The central bankers on the Nobel Prize committee gave their award this year to the central bankers who, as Mark Thornton outlines in this guest post, "rescued" the world from a disaster of their own making.

Ben Bernanke's Nobel Prize: The Committee Rewards an Arsonist for Claiming to Fight the Fire He Started

Guest post by Mark Thornton

Former Federal Reserve Chairman and 'saviour of the world' Ben Bernanke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics this week, along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. The three have written extensively on the need to bail out banks in times when the economy is in corrective mode, generally after a long period of monetary injections. Bernanke was Chairman of the Federal Reserve when he pushed for the latest round of bank bailouts in 2007-2009.

Bernanke’s research concentrated on the Great Depression, and argued that the banks needed to be bailed out in the 1930s in response to the collapse of the stock market and the severe correction in the US economy. Diamond and Dybvig have also written on the implications of bank failures on the US economy. All three have latched onto the idea that banks take in deposits which are redeemable short term, but they make loans that are longer term and are thus susceptible to bank runs.

Their work is highly suspect from the view of economic theory and is derived from the point of view of history and the social sciences. They neglect the overall situation they are trying to explain, the role of institutions, and the basics of government intervention. For example, Bernanke’s work does not explain why the “situation” occurred in the first place, what the government did from the outset, or how it could be prevented in the future, except for ever-increasing government and Fed intervention.

Their research amounts to little more than an excuse to bail out the banks. Therefore, if you are a member of the privileged financial elites, the Housing Bubble and the ensuing Financial Crisis was an unmixed blessing. You made big money all throughout the housing and stock market bubbles and then your banks received several bailouts and special privileges during the bust, including borrowing at zero interest rates on loans, capital infusions, Quantitative Easing 1 & 2, and interest payments on “excess reserves.”

Of course, most importantly, you had your man in charge of the Federal Reserve, the man who literally “wrote the book” and dissertation on how the Fed must bailout the banks in times of economic trouble. No matter how badly everyone else fared, you could depend on Bernanke to bailout the banks, whatever the costs to others.

The Great Depression is a pivotal event in American history, and it is also crucial in terms of economic theory and policy. Bernanke’s writings are pivotal in terms of redirecting government bailout policy from monetary policy to bank bailouts.

Milton Friedman’s monumental work (on which Bernanke's bailouts were based) argued that the depression became "great" because the Fed allowed the money supply to collapse in the early 1930s. Instead, Joseph Salerno has /shown/ that the Fed was aggressive in trying to keep the money supply growing, but they failed. Bernanke’s own work shows that banks failed in large numbers in the early 1930s -- due to the negative expectations of banks (and the demise of many of them) they were simply not an effective conduit of the Fed’s desire to pump up the money supply. Banks thereby became “systemically important.”

Each major school of economic thought has its own story of the Great Depression, with Friedman and Bernanke representing the Monetarists, and Bernanke providing the “shock” that provided the “pluck” to Friedman’s Fed-piloted model, as explained by Professor Garrison.

The Keynesians of course have Keynes’s (1936) General Theory. He felt that the depression was caused by a failure of aggregate demand: people were unwilling to spend and invest causing the economy to contract via a psychological pathway, without any fundamental cause, thus necessitating government intervention to prop up the economy. This is the same naive “explanation” you would hear from your grocer, barber, or gas station clerk. Peter Temin filled out this historical narrative in his 1976 book Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? where he suggests that the cause was a decrease in the demand for money.

The debate between Monetarists and Keynesians devolved into bickering over aggregate supply and demand, model specifications, empirical results, and, at base, cause and effect.

The Austrian school has its own macroeconomic approach, and this can be seen vividly in the case of Great Depression. Ludwig von Mises wrote about the coming of the depression before it happened, and he pointed out what was causing it. In his day, Irving Fisher was the leading economist in the US; Mises showed that it was Fisher’s notion of a stable dollar, managed by the Fed, that was the cause of the coming depression. I explain this episode as evidence of the superiority of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Lionel Robbins wrote a contemporaneous account of the Great Depression based on the Austrian Business Cycle Theory.

Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression provides a comprehensive view of the economics, politics, and policy implications of the event from the Austrian view. 

First, Rothbard shows that the Fed’s policies in the 1920s, based on Fisher’s views, were the fundamental economic cause of the crash. It was the Fed that was inflating the money supply during the 1920s, and it was the Fed that had recently taken on the newly created function of "lender of last resort" -- thereby encouraging bankers to take on more risk, and making our fractional reserve banking system more unstable in the first place.

Second, it was the political action by Hoover, Roosevelt and others -- regulations; tariffs; attempting to keep prices and wages high; propping up malinvested resources through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; moral suasion to raise prices -- that caused the resulting depression to be "great." 

Third, the policy action in the 1930s to keep spending high and to restructure the American economy with New Deal policies lengthened the time of recovery, largely due to the regime uncertainty created by all the political activism. (And just by the way: Robert Higgs demonstrated conclusively that WWII did not get us out of the Great Depression.)

While Bernanke et al are dependable in terms of recommending and endorsing bailout policies and promoting the activities of the central bank -- the Nobel Prize being awarded by and for central bankers -- were happy to  the Austrian school seeks a better, fuller understanding and questions the fundamental effectiveness of such bailouts. The cause of the Great Depression was the Federal Reserve Banks’s inflationary monetary policy of the 1920s. Rather than preventing or even reducing the impact of the depression, it was the New Deal policies of Hoover and Roosevelt expanding the role of government in the 1930s that made it great!

To address the fundamental problem that Bernanke, Diamond and Dybvig have fixated on, and which any non-central banker can explain, requires not an extensive quilt of government regulation, controls, and bailouts, but merely a sound-money regime of money, and banking without a central bank.

