale for an incomes policy was not to allow monetary expansion to increase total spending, output and employment without causing increased inflation, but to allow the monetary restraint to be administered without increasing unemployment. But under the circumstances in the summer of 1971, when a recovery from the 1970 recession was just starting, and unemployment was still high, monetary expansion might have hastened a recovery in output and employment the resulting increase in total spending and income might still increase output and employment rather than being absorbed in higher wages and prices.

But using controls over wages and prices to speed the return to full employment could succeed only while substantial unemployment and unused capacity allowed output and employment to increase; the faster the recovery, the sooner increased spending would show up in rising prices and wages, or in supply shortages, rather than in increased output. An incomes policy to enable monetary expansion to speed the recovery from recession and restore full employment might theoretically be successful, but, only if the monetary stimulus were promptly tapered off before driving up inflation.

Thus, if Burns wanted an incomes policy to be able to hasten the recovery through monetary expansion and maximize the political benefit to Nixon in time for the 1972 election, he ought to have recognized the need to withdraw the stimulus after the election. But for a year after Nixon’s reelection, Burns continued the monetary expansion without let up. Burns’s expression of anguish at the dilemma foisted upon him by circumstances beyond his control hardly evokes sympathy, sounding more like an attempt to deflect responsibility for his own mistakes or malfeasance in serving as an instrument of the criminal Campaign to Re-elect the President without bothering to alter that politically motivated policy after its dishonorable mission had been accomplished.

But it was not until Burns’s successor, G. William Miller, was succeeded by Paul Volcker in August 1979 that the Fed was willing to adopt — and maintain — an anti-inflationary policy. In his recently published memoir Volcker recounts how, responding to President Carter’s request in July 1979 that he accept appointment as Fed chairman, he told Mr. Carter that, to bring down inflation, he would adopt a tighter monetary policy than had been followed by his predecessor. He also writes that, although he did not regard himself as a Friedmanite Monetarist, he had become convinced that to control inflation it was necessary to control the quantity of money, though he did not agree with Friedman that a rigid rule was required to keep the quantity of money growing at a constant rate. To what extent the Fed would set its policy in terms of a fixed target rate of growth in the quantity of money became the dominant issue in Fed policy during Volcker’s first term as Fed chairman.

In a review of Volcker’s memoir widely cited in the econ blogosphere, Tim Barker decried Volcker’s tenure, especially his determination to control inflation even at the cost of spilling blood — other people’s blood – if that was necessary to eradicate the inflationary psychology of the 1970s, which become a seemingly permanent feature of the economic environment at the time of Volcker’s appointment.

If someone were to make a movie about neoliberalism, there would need to be a starring role for the character of Paul Volcker. As chair of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, Volcker was the most powerful central banker in the world. These were the years when the industrial workers movement was defeated in the United States and United Kingdom, and third world debt crises exploded. Both of these owe something to Volcker. On October 6, 1979, after an unscheduled meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, Volcker announced that he would start limiting the growth of the nation’s money supply. This would be accomplished by limiting the growth of bank reserves, which the Fed influenced by buying and selling government securities to member banks. As money became more scarce, banks would raise interest rates, limiting the amount of liquidity available in the overall economy. Though the interest rates were a result of Fed policy, the money supply target let Volcker avoid the politically explosive appearance of directly raising rates himself. The experiment—known as the Volcker Shock—lasted until 1982, inducing what remains the worst unemployment since the Great Depression and finally ending the inflation that had troubled the world economy since the late 1960s. To catalog all the results of the Volcker Shock—shuttered factories, broken unions, dizzying financialization—is to describe the whirlwind we are still reaping in 2019. . . .

Barker is correct that Volcker had been persuaded that to tighten monetary policy the quantity of reserves that the Fed was providing to the banking system had to be controlled. But making the quantity of bank reserves the policy instrument was a technical change. Monetary policy had been — and could still have been — conducted using an interest-rate instrument, and it would have been entirely possible for Volcker to tighten monetary policy using the traditional interest-rate instrument.

