In a world of uncertainty, waste—the destruction of value—is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, often involves laboring to transform scarce resources from a less useful form to a more useful form. For example, I transform money earned by my labor into raw beef (by using time and gasoline to drive to the supermarket and engaging in exchange), then I transform the raw beef into a medium-well hamburger through the time-consuming process of cooking. If after I eat the hamburger I wish I had done something else with the money and time (say, bought a chicken), I will regret my course of action and feel I’d wasted both.

We have all devoted time and resources to some project that we later realized was the wrong project. That’s the price of imperfect knowledge, which plagues all human beings. If we’re lucky some of the resources we used might be salvageable and put to other purposes, but the time, effort, and other resources are gone.

The same thing of course occurs in commercial production. An entrepreneur buys inputs and hires labor, thinking the finished product will bring a price that covers costs and yields a competitive return—only to find that people don’t want the product, or not badly enough to pay the anticipated price. The loss represents the destruction of value: The value of the inputs before the transformation took place turned out to be greater than the value of the finished product.

As I say, this happens because our knowledge is imperfect. It’s too bad, but perhaps not a tragedy—just a fact of life we learn to live with and minimize. The tragedy occurs when government intervention distorts price signals and induces people en masse unwittingly to make value-destroying plans. That’s part of the story told by the Austrian theory of the business cycle. In the present economic case the Federal Reserve’s low-interest-rate policy in the early 2000s and several federal agencies’ decade-long easy-housing policies induced builders to produce too many houses relative to what the demand would have been without those unsustainable policies. The result was the infamous housing boom and inevitable bust. With housing prices apparently on an unstoppable upward trajectory, and government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—not to mention too-big-to-be-allowed-to-fail banks—willing to buy lenders’ mortgages no matter how shaky, builders and buyers were found in great abundance. Buying more house than one could afford seemed smart when one could get a low teaser rate on an adjustable-rate mortgage for a low-to-no-down-payment home and expect its price to rise significantly in six months. When the higher rate kicked in, one could refinance or sell and walk off with the equity.

But when interest rates rose, the bubble burst, and demand plummeted, this smart scheme turned sour. Houses stood unsold, and many people couldn’t pay their mortgages, refinance, or sell at a profit. Foreclosures skyrocketed and the multitude with underwater homes simply disappeared, leaving banks holding a slew of vacant houses that cost money in taxes, code violations, and so on.

As a result, banks now would rather donate the properties to government-created nonprofit land banks and pay for the demolition than hold them and hope for future sales. This is happening in Cleveland, and the Washington Post reported that similar programs were being discussed elsewhere.

How does this relate to the waste identified by the Austrian business-cycle theory? To the extent the homes were vacated and allowed to deteriorate because of the process described above, the demolitions represent destruction of value attributable to government. In the absence of the unsustainable bubble-inflating policies, some of those houses wouldn’t have been built.

In the case of older homes, fewer newly built houses would have competed with them in the real estate market. They would still be occupied and therefore would have been maintained. (There would have been no Great Recession and high unemployment.) Demolition would not have been an attractive alternative.

The tragedy is that because of government policy, demolition is the most attractive alternative. Think of the resources and labor—now seen to have been squandered—that went into making each house. Imagine what products might have been created instead. It’s worse than that: Products always summon complementary products. A housing boom stimulates the production of related shopping centers, office parks, and myriad smaller facilities and products. The resources required to make those things also would have gone elsewhere. Now all those resources, along with much labor and time, are gone because people in government thought they knew how to plan the housing market.

* * *

Georgia and Alabama have joined Arizona in enacting a tough law directed at undocumented immigrants. As Scott Beaulier, Darrick Luke, and Daniel Smith demonstrate, this is already damaging their economies.

Andrew Morriss has been to Graceland, where he found that the lap of luxury in which its fabulously wealthy late resident lived doesn’t look so luxurious today.

Conventional wisdom holds that without the welfare state, the poor would be in dire straits. But what if, as Gary Chartier suggests, government is responsible for the poor’s condition in the first place?

If public policy created the housing bubble, the bursting of which has caused so much misery, can it really be a good idea to reinflate the bubble? Richard Fulmer says that according to political logic, the answer is yes.

The more government controls the curriculum, the more inimical schooling becomes to education. Peter McAllister explains.

The eurozone is in trouble, leading Robert Murphy to explore the possibility that it was a colossal mistake in the first place.

Regulation at the national level gets the lion’s share of attention from market advocates. But let’s not overlook the planning mentality more locally. Sam Staley surveys the taxicab industry.

Here’s what our columnists have whipped up: Donald Boudreaux audits the economics textbook writers. Robert Higgs explains why there’s so little investment. John Stossel brands government a job destroyer. Charles Baird looks at the latest outrage against free speech. And Tyler Watts, bombarded with claims that we couldn’t live without FEMA, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Books on libertarianism, the economy, socialism, and the threat to freedom occupy our reviewers.

—Sheldon Richman

srichman@fee.org

This summer marked the 40th anniversary of President Richard M. Nixon’s decision to sever the U.S. dollar’s official link to gold. On August 15, 1971, Nixon took to the airwaves in a national address from the Oval Office to declare that the U.S. Treasury would no longer honor foreigners’ demands to redeem dollars for gold. Because the United States was then the last country in the world with a currency defined by gold, it represented a complete and historic decoupling of the globe’s currencies—literally the money of the entire world—from the yellow metal.

