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Alan Greenspan Admits Ron Paul Was Right About Gold – Article by Ryan McMaken

Alan Greenspan Admits Ron Paul Was Right About Gold – Article by Ryan McMaken

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Ryan McMaken
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In the next issue of The Austrian, David Gordon reviews Sebatian Mallaby’s new book, The Man Who Knew, about the career of Alan Greenspan. Mallaby points out that prior to his career at the Fed, Greenspan exhibited a keen understanding of the gold standard and how free markets work. In spite of this contradiction, Mallaby takes a rather benign view toward Greenspan.

However, in his review, Gordon asks the obvious question: If Greenspan knew all this so well, isn’t it all the more worthy of condemnation that Greenspan then abandoned these ideas so readily to advance his career?

Perhaps not surprisingly, now that his career at the Fed has ended, Old Greenspan — the one who defends free markets — has now returned.

This reversion to his former self has been going on for several years, and Greenspan reiterates this fact yet again in a recent interview with Gold Investor magazine. Greenspan is now a fount of sound historical information about the historical gold standard:

I view gold as the primary global currency. It is the only currency, along with silver, that does not require a counterparty signature. Gold, however, has always been far more valuable per ounce than silver. No one refuses gold as payment to discharge an obligation. Credit instruments and fiat currency depend on the credit worthiness of a counterparty. Gold, along with silver, is one of the only currencies that has an intrinsic value. It has always been that way. No one questions its value, and it has always been a valuable commodity, first coined in Asia Minor in 600 BC.

The gold standard was operating at its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of extraordinary global prosperity, characterised by firming productivity growth and very little inflation.

But today, there is a widespread view that the 19th century gold standard didn’t work. I think that’s like wearing the wrong size shoes and saying the shoes are uncomfortable! It wasn’t the gold standard that failed; it was politics. World War I disabled the fixed exchange rate parities and no country wanted to be exposed to the humiliation of having a lesser exchange rate against the US dollar than itenjoyed in 1913.

Britain, for example, chose to return to the gold standard in 1925 at the same exchange rate it had in 1913 relative to the US dollar (US$4.86 per pound sterling). That was a monumental error by Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. It induced a severe deflation for Britain in the late 1920s, and the Bank of England had to default in 1931. It wasn’t the gold standard that wasn’t functioning; it was these pre-war parities that didn’t work. All wanted to return to pre-war exchange rate parities, which, given the different degree of war and economic destruction from country to country, rendered this desire, in general, wholly unrealistic.

Today, going back on to the gold standard would be perceived as an act of desperation. But if the gold standard were in place today we would not have reached the situation in which we now find ourselves.

Greenspan then says nice things about Paul Volcker’s high-interest-rate policy:

Paul Volcker was brought in as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and he raised the Federal Fund rate to 20% to stem the erosion [of the dollar’s value during the inflationary 1970s]. It was a very destabilising period and by far the most effective monetary policy in the history of the Federal Reserve. I hope that we don’t have to repeat that exercise to stabilise the system. But it remains an open question.

Ultimately, though, Greenspan claims that central-bank policy can be employed to largely imitate a gold standard:

When I was Chair of the Federal Reserve I used to testify before US Congressman Ron Paul, who was a very strong advocate of gold. We had some interesting discussions. I told him that US monetary policy tried to follow signals that a gold standard would have created. That is sound monetary policy even with a fiat currency. In that regard, I told him that even if we had gone back to the gold standard, policy would not have changed all that much.

This is a rather strange claim, however. It is impossible to know what signals a gold standard “would have” created in the absence of the current system of fiat currencies. It is, of course, impossible to recreate the global economy under a gold standard in an economy and guess how the system might be imitated in real life. This final explanation appears to be more the sort of thing that Greenspan tells himself so he can reconcile his behavior at the fed with what he knows about gold and markets.

Nor does this really address Ron Paul’s concerns, expressed for years, toward Greenspan and his successors. Even if monetary policymakers were attempting to somehow replicate a gold-standard environment, Paul’s criticism was always that the outcome of the current monetary regime can be shown to be dangerous for a variety of reasons. Among these problems are enormous debt loads and stagnating real incomes due to inflation. Moreover, thanks to Cantillon effects, monetarily-induced inflation has the worst impact on lower-income households.

Even Greenspan admits this is the case with debt: “We would never have reached this position of extreme indebtedness were we on the gold standard, because the gold standard is a way of ensuring that fiscal policy never gets out of line.”

Certainly, debt loads have taken off since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, breaking the last link with gold:

Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Free Market. He has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. 

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

To Really ‘Make America Great Again,’ End the Fed! – Article by Ron Paul

To Really ‘Make America Great Again,’ End the Fed! – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
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Former Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher recently gave a speech identifying the Federal Reserve’s easy-money/low-interest-rate policies as a source of the public anger that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Mr. Fisher is certainly correct that the Fed’s policies have “skewered” the middle class. However, the problem is not specific Fed policies, but the very system of fiat currency managed by a secretive central bank.

Federal Reserve-generated increases in money supply cause economic inequality. This is because, when the Fed acts to increase the money supply, well-to-do investors and other crony capitalists are the first recipients of the new money. These economic elites enjoy an increase in purchasing power before the Fed’s inflationary policies lead to mass price increases. This gives them a boost in their standard of living.