It is possible that, as Barker asserts, it was politically easier to tighten policy using a quantity instrument than an interest-rate instrument. But even so, the real difficulty was not the instrument used, but the economic and political consequences of a tight monetary policy. The choice of the instrument to carry out the policy could hardly have made more than a marginal difference on the balance of political forces favoring or opposing that policy. The real issue was whether a tight monetary policy aimed at reducing inflation was more effectively conducted using the traditional interest-rate instrument or the quantity-instrument that Volcker adopted. More on this point below.

Those who praise Volcker like to say he “broke the back” of inflation. Nancy Teeters, the lone dissenter on the Fed Board of Governors, had a different metaphor: “I told them, ‘You are pulling the financial fabric of this country so tight that it’s going to rip. You should understand that once you tear a piece of fabric, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to put it back together again.” (Teeters, also the first woman on the Fed board, told journalist William Greider that “None of these guys has ever sewn anything in his life.”) Fabric or backbone: both images convey violence. In any case, a price index doesn’t have a spine or a seam; the broken bodies and rent garments of the early 1980s belonged to people. Reagan economic adviser Michael Mussa was nearer the truth when he said that “to establish its credibility, the Federal Reserve had to demonstrate its willingness to spill blood, lots of blood, other people’s blood.”

Did Volcker consciously see unemployment as the instrument of price stability? A Rhode Island representative asked him “Is it a necessary result to have a large increase in unemployment?” Volcker responded, “I don’t know what policies you would have to follow to avoid that result in the short run . . . We can’t undertake a policy now that will cure that problem [unemployment] in 1981.” Call this the necessary byproduct view: defeating inflation is the number one priority, and any action to put people back to work would raise inflationary expectations. Growth and full employment could be pursued once inflation was licked. But there was more to it than that. Even after prices stabilized, full employment would not mean what it once had. As late as 1986, unemployment was still 6.6 percent, the Reagan boom notwithstanding. This was the practical embodiment of Milton Friedman’s idea that there was a natural rate of unemployment, and attempts to go below it would always cause inflation (for this reason, the concept is known as NAIRU or non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). The logic here is plain: there needed to be millions of unemployed workers for the economy to work as it should.

I want to make two points about Volcker’s policy. The first, which I made in my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform over 30 years ago, and which I have reiterated in several posts on this blog and which I discussed in my recent paper “Rules versus Discretion in Monetary Policy Historically Contemplated” (for an ungated version click here) is that using a quantity instrument to tighten monetary policy, as advocated by Milton Friedman, and acquiesced in by Volcker, induces expectations about the future actions of the monetary authority that undermine the policy, rendering it untenable. Volcker eventually realized the perverse expectational consequences of trying to implement a monetary policy using a fixed rule for the quantity instrument, but his learning experience in following Friedman’s advice needlessly exacerbated and prolonged the agony of the 1982 downturn for months after inflationary expectations had been broken.

The problem was well-known in the nineteenth century thanks to British experience under the Bank Charter Act that imposed a fixed quantity limit on the total quantity of banknotes issued by the Bank of England. When the total of banknotes approached the legal maximum, a precautionary demand for banknotes was immediately induced by those who feared that they might not later be able to obtain credit if it were needed because the Bank of England would be barred from making additional credit available.

Here is how I described Volcker’s Monetarist experiment in my book.

The danger lurking in any Monetarist rule has been perhaps best summarized by F. A. Hayek, who wrote:

As regards Professor Friedman’s proposal of a legal limit on the rate at which a monopolistic issuer of money was to be allowed to increase the quantity in circulation, I can only say that I would not like to see what would happen if under such a provision it ever became known that the amount of cash in circulation was approaching the upper limit and therefore a need for increased liquidity could not be met.

Hayek’s warnings were subsequently borne out after the Federal Reserve Board shifted its policy from targeting interest rates to targeting the monetary aggregates. The apparent shift toward a less inflationary monetary policy, reinforced by the election of a conservative, antiinflationary president in 1980, induced an international shift from other currencies into the dollar. That shift caused the dollar to appreciate by almost 30 percent against other major currencies.