AUTHOR

Mark Thornton is the Peterson-Luddy Chair in Austrian Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and has authored seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio shows.

His post first appeared at the Mises Wire.

Four Reasons the Bernanke-Yellen Asset-Price Inflation May Be Nearing Its End

The American central bank – the Fed – has exported asset-price inflation to the world. But in  recent times there are signs this asset bubble is beginning to burst. In this guest post, Joseph Salerno offers four reasons the Federal Reserve’s asset-price inflation may be nearing its end.

There are strong indications that the remarkable run up of asset prices in the last few years is beginning to run out of steam and may be on the verge of collapse. (We will leave aside the question of whether the asset inflation is symptomatic of a garden-variety inflationary boom or is a more virulent bubble phenomenon in which prices are rising today simply because buyers anticipate that they will rise tomorrow.)

The Evidence

1. The dizzying climb of London real estate prices since the financial crisis, noted in a recent post by Dave Howden, may be fizzling out. Survey data from real-estate agents indicate London housing prices in September fell 0.1 percent from August, their first decline since November 2012. Meanwhile, an index of U.K. housing prices declined for the first time in 17 months. In explaining the "pronounced slowdown" in the London real estate market, the research director of Hometrack Ltd. commented, “Buyer uncertainty is growing in the face of a possible interest-rate rise, a general election on the horizon and recent warnings of a house-price bubble,” which is playing out "against a backdrop of tougher mortgage affordability checks and limits on high loan-to-income lending."

2. Just released data from the Dow Jones S&P/Case Schiller Composite Home Price Indices through July 2014 shows a marked deceleration of U.S. housing prices. 17 of the 20 cities included in the 20-City Composite Index experienced lower price increases in July than in the previous month. Both the 10- and 20-City Index recorded a 6.7 percent year-over-year rate of increase, down sharply from the post-crisis peak of almost 14 percent less than a year ago.

3. More ominously…

Myths and Lessons of the Argentine “Currency Crisis”

Guest post by Joseph Salerno

The crash of the Argentine peso last month brings to a close yet another foredoomed experiment in South American left-wing populism. The precipitous “devaluation” of the peso by 15 percent against the U.S. dollar in January represents its steepest decline since the devaluation of 2001 when Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt. From January 21 to the close of trading on January 23 the peso dropped from 6.88 per dollar to 8.00 on the official market. On the black market the peso fell by 6 percent on January 23 to 13 to the dollar. Over the past year the peso has declined by 35 percent.

In a foolish and futile attempt to maintain its overvalued pegged exchange rate, the Argentine central bank has sold off dollar reserves at the rate of $1.1 billion per month over the past year in buying up the excess pesos sloshing around on foreign exchange markets. Overall, dollar reserves have plunged from a record high of $52.6 billion in 2011to a seven-year low of $29.3 billion. Also since 2011, the Fernández de Kirchner government has implemented highly restrictive exchange controls including delays in approving repatriation of the dividends of foreign firms as well restrictions on purchases by tourists, taxes on credit card purchases, and, recently, limits on online spending that have made it nearly impossible for ordinary Argentine citizens to obtain dollars to hoard or invest abroad. Of course, these draconian measures have failed to stanch the outflow of dollars in the face of the salutary operation of the black market in which dollars were freely available at the equilibrium price of 13 pesos per dollar. The government finally threw in the towel on January 22 and 23 by refusing to intervene in foreign exchange markets to prop up the peso, which declined by 10 percent on January 23 alone. On January 24, the government went further and announced a loosening of exchange controls. Now Argentines will be permitted to buy pesos in proportion to their income while the redeemable tax on peso purchases has been reduced from 35 percent to 20 percent.

Now these are the facts as they have been reported but many commentators have erred in their interpretations of the situation.[1]

Janet Yellen, Bubble Blowing, and a Coming Economic Nightmare

Guest post by Joseph Salerno

On Monday last week, former US Federal Reserve  official Andrew Huszar publicly apologized to the American public for his seminal role in executing the Quantitative Easing (QE) programme, a programme he characterises as “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time,” and “the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.”

While this is a momentous admission from an insider (Mr. Huszar is also a former Wall Street banker), perhaps Mr. Huszar’s most revealing statement concerned the results of QE’s “relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years.” He referred to the spectacular rally in financial markets and expressed agreement with the growing belief among expert observers that market conditions had become “bubble-like.”

In a paper just released by the American Enterprise Institute, another former policymaker, resident fellow Desmond Lachman, formerly deputy director of the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department, warns that QE and other “unorthodox monetary policies” are having “unintended consequences.” Among other consequences, Lachman sees signs of incipient bubbles forming throughout the world:

An important aim of the QE policies pursued in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan has been to encourage risk taking and to raise asset prices as the means to stimulate aggregate demand. The question that now needs to be asked is whether these policies may have given rise to excessive risk taking, overleveraging, and bubbles in asset and credit markets. In this context, one has to wonder whether historically low yields on junk bonds in the industrialized countries now understate the risk of owning those bonds. . . . One also has to wonder whether yields on sovereign bonds in the European periphery have become disassociated from those countries’ underlying economic fundamentals and whether global equity valuations have not become excessively rich.

The markets for gems and for collectibles have also become very frothy of late. Yesterday, new records were set for a gemstone and for an Andy Warhol piece of art sold at auction. The “Pink Dream,” is a 59.60 carat vivid pink diamond, which is the highest colour grade for diamonds, and the purity of its crystals is ranked among the top 2 percent in the world. The record setting price was $83 million. Not coincidentally, the DJIA set an intraday record shortly before the auction. The new record price for the Andy Warhol piece was $105.4 million. The auction’s combined $199.5 million in revenues was also a record for Sotheby’s. During Sotheby’s Geneva fall auction season, records were also set for the prices of an orange diamond and a Rolex Daytona watch.

