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- Sprache: Englisch
Explore the inevitable collapse of the fiat monetary system Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money, Second Edition challenges the mainstream consensus on money and monetary policy. While it is today generally believed that the transition from 'hard' and inflexible commodity money (such as a gold standard) to entirely flexible and potentially unlimited fiat money under national central banks allows for superior economic stability, Paper Money Collapse shows that the opposite is true. Systems of highly elastic and constantly expanding money are not only unnecessary, even for growing economies, they are always extremely destabilizing. Over time, they must lead to substantial imbalances, including excessive levels of debt and distorted asset prices, that will require ever faster money production to sustain. Ultimately, however, there is no alternative to a complete liquidation of these distortions. Based on insights of many renowned economists and in particular of the Austrian School of Economics, the book explains through rigorous logic and in precise language why our system of flexible fiat money is incompatible with a market economy and therefore unsustainable. Paper money systems have always led to economic disintegration--without exception--throughout history. It will not be different for our system and we may be closer to the endgame than many think. The updated second edition incorporates: * A new introduction and an extended outlook section that discusses various "endgames" * Responses to criticisms, alternative views, and a critical assessment of 'solutions' * Comments on recent policy trends, including attempts to exit the 'easy money' policy mode * An evaluation of new crypto-currency Bitcoin Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money, Second Edition clarifies the problem of paper money clearly and eloquently, and proposes multiple routes to a solution.
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Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Contra the Mainstream Consensus—What This Book Is About
Part One: The Basics of Money
Chapter 1: The Fundamentals of Money and Money Demand
The Origin and Purpose of Money
An Anthropologist’s Challenge
What Gives Money Value?
(Almost) Any Quantity of Money Will Do
The Demand for Money
Are “Sticky” Prices a Problem?
Other Functions of Money
The Unique Position of the Paper Money Producer
The Monetary Asset versus Other Goods
Notes
Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Fractional-Reserve Banking
The Origin and Basics of Fractional-Reserve Banking
Who Owns “Deposited” Money?
Exposing Misconceptions about Fractional-Reserve Banking
“Free Banking” Is Limited Banking
Summary of Part One
Notes
Part Two: The Effects of Money Injections
Chapter 3: Money Injections without Credit Markets
Even, Instant, and Transparent Money Injection
Even and Nontransparent Money Injection
Uneven and Nontransparent Money Injection
Notes
Chapter 4: Money Injections via Credit Markets
Consumption, Saving, and Investing
Interest
Interest Rates Are Not Determined by Factor Productivity
Money Injection via the Loan Market
The Process in More Detail
Policy Implications of the Austrian Theory
Addendum: Gordon Tullock’s Critique of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory and Some Words on “Forced Saving”
An Example: U.S. Housing Boom and Bust
Summary of Part Two
Notes
Part Three: Fallacies about the Price Level and Price-Level Stabilization
Chapter 5: Common Misconceptions Regarding the Price Level
The Fallacy That a Stable Price Level Means “Neutral” Money
The Fallacy That Hard Money Is Unstable Money, Part 1—History
The Fallacy That Hard Money Is Unstable Money, Part 2—Theory
Notes
Chapter 6: The Policy of Stabilization
Problems with Price Index Stabilization
Addendum: The “Free Bankers” and the Theory of Immaculate Fractional-Reserve Banking
Summary of Part Three
Notes
Part Four: A History of Paper Money and How We Got to Where We Are Now
Chapter 7: A Legacy of Failure
Paper Money Experiments
1914–2014: A Century of Monetary Decay
Notes
Part Five: Beyond the Cycle: Paper Money’s Endgame and the Future of Money
Chapter 8: The Beneficiaries of the Paper Money System
Paper Money and the Banks
Paper Money and the State
Paper Money and the Professional Economist
Notes
Chapter 9: The Intellectual Superstructure of the Present System
The Alternative View: Individualism and Laissez-Faire
The Mainstream View: Collectivism and Interventionism
The Political Appeal of Mainstream Macroeconomics
The Myth That Everybody Benefits from “Stimulus”
Monetarism as Monetary Interventionism
The Savings Glut Theory and the Myth of Underconsumption and Underinvestment
Inflationism and International Policy Coordination
Notes
Chapter 10: Endgames—Inflationary Meltdown or Return to Hard Money?
Paper Money Collapse
Alternatives: Return to Hard Money
A Return to a Gold Standard
The Separation of Money and State
Bitcoin—Money of No Authority
Notes
Epilogue: Money, Freedom, and Capitalism
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Paper Money Collapse
Second Edition
The Folly of Elastic Money
Detlev S. Schlichter
Cover image: © Getty/Brand New Images
Cover design: Wiley
Copyright © 2014 by Detlev S. Schlichter. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
The first edition of Paper Money Collapse was published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in 2011.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Schlichter, Detlev S., 1964-
Paper money collapse : the folly of elastic money / Detlev S. Schlichter ; foreword by Thomas Mayer. — Second Edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-87732-6 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-87736-4 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-87733-3 (ebk)
1. Paper money. 2. Money supply. 3. Currency question. 4. Credit. I. Title.
HG353.S35 2014
332.4'044—dc23
2014012694
To my parents.