For the first time in at least 2,700 years, dating to the Lydian coinage in what is now Turkey, gold was used as official money nowhere in the world. And for the first time ever the world’s monetary affairs were defined by a system of politically managed fiat currencies—that is, paper money run by governments or their central banks. The story behind Nixon’s catastrophic mistake, and the lessons it contains for today, suggest a framework for monetary policy and reforms that will induce strong and sustainable economic growth in the future.

It is important to understand what many current central bankers seem to have forgotten: the seminal importance of sound money—dependably valued, honest money whose value is not intentionally manipulated—as an institution in a modern exchange economy. Economies grow, and material wealth and welfare advance, through three interconnected phenomena, all of which are crucially supported by a well-functioning monetary unit: 1) efficient use of scarce resources via a system of prices and profit-and-loss, both of which encourage optimizing behavior on the part of all; 2) saving and the accumulation of capital for investment; and 3) the division of labor, specialization, and trade.

Regarding the last phenomenon, we would all be poor, and indeed most of us dead due to starvation, if we had to make and produce all our own food, housing, clothing, and other necessities and modern luxuries. As Adam Smith explained in his famous examination of a pin factory, dividing up the metal-straightening, wire-cutting, grinding, pin-head fashioning, and fastening and bundling operations into 18 separate steps increased the productivity of labor in the factory by at least 240-fold. (This of course dramatically increased productive output and raised workers’ real incomes.) And of course for society at large this specialization was not confined to single factories but spread across industries and agriculture: The baker, the butcher, the brewer, and the cobbler could all focus on their productive specialties and produce for a market wherein they could exchange with other specialists for desired goods.

Via economies of scale and scope, then, specialized production and exchange help to create a material horn of plenty for all in a society that’s felicitously based on peaceful, harmonious social cooperation. And here’s the key: None of this would be possible without a dependable monetary unit that serves as a medium for this exchange. Absent sound money, in fact, a division of labor, with all its specialized knowledge and skills, could hardly be exploited, because barter would mean that, say, a neurosurgeon would have to find a grocer who coincidentally needed brain surgery every time he wanted to obtain food. A barter society is by definition a primitive and poor one.

Similarly, the explosion in human progress in the last three centuries was propelled by the accumulation of capital, the tools, machinery, and other assets that increase per capita output and dramatically increase living standards. And here again, a well-functioning monetary unit facilitates the saving that allows for capital accumulation: Income need not be consumed immediately but can be transferred to others to invest productively in return for future payment streams. Sound money, in short, greatly enhances wealth-creating exchange and transfer of resources between present and future, and in doing so often assists in the development of higher output capacity in the future.

There is a third crucial way in which sound money serves to advance civilized human progress: By providing a common denominator for the expression of all exchange prices between goods, money greatly facilitates trade among all parties, thus extending the breadth of markets as far as money’s use itself, which in turn intensifies the division of labor that increases productive output and per capita incomes. Think about it: Without a monetary unit of account there would be an infinite array of prices for one good against all other goods; for example, the bread-price of shoes, the book-price of apples, and so on. In turn, calculation of profit and loss, on which effective use of scarce resources so critically depends, would be impossible.

In sum the institutional development and use of money has been an immense human achievement, every bit as important as language, property rights, the rule of law, and entrepreneurship in the advancement of human civilization. And it is important to note that while several commodities were tried as monetary exchange media over the centuries, from fish to cigarettes, the precious metals and especially gold were seen to be most effective, as they are valuable, highly divisible, durable, uniform in composition, easily assayable, transportable, and bear high value-to-bulk, along with being relatively stable in annual supply. In short, in an ever-changing world of imperfection, gold has been found to be a near-perfect, and certainly dependably valued, form of money.

Money, International Trade, and Economic Growth

To understand much about our current economic challenges and what to do to meet them, it is important to understand why gold, after several centuries of trial and error, came to be seen as sound money versus paper, other commodities, and even silver. The term sound money is especially important to grasp: It is meant to describe a reliable, dependably valued medium of exchange and account, not subject easily to manipulation, which can therefore effectively perform the three functions of money described above, all of which lead to prosperity and an advancing economy. This is critical for a civilized society whose economy is based on monetary exchange, because money is literally one-half of every transaction. So when the value of the monetary unit is volatile—when money becomes more or less unsound—it changes the intended terms of trade between parties, especially when that transaction involves exchange between present and future, as in capital investment. This in turn can cause such exchanges to break down or lead to distortions in trade that bring malinvestment of assets and waste of scarce resources.

No better illustration of this can be seen than in the German hyperinflation of 1923. German war reparations mandated by Versailles had so burdened the German economy that the German government took literally to printing the currency known as the papiermark in massive quantities. This rapidly depreciated the value of the currency until in the fall of 1923 workers were paid in wheelbarrows of cash twice daily. The velocity of spending skyrocketed, as workers immediately rushed to trade the quickly worthless paper money for anything of tangible value, buying commodities they often did not need. Saving and investment were stunted, price inflation soared out of control, and civil society lurched toward a complete breakdown by the end of 1923, when $1, which had bought 5.21 marks in 1918, now bought 4.2 trillion of them.

Seen another way, the German hyperinflation is an example of a “virus” infecting the economy, distorting prices in every transaction, every entrepreneurial investment decision, and the value of every bank account. Every calculation of profit and loss was changed in real terms as well, thus causing resources to be inefficiently used or traded—that is, wasted. While the harm caused by unsound money is usually less than what occurred in 1923 in Germany, it was no less real in a 1970s-style inflation, a 1930s-style deflation, or a 2000s-style housing bubble fueled by falsified interest rates thanks to the Fed’s over-creation of money.

