Money Free and Un–Free
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MONEY FREE AND UN–FREE GEORGE SELGIN Copyright ©2017 by the Cato Institute. All rights reserved. eBook ISBN: 978-1-944424-30-5 Print ISBN: 978-1-944424-29-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. Cover design: Faceout Studio. Printed in the United States of America. CATO INSTITUTE 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20001 www.cato.org Contents Figures and Tables Introduction PART I: REGULATORY SOURCES OF FINANCIAL INSTABILITY 1 A Fiscal Theory of Government’s Role in Money with Lawrence H. White 2 Central Banks as Sources of Financial Instability 3 Legal Restrictions, Financial Weakening, and the Lender of Last Resort PART II: BEFORE THE FED 4 The Suppression of State Bank Notes: A Reconsideration 5 Monetary Reform and the Redemption of National Bank Notes, 1863–1913 with Lawrence H . White 6 New York’s Bank: The National Monetary Commission and the Founding of the Fed PART III: THE FEDERAL RESERVE ERA 7 The Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard in the United States 8 Has the Fed Been a Failure? with William D. Lastrapes and Lawrence H. White 9 Operation Twist-the-Truth: How the Federal Reserve Misrepresents Its History and Performance 10 Liberty Street: Bagehotian Prescriptions for a 21st-Century Money Market Notes References Figures and Tables Figure 2.1: Reserve and Spending Equilibrium under Free Banking Figure 2.2: Bank Notes in Circulation, 1880–1909, Monthly Figure 4.1: Bank Circulation and Loans as a Percentage of Wealth, by Region, 1861 and 1869 Figure 4.2: Bank Notes in Circulation, 1880–1909, Monthly Figure 5.1: Bank Notes in Circulation, 1880–1909, Monthly Figure 5.2: Bank-Note and Call Loan Rate Seasonals Figure 5.3: National Bank-Note Redemptions, 1875–1915, Yearly Figure 6.1: Bank Notes in Circulation, 1880–1909, Monthly Figure 6.2: Bankers’ Balances in National Banks, 1900–30 Figure 8.1: Quarterly U.S. Price Level and Inflation Rate, 1875–2010 Figure 8.2: Price Level Response to Standard Deviation Inflation Shock, Various Subperiods Figure 8.3: Price Level and Inflation Uncertainty Figure 8.4: ConditionalVariances of the Price Level Forecast Errors, Various Horizons Figure 8.5: Percentage Deviations of Real GNP from Trend Figure 8.6: U.S. Unemployment Rate, 1869–2009 Figure 8.7: Dynamic Responses of Output and Money to Aggregate Demand Shocks, Pre-Fed and Post–World War II Figure 8.8: Annual Federal and State and Local Spending Relative to GDP, 1902–2009 Figure 8.9: U.S. Bank Failures as Percentage of All Banks, 1896–1955 Figure 8.10: Federal Reserve Credit and Components, Monetary Base, and Excess Reserves, 2007–10 Figure 8.11: Nominal GDP Growth and Inflation, 2000–10 Figure 8.12: Real Price of Gold, 1861–2009 Table 4.1: Formation of National Banks, 1863–66 Table 4.2: New York Bank-Note Discounts, October 1863 Table 4.3: Chicago Bank-Note Discounts, October 1863 Table 6.1: Deposits of the Eight Largest New York City Banks, October 21, 1913 Table 6.2: Bankers’ Balances in Six Largest New York National Banks, 1913 and 1926 Table 8.1: Characteristics of Quarterly Inflation Table 8.2: Output Volatility, Alternative GNP Estimates Table 8.3: Contribution of Aggregate Supply Shocks to Output Forecast Error Variance INTRODUCTION IF ONE INSTITUTION CAN BE SAID TO exercise a greater influence than any other on the economic well-being of the world’s citizens, that institution must surely be the Federal Reserve System. Through its influence on the supply of money and credit in the United States and, indirectly, in other parts of the world, and also through its role in regulating the U.S. financial market, the Fed directly influences both the long-run behavior of spending and prices and the short-run behavior of real interest rates, real output, and unemployment. Occasionally—such as during the so-called Great Moderation roughly coinciding with Alan Greenspan’s tenure (1987–2006) as Fed chairman—its conduct has been tolerable, if not beneficial. At other times its policies have been at best controversial and at worst widely condemned. Despite the Fed’s spotted record, most people, economists included, continue to regard it and, more particularly, its governing and monetary-policymaking bodies, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Open Market Committee, as the best of all possible means for managing the U.S. dollar, and for indirectly regulating interest rates, prices, unemployment, and countless other macro- and microeconomic variables. On what evidence or arguments does this consensus rest? Most non-experts who take part in it do so, presumably, out of deference to (most) experts. And the experts themselves? It’s only natural to suppose that their own consensus rests upon a careful comparison of the Fed’s performance with that of other arrangements, including ones already tested in the United States or elsewhere, and as-yet untested ones