The evils of this deluge of paper money are not to be removed until our citizens are generally and radically instructed in their cause and consequences, and silence by their authority the interested clamors and sophistry of speculating, shaving, and banking institutions. Till then, we must be content to return quo ad hoc to the savage state, to recur to barter in the exchange of our property for want of a stable common means of value, that now in use being less fixed than the beads and wampum of the Indian, and to deliver up our citizens, their property and their labor, passive victims to the swindling tricks of bankers and mountebankers.
—Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, March 1819
Foreword
Joseph Schumpeter is well known for his brilliant analysis of the role of the entrepreneur in the capitalist economy. Perhaps this is why the British magazine The Economist has labeled its weekly column on entrepreneurship after him. Many readers will be familiar with Schumpeter’s formula of “creative destruction” as the driver of progress in a capitalist economy. Less well known may be that Schumpeter forecast the downfall of capitalism, and that he blamed our monetary system for this.
In the war year of 1942, Schumpeter published his seminal work entitled Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.1 There, he described capitalism as the brute force that creates economic progress. The fundamental drivers that keep the capitalist machine going are the new consumer goods, the new production and transportation technologies, the new markets, and the new forms of industrial organization, which the capitalist company creates. The economy is continually revolutionized from within. The process of creative destruction is at the heart of capitalism. The creation of credit and money out of nothing is the adrenaline that carries creative destruction forward. Schumpeter says that the issuance of new means of payments corresponds to the commands of the central planning office of the socialist state, because companies lack their own means of payment, and there are no savings at the beginning of the investment process. The banking sector has a central role to generate growth in a capitalist economy. The ability of banks to create credit and money out of nothing is crucial for the funding of new entrepreneurial activities spontaneously. All that is needed is the decision of the bank to extend credit, and investment can begin, as if the central planning bureau in socialism had given the green light.
But the extension of credit can be faulty. Too many or the wrong entrepreneurial activities can be started. The result is financial crisis, recession, or even depression. But this is part of the capitalist process. A financial crisis where credits have to be written off because investments have failed is concentrated creative destruction. However, creative destruction is not only the engine for growth and expansion in the capitalist system; creative destruction in the end destroys capitalism itself, because society sets out to tame raw capitalism. Schumpeter expects the hollowing out of creative entrepreneurship by the rise of the managers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals in the companies and in society. With this, the entrepreneur loses his intellectual leadership and the economic structure transforms toward some sort of bureaucratic socialism. In that event, Schumpeter says, capitalism needs a policeman and a protector that regulates, protects, and exploits him: the state.
In this book, Detlev Schlichter shows how the elastic money system, the ability to create credit and money out of nothing, leads to economic instability and eventually its self-destruction. In this regard, he is in agreement with Schumpeter. Schlichter sees our money system ending in an inflationary meltdown. However, Schumpeter not only forecast but also welcomed the transition of capitalism to bureaucratic socialism as a way to tame capitalism and to create economic stability. He even thought that bureaucratic socialism was compatible with democracy. As long as politicians competed in the political market for votes, there was freedom of opinion and majority rule. Today, we know better. Socialism is a rotten economic system and incompatible with democracy. Schumpeter’s compatriots and contemporaries, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek, saw this much more clearly. Socialism was a failure, and it did fail. Prosperity needs economic and political freedom of individuals. Only they have the information needed for sensible economic decisions. No central planner can obtain this information, however sophisticated his instrument kit may be. It is the ideas of these other Austrian economists on which Schlichter builds his case for “inelastic money.” Only money that cannot be created out of nothing by the planners residing in central banks and their helpers in the commercial banks can protect us from the boom-bust cycles of the elastic money economy. Will inelastic money stifle innovation and growth? Hardly. Schumpeter gave too much credit to bankers for driving the capitalist economy. Bankers surely need entrepreneurs to extend credit for productive investment, but entrepreneurs do not need bankers. They can also go to the capital markets to seek funding for new projects. Credit need not be created out of nothing. In the capital markets, savings are readily available to be invested in rewarding projects. Capital markets are at heart intermediaries between savers and investors and not, like banks, creators of credit and money out of nothing.
The idea of inelastic money has few followers at present. The reaction of politicians and populations to the financial crisis has been along the lines predicted by Schumpeter: more bureaucratic socialism. But as Schlichter argues, “If we want a well-functioning economy we need free markets, and free markets require individual liberty, private property, and sound money.”2 Thus, sound money is also highly political: “It belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights.”3 I hope this book will have many readers who carry this message to our politicians and functionaries in central banks.
Thomas Mayer
Senior Fellow, Center for Financial Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt
Notes
1
. Joseph A. Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(New York/London: Harper and Brothers, 1942).
2
. See Epilogue, p. TK.
3
. Ludwig von Mises,
The Theory of Money and Credit
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), Chapter 21, quoted by Schlichter in Epilogue, p. 307.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tula Batanchiev and her team at John Wiley & Sons for proposing this second, revised and updated edition of Paper Money Collapse, for their excellent editorial work on the manuscript, and exemplary support all round.
Additional thanks to the many readers and the reviewers of the book’s first edition, the visitors to my website, and attendees to my lectures and speeches, who have generously commented on the book and my ideas, and whose criticisms, questions, and suggestions have further shaped my thinking, have helped me correct errors and hopefully better articulate my case with this second edition.
Of course, there would no second edition without a first edition, and for that one I am still grateful to Debra Englander, my first editor at John Wiley & Sons, whose support was crucial in bringing the book to publication.
