For some nine years I have been predicting that the economy is going to a recession morphing into a depression, using a purely theoretical argument. The essence of my argument is that the open market operations of the Fed cause a protracted decline in interest rates which is responsible for the hard-to-detect capital destruction affecting the financial sector no less than the productive sector. The immediate cause of the depression is the destruction of capital. The ultimate cause is the monetary policy of open market operations. The chain of causation is as follows;

• Open market operations (in effect, net purchases of T-bills) by the Fed are predictable. They invite bond speculators to take risk-free profits offered by this fact of predictability.
• Bond speculators buy the long-dated Treasurys and sell the short-dated ones, to pocket the difference in yields. These straddles represent borrowing short and lending long. As such, they are inherently risky. However, Quantitative Easing takes the risk out by making the odds, that the normal yield curve will invert, negligible.
• The bond speculator faces the problem of having to roll forward the fast-expiring short leg of his straddle by selling T-bills. The extraordinary funding and refunding requirements the Treasury is facing, and the extraordinary pressure on the Fed to increase the money supply combine to make it ultra-easy for the bond speculator to move both the short and the long leg of his straddles as he sees fit.
• The upshot is that interest rates keep falling along the entire yield curve. Regardless how many long-dated issues the Treasury offers, bond speculators snap them up even before the ink is dry on them.

Here we have the solution to the Greenspan-conundrum: the sky is the limit to the bond speculators’ appetite for Treasury paper. They are all right as long as they can sell T-bills against them. But as the sky is the limit to the Fed’s appetite for T-bills, both flanks of the speculators are secure.

In my other writings I have explained how a prolonged fall in interest rates along the yield curve brings about depression through the indiscriminate destruction of capital in the productive as well as financial sector.

There is a vicious spiral: the more currency the Fed creates, the more risk-free profits bond speculators will reap, contributing to a further fall of interest rates.

This outcome is the exact opposite of the one predicted by monetarism. The latter predicts that the new money created by the Fed will flow to the commodity market bidding up prices there, to nip depression in the bud. Bernanke & Co. fully expects this to happen. This is not what is happening, however. The new money refuses to flow uphill to the commodity market. It flows downhill to the bond market where the fun is. Why take risks in the commodity market, the speculators ask, when you can gamble risk free in the bond market? So grab the money, buy more bonds and sell an equal amount of bills. As a consequence of bullish bond speculation interest rates fall, prices fall, employment falls, firms fall. The squeeze is on, bankrupting the entire economy.

Official check-kiting

Some might object that the Fed could short-circuit the process and undercut the bond speculators’ lucrative business. All it has to do is to buy the short-dated paper directly from the Treasury. Inverting the yield curve will shake off the parasites. My answer is that there is no danger of this happening. The Treasury and the Fed know that bond-vigilantes watch what they are doing like a hawk. Any hanky-panky of direct sales of T-bills by the Treasury to the Fed would make them cry “foul play!” As indeed it would be: direct sale of Treasury paper to the Fed would degrade the dollar from irredeemable currency to fiat currency. There is a subtle difference, realized only by the few.

Fiat currency is worse. Its arbitrary augmenting is decided behind closed doors. It does not need the endorsement of the open market. Fiat currencies have a short life-span as they readily succumb to the sudden-death syndrome. Irredeemable currencies are different from fiat in that they are created openly, using collateral purchased in the open market. They have a more respectable life-span. As long as the official check-kiting conspiracy between the Treasury and the Fed remains hidden from the general public, irredeemable currency may even prosper. Direct sale of T-bills by the Treasury to the Fed would tear down the curtain that hides the fact of check-kiting.

The mechanism of check-kiting is as follows; The Treasury issues debt which it has neither the intention nor the means ever to repay. This debt is used as ‘backing’ for Federal Reserve notes and deposits, which the Fed has neither the intention nor the means ever to redeem. When the Treasury debt matures, it is paid in Federal Reserve credit issued on the collateral security of new Treasury debt. When Federal Reserve credit is presented for redemption, the Fed offers interest-bearing Treasury debt in exchange. This is a shell game and it exhausts the definition of check-kiting. Neither the Treasury debt, nor the Federal Reserve credit is issued in good faith. Neither is redeemable any more than Charles Ponzi’s tickets were. They are both issued in order to mesmerize a gullible public, much the same way as Ponzi did.

Treasury and Fed officials know their history. They are familiar with the fate of the assignat, the mandat, the Reichsmark, not to mention the Continental. They know that no fiat money ever survived the ‘slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune’. Their only hope is that the fate of the irredeemable dollar, as predicted by Friedman, would be different. They would not embark upon an adventure in monetary policy involving direct sales of T-bills by the Treasury to the Fed. If they did, surely this would be the end of their experiment. Foreigners as well as Americans would start dumping the dollar unceremoniously, and buy anything they can lay their hands on. This is variously known as flight into real goods, Flucht in die Sachwerte, crack-up boom, Katastrophenhausse. I purposely avoid using the term hyperinflation as it connotes with the Quantity Theory of Money, which is not really a theory. It is a linear model trying to explain non-linear phenomena.

Falsecarding by the Fed

There is also a second method by means of which bond speculators are making risk-free profits. They ‘front-run’ the Fed in the bill market. This means that, through inside information or otherwise, they divine when the Fed has to answer ‘nature’s call’ and must make the next trip to the open market in order to buy the collateral without which it cannot issue more money.

Bond speculators forestall the Fed by purchasing the bills beforehand, thus driving up the price. Then they turn around and dump the paper into the lap of the Fed at the enhanced price, making a risk-free profit. This process is called ‘scalping’, after the kindred activities of small-time speculators in tickets for the World Series and other popular sporting events.

The objection that the Fed knows how to throw bond speculators off scent by various stratagems — for example, through falsecarding, say, by selling when speculators would expect it to buy — can be safely dismissed. There is no question that every year the Fed is a big buyer of bills on a net basis. If it sells, it has to buy that much more later on. Fiddling means that the Fed may miss its target. Falsecarding may backfire.

