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The Debate Over Hyperinflation | act ing-man.co m http://www.acting-man.com/?p=4987 The Debate over Hyperinflation | September 27, 2010 | Author Pater Tenebrarum Dear Readers, We want to thank all of you who have donated to Acting Man. We are honored by your support. All donations will be used to optimize our services f or you. Should you wish to contribute, press the button below ... There is an ongoing debate over whether the current secular contraction will resolve in a def lationary era or an inf lationary one. Even the FOMC has recently announced in its policy statement that prices are not rising f ast enough f or its taste, which is truly an extraordinary thing to say f or a central bank, given that the rather Orwellian of f icial propaganda line has always been to portray it as an 'inf lation f ighter' – apparently it is now af raid of being too successf ul in that particular department. For the purpose of this article, we want to leave the question of whether def lation or inf lation are more likely to become prevalent in the f uture aside f or the moment and concentrate on what has become a sub-set of this debate, namely the topic of hyperinf lation. Many of the people who come down on the 'pro- inf lation' side of the debate, i.e. those who maintain that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have both the ability and willingness to implement a highly inf lationary policy, have been stymied by the continued lack of evidence of rising prices f or goods and services. Lately it has become f ashionable to make a kind of conceptual jump f rom inf lation to hyperinf lation, and asserting in the process that the two are inherently distinct phenomena (instead of one being an extension of the other). To our knowledge this trend was – inadvertently we believe – set in motion by Jim Sinclair, who was in all likelihood misunderstood due to his sometimes byzantine manner of expressing himself . The way we understand Sinclair's argument, he merely wants to stress that 'slack in the economy', 'excess capacity', iow. the so-called 'output gap' and other f acets of economic weakness which are regularly cited by mainstream economists and central banks alike as to why 'inf lationary pressures will remain low', are def initely not a reason not to expect inf lation. If indeed we understand Sinclair's meaning correctly, then we def initely agree with him on this point. The way he puts it is: 'hyperinf lation is a currency event'. This is just another way of saying that it is a monetary phenomenon, f irst and f oremost, i.e., the end result of currency debasement by means of a too loose monetary policy. What prompted us to delve into the subject here was a recent article on Zerohedge by one Gonzalo Lira (it is quite f unny that someone writing about inf lation goes by the name of 'Lira' – the name of the late, perennially inf lating Italian currency) regarding the events of 1979, when Paul Volcker became Fed chairman and set out to smother the then raging inf lationary outbreak. Lira speculates that the late 1970's were probably a period when the danger of hyperinf lation was incipient, an assessment with which we would tend to agree. Below we discuss what we do and what we do not agree with in Lira's article. Lira writes: “Because of the Oil Shock, the inf lation index rose to a peak of 15%—yet unemployment also exploded, reaching almost 11%. This combination of unemployment and inf lation was what gave the period its name—stagflation: “Stagnant inf lation”. The 'oil shock' certainly could be termed one of a number of trigger events along the way, but a price signal due to supply problems is by itself not suf f icient to create inf lation. If the money supply had remained stable, the rising oil price would have caused prices elsewhere in the economy to decline – no general increase in prices would have been possible. Furthermore, if you want to be technical about it, 'stagf lation' – a term coined in 1965 by British parliamentarian Iain McLeod in a speech to the House of Commons, describes 'inf lation combined with economic stagnation' – which is a more common phenomenon than is generally held. Of Keynesians and Monetarists In the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's, when the 'stagf lation' phenomenon occurred, it lef t the then dominant Keynesian economists who had previously believed the combination of a weak economy and a rising general price level to be impossible at a loss to explain what had happened and the Chicago monetarist school rose in prominence as a result. It is probably also no coincidence that the preeminent Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek won his Nobel prize f or economics in 1974. Clearly the Austrian school of f ered the by f ar best explanations f or the 'stagf lation' experience, alas, since Austrian economists were seen as inimical to the establishment, the central bank directed f iat money system and the welf are/warf are state more generally, their advice was probably not really welcome. Instead, the monetarists were seen as the 'saf er' economic advisers and their inf luence increased as the 1970's wore on. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe once remarked (in 'Natural Elites, Intellectuals and the State'): “[The] seemingly unstoppable drif t toward statism is illustrated by the f ate of the so-called Chicago School: Milton Friedman, his predecessors, and his f ollowers. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago School was still considered left-fringe, and justly so, considering that Friedman, f or instance, advocated a central bank and paper money instead of a gold standard. He wholeheartedly endorsed the principle of the welf are state with his proposal of a guaranteed minimum income (negative income tax) on which he could not set a limit. He advocated a progressive income tax to achieve his explicitly egalitarian goals (and he personally helped implement the withholding tax). Friedman endorsed the idea that the State could impose taxes to f und the production of all goods that had a positive neighborhood ef f ect or which he thought would have such an ef f ect. This implies, of course, that there is almost nothing that the state can not tax-f und!” This harsh assessment of the Chicago School was apparently shared by Ludwig von Mises, who once walked out of a Mont Pelerin meeting announcing 'You're all a bunch of socialists'. It is quite ironic that nowadays, the supply-siders as they are also called, enjoy the reputation of representing the epitome of economic liberalism. This shows the great extent to which statism has become the f undamental econo-political guiding principle of our times, just as Hoppe contends. In terms of their support f or low taxes , f ree trade and the f ree market (with unf ortunately a number of rather decisive 'exceptions') , the Chicago school proponents are certainly a lot closer to the Austrians than the Keynesians or neo-Keynesians are. There is a big dif f erence between Milton Friedman, Jude Wanninski , Arthur Laf f er and people like Paul Krugman, Alan Blinder and John Samuelson, to name a f ew. It is however what these schools of economic thought agree on that represents the problem – indeed, it could well be argued that the Chicago School's support f or a central bank directed f iat money is what has ultimately brought us to the current juncture (namely a grave secular economic contraction). Let's get back though to Lira's article and the 1970's. Economic History vs. Economic Theory and the Problem of Definitions Lira launches into a description of economic history, this is to say various economic data and their behavior during the 1970's. Note here that when he speaks of 'inf lation' he is not ref erring to the increase in the money supply, but instead to its ef f ect: rising prices. Lira recounts how the rise in prices as calculated by the government's CPI measure kept accelerating into 1980 and how unemployment rose with a considerable lag in the wake of the 'double dip' recession induced by Volcker's tight monetary policy, which ultimately ended the inf lationary episode. So f ar so good. Then it get's really conf using. Lira tries to explain what he actually means when he speaks of inf lation: “A quick note on terms— by the word “inf lation”, I mean two distinct things: One is the macro- economic event whereby prices rise, due to the expansion of both the economy and the credit environment, which bids up the prices of consumables. This sense is used in opposition to the other three macro-economic events, def lation, disinf lation, and hyperinf lation. The other meaning of the word “inf lation” — or what I sometimes call the inflation index or sometimes the CPI number — is simply the actual percentage rise in prices in an economy, regardless of whether the cause is inf lationary or hyperinf lationary.” As f ar as we are concerned, not one of these things is inf lation. As Ludwig von Mises has pointed out, the authorities and their courtier intellectuals managed to pull of f a neat propaganda trick by sowing this type of conf usion. In 'Planning f or Freedom', a collection of Mises essays, we f ind this pertinent quote: “What people today call inf lation is not inf lation, i.e., the increase in the quantity of money and money substitutes, but the general rise in commodity prices and wage rates which is the inevitable consequence of inflation.” In other words, today's widely accepted usage of the term inf lation is really conf using cause and ef f ect.
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