Bank Failures and the Federal Reserve’s Recipe for Hangover Economics

Want to know who to blame for the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and the general turmoil in the banking sector?

Poor management is part of the answer, of course, but the Federal Reserve also should be castigated because of bad monetary policy.

Why?

Because the central bank’s easy-money policy created artificially low interest rates, but those policies also produced high inflation, and now interest rates are going up as the Fed tries to undo its mistake.

Inspired by my “magic beans” visual, here’s a new one that shows the Fed’s boom-bust cycle.

By the way, the center box (higher prices) also includes asset bubble since bad monetary policy sometimes leads to financial bubbles instead of (or in addition to) higher consumer prices.

And higher interest rates can occur for two reasons. Most people focus on the Federal Reserve tightening monetary policy as it tries to reverse its original mistake of easy money. But don’t forget that interest rates also rise once lenders feel the pinch of inflation and insist on higher rates to compensate for the falling value of the dollar.

But let’s not digress too much. The focus of today’s column is that the Fed goofed by creating too much money in 2020 and 2021. That’s what set the stage for big price increases in 2022 and now economic instability in 2023.

Joakim Book of Reason shares my perspective. Here are excerpts from his article.

The Federal Reserve is in the unenviable position of achieving its mandate by crashing the economy. …it’s something that happens as an unavoidable outcome of slowing down an economy littered with excess money and inflation. …This hiking cycle, the fastest that the Fed has embarked upon in a generation, was always likely to break something. And break something they did over the weekend…Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which faced the second-largest bank run in U.S. history. …this pushes the Fed into a very delicate position: risk systemic bank runs, or roll back the hikes and quantitative tightening that caused this mess, printing money for an even hotter inflation.

The Wall Street Journal also has the right perspective, editorializing that the current mess was largely caused by bad monetary policy.

Cracks in the financial system emerge whenever interest rates rise quickly after an easy-credit mania, and the surprise is that it took so long. …This week’s bank failures are another painful lesson in the costs of a credit mania fed by bad monetary policy. The reckoning always arrives when the Fed has to correct its mistakes. …We saw the first signs of panic in last year’s crypto crash and the liquidity squeeze at British pension funds. …nobody, least of all central bank oracles, should be surprised that there are now bodies washing up on shore as the tide goes out.

This tweet also notes that monetary policy is to blame.

What's the main monetary lesson from SVB?

Wrong: See what inflation-fighting does? It can cause a financial crisis. So give up and adjust the inflation target to 4%.

Right: Inflation must be fought ASAP. The longer the delay, the bigger the pain.
P.S. Don't print so much money! pic.twitter.com/2XgkpTXiO0

— Dror Goldberg (@DrorGoldberg) March 13, 2023

Finally, I can’t resist sharing some excerpts from Tyler Cowen’s Bloomberg column. He pointed out last November that the Austrian School has some insights with regards to the current mess.

The Austrian theory…works something like this: Investors expected that very low real interest rates would hold. They committed resources accordingly, and now forthcoming rates are likely to be much higher. That means the economy is stuck with malinvestment and will need to reconfigure in a painful manner. …The basic story here fits with the work of two economists from Austria, Ludwig Mises and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek, and thus it is called the Austrian theory of the business cycle. The Austrian theory stresses how mistaken expectations about interest rates, brought on by changes in the rate of inflation, will lead to bad and abandoned investment projects. The Austrian theory has often been attacked by Keynesians, but in one form or another it continues to resurface in the economic data.

Needless to say, proponents of the Austrian School are not big fans of central banking.

If you want to learn more about Austrian economics, click here and here.

Read Full Post »

Deficit Spending and Inflation

In this segment from a December interview, I explain that budget deficits are most likely to produce inflation in countries with untrustworthy governments.*

The simple message is that budget deficits are not necessarily inflationary. It depends how budget deficits are financed.

If a government finances its budget deficits by selling bonds to private savers and investors, there is no reason to expect inflation.**

But if a government finances its budget deficits by having its central bank create money, there is every reason to expect inflation.

So why would politicians ever choose the second option? For the simple reason that private savers and investors are reluctant to buy bonds from some governments.

And if those politicians can’t get more money by borrowing, and they also have trouble collecting more tax revenue, then printing money (figuratively speaking) is their only option (they could restrain government spending, but that’s the least-preferred option for most politicians).

Let’s look at two real-world examples.

• Consider the example of Japan. It has been running large deficits for decades, resulting in an enormous accumulation of debt. But Japan has very little inflation by world standards. Why? Because governments bonds are financed by private savers and investors, who are very confident that the Japanese government will not default..
• Consider the example of Argentina. It has been running large deficits for decades. But even though its overall debt level if much lower than Japan’s, Argentina suffers from high inflation. Why? Because the nation’s central bank winds up buying the bonds because private savers and investors are reluctant to lend money to the government.

If you want some visual evidence, I went to the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook database.

Here’s the data for 1998-2022 showing the average budget deficit and average inflation rate in both Japan and Argentina.

The bottom line is that prices are very stable in Japan because the central bank has not been financing Japan’s red ink by creating money.

In Argentina, by contrast, the central bank is routinely used by politicians as a back-door way of financing the government’s budget.

*To make sure that my libertarian credentials don’t get revoked, I should probably point out that all governments are untrustworthy. But some are worse than others, and rule-of-law rankings are probably a good proxy for which ones are partially untrustworthy versus entirely untrustworthy.

**Borrowing from the private sector is economically harmful because budget deficits “crowd out” private investment. Though keep in mind that all the ways of financing government (taxes, borrowing, and money creation) are bad for prosperity.

Read Full Post »

Central Bankers Dodging Blame

The great Milton Friedman repeatedly explained that rising prices are an inevitable consequence of easy-money policies by central banks.

That’s a lesson everyone should have learned about 50 years ago when the Federal Reserve unleashed the inflation in the 1960s and 1970s (also blame Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon for appointing the wrong people).

And we should have learned another lesson when the Fed (with strong support from Ronald Reagan) then put the inflation genie back in the bottle in the 1980s.

But today’s central bankers must have been very bad students.

Writing for National Review, E.J. Antoni explains that we are once again bearing the inevitable cost of bad monetary policy.

…central banks are allowing interest rates to rise in an effort to belatedly respond to a crisis they helped cause. …the global economic downturn has been baked into the cake for months. …central banks around the world laid the groundwork for economic pain when they decided to finance trillions of dollars in unfunded government spending in 2020. As those central banks continued — and in some cases accelerated — their excessive money creation throughout 2021 and into 2022, a global downturn became inevitable. …History shows that high levels of inflation almost always lead to recession …once inflation became apparent central bankers persisted with their earlier course, feeding inflation, rather than starving it. If they had acted earlier, far less drastic treatment would now be required. …there is no way around the harsh reality that the bill is coming due for the last two years of monetary malfeasance.

Well said. Easy-money policy is like having six drinks at the bar. The consequences – rising prices, financial bubbles, and recessions – are akin to the hangover.

However, while I agree with the above article, I don’t agree with the title. It should be changed to: “Economies Can’t Avoid the Consequences of Central Bank Actions.”

Why the new title?

For the simple reason that central bankers are actually very capable of dodging responsibility for their mistakes.

For instance, has anyone heard the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, apologize for dumping $4 trillion of liquidity into the economy in 2020 and 2021, thus creating today’s big price increases in the United States?

A more glaring example comes from the United Kingdom, where the former Governor of the Bank of England wants to blame Brexit. I’m not joking. Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg story.

Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney pointed to Brexit as a key reason why the UK central bank is now having to hike interest rates in its struggle to contain inflation. Alongside rising energy prices and a tight labor market, Britain’s exit from the European Union added to the economic headwinds for the UK, according to Carney. “In the UK, unfortunately, we’ve also had in the near term the impact of Brexit, which has slowed the pace at which the economy can grow,” Carney said in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program on Friday. …“The economy’s capacity would go down for a period of time because of Brexit, that would add to inflationary pressure, and we would have a situation, which is the situation we have today, where the Bank of England has to raise interest rates despite the fact the economy is going into recession.”

This is galling.

Brexit did not cause inflation. The finger of blame should be pointed at the Bank of England.

Like the Fed, the BoE dramatically expanded its balance sheet starting in the spring of 2020.

And, like the Fed (and the European Central Bank), it maintained an easy-money policy for the remainder of the year and throughout 2021 – even after it became very clear that the pandemic was not going to cause an economic crisis.

To be fair, Carney left the Bank of England in early 2020, so it’s possible he might not have made the same mistake as Andrew Bailey, who took his place.

But Carney blaming Brexit shows that, if nothing else, he is willing to prevaricate to protect the BoE’s reputation.

What makes his analysis so absurd is that he almost surely would have made the same claims regardless of what happened after Brexit.

• Boris Johnson delivered Brexit, but then proceeded to enact bad policies such as higher taxes and more spending. The economy weakened and Carney says this is why the BoE is being forced to raise interest rates.
• But if Johnson had enacted good policy (the Singapore-on-Thames scenario), the economy would be performing much better. In that case, Carney doubtlessly would have claimed interest rates needed to rise because of overheating.

In reality, of course, interest rates are going up because the BoE is trying to undo its easy-money mistake.

Too bad Carney isn’t man enough to admit what’s really happening. Maybe a woman would be more honest.

P.S. The current Governor of the BoE, Bailey, also likes shifting blame since he wants people to think that Liz Truss’ proposed tax cuts were responsible for financial market instability – even though his easy-money policies are the real culprit.

Read Full Post »

Understanding Inflation and the Federal Reserve

Today’s column is about inflation and I want to start by recycling this clip from an interview back in April.

The main message is that the Federal Reserve deserves the blame for inflation.

America’s central bank created dramatically expanded its balance sheet starting in early 2020. This meant lots of extra liquidity sloshing around the economy and that inevitably led to rising prices.

As Milton Friedman explained, inflation is “always and everywhere on monetary phenomenon.”

So why am I regurgitating this type of analysis? Because someone sent me a PolitiFact article from April that supposedly does a “fact check” on the claim that Biden’s spending contributed to inflation.

What shocked me is that the article never mentions the Federal Reserve or monetary policy. I’m not joking.

We decided to look at how much of an impact Biden’s spending had on prices. …some economists, including Larry Summers, a top official under President Barack Obama, warned that the bill would lead to inflation. Fiscal conservatives joined in the warning. …How much of this can be put at Biden’s feet? Some, but not all of it, experts say. …The post-COVID-19 inflation story is more complicated than just federal spending. Other forces, including changes in the labor market, rising global energy and commodity prices, supply chain dysfunction and the war in Ukraine have all contributed to higher prices. …Russia’s attack on Ukraine disrupted a world economy that was still sorting itself out after COVID. Sanctions aimed at cutting Russia’s energy revenues sent oil and gas prices soaring. The war’s crippling hit on Ukraine’s agricultural sector, combined with sanctions (Russia is a major wheat producer), has raised the prices of basic goods like wheat and sunflower oil. …none of the experts we reached, liberal and conservative, said Biden’s actions were responsible for all of the inflation. Past government spending, COVID’s disruptions to labor markets, energy prices and supply-chains also played significant roles. Most recently, the war in Ukraine has made a challenging situation worse.

This is nonsense. At the risk of being boring and wonky, the factors mentioned in the article are important, but they will only change relative prices in the absence of bad monetary policy.

In other words, energy prices may increase, but that will be offset by declines in other prices. Unless, of course, the central bank is creating too much liquidity, thus enabling an increase in the overall price level.

I’ll close with a caveat. Bad monetary policy sometimes will cause rising asset prices (a bubble) rather than rising consumer prices. Both outcomes are examples of inflation, but only the latter shows up when the government releases monthly data on the consumer price index.

That being said, is it possible that some of Biden’s (and Trump’s) spending policies led to more price inflation rather than more asset inflation?

Yes, but that’s merely shifting the deck chairs on the monetary Titanic. And it doesn’t change the fact that it is gross economic malpractice for PolitiFact to write about inflation without mentioning the Federal Reserve or monetary policy.

P.S. Here’s a humorous video about the Federal Reserve and here’s a serious tutorial video about the Federal Reserve.

Read Full Post »

Government Intervention Hurts the Poor

A big argument for free enterprise over statism is that the former delivers growth while the latter leads to stagnation.

And that’s very apparent when you review decades of data.

The case for capitalism is especially powerful if you care about what’s best for the disadvantaged. As the chart from Economic Freedom of the World illustrates, poor people enjoy much higher levels of income in nations that have higher levels of economic liberty.

So why, then, do our friends on the left support bigger government?

There are several possible answers, but today let’s focus on their understandable desire to do things that seem compassionate. Particularly things that seem to offer immediate help.

I think that’s a big reason why some well-meaning leftists support a big welfare state even though there is plenty of evidence that poor people get trapped in dependency. They are so focused on doing something that ostensibly alleviates today’s problems that they do not appreciate the risk of harmful long-run consequences.

This problem is so pervasive that we need to create a new Theorem of Government.

If you want an example of this Theorem, we can look at a story in today’s New York Times.

Reporters Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman document how low-income people are being hurt by inflation and will probably be hurt by what will be needed to curtail inflation.

…data and anecdotes suggest that lower-income households, despite the resilient job market, are struggling more profoundly with inflation. That divergence poses a challenge for the Federal Reserve, which is hoping that higher interest rates will slow consumer spending and ease pressure on prices across the economy. Already, there are signsthat poorer families are cutting back. …The Fed might need to raise interest rates even more to bring inflation under control, and that could cause a sharper slowdown. In that case, poorer families will almost certainly bear the brunt again, because low-wage workers are often the first to lose hours and jobs. …America’s poor have spent part of the savings they amassed during coronavirus lockdowns, and their wages are increasingly struggling to keep up with — or falling behind — price increases.

The story is filled with anecdotes about poor people suffering from inflation.

And, as the above excerpts captures, it has plenty of fretting about how the less fortunate will suffer as the Federal Reserve tries to fix the mess.

But what you won’t find in the story is any acknowledgement that poor people would not be dealing with this hardship if the Federal Reserve had not made the mistake of creating too much liquidity in the first place.

Yet this is the big lesson all of us should learn.

The Federal Reserve wanted to offer short-run help to the economy, motivated in part by a desire to help poor people by propping up the economy during the pandemic.

Yet any short-run help has been swamped by subsequent negative consequences.

And this is not unique. The big lesson from the so-called War on Poverty is that poverty rates suddenly stopped declining. In other words, government tried to help, but wound up doing harm.

P.S. Here are the other 13 Theorems of Government.

• The “First Theorem” explains how Washington really operates.
• The “Second Theorem” explains why it is so important to block the creation of new programs.
• The “Third Theorem” explains why centralized programs inevitably waste money.
• The “Fourth Theorem” explains that good policy can be good politics.
• The “Fifth Theorem” explains how good ideas on paper become bad ideas in reality.
• The “Sixth Theorem” explains an under-appreciated benefit of a flat tax.
• The “Seventh Theorem” explains how bigger governments are less competent.
• The “Eighth Theorem” explains the motives of those who focus on inequality.
• The “Ninth Theorem” explains how politics often trumps principles.
• The “Tenth Theorem” explains how politicians manufacture/exploit crises.
• The “Eleventh Theorem” explains why big business is often anti-free market.
• The “Twelfth Theorem” explains you can’t have European-sized government without pillaging the middle class.
• The “Thirteenth Theorem” explains that people are unwilling to pay for bloated government.

Read Full Post »

Inflation Is Caused by Bad Government Policy

Milton Friedman wisely observed that inflation is always the result of bad monetary policy by central banks. And I echoed that point last month in remarks to the European Resource Bank meeting in Stockholm.