The speculators are a smart lot, thanks to ‘natural selection’ culling the rank and file. They risk their own capital, which they stand to lose if they place the wrong bet. Once their capital is gone they are out, and smarter guys will take over. Hired hands at the Fed are no match for them as far as brightness and adroitness is concerned. The latter work for salaries. If they make the wrong bet, losses will be replenished by dipping into the public purse. Think of the losses the Bank of England suffered at the hand of a lonely bond speculator, one George Soros. The British public was forced to swallow the loss, and Soros was allowed to run with the loot and boast in his book that he has busted the Bank of England single-handedly. Recently Soros said in Davos that he is bearish on gold. In his opinion gold is in a bubble. Of course. He knows that he couldn’t bust the Bank of England again, once it is back on the gold standard!

Cheating in Las Vegas

My voice has remained a cry in the wilderness. Nobody paid attention to the mumblings of this armchair economist.

My idle theorizing got an unexpected boost from the website Jesse’s Café Américain jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com. On January 22, 2010, Jesse posted a story with the title Front-Running the Fed in the Treasury Market from which the following quotation is taken;

Attached is some information from a reader. I cannot assess its validity, not being in the bond trading business. But it does sound like someone has tapped into the Fed’s buying plans to monetize the public debt and is front-running those purchases, essentially ‘stealing’ money from the public. It’s what they call a ‘sure thing’. To try and figure out who might be doing it, I would look for some big player who is showing extraordinary returns on their trading, with consistent profit that is not statistically ‘normal’, but is consistently ‘too good’. The problem with cheaters is that they sometimes get greedy and call attention to themselves. In Las Vegas the bigger cheats at the casino were often taken to the desert for further questioning and final disposal. On Wall Street they are more arrogant and persistent, defying resolution with that ultimate defiance, “We’ll just have to figure out other ways to cheat, and come back again”.

Time for a trip to the desert? Here are my reader’s observations from the bond market.

“I used to work for a BB on a prop desk until the financial crisis took hold and they fired the less senior guys. I now trade US Treasuries for a small prop firm in xxxxx, to scalp basis trades in most on-the-run securities. Occasionally, I will also take position in the repo markets for off-the-runs if I see something ‘mispriced’. Your recent article piqued my interest because we, too, have noticed ‘shenanigans’ of a sort in the Quantitative Easing program involving US Treasuries.”

“What we have noticed, especially in smaller issues like the 7 Year Cash, is that before a Fed buy-back would be announced, the price would pop significantly as if buyers would run through all the offers on the two major electronic exchanges (BGC Espeed and ICAP Broker Tec). This has occurred more than several times as the 7 Year Cash would be overvalued both by its BNOC, by as much as 20-30 ticks, as well as by its value relative to similar off-the-runs. These buyers would lift every offer they could, driving the price substantially above its ‘value’, sometimes for as long as a week at a time. After this buying occurred, the Fed would announce the purchase of that security, sometimes a handle above its approximate value. This ‘luck’ has occurred not just in the on-the-run 7 Year sector, but also in the 30 Year Cash, 3 Year Cash, and in several other off-the-runs. Again, it was especially prevalent in the less liquid Treasury products. Often the ‘appetite’ for these securities would begin two weeks before the official Fed announcement. The buying was well-orchestrated and done in such a way as to throw it out of kilter with the like cash Treasurys and the CME Ten Year Contract. If you examine the charts of some of the selected buy-backs before the official announcement, you will see a similar occurrence.”

“While I haven’t broken this down into a paper to prove it (and I see nothing positive coming out of contacting the ESS-EEE-SFE about this issue), I can assure you that it was occurring on a consistent basis across the entire curve. A certain issue would be bid up substantially above market value (as determined by several metrics), only to be gobbled up later by the Fed at an unreasonably high price. These players must have substantial pockets as we, the small guys (but with a decent capital base) would take the other side of what seemed to be an obvious fade. While this did not occur in every issue of the Quantitative Easing program, it occurred often enough to be obvious to any knowledgeable observer.”

“While I am not sure that this can be attributed to a purposeful Fed policy or someone at the Fed talking to his pals, I am certain that it transpired.”

Congenital disease of the monetary system

The anonymous correspondent of Jesse is looking for an answer in the wrong direction. Cheating is not necessarily involved. What he has observed need not be a purposeful, if veiled, Fed policy, nor is it necessarily someone at the Fed tipping off his brother-in-law at a brokerage house (however valuable the tip may be).

What we face here is a congenital disease of the irredeemable dollar. Open-market operations is the tool for the purpose of increasing the money supply through monetizing government debt as needed. It should be recalled that open-market operations by the Fed were illegal according to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The original Act looked at the monetization of government debt as an anathema. Illegal open-market operations started in the early 1920′s. They were legalized ex post facto in 1935 by an amendment to the Act, after the gold standard was destroyed by the proclamation of president Roosevelt in 1933. Those who sponsored the amendment were ignorant of what effect open market operations would have on bond speculation. Economists in and out of government and academia were equally ignorant. The financial press also failed to criticize the hare-brained scheme of open market operations making, as it did, profits from bond speculation risk free.

There is no need to look for a conspiracy in the bond market. It is quite possible that a large number of smart speculators, acting spontaneously and independently of one another, have come to realize that there is a bonanza, perfectly legal, in ripping off the public purse. Of course, they kept their own counsel.

If anybody is responsible for this colossal blunder of economics releasing the genie of risk-free speculation out of the bottle, the names that come to mind are those of Keynes and Friedman, resp. They invented, resp., ‘improved’, the system of floating exchange rates assuming a goldless currency that has to be arbitrarily augmented from time-to-time through the monetization of government debt (that, incidentally, proliferated profusely after the politicians deliberately unbalanced the budget upon the explicit advice of Keynes). The rest, as they say, is history.

