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The Consequences of Magic Money

Those receiving subsidies and loan guarantees are no doubt grateful, though they probably see it as the government’s duty and their right. But someone has to pay for it. In the past, the redistribution of wealth through taxes meant that the haves were taxed to give financial support to the have-nots, at least that was the story. Today, through monetary debasement nearly everyone benefits from monetary redistribution.

This is not a costless exercise. Governments are no longer robbing Peter to pay Paul. They are robbing Peter to pay Peter as well. You would think this is widely understood, but the Peters are so distracted by the apparent benefits they might or might not get that they don’t see the cost. They fail to appreciate that printing money is not just the marginal source of financing for excess government spending, but that it has now become mainstream.

There is almost a total absence in the established media of any commentary on the consequences of monetary inflation, and in a cry for more we even have financial experts warning us of a deflationary collapse and the need for the Fed to introduce negative interest rates to stave off deflation. Yes, there are deflationary forces, because banks wish to reduce their loan exposure at a time of increasing risk. But we can be sure that central banks and their political masters will do everything they can to counter the trend of contracting bank credit by increasing base money. There can only be one outcome: the debasement and eventual destruction of fiat currencies.

There is an aspect of the destruction brought about by monetary policy which is almost never considered by policymakers, and that is how it distorts the allocation of capital and leads to its misallocation. In free markets, capital is scarce and must be used to greatest effect if the consumer is to be properly served and the entrepreneur is to maximize his profits.

Capital comes in several forms and encompasses every aspect of production: principally an establishment, machinery, labor, semimanufactured goods and commodities to be processed, and money. An establishment, such as a factory or offices, and the availability of labor are relatively fixed in their capacity. Depending on their deployment and capacity they produce a limited amount of goods. It is just one form of capital, money and credit, which central banks and the banking system now provide, and which in its unbacked form is infinitely flexible. Consequently, attempts to stimulate production by monetary means still run into the capacity constraints of the other forms of capital.

Monetary policy has been increasingly used to manipulate capital allocation since the early days of the Great Depression. The effect has varied, but it has generally come up against the constraints of the other forms of capital. Where there is excess labour, it takes time to retrain it with the specialized skills required, a process hampered by trade unions ostensibly protecting their members but in reality resisting the reallocation of labor resources. Government control over planning and increasingly stifling regulations, again putting a brake on change, mean that changes and additions to the use of establishments have lengthened the time before entrepreneurial investment is rewarded with profits. Government intervention has also discouraged the withdrawal of monetary capital from unprofitable deployment, or malinvestments, lengthening recessions needlessly.

When the advanced nations had strong industrial cores, the periodic expansions of credit and their subsequent sudden contractions led to observable booms and busts in the classical sense, since production of labor-intensive consumer goods dominated production overall.

There have been two further developments.

The first was the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, which led to a substantial rise in prices for commodities. The broad-based UN index of commodities rose from 33 to 157 during the decade, a rise of 376 percent. This input category of production capital compared unfavorably with US consumer price increases of 112 percent  over the decade, the mismatch between these and other categories of capital allocation making economic calculation a fruitless exercise.

The second development was the liberation of financial controls in the mid-eighties, London’s Big Bang and the repeal of America’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, allowing commercial banks to fully embrace and exploit investment banking activities.

The banking cartel increasingly directed its ability to create credit toward purely financial activities mainly for their own books, thereby financing financial speculation while deemphasising bank credit expansion for production purposes for all but the larger corporations. Partly in response, the nineties saw businesses move production to low-cost centers in Southeast Asia, where all forms of production capital, with the exception of monetary capital, were significantly cheaper and more flexible.

There then commenced a quarter-century of expansion of international trade replacing much of the domestic production of goods in the US, the UK, and Europe. It was these events that denuded America of its manufacturing, not unfair competition as President Trump has alleged, and Germany’s retention of manufactures proves this. But the effect has been to radically alter how we should interpret the effects of monetary expansion on the US economy and others, compared with Hayekian triangles and the like.

Business cycle research had assumed a capitalistic structure of savers saving and thereby making monetary capital available to entrepreneurs. Changes in the propensity to save sent contrary signals to businesses about the propensity to consume, which caused them to alter their production plans. Based on the ratio between consumer spending and savings, this analytic model has been corrupted by the state and its licensed banks by replacing savers with former savers now no longer saving, and even borrowing to consume.

Today, the inflationary origins of investment funds for business development are hidden through financial intermediation by venture capital funds, quasi-government funds, and others. Being mandatory, pension funds continue to invest savings, but their beneficiaries have abandoned voluntary saving and run up debts, so even pension funds are not entirely free of monetary inflation. Insurance funds alone appear to be comprised of genuine savings within an inflationary system.

Other than pension funds and insurance companies, Keynes’s wish for the euthanasia of the saver has been achieved. He went on to suggest there would be a time “when we might aim in practice…at an increase in the volume of capital until it ceases to be scarce, so that the functionless investor will no longer receive a bonus.”

Now that everywhere bank deposits pay no interest, his wish has been granted, but Keynes did not foresee the unintended consequences of his inflationist policies which are now being visited upon us. Among other errors, he failed to adequately account for the limitation of nonmonetary forms of capital, which leads to bottlenecks and rising prices as monetary expansion proceeds.

The unintended consequences of neo-Keynesian policy failures are shortly to be exposed. The checks and balances on the formation and deployment of monetary capital in the free market system have been completely destroyed and replaced by inflation. So, where do you take us from here, Mr. Powell, Mr. Bailey, Ms. Lagarde, Mr. Kuroda? (read more)

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