This topic deserves more attention, particularly given the depressing inflation numbers just released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Some of our friends on the left want to downplay these bad numbers. In large part, they are motivated by a desire to shield President Biden from political damage. And I sympathize with them since Biden was not in the White House when the Federal Reserve decided to dump lots of liquidity into the U.S. economy.

Here’s a chart showing the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet over the past decade. It’s easy to see the Fed’s panicked response to the pandemic in early 2020.

But I don’t sympathize with folks who claim that inflation is just something random.

Some of them want to blame Putin. Or the pandemic. Or “corporate greed.” Or maybe even space aliens.

I also wonder about this tweet from Ian Bremmer. He points out that inflation is showing up everywhere, regardless of which political party (or coalition) is running a government.

But I can’t tell what he means by his final line (“wild guess it’s not the govt”).

Is he saying that we should focus on the actions of central banks, not the partisan composition of a nation’s government? If so, I agree.

Or is he saying that we should not blame any part of government? If so, I completely disagree.

Central banks may have varying levels of day-to-day independence, but they are government entities. They were created by politicians and run by people appointed by politicians.

And inflation is happening in many nations because various central banks all made similar mistakes.

For instance, Bremmer mentions Germany and Italy. Those are euro countries and you can see that the European Central Bank made the same mistake as the Fed. It panicked at the start of the pandemic and then never fixed its mistake.

Bremmer also mentioned the United Kingdom. Well, here’s the balance sheet data from the Bank of England.

Once again, you can see a big spike in the amount of liquidity created when the BoE expanded its balance sheet.

And, just as was the case with the Fed and the ECB, the BoE did not fix its mistake once it became apparent than the pandemic was not going to cause a global economic collapse.

P.S. I suggested in the video that the ECB is partly motivated by a desire to prop up decrepit welfare states in nations such as Italy and Greece. This is a point I’ve been warning about for many, many years.

P.P.S. While Biden is not to blame for the outbreak of inflation, it’s also true that he is not part of the solution and has not used his appointment power to push the Fed in a more sensible direction.

P.P.P.S. If you have the time and interest, here’s a 40-minute video explaining the Federal Reserve’s track record of bad monetary policy.

P.P.P.P.S. If you’re constrained for time, I recommend this five-minute video on alternatives to the Federal Reserve and this six-minute video on how people can protect themselves from bad monetary policy.

Read Full Post »

Blame the Federal Reserve

Back in 2015, I explained to Neil Cavuto that easy money creates the conditions for a boom-bust cycle.

It’s now 2022 and my argument is even more relevant.

That’s because the Federal Reserve panicked at the start of the pandemic and dumped a massive amount of money into the economy (technically, the Fed increased its balance sheet by purchasing trillions of dollars of government bonds).

As the late, great Milton Friedman taught us, this easy-money, low-interest-rate approach produced the rising prices that are now plaguing the nation.

But that’s only part of the bad news.

The other bad news is that easy-money policy sets the stage for future hard times. In other words, the Fed causes a boom-bust cycle.

Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute explains how and why the Federal Reserve has put the country in a bad situation.

Better late than never. Today, the Federal Reserve finally took decisive monetary policy action to regain control over inflation that has been largely of its own making. …The Fed’s abrupt policy U-turn is good news in that it reduces the likelihood that we will return to the inflation of the 1970s. However, this does not mean that we will avoid paying a heavy price for the Fed’s past policy mistakes in lost output and employment. …One might well ask what the Fed was thinking last year when it kept interest rates at their zero lower bound and when it let the money supply balloon at its fastest pace in over fifty years at a time especially when the economy was recovering strongly… One might also ask what the Fed thought when it continued to buy $120 billion a month in Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities throughout most of last year when the equity and the housing markets were on fire?

The relevant question, he explains, is whether we have a hard landing…or a harder landing.

If the Fed sticks to its program of meaningful interest rate hikes and balance sheet reduction over the remainder of this year, there would seem to be an excellent chance that we do not return to the inflation of the 1970s. However, there is reason to doubt that the Fed will succeed in pushing the inflation genie to the bottle without precipitating a nasty economic recession. One reason for doubting that the Fed will succeed in engineering a soft economic landing is that there is no precedent for the Fed has done so when it has allowed itself to fall as far behind the inflation curve as it has done today. …there is a real risk that higher interest rates might be the trigger that bursts today’s asset and credit market bubbles. Should that indeed happen, we could be in for a tough landing. Milton Friedman was fond of saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This is a lesson that the Fed might soon relearn as last year’s economic party gives way to a painful economic slump.

Let’s hope we have a proverbial “soft landing,” but I’m not holding my breath.

Especially with Biden pursuing other bad policies (FWIW, I don’t blame him for today’s price spikes).

P.S. As explained in this video from the Fraser Institute, Friedrich Hayek understood a long time ago that feel-good government intervention leads to a feel-bad economic hangover.

P.P.S. Here’s my video on the Federal Reserve, which also explains that there might be a good alternative.

Read Full Post »

The Economics of Greed

Looking back on the 2008 financial crisis, it seems clear that much of that mess was caused by bad government policy, especially easy money from the Federal Reserve and housing subsidies from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Many of my left-leaning friends, by contrast, assert that “Wall Street greed” was the real culprit.

I have no problem with the notion that greed plays a role in financial markets, but people on Wall Street presumably were equally greedy in the 1980s and 1990s. So why didn’t we also have financial crises during those decades?

Isn’t it more plausible to think that one-off factors may have caused markets to go awry?

I took that trip down Memory Lane because of a rather insipid tweet from my occasional sparring partner, Robert Reich. He wants his followers to think that inflation is caused by “corporate greed.”

For what it’s worth, I agree that corporations are greedy. I’m sure that they are happy when they can charge more for their products.

But that’s hardly an explanation for today’s inflation.

After all, corporations presumably were greedy back in 2015. And in 2005. And in 1995. So why didn’t we also have high inflation those years as well?

If Reich understood economics, he could have pointed out that today’s inflation was caused by the Federal Reserve and also absolved Biden by explaining that the Fed’s big mistake occurred when Trump was in the White House.

I don’t expect Reich to believe me, so perhaps he’ll listen to Larry Summers, who also served in Bill Clinton’s cabinet.

But I won’t hold my breath.

As Don Boudreaux has explained, Reich is not a big fan of economic rigor and accuracy.

P.S. Reich also blamed antitrust policy, but we have had supposedly “weak antitrust enforcement” since the 1980s. So why did inflation wait until 2021 to appear?

P.P.S. In addition to being wrong about the cause of the 2008 crisis, my left-leaning friends also were wrong about the proper response to the crisis.

Read Full Post »

Don’t Blame Joe Biden for High Inflation

I’m more than happy to condemn Joe Biden for his bad policy proposals, such as higher tax rates, fake stimulus, red tape, and a bigger welfare state.

But as I discuss in this segment from a recent interview, he bears very little blame for today’s high inflation rate.

If you want to know who is responsible for 8.5 percent inflation, the highest in four decades, this chart tells you everything you need to know.

Simply stated, the Federal Reserve has created a lot more money by expanding its balance sheet (which happens, for example, when the central bank purchases government bonds using “open market operations”).

Notice, by the way, that the Fed dramatically expanded its balance sheet beginning in March 2020. That was almost one year before Biden was inaugurated.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Biden does not have the power of time travel. He can’t be at fault for a monetary policy mistake that happened when Trump was president.

That being said, I don’t want anyone to think that Biden believes in good monetary policy.

• Biden has never made any sort of statement favoring monetary restraint by the Fed.
• Neither the president not his senior advisors have urged the Fed to reverse its mistake.
• Biden renominated Jerome Powell to be Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors.
• None of Biden’s other nominees to the Federal Reserve have a track record of opposing easy money.

The bottom line is that the Fed almost surely would have made the same mistake in 2020 if Biden was in the White House.

But he wasn’t, so he gets a partial free pass.

P.S. Speaking of time travel, Paul Krugman blamed Estonia’s 2008 recession on spending cuts that took place in 2009.

P.P.S. Here’s my two cents on how people can protect themselves in an inflationary economy.

P.P.P.S. Only one president in my lifetime deserves praise for his approach to monetary policy.

Read Full Post »

Blame the Federal Reserve

The good thing about being a policy-driven libertarian is that I don’t feel any need to engage in political spin.

I can praise Democrats who do good things and praise Republicans who do good things. And also criticize members of either party (sadly, that’s a more common task).

It also means I don’t believe in blaming politicians for things that are not their fault. For example, NBC just released a poll showing that Joe Biden has low marks for economic policy.

Some of that is appropriate (his fiscal policy is atrocious, to cite one reason), but I think the answers to this question show that the president is getting a bum rap on one issue.

Why am I letting Biden off the hook about monetary policy?

For the simple reason that the Federal Reserve (the “Fed”) deserves the blame. The central bank’s inflationary policies are the reason that prices are rising.

One can claim that Joe Biden is partly to blame because he recently re-nominated Jay Powell, the current Chairman of the Fed. But, if that’s the case, then Donald Trump also is partly to blame – or even more to blame – because he nominated Powell in the first place.

Moreover, as illustrated by this chart, the Fed’s mistake that led to rising prices occurred in early 2020.

Simply stated, the Fed pumped lots of liquidity into the system. That set the stage for today’s price increases (as Milton Friedman told us, there’s always a lag between decisions about monetary policy and changes in prices).

If you look closely, you’ll notice that this massive monetary intervention began nearly one year before Biden took office.

Given his support for Keynesian fiscal policy, I suspect Biden also believes in Keynesian monetary policy. As such, we presumably would have had the same policy if Biden had been elected in 2016.

In other words, Biden would have been just like Trump. At least on this issue.

But none of that changes the fact that Biden’s actions since becoming president have very little to do with today’s price increases.

Let’s close with a few additional observations about the aforementioned polling results.

• The folks at NBC deserve some criticism for failing to give people the option of choosing the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. I’m guessing this was because of ignorance rather than bias.
• The people who blamed “corporations increasing prices” obviously didn’t pay attention in their economics classes. Rising prices are a symptom of inflation, not the cause.
• The people who blamed Putin for inflation are even more ignorant. At the risk of stating the obvious, a Russian invasion in February of 2022 obviously wasn’t responsible for rising prices in 2021.

P.S. The inflation-recession cycle caused by bad monetary policy could be avoided if the Fed was constrained by some simple rules.

P.P.S. Or maybe, just maybe, we should reconsider the role of central banks.

P.P.P.S. For what it’s worth, very few politicians have the intelligence and fortitude to support good monetary policy.

Read Full Post »

The Failure of Bidenomics, Part II

Yesterday’s column explained that Biden’s proposals to expand the welfare state were bad news, in part because government subsidies often lead to inefficiency and higher prices.

That’s not a smart strategy when inflation already is at 40-year highs.

President Biden did address the topic of rising prices during his speech, but his approach was so incoherent that even Larry Summers (Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton and head of the National Economic Council for Barack Obama) felt compelled to share some critical tweets.

This is remarkable. I’ve spent the past three decades fighting against some of Summers’ bad ideas on fiscal policy (he was a big supporter of the OECD’s anti-tax competition project, for instance).

But now we’re sort of on the same side (at least on a few issues) because Biden has embraced a reckless Bernie Sanders-type agenda of budget profligacy, class-warfare taxes, regulatory excess, and crass protectionism that is too extreme for sane people on the left.

Along with a head-in-the-sand view of monetary policy.

In a column for Canada’s Fraser Institute, Robert O’Quinn and I addressed Biden’s strange comments on inflation.

Here’s some of what we wrote on that topic.

After a disastrous first year pursuing an agenda that became increasingly unpopular, President Biden had an opportunity to reset his administration in a centrist direction as part of his first State of the Union Address. But he didn’t. On every domestic issue, he catered to the Democratic Party’s hardcore left-wing activists… Inflation, as Nobel laureate Milton Friedman observed, is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. …In his speech, Biden ignored the true cause of inflation. Instead, he offered a grab bag of statist ideas such as aggressive antitrust enforcement, price controls on prescription drugs, and tax credits for energy conservation and green energy—policies that, whatever their merits, have little or nothing to do with inflation.

Our basic message is that Biden ignored the real cause of inflation (bad monetary policy by the Federal Reserve) and instead came up with ideas (either bad or irrelevant) to addresses the symptom(s) of inflation.

We also noted that Biden’s nominees to the Federal Reserve are underwhelming.

Moreover, he has been pushing three controversial nominees to the Federal Reserve Board—Sarah Bloom Raskin, Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson—who lack monetary expertise and are generally regarded as inflation doves. Raskin’s primary “qualification” is her support for using the Fed’s regulatory powers to divert credit away from oil and natural gas production. Cook and Jefferson have primarily written about poverty and race, which are outside of the Fed’s legislative mandate.

What we need is a president – like Ronald Reagan – who understands that the inflation genie needs to be put back in the bottle and thus pushes the Federal Reserve in the right direction.

Instead, we have a president who thinks it’s a place where left-leaning activists should get patronage appointments.

P.S. If you have the time and interest, here’s an 40-minute video explaining the Federal Reserve’s track record of bad monetary policy.

P.P.S. If you’re constrained for time, I recommend this five-minute video on alternatives to the Federal Reserve and this six-minute video on how people can protect themselves from bad monetary policy.

Read Full Post »

The Most Important Thing to Understand about Inflation

Every few years (2012, 2015, 2019), I warn that easy-money policies by the Federal Reserve are misguided.

But not just because such policies eventually can lead to price inflation, which now has become a problem in the United States.

Bad monetary policy also can lead to asset inflation. In other words, bubbles. And it’s no fun when bubbles burst.

The obvious lesson to be learned is that central banks such as the Fed shouldn’t try to steer the economy with Keynesian-style monetary policy.

I’m motivated to write about this issue because the Washington Post recently invited some people to offer their ideas on how to fight inflation.

Some of the ideas were worthwhile.

• Michael Strain recommended trade liberalization.
• Brian Riedl recommended spending restraint.
• Matt Darling recommended deregulation.

Some of the ideas were bad, or even awful.

• Robert Hockett recommended industrial policy.
• Lauren Melodia recommended government-subsidized child care.
• William Spriggs recommended class-warfare taxation.
• Lindsay Owens recommended antitrust intervention.
• Todd Tucker recommended price controls.

If asked to contribute, what would I have suggested?

Being a curmudgeonly libertarian, I would have channeled the spirit of Milton Friedman and pointed out that bad monetary policy by central banks is the cause of inflation. Simply stated, it is appropriate to blame central banks if there are sustained and permanent increases in the overall price level.

And the only way to fix inflation is for central banks to unwind the policy mistakes that caused the problem in the first place.

Some of the respondents did mention the need for Federal Reserve to rectify its mistakes, so I’m not the only one to think monetary policy is important.

But I’m very fixated on assigning blame where it belongs, so I would not have mentioned any other factor.

For instance, in an article just published by the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Robert O’Quinn and I explain that bad fiscal policy does not cause inflation.

Are we seeing higher levels of price inflation because of fiscal profligacy?  Some Republican U.S. Senators and Representatives have blamed this acceleration of price inflation on Biden’s blowout of federal spending. There are many good reasons to criticize Biden’s spending spree. It is not good for the economy to increase the burden of government spending and push for higher tax rates… But that does not necessarily mean deficit spending is inflationary. …Price inflation occurs when the supply of money exceeds the demand for money… Notably, none of the mechanisms that central banks use for monetary policy (buying and selling government securities, setting interest rates paid on reserves, loans to financial institutions, etc) have anything to do with federal spending or budget deficits.  The Fed and other central banks can maintain price stability regardless of whether governments are enacting reckless fiscal policies.