As long as budget deficits were ‘modest’, the activity of speculators making risk-free profits in the bond market escaped public attention. With the advent of ‘Quantitative Easing’ and mega-deficits, everybody sitting at a bond-trading desk can see it. The figures literally jump off the screen, as explained by Jesse’s blog.

Recruiting a corps of shills

To be fair to Jesse’s anonymous correspondent I must admit that his conjecture, that in risk-free bond speculation we may be looking at deliberate Fed policy, is plausible. It is not impossible that the rot in the U.S. monetary system has already spread so far that in a truly free and unrigged bond market no bidders would turn up. Time is long since past when Treasuries were eagerly sought after by the most conservative segment of the investing public, such as guardians of widows and orphans, trust funds, eleemosynary institutions. Typically, they held the bonds to maturity. Treasuries, second only to gold, were the most trusted instruments of wealth-preservation.

Under the regime of the irredeemable dollar no investor in his right mind would buy a Treasury bond and hold it till maturity. Treasuries lose value as ice melts in the sunshine. They have become a plaything in the hands of speculators for their value in turning a fast buck. Under the gold standard there was no bond speculation, just as there was no foreign exchange speculation. Interest rates were stable and so were bond prices. Speculators would shun bonds. Of course, all this changed when president Nixon defaulted on the short-term gold obligation of the Treasury to foreigners in 1971, and gold was finally removed from the international monetary system at the behest of the U.S. government.

For a decade speculators were happy with the trading profits they could make in the bond market. But as the monetary system kept deteriorating, they started abandoning bonds, transferring their activities to the commodity market. By 1981 demand for bonds practically evaporated. As this spelled the end of the regime of the irredeemable dollar, the Fed had to do something to prop up the bond market by enticing bond speculators back.

Thus, then, it is quite possible that a decision was made at the highest level to offer the enticement of risk-free profits to bond speculators. It certainly cannot be denied that bond speculators have been making obscene profits in the course of the 30-year bull market in bonds that is still ongoing. These profits are unprecedented in the history of speculation, both on account of their magnitude and their regularity. They were made at the expense of productive enterprise, the capital of which has been surreptitiously siphoned off by the falling interest-rate structure.

Another way of describing this scenario (assuming it is correct) is that in 1981 the Fed, unknown to the public, decided to recruit a corps of shills to prop up a moribund bond market. The shills hired by the casinos of Las Vegas bet big and win big at the gaming tables in full view of the gamblers who are unaware that they are being treated to a show. The sight of these big payoffs will then perk up the gambling spirit of a lethargic clientele.

The shills recruited by the Fed are the bond speculators, and their remuneration is in the form of risk-free profits they are allowed to make (and keep). The scheme was a roaring success. Not only did it save the bond market from extinction; it also saved the dollar from ignominy, and was instrumental in making possible a whole string of bubbles, each bigger than the previous one.

The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions

The problem is far more serious than it may at first appear. Risk-free speculation is like a computer-virus that has no antidote and threatens to wipe out the Internet. It short-circuits normal economic processes and gobbles up the world economy.

I would welcome a public debate of my thesis that risk-free bond speculation suppresses the rate of interest and destroys capital in the process. I have challenged neo-classical economists who still consider the open-market operations of the Fed as a ‘refined tool to manage the national economy’. I want them, instead, to see in open-market operations the cancer of the economy responsible for the withering of the world’s prosperity. So far my challenge has fallen upon deaf ears.

Here is the problem. The prevailing orthodoxy is the unholy alliance between Keynesianism and monetarism inspired by Friedman (defying the pretence that these two are antagonistic theories). The idea that an artificial increase in the money supply must raise commodity prices dies hard. But as my theory suggests, and as events have repeatedly shown (first during the Great Depression of the 1930′s, and again, during the present crisis), the presence of risk-free speculation renders the increase in the money supply counter-productive. It causes prices to fall rather than rise.

Giving them the toy of risk-free profits makes speculators vacate the commodity market where risks are too high. They will then congregate in the bond market where risks are non-existent. The speculator who in the absence of risk-free profits might resist falling prices in the commodity market, will decline the honor of pushing the Keynesian agenda if given the choice of risk-free profits in bonds. This is basic human reaction that cannot be criticized, still less rectified, by official brow-beating. Keynesians should have thought about the consequences of their master-plan more thoroughly before they put open-market operations into effect.

The intentions of policy-makers at the Fed are praiseworthy. They want to prevent prices and employment from collapsing. But they are prisoners of their orthodoxy, and their good intentions make them steer the economy to the road to hell. A catastrophe is confronting the Titanic, but the captain, just confirmed in his position in spite of a most serious public challenge, will not change his course.

A head-on collision with the iceberg straight ahead, otherwise known as the debt-tower, now appears inevitable.

February 10, 2010

An Address to the CARA Bahamas Conference, Freeport, Grand Bahama

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The cliché that the present credit collapse is “the greatest financial crisis since 1929″ is the understatement of the century. One measure of the crises is the ratio of gross private debt to nominal GDP. This ratio captures the idea how many years of current output it would take to retire outstanding debt. In these terms, the crisis is truly unprecedented. The world plunged into the present crisis with far greater debt than the debt outstanding at the time when it plunged into the Great Depression in 1929. Add to this the qualitative change in the structure of debt. The most exotic of the Roaring Twenties era debt was brokers’ margin lending on the stock purchases of clients. Today, in addition, we have:

1. derivative instruments valued up to one quadrillion dollars,
2. adjustable-rate mortgages,
3. the unquantifiable off-balance-sheet activities of financial institutions, and
4. the junk-bond activities of private equity firms.

The unwinding, or should I say The momentum of change in the debt-tower will insure that debt – and bankruptcies – will continue to rise even as the economy contracts.

The greatest amplifier of the debt burden: falling interest rates

I won’t beat around the bush and say it without hesitation that the greatest underlying cause of the present crisis is the ongoing destruction of capital induced by the falling interest-rate structure. Economists and accountants are still blind to the fact that falling interest rates amplify the burden of debt. According to Fischer’s Paradox: “The more debtors pay, the more they owe”. In this single sentence we have the essence of deflation. Payments of the debtors are discounted at the lower current rate of interest – not at the higher rate at which the debt was originally contracted!

