Category: Money

Modern Monetary Theory—A Critique

So called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has become popular with Green New Dealers because it claims to remove or at least loosen traditional constraints on government spending.  MMT offers unconventional ideas about the origins of money, how money is created today, and the role of fiscal policy in the creation of money. It argues that government can spend more freely by borrowing or printing money than is claimed by conventional monetary theory. “The most provocative claim of the theory is that government deficits don’t matter in themselves for countries—such as the U.S.—that borrow in their own currencies….  The core tenets of MMT, and the closest it gets to a theory, are that the economy and inflation should be managed through fiscal policy, not monetary policy, and that government should put the unemployed to work.” James Mackintosh,  “What  Modern Monetary Theory Gets Right and Wrong’  WSJ April 2, 2019.

In fact, despite its efforts to change how we conceive and view monetary and fiscal policies, MMT abandons market based countercyclical monetary and fiscal policies for targeted central control over the allocation of resources. It would rely on specific interventions to address “road blocks” upon the foundation of a government guaranteed employment program.

MMT is an unsuccessful attempt to convince us that we can finance the Green New Deal and a federal job guarantee painlessly by printing money. But it remains true that shifting our limited resources from the private to the public sector should be judged by whether society is made better off by such shifts.  Printing money does not produce free lunches.

Where does money come from?

It has been almost 50 years since the U.S. dollar (or any other currency for that matter) has been redeemable for gold or any other commodity whose market value thus determined the value of money. It remains true, however, that money’s value depends on its supply given its demand. The supply of money these days reflects the decisions of the Federal Reserve and other central banks.

The traditional story for the fractional reserve banking world we live in is that a central bank issues base or high-powered money (its currency and reserve deposits of banks with the central bank) that is generally given the status of “legal tender.”  You must pay your taxes with this money.  We deposit some of that currency in a bank, which provides the bank with money it can lend. When the bank lends it, it deposits the loan in the borrower’s deposit account with her bank, thus creating more money for the bank to lend.  This famous money multiplier has resulted in a money supply much larger than the base money issued by the central bank. In July 2008, base money (M0) in the United States was $847 billion dollars while the currency component of that plus the public’s demand deposits in banks (M1) was almost twice that — $1,442 billion dollars. Including the public’s time and savings deposits and checkable money market mutual funds (M2) the amount was $7,730 billion.  [I am reporting data from just before the financial crisis in 2008 because after that the Federal Reserve began to pay interest on bank reserve deposits at the Fed in order to encourage them to keep the funds at the Fed rather than lending them and thus multiplying deposits. This greatly increased and distorted the ratio of base money to total money, i.e. reduced the multiplier. In October 2015 at the peak of base money M0 = $4,060 billion, of which only $1,322 billion was currency in circulation.]

The neo Chartalists, now known as MMTists, want us to look at this process differently.  In their view banks create deposits by lending rather than having to receive deposits before they can lend.  While a bank loan (an asset of the bank) is extended by crediting the borrower’s deposit account with the bank (a liability of the bank), the newly created deposit will almost immediately be withdrawn to pay for whatever it was borrowed for.  Thus, the willingness of banks to lend must depend on their expectations of being able to finance their loans from existing or new deposits, by borrowing in the interbank or money markets, or by the repayment of previous loans at an interest rate less than the rate on its loans.

The money multiplier version of this story assumes a reserve constraint, i.e., it assumes that the central bank fixes the supply of base money and bank lending and deposit creation adjust to that.  The MMT version reflects the fact that monetary policy these days targets interest rates leaving base money to be determined by the market.  Traditionally the Fed set a target for the over-night interbank lending rate—the so-called Fed Funds rate.  In order to maintain its target interest rate, the central bank lends or otherwise supplies to the market whatever amount of base money is needed to cover private bank funding needs at that rate.  The market determination of the money supply at a given central bank interest rate is, in fact, similar to the way in which the market determines the money supply under currency board rules under which the central bank passively supplies whatever amount of money the market wants at the fixed official price (exchange rate) of the currency.  With the Federal Reserve’s introduction of interest on bank reserve deposits at Federal Reserve Banks, including excess reserves (the so-called Interest On Excess Reserves – IOER), banks’ management of their funding needs for a given policy rate now involve drawing down or increasing their excess reserves.

According to MMT proponents, loans create deposits and repayment of loans destroys deposits.  This is a different description of the same process described by the money multiplier story, which focuses on the central bank’s control of reserves and base money rather than interest rates. It is wrong to insist that deposits are only created by bank lending and equally wrong to insist that banks can only lend after they receive deposits.

How is Base Money Produced?

MMT applies the same approach to the creation of base or high-powered money (HPM) by the government as it does to the creation of bank deposits by the private sector:

“It also has to be true that the State must spend or lend its HPM into existence before banks, firms, or households can get hold of coins, paper notes, or bank reserves…. The issuer of the currency must supply it first before the users of the currency (banks for clearing, households and firms for purchases and tax payments) have it. That makes it clear that government cannot sit and wait for tax receipts before it can spend—no more than the issuers of bank deposits (banks) can sit and wait for deposits before they lend.”[1]

This unnecessarily provocative way of presenting the fact that government spending injects its money into the economy and tax payments and t-bond sales withdraws it does not offer the free lunch for government spending that MMT wants us to believe is there. Central banks can finance government spending by purchasing government debt, but this does not give the Treasury carte blanche to spend without concern about taxes and deficit finance.  This is the core of MMT that we must examine carefully.

MMT claims that:

“(i) the government is not constrained in its spending by its ability to acquire HPM since the spending creates HPM….  Spending does not require previous tax revenues and indeed it is previous spending or loans to the private sector that provide the funds to pay taxes or purchase bonds….

“(iii) the government deficit did not crowd out the private sector’s financial resources but instead raised its net financial wealth.

