11. Binary Intervention, Inflation and Business Cycles
a. Inflation and Credit Expansion
In Chapter 11 we depicted the workings of the monetary system of a purely free market.
A free money market adopts specie, either gold or silver, or both parallel,
Units of Money are simply units of weight of the money stuff.
The total stock of the money commodity increases with new production, mining, and decreases
from wear and tear and use in industrial employments.
Generally there will be a gradual secular rise in the money stock, with effects as analyzed.
The wealth of some people will increase, and of others will decline, and no social usefulness
will accrue from an increased supply of money in its monetary use.
However, an increased stock will raise the social standard of living and well-being by
further satisfying non-monetary demands for the monetary metal.
Demand in this money market usually takes the form of issuing pseudo-warehouse receipts
as money substitutes.
As we saw in Chapter 11, demand liabilities, such as deposits or paper notes, may come
into use in a free market, but may equal only the actual value or weight of the specie deposited.
The demand liabilities are then genuine warehouse receipts, or true money certificates, and
they pass on the market as representatives of the actual money, that is, as money substitutes.
Pseudo-warehouse receipts are those issued in excess of the actual weight of specie on
deposit.
Naturally, their issue can be a very lucrative business.
Working like the genuine certificates, they serve also as money substitutes, even though
not covered by specie.
They are fraudulent because they promise to redeem in specie at face value, a promise
that could not possibly be met were all the deposit holders to ask for their own property
at the same time.
Only the complacency and ignorance of the public permit the situation to continue.
Although it has obvious third-person effects, this type of intervention is essentially binary
because the issuer, or intervener, gains at the expense of individual holders of legitimate
money.
The lines of force radiate from the interveners to each of those who suffer losses.
Broadly, such intervention may be affected either by the government or by private individuals
Inflation Inflation in this work is explicitly defined
to exclude increases in the stock of specie.
While these increases have such similar effects as raising the prices of goods, they also
differ sharply in other effects.
A. Simple increases in specie do not constitute an intervention in the free market, penalizing
one group and subsidizing another.
And B. They do not lead to the processes of the business cycle.
A contraction in the money supply outstanding over any period, aside from a possible net
decrease in specie, may be called deflation.
Clearly, inflation is the primary event, and the primary purpose of monetary intervention.
There can be no deflation without an inflation having occurred in some previous period of
time.
A priori, almost all intervention will be inflationary.
For not only must all monetary intervention begin with inflation, the great gain to be
derived from inflation comes from the issuers putting new money into circulation.
The profit is practically costless, because while all other people must either sell goods
The Government or the commercial banks are literally creating money out of thin air.
They do not have to buy it.
Any profit from the use of this magical money is clear gain to the issuers.
As happens when new specie enters the market, the issue of uncovered money substitutes also
has a diffusion effect.
The first receivers of the new money gain the most.
The next gain slightly less, etc., until the midpoint is reached.
And then each receiver loses more and more as he waits for the new money.
For the first individuals, selling prices soar while buying prices remain almost the
same.
But later, buying prices have risen while selling prices remain unchanged.
A crucial circumstance, however, differentiates this from the case of increasing specie.
The new paper or new demand deposits have no social function whatever.
They do not demonstrably benefit some without injuring others in the market society.
The increasing money supply is only a social waste and can only advantage some at the expense
and the benefits and burdens are distributed as just outlined, the early comers gaining at the expense of later comers.
Certainly the business and consumer borrowers from the bank, its clientele, benefit greatly from the new money, at least in the short run, since they are the ones who first receive it.
If inflation is any increase in the supply of money not matched by an increase in the gold or silver stock available, the method of inflation just depicted is called credit expansion, the creation of new money substitutes entering the economy on the credit market.
As will be seen, while credit expansion by a bank seems far more sober and respectable than outright spending of new money, it actually has far graver consequences for the economic system, consequences which most people would find especially undesirable.
This inflationary credit is called circulating credit, as distinguished from the lending of saved funds, called commodity credit.
In this book, the term credit expansion will apply only to increases in circulating credit.
Credit expansion has, of course, the same effect as any sort of inflation.
The prices tend to rise as the money supply increases.
Like any inflation, it is a process of redistribution, whereby the inflators and the part of the economy
selling to them gain at the expense of those who come last in line in the spending process.
This is the charm of inflation for the beneficiaries and the reason why it has been so popular,
Particularly since modern banking processes have camouflaged its significance for those
losers who are far removed from banking operations.
The gains to the inflators are visible and dramatic.
The losses to others hidden and unseen, but just as effective for all that.
Just as half the economy are taxpayers and half tax consumers, so half the economy are
Most of these gains and losses will be short run or one shot.
They will occur during the process of inflation but will cease after the new monetary equilibrium
is reached.
The inflators make their gains, but after the new money supply has been diffused throughout
About the economy, the inflationary gains and losses are ended.
However, as we have seen in Chapter 11, there are also permanent gains and losses resulting
from inflation.
For the new monetary equilibrium will not simply be the old one multiplied in all relations
and quantities by the addition to the money supply.
This was an assumption that the old quantity theory economists made.
The valuations of the individuals making temporary gains and losses will differ.
Therefore, each individual will react differently to his gains and losses and alter his relative
spending patterns accordingly.
Moreover, the new money will form a high ratio to the existing cash balance of some and a
and a low ratio to that of others, and the result will be a variety of changes in spending
patterns.
Therefore, all prices will not have increased uniformly in the new equilibrium.
The purchasing power of the monetary unit has fallen, but not equaproportionally over
the entire array of exchange values.
Some prices have risen more than others, therefore, some people will be permanent gainers and some permanent losers from the inflation.
Particularly hard hit by an inflation, of course, are the relatively fixed income groups, who end their losses only after a long period or not at all.
Pensioners and annuitants who have contracted for a fixed money income are examples of permanent
as well as short-run losers.
Life insurance benefits are permanently slashed.
Conservative anti-inflationists' complaints about the widows and orphans have often been
ridiculed, but they are no laughing matter nevertheless, for it is precisely the widows
Mises and Orphans who bear a main part of the brunt of inflation.
The avowed goal of Cain's inflationist program was the euthanasia of the rentier.
Did Cain's realize that he was advocating the not-so-merciful annihilation of some of
the most unfit for labor groups in the entire population?
Profits whose marginal value productivity consisted almost exclusively in their savings.
Also suffering losses are creditors who have already extended their loans and find it too
late to charge a purchasing power premium on their interest rates.
Inflation also changes the market's consumption investment ratio.
Superficially, it seems that credit expansion greatly increases capital, for the new money
enters the market as equivalent to new savings for lending.