This may be the nightmare that keeps Ben Bernanke awake and his printing presses in high gear. All in vain; falling prices defy the printing presses. Last year the fall in CPI was the steepest since 1932 at 2 percent. Forget monetarism, forget the Quantity Theory of Money. Forget Friedman. Call it Fekete’s Paradox if you will; “The more the Fed tries to pump up commodity prices with its printing presses, the more they will fall”. The explanation of this paradox is found in the contrarian behavior of the speculators. Yes, they will snap up the newly printed dollars and run with them. But run they will in the wrong direction. They run not to the commodity market as hoped by Bernanke, but to the bill market where the fun is. They front-run Bernanke and his team. They effectively corner the market for T-bills before Bernanke can buy his quota, without which he cannot print more dollars. Then speculators turn around and feed the T-bills to the Fed on their own terms. Thus the Fed’s effort to induce inflation will fail – just as the effort of the Bank of Japan to pump up prices was a dismal failure in 2002.

Greenspan surfing the tsunamis

In a testimony to Congress Alan Greenspan has described the financial crisis as a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami”. His simile is as misleading as it is inappropriate, on at least two counts. First, geologists do understand the cause of a tsunami; Greenspan and other policy-makers do not understand why the global financial crisis has occurred. Second, while geologists understand tsunamis, they do not cause them. In contrast, policies implemented at the Fed and at the Treasury are directly responsible for the financial tsunami. Worse still, policy-makers fight the destructive effects of the tsunami with means that can only be described as counter-productive. They make the crisis worse, not better.

They had encouraged a debt-financed speculative bubble in asset prices that created a 25-year illusory prosperity but was doomed to burst, ushering in a self-aggravating economic downturn. They are utterly ignorant about the role of capital and debt in the productive process. They believe that credit can replace capital, so that capital destruction can be repaired with more credit expansion. The vast majority of their colleagues at the universities are not any better informed, either.

Gold as the ultimate extinguisher of debt

If we accept the thesis that exorbitant debt and the destruction of capital is at the root of the present crisis, then we’ll be directed to the solution of the problem. The solution is gold. The reason why there can be no resolution of the crisis without gold is two-fold:

1. Gold is the only form of capital that is immune to destruction under any circumstances.
2. Gold is the only ultimate extinguisher of debt.

I shall deal with the first reason in a moment. Here I just point out that when a debtor repays his debt by handing over Federal Reserve notes to his creditor, the debt is not extinguished. It is merely transferred to the Federal Reserve bank that issued the note. Transferring debt is not the same as extinguishing it. One reason for the present plight of the world is that for the past forty years gold, the only ultimate extinguisher of debt, has been forcibly prevented by the U.S. government to discharge its debt-extinguishing function. As a consequence the debt-tower has kept growing, rain or shine. Conversely, until policy-makers at the Fed and the Treasury will understand that there is no substitute for gold in taming the debt-monster, their tinkering at the edges will keep making the global debt crisis worse.

Unfortunately, the news is not good in this regard. Bernanke is a dyed-in-the-wool chrysophobe. He would hardly be competent to make the necessary changes that would restore gold as the ultimate extinguisher of debt in the international monetary system.

Here I come to the point of my talk. What can the individual investor do to make sure that his investments will not be completely wiped out in the coming financial Armageddon?

Gold as the only form of capital that cannot be destroyed

In wartime capital destruction normally presents itself as physical destruction of plant, equipment, and products at various stages of production. By contrast, in peacetime, capital destruction takes place on paper, through the consolidation of balance sheets. Take the simplest case when a bankrupt economic entity is overtaken by another in order to save whatever can be saved. Clearly, that part of the assets of the latter that have a counterpart in the liabilities of the former cannot be saved. It will be wiped out.

It follows that no asset that also occurs as liability in the balance sheet of a counter-party is safe against destruction through consolidation – even if that counter-party is the government. We must remember that every government experiment with irredeemable currency in history has been an abysmal failure.

In the extreme case, when the balance sheets of all economic entities are consolidated in a holocaust, and all paper assets are wiped out, gold is always a survivor: the only asset that cannot be destroyed through inflation, through deflation, or through any other malady of the monetary system.

This means that gold, and only gold, qualifies as an instrument of hedging paper assets. Every investor owes it to himself to provide an adequate level of insurance against risks that prey upon the value of paper investments. But unless this insurance consists of physical gold held by the investor himself on his own premises, it will be ineffective.

Trading insurance makes no sense

This also shows that the attitude of most investors with regard to gold is faulty, not to say foolish. They keep talking about the ‘performance’ of gold. They trade gold: buy it when they expect the gold price to rise; they sell it when they expect the gold price to fall. Many of them are finished with gold saying that “the bloom is off the roses”. This attitude is akin to that of the property-owner who thinks that he is saving money by cancelling his insurance coverage hoping to reinstate it later. It never occurs to him that it may not be possible to reinstate, if the external conditions change drastically.

The best policy concerning insurance is to buy it and ‘forget about it’. No regrets if the occasion to collect insurance compensation never arises. It is not a loss: it should be looked at as a gain.

A simple gold-accumulation plan, aiming at a gold hedge equivalent to 10-15 percent of net worth, with monthly additions will suffice, with the proviso that it is preferable to increase the hedge when the gold price is down.

Gold investors typically get nervous as they listen to rumors that the volatility in the price of gold indicates that the value of gold has become unstable. They forget that it is not gold that is unstable, but the dollar in which the gold price is quoted. Gold has been, is, and will be the paragon of stability. Ultimately, the price at which you have purchased your hedges is unimportant.