While the Austrian insight that super-accommodative Fed monetary policy may be causing a recurrence of asset bubbles is making headway in policy circles, it has not yet dawned on Janet Yellen. Nor is such an epiphany likely. Ms. Yellen wears the intellectual blinders of the mainstream macroeconomist which force her to focus narrowly on arbitrary and increasingly irrelevant statistical averages and aggregates like the CPI, the unemployment rate, and GDP and to ignore what is going on around her in real markets.

This was clearly revealed in remarks prepared for her confirmation hearing released yesterday. Ms. Yellen noted that the rate of increase in the CPI index was less than the Fed target of 2.00 percent and that the labour market and the economy were performing far short of their potential (based on the meaningless concept of “potential GDP”). She thus reiterated her commitment to continuing monetary accommodation and “unconventional policy tools such as asset purchases.” It is true that in her testimony before the Senate committee last Thursday she did concede that it is “important for the Fed to attempt to detect asset bubbles when they are forming.” However, she blithely dismissed concerns that recent record highs in asset markets reflected “bubble-like conditions.”

With Ms. Yellen’s confirmation highly likely, we can look forward to the Fed blindly fueling asset bubbles to a fare-thee-well. With the financial system still on shaky ground, this will lead to another financial meltdown and a U.S. government takeover of the financial system, the likes of which will make the last Wall Street bailout appear to be a minor intervention.

Joseph Salerno is an Economics professor at Pace University, academic vice president at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and editor of the “Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.” He is the author of the book ‘Money, Sound and Unsound,’ a sweeping and nearly comprehensive book on applied Austrian monetary theory.
This article first appeared at the Mises Daily.

Bernanke: A Tenure of Failure

If stock market’s took a dive when US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke hinted his psuedo golden shower of monetary stimulus might come to an end, just what might happen when the Great Stimulator leaves the building altogether, asks this guest post by John Cochran.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s term as chairman of the Fed expires at the end of the year and President Obama has quite ungraciously indicated his intent to replace him, remarking that he had, “already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to.”

Despite what Mort Zukerman has argued in his column titled “Mistreating Ben Bernanke, the Man Who Saved the Economy,” policy under Bernanke has not been good, to say the least. Policy before the crisis expanded created credit and kept rates too low for too long, generating a second (and this time catastrophic) boom-bust cycle. Since then, the Fed’s “dovish” policy of low interest rates and quantitative easing has retarded recovery in three main ways:

1. by keeping interest rates from tracking market levels, which would have better redirect resources to highest value uses;[1]
2. by making it easier for firms to avoid necessary liquidation and reallocation of resources; and
3. by adding to the policy uncertainty which, coupled with the extreme regime uncertainty caused by both Bush and Obama Administrations, is the main cause of the continuing Bush-Obama Great Stagnation.

Mainstream criticism of Fed policy, both before and after the crisis, can be found at John B. Taylor’s blog “Economics One” or his book Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. For an Austrian perspective, besides the Salerno paper cited above, see Frank Shostak’s archive, George A. Selgin’s “Guilty as Charged,” or my “Bernanke: The Good Engineer?”, which concludes, “Bernanke's current monetary policy is a train wreck waiting to happen. The ultimate solution as is pointed out by Roger Garrison: ‘The hope of achieving long-run sustainable growth can only rest on the prospects for decentralizing the business of banking.’”

A picture of how much policy has drifted into “Mondustrial Policy” under Chairman Bernanke and toward ever-more dangerous monetary central planning can be found in the Independent Review, “Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman: The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner” by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. Hummel summarizes much of Bernanke’s post-crisis Fed policy as follows:

In sum, phase one and phase two of Bernanke’s policies turned out to be only slight variations on the same theme. Almost nothing that the Fed did during either phase can be accurately described as an effort to stimulate or even stabilise aggregate demand. Whatever the ostensible rationale, everything ended up being a supply-side intervention designed to prop up failing financial institutions. Helicopter Ben talks a good line about being ready to unleash quantitative easing, but this talk only imparts an aura of justification for the Fed’s incredibly expanded role in allocating the country’s scarce supply of savings. If anything, his policies were closer to a quantitative tightening. A better moniker would therefore be “Bailout Ben.”

We are unfortunately back in the situation in which, as bad as Fed policy has been, monetary policy could easily become even more destructive of wealth creation. As I wrote in a letter to the editor in 2010 when Bernanke was last up for reappointment, the only legitimate reason to reappoint Bernanke was that anyone else this administration might appoint would provide leadership which would most likely make policy even worse.

Currently the two leading candidates to replace Bernanke are Janet Yellen and Lawrence Summers. Neither name instils confidence even on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal which writes on July 29:

The real problem is that neither Ms. Yellen nor Mr. Summers seems likely to do what should be the next chairman’s priority — restoring the Fed’s independence by ending its post-crisis political interventions and focusing above all on maintaining price stability.

Those who believe in sound money should tremble at the prospect of either.

Janet Yellen who is heralded as the “Best Fed Choice” by Fed cheerleader Alan S. Blinder (a leading proponent of Fed activism and more fiscal stimulus) is more aptly described by the Journal:

Ms. Yellen is also seen, in and outside the Fed, as a leading monetary ‘dove.’ That isn’t limited to her backing for Mr. Bernanke’s monetary interventions since the 2008 panic. We’ve followed Ms. Yellen for 20 years and can’t recall a key juncture when her default policy wasn't to keep spiking the punchbowl [emphasis mine]. Many Democrats think the Fed needs to keep interest rates at near zero through the 2016 election, and Ms. Yellen is their woman.