In the article, we cited Japan as an example of a country with huge levels of debt, yet prices are stable.

By contrast, prices are rising in the United States because of Keynesian monetary policies by the Federal Reserve (often with the support of politicians).

What’s causing inflation, if not budget deficits and government debt? …central banks have been pursuing an inflationary policy. But they’ve been pursuing that approach not to finance budget deficits, but instead are motivated by a Keynesian/interventionist viewpoint that it is the role of central banks to “stimulate” the economy and/or prop up the financial market with easy-money policies.

I’ll close by observing that there can be a link between bad fiscal policy and inflation.

In basket-case nations such as Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina, politicians periodically use central banks to finance some of their excessive spending.

Some governments, particularly in less-developed countries, cannot easily borrow money and they rely on their central banks to finance their budget deficits. And that is clearly inflationary.

Because of changing demographics and poorly designed entitlement programs, it’s possible that the United States and other western nations eventually may get to this point.

Heck, I speculated just a couple of days ago that the European Central Bank may be doing this with Italy.

But the United States hasn’t yet reached that “tipping point.” There are still plenty of investors willing to buy the federal government’s debt (especially since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency).

The bottom line is that we should pursue good fiscal policy because it makes sense. And we should pursue good monetary policy because it makes sense. But the two are not directly connected.

P.S. On the topic of inflation, Ronald Reagan deserves immense praise for standing firm for good policy in the 1980s.

P.P.S. On the topic of the Federal Reserve, the central bank also should be criticized for interfering with the allocation of credit. And financial repression as well.

P.P.P.S. On the topic of basket-case economies, let’s hope that the American policy makers don’t embrace “modern monetary theory.”

Read Full Post »

How Can People Protect Themselves from Bad Monetary Policy?

In the libertarian fantasy world, we would have competing private currencies. In the real world, we have a government central bank.

And central banks have a track record of bad monetary policy, so here’s my two cents on how people can try to protect their household finances.

The above video is a clip from a longer presentation I made as part of “Libertarian Solutions,” an online program put together by the folks at Liberty International.

And I should point out that I goofed around the 3:28 mark of the video, when I meant to say “not planning to take it all out in 2009” (a dumb mistake, but not as bad as the time I said “anals” rather than “annals” on live TV).

That correction aside, I was tasked with discussing how people can prosper in spite of bad government policy, and, as you can see, I did not pretend to have any uniquely brilliant investment strategies.

So I focused on explaining the risks of bad monetary policy, especially the way that central banks (and other government policies) create boom-bust cycles in the economy.

If I had more time, I could have talked about additional threats, such as the crackpot idea of “modern monetary theory.”

And I probably should have found some time to explain the notion of “financial repression” since that’s a government policy that has a very direct adverse effect on people trying to build wealth.

One final point. While I’m very hopeful that they may somehow help people protect their personal finances, you’ll notice that I didn’t recommend cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. This is for two reasons.

1. I don’t know enough about how they work to competently discuss the issue.
2. I fear that governments will have the power, desire, and ability to squash the market.

Needless to say, I hope I’m wrong about the second point.

P.S. A classical gold standard could block central banks from engaging in bad monetary policy, but returning to that type of system is almost as unlikely as a shift to private currencies.

P.P.S. While I’m obviously not a big fan of the Federal Reserve, other nations have even worse experiences with their central banks, which is why “dollarization” makes sense for many developing countries.

Read Full Post »

A Gold Standard vs. the Federal Reserve’s Fiat Money

I’m not a big fan of the Federal Reserve, mostly because of its Keynesian monetary policy.

Incumbent politicians often applaud when the central bank intervenes to create excess liquidity and artificially low interest rates. That’s because the Keynesian approach produces a short-run “sugar high” that seems positive.

But such policies also create boom-bust conditions.

Indeed, the Federal Reserve deserves considerable blame for some of the economy’s worst episodes of the past 100-plus years – most notably the Great Depression, 1970s stagflation, and the 2008 financial crisis.

So what’s the solution?

I’ve previously pointed out that the classical gold standard has some attractive features but is not politically realistic.

But perhaps it’s time to reassess.

In a column for today’s Wall Street Journal, Professors William Luther and Alexander Salter explain the differences between a gold standard and today’s system of fiat money (i.e., a monetary system with no constraints).

Under a genuine gold standard, …Competition among gold miners adjusts the money supply in response to changes in demand, making purchasing power stable and predictable over long periods. The threat of customers redeeming notes and deposits for gold discourages banks from overissuing… Fiat dollars aren’t constrained by the supply of gold or any other commodity. The Federal Reserve can expand the money supply as much or as little as it sees fit, regardless of changes in money demand. When the Fed expands the money supply too much, an unsustainable boom and costly inflation follow.

They then compare the track records of the two systems.

…nearly all economists believe the U.S. economy has performed better under fiat money than it would have with the gold standard. This conventional wisdom is wrong. The gold standard wasn’t perfect, but the fiat dollar has been even worse. …in practice, the Fed has failed to govern the money supply responsibly. Inflation averaged only 0.2% a year from 1790 to 1913, when the Federal Reserve Act passed. Inflation was higher under the Fed-managed gold standard, averaging 2.7% from 1914 to 1971. It has been even higher without the constraint of gold. From 1972 to 2019, inflation averaged 4%. …the Fed…has also become less predictable. In a 2012 article published in the Journal of Macroeconomics, George Selgin, William D. Lastrapes and Lawrence H. White find “almost no persistence in the variance of inflation prior to the Fed’s establishment, and a very high degree of persistence afterwards.” …One might be willing to accept the costs of higher inflation and a less predictable price level if a Fed-managed fiat dollar reduced undesirable macroeconomic fluctuation. But that hasn’t happened. Consider the past two decades. The early 2000s had an unsustainable boom, as the Fed held interest rates too low for too long.

There was also a column on this issue in the WSJ two years ago.

James Grant opined about (the awful) President Nixon’s decision to make Federal Reserve policy completely independent of the gold anchor.

Richard Nixon announced the suspension of the Treasury’s standing offer to foreign governments to exchange dollars for gold, or vice versa, at the unvarying rate of $35 an ounce. The date was Aug. 15, 1971. Ever since, the dollar has been undefined in law. …In the long sweep of monetary history, this is a new system. Not until relatively recently did any central bank attempt to promote full employment and what is called price stability (but is really a never-ending inflation) by issuing paper money and manipulating interest rates. …a world-wide monetary system based on the scientifically informed discretion of Ph.D. economists. The Fed alone employs 700 of them.

But Grant says the gold standard worked reasonably well.

A 20th-century scholar, reviewing the record of the gold standard from 1880-1914, was unabashedly admiring of it: “Only a trifling number of countries were forced off the gold standard, once adopted, and devaluations of gold currencies were highly exceptional. Yet all this was achieved in spite of a volume of international reserves that, for many of the countries at least, was amazingly small and in spite of a minimum of international cooperation . . . on monetary matters.” …Arthur I. Bloomfield wrote those words, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published them, in 1959.

The new approach, which Grant mockingly calls the “Ph.D. standard,” gives central bankers discretionary power to do all sorts of worrisome things.

The ideology of the gold standard was laissez-faire; that of the Ph.D. standard (let’s call it) is statism. Gold-standard central bankers bought few, if any, government securities. Today’s central bankers stuff their balance sheets with them. In the gold-standard era, the stockholders of a commercial bank were responsible for the solvency of the institution in which they held a fractional interest. The Ph.D. standard brought the age of the government bailout and too big to fail.

By the way, the purpose of today’s column isn’t to unreservedly endorse a gold standard.

Such as system is very stable in the long run but can lead to short-term inflation or deflation based on what’s happening with the market for gold. And those short-term fluctuations can be economically disruptive.

I was messaging earlier today with Robert O’Quinn, the former Chief Economist at the Department of Labor (who also worked at the Fed) and got this reaction to the Luther-Salter column.

Which is better matching the long-term growth of the economy and the demand for money? The profitability of gold mining or central bank decision-making? A good monetary rule may be better than a classical gold standard. The difficulty is sustaining a good rule.

The ;problem, of course, is that I don’t trust politicians (and their Fed appointees) to follow a good rule.

• Especially in a world where many of them believe in Keynesian boom-bust monetary policy.
• Especially in a world where many of them think the Fed should prop up or bailout Wall Street.
• Especially in a world where many of them might use the central bank to finance big government.
• Especially in a world where many of them support a “war against cash” to empower politicians.

The bottom line is that we have to choose between two imperfect options and decide which one has a bigger downside.

P.S. Since a return to a classical gold standard is highly unlikely (and because the libertarian dream of “free banking” is even more improbable), the best we can hope for is a president who 1) makes good appointments to the Fed, and 2) supports sound-money policies even when it means short-run political pain. We’ve had one president like that in my lifetime.

Read Full Post »

Ranking Presidents: Was Woodrow Wilson the Worst of the Worst?

I certainly don’t intend to do this for everyone who has made it to the White House, but I have produced big-picture economic assessments of several presidents.

• Herbert Hoover
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Richard Nixon
• Ronald Reagan
• George H.W. Bush
• Bill Clinton
• George W. Bush
• Barack Obama

Today, let’s go back farther in history and take a look at Woodrow Wilson.

At the risk of understatement, he did a very bad job. Indeed, it’s quite likely that he ranks as America’s worst president, at least when judging economic policy. His mistakes were either huge or disgusting.

Creating the income tax – The internal revenue code began when Wilson signed into law an income tax on October 3, 1913. The initial tax wasn’t overly onerous – with a top rate of just 7 percent – but it predictably evolved into the punitive levy that currently plagues America.

Creating the Federal Reserve – You don’t have to be a libertarian-minded advocate of competitive currencies to conclude that the central bank – also signed into law by Wilson in 1913 – has caused immense damage with its erratic, boom-bust approach to monetary policy.

Segregating the federal government – Wilson was a reprehensible racist. To make matters worse, he turned that personal moral failing into a big policy mistake by overseeing rampant (and costly) discrimination and segregation in the federal government.

Those are just the highlights – though lowlights would be a more accurate word to describe Wilson’s policies.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a description of some additional forms of intervention imposed during his tenure.

…he took up and pushed through Congress the Progressive-sponsored Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. It established an agency—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—with sweeping authority. …because his own political thinking had been moving toward a more advanced Progressive position—Wilson struck out upon a new political course in 1916. He began by appointing Louis D. Brandeis, the leading critic of big business and finance, to the Supreme Court. Then in quick succession he obtained passage of a rural-credits measure to supply cheap long-term credit to farmers; anti-child-labour and federal workmen’s-compensation legislation; the Adamson Act, establishing the eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers; and measures for federal aid to education and highway construction.

Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education put together a damning indictment of Wilson.

1913…was a disastrous year that we’re still paying a hefty, annual price for… Wilson, arguably the worst president…ordered the segregation of all departments within the executive branch and appointed ardent segregationists to high positions. …He locked up political dissidents right and left as he trampled on the Constitution’s guarantees of speech, assembly, and press freedoms. His wartime economic controls were hideously stupid and counterproductive. …the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was…Strongly supported by Wilson… Subsequent legislation set the top rate at a mere 7 percent. …When Wilson left office eight years later, the top rate was more than ten times higher. …Wilson’s signature enshrined into law the Federal Reserve Act, creating a central bank and more economic mischief than any other federal initiative or institution in the last 100 years. …In American history, 1913 should go down as a year that will live in infamy.

It’s also worth noting that Wilson was a believer in global governance, which adds to his awful legacy.

In a review of a biography about Wilson for the Claremont Review of Books, David Goldman mentions that unpalatable feature of his presidency.

So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. …He wanted to compromise American sovereignty and most of the Senate did not. …Wilson would have liked to impose a legal obligation from a foreign body upon the United States, but could not say so openly. …His obsession was the creation of a supranational agency able to dictate policy to national governments, an obsession that grew out of his lifelong hostility to the American political system… To make sense of his grand overreach in 1919, historians will need to give more attention to his rancor at the U.S. Constitution… The constitution in Wilson’s reading had become a relic of a bygone era. He proposed to jettison this putatively archaic document in favor of a government less burdened by checks and balances. …The same utilitarian criteria that Wilson applied to the Constitution guided his judgment about capitalism and socialism. …As economists Clifford Thies and Gary Pecquet have observed, “Wilson believed that the difference between socialism and democracy was a matter of means rather than ends.” …He eschewed mass expropriation of industry only because he thought it inefficient. …Although Wilson’s dudgeon came from the Deep South, his Progressivism came from Princeton and the Social Gospel.

Wilson’s hostility to the Constitution was part of the so-called progressive era. Unlike America’s Founders, proponents of this approach viewed the federal government as a positive force rather than something to be constrained.

The idea that government or “the community,” has “an absolute right to determine its own destiny and that of its members” is a progressive one. The difference between the Founders’ and progressive’s visions can be summarized this way: The Founders believed citizens could best pursue happiness if government was limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of individuals. …Unlike the framers of the Constitution, progressives believed that…“communities” have rights, those rights are more important than the personal liberty of any one individual in that community. …they believed…government-sponsored programs and policies as well as economic redistribution of goods from the rich to the poor. …Wilson, who served as president from 1913-1919, advocated what we today call the living Constitution, or the idea that its interpretation should adapt to the times. …Wilson oversaw the implementation of progressive policies such as the introduction of the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve System to attempt to manage the economy.

Bre Payton, in an article for the Federalist, opined about Wilson and the changes during the progressive era.

…to understand The New Deal and how American life and government  changed in the twentieth century and beyond, it is vital to understand the Progressive Era… FDR cited progressive-minded presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as his intellectual inspirations. …Progressives believed restricting government to only protecting citizens’ life, liberty, and ability to pursue happiness was simplistic. …Thus people should not fear the ever-expanding role of government… Wilson went on to say that modern European thinkers had declared that men were defined not by their individuality, but by their society. And one’s rights come from government.

Hostility to the Constitution and limited government was just one problem with the progressives.

Their views of minorities also were very troubling.

In a column for National Review, Paul Rahe documented not only Wilson’s racism, but also his use of government power to harm the economic prospects for black Americans.

Wilson, our first professorial president, was…the very model of a modern Progressive…he shared the conviction, dominant among his brethren, that African-Americans were racially inferior to whites. …Prior to the segregation of the civil service in 1913, appointments had been made solely on merit as indicated by the candidate’s performance on the civil-service examination. Thereafter, racial discrimination became the norm. …The existing work force was segregated. Many African-Americans were dismissed. …Jim Crow had not been the norm before 1890, even in the deep South. …it became the norm there only when it received sanction from the racist Progressives in the North. …For similar reasons, Wilson was hostile to the constitutional provisions intended as a guarantee of limited government. The separation of powers, the balances and checks, and the distribution of authority between nation and state distinguishing the American constitution he regarded as an obstacle.

This article from the New Republic covers the same ground, starting with his time as head of Princeton University, but from a left-wing perspective.

Wilson not only refused to admit any black students, he erased the earlier admissions of black students from the university’s history. …Elected president in 1912, …Wilson appeared to be the quintessential Progressive Era leader. …the progressive ideology of the era was in many ways quite racist. …it quickly became known that the Wilson administration was instituting a major modification in the treatment of black workers throughout the federal government from what had been the case under postwar presidents. …the Civil Service began demanding photographs to accompany employment applications for the first time. It was widely understood that the only purpose of this requirement was to weed out black applicants. …He insisted that the segregation policy was for the comfort and best interests of both blacks and whites.