At the same time the domestic demand for deposits was increasing as deregulation of the banking system reduced the cost of holding deposits. But instead of accommodating the increase in the foreign and domestic demands for dollars, the Fed tightened monetary policy. . . . The deflationary impact of that tightening overwhelmed the fiscal stimulus of tax cuts and defense buildup, which, many had predicted, would cause inflation to speed up. Instead the economy fell into the deepest recession since the 1930s, while inflation, by 1982, was brought down to the lowest levels since the early 1960s. The contraction, which began in July 1981, accelerated in the fourth quarter of 1981 and the first quarter of 1982.

The rapid disinflation was bringing interest rates down from the record high levels of mid-1981 and the economy seemed to bottom out in the second quarter, showing a slight rise in real GNP over the first quarter. Sticking to its Monetarist strategy, the Fed reduced its targets for monetary growth in 1982 to between 2.5 and 5.5 percent. But in January and February, the money supply increased at a rapid rate, perhaps in anticipation of an incipient expansion. Whatever its cause, the early burst of the money supply pushed M-1 way over its target range.

For the next several months, as M-1 remained above its target, financial and commodity markets were preoccupied with what the Fed was going to do next. The fear that the Fed would tighten further to bring M-1 back within its target range reversed the slide in interest rates that began in the fall of 1981. A striking feature of the behavior of interest rates at that time was that credit markets seemed to be heavily influenced by the announcements every week of the change in M-1 during the previous week. Unexpectedly large increases in the money supply put upward pressure on interest rates.

The Monetarist explanation was that the announcements caused people to raise their expectations of inflation. But if the increase in interest rates had been associated with a rising inflation premium, the announcements should have been associated with weakness in the dollar on foreign exchange markets and rising commodities prices. In fact, the dollar was rising and commodities prices were falling consistently throughout this period – even immediately after an unexpectedly large jump in M-1 was announced. . . . (pp. 218-19)

I pause in my own earlier narrative to add the further comment that the increase in interest rates in early 1982 clearly reflected an increasing liquidity premium, caused by the reduced availability of bank reserves, making cash more desirable to hold than real assets, thereby inducing further declines in asset values.

However, increases in M-1 during July turned out to be far smaller than anticipated, relieving some of the pressure on credit and commodities markets and allowing interest rates to begin to fall again. The decline in interest rates may have been eased slightly by . . . Volcker’s statement to Congress on July 20 that monetary growth at the upper range of the Fed’s targets would be acceptable. More important, he added that he Fed was willing to let M-1 remain above its target range for a while if the reason seemed to be a precautionary demand for liquidity. By August, M-1 had actually fallen back within its target range. As fears of further tightening by the Fed subsided, the stage was set for the decline in interest rates to accelerate, [and] the great stock market rally began on August 17, when the Dow . . . rose over 38 points [almost 5%].

But anticipation of an incipient recovery again fed monetary growth. From the middle of August through the end of September, M-1 grew at an annual rate of over 15 percent. Fears that rapid monetary growth would induce the Fed to tighten monetary policy slowed down the decline in interest rates and led to renewed declines in commodities price and the stock market, while pushing up the dollar to new highs. On October 5 . . . the Wall Street Journal reported that bond prices had fallen amid fears that the Fed might tighten credit conditions to slow the recent strong growth in the money supply. But on the very next day it was reported that the Fed expected inflation to stay low and would therefore allow M-1 to exceed its targets. The report sparked a major decline in interest rates and the Dow . . . soared another 37 points. (pp. 219-20)

The subsequent recovery, which began at the end of 1982, quickly became very powerful, but persistent fears that the Fed would backslide, at the urging of Milton Friedman and his Monetarist followers, into its bad old Monetarist habits periodically caused interest-rate spikes reflecting rising liquidity premiums as the public built up precautionary cash balances. Luckily, Volcker was astute enough to shrug off the overwrought warnings of Friedman and other Monetarists that rapid increases in the monetary aggregates foreshadowed the imminent return of double-digit inflation.

