The Mistake of 1937
by Steve Saville
321 Gold
Below is
an excerpt from a commentary originally posted at www.speculative-investor.com
on 19th April 2012.
The US Great
Depression lasted from 1929 until 1945, but the deflationary phase
of the Depression effectively ended in 1932. Regardless of whether
you define deflation and inflation in terms of money supply or prices,
there was almost continuous inflation in the US after 1932. The
inflation was, however, briefly interrupted during 1937-1938, when
a leveling-off in the money supply and a sudden economic downturn
led to sharp declines in equity and commodity prices. The 1937-1938
downturn is sometimes called the “mistake of 1937” by
those who believe that it only occurred because the Fed tightened
monetary policy prematurely. According to the believers in this
theory, the US economy would have continued to recover from the
collapse of 1929-1932 if not for the Fed’s premature tightening.
Significantly, Ben Bernanke is one of the believers.
Believers in
the theory that the collapse of 1937-1938 was caused by the Fed’s
premature tightening of monetary conditions are partially right
in that modest Fed tightening during the second half of 1936 and
the first half of 1937 was probably the catalyst for the collapse.
The question that this theory fails to address is: if a genuine
economic recovery had got underway in 1933, then why did the recovery
fall apart so rapidly and so completely following only a minor tweaking
of monetary conditions? The answer is that the recovery wasn’t real;
it was an illusion based on increasing money supply. When economic
growth is mainly the result of increasing money supply then stopping,
or even just slowing, the rate of money-supply growth will likely
bring about a collapse.
(As an aside,
the recovery’s flimsy monetary underpinning is part of the reason
why, like the recovery that began in mid 2009, it was essentially
“jobless” (the unemployment rate remained very high throughout
the 1933-1937 rebound). However, there was more to the relentlessly
high unemployment of the 1930s than the Fed’s counter-productive
monetary machinations. Actions taken by the Hoover and Roosevelt
administrations to raise the price of labour can also be given a
lot of credit for keeping people out of work.)
This prompts
the question: shouldn’t the Fed have continued to “support”
the economy with a constant flow of new money until a real recovery
was able to take hold?
The above question
ignores the fact that the flow of new money (monetary inflation)
leads to more mal-investment and thus not only gets in the way of
a real recovery, but also further weakens the economic structure.
Had the Fed continued to provide monetary support for an additional
year then the collapse would have commenced in mid 1938 rather than
mid 1937. Also, it would have been even more devastating thanks
to an additional year of mal-investment. As Ludwig von Mises pointed
out long ago: “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse
of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is
only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary
abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and
total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
The above question
also ignores the fact that in real time the central bank finds itself
between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Even when the economy
is subject to natural deflationary forces, as it was in the mid-1930s,
the unnatural creation of new money by the central bank will eventually
cause evidence of an inflation problem – in the form of rising
prices for important commodities and some goods and services –
to emerge. After a while, the pressure on the central bank to curtail
the inflation problem can become greater than the pressure on the
central bank to ‘support’ the economy with a continuing flow of
new money.
May
3, 2012
Copyright
© 2012 321 Gold