“Regarding (iii), the private sector’s net financial wealth has been increased by the amount of the deficit. That is, the different sequencing of the Treasury’s debt operations does not change the fact that deficits add net financial assets rather than “crowding out” private sector financial resources.”[2]

MMT is correct that federal government spending does creates money. But what if the resulting increase in money exceeds the public’s demand (thus reducing interest rates), or the destruction of money resulting from tax payments or public purchases of government debt reduces money below the public’s demand (thus increasing interest rates)?  MMT claims to be aware of the risk of inflation and committed to stable prices (an inflation target) but ignore it most of the time.

If the central bank sets its policy interest rate below the market equilibrium rate, it will supply base money at a rate that stimulates aggregate demand. If it persists in holding short term interest rates below the equilibrium rate it will eventually fuel inflation, which will put upward pressure on nominal interest rates requiring ever increasing injections of base money until the value of money collapses (hyperinflation). If instead the central bank money’s price is fixed to a quantity of something (as it was under the gold standard, or better still a basket of commodities) and is issued according to currency board rules (the central bank will issue or redeem any amount demanded by the market at the fix price), arbitrage will adjust the supply so as to keep the market price and the official price approximately the same (for a detailed explanation see my: “Real SDR Currency Board”).  Unlike an interest rate target, a quantity price target is stable.

Does the Story Matter?

But does the MMT story of how money is created open the door for government to spend more freely and without taxation, either by borrowing in the market or directly from the central bank?  According to MMT, “One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unencumbered by hard financial constraints.  Not only can they issue their own currency to meet commitments denominated in their own unit of account, but also any self-imposed constraint on their budgetary operations can be by-passed by changing rules.”[3]

MMT maintains that: “Politicians need to reject the urge to ask ‘How are we going to pay for it?’…   We must give up our obsession with trying to ‘pay for’ everything with new revenue or spending cuts….  Once we understand that money is a legal and social tool, no longer beholden to the false scarcity of the gold standard, we can focus on what matters most: the best use of natural and human resources to meet current social needs and to sustainably increase our productive capacity to improve living standards for future generations.”[4]

MMT proclaims that a government that can borrow in its own currency “has an unlimited capacity to pay for the things it wishes to purchase and to fulfill promised future payments, and has an unlimited ability to provide funds to the other sectors. Thus, insolvency and bankruptcy of this government is not possible. It can always pay….  All these institutional and theoretical elements are summarized by saying that monetarily sovereign governments are always solvent, and can afford to buy anything for sale in their domestic unit of account even though they may face inflationary and political constraints.”[5] But inflating away the real value of obligations (government debt) is economically a default.  Moreover, debt cannot grow without limit without debt service costs absorbing the government’s entire budget and even the inflation tax has its hyperinflation limit (abandonment of a worthless currency).

MMT advocates do acknowledge that at some point idle resources will be used up and that this process would then become inflationary, but this caveat is generally ignored.  But if MMT is serious about an inflation constraint, we must wonder about their criticism of asking how government spending will be paid for.  In this regard MMT is a throwback to the old Keynesianism, which implicitly assumed a world of perpetual unemployment.

Is There a Free Lunch?

MMT states that when the government spends more than its income (and thus must borrow or print money) private sector wealth is increased “because spending to the private sector is greater than taxes drawn from the private sector, the private sector’s net financial wealth has increased.”  As explained below this deficit spending increases the private sector’s holdings of government securities, but not necessarily its net financial wealth.

Whether we take account of the future tax liabilities created by this debt in the public’s assessment of its net wealth (Ricardian equivalence) or not, we must ask where the public found the resources with which it bought the debt. Did it substitute T-bonds for corporate bonds, i.e. did the government’s debt (or monetary) financing of government spending crowd out private investment thus leaving private sector wealth unchanged, or did it come from reduced private consumption, i.e. increased private saving. Any impact on private consumption will depend on what government spent its money on.  MMT claims that “the government deficit did not crowd out the private sector’s financial resources but instead raised its net financial wealth,” is simply asserted and is unsupported.  Whether the shift in resources from the private sector to the public sector is beneficial depends on whether the value of the government’s resulting output is greater than is the reduced private sector output that financed it.

One way or another, government spending means that the government is commanding resources that were previously commanded by or could be commanded by the private sector.  If the government takes resources by spending newly created money that the central bank does not take back, prices will rise to lower its real value back to what the public wants to hold. This is the economic equivalent of the government defaulting on its debt, contrary to MMT’s claim that default is impossible.  This inflation tax is generally considered the worst of all taxes because it falls disproportionately on the poor.  In fact, MMT proponents rarely mention or acknowledge the distinction between real and nominal values that are, or should be, central to discussions of monetary policy. The exception to the inflationary impact of monetary finance is if the resources taken by the government were idle, i.e. unemployed, which, obviously, is the world MMT thinks it is in.

MMT claims to have exposed greater fiscal space than is suggested by conventional analysis. They claim that government can more freely spend to fight global warming or to fund guaranteed jobs or other such projects by printing (electronic) money. However, the market mechanism they offer for preventing such money from being inflationary (market response to an interest rate target that replaces unwanted money with government debt), implies that such spending must be paid for with tax revenue or borrowing from the public.  Both, in fact all three financing options (taxation, borrowing, and printing money), shift real resources from the private sector to the public sector and only make society better off if the value of the resulting output is greater than that of the reduced private sector output. There is nothing new here.

Fiscal Policy as Monetary Policy

Government spending increases M and the payment of taxes reduces it.  MMT wants to use taxation to manage the money supply rather than for government financing purposes.  MMT wants to shift the management of monetary policy from the central bank to the finance ministry (Treasury).  The relevant question is whether this way of thinking about and characterizing monetary and fiscal policy produces a more insightful and useful approach to formulating fiscal policy.  Does it justify shifting the responsibly for monetary policy from the central bank to the Finance Ministry?  Should taxes be levied so as to regulate the money supply rather than finance the government (though it would do that as well)?

