In his letter of April 28 Prof. Robert Blohm concedes the main point of our April 20 op-ed "Monetary Reform or Trade War," noting that when it was suspended, the Bretton Woods gold-exchange system "was already unsustainable because of the 'duplicating credit' the authors mention."
Almost every candidate for president in 2016 has made the case, none more intensely than Donald Trump, that Americans have lost jobs and industry because of predatory currency depreciation. This neo-mercantilism is practiced by almost every nation that competes with the U.S. What is the solution to this grave problem?
Donald Trump has denounced giving President Obama trade-promotion authority on the grounds that trade deals do not address "currency manipulation," which he claims is the reason "we get beaten in trade."
To evaluate the history of the Federal Reserve System, we cannot help but wonder, whither the Fed? and to consider wherefore its reform—even what and how to do it. But first let us remember whence we came one century ago.
The End of the Classical Gold Standard
No one knew better than Jacques Rueff, a soldier of France and a famous central banker, that World War I had brought to an end the preeminence of the classical European states system and its monetary regime—the classical gold standard. World War I had decimated the flower of European youth; it had destroyed the European continent’s industrial primacy. No less ominously, the historic monetary standard of commercial civilization had collapsed into the ruins occasioned by the Great War. The international gold standard—the gyroscope of the Industrial Revolution, the common currency of the world trading system, the guarantor of more than 100 years of a stable monetary system, the balance wheel of unprecedented economic growth—was brushed aside by the belligerents. Into the breach marched unrestrained central bank credit expansion, the express government purpose of which was to finance the colossal budget deficits occasioned by war and its aftermath.
The Rise of Discretionary Central Banking
With the benefit of hindsight we can see that quantitative easing (QE) was actually inaugurated with World War I. We can see also that discretionary central banking in the United States coincided with the founding of the Federal Reserve System. After the banking panic of 1907, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was designed to provide “an elastic currency” but also to reinforce the international gold standard. Thus, Federal Reserve sponsorship of floating exchange rates in 1971 would become one of the great ironies of American monetary history.
To interpret the financial events associated with the Great War and their effect on the ensuing 100 years, my colleague John Mueller and I have highlighted two crucial events of 1913. First, of course, was the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, and second, the publication by the young John Maynard Keynes of his book, Indian Currency and Finance. The inauguration of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual foundation provided by the monetary ideas of Keynes, taken together, soon gave rise to a perfect intellectual and financial storm—a storm which would last a century.
The Demise of Money and Credit Monday, June 03, 2013 - The American Spectator
Lately we have been engulfed by headlines reporting financial turmoil on every continent, in almost every nation, large and small. The commissars of central planning who so marred the history of the 20th century have been replaced by central banks in the 21st. In Cyprus, the new leadership now dares to confiscate citizens’ wealth with a one-time tax of up to 60 percent on bank deposits above 100,000 euros. Self-interested prime ministers blame continental monetary policies for instigating the currency wars that they themselves surreptitiously carry on.
Central banks worldwide, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve, mint new money ceaselessly to bail out insolvent governments, insolvent banks, and insolvent but politically powerful corporations and labor unions. This new money goes first to insiders in the financial sector, who exchange the cheap credit for commodities, stocks, and real estate at ever-rising prices. This is the so-called carry-trade, monopolized by a financial class that uses free money from the Fed to front-run the authorities for insider profits.
From the beginning of the American republic until not long ago, dollars could be exchanged for gold at a parity established by congressional statute (1792–1971, but from 1934–1973 convertible by foreigners alone). Currency convertibility to gold, enforced by law, established a finite limit to the money supply. Inflation—caused by the issue of excess money and credit—would lead citizens to promptly cash out for gold, thus reducing the money supply and ending the rise in prices. In a sense, the system was self-regulating.
With an unlimited money supply, the insolvency of national banking institutions has become an endemic global problem. Depositors are at risk of loss or arbitrary confiscation by panicked political authorities, as in Cyprus. Taxpayers are involuntarily dragooned in to bail out the banking system, as at the start of America’s recession. And if the central bank credit bubble collapses, systemic deflation will be the profound and destructive consequence.
Fiscal Fitness Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - The Weekly Standard
A winning agenda for a political party must simultaneously satisfy the requirements of economic effectiveness and political success. Ronald Reagan had such an agenda in the 1980s. Subsequent Republican presidential candidates have not. The opportunity now is great. Far from having a free hand after reelection, President Obama is constrained by the same economic and political realities as everyone else. This is why his first act of 2013 was to sign into law a tax code in which the top rate on labor income is about twice the rate on property income, disappointing the dominant faction of his own party.