Tips for hedging

Buy anonymously and don’t talk about it. Don’t worry that you can’t sell anonymously; you are not going to sell, just like you are not going to cancel your fire insurance policy as long as you own the house. Don’t worry about capital gains taxes on your gold that you hold as hedges against paper assets. Since you never sell, you never incur a tax liability. There is no way the government can impose or collect taxes on paper profits. At any rate, those so called profits on your gold hedges should never be considered as profits. They should be looked at as advances on payments of insurance compensation for anticipated losses. It would be foolish to take these ‘profits’ and spend them. Those losses may disappear, together with the gold profits, creating the impression that your hedges don’t work. They do, but the results have to be interpreted correctly. Spending gold profits is tantamount to cancelling the insurance policy prematurely. The big test is still ahead. The crisis is not over, not by a long shot.

The shape of things to come

The world lives in a delusion. It sets great stores on Keynesian nostrums, hoping that public debt-financed government spending, or inflating the money supply will resolve the crisis. They won’t. The first-mentioned Keynesian remedy will fail because replacing private debt with public debt means jumping from the frying pan into the fire. A true solution must reduce total debt. The second-mentioned Keynesian remedy will fail to induce the intended inflation because the newly created money just won’t go where the Fed would like it to go; to the commodity, real estate, and stock markets. Instead it will go to the bond market to facilitate bond speculation; borrowing short and lending long, putting a downward pressure on the yield curve. Alternatively, it will be used to retire private debt. In either case, the result will be deflationary, not inflationary.

As the decrease in debt reaches a threshold, it will have two immediate consequences. One: unemployment will skyrocket. Two: the financial system will self-destruct in a spectacular fire-work that will make the fact obvious to one and all. Concerning the first consequence, the U.S. must face the situation squarely that during the boom years it has dismantled much of its industrial park producing consumer goods for the mass market. It no longer has the factories needed to employ the armies of unemployed people that will be laid off in the financial sector; at brokerages, real estate agencies, insurance companies, not to mention banks.

Concerning the second consequence, it must be stated that the U.S. financial system is bankrupt already; it self-destructed during the long-drawn-out decline of interest rates to zero. This bankruptcy is camouflaged by the wholly misconceived measure of allowing the banks, pension funds and insurance companies to cook their books. They can only balance their books through the trick of overstating the value of their assets and understating the value of their liabilities. The government and the accounting profession are accomplices. Not only do they fail to prosecute violators of the accounting code, they even cheer them on and encourage others to do the same. Worst of all, they set the example. The Fed carries dead assets such as mortgage-backed bonds with no bid and no market at a positive value.

Revaluation of gold

The nation is lulled into a false sense of security. When the truth dawns on the nation that the American financial system is working without capital (following in the footsteps of the Japanese banks that have been brain-dead for over a decade), the shock will greatly aggravate the crisis. It would be better to let the truth come out now, so that the process of re-industrializing the country and recapitalizing the financial system by an appropriate revaluation of gold could start without delay.

The alternative to the revaluation of gold, seriously suggested by some respectable economists, is a complete debt-jubilee, that is, forgiving any and all dollar-denominated debt, starting with the government debt through mortgages and corporate debt, all the way down to the short-term liabilities of banks, including bank deposits. This is, of course, the ultimate shock-therapy with all the unknown consequences that it may bring with it in its train. Nobody knows how the unfairly dispossessed creditors, including all the pensioners and holders of life insurance policies will react. Nobody knows what the unjustly enriched debtors will do with their godsend, the transfer of unencumbered assets to their possession. Maybe bloodshed in the streets can be avoided. Maybe not. The still unsolved problem of unemployment strongly suggests the latter.

At any rate, why take the risk, when this dormant asset, gold, has been lying around fallow for some forty years and is waiting for rehabilitation. It has the two prerequisite properties that fit the need just like the glove fits the hand; the ultimate extinguisher of debt, and capital indestructible par excellence. With a proper revaluation of monetary gold, much of the existing debt-burden could be alleviated and new productive capital could be accumulated.

I am not suggesting that sufficient wisdom presently resides in the leadership of the world to see this. But as their false remedies will be tried, and one after the other will backfire, the ultimate solution to the crisis, gold-revaluation, would dawn on the world.

Let’s face it; the only reason why this plausible solution to the long-festering problem of runaway debt has not been applied already is sheer envy. Those who saw in gold only a ‘barbarous relic’ would always look with envy at those who saw in gold the ultimate extinguisher of debt and the only indestructible form of capital. They would do everything in their power to deny the latter any benefit of their superior foresight.

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Chrysophobe

* From chryso (Greek Khrusos) ‘gold’ and phobe (Greek phobos) ‘disliker’. Back to article

aefekete@hotmail.com

February 20, 2010

For anyone out there who has not attended one of the good Professor’s seminars, now is your chance. I have been attending these seminars for four years now and they are truly priceless. I will also of course be in attendance at Munich and look forward to catching up with old friends and making new ones, not to mention hearing the latest developments in New Austrian theory from the master himself.

Philip Barton

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Announcing the third session of Professor Antal E. Fekete‘s New Austrian School in Munich, Germany.

Dates: 20-29th August, 2011

Venue: Maria-Theresia-Str. 20, Munich

Speakers: Prof A.E. Fekete (Hungary), Sandeep Jaitly (UK) and Keith Weiner (USA).

Subjects to be covered include: The unadulterated gold standard. Inflation versus deflation – simple terms for non-simple action. The gold/silver market, the gold/silver basis. The creation of the interest rate spread. Gold against other assets. The future of the bond market.

For further information regarding this event, please contact the organiser Mr. Ludwig Karl at nasoe@kt-solutions.de

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2012/02/TheGoldProblemReviseted.pdf

The article The Gold Problem of Ludwig von Mises, published 47 years ago in 1965, just six years before he died (the gold standard died with him in the same year) has some breath-taking thoughts, for example, “the gold standard alone can make the determination of money’s purchasing power independent of the ambitions and machinations of governments, of dictators, of political parties, and of pressure groups”, or: “the gold standard did not fail: governments deliberately sabotaged it, and still go on sabotaging it.” But for all our admiration we would be amiss if we did not point out certain errors in his article. These are all errors of omission, and correcting them would hopefully make the Mises article even more helpful to the discriminating reader.