By the time the increased money supply trickles down to middle- and working-class Americans, the economy is already beset by inflation. So most average Americans see their standard of living decline as a result of Fed-engendered money supply increases.

Some Fed defenders claim that inflation doesn’t negatively affect anyone’s standard of living because price increases are matched by wage increases. This claim ignores the fact that the effects of the Fed’s actions depend on how individuals react to the Fed’s actions.

Historically, an increase in money supply does not just cause a general rise in prices. It also causes money to flow into specific sectors, creating a bubble that provides investors and workers in those areas a (temporary) increase in their incomes. Meanwhile, workers and investors in sectors not affected by the Fed-generated boom will still see a decline in their purchasing power and thus their standard of living.

Adoption of a “rules-based” monetary policy will not eliminate the problem of Fed-created bubbles, booms, and busts, since Congress cannot set a rule dictating how individuals react to Fed policies. The only way to eliminate the boom-and-bust cycle is to remove the Fed’s power to increase the money supply and manipulate interest rates.

Because the Fed’s actions distort the view of economic conditions among investors, businesses, and workers, the booms created by the Fed are unsustainable. Eventually reality sets in, the bubble bursts, and the economy falls into recession.

When the crash occurs the best thing for Congress and the Fed to do is allow the recession to run its course. Recessions are the economy’s way of cleaning out the Fed-created distortions. Of course, Congress and the Fed refuse to do that. Instead, they begin the whole business cycle over again with another round of money creation, increased stimulus spending, and corporate bailouts.

Some progressive economists acknowledge how the Fed causes economic inequality and harms average Americans. These progressives support perpetual low interest rates and money creation. These so-called working class champions ignore how the very act of money creation causes economic inequality. Longer periods of easy money also mean longer, and more painful, recessions.

President-elect Donald Trump has acknowledged that, while his business benefits from lower interest rates, the Fed’s policies hurt most Americans. During the campaign, Mr. Trump also promised to make Audit the Fed part of his first 100 days agenda. Unfortunately, since the election, President-elect Trump has not made any statements regarding monetary policy or the Audit the Fed legislation. Those of us who understand that changing monetary policy is the key to making America great again must redouble our efforts to convince Congress and the new president to audit, then end, the Federal Reserve.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Americans Are Going to be Disappointed in Election Outcome – Article by Ron Paul

Americans Are Going to be Disappointed in Election Outcome – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
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It is a sad commentary on the state of political life in the United States that our political conventions have become more like rock music festivals than competitions of ideas. There has been a great deal of bombast, of insults, of name-calling, and of chest-beating at both party conventions, but what is disturbingly absent is any mention of how we got to this crisis and how we can get out. From the current foreign-policy mess to the looming economic collapse, all we hear is both party candidates saying they will fix it, no problem.

In her convention speech Hillary Clinton promised that she would “fight terrorism” and defeat ISIS by doing more of what we have been doing all along: bombing. In fact we have dropped more than 50,000 bombs on ISIS in Iraq and Syria over the past two years and all she can say is that she will drop more. How many more bombs will defeat ISIS? How many more years will she keep us in our longest war, Afghanistan? She doesn’t say.

In fact, the New York Times – certainly not hostile to the Clintons – wrote that it was almost impossible to fact-check Hillary’s speech because, “she delivered a speech that was remarkably without hard facts.”

Clinton’s top foreign policy advisor said just a day after her convention speech that her big plan for Syria was to go back to square one and concentrate on overthrowing its secular president. How many more thousands more will die if she gets her way? And won’t she eventually be forced to launch a massive US ground invasion that will also kill more Americans?

Clinton does not understand that a policy of endless interventionism has brought us to our knees and made us far weaker. Does she really expect us to be the policemen of the world with $20 trillion in debt?

Likewise, Republican candidate Donald Trump misses the point. He promises to bring back jobs to America without any understanding of the policies that led to their departure in the first place. Yes, he is correct that the middle class is in worse shape than when Obama took office, but not once did he mention how it happened: the destructive policies of the Federal Reserve; the financing of our warfare/welfare state through the printing of phony money; distorted interest rates that encourage consumption and discourage saving and investment.

Trump tweeted this week that home ownership is at its lowest rate in 51 years. He promised that if elected he will bring back “the American dream.” He seems to have no idea that home ownership is so low because the Fed-created housing bubble exploded in 2007-2008, forcing millions of Americans who did not have the means to actually purchase a home to lose their homes. Not a word about the Fed from Trump.

How are these candidates going to fix the problems we face in America if they have absolutely no idea what caused the problems? No matter who is elected, Americans are going to be very disappointed in the outcome. The warfare/welfare state is going to proceed until we are bankrupt. There is hope, however. It is up to us to focus on the issues, to focus on educating ourselves and others, and to demand that politicians listen.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

We’re Going Deeper into Debt as Real Incomes Fall – Article by Victor Xing

We’re Going Deeper into Debt as Real Incomes Fall – Article by Victor Xing

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The New Renaissance HatVictor Xing

New York Fed President Dudley recently commented that “real consumer spending growth appears to have moderated somewhat from the relatively robust pace of the second half of 2015.” While this may suggest headwinds from cyclical economic conditions, there are emerging signs that ultra-accommodative policy also acts as a constraint on consumer spending via income effects. Instead of inducing savers to spend and borrow, rapid asset price appreciation as a result of monetary easing has outpaced wage growth, and pass-through services inflation subsequently reduced discretionary income and forced already-levered consumers to save instead of spend. This unintended consequence worked against accommodative policy’s desired substitution effects and suggests further easing would likely yield diminishing results if asset price appreciation continues to outpace real income growth.

