My correspondence with a local pro-central bank economics professor

Economics Political Theory
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There was an op-ed column in a my local newspaper recently, concerning Barack Obama’s proposed economic policies, and specifically mentioning his proposed nomination of N.Y. Federal Reserve chairman Timothy Geithner as the next secretary of the Treasury. In the op-ed, the author cited pieces of an interview they did with an economics professor at the University of Delaware, a college about 10 minutes from my home. The professor’s name is James Butkiewicz, and the author of the op-ed mentioned him explicitly as "an expert in monetary theory. Not surprisingly, Prof. Butkiewicz gave high praise to Sen. Obama, and specifically to his proposal to nominate the central banker Geithner to the secretary of treasury position.

So I give a visit to the UofD website, and sure enough, it introduces Professor Butkiewicz as specializing in monetary theory and history, among other things.

So I decided to send Prof. Butkiewicz an email last night, and much to my surprise, he had responded by the time I checked my inbox this morning. What follows is the correspondence, including my most recent response to his response, which he has yet to answer:

From: Steve Bachman [mailto:bachy1076@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 7:31 PM
To: Butkiewicz, Jim
Subject: Your quote in the News Journal, and questions regarding monetary theory

Professor Butkeiwicz,

My name is Steven Bachman, I am a resident of Delaware who has been studying economics, informally, in my own spare time for a little more than a year now. I recently read an op-ed in the News Journal, which introduced you as “an expert in monetary theory,” and quoted you as approving of president-elect Obama’s selection (I can’t remember exact wording, and the paper in question has been inadvertently disposed of) of Timothy Geithner, current chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, for secretary of the Treasury. Is this an accurate representation of your views?

I suppose the real reason I am writing you, then, is this: I consider myself a person of above-average intelligence – although I have no formal education above high school – and through my own informal studies, I have come to regard the Austrian school of economics as superior to all other schools of economic thought, and especially so in regard to both capital theory and business cycle theory. You may be able to imagine what goes through my head, whenever I read a column by, say, a recent Nobel Prize-winning economist, who happens to be a die-hard disciple of Keynesian theory, and I think to myself: Can I really be smarter than an MIT-trained professor who just won the Nobel Prize for economics?

Just today I read a past article ( http://www.slate.com/id/9593) of Professor Krugman’s, where he derisively refers to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) as “hangover theory”; and in the article Krugman makes it abundantly clear that he actually does not even understand the most fundamental aspects of the theory!

My questions to you are: do you understand the ABCT? Have you ever read any of the work on this subject by Professors Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek. or Murray Rothbard? Have you ever read either of the treatises’ of Mises or Rothbard, respectively, Human Action or Man, Economy, & State?

Because I am having a hard time understanding how someone so obviously educated as yourself, could be familiar with these works, and the Austrian school of economics in general, and yet look approvingly upon president-elect Obama’s selection of a Fed chairman to be the next secretary of the Treasury – as a firm understanding of monetary economics in general ought to be sufficient to enlighten one to the destructive and even insidious nature of central banking (what I consider macroeconomic central planning) in and of itself, let alone enough to make one predisposed to disapprove of a central banker, as such, being selected to serve in such a capacity.

My position is that the Federal Reserve ought to be abolished post haste, all legal tender laws repudiated and repealed, and the public be left free to use sound commodity-based money – gold and silver in particular – and fractional-reserve banking be recognized by law for what it is: fraud; and that this would be sufficient to end the incessant cycles of illusory boom and miserable bust, and the economy would then grow and prosper on a solid foundation based on the real conditions of supply and demand, and sound economic relationships. Interest rate manipulation and artificial credit and money supply expansion cannot increase wealth and abundance; they are only recipes for future instability and unnecessary hardship.

I would love to know what your thinking is on these most important subjects. I do not pretend that I, in my one-plus year of informal studies, am smarter or more informed than yourself; I just would like to know, if you believe I am mistaken in any of this, then why? If you can find the time, any response you could offer me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Have a safe and happy holiday season,

Steven Bachman

From: Butkiewicz, Jim (butkiewj@lerner.udel.edu)
Sent: Mon 12/01/08 2:04 PM
To: Steve Bachman (bachy1076@hotmail.com)
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Dear Steven,

Thank you for you comments. I am familiar with the Austrian school, and share their faith in markets. However, I do not believe commodity money systems are workable in today’s world. As you may know from your readings, Gresham’s Law proves bimetallism to be unworkable. The problems of the gold standard resulted in its abandonment. The many crises during the classical gold standard era were the reason the Federal Reserve System was created. The Great Depression became a depression due to the gold standard. The Fed’s policies were driven by the defense of gold rather than the need to recover. Also, a commodity money system is an international system, so countries are affected by the decisions of other countries on the same system. France has never received enough blame for its role in causing the depression. If France and the U.S. had followed the gold standard’s “rules of the game” the depression might have been avoided. However, as long as France absorbed gold and deflated, nothing the U.S. did could have stopped the loss of gold, monetary deflation and depression.