The four basic principles of successful American political economy may be summarized simply:
1. Current peacetime government consumption of goods and services should be funded by current taxation, not money creation—thus limiting peacetime government borrowing to an amount equal to government-owned investments of the same or lesser duration. This principle was first enunciated and implemented under President George Washington.
2. Current consumption of true public goods (such as national defense and administration of justice) should be funded with an income tax levied about equally on labor and property income. This principle was first implemented under Abraham Lincoln.
3. More narrowly targeted “quasi-public” goods, which benefit many but not all citizens, should have dedicated funding. Social benefits for specified individuals (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, primarily) should be financed by payroll taxes on individuals, not by income or property taxes. This principle was first applied under Franklin D. Roosevelt at the insistence of his Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau.
The counterpart to this policy is that subsidies to property owners (e.g., tax-advantaged savings accounts and product, corporate, and banking subsidies) should be financed by taxes on property income (such as interest, dividends, rents, or capital gains), not payroll or income taxes.
4. Government’s size and methods should be strictly limited in order not to displace private jobs, or cause general unemployment or disinvestment in people and property. This was attempted by Ronald Reagan (with its success limited by factors we will describe).
President Obama chose to deliver his State of the Union address this year on the 204th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. It was a good selection of a significant date. As Steven Spielberg makes clear in his epic film "Lincoln," Americans of all backgrounds and political persuasions can learn much from the character and presidency of the 16th president.
With regard to human rights and economic liberty, Lincoln adhered to two fundamental principles. First, that every person was entitled to the fruits of his or her labors, and no one had an unrequited claim (i.e., slavery) to the fruits of the labors of others. What so troubled Lincoln about slavery was that it was theft—pure and simple. Lincoln ran for president on a platform to stop slavery's spread. As president and commander in chief, he struck against slavery in the rebellious states through the Emancipation Proclamation. Then he pressed for slavery's permanent abolition by constitutional amendment—in both rebellious and loyal border states—because no man may steal the fruits of the labor of others.
The second principle that guided the Republican president was that every person, regardless of the circumstances of his birth, should be able to climb as far up the economic ladder as his talents may take him. Historian Richard Hofstadter called Lincoln the "greatest dramatist" for upward mobility the nation ever produced, and for good reason.
Under Lincoln's watchful eye and skillful leadership, the 37th Congress enacted more economically significant legislation than had any of its predecessors. The underlying theme of Lincoln's economic initiatives was that by providing ordinary people with incentives to use their own skills and labor, the entire nation would prosper. Very little of what Lincoln signed into law could be declared, in the present-day idiom, "entitlements" or "redistribution."
Money for Nothing Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - The Weekly Standard
Who caused the financial collapse? Just about everyone.
To appreciate this landmark work it is necessary to know a bit about the author’s background.
John Allison is not only a banker-entrepreneur; he is also a recognized intellectual leader of American business. Moreover, Allison’s financial expertise is a product of his personal biography: In a mere two decades, he built BB&T (Branch Banking & Trust Co.), a comparatively small Southern bank of $4.5 billion in assets, into a $152-billion financial enterprise, making it one of America’s largest and most profitable banks. But unlike many overpaid, underperforming CEOs, Allison focused his leader-manager skills—at modest compensation—on behalf of his employees, customers, and shareholders.
Briefly stated, Allison’s core principles begin with an unapologetic dedication to customer-oriented banking and carefully managed risk-taking as sound and effective means to long-term profitability and high returns on capital. BB&T deploys an uncommon means to sustain the bank’s dedicated corporate culture: continuous, serious, systemic employee education aimed at the formation of leaders, executives, and well-trained employees at every level. A core goal of every employee must be to focus on making every client profitable and successful on a risk-adjusted financial basis—that is, through conservative banking. False financial products were neither fabricated nor widely distributed during the bubble years (such products having been an important cause of the financial crisis). Monthly employee readings in philosophy and economics are mobilized to reinforce the core principles.
At the center of this banking philosophy is the development of the full potential of each employee, and each client, of the bank: This strategy, Allison argues, is the optimum path to shareholder, customer, and employee enrichment. Many firms pretend to such a strategy; Allison earned a national reputation because he actually carried it out, and successfully, in a banking system engaged during the bubble years in a “race to the bottom.”
In a free-market society, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of such a corporate culture. And in business, the individual conscience, dedicated to long-term rational self-interest, is the indispensable condition of a minimally regulated free market. It is striking that Allison’s strategy was vindicated by good returns on capital; it is equally striking that BB&T’s corporate culture was proven right in the financial crisis and Great Recession, as BB&T experienced not a single quarterly loss during the financial earthquake of 2007-2009.