In advocating this change, MMT ignores the traditional arguments that have favored the use of central bank monetary policy over fiscal policy (beyond automatic stabilizers) for stabilization purposes.  None of the challenges of the use of fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool (timing, what the money is spent for, etc.) established with traditional analysis have been neutralized by the MMT vision and claim of extra fiscal space.  In fact, as we will see below, despite their advocacy of fiscal over monetary policy for maintaining price stability, MMT supporters have little interest in and no clear approach to doing so as they prefer to centrally manage wages and prices in conjunction with a guaranteed employment program.

But the arguments against MMT are stronger than that. The existing arrangements around the globe (central banks that independently execute price stability mandates and governments that determine the nature and level of government spending and its financing) are designed to protect monetary stability from the inflation bias of politicians with shorter policy horizons (the time inconsistence problem). The universal separation of responsibilities for monetary policy and for fiscal policy to a central bank and a finance ministry are meant to align decision making with the authority responsible for the results of its decisions (price stability for monetary policy and welfare enhancing levels and distribution of government spending and its financing).  It is the sad historical experience of excessive reliance on monetary finance and the costly undermining of the value of currencies that resulted that have led to the world-wide movement to central bank independence.  MMT is silent on this history and its lessons.  As pointed out by Larry Summers in an oped highly critical of MMT, the world’s experience with monetary finance has not been good. Modern Monetary Theory-a-foolish-pursuit-for-democrats

The establishment of central bank operational independence in recent decades is rightly considered a major accomplishment.  MMT advocates bring great enthusiasm for more government spending—especially on their guaranteed employment and green projects, which will need to be justified on their own merits.  MMT’s way of viewing money and monetary policy adds nothing to the arguments for or against these policies.

The Bottom Line

To a large extent, most of the above arguments by MMT are a waste of our time as MMT advocates actually reject the macro fine tuning of traditional Keynesian analysis. “This approach of government intervention aims at avoiding direct intervention to achieve the goal (e.g. hiring to achieve full employment, or price controls to achieve low inflation), but rather using indirect “tools” while letting market participants push the economy toward desired goals by tweaking their incentives.  MMT does not agree with this approach. The government should be directly involved continuously over the cycle, by putting in place structural macroeconomic programs that directly manage the labor force, pricing mechanisms, and investment projects, and constantly monitoring financial developments….  But MMT goes beyond full employment policy as it also promotes capital controls for open economies, credit controls, and socialization of investment. Wage rates and interest rate management are also important.”[6]  No wonder Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is excited by MMT.

MMT attempts, unsuccessfully in my opinion, to repackage and resurrect the empirically and theoretically discredited Keynesian policies of the 1960s and 70s.  A 2019 survey of leading economists showed a unanimous rejection of modern monetary theory’s assertions that “Countries that borrow in their own currency should not worry about government deficits because they can always create money to finance their debt” and “Countries that borrow in their own currency can finance as much real government spending as they want by creating money.” http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/modern-monetary-theory  Both the excitement and motivation for MMT seem to reflect the desire to promote a political agenda, without the hard analysis of its pros and cons—its costs and benefits.

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[1] Fullwiler, Scott, Stephanie Kelton & L. Randall Wray (2012), ‘Modern Money Theory: A Response to Critics’, in Modern Monetary Theory: A Debate,  Modern Monetary Theory: A Debate, http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_251-300/WP279.pdf,  2012, page 19

[2] Ibid. page 22-23.

[3] Tymoigne and Wray, 2013 http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/modern-money-theory-101

[4] Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal, and Greg Carlock, “We Can Pay For A Green New Deal” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-green-new-deal cost_n_5c0042b2e4b027f1097bda5b  11/30/2018

[5] Tymoigne and Wray, op cit. p. 2 and 5

[6] Ibid. pp. 44-45.

Central Banking Award

As a monetary policy expert working at the IMF when the Soviet Union dissolved I had the exciting and fulfilling opportunity of leading technical assistance missions to the central banks of Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Slovakia and building on those experiences to a number of post conflict country central banks (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Sudan). I am grateful to the IMF and the wonderful colleagues I worked with for these opportunities and now I am grateful to the Central Banking Journal for acknowledging this work with its “Outstanding Contribution for Capacity Building Award.”  I will received the award in London March 13.   Award announcement

 

Their Turkey and Ours

“Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes high interest rates are the cause of inflation, not the remedy for it”  The Economist May 19, 2018 “How-turkey-fell-from-investment-darling-to-junk-rated-emerging-market”

During the 1990s the inflation rate in Turkey averaged around 80% per annum varying between 60% and 105%.  Over that period interest rates on its 3-month treasury bills averaged about 30% above the inflation rate reaching almost 150% in 1996.  The economy grew rapidly in real terms with real GDP growth averaging 8% per annum between 1995-7.  But growth depended heavily on borrowing abroad in foreign currencies.  Banks were poorly regulated, and heavily exposed to foreign exchange risk and to government debt.  Obviously, Turkey’s nominal exchange rate depreciated at about the same rate as its inflation rate in order to preserve a stable real exchange rate.

In the wake of the Asian and Russian debt crises in 1997 and 1998 foreign investors became more risk averse and capital inflows into Turkey were reduced sharply slowing down economic growth from 7.5% in 1997 to 2.5% in 1998.  A serious earthquake in Turkey’s industrial heartland in August 1999 further deteriorated Turkey’s economic performance.  The combined impact of the two pushed the economy into a deep recession, shrinking GDP by 3.6% in 1999.

With support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1999-2003 the Turkish government reigned in its spending and monetary growth and reduced its inflation rate to 10% by 2004. I was a member of the IMF’s Turkey team at that time and remember the long sleepless nights very well. Turkey’s interest rates followed inflation down and, in fact, its real interest rates (nominal interest rate minus its inflation rate) fell from 30% to negative rates as the economy stabilized. During this transition, a number of state owned enterprises were privatized, 18 insolvent banks were intervened, and debt and the financial sector were restructured and strengthened.  Within a few (rough) years the economy was growing rapidly with low inflation and low interest rates.  In 2017 real GDP grew 7.0% though inflation had crept back up to 11.1%.