Mises fails to answer his own question why gold is the best choice to serve as money. Indeed, why not another commodity, or a basket of commodities? The reason is that the marginal utility of gold is unique in that it declines at a rate slower than that of any other substance on Earth. Various assets have various marginal utilities which determine their value. All of them decline, albeit at various rates. In other words, economic actors accumulate assets increasingly reluctantly, up to their satiation point that will be reached sooner or later. For gold, this point is removed farther, so far indeed that for all practical purposes it is beyond reach.

Therefore if you substituted another commodity, or basket of commodities for gold, then you would end up with a unit of value the marginal utility of which was inferior. It would decline at a rate faster than that of gold. It would be akin to substituting a yardstick made of rubber for one made of metal.

1. The futility of inflationary policies

Mises ignores the fact that newly created money can be spent not only on goods and services, but also on financial assets. This is the proverbial fly in the ointment of the inflationary argument. It is also a subtle one, so much so that the government as the would-be perpetrator of inflation often falls victim to it. It may think that it is promoting inflation while, in fact, it acts as quartermaster for deflation.

By restricting the circulation of gold money or by other means, the government can make financial speculation more attractive. In doing so it wants to reduce the amount of money available for buying goods and services. This strategy of the government and its pseudo-economists consists precisely in channeling enough of the newly created money into speculative ventures so that the untoward consequences of price and wage rises will not occur, or they will occur later, so that the causality relation is obscured.

The paramount example is bond speculation. Of course, under the gold standard there is no bond speculation because the variation in the bond price (or, equivalently, in the rate of interest) is minuscule making the opportunity to earn speculative profits negligible. Unless… unless… the central bank makes profits risk free as a bait to speculators by inappropriate monetary and fiscal measures. This is exactly what happened in the early 1920’s when the policy of open market operations, so called, of the Fed were first introduced quite illegally, we might add (the policy was legalized retroactively in 1935).

As the Fed was originally constituted, it was only enabled to be a passive partner in business. Limited by its charter the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, it could enter (or decline to enter) business initiated by others, but it could not initiate business on its own. It could post its rediscount rate, but member banks had step forward to request rediscounting real bills from their portfolio. In and of itself rediscounting was not inflationary as a way to create new money. The new purchasing power so created was backed, dollar for dollar, by salable merchandise arising in production, and it was to be extinguished when the merchandise was sold to the ultimate consumer at the time the bill matured.

This was not the case, however, when the Fed assumed an active role and started purchasing government bonds in the open market at its own initiative in contravention of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The monetary base was enlarged. This provided a direct incentive for member banks to make loans regardless whether or not new merchandise was simultaneously emerging in production. Using standard Quantity Theory of Money (QTM) reasoning the Fed and everybody else assumed that the effect would be inflationary. Hooray, a subtle and potent new way of inflating the money supply has been invented! The economy can now be micromanaged at will! There was jubilation in the inflationist camp.

The jubilation was premature. The policy of open market operation as an instrument of inflation was an enormous blunder. QTM was inoperative: bond speculators overrode it. They knew when the Fed had to go to the open market to relieve ‘natures urge’ (to purchase its next quota of government bonds). Speculators could make risk-free profits by pre-empting the Fed in buying the bonds first. The ‘tool’ of baiting speculators with risk free profits backfired badly, if only for the reason that speculators were a much smarter lot than central bank agents facing them in the bond pit. They risked their own capital while losses made by central bank agents were covered from public funds. The game plan was upset. What was supposed to be inflation ended up as deflation. Here are the details.

In an unhampered market risk-free profits that may occur from time to time are ephemeral and therefore inconsequential. Hawk-eyed speculators immediately take advantage of them with the result that any further opportunity to make risk-free profits is eliminated on the spot. This is no longer true if the opportunity to make risk-free profit is not an infrequent aberration but the consequence of deliberate and well-advertised official policy as it is in the case of the policy of open market operations. When the central bank relies on open market purchases of government bonds in order to augment the monetary base on a regular, ongoing basis, then speculators can anticipate and pre-empt it. This policy, whole-heartedly supported by Keynesian/Friedmanite economics, is the most ill-conceived monetary policy ever concocted for the purpose of increasing the stock of money. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, for excellent reasons, disallowed such a policy and imposed stiff and progressive penalties for non-compliance on the Federal Reserve banks if their balance sheet showed that government bonds had been used to cover Federal Reserve note or deposit liabilities. At first the Fed used open market operations illegally. It could get away with it because of the connivance of the Treasury in ‘forgetting’ to collect the penalty. The conspiracy created a fait accompli and, in the end, Congress was forced to legalize the corrosive practice retroactively in 1935 when it amended the Federal Reserve Act.

The newly invented monetary policy of open market operations is responsible for much of the deflationary damage inflicted on the world economy during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It started an avalanche of falling interest rates that soon went out of control. Falling interest rates destroy capital as they increase the burden of debt contracted earlier at higher rates. Perfectly sound businesses fail if their debt burden, through no fault of theirs, exceeds the profitability of deployed capital. The whole process was most insidious. Entrepreneurs did not know what hit them. From one day to the next they found themselves uncompetitive as competitors financed their business at lower rates. They had to lay off their employees. They went bankrupt in droves. Wanton destruction of capital was the main cause of deflation and the Great Depression in the 1930’s.

Herein lies the incredible failure of the policy of open market operations, missed by Mises. The policy is counterproductive from the point of view of central bank and pseudo-economists acting as its cheer-leaders. It released the genie of risk-free bond speculation from the bottle in the hope that it could always be put back. But it could not. Falling interest rates would run their devastating course.