Thus, the Monetarist obsession with controlling the monetary aggregates senselessly prolonged an already deep recession that, by Q1 1982, had already slain the inflationary dragon, inflation having fallen to less than half its 1981 peak while GDP actually contracted in nominal terms. But because the money supply was expanding at a faster rate than was acceptable to Monetarist ideology, the Fed continued in its futile, but destructive, effort to keep the monetary aggregates from overshooting their arbitrary Monetarist target range. It was not until Volcker, in the summer of 1982, finally and belatedly decided that enough was enough and announced that the Fed would declare victory over inflation and call off its Monetarist crusade even if doing so meant incurring Friedman’s wrath and condemnation for abandoning the true Monetarist doctrine.

Which brings me to my second point about Volcker’s policy. While it’s clear that Volcker’s decision to adopt control over the monetary aggregates as the focus of monetary policy was disastrously misguided, monetary policy can’t be conducted without some target. Although the Fed’s interest rate can serve as a policy instrument, it is not a plausible policy target. The preferred policy target is generally thought to be the rate of inflation. The Fed after all is mandated to achieve price stability, which is usually understood to mean targeting a rate of inflation of about 2%. A more sophisticated alternative would be to aim at a suitable price level, thereby allowing some upward movement, say, at a 2% annual rate, the difference between an inflation target and a moving price level target being that an inflation target is unaffected by past deviations of actual from targeted inflation while a moving price level target would require some catch up inflation to make up for past below-target inflation and reduced inflation to compensate for past above-target inflation.

However, the 1981-82 recession shows exactly why an inflation target and even a moving price level target are bad ideas. By almost any comprehensive measure, inflation was still positive throughout the 1981-82 recession, though the producer price index was nearly flat. Thus, inflation targeting during the 1981-82 recession would have been almost as bad a target for monetary policy as the monetary aggregates, with most measures of inflation showing that inflation was then between 3 and 5 percent even at the depth of the recession. Inflation targeting is thus, on its face, an unreliable basis for conducting monetary policy.

But the deeper problem with targeting inflation is that seeking to achieve an inflation target during a recession, when the very existence of a recession is presumptive evidence of the need for monetary stimulus, is actually a recipe for disaster, or, at the very least, for needlessly prolonging a recession. In a recession, the goal of monetary policy should be to stabilize the rate of increase in nominal spending along a time path consistent with the desired rate of inflation. Thus, as long as output is contracting or increasing very slowly, the desired rate of inflation should be higher than the desired rate over the long-term. The appropriate strategy for achieving an inflation target ought to be to let inflation be reduced by the accelerating expansion of output and employment characteristic of most recoveries relative to a stable expansion of nominal spending.

The true goal of monetary policy should always be to maintain a time path of total spending consistent with a desired price-level path over time. But it should not be the objective of the monetary policy to always be as close as possible to the desired path, because trying to stay on that path would likely destabilize the real economy. Market monetarists argue that the goal of monetary policy ought to be to keep nominal GDP expanding at that whatever rate is consistent with maintaining the desired long-run price-level path. That is certainly a reasonable practical rule for monetary policy, but the policy criterion I have discussed here would, at least in principle, be consistent with a more activist approach in which the monetary authority would seek to hasten the restoration of full employment during recessions by temporarily increasing the rate of monetary expansion and in nominal GDP as long as real output and employment remained below the maximum levels consistent with desired price level path over time. But such a strategy would require the monetary authority to be able to fine tune its monetary expansion so that it was tapered off just as the economy was reaching its maximum sustainable output and employment path. Whether such fine-tuning would be possible in practice is a question to which I don’t think we now know the answer.

 

Ralph Hawtrey Wrote the Book that Arthur Burns Should Have Read — but Didn’t

Published April 15, 2019 exchange rate protection , Max Corden , R. G. Hawtrey 14 Comments
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In my previous post I wrote about the mistakes made by Arthur Burns after Nixon appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Here are the critical missteps of Burns’s unfortunate tenure.

1 Upon becoming chairman in January 1970, with inflation running at over 5% despite a modest tightening by his predecessor in 1969, Burns further tightened monetary policy, causing a downturn and a recession lasting the whole of 1970. The recession was politically damaging to Nixon, leading to sizable Republican losses in the November midterm elections, and causing Nixon to panic about losing his re-election bid in 1972. In his agitation, Nixon then began badgering Burns to loosen monetary policy.