Following Turkey’s and the rest of the world’s recession in 2009 the country reverted back to its bad old ways.  “Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a decree easing access to foreign-exchange loans for Turkish companies.  The new rules lifted restrictions that barred companies without revenue in hard currencies from doing such borrowing—as long as the loans exceeded $5 million.”  How Erdogan’s push for endless growth brought Turkey to the Brink

Erdogan observed the low interest rates, low inflation, and high growth and apparently concluded that low interest rates caused low inflation rather than the other way around. Every economist knows that interest rates incorporate the market’s expectation of inflation over the period of a loan in order to establish a market clearing real rate of interest.  In 1996 when a borrower was willing to pay 130% interest and a lender was not willing to accept less it was because they expected 80% to 90% inflation per annum over the life of the loan.  The very high real rate (130% – 80% = 50%) reflects the risk premium of getting it wrong.

Central banks can, if inflation expectations adjust slowly, push real rates down temporarily by lowering nominal market rates below their equilibrium rate.  Doing so, however, increases the rate at which the money supply grows eventually increasing inflation and forcing nominal interest rates higher than they would otherwise have been.

Under political pressure from Erdogan, the central bank of Turkey has kept interest rates lower (and thus money supply growth greater) than are consistent with its inflation target of 5%.  In the last few years inflation has drifted up reaching 11.1% in 2017.  Markets have grown uneasy about the economic situation in Turkey and when the Central Bank failed to increase its policy interest rate last month from 17.75% investors began selling off Turkish bonds and withdrawing funds from the country.  Its exchange rate plummeted.  From January of this year the Turkish lira depreciated from 11.7 per dollar to 16 lira/USD at the beginning of July and to 21 lira/USD on the 22ndof August. Erdogan’s wrong-headed misunderstanding of the role of interest rates is pushing Turkey over the precipice of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile here in the United States, President Trump apparently attended the same school as Erdogan. After breaking a several decades old protocol against commenting on or interfering with the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy when he stated last month that he didn’t want to see the Fed increase its policy interest rate, he did it again a few days ago. “Trump-escalates-attacks-federal-reserve”  Trump’s advice is wrong. The Federal Reserve needs to continue raising its policy rate back toward normal levels (3% to 4%) before inflation momentum becomes any stronger. Real interest rates are still negative (less than the inflation rate).  The Fed should have started increasing rates several years earlier.

Trump and interest rates

There seems to be no norm or conventional wisdom that President Trump is not willing to overturn. Following Fed Chairman Powell’s congressional testimony Tuesday in which he confirmed the Fed’s intention to continue its gradual increase in its policy interest rate, Trump said: “I don’t like all of this work that we’re putting into the economy and then I see rates going up.”  The statement is wrong on multiple accounts.

The economy is now fully employed and interest rates probably should have been returned to normal some time ago.  The alarming current and projected fiscal deficits of the federal government will force interest rates and trade deficits still higher.  This is Trump’s fault– not Powell’s.  “Who pays uncle Sam’s deficits?”  The major policies threatening to undermine the economic boost from tax and regulatory reforms are Trump’s trade policies (pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, stalling and threatening U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA, Steel and Aluminum tariffs (taxes) on our friends in Canada, Mexico and the EU, and a deepening trade war with China).  Leaving the TPP  Resisting the interest rate increases needed to keep inflation at 2% would increase the most regressive tax around (inflation).

But Presidential interference in implementing monetary policy, as is now being undertaken by President Erdoğan in Turkey, violates a long established principle and practice of central bank independence.  Historically, inflation, which falls heaviest on the poor and undermines economic efficiency and growth, has resulted primarily from governments turning to their central banks for financing in misguided and ultimately futile efforts to keep interest rates (government borrowing costs) low.

President Trump can save the economic benefits of his tax and regulatory reforms by rejoining the TPP, rapidly concluding amendments to NAFTA that improve productive efficiency and fairness, dropping the steel and aluminum tariffs, ending the trade war with China, joining with the EU, Canada, Japan and others to bring China into compliance with the rules of a strengthened WTO, and establishing a fiscal budget surplus primarily through entitlement reform.

A proposal for the Fed’s balance sheet

By Warren Coats[1]

To save financial institutions from the collapse that threatened them after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Federal Reserve purchased government securities and Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) sufficient to increase the size of its asset holdings from $0.9 trillion to $4.5 trillion by the end of 2014.  These large open market purchases were not meant to increase the money supply, the traditional purpose of such operations, which after a sharp drop followed by a sharp increase in the growth rate of broad money (M2) has grown at its historical average rate of around 6% per year. Rather they were to support the market prices of government debt and hard to price MBS in the face of market panic (at least initially).

The Fed accomplished this trick (large increase in the Fed’s asset holding with only modest increases in the money supply) by paying banks to keep the proceeds of their sales of securities to the Fed in deposits with the Fed, so called “reserves,” in excess of what is required, so called “excess reserves.”  Beginning in October 2008, the Fed began to pay interest on bank required and excess reserves deposited with Federal Reserve banks.  This kept broad money from growing in response to the huge increases in base money (the counterpart of the securities purchased by the Fed) and became the primary tool of monetary policy.

The Fed is now pondering what to do about its abnormally large balance sheet.  A year ago it announced its intention to gradually reduce the size of its asset portfolio in order to return to its traditional policy tools—regulating the growth in bank money and credit by targeting the overnight interbank lending rate (the Fed funds rate) via open market operations.  After having suspended the open market purchases that had inflated its balance sheet in recent years (QEs 1, 2, and 3), in October 2017 the Fed stopped replacing the maturing securities it held to the extend of about $20 billion per month.  As a result its asset holdings dropped about $150 billion in the nine months since then and by the end of June 2018 stood at $4,315 billion.  Its current intention is to reduce its asset holdings to $3 trillion by the end of 2022.