Summers may actually be even more problematic. He is an architect of the failed stimulus of 2009, and a revolving door player between Wall Street and government that would only add to the image of the Fed as a financial central planner—and most likely continue the evolution of monetary policy to mondustrial policy.

Can Fed policy get worse under the leadership of either Dr. Yellen or Dr. Summers? Most definitely YES. Unfortunately leadership of the Fed is not the only problem. An institution that relies on good leadership to avoid harm to the economy and the nation is not a good institution. If banks and other financial institutions should not be too big to fail, neither should the Fed. While in the perception of too many, the Fed is both too big and too important to fail, it is an institution that not only could be, but has been, a complete failure.

The conclusion of my 2010 letter is still relevant:

The FED according to the Washington Post is an “institution that has served us well for decades. ...” However, The FED is not an institution that has served us well. It was set up to protect the value of the dollar and to avoid boom and bust cycles. Since inception of the Fed however the dollar has, in real terms, declined over 87 percent—now having a purchasing power compared to a 1913 dollar of less than 13 cents.
    Just since the mid-1990s, overly easy monetary policy has caused or enabled two significant boom-bust periods with accompanying bubbles in first dot.com stocks and then residential and commercial real estate.
    The Wall Street Journal in a January 25^th editorial, which argues against confirmation partially because of Bernanke’s and the FED’s complicity in causing the most recent boom and resulting bust and financial crisis, unwittingly gives the one legitimate short-run reason to retain Bernanke: that other potential nominees would be even worse. In the long run, instead of celebrating the Fed and central banking, true financial reform would, following Nobel winner F. A. Hayek, look seriously at proposals to “denationalisation of money” including the recent suggestion by economist Richard Ebeling to end the Federal Reserve altogether.

John P. Cochran is emeritus dean of the Business School and emeritus professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and coauthor with Fred R. Glahe of The Hayek-Keynes Debate: Lessons for Current Business Cycle Research.  He is also a senior scholar for the Mises Institute and serves on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
This post first appeared at the Mises Daily.

[1] Joseph T. Salerno, “A Reformulation of Austrian Business Cycle Theory in Light of the Financial Crisis,” pp. 37-38. Ronald I. McKinnon makes a similar point in “The Near-Zero Interest Rate Trap.” He summarizes nicely, “By trying to stimulate aggregate demand and reduce unemployment, central banks have pushed interest rates down too much and inadvertently distorted the financial system [and real structure of production] in a way that constrains both short- and long –term business investment. The misnamed monetary stimuli are actually holding the economy back.”

Cyprus and the Unravelling of Fractional-Reserve Banking

Why is Cyprus important? Because for one moment the curtain slipped, and modern banking was revealed again as just the latest version of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes.’  Guest poster Joseph Salerno explains:

The “Cyprus deal” as it has been widely referred to in the media may mark the next to last act in the the slow motion collapse of fractional-reserve banking that began with the implosion of the savings-and-loan industry in the U.S. in the late 1980s.

This trend continued with the currency crises in Russia, Mexico, East Asia, and Argentina in the 1990s in which fractional-reserve banking played a decisive role. The unravelling of fractional-reserve banking became visible even to the average depositor during the financial meltdown of 2008 that ignited bank runs on some of the largest and most venerable financial institutions in the world. The final collapse was only averted by the multi-trillion dollar bailout of U.S. and foreign banks by the Federal Reserve.

Even more than the unprecedented financial crisis of 2008, however, recent events in Cyprus may have struck the mortal blow to fractional-reserve banking. For fractional-reserve banking can only exist for as long as the depositors have complete confidence that regardless of the financial woes that befall the bank entrusted with their “deposits,” they will always be able to withdraw them on demand at par in currency, the ultimate cash of any banking system.

Ever since World War Two governmental deposit insurance, backed up by the money-creating powers of the central bank, was seen as the unshakable guarantee that warranted such confidence. In effect, fractional-reserve banking was perceived as 100-percent banking by depositors, who acted as if their money was always “in the bank” thanks to the ability of central banks to conjure up money out of thin air (or in cyberspace).

Perversely the various crises involving fractional-reserve banking that struck time and again since the late 1980s only reinforced this belief among depositors, because troubled banks and thrift institutions were always bailed out with alacrity—especially the largest and least stable. Thus arose the “too-big-to-fail doctrine.” Under this doctrine, uninsured bank depositors and bondholders were generally made whole when large banks failed, because it was widely understood that the confidence in the entire banking system was a frail and evanescent thing that would break and completely dissipate as a result of the failure of even a single large institution.

Getting back to the Cyprus deal, admittedly it is hardly ideal from a free-market point of view. The solution in accord with free markets would not involve restricting deposit withdrawals, imposing fascistic capital controls on domestic residents and foreign investors, and dragooning taxpayers in the rest of the Eurozone into contributing to the bailout to the tune of 10 billion euros.

Nonetheless, the deal does convey a salutary message to bank depositors and creditors the world over. It does so by forcing previously untouchable senior bondholders and uninsured depositors in the Cypriot banks to bear part of the cost of the bailout. The bondholders of the two largest banks will be wiped out and it is reported that large depositors (i.e., those holding uninsured accounts exceeding 100,000 euros) at the Laiki Bank may also be completely wiped out, losing up to 4.2 billion euros, while large depositors at the Bank of Cyprus will lose between 30 and 60 percent of their deposits. Small depositors in both banks, who hold insured accounts of up to 100,000 euros, would retain the full value of their deposits.