2 Yielding to Nixon’s demands for an easing of monetary policy, Burns eased monetary policy sufficiently to allow a modest recovery to get under way in 1971. But the recovery was too tepid to suit Nixon. Fearing the inflationary implications of a further monetary loosening, Burns began publicly lobbying for the adoption of an incomes policy to limit the increase of wages set by collective bargaining between labor unions and major businesses.

3 Burns’s unwillingness to provide the powerful stimulus desired by Nixon until an incomes policy was in place to hold down inflation led Nixon to abandon his earlier opposition to wage-and-price controls. On August 15, 1971 Nixon imposed a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices to be followed by comprehensive wage-and-price controls. With controls in place, Burns felt secure in accelerating the rate of monetary expansion, leaving it to those controlling wages and prices to keep inflation within acceptable bounds.

4 With controls in place, monetary expansion at first fueled rapid growth of output, but as time passed, the increase in spending was increasingly reflected in inflation rather than output growth. By Q4 1973, inflation rose to 7%, a rate only marginally affected by the Arab oil embargo on oil shipments to the United States and a general reduction in oil output, which led to a quadrupling of oil prices by early 1974.

5 The sharp oil-price increase simultaneously caused inflation to rise sharply above the 7% rate it had reached at the end of 1973 even as it caused a deep downturn and recession in the first quarter of 1974. Rather than accommodate the increase in oil prices by tolerating a temporary increase in inflation, Burns sharply tightened monetary policy reducing the rate of monetary expansion so that the rate of growth of total spending dropped precipitously. Given the increase in oil prices, the drop in total spending caused a major contraction in output and employment, resulting in the deepest recession since 1937-38.

These mistakes all stemmed from a failure by Burns to understand the rationale of an incomes policy. Burns was not alone in that failure, which was actually widespread at the time. But the rationale for such a policy and the key to its implementation had already been spelled out cogently by Ralph Hawtrey in his 1967 diagnosis of the persistent failures of British monetary policy and macroeconomic performance in the post World War II period, failures that had also been deeply tied up in the misunderstanding of the rationale for – and the implementation of — an incomes policy. Unlike Burns, Hawtrey did not view an incomes policy as a substitute for, or an alternative to, monetary policy to reduce inflation. Rather, an incomes policy was precisely the use of monetary policy to achieve a rate of growth in total spending and income that could be compatible with full employment, provided the rate of growth of wages was consistent with full employment.

In Burns’s understanding, the role of an incomes policy was to prevent wage increases from driving up production costs so high that businesses could not operate profitably at maximum capacity without a further increase in inflation by the Federal Reserve. If the wage increases negotiated by the unions exceeded the level compatible with full employment at the targeted rate of inflation, businesses would reduce output and lay off workers. Faced with that choice, the Fed or any monetary authority would be caught in the dreaded straits of Scylla and Charybdis (aka between a rock and a hard place).

What Burns evidently didn’t understand, or chose to ignore, was that adopting an incomes policy to restrain wage increases did not allow the monetary authority to implement a monetary policy that would cause nominal GDP to rise at a rate faster than was consistent with full employment at the target rate of inflation. If, for example, the growth of the labor force and the expected increase in productivity was consistent with a 4% rate of real GDP growth over time and the monetary authority was aiming for an inflation rate no greater than 3%, the monetary authority could not allow nominal GDP to grow at a rate above 7%.

This conclusion is subject to the following qualification. During a transition from high unemployment to full employment, a faster rate of nominal GDP growth than the posited 7% rate could hasten the restoration of full employment. But temporarily speeding nominal GDP growth would also require that, as a state of full employment was approached, the growth of nominal GDP be tapered off and brought down to a sustainable rate.