It is necessary to know all this in order to understand the importance of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure. As the head of a major American bank, Allison was witness to the decisions of government, Federal Reserve leaders, and banking CEOs that led to a huge speculative bubble and the collapse of the financial system, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, virtually the entire cartel of big banks and brokers, and major companies. Allison guides us, with a gimlet eye, through taxpayer-subsidized bailouts of these wards of the state, focusing on a reckless, insolvent, privileged financial oligarchy—subsidized by a feckless Fed, a dilatory Treasury, and a politicized FDIC. The coercive power of the federal government, and the moral hazard of excessive regulation, is dissected and debunked.
Money and Oil Tuesday, December 04, 2012 - The American Spectator
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” – Albert Einstein
EVERY DAY WE WAKE UP hoping for good economic news: lower unemployment numbers, more jobs created, stronger growth. But we miss the forest for the trees. Our markets, for the past 100 years, have been engulfed in perennial financial crises.
Many of these crises have been associated with major Federal Reserve credit expansions and contractions. Upon examination, these volatile market episodes almost always lead to major moves in non-durable commodities, primarily oil and food.
But first, some historical background.
How do we mark the onset of the age of financial disorder, or, if you will, the Age of Inflation? The starting point was the volcanic eruption in 1914 at the epicenter of the Western world. World War I brought to an end the preeminence of the classical European states system; it decimated the flower of European youth; it destroyed the European continent’s industrial primacy, making Europe a debtor and America a creditor. The classical gold standard was suspended everywhere by the belligerents. The monetary gyroscope of the Industrial Revolution collapsed along with the world trading system into the anarchy of total war.
To interpret the financial events associated with the Great War —and their effect on the ensuing hundred years—let us highlight two crucial occasions of 1913: the establishment of the Federal Reserve system and the publication by the young John Maynard Keynes of his book Indian Currency and Finance. Neither event by itself would probably have created a barrier to resumption of the long period of monetary stability and economic growth under the prewar classical gold standard. But the inauguration of the Federal Reserve and the monetary ideas of Keynes, taken together, created the perfect storm.
As originally conceived, the Federal Reserve system, a government-dominated central bank, was designed to strengthen American participation in the classical international gold standard, even while making the U.S. currency and banking system more “elastic,” so it would be able to deal with crises like the panic of 1907. As the lender of last resort, the Fed was also tasked with issuing Federal Reserve notes and commercial bank deposits against collateral convertible on demand into gold. (By collateral here, we mean things such as the liquid, short-term, high-quality commercial paper of solvent firms used to finance goods in the process of production.)
Statement and Testimony of Lewis E. Lehrman Chairman, The Lehrman Institute Prepared for September 21, 2012 Hearing
... Now we are able to formulate an authentic, bipartisan program to restore 4 percent American economic growth over the long term. Tax rate reductions with an enlarged tax base, government spending restraint aimed at a balanced budget, simplification of business regulation designed to empower entrepreneurial innovation -- these reforms can be made effective for America and the world by a modernized gold standard and stable exchange rates. This is the very same platform which uplifted 13 impoverished colonies by the sea in 1789 to leadership of the world in little more than a century.
A Road to Prosperity Friday, September 14, 2012 - The American Spectator
Gold, a fundamental, metallic element of the earth’s constitution, exhibits unique properties that enabled it, during two millennia of market testing, to emerge as a universally accepted store of value and medium of exchange, not least because it could sustain purchasing power over the long run against a standard assortment of goods and services. Rarely considered in monetary debates, these natural properties of gold caused it to prevail as a stable monetary standard, the most marketable means by which trading peoples worldwide could make trustworthy direct and indirect exchanges for all other articles of wealth.
The preference of tribal cultures, as well as ancient and modern civilizations, to use gold as money was no mere accident of history. Nor has this natural, historical, and global preference for gold as a store of value and standard of measure been easily purged by academic theory and government fiat.
Gold, by its intrinsic nature, is durable, homogenous, fungible, imperishable, indestructible, and malleable. It has a relatively low melting point, facilitating coined money. It is portable and can be readily transported from place to place. Gold money can be safely stored at very low cost, and then exchanged for monetary certificates, bank deposits, and notes—convertible bills of exchange that efficiently extended the gold standard worldwide.
Like paper money, gold is almost infinitely divisible into smaller denominations. But paper money has a marginal production cost near zero. Producing gold money, like other articles of wealth, requires real labor and capital.
