In the present article I have three aims: First, I will point out that the critics are right; to the extent that Social Security “worked,” it was because of its resemblance to a classic Ponzi scheme. Second, I will show how private-sector retirement planning operates nothing like this. Third, I will defend the good name of Charles Ponzi from the scurrilous comparisons — what he did was nothing like the racket known as Social Security.

Social Security’s “Ponzi Game Aspects”

Paul Krugman is a famous guy with a long record of strong opinions. It’s to be expected that periodically these will come back to bite him. His usual tack is to deny that his old columns meant what their plain-word reading would indicate. For example, Krugman can’t believe anybody thought this column (from 2002) should be construed as his endorsement of Greenspan trying to create a housing bubble.

When it comes to Social Security, here’s what Krugman wrote in late 1996:

Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).

As with his unfortunate housing-bubble article, here too Krugman has had to do damage control. After the above column floated around the Internet, Krugman tried to quell the giggling, claiming that anyone who tried to use him in support of Republican claims was playing “word games.” Krugman then gave a link to this fascinating history of the original Ponzi scheme, courtesy of — the Social Security Administration! (It seems they must get this a lot.)

I was curious to see how the Social Security Administration would defend itself from the charge that it was a Ponzi scheme. Here’s what they say:

In contrast to a Ponzi scheme, dependent upon an unsustainable progression, a common financial arrangement is the so-called “pay-as-you-go” system. Some private pension systems, as well as Social Security, have used this design. A pay-as-you-go system can be visualized as a pipeline, with money from current contributors coming in the front end and money to current beneficiaries paid out the back end…

There is a superficial analogy between pyramid or Ponzi schemes and pay-as-you-go programs in that in both money from later participants goes to pay the benefits of earlier participants. But that is where the similarity ends…

As long as the amount of money coming in the front end of the pipe maintains a rough balance with the money paid out, the system can continue forever. There is no unsustainable progression driving the mechanism of a pay-as-you-go pension system and so it is not a pyramid or Ponzi scheme.

Contrary to the claims of Yglesias, Krugman, and the Social Security Administration, I don’t think the “Ponzi scheme” charge is unfair in the slightest. When critics say Social Security is “unsustainable,” they quite obviously mean that it can’t keep up the current taxing and benefit schedules. Either taxes on workers will go up, promised benefits will be reduced, or some combination of the two. Krugman’s 1996 column confirms that analysis, and the Social Security Administration’s pipeline does too.

Up until now, retirees have been taking out more than they put in, and that can’t continue — this pattern relied on finding ever more workers to join the system. In other words, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. I am not here to endorse candidate Rick Perry, but the point of his charge is obviously true: each generation can’t keep taking more out of the system than it put in, once the demographics change.

The SSA’s pipeline graphic is interesting. If that is ultimately what Social Security turns into, and if each generation of workers merely takes out “what it originally put in,” then it means workers will earn a zero-percent (real) return on their “contributions” into the system.

Yes, that would certainly be “sustainable” in an accounting sense (at least with a stable age distribution in the population), but would it work politically? If politicians frankly told voters, “When we take $1,000 from you at age 25, don’t worry, that $1,000 will be waiting for you when you’re 65,” would they be happy with this arrangement? Charles Ponzi too could have made his scheme more sustainable if he promised his investors a 0 percent rate of return, but then nobody would have been interested.

In fairness, Matt Yglesias points out that the pipeline method can yield a positive rate of return. If the workers at the left end of the pipe always pump in, say, 15 percent of their paycheck, then (if productivity grows over time as it normally does) 50 years later, when they are on the other end of the pipe, there will be more dollars shooting out. However, in this scenario we’re back to an arrangement where each generation gets out more than it put in — what Krugman himself thought was a “Ponzi game aspect.” In any event, Yglesias’s framework is still vulnerable to demographic shifts.

Why Private-Sector Retirement Planning Works

The confusion in popular discussions of Social Security partly rests on the general ignorance of how an entire community can actually become richer through saving and investment. In other words, a lot of people believe (whether or not they’ve really thought it through carefully) that for every Sally out there who’s saving $10,000 per year, there must be some Jim who’s racking up $10,000 in debt. Therefore, whenever Sally starts living off her savings, people imagine that Jim must be cutting back on his own standard of living. At the communal level — so the thinking goes — everything is a wash, and we’re just changing the distribution of “total output” based on which people were frugal and which were spendthrifts.

This mindset is totally wrong. I explain things methodically in chapter 10 of my introductory textbook, but here’s the gist: It’s possible for everyone in the entire community to “live below his means,” that is, to consume less than his income and to save. The economy is then physically capable of reducing the output of consumption goods (TVs, sports cars, steak dinners, etc.) and increasing the output of investment or capital goods (drill presses, fertilizer, MRI machines, etc.). In the future, the larger quantities of various tools and equipment make the workers more productive than they otherwise would have been. That’s why the standard of living can rise; the community is physically capable of cranking out more goods and services because of the past investments.

Think of it like this: During his working career, a farmer takes some of his crop every year and uses it to buy a component for a tractor. One year he buys a tire, another year he buys a steering wheel, and so on. After working for 45 years, the farmer is ready to retire. By this point, he has assembled a brand-new tractor. Now he no longer needs to use his labor to earn an income. Instead, he rents out use of the tractor to the younger workers (who otherwise would have to use their bare hands to till the soil, etc.).

From a certain viewpoint, the retired farmer would be “skimming off the top” every time he ate an ear of corn harvested after he no longer worked the fields himself. After all, that corn would be part of that year’s harvest, so if the retired farmer ate it, there would be less corn available to the people who actually picked it. Yet the retired man’s consumption wouldn’t be financed through a “contribution” or “redistribution” from the young workers that year.