There’s more bad news about Wilson.

In a column for the Washington Post, Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, writes about his authoritarianism as well as his racism.

His most disgraceful flaw was his racism. …Wilson especially stood out in his white supremacy. He was not a man of his time but a throwback. …Wilson, who preened as a civil libertarian, persuaded Congress to pass the Espionage Act, giving him extraordinary power to retaliate against Americans who opposed him and his wartime behavior. That same law today enables presidents to harass their political adversaries. Wilson’s Justice Department also convicted almost a thousand people for using “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language” against the government, the military or the flag. Wilson is an excellent example of how presidents can exploit wars to increase authoritarian power and restrict freedom.

All things considered, definitely one of America’s worst chief executives.

This tweet is an apt summary of Wilson’s presidency.

Woodrow Wilson also segregated the government, coined the concept of a "living Constitution," hated Jews, & founded modern progressivism & the administrative state. https://t.co/OG8u5C4aU0

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) June 16, 2019

For readers who are interested in the quirks of history, Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education bemoans the fact that an untimely death in 1899 probably led to the unfortunate election of Wilson.

Garret Augustus Hobart—known to his friends as “Gus”—was America’s 24^th vice president. He served under William McKinley for two years and eight months until his death in office in November 1899 at the age of 55. With Hobart’s untimely passing, President William McKinley had to find a new running mate for the election of 1900. That man turned out to be Theodore Roosevelt, who became president upon McKinley’s assassination only six months into his second term. …Teddy…enter the presidential race in 1912 as a third-party nominee. That split the Republican vote and handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won with just 42% of the popular tally and went on to become arguably the very worst of our 45 chief executives. …I greatly lament the sad fact that Gus Hobart wasn’t around to run again with McKinley in 1900. If he had lived, he instead of Teddy would have become our 26^th President when McKinley died. And if there had been no Teddy Roosevelt presidency, there might never have been a philandering, racist, “progressive” Wilson in the White House to royally screw up the country with an income tax, a Federal Reserve, entry into World War I, and other mischievous adventures in statism.

In keeping with my traditional practice, here’s a visual depiction of the good and bad policies of the Wilson Administration.

And although it’s hard to measure, Wilson belongs in the presidential Hall of Shame because his administration was a turning point in America’s tragic evolution from Madisonian constitutionalism to modern statism.

For instance, Wilson almost surely paved the way for FDR’s ill-fated New Deal.

P.S. Now readers will hopefully understand why I wrote that Obama (who largely had a forgettable legacy) wasn’t nearly as bad at Wilson.

Read Full Post »

Coronavirus, Easy Money, and the “Bad Penny” of Keynesian Economics

The coronavirus is a genuine threat to prosperity, at least in the short run, in large part because it is causing a contraction in global trade.

The silver lining to that dark cloud is that President Trump may learn that trade is actually good rather than bad.

But dark clouds also can have dark linings, at least when the crowd in Washington decides it’s time for another dose of Keynesian economics.

• Fiscal Keynesianism – the government borrows money from credit markets and politicians then redistribute the funds in hopes that recipients will spend more.
• Monetary Keynesianism – the government creates more money in hopes that lower interest rates will stimulate borrowing and recipients will spend more.

Critics warn, correctly, that Keynesian policies are misguided. More spending is a consequence of economic growth, not the trigger for economic growth.

But the “bad penny” of Keynesian economics keeps reappearing because it gives politicians an excuse to buy votes.

The Wall Street Journal opined this morning about the risks of more Keynesian monetary stimulus.

The Federal Reserve has become the default doctor for whatever ails the U.S. economy, and on Tuesday the financial physician applied what it hopes will be monetary balm for the economic damage from the coronavirus. …The theory behind the rate cut appears to be that aggressive action is the best way to send a strong message of economic insurance. …Count us skeptical. …Nobody is going to take that flight to Tokyo because the Fed is suddenly paying less on excess reserves. …The Fed’s great mistake after 9/11 was that it kept rates at or near 1% for far too long even after the 2003 tax cut had the economy humming. The seeds of the housing boom and bust were sown.

And the editorial also warned about more Keynesian fiscal stimulus.

Even if a temporary tax cuts is the vehicle used to dump money into the economy.

This being an election year, the political class is also starting to demand more fiscal “stimulus.” …If Mr. Trump falls for that, he’d be embracing Joe Bidenomics. We tried the temporary payroll-tax cut idea in the slow growth Obama era, reducing the worker portion of the levy to 4.2% from 6.2% of salary. It took effect in January 2011, but the unemployment rate stayed above 9% for most of the rest of that year. Temporary tax cuts put more money in peoples’ pockets and can give a short-term lift to the GDP statistics. But the growth effect quickly vanishes because it doesn’t permanently change the incentive to save and invest.

Excellent points.

Permanent supply-side tax cuts encourage more prosperity, not temporary Keynesian-style tax cuts.

Given the political division in Washington, it’s unclear whether politicians will agree on how to pursue fiscal Keynesianism.

But that doesn’t mean we can rest easy. Trump is a fan of Keynesian monetary policy and the Federal Reserve is susceptible to political pressure.

Just don’t expect good results from monetary tinkering. George Melloan wrote about the ineffectiveness of monetary stimulus last year, well before coronavirus became an issue.

The most recent promoters of monetary “stimulus” were Barack Obama and the Fed chairmen who served during his presidency, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. …the Obama-era chairmen tried to stimulate growth “by keeping its policy rate at zero for six-and-a-half years into the economic recovery and more than quadrupled the size of the Fed’s balance sheet.” And what do we have to show for it? After the 2009 slump, economic growth from 2010-17 averaged 2.2%, well below the 3% historical average, despite the Fed’s drastic measures. Low interest rates certainly stimulate borrowing, but that isn’t the same as economic growth. Indeed it can often restrain growth. …Congress got the idea that credit somehow comes free of charge. So now the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders think there is no limit to how much Uncle Sam can borrow. Easy money not only expands debt-service costs but also encourages malinvestment. …when Donald Trump hammers on the Fed for lower rates, …he is embarked on a fool’s errand.

Since the Federal Reserve has already slashed interest rates, that Keynesian horse already has left the barn.

That being said, don’t expect positive results. Keynesian economics has a very poor track record (if fiscal Keynesianism and monetary Keynesianism were a recipe for success, Japan would be booming).

So let’s hope politicians don’t put a saddle on the Keynesian fiscal horse as well.

If Trump really feels he has to do something, I ranked his options last summer.

The bottom line is that good short-run policy is also good long-run policy.

Read Full Post »

The Inevitability of Bureaucratic Bloat

I’m not a big fan of bureaucracy, mostly because government employees are overpaid and they often work for departments and agencies that shouldn’t exist.

Today, motivated by “public choice” insights about self-interested behavior, I want to make an important point about how bureaucracies operate.

We’ll review two articles about completely disconnected issues. But they both make the same point about ever-expanding bureaucracy.

First, the Economist has an article about central banks, specifically looking at how they employ thousands of bureaucrats. What makes the numbers so remarkable, at least in most of Europe, is that they no longer have currencies to manage.

Central bankers around the world have long pondered why productivity growth is slowing. …But might central banks themselves, with their armies of employees, be part of the problem? …many central banks in Europe look flabby. Although the euro area’s 19 national central banks have ceded many of their monetary-policymaking responsibilities to the European Central Bank (ECB)—they no longer set monetary policy by themselves, for instance—they still retain thousands of employees… the Banque de France and the Bundesbank each employ more than 10,000 people… The Bank of Italy employs 6,700. All told, the ECB and the euro zone’s national central banks boast a headcount of nearly 50,000. …The Board of Governors in Washington, DC, where most policy decisions are made, had about 3,000 staff at last count. When the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks are included, the number rises to more than 20,000.

I actually wrote about this issue back in 2009 and mentioned the still-relevant caveat that some central banks have roles beyond monetary policy, such as bank supervision.

That being said, this chart suggests that there’s plenty of fat to cut.

What I would like to see is a comparison of staffing levels for countries that use the euro, both before and after they outsourced monetary policy the European Central Bank.

I would be shocked if there was a decline in the number of bureaucrats, even though monetary policy presumably is the primary reason central banks exist.

By the way, there’s a sentence in the article that cries out for correction.

Although central banks have become more important since the global financial crisis, it is not clear why they need quite so many regional staff.

It would be far more accurate if the sentence was modified to read: “…have become more of a threat to macroeconomic stability since the global financial crisis that they helped to create.”

But I’m digressing.

Let’s now look at the next article about bureaucracy.

John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy, recently opined in the Wall Street Journal about bureaucratic bloat at the National Security Council.

The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947. The White House has long sought to centralize decision-making to overcome the political jockeying that often takes place within the national-security establishment. …The NSC was established in the 1947 National Security Act, which named the members of the council: president, vice president and secretaries of state and defense. …under President Nixon…, Mr. Kissinger grew the council to include one deputy, 32 policy professionals and 60 administrators. …the NSC has only continued to expand. By the end of the Obama administration, 34 policy professionals supported by 60 administrators had exploded to three deputies, more than 400 policy professionals and 1,300 administrators. The council lost the ability to make fast decisions informed by the best intelligence. The NSC became one more layer in the wedding cake of government agencies.

Wow.

A bureaucracy that didn’t exist until 1947 and didn’t even have a boss until 1953 then grows to almost 100 people about 20 years later.

And then 1700 bureaucrats by the Obama Administration.

Needless to say, I’m sure that the growth of the NSC bureaucracy wasn’t accompanied by staffing reductions at the Department of State, Department of Defense, or any other related box on the ever-expanding federal flowchart.

Whenever I read stories like the two cited above, I can’t help but remember what Mark Steyn wrote almost ten years ago.

London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least-worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less.

As always, Steyn is very clever. But there’s a very serious underlying point. Is there any evidence that additional bureaucracy has produced better decision making?

Either in the field of central banking, national security, or in any other area where more and more bureaucrats exercise more and more control over our lives?

Maybe there is such evidence, but I haven’t seen it. Instead, I see research showing how bureaucracy stifles growth, creates waste, promotes inefficiency, crowds out private jobs, delivers bad outcomes, acts in a self-serving fashion, and bankrupts governments.

P.S. The best example of bureaucrat humor is this video.

P.P.S. If you want more, we have a joke about an Indian training for a government job, a slide show on how bureaucracies operate, a cartoon strip on bureaucratic incentives, a story on what would happen if Noah tried to build an Ark today, a top-10 list of ways to tell if you work for the government, a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.

Read Full Post »

The Federal Reserve, Inflation, and Asset Bubbles

Having been exposed to scholars from the Austrian school as a graduate student, I have a knee-jerk suspicion that it’s not a good idea to rely on the Federal Reserve for macroeconomic tinkering.

In this interview from yesterday, I specifically warn that easy money can lead to economically harmful asset bubbles.

 

Since I don’t pretend to be an expert on monetary policy, I’ll do an appeal to authority.

Claudio Borio of the Bank for International Settlements is considered to be one of the world’s experts on the issue.

Here are some excerpts from a study he recently wrote along with three other economists. I especially like what they wrote about the risks of looking solely at the price level as a guide to policy.

The pre-crisis experience has shown that, in contrast to common belief, disruptive financial imbalances could build up even alongside low and stable, or even falling, inflation. Granted, anyone who had looked at the historical record would not have been surprised: just think of the banking crises in Japan, the Asian economies and, going further back in time, the US experience in the run-up to the Great Depression. But somehow the lessons had got lost in translation… And post-crisis, the performance of inflation has repeatedly surprised. Inflation…has been puzzlingly low especially more recently, as a number of economies have been reaching or even exceeding previous estimates of full employment. …the recent experience has hammered the point home, raising nagging doubts about a key pillar of monetary policymaking. …Our conclusion is that…amending mandates to explicitly include financial stability concerns may be appropriate in some circumstances.

Here’s a chart showing that financial cycles and business cycles are not the same thing.

The economists also point out that false booms instigated by easy money can do a lot of damage.

Some recent work with colleagues sheds further light on some of the possible mechanisms at work (Borio et al (2016)). Drawing on a sample of over 40 countries spanning over 40 years, we find that credit booms misallocate resources towards lower-productivity growth sectors, notably construction, and that the impact of the misallocations that occur during the boom is twice as large in the wake of a subsequent banking crisis. The reasons are unclear, but may reflect, at least in part, the fact that overindebtedness and a broken banking system make it harder to reallocate resources away from bloated sectors during the bust. This amounts to a neglected form of hysteresis. The impact can be sizeable, equivalent cumulatively to several percentage points of GDP over a number of years.

Here’s a chart quantifying the damage.

And here’s some more evidence.

In recent work with colleagues, we examined deflations using a newly constructed data set that spans more than 140 years (1870–2013), and covers up to 38 economies and includes equity and house prices as well as debt (Borio et al (2015)). We come up with three findings. First, before controlling for the behaviour of asset prices, we find only a weak association between deflation and growth; the Great Depression is the main exception. Second, we find a stronger link with asset price declines, and controlling for them further weakens the link between deflations and growth. In fact, the link disappears even in the Great Depression (Graph 4). Finally, we find no evidence of a damaging interplay between deflation and debt (Fisher’s “debt deflation”; Fisher (1932)). By contrast, we do find evidence of a damaging interplay between private sector debt and property (house) prices, especially in the postwar period. These results are consistent with the prevalence of supply-induced deflations.

I’ll share one final chart from the study because it certainly suggest that the economy suffered less instability when the classical gold standard was in effect before World War I.

I’m not sure we could trust governments to operate such a system today, but it’s worth contemplating.

P.S. I didn’t like easy money when Obama was in the White House and I don’t like it with Trump in the White House. Indeed, I worry the good economic news we’re seeing now could be partly illusory.

Read Full Post »

The Federal Reserve Should Have Less Power, not More Power

What’s the biggest problem with the Federal Reserve?

The obvious answer is that the Central Bank is susceptible to Keynesian monetary policy, which results in a harmful boom-bust cycle.

For instance, the Fed’s artificially low interest rates last decade played a key role (along with deeply misguided Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac subsidies) is causing the 2008 crisis.

And let’s not forget the Fed’s role in the Great Depression.

Today, though, let’s focus on a narrower topic.

As Norbert Michel explains for the Heritage Foundation, the central bank is trying to expand its power in the financial system.

…one of the “potential actions” the Fed Board is considering is to develop its very own real-time settlement system. This approach makes many private sector actors anxious because no private company wants to compete with the feds. …Since its inception, the Fed has been heavily involved in the U.S. payments system. And one can easily argue that the system has lagged behind precisely because the Fed has been too involved. …The Fed also effectively took over the check-clearing business even though the economic case for such a move was highly suspect. Private firms were doing fine. In fact, there is a long history of the Fed usurping the private market.

Here are some details on the Fed’s most-recent power grab.

…the government is once again angling to take over a function that private firms are already providing. The Clearinghouse, a private association owned by 25 large banks, launched its own system—Real-Time Payments (RTP)—in November 2017. …the private sector is better than the government at providing more goods and services to more people. In the private sector, competitive forces and the need to satisfy customers create constant pressure to innovate and improve. Government entities are wholly insulated from these pressures. The government should not provide a good or service unless there is some sort of clear market failure, where the private sector has failed to provide it. This type of failure clearly does not exist in the payments industry.

Norbert is right. Competition is the way to get better outcomes for consumers.