Conversely it was sound money, based on the international gold standard, that greatly impelled the fantastic rise in living standards across the nineteenth century in many parts of the globe. Gold as a common medium facilitated dramatic increases in trade and the international division of labor. With a dependably valued international medium of exchange and unit of account, long-term investment could be undertaken, and ever-increasing volumes of mutually profitable trading developed between nations, increasing jobs, output, and living standards dramatically. The century up to 1914 was a golden age of prosperity and harmony among nations, and while not devoid of all war, recessions, or panics, it was comparatively more peaceful and productive than any other period in human history.

The Rise of Central Banking

While the Bank of England was created in 1694, the United States did not get a central bank until the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913; by 1935, with the creation of the Bank of Canada, all modern nations had central banks. In theory a central bank, through monopoly banknote issue and effective control of a nation’s money supply, serves as a stabilizing influence in an economy by acting as a banker’s bank, a lender of last resort providing liquidity in panics, and a regulator of commercial banks and thus governor of their excesses. (However, in a recent exhaustive study, economists George Selgin and William Lastrapes of the University of Georgia and Lawrence White of George Mason University show that recessions were shorter and less severe, inflation and unemployment lower, and economic growth stronger and more durable in the century before 1913 than since the Fed’s creation). At the least, the central bank’s mandate included—and seemed to assure—maintenance of the value of the currency.

Beginning with World War I, and continuing through the Great Depression and World War II, the links to gold were for the most part effectively severed from most nations’ currencies, including the U.S. dollar. In the summer of 1944 economists (led by John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White) met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to design a postwar monetary system conducive to international trade. The resulting mechanism, known as the gold-exchange standard, tried to resurrect the beneficial aspects of the nineteenth century’s classical gold standard and lasted until Nixon scrapped it in 1971. In short the Bretton Woods agreement charged the U.S. government with defining the dollar in gold ($35 per ounce) and maintaining convertibility at this rate only with foreign governments and central banks. (Pointedly, there was no similar obligation to U.S. banks or citizens; gold had disappeared from circulation in the United States after Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 decree.) In turn all foreign nations were to peg their currencies to the dollar, thereby preserving a regime (however illusory) of fixed exchange rates so as to promote certainty in international exchange and encourage cross-border trade and investment.

By the 1960s this system was beginning to break down on all sides. Foreign governments announced periodic devaluations against the gold-linked dollar to promote exports and allow for domestic government spending, and the United States ramped up “guns-and-butter” federal spending on both the Great Society and the Vietnam War. Inflation slowly crept into the U.S. economy, and gold-redemption requests spiked by the late 1960s at the U.S. Treasury’s gold window.

Nixon thus made his fateful decision in the summer of 1971, freeing the government from any redemption obligations. This had two immediate effects: It amounted to an automatic, if stealthy, repudiation of U.S. debt in real terms because it devalued all dollar-denominated assets and currency at once. It also allowed the U.S. government, in concert with a technically independent Federal Reserve, to manage the U.S. money supply for its own political ends indefinitely.

The Predictable Aftermath of 1971

In developing his theory of money and credit a century ago, the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained why a system of fiat currencies was bound to break down: The politicians’ urge to inflate the money supply in order to commandeer the resources of the real economy via expanded government spending would prove too great. Further, because the dollar was the de facto reserve currency of the globe post-Nixon (replacing gold itself), any U.S. inflation would encourage other nations’ monetary expansions and competitive devaluations in tandem. And indeed, an era of predictable instability has been the result: A trenchant stagflation in the 1970s was followed by banking and S&L crises in the 1980s; Russian, Asian, and Latin American banking crises in the 1980s–90s; overleveraged financial institutions and moral hazard-based bailouts of too-big-to-fail institutions in the 1990s–2000s; and in the last decade or so two Fed-induced bubbles and subsequent crashes. The second of those, based in the housing sector, “went viral” across the world thanks to the huge nominal amount of funds plus leverage of U.S.-based mortgage debt, coupled with the expectation on the part of investors that the U.S. government would guarantee any mortgage-bond losses.

This instability has starkly proven another tenet of Mises’s seminal work: Fiat currencies managed by central banks with a monopoly on note issue, rather than being a source of macro stability, are themselves the causal agents of repeated boom-and-bust business cycles. By increasing the money supply at zero effective cost, central banks encourage government spending and cause interest rates to fall below their natural rate, which induces private investment and a temporary boom. But this boom, usually in capital-equipment sectors or long-term durables, is not based on real individual and institutional savings. That is, the accumulation of capital is not “backed” by the real resources of society. By definition such a boom is inherently unsustainable and unstable, and must end in a bust and painful retrenchment. The greater and longer the creation of fiat money by the central bank, the harder and longer will be the ensuing recession.

A Path to Reform

The best solution to the myriad problems caused by the Fed’s post-Nixon fiat currency management is to return to sound money generated by private markets and intermediated by freely competing banks issuing their own notes. These notes could be backed by any commodity but most likely would involve a return to gold. Banks would compete for customer deposits and loan business on the basis of the soundness of their balance sheets and thus could not over-issue—or else they’d face redemption of their outstanding notes and a potential collapse from a bank-run. Such a system is far more stable than a monopoly central bank without constraints, subject to the inexorable pull of political designs (that is, malfeasance).

But there are many challenges to developing and implementing such a free-banking system with commodity money; this is the subject of work to be published in the future. Meanwhile a second-best solution would be for the Federal Reserve to cease and desist with any further fiat money creation—in essence, freeze the monetary base where it is, permanently. The Fed could then announce an intent to return to full gold convertibility, and any new notes it issued (and used by Fed member banks) would be 100 percent backed by gold. Any maturing securities held as assets on the Fed’s balance sheet would be used to purchase gold to build the Fed’s reserves. The permanent price of gold would be set over a period of months after the announcement of the new regime, as gold itself and competing currencies traded at new (lower) levels based on the U.S. government’s new commitment to dollar stability.