On the contrary, those young workers would be earning their full market wage (and if they were smart, they’d be saving some of it for their own retirement). The retired farmer would buy the corn on the open market, with the income he earned from renting out his tractor. There would be more corn to go around because he had spent decades assembling the tractor, and others in his cohort had built up stockpiles of fertilizer, hoes, irrigation equipment, etc.

Obviously my tale isn’t realistic, but it serves to get across the essence of voluntary retirement planning. People can get out more than they put in (measured in physical terms) because of what Böhm-Bawerk called the superior physical productivity of roundabout processes. As I complained during the debates over George W. Bush’s “privatization” proposals, many supposedly pro-market reformers want to get the magic of compound interest without the discipline of saving for decades.

A (Very Qualified) Defense of Charles Ponzi

Above I’ve explained why the “Ponzi scheme” accusation is accurate, in the context of modern political debates. However, there is a very important sense in which it is unfair — unfair to Charles Ponzi.

It’s true that Ponzi engaged in fraud; his victims never would have “invested” with him, had he accurately explained the business model. Libertarians therefore agree with everybody else that Charles Ponzi was a criminal and would have to face legal consequences in any just legal order.

However, so far as we know Ponzi never threatened anybody. He didn’t tell struggling young workers, “Give me 15 percent of your paycheck every week, so that I can make you a fantastic return — or else I’ll send goons to kidnap you.”

In this respect, Social Security isn’t a Ponzi scheme after all. It’s more analogous to mobsters shaking down people for protection money, because otherwise “bad things could happen.”

Conclusion

The complaints about Social Security are accurate: The only reason it has enjoyed such “success” thus far is that it relied on increasing contributions from each new generation of workers. Now that the demographics have turned against the system, it is literally unsustainable. We will see increased taxes on workers, reduced payments to beneficiaries, or some combination of the two.

In the voluntary private sector, people can plan for their own retirement through genuine saving and investment. They don’t need to extract concessions from the next generation of workers, because the retirees’ prior savings allow the creation of capital goods that will provide income when their bodies no longer can do so.

Finally, in one important respect a classic Ponzi scheme is less dangerous than Social Security: It relies on fooling people into voluntarily handing over their money. Once the fraud is detected, the danger is eliminated. In contrast, American workers have no choice but to “contribute” to Social Security, whether they like the deal or not.

Regards,

Robert Murphy,
for The Daily Reckoning

Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

The usual suspects immediately denounced him, with Keynesian Brad DeLong anointing Zoellick the “Stupidest Man Alive.”

In the present article I’ll explain the resurging interest in the yellow metal.

I’ll also explain the dangers of Zoellick’s proposal, and why fans of the classical gold standard should be wary.

The Limitations of the Printing Press

In order to make sense of our current situation – and why Zoellick would timidly call for a return to a pseudo-gold standard – we need to first think through the logic of fiat money. Fiat money is not “backed up” by anything; it is intrinsically useless paper (or nowadays, mere electronic bookkeeping entries) that is valuable only because of its anticipated purchasing power. In contrast, a market-based commodity money, such as gold or silver, is a useful good in its own right, serving industrial and consumer purposes.

The critical difference between fiat and commodity money is that fiat money can be produced in virtually unlimited quantities at very low cost. In this respect, the person who controls the printing press of a fiat currency is in a much stronger position than the person who owns a gold mine. With just some ink and paper, the printing press can create a million new dollars quite easily, whereas the owner of the gold mine would need to hire workers to operate expensive equipment in order to bring forth new amounts of gold having the same market value.

Yet we shouldn’t conclude that the owner of a printing press has unlimited power. For one thing, prices would eventually rise in response to large amounts of new money creation. So printing off, say, $1 million in fresh new currency would buy fewer and fewer goods and services with each successive round of inflation.

Even more problematic, the people in the community would abandon the currency if the inflation became too excessive. For example, if a brilliant counterfeiter developed a machine to produce perfect $100 bills in his basement, he wouldn’t be able to literally buy the whole world. Long before that point – even if the authorities didn’t track him down – people would have ditched the dollar and switched to the use of other currencies.

Although our scenario sounds farfetched, it’s actually very close to the real world, right now. The only difference is that instead of our hypothetical, brilliant counterfeiter in the basement, we have our actual, less-than-brilliant economist in the Federal Reserve. His name, of course, is Ben Bernanke.

The Bretton Woods System

The original Bretton Woods system – so named because of the location of the meetings that established it in 1944 – governed international monetary arrangements in the postwar era until Richard Nixon’s fateful decision to close the gold window in 1971.

Under the Bretton Woods agreement, other nations would use US dollars as their “reserves.” The Bank of England, Bank of France, etc., would issue their own domestic currencies, but would maintain stockpiles of US dollars with which they could regulate the value of their own currencies. If the British pound sterling began to depreciate against the US dollar, for example, then the Bank of England could enter the foreign-exchange market and use some of its dollar holdings to “buy pounds,” thus bringing the value of the pound back within target. In this way, investors across the globe could feel comfortable with their British financial holdings, because the pound was tied to the dollar.

Note the tremendously advantageous position that the Bretton Woods system assigned to the United States. As issuer of the world’s reserve currency, the United States had a very captive market. If the Bank of England wanted to increase its dollar reserves by another $1 million, then ultimately Great Britain had to sell $1 million worth of goods and services to Americans in order to earn the dollars. The Bretton Woods system effectively expanded the scope for US inflation to the entire world, thus magnifying the benefits to those who controlled the American printing press.