Economists believe that deflation causes problems, so the long-run deflation resulting from an inelastically-supplied commodity money such as gold creates long-run problems.

In the current global slump, being on the gold standard would have likely already created a depression. In a flight to safety where the safe asset is gold whose supply is inelastic, the resulting price increase for gold implies severe goods-price deflation, rising interest rates, and strong economic contraction. Since the preferred asset is Treasury bills which are elastically supplied (and happily so given the deficit), demand for the safe asset can be satisfied without a monetary contraction.

Sincerely,

Jim Butkiewicz

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From: Steven Bachman (bachy1076@hotmail.com)
Sent: Mon 12/01/08 4:09 PM
To: butkiewj@lerner.udel.edu

Subject: RE: Your quote in the News Journal, and questions regarding monetary theory
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 14:04:33 -0500
From: butkiewj@lerner.udel.edu
To: bachy1076@hotmail.com

Professor Butkiewicz,

Thank you for responding; I realize that your time is valuable.

You’re correct that the traditional gold standard was unworkable, but this was due to government intervention, not to the nature of free-market money. Statutes intended to fix the ratio of value of silver to gold (I believe it was 15:1?) was what put Gresham’s Law into effect. Had the exhange ratios of each been allowed to freely “float,” so to speak, the issues concerning bi-metallism would have never come into being.

I strongly disagree with your assessment regarding the genesis of the Federal Reserve system, as well as the cause of the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve was actually conceived during a highly secret nine-day retreat on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia; attendees included Senator Nelson aldrich, Paul Warburg, Henry P. Davison, Abe Piatt Andrew, Frank Vanderlip, and Benjamin Strong. The meeting was secret, of course, because the Federal Reserve Act was presented to the public as a means of “breaking the grip of the ‘money trust’”; if the public had any inkling that the bill was actually written by the “money trust”… well, you could imagine.

Anyhow, the purpose of the system is easy enough to ascertain once you understand the nature of money and banking. “Fractional-reserve” banking is inherently insolvent; it requires the sanction of government to sustain it and make it profitable in the long run for competitive interests. The answer that the banking giants of the time – the interests of J.P Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, and Kuhn Loeb & Asooc. – came up with was to establish a banking cartel, in partnership with the government, in order to pool together the reserves of the entire banking system, and pass inevitable losses incurred by the system off to the taxpayers.
The government acquires a means of securing funds beyond the limits of what is politically viable for them to accrue through overt taxation and open borrowing, via the hidden form of taxation called inflation, and the banking cartel aquires monopoly privilege over the nation’s supply of money and credit, thus overcoming the problems inherent in the operation of a scheme wherein banks intentionally enter into contractual agreements with customers, the terms of which they could not possibly be good for.

The crash of 1929 was classic “bust” brought about by systematic clusters of malinvestment, the inevitable result of artificial interest rate manipulation via phony expansion of money and credit. The artificial expansion of money and credit does not increase the supply of capital or augment a nation’s wealth; you cannot increase aggregate demand by printing more green pieces of paper or merely by putting new entries in a ledger somewhere. All this does is to re-allocate existing scarce resources to areas where they create an unsustainable condition; it distorts the vital market signal that is constituted by the natural rate of interest, misleading investors and entrepreneurs into embarking on projects the unprofitability of which would have been evident but for the artificial market distortions created by the central bank.

I don’t see how anyone could attribute the length and depth of the Great Depression to the gold standard, considering that FDR unconstitutionally ordered the seizure of Americans’ gold holding in excess of 5 oz. in 1933. From that point, the problems concerning monetary policy derived not from the limitations inherent in the gold standard, but rather the central bank’s attempts to undermine those limitations.
As to the greater nature of the Depression itself, the problem wasn’t so much “deflation,” as it was government policy which precluded the economic systems ability to adjust naturally to the contraction of the money supply. In order for that to have occured, there would have needed to be wage and price flexibility downwards, and government policy in many areas was designed expressly to prevent that from happening.