Thanks again to my friends who read early versions of my original manuscript, and who provided constructive feedback, comments, and recommendations: Paul Fitter, David Goldstone, Ken Leech, Bruno Noble, Andres Sanchez-Balcazar, and Dr. Holger Schmieding. My good friend Dr. Reinhard Fuerstenberg has been involved with this project from the start and has remained an indispensable sounding board for my ideas and theories throughout. Special thanks are due to David Goldstone, who has patiently answered all my questions on Bitcoin. None of the above may be in full agreement with all my conclusions but their feedback and ideas have all been invaluable. The responsibility for the final text is entirely mine.
Thanks to my family for their love and support.
PrologueContra the Mainstream Consensus—What This Book Is About
This book presents an economic argument. It attempts to demonstrate that the present consensus on money and monetary policy is wrong, and that monetary policies that broadly reflect this consensus must, contrary to the intentions of policy makers and the expectations of large parts of the public, further destabilize the economy.
After the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, unprecedented monetary policies were implemented globally, and a public debate about these policies has ensued. The reader may therefore wonder if a true monetary policy consensus still exists. Yet almost all discussions in the media, in financial markets, in policy circles, and, as far as I can tell, in academia, still consider certain fundamental aspects of our monetary system unchallengeable and beyond serious criticism. A clearly delineated intellectual common ground exists beyond which accepted, enlightened, and sophisticated debate is believed to cease. That is what I call the mainstream consensus. I will try to give a short and fair representation of this consensus first, then outline briefly why this consensus is wrong, and how I will demonstrate this.
The Ruling Mainstream Consensus on Money
Today’s mainstream view on money holds that the abandonment of a system of hard money, of money with a fairly inflexible supply, such as a gold standard, and the implementation in its place of a system of essentially elastic money, that is, a paper money system under political supervision that can inject new money into the economy more easily, has constituted progress. It is almost universally believed that the elastic monetary system avoids certain rigidities of the gold standard, that it allows for active monetary policy and better crisis management in economic emergencies, and that it thus can, if handled correctly, help avoid depressions and guarantee a higher degree of stability.
At this point I should clarify a few terms that will appear throughout the book. I will use synonymously the terms hard money system, commodity money system, and inelastic money system. In the context of this analysis, they broadly mean the same thing. The gold standard is the prime example of such a system, even if historically the commodity of choice was often silver, and even if we should really distinguish between different possible commodity money arrangements. But in order to have a meaningful discussion about fairly complex phenomena, we need to deal in prototypes. I will contrast two prototypes of monetary systems in this book, and one of these prototypes is the hard money/commodity money/inelastic money system. This is the “old” system, the historic norm. The characteristic feature here is that the supply of money, at least at its core, is fairly inflexible, as it is tied to some commodity (or other entity), the supply of which is fixed, at least in the short run, and in any case outside the control of banks and of monetary authorities. Since the advent of banking more than 300 years ago, no monetary system has been entirely inelastic, as banks have always been in the business of issuing certain forms of money on top of the supply of the core monetary asset, even when that core asset was gold or silver. We will later see how banks do this. But even then, the money supply was still fairly inelastic, as it was ultimately constrained via a link to a commodity that no authority—no central bank and no private bank—could create at will. We may also call such a system an apolitical monetary system, because the scope for any form of monetary policy, for any use of money as a tool to other, political, ends is severely restricted.
I will juxtapose this “old” system against the modern monetary system for which I will use the following terms synonymously: soft money system/paper money system/elastic money system. This is now the dominant monetary arrangement globally, and the present consensus claims it is the better of the two. Just as any inelastic money system does not have to be based on gold, so an elastic money system does not have to be based on paper. In fact, most of today’s money exists only as electronic book entries on computers at banks and central banks and is not even printed on paper. But the defining feature here is that the supply of money is flexible. In such a system, designated money producers exist that can produce new money at practically no cost and without limit, and then inject this new money into the economy. Banks play again an important role in this process and their ability to create money is greatly enhanced compared to the older, more inflexible commodity money system. But, crucially, their ability to create money still is not unlimited. That privilege is reserved for the state central banks, which, at least conceptually, control the entire money creation process, and which can, in extremis, inject new money in unlimited quantities. As we will see in the course of our investigation, full paper money systems are always state-run or state-backed monetary systems. They are thus always political systems or fiat money systems. Fiat here means “by decree of the state.”
Back to the mainstream consensus. That a paper money system comes with at least one strong health warning is certainly acknowledged by the consensus. In a system in which some entity can produce money at no cost and without limit is always at risk of producing too much money and thus creating inflation, which means a persistent loss of money’s purchasing power, or, what is the same thing, a general trend of rising money-prices for goods and services.1 Inflations as major economic problems, and certainly devastating hyperinflations that cause economic chaos, are conceptually impossible in hard money systems. It is no surprise that all recorded currency collapses occurred exclusively in complete paper money systems. In fact, as we will see in a short historical overview, paper money systems have been tried periodically since the Chinese introduced the first such systems 900 years ago, and they have—until recently—either ended in inflation, economic chaos, and currency disaster, or, before that could happen, the authorities managed a voluntary return to hard commodity money.
If the purpose of this book were to simply point to the risk of inflation, as a naïve interpretation of the title could suggest, it would end right here, and it would not constitute much of an attack on the consensus. The fact that in paper money systems too much money can be created and often has been created is hardly controversial. The consensus fully accepts this. While high inflation is a risk, the consensus maintains it is one worth taking, as there are other benefits to be had from elastic money, among them moderate inflation.
