This thread on the current presidential candidacy of Ron Paul (onetime Libertarian candidate for POTUS) was getting hijacked into a discussion of the Federal Reserve, inflation, and “hard currency,” so I thought I’d spin that debate off into a separate thread.
The problem prior to the FED was the “inelasticity” of money or money supply. They called them “panics” prior to “depressions” and they were nasty. There simply can’t be enough specie (as gold or possibly silver was called) to possibly meet the needs of commerce in even just the United States much less the entire world, unless one places a value of a common wedding band at some astronomical figure.
Good lord. I’ve always said that liberatarians are ignorant of economics despite their loud protestations of love for it, and now we have proof of that.
A certain level of inflation is necessary to keep the economy going. It encourages people to invest their money to recoup the wealth they lose to inflation. Investment is critical for driving long-term economic growth. Also, certain prices, like wages, will almost always be increasing, so it’s important that firms be able to raise their prices to accomodate this.
Any money supply based on the gold standard would essentially be constant. Meanwhile, the demand for money would increase over time(as the population rises). This would lead to a shart deflation, which would be terrible for the economy.
I’m trying to come up with a reasonably complex but still reasonably short post to this thread, but I can’t let this one go.
Please explain, if you can, how the U.S. became the premier economic power in the world by 1913 with a gold standard and a history - except for war - of stable to decreasing prices.
I’ll give it a shot. But please don’t make me read the linked thread.
Hm. Milton Friedman said that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Or something like that.
Put another way, a determined Fed can put a stop to inflationary pressures in an economy, and even reverse them. But doing so might cause a recession.
--------------- 2. If so, is it the primary cause of inflation? Or even a significant contributing cause?
Inflation won’t occur without the acquiescence of the monetary authorities. But consider what happens to an industrial economy in the case of an oil shock. In such circumstances, factory products will cost more to produce. If the Fed wanted to keep the price level constant, lots of prices (and wages) would have to decline to compensate for the higher price of a key input (oil). That’s an option. But if you believe that workers are reluctant to take wage cuts and firms slow to cut prices, then it’s going to take a recession to help the process along.
Alternatively, the central bank could allow a temporary spike in inflation.
The theory of the Phillips curve suggests that policy makers face a short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Friedman believed that this was only over the short-run though, and that over the long run there was a natural equilibrium rate of unemployment.
Fiscal policy (that is, changes in budget deficits or in the Clinton era surpluses) can also stimulate the economy (lowering unemployment and at times raising inflation) or contract it (the opposite).
------------- 3. If so, does it matter? That is, is inflation always a bad thing?
IMO, a little bit of inflation (2-4%, though most central bankers say 1-2%) is a good thing.
------------- 4. Could any modern monetary system function efficiently if its money supply were still based on the gold standard?
Hey, let’s try it out. But what do you mean by efficiently?
Put it another way. Barry Eichengreen has pointed out that price stability was not the rule during the days of the gold standard. Advocates of the gold standard generally use theoretic, not empirical arguments.
I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I’ve honestly never heard that idea before. Do you have any cite to any reputable economist who shares that belief? That’s not a challenge, just a request.
I just remembered that the Chicago Fed’s history of itself has a nice, simple explanation of how the Fed came into being: see Early History.
The controversy centers around this sentence, I believe:
The above is obviously incompatible with a hard-currency system. FRN’s circulated in tandem with US notes, whose issuance was strictly limited by the act that created them in 1862. This set the stage for their abandonment since, as The US Treasury’s page on currencies says:
In short, the FRN, because it was backed by the collateral held in reserve at the banks, which could be either gold/gold securities or the bank notes it received from its member banks, had no statutory limit on how many could be issued - an “elastic” currency whose supply would increase or decrease based on demand (see the FRB’s currency and coin page). Thus, the argument that the Fed is itself the cause of inflation.
Er, wasn’t Great Britain the premier economic power before WWI?
And didn’t the US flirt with the silver standard for a while, thus increasing the level of specie?
And, most critically, is it really appropriate to compare the largely agrarian economy of the 1800s to a modern industrial or post-industrial one today?
Yeah, Milton Friedman was a hack. You might want to narrow down that brush a tad. In fact, you need to narrow it down a lot, especially in light of your comments about economics, below.
Questionable
Yeah, no one would invest if there weren’t any inflation.
Generally true of wages, but not true of many prices. In fact, most prices decrease over time, if inflation is low.
So why wasn’t the money supply constant when we were on the gold standard?
I’m not a big fan of the gold standard, but the idea that inflation is caused by the Fed isn’t all that crazy. It’s pretty mainstream thought that The Depression was caused in large part by mismanagement of monetary policy by the Fed.
Measure for Measure, I’ll have to go digging to find the cite, but if I recall correctly by the 1870’s, the US was already the number one industrial producer on the planet. So no, it wasn’t an agrarian economy. Not even close.
Actually, the panics were caused by the banks creating too many banknotes than what could be redeemed in actual gold. When people realized the paper they held wasn’t backed by gold there was a panic. But the conniving bankers managed to blame the gold for causing panics, not their fraudulent money creation schemes.
You are absolutely correct when you say there isn’t enough gold or silver to meet the needs of commerce. That is a fundmental fact of economics, commodities like money, wool, oranges, lumber, wheat, iron, etc are in short supply. That is what makes them valuable. If there were enough of everything we would be livin on Big Rock Candy Mountain.
The great thing about free markets is people can decide what they think is valuable. Precious metals have worked great as money for centuries, but governments, especially the greedy power-hungry type, don’t like honest money. So they create central banks that give them an unlimited line of credit.
Best I could come up with for now is the Wiki page on historical GDP. If you look at 1870, you see that the US was very close behind the UK. (with India and China ahead of them both. Hmm.) By 1913, it took the output of the entire British Empire to match that of the US all by itself. The UK was already far, far behind.
Your POV comes off fairly well- better than mine, I’d say. I’ll note though that about half the country were farmers from 1850-1880.
Still, I would argue that the vociferous debates regarding the silver and gold standard during the 1800s, and general unhappiness with periodic bank panics (culminating in the establishment of the FDIC in the 1930s), indicates some problems with economic stability during that era.
Yep. The Chicago Fed page I linked to earlier noted that the proximate cause for the Federal Reserve Act was the Panic of 1907. There was a populist movement for silver in the 1880’s and 1890’s, as well. (which led to the “Cross of Gold” speech.)
Can you elaborate a little? I’m particularly interested in what you mean by gold-backed money being “honest”. I suppose trust money is “dishonest”?
I learned in macroeconomics that the Fed uses monetary policy to keep the economy between extremes of the business cycle. One extreme is a recessionary gap, where potential GDP minus real GDP is a positive number; apparently this is when unemployment is high. The other extreme is an inflationary gap where potential GDP minus real GDP is a negative number; this is when inflation is high. By trying to keep the economy “walking the line” so to speak, the Fed needs there to be a little inflation, so I could see this being construed as “the Fed causes inflation”.
I’m arguing that the economies of the 1870s were rather different than, say, the 1970s, owing to the large share of the labor force that were tied to farming.