But what if an incomes policy does keep the rate of increase in wages below the rate consistent with 3% inflation? Could the monetary authority then safely conduct a monetary policy that increased the rate of nominal GDP growth in order to accelerate real economic growth without breaching the 3% inflation target? Once again, the answer is that real GDP growth can be accelerated only as long as sufficient slack remains in an economy with less than full employment so that accelerating spending growth does not result in shortages of labor or intermediate products. Once shortages emerge, wages or prices of products in short supply must be raised to allocate resources efficiently and to prevent shortages from causing production breakdowns.

Burns might have pulled off a remarkable feat by ensuring Nixon’s re-election in 1972 with a massive monetary stimulus causing the fastest increase in nominal real GDP since the Korean War in Q4 of 1972, while wage-and-price controls ensured that the monetary stimulus would be channeled into increased output rather than accelerating inflation. But that strategy was viable only while sufficient slack remained to allow additional spending to call forth further increases in output rather than cause either price increases, or, if wages and prices are subject to binding controls, shortages of supply. Early in 1973, as inflation began to increase and real GDP growth began to diminish, the time to slow down monetary expansion had arrived. But Burns was insensible to the obvious change in conditions.

Here is where we need to focus the discussion directly on Hawtrey’s book Incomes and Money. By the time Hawtrey wrote this book – his last — at the age of 87, he had long been eclipsed not only in the public eye, but in the economics profession, by his slightly younger contemporary and fellow Cambridge graduate, J. M. Keynes. For a while in the 1920s, Hawtrey might have been the more influential of the two, but after The General Theory was published, Hawtrey was increasingly marginalized as new students no longer studied Hawtrey’s writing, while older economists, who still remembered Hawtrey and were familiar with his work, gradually left the scene. Moreover, as a civil servant for most of his career, Hawtrey never collected around himself a group disciples who, because they themselves had a personal stake in the ideas of their mentor, would carry on and propagate those ideas. By the end of World War II, Hawtrey was largely unknown to younger economists.

As a graduate student in the early 1970s, Hawtrey’s name came only occasionally to my attention, mostly in the context of his having been a notable pre-Keynesian monetary theorist whose ideas were of interest mainly to historians of thought. My most notable recollection relating to Hawtrey was that in a conversation with Hayek, whose specific context I no longer recall, Hayek mentioned Hawtrey to me as an economist whose work had been unduly neglected and whose importance was insufficiently recognized, even while acknowledging that he himself had written critically about what he regarded as Hawtrey’s overemphasis on changes in the value of money as the chief cause of business-cycle fluctuations.

It was probably because I remembered that recommendation that when I was in Manhattan years later and happened upon a brand new copy of Incomes and Money on sale in a Barnes and Noble bookstore, I picked it up and bought it. But buying it on the strength of Hayek’s recommendation didn’t lead me to actually read it. I actually can’t remember when I finally did read the book, but it was likely not until after I discovered that Hawtrey had anticipated the gold-appreciation theory of the Great Depression that I had first heard, as a graduate student, from Earl Thompson.

In Incomes and Money, Hawtrey focused not on the Great Depression, which he notably had discussed in earlier books like The Gold Standard and The Art of Central Banking, but on the experience of Great Britain after World War II. That experience was conditioned on the transition from the wartime controls under which Britain had operated in World War II to the partial peacetime decontrol under the Labour government that assumed power at the close of World War II. One feature of wartime controls was that, owing to the shortages and rationing caused by price controls, substantial unwanted holdings of cash were accumulating in the hands of individuals unable to use their cash to purchase desired goods and services.

The US dollar and the British pound were then the two primary currencies used in international trade, but as long as products were in short supply because of price controls, neither currency could serve as an effective medium of exchange for international transactions, which were largely conducted via managed exchange or barter between governments. After the war, the US moved quickly to decontrol prices, allowing prices to rise sufficiently to eliminate excess cash, thereby enabling the dollar to again function as an international medium of exchange and creating a ready demand to hold dollar balances outside the US. The Labour government being ideologically unwilling to scrap price controls, excess holdings of pounds within Britain could only be disposed of insofar as they could be exchanged for dollars with which products could be procured from abroad.