The happy result will be that depositors, both insured and uninsured, in Europe and throughout the world will become much more cautious or even suspicious in dealing with fractional-reserve banks. They will be poised to grab their money and run at the slightest sign or rumor of instability. This will induce banks to radically alter the sources of the funds they raise to finance loans and investments, moving away from deposit and toward equity and bond financing. As was reported Tuesday, March 26, this is already expected by many analysts:

One potential spillover from the March 26 agreement is the knock-on effects for bank funding, analysts said. Banks typically fund themselves with some combination of deposits, equity, senior and subordinate notes and covered bonds, which are backed by a pool of high-quality assets that stay on the lender’s balance sheet.
    The consequences of the Cyprus bailout could be that banks will be more likely to use contingent convertible bonds—known as CoCos—to raise money as their ability to encumber assets by issuing covered bonds reaches regulatory limits, said Chris Bowie at Ignis Asset Management Ltd. in London.
   “We’d expect to see some deposit flight and a shift in funding towards a combination of covered bonds, real equity and quasi-equity,” said Bowie, who is head of credit portfolio management at Ignis, which oversees about $110 billion.

If this indeed occurs it will be a significant move toward a free-market financial system in which the radical mismatching of the maturities of assets and liabilities in the case of demand deposits is eliminated once and for all. A few more banking crises in the Eurozone—especially one in which insured depositors are made to participate in the so-called “bail-in”—will likely cause the faith in government deposit insurance to completely evaporate and with it confidence in the fractional-reserve banking system.

There may then naturally arise on the market a system in which equity, bonds, and genuine time deposits that cannot be redeemed before maturity become the exclusive sources of finance for bank loans and investments. Demand deposits, whether checkable or not, would be segregated in actual deposit banks which maintain 100-percent reserves and provide a range of payments systems from ATMs to debit cards.

While this conjecture may be overly optimistic, we are certainly a good deal closer to such an outcome today than we were before the “Cyprus deal” was struck. Of course we would be closer still if there were no bailout and the full brunt of the bank failures were borne solely by the creditors and depositors of the failed banks rather than partly by taxpayers. The latter solution would have completely and definitively exposed the true nature of fractional-reserve banking for all to see.

Joseph Salerno is academic vice president of the Mises Institute, professor of economics at Pace University, and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. This post originally posted on Circle Bastiat, the faculty blog of the Mises Institute.

Addicted to Asset Bubbles

Guest post by Joseph Salerno, based on the recent adventures of ‘Helicopter Ben’ Bernanke

Helicopter Ben Runs Out of Ideas for Creating Money
Circle Bastiat, January 15, 2013

U.s. Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke confided on January 14 that he is unaware of any new method of stimulating American economic growth. Bernanke said: “As far as I’m aware, there’s no completely new method that we haven’t [already tapped].” So Helicopter Ben has run out of innovative and unconventional ways to create new money.
    Lest you be tempted to breathe a bit easier, however, rest assured that the now conventional method of quantitative easing, involving the Fed’s monthly purchase of $85 billion worth of mortgage-backed and U.S. government securities, seems to be working just fine according to Bernanke and he foresees its continuation. Noting the stubbornly high unemployment rate combined with the low inflation rate in the U.S. economy, Bernanke stated, “That is the case for being aggressive, which we are trying to do.” Although he is “cautiously optimistic,” he does promise to closely monitor the risks, efficacy, costs, and benefits of this inflationary policy.
    I guess the rapid asset price run-up in stock and commodities markets, which are nearly back to financial bubble levels, and booming farmland prices do not count in Bernanke’s benefit-cost calculus. More likely, Bernanke accounts them as a benefit, which, via the “wealth effect” [whereby folk spend more when they’re wealthier, or think they are], will induce another debt-driven consumption spree on the part of the American public that will stimulate economic growth, i.e., create another bubble economy.

Recreating the Asset Bubble: The Fed’s Plan for Economic Recovery
Circle Bastiat, February 11, 2013

While Keynesians continue to sing that lame old song about insufficient aggregate demand stimulus and the horrors of austerity and “market” monetarists prattle on about deficient growth in nominal GDP, the signs of an incipient American asset bubble become more evident every day. In fact, it would not be overstating the case to say that the U.S.Federal Reserve is deliberately aiming at recreating an asset bubble as a means of rekindling the historically unprecedented consumption booms of the latter half of the 1990s and the first part of the last decade. These consumption manias were driven by the “wealth” or “net worth” effect, pithily described in the metaphor “using one’s home as an ATM machine.”
    As the following graphs show, Fed monetary policy is succeeding in pumping up total net worth, which consists mainly of financial assets plus real estate owned by households (and non-profit organisations) minus household debt.

What the above graph shows is that total American net worth peaked at $67.3 trillion in Q3 2007 and fell precipitously to $51.1 trillion in Q1 2009. This $16.1 trillion decline in U.S. household wealth exceeded the combined annual GDP of Great Britain, Germany, and Japan. The Fed has since succeeded in pumping up net worth, to $64.8 trillion by Q3 2012, which is only $2.5 trillion below its level at the peak of the bubble. Although the value of household real estate remained $5.5 trillion below its bubble peak for Q3 2012 and has been slowly increasing, the Fed has been wildly successful in pushing up the value of U.S. financial assets. This is revealed in the the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index. This index tracks the total dollar value of all U.S.-headquartered equity securities with readily available price data and includes more than 6,000 firms.

Note in the graph above that the index reached its peak of 15,244 in December 2007, then went crashing to its trough of 6,800 by March 2009. By January 2013 the Fed’s inflationary policies drove it past its previous peak, reflating the index by 2,000 points in 2012 alone. But perhaps the most telling graph is the ratio of household net worth to GDP.