While high inflation and certainly hyperinflation are to be avoided, some moderate inflation is today widely considered to be good for the economy. An economy, so the consensus, functions more smoothly if prices on average continue to appreciate at a moderate pace. The opposite phenomenon of falling prices on trend, deflation, is now considered an economic evil, and even a moderate or very moderate deflation is to be avoided.
But here the consensus faces a problem. One of the key features of the capitalist economy happens to be that it makes things cheaper over time. The free market leads to rising productivity, meaning a better, more efficient use of presently available resources and thus a greater supply of future resources. (How the “market” does this we will see later, but we can already mention the fundamental origins of rising productivity: increased division of labor and the accumulation of productive capital. Technological innovation plays a role, too, but without capital investment most new technologies would remain in the realm of the inventor’s imagination.) Under capitalism, things become more affordable over time. People become wealthier. We can see this in all capitalist economies when we measure the affordability of things not in terms of paper money outlays but in terms of something like hours worked at the average pay. Today, in most societies, the “average” worker will work fewer hours to afford a new refrigerator or new TV than 20 or 30 years ago (and he or she will get a much better version of the product, too). Admittedly, this process may be slow and the fall in prices—the rise in affordability—moderate, but it is still a powerful trend. So if the consensus maintains that moderately rising prices are a good thing (a notion we will put to the test as well), it has to face up to the fact that, if left on its own, the free market will produce the opposite over time. Moderate deflation is the norm in capitalist economies, not the moderate inflation that the consensus claims to be superior.
It follows, and I think the consensus economist agrees with this, that persistent moderate inflation can only be had if sufficient quantities of new money are constantly being created and brought into circulation. Sufficient here means that the supply of money must be expanded fast enough so that the price-rising effects of the new money offset the price-lowering effects of improving productivity. For prices to rise, money has to lose its purchasing power faster than the competitive economy can become more productive and make things cheaper.
And here, the consensus finds itself in opposition to market forces in another way: In a free market there is simply no process by which this could be accomplished. I have already mentioned that private banks have always managed to issue new forms of money and bring them into circulation, even when money proper was gold or silver. In an elastic monetary system, the ability of banks to do this is greatly enhanced. But, still, there are no market mechanisms by which the banks could be encouraged and directed to create precisely the quantities of money that deliver the desired overall moderate price rises.2 A political authority will have to guide them in order to achieve this. From this follows that the belief in the benefit of constant moderate inflation requires a further belief in the desirability of monetary policy, of a systematic influencing and directing of key monetary processes by a central authority. The present money consensus is thus characterized by a belief in the desirability—or even inevitability—of central banking. (Please note that this is not yet a critique of the consensus, just a logical deduction from its key premises. I expect most mainstream economists would have to agree with this description.)
While one advantage of the paper money economy is the ability of a central authority to implement ongoing moderate inflation, and thus beneficial inflation, another advantage, so the consensus is that in the case of emergencies, such as severe recessions or depressions, or bank runs and financial panics, the central bank can stabilize the system by keeping interest rates low or lowering them further, by accelerating the production of money and by producing—in theory—unlimited amounts of new money. This can sustain “aggregate demand,” and keep the banks liquid and the economy from correcting. Furthermore, the mere knowledge that the central bank has these powers and is willing to use them may sustain public confidence in the system, which by itself should further enhance financial stability.
We conclude that it is today widely believed that the appropriate monetary arrangement for a modern economy is one that allows for the constant expansion of the money supply at adjustable speeds and under the supervision and control of a state institution, the central bank, to target ongoing but moderate monetary debasement at normal times, and more aggressive money injections and a depression of interest rates at times of economic difficulties. This is a system in which central banks play the role of lender of last resort to the private banks, which means that central banks have a mandate to keep banks liquid (at least under certain conditions, which are defined politically and thus often purely nominal in practice), even when the private market would no longer do this. These are advantages of an elastic monetary system under government control that an inelastic monetary system does not offer, and these advantages are believed to be worth the price of living with the theoretical possibility of high inflation and currency collapse, although this risk may in practice, with appropriate institutional arrangements, and under prudent central bankers, be remote.
I believe this description of the consensus to be correct and fair. Of course, many who participate in policy debates in financial markets, in the media, or in policy circles may never articulate it in those terms, or, in fact, never articulate their belief system at all. It is precisely the hallmark of an established consensus that it is the basis of debate and hardly ever the topic of debate. This belief system is thus an intellectual tool with which analysts analyze monetary phenomena. The belief system itself is beyond reproach. In my 19 years as a professional trader and portfolio manager in the financial industry, this consensus informed almost all macroeconomic research and all discussion on what policy makers can, should, and will do.
The Growth-versus-Inflation Trade-Off
It is maybe not surprising that most people now assume that a simple trade-off exists between the growth-stimulating effects of money injections, which are considered to be generally good, and the inflation-boosting effects of money injections, which are usually bad, although at times they are considered good as well. They are deemed “good” when inflation is too low (remember the mainstream’s belief that moderate inflation is a good thing and even moderate deflation an evil), but they are bad when inflation is too high. Therefore, the idea seems to have taken hold that injections of new money are, as a general rule, a good thing, as they help avoid deflation, encourage banks to lend, and thus aid economic growth in general, and that the only constraining factor to this positive prospect is the risk of inflation. As long as the provision of new money by the central bank does not lead to uncomfortably high inflation, money creation is believed to be at least harmless and at best beneficial to economic performance. This has become an important part of today’s mainstream consensus on money and monetary policy.