Asset Price and Services Inflation Outpaced Real Wage Growth
Post-2008 policy accommodation broadly lowered funding costs for consumers and businesses to supported asset price appreciation. However, rising prices have also made assets less affordable, and home buyers “priced out” of their respective housing markets subsequently became involuntary renters. Not only do they not benefit from rising home values, higher education, and medical care inflation also outpaced aggregate real wage growth (Chart 1) to weigh on renters’ discretionary spending.

xing1In response with rising commercial real estate prices (Chart 2), businesses also pass on higher operating costs in the form of services inflation. Year-over-year personal consumption expenditure — services (chain-type price index) has been well-anchored in the 2% range (2.13% in Feb 2016) since 4Q 2011.

xing2Another factor constraining consumer spending is the well-publicized effect of student debt burden. This supports a view that household spending may be at a lower potential than during prior cycles, thus magnifying the costs of higher services inflation as a result of asset price appreciation.

Consumers Redlining their Engines: Inability To Pay $400 Emergency Expense
Accommodative monetary policy encourages consumers to spend and borrow rather than hoarding cash. However, cash-strapped consumers already facing the pressure of debt burden would likely do neither.

Federal Reserve’s recent Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households highlighted signs that some consumers are already stretching their spending power to meet existing obligations. 47% of respondents reported that a $400 emergency expense would be “more challenging to handle” (unable to use cash or a credit card that they pay off at the end of the mouth). Results from middle-income household with $40,000 to $100,000 annual income were similarly downbeat, where 44% of respondents indicated difficulties (Chart 3).

Chart 3: Percent of respondents who would completely pay an emergency expense that costs $400 using cash or a credit card that they pay off at the end of the month (by race/ethnicity and household income)

xing3Source: Federal Reserve Board of Governors

Chart 4: During the past 12 months, was there a time when you needed any of the following, but didn’t get it because you couldn’t afford it?

xing4Source: Federal Reserve Board of Governors

A survey on health-care expenses was also discouraging. 31% of respondents reported going without some type of medical care in the preceding 12 months due to inability to afford the cost. 45% of those surveyed under a household income of $40,000 reported similar decisions to defer treatment.

In the section “spending relative to income,” Fed researchers reported that one-in-five respondents with spending exceeded their income (leveraged spending). These are signs that consumers were taking advantage of lower rates, but the spending does not appear to be sustainable without corresponding rise in real wage growth.

Rising Renter Cost Burden
Another factor constraining discretionary spending is rising renter cost burden. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies projected a “fairly bleak picture of severe renter burden across the U.S. for the coming decade.” The report acknowledged falling incomes among renters and the persisting gap between renter income and renter housing costs (Chart 6), as well as severely burdened renter households (housing costs of more than 50% of household income) reaching 11.8 million in 2015 (Chart 7), or about one in four renters.

Assuming the correlation between rental price inflation and asset price inflation holds, further declines in housing affordability as a result of policy easing would exacerbate renter burden — one likely needs rising real wages to offset.

Chart 5: In the past 12 months, would you say that your household’s total spending was more, less, or the same as your income? (by household income)

xing5Source: Federal Reserve Board of Governors

xing6xing7

Impacts of “Long and Variable Lags” Between Asset Price Inflation and Real Wage Growth
Financial market participants play an essential role in the transmission of Federal Reserve’s monetary policy by affecting financial conditions — the following components are part of the GS Financial Conditions Index:

  • Short-term bond yield
  • Long-term corporate credit spread
  • Stock market variable
  • Exchange rate

The Federal Reserve only has effective control of the very front-end of the Treasury curve via conventional monetary policy. Nevertheless, unconventional policies such as QE, as well as forward guidance on SOMA principal reinvestments also allow the central bank to affect longer-term funding costs via the expectations and “recruitment channel.” Under this mechanism, asset prices take little time to react to changing policy stances, while impacts on income growth and economic conditions would often take longer to manifest.

Such lag between asset price appreciation and changing economic conditions carries a hidden cost — if asset price inflation becomes well entrenched ahead of broad-based economic growth, those without assets would be penalized just to maintain their life-style, and the reduction in their discretionary spending would serve as a disinflationary drag to Federal Reserve’s effort to reflate the economy.

Conclusion
Inefficiencies within the monetary policy transmission mechanism have resulted in income effects becoming greater than the substitution effects. Under this scenario, ultra-accommodative policy may induce further saving by asset-less consumers to further weigh on aggregate demand. Additionally, policymakers should exercise caution if increasingly aggressive and unconventional reflationary policies do not yield intended results.

