Bank Credit and the Business Cycle

The business cycle arrived in the Western world in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a curious phenomenon, because there seemed to be no reason for it, and indeed it had not existed before. The business cycle consisted of a regularly recurring (though not strictly periodical) series of booms and busts, of inflationary periods marked by increased business activity, higher employment, and higher prices followed sharply by recessions or depressions marked by declining business activity, higher unemployment, and price declines; and then, after a term of such recession, recovery takes place and the boom phase begins again.

A priori, there is no reason to expect this sort of cyclical pattern of economic activity. There will be cyclical waves in specific types of activity, [p. 184] of course; thus, the cycle of the seven-year locust will cause a seven-year cycle in locust-fighting activity, in the production of antilocust sprays and equipment, etc. But there is no reason to expect boom-bust cycles in the overall economy. In fact, there is reason to expect just the opposite; for usually the free market works smoothly and efficiently, and especially with no massive cluster of error such as becomes evident when boom turns suddenly to bust and severe losses are incurred. And indeed, before the late eighteenth century there were no such overall cycles. Generally, business went along smoothly and evenly until a sudden interruption occurred: a wheat famine would cause a collapse in an agricultural country; the king would seize most of the money in the hands of financiers, causing a sudden depression; a war would disrupt trading patterns. In each of these cases, there was a specific blow to trade brought about by an easily identifiable, one-shot cause, with no need to search further for explanation.

So why the new phenomenon of the business cycle? It was seen that the cycle occurred in the most economically advanced areas of each country: in the port cities, in the areas engaged in trade with the most advanced world centers of production and activity. Two different and vitally important phenomena began to emerge on a significant scale in Western Europe during this period, precisely in the most advanced centers of production and trade: industrialization and commercial banking. The commercial banking was the same sort of “fractional reserve” banking we have analyzed above, with London the site of the world’s first central bank, the Bank of England, which originated at the turn of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, in the new discipline of economics and among financial writers and commentators, two types of theories began to emerge in an attempt to explain the new and unwelcome phenomenon: those focusing the blame on the existence of industry, and those centering upon the banking system. The former, in sum, saw the responsibility for the business cycle to lie deep within the free-market economy — and it was easy for such economists to call either for the abolition of the market (e.g., Karl Marx) or for its drastic control and regulation by the government in order to alleviate the cycle (e.g., Lord Keynes). On the other hand, those economists who saw the fault to lie in the fractional reserve banking system placed the blame outside the market economy and onto an area — money and banking — which even English classical liberalism had never taken away from tight government control. Even in the nineteenth century, then, blaming the banks meant essentially blaming government for the boom-bust cycle.

We cannot go into details here on the numerous fallacies of the schools [p. 185] of thought that blame the market economy for the cycles; suffice it to say that these theories cannot explain the rise in prices in the boom or the fall in the recession, or the massive cluster of error that emerges suddenly in the form of severe losses when the boom turns to bust.

The first economists to develop a cycle theory centering on the money and banking system were the early nineteenth-century English classical economist David Ricardo and his followers, who developed the “monetary theory” of the business cycle.3  The Ricardian theory went somewhat as follows: the fractional-reserve banks, spurred and controlled by the government and its central bank, expand credit. As credit is expanded and pyramided on top of paper money and gold, the money supply (in the form of bank deposits or, in that historical period, bank notes) expands. The expansion of the money supply raises prices and sets the inflationary boom into motion. As the boom continues, fueled by the pyramiding of bank notes and deposits on top of gold, domestic prices also increase. But this means that domestic prices will be higher, and still higher, than the prices of imported goods, so that imports will increase and exports to foreign lands will decline. A deficit in the balance of payments will emerge and widen, and it will have to be paid for by gold flowing out of the inflating country and into the hard-money countries. But as gold flows out, the expanding money and banking pyramid will become increasingly top-heavy, and the banks will find themselves in increasing danger of going bankrupt. Finally, the government and banks will have to stop their expansion, and, to save themselves, the banks will have to contract their bank loans and checkbook money.