The recent debates about the more aggressive interventions by central banks after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and in particular the increased speed of “base money” production by central banks (“quantitative easing”), are a case in point. The criticism that carries the most weight in the public discussion and is often considered the only really substantive and admissible criticism is that this policy carries the risk of imminent inflation. The strongest argument against this criticism seems to be that there is no inflation or very little inflation at present, so why not enjoy the growth-boosting effects of “easy” monetary policy?
On the margin, this has begun to change a bit recently. Other criticisms of quantitative easing are now being articulated, such as that it creates moral hazard, that it furthers income inequality, or that it is liable to blow new asset price “bubbles” and thus sets the stage for another financial crisis. It is noteworthy, however, that these adverse effects of money creation enter the debate only now that policy has reached extreme levels. As I will show with the following analysis, these effects are necessarily at work at any rate of central bank money creation, even when a more conventional policy is being conducted. As we will see, any form of ongoing monetary expansion must lead to a range of distortions, and as these distortions accumulate over time, they will destabilize the economy more broadly. Inflation is not the only and probably not the most sinister effect of ongoing money production. A complete and accurate theory of money is needed to fully illustrate these effects, and such a theory will reveal today’s consensus on money to be flawed, incoherent, and inconsistent.
It is important to stress that this book is not predominantly a critique of recent policy initiatives, such as “quantitative easing.” The recent crisis as a specific historical event is not the main topic of this book, although it will feature prominently in the final chapters. In the course of the argument, I will try to show that crises such as the one that occurred in 2007–2008 are inevitable in a system of elastic money, and we will also see that recent policy initiatives, including quantitative easing, are counterproductive, as they must lead to more deformations and more instability. But in the context of this book, these events and policy initiatives function mainly as illustrations of my more general case against the mainstream consensus.
What This Book Shows
This book aims to show that the consensus is wrong. Today’s mainstream view on money is logically incoherent because it is in fundamental conflict with essential aspects of money and money’s role in a market economy. Even a carefully controlled elastic money system, that is, one that operates according to the best intentions and the best designs of today’s mainstream economists and that avoids any obvious policy errors, will not enhance economic stability. Instead, the ongoing injections of new money must systematically distort market signals and cause misuse of resources, mispricing of assets, and misallocation of capital. In fact, such a system is unsustainable in the long run. It is bound to generate larger and larger crises and is likely to end in total collapse.
We will see that, contrary to widely accepted beliefs today, a growing supply of money is not a necessary condition for a growing economy. Money is the medium of exchange, and no society is richer in goods and services or can produce more goods and service or more easily exchange goods and services, if it has a larger quantity of the medium of exchange. As long as we allow prices to be reasonably flexible, there can never be a shortage of money. If we had a smaller stock of money, prices would be lower—that is all. As surprising as this may at first appear to many readers, it is indeed in the very nature of a medium of exchange that any quantity of it—within reasonable limits—is sufficient, that is, can facilitate any number of economic transactions and is indeed optimal.
We will also see that injecting new money into the economy can never mean just “greasing” the economic machinery. It can never enhance all economic activity evenly or “stimulate” the economy in some all-encompassing, general way. Every injection of new money must lead to changes in relative prices, to changes in resource use, to a redirection of economic activity from some areas to others, and change income and wealth distribution. Inflows of new money inevitably change the economy and must create winners and losers. This may, of course, be said of many other economic phenomena as well. Sudden changes in consumer tastes or technological inventions will also change the composition and the direction of economic activity, and they may create winners and losers, too, but—and this is important—only in the very short term. As the economy adapts to these changes and digests them, the overall level of want-satisfaction in the economy rises. As more needs are satisfied (the new tastes) or satisfied more easily (through new technologies), society overall becomes more prosperous. We will see that this is decidedly not the case with the changes that result from money expansion. They do not enhance wealth in aggregate, and they redistribute wealth arbitrarily.
But it gets worse. In a modern economy, new money will be injected via the banking system and the wider financial system in a process that must distort interest rates, in particular depress them relative to where they would otherwise be. Interest rates, however, are crucial relative prices (to be precise, they are the relationship between similar goods at different points in time) that coordinate savings with investment. We will see that ongoing money injections must systematically disrupt this coordination process. Rather than leading to some benign moderate inflation and a smoothly expanding economy, as the consensus believes, ongoing money injections must lead to the misallocation of capital, even though these misallocations may not be detectable as such for some time. Eventually, however, they will force the economy into a correction. A recession is then necessary to cleanse the economy of the various dislocations accumulated in the previous money-driven expansion. A liquidation of misallocations of capital will sooner or later be inevitable. We conclude that monetary expansion must lead to a boom-bust cycle.
And it gets worse still. In our modern fiat money system, the central banks are now freed from the shackles of the old hard money system (gold standard) and can always print more money and cut policy rates. Thus, they will usually attempt to short-circuit the recession—the market’s liquidation process—with accelerated money injections and lower interest rates. (Remember the consensus view that new money is damaging only if it instantly leads to higher inflation. As there is often some downward pressure on prices in a cyclical downturn, the central bank usually considers monetary stimulus harmless. Why not stimulate the economy with easy money when inflation is not a problem?) As a result of this new intervention, misallocations of capital may not get liquidated or not liquidated completely. These imbalances will be carried forward into the next cyclical and again money-induced upswing when new imbalances will be added to the old ones. Over time, the economy will necessarily become ever more distorted as a result of the accumulated misallocations of capital and misdirection of economic activity, and ever more money injections from the central bank and ever lower policy rates will be required to contain the market forces that would normally work toward the liquidation of these imbalances.