This graph shows that for over 40 years, from 1952 until the dot-com boom began in the mid-1990s, the household net worth to GDP ratio fluctuated in a band between 300 percent and 350 percent. After falling back toward this range after the recession of 2001, the Fed’s monetary expansion interrupted the correction and sharply drove the ratio up by 100 percentage points in a matter of three years. The financial crisis set another needed asset price readjustment in train, but it was once again reversed by the Fed, which was desperate to re-inflate asset prices in order to first prevent a financial collapse and then to start another consumption boom. The ratio now sits at 400 percent—a level it first reached midway through the dot-com bubble—and is headed inexorably upward. Once housing markets in general begin to follow the lead of New York City’s and Washington, D.C.’s overheated residential real estate markets, we will be well on our way to another unsustainable asset bubble.

The Fed is Blowing More Bubbles
Circle Bastiat, February 15, 2013

As if any more evidence were needed that the Fed has succeeded, either through ignorance or design, in igniting new asset bubbles throughout the American economy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City just released a survey of bankers that confirms a continuing rise in U.S. farmland prices. The following chart shows the stratospheric year-over-year rise in non-irrigated cropland prices for 3Q 2012.

As reported by TheBlaze, one analyst noted, “If this trend continues . . . these agricultural areas may very well become ‘New Manhattans’ (as far as wealth is concerned).” The chart below from the report by the Kansas City Fed puts this stunning trend in temporal perspective and reveals that it extends across all farmland, including irrigated cropland and ranchland.

Bernanke the Comedian
Circle Bastiat, February 27, 2013

Dr. Brendan Brown is an eminent financial economist in the City of London and the author of The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve, initially published in 2011 and just released in its second revised edition. In his book, Brown is critical of Milton Friedman and the monetarists for ignoring the effects of monetary expansion on interest rates and asset prices and for assuming that a stable price level indicates an absence of inflation. Brown adopts Rothbard’s view that the 1920s were an inflationary decade, because, despite the rough price-level stability that obtained, asset and commodities markets were “overheated.”
    Brown also rejects the monetarist argument that price-level stabilization is the sine qua non of economic stability. He argues that price stabilization policy is one of the “dangerous features of Friedmanite monetarism” which “Austrian critics have long highlighted” and “which in hindsight may have played a role in the growth in Bernanke-ism.” Finally, and most insightfully, Brown also maintains that deflation is effective—and indeed, necessary—to extricate an economy from the depths of a recession or depression.
    Needless to say, Dr. Brown is no fan of Chairman Bernanke. In fact, in a memo today, Brown perceptively identifies the comedic aspect of Bernanke’s testimony on the first day of his semiannual monetary policy report to Congress. Writes Brown:

Comedy according to the theorists of drama is based on inflexibility of character. The lead role cannot in any way bend his stereotyped behaviour even when this would avoid an accident or disaster which is looming. And so Don Juan byMolière is a comedy. Even when the ghostly statue of his slain victim threatens to take Don Juan on a fiery descent into hell, the lead character cannot show remorse and desist from his life of debauchery. Chekhov listed his Cherry Orchard as a comedy because the lead characters could not shake themselves out of their nonchalance and avoid bankruptcy by selling the cherry orchard of their villa to a property developer on which he would build bungalows.
    And so we come to the monetary comedy which played out in Washington yesterday. Professor Bernanke, adamant as always that the road to economic prosperity and stability takes the form of a rigorous targeting of inflation and supremely confident in a good outcome to his massive monetary experimentation tells his Congressional questioners that he sees no signs of asset price inflation which would justify changing his present policies. This is the same professor who largely repudiates any concept of asset price inflation and believes totally that any such dangers can be avoided well ahead of time by skilful action on the part of an army of regulators following the recently expanded book of rules. And this is the same professor who denies that monetary disequilibrium played any role in the giant asset and credit market inflations of the last two decades.
    There is another element in the monetary comedy under the title of “Fed chair’s semi-annual testimony to Congress.” This is the failure of congressional questioners to hold the professor to account. When he declared that there is no asset price inflation, there was no follow on question such as “but professor you still say there was no asset price inflation in the last great bubble and bust and deny that the Fed of which you were a leading policy maker was in any way responsible: why should we believe you now?”
    That there should be no such question is part of the comedy, in its literal sense.

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Joseph Salerno is academic vice president of the Mises Institute, professor of economics at Pace University, and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He has been interviewed in the Austrian Economics Newsletter and on Mises.org.

Recessions: The Don't Do List

Back in 2008, when even politicians started to notice the economic fertiliser had begun hitting the blade-rotating ventilation device, I suggested there were seven things governments could to to ensure the economic recession was a long one—and predicted they would do them all.
And so they did.
And here we still are.
Those seven things were taken from Murray Rothbard’s excellent book America’s Great Depression. In this Guest Post, John Cochran updates the story.

Listening to a new report on the just-released American GDP numbers while reading Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression made me realize how relevant and important this work is relative to today’s poorly performing economy. The book briefly summarizes Austrian Business Cycle Theory and applies the theory to the period of the Great Depression from 1929–1933. The book is especially relevant in that it provides policy guidance for dealing with an economic crisis, based on both historical evidence and Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The policy recommendations include actions to avoid, as well as positive actions government could undertake to speed recovery. Unfortunately, the official reaction to the present crisis has been a virtual match to Rothbard’s “don’t do” list, while the few positive actions have been conspicuous by their absence in most mainstream policy discussions. Even more important for  future prosperity is the need for monetary reform, the key to preventing future boom-bust cycles and thus avoiding depressions altogether.