The sudden shift from bank credit expansion to contraction reverses the economic picture and bust quickly follows boom. The banks must pull in their horns, and businesses and economic activity suffer as the pressure mounts for debt repayment and contraction. The fall in the supply of money, in turn, leads to a general fall in prices (”deflation”). The recession or depression phase has arrived. However, as the money supply and prices fall, goods again become more competitive with foreign products and the balance of payments reverses itself, with a surplus replacing the deficit. Gold flows into the country, and, as bank notes and deposits contract on top of an expanding gold base, the condition of the banks becomes much sounder, and recovery gets under way.

The Ricardian theory had several notable features: It accounted for the behavior of prices by focusing on changes in the supply of bank [p. 186] money (which indeed always increased in booms and declined in busts). It also accounted for the behavior of the balance of payments. And, moreover, it linked the boom and the bust, so that the bust was seen to be the consequence of the preceding boom. And not only the consequence, but the salutary means of adjusting the economy to the unwise intervention that created the inflationary boom.

In short, for the first time, the bust was seen to be neither a visitation from hell nor a catastrophe generated by the inner workings of the industrialized market economy. The Ricardians realized that the major evil was the preceding inflationary boom caused by government intervention in the money and banking system, and that the recession, unwelcome though its symptoms may be, is really the necessary adjustment process by which that interventionary boom gets washed out of the economic system. The depression is the process by which the market economy adjusts, throws off the excesses and distortions of the inflationary boom, and reestablishes a sound economic condition. The depression is the unpleasant but necessary reaction to the distortions and excesses of the previous boom.

Why, then, does the business cycle recur? Why does the next boom-and-bust cycle always begin? To answer that, we have to understand the motivations of the banks and the government. The commercial banks live and profit by expanding credit and by creating a new money supply; so they are naturally inclined to do so, “to monetize credit,” if they can. The government also wishes to inflate, both to expand its own revenue (either by printing money or so that the banking system can finance government deficits) and to subsidize favored economic and political groups through a boom and cheap credit. So we know why the initial boom began. The government and the banks had to retreat when disaster threatened and the crisis point had arrived. But as gold flows into the country, the condition of the banks becomes sounder. And when the banks have pretty well recovered, they are then in the confident position to resume their natural tendency of inflating the supply of money and credit. And so the next boom proceeds on its way, sowing the seeds for the next inevitable bust.

Thus, the Ricardian theory also explained the continuing recurrence of the business cycle. But two things it did not explain. First, and most important, it did not explain the massive cluster of error that businessmen are suddenly seen to have made when the crisis hits and bust follows boom. For businessmen are trained to be successful forecasters, and it is not like them to make a sudden cluster of grave error that forces them to experience widespread and severe losses. Second, another important [p. 187] feature of every business cycle has been the fact that both booms and busts have been much more severe in the “capital goods industries” (the industries making machines, equipment, plant or industrial raw materials) than in consumer goods industries. And the Ricardian theory had no way of explaining this feature of the cycle.

The Austrian, or Misesian, theory of the business cycle built on the Ricardian analysis and developed its own “monetary overinvestment” or, more strictly, “monetary malinvestment” theory of the business cycle. The Austrian theory was able to explain not only the phenomena explicated by the Ricardians, but also the cluster of error and the greater intensity of capital goods’ cycles. And, as we shall see, it is the only one that can comprehend the modern phenomenon of stagflation.

Mises begins as did the Ricardians: government and its central bank stimulate bank credit expansion by purchasing assets and thereby increasing bank reserves. The banks proceed to expand credit and hence the nation’s money supply in the form of checking deposits (private bank notes having virtually disappeared). As with the Ricardians, Mises sees that this expansion of bank money drives up prices and causes inflation.

But, as Mises pointed out, the Ricardians understated the unfortunate consequences of bank credit inflation. For something even more sinister is at work. Bank credit expansion not only raises prices, it also artificially lowers the rate of interest, and thereby sends misleading signals to businessmen, causing them to make unsound and uneconomic investments.