Ongoing moderate monetary expansion does not stabilize the economy but, slowly and surely, destabilizes it. Elastic money is not a remedy for recessions but the prime cause of recessions. Accelerated money printing and artificially low interest rates at times of recession are counterproductive because if they are effective at all, they must be so to the extent that they abort the necessary cleansing process and move the economy further away from balance. At this point, it should become clear that the mainstream consensus lies in tatters.
I will also criticize the now widespread notion that the relative stability of some price level (usually a consumer price index) is a reliable indicator of underlying economic stability, and that, as long as this type of inflation is not uncomfortably high, the central bank has made no mistakes, and the economy is in some sort of monetary equilibrium. While on the topic of price-level stability, I will further show that fears of deflation are usually unwarranted. This applies in particular to the type of deflation we should expect over time in less elastic monetary systems. Such moderate, secular deflation has many advantages and is the normal corollary of a capitalist economy. The deflationary recession that is so feared today, however, is the inevitable consequence of a preceding credit boom. Such recessions can be avoided only if we abstain from easy monetary policy and from stimulating the economy with artificially low rates in the first place. Fighting the deflationary corrections through which the market liquidates misallocations of capital with even easier monetary policy is not a rational policy. Such a policy not only sabotages the required—if often painful—rebalancing of the economy; it must add new imbalances to the old ones.
My point is not that a system of inelastic money would guarantee perfect stability. I believe that any economy that uses money will be subject to certain instabilities, but elastic money can be shown to be much less stable and indeed disruptive of the market economy. It is important to remember that today’s elastic monetary system is not the result of market forces but of political design. Paper money systems are creations of politics. The notion that such a system can—even theoretically and under the assumption that no major policy blunders occur—lead to a more stable economy is unsound. The opposite is the case. To show this is the main purpose of this book.
Understanding Our Fiat Money System
This is not a debate of purely academic relevance. If the analysis presented here is correct and the reigning mainstream consensus wrong, then this has enormous consequences for our own financial system. This system is truly unique in that, for the first time in history, the entire world is on a paper standard. Nowhere is the production of money any longer restricted by a firm, institutional link to a commodity. Money production is everywhere a discretionary policy tool of the state or groups of states (monetary union in Europe). Money has become completely elastic. In its present form, the system came into being only as recently as August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon unilaterally closed the “gold window,” which meant the United States de facto defaulted on the promise to exchange physical gold for paper dollars at a fixed price.
Reinhard and Rogoff3 demonstrated that, since 1971, the number and intensity of banking crises around the world has increased. The dollar and the pound are the two oldest currencies in use today, and they have lost more purchasing power since 1971 than over any other similar period in their long history. There is a belief today that after the inflationary 1970s, inflation has ceased to be a problem, and that central bankers—now allegedly politically independent and keenly aware of inflation risks—have learned to safely manage a paper money system. Monetary expansion has, however, continued at a fairly brisk pace, and since the 1980s seems to have fed asset price inflations more than consumer price inflations. Spectacular real estate lending booms occurred in Japan in the 1980s, in Scandinavia and various Southeast Asian economies in the 1990s, and more recently, in Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 2000s, and in each and every case, the bursting of these bubbles led to sharp economic contractions and financial crises. The paper money system unsurprisingly has fed the powerful trend of “financialization” of the economy, making banks and the entire financial sector disproportionately big and also disturbingly unstable. Elastic money and central banks that stand ready as lenders of last resort were supposed to make bank runs a thing of the past; however, not only have bank runs made a noticeable comeback in the recent crisis, but we now seem to face the increasing risk of a run on the entire system courtesy of a banking industry that under the privilege of central bank protection has become bloated, overstretched, and dangerously interconnected. Last but not least, indebtedness has exploded everywhere, in absolute terms and relative to economic productivity, and the financial system and indeed the economy at large now seem to have become addicted to easy money. Global central banks have finally painted themselves into a corner where they must keep interest rates at practically zero and repeatedly use their printing presses to prop up selected asset prices directly to sustain even a minimal appearance of stability. This, however, the consensus tells us, is just a cyclical phenomenon. There will be an exit and a return to normality and probably soon. Well, we shall see, but there are reasons to remain doubtful.
This leads us from diagnosis to outlook, by definition the most speculative part of the book. If I am right, then we can say more about the long-run prospect of our current monetary arrangements than simply that volatility will persist and crises occasionally recur. An inherently unstable system that produces growing imbalances is unlikely to last forever. It is likely to sooner or later approach some form of endgame, some form of cathartic event. And I believe the choice is the following: Either policy makers accept the inevitable and allow the market to liquidate the accumulated dislocations, maybe as part of a deliberate return to some form of hard and inelastic monetary arrangement, or at least a voluntary end to central bank money printing and active monetary policy, or, ever faster money printing will ultimately lead to inflation, undermine confidence in the system, and bring about the hyperinflationary disaster that has terminated most paper money systems in the past.