Since the new bank money is apparently added to the supply of savings on the credit market,
businesses can now borrow at a lower rate of interest.
Hence, inflationary credit expansion seems to offer the ideal escape from time preference,
as well as an inexhaustible fount of added capital.
Actually, this effect is illusory.
On the contrary, inflation reduces saving and investment,
thus lowering society's standard of living.
It may even cause large-scale capital consumption.
In the first place, as we have just seen, existing creditors are injured.
This will tend to discourage lending in the future,
and thereby discourage saving investment.
Secondly, as we have seen in Chapter 11, the inflationary process inherently yields a purchasing power profit to the businessman,
since he purchases factors and sells them at a later time, when all prices are higher.
The businessman may thus keep abreast of the price increase.
We are here exempting from variations in price increases, the terms of trade component, neither losing nor gaining from the inflation.
But business accounting is traditionally geared to a world where the value of the monetary unit is stable.
Capital goods purchased are entered in the asset column at cost, that is, at the price paid for them.
When the firm later sells the product, the extra inflationary gain is not really a gain at all, for it must be absorbed in purchasing the replaced capital good at a higher price.
Inflation, therefore, tricks the businessman. It destroys one of his main signposts and leads him to believe that he has gained extra profits when he is just able to replace capital.
capital. Hence he will undoubtedly be tempted to consume out of these profits and thereby
unwittingly consume capital as well. Thus inflation tends at once to repress saving investment and to
cause consumption of capital. The accounting error stemming from inflation has other economic
Consequences.
The firms with the greatest degree of error will be those with capital equipment bought
more preponderantly when prices were lowest.
If the inflation has been going on for a while, these will be the firms with the oldest equipment.
Their seemingly great profits will attract other firms into the field, and there will
will be a completely unjustified expansion of investment in a seemingly high profit area.
Conversely, there will be a deficiency of investment elsewhere.
Thus the error distorts the market system of allocating resources and reduces its effectiveness
in satisfying the consumer.
The error will also be greatest in those firms with a greater proportion of capital equipment
to Product, and similar distorting effects
will take place through excessive investment
in heavily capitalized industries,
offset by under-investment elsewhere.
B, Credit Expansion and the Business Cycle.
We have already seen in chapter eight
what happens when there is net saving investment,
an increase in the ratio of gross investment
to Consumption in the Economy
Consumption expenditures fall,
and the prices of consumers' goods fall.
On the other hand, the production structure is lengthened,
and the prices of original factors,
specialized in the higher stages, rise.
The prices of capital goods change like a lever
being pivoted on a fulcrum at its center.
The prices of consumers' goods fall most,
Those of first-order capital goods fall less, those of highest-order capital goods rise
most and the others less.
Thus, the price differentials between the stages of production all diminish.
Prices of original factors fall in the lower stages and rise in the higher stages, and
the non-specific original factors, mainly labor, shift partly from the lower to the higher
in the higher stages. Investment tends to be centered in lengthier processes of production.
The drop in price differentials is, as we have seen, equivalent to a fall in the natural
rate of interest, which, of course, leads to a corollary drop in the loan rate. After
a while, the fruit of the more productive techniques arrives, and the real income of
of Everyone rises.
Thus an increase in saving resulting from a fall in time preferences leads to a fall
in the interest rate and another stable equilibrium situation with a longer and narrower production
structure.
What happens, however, when the increase in investment is not due to a change in time
Is this a magic way of expanding the capital structure easily and costlessly without reducing
present consumption?
Suppose that 6 million gold ounces are being invested and 4 million consumed in a certain
period of time.
Suppose now that the banks in the economy expand credit and increase the money supply
by 2 million ounces.
What are the consequences?
The new money is loaned to businesses.
To the extent that the new money is loaned to consumers rather than businesses, the cycle
effects discussed in this section do not occur.
These businesses, now able to acquire the money at a lower rate of interest, enter the
Capital Goods and Original Factors Market to bid resources away from the other firms.
At any given time, the stock of goods is fixed, and the 2 million new ounces are therefore
employed in raising the prices of producers' goods.
The rise in prices of capital goods will be imputed to rises in original factors.
The credit expansion reduces the market rate of interest.
This means that price differentials are lowered, and as we have seen in Chapter 8, lower price
differentials raise prices in the highest stages of production, shifting resources to
these stages and also increasing the number of stages.
As a result, the production structure is lengthened.
The borrowing firms are led to believe that enough funds are available to permit them
to embark on projects formerly unprofitable.
On the free market, investment will always take place first in those projects that satisfy
the most urgent wants of the consumers, then the next most urgent wants are satisfied,
etc.
The interest rate regulates the temporal order of choice of projects in accordance with their
urgency.
A lower rate of interest on the market is a signal that more projects can be undertaken
profitably.
Increased saving on the free market leads to a stable equilibrium of production at a
lower rate of interest, but not so with credit expansion, for the original factors now receive
In the free market example, total money incomes remained the same.
The increased expenditure on higher stages was offset by decreased expenditure in the lower stages.
The increased length of the production structure was compensated by the reduced width.
But credit expansion pumps new money into the production structure.
Aggregate money incomes increase instead of remaining the same.
The production structure has lengthened, but it has also remained as wide,
without contraction of consumption expenditure.
The owners of the original factors, with their increased money income,
naturally hasten to spend their new money.
They allocate this spending between consumption and investment in accordance with their time preferences.
Let us assume that the time preference schedules of the people remain unchanged.
This is a proper assumption, since there is no reason to assume that they have changed because of the inflation.
Production now no longer reflects voluntary time preferences.
Advances. Business has been led by credit expansion to invest in higher stages as if
more savings were available. Since they are not, business has over-invested in the higher
stages and under-invested in the lower. Consumers act promptly to re-establish their time preferences,
Their Preferred Investment Consumption Proportions and Price Differentials
The differentials will be re-established at the old, higher amount, that is, the rate
of interest will return to its free market magnitude.
As a result, the prices at the higher stages of production will fall drastically, the prices
Those at the lower stages will rise again, and the entire new investment at the higher
stages will have to be abandoned or sacrificed.
Altering our oversimplified example, which has treated only two stages, we see that the
highest stages, believed profitable, have proved to be unprofitable.
The pure rate of interest, reflecting consumer desires, is shown to have really been higher
all along.
The bank's credit expansion had tampered with that indispensable signal, the interest
rate, that tells businessmen how much savings are available and what length of projects
will be profitable.