Preliminary US GDP numbers for 4th quarter 2012 were just released and, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, indicated that the “[r]ecovery shows a soft spot” with GDP declining 0.1%. As Jeffrey Tucker reports in “The GDP Shock”:

Hardly anyone anticipated this. USA Today and other purportedly reliable venues immediately assured the world that this does not mean recession. Somehow after hanging onto to GDP numbers for three years—recovery is here despite your internal sense that the economy is still in a ditch—now we are told that the GDP figures are really just misleading. Recovery is still here, says the mainstream press.

Jon Hilsenrath in “Unusual Quarter of Contraction Doesn’t Mean Recession” provides a toned-down example of what Tucker is talking about:

A one-quarter contraction of economic output doesn’t mean the economy is formally in recession, but it is unusual for such contractions to happen in the middle of economic expansions.

Austrian economists are keenly aware that “GDP figures are really just misleading.” Inclusion of government spending in any measure of economic production or growth is inherently misleading.  Business cycles are characterized by greater fluctuations in the capital goods industries relative to consumer goods. Malinvestment during the boom is followed by capital restructuring during the depression/recovery. Maintaining a coordinated structure of production is essential for maintaining a given level of prosperity, and lengthening the structure is a necessary condition for an improvement in the material standard of living. When one fully incorporates capital theory into macroeconomic analysis, it becomes clear that consumption is not the “engine of the economy” (see John Papola’s “Think Consumption Is The ‘Engine’ Of Our Economy? Think Again”in Forbes online, or Mark Skousen’s “Gross Domestic Expenditures (GDE): the Need for a New National Aggregate Statistic”). Per Rothbard (Americas Great Depression, pp. 58–59):

Savings, which go into investment, are therefore just as necessary to sustain the structure of production as consumption. Here we tend to be misled because national income accounting deals solely in net terms. Even “gross national product” is not really gross by any means; only gross durable investment is included, while gross inventory purchases are excluded. It is not true, as the underconsumptionists tend to assume, that capital is invested and then pours forth onto the market in the form of production, its work over and done. On the contrary, to sustain a higher standard of living, the production structure—the capital structure—must be permanently “lengthened.” As more and more capital is added and maintained in civilized economies, more and more funds must be used just to maintain and replace the larger structure. This means higher gross savings, savings that must be sustained and invested in each higher stage of production.

Even though GDP is a highly inaccurate measure of economic activity, and regardless of whether or not one quarter of negative growth in real GDP indicates an economy on the verge of a double-dip recession, the number does provide further evidence of an economy struggling to recover from the depression which followed back-to-back Fed induced boom-bust cycles. This is an economy essentially stagnating since the reported end of the “Great Recession” in June 2009, nearly four years ago.

Mainstream economists have given competing explanations of why this is the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Many Keynesians, including Paul Krugman, have argued the recovery is slow, not because the policy response was wrong, but because it was not big enough. The policy response was strong enough to save the economy from a bigger disaster, but despite an $800 billion fiscal stimulus, deficits of over one trillion dollars leading to a public debt of over $16 trillion, and a tripling of the Fed’s balance sheet, the policy response was still too small. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, also defend the policy response, but in This Time is Different, they argue that recoveries from recessions accompanied by a financial crisis have, based on historical evidence, always been slow compared to recessions not accompanied by financial crisis. While fiscal and monetary stimuli have not generated a speedy recovery, these policies did prevent the crisis from being even worse. According to Rana Foroohar in Time, “The Risks of Reviving a Revived Economy”:

Ironically, the stimulus is also a reason the recovery has been so slow and will continue to be for the next three to five years. Harvard economist Ken Rogoff, who, along with his colleague Carmen Reinhart, has been the best rune reader of the past few years, says that historically during financial crises “to the extent that you act to slow the deep, sharp economic pain, you also slow the recovery.”

Contra Rogoff and Reinhart, Michael Bordo has done some excellent work showing that throughout US economic history, recovery has actually been quicker following financial crises. His work has been used by John B. Taylor to bolster his argument that policy activism and the accompanying policy uncertainty, both monetary and fiscal, have impeded business planning and recovery. Much of the debate can be accessed here. Austrian economists like Robert Higgs and myself, and fellow travelers such as Mary L. G. Theroux, have pushed the uncertainty argument even further to include regime uncertainty as the key element retarding recovery.

However, readers of Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression should not have been surprised that the recent bust was not a sharp depression followed quickly by a return to prosperity and sustainable growth, albeit not necessarily to the levels expected by those fooled by the false expectations created by monetary mismanagement due to malinvestments and wealth destruction during the previous two booms (see Salerno’s “A Reformulation of Austrian Business Cycle Theory in Light of the Financial Crisis,” Ravier’s “Rethinking Capital-Based Macroeconomics,” and most recently Shostak’s “Fed’s policies expose mainstream fallacies”). While the first part of Rothbard’s great book is devoted to explaining the Austrian boom-bust theory of the business cycle, defending the theory from critics, and illustrating its applicability to the events leading up to the 1929 crisis/bust, the second part of the book is devoted to examining governmental interventions and policy errors that retarded recovery and turned a “garden variety recession” into a Great Depression.

Rothbard notes two things of significance for both then and now:

1. “[T]he longer the boom goes on the more wasteful the errors committed, and the longer and more severe will be the necessary depression readjustment” (p. 13). The current boom-bust had its roots in the boom during the late 1990s, which resulted in a bust/recession, recovery from which was aborted by aggressive Fed action beginning in 2003, which added new malinvestments and misdirections of production to the unresolved malinvestments left over from the previous boom (see my article “Hayek and the 21st Century Boom-Bust and Recession-Recovery”).