In either case, some form of liquidation of the accumulated imbalances will be unavoidable. What Ludwig von Mises wrote about the individual credit boom applies to the modern fiat money system as a whole:
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.4
Although both outcomes are still possible, and both constitute some form of “paper money collapse,” the reader may suspect that the title of this book is more appropriate for the hyperinflationary endgame. And, indeed, it is my view that this remains the more likely of the two outcomes in the long run, although I believe the other one to be preferable because it is less damaging to society overall. How the present system will end must, however, remain a question of subjective judgment. Reasonable people may disagree on this point, although I do not believe that they can disagree on the validity of the theoretical argument presented here. I will make my case for what I consider the likely future of our monetary system toward the end of the book.
What Is Different from the First Edition?
A second edition allows the author to respond to criticisms of his initial effort, to incorporate new ideas and to reflect further on the topic, to comment on related works by other authors that have come out in the meantime or have been brought to his attention, and to also comment on and incorporate into his analysis any developments in the “real world” that have occurred since the book was first published. I am delighted at the opportunity to revisit Paper Money Collapse, and I have made use in some form of every one of the opportunities listed above.
Over the two years since the publication of the first edition, I have given numerous speeches and lectures and also launched a website for which I wrote more than 100 blog posts, often in the form of small essays. These in turn received more than 2,300 comments from readers, many of which were extremely insightful and thought provoking. Additionally, I benefited from the many questions, challenges, criticisms, and suggestions from those who attended my presentations, and from the comments made by reviewers of the book. Thus, the reader of the second edition will find additional material at various points of the investigation, and will (hopefully) also find some points better articulated and various errors corrected and some criticism addressed. All of this is woven into the text rather than concentrated in separate chapters, as I did not want to disrupt the flow of the argument.
More specifically, the treatment of fractional-reserve banking (money creation by private banks) is now clearer and more accurate, I believe. I have also addressed at two points in the text the so-called free-banking school, represented in particular by George Selgin and Lawrence White, with whom I agree in some respects and strongly disagree in others, in more detail than I did in the first edition. I will also address Gordon Tullock’s critique of Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Additionally, I will provide a (short) critical treatment of some new proposals to curb money creation by the private sector but to enlarge and strengthen the money-creation powers of the state, such as the recent International Monetary Fund working paper by Benes and Kumhof5 or by the British advocacy group Positive Money. These authors often include a critical treatment of fractional-reserve banking in their argument, and as fractional-reserve banking has been an important reason for the growth of the money supply (mainly due to its being systematically and generously subsidized by the state), a casual observer might think their ideas are similar to mine. That is not the case. Their economic arguments are deficient and their policy proposals dangerous, and I hope I have made my differences with them clear.
There has been one major new—and positive—development in the sphere of money that is potentially revolutionary, that did come as a surprise to me, and that has profound implications for what is discussed in this book: It is the rise of cryptocurrencies, and in particular, of bitcoin. I was not even aware of bitcoin’s existence when I handed in the final draft of the first edition. (Bitcoin was launched in 2008; my final draft of the first edition dates from February 2011.) But it is, of course, of profound importance to the topics discussed in this book, and I include my assessment of it in this second edition. The more I learn about it, the more I consider it one of the greatest developments in the sphere of money in a very long time. Maybe it will still fail, but conceptually—viewed from the perspective of the monetary economist—its potential is staggering.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency based on a complex cryptographic algorithm that allows monetary transactions between any two parties anywhere in the world through a process that promises to be cheap, fast, and secure. It combines the benefits of modern payment technology with the advantages of the commodity money of old: Bitcoin is a form of money that has no issuing authority (Bitcoins can be “mined” in a complicated and self-limiting process by bitcoin users), is not tied to any country or political jurisdiction, and because it has no issuer, it cannot be used for any political ends. Most important, its algorithm is designed in such a way that the supply of bitcoins will expand only very slowly for some time but finally end up being entirely fixed. Bitcoin is inelastic, hard, apolitical, and completely global money. It thus ticks all of the boxes that this book suggests are the true characteristics of good money, and I am glad I can now incorporate it into my treatment.
As the themes of Paper Money Collapse have continued to preoccupy me since the first edition came out, my thinking on this topic has naturally evolved further. In that sense, a book like Paper Money Collapse may never be truly finished. However, I have had no reason so far to change, in any fundamental and meaningful way, the overall argument presented in the first edition. The key message of the book remains the same, and so do its conclusions.
What about real-life events? Have the developments of the past two years—with the possible exception of bitcoin—made a reassessment of the originally bleak outlook necessary?
When revisiting the original forecasts, I think the reader will find that some of them have been borne out by events and some not. As far as policy is concerned, and in particular monetary policy, recent developments have for the most part confirmed my expectations. None of the major central banks have been able to exit the extreme policy programs adopted years earlier and originally advertised as short-lived emergency measures, or even been able to reduce policy accommodation on the margin. To the contrary, in most countries, additional “stimulus” has been implemented. Here is a snapshot of what has happened since the first edition was published:
The U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) is now on its third round of quantitative easing (QE), started in September 2012, and this time the program is officially open-ended. Under current arrangements, the Fed is on target to produce more than $1 trillion of new base money per calendar year. A policy tool that was deemed highly unconventional when introduced in 2008 to stabilize the banks in the wake of the Lehman collapse has now, five years after the recession officially ended, become a tool for boosting overall economic activity and in particular the rate of employment in the United States. Recently (this introduction was written in January 2014), the Fed has begun to slowly reduce its bond-buying program, a process that is now labeled tapering. We should remember, however, that the Fed had already ended QE twice since the crisis, only to resume the policy later. Whether the process of tapering can be continued and if it is really the start of a normalization of policy and the removal of ultra-easy money remains to be seen.