Of course, the other members of Bretton Woods understood these details. The US achieved its privileged outcome in the negotiations because of its economic and military might at that point in world history. But in order to restrain the natural temptation for runaway inflation by US officials, the Bretton Woods system linked the dollar itself to gold. Specifically, any central bank could redeem its dollars for gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce.

The Bretton Woods system has been described as a “gold-exchange standard,” in contrast to the classical gold standard. In the original framework – which was smashed, like so many other aspects of Western civilization, in World War I – each nation tied its own currency to gold. Then, the currencies in turn traded at fixed exchange rates against each other, because of their mutual ties to gold. Individual citizens could present the currencies for redemption in gold, keeping a very tight check on inflation. If any central bank began to issue too much currency in relation to its gold reserves, speculators would begin depleting the reserves, causing the central bank to quickly reverse course.

Under the diluted Bretton Woods system, individual citizens had no right of redemption. Most currencies were only indirectly linked to gold (via their link to the dollar). And, of course, even this tenuous link was destroyed when Richard Nixon abandoned the dollar’s convertibility to gold in 1971. At this point, the entire global financial system was based utterly on fiat money.

No longer shackled by the peg to gold, the Federal Reserve began printing money with reckless abandon. The obvious results were an acceleration in US consumer prices, and an explosion in the US trade deficit, trends that noticeably worsen after 1971:

Consumer Price Index (Blue Line, Right Scale) and Balance of Payments as a Share of GDP (Red Line, Left Scale)

The Reluctant Return to Gold

Say what you will about the powerful people running the global monetary system, but they aren’t stupid. They can see as well as the rest of us that there is no “exit strategy” for Bernanke’s bouts of massive inflation, or “quantitative easing” as they now call it. At some point, the trillion(s) in excess reserves will begin leaking back into the broader monetary aggregates. At that point, Bernanke or a successor will need to choose between saving the dollar or saving major Wall Street institutions. I predict that he will sacrifice the dollar, and it seems many elites around the world have come to the same conclusion.

It is in this context that World Bank president Zoellick writes:

The G20 should complement [a] growth recovery programme with a plan to build a co-operative monetary system that reflects emerging economic conditions. This new system is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves towards internationalisation and then an open capital account.

The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today. (emphasis added)

To repeat, gold is the bane of central bankers; it ties their hands and limits their discretion when conducting monetary policy. However, the game collapses if people lose faith in the fiat currency underpinning the whole system. As the recklessness of Bernanke’s moves becomes apparent to more and more people, the central planners around the world will need to throw a bone to the fearful public. A “basket of currencies,” each of which is still fiat-paper money, will not suffice.

As Zoellick is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a participant in the notorious Bilderberg meetings, some analysts are understandably suspicious of his motives. After all, if powerful people were trying to introduce a regional currency to replace the dollar – in the same way that the euro has supplanted the traditional European currencies – then it would be necessary to first wreck the dollar. In its place, it would be very tempting to offer a new currency with a tie to gold.

In this light, what appear to be “inexplicable” and contradictory actions by the Federal Reserve and other powerful figures would make perfect sense.

Conclusion

Regardless of the machinations of the political insiders, the laws of economics cannot be denied. Central bankers cannot be trusted with the printing press, especially when there is no formal check on their inflationary policies. It is no coincidence that gold is hitting such heights as investors the world over hunker down for what may very well be a collapse of the dollar system.

Robert Murphy
for The Daily Reckoning

Gold: The Market’s Global Currency originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

Bad Hoover History

Krugman writes,

More than a year ago I coined a phrase that seems to have made its way into the econolexicon; writing about how cutbacks at the state and local level would tend to undermine fiscal stimulus at the federal level, I said that we had fifty Herbert Hoovers.

But I was wrong. Via Mark Thoma, we have at least fifty-one – because we have to add David Broder to the list.

Before I get there, let’s note that fears about fiscal drag at the state and local level have, in fact, proved justified. Aizenman and Pasricha have a fairly definitive analysis; you can get the quick and dirty version just by looking at government purchases of goods and services…

Krugman then produces a chart (which we’ll get to in a moment) showing that federal spending has risen while state and local government spending has fallen. He concludes,

And David Broder thinks this is a good thing, that Washington should be more like the states.

What amazes me is that Broder doesn’t even seem to be aware that there’s an argument on the other side, let alone that most economists are dismayed by the effects of fiscal austerity. If Broder is a guide to Beltway conventional wisdom – which he usually is – we’ve got a big problem.

This notion of Herbert Hoover engaging in merciless budget cutting has become quite entrenched in the pro-deficit community. The idea is that the reason the Great Depression was so awful was that Herbert Hoover was afraid to engage in sufficiently stimulative fiscal policy, at the same time that the gold standard prevented the Federal Reserve from implementing sufficiently expansionary monetary policy.

According to this view, FDR came sweeping into office and increased the deficit, which pulled the US economy back from the brink. But then – alas – Roosevelt too succumbed to the irrational deficitphobia, and his attempt to balance the budget plunged the nation back into deep recession in 1937.

I have already documented the theoretical and empirical problems with this narrative, when Christina Romer gave a version of it to defend the Obama administration’s plans for “stimulus” spending.

Let’s go back to Krugman’s original “Fifty Herbert Hoovers” column to see exactly what his point is:

No modern American president would repeat the fiscal mistake of 1932, in which the federal government tried to balance its budget in the face of a severe recession. The Obama administration will put deficit concerns on hold while it fights the economic crisis…

It’s true that the economy is currently shrinking. But that’s the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending, too…

The priority right now is to fight off the attack of the 50 Herbert Hoovers, and make sure that the fiscal problems of the states don’t make the economic crisis even worse.