If you are a fan of markets, you should know that the free-market price/wage structure and the profit/loss test of the market must be allowed to operate freely if it is to perform its vital social function. What the goal of monetary policy in all this should be is not to provide “stable prices,” as the typical Keynesian fallacy holds – as Professor Mises once noted, the only time we should expect “stable prices” is if the market economy were in its “final state of rest” – rather, to provide accurate prices. If the economy is growing, and the money supply remains relatively static (as it does under a commodity-money system), then there is a natural downward tendency of prices. But this is what is supposed to happen when the productivity of labor is increased, natural scarcity is alleviated, and society becomes wealthier; the increased wealth of the public is reflected in the increased purchasing power of their wages and savings. As it is now, so much of the increased wealth that each of us should be experiencing in times of economic growth, is siphoned off to the first people to receive the artificially-expanded money and credit.
Inflation constitutes a real redistribution of wealth, generally regressive.

In closing, I will venture to step way out of line, and offer a suggestion to a man who is a thousand-times my superior in knowledge and life experience: check out Professor Murray Rothbard’s awesome and most important works on these topics: America’s Great Depression (http://store.mises.org/Americas-Great-Depression-P63.aspx) and A History of Money and Banking in the United States (http://store.mises.org/History-of-Money-and-Banking-in-the-United-States–P191.aspx).

Also, a relevant work that I believe is very important and was quite helpful to me, is Henry Hazlitt’s The Failure of the “New Economics” (http://store.mises.org/Failure-of-the-New-Economics-The-P337.aspx).

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[+o(]

So… being an economics professor means never having to think for yourself?

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I guess not. that’s the impression I got, too, especially after he wrote about what “economists believe,” in the third person, as if to admit that he himself is not an economist.

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I can’t stress enough how sad I become every time I hear an economics professors using Gresham’s Law to explain why non-fiat money wouldn’t work. It’s the perfect proof than non of them have ever thought about those matters for themselves but are rather taking textbooks for granted. Sadly one of my professors is about the same.

7

All non-science college professors scare the **** out of me. In every humanities field I have found reams of fallacious reasoning passed off as knowledge. It’s like everyone is afraid to point out that the emperor is naked.

And these are the people training our future leaders.

What Beaners said is correct. They take textbooks for granted, and the vast majority of textbooks are written by college professors. It’s one huge echo chamber.

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Any updates on this? I’m very interested in his response.

9

I’d say send him a copy of:

“What has Government Done to Our Money?” - Murray Rothbard.. he’s obviously never read it.

Maybe even deliver it yourself, OP - and say you’ll be back in a week or two to ask some questions? Thus actually getting him to read it. And its pretty small.

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Update:

Subject: RE: Your quote in the News Journal, and questions regarding monetary theory
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 21:58:37 -0500
From: butkiewj@lerner.udel.edu
To: bachy1076@hotmail.com

Mr. Bachman,

I own a copy of the “Creature from Jekyll Island” and once attempted to read it (I also own Rothbard’s book). I found the conspiracy theory contained therein to be so uninformed as to not merit further consideration. If the money trusts had their way, there would only be eight Federal Reserve banks, not twelve.

The contraction phase of the Depression was from August 1929 through March 1933, and the gold standard errors I refer to were made during this period. FDR’s bank holiday and suspension of the gold standard began the recovery.

The failure of the gold standard is not due to any unilateral decisions made in a single country. The gold standard is an international fixed-exchange rate system, and the policies of any major country can disrupt the system. During the depression and the 1960s France was the problem.

You did not say anything about how the increased demand for gold would affect the current situation.

Historical experience has show deflation t be politically unacceptable, resulting in political movements advocating inflationary policies. Policies of price stability or inflation targeting will result in lower long-run rates of inflation in a democracy.

JLB

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From: Steven Bachman [mailto:bachy1076@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 10:55 PM
To: Butkiewicz, Jim
Subject: RE: Your quote in the News Journal, and questions regarding monetary theory

Professor Butkiewicz,

Could we agree that boom-bust cycles are caused by artificial bank credit expansion (expansion of credit beyond the available supply of genuine savings banks have on hand to loan) and the correlating artificial decrease of the interest rate this causes, leading investors and entrepreneurs to allocate scarce resources to projects based on what amounts to an illusion?

Could we agree that what kicked off the Great Depression was the “bust” phase of the “boom” of the 1920’s? That the Federal Reserve’s pushing down of the interest rate throughout the decade of the 1920’s led to massive bouts of malinvestment, finally culminating in the crash of 1929?