The reduction in the Fed’s holdings of these securities (Treasuries and MBSs) is an increase in the market’s holdings of them, other things equal.  But other things are not expected to be equal.  Our profligate government is expected to run a one trillion dollar deficit in 2019, adding that amount of government debt to the market on top of the Fed’s additions.  The Congressional Budget Office projects a worsening federal deficit every year over the next ten of its official forecast, worsening even as a percent of GDP. This will put pressure on the Fed to rain in or suspend its program to return its asset holdings to more traditional levels.

There is a better way to handle this difficult situation.  Bank reserves with the Fed are currently about $2 trillion (the rest of the Fed’s monetary liabilities is Currency in Circulation of $1.7 trillion) and banks’ checkable deposits are about the same amount (of which demand deposits are $1.5 trillion).  Requiring 100% reserve backing of checkable deposits was recommended in the 1930s by a group of University of Chicago economists as a way to protect our payment system from the loan default problems being experienced by many banks at the time.  This so called Chicago Plan would remove any risks to checkable deposits, a key part of our payment system, and thus eliminate the need for deposit insurance for such deposits.  Required reserves would continue to earn interest as they do now, but excess reserves would not.  But in addition to strengthening our payment system, adopting the Chicago Plan today would convert existing excess reserves into required reserves and end the debate over whether to further shrink the Fed’s balance sheet.

Adopting the Chicago Plan would prevent banks from on lending our checkable deposits.  At the moment they are not doing that anyway. This raises the question of where banks would get the funds (our savings) to on lend in their financial intermediary role?  In an extreme version of the Chicago Plan (100% required reserves against all deposits and deposit like bank liabilities) all bank lending would be finance by equity rather than debt.  Savers would hold claims on the value of a portfolio of loans as they now do with mutual fund investments and as in some Islamic banking instruments.  Equity rather than debt financed bank intermediation is a more stable structure as a result of shifting the risk of loses (loan defaults) from banks to the ultimate public investors.  The Federal Deposit Insurance Company would stop insuring 100% reserved deposits and its bank resolution functions would be moved to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

For purposes of requiring a 100% reserve and dropping deposit insurance, a more pragmatic boundary between all deposit liabilities and checkable deposits might include savings deposits (which can generally be shifted into checkable deposits almost automatically) and time deposits with a maturity of less than six months (or maybe three months).  This would add almost $10 trillion dollars to required reserves and would need to be phased in gradually.  The Fed would need to buy an equivalent amount of government securities in order to finance the increase in required reserves without contracting the money supply or bank credit.

It is very desirable to separate our payment system (checkable deposits of one definition or another) from the necessarily risky lending by banks and other financial institutions and make our money (currency and deposits) risk free.  Doing so would allow banks to take whatever risks with investor funds those investors are willing to finance.  This would enable a significant reduction in the government’s regulations of these activities.  “Changing Direction on Bank Regulation” Cayman Financial Review April 2015

[1]Dr. Coats retired from the International Monetary Fund in 2003 and is a fellow of Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.

Free Banking in the Digital Age?

By Warren Coats[1]

Introduction

A number of central banks are considering issuing digital currency either in place of the paper currency they now issue or in parallel with it.  The advantages of central bank digital currency (CBDC) over paper currency for the issuer is the much lower cost of supplying and maintaining the currency (printing, storing, transporting, safekeeping and replacing old and damaged notes). For the users, there are the benefits of much greater speed and lower cost of making payments of currency across distances.  The use of paper currency (cash) in economies with proliferating electronic means of payment (Visa, PayPal, Zella, popmoney, etc.) has been and will continue to fall.  In addition, digital currencies can and do extend digital payment services to the unbanked.  This note explores some of the policy issues raised by CBDC, by which I mean digital claims on the currency issued by the official monetary authority, whether directly or indirectly.

Payment with digital currency involves transferring ownership of a claim on the issuer without needing to or providing any information about the payer, in particular without providing information about the payer’s bank account if she has one.  In this respect it mirrors the payment of traditional paper currency.  A primary issue for a central bank when considering issuing a digital currency is whether it should be offered wholesale or retail, i.e., offered only to banks and maybe other financial firms, or offered to the general public.  If a central bank offered CBDC directly to the general public it would transform and greatly expand the role of the central bank and could potentially end the role of commercial banks in the payment system.

Offering CBDC only to banks and other financial firms would offer little that is not already available via central banks’ acceptance of deposits from these entities, which of course are digital.  In fact the distinction between digital currency and traditional deposits is not always clear or important.[2]  Currently Fedwire settles payments between account holders, including government agencies, in domestic and foreign banks licensed in the U.S.  It does not settle USD payments between accounts in non-resident banks and resident banks.  Such payments could occur with CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payments System) correspondent banks, but could also potentially be made by the transfer of a central bank digital currency.

If a digital currency is issued to the general public by banks in the two-tier fashion of today’s bank money, in which banks maintain deposits of national money with their central bank to secure the deposits of national money held by banks for the general public, there is an issue of what assets banks should hold or be required to hold against their deposit or currency liabilities to the public.  Digital currency issued to the public by the central bank would have no default risk, whereas digital currency issued by banks or other entities, being a liability of the issuing bank, would have default risks.

It is also possible to permit non-banks to issue digital currency as has been done very successfully in Kenya by a phone company.[3]  Over half of Kenya’s population participates in this so-called mobile phone money service. Public acceptance of a digital currency requires that its claim on central bank money is credible.  Safaricom, the issuer of Kenya’s digital currency, M-Pesa, backs the deposits of participants 100% with Kenyan shilling deposits with banks.  While M-Pesa balances are generally paid from one person or firm to another, they can be withdrawn via an agent at their face value in shilling currency issued by the central bank at any time.

A study issued by the Bank of International Settlements explores issues raised by central bank digital currency (CBDC) more generally.[4]

Background

A review of the free banking era in the U.S. (1837 – 1913) provides a useful framework in which to analyze the options and implications of digital national currencies.  Banks in that period could issue their own U.S. dollar denominated banknotes.  Because banks lend some of the money deposited with them – so-called fractional reserve banking – issuing their own currency when their depositors wished to withdraw cash, was stabilizing as explained below.  The issue of whether CBDC should use block chain (DLT) or centrally administered ledgers will not be considered here as DLT is too expensive and inefficient to take seriously as an option at this time.[5] Project Jasper of the Bank of Canada concluded that: “the versions of distributed ledger currently available may not provide an overall net benefit when compared with existing centralized systems for interbank payments.  Core wholesale payment systems function quite efficiently.”[6]

The report does not exclude the possibility that future versions might overcome existing defects and have net advantages for some applications.