After reading Krugman’s piece, the casual reader would be quite confident that the Hoover administration slashed spending in 1932. Such a reader would probably be surprised to learn that the “fiscal mistake of 1932” was a reduction in spending of about $63 million, or 1.3 percent of the prior year’s budget. Krugman’s column mentions nothing of the tremendous hike in tax rates at this time, such as the top income tax rate which jumped from 25 percent to 63 percent (!) in 1932. (See my book on the Depression for more details.)

Yet these are just the minor surprises. The real surprise would come if the reader saw a compilation of federal budget deficits as a share of the economy, and saw that the Hoover administration (a) came nowhere near a balanced budget after its attempt at “fiscal austerity” and (b) saw the deficit grow as a share of GDP after the stock market crash in every single year Hoover remained in office. See for yourself, keeping in mind that government budgets are calculated with respect to fiscal, not calendar, years:

Isn’t that extraordinary? The Keynesians typically measure budget deficits as a share of the economy. Yet despite the merciless budget-austerity measures implemented in calendar year 1932 (which show up in fiscal year 1933), the budget deficit as a share of GDP was actually at a record high for the Hoover term.

To be clear, the budget deficit in absolute terms shrank just a tad, from $2.7 billion dollars in fiscal year 1932 to $2.6 billion in FY 1933. But the size of the economy itself imploded – due in part to Hoover’s obscene tax-rate hikes, but also to the general deflation. (From June 1932 to June 1933, the consumer price index fell a whopping 6.6 percent.) So in real terms, federal spending went up every year of the Hoover administration, even after the alleged budget bloodbath of 1932.

Of course, Krugman could come back and argue that although the budget deficit went up, it was too little, too late. After all, Hoover was apparently in the grip of the liquidationists, and so maybe his budget deficits were tiny in the grand scheme of things.

To get a sense of just how big Hoover’s deficits were, we can compare the table above to the first term of George W. Bush. (Note that the federal government’s fiscal years now start on October 1, compared to July 1 back in the 1930s.)

Isn’t that interesting? After Herbert Hoover engaged in his merciless austerity programs, which recklessly placed the goal of a balanced budget above the need for countercyclical stimulus spending, the deficit was 4.5 percent of GDP. And yet during the first term of the George W. Bush administration – when Krugman and others denounced him for reckless tax cuts while starting a war – the budget deficit peaked at 3.6% of GDP.

Yes, yes, the clever Keynesian can always wriggle free from the handcuffs and escape the trap we’ve set for him. You see, the economy needed massive budget deficits in the early 1930s, whereas there was no such “output gap” in 2004.

But my point here is this: Krugman’s assessment of a merciless austerity budget, versus a reckless spending orgy, has nothing to do with the actual numbers. No, Hoover’s budget deficit must have been too small, because the economy kept getting worse. Just like Obama’s stimulus package must have been too small, because the economy got worse than any of Obama’s advisors had predicted.

Believing Is Seeing

Krugman’s habit of looking at the data and seeing whatever “facts” his Keynesian theory requires is beautifully illustrated in his commentary on a chart contrasting federal with state and local government spending:

[L]et’s note that fears about fiscal drag at the state and local level have, in fact, proved justified. Aizenman and Pasricha have a fairly definitive analysis; you can get the quick and dirty version just by looking at government purchases of goods and services:

The…green line shows the rate of growth of federal G, which did shoot up, although it’s starting to fade out. The red line shows state and local G, which moved in the opposite direction. And the blue line in the middle shows the total, which did nothing much.

Now, this omits tax cuts and transfer payments, which presumably did something. But I think it’s fair to say that state and local cuts largely offset federal stimulus.

Now here’s what’s really interesting: Try to match up Krugman’s commentary with the actual lines in that chart. You will find it rather difficult.

First of all, Krugman is trying to show that the boost in federal spending was largely offset by the drop in state and local spending; that’s why he says the blue line “did nothing much.”

Well what does Krugman consider to be “nothing much”? As we can see from the chart, the blue line – spending at all levels of government – did in fact go up as a result of the immense increase in federal government spending. The recession officially began in December 2007. From the 4th quarter of 2007 through the 4th quarter of 2009, spending at all levels (the series Krugman is measuring above as the blue line) increased by 4.4 percent.

Now Krugman wants to say this increase amounts to “nothing much.” OK, fair enough. But what then should we say about the drop in state and local spending? Over the same time period, state and local spending (the series Krugman is measuring above as the red line) fell by 0.4 percent. So if the increase in total spending of 4.4 percent since the start of the recession is “nothing much,” then the drop in state and local spending of 0.4 percent must be much ado about nothing, I would think.

You can check that my figures make sense, by simply eyeballing Krugman’s own chart. The shocking “fifty Herbert Hoovers” at the state and local levels only very briefly managed to make their year-over-year growth rates negative. In other words, the red line in Krugman’s chart just dips below the zero line very modestly in late 2008 and early 2009.

In fact, pretend for a moment that you didn’t know when the huge fiscal crisis in state and local spending hit the United States, and all you had to work with was Krugman’s chart. Looking at the red line, wouldn’t you have thought the plunge from 2001 to 2003 was far more dramatic? And wouldn’t you have thought the negative growth rates from late 2004 through early 2005 were an indication of more severe fiscal austerity than the relatively modest dip of recent vintage?