Romneyconomics Monday, July 16, 2012 - The Weekly Standard, republished by NPR
Mitt Romney has articulated the choice we will make in November. We can choose President Obama and a European future—i.e., high unemployment, demographic winter, big government commanding over 50 percent of future output, a welfare state engineered and manipulated by the Washington bureaucracy, the end of American leadership, and, ultimately, national insolvency. Or we can embark once again on the road to rapid economic expansion, through pro-growth tax reform, smaller government, a balanced budget, and sound money. What we need, Romney argues, is an entrepreneurial economy based on the free price mechanism, free markets, free and fair international trade. For Romney the goal of rapid economic growth is full employment, a strong national defense, and a rising American standard of living. These policies are necessary. But are they sufficient?
Romney’s analysis emphasizes the character of presidential leadership, the need for hands-on White House direction of national economic policy. Workable economic policies require not only the right goals but also a strong president capable of leading Congress and the nation in a new direction—away from Obama’s backward-looking statism, and forward to pro-growth tax policies, budgetary equilibrium, and sound monetary policies. Regulations must be radically simplified. The tax code must be comprehensively reformed—with a larger base, fewer loopholes, and lower rates.
In his 2010 book Seeds of Destruction, Glenn Hubbard, a top economic adviser to Romney, summarizes the entrepreneurial spirit underlying Romney’s approach. “First and foremost, it will mean putting unemployed Americans back to work. Second, it will mean stabilizing the housing market and housing prices. Third, it will mean increasing the productivity of the American worker and making U.S. industry more competitive in international markets so that wage and economic growth can once again boost purchasing power. Fourth, it will mean reducing America’s dependence on increasingly expensive oil. Finally, it will mean creating a strong and stable dollar so that our import bill remains manageable.”
On this last point, Romney has criticized the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed—the ultimate cause of the stock market bubble of the 1990s and the subsequent crash and recession (2000-2002); the ultimate cause also of the real estate bubble, its collapse, and the Great Recession (2007-2009). Romney argues in almost every economic speech that Obama’s stimulus policies are poorly planned and ineffective, and that Obama has been AWOL on major legislation, defaulting to a pork barrel Democratic congressional majority on economic and health care policy in 2009-2010, when he had a majority in both the Senate and the House.
In private and public comments, Romney and Hubbard have suggested that hyper-expansive Fed policy and quantitative easing—repressing interest rates to zero—is a recklessmonetary approach that in the past has led to bouts of inflation, followed by deflation and recession.
I embrace much of this analysis and many of Romney’s proposals. His program is necessary, but it may not be sufficient.
Papering over U.S. debts and trade imbalances will take bills than we can print.
The Consequences of Disorder
The economic crisis we endure today is only the latest chapter in the century-long struggle to restore financial order in world markets -- a struggle whose outcome is inextricably bound up with U.S. prosperity and the promise of the American way of life.
As we think through the consequences of financial disorder, what come to mind are the economic heresies of fascism and bolshevism, and the catastrophic world wars of the 20th century. These historical episodes compel us to remember that floating exchange rates and competitive currency wars became the occasion for violent social disorder and revolutionary civil strife in the first half of the 20th century. They remind us that natural resource rivalry, monetary depreciation, mercantilism, and war clouds have appeared together from time immemorial.
The monetary disorder and national currency wars of that era are now being repeated in our own time, and have again led to social disorder and pervasive civil strife. I cite only one example among legions. The recent “Arab spring,” a revolutionary upheaval of the suppressed Islamic poor and middle class, was triggered by a vast food and fuel inflation, transmitted to the dollarized world commodity markets by hyper-expansive Federal Reserve monetary policy during 2008-2011. Huge price increases for necessities penetrated into the heart of all subsistence economies -- in this case, North Africa. Because the dollar is the official reserve currency of the world trading system, when the Fed creates excess credit to bail out the banks and the U.S. government deficit, it exports some of the excess liquidity abroad, igniting basic commodity inflation and the social strife this engenders. At home, the same rising prices of food, fuel, and other basic needs impoverish those on fixed incomes. Moreover, they lower the standard of living of the middle class, held back by wages and salaries that always lag rising prices.
At a recent Presidential debate, the Republican candidates discussed a new Gold Commission much like the one to which President Reagan appointed Ron Paul and me in 1981. When asked, Jim Grant and I agreed to serve as co-chairmen of a new gold commission — proposed by Newt Gingrich if he were elected. Just weeks prior, Senator Paul was reported by the Weekly Standard as having called for just such a commission. We said at the time that we would serve on a gold commission established by any president seriously interested in monetary and Federal Reserve reform.