2. Unemployment, if recovery is not impeded by interventions, will be temporary. Per Rothbard (p. 14):

Since factors must shift from the higher to the lower orders of production, there is inevitable “frictional” unemployment in a depression, but it need not be greater than unemployment attending any other large shift in production. In practice, unemployment will be aggravated by the numerous bankruptcies, and the large errors revealed, but it still need only be temporary. The speedier the adjustment, the more fleeting will the unemployment be. Unemployment will progress beyond the “frictional” stage and become really severe and lasting only if wage rates are kept artificially high and are prevented from falling. If wage rates are kept above the free-market level that clears the demand for and supply of labor, laborers will remain permanently unemployed. The greater the degree of discrepancy, the more severe will the unemployment be.

When the crisis hit in 2007 and 2008, the correct policy would have been the response Rothbard recommended in 1982 in the introduction to the fourth edition (p. xxi) of America’s Great Depression:

The only way out of the current mess is to “slam on the brakes,” to stop the monetary inflation in its tracks. Then, the inevitable recession will be sharp but short and swift[emphasis added], and the free market, allowed its head, will return to a sound recovery in a remarkably brief time.

While, as mentioned above, Rothbard only briefly discusses Austrian Business Cycle Theory (p. xxxviii), “a full elaboration being available in other works,” America’s Great Depression, elaborates on the theory’s implication on government policy: “implications which run flatly counter to prevailing views [both then, 1963, and now].”

What are these implications? First and foremost (p. 19), “don’t interfere with the market’s adjustment process” [emphasis original]. The more government blocks market adjustments, the “longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.” Rothbard argues it is possible to logically list the ways market adjustment could be aborted by government action and such a list would coincide well with the “favorite ‘anti-depression’ arsenal of government policy.” The list almost perfectly matches with policy responses to the crisis during both the Bush (see Thornton’s “Hoover, Bush, and Great Depressions”) and Obama administrations.

Here is Rothbard’s “Don't Do” list (pp. 19–20), with my comments in brackets:

1. Prevent or delay liquidation
“Lend money to shaky businesses, call on banks to lend further, etc.” [Done. Tarp, auto bailouts, and the Fed’s mondustrial policy. See recently John B. Taylor in the Wall Street Journal: “The low rates also make it possible for banks to roll over rather than write off bad loans, locking up unproductive assets.”]

2. Inflate further
“Further inflation blocks the necessary fall in prices, thus delaying adjustment and prolonging depression. Further credit expansion creates more malinvestments, which, in their turn, will have to be liquidated in some later depression. A government ‘easy money’ policy prevents the market's return to the necessary higher interest rates.” [Done in spades.]

3. Keep wage rates up
“Artificial maintenance of wage rates in a depression insures permanent mass unemployment. Furthermore, in a deflation, when prices are falling, keeping the same rate of money wages means that real wage rates have been pushed higher. In the face of falling business demand, this greatly aggravates the unemployment problem.”

4. Keep prices up
“Keeping prices above their free-market levels will create unsalable surpluses, and prevent a return to prosperity.” [3 and 4 are both direct results of current Fed actions, including price inflation targets near 2%.]

5 & 6. Stimulate consumption and discourage saving
“We have seen that more saving and less consumption would speed recovery; more consumption and less saving aggravate the shortage of saved-capital even further. Government can encourage consumption by ‘food stamp plans’ and relief payments. It can discourage savings and investment by higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on corporations and estates. As a matter of fact, any increase of taxes and government spending will discourage saving and investment and stimulate consumption, since government spending is all consumption. Some of the private funds would have been saved and invested; all of the government funds are consumed. Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption-investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.” [The federal government has expanded from a bloated 18–20% of the economy to 23–25% of the economy under the current administration. The Bush fiscal stimulus in 2008 and the majority of the 2009 Obama stimulus supported consumption relative to investment as did the ineffective recently repealed temporary payroll tax cut.]

7. Subsidize unemployment
“Any subsidization of unemployment (via unemployment ‘insurance,’ relief, etc.) will prolong unemployment indefinitely, and delay the shift of workers to the fields where jobs are available.” [Does anything need added here?]

Rothbard (p. 21) argued these were “time-honored favorites of government policy” and the last part of America’s Great Depression was devoted to showing how these were the policies adopted in 1929–1933. Current policy has followed the same path. We should not be surprised that the result has been similar, if not as yet quite as tragic. It is still not too late to change paths, but unfortunately such action, while possible is not likely to happen. Neither will the positive actions recommended by Rothbard (p. 22) to speed recovery be undertaken. Reducing the relative role of the government in the economy while reducing taxes, especially those that bear most heavily on saving and investment, are also, as I have argued previously in “Thoughts on Capital-Based Macroeconomics” (Part III),the correct actions to address the debt and size-of-government crisis.

We are again undone by the “Crisis of Authority,” the urge to action, the incorrect, but too often, as explained by Pierre Lemieux, unchallenged belief that Somebody in Charge[1] is a solution to recessions. The correct government depression policy is “Nobody in Charge.” Laissez-faire is thus the untried alternative and the preventative of depression. Sound, free market money is the untried alternative to government money. Laissez-faire and sound money would replace the recurring boom-bust, and its attendant needless depression and unemployment, with sustainable growth and relative prosperity.

* * * * *

John P. Cochran is emeritus dean of the Business School and emeritus professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and coauthor with Fred R. Glahe of The Hayek-Keynes Debate: Lessons for Current Business Cycle Research. He is also a senior scholar for the Mises Institute and serves on the editorial board of theQuarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
This post first appeared at the Mises Daily.