The results of this reform program would be electric and dramatic. Capital investment would soar in the United States, as America became a haven for high-productivity ventures once again. The entire U.S. economy would in effect be recapitalized. While an end to activist Fed monetary policy would raise the short end of the yield curve, over time real interest rates would revert to historic low levels due to dollar stability. Such monetary reform implies pro-growth fiscal reforms as well; the U.S. government’s profligacy would have to end because fiscal laxity would no longer be supported by an accommodating Fed. A new, sound dollar and a passive Fed would also engender other pro-growth reforms in banking, such as a reduction in or end to deposit insurance and a lower burden of regulations that stunt growth. The banking sector would at once be more competitive, better capitalized, less brittle, and on sounder footing itself.

To bring this about monetary policy must again become a big political issue—the dominating political issue—in a way it has not been since the presidential election of 1896, when William Jennings Bryan railed against a “cross of gold.” Indeed this can happen if people come to understand that the main culprit of U.S. booms and busts since 1971, and indeed the primary progenitor of the global disaster of 2008—from which we have yet to recover—is the political management of money by the Federal Reserve. Sound money, honest money, besides being a necessary cause of sustainable economic growth itself, is the antidote to the tragically unnecessary torpor of our modern world.

There have been huge advances in technology and substantial declines in trade barriers in recent years. While these developments have raised living standards they have been hard on people whose skills were rendered obsolete or uncompetitive. When changes evolve gradually, as when so many people left farming in the last century, the disruption is not so great. Changes are now coming faster and are extending to some high-paid professional jobs. Automated systems can now handle at least the routine aspects of some legal research and medical diagnosis.

Time and time again new doors have opened to workers as old doors closed. Machines replace workers, but they raise productivity and produce new employment opportunities. We can expect this pattern to continue for a long time to come. Still, it is within the realm of possibility that robots and computers could take over so much work that the demand for human workers would shrink drastically. But those very machines would mean higher productivity and thus higher living standards.

A great deal of work can be now be done remotely, providing an advantage to areas with low living costs. Substantial outsourcing of such jobs to foreign countries has occurred (though that trend may be reversing as low-cost areas of the United States become competitive and as customer dissatisfaction and problems with managing offshore workers come up). The benefits of outsourcing and other productivity enhancements are spread across all consumers, but the job losses are concentrated among small and sometimes vocal minorities.

Another theoretical point: Unemployment notwithstanding, it is an empirical fact of life that labor is scarce relative to natural resources, as Murray Rothbard explained. Over time, this gap tends to lessen and could theoretically disappear.

Education Is Key

Problems with education are legion, but two in particular bear on unemployment and underemployment. One is the emphasis on college education over vocational training. Everyone should attend college, says President Obama. Really? What about welders, truck drivers, repair people, retail sales people? These skills are in demand, and for many people the jobs may offer good pay and personal satisfaction. Why not attend a trade school or get an apprenticeship rather than a college degree? Compare four years in school leading to a bachelor of arts in business and a big student debt versus on-the-job learning.

The second problem is that college administrators and instructors lack incentives to prepare students for good jobs. Schools usually have little to say about the jobs their graduates have gotten or the debt burdens they carry.

Even with all the emphasis on college, by 2020 only about a third of the labor force will be equipped with bachelor’s degrees or higher, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. But the glut of dubious business and social “science” degree-holders will continue while STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degree holders will remain scarce.

Among employers surveyed by McKinsey, a majority expect to hire more part-time, temporary, or contract workers. One reason for this trend is mandated and generally very expensive health insurance for full-time employees. But more sophisticated resource-management systems also contribute to this trend, in addition to telecommuting opportunities.

Unemployment Figures Are Grim, and Yet . . .

As this is written, the widely followed U-3 measure of unemployment stands at 9.1 percent while the broader U-6 is a whopping 16.2 percent. People are also going longer without work. About 45 percent of those unemployed have been out of work for more than 27 weeks. The number of discouraged workers rose sharply during the recent recession. Speaking of the Great Recession, it officially ended in June 2009, and if we had gotten a recovery along the lines of past recoveries, GDP would be booming by now and unemployment, always the last aspect to recover, would be falling noticeably. Not only is unemployment high, but GDP growth for the first half of 2011 was close to zero. There was talk of a slide back into recession, though this diminished in the fall.

Job losses since the start of the Great Recession number about 7.5 million; three million more people have become discouraged. Total payrolls amount to about 130 million, fewer than in 2000, when the population was about 11 percent lower. Seven people compete for each job opening.

Unemployment varies widely from place to place. The U-3 version varies from 3.2 percent in North Dakota to 12.4 percent in Nevada. Among cities the numbers range from 3.2 percent in Bismarck, North Dakota, to 27.9 percent in Yuma, Arizona. There is also wide variation among job classifications. Nutritionists, welders, and nurses’ aides are in short supply, along with computer specialists and engineers.

Aggregate figures always mask important differences. Many employers still find it hard to locate good people. The McKinsey study reports that 40 percent of companies surveyed have had openings for six months, while 64 percent reported positions for which they cannot find qualified applicants, with managers, scientists, and computer engineers topping the list.

Anecdotally, “Now Hiring” signs are not hard to spot. Friends who own businesses tell me they have difficulty filling even a receptionist’s job with someone who is reliable, can write a passable letter, or create a simple Excel spreadsheet. Alas these days one cannot assume that a holder of a bachelor’s degree in business, for example, has these basic skills.