The next gold commission, however, must be different from the Reagan Gold Commission, the majority of which endorsed the managed paper dollar and floating exchange rates. As the two dissenting minority members of the 1981 commission Ron Paul and I filed a minority report. We called for the restoration of the gold standard — that is, a stable dollar defined by law as a certain weight of gold. The minority report, entitled “The Case for Gold,” was later republished in book form.
My views on monetary reform have not changed, except that my sense of urgency is even greater. The Constitution in Article I, Sections 8 and 10, makes clear that Congress has the full authority “to coin money” from gold to be the monetary standard of the United States. Since 1792, Congress by statute established a stable dollar, defined in law as a specific weight unit of gold, but a 1971 executive order effectively changed that.
It's past time for Congress to "tear up" the U.S. Treasury's credit cards.
The super-committee of Congress is the latest group to confess abject defeat by the Treasury budget deficit. Who can be surprised by this total failure? During the past generation Congress has made as many as fifteen legislative attempts to control government spending -- aimed ultimately at a balanced budget. The most notable efforts were those sponsored by the all-time budget hawk, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. But every administrative and legislative effort by the authorities, no matter how well-intentioned, has collapsed. Why is this so?
Nobel economist Milton Friedman believed the solution to the budget deficit problem was to deny Congress tax revenues. So he advised Congressmen and Presidents to oppose all tax increases -- thereby denying bloated government the funds with which to increase spending. But Friedman's advice has failed, too. We know this because marginal tax rates have been reduced from as high as 70% in 1964 to 15-20-39% in 2011 -- depending on the type of income. But congressional spending has nevertheless increased every year -- such that, today, only 60% of the Federal budget is financed by taxes, the remainder by Treasury debt. Total direct Federal debt is now about equal to total U.S. output.
The intractable budget deficit and the inexorable rise of government spending has a simpler explanation. Congress and the Treasury are in possession of several open-ended charge accounts -- "permanent credit card financing" -- with no limits. With its charge cards the Treasury can borrow new credit (money) from the banking system -- much of what it needs every year to finance the ever-rising budget deficit.
A look at the current Federal Reserve Balance Sheet shows that the Fed has created about $1.7 trillion of new credit (money) with which to purchase Treasury debt. Foreign central banks have created about $2.7 trillion of new credit to purchase U.S. Treasury bonds. This global, electronic, money-printing exercise has financed almost 30% of the total direct debt of the U.S. Treasury. In 2002, Ben Bernanke, now Chairman of the Fed, did not mince words to describe this process:
[U]nder a fiat (that is, paper) money system, a government (in practice, the central bank in cooperation with other agencies) should always be able to generate increased nominal spending and inflation, even when the short-term nominal interest rate is at zero…. [T]he U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.
He might have added that these "no cost" dollars, printed by the Fed, are the enablers of the perennial U.S. budget deficit.
But the Fed is not the only credit card used by the Treasury to finance the budget deficit. Because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, foreign central banks also finance U.S. budget deficits (as the custody account of the Fed balance sheet shows). Domestic and foreign commercial banks, too, supply vast amounts of new credit to the U.S. Treasury because domestic, foreign, and international bank regulators, such as the Basel authorities, define U.S. sovereign bonds as high quality assets for which bank reserves are not necessary. Therefore financial institutions can qualify their overleveraged balance sheets by loading up on Treasury Securities. Indeed, only 10-20% of the total direct debt of the U.S. Treasury is now owned by the non-bank, non-government private market. In a word, given the reserve currency role of the dollar, the Federal Reserve and foreign central banks have been given every institutional incentive to finance the U.S. budget deficit. Beginning with World War I, every monetary discipline has been removed by domestic and international authorities, such that runaway government spending everywhere relies on the ultimate credit card -- newly created money in the banking system.
The simplest solution to the government spending problem in Congress is "to tear up" its credit cards. The way to do this is not with ad hoc and unavailing administrative patchworks, all of which are nullified by world banking system credit made available to the U.S. Treasury. Instead, the effective democratic solution is authorized by the U.S. Constitution -- in Article I, Sections 8 and 10: -- whereby the control of the supply of dollars is entrusted to the hands of the people -- where it stayed for most of American history, especially from 1792 to 1914. This was America's longest period of rapid, non-inflationary, economic growth -- almost 4% annually, with the budget under control except wartime.
Congress need only mobilize its unique, Article I, constitutional power "to coin money and regulate the value thereof." From 1792 to 1971 Congress defined by law the gold value of the currency such that paper dollars and bank demand deposits were convertible to their gold equivalent -- by the people (1792-1914) and/or by governments (1933-1971). Congress should exercise this constitutional power to restore dollar-gold convertibility, because of the proven budgetary and economic growth benefits of a dollar as good as gold.