In the free market, the interest rate is an indispensable guide in the time dimension
to the urgency of consumer wants, but bank intervention in the market disrupts this free price
and renders entrepreneurs unable to satisfy consumer desires properly or to estimate the
most beneficial time structure of production. As soon as the consumers are able, that is,
as soon as the increased money enters their hands, they take the opportunity to reestablish
Overinvestment in the highest stages and underinvestment in the lower stages are now revealed in all
their starkness.
The situation is analogous to that of a contractor misled into believing that he has more building
Banking material than he really has and then awakening to find that he has used up all
his material on a capacious foundation, the higher stages, with no material left to complete
the house.
Clearly, bank credit expansion cannot increase capital investment by one iota.
Investment can still come only from savings.
It should not be surprising that the market tends to revert to its preferred ratios.
The same process, as we have seen, takes place in all prices after a change in the money
stock.
Increased money always begins in one area of the economy, raising prices there, and
filters and diffuses eventually over the whole economy, which then roughly returns to an
an equilibrium pattern conforming to the value of the money.
If the market then tends to return to its preferred price ratios after a change in the
money supply, it should be evident that this includes a return to its preferred saving
investment ratio, reflecting social time preferences.
It is true, of course, that time preferences may alter in the interim, either for each
individual or as a result of the redistribution during the change.
The gainers may save more or less than the losers would have done.
Therefore, the market will not return precisely to the old free market interest rate and investment
Consumption Ratio just as it will not return to its precise pattern of prices.
It will revert to whatever the free market interest rate is now as determined by current
time preferences.
Some advocates of coercing the market into saving and investing more than it wishes have
have hailed credit expansion as leading to forced saving, thereby increasing the capital
goods structure.
But this can happen not as a direct consequence of credit expansion, but only because effective
time preferences have changed in that direction.
That is, time preference schedules have shifted, or relatively more money is now in the hands
of those with low time preferences.
Credit expansion may well lead to the opposite effect.
The gainers may have higher time preferences, in which case the free market interest rate
will be higher than before.
Because these effects of credit expansion are completely uncertain and depend on the
concrete data of each particular case, it is clearly far more cogent for advocates of
of Forced Saving to use the taxation process to make their redistribution.
The market, therefore, reacts to a distortion of the free market interest rate by proceeding
to revert to that very rate.
The distortion caused by credit expansion deceives businessmen into believing that more
Our savings are available and causes them to malinvest, to invest in projects that will
turn out to be unprofitable when consumers have a chance to reassert their true preferences.
This reassertion takes place fairly quickly, as soon as owners of factors receive their
increased incomes and spend them.
This theory permits us to resolve an age-old controversy among economists, whether an increase
in the money supply can lower the market rate of interest.
To the mercantilists and to the Keynesians, it was obvious that an increased money stock
permanently lowered the rate of interest, given the demand for money.
To the classicists, it was obvious that changes in the money stock could affect only the value
The answer is that an increase in the supply of money does lower the rate of interest when it enters the market as credit expansion, but only temporarily.
In the long run, and this long run is not very long, the market re-establishes the free market time preference interest rate and eliminates the change.
Change
In the long run, a change in the money stock affects only the value of the monetary unit.
This process, by which the market reverts to its preferred interest rate and eliminates
the distortion caused by credit expansion, is, moreover, the business cycle.
Our analysis, therefore, permits the solution not only of the theoretical problem of the
The Relation Between Money and Interest, but also of the problem that has plagued society
for the last century and a half and more, the dread business cycle.
And furthermore, the theory of the business cycle can now be explained as a subdivision
of our general theory of the economy.
Note the hallmarks of this distortion-reversion process.
First, the money supply increases through credit expansion.
Then, businesses are tempted to malinvest, overinvesting in higher stage and durable
production processes.
Next, the prices and incomes of original factors increase, and consumption increases, and businesses
realize that the higher stage investments have been wasteful and unprofitable.
The first stage is the chief landmark of the boom.
The second stage, the discovery of the wasteful malinvestments, is the crisis.
The depression is the next stage, during which malinvested businesses become bankrupt, and
original factors must suddenly shift back to the lower stages of production.
The liquidation of unsound businesses, the idle capacity of the malinvested plant, and
the frictional unemployment of original factors that must suddenly and en masse shift to lower
stages of production, these are the chief hallmarks of the depression stage.
We have seen in Chapter 11 that the major unexplained features of the business cycle
are the mass of error and the concentration of error and disturbance in the capital goods industries.
Our theory of the business cycle solves both of these problems.
The cluster of error suddenly revealed by entrepreneurs is due to the interventionary distortion of a key market signal, the interest rate.
The concentration of disturbance in the capital goods industries is explained by the spur to
unprofitable higher order investments in the boom period. And we have just seen that other
characteristics of the business cycle are explained by this theory. One point should be stressed.
The depression phase is actually the recovery phase. Most people would be happy to keep the
The boom period, where the inflationary gains are visible and the losses hidden and obscure.
This boom euphoria is heightened by the capital consumption that inflation promotes through
illusory accounting profits.
The stages that people complain about are the crisis and depression.
But the latter periods, it should be clear, do not cause the trouble.
The trouble occurs during the boom, when malinvestments and distortions take place.
The crisis depression phase is the curative period, after people have been forced to recognize
the malinvestments that have occurred.
The depression period, therefore, is the necessary recovery period.
It is the time when bad investments are liquidated and mistaken entrepreneurs leave the market.
The time when consumer sovereignty and the free market reassert themselves and establish
once again an economy that benefits every participant to the maximum degree.
The depression period ends when the free market equilibrium has been restored and expansionary
distortion eliminated.
It should be clear that any governmental interference with the depression process can only prolong
it, thus making things worse from almost everyone's point of view.
Since the depression process is the recovery process, any halting or slowing down of the
process impedes the advent of recovery.
The depression readjustments must work themselves out before recovery can be complete.
The more these readjustments are delayed, the longer the depression will have to last,
and the longer complete recovery is postponed.
For example, if the government keeps wage rates up, it brings about permanent unemployment.
If it keeps prices up, it brings about unsold surplus, and if it spurs credit expansion
again, then new malinvestment and later depressions are spawned.
Many 19th century economists referred to the business cycle in a biological metaphor, likening
the depression to a painful but necessary curative of the alcoholic or narcotic jag
which is the boom and asserting that any tampering with the depression delays recovery.
They have been widely ridiculed by present-day economists.
The ridicule is misdirected, however, for the biological analogy is, in this case, correct.
One obvious conclusion from our analysis is the absurdity of the under-consumptionist
Most Remedies for Depression The idea that the crisis is caused by under-consumption
and that the way to cure the depression is to stimulate consumption expenditures.
The reverse is clearly the truth.