Victor Xing is founder and investment analyst at Kekselias, Inc. He is formerly a fixed-income trading analyst for the Capital Group Companies with 5 years of experience on its interest rates trading desk.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Chasing 2 Percent Inflation: A Really Bad Idea – Article by John Chapman

Chasing 2 Percent Inflation: A Really Bad Idea – Article by John Chapman

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The New Renaissance HatJohn Chapman

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In just two years, inflation targeting (namely, the quest for 2 percent inflation) has gone from the lunatic fringe of economics to mainstream dogma. Much of the allure springs from notions that a little inflation motivates people to speed up spending, thereby greatly increasing the efficacy of central bank stimulus. It is touted as a cure for sagging demand and a defense against the (overly) dreaded deflation.

Other benefits include melting away some of the massive government and private debts and improving people’s perception of progress as they see their nominal wages rise. Employers can lower real wages without unpopular dollar pay cuts. The Fed can allow price increases to signal the need for production responses, allow for minor supply shocks and for monopolistic industries to increase prices all without a monetary response that would hurt other elements of the economy.

For the politicians it provides a tax windfall in the form of capital gains taxes on inflated assets and income taxes on interest that simply reflects inflation. It also necessitates printing more money thereby earning seigniorage (profits from printing money) for the government. In addition, it provides cover for competitive currency devaluation and is a great excuse to kick the can down the road: “Let’s not tighten before we reach our highly desired inflation target.”

What’s Magical about 2 Percent Inflation?
Then there is the question of why 2 percent? Perhaps that was seen as a still comfortable rate during some past periods of strong growth. Conditions today are very different, which perhaps suggests they are trying to imitate past growth by copying symptoms instead of substance. Of course for politicians, permission to print money is a godsend, and with inflation all around the developed world below 2 percent, it was “all aboard!”

Clearly not all of the features above are desirable, but even some of the touted ones are underwhelming. While increased inflation expectations will speed up spending, it is far from being the reservoir of perpetual demand that some seem to believe. Essentially, a onetime increase in expectations of a new steady rate of inflation would speed up purchases for the period ahead, but with negligible net effects in subsequent periods — a onetime phase shift in demand.

The Danger of Raising Interest Rates
After almost eight years of stimulus, the Fed has taken its first timid steps toward normalizing monetary policy. That means we will soon have to contend with something entirely absent during the years of easy money — a bill for all of the goodies passed out and the distortions created. And what a bill! A 3 percent rise in average interest rates on just our present government debt over the next few years would ultimately amount to over $500 billion a year in additional interest expense, equal to roughly 1/7 of current Federal tax receipts. Those bills start arriving with a vengeance when rates go back up, and for the first time in years the market will see concrete evidence of whether the US and other governments are willing to pay the price of continuing to have viable currencies.

Prior to the appearance of inflation targeting, I was already dreading the impact of political interference with efforts to return to normal. But targeting makes every politician an economist, able to make simplistic, grandstanding statements with the authority of the Fed’s own model. This makes the problem far worse.

Two percent, which has (foolishly) been defined as desirable, will quickly be interpreted as an average. “So what’s the big deal,” critics will say, “about a pop to 3 percent or more, after all it has spent years ‘below target’, and if you excluded a handful of ‘temporary exceptions’, it would still be only 2 percent …?” Imagine the political storm if the Fed decided to quickly raise rates a couple of full percentage points in response to a surge in inflation to 3 percent.

There are a lot of people (especially politicians) whose short-term interests would be harmed by a sharp rise in interest rates. Lulled by today’s relative calm, many fail to appreciate how explosive the situation becomes when we transition from the concerned waiting of the long easy money period to the concrete tests of our credibility during renormalization. If we had to temporarily sacrifice half a percent from our already tepid growth rate to preserve the credibility of the dollar, that would pale next to the cost of worldwide panic and collapse. Unfortunately the sacrifice part is up front.

Americans think of inflation as a purely monetary phenomenon, which the mighty and independent Fed has handled in the past and will again if necessary. Actually once the inflation genie starts to escape from the bottle it becomes purely a political problem. Even the most determined central banker is helpless if the people refuse to accept the paper money, the politicians balk and take away the bank’s independence, or there is an opposition political party promising a credible-sounding and painless alternative plan. It comes down to what the market sees as the political will and ability to pay the short-term cost of reining in the inflation.

The Political Advantages of the 2 Percent Target
Political resistance to the cost of moving back to normal plus our willingness to decisively confront signs of panic will be watched carefully by owners of dollars and dollar instruments. This is a huge liquid pool which could stampede en masse into wealth storage and productive assets. Such a run would quickly become unstoppable and would mean a collapse of the world economy. Inflation targeting greatly facilitates the political opposition to decisive Fed action right at the first critical test points where there might still be hope of heading off an uncontrollable panic.

Deliberately seeking higher inflation amounts to intentionally damaging people’s faith in a fiat currency, one already in danger from massive debt, disquiet over novel monetary policy, and noises from Congress about reducing Fed independence. Targeting also provides a handy excuse to delay returning to normal, thereby worsening the mounting distortions. Finally, it invites wholesale political interference with the Fed’s efforts to manage an orderly return to normal financial conditions.

John Chapman is a retired commodity trader, having headed his own small trading firm for over thirty years. Prior to that he worked in the international division of a large New York bank, managed foreign exchange hedging for a major NY commodity firm, and worked as a silver trader.