that might be put into practice. People who defer to expert opinion presumably do so owing to this natural supposition. Yet the surprising truth is that most economists, including most champions of the monetary status quo (or something not far from it), are only vaguely familiar with alternative arrangements, assuming that they are aware of them at all. Ask a monetary economist to compare the Fed’s record to that of the pre-Fed National Currency System, for example, and he or she is likely to declare confidently that, since World War II at least, the price level has become more predictable, output much more stable, and business contractions much less frequent and protracted, than was the case before 1913. In fact, none of these claims is true. Although the Fed was established in response to a series of severe economic crises, in most respects its performance has been even worse than that of the admittedly flawed system it replaced. Likewise, although most economists are quick to pronounce the gold standard an unstable, if not barbaric, arrangement, few appreciate the crucial difference between the pre-1914 “classical” gold standard, which actually worked remarkably well, and the interwar “gold exchange standard,” which did not. Many also tend to blame the (classical) gold standard for pre-Fed financial and economic instability that was actually the fault of ancillary banking and currency legislation—a mistake that’s easy enough to avoid if one compares the United States’ classical gold-standard experience with that of some other gold-standard countries. Not surprisingly, most U.S. economists know even less about the monetary histories of other countries than they do about U.S. monetary history. Take, for example, Canada’s experience prior to 1935, when the Bank of Canada was established. Few know that even though it also lacked a central bank, Canada avoided not only the crises that shook the United States before 1914, but also those by which it was afflicted after 1929. In fact, not a single Canadian bank failed throughout the entire 1930s, while thousands of U.S. banks went under. Still less is it likely that our economist knows that the Scottish banking system was almost crisis free for a century prior to 1845, while England suffered from crisis after crisis—despite the fact that Scottish banks had no central bank to turn to, and despite the relative lack of banking regulations north of the Tweed. Instead of knowing about the actual record of past, decentralized monetary systems, most economists today simply take for granted that no country can avoid financial crises except by resort to substantial government regulation, including laws establishing a central bank capable of regulating its money supply and serving as a “lender of last resort.” Given that so many economists today are unfamiliar with the non- central-bank-based monetary arrangements of the past, and so are convinced, in their ignorance, that such systems couldn’t have worked well, it should come as no surprise that few have bothered to seriously consider how other, still experimental alternatives, might also prove more conducive to financial and monetary stability than the Fed and other central banks. Of the many misunderstandings that lack of familiarity with past and hypothetical monetary alternatives can be said to have bred, one is of paramount importance: the failure to distinguish both weaknesses in financial arrangements and fluctuations in money and credit attributable to market-based forces and institutions from ones attributable to government interference with such market-based forces and institutions. It is owing to this paramount misunderstanding that experts, instead of appreciating the harm done by past and present government interference with market- based monetary and banking arrangements, continue, despite failure after failure, to cling to the vain hope that lasting stability might be achieved by adding still more layers of government control to those already in place. Economists’ general lack of awareness of, and interest in, alternative monetary arrangements—and decentralized alternatives especially—is partly due to the tremendous influence exerted by central banks themselves, and partly a reflection of the state of modern economics graduate programs.* Most of the latter programs have dispensed with classes on either economic history or the history of economic thought—subjects once considered indispensable—so as to make room for more courses on mathematical modeling and econometrics. Courses on monetary theory and macroeconomics have at the same time become increasingly abstract—so much so, indeed, that many of them hardly refer to “money” at all! Faced with such a curriculum, graduate students are left to their own devices when it comes to learning anything at all about existing U.S. monetary institutions, let alone foreign or historical ones, or others that have been proposed but never tried.