There was therefore intense British demand for dollars but little or no American demand for pounds, an imbalance reflected in a mounting balance-of-payments deficit. The balance-of-payments deficit was misunderstood and misinterpreted as an indication that British products were uncompetitive, British production costs (owing to excessive British wages) supposedly being too high to allow the British products to be competitive in international markets. If British production costs were excessive, then the appropriate remedy was either to cut British wages or to devalue the pound to reduce the real wages paid to British workers. But Hawtrey maintained that the balance-of-payments deficit was a purely monetary phenomenon — an excess supply of pounds and an excess demand for dollars — that could properly be remedied either by withdrawing excess pounds from the holdings of the British public or by decontrolling prices so that excess pounds could be used to buy desired goods and services at market-clearing prices.

Thus, almost two decades before the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments was developed by Harry Johnson, Robert Mundell and associates, Hawtrey had already in the 1940s anticipated its principal conclusion that a chronic balance-of-payments disequilibrium results from a monetary policy that creates either more or less cash than the public wishes to hold rather than a disequilibrium in its exchange rate. If so, the remedy for the disequilibrium is not a change in the exchange rate, but a change in monetary policy.

In his preface to Incomes and Money, Hawtrey set forth the main outlines of his argument.

This book is primarily a criticism of British monetary policy since 1945, along with an application of the criticism to questions of future policy.

The aims of policy were indicated to the Radcliffe Committee in 1957 in a paper on Monetary Policy and the Control of Economic Conditions: “The primary object of policy has been to combine a high and stable level of employment with a satisfactory state of the balance of payments”. When Sir Robert Hall was giving oral evidence on behalf of the Treasury, Lord Radcliffe asked, ”Where does sound money as an objective stand?” The reply was that “there may well be a conflict between the objective of high employment and the objective of sound money”, a dilemma which Treasury did not claim to have solved.

Sound money here meant price stability, and Sir Robert Hall admitted that “there has been a practically continuous rise in the price level. The rise in prices of manufactures since 1949 had in fact been 40 percent. The wage level had risen 70 percent.

Government pronouncements ever since 1944 had repeatedly insisted that wages ought not to rise more than in proportion to productivity. This formula meaning in effect price level of home production, embodies the incomes policy which is now professed by all parties. But it has never been enforced through monetary policy. It has only been enjoined by exhortation and persuasion. (p. ix)

The lack of commitment to a policy of stabilizing the price level was the key point for Hawtrey. If policy makers desired to control the rise in the price level by controlling the increase in incomes, they could, in Hawtrey’s view, only do so by way of a monetary policy whose goal was to keep total spending (and hence total income) at a level – or on a path – that was consistent with the price-level objective that policy-makers were aiming for. If there was also a goal of full employment, then the full-employment goal could be achieved only insofar as the wage rates arrived at in bargaining between labor and management were consistent with the targeted level of spending and income.

Incomes policy and monetary policy cannot be separated. Monetary policy includes all those measures by which the flow of money can be accelerated or retarded, and it is by them that the money value of a given structure of incomes is determined. If monetary policy is directed by some other criterion than the desired incomes policy, the income policy gives way to the other criterion. In particular, if monetary policy is directed to maintaining the money unit at a prescribed exchange rate parity, the level of incomes will adapt itself to this parity and not to the desired policy.

When the exchange parity of sterling was fixed in 1949 at $2.80, the pound had already been undervalued at the previous rate of $4.03. The British wage level was tied by the rate of exchange to the American. The level of incomes was predetermined, and there was no way for an incomes policy to depart from it. Economic forces came into operation to correct the undervaluation by an increase in the wage level. . . .

It was a paradox that the devaluation, which had been intended as a remedy for an adverse balance of payments, induced an inflation which was liable itself to cause an adverse balance. The undervaluation did indeed swell the demand for British exports, but when production passed the limit of capacity, and output could not be further increased, the monetary expansion continued by its own momentum. Demand expanded beyond output and attracted an excess of imports. There was no dilemma, because the employment situation and the balance of payments situation both required the same treatment, a monetary contraction. The contraction would not cause unemployment, provided it went no further than to eliminate over-employment.