For its part, the European Central Bank (ECB) even attempted to hike rates in the spring of 2011, but then felt compelled to reverse course again. Just recently, the ECB cut rates to a new record low. In contrast to the Fed, the ECB does not have a much larger “balance sheet” now compared to two years ago. (An official balance sheet does not exist at the ECB, but what is known as the “consolidated financial statement of the Eurosystem” comes pretty close.) The European debt crisis has abated somewhat at the time of this writing, but only because the ECB announced that it was prepared to buy the sovereign bonds of struggling nations in potentially unlimited quantities, a promise on which the markets may still decide to call the central bank.
The Bank of England has conducted an additional three QE programs in the course of which it has almost doubled its holdings of U.K. government debt (gilts). Its policy rate has been nailed to the floor (0.5 percent) since 2009, and the bank promises it will stay there for a long time.
And Japan confirmed my expectation that policy makers will not be content for long to produce just enough monetary accommodation to keep things from deteriorating further, but will at some point go “all in” to create a new upswing at almost any cost. Under a new prime minister and a new central bank chief, this is precisely what the Bank of Japan promised to do in early 2013 with a new policy of aggressive debt monetization and renewed quantitative easing.
There were a few policy-driven events that pointed in the other direction, that is, not toward reliquefying everything but toward allowing the market to liquidate some things. Greece experienced a partial default that wiped out a lot of its privately held debt but—bizarrely but not unsurprisingly—shielded the debt held by various public-sector institutions, and in Cyprus a major bank was wound down, resulting in losses for shareholders, bondholders, and depositors. Fiscal reform is a hot political topic in many countries, but progress has at best been modest. “Living within your means” is now called austerity and has predominantly a negative connotation. The main thrust of policy around the world continues to be in the direction of reflation and “stimulus.” The Eurozone has been a partial exception to this global trend, but the question is: Will it remain one?
As I expected in the first edition, aggressive reflation did lead to rising prices but delivered so far disappointingly little in terms of self-sustaining growth. Frustration about the strength of the “recovery” is still widespread. However, and this was indeed a big surprise for me, it was again mainly asset prices that rose sharply, while consumer prices continued to remain remarkably subdued. The biggest surprises over recent years were asset markets, not policy or the “real economy.” I had expected a somewhat different mix between consumer and asset price inflations, mainly as a consequence of the changed transmission channels of policy and because I thought the public would remain more skeptical toward new asset price booms and would not embrace them so readily. Yet at the time of this writing (January 2014), in the United States all the major stock indices are at or near all-time highs, yield spreads on corporate debt are at or near all-time lows, issuance in the corporate bond market is at record levels, and farmland is appreciating at double-digit rates in many parts of the country. At the same time, the preferred measures of consumer price inflation are barely positive and remain below their official target. The extent of asset price appreciation and of consumer price stagnation is certainly at odds with my earlier forecast.
Most surprising of all, however, was the sharp correction in the gold price that started in 2013, in particular in light of the persistently reflationary policies of central banks and continuing rallies in almost all other asset markets. If the gold market anticipates an end to reflation and a coming deflationary correction, then should certain other asset markets not behave differently, too?
Paper Money Collapse was never intended to be an investment book, never a book that provides near-term forecasts and investment ideas. Its outlook was never aimed at a two-year forecasting window. Nevertheless, I will try to provide some thoughts about markets as part of an updated outlook at the end of the book. Here, it may suffice to say that my main views have not changed. Central banks have no exit strategy. A return to “normal” policy will be impossible, meaning politically unacceptable. Heavy-handed interventions in the economy are pretty much a certainty, and inflation remains the most likely endgame. This will end badly.
Support from Eminent Economists
This book is an attack on modern mainstream economics’ view on money, but it is not an attack on economics. To the contrary, I believe my position stands in a long tradition of analysis of monetary phenomena, and in the course of my argument I will draw on the work of some of the greatest minds in the history of economics in support of my case. Indeed, the idea that monetary expansion is a source of broader economic instability, which is central to my argument, is as old as economics itself, and it has remained a recurring feature of economic theorizing for almost 300 years, from Cantillon’s essays, published in 1755, through the Currency School of British Classical Economics in the nineteenth century, and to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, developed by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. von Hayek between 1912 and 1933. It appears that since the 1930s modern macroeconomics has neglected or even forgotten some crucial insights that had once been well-established and that are still important today.
To develop my argument from the ground up, I start with some basic notions about money that every user of money, and that means practically everybody, should be able to confirm from their own everyday experience. This process has two advantages: It allows the layperson to follow my argument throughout; no previous knowledge of economics is required. But, importantly, it also forces the economically trained reader to critically examine some of the notions that he or she may have adopted without much reflection through long exposure to mainstream economics and that he or she never really put to the test. I believe it will become clear that many of these do not stand up to rigorous analysis.
Building on the work of the giants of economics is a plus and a minus. The plus is that it lends some respectability to my case and that hopefully more readers will be willing to engage with my argument and not be put off by its bold conclusions. The downside is that some may suspect there is nothing new here and that they know it