As such, it’s rather absurd to think a government-operated monopoly will produce good results (look, for instance, at its cronyist behavior during the financial crisis).

Now let’s zoom out and consider the big picture.

Richard Rahn has a column in the Washington Times that raises questions about the Fed’s role in a modern economy.

Is there a need for the Fed? …The Fed has an extensive history of policy mistakes, (too long to even summarize here). The problem has been the assumption that the Fed had better information and tools than it had. At times, it was expected to “lean against the wind” as if it had information not available to the market — or smarter people. In Hayekian terms, it suffered from “the pretense of knowledge.” At this point, it may be beyond fixing. Several very knowledgeable economists who have held high-level positions at the Fed, including regional bank presidents, have begun discussions about setting up a new commission to rethink the whole idea of a Fed and its activities. The structure that now exists is a jerry-built concoction that has been assembled in bits and pieces for more than a century — and increasingly appears to be past its expiration date.

I’ve written about the need to clip the Fed’s wings, but Richard’s column suggests even bolder action is needed.

Larry White and John Stossel also have questioned the role and power of the Federal Reserve.

In any event, one thing that should be clear is that the Fed hasn’t used its existing powers either wisely or effectively.

Thomas Sowell is right. Don’t reward a bureaucracy’s poor performance by giving it even more power.

P.S. Here’s a video I narrated on the Fed and central banking.

Read Full Post »

Trump’s Keynesian Monetary Policy

Being a policy wonk in a political town isn’t easy. I care about economic liberty while many other people simply care about political maneuvering. And the gap between policy advocacy and personality politics has become even larger in the Age of Trump.

One result is that people who should be allies periodically are upset with my columns. Never Trumpers scold me one day and Trump fanboys scold me the next day. Fortunately, I have a very simple set of responses.

• If you would have loudly cheered for a policy under Reagan but oppose a similar policy under Trump, you’re the problem.
• If you would have loudly condemned a policy under Obama but support a similar policy under Trump, you’re the problem.

Today, we’re going to look at an example of the latter.

The New York Times reported today on Trump’s advocacy of easy-money Keynesianism.

President Trump on Friday called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and take additional steps to stimulate economic growth… On Friday, he escalated his previous critiques of the Fed by pressing for it to resume the type of stimulus campaign it undertook after the recession to jump-start economic growth. That program, known as quantitative easing, resulted in the Fed buying more than $4 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities as a way to increase the supply of money in the financial system.

I criticized these policies under Obama, over and over and over again.

If I suddenly supported this approach under Trump, that would make me a hypocrite or a partisan.

I’m sure I have my share of flaws, but that’s not one of them.

Regardless of whether a politician is a Republican or a Democrat, I don’t like Keynesian fiscal policy and I don’t like Keynesian monetary policy.

Simply stated, the Keynesians are all about artificially boosting consumption, but sustainable growth is only possible with policies that boost production.

There are two additional passages from the article that deserve some commentary.

First, you don’t measure inflation by simply looking at consumer prices. It’s quite possible that easy money will result in asset bubbles instead.

That’s why Trump is flat-out wrong in this excerpt.

“…I personally think the Fed should drop rates,” Mr. Trump said. “I think they really slowed us down. There’s no inflation. I would say in terms of quantitative tightening, it should actually now be quantitative easing. Very little if any inflation. And I think they should drop rates, and they should get rid of quantitative tightening. You would see a rocket ship. Despite that, we’re doing very well.”

To be sure, many senior Democrats were similarly wrong when Obama was in the White House and they wanted to goose the economy.

Which brings me to the second point about some Democrats magically becoming born-again advocates of hard money now that Trump is on the other side.

Democrats denounced Mr. Trump’s comments, saying they showed his disregard for the traditional independence of the Fed and his desire to use its powers to help him win re-election. “There’s no question that President Trump is seeking to undermine the…independence of the Federal Reserve to boost his own re-election prospects,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee.

Notwithstanding what I wrote a few days ago, I agree with Sen. Wyden on this point.

Though I definitely don’t recall him expressing similar concerns when Obama was appointing easy-money supporters to the Federal Reserve.

To close, here’s what I said back in October about Trump’s Keynesian approach to monetary policy.

I also commented on this issue earlier this year. And I definitely recommend these insights from a British central banker.

Read Full Post »

The Federal Reserve and Boom-Bust Monetary Policy

Back in January, I spoke with Cheddar about market instability and put much of the blame on the Federal Reserve. Simply stated, I fear we have a bubble thanks to years and years (and years and years) of easy money and artificially low interest rates.

To be sure, I also noted that there are other policies that could be spooking financial markets.

But I do think monetary policy is the big threat. Mistakes by the Fed sooner or later cause recessions (and the false booms that are the leading indicator of future downturns).

Mistakes by Congress, by contrast, “merely” cause slower growth.

In this next clip from the interview, I offer guarded praise to the Fed (not my usual position!) for trying to unwind the easy-money policies from earlier this decade and therefore “normalize” interest rates (i.e., letting rates climb to the market-determined level).

For those interested in the downside risks of easy money, I strongly endorse these cautionary observations from a British central banker.

My modest contribution to the discussion was when I mentioned in the interview that we wouldn’t be in the tough position of having to let interest rates climb if we didn’t make the mistake of keeping them artificially low. Especially for such a long period of time.

My motive for addressing this topic today is that Robert Samuelson used his column in the Washington Post to launch an attack against Steve Moore.

Stephen Moore does not belong on the Federal Reserve Board… Just a decade ago, the U.S. and world economies suffered the worst slumps since World War II. What saved us then were the skilled interventions of the Fed under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke… Do we really want Moore to serve as the last bulkhead against an economic breakdown? …as a matter of prudence, we should assume economic reverses. If so, the Fed chief will become a crisis manager. That person should not be Stephen Moore.

I’ve been friends with Steve for a couple of decades, so I have a personal bias.

That being said, I would be arguing that Samuelson’s column is problematic for two reasons even if I never met Steve.

• First, he doesn’t acknowledge that the crisis last decade was caused in large part by easy-money policy from the Fed. Call me crazy, but I hardly think we should praise the central bank for dousing a fire that it helped to start.
• Second, he frets that Steve would be bad in a crisis, which presumably is a time when it might be appropriate for the Fed to be a “lender of last resort.”* But he offers zero evidence that Steve would be opposed to that approach.

For what it’s worth, I actually worry Steve would be too willing to go along with an easy-money approach. Indeed, I look forward to hectoring him in favor of hard money if he gets confirmed.

But this column isn’t about a nomination battle in DC. My role is to educate on public policy.

So let’s close by reviewing some excerpts from a column in the Wall Street Journal highlighting the work of Claudio Borio at the Bank for International Settlements.

In a 2015 paper Mr. Borio and colleagues examined 140 years of data from 38 countries and concluded that consumer-price deflation frequently coincides with healthy economic growth. If he’s right, central banks have spent years fighting disinflation or deflation when they shouldn’t have, and in the process they’ve endangered the economy more than they realize. “By keeping interest rates very, very, very low,” he warns, “you are contributing to the buildup of risks in the financial system through excessive credit growth, through excessive increases in asset prices, that at some point have to correct themselves. So what you have is a financial boom that necessarily at some point will turn into a bust because things have to adjust.” …It’s not that other economists are blind to financial instability. They’re just strangely unconcerned about it. “There are a number of proponents of secular stagnation who acknowledge, very explicitly, that low interest rates create problems for the future because they’re generating all these financial booms and busts,” Mr. Borio says. Yet they still believe central banks must set ultralow short-term rates to support economic growth—and if that destabilizes the financial system, it’s the will of the economic gods.

Amen. I also recommend this column and this column for further information on how central bankers are endangering prosperity.

P.S. For a skeptical history of the Federal Reserve, click here. If you prefer Fed-mocking videos, click here and here.

P.P.S. I fear the European Central Bank has the same misguided policy. To make matters worse, policy makers in Europe have used easy money as an excuse to avoid the reforms that are needed to generate real growth.

P.P.P.S. Samuelson did recognize that defeating inflation was one of Reagan’s great accomplishments.

*For institutions with liquidity problems. Institutions with solvency problems should be shut down using the FDIC-resolution approach.

Read Full Post »

The Economy Is Faltering and Trump’s Protectionism and Weakness on Spending Deserve Part of the Blame

In this interview yesterday, I noted that there are “external” risks to the economy, most notably the spillover effect of a potential economic implosion in China or a fiscal crisis in Italy.

But many of the risks are homegrown, such as Trump’s self-destructive protectionism and the Federal Reserve’s easy money.

Regarding trade, Trump is hurting himself as well as the economy. He simply doesn’t understand that trade is good for prosperity and that trade deficits are largely irrelevant.

Regarding monetary policy, I obviously don’t blame Trump for the Fed’s easy money policy during the Obama years, though I wish that he wouldn’t bash the central bank and instead displayed Reagan’s fortitude about accepting the need to unwind such mistakes.

The interview wasn’t that long, but I had a chance to pontificate on additional topics.

• Economists are lousy forecasters.
• On trade, I’m especially worried about Trump pulling America out of the WTO and/or imposing big trade taxes on the auto sector.
• The reduction in the corporate tax rate is the crowing achievement of the Trump presidency.
• Trump’s track record on government spending is very anemic.
• Trump says a border wall is needed for national security, yet he’s weaker on spending than Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
• The Trump tax plan does reduce revenue in the short run, but we could still quickly balance the budget with modest spending restraint.
• Government spending is not “juice” for the economy. Federal outlays merely divert resources from the productive sector.

The bottom line is that Trump has a very mixed record on the economy. But I fear the good policies are becoming less important and the bad policies are becoming more prominent.

Read Full Post »

Keynesian Monetary Policy: A Recipe for False Booms and Real Busts

I periodically explain that you generally don’t get a recession by hiking taxes, adding red tape, or increasing the burden of government spending. Those policies are misguided, to be sure, but they mostly erode the economy’s long-run potential growth.

If you want to assign blame for economic downturns, the first place to look is monetary policy.

When central banks use monetary policy to keep interest rates low (“Keynesian monetary policy,” but also known as “easy money” or “quantitative easing”), that can cause economy-wide distortions, particularly because capital gets misallocated.

And this often leads to a recession when this “malinvestment” gets liquidated.

I’ve made this point in several recent interviews, and I had a chance to make the same point yesterday.

By the way, doesn’t the other guest have amazing wisdom and insight?

But let’s not digress.

Back to the main topic, I’m not the only one who is worried about easy money.

Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute is similarly concerned.

Never before have the world’s major central banks kept interest rates so low for so long as they have done over the past decade. More importantly yet, never before have these banks increased their balance sheets on anything like the scale that they have done since 2008 by their aggressive bond-buying programmes. Indeed, since 2008, the size of the combined balances sheet of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England has increased by a mind-boggling US$10tn. …in recent years, if anything central bank monetary policy might have been overly aggressive. By causing global asset price inflation as well as the serious mispricing and misallocation of global credit, the seeds might have been sown for another Lehman-style economic and financial market crisis down the road. …the all too likely possibility that, by having overburdened monetary policy with the task of stabilizing output, advanced country governments might very well have set us up for the next global boom-bust economic cycle.

If you want the other side of the issue, the Economist is more sympathetic to monetary intervention.

And if you want a very learned explanation of the downsides of easy money, I shared some very astute observations from a British central banker back in 2015.

The bottom line is that easy money – sooner or later – backfires.

By the way, here’s a clip from earlier in the interview. Other than admitting that economists are lousy forecasters, I also warned that the economy is probably being hurt by Trump’s protectionism and his failure to control the growth of spending.

P.S. The “war on cash” in many nations is partly driven by those who want the option of easy money.

P.P.S. I worry that politicians sometimes choose to forgo good reforms because they hope easy money can at least temporarily goose the economy.

P.P.P.S. Easy money is also a tool for “financial repression,” which occurs when governments surreptitiously confiscate money from savers.

P.P.P.P.S. Maybe it’s time to reconsider central banks?

Read Full Post »

What’s Happening with the Economy, Strong Growth or False Boom?

During the Obama years, I used data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve to explain that the economic recovery was rather weak. And when people responded by pointing to a reasonably strong stock market, I expressed concern that easy-money policies might be creating an artificial boom.

Now that Trump’s in the White House, some policies are changing. On the plus side, we got some better-than-expected tax reform. Moreover, the onslaught of red tape from the Obama years has abated, and we’re even seeing some modest moves to reduce regulation.

But there’s also been bad news. Trump’s bad protectionist rhetoric is now turning into bad policy. And his track record on spending is very discouraging.

What’s hard to pin down, though, is the impact of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve apparently is in the process of slowly unwinding the artificially low interest rates that were part of its easy-money approach. Is this too little, too late? Is it just right? What’s the net effect?

Since economists are lousy forecasters, I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I think we should worry about the legacy impact of all the easy money, which is the point I made in this clip from a recent interview.

James Pethokoukis from the American Enterprise Institute has similar concerns.

Here’s some of what he recently wrote on the topic.

…this supposed “boom” looks more like same-old, same-old. First quarter GDP, for instance, was just revised down two ticks to 2% and monthly job growth is a bit weaker than under President Obama’s final few years. …What’s more, pretty much every recession for a century has been accompanied by some magnitude of explicit Fed tightening. And, of course, the Fed is now well into a tightening cycle. …Another complicating factor is the Trump trade policy, which seems to be a market suppressant right now, if not yet a significant economic one.

Those are all good points, though we still don’t know the answer.

I’ll close with two observations.

• First, our main concern should be boosting the economy’s long-run growth rate, and that’s why we need lower tax rates, less government spending, open trade, and less red tape. As I’ve noted already, Trump has a mixed track record.
• Second, a short-run concern is whether the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy in recent years has created a bubble that is poised to burst. If it does, Trump will take the blame simply because he happens to be in the White House.

And that second issue gives me an excuse to re-emphasize that Keynesian monetary policy is just as foolish as Keynesian fiscal policy. You may enjoy a “sugar high” for a period of time, but eventually there’s a painful reckoning.

P.S. For what it’s worth, we’d have more growth and stability if policymakers learned from the “Austrian School” of economics.

P.P.S. Moreover, it’s a good idea to be skeptical about the Federal Reserve.

Read Full Post »

Anti-Economics from The Economist

When I was younger, folks in the policy community joked that BusinessWeek was the “anti-business business weekly” because its coverage of the economy was just as stale and predictably left wing as what you would find in the pages of Time or Newsweek.

Well, perhaps it’s time for The Economist to be known as the “anti-economics economic weekly.”

Writing about the stagnation that is infecting western nations, the magazine beclowns itself by regurgitating stale 1960s-style Keynesianism. The article is worthy of a fisking (i.e., a “point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies”), starting with the assertion that central banks saved the world at the end of last decade.

During the financial crisis the Federal Reserve and other central banks were hailed for their actions: by slashing rates and printing money to buy bonds, they stopped a shock from becoming a depression.

I’m certainly open to the argument that the downturn would have been far worse if the banking system hadn’t been recapitalized (even if it should have happened using the “FDIC-resolution approach” rather than via corrupt bailouts), but that’s a completely separate issue from whether Keynesian monetary policy was either desirable or successful.

Regarding the latter question, just look around the world. The Fed has followed an easy-money policy. Has that resulted in a robust recovery for America? The European Central Bank (ECB) has followed the same policy. Has that worked? And the Bank of Japan (BoJ) has done the same thing. Does anyone view Japan’s economy as a success?

At least the article acknowledges that there are some skeptics of the current approach.