Even with my decidedly limited research into these matters, even I can see that the Keynesian explanation of the boom-bust cycle doesn’t stand up to rigorous rational analysis; the Austrian theory explains every aspect of the phenomenon, and does so through a process of deductive ratiocination, from one logically unassailable premise to the next.

And if its true that artificial expansion of money and credit must, necessarily, always lead to a situation which is inherently unsustainable (without perpetual inflation, anyhow; which history and human nature combine to dictate must eventually break down in a fit of hyperinflation and certain monetary collapse), then we can therefore assert that a system based on institutionalized fractional-reserve banking will always be a perpetual merry-go-round of illusory “booms,” consequent bouts of malinvestment, followed by jolts of economic reality, which become ever more intense and socially disruptive, the longer they are postponed or the attempt is made to cure the patient by more and bigger doses of the very poison that caused the illness in the first place.

When you stated that the traditional gold standard was “an international fixed-exchange rate system,” you flew right past what was one major problem with the traditional system. Of course it is extremely difficult to “fix” international exchange rates based on a commodity-money, when each of the countries involved has their own autonomous central bank, each inflating (or deflating) at a different pace, causing the real purchasing power of each nations unit of currency to fluctuate unpredictably, and then respective government policies intended to affix a definite exchange value to each unit, which may or may not reflect the true subjective value ascribed to each given unit of currency by the individuals doing the exchanging.
Might it be that the problem here, is not the actual commodity being used as a medium of exchange, but rather the central banks’ (and the corresponding governments) attempts to throw off the disciplines imposed by a commodity money, through fractional-reserve policies, and the havoc this plays not only on the currencies in each respective country, but doubly so when people have to account for the consequences of this havoc when engaged in international trade?

I maintain that were it not for the banks’ insistence on finding a way to overcome the inherent instabilities of fractional-reserve banking (the threat of bank runs, currency drains, etc.), then a central bank would have never been necessary. Instead of finding a way to prop up and sustain an inherently insolvent practice, they could have just abandoned fraud and opted to practice their profession honestly, way back in the mid-1800’s, before the National Bank Act was passed as an initial attempt to overcome such difficulties.
If so, then we would have never even had a Great Depression, because we would not have had the institution that was the catalyst of the the boom-bust cycle that gave birth to it.

I see no reason why a nation with an honest government could not sustain an honest monetary policy, even in a world where every other country was mired in the perpetual misery cycle that is fractional-reserve central banking. As long as our government didn’t find the need to bury their citizens under a mountain of insoluble debt to foreign governments, I don’t believe there would be any need to worry about exchange rates or “loss of gold.” We get along okay now, with a currency that is forever fluctuating in real value; it would be that much easier for us if at least our own unit of account were relatively stable. If we went through periods of deflation due to gold leaving the country in payment for imports, then our own price level would decrease, stimulating the flow of gold back into the country through the sale of exports.

This leads me to your concern about deflation being politically unacceptable. I suppose you’re probably right, but I don’t think it would be much of a concern, if there were no more any inflation to have have deflated in the first place.

Prices would generally tend to be subject to downward pressure with a relatively static money supply, but to call this “deflation” and ascribe a harmful nature to it a priori seems to me to overlook what is actually going on. Prices don’t rise or fall uniformly, system-wide, in response to some monolithic signal. Under a commodity-money system, prices reflect the actual real-life conditions of supply and demand of all the various goods and services, relative to one another – like a real medium of exchange is supposed to do. When a given firm or industry finds some way to improve productivity or otherwise cut costs, in such a way as to bring the supply of a given product more towards equilibrium with demand, the result is a decrease in price of the given product of that particular firm or industry. Its just reflecting the fact that that particular product is now more abundant relative to all the other goods and services for which it is exchanged, albeit indirectly, through the use of a common medium of exchange. Over time, this obviously tends to happen all over the economic system. Firms that can’t keep up with the downward pressure on prices of their particular product, need to find some other way to use their resources in a manner that would best serve the consumers, and free up the market for their more-productive competitors; or else find some way to become more productive, and stay in competition. But thats just common sense economics, is it not?

Anyhow, this process over time would tend to raise the marginal utility of the monetary unit, and at some point it would become profitable for firms to allocate resources to the production of gold (or silver, or whatever commodity a free society might choose to use as money), and thus bring more money into the system – up until the point where the purchasing power of the monetary unit decreased to such an extent as to render further production of the commodity for monetary purposes unprofitable again.