Conclusion

Paul Krugman loves to buttress his commentary with statistics and charts. But very often his own data don’t agree with the story he’s selling. This doesn’t mean Krugman is consciously lying; he might honestly “see” his interpretation jumping out of the numbers. But rival explanations – for example ones that claim government deficit spending doesn’t help an economy – fit the evidence far better.

Robert Murphy
for The Daily Reckoning

Krugman’s Hoover History originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

Let’s first set the record straight on Herbert Hoover’s fiscal policies. Contrary to what you have heard and read over the last year, Hoover behaved as a textbook Keynesian after the stock market crash. He immediately cut income tax rates by one percentage point (applicable to the 1929 tax year) and began ratcheting up federal spending, increasing it 42 percent from fiscal year (FY) 1930 to FY 1932.

But to truly appreciate Hoover’s Keynesian bona fides, we must realize that this enormous jump in spending occurred amidst a collapse in tax receipts, due both to the decline in economic activity as well as the price deflation of the early 1930s. This combination led to unprecedented peacetime deficits under the Hoover Administration—something FDR railed against during the 1932 campaign!

How big were Hoover’s deficits? Well, his predecessor Calvin Coolidge had run a budget surplus every single year of his own presidency, and he held the federal budget roughly constant despite the roaring prosperity (and surging tax receipts) of the 1920s. In contrast to Coolidge—who was a true small-government president—Herbert Hoover managed to turn his initial $700 million surplus into a $2.6 billion deficit by 1932.

It’s true, that doesn’t sound like a big number today; Henry Paulson handed out more to bankers by breakfast. But keep in mind that Hoover’s $2.6 billion deficit occurred because he spent $4.6 billion while only taking in $2 billion in tax receipts. Thus, as a percentage of the overall budget, the 1932 deficit was astounding—it would translate into a $3.3 trillion deficit in 2007 (instead of the actual deficit of $162 billion that year). For another angle, I note that Hoover’s 1932 deficit was 4 percent of GDP, hardly the record of a Neanderthal budget cutter.

The real reason unemployment soared throughout Hoover’s term was not his aversion to deficits, or his infatuation with the gold standard. No, the one thing that set Hoover apart from all previous US presidents was his insistence to big business that they not cut wage rates in response to the economic collapse. Hoover held a faulty notion that workers’ purchasing power was the source of an economy’s strength, and so it seemed to him that it would set in motion a vicious cycle if businesses began laying off workers and slashing paychecks because of slackening demand.

The results speak for themselves. During the heartless “liquidationist” era before Hoover, depressions (or “panics”) were typically over within two years. Yes, it was surely no fun for workers to see their paychecks shrink quite rapidly, but it ensured a quick recovery and in any event the blow was cushioned because prices in general would fall too.

So what was the fate of the worker during the allegedly compassionate Hoover era, when “enlightened” business leaders maintained wage rates amidst falling prices and profits? Well, Econ 101 tells us that higher prices lead to a smaller amount purchased. Because workers’ “real wages” (i.e. nominal pay adjusted for price deflation) rose more quickly in the early 1930s than they had even during the Roaring Twenties, businesses couldn’t afford to hire as many workers. That’s why unemployment rates shot up to an inconceivable 28 percent by March 1933.

“This is all very interesting,” the skeptical reader might say, “but it’s undeniable that the huge spending of World War II pulled America out of the Depression. So it’s clear Herbert Hoover didn’t spend enough money.”

Ah, here we come to one of the greatest myths in economic history, the alleged “fact” that US military spending fixed the economy. In my book I relied very heavily on the pioneering revisionist work of Bob Higgs, who has shown in several articles and books that the US economy was mired in depression until 1946, when the federal government finally relaxed its grip on the country’s resources and workers.

Sure, unemployment rates dropped sharply after the US began drafting men into the armed forces. Is that so surprising? By the same token, if Obama wanted to reduce unemployment today, he could take two million laid-off workers, equip them with arm floaties, and send them to fight pirates. Voila! The unemployment rate would fall.

The official government measures of rising GDP during the war years is also misleading. GDP figures include government spending, and so the massive military outlays were lumped into the numbers, even though $1 million spent on tanks is hardly the same indication of true economic output as $1 million spent by households on cars.

On top of that distortion, Higgs reminds us that the government instituted price controls during the war. Normally, if the Fed prints up a bunch of money to allow the government to buy massive quantities of goods (such as munitions and bombers, in this case), the CPI would go through the roof. Then when the economic statisticians tabulated the nominal GDP figures, they would adjust them downward because of the hike in the cost of living, so that “inflation adjusted” (real) GDP would not look as impressive. But this adjustment couldn’t occur, because the government made it illegal for the CPI to go through the roof. So those official measures showing “real GDP” rising during World War II are as phony as the Soviet Union’s announcements of industrial achievements.

If the Keynesians rely on bad economic theory, and misleading history, to justify their calls for huge government deficits, the Chicago School monetarists are hardly better when they call for interest rates at zero percent (or even negative!) and blame the Depression on the Fed’s lack of willpower.

In doing research for the book, what I noticed is that from the time it opened its doors in November, 1914, all the way through 1931, the New York Fed charged its record-low rates at the very end of this period. The “discount rate” was the interest rate the Fed banks would charge on collateralized loans made to member banks. For the New York Fed, rates had bounced around since its founding, but they were never higher than 7 percent and never lower than 3 percent, going into 1929.

This changed after the stock market crash. On November 1, just a few days following Black Monday and Black Tuesday—when the market dropped almost 13 percent and then almost 12 percent back-to-back—the New York Fed began cutting its rate. It had been charging banks 6 percent going into the Crash, and then a few days later it slashed by a full percentage point. Then, over the next few years, the New York periodically cut rates down to a record-low of 1½ percent by May 1931. It held the rate there until October 1931, when it began hiking to stem a gold outflow caused by Great Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard the month before. (Worldwide investors feared the US would follow suit, so they started dumping their dollars while the American gold window was still open.)