The same thing repeats itself today. Interest rates have been falling for over thirty years. The Fed is no longer in control. It is lunacy to believe that it can stop the avalanche that it started so easily in the early 1980’s. Today the speculators are the only buyers after China and other exporters to the US bailed out of the US T-bond market. Speculators will keep buying the bonds as long as they can reap risk free profits. It is true that ‘quantitative easing’ cuts into that business, as the Fed is buying bonds directly from the Treasury, bypassing the open market (another illegal practice). Watch for the day when the speculators will start dumping bonds and selling them short. When they transfer their buying from the bond market to the commodity market, the game is up.

Open market operations is a charade that can go on only so long as speculators are allowed to reap risk-free profits at the expense of the producers and the savers. When the latter have been squeezed dry, it’s “après nous le deluge”. That is the true scenario of Great Depression II.

2. The futility of the policy of suppressing interest rates.

The rate of interest is a market phenomenon just like prices. In fact, the definition of the rate of interest must refer to the bond price: it is the rate that amortizes the price of the bond as quoted in the secondary market through the bond’s maturity date. The floor for the range in which the interest rate may move is determined by marginal time preference. (The ceiling, on the other hand, is determined by the marginal productivity of capital.) To understand this, we must consider the arbitrage of the marginal bondholder between the bond market and the gold market. If the rate of interest falls below the rate of marginal time preference, then the marginal bondholder sells his overpriced bond and keeps the proceeds in gold coin. In this way he can force the bond price to come back to earth from outer space. Bank reserves are shrinking and the banks have to call in some of their credits and sell bonds from portfolio. When the bond price falls, the marginal bondholder repurchases his bond at a cheaper price. Time preference has no meaning outside of this context. It will remain a pious wish ? until the marginal bondholder gives it teeth.

Mises (and, before him, Ricardo who was an advocate of the elimination of gold coins from circulation) was wrong when he stated that there is no difference between the gold coin and a promise to pay gold coin as long as the security and maturity of the promise cannot be doubted. The promise can perform all the monetary functions that the gold coin does. Well, it cannot, because there is one very important exception. When the marginal bondholder in protest to low interest rates sells his bond (a future good), he insists on getting gold (a present good). He will not take a promise to pay gold, because it is still a future good, and an inferior one to boot as it pays no interest. Taking it would mean jumping from the frying pan into the fire. This shows that gold hoarding, far from being a deus ex machina, and far from being a curse of the gold standard, is an important market signal. It indicates that the rate of interest is being pushed below the rate of marginal time preference. It had better be heeded before it is too late. Gold hoarding cannot be understood except in the context of its counterpart, gold dishoarding. When the signal is heeded, banks tighten up their loose credit policies and the government reins in expenditures, gold will be dishoarded and the marginal bondholder will replace gold in his portfolio by repurchasing the bond at a profit.

This was the reason for eliminating gold coin circulation first in Europe in 1914, and then in the United States and Canada in the 1930’s. Governments wanted to make sure that they were in full control of the rate of interest, free from any interference from the marginal bondholder. This policy had to fail. It was shipwrecked on the reef of gold hoarding.

All economists, including Mises himself, missed the importance of the nexus of gold hoarding and dishoarding as the manifestation of arbitrage by the marginal bondholder between the bond market and the gold market, explaining the all-important contact between gold and interest.

3. The futility of the policy of boosting wages.

Mises did not subscribe to Adam Smith’s Real Bills Doctrine (RBD). Although he acknowledged the fact that real bills drawn on consumer goods in most urgent demand could circulate as a kind of ephemeral money through endorsing, as they indeed did in Lancashire before the Bank of England opened its branch in Manchester, he did not find this matter worthy of further attention. He coined the word “circulation credit” that financed the movement of commodities from the producer to the consumer through the various phases of production, but he blotted out the important distinction between the discount rate and the rate of interest. He never used the term “self-liquidating credit”, that would have revealed why circulation credit did indeed circulate without any coercion from the government. They did circulate because the credit was liquidated by the sale of merchandise in high demand on which the bill was drawn.

Mises was unimpressed by the fact that bonds and mortgages could not circulate in the same way. He had too great a faith in the Quantity Theory of Money, and was probably disturbed by the fact that real bills, however temporarily, could serve either as money substitutes, or as bank reserves on which sound money could be built. His negative attitude with regard to Adam Smith’s RBD is regrettable. Real Bills are the next best thing to gold into which they mature in 91 days or less. The demand for real bills is virtually unlimited. Not only banks with surplus gold in their tills scramble for them as the best earning asset commercial banks can have, but also those individuals and institutions who have large payments coming up (say, the purchase of a house, or a factory, or the retirement of a bond issue) and they have to assemble cash by the closing or maturity date. They could not put these accumulating funds into stocks, bonds, or mortgages because they were not sufficiently liquid. An increased offering would immediately depress their price. Instead, these people went into the bill market and bought real bills the liquidity of which was second only to gold.

But real bills had another great significance having to do with the labor market. The only author who recognized this fact was the German economist Heinrich Rittershausen (1898-1984), see his book Arbeitslosigkeit und Kapitalbildung, Jena, 1930. A large part of outstanding real bills in circulation represented the wage fund of society. Out of this fund wages for labor producing merchandise that will not be available for sale for up to 91 days could be paid now. Thus real bills represented a real extension of demand for labor. Employers would simply go ahead and hire all the hands needed to produce merchandise in high consumer demand, without worrying who will advance the funds to pay wages before the merchandise could be sold. The wage fund would always be there. The RBD explains why there was no ‘structural unemployment’ in the 19th century, in contrast with the 20th when the wage fund was destroyed never to be rebuilt. 19th century entrepreneurs did not have to assume the burden of financing the payment of wages. The bill market took care of that. Say’s Law was operative: there were employment opportunities as long as prospective employees wanted to eat, get clad, shod, and keep themselves warm in winter.