As to how the increased demand for gold would affect the current situation, I’m afraid I don’t have sufficient knowledge to form an opinion that would be worth anything.
However, I can say this: I know that freedom works. I know this because I’ve studied enough to realize that to what extent we have prospered, and the degree to which our economy is sound and resilient, is the exact degree to which we have any economic freedom at all. Central planning doesn’t work, and I don’t say that as partisan sloganeering or idle rhetoric; I say this because Mises proved the truth of it as far back as the 1920’s, with Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth – bureaucratic planners are effectively blind, there is no way they could ever have sufficient (or sufficiently accurate) information to operate any aspect of an economic system, better than all the various individuals using their own subjective analyses, responding to the information provided by all the various vital signals of the freely-functioning marketplace.

And that’s just the thing about us “laissez faire” libertarian types: we’re not into the whole central planning thing. I suppose I could venture a guess as to how the market would respond to an announcement that we were finally going to try real free market money; but it would be just a guess. Freedom is unpredictable, but it works; because individuals responding to the demands of the market make it work – guided by that all-powerful intrinsic compass that leads us to do what is ultimately best for society as a whole: self-interest.

Finally, I can’t really speak on “conspiracy theory” or any such thing. All I have to go on is what is in the public record – including what is written in the biographies (and autobiographies) of several of the men who attended the retreat at the Jekyll Island Club in late 1910 – and that is that seven men met and hammered out the basics of what would eventually become the Federal Reserve Act at J.P Morgan’s exclusive island getaway, and did so under conditions of extreme secrecy.

I don’t think it irrational to believe that powerful and influential men would conspire to arrange a cartel agreement, for the purpose of securing their means to wealth, power and influence. Especially when the men in question admit to having done so after the fact.

In closing, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to discuss these issues with me. As I said, I believe this subject to be of the utmost importance, and to have the opportunity to discuss it with an informed individual (let alone a professor of economics!) is unfortunately rare, and very much appreciated.

Peace and God bless,
Steve Bachman

12

Professor Butkiewicz recently sent me an email stating that he intends to reply to my most recent response (posted above), but it is the end of the semester, and that he will get to it soon.

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I believe you’re pushing too much, at least too much text in one e-mail. You should attempt to prove one single important point, and let things go from there. For example, focus on how inflation damages the economy, but don’t switch the subject to the gold standard. For the sake of clarity, you should not even mention it. If he’d rather have Hayek’s private fiat money or a government-issued frozen monetary mass over the gold standard, okay, you can sort that out later. But it’s practically impossible to get his attention with multiple parallel subjects of discussion.

To make it simple, here’s how I would’ve discussed the matter: the state likes inflation, fractional-banking thrives due to guarantees given by the state, inflation damages the economy (insert Hayek’s argument against inflation here, from “Denationalization of Money”).

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Frankly I have to applaud Professor Butkiewicz for being willing to engage in debate and discussion with you. Despite his views, which I certainly disagree with, I feel that if more were like him and willing to engage in debate on the subject we would all be able to get closer to the truth. Sadly most are more comfortable just dismissing these views out of hand and without any debate or justification.

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I agree 100%. And if I were a university professor, I’m not sure if I would be willing to entertain arguments by some schmuck who read a quote of mine in the newspaper, and got a hair up his ass about it. I took care to point out, that I recognize that his time is valuable, and that I admired his willingness to even take a few minutes to respond; especially to some Joe Schmoe who’s never even stepped foot in a university, and probably never will.

So, absolutely; due applause for Professor Butkiewicz.

16

I don’t know how I missed this. Great thread. Fantastic initiative.

As far as conspiracy theory, that stuff pisses me off. I really get agitated when people dismiss historical fact as conspiracy theory. Professors no less, it’s very disappointing. If they disagree with the record, they should state that clearly, and with their reasons for doing so.

Claiming conspiracy theory is a copout. I suppose he’s one that thinks the Lusitania still was only a passenger ship, and that the Gulf of Tonkin attack actually happened?

Kudos to the Professor for answering. But I think the OP has given him a run for his money intellectually, and I enjoy that because like the OP, I only have a high school education, and yet seem to know more than Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize Winner.

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You should think of it more as that you only have a high school indoctrination.

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Kudos to you for writing to him. And kudos to him for responding. However, my guess is he thinks he is far smarter than you. I mean, he does think of himself as a self-styled expert on money.

19

I reall do have to say that this is one of the most interesting posts here, as it concerns the very people most of us critizise. But i do very much appreciate both Steve for writing and the professor for answering. Great stuff

20

Yes. And yet, proponents of conspiracy theories often take it too far.

I did a presentation about conspiracy theories not long ago.