So far my story doesn’t sound unusual. “Everybody knows” that the Fed is supposed to slash rates to ease liquidity crunches during a financial panic. It helps to ease the crisis, and provides a softer landing than if the supply of credit were fixed.

But guess what? Throughout the period we are considering, the highest the New York Fed ever charged banks was 7 percent. And the only time it did that was smack dab in the middle of the 1920-1921 depression.

Although you’ve probably never heard of it, this earlier depression was quite severe, with unemployment averaging 11.7 percent in 1921. Fortunately it was over fairly quickly; unemployment was down to 6.7 percent in 1922, and then an incredibly low 2.4 percent by 1923.

After working on these issues for my book, it suddenly became obvious to me: The high rates of the 1920-1921 depression had certainly been painful, but they had cleaned the rot out of the structure of production very thoroughly. The US money supply and prices had roughly doubled during World War I, and the record-high discount rate starting in June 1920 was a pressure washer on the malinvestments that had festered during the war boom.

Going into 1923, the capital structure in the United States was a lean, mean, producing machine. In conjunction with Andrew Mellon’s incredible tax cuts, the Roaring ’20s were arguably the most prosperous period in American history. It wasn’t merely that the average person got richer. No, his life changed in the 1920s. Many families acquired electricity and cars for the first time during this decade.

In contrast, during the early 1930s, the Fed’s rate cuts “for some reason” didn’t seem to do the trick. In fact, they sowed the seeds for the worst decade in US economic history.

It’s actually easier to see what’s going on if you forget about a central bank, and just pretend that we were living in the good old days when banks would compete with each other and there was no cartelizing overseer. Now in this environment, when a panic hits and most people realize that they haven’t been saving enough—that they wish they were holding more liquid funds right this moment than their earlier plans had provided them—what should the sellers of liquid funds do?

The answer is obvious: They should raise their prices. The scarcity of liquid funds really has increased after the bubble pops, and its price ought to reflect that new information. People need to know how to change their behavior, after all, and market prices mean something.

But in more modern times, thanks not just to Keynes but more important to Milton Friedman, central bankers now think that during the sudden liquidity crunch, they are supposed to shovel their product out the door. But in order to do that, of course, they have to water down its potency. It’s as if a wine dealer suddenly has a rush of customers for a rare vintage of which he only has 3 bottles, and his response is to put the vintage on sale but then dilute it with 9 parts water to 1 part wine. That way he can sell to all the eager customers and not pick their pocket at the same time.

Let’s try a different example: If the owner of a trucking company experiences a huge rush for his services, he might decide to postpone essential maintenance on his fleet, to take advantage of the unprecedented demand. But during this period he will be charging record shipping prices to make it worth his while to deviate from the normal, “safe” way of running his business. He will only be willing to bear the extra risk (either to the safety of his drivers or just the long-term operation of the trucks) if he is being compensated for it.

The same is true for the banks. Just as every other business during a recession wants to bolster its cash reserves, so too with the business that rents out cash reserves. If there’s a hurricane, the stores selling flashlights and generators should raise the prices on those essential items, to make sure they are rationed correctly. The same is true for liquidity, the moment after the community realizes they are in desperate need of it.

Regards,

Robert P. Murphy
for The Daily Reckoning

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

First, let’s look at what those penny pinchers in the federal government are up to. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released its analysis of the Obama Administration’s ten-year budget proposal. The projected deficit for (fiscal year) 2009 is a whopping $1.8 trillion. Now the president has said, in effect, that you need to spend money to save money, but the CBO projects deficits once again exceeding $1 trillion by 2018. In fact, over the whole CBO forecast from 2009-2019, the lowest the deficit ever goes is $658 billion.

This should be rather surprising to anyone who actually took Obama at his word when he promised to restore fiscal discipline to Washington. In fact, the CBO projects that the outstanding federal debt held by the public will increase from 40.8% of GDP in 2008 to 82.4% in 2019. In other words, the CBO predicts a doubling of the national debt in a mere decade.

One last thing to give you chills (and not the good kind): The CBO is not exactly a doom-and-gloom forecasting service. They’re run by the government, for crying out loud. This is the same CBO that projected at the start of the Bush Administration ten years of an accumulated $5.6 trillion in budget surpluses.

I would caution readers not to dismiss all CBO numbers as obviously meaningless. On the contrary, I think we will see the same pattern play out under Obama as under Bush: Because the CBO in both cases is grossly overstating future tax receipts, its projections for the Obama proposal are going to turn out just as rosy as they did back in 2001. Besides anemic tax receipts, if mortgage defaults continue to increase, the CBO projections on losses from the Treasury’s numerous “rescue” measures will also be far too optimistic.

In short, I think we should view the doubling of the national debt (as a share of the overall economy) over the next decade as a naïve best-case scenario.

If fiscal policy is a disaster, monetary policy is even worse. Unfortunately, the issues here get very complicated, and so it’s difficult for the layman to know whom to trust. Not only do left-wingers like Paul Krugman say that we need more inflation, but even (alleged) right-wingers like Greg Mankiw are saying the exact same thing. With all due respect, those guys are crazy.

Normally, I do my best unshaved-guy-wearing-a-sandwich-board routine by showing the scary Fed chart of the monetary base. But every time I do that, some wise guy argues that I don’t understand how our banking system works, and that because of “deleveraging” we are actually experiencing a shrinking money supply.