The White Paper of 1956 on the Economic Implications of Full Employment, while confirming the Incomes Policy of price stabilization, placed definitely on the Government the responsibility for regulating the pressure of demand through “fiscal, monetary and social policies”. The Radcliffe Committee obtained from the Treasury the admission that this was not being done. No measures other than persuasion and exhortation were being taken to give effect to the incomes policy. Reluctant as the authorities were to resort to deflation, they nevertheless imposed a Bank rate of 7 per cent and other contractive measures to cope with a balance of payments crisis at the very moment when the Treasury representative were appearing before the Committee. But that did not mean that they were prepared to pursue a contractive policy in support of the incomes policy. The crises of 1957 and 1961 were no more than episodes, temporarily interfering with the policy of easy credit and expansion. The crisis of 1964-6 has been more than an episode, only because the deflationary measures were long delayed, and when taken, were half-hearted.

It would be unfair to impute the entire responsibility for these faults of policy to Ministers. They are guided by their advisers, and they can plead in their defence that their misconceptions have been shared by the vast majority of economists. . . .

The fault of traditional monetary theory has been that it is static, and that is still true of Keynes’s theory. But a peculiarity of monetary policy is that, whenever practical measures have to be taken, the situation is always one of transition, when the conditions of static equilibrium have been departed from. The task of policy is to decide the best way to get back to equilibrium, and very likely to choose which of several alternative equilibrium positions to aim at. . . .

An incomes policy, or a wages policy, is the indispensable means of stabilizing the money unit when an independent metallic standard has failed us. Such a policy can only be given effect by a regulation of credit. The world has had long experience of the regulation of credit for the maintenance of a metallic standard. Maintenance of a wages standard requires the same instruments but will be more exacting because it will be guided by many symptoms instead of exclusively by movements of gold, and because it will require unremitting vigilance instead of occasional interference. (pp. ix-xii)

The confusion identified by Hawtrey between an incomes policy aiming at achieving a level of income consistent with full employment at a given level of wages by the appropriate conduct of monetary policy and an incomes policy aiming at the direct control of wages was precisely the confusion that led to the consistent failure of British monetary policy after World War II and to the failure of Arthur Burns. The essence of an incomes policy was to control total spending by way of monetary policy while gaining the cooperation of labor unions and business to prevent wage increases that would be inconsistent with full employment at the targeted level of income. Only monetary policy could determine the level of income, and the only role of exhortation and persuasion or direct controls was to prevent excessive wage increases that would prevent full employment from being achieved at the targeted income level.

After the 1949 devaluation, the Labour government appealed to the labour unions, its chief constituency, not to demand wage increases larger than productivity increases, so that British exporters could maintain the competitive advantage provided them by devaluation. Understanding the protectionist motive for devaluation was to undervalue the pound with a view to promoting exports and discouraging imports, Hawtrey also explained why the protectionist goal had been subverted by the low interest-rate, expansionary monetary policy of the Labour government to keep unemployment well below 2 percent.

British wages rose therefore not only because the pound was undervalued, but because monetary expansion increased aggregate demand faster than the British productive capacity was increasing, adding further upward pressure on British wages and labor costs. Excess aggregate demand in Britain also meant that domestic output that might have been exported was instead sold to domestic customers, while drawing imports to satisfy the unmet demands of domestic consumers, so that the British trade balance showed little improvement notwithstanding a 40% devaluation.

In this analysis, Hawtrey anticipated Max Corden’s theory of exchange-rate protection in identifying the essential mechanism by which to manipulate a nominal exchange rate so as to subsidize the tradable-goods sector (domestic export industries and domestic import-competing industries) as a tight-money policy that creates an excess demand for cash, thereby forcing the public to reduce spending as they try to accumulate the desired increases in cash holdings. The reduced demand for home production as spending is reduced results in a shift of productive resources from the non-tradable- to the tradable-goods sector.

To sum up, what Burns might have learned from Hawtrey was that even if some form of control of wages was essential for maintaining full employment in an economic environment in which strong labor unions could bargain effectively with employers, that control over wages did not — and could not — free the central bank from its responsibility to control aggregate demand and the growth of total spending and income.

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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