What has brought about the crisis is precisely the fact that entrepreneurial investment erroneously
anticipated greater savings and that this error is revealed by consumers re-establishing
Overconsumption or undersaving has brought about the crisis, although it is hardly fair
to pin the guilt on the consumer, who is simply trying to restore his preferences after the
market has been distorted by bank credit.
The only way to hasten the curative process of the depression is for people to save and
and invest more and consume less, thereby finally justifying some of the malinvestments
and mitigating the adjustments that have to be made.
One problem has been left unexplained.
We have seen that the reversion period is short and that factor incomes increase rather
quickly and start restoring the free market consumption-saving ratios.
But why do booms historically continue for several years?
What delays the reversion process?
The answer is that as the boom begins to peter out from an injection of credit expansion,
the banks inject a further dose.
In short, the only way to avert the onset of the depression adjustment process is to
continue inflating money and credit.
For only continual doses of new money on the credit market will keep the boom going and
the new stages profitable.
Furthermore, only ever-increasing doses can step up the boom, can lower interest rates
further and expand the production structure.
For as the prices rise, more and more money will be needed to perform the same amount
of work.
Once the credit expansion stops, the market ratios are reestablished and the seemingly
glorious new investments turn out to be malinvestments, built on a foundation of sand.
How long booms can be kept up?
What limits there are to booms in different circumstances will be discussed later.
But it is clear that prolonging the boom by ever larger doses of credit expansion will
will have only one result, to make the inevitably ensuing depression longer and more grueling.
The larger the scope of malinvestment and error in the boom, the greater and longer
the task of readjustment in the depression.
The way to prevent a depression, then, is simple, avoid starting a boom.
And to avoid starting a boom, all that is necessary is to pursue a truly free market
policy in money, that is, a policy of 100% specie reserves for banks and governments.
Credit expansion always generates the business cycle process, even when other tendencies
cloak its workings.
Thus many people believe that all is well if prices do not rise or if the actually recorded interest rate does not fall.
But prices may well not rise because of some counteracting force, such as an increase in the supply of goods or a rise in the demand for money.
But this does not mean that the boom-depression cycle fails to occur.
The essential processes of the boom, distorted interest rates, malinvestments, bankruptcies, etc., continue unchecked.
This is one of the reasons why those who approach business cycles from a statistical point of view and try in that way to arrive at a theory are in hopeless error.
Any historical statistical fact is a complex resultant of many causal influences, and cannot be used as a simple element with which to construct a causal theory.
The point is that credit expansion raises prices beyond what they would have been in the free market, and thereby creates the business cycle.
Similarly, credit expansion does not necessarily lower the interest rate below the rate previously recorded.
It lowers the rate below what it would have been in the free market, and thus creates distortion and malinvestment.
Recorded interest rates in the boom will generally rise, in fact, because of the purchasing power component in the market interest rate.
An increase in prices, as we have seen, generates a positive purchasing power component in the natural interest rate, that is, the rate of return earned by businessmen on the market.
In the free market, this would quickly be reflected in the loan rate, which, as we have seen, is completely dependent on the natural rate.
natural rate, but a continual influx of circulating credit prevents the loan rate from catching up with the natural rate, and thereby generates the business cycle process.
Since Knut Wichsel is one of the fathers of this business cycle approach, it is important to stress that our usage of natural rate differs from his.
Excel's natural rate was akin to our free market rate.
Our natural rate is the rate of return earned by businesses on the existing market without
considering loan interest.
It corresponds to what has been misleadingly called the normal profit rate, but is actually
the basic rate of interest.
A further corollary of this bank-created discrepancy between the loan rate and the natural rate
is that creditors on the loan market suffer losses for the benefit of their debtors, the
capitalists on the stock market or those who own their own businesses.
The latter gain during the boom by the differential between the loan rate and the natural rate,
While the creditors, apart from banks, which create their own money, lose to the same extent.
After the boom period is over, what is to be done with the malinvestments?
The answer depends on their profitability for further use, that is, on the degree of
error that was committed.
Some malinvestments will have to be abandoned, since their earnings from consumer demand
will not even cover the current costs of their operation, others, though monuments of failure,
will be able to yield a profit over current costs, although it will not pay to replace them as they
wear out. Temporarily working them fulfills the economic principle of always making the best
of Even a Bad Bargain.
Because of the malinvestments, however, the boom always leads to general impoverishment,
that is, reduces the standard of living below what it would have been in the absence of
the boom.
For the credit expansion has caused the squandering of scarce resources and scarce capital.
Some resources have been completely wasted, and even those malinvestments that continue
in use will satisfy consumers less than would have been the case without the credit expansion.
c. Secondary developments of the business cycle
In the previous section we have presented the basic process of the business cycle.
This process is often accentuated by other or secondary developments induced by the cycle.
Thus, the expanding money supply and rising prices are likely to lower the demand for
money.
Many people begin to anticipate higher prices and will therefore disord.
The lowered demand for money raises prices further.
Since the impetus to expansion comes first in expenditure on capital goods, and later
in consumption, this secondary effect of a lower demand for money may take hold first
in producers' goods industries.
This lowers the price and profit differentials further, and hence widens the distance that
the rate of interest will fall below the free market rate during the boom.
The effect is to aggravate the need for readjustment during the depression.
The adjustment would cause some fall in the prices of producers' goods anyway, since
the essence of the adjustment is to raise price differentials.
The extra distortion requires a steeper fall in the prices of producers' goods before
recovery is completed.
As a matter of fact, the demand for money generally rises at the beginning of an inflation.
People are accustomed to thinking of the value of the monetary unit as inviolate and of prices
as remaining at some customary level.
Hence, when prices first begin to rise, most people believe this to be a purely temporary
development, with prices soon due to recede.
This belief mitigates the extent of the price rise for a time.
Eventually, however, people realize that credit expansion has continued and undoubtedly will
continue, and their demand for money dwindles, becoming lower than the original level.
After the crisis arrives and the depression begins, various secondary developments often
occur.
In particular, for reasons that will be discussed further, the crisis is often marked not only
by a halt to credit expansion, but by an actual deflation, a contraction in the supply of
money.
The deflation causes a further decline in prices.
Any increase in the demand for money will speed up adjustment to the lower prices.
Furthermore, when deflation takes place first on the loan market, that is, as credit contraction
by the banks, and this is almost always the case, this will have the beneficial effect
of speeding up the depression adjustment process.
For credit contraction creates higher price differentials, and the essence of the required
Adjustment is to return to higher price differentials, that is, a higher natural rate of interest.
Furthermore, deflation will hasten adjustment in yet another way, for the accounting error
of inflation is here reversed, and businessmen will think their losses are more, and profits
less than they really are, hence they will save more than they would have with correct
Accounting and the Increased Saving will speed adjustment by supplying some of the needed
deficiency of savings.
It may well be true that the deflationary process will overshoot the free market equilibrium
point and raise price differentials and the interest rate above it.
But if so, no harm will be done, since a credit contraction can create no malinvestments and
therefore does not generate another boom bust cycle.
If some readers are tempted to ask why credit contraction will not lead to the opposite
type of malinvestment to that of the boom, overinvestment in lower order capital goods
and underinvestment in higher order goods, the answer is that there is no arbitrary choice
Open of Investing in Higher-Order or Lower-Order Goods.
Increased investment must be made in the higher-order goods, in lengthening the structure of production.
A decreased amount of investment simply cuts down on higher-order investment.
There will thus be no excess of investment in the lower orders, but simply a shorter
are structured than would otherwise be the case.
Contraction, unlike expansion,
does not create positive malinvestments.
And the market will correct the error rapidly.
When there is such excessive contraction
and consumption is too high in relation to savings,
the money income of businessmen is reduced
and their spending on factors declines,
especially in the higher orders.
Owners of original factors, receiving lower incomes,
will spend less on consumption.
Price differentials and the interest rate
will again be lowered,
and the free market consumption investment ratios
will be speedily restored.
Just as inflation is generally popular
for its narcotic effect,
Deflation is always highly unpopular for the opposite reason.
The contraction of money is visible.
The benefits to those whose buying prices fall first and who lose money last remain
hidden.
And the illusory accounting losses of deflation make businesses believe that their losses
are greater, or profits smaller, than they actually are.
and this will aggravate business pessimism.
It is true that deflation takes from one group and gives to another, as does inflation, yet
not only does credit contraction speed recovery and counteract the distortions of the boom,
but it also, in a broad sense, takes away from the original coercive gainers and benefits
the original coerced losers.
Now this will certainly not be true in every case.
In the broad sense, much the same groups will benefit and lose, but in reverse order from
that of the redistributive effects of credit expansion.
Fixed income groups, widows and orphans will gain, and businesses and owners of original
factors previously reaping gains from inflation will lose.
The longer the inflation has continued, of course, the less the same individuals will
be compensated.
If the economy is on a gold or silver standard, then many advocates of a free market will
argue for credit contraction for the following additional reasons.
A. To preserve the principle of paying one's contractual obligations.
be, to punish the banks for their expansion and force them back toward a 100% specie reserve
policy.
Some may object that deflation causes unemployment.
However, as we have seen, deflation can lead to continuing unemployment only if the government
or the unions keep wage rates above the discounted marginal value products of labor.
If wage rates are allowed to fall freely, no continuing unemployment will occur.
Finally, deflationary credit contraction is necessarily severely limited.
Whereas credit can expand, barring various economic limits to be discussed later, virtually
to infinity, circulating credit can contract only as far down as the total amount of specie
in Circulation. In short, its maximum possible limit is the eradication of all previous credit
expansion. The business cycle analysis set forth here has essentially been that of the Austrian
School, originated and developed by Ludwig von Mises and some of his students. A prominent
criticism of this theory is that it assumes the existence of full employment or that its analysis
This holds only after full employment has been attained.
Before that point, say the critics, credit expansion will beneficently put these factors
to work and not generate further malinvestments or cycles.
But in the first place, inflation will put no unemployed factors to work unless their
owners, though holding out for a money price higher than their marginal value product,
are blindly content to accept the necessarily lower real price when it is camouflaged as
a rise in the cost of living, and credit expansion generates further cycles whether or not there
are unemployed factors.
It creates more distortions and malinvestments, delays indefinitely the process of recovery
from the previous boom and makes necessary an eventually far more grueling recovery to
adjust to the new malinvestments as well as to the old.
If idle capital goods are now set to work, this idle capacity is the hangover effect
of previous wasteful malinvestments and hence is really sub-marginal and not worth bringing
into production.
Putting the capital to work again will only redouble the distortions.
D. The Limits of Credit Expansion.
Having investigated the consequences of credit expansion, we must discuss the important question,
if fractional reserve banking is legal, are there any natural limits to credit expansion
by the banks?
The one basic limit, of course, is the necessity of the banks to redeem their money substitutes
on demand.
Under a gold or silver standard, they must redeem in specie.
Under a government fiat paper standard, the banks have to redeem in government paper.
In any case, they must redeem in standard money or its virtual equivalent.
Therefore, every fractional reserve bank depends for its very existence on persuading the public,
specifically its clients, that all is well, and that it will be able to redeem its notes
or deposits whenever the clients demand. Since this is palpably not the case, the continuance
of confidence in the banks is something of a psychological marvel. Perhaps one reason for
For continuing confidence in the banking system is that people generally believe that fraud
is prosecuted by the government and that therefore any practice not so prosecuted must be sound.
Governments indeed always go out of their way to bolster the banking system.
It is certain at any rate that a wider knowledge of praxeology among the public would greatly
Let just a few of their clients lose confidence and begin to call on the banks for redemption,
and this will precipitate a scramble by other clients to make sure that they get their money
while the bank's doors are still open.
The obvious and justifiable panic of the banks, should any sort of run develop, encourages
other clients to do the same, and aggravates the run still further.
At any rate, runs on banks can wreak havoc, and of course, if pursued consistently, could
close every bank in the country in a few days.
All this, of course, assumes no further government intervention in banking than permitting fractional
reserve banking.
Since the advent of deposit insurance during the New Deal, for example, the bank run limitation
has been virtually eliminated by this act of special privilege.
Runs, therefore, and the constant underlying threat of their occurrence, are one of the
The Prime Limits to Credit Expansion
Runs often develop during a business cycle crisis, when debts are being defaulted and failures become manifest.
Runs and the fear of runs help to precipitate deflationary credit contraction.
Runs may be an ever-present threat, but as effective limitations they are not generally active.
When they do occur, they usually wreck the banks.
The fact that a bank is in existence at all signifies that a run has not developed.
A more active, everyday limitation is the relatively narrow range of a bank's clientele.
The clientele of a bank consists of those people willing to hold its deposits or notes,
its money substitutes, in lieu of money proper.
It is an empirical fact in almost all cases that one bank does not have the patronage of all people in the market society, or even of all those who prefer to use bank money rather than specie.
It is obvious that the more banks exist, the more restricted will be the clientele of any one bank.
People decide which bank to use on many grounds.
Reputation for integrity, friendliness of service, price of service, and convenience of location may all play a part.
How does the narrow range of a bank's clientele limit its potentiality for credit expansion?
The newly issued money substitutes are, of course, loaned to a bank's clients.
The client then spends the new money on goods and services.
The new money begins to be diffused throughout the society.
Eventually, usually very quickly, it is spent on the goods or services of people who use a different bank.
Suppose that the Star Bank has expanded credit.
The newly issued Star Bank's notes or deposits find their way into the hands of Mr. Jones, who uses the Citibank.
Two alternatives may occur, either of which has the same economic effect.
A. Jones accepts the Star Bank's notes or deposits and deposits them in the Citibank,
which calls on the Star Bank for redemption.
Or B. Jones refuses to accept the Star Bank's notes and insists that the star client,
Say, Mr. Smith, who bought something from Jones, redeemed the note himself and paid Jones in acceptable standard money.
Thus, while gold or silver is acceptable throughout the market, a bank's money substitutes are acceptable only to its own clientele.
Clearly, a single bank's credit expansion is limited, and this limitation is stronger a. the narrower the range of its clientele, and b. the greater its issue of money substitutes in relation to that of competing banks.
In illustration of the first point, let us assume that each bank has only one client.
Then it is obvious that there will be very little room for credit expansion.
At the opposite extreme, if one bank is used by everybody in the economy, there will be
no demands for redemption resulting from its clients purchasing from non-clients.
It is obvious that Ceteris Paribus, a numerically smaller clientele, is more restrictive of
credit expansion.
As regards the second point, the greater the degree of relative credit expansion by any
one bank, the sooner will the day of redemption and potential bankruptcy be at hand.
Suppose that the star bank expands credit while none of the competing banks do.
This means that the Star Bank's clientele have added considerably to their cash balances.
As a result, the marginal utility to them of each unit of money to hold declines, and
they are impelled to spend a great proportion of the new money.
Some of this increased spending will be on one another's goods and services, but it
is clear that the greater the credit expansion, the greater will be the tendency for their
In the meantime, the prices of the goods sold by non-clients remain the same.
As a consequence, clients are impelled to buy more from non-clients and less from one
another, while non-clients buy less from clients and more from one another.
The result is an unfavorable balance of trade from clients to non-clients.
In the consolidated balance of payments of the clients, money income from sales to non-clients,
The exports will decline and money expenditures on the goods and services of non-clients, imports, will increase.
The excess cash balances of the clients are transferred to non-clients.
It is clear that this tendency of money to seek a uniform level of exchange value throughout the entire market
is an example of the process by which new money, in this case new money substitutes, is diffused through the market.
The greater the relative credit expansion by the bank then, the greater and more rapid will be the drain and consequent pressure on an expanding bank for redemption.
The purpose of banks keeping any specie reserves in their vaults, assuming no legal reserve requirements, now becomes manifest.
It is not to meet bank runs, since no fractional reserve bank can be equipped to withstand a run.
It is to meet the demands for redemption, which will inevitably come from non-clients.
Mises has brilliantly shown that a subdivision of this process was discovered by the British currency school and by the classical international trade theorists of the 19th century.
These older economists assumed that all the banks in a certain region or country expanded credit together.
The result was a rise in the prices of goods produced in that country.
A further result was an unfavorable balance of trade, that is, an outflow of standard
specie to other countries.
Since other countries did not patronize the expanding countries' banks, the consequence
was a specie drain from the expanding country and increased pressure for redemption on its
banks.
Like all parts of the overstressed and over-elaborated theory of international trade, this analysis
is simply a special subdivision of general economic theory, and cataloguing it as international
trade theory, as Mises has shown, underestimates its true significance.
Older economists also distinguished an internal drain as well as the external drain, but included
in the former only the drain from bank users to those who insist on standard money.
Thus the more freely competitive and numerous are the banks, the less they will be able
to expand fiduciary media, even if they are left free to do so.
As we noted in Chapter 11, such a system is known as free banking.
A major objection to this analysis of free banking has been the problem of bank cartels.
If banks get together and agree to expand their credit simultaneously, the clientele
limitation vis-à-vis competing banks will be removed, and the clientele of each bank
will, in effect, increase to include all bank users.
Mises points out, however, that the sounder banks with higher fractional reserves will
not wish to lose the goodwill of their own clients and risk bank runs by entering into
collusive agreements with weaker banks.
This consideration, while placing limits on such agreements, does not rule them out altogether,
for after all, no fractional reserve banks are really sound, and if the public can be
The theory led to believe that, say, an 80% specie reserve is sound.
It can believe the same about 60% or even 10% reserve banks.
Indeed, the fact that the weaker banks are allowed by the public to exist at all demonstrates
that the more conservative banks may not lose much goodwill by agreeing to expand with them.
As Mises has demonstrated, there is no question that from the point of view of opponents of
inflation and credit expansion, free banking is superior to a central banking system.
But as Amasa Walker stated, much has been said at different times of the desirableness
of free banking, of the propriety and rightfulness of allowing any person who chooses to carry
on Banking, as freely as farming or any other branch of business, there can be no doubt.
But while banking, as at present, means the issuing of inconvertible paper, the more it
is guarded and restricted, the better.
But when such issues are entirely forbidden, and only notes equivalent to certificates
of so much coin are issued, banking may be as free as brokerage.
The only thing to be secured would be that no issues should be made except upon specie in hand.
E. The Government as Promoter of Credit Expansion
Historically, governments have fostered and encouraged credit expansion to a great degree.
They have done so by weakening the limitations that the market places on bank credit expansion.
One way of weakening it is to anesthetize the bank against the threat of bank runs.
In 19th century America, the government permitted banks, when they got into trouble in a business crisis,
to suspend specie payment while continuing in operation.
They were temporarily freed from their contractual obligation of paying their debts,
While they could continue lending and even force their debtors to repay in their own banknotes, this is a powerful way to eradicate limitations on credit expansion, since the banks know that if they overreach themselves, the government will permit them blithely to avoid payment of their contractual obligations.
Under a fiat money standard, governments, or their central banks, may obligate themselves to bail out, with increased issues of standard money, any bank, or any major bank, in distress.
In the late 19th century, the principle became accepted that the central bank must act as the lender of last resort, which will lend money freely to banks threatened with failure.
Another recent American device to abolish the confidence limitation on bank credit is deposit insurance, whereby the government guarantees to furnish paper money to redeem the bank's demand liabilities.
These and similar devices remove the market breaks on rampant credit expansion.
A second device, now so legitimized that any country lacking it is considered hopelessly
backward, is the central bank.
The central bank, while often nominally owned by private individuals or banks, is run directly
by the national government.
Its purpose, not always stated explicitly, is to remove the competitive check on bank
provided by a multiplicity of independent banks.
Its aim is to make sure that all the banks in the country are coordinated
and will therefore expand or contract together, at the will of the government.
And we have seen that coordination of expansion greatly weakens the market's limits.
The crucial way in which governments have established central bank control
control over the commercial banking system is by granting the bank a monopoly of the
note issue in the country.
As we have seen, money substitutes may be issued in the form of notes or book deposits.
Economically, the two forms are identical.
The state has found it convenient, however, to distinguish between the two and to outlaw
all note issue by private banks.
Such nationalizing of the note-issue business forces the commercial banks to go to the central
bank whenever their customers desire to exchange demand deposits for paper notes.
To obtain notes to furnish their clients, commercial banks must buy them from the central
bank.
Such purchases can be made only by selling their gold coin or other standard money or
Or by Drawing on the Bank's Deposit Accounts with the Central Bank
Since the public always wishes to hold some of its money in the form of notes and some
in demand deposits, the banks must establish a continuing relationship with the central
bank to be assured a supply of notes.
Their most convenient procedure is to establish demand deposit accounts with the central bank,
which thereby becomes the banker's bank.
These demand deposits added to the gold in their vaults become the reserves of the banks.
The central bank can also more freely create demand liabilities not backed 100% by gold,
and these increased liabilities add to the reserves and demand deposits held by banks
or else increase central bank notes outstanding.
The rise in reserves of banks throughout the country will spur them to expand credit, while
any decrease in these reserves will induce a general contraction in credit.
The central bank can increase the reserves of a country's banks in three ways.
a. by simply lending them reserves, b. by purchasing their assets, thereby adding directly
to the bank's deposit accounts with the central bank, or c. by purchasing the IOUs of the
public, which will then deposit the drafts on the central bank in the various banks that
serve the public directly, thereby enabling them to use the credits on the central bank
to add to their own reserves.
The second process is known as discounting, the latter as open market purchase.
A lapse in discounts as the loans mature will lower reserves, as will open market sales.
In open market sales, the people will pay the central bank for its assets, purchased
with checks drawn on their accounts at the banks, and the central bank exacts payment
by reducing bank reserves on its books. In most cases, the assets purchased or sold on
the open market are government IOUs. There is a fourth way by which a central bank may
increase bank reserves. In countries such as the United States, where banks must keep
a legally required minimum ratio of reserves to deposits, the bank may simply lower the
and the required ratio.
Thus the banking system becomes coordinated under the aegis of the government.
The central bank is always accorded a great deal of prestige by its creator government.
Often the government makes its notes legal tender.
Under the gold standard, the wide resources which it commands,
added to the fact that the whole country is its clientele,
usually make negligible any trouble the bank may have in redeeming its liabilities in gold.
Furthermore, it is certain that no government will let its own central bank, that is, itself, go bankrupt.
The central bank will always be permitted to suspend specie payment in times of serious difficulty.
It can therefore inflate and expand credit itself through rediscounts and open market purchases and, by adding to bank reserves, spur a multiple bank credit expansion throughout the country.
The effect is multiple because banks will generally keep a certain proportion of reserves to liabilities, based on estimates of non-client redemption, and a general increase in their reserves will induce a multiple expansion of fiduciary media.
In fact, the multiple will even increase, for the knowledge that all the banks are coordinated and expanding together decreases the possibility of non-client redemption, and therefore the proportion of reserves that each bank will wish to keep.
When the government goes off the gold standard, central banknotes then become legal tender, and virtually the standard money.
It then cannot possibly fail. And this, of course, practically eliminates limitations on its credit expansion.
In the present-day United States, for example, the current basically fiat standard, also known as a restricted international gold bullion standard,
virtually eliminates pressure for redemption, while the central bank's ready provision of reserves, as well as deposit insurance, eliminates the threat of bank failure.
Foreign central banks and governments are still permitted to redeem in gold bullion, but this is hardly a consolation for either foreign citizens or Americans.
The result is that gold is still an ultimate balancing item between national governments and therefore a kind of medium of exchange for governments and central banks in international transactions.
In order to ensure centralized control by the government over bank credit, the United States enforces on banks a certain minimum ratio of reserves,
So long as a country is, in any sense, on the gold standard, the central bank and the banking system must worry about an external drain of specie, should the inflation become too great.
Under an unrestricted gold standard, it must also worry about an internal drain, resulting from the demands of those who do not use the banks.
A shift in public taste from deposits to notes will embarrass the commercial banks, though not the central bank.
Asiduous propaganda on the conveniences of banking, however, has reduced the ranks of those not using banks to a few malcontents.
As a result, the only limitation on credit expansion is now external.
Governments, of course, are always anxious to remove all checks on their powers of inducing monetary expansion.
One way of removing the external threat is to foster international cooperation, so that
all governments and central banks expand their money supply at a uniform rate.
The ideal condition for unlimited inflation is, of course, a world fiat paper money, issued
by a world central bank or other governmental authority.
Poor fiat money on a national scale would serve almost as well, but there would then
be the embarrassment of national monies depreciating in terms of other monies, and imports becoming
much more expensive.
The transition from gold to fiat money will be greatly smoothed if the state has previously
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
With its own unique name, it will be far easier for each state to control its own fiat issue, absolutely.
With the establishment of fiat money by a state or by a world state,
it would seem that all limitations on credit expansion or on any inflation are eliminated.
The central bank can issue limitless amounts of nominal units of paper unchecked by any necessity of digging a commodity out of the ground.
They may be supplied to banks to bolster their credit at the pleasure of the government.
No problems of internal or external drain exist.
exist. And if there existed a world state, or a cooperating cartel of states, with a
world bank and world paper money, and gold and silver money were outlawed, could not the
world state then expand the money supply at will, with no foreign exchange or foreign trade
difficulties, permanently redistributing wealth from the market's choice to its own favorites,
from Voluntary Producers to the Ruling Castes?
Many economists and most other people assume that the state could accomplish this goal.
Actually, it could not, for there is an ultimate limit on inflation.
A very wide one, to be sure, but a terrible limit that will, in the end, conquer any inflation.
Paradoxically, this is the phenomenon of runaway inflation, or hyperinflation.
When the government and the banking system begin inflating, the public will usually aid them unwittingly in this task.
The public, not cognizant of the true nature of the process, believes that the rise in prices is transient, and that prices will soon return to normal.
As we have noted, people will therefore hoard more money, that is, keep a greater proportion of their income in the form of cash balances.
The social demand for money, in short, increases.
As a result, prices tend to increase less than proportionately to the increase in the quantity of money.
The government obtains more real resources from the public than it had expected, since the public's demand for these resources has declined.
Eventually, the public begins to realize what is taking place.
It seems that the government is attempting to use inflation as a permanent form of taxation, but the public has a weapon to combat this depredation.
Education.
Once people realize that the government will continue to inflate, and therefore that prices
will continue to rise, they will step up their purchases of goods, for they will realize
that they are gaining by buying now instead of waiting until a future date when the value
of the monetary unit will be lower and prices higher.
In other words, the social demand for money falls, and prices now begin to rise more rapidly
than the increase in the supply of money.
When this happens, the confiscation by the government, or the taxation effect of inflation,
will be lower than the government had expected, for the increased money will be reduced in
purchasing power by the greater rise in prices.
This stage of the inflation is the beginning of hyperinflation, of the runaway boom.
The lower demand for money allows fewer resources to be extracted by the government, but the
government can still obtain resources so long as the market continues to use the money.
The accelerated price rise will, in fact, lead to complaints of a scarcity of money
and stimulate the government to greater efforts of inflation, thereby causing even more accelerated
price increases.
This process will not continue long, however.
As the rise in prices continues, the public begins a flight from money, getting rid of
money as soon as possible in order to invest in real goods, almost any real goods, as a
store of value for the future.
This mad scramble away from money, lowering the demand for money to hold practically to
zero, causes prices to rise upward in astronomical proportions.
The value of the monetary unit falls practically to zero.
The devastation and havoc that the runaway boom causes among the populace is enormous.
The relatively fixed income groups are wiped out.
Human Action declines drastically, sending up prices further, as people lose the incentive
to work, since they must spend much of their time getting rid of money.
The main desideratum becomes getting hold of real goods, whatever they may be, and spending
money as soon as received.
When this runaway stage is reached, the economy, in effect, breaks down, the market is virtually
and Society reverts to a state of virtual barter and complete impoverishment.
Commodities are then slowly built up as media of exchange.
The public has rid itself of the inflation burden by its ultimate weapon,
lowering the demand for money to such an extent that the government's money has become worthless.
When all other limits and forms of persuasion fail,
This is the only way, through chaos and economic breakdown, for the people to force a return to the hard commodity money of the free market.
The most famous runaway inflation was the German experience of 1923.
It is particularly instructive because it took place in one of the world's most advanced industrial countries.
The chaotic events of the German hyperinflation and other accelerated booms, however, are only a pale shadow of what would happen under a world state inflation.
For Germany was able to recover and return to a full monetary market economy quickly, since it could institute a new currency based on exchanges with other pre-existing monies, gold or foreign paper.
As we have seen, however, Mises regression theorem shows that no money can be established on the market except as it can be exchanged for a previously existing money, which in turn must have ultimately related back to a commodity in barter.
If a world state outlaws gold and silver and establishes a unitary fiat money, which it
proceeds to inflate until a runaway boom destroys it, there will be no pre-existing money on
the market.
The task of reconstruction will then be enormously more difficult.
G. Inflation and Compensatory Fiscal Policy
Money in recent years has been generally defined as an increase in prices.
This is a highly unsatisfactory definition.
Prices are highly complex phenomena, activated by many different causal factors.
They may increase or decrease from the goods side, that is, as a result of a change in
the supply of goods on the market.
They may increase or decrease because of a change in the social demand for money to hold,
or they may rise or fall from a change in the supply of money.
To lump all of these causes together is misleading, for it glosses over the separate influences,
the isolation of which is the goal of science.
Thus, the money supply may be increasing, while at the same time the social demand for
Your money is increasing from the goods side, in the form of increased supplies of goods.
Each may offset the other, with no general price changes occurring, yet both processes
perform their work, nevertheless.
Resources will still shift as a result of inflation, and the business cycle caused by
credit expansion will still appear.
It is therefore highly inexpedient to define inflation as a rise in prices.
Movements in the supply of goods and in the demand for money schedules are all the results
of voluntary changes of preferences on the market.
The same is true for increases in the supply of gold or silver, but increases in fiduciary
Voluntary or fiat media are acts of fraudulent intervention in the market, distorting voluntary
preferences and the voluntarily determined pattern of income and wealth.
Therefore, the most expedient definition of inflation is one we have set forth, an increase
in the supply of money beyond any increase in specie.
Inflation is here defined as any increase in the money supply greater than an increase
in specie, not as a big change in that supply.
As here defined, therefore, the terms inflation and deflation are praxeological categories.
The absurdity of the various governmental programs for fighting inflation now becomes
evident.
Most people believe that government officials must constantly pace the ramparts, armed with
a huge variety of control programs designed to combat the inflation enemy.
Yet all that is really necessary is that the government and the banks, nowadays controlled
almost completely by the government, cease inflating.
The absurdity of the term inflationary pressure also becomes clear.
Either the government and banks are inflating or they are not.
There is no such thing as inflationary pressure.
The idea that the government has the duty to tax the public in order to sop up excess
purchasing power is particularly ludicrous.
If inflation has been underway, this excess purchasing power is precisely the result of
previous governmental inflation.
In short, the government is supposed to burden the public twice, once in appropriating the
resources of society by inflating the money supply, and again by taxing back the new money
from the public.
Rather than checking inflationary pressure then, a tax surplus in a boom will simply
place an additional burden upon the public.
If the taxes are used for further government spending, or for repaying debts to the public,
then there is not even a deflationary effect.
If the taxes are used to redeem government debt held by the banks, the deflationary effect
Conflict will not be a credit contraction and therefore will not correct maladjustments
brought about by the previous inflation.
It will, indeed, create further dislocations and distortions of its own.
Keynesian and neo-Keynesian compensatory fiscal policy advocates that government deflate during
Inflating an inflationary period and inflate incur deficits financed by borrowing from the
banks to combat a depression.
It is clear that government inflation can relieve unemployment and unsold stocks only
if the process dupes the owners into accepting lower real prices or wages.
This money illusion relies on the owners being too ignorant to realize when their real incomes
have declined, a slender basis on which to ground a cure.
Furthermore, the inflation will benefit part of the public at the expense of the rest,
and any credit expansion will only set a further boom-bust cycle into motion.
The Keynesians depict the free market's monetary fiscal system as minus a steering wheel so
that the economy, though readily adjustable in other ways, is constantly walking a precarious
tightrope between depression and unemployment on the one side and inflation on the other.
It is then necessary for the government, in its wisdom, to step in and steer the economy
on an even course.
Under our completed analysis of money and business cycles, however, it should be evident
that the true picture is just about the reverse.
The free market, unhampered, would not be in danger of suffering inflation, deflation,
depression or unemployment, but the intervention of government creates the tightrope for the
of the Economy and is constantly, if sometimes unwittingly, pushing the economy into these pitfalls.