The end of the Gold Standard

NYTimes September 21, 1931

84 years ago Britain left the Gold Standard. Some thought it was the end of Western civilization. Keynes thought it was the beginning of the end of the Depression, at least in Great Britain. He was certainly happy. He said: "There are few Englishmen who do not rejoice at the breaking of our gold fetters. We feel that we have at last a free hand to do what is sensible. The romantic phase is over, and we can begin to discuss realistically what policy is for the best." On the functioning of the Gold Standard and why the conventional view, which according to Eichengreen can still be roughly understood with Hume's specie-flow mechanism, is incorrect go here.

Balance of Payments Adjustment and the Euro Crisis

It is worth remembering that according to Eichengreen (1996, p. 25) “the most influential formalization of the gold-standard is the price-specie flow model of David Hume. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this model is its durability: developed in the eighteenth century, it remains the dominant approach to thinking about the gold standard” (for a critique go here).

The idea is that, at least in a fixed exchange rate regime, inflation and deflation do all the work of adjusting the balance of payments (BOPs). Modern versions add credibility and all that (which includes austerity) for the stabilizing flows of capital to work. Why do I bring this up? Because of Martin Wolf's column (subscription required) in the Financial Times today, which has the graph below.

Note that the countries in crisis, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain have already adjusted their BOPs (in this case their trade balances). Yet the adjustment is more Keynesian than Humean, or to be more precise, it follows the analysis of A.G. Ford, who argued that peripheral countries, like Argentina, adjust their current account deficits with a good old recession not by lowering domestic prices. And yes, Wolf is right, the specie-flow would only work in a parallel universe.

Hamilton's Reports and the American Economic System

Alexander Hamilton's reports to Congress go against the grain of much of the core principles of mainstream economics. Hamilton had read the main economic authors of his time, including David Hume and Adam Smith, both of which had a much more critical view of public debt than Hamilton did. He was also influenced by policy makers like Jacques Necker (see here; subscription required), a Genevan banker and finance minister of France just before the Revolution, and Robert Morris, who is often referred as the Financier of the Revolution (see Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton).

The Hamiltonian plan, which was to a great extent based on the British economic model, was based on the need to consolidate all debts incurred by the states under the Federal government, and to provide the latter with revenues from foreign trade, implying tariffs, and excise taxes (e.g on whisky) to allow to pay the interest on the new national debt. Hamilton argued famously in his Report on Public Credit that a well-funded national debt would be under certain circumstances a blessing, and writing about Jeffersonians* -- which would surprisingly look not very different than some members of the current GOP -- said that: "a certain description of men are for getting out of debt, yet are against all taxes for raising money to pay it off."

Further, he was for a national bank, being instrumental in the founding of the First Bank of the United States, modeled on the Bank of England. Not only the bank would promote the expansion of credit, but also it would provide funding for the government. Further, he was very clear that tariffs on foreign trade were needed not just to raise revenue, but also for the protection of domestic industry. In his famous Report on Manufactures, which advanced ideas on infant industry later developed by Frederich List (for other more recent critics of free trade go here and here), he said:

"The superiority antecedently enjoyed by nations, who have preoccupied and perfected a branch of industry, constitutes a more formidable obstacle, than either of those, which have been mentioned, to the introduction of the same branch into a country, in which it did not before exist. To maintain between the recent establishments of one country and the long matured establishments of another country, a competition upon equal terms, both as to quality and price, is in most cases impracticable. The disparity in the one, or in the other, or in both, must necessarily be so considerable as to forbid a successful rivalship, without the extraordinary aid and protection of government."

All the elements of his economic plan, discussed in his five reports to Congress (available here), were central in what eventually became known as the American System, usually associated to Henry Clay.

* Jefferson abhorred public debt, but was very fond of private debt, being constantly indebted. In 1815 he sold his library, in part to pay his debts, which formed the basis of the Library of Congress.

Newton and the Gold Standard

My limited knowledge of Newton's involvement with the Gold Standard, as the Master of the Mint, came from Barry Eichengreen's discussion in Globalizing Capital [a book that is very influential in spite of his claim that a variation of Hume's specie-flow is still the best view of balance of payments adjustment; for a critique go here or here; mind you the book is the best description of the mainstream views of balance of payments adjustment in historical perspective]. In that book he suggests that Newton got the price of silver incorrectly against gold, a too low gold price for silver, with the consequence that Britain moved effectively into a Gold Standard by accident. In this view, the new supply of Gold from Brazil, and the undervalued price of silver explain the slow move into a Gold Standard.

The more recent book by Thomas Levenson, not an economist (that's often good), Newton and the Counterfeiter, which is more of a police story, suggests that Newton was well aware of the correct exchange rate between gold and silver, but was prevented from changing it by political reasons. He cites two reports by Newton an early one from the mid-1690s arguing that gold was cheaper in France leading to silver scarcity in England, and another one from 1717 or so suggesting that the problem was that gold was much cheaper in China and India, and that arbitrage opportunities moved silver eastward. Other than that Newton seems to have been favorable to paper currency an other financial innovations (getting famously entangled in the South Sea Bubble).