The feature of so called free banking that is relevant here was the ability of commercial banks to issue their own currency (banknotes).  These banknotes did not represent private currencies in the way bitcoin does.  In the case of the United States, all bank issued currency was denominated in US dollars and redeemable for gold (or silver) at its fixed price for the dollar.  Historicallybanknotes were originally created by goldsmiths in post Medieval England – first as warehouse receipts to depositors of cash – and then as a form of lending as an alternative to having the borrower’s account credited.  For an interesting account see the article by Benjamin Geva.[7]

Banks generate most of their income by lending at interest or investing the money deposited with them by the public.  As a result, not all of the money deposited is available to pay out to the depositors should they all want their money back (as cash or by transfer to another bank) at the same time (a so-called bank run).  Only a modest amount of depositors’ money (it is actually the bank’s money once it is deposited) is available in the bank in the form of cash or deposits at the central bank.  These so called reserves must be, and virtually always are, sufficient to satisfy the cyclical (monthly and seasonally) variations in the public’s preferences for cash over deposits.  This system is referred to as fractional reserve banking because the amount of bank “reserves” are less than the amount of their deposit liabilities.  The difference in the amount of deposits and of reserves consists of bank loans and investments in less liquid assets.

In today’s banking systems all banknotes (cash) are issued by a central bank.  Thus when a deposit is withdrawn for cash, the bank’s assets (cash) and deposit liabilities both fall by the same amount.  If a bank does not hold sufficient cash or deposits with the central bank to satisfy these periodic demands, the bank is said to be illiquid.  When banks were able to issue their own currencies (Citibank dollars and Chase dollars) only the mix of bank liabilities changed (from deposits to cash) with no change in their assets.  Their total liabilities and assets remained the same.  This was a very desirable feature of note issuing banks and eliminated the risk of illiquidity from cash withdrawals.  These banks might still suffer illiquidity from deposit transfers/payments to entities with deposits in other banks.

In the free banking era when the public came to doubt the solvency of their bank (loan and investment losses that exceeded a bank’s capital—i.e., when the value of a bank’s assets falls below the value of its deposit and other liabilities) it was pointless to withdraw deposits as the bank’s own banknotes because the bank did not have sufficient assets to redeem them.  Bank runs in such cases would take the form of converting deposit or cash claims on the bank into claims on another, hopefully sounder, bank.  Those who failed to do so before the insolvent bank was closed and liquidated would lose part of their claim, i.e. they would be forced to absorb their share of the bank’s asset shortfall (its negative capital).

Thus a ten dollar bill issued by Citibank and one issued by Chase, being claims on two different banks, could have different values (even if redeemable in theory for the same amount of gold) if the public lost confidence in the solvency of one or the other. Merchants needed to pay attention to whose banknotes they were accepting.

When you pay someone by transferring some of your bank balance to the payee’s bank account (e.g. by writing a check), your bank and the receiving bank must both participate in the same clearinghouse (or have an account with a correspondent bank that participates) enabling their obligations with each other to be settled in central bank money.[8]  This role is now generally performed by each country’s central bank and the deposits that banks keep there are called reserve deposits.  In some countries a minimum amount is required (a reserve requirement) and in others it is fully voluntary but needs to be sufficient for net payments between banks.

While this fractional reserve system worked well most of the time, banks were occasionally hit with unusually large or panic withdrawals that they were not able to satisfy even when they were fully solvent (had positive capital).  A key function of the central banks being established all over the world a century or more ago was to provide temporary liquidity to such illiquid but solvent banks (though it is difficult to evaluate the solvency of a bank in real time—i.e. the soundness of their loans and investments).  Thus central banks were so-called Lenders of Last Resort.

In 1933, in the midst of America’s Great Depression, a group of University of Chicago economists proposed, among other things, that banks be required to hold reserves (cash and deposits with the Federal Reserve) of at least 100% of their demand deposit liabilities (checking accounts).  This is often called “The Chicago Plan.”  If banks’ demand deposit liabilities and their reserve assets are segregated from the rest of their balance sheet it removed any default risk to the public of holding demand deposits at any bank.  Instead of the Chicago Plan, the U.S. Congress enacted deposit insurance to reduce the risk of bank runs.

To review:banknotes issued by banks in the free banking era eliminated the risk of a bank becoming illiquid when its depositors withdrew cash, but imposed on the public the need to judge the solvency of the note-issuing bank before accepting its currency.  The risk of losses on demand deposits remained.  While that risk could have been eliminated with a 100% reserve requirement (The Chicago Plan), it was eliminated for smaller deposits by deposit insurance.

Central banks around the world now have a monopoly on issuing legal tender currency.  This eliminates the default risk of accepting such currency but reintroduces a liquidity risk for banks that promise to convert customer deposits into (central bank issued) cash on demand.  This risk is substantially reduced by central banks’ lender of last resort function.

Structuring Digital Currency

The above considerations can help us evaluate options for central banks wishing to issue digital currencies.  So-called “digital currencies” can take different forms.  “Digital coins” are the closest digital counterpart to paper currency.  Both have unique serial numbers for each unit.  “Tokens” or “claim check centralized digital currency” pass from one owner to another P2P via block chain or central registry and can be redeemed for central bank base money at any time.  “Deposits” function the same as tokens without pretending that they are not deposits.  The distinctions between these are primarily technical and may be of little if any relevance to users.  Thus I will use “digital currency” to refer to any and all of them.

