|
Overture���
This is a
rejoinder to a piece of the same title by Paul Krugman, MIT professor (now at
Princeton) and staff writer of The New
York Times. It was posted on the internet on November 22, 1996,
with a note saying that it was to be composted two weeks later, on
December 6. It wasn�t. I came across it a few weeks ago while surfing the
internet. At first I thought that it fully deserved to be composted in short
order. But on second thought I decided that it called for a careful
rejoinder. Bad-mouthing the gold standard is a periodically returning pastime
for mainstream economists. Their arguments have never been put to rest by an
authoritative rejoinder, which I therefore venture to present.
Krugman�s piece
was part of a series entitled �The Dismal Science�. If I continue with these
variations, which I am rather tempted to do, then I shall call my series �The
Dismal Monetary Science�. I apply this name to the monetary science, so
called, of the Krugman variety, more precisely, the demand-side theory of
money according to Lord Keynes, as well as the Quantity Theory of Money
according to Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, also known as monetarism.
In what follows
quotations from Krugman are under the caption �Recitativo�, and my rejoinder
under �Rondo�.
Recitativo
The legend of
King Midas, the original goldbug, has been generally misunderstood. Recall
that his prayers were answered by the gods: everything he touched turned into
gold. The catch was that �everything� included food and drinks as well, and
the poor king was starving to death as his system could not ingest gold. The
gods wanted to teach him a lesson. Most people think that the lesson was in
the perils of avarice. This is a mistake. Midas� true sin was his failure to
understand monetary economics. What the gods were telling him was that gold
was just another metal. If it sometimes seemed to be more, that was only
because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange �
a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects.
Rondo
Krugman is cutting down the difference between �sometimes� and
�always� to microscopic size. Gold has been the preferred means of exchange
since time immemorial. After barter was phased out as inefficient, and after
a relatively brief period of experimentation with other goods such as oxen,
shells, and tobacco to mention but three of them, the marketability of gold
(and silver) snowballed relative to that of other contenders. Gold became
king, and silver the queen. Gold would still be king but for a coup d�etat
overthrowing the Constitutional order in the United States.
In 1933 it took all the violence and duplicity a government could
muster against its own subjects to grab the gold belonging to the people. There
was wholesale confiscation of monetary gold, under false pretenses. No sooner
had the U.S.
government laid its hands on the people�s gold than it wrote up its value. This
piece of chicanery was used to conceal the act of robbery. People were
�compensated� for the confiscated gold in the form of paper money. In 1935
the Supreme Court of the United
States dismissed charges that value was
taken from the people without due process of law arguing that paper money
continued to have the same purchasing power as gold coins. This flies in the
face of the fact that the loss of purchasing power of the dollar abroad was
instantaneous. Domestically it was gradual and by the 35th
birthday of the irredeemable dollar it amounted to 90 percent, an
unprecedented monetary destruction in the history of the republic up to that
point. (Much worse was to follow during the next 35 years.)
Gold�s forcible removal as the monetary metal was done in two
convenient steps, 35 years apart.� (1)� In 1933 the U.S. government defaulted on its
domestic monetary obligations, including the dishonoring of the promise
printed on every Federal Reserve note, to pay bearer gold coin of the
specified weight and fineness upon demand, and the repudiation of the
gold-bonded public debt held by its own citizens. Gold was retained as a
means of exchange for international payments. (2) In 1968 the U.S.
government defaulted on its gold obligations to foreigners as well (the
initial de facto gold embargo was made official in 1971). To add
insult to injury, the U.S.
government (after some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting) put a gag-order into
effect. The injured party was not allowed to call a spade a spade. An
international obligation, solemnly agreed to at an international conference
enjoying the widest publicity, duly ratified by Congress and subsequently
affirmed by four sitting Presidents, was unceremoniously and unilaterally
abrogated by a stroke of the pen. Foreign creditors of the United States,
the primary victims, were not allowed to say �ouch�. They were ordered to
call it an �enlightened monetary reform,� dropping nothing more substantial
than the trappings of a �barbarous relic�, in the words of John Maynard
Keynes. Such a level of bad faith in monetary dealings, compounded by the
gag-order, was surely unprecedented in the financial annals. Previously a
defaulting government had to bear the shame, and live it down before it could
rejoin the exclusive club of credit-worthy nations. Now the offender�s
deserts were not only high praise for a courageous deed in fighting
superstition, but also license to keep on plundering its neighbors� natural
and human resources through the fiat money system.
�������� Even today textbooks
refrain from calling the 1933 and 1968 repudiation by its proper name,
default. A new breed of professors, including Krugman (who was born after
these defaults have taken place) lionize the U.S. for cheating its domestic
and foreign creditors, and plunging the nation and the world into the worst
experimentation with fiat paper. Some dismal monetary science, indeed!
Recitativo
There are other possible mediums of exchange beside gold, and it is
silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has
some irreplaceable significance.
Rondo
It is incredible that this monetary economist has apparently never
heard of marginal utility. Every substance, in addition to its main
applications, has a marginal application (which determines its marginal
utility), as well as several submarginal applications. Bread, for example,
has its main application as staple food for humans. The marginal application
of bread was inadvertently found by Queen Marie Antoinette of France who
later paid with her head for her discovery on the scaffold during the French
Revolution. When she had heard that people had no bread to eat, she asked:
�Well, why don�t they eat cake?� Accordingly, the marginal utility of bread
is determined by its marginal application which is to be eaten for dessert,
instead of cake, if you have it. But bread could also serve as fodder to
animals, and it could be used as fertilizer of agricultural land. If it
isn�t, it�s because it is far too valuable for these �submarginal�
applications.