No, we aren’t. It’s true that there are forces tending to shrink the money supply, but Bernanke has more than overwhelmed them. All of the standard measures of the money stock went way up during 2008, even though prices (as measured by the CPI) fell in some months. For example, the monetary aggregate M1 consists of very liquid items such as actual currency held by the public, and checking account deposits. It does not include the monetary base (which we know has exploded through the roof). Even so, look at the annual percentage graph of M1 recently; it’s grown at almost a record rate:

Now the reason prices haven’t exploded is that the demand to hold U.S. dollars has also increased dramatically. (That’s also what happened in the 1980s: the Reagan tax cuts and Volcker’s squelching of severe price inflation made it much more attractive to hold dollars, and so the Fed got away with printing a bunch even though the CPI didn’t increase wildly.)

Once people get over the shock of the financial crisis, the new money Bernanke has pumped into the system will begin pushing up prices. Others have used this analogy before me, but it’s still apt: The U.S. economy right now is like Wile E. Coyote right after he runs off a cliff but hasn’t yet looked down. Once the spell of a “deflationary spiral” is broken by a full quarter of significant price hikes, there will be an avalanche as people come to their senses.

Some analysts concede that the traditional Fed policies have indeed left the dollar vulnerable to serious devaluation, but they think the central bank wizards can save the day by acquiring new “tools.” For example, San Francisco Fed president Janet Yellen has been arguing that the Fed should be able to issue its own debt, to give the Fed more flexibility. The idea is that when the time comes for the Fed to sop up the excess reserves it has pumped into the banking system, it would be devastating to the incipient economic recovery if the Fed has to dump a bunch of mortgage-backed securities, or Treasury bonds, back onto the market. This would ruin the banks with MBS on their balance sheets, and/or it would push up interest rates for the government. Thus, the Fed would have painted itself into a corner, and it would have to choose between massive CPI hikes or a renewed recession. To avoid that nasty tradeoff, Yellen argues that if the Fed could sell its own debt, then it could drain reserves out of the banking system without unloading its own balance sheet.

For a different idea, economists Woodward and Hall think the Fed just needs the ability to charge banks for holding reserves. The Fed already (recently) obtained the right to pay interest on reserves, and so Woodward and Hall think the Fed should also have the ability to do the opposite, i.e. to be able to pay a negative interest rate on reserves that banks hold on deposit with the Fed.

How does this avert the threat of hyperinflation? Simple, according to Woodward and Hall. If banks ever start loaning out too much of their (now massive) excess reserves, and thereby start causing large price inflation, then the Fed can simply raise the interest rate it pays on reserves. Banks would then find it more profitable to lend to the Fed, as it were, rather than lending reserves out to homebuyers and other borrowers in the private sector. Voila! Problem solved.

Obviously these tricks can’t avoid the consequences of Bernanke’s mad money printing spree. At best, they would merely push back the day of reckoning, while ensuring that it grows exponentially (quite literally).

A quick numerical example: Let’s say the Fed wants to drain $100 billion in reserves out of the banking system, in order to cool off rising prices. But it doesn’t want to sell off some of its assets on its balance sheet (like “toxic” mortgage-backed securities), so instead the Fed sells $100 billion worth of the brand new “Fed bonds,” as Yellen hopes.

In the beginning, this will indeed solve the problem. When people in the private sector buy the Fed-issued bonds, they write checks on their banks and ultimately those banks see their reserves go down at the Fed. There is less money held by the public, and so prices don’t rise as quickly.

But what happens when the Fed bonds mature? For example, if the Fed sold a 12-month bond paying 1% interest, then after the year has passed our private sector buyers will hand over the securities and now their checking accounts will be credited with $101 billion. At that point, the economy would be in the same position as before, only worse: there would be an extra billion in newly created reserves (because of interest on the Fed debt).

The financial gurus running our financial system and advising our political leaders aren’t even thinking two steps ahead when making their cockamamie recommendations. For those readers who share my skepticism, the solution seems clear: You need to transfer your wealth out of assets denominated in fixed streams of U.S. dollars, and switch to something that responds to large price inflation. In short, sell your corporate and government bonds, and start stocking up on precious metals.

Regards,

Robert Murphy
for The Daily Reckoning

Editor’s Note: Robert P. Murphy has a PhD in economics from NYU and is author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal (Regnery 2009). He runs the blog Free Advice.

Will New Fed “Tools” Avert Hyperinflation? originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.

This Keynesian orthodoxy was shattered in the 1970s when the United States suffered through “stagflation,” which was high unemployment and high inflation. This outcome was not supposed to be possible, according to the popular macroeconomics models, and it left policy makers with no clear choice. If the Fed raised rates to stem the inflation, it would hurt the economy even more, but if the Fed cut rates (through printing more money) the inflation problem would worsen. The vacuum created by this crisis in both theory and policy was filled by the Reagan Revolution and supply-side economics.

At this stage nothing is certain, but the country is currently headed straight into a period of very rapid price hikes and a very bad recession. It would not surprise me at all if the national unemployment rate and the annualized rate of consumer price inflation both broke through into double digits by the end of 2009. Moreover, regardless of when it actually starts, I predict that things will get much worse before they get better, and that the United States will be mired in a malfunctioning economy for at least a decade, with price inflation in the double-digits (possibly higher) the entire time. We can call this condition “hyper-depression.”