Recent Government Policy

The Fed has been unable to do anything about unemployment in recent years. The massive doses of money inflation, which tripled the monetary base (currency plus bank reserves) from about 2008 until the present, have not produced any significant price inflation, and unemployment remains stubbornly high. Money inflation has not produced price inflation largely because banks are not lending but instead have accumulated massive amounts of excess reserves—above and beyond the levels mandated by the Fed to back deposit liabilities. (The Fed pays interest on reserves held in the banks’ Fed accounts.)

As we have seen, the distinction between U-3 and U-6 hinges on the rather arbitrary classification of some unemployed workers as “discouraged.” Alternately, one could simply count the number of work-age people who do not hold jobs. For example, one-fifth of all men of prime working age are not getting up in the morning and heading for a job either because they’re officially unemployed or excluded from the labor force.

Labor productivity is way up and with it, corporate profits. This is typical of the early stages of a recovery. Employers realize that they may have gone overboard with hiring during the boom and need to pull back. When they need additional help they usually turn first to temporary workers. Employees work harder with the specter of unemployment looming large. Only later does employers’ confidence pick up enough that they’re willing to take the risky step of adding permanent hires.

Productivity increases are a good thing in the long run, but by this stage of the recovery employment should be picking up. Why isn’t it?

What’s to Be Done?

Businesspeople have to predict the future, so they hate uncertainty, especially the kind that comes from government—and there’s plenty of that around right now. What will Obamacare do to them? Will the Bush tax cuts be allowed to expire next year? Will there be another debt crisis? What will happen to the not-so-almighty dollar? Who will win next year’s election? The best way to get the economy on track again is to lessen these vexing uncertainties. Given the performance of the President and Congress in the recent debt ceiling debacle, this seems unlikely to happen before the next election.

Rhetoric matters. By 1937 unemployment had recovered somewhat from its Great Depression peak of 25 percent. But with the failure of the New Deal becoming evident, FDR, needing a scapegoat, turned against businesspeople with new regulations, antitrust action, new taxes, and hostile rhetoric—he called them “economic royalists” at one point. The recovery stalled, unemployment rose, and only the war brought an end to unemployment—good news if you got a job, bad news if it was a job that got you shot at. (But what was being made? Not consumer goods.) President Obama has referred to “fat-cat bankers” but has backed away from inflammatory rhetoric, perhaps because of adult supervision.

Can stimulus programs mitigate unemployment? Sure, they can put people to work, but the projects are politically motivated and do not represent the best use of scarce resources, as market-based projects must try to do. The projects end, the workers disperse, and there has often been little or no lasting benefit. About all we have to show for those programs are massive new debt levels, a weakening dollar, and a feeble economy—and yes, a frightened and angry populace.

The economics profession must lessen its fascination with dubious macroeconomic aggregates. Production of needed and wanted goods and services is what really matters, not just production of any old thing that gets added to GDP. Economists should focus on conditions that generate real jobs, jobs that produce things people really want, not just any activity that draws a subsidized paycheck.

Congress must make serious spending cuts, and proponents should not pretend these won’t hurt short-term. Cuts should be immediate, because promises about cuts ten years from now are all but meaningless. Today’s Congress has little influence over future officeholders.

The Federal Reserve should be relieved of its unemployment mandate (and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). Its money-creation powers should be reined in, and ultimately it should be abolished.

The authors’ criticisms of the Fed’s response to the crisis are no less trenchant. “In its rush to prop up the financial system,” they observe, the Fed rescued insolvent financial institutions, exposing taxpayers to losses on toxic assets while helping to “sow the seeds of bigger bubbles and even more destructive crises.”

But although Roubini and Mihm draw attention to some ways in which the government contributed to the crisis, they go seriously wrong in claiming that the boom “was primarily underwritten not by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but by private mortgage lenders like Countrywide”: Although Fannie and Freddie didn’t originate any subprime loans, they bought and (implicitly) guaranteed plenty of them, including a very large share of Countrywide’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) “Best Practice” loans. What Fannie and Freddie didn’t buy other lenders did, to meet their own CRA requirements. Such facts undermine Roubini and Mihm’s conclusion that “the significance of government intervention was dwarfed by the significance of government inaction.”

Roubini and Mihm’s reform proposals also fail to properly weigh government policy’s contribution to the crisis. They start well again by insisting on the need to restore to financial services “the creative destruction that Schumpeter saw as essential for capitalism’s long-term health.” Although Lehman Brothers’ failure revealed the shortcomings of ordinary bankruptcy as a means for resolving large and heavily leveraged financial firms, Roubini and Mihm note how those shortcomings could be avoided by means of “living wills” or by splitting ailing firms into “good” and “bad” parts, so that the latter might be declared bankrupt without raising Cain.

But some of Roubini and Mihm’s other proposals appear useless at best, including their endorsement of a “beefed-up” Glass-Steagall that would forcibly break up enterprises that become too big to fail, with its implicit suggestion that Gramm-Leach-Bliley contributed to the crisis. In fact that 1999 “repeal” of Glass-Steagall merely allowed commercial banks to affiliate with investment banks and played no important part in the insolvency of Lehman Brothers and other independent broker-dealers that was at the heart of the crisis.

A beefed-up Glass-Steagall Act might of course spin a much tighter web of firewalls than the original did. But as Roubini and Mihm themselves suggest, many TBTF firms exist only thanks to “heavy helpings of government largess,” including guarantees and actual bailouts, and could be left to break up naturally once improved bankruptcy procedures are in place. Perversities in executive compensation might likewise vanish on their own once imprudent decisions lead to bankruptcy rather than bailouts.

