Boom Bust Boom and the South Sea Bubble

Terry Jones documentary Boom Bust Boom has been out for a while. Worth watching too. The Economist gave it a reasonable review. And there are Minsky and Galbraith puppets.

Above a brief, and simple discussion of the South Sea Bubble. I think role of trade with Spanish America is exaggerated. The most relevant part of the scheme was the public debt swap. Dale's The First Crash provides an interesting account of it.

The Economist thinks bubbles are rational

Or at least is what they suggest in the popular blog Free Exchange. They bring back Peter Garber's research on the Tulipmania, and more recent research by Earl Thompson, which suggests that "the market for tulips was an efficient response to changing financial regulation." They conclude by arguing that:

"It is easy to claim that bubbles are irrational. They seem to represent a deviation of prices from fundamental values—and they contradict basic economic theory. But there has been little attempt to understand how speculation actually works. The example of tulipmania shows the importance of doing that—rather than relying on lazy quips about 'animal spirits' or irrationality."

The notion is related to the idea of the Arrow-Debreu models in which short term prices (they don't have long term prices associated with a uniform rate of profit) do reflect the fundamental values associated to the preferences of agents and the given technology and factor endowments. In this context, the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) suggests that the prices of financial assets reflect all market information, and as a result those prices would not deviate from their fundamentals. In other words, according to the EMH, bubbles do not exist.

Rational bubbles assume that rational behavior may still be associated with deviations of asset prices away from their fundamental values. In general, a self-confirming belief that asset prices depend on a variable that is intrinsically irrelevant, that is, not part of market fundamentals, is assumed. Much discussion goes into the behavioral assumptions that would make rational bubbles possible. Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market, which I reviewed here (subscription required) provides an accessible introduction.

John Eatwell (here; subscription required) noted that a more relevant question than the rationality or not of bubbles is whether they are useful or not. Railroads were built on bubbles, and the dot.com bubble even left some infrastructure in terms of telecommunications that has been useful. Other bubbles, like the one associated with the subprime, are less obviously useful.

Finally, note that the old capital debates are still important to understand the limitations of much of this literature. Garegnani and Petri have noted that even the short run Arrow-Debreu models must bring investment to equality to full employment savings, and as a result some notion of a natural rate of interest is implicitly needed. And then all the problems of the aggregative model apply. So it is not possible to show that long term prices do reflect fundamentals associated with preferences, technology and endowments.

PS: On the related topic of whether the Bubble Act (financial regulation), that followed the South Sea Bubble, led to lower rates of growth see here. For the capital debates go here.

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).