Economics, especially money and banking, has been a passion of his since college. In 1990 he took a trip to South America for the express purpose of studying inflation “at its source.” His formal economics credentials consist of half a dozen courses, five of which were as an undergraduate at MIT (where he majored in aeronautical engineering.) He also received an MBA from the University of Arizona.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

What Did Fed Chairman Yellen Tell Obama? – Article by Ron Paul

What Did Fed Chairman Yellen Tell Obama? – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
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This week, President Obama and Vice President Biden held a hastily arranged secret meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen. According to the one paragraph statement released by the White House following the meeting, Yellen, Obama, and Biden simply “exchanged notes” about the economy and the progress of financial reform. Because the meeting was held behind closed doors, the American people have no way of knowing what else the three might have discussed.

Yellen’s secret meeting at the White House followed an emergency secret Federal Reserve Board meeting. The Fed then held another secret meeting to discuss bank reform. These secret meetings come on the heels of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s estimate that first quarter GDP growth was .01 percent, dangerously close to the official definition of recession.

Thus the real reason for all these secret meetings could be a panic that the Fed’s eight-year explosion of money creation has not just failed to revive the economy, but is about to cause another major market meltdown.

Establishment politicians and economists find the Fed’s failures puzzling. According to the Keynesian paradigm that still dominates the thinking of most policymakers, the Fed’s money creation should have produced such robust growth that today the Fed would be raising interest rates to prevent the economy from “overheating.”

The Fed’s response to its failures is to find new ways to pump money into the economy. Hence the Fed is actually considering implementing “negative interest rates.” Negative interest rates are a hidden tax on savings. Negative interest rates may create the short-term illusion of growth, but, by discouraging savings, they will cause tremendous long-term economic damage.

Even as Yellen admits that the Fed “has not taken negative interest rates off the table,” she and other Fed officials are still promising to raise rates this year. The Federal Reserve needs to promise future rate increases in order to stop nervous investors from fleeing US markets and challenging the dollar’s reserve currency status.

The Fed can only keep the wolves at bay with promises of future rate increases for so long before its polices cause a major dollar crisis. However, raising rates could also cause major economic problems. Higher interest rates will hurt the millions of Americans struggling with student loan, credit card, and other forms of debt. Already over 40 percent of Americans who owe student loan debt are defaulting on their payments. If Federal Reserve policies increase the burden of student loan debt, the number of defaults will dramatically increase leading to a bursting of the student loan bubble.

By increasing the federal government’s cost of borrowing, an interest rate increase will also make it harder for the federal government to manage its debt. Increased costs of debt financing will place increased burden on the American people and could be the last straw that finally pushes the federal government into a Greek-style financial crisis.

The no-win situation the Fed finds itself in is a sign that we are reaching the inevitable collapse of the fiat currency system. Unless immediate steps are taken to manage the transition, this collapse could usher in an economic catastrophe dwarfing the Great Depression. Therefore, those of us who know the truth must redouble our efforts to spread the ideas of liberty.

If we are successful, we may be able to force Congress to properly manage the transition by cutting spending in all areas and auditing, then ending, the Federal Reserve. We may also be able to ensure the current crisis ends not just the Fed but the entire welfare-warfare state.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Dumb and Dumber – From Negative Interest Rates to Helicopter Money – Article by Paul-Martin Foss

Dumb and Dumber – From Negative Interest Rates to Helicopter Money – Article by Paul-Martin Foss

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Paul-Martin Foss
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We’ve all run into someone who thinks that all it take to bring about prosperity is to give everyone a million dollars. If everyone is a millionaire, we’ll all be rich and be able to afford anything we want, or so the thinking goes. Any sound economist knows that wouldn’t be the case, however. If everyone were given a million dollars the increased amount of money chasing the existing stock of goods would merely result in a massive rise in prices. No one would be better off, at least not once prices were once again equilibrated. The concept of giving everyone a million dollars is so absurd that no one takes it seriously. That is, they don’t take it seriously when a million dollars is the proposed amount. When the amount is smaller, all of a sudden it becomes a viable and increasingly-discussed policy proposal: helicopter money.

Ben Bernanke was derided for bringing up the possibility of helicopter money in 2002, although the idea dates back to Milton Friedman. What Bernanke did say was:

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.

In fact, if you read that speech you will see Bernanke touting the effectiveness of policies which the Fed has since tried and failed at, as well some policies which the Fed has not yet tried and which we hope it never will.

As a decade of stimulus, quantitative easing, and zero or below-zero interest rates has now proven to be an absolute failure, helicopter money is once again being discussed as a potential central bank action, by central bankers who have no idea what to do and who are grasping at straws. The chief fixed income analyst at Nordea bank has publicly speculated that the European Central Bank (ECB) might be able to distribute 1,300 euros to each European citizen in a bid to boost inflation.