Our two-tiered system for supplying money to the public (central banks issue base money that is their own liability and commercial banks create deposit money fractionally backed by central bank base money) has the very considerable benefit of outsourcing the competitive creation and management of money to many banks.  Banks develop and service their own relationships with their customers from tens of thousands of offices around the country (speaking now of the U.S.).  However, this money creating and payment function performed by banks is also comingled with their lending activity intermediating between savers and borrowers. There are synergies as well as risks from providing both services under one roof.[9]

Should central bank digital currency be provided retail or wholesale?  A central bank could issue its digital currency to anyone who signed up (registered, i.e. opened an account directly with the central bank). As all uses of this digital currency would be between participants in the system, transfer would be simple and instantaneous.  It would be essentially the same as logging into your current bank account and transferring money to another depositor in the same bank.

In addition to the above advantages of speed and simplicity, this central bank retail approach carries the burden of an enormous expansion of central bank staff to interface with the general public in establishing and managing this new digital currency. Equally troublesome is the likelihood, if not certainty of a “digital run” from bank deposits to the central bank’s digital currency.  This would be a permanent shift from banks to the central bank, which would force banks to liquidate a significant share of their assets in order to finance the outflow of their demand deposits into the central bank’s payment system.  The transition would need to be carefully managed. The magnitude of the digital run could be limited by limiting the size of CBDC payments.  This could leave most business payments with the banking system.

There are advantages to a single, monopoly provider of digital currency because payments would take the form of transfers between accounts/participants within the same system (in effect intra-bank).  But there would be the usual disadvantages of monopolies as well (e.g. sluggish technical innovation).[10]  Central banks generally have a monopoly in printing paper currency, but their sale to the public is done by competitive commercial banks.

Central banks could leave the provision of digital cash to banks and other qualifying financial firms.  This would parallel the two-tier system now in place with central bank base money and commercial bank broad money (deposits of the public).  Digital currency would be supplied only by banks, as was the case during the free banking era when individual banks supplied their own currency notes.  Thus there would be many digital dollars (Citibank digital currency, Chase digital currency, etc.).  As with free banking banknotes, each digital currency would be the liability of the issuing bank.  The risk of default for each bank’s digital currency could be eliminated by requiring 100% reserves with the central bank against any digital currency issued and segregating these assets and liabilities from the rest of bank balance sheets. It would also be possible for commercial banks to sell and administer central bank digital currency on behalf of the central bank.  Adoption of a full Chicago Plan (100% reserves for both currency and demand deposits and legal segregation from the rest of the bank’s activities) would fully protect all payment system assets (money) from bank failures. Policies would also be needed with regard to close substitutes for demand deposits such as time and savings deposits.[11] Alternatively the risk could be limited via the equivalent of deposit insurance.

Non Central Bank Digital Currency

Digital currencies issued by commercial banks would eliminate the risk of “digital runs” on bank deposits to the central bank’s digital currency flagged by the BIS in its report cited above.  Non-national digital currencies (or deposits) fixed in value to a foreign currency, to SDRs, or to gold, for example, issued by an entity playing the role of a central bank for that currency (e.g. the BIS) would also minimize the risk of a “digital run” from bank deposits in national currencies.  Such digital currencies could also adopt a traditional two-tier model by which commercial banks issue the digital currency to the retail public. In all cases of multiple, individual bank issued digital currencies, arrangements would be needed (as now) to settle payments from holders of digital currency issue by one bank to holders of digital currency issued by a different bank.  The transfer of deposits from one issuing bank to another on the books of a common institution (the traditional central bank) is the most likely mechanism for settling such payments as is now the case for deposit payments.

In the digital world the distinction between a digital deposit and a digital currency is notional. Both are liabilities of and claims on the bank or other entity that issued them.  Distinctions blur.  In addition, digital currency need not necessarily be issued by a deposit-taking bank. M-Pesa is the digital mobile phone currency version of the Kenyan shilling issued by a trust operated by the Kenyan mobile phone operator Safaricom.[12]  The trust is not licensed as a bank as it does not lend any of the money deposited with it.  One hundred percent of the money deposited with M-Pesa is placed with commercial banks. If these deposits were with the central bank, they would be risk free—an example of the Chicago Plan.

Conclusion

My conclusion from the above considerations is that digital currency should be issued by banks or by entities adhering to the Chicago Plan if and when they prove superior to existing electronic means of payment.  Commercial bank digital currency liabilities should be insured or should adhere to the Chicago Plan segregated from the rest of the bank and thus from any losses the bank’s other activities might suffer.  If bank demand deposits were also 100% reserved, bank digital currency would feature the same stability benefit as was enjoyed in the free banking era by bank note issuing banks without the default risk of that era.  Such digital currency can extend the benefits of digital payments to the non-banked as it has in Kenya and a growing number of other countries.  It is a model also well suited to the issue of global, non-national currencies such as market SDRs or gold backed currency.

[1]Dr. Coats is retired from the International Monetary Fund, where he was Assistant Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department.

[2]Michael D. Bordo and Andrew T. Levin, “Central Bank Digital Currency  and the Future of Monetary Policy” Economics Working Paper 17104, Hoover Institution, August 2017. https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/17104-bordo-levin_updated.pdf

[3]Warren Coats, “The Technology of Money”Cayman Financial Review,January 18, 2012.

[4]“Central Bank Digital Currency,” Bank for International Settlements, March, 2018. https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d174.pdf.

[5]Warren Coats, “Bitcoin, Cybercurrencies, and Blockchain” March 12, 2018. https://wcoats.blog/2018/03/12/bitcoin-cybercurrencies-and-blockchain/

[6]Project Jasper: Are Distributed Wholesale Payment Systems Feasible Yet?Bank Of Canada, Financial System Review, June 2017.  https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fsr-june-2017-chapman.pdf

[7]Benjamin Geva, “Banking In The Digital Age – Who is Afraid of Payment Disintermediation?”  EBI Working Paper Series, 2018 No 23, March 23, 2018.  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3153760

[8]In the “good ol days” representatives of all local banks would meet in a room and exchange the physical checks that their customers had written to each other and settling the net differences between each bank via a common correspondent bank.