The central bankers say that ultra-loose monetary policy remains essential to prop up still-weak economies and hit their inflation targets. …But a growing chorus of critics frets about the effects of the low-rate world—a topsy-turvy place where savers are charged a fee, where the yields on a large fraction of rich-world government debt come with a minus sign, and where central banks matter more than markets in deciding how capital is allocated.

The Economist, as you might expect, expresses sympathy for the position of the central bankers.

In most of the rich world inflation is below the official target. Indeed, in some ways central banks have not been bold enough. Only now, for example, has the BoJ explicitly pledged to overshoot its 2% inflation target. The Fed still seems anxious to push up rates as soon as it can.

The preceding passage is predicated on the assumption that there is a mechanistic tradeoff between inflation and unemployment (the so-called Phillips Curve), one of the core concepts of Keynesian economics. According to adherents, all-wise central bankers can push inflation up if they want lower unemployment and push inflation down if they want to cool the economy.

This idea has been debunked by real world events because inflation and unemployment simultaneously rose during the 1970s (supposedly impossible according the Keynesians) and simultaneously fell during the 1980s (also a theoretical impossibility according to advocates of the Phillips Curve).

But real-world evidence apparently can be ignored if it contradicts the left’s favorite theories.

That being said, we can set aside the issue of Keynesian monetary policy because the main thrust of the article is an embrace of Keynesian fiscal policy.

…it is time to move beyond a reliance on central banks. …economies need succour now. The most urgent priority is to enlist fiscal policy. The main tool for fighting recessions has to shift from central banks to governments.

As an aside, the passage about shifting recession fighting “from central banks to governments” is rather bizarre since the Fed, the ECB, and the BoJ are all government entities. Either the reporter or the editor should have rewritten that sentence so that it concluded with “shift from central banks to fiscal policy” or something like that.

In any event, The Economist has a strange perspective on this issue. It wants Keynesian fiscal policy, yet it worries about politicians using that approach to permanently expand government. And it is not impressed by the fixation on “shovel-ready” infrastructure spending.

The task today is to find a form of fiscal policy that can revive the economy in the bad times without entrenching government in the good. …infrastructure spending is not the best way to prop up weak demand. …fiscal policy must mimic the best features of modern-day monetary policy, whereby independent central banks can act immediately to loosen or tighten as circumstances require.

So The Economist endorses what it refers to as “small-government Keynesianism,” though that’s simply its way of saying that additional spending increases (and gimmicky tax cuts) should occur automatically.

…there are ways to make fiscal policy less politicised and more responsive. …more automaticity is needed, binding some spending to changes in the economic cycle. The duration and generosity of unemployment benefits could be linked to the overall joblessness rate in the economy, for example.

In the language of Keynesians, such policies are known as “automatic stabilizers,” and there already are lots of so-called means-tested programs that operate this way. When people lose their jobs, government spending on unemployment benefits automatically increases. During a weak economy, there also are automatic spending increases for programs such as Food Stamps and Medicaid.

I guess The Economist simply wants more programs that work this way, or perhaps bigger handouts for existing programs. And the magazine views this approach as “small-government Keynesianism” because the spending increases theoretically evaporate as the economy starts growing and fewer people are automatically entitled to receive benefits from the various programs.

Regardless, whoever wrote the article seems convinced that such programs help boost the economy.

When the next downturn comes, this kind of fiscal ammunition will be desperately needed. Only a small share of public spending needs to be affected for fiscal policy to be an effective recession-fighting weapon.

My reaction, for what it’s worth, is to wonder why the article doesn’t include any evidence to bolster the claim that more government spending is and “effective” way of ending recessions and boosting growth. Though I suspect the author of the article didn’t include any evidence because it’s impossible to identify any success stories for Keynesian economics.

• Did Keynesian spending boost the economy under Hoover? No.
• Did Keynesian spending boost the economy under Roosevelt? No.
• Has Keynesian spending worked in Japan at any point over the past twenty-five years? No.
• Did Keynesian spending boost the economy under Obama? No.

Indeed, Keynesian spending has an unparalleled track record of failure in the real world. Though advocates of Keynesianism have a ready-built excuse. All the above failures only occurred because the spending increases were inadequate.

But what do expect from the “perpetual motion machine” of Keynesian economics, a theory that is only successful if you assume it is successful?

I’m not surprised that politicians gravitate to this idea. After all, it tells them that their vice  of wasteful overspending is actually a virtue.

But it’s quite disappointing that journalists at an allegedly economics-oriented magazine blithely accept this strange theory.

P.S. My second-favorite story about Keynesian economics involves the sequester, which big spenders claimed would cripple the economy, yet that’s when we got the only semi-decent growth of the Obama era.

P.P.S. My favorite story about Keynesianism is when Paul Krugman was caught trying to blame a 2008 recession in Estonia on spending cuts that occurred in 2009.

P.P.P.S. Here’s my video explaining Keynesian economics.

Read Full Post »

The War against Cash, Part IV

The War against Cash continues.

• In Part I, we looked at the argument that cash should be banned or restricted so governments could more easily collect additional tax revenue.
• In Part II, we reviewed the argument that cash should be curtailed so that governments could more easily impose Keynesian-style monetary policy.
• In Part III, written back in March, we examined additional arguments by people on both sides of the issue and considered the risks of expanded government power.

Now it’s time for Part IV.

Professor Larry Summers of Harvard University is President Obama’s former top economic adviser and he’s a relentless advocate of higher taxes and bigger government. If he favors an idea, it doesn’t automatically make it bad, but it’s surely a reason to be suspicious. So you won’t be surprised to learn that he wrote a column for the Washington Post applauding the move in Europe to eliminate €500 notes. Indeed, he wants to ban all large-denomination notes.

There is little if any legitimate use for 500-euro notes. Carrying out a transaction with 20 50-euro notes hardly seems burdensome, and this would represent over $1,000 in purchasing power. Twenty 200-euro notes would be almost $5,000. Who in today’s world needs cash for a legitimate $5,000 transaction? …Cash transactions of more than 3,000 euros have in fact been made illegal in Italy, while France has placed the limit at 1,000 euros. …In contrast to the absence of an important role for 500-euro notes in normal commerce, these bills have a major role facilitating illicit activity, as suggested by their nickname —“Bin Ladens.” …Estimates by the International Monetary Fund and others of total annual money laundering consistently exceed $1 trillion. High-denomination notes also have a substantial role in facilitating tax evasion and capital flight.

Who “needs cash” for transactions, he asks, but isn’t the real issue whether people should have the freedom to use cash if that’s what they prefer?

Also, in dozens of trips to Europe since the adoption of the euro, I’ve never heard anyone refer to the €500 note as a “Bin Laden,” so I suspect that’s an example of Summers trying to demonize something that he doesn’t like.

But perhaps the most important revelation from his column is that he admits there’s no evidence that crime would be stopped by his plan to restrict cash.

To be sure, it is difficult to estimate how much crime would be prevented by stopping the creation of 500-euro notes. It would surely impose some burdens on criminals and might interfere with some transactions, which is not unimportant.

Unsurprisingly, he wants to coerce other governments into restricting high-value notes.

Europe has led on a significant security issue. But its action should be seen as a beginning, not an end. As a first follow-on, the world should demand that Switzerland stop issuing 1,000-Swiss-franc notes. After Europe’s action, these will stand out as the world’s highest-denomination note by a huge margin. Switzerland has a long and unfortunate history with illicit finance. It would be tragic if it were to profit from criminal currency substitution following Europe’s bold step. …There would be a strong case for stopping the creation of notes with values greater than perhaps $50.

Summers isn’t the only academic from Harvard who is agitating to restrict cash. Prof. Kenneth Rogoff (who’s also the former Chief Economist at the IMF) recently wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal explaining his hostility.

…paper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. …There is little debate among law-enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the U.S. $100 bill, facilitates crime: racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug and human trafficking, the corruption of public officials, not to mention terrorism.

At the risk of bursting his balloon, cash played almost no role in the most notorious terrorist event, the 9-11 attacks. And Rogoff admits that bad guys would use easy substitutes.

There are substitutes for cash—cryptocurrencies, uncut diamonds, gold coins, prepaid cards.

So he then dredges up the argument that cash facilitates tax evasion.

Cash is also deeply implicated in tax evasion, which costs the federal government some $500 billion a year in revenue. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a lot of the action is concentrated in small cash-intensive businesses, where it is difficult to verify sales and the self-reporting of income.

I addressed these issues in Part I of this series, but I’ll simply add that the academic evidence shows that lower tax rates are the best way of boosting tax compliance (as even the IMF has admitted).

To his credit, Rogoff acknowledges that his preferred policy would reduce the rights of individuals.

Perhaps the most challenging and fundamental objection to getting rid of cash has to do with privacy—with our ability to spend anonymously. But where does one draw the line between this individual right and the government’s need to tax and regulate.

His main argument is that our rights should be reduced to give government more power. He especially wants central bankers to have more power to impose Keynesian monetary policy.

Cutting interest rates delivers quick and effective stimulus by giving consumers and businesses an incentive to borrow more. It also drives up the price of stocks and homes, which makes people feel wealthier and induces them to spend more. Countercyclical monetary policy has a long-established record, while political constraints will always interfere with timely and effective fiscal stimulus.

Yes, he’s right. Activist monetary policy does have a long-established track record. It played a key role in causing the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, and the recent financial crisis.

Hooray, Federal Reserve!

And Rogoff wants the arsonists at the Fed to have more power to create boom-bust cycles.

In principle, cutting interest rates below zero ought to stimulate consumption and investment in the same way as normal monetary policy, by encouraging borrowing. Unfortunately, the existence of cash gums up the works. If you are a saver, you will simply withdraw your funds, turning them into cash, rather than watch them shrink too rapidly. Enormous sums might be withdrawn to avoid these loses, which could make it difficult for banks to make loans—thus defeating the whole purpose of the policy. Take cash away, however, or make the cost of hoarding high enough, and central banks would be free to drive rates as deep into negative territory as they needed in a severe recession. …if a strong dose of negative rates can power an economy out of a downturn, it could bring inflation and interest rates back to positive levels relatively quickly, arguably reducing vulnerability to bubbles rather than increasing it.

Needless to say, I disagree with Rogoff and agree with Thomas Sowell that an institution that repeatedly screws up shouldn’t be given more power.

Especially since I’m concerned that the option to use bad monetary policy may actually be one of the excuses that politicians use for not fixing the problems that actually are hindering growth.

So, yes, instead of expanding their power, I want to clip the wings of the Federal Reserve and other central banks.

Now let’s consider the harm that would be caused by restricting or banning cash. Two professors from NYU Law School looked at some of the logistical issues of a shift to digital money. The echoed some of the points raised by Summers and Rogoff, but they also pointed out some downsides. Such as government being able to monitor everything we buy.

…centralization of banking under this system would also create a Leviathan with the power to monitor and control the personal finances of every citizen in the country. This is one of the chief reasons why many are loath to give up on hard currency. With digital money, the government could view any financial transaction and obtain a flow of information about personal spending that could be used against an individual in a whole host of scenarios.

It also would cause a mess because so many people around the world rely on dollars, something that’s beneficial to the U.S. Treasury and foreigners from places with untrustworthy central banks.

…a transition to digital currency might come at a large cost for the U.S. in particular, because the dollar remains the world’s de facto reserve currency. The U.S. collects enormous seigniorage revenue that accrues to the economy when the Federal Reserve prints dollars that are exported abroad in exchange for foreign goods and services. These bank notes ultimately end up in countries with less reliable central banks where locals prefer to hold U.S. currency instead of their own. Forfeiting this franchise as the world’s reserve currency might be too costly, as the U.S. currency held abroad exceeds half a trillion dollars, according to reliable estimates.

Professor Larry White of George Mason University (also a Senior Fellow at Cato) writes about what he calls “currency prohibitionists.”

The rhetoric of the anti-high-denomination gang has gotten increasingly shrill.  …Charles Goodhart in September called the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank “shameless” for issuing “vastly high-denomination notes,” namely the €500 and SWF 1000, “which are there to finance the drug deals.” …I have an alternative suggestion for removing $100 bills from the illegal drug trades:  Legalize the trade.  …My suggestion would reduce the demand for high-denomination currency.

Nice plug for sensible libertarian policy.

But even if one favors drug prohibition, that doesn’t mean currency prohibition will be effective.

Today’s high-denomination-currency prohibitionists, like today’s drug prohibitionists and yesterday’s alcohol prohibitionists, only think about the supply side.  But does anyone think that banning the $100 bill during Prohibition (when it had a purchasing power more than 11 times today’s, as evaluated using the CPI) and even higher denominations would have put a major dent in the rum-running business, if an army of T-Men couldn’t? …eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder” for such criminal enterprises.  No doubt.  But we would also make life harder for everyone else.  The rest of us also find high-denomination notes convenient now and again for completely legal and non-controversial purposes, like buying automobiles and carrying vacation cash compactly.  …currency prohibitionists too often regard those who defend high-denomination notes not as intellectually honest but mistaken opponents, but rather as morally suspect characters.  Larry Summers goes out of his way to smear an ECB executive from Luxembourg (who has had the temerity to ask for better evidence before accepting the case for prohibiting high-denomination notes)… The case for prohibiting large-denomination currency, to summarize, is largely based on guilt by association or on wishful thinking about the benefits of allowing greater range of action to discretionary monetary policy.

On the topic of crime and cash, an article for the WSJ debunks one of the left’s main talking points. If using cash is supposed to be a sign of criminal activity, why are the world’s two most cash-friendly nations also two of the safest and crime-free countries?

Are Japan and Switzerland havens for terrorists and drug lords? High-denomination bills are in high demand in both places, a trend that some politicians claim is a sign of nefarious behavior. Yet the two countries boast some of the lowest crime rates in the world. The cash hoarders are ordinary citizens… The current hoarding in Switzerland and Japan thus underscores one of many ways in which cash is a basic tool of economic liberty: It lets people shield themselves from monetary policies that would force their savings into weak economies that can’t attract sufficient spending or investment on their own. These economies need reforms that boost incentives to work and invest, not negative interest rates and cash limits that raid the bank accounts of law-abiding citizens.

A column by Sarah Jeong in Bloomberg explores some of the additional implications of cash restrictions.

…wherever information gathers and flows, two predators follow closely behind it: censorship and surveillance. The case of digital money is no exception. Where money becomes a series of signals, it can be censored; where money becomes information, it will inform on you. …the Department of Justice began to come under fire for Operation Choke Point…the means were highly dubious. …the DOJ got creative, and asked banks and payment processors to comply with government policies, and proactively police “high-risk” activity. Banks were asked to voluntarily shut down the kinds of merchant activities that government bureaucrats described as suspicious. The price of resistance was an active investigation by the Department of Justice. …Where paternalism is bluntly enforced through a bureaucratic game of telephone, unpleasant or even inhumane unintended consequences are bound to result. …the cashless society offers the government entirely new forms of coercion, surveillance, and censorship. …As paper money evaporates from our pockets and the whole country—even world—becomes enveloped by the cashless society, financial censorship could become pervasive, unbarred by any meaningful legal rights or guarantees.

Her observation on Operation Choke Point is very important since that campaign has been a chilling example of how government abuses its power in the financial sector.

Megan McArdle’s Bloomberg column touches on some additional concerns.