This bid to boost inflation makes the age-old error of confusing more money and higher prices with greater wealth. We know from our million-dollar example that that isn’t the case. So why try on a small scale what fails at the large scale? It is like the minimum wage debate, in which those who favor boosting minimum wages argue that it will result in workers being better-paid and more well-off. Yet we know that raising the minimum wage will result in some workers losing their jobs, as businesses cannot absorb all the increased costs and must dismiss their least-productive workers. The challenge to the proponents of minimum wages always is, if $15 an hour is so good, why not $15,000 an hour? Well, that’s because such a large increase would make abundantly clear what the minimum wage proponents are trying to hide. Minimum wages make some workers better off, but they do so by forcing other workers out of work, thus their wage falls to $0. In the same way, if the ECB could give 1,300 euros to each person, why not 1,300,000 euros? Because prices would rise in result and quickly negate any short-term benefit gained by the monetary increase. That type of hypothetical question exposes the farce of such handouts.

If helicopter money is implemented, those who first gain the use of the new money may benefit by increasing consumption before prices rise, while others will see prices rise before they are able or willing to use the money. But the end result will be higher prices but no overall increase in welfare. The economy will not see any sort of burst in productivity from a one-shot injection. So what will be proposed next? How about multiple injections of helicopter money over extended periods of time? That would seem to follow.

But again, anticipation and expectation of future injections would not lead to economic growth. It would only serve to further raise prices as new money enters the economy and transfers wealth to those who first use the new money from those who don’t. Economic growth comes not from more money or higher prices, but from savings and investment. No matter where in the economy central bank monetary injections enter, they cannot and will not result in real economic growth.

Zero interest rates didn’t do what central banks thought they would do, so they moved to quantitative easing. QE didn’t do what central banks thought it would do, so they moved or are moving to negative interest rates. Negative interest rates won’t work either so, assuming they don’t completely destroy the banking system beforehand, central banks may very well resort to helicopter money. Guess what, that won’t work either. How much more suffering will central banks have to impose on their countries before people realize that they are monetarily, morally, and intellectually bankrupt?

Paul-Martin Foss is the founder, President, and Executive Director of the Carl Menger Center for the Study of Money and Banking, a think tank dedicated to educating the American people on the importance of sound money and sound banking.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Central Banks Should Stop Paying Interest on Reserves – Article by Brendan Brown

Central Banks Should Stop Paying Interest on Reserves – Article by Brendan Brown

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Brendan Brown
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In 2008, the Federal Reserve began paying interest on reserve balances held on deposit at the Fed. It took more than seven decades from the US leaving the gold standard — in 1933 — for the fiat regime to do this and thus revoke a cardinal element of the old gold-based monetary system: the non-payment of any interest on base money.

The academic catalyst to this change came from Milton Friedman’s essay “The Optimum Quantity of Money” where he argued that the opportunity cost of paper money (any foregoing of interest compared to on alternative money-like instruments such as savings deposits) should be equal to its virtually-zero marginal cost of production. Opportunity cost could indeed be brought down to zero if base money (bank reserves, currency) in large part paid interest at the market rate. Under the gold standard, the opportunity cost of holding base money largely in metallic form (gold coin) was indeed typically significant. All forms of base money paid no interest. And the stream of interest income foregone in terms of present value was equal in principle to the marginal cost of gold production (this was equal to the gold price).

Interest on Reserves are Important to Controlling Markets and Imposing Negative Rates
Friedman, however, did not identify the catch-22 of his proposal. If the officials of the fiat money regime indeed take steps to close the gap between the marginal production cost and opportunity cost of base money, with both at zero, then there can be no market mechanism free of official intervention and manipulation for determining interest rates.

That is what we are now finding out in the few years since central banks in the US, Europe, and Japan started paying interest on reserves. (The ECB was authorized to do this since its launch in 1999, while the Fed and BoJ began following the 2008 financial crisis.) Central banks can now bind the invisible hand operating in the interest rate market to an extent almost unprecedented in peacetime. In some cases, central banks have even deployed a negative interest rate “tool” which would have been impossible under the prior status quo where base money paid no interest.

How We Got Here
The signing into law of the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act in 2006 authorized the Federal Reserve to begin paying interest on reserves held by depository institutions beginning October 1, 2011. On the insistence of then Fed Chief Bernanke, that date was brought forward to October 1, 2008 by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. He was in the process of dispensing huge loans to troubled financial institutions but wanted nonetheless to keep interest rates at a positive level (one purpose here was to protect the money market fund industry).

Accordingly, the Federal Reserve Board amended its regulation D so that the interest rate paid on required reserves and on excess reserves would be at levels tied (according to distinct formulas at the start) to market rates. An official communiqué explained that the new procedure would eliminate the opportunity cost of holding required reserves (and thereby “deregulate”) and help to establish a lower limit for the Federal Funds rate, becoming thereby a useful tool of monetary policy.

This was useful indeed from the viewpoint of rate manipulators: by setting the rate on excess reserves the Fed could now determine the path of short-term interest rates and strongly influence longer term rates regardless of how the supply of monetary base was growing relative to trend demand. By contrast, under the gold standard and the subsequent first seven decades of the fiat money regime, interest rates in the money market were determined by forces which brought demand for base money into balance with the path of supply as set by gold mining conditions or by central bank policy decision respectively. A rise in rates meant that the public and the banks would economize on their direct or indirect holdings of base money and conversely.