The most disappointing part of Crisis Economics is the second chapter’s hackneyed history of thought. Here Adam Smith is portrayed as a Walras-Debreu manqué who blinked at capitalism’s “vulnerabilities,” while Marx is credited with the “hugely important insight” that crises are “part and parcel of capitalism”—as if he’d predicted occasional financial panics rather than a steady decline in firm profits. The incomprehensible parts of the General Theory are treated, per usual, as proof of Keynes’s genius rather than of his being, well, incomprehensible. Finally and most disappointingly, by confusing the Mises-Hayek view of the business cycle with Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, Roubini and Mihm overlook the one theory of crises that best fits the housing boom-bust story.

Crisis Economics’s occasional references to the Great Depression must also be taken with a pinch of salt. It wasn’t Hoover but FDR who, in February 1933, stood by while “thousands of banks” went under; and it was growth in the money stock rather than fiscal stimulus that fueled the post-1933 recovery. The deflation of 1937–38 was mainly caused not by FDR’s belated attempt to balance the federal budget but by the Fed’s doubling of bank reserve requirements. Finally, corrected statistics show that World War II brought further stagnation rather than sustained recovery.

In short this “crash course in the future of finance” has both strengths and weaknesses. Although it contains much useful information about the subprime debacle, it understates the government’s contribution to the crisis, and although it suggests some desirable reforms, it suggests others that could prove counterproductive. Readers looking for straight A’s are advised to cram with caution.

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Read about it here.

It is as though the Fed were riding on the back of a double-headed monster. It cannot hang on forever, but it cannot dismount the beast without being devoured. As it is, the U.S. Treasury depends on ZIRP to fund America’s ballooning debt. When investors flee an enfeebled dollar the Fed is likely to be the “buyer of first resort” so that the price of Treasurys does not fall, pushing up interest rates. (So far Treasurys with low yields are still in high demand.) So with the Fed insisting that short-term interest rates will remain near zero “for an extended period,” a phrase used for the past two years, a new round of QE is almost inevitable.

For its part, QE involves flooding financial institutions with excess liquidity to try to flatten out the yield curve and depress long-term interest rates in hopes of sparking a recovery. But QE has created a massive overhang of excess reserves in the banking system that constitute repressed price inflation. And the sums involved are truly staggering: The Fed has injected at least $2.3 trillion into the financial system since Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

From late 2008 through March 2010 the Fed bought longer-term securities worth $1.7 trillion (QE1). This included purchases of $500 billion in mortgage securities and $100 billion in agency debentures with a target of $1.25 trillion for mortgage debt. Purchasing mortgage-backed securities and bailing out AIG and Bear Stearns, as well as buying other securities, led to a 140 percent increase in the monetary base.

In November 2010 the Fed began QE2 by buying an additional $600 billion in longer-term Treasury securities, a program that officially expired at the end of June. Yet the Fed has indicated it will continue buying Treasurys using proceeds from maturing debt it already owns.

Stealth Easing

With over $112 billion of the Fed’s government bond holdings maturing over the coming 12 months, replacement alone would involve purchasing over $9 billion of Treasurys each month. It also has more than $914 billion of mortgage-backed debt and $118 billion of debentures issued by government-sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). As such this is a “stealth” continuation of QE with only a limited, if any, decrease in the money-creation process.

For all the fanfare about QE, it must be said that it constitutes a last-gasp step and admission of the failure of other monetary policy tools. Consider the case of Japan. Its central bank, the Bank of Japan (BoJ), began asset purchases under QE to offset deflation and stimulate its ailing economy in early 2001. After nearly a decade of setting interest rates near zero the BoJ realized it had been unable to conjure up an economic recovery. Then after five years of gradually expanding its bond purchases, the BoJ exercised an exit strategy from QE in 2006, only to begin again.

Last March the BoJ increased its QE program from ¥5 trillion to ¥10 trillion (about $130 billion) scheduled until the end of 2012. Recently it announced another expansion to ¥15 trillion ($183 billion).

Incentives vs. Growth

A child untutored in economics might think it makes no sense to continue massive increases of liquidity into the economy that have been ineffective for so long. But most central bankers and many economists argue that previous amounts were too little and more is needed.

The incentives that QE and ZIRP create for commercial banks make it easy to see why these policies cannot promote economic growth. On the one hand, low interest rates reduce the cost of borrowing, which should encourage more investment spending. But on the other, commercial banks pay almost nothing to borrow yet receive interest payments from the Fed to hold excess reserves, making them unlikely to extend new loans.

A sufficiently high interest rate paid on bank reserves will induce banks to choose a risk-free interest-bearing asset rather than lending to private-sector borrowers. And so it is that commercial banks are earning record profits while making very few new loans.

Exit Strategy?

The question of whether the Fed or the BoJ has an effective “exit strategy” from monetary expansion using near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing remains open. One possibility for the Fed is to engage in repurchase agreements (repos) to remove some of the excess liquidity that it pumped into the financial system.

These repos involve selling securities to commercial banks with the Fed agreeing to buy them back at a higher price at a later date. But once again commercial banks will find holding risk-free interest-bearing assets a much better bet than issuing new commercial loans.

In the end both QE and ZIRP have been ineffective in restoring economic vitality while also creating a massive overhang of repressed inflation. Most economists view business startups, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, as the key to economic recovery and growth. Yet QE and associated central-bank policies are diverting credit away from newly forming firms.