The point was driven home most forcefully when the wage fund was inadvertently destroyed by the victorious Entente Powers. They decided not to allow the rehabilitation of the bill market after the cessation of hostilities in 1918. This single decision sealed the fate of tens of millions of workers who were to be laid off in the 1930’s for lack of financing the wage bill. It was also the reason for creating the corrosive ‘welfare’ state that paid workers for not working and farmers for not farming. It also caused the demise of the gold standard by removing a vital organ, its clearing house: the bill market. Here are the details.

The victorious Entente Powers were afraid of German competition in the postwar period. They wanted to monitor, if not control, Germany’s exports and imports. As this would not be possible under the system of multilateral trade, that is, trade financed by real bills circulation, they opted for a system of bilateral trade. Never mind that this meant a setback for their own producers and consumers as well. Never mind that much more gold was needed to run a system of bilateral trade than that required by a system of multilateral trade extra gold they did not have. Never mind that this would make the 1925 return of Britain to the gold standard deflationary. The neurotic fear of German competition took precedence over all other concerns. In fact, these concerns were never examined and the decision was made in high secrecy.

This was the end of real-bill financed world trade, the great success story of the 19th century. The bill market was destroyed. We still suffer the consequences. In effect, world trade was reduced to barter. Worse still, along with the destruction of the bill market society’s wage fund was also destroyed. There was no one to advance wages payable to laborers whose products could not be sold for cash up to 91 days. Vast sections of the world’s productive plants were condemned to idleness for the disappearance of the wage fund. As I mentioned, the only economist in the world who saw what was coming was Rittershausen. Economists still owe him recognition for his great insight. The world is still condemning the gold standard as the major cause of the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the horrible unemployment in its wake, when the real cause was the destruction of the wage fund, a misguided unilateral decision of the victors in World War I made in secrecy.

It was most unfortunate for economic science that Mises failed to put the weight of his reputation behind Rittershausen’s charge. Not only had governments put improper and counterproductive measures into effect to boost wage rates, thus fostering unemployment. They were directly responsible for the world-wide leap-tide of unemployment by destroying the bill market and the wage fund.

Once again the world is facing the same dangers as it did four score of years ago. Yet one can see only complacent governments in a self-congratulating mood over their ‘success’ in ‘fending off’ the Great Financial Crisis. But the writing is on the wall: if governments fail to rehabilitate the gold standard and its clearing house, the bill market, together with the wage fund, then a much more devastating leap-tide may soon engulf the world.

4. The futility of the policy of gold valorization.

The world has been witnessing the pathetic attempts of governments and central banks “to keep the gold price in check” since the 1971 fraudulent default of the US government on its international gold obligations. To be sure, a default is always followed by a depreciation of the dishonored paper, so the futility of the policy of gold valorization has always been a foregone conclusion. But what we have is far more than this self-defeating effort to keep gold out forever from the monetary system. What we have is a veritable brain-washing of the whole world about the role of gold in the economy, and blaming gold for results that only keeping gold in the system could have prevented.

It is alleged that gold has disqualified itself from playing the role as the monetary anchor and source of credit in the economy. ‘Gold is far too volatile for that’. This is puerile because it ignores the fact that the so-called volatility of gold is just the mirror image of the volatility of the irredeemable dollar in which the price of gold is quoted.

It is also ignored that the debt crisis is a direct consequence of exiling gold from the international monetary system. Gold is the only ultimate extinguisher of debt. It cannot be replaced by the dollar or any other irredeemable currency. Under the dollar system debt simply cannot be extinguished. Total debt can only grow, never shrink. All the bad debt and “toxic sludge” stays in the system and is merely kicked upstairs into the balance sheet of the US Treasury. There it remains, representing a great threat to the world. Like radioactive material, when its quantity exceeds the threshold, a chain-reaction starts triggering an nuclear explosion. The world needs gold as a safe way to eliminate bad debt.

Through a system of bribes, blackmail and intimidation research on questions relating to gold has been discouraged to the point that it is practically non-existent. The world continues to live in a fool’s paradise. It believes the size of government debt does not matter because it can always be rolled over. Nor would it cause inflation or deflation because competent and honorable gentlemen at the helm can safely navigate our monetary ship through the strait of Scylla and Charybdis. They have a sharp tool, the printing press, and with its judicious application they can fine-tune the quantity of money in circulation as well as the rate of interest for the benefit of all. But the virtual elimination of research on gold will strike back. These ‘competent’ and ‘honorable’ gentlemen at the helm are complete ignoramuses when it comes to gold. They have no notion of the erosion of the gold basis and the irresistible march of the gold futures markets into the death valley of permanent gold backwardation. When disaster strikes, gold will not be available at any price. What this means is that the world is insidiously slipping into barter. But you cannot feed the world’s present population on the basis of a barter economy. Poverty, pestilence, famine threatens society, not to mention the breakdown of law and order. All this, and more, because government leaders have allowed the suppression not only of monetary gold itself, but also the research on monetary gold.

Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board introduced a new phrase into the vocabulary of economics on July 11, 2011, in his testimony at a Congressional hearing. The new phrase is: tail risk. He defined it as the “really, really bad outcomes” in the economy, as if they were completely outside of human control on the pattern of floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.

But ‘tail risk’ in reality is the wholly unnecessary risk taken with human lives by a parasitic, contemptuous, conceited, and yes, ignorant ruling class symbolized by Bernanke, that has hijacked the Constitution, in particular, turning the Constitution’s monetary provisions upside down which define money in terms of gold and silver. They are only interested in their own self-aggrandizement, in perpetuating their power, and in preserving their superstitious faith in irredeemable currency a monetary system that has failed miserably every time foolish leaders in history experimented with it.

Mises was a great warrior fighting these usurpers and monetary hijackers with the sharpest weapon there is: human reason. We must follow his lead even if it sometimes means that we have to add new ideas that go beyond Mises’s opus.

The day of reckoning for monetary insanity is on hand. The Constitution is there for the protection of all. If we fail to preserve and uphold it, and meekly succumb to the monetary hijackers’ and usurpers’ tactics, then we shall have only ourselves to blame for the consequences.