Back Before the Fed Paid Interest on Reserves
Yes, under the fiat money system the central bank could effectively peg a short-term rate and supply whatever amount of base money was needed to underwrite that — but the consequential growth of supply in base money was a variable which got wide attention and remained an ostensible policy concern. Right up until the Greenspan era, the FOMC implemented policy decisions by directing the New York Fed money desk to increase or reduce the pace of reserve growth and changes in the Fed funds rate occurred ostensibly to accomplish that purpose. This old method of determining money market interest rates under a fiat regime — in which banks’ need for reserves was minute given deposit insurance, a generous lender of last resort, and too-big-to-fail — depended on the banking industry enduring what was essentially a tax on its deposit business, which was then magnified by fairly high legal reserve requirements. Thus, it is not surprising that the original impetus to paying interest on reserves, whether in the US or Europe, came from the banking lobby. There was no such burden under the gold standard even though the yellow metal earned no interest. Banks in honoring their pledge to deposit clients that their funds were convertible into gold had to visibly hold large amounts of the metal in their vaults or at hand in a reserve center. Actual and potential demand for monetary base by the public is more limited under a fiat money regime than under the gold standard as bank notes are hardly such a distinct asset as gold coin from other financial instruments.

More Problems with Friedmanite “Solutions”
Friedman, when he advocated eliminating the opportunity cost of base money under a fiat regime, hypothesized that this could occur under a long-run declining trend of prices rather than by the payment of interest. The real rate of return on base money could then be in line with the equilibrium real interest rate. This proposal for perpetually declining prices would also have been problematic, though. The interest rate would fluctuate, and in boom times be well above the rate of price decline. In any case, the rate of price decline would surely vary (sometimes into positive territory) in a well-functioning economy even when the long-run trend was constant (downward). The equilibrium real interest rate would be below the rate of price decline sometimes (for example, during business downturns), meaning that market rates even at zero would be too high. That situation did not occur often under the gold standard where prices were expected to be on a flat trend from a very long-run perspective and move pro-cyclically (falling to a low-point in the recession from which they were expected to rise in the subsequent business expansion, meaning that real interest rates would then be negative).

What Can Be Done?
So what is to be done to escape the curse? A starting point in the US would be for Congress to ban the payment of interest on bank reserves. And the US should use its financial power with respect to the IMF to argue that Japan and Europe act similarly within a spirit of G-7 coordination such as to combat monetary instability. We have seen in recent years how rate manipulation and negative rates are made possible by the payment of interest on reserves, and are potent weapons of currency warfare. Yes, the ban in the immediate would force the Federal Reserve to slim down its balance sheet so that supply and demand for base money would balance at a low positive level of interest rates. The Fed might have to swap its holdings of long-maturity debt for T-bills at the Treasury window so as to avoid any dislocation of the long-term interest rate market in consequence. That, not the Yellen-Fischer “rate lift off day and beyond,” is the road back to monetary normalcy.

Brendan Brown is an associated scholar of the Mises Institute and is author of Euro Crash: How Asset Price Inflation Destroys the Wealth of Nations and The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve: Manifesto for a Second Monetarist Revolution. See Brendan Brown’s article archives.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Why Negative Interest Rates Will Fail – Article by Frank Hollenbeck

Why Negative Interest Rates Will Fail – Article by Frank Hollenbeck

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The New Renaissance HatFrank Hollenbeck
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It is now just a matter of time before the US central bank follows the central banks of Japan, the EU, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland in setting negative rates on reserve deposits.

The goal of such rates is to force banks to lend their excess reserves. The assumption is that such lending will boost aggregate demand and help struggling economies recover. Using the same central bank logic as in 2008, the solution to a debt problem is to add on more debt. Yet, there is an old adage: you can bring a horse to water but you cannot make him drink! With the world economy sinking into recession, few banks have credit-worthy customers and many banks are having difficulties collecting on existing loans.

Italy’s non-performing loans have gone from about 5 percent in 2010 to over 15 percent today. The shale oil bust has left many US banks with over a trillion dollars of highly risky energy loans on their books. The very low interest rate environment in Japan and the EU has done little to spur demand in an environment full of malinvestments and growing government constraints.

Central bank policies have also driven government bond yields into negative territory. Nearly $7 trillion of government bonds are currently trading at negative rates.

But, economic theory presupposes that negative rates are an impossibility. After all, why would you buy a one-year treasury bill for $1,005 that will get you $1,000 in a year, when you can stuff your mattress with the $1,005 and still have $1,005 in a year? Some would say that storing money is costly and risky, but that is also true for most assets.

The reason is actually quite simple and shows how distortive monetary policy has become worldwide: It makes sense to purchase a bill for $1,005 if you intend to sell it before it matures to the central bank for more than $1,005. In today’s world, the central bank is often ultimately expected to purchase the bill and lose money on it. It’s just another type of debt monetization.

(And it is, by the way, something the Germans emphatically wanted to avoid when the ECB was initially created.)

We Just Need to Print More Money!
The real problem is the way monetary policy is taught in almost every undergraduate and graduate program in the world. Pick up any macroeconomics textbook and it will explain how interest rates are determined by the demand and supply of liquidity. The economy is treated as a car, and interest rates are viewed as the gas petal. When reality does not match up with the model, today’s economist, instead of questioning the model and theory, assumes that more of the same will ultimately force reality into the model.