The Fed has now announced it will continue the “exceptionally” low short-term interest rates until the middle of 2013. This indicates that U.S. central bankers are unconvinced of the errors of their ways in their policy choices. That they are unwilling or unable to change course means the U.S. and Japanese economies are doomed to painfully slow economic growth for the foreseeable future.

Nowhere is this more true than in government, which means we have to watch it closely. Unfortunately preconceived notions can make us impervious to events right in front of us and lead us to colossal misperceptions.

Take the Federal Reserve System. (All together now: Please!) Since the central bank controls the money supply, advocates of free markets and market-based money are understandably wary of its power to generate inflation. It’s inflated in the past and has the capacity to do so in the future. So attention naturally goes in that direction.

The problem is that while we’re watching for inflation, we might be missing the Fed’s real mischief elsewhere. In stage magic this is called misdirection.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a macroeconomist at San Jose State University and a Freeman contributor (not to mention an old friend), says that’s exactly what has been happening. While inflation hawks have been busy looking for any sign, or even any word, of monetary expansion, Hummel writes, “[Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke has so expanded the Fed’s discretionary actions beyond merely controlling the money stock that it has become a gigantic, financial central planner.”

In other words, “Bernanke’s targeted and sterilized bailouts have altered the fundamental nature of the Federal Reserve. . . . [T]he Fed that emerged from the [housing and financial] crisis is no longer the same as the Fed before the crisis. . . . Most economists appear not to appreciate fully how drastic the changes are that Bernanke has wrought.”

Note the word “sterilized.” That means the Fed’s huge bailout program has been carried on largely without creating net new money. And that makes the Fed a menace to markets even when it’s not generating inflation! Hummel says that what we should be concerned about today with respect to the Fed is not inflation but central, nonmarket control of the allocation of scarce capital. In our obsession with inflation, we are missing an ominous leap further into corporate statism.

Hummel spells this all out with admirable clarity and detail in “Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman: The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner,” published in Freeman columnist Robert Higgs’s great quarterly journal, The Independent Review, Spring 2011.

Bernanke’s efforts to channel capital to particular firms and sectors, including insolvent financial institutions, are breathtaking in scope. Previous Fed chairmen, notably Alan Greenspan, poured new money into the economy in response to anticipated crises, but they did not attempt to direct the money to chosen destinations. That was left to the market (however distorted). Things are different now. Bernanke directs the flow of credit—and has been doing it generally without creating new money.

How so? By selling assets to or borrowing money from banks and other institutions. Follow the money: When the Fed sells assets (T-bills, mortgage-backed securities, whatever) or borrows, it takes money out of the economy. If it turns around and lends the money to a bank, the impact on the money stock is a wash. However, the Fed has acted like a central planner of the capital market. Hummel leaves no doubt that this is what the Fed was up to before September 2008.

After that the Fed appeared to create huge amounts of new money through what has been called “quantitative easing” (QE1 and then QE2). But since 2008 it has also paid banks interest on reserves kept in their Fed accounts. “Bernanke in effect created money and then borrowed it back from the banks by paying them interest. . . . [T]he payment of interest on reserves was tantamount to borrowing back from depositories the full $800 billion increase in reserves and more. No wonder the impact of the base explosion on the broader monetary measures (except for M1) was so muted,” Hummel writes.

Summing up, Hummel says, “Helicopter Ben talks a good line about being ready to unleash quantitative easing, but this talk only imparts an aura of justification for the Fed’s incredibly expanded role in allocating the country’s scarce supply of savings. If anything, his policies were closer to a quantitative tightening. A better moniker would therefore be ‘Bailout Ben.’”

* * *

The Progressive Era’s infatuation with regulation of labor markets is typically portrayed as a humanitarian impulse. But could darker motives have been at work? Art Carden and Steven Horwitz have evidence to support that suspicion.

During last summer’s debt-ceiling controversy Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made a remarkably anti-Keynesian concession that undercut his own monetary policies. James C. W. Ahiakpor has the scoop.

The government now will pay people—possibly a lot—to blow the whistle on the companies they work for. One need not believe that business is faultless to see the dangers in this government-created incentive. Warren Gibson spells it out.

Arthur Koestler’s classic novel about the horrors of the Soviet Union, Darkness at Noon, was published 70 years ago this year. Edward Bruce Walker has a tribute to Koestler and his unique book.

Classical liberals like Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., and George C. Roche III, as well as Progressives, were critics of the Gilded Age. Joseph Stromberg thinks they were onto something.

One of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century was Walter Lippmann, an establishment figure who mostly took wrong positions on economic policy. But for a brief period he was struck with free-market insights about the impossibility of central planning. Harold B. Jones, Jr., has the details.

Bureaucratic central decision-making is notoriously bad because it ignores what F. A. Hayek called “the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.” Paul Schwennesen applies this principle to two seemingly dissimilar cases.

Here’s what our ever-curious columnists have cooked up this issue: Lawrence Reed pays attention to the sadly neglected Samuel Smiles. Robert Higgs takes a scalpel to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Thomas Szsaz focuses on a degraded and disfavored class of Americans. John Stossel exposes the scam of college. Charles Baird traces crony unionism in the government sector. And Arthur Foulkes, reading that claim that America can be great only through big government, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Books coming under our reviewers’ microscopes cover so-called great leaders, the Mont Pelerin Society, state nullification of federal law, and the relationship between science and liberal democracy.

“The central bank has to be, in a way, a neutral player, and yet we find ourselves trying to stimulate, and the effect is further leveraging,” he said. “If I thought zero rates would bring jobs, I’d want it forever. But it distorts the economy.”

He continued, “In 2003, when we lowered rates and kept them there because unemployment was 6.5 percent — look at the consequences.” Those consequences included the nation’s mortgage feast, followed by its current economic famine.