For, on the free and unhampered market, the interest rate on loans is determined solely by the “time preferences” of all the individuals that make up the market economy. For the essence of any loan is that a “present good” (money which can be used at present) is being exchanged for a “future good” (an IOU which can be used at some point in the future). Since people always prefer having money right now to the present prospect of getting the same amount of money at some point in the future, present goods always command a premium over future goods in the market. That premium, or “agio,” is the interest rate, and its height will vary according to the degree to which people prefer the present to the future, i.e., the degree of their time preferences.

People’s time preferences also determine the extent to which people will save and invest for future use, as compared to how much they will consume now. If people’s time preferences should fall, i.e., if their degree of preference for present over future declines, then people will tend to consume less now and save and invest more; at the same time, and for the same reason, the rate of interest, the rate of time-discount, [p. 188] will also fall. Economic growth comes about largely as the result of falling rates of time preference, which bring about an increase in the proportion of saving and investment to consumption, as well as a falling rate of interest.

But what happens when the rate of interest falls not because of voluntary lower time preferences and higher savings on the part of the public, but from government interference that promotes the expansion of bank credit and bank money? For the new checkbook money created in the course of bank loans to business will come onto the market as a supplier of loans, and will therefore, at least initially, lower the rate of interest. What happens, in other words, when the rate of interest falls artificially, due to intervention, rather than naturally, from changes in the valuations and preferences of the consuming public?

What happens is trouble. For businessmen, seeing the rate of interest fall, will react as they always must to such a change of market signals: they will invest more in capital goods. Investments, particularly in lengthy and time-consuming projects, which previously looked unprofitable, now seem profitable because of the fall in the interest charge. In short, businessmen react as they would have if savings had genuinely increased: they move to invest those supposed savings. They expand their investment in durable equipment, in capital goods, in industrial raw material, and in construction, as compared with their direct production of consumer goods.

Thus, businesses happily borrow the newly expanded bank money that is coming to them at cheaper rates; they use the money to invest in capital goods, and eventually this money gets paid out in higher wages to workers in the capital goods industries. The increased business demand bids up labor costs, but businesses think they will be able to pay these higher costs because they have been fooled by the government-and-bank intervention in the loan market and by its vitally important tampering with the interest-rate signal of the marketplace — the signal that determines how many resources will be devoted to the production of capital goods and how many to consumer goods.

Problems surface when the workers begin to spend the new bank money that they have received in the form of higher wages. For the time preferences of the public have not really gotten lower; the public doesn’t want to save more than it has. So the workers set about to consume most of their new income, in short, to reestablish their old consumer/saving proportions. This means that they now redirect spending in the economy back to the consumer goods industries, and that they don’t save and invest enough to buy the newly produced machines, capital [p. 189] equipment, industrial raw materials, etc. This lack of enough saving-and-investment to buy all the new capital goods at expected and existing prices reveals itself as a sudden, sharp depression in the capital goods industries. For once the consumers reestablish their desired consumption/investment proportions, it is thus revealed that business had invested too much in capital goods (hence the term “monetary overinvestment theory”), and had also underinvested in consumer goods. Business had been seduced by the governmental tampering and artificial lowering of the rate of interest, and acted as if more savings were available to invest than were really there. As soon as the new bank money filtered through the system and the consumers reestablish their old time-preference proportions, it became clear that there were not enough savings to buy all the producers’ goods, and that business had misinvested the limited savings available (”monetary malinvestment theory”). Business had overinvested in capital goods and underinvested in consumer goods.

The inflationary boom thus leads to distortions of the pricing and production system. Prices of labor, raw materials, and machines in the capital goods industries are bid up too high during the boom to be profitable once the consumers are able to reassert their old consumption/investment preferences. The “depression” is thus seen — even more than in the Ricardian theory — as the necessary and healthy period in which the market economy sloughs off and liquidates the unsound, uneconomic investments of the boom, and reestablishes those proportions between consumption and investment that are truly desired by the consumers. The depression is the painful but necessary process by which the free market rids itself of the excesses and errors of the boom and reestablishes the market economy in its function of efficient service to the mass of consumers. Since the prices of factors of production (land, labor, machines, raw materials) have been bid too high in the capital goods industries during the boom, this means that these prices must be allowed to fall in the recession until proper market proportions of prices and production are restored.

Put another way, the inflationary boom will not only increase prices in general, it will also distort relative prices, will distort relations of one type of price to another. In brief, inflationary credit expansion will raise all prices; but prices and wages in the capital goods industries will go up faster than the prices of consumer goods industries. In short, the boom will be more intense in the capital goods than in the consumer goods industries. On the other hand, the essence of the depression adjustment period will be to lower prices and wages in the capital goods industries relative to consumer goods, in order to induce resources to [p. 190] move back from the swollen capital goods to the deprived consumer goods industries. All prices will fall because of the contraction of bank credit, but prices and wages in capital goods will fall more sharply than in consumer goods. In short, both the boom and the bust will be more intense in the capital than in the consumer goods industries. Hence, we have explained the greater intensity of business cycles in the former type of industry.

There seems to be a flaw in the theory, however; for, since workers receive the increased money in the form of higher wages fairly rapidly, and then begin to reassert their desired consumer/investment proportions, how is it that booms go on for years without facing retribution: without having their unsound investments revealed or their errors caused by bank tampering with market signals made evident? In short, why does it take so long for the depression adjustment process to begin its work? The answer is that the booms would indeed be very shortlived (say, a few months) if the bank credit expansion and the subsequent pushing of interest rates below the free-market level were just a one-shot affair. But the crucial point is that the credit expansion is not one shot. It proceeds on and on, never giving the consumers the chance to reestablish their preferred proportions of consumption and saving, never allowing the rise in cost in the capital goods industries to catch up to the inflationary rise in prices. Like the repeated doping of a horse, the boom is kept on its way and ahead of its inevitable comeuppance by repeated and accelerating doses of the stimulant of bank credit. It is only when bank credit expansion must finally stop or sharply slow down, either because the banks are getting shaky or because the public is getting restive at the continuing inflation, that retribution finally catches up with the boom. As soon as credit expansion stops, the piper must be paid, and the inevitable readjustments must liquidate the unsound overinvestments of the boom and redirect the economy more toward consumer goods production. And, of course, the longer the boom is kept going, the greater the malinvestments that must be liquidated, and the more harrowing the readjustments that must be made.

Thus, the Austrian theory accounts for the massive cluster of error (overinvestments in capital goods industries suddenly revealed as such by the stopping of the artificial stimulant of credit expansion) and for the greater intensity of boom and bust in the capital goods than in the consumer goods industries. Its explanation for the recurrence, for the inauguration of the next boom, is similar to the Ricardian; once the liquidations and bankruptcies are undergone, and the price and production adjustments completed, the economy and the banks begin to [p. 191] recover, and the banks can set themselves to return to their natural and desired course of credit expansion.

What of the Austrian explanation — the only preferred explanation — of stagflation? How is it that, in recent recessions, prices continue to go up? We must amend this first by pointing out that it is particularly consumer goods prices that continue to rise during recessions, and that confound the public by giving them the worst of both worlds at the same time: high unemployment and increases in the cost of living. Thus, during the most recent 1974-1976 depression, consumer goods prices rose rapidly, but wholesale prices remained level, while industrial raw material prices fell rapidly and substantially. So how is it that the cost of living continues to rise in current recessions?

Let us go back and examine what happened to prices in the “classic,” or old-fashioned boom-bust cycle (pre-World War II vintage). In the booms the money supply went up, prices in general therefore went up, but the prices of capital goods rose by more than consumer goods, drawing resources out of consumer and into capital goods industries. In short, abstracting from general price increases, relative to each other, capital goods prices rose and consumer prices fell in the boom. What happened in the bust? The opposite situation: the money supply went down, prices in general therefore fell, but the prices of capital goods fell by more than consumer goods, drawing resources back out of capital goods into consumer goods industries. In short, abstracting from general price declines, relative to each other, capital goods prices fell and consumer prices rose during the bust.

The Austrian point is that this scenario in relative prices in boom and bust is still taking place unchanged. During the booms, capital goods prices still rise and consumer goods prices still fall relative to each other, and vice versa during the recession. The difference is that a new monetary world has arrived, as we have indicated earlier in this chapter. For now that the gold standard has been eliminated, the Fed can and does increase the money supply all the time, whether it be boom or recession. There hasn’t been a contraction of the money supply since the early 1930s, and there is not likely to be another in the foreseeable future. So now that the money supply always increases, prices in general are always going up, sometimes more slowly, sometimes more rapidly.

In short, in the classic recession, consumer goods prices were always going up relative to capital goods. Thus, if consumer goods prices fell by 10% in a particular recession, and capital goods prices fell by 30%, consumer prices were rising substantially in relative terms. But, from the point of view of the consumer, the fall in the cost of living was [p. 192] highly welcome, and indeed was the blessed sugarcoating on the pill of recession or depression. Even in the Great Depression of the 1930s, with very high rates of unemployment, the 75-80% of the labor force still employed enjoyed bargain prices for their consumer goods.

But now, with Keynesian fine-tuning at work, the sugarcoating has been removed from the pill. Now that the supply of money — and hence general prices — is never allowed to fall, the rise in relative consumer goods prices during a recession will hit the consumer as a visible rise in nominal prices as well. His cost of living now goes up in a depression, and so he reaps the worst of both worlds; in the classical business cycle, before the rule of Keynes and the Council of Economic Advisors, he at least had to suffer only one calamity at a time.

What then are the policy conclusions that arise rapidly and easily from the Austrian analysis of the business cycle? They are the precise opposite from those of the Keynesian establishment. For, since the virus of distortion of production and prices stems from inflationary bank credit expansion, the Austrian prescription for the business cycle will be: First, if we are in a boom period, the government and its banks must cease inflating immediately. It is true that this cessation of artificial stimulant will inevitably bring the inflationary boom to an end, and will inaugurate the inevitable recession or depression. But the longer the government delays this process, the harsher the necessary readjustments will have to be. For the sooner the depression readjustment is gotten over with, the better. This also means that the government must never try to delay the depression process; the depression must be allowed to work itself out as quickly as possible, so that real recovery can begin. This means, too, that the government must particularly avoid any of the interventions so dear to Keynesian hearts. It must never try to prop up unsound business situations; it must never bail out or lend money to business firms in trouble. For doing so will simply prolong the agony and convert a sharp and quick depression phase into a lingering and chronic disease. The government must never try to prop up wage rates or prices, especially in the capital goods industries; doing so will prolong and delay indefinitely the completion of the depression adjustment process. It will also cause indefinite and prolonged depression and mass unemployment in the vital capital goods industries. The government must not try to inflate again in order to get out of the depression. For even if this reinflation succeeds (which is by no means assured), it will only sow greater trouble and more prolonged and renewed depression later on. The government must do nothing to encourage consumption, and it must not increase its own expenditures, for this will further increase the social [p. 193] consumption/investment ratio — when the only thing that could speed up the adjustment process is to lower the consumption/savings ratio so that more of the currently unsound investments will become validated and become economic. The only way the government can aid in this process is to lower its own budget, which will increase the ratio of investment to consumption in the economy (since government spending may be regarded as consumption spending for bureaucrats and politicians).

Thus, what the government should do, according to the Austrian analysis of the depression and the business cycle, is absolutely nothing. It should stop its own inflating, and then it should maintain a strict hands-off, laissez-faire policy. Anything it does will delay and obstruct the adjustment processes of the market; the less it does, the more rapidly will the market adjustment process do its work and sound economic recovery ensue.

The Austrian prescription for a depression is thus the diametric opposite of the Keynesian: it is for the government to keep absolute hands off the economy, and to confine itself to stopping its own inflation, and to cutting its own budget.

It should be clear that the Austrian analysis of the business cycle meshes handsomely with the libertarian outlook toward government and a free economy. Since the State would always like to inflate and to interfere in the economy, a libertarian prescription would stress the importance of absolute separation of money and banking from the State. This would involve, at the very least, the abolition of the Federal Reserve System and the return to a commodity money (e.g., gold or silver) so that the money-unit would once again be a unit of weight of a market-produced commodity rather than the name of a piece of paper printed by the State’s counterfeiting apparatus.

• 3For the analysis of the remainder of this chapter, see Rothbard, Depressions: Their Cause and Cure, pp. 13-26. [p. 194]