What’s not to like? Very little. Except, and I’m afraid it’s a rather large exception, the amount of power that this gives the government over its citizens. Consider the online gamblers who lost their money in overseas operations when the government froze their accounts. Now, what they were doing was indisputably illegal in these here United States, and I am not claiming that they were somehow deeply wronged. But consider how immense the power that was conferred upon the government by the electronic payments system; at a word, your money could simply vanish. …Unmonitored resources like cash…create a sort of cushion between ordinary people and a government with extraordinary powers. Removing that cushion leaves people who aren’t criminals vulnerable to intrusion into every remote corner of their lives. …If we want to move toward a cashless society — and apparently we do — then we also need to think seriously about limiting the ability of the government to use the payments system as an instrument to control the behavior of its citizens.

For what it’s worth, one way of getting the benefits of a cashless world without the risks is with private digital monies such as bitcoin.

Steve Forbes nails the issue.

Gaining attention these days is the idea of abolishing high denominations of the dollar and the euro. This concept graphically displays the astonishing stupidity–and intellectual bankruptcy–of today’s liberal economic policymakers and the economics profession. …The ostensible reason is to help in the fight against terrorists, bribers, drug dealers and tax evaders by making it more inconvenient for these bad guys to move around and store their ill-gotten cash. …The notion that such evildoers as the Mexican drug cartels and ISIS will be seriously disrupted by the absence of the Benjamin–”These sacks of cash are too heavy now. Let’s surrender!”–is so comical… Monetary expert Seth Lipsky pithily points out in the New York Post, “When criminals use guns, the Democrats want to take guns from law-abiding citizens. When terrorists use hundreds, the liberals want to deny the rest of us the Benjamins.”

Excellent point. Politicians should concentrate on restricting the freedom of bad guys, not ordinary citizens.

So what are the implications of the war against cash? They aren’t pretty.

The real reason for this war on cash–start with the big bills and then work your way down–is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.

Steve raises a good point about tracking certain purchases. Imagine the potential mischief if politicians had a mechanism to easily impose discriminatory taxes on disapproved products.

He also notes that the war on cash is motivated by a desire to more effectively implement an ineffective policy.

Policymakers in Washington, Tokyo and the EU think the reason that their economies are stagnant is that ornery people aren’t spending and investing the way they should. How to make these benighted, recalcitrant beings do what they’re supposed to do? The latest nostrum from our overlords is negative interest rates. If people have to pay fees to store their money, as they do to put their stuff in storage facilities, then, by golly, they might be more inclined to spend it.

And Steve correctly observes that bad monetary policy is now an excuse to not fix the problems that actually are contributing to economic stagnation.

Manipulating the value of money and controlling interest rates, i.e., the price of money, never works. Money measures value. It is a claim on services and is a tool for facilitating commerce and investing. The reason economies around the world are in the ditch–which is fueling anger, discontent and ugly politics–is structural, government-created barriers: unstable money, suffocating rules and too-high rates of taxation.

James Grant, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, is not impressed by the anti-cash agitprop and specifically debunks some of the arguments put forth by Rogoff. He starts with some very sensible observation that politicians should reform drug laws and tax laws rather than restricting our freedom to use cash.

Terrorists traffic in cash, Mr. Rogoff observes. So do drug dealers and tax cheats. Good, compliant citizens rarely touch the $100 bills that constitute a sizable portion of the suspiciously immense volume of greenbacks outstanding—$4,200 per capita. Get rid of them is the author’s message. Then, again, one could legalize certain narcotics to discommode the drug dealers and adopt Steve Forbes’s flat tax to fill up the Treasury. Mr. Rogoff considers neither policy option. Government control is not only his preferred position. It is the only position that seems to cross his mind.

Grant makes the (obvious-to-folks not-in-Washington) point that restricting cash to enable Keynesian monetary policy is akin to throwing good money after bad.

Mr. Rogoff lays the blame for America’s lamentable post-financial-crisis economic record not on the Obama administration’s suffocating tax and regulatory policies. The problem is rather the Fed’s inability to put its main interest rate, the federal funds rate, where it has never been before. In a deep recession, Mr. Rogoff proposes, the Fed ought not to stop cutting rates when it comes to zero. It should plunge right ahead, to minus 1%, minus 2%, minus 3% and so forth. At one negative rate or another, the theory goes, despoiled bank depositors will stop saving and start spending. …What would you do if your bank docked you, say, 3% a year for the privilege of holding your money? Why, you might convert your deposit into $100 bills, rent a safe deposit box and count yourself a shrewd investor. Hence the shooting war against currency. …In the topsy-turvy world of Mr. Rogoff, negative rates would be the reward to impetuousness and the cost of thrift. …Never mind that, in post-crisis America, near 0% interest rates have failed to deliver the promised macroeconomic goods. Come the next crackup, Mr. Rogoff would double down—and down.

And he echoes the insights of Austrian-school scholars about how easy-money policies are the cause of problems rather than the cure.

Interest rates are prices. They impart information. They tell a business person whether or not to undertake a certain capital investment. They measure financial risk. They translate the value of future cash flows into present-day dollars. Manipulate those prices—as central banks the world over compulsively do—and you distort information, therefore perception and judgment. The ultra-low rates of recent years have distorted judgment in a bullish fashion. True, they have not, at least in America, ignited a wave of capital investment—who needs it in a comatose economy? They have rather facilitated financial investment. They have inflated projected cash flows and anesthesized perceptions of risk (witness the rock-bottom yields attached to corporate junk bonds). In so doing, they have raised the present value of financial assets. Wall Street has enjoyed a wonderful bull market. The trouble is that the Fed has become hostage to that very bull market. The higher that asset prices fly, the greater the risk of the kind of crash that impels new rounds of intervention, new cries for government spending, bigger deficits—more “stimulus.”

Let’s close with the good news is that Switzerland doesn’t seem very interested in following Europe and the United States down the primrose path of seeking to curtail monetary freedom.

Manuel Brandenberg, a lawmaker in the Swiss canton of Zug, loves cash. …That belief in bills is shared by many of his compatriots, who have a penchant for hard currency even when electronic options are available. In a country whose wealth managers flourished thanks to banking secrecy, citizens often cherish the untraceable privacy conferred by notes and coins. “Cash is property and cash is freedom,” said Brandenberg… Unlike their neighbors, the Swiss have no plans to reconsider banknote denominations — 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 francs. Not even the highest of 1,000 francs ($1,040). …The predilection for notes and coins is evident on the streets of Zurich, where a number of stores don’t take plastic — among them Belcafe at Bellevue, a busy transport hub in the center. …Roughly 20 percent of purchases — including large sums for jewelry — were paid in cash, then-Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told parliament in 2014. …“There’s no reason to change things,” said Rickli. “I don’t want the state to know who goes to what restaurant. That’s none of the government’s business.”

Thank goodness for the “sensible Swiss.” On so many issues, Switzerland is a beacon of common sense and individual freedom.

Read Full Post »

The War against Cash, Part III

Although it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it warrants, one of the greatest threats to liberty and prosperity is the potential curtailment and elimination of cash.

As I’ve previously noted, there are two reasons why statists don’t like cash and instead would prefer all of us to use digital money (under their rules, of course, not something outside their control like bitcoin).

First, tax collectors can’t easily monitor all cash transactions, so they want a system that would allow them to track and tax every possible penny of our income and purchases.

Second, Keynesian central planners would like to force us to spend more money by imposing negative interest rates (i.e., taxes) on our savings, but that can’t be done if people can hold cash.

To provide some background, a report in the Wall Street Journal looks at both government incentives to get rid of high-value bills and to abolish currency altogether.

Some economists and bankers are demanding a ban on large denomination bills as one way to fight the organized criminals and terrorists who mainly use these notes. But the desire to ditch big bills is also being fueled from unexpected quarter: central bank’s use of negative interest rates. …if a central bank drives interest rates into negative territory, it’ll struggle to manage with physical cash. When a bank balance starts being eaten away by a sub-zero interest rate, cash starts to look inviting. That’s a particular problem for an economy that issues high-denomination banknotes like the eurozone, because it’s easier for a citizen to withdraw and hoard any money they have got in the bank.

Now let’s take a closer look at what folks on the left are saying to the public. In general, they don’t talk about taxing our savings with government-imposed negative interest rates. Instead, they make it seem like their goal is to fight crime.

Larry Summers, a former Obama Administration official, writes in the Washington Post that this is the reason governments should agree on a global pact to eliminate high-denomination notes.

…analysis is totally convincing on the linkage between high denomination notes and crime. …technology is obviating whatever need there may ever have been for high denomination notes in legal commerce. …The €500 is almost six times as valuable as the $100. Some actors in Europe, notably the European Commission, have shown sympathy for the idea and European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi has shown interest as well.  If Europe moved, pressure could likely be brought on others, notably Switzerland. …Even better than unilateral measures in Europe would be a global agreement to stop issuing notes worth more than say $50 or $100.  Such an agreement would be as significant as anything else the G7 or G20 has done in years. …a global agreement to stop issuing high denomination notes would also show that the global financial groupings can stand up against “big money” and for the interests of ordinary citizens.

Summers cites a working paper by Peter Sands of the Kennedy School, so let’s look at that argument for why governments should get rid of all large-denomination currencies.

Illegal money flows pose a massive challenge to all societies, rich and poor. Tax evasion undercuts the financing of public services and distorts the economy. Financial crime fuels and facilitates criminal activities from drug trafficking and human smuggling to theft and fraud. Corruption corrodes public institutions and warps decision-making. Terrorist finance sustains organisations that spread death and fear. The scale of such illicit money flows is staggering. …Our proposal is to eliminate high denomination, high value currency notes, such as the €500 note, the $100 bill, the CHF1,000 note and the £50 note. …Without being able to use high denomination notes, those engaged in illicit activities – the “bad guys” of our title – would face higher costs and greater risks of detection. Eliminating high denomination notes would disrupt their “business models”.

Are these compelling arguments? Should law-abiding citizens be forced to give up cash in hopes of making life harder for crooks? In other words, should we trade liberty for security?

From a moral and philosophical perspective, the answer is no. Our Founders would be rolling in their graves at the mere thought.

But let’s address this issue solely from a practical, utilitarian perspective.

The first thing to understand is that the bad guys won’t really be impacted. The head the The American Anti-Corruption Institute, L. Burke Files, explains to the Financial Times why restricting cash is pointless and misguided.

Peter Sands…has claimed that removal of high-denomination bank notes will deter crime. This is nonsense. After more than 25 years of investigating fraudsters and now corrupt persons in more than 90 countries, I can tell you that only in the extreme minority of cases was cash ever used — even in corruption cases. A vast majority of the funds moved involved bank wires, or the purchase and sale of valuable items such as art, antiquities, vessels or jewellery. …Removal of high denomination bank notes is a fruitless gesture akin to curing the common cold by forbidding use of the term “cold”.

In other words, our statist friends are being disingenuous. They’re trying to exploit the populace’s desire for crime fighting as a means of achieving a policy that actually is designed for other purposes.

The good news, is that they still have a long way to go before achieving their goals. Notwithstanding agitation to get rid of “Benjamins” in the United States, that doesn’t appear to be an immediate threat. Additionally, according to SwissInfo, is that the Swiss government has little interest in getting rid of the CHF1,000 note.

The European police agency Europol, EU finance ministers and now the European Central Bank, have recently made noises about pulling the €500 note, which has been described as the “currency of choice” for criminals. …But Switzerland has no plans to follow suit. “The CHF1,000 note remains a useful tool for payment transactions and for storing value,” Swiss National Bank spokesman Walter Meier told swissinfo.ch.

This resistance is good news, and not just because we want to control rapacious government in North America and Europe.

A column for Yahoo mentions the important value of large-denomination dollars and euros in less developed nations.

Cash also has the added benefit of providing emergency reserves for people “with unstable exchange rates, repressive governments, capital controls or a history of banking collapses,” as the Financial Times noted.

Amen. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I like bitcoin. People need options to protect themselves from the consequences of bad government policy, regardless of where they live.

By the way, if you’ll allow me a slight diversion, Bill Poole of the University of Delaware (and also a Cato Fellow) adds a very important point in a Wall Street Journal column. He warns that a fixation on monetary policy is misguided, not only because we don’t want reckless easy-money policy, but also because we don’t want our attention diverted from the reforms that actually could boost economic performance.

Negative central-bank interest rates will not create growth any more than the Federal Reserve’s near-zero interest rates did in the U.S. And it will divert attention from the structural problems that have plagued growth here, as well as in Europe and Japan, and how these problems can be solved. …Where central banks can help is by identifying the structural impediments to growth and recommending a way forward. …It is terribly important that advocates of limited government understand what is at stake. …calls for a return to near-zero or even negative interest rates…will do little in the short run to boost growth, but it will dig the federal government into a deeper fiscal hole, further damaging long-run prospects. It needs to be repeated: Monetary policy today has little to offer to raise growth in the developed world.

Let’s close by returning to the core issue of whether it is wise to allow government the sweeping powers that would accompany the elimination of physical currency.

Here are excerpts from four superb articles on the topic.

First, writing for The American Thinker, Mike Konrad argues that eliminating cash will empower government and reduce liberty.

Governments will rise to the occasion and soon will be making cash illegal.  People will be forced to put their money in banks or the market, thus rescuing the central governments and the central banks that are incestuously intertwined with them. …cash is probably the last arena of personal autonomy left. …It has power that the government cannot control; and that is why it has to go. Of course, governments will not tell us the real reasons.  …We will be told it is for our own “good,” however one defines that. …What won’t be reported will be that hacking will shoot up.  Bank fraud will skyrocket. …Going cashless may ironically streamline drug smuggling since suitcases of money weigh too much. …The real purpose of a cashless society will be total control: Absolute Total Control. The real victims will be the public who will be forced to put all their wealth in a centralized system backed up by the good faith and credit of their respective governments.  Their life savings will be eaten away yearly with negative rates. …The end result will be the loss of all autonomy.  This will be the darkest of all tyrannies.  From cradle to grave one will not only be tracked in location, but on purchases.  Liberty will be non-existent. However, it will be sold to us as expedient simplicity itself, freeing us from crime: Fascism with a friendly face.

Second, the invaluable Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Telegraph warns that the desire for Keynesian monetary policy is creating a slippery slope that eventually will give governments an excuse to try to completely banish cash.

…the fact that interest rates of -0.5pc or so are manageable doesn’t mean that interest rates of -4pc would be. At some point, the cost of holding cash in a bank account would become prohibitive: savers would eventually rediscover the virtues of stuffed mattresses (or buying equities, or housing, or anything with less of a negative rate). The problem is that this will embolden those officials who wish to abolish cash altogether, and switch entirely to electronic and digital money. If savers were forced to keep their money in the bank, the argument goes, then they would be forced to put up with even huge negative rates. …But abolishing cash wouldn’t actually work, and would come with terrible side-effects. For a start, people would begin to treat highly negative interest rates as a form of confiscatory taxation: they would be very angry indeed, especially if rates were significantly more negative than inflation. …Criminals who wished to evade tax or engage in illegal activities would still be able to bypass the system: they would start using foreign currencies, precious metals or other commodities as a means of exchange and store of value… The last thing we now need is harebrained schemes to abolish cash. It wouldn’t work, and the public rightly wouldn’t tolerate it.

The Wall Street Journal has opined on the issue as well.