The problem arises from a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of interest rates. Mises in 1912 had this to say about our current enlightened view on money:

[This view of money] regards interest as a compensation of the temporary relinquishing of money in the broader sense — a view, indeed, of unsurpassable naiveté. Scientific critics have been perfectly justified in treating it with contempt; it is scarcely worth even cursory mention. But it is impossible to refrain from pointing out that these very views on the nature of interest holds an important place in popular opinion, and that they are continually being propounded afresh and recommended as a basis for measures of banking policy.

In fact, interest rates reflect the ratio of the value assigned to current consumption relative to the value assigned to future consumption. That is, money isn’t just some commodity that can solve our problems if we just create more of it. Money serves a key function of coordinating output with demand across time.

So, the more you interfere with interest rates, the more you create a misalignment between demand and supply across time, and the greater will be the adjustment to realign output with demand to return the economy to sustainable economic growth with rising standards of living (see here and here). Negative rates will only ensure an ever greater misalignment between output and demand.

As with Japan, Western economies that pursue a long-term policy of low or negative interest rates can expect decades of low growth unless these “unorthodox” monetary policies are rapidly abandoned. Recessions are not a problem of insufficient demand. They are a problem of supply being misaligned with demand.

The War on Cash
Meanwhile, a goal of some of the attendees at Davos and others has been to push the world toward a cashless society since an increase in cash holdings would limit the effectiveness of negative rates. They know that if they eliminate cash, central banks will have greater control over the money supply and the ability to guide the economy toward their macroeconomic goals.

As long as there is physical cash, people will hold cash in times of uncertainty. It is a wise alternative when all other options seem unproductive or irrational — and keeping cash in a bank at a time of negative rates is, all things being equal, irrational. Central banks, not surprisingly, would therefore like to take away the ability to hold cash outside the banking system. Worst of all, people who hold cash outside the system might be saving it instead of spending it. Naturally, from the Keynesian perspective, this must be stopped.

This is just the latest frontier in the radical monetary policy we’ve been increasingly witnessing since the 2008 financial crisis. The best monetary policy, however, is no monetary policy at all, and central bankers should take an extended holiday so that the world economy can finally heal itself.

Frank Hollenbeck teaches finance and economics at the International University of Geneva. He has previously held positions as a Senior Economist at the State Department, Chief Economist at Caterpillar Overseas, and as an Associate Director of a Swiss private bank.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

What Markets Are Telling Us – Article by Ron Paul

What Markets Are Telling Us – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
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Last week US stock markets tumbled yet again, leaving the Dow Jones index down almost 1500 points for the year. In fact, most major world markets are in negative territory this year. There are many Wall Street cheerleaders who are trying to say that this is just a technical correction, that the bottom is near, and that everything will be getting better soon. They are ignoring the real message the markets are trying to send: you cannot print your way to prosperity.

People throughout history have always sought to acquire wealth. Most of them understand that it takes hard work, sacrifice, savings, and investment. But many are always looking for that “get rich quick” scheme. Monetary cranks throughout history have thought that just printing more money would result in greater wealth and prosperity. Every time this was tried it resulted in failure. Huge economic booms would be followed by even larger busts. But no matter how many times the cranks were debunked both in theory and practice, the same failed ideas kept coming back.

The intellectual descendants of those monetary cranks are now leading the world’s central banks, which is why the last decade has seen an explosion of money creation. And what do the central bankers have to show for it? Lackluster employment numbers that have not kept up with population growth, increasing economic inequality, a rising cost of living, and constant fear and uncertainty about what the future holds.

The past decade has been a lot like the 1920s, when prices would have dropped without intervention, but the Federal Reserve kept the price level steady through injections of easy money into the economy. The result in the 1920s was the Great Depression. But in the 1920s prices were dropping because of increased production. More goods being produced meant lower prices, which the Fed then tried to prop up by printing money. Unlike the “Roaring 20s” however, the economy isn’t quite as strong today. It’s more of a gasp than a roar.

Production today is barely above 2007 levels, while heavily-indebted households already hurt during the financial crisis don’t want to keep spending. The bad debts and mal-investments from the last Federal Reserve-induced boom were never liquidated, they were merely papered over with more easy money. The underlying economic fundamentals remain weak but the monetary cranks who run the Fed keep trying to pump more and more money into the system. They fail to realize that easy money is the cause, not the cure, of recessions and depressions. They didn’t realize that prices needed to drop in order to clear all the bad debt and mal-investments out of the system. Because they don’t realize that, we are on the verge of yet another financial crisis.

Don’t be confused by any stock market rallies over the next few months and think that the worst is over. Remember that after Black Tuesday in 1929 the Dow Jones rallied over the next year before it began slowly and steadily to sink again. The central bankers will do everything they can to delay the inevitable. If they had allowed housing prices to fall in 2008 and hadn’t bailed out the big Wall Street banks, the economy would have corrected itself. Yes, it would have been a severe correction, but it would have been nothing compared to the inevitable correction that will present itself when the Fed runs out of easy money options. The Fed may try to cut interest rates again, maybe even going negative, or it will do more quantitative easing, but that won’t work. Creating more money does not lead to economic growth and well-being. The more money the Federal Reserve creates, the more ordinary Americans will end up suffering.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.