It is no different with gold. Its main application is to serve as the
monetary metal. Marginal application is in jewelry. But the list of the submarginal
applications of gold is endless, thanks to its fine physical properties such
as malleability, ductility, conductivity, non-corrosiveness, among others. It
is the last-mentioned property of gold which Lenin�s fertile imagination
used, dangling it before the hungry eyes of his starving subjects, to
illustrate the blissful conditions prevailing under Communism. Lenin observed
that there was no better material with which to plate public urinals. It was
precisely this application to which the �capitalist metal� would be put after
the final victory of Communism, Lenin said. You may object that gold is far
too valuable for this submarginal application and, as a consequence, the gold
plating of public urinals would be picked just as quickly as they were installed,
by the beneficiaries of the Soviet paradise. Lenin, of course, would have an
answer ready to meet this objection. The Cheka (secret police) would take
care of saboteurs who picked the gold plating of public urinals, and would
shoot them on sight. To say that gold is only moderately useful betrays
ignorance of Himalayan proportions. Ignorance of technology but, no less,
ignorance of microeconomics.
Whether gold is irreplaceable or not as money remains to be seen. It
will not be decided by quacks and imposters posing as doctors who have banned
the use of gold as a thermometer, expecting that the patient will not run a
temperature if he remains blissfully ignorant about his feverish condition. Can
it be reasonably doubted that the patient, if he survives, will chase the
quacks away, and rehabilitate the thermometer to its former use?
Recitativo
There is a case to be made for a return to the gold standard. It
is not a very good case, and most sensible economists reject it, but the idea
is not completely crazy. On the other hand, the ideas of our modern gold bugs
are completely crazy. Their belief in gold is, it turns out, not
pragmatic but mystical.
Rondo
I do not speak for the gentlemen named by Krugman as �modern gold
bugs� but I am happy to present the case for the gold standard as I see it. I
am prepared to submit it for general discussion before any competent and
impartial forum to judge whether it is �completely crazy� or not.
The gold standard has nothing to do with stabilizing the price level
that is neither possible, nor desirable. It has to do with the stabilization
of the rate of interest at the lowest level compatible with savings and
production. Under a gold standard there is no bond speculation, just as there
is no foreign exchange speculation. There are no derivatives markets in
interest-rate futures the size of which, as measured by the liabilities of
speculators, is in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, which
is more than the market capitalization of the entire globe (or soon it
will be). Under a gold standard talent must find outlet in productive
enterprise rather than in gambling.
Bond speculation is the heel of Achilles for the regime of
irredeemable currency, that will cause its self-destruction in due course. Like
an incubus, it sucks all the economic resources of the world, and robs it of
the best talent. The tricksters who grabbed the gold belonging to the people
of the United States
and its foreign creditors were unaware that their looting would let the genie
of destruction, bond speculation, out of the bottle. How can we explain this
colossal oversight?
Interest rates were stable under the gold standard, and the small
variation in bond prices did not admit a profitable opportunity to speculate
in bonds. But bond speculation started as soon as the gold anchor was cut in
1971, on the dot. The �brain trust� of apologists for irredeemable currency
can develop theories on bond speculation, suggesting that it has a
stabilizing influence on interest rates, just as commodity speculation has on
the prices of agricultural goods. Let us bypass, for the sake of argument,
that this stabilization was automatic under the gold standard. Any effort to
suggest that speculation has an analogous stabilizing influence in both
cases, the commodity market as well as the bond market, ignores the fact that
the supply of bonds is controlled by man, in contrast with that of
agricultural goods which is controlled by nature. The analogy is flawed
beyond the hope of repair. Commodity speculation is self-limiting. It is
limited by the size of available supply. By contrast, bond speculation is not
self-limiting. It is self-aggrandizing. The more it grows, the more bonds
will be printed. Or, to save the cost of printing, the more bond-derivatives
(futures, call options, put options, options on futures, etc., ad libitum)� will be invented. Thereby an avalanche is
set into motion which will bury innocent villages down there in the valley. There
is nothing that the protagonists of �managed money� can do about it. Bond
speculation introduces distortions into the economy that will inevitably
cause the downfall of the regime of irredeemable currency. It may or may not
be through runaway inflation as in France during the last decade of
the eighteenth century. It may be through runaway deflation. In either case,
there will be enormous economic pain.
What Krugman calls �mystical�, Keynes called �psycho-pathological�. Another
famous quotation from him is that �the desire to palm gold is a human aberration
that the economist passes on to the psycho-pathologist for study with a
shudder.� Well, gold is an ultimate means of payment, such as the
regime of irredeemable currency hasn�t got and will never get. Gold is
voluntarily accepted in final settlement of debts by all creditors. In this
capacity, gold can be applied as the agent of the bubble-test. If an
individual wanted to make sure that he would not be victimized in a
check-kiting scheme, all he had to do is to demand that his check be paid in
gold coin. Why is the joy one feels over one�s ability to frustrate would-be
criminals �psycho-pathological�? What is mystical about one�s desire to
protect oneself against check-kiting?
The litmus-test to find out whether a monetary economist serves the
cause of the search for and dissemination of truth, or whether he has a
hidden agenda such as to cover up for the looting of the people�s gold, is to
engage him in a discussion on the subject of interest rates under the regime
of the irredeemable dollar as opposed to the gold dollar. Apologists for the
gold-looting invariably wriggle out.
I hereby challenge Paul Krugman to open the columns of The New York
Times for such a discussion.
Reference
�������� Andrew White, Fiat
Money Inflation in France,
The Duke Endowment Edition, 1933
March 25, 2005
|