…we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency. …the European Central Bank would like to ban €500 notes. …Limits on cash transactions have been spreading in Europe… Italy has made it illegal to pay cash for anything worth more than €1,000 ($1,116), while France cut its limit to €1,000 from €3,000 last year. British merchants accepting more than €15,000 in cash per transaction must first register with the tax authorities. …Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister Michael Meister recently proposed a €5,000 cap on cash transactions. …The enemies of cash claim that only crooks and cranks need large-denomination bills. They want large transactions to be made electronically so government can follow them. Yet…Criminals will find a way, large bills or not. The real reason the war on cash is gearing up now is political: Politicians and central bankers fear that holders of currency could undermine their brave new monetary world of negative interest rates. …Negative rates are a tax on deposits with banks, with the goal of prodding depositors to remove their cash and spend it… But that goal will be undermined if citizens hoard cash. …So, presto, ban cash. …If the benighted peasants won’t spend on their own, well, make it that much harder for them to save money even in their own mattresses. All of which ignores the virtues of cash for law-abiding citizens. Cash allows legitimate transactions to be executed quickly, without either party paying fees to a bank or credit-card processor. Cash also lets millions of low-income people participate in the economy without maintaining a bank account, the costs of which are mounting as post-2008 regulations drop the ax on fee-free retail banking. While there’s always a risk of being mugged on the way to the store, digital transactions are subject to hacking and computer theft. …the reason gray markets exist is because high taxes and regulatory costs drive otherwise honest businesses off the books. Politicians may want to think twice about cracking down on the cash economy in a way that might destroy businesses and add millions to the jobless rolls. …it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the politicians want to bar cash as one more infringement on economic liberty. They may go after the big bills now, but does anyone think they’d stop there? …Beware politicians trying to limit the ways you can conduct private economic business. It never turns out well.

Last, but not least, Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, explores the downsides of banning cash in a column for USA Today.

…we need to restore the $500 and $1000 bills. And the reason is that people like Larry Summers have done a horrible job. …What is a $100 bill worth now, compared to 1969? According to the U.S. Inflation Calculator online, a $100 bill today has the equivalent purchasing power of $15.49 in 1969 dollars. …And although inflation isn’t running very high at the moment, this trend will only continue. If the next few decades are like the last few, paper money in current denominations will become basically useless. …to our ruling class this isn’t a bug, but a feature. Governments want to get rid of cash… But at a time when, almost no matter where you look in the world, the parts of it controlled by the experts and technocrats (like Larry Summers) seem to be doing badly, it seems reasonable to ask: Why give them still more control over the economy? What reason is there to think that they’ll use that control fairly, or even competently? Their track record isn’t very impressive. Cash has a lot of virtues. One of them is that it allows people to engage in voluntary transactions without the knowledge or permission of anyone else. Governments call this suspicious, but the rest of us call it something else: Freedom.

Amen. Glenn nails it.

Banning cash is a scheme concocted by politicians and bureaucrats who already have demonstrated that they are incapable of competently administering the bloated public sector that already exists.

The idea that they should be given added power to extract more of our money and manipulate our spending is absurd. Laughably absurd if you read Mark Steyn.

P.S. I actually wouldn’t mind getting rid of the government’s physical currency, but only if the result was a system that actually enhanced liberty and prosperity. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to happen in the near future.

Read Full Post »

The War against Cash, Part II

I wrote yesterday that governments want to eliminate cash in order to make it easier to squeeze more money from taxpayers.

But that’s not the only reason why politicians are interested in banning paper money and coins.

They also are worried that paper money inhibits the government’s ability to “stimulate” the economy with artificially low interest rates. Simply stated, they’ve already pushed interest rates close to zero and haven’t gotten the desired effect of more growth, so the thinking in official circles is that if you could implement negative interest rates, people could be pushed to be good little Keynesians because any money they have in their accounts would be losing value.

I’m not joking.

Here’s some of what Kenneth Rogoff, a professor at Harvard and a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, wrote for the U.K.-based Financial Times.

Getting rid of physical currency and replacing it with electronic money would…eliminate the zero bound on policy interest rates that has handcuffed central banks since the financial crisis. At present, if central banks try setting rates too far below zero, people will start bailing out into cash.

And here are some passages from an editorial that also was published in the FT.

…authorities would do well to consider the arguments for phasing out their use as another “barbarous relic”…even a little physical currency can cause a lot of distortion to the economic system. The existence of cash — a bearer instrument with a zero interest rate — limits central banks’ ability to stimulate a depressed economy.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that the Willem Buiter of Citi (the same guy who endorsed military attacks on low-tax jurisdictions) supports the elimination of cash.

Citi’s Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. …the ELB only exists at all due to the existence of cash, which is a bearer instrument that pays zero nominal rates. Why have your money on deposit at a negative rate that reduces your wealth when you can have it in cash and suffer no reduction? Cash therefore gives people an easy and effective way of avoiding negative nominal rates. …Buiter’s solution to cash’s ability to allow people to avoid negative deposit rates is to abolish cash altogether.

So are they right? Should cash be abolished so central bankers and governments have more power to manipulate the economy?

There’s a lot of opposition from very sensible people, particularly in the United Kingdom where the idea of banning cash is viewed as a more serious threat.

Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Telegraph worries that governments would engage in more mischief if a nation got rid of cash.

Many of our leading figures are preparing to give up on sound money. The intervention I’m most concerned about is Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane’s call for a 4pc inflation target, as well as his desire to abolish cash, embrace a purely electronic currency and thus make it easier for the Bank to impose substantially negative interest rates… Imagine that banks imposed -4pc interest rates on savings today: everybody would pull cash out and stuff it under their mattresses. But if all cash were digital, they would be trapped and forced to hand over their money. …all spending would become subject to the surveillance state, dramatically eroding individual liberty. …Money is already too loose – turning on the taps would merely further fuel bubbles at home and abroad.

Also writing for the Telegraph, Matthew Lynn expresses reservations about this trend.

As for negative interest rates, do we really want those? Or have we concluded that central bankers are doing more harm than good with their attempts to manipulate the economy? …a banknote is an incredibly efficient way to handle small transactions. It is costless, immediate, flexible, no one ever needs a password, it can’t be hacked, and the system doesn’t ever crash. More importantly, cash is about freedom. There are surely limits to the control over society we wish to hand over to governments and central banks? You don’t need to be a fully paid-up libertarian to question whether…we really want the banks and the state to know every single detail of what we are spending our money on and where. It is easy to surrender that freedom – but it will be a lot harder to get back.

Merryn Somerset Webb, a business writer from the U.K., is properly concerned about the economic implications of a society with no cash.

…at the beginning of the financial crisis, there was much talk about financial repression — the ways in which policymakers would seek to control the use of our money to deal with out-of-control public debt. …We’ve seen capital controls in the periphery of the eurozone… Interest rates everywhere have been at or below inflation for seven years — and negative interest rates are now snaking their nasty way around Europe… This makes debt interest cheap for governments…and it and forces once-prudent savers to move their money into the kind of risky assets that are supposed to drive growth (and tax receipts).

Amen. She’s right that low interest rates are good news for governments and not very good news for people in the productive sector.

Last but not least, Chris Giles wrote a column for the FT and made one final point that is very much worth sharing.

Mr Haldane’s proposal to ban cash has all the hallmarks of a public official confusing what is convenient for the central bank with what is in the public interest.

Especially since the central bankers are probably undermining long-run economic prosperity with short-run tinkering.

Moreover, the option to engage in Keynesian monetary policy also gives politicians an excuse to avoid the reforms that actually would boost economic performance. Indeed, it’s quite likely that an easy-money policy exacerbates the problems caused by bad fiscal and regulatory policy.

Let’s conclude by noting that maybe the right approach isn’t to give politicians and central bankers more control over money, but rather to reduce government’s control over money. That’s one of the arguments I made in this video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

P.S. By the way, Ryan McKaken at the Mises Institute identifies a third reason why politicians would prefer a cash-free society.

…the elimination of physical cash makes it easier for the state to keep track of private persons, and it assists central banks in efforts to punish saving and expand the money supply by implementing negative interest rate schemes. A third advantage of the elimination of physical cash would be to more easily control people and potential dissidents through the freezing of their bank accounts.

Excellent point. We’ve already seen how asset forfeiture allows governments to steal people’s bank accounts without any conviction of wrongdoing. Imagine the damage politicians and bureaucrats could do if they had even more control over our money.

Read Full Post »

Yes, We Should Clip the Wings of the Federal Reserve’s Philosopher Kings

We’ve been suffering through the weakest recovery since the Great Depression. Labor force participation hasn’t recovered and median household income is stagnant.

So how are our benevolent and kind overseers in Washington responding?

Are they reducing the burden of spending? Nope, they just busted the spending caps (again).

Are they cutting back on red tape? No, they’re moving in the other direction.

Are they lowering taxes? With Obama in the White House, that’s not even a serious question.

But that doesn’t mean all the people in Washington is sitting on their collective hands. The folks at the Federal Reserve have been trying to goose the economy with an easy-money policy.

Unfortunately, as I argue in this recent interview, that’s not a recipe for success.

At best, an easy-money policy is ineffective, akin to “pushing on a string.” At worst, it creates bubbles and does serious damage.

Yet if you don’t like the Fed trying to manipulate the economy, you’re often perceived as a crank. And if you’re an elected official who questions the Fed’s actions, you’re often portrayed as some sort of uninformed demagogue.

I explored this issue today in The Federalist. In my column, I defended Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

Rand Paul and Ted Cruz…deserve credit for criticizing the Federal Reserve. …This irks some folks, who seem to think Fed critics are knuckle-dragging rubes and yahoos with a superstitious fealty to the gold standard.

This isn’t a debate over the gold standard, per se, but instead of fight over monetary Keynesianism vs. monetary rules.

The dispute isn’t really about a gold standard, but whether the Federal Reserve should have lots of discretionary power.  …On one side are the advocates of…the monetary component of Keynesian economics. Proponents explicitly want the Fed to fine-tune and micromanage the economy. …On the other side are folks who believe in rules to limit the Fed’s powers…because they believe discretionary power is more likely to give us bad results such as higher price inflation, volatility in output and employment, and financial instability.

And the Joint Economic Committee is on the side of rules. Here’s an excerpt from a JEC report that I cited in my article.

Well-reasoned, stable and predictable monetary policy reduces economic volatility and promotes long-term economic growth and job creation. Generally, ‘rules-based’ policies reduce uncertainties and facilitate long-term planning and investment. …Conversely, activist, interventionist, and discretionary monetary policies have been historically associated with increased economic volatility and subpar economic performance.

I then mention various rules-based methods of limiting the Fed’s discretion and conclude by commenting on the legitimacy of those who want to curtail the Federal Reserve.

Paul and Cruz may not be experts on monetary policy, just as left-wing senators doubtlessly have no understanding of the intricacies of discretionary monetary policy. But the two senators are on very solid ground, with an illustrious intellectual lineage, when they assert that it would be a good idea to constrain the Fed.

Now let’s expand on two issues. First, I mention in my article the gold standard as a potential rule to constrain the Fed. I’ve previously shared some analysis by George Selgin on this topic. He’s concluded that governments won’t ever allow its return and probably couldn’t be trusted with such a system anyway, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

Here are some excerpts from a recent article by George. Read the entire thing, but here’s the part that matters most for this discussion.

…the gold standard was hardly perfect, and gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard. …the classical gold standard worked remarkably well (while it lasted). …it certainly did contribute both to the general abundance of goods of all sorts, to the ease with which goods and capital flowed from nation to nation, and, especially, to the sense of a state of affairs that was “normal, certain, and permanent.” The gold standard achieved these things mainly by securing a degree of price-level and exchange rate stability and predictability that has never been matched since.

And Norbert Michel of the Heritage Foundation touches on some of the same issues in a new column for Forbes.

Several candidates suggested the gold standard was a good system, and they’re all getting flak for talking about gold.

But here’s the most fascinating revelation from Norbert’s column. It turns out that even Ben Bernanke agrees with George Selgin that the classical gold standard worked very well. Norbert quotes this passage from Bernanke.

The gold standard appeared to be highly successful from about 1870 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. During the so-called “classical” gold standard period, international trade and capital flows expanded markedly, and central banks experienced relatively few problems ensuring that their currencies retained their legal value.

Both Norbert’s article and George’s article have lots of good (but depressing) analysis of how governments went off the gold standard because of World War I and then put in place a hopelessly weak and impractical version of a gold standard after the war (the politicians didn’t want to be constrained by an effective system).

So here’s Norbert’s bottom line, which is very similar to the conclusion in my column for The Federalist.

Many who favor the gold standard recognize that it provided a nominal anchor as opposed to the discretionary fiat system we have now. Maybe the gold standard isn’t the best way to achieve that nominal anchor, but we shouldn’t just dismiss the whole notion.

The second issue worth mentioning is that the best way to deal with bad monetary policy may be to have no monetary policy.

At least not a monetary policy from government. This video explains the merits of this approach.

Gee, maybe Friedrich Hayek was right and private markets produce better results than government monopolies.

Read Full Post »

Bubbles, Easy Money, and Free-Lunch Monetary Policy

What’s the biggest economic fallacy on the left? What’s the defining mistake for our statist friends?

One obvious answer is that many of them hold the anti-empirical belief that the economy is  a fixed pie and that one person can’t climb the economic ladder unless another person falls a few rungs.

There’s no doubt that the fixed-pie myth is an obstacle to sound thinking, but I’m wondering whether an even bigger problem is the pervasive belief on the left that there are easy shortcuts to prosperity.

Keynesian fiscal policy, for instance, is based on the notion that more growth is just a simple question of having the government spend more money.

And Keynesian monetary policy is based on a similarly simplistic assumption that more growth is generated by having central banks create more money.

To be sure, both policies may seem to work in the short run since people suddenly perceive that they have more money. But perceptions and reality may be different, particularly if the short-run boost in the economy is an illusory bubble.

And that’s why I’m not a big fan of QE-type policies designed to “stimulate” growth with artificially low interest rates.

As I explain in this brief FBN interview, any short-run gain is offset by long-run pain.

And I’m not the only one who has a jaundiced view.

The Wall Street Journal also is not happy with the Federal Reserve, opining that the real economy has stagnated as financial assets have been propped up by easy money.

…the Fed has only itself to blame for its economic and political predicament. …One lesson here is that the Fed’s great monetary experiment since the recession ended in 2009 looks increasingly like a failure. Recall the Fed’s theory that quantitative easing (bond buying) and near-zero interest rates would lift financial assets, which in turn would lift the real economy. …But while stocks have soared, as have speculative assets like junk bonds and commercial real estate, the real economy hasn’t. This remains the worst economic recovery by far since World War II…the economic expectations of Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen have been consistently wrong. …the Fed now finds itself caught between a slowing global economy and its promise to begin normalizing rates this year. …One result has been to increase economic uncertainty and market volatility.

Another result is that easy-money policies give politicians an excuse to avoid the real reforms that would boost long-run growth.

I definitely think that’s been a problem in Europe. Politicians keep waiting for magical results from the European Central Bank when the real obstacle to prosperity is a stifling burden of taxation, spending, and regulation.

The bottom line is that politicians all over the world are exacerbating bad fiscal and regulatory policy with bad monetary policy.

To augment this analysis, here’s a video from the Fraser Institute about the insight of Friedrich Hayek, who warned that government intervention, particularly via monetary policy, caused booms and busts by distorting market signals.

Needless to say, last decade’s financial crisis is a case study showing the accuracy of Hayek’s Austrian-school analysis.

But politicians never seem to learn. Or maybe they just don’t care. They focus on the short run (i.e., the next election) and it always feels good when the bubble is expanding.

And when the government-created bubble bursts, they can simply blame greed, or rich people, or find some other scapegoat (and then repeat the same mistakes as soon as the dust settles).

P.S. For a more detailed look at Austrian economics, check out this lecture. And Austrian-school scholars also have the best analysis of the Great Depression.

P.P.S. And for a more conventional critique of easy-money policies, here are some highlights from a speech by a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.

Read Full Post »