As with stagflation during the 1970s, hyper-depression will blow up the prevailing “cutting edge” models of the macroeconomy. Back when he was an academic, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke was actually an expert on the Great Depression. Bernanke adheres to the (alleged) lesson taught by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their classic A Monetary History of the United States. F&S argued that Fed officials bore a large share of the blame for the Great Depression, because they did not pump in enough liquidity. The quantity of money actually declined by about a third from 1929-1933, as panicked customers withdrew cash from the banks. (In a fractional reserve banking system, when people withdraw deposits, the banks have to shrink their outstanding checking balances because of reserve requirements.)

As the following chart illustrates, Bernanke has taken Friedman’s warning to heart: The Fed has more than doubled its balance sheet since the financial crisis began, leading to an unprecedented jump in the monetary base:

Thus far, this enormous injection of new reserves into the banking system hasn’t caused the CPI to explode, but that is because (a) the banks are mostly sitting on the new reserves because they are all terrified, and (b) the public’s demand for cash balances has risen sharply. But using very back-of-the-envelope calculations, there is now enough slack in the system so that if banks calmed down and lent out the maximum amount of reserves, the public’s total money stock could increase by a factor of 10. There is no way that the public will simply add that new money to its checking accounts or home safes without increasing their spending. Eventually, prices quoted in U.S. dollars will start shooting upward.

All of the financial analysts are aware of this threat, but they foolishly reassure us, “Bernanke will unwind the Fed’s holdings once the economy improves.” But this commits the same mistake as the Keynesians during the 1970s: What happens when the CPI begins rising several percentage points per month, and unemployment is still in the double digits? What would Bernanke do at that point? Expecting the Fed chief to relinquish his new role of buying hundreds of billions in assets at whim, in the midst of a severe recession, would be akin to hoping that a dictator would end his declaration of “emergency” martial law in the middle of a civil war.

There are even many free market economists who are predicting that the Fed’s massive money-pumping will “fix” the economy, at least for a while, but at the cost of high price inflation. Yet these analysts don’t realize that they are buying into – what we all thought was – the discredited Phillips Curve. The 1970s proved that the Fed cannot fix structural problems with the economy by showering it with new money. Hyper-depression is simply stagflation squared.

People need to stop wondering, “When will the market find its bottom? This month? Next?” The federal government has already done an incalculable amount of damage to the American financial sector, and the insults keep growing. Think of it: Besides the unpredictable “sometimes we seize you, sometimes we take billions of bad assets off your books, sometimes we let you fail” strategy with respect to major financial institutions, the government has also done childish things such as ban short-selling of financial stocks. No one knows what the rules will be next week in these markets. Only a fool would expose new capital to the American financial sector at this point – and the politicians have the gall to wonder, “Why are the laissez-faire credit markets frozen?”

Market interest rates are prices and as such they communicate important information about real, underlying scarcity. When the central banks of the world decided to drive interest rates down to practically zero, they crippled the ability of the world economy to heal itself after the overconsumption of the housing boom. People all over the world need to be saving right now, and yet governments are doing everything they can to squander what’s left of the capital stock.

I had resisted predicting that we are now living through the early period of the Great Depression II. After all, the conventional statistics today are nowhere near as bad as they were in the 1930s. However, the recent tussle over AIG bonus payments convinced me that we are in this one for the long haul. In particular, Senator Charles Schumer’s comments – and the proposed legislation to back them up – show that we no longer have property rights in this country:

“My colleagues and I are sending a letter to [AIG CEO] Mr. Liddy informing him that he can go right ahead and tell these employees that are scheduled to get bonuses that they should voluntarily return them, because if they don’t, we plan to virtually tax all of it. He should tell these employees if they don’t give the money back, we’ll put in place a new law, that will allow us to [tax] these bonuses at a very high rate, so that it’s returned to its rightful owners, the taxpayers. So for those of you who are getting these bonuses, be forewarned: You will not be getting to keep them.”

This is an extremely dangerous precedent. It’s true – as many outraged callers to the AM talk shows explain – AIG received billions in government handouts, and so there is a plausible case to be made that those contractual arrangements with its executives should have been amended. But if that’s the case, then the government should have made that a condition of the original “loan,” or at the very least the government should now exercise its power as the de facto owner of AIG. Liddy was handpicked by the government to run the company, so if the politicians don’t like his decisions, they should fire him.

In contrast, look what Schumer & Co. have done. They are establishing the precedent that if a particular group of rich people does something that angers the government, and if this group happens to be wildly unpopular with the general public, then it is noble for the government to implement ex post facto changes to the tax code, singling this people out and basically robbing them. Schumer’s speech against AIG executives is not much different from him declaring, “So I say to Rush Limbaugh and other talk show hosts: Go ahead and continue preaching your hatred and pessimism about the U.S. economy; this is a free country and you have the right to do that. But be forewarned that we are crafting new legislation that will tax 90 percent of your ad revenues from doing so.”

What people need to realize is that the government is going to keep making this worse. In other words, it is not enough to step back and say, “Well, the feds have already partially nationalized the entire banking system, and brought politics into all major business decisions – including how executives choose to travel to business meetings. What are the effects?” On the contrary, we need to realize that as things continue to deteriorate – and they will – the Obama Administration will keep upping the ante. “What? The first stimulus didn’t work? OK let’s borrow and spend another $1 trillion; maybe that will ‘take.’”

The American people need to prepare themselves for hyper-depression. The future is still uncertain, and if the folks in Washington suddenly found free market religion, that terrible outcome could be avoided. But I’m not holding my breath.

Regards,

Robert Murphy
for The Daily Reckoning

Editor’s Note: Robert P. Murphy has a PhD in economics from NYU and is author of the forthcoming The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal (Regnery 2009). He runs the blog Free Advice.

The Threat of Hyper-Depression originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas.