Wednesday, August 17, 2011
A Gold Standard Is Unthinkable No More
Fiat money has worked well since Richard Nixon ended the dollar’s peg to gold 40 years ago this week, but this latest recession must gnaw at believers. If years of ultra-cheap cash give rise to serious inflation or an accelerated retreat of the American currency, the gold standard, however erratic and deflationary, could start to appeal again.
The arrangement born at Bretton Woods and used for nearly three decades was not a true gold standard, as it was entirely intergovernmental and the private holding of gold was illegal in America. It thus lacked the virtue of independence from political meddling, failed to provide anti-inflationary benefits and collapsed once its American sponsors no longer controlled the world economy.
The true gold standard, in which gold coins circulated freely as legal tender, was started in Britain in 1717 and lasted for just under 200 years, interrupted only during the Napoleonic wars.Compared with an ideal, stable and noninflationary monetary system, free from influence by elected officials, the gold standard has two flaws. The metal’s supply is erratic. It can soar unexpectedly with new discoveries, thus causing currency values to fluctuate. Conversely, new deposits tend to be found slowly, making a gold standard excessively deflationary when population growth is rapid. That is what
contributed to the standard’s breakdown after 1900.World population growth is now declining after its annual peak of 2.2 percent in the early 1960s. By 2030, it is forecast to fall below the 0.72 percent rate of 1900. That would make a gold standard practicable and not too deflationary.
That doesn’t make it any more likely that central bankers would embrace it, despite advocacy from critics of quantitative easing and the Federal Reserve like Steve Forbes and Ron Paul. For one thing, it would drastically undercut the banks’ influence.
But further chipping at the dollar’s credibility, further downgrades of United States credit or other harmful results from years of very low interest rates could bring more people around to the idea of a new reserve currency. A return to the gold standard remains unlikely, but it’s no longer unthinkable.
source
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Gold Standard Advantages
Judy Shelton
Monday, November 22, 2010
Gold v. The Fed
When it last met, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) signaled its desire to increase the rate of inflation by providing additional monetary stimulus. This policy is based on a false – and dangerous – premise: that manipulating the dollar’s buying power will lead to higher employment and economic growth. But the experience of the past 40 years points to the opposite conclusion: that guaranteeing a stable value for the dollar by restoring dollar-gold convertibility would be the surest way for the Federal Reserve to achieve its dual mandate of maximum employment and price stability...
What’s happened since 1971, when President Nixon formally broke the link between the dollar and gold? Higher average unemployment, slower growth, greater instability and a decline in the economy’s resilience...
Economists and pundits may disagree on why the gold standard delivered such superior results compared to the recurrent crises, instability and overall inferior economic performance delivered by the current system. But the data are clear: A gold-based system delivers higher employment and more price stability. The time has come to begin the serious work of building a 21st-century gold standard for the benefit of American workers, investors and businesses.
read the essay
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A Return to the Gold Standard
Over the weekend of November 6-7, 2010, World Bank president, Robert Zoellick , proposed in a column written for the Financial Times that the global economy once more be linked to gold as an anchor to help maintain currency stability and reduce inflationary expectations in international markets...
But in spite of Wolf's concerns, it can be argued the costs of a gold standard are far less that the costs that have been imposed on society from a century of gross mismanagement of the monetary system by governments around the world. Since 1914, when the Federal Reserve System came into operation as America's central bank, and the beginning of the First World War that same year, the world has experienced severe inflations, including a number of hyperinflations, and the rollercoaster of several booms and recessions, including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the current global economic downturn.
Placing the fate of the world's monetary system in the hands of monetary central planners, who have had all the discretion imaginable through their control of paper money instead of gold, has not secured an inflation- or recession-free economic environment...
Finally, Wolf's concern that a real gold standard would tie the hands of governments and central banks from having the discretionary authority to manipulate the monetary system should be considered a "plus," not a minus. Only the most doctrinaire Keynesian can deny or fail to see that past recessions and the current economic downturn were all preceded by unsustainable booms resulting from monetary expansions and interest rate manipulations that threw savings and investment out of balance, artificially stimulated misplaced construction projects, and misdirected labor into employments that became unprofitable to maintain once the inevitable financial and investment bubbles burst...
Monetary central planning has worked no better than any other form of central planning over the last one hundred years. The world's central bankers – just like the central planners in the old Soviet Union – just do not have the knowledge, wisdom and ability to successful manage the monetary system of a market economy...
The return to a market-based money such as gold, therefore, is both possible and desirable. And it would be most effective in acting as a barrier against any further government abuses of the monetary system, if such a return to gold was introduced through the freeing of banking and financial markets from the heavy-hand of government, as well.
The next phase of our post-communist world may very well require the end to monetary socialism, which is what central banking really represents.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The Free Market: A Litmus Test
Very few people believe in the free market. This is true of virtually all academic economists. The proof that they do not believe in the free market is that they oppose the creation of a full gold coin standard. They say they believe in the free market in many areas of life, but they do not believe in the free market with respect to the monetary system. Yet, above all other areas of the economy that ought to be governed by the free market, the money system should be. Why is this? Because money is the central institution in a market economy. Control over money is the central form of economic control.
We have seen this with a vengeance with the passing of the banking reform bill of 2010. The great winner in the reform is the Federal Reserve System. It receives the authority over the banking system. It is not limited merely to control over the money supply; it now possesses the authority of direct regulation and intervention.
The central banks of the world have now become allocators of capital. They are making the decisions as to who gets what and on what terms. Central planning over money increasingly has become central planning over the entire economy. This is not a mistake. This is consistent with the original logic of central banking. It means government control over the money supply.
When you hear a self-designated free market economist defend the idea of central banking, meaning a government-licensed monopoly over the monetary base, you can be sure that this person does not believe in the free market. He does not believe in the logic of decentralized private property. He believes in central planning, and he sees the central bank as the agency of such planning.
The few academic economists who are willing to accept even a pseudo-gold standard do not believe the government should be out of the money business. They do not believe in the widespread use of gold coins by the general population. They believe in central banks, and they believe in government control over the banking system.
What I recommend is simple: the removal of all government authority possessed by the Federal Reserve System. There would be no further legal connection between the Federal Reserve System and the United States government.
What would the result be? Within a few years, the Federal Reserve System would go bankrupt. This has been the fate of the two previous central banks of the United States. They could not operate in a competitive environment. They could operate only by means of a grant of monopolistic power by the United States government. So, I am not at all worried about the operation of the Federal Reserve System without government supervision. Besides, there is no government supervision of the Federal Reserve System. There is supervision of the government by the Federal Reserve System. Congress does not control the FED: the FED controls Congress. This has been true since 1914, and it is not likely to change...
If we were to abolish the Federal Reserve System, and if the government would then transfer to American voters all of the gold presently said to be in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Fort Knox, we would see the restoration of liberty. I can think of no other pair of laws that would transfer more authority to the voters the abolition of the Federal Reserve system and transfer of the gold in the form of tenth-ounce coins back to the voters. This is why this essay is hypothetical.
Who are the opponents of such a procedure? First, the Congress of the United States. Second, all the bureaucrats who work for the Federal government. Third, all of the decision-makers of the Federal Reserve System. Fourth, the vast majority of all commercial bankers. Fifth, the entire academic economics profession. This is why we are unlikely to see this pair of laws passed in our generation.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The Meaning of Gold in the News
Bob Murphy writes:Most people assume that since money is a very useful institution, and since it obviously is not "natural" but was developed by humans, therefore some wise king or group of experts must have deliberately invented money. But this is a classic fallacy that Friedrich Hayek spent much of his career attacking. There are many aspects of society -- including language and the market economy itself -- that were not consciously planned by a group of experts. Drawing on the Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson, Hayek said they are the products of human action but not of human design...
Nobody set out to consciously create a medium of exchange, yet that is what self-interested individuals ended up producing...
Try as they might, central bankers and politicians can't repeal the laws of economics. They can use various means to foist unbacked paper currencies on their subjects, but printing up more bills will still lead to rising prices.
The Fed's "bold" moves may have temporarily averted a crash in the US financial markets, and the European Central Bank's interventions may have postponed a string of defaults by indebted governments.
But more and more investors -- including the central bankers themselves -- know that these stopgap measures merely pushed back the day of reckoning. As the crisis looms, people are rushing back to gold.read the entire essay
Saturday, August 28, 2010
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Gold Standard
France, Germany, the European Central Bank, Russia, India, and China are all much more favorable toward gold as a reserve asset than is the United States. They have shown this through their actions in holding or adding to their gold reserves. China has promoted gold as an investment. Although they have not spoken openly of gold, they are moving toward the increased importance of gold in the international monetary arrangements.
In other words, they are aiming at some version of a gold standard. The idea seems to be to go back to a pre-1971 system while bolstering the roles of the IMF and the BIS and reducing the dollar standard to a standard of a basket of currencies linked to gold.
The idea is to prolong the life of national central banks and fiat currencies by a gold linkage.
This, I say, is something we don’t need. We don’t need no stinkin’ gold standard that is another version of government-controlled currencies, accompanied by government suppression of monetary freedom and privately or market-produced money.
What we need is market-produced money. This may take a number of possible forms, such as e-money backed by metals such as silver and gold, or silver coin, or gold coin and bullion for larger transactions.
Market-produced money differs radically from government-controlled and government-produced money. With market-produced money, there cannot be a systematically injurious deflation or harmful shortage of money. If the demand for money exceeds the supply to the point where the costs of a money shortage to demanders are exceeding the costs of producing more money, the market will produce more money and eliminate the shortage.
By the same token, with market-produced money, there cannot be a systematically injurious inflation or excess of money. If the supply of a money exceeds its demand at a given price, the market will reduce the supply and demanders will seek alternative money, thereby eliminating the excess demand.
With market-produced money, variations in the demand and supply of money will be of no greater consequence than the analogous variations of any other of the thousands of goods and services that the government does not control and whose prices are market-determined.
With market-produced money, there cannot be a money-caused business cycle of any substantial consequence, because prolonged alterations in money supply and interest rates caused by government control of money will be absent.
This means that with market-produced money, we can say goodbye to unemployment caused by business cycles induced by government mismanagement of currencies.
The Great Depression occurred at a time when the gold backing of government money was extensive. The current hardships are occurring at a time when gold is far, far less important in America’s monetary system. The common feature of these large depressions is not the presence or absence of gold backing. It is the presence of government-controlled money, with or without gold backing.
The most common meaning of "gold standard" associates this term with government-controlled money, not privately-produced money. This is why we don’t need no stinkin’ gold standard.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Return to the Gold Standard
If the very idea seems at odds with what is currently happening in our country -- with Congress preparing to pass a massive economic stimulus bill that will push the fiscal deficit to triple the size of last year's record budget gap -- it's because a gold standard stands in the way of runaway government spending.
Under a gold standard, if people think the paper money printed by government is losing value, they have the right to switch to gold. Fiat money -- i.e., currency with no intrinsic worth that government has decreed legal tender -- loses its value when government creates more than can be absorbed by the productive real economy. Too much fiat money results in inflation -- which pools in certain sectors at first, such as housing or financial assets, but ultimately raises prices in general.
Inflation is the enemy of capitalism, chiseling away at the foundation of free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It distorts price signals, making retailers look like profiteers and deceiving workers into thinking their wages have gone up. It pushes families into higher income tax brackets without increasing their real consumption opportunities.
read the essay
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
The Gold Standard
Is the Gold Standard Still the Gold Standard among Monetary Systems?
by Lawrence H. White
Critics have raised a number of theoretical and historical objections to the gold standard. Some have called the gold standard a "crazy" idea.
The gold standard is not a flawless monetary system. Neither is the fiat money alternative. In light of historical evidence about the comparative magnitude of these flaws, however, the gold standard is a policy option that deserves serious consideration.
In a study covering many decades in a large sample of countries, Federal Reserve Bank economists found that "money growth and inflation are higher" under fiat standards than under gold and silver standards. Nor is the gold standard a source of harmful deflation. Alan Greenspan has testified before Congress that "a central bank properly functioning will endeavor to, in many cases, replicate what a gold standard would itself generate."
This study addresses the leading criticisms of the gold standard, relating to the costs of gold, the costs of transition, the dangers of speculation, and the need for a lender of last resort. One criticism is found to have some merit. The United States would not enjoy the benefits of being on an international gold standard if it were the first and only country whose currency was linked to gold.
A gold standard does not guarantee perfect steadiness in the growth of the money supply, but historical comparison shows that it has provided more moderate and steadier money growth in practice than the present-day alternative, politically empowering a central banking committee to determine growth in the stock of fiat money. From the perspective of limiting money growth appropriately, the gold standard is far from a crazy idea.
Is it worth a try?