Selgin points out that Hoenig, whether he knows it or not, is saying what F.A. Hayek would have said. “I can’t help feeling that Hayek deserves a lot more credit than he’s getting for having put forward a theory which, whatever its general merits may be, seems to fit the recent boom-bust experience so well,” Selgin writes. “…[I]t seems to me that anyone who believes that the recent bust is to some important extent a consequence of past malinvestment that was sponsored by easy monetary policy ought to acknowledge the fact that F.A. Hayek spent much of his early career warning against this very possibility, and later won a Nobel prize for the work in question. That something akin to his theory, if not the very thing itself, is now subscribed to by many non-Austrians, either with no mention of Hayek’s contribution or with somewhat grudging acknowledgment of it only, seems to me both strange and unfair.”

Despite assertions that it has ended its policy of quantitative easing (QE), the Fed is unlikely to be able to do so until it also ends its zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP). This deadly policy duo has had terrible consequences for the American economy and every country using U.S. dollars, which continue to depreciate.

It is as though the Fed were riding on the back of a double-headed monster. It cannot hang on forever, but it cannot dismount the beast without being devoured. As it is, the U.S. Treasury depends on ZIRP to fund America’s ballooning debt. As investors flee an enfeebled dollar and ponder S&P’s downgrade, the Fed is likely to be the “buyer of first resort” so that the price of Treasuries does not fall, pushing up interest rates. So with the Fed insisting that short-term interest rates will remain near zero “for an extended period,” a phrase used for the past two years, a new round of QE is almost inevitable.

Excess Liquidity

For its part, QE involves flooding financial institutions with excess liquidity to try to flatten out the yield curve and depress long-term interest rates in hopes of sparking a recovery. But QE has created a massive overhang of excess reserves in the banking system that constitute repressed price inflation. And the sums involved are truly staggering with the Fed having injected at least $2.3 trillion into the financial system since Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

From late 2008 through March 2010, the Fed bought longer-term securities worth $1.7 trillion (QE1). This included purchases of $500 billion of mortgage securities and $100 billion of agency debentures with a target of $1.25 trillion for mortgage debt. purchasing mortgage-backed securities and bailing out AIG and Bear Stearns, as well as buying other securities, led to an increase in the monetary base of 140 percent.

In November 2010 the Fed began QE2 by buying an additional $600 billion in longer-term Treasury securities, a program that officially expired at the end of June. Yet the Fed has indicated it will continue buying Treasuries using proceeds from maturing debt it already owns, allowing it to engage in continuing quantitative easing by another name.

With over $112 billion of the Fed’s government bond holdings maturing over the coming 12 months, replacement alone would involve purchases of Treasurys of over $9 billion each month. It also has more than $914 billion of mortgage-backed debt and $118 billion of debentures issued by government-sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). As such, this is a “stealth” continuation of QE with only a limited, if any, decrease in the money-creation process.

Last Gasp

For all the fanfare about QE, it must be said that it constitutes a last-gasp step and admission of failure of other monetary policy tools. Consider the case of Japan. Its central bank, the Bank of Japan (BoJ), began asset purchases under QE to offset deflation and stimulate its ailing economy in early 2001.

After nearly a decade of setting interest rates near zero, the BoJ realized it had been unable to conjure up an economic recovery. Then after five years of gradually expanding its bond purchases, the BOJ exercised an exit strategy from QE in 2006, only to begin again.

Last March the BoJ increased its QE program from ¥5 trillion to ¥10 trillion (about $130 billion) scheduled until the end of 2012. Recently, it announced another expansion to ¥15 trillion ($183 billion).

A child untutored in economics might think it makes no sense to continue massive increases of liquidity into the economy that have been ineffective for so long. But most central bankers and many economists demur that previous amounts were too little and more is needed.

No Growth

But the incentives that QE and ZIRP create for commercial banks make it easy to see why these policies cannot promote economic growth. On the one hand, low interest rates reduce the cost of borrowing, which should encourage more investment spending. But on the other, commercial banks pay almost nothing to borrow yet receive interest payments from the Fed to hold excess reserves, making them unlikely to extend new loans.

A sufficiently high interest rate paid on bank reserves will induce banks to choose a risk-free, interest-bearing asset rather than lending to private-sector borrowers. And so it is that commercial banks are earning record profits while making very few new loans.

The question of whether the Fed or the BoJ have an effective “exit strategy” from their policies of monetary expansion using near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing remains open. One possibility for the Fed is to engage in repurchase agreements (reverse repos) to remove some of the excess liquidity that it pumped into the financial system.

These reverse repos involve selling securities to commercial banks with the Fed agreeing to buy them back at a higher price at a later date. But once again, commercial banks will find the choice between holding risk-free, interest-bearing assets a much better bet than issuing new commercial loans.

Repressed Inflation

In the end both QE and ZIRP have been ineffective in restoring economic vitality while also creating a massive overhang of repressed inflation. Most economists view business startups, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises, as the key to economic recovery and growth. Yet QE and associated central-bank policies are diverting credit away from newly forming firms.

The Fed has now announced it will continue the “exceptionally” low short-term interest rates until the middle of 2013! This indicates that U.S. central bankers are unconvinced of the errors of their ways in their policy choices. That they are unwilling and unable to change course means that the U.S. and Japanese economies are doomed to painfully slow economic growth for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. Federal Reserve gave out $16.1 trillion in emergency loans to U.S. and foreign financial institutions between Dec. 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010, according to figures produced by the government’s first-ever audit of the central bank.

–The Raw Story

HT: Ken Sturzenacker