[9]Warren Coats, “Changing direction on bank regulation”Cayman Financial Review, April 2015.

[10]For an elaboration see Geva, op.cit.

[11]Warren Coats, “The Money Problem-Rethinking Financial Regulation” by Morgan Ricks, Cayman Financial Review April 26, 2017.

[12]op. cit. Coats, 2012

Review of John Tamny’s attack on Jack Kemp Foundation article

By Dr. Warren Coats

Dr. Coats is retired from the International Monetary Fund, where he was Assistant Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department.

In an article titled, “When the Ideas of Thinkers and Great Statesmen Are Perverted,” John Tamny offers what he calls “a semi-brief response” to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Sean Rushton from the Jack Kemp Foundation, “Monetary reform would rebalance trade.”

Mr. Tamny wastes no time in launching his attack with the following: “Worse were the myriad factual inaccuracies, including a Bretton Woods monetary agreement that took place after World War II. Except that it took place in 1944.”  This is his only valid criticism in his not so brief discussion. As we all know, the Bretton Woods conference was in anticipation of the end of WWII and did not actually take place “after” the war.  Devastating, right?

Mr. Tamny launches his more substantive critic by noting that, “To be clear, all trade balances. Always.” Whether that balance is healthy or not, however, depends on its composition. Mr. Rushton’s article is about that composition. He discusses the implications of the fact that one of the ways in which we pay for what we import is by exporting U.S. dollars. The others are exporting U.S. debt (largely government) and the ownership of American firms and other private assets. Many countries wish to hold our dollars (it is the primary international reserve asset held by central banks) because so much of world trade is priced in and paid for with USDs.

Given all the many factors that determine what we import and export, the global demand for USD as a reserve asset makes our trade deficits larger than they would otherwise be in order to supply (export) those dollars. Tamny correctly notes that “the U.S. has run ‘trade deficits’ for longer than it’s been the United States.” Obviously such deficits were not the result of the world’s demand for U.S. currency. “The U.S. always ran trade deficits precisely because it’s long been an attractive destination for investment.”  In other words, other countries sold us more than they purchased in goods and services (our trade deficit) in order to earn the dollars to invest in the U.S.

But times have changed. Today, and since the U.S. left the gold standard in early 1970, most of the dollars earn abroad from our trade deficits (their surpluses) are invested in U.S. treasury securities. In short, dollars earn abroad via our trade deficits (in addition to accumulating dollars in foreign exchange reserves) are now largely invested in financing our government’s deficit spending. Even Mr. Tamny would not argue that this inflow of investment in the U.S. is contributing to our increased growth and productivity.

On the contrary, Tamny seems to be arguing exactly that. He says that: “we have a so-called “trade deficit” as a country precisely because the U.S. is a magnet for investors the world over. When we “export” shares in American companies that are routinely the most valuable in the world.” He seems to applaud selling our firms to foreigners when our government crowds out the domestic financing of our industries in order to finance our irresponsible government deficits.

Mr. Tamny is not content to label Mr. Rushton’s analysis false. He calls it “obnoxiously false” and “comically false.” Unfortunately these labels apply more accurately to Mr. Tamny.

Rushton claims and provides evidence that U.S. fiscal discipline weakened when Nixon closed the gold window. “No longer bound by fixed exchange rates and dollar convertibility, the U.S. government’s fiscal discipline broke down.” Obviously other political and demographic factors have also contributed to the alarming increases in U.S. deficits, but no longer needed to defend the dollars exchange rate removed an important constraint. To rebut Rushton’s claim and data, Tamny notes that our deficits were even higher during WWII. Truly. I am not making this up.

Turning to the dollar’s role as an international reserve asset, Mr. Tamny notes that Mr. Rushton “argues that thanks to ’high global demand,’ the ’dollar’s international position is always stronger and U.S. interest rates are lower than they would be otherwise.’” Added to all of the other factors influencing the composition of our external financial flows (our balance of payments), the world’s demand for dollars in their foreign exchange reserve holdings must increase their trade surplus (our trade deficits) or their investments in the U.S., either of which will appreciate the dollar’s exchange rate and lower interest rates in the U.S. relative to what they would other wise be. Mr. Tamny doesn’t get this. He says that Mr. Rushton “wants us to believe that a devaluation of the income streams paid out by the U.S. Treasury actually made them more attractive to investors.” I don’t really know what he means by that either.

Another of Mr. Tamny’s “obnoxiously and comically false,” or perhaps merely nonsensical statements is that: “if we ignore the obvious, that the sole purpose of production is to import as much as possible….” If he is relating production to imports, he presumably means producing for export. What we import must be paid for one way or another, i. e., by exports of goods and services, U.S. dollars for reserves, U.S. government debt, or ownership of U.S. firms.

I leave it to the reader to sort out what Mr. Tamny might mean by: “the path to a lower ’trade deficit’ is only possible if we’re willing to accept being much poorer.”

As a parting shot, Tamny mischaracterizes the views of the late Jack Kemp. Here’s what Kemp actually said, speaking in 1987:

“Why do we keep having these cycles? I believe it has to do with the burdens and privileges of the dollar’s unique international role. First, the extra demand for dollars puts a premium on their value that makes American exports less competitive. And on world markets, only a few cents means the difference between a sale and a loss. This increases our merchandise trade deficit.

“Second, the dollar’s role helps fuel Congress’s deficit spending. Foreign central banks buy U.S. Treasury securities to hold as reserves and to keep their currencies from rising—almost $100 billion in the last year and a half. This amounts to a special ‘line of credit’ that lets Congress spend resources that would otherwise be used to farm or manufacture for export. President Reagan used to say that to get Congress to spend less you have to reduce its allowance. Well, we may have reduced its allowance but we haven’t taken away its charge card. That’s one reason why every tax dollar is spent without cutting the deficit.

“Trying to compete in world markets under these conditions is like trying to run a race with a ball and chain around your ankle. We face a constant choice between giving in to pressure to let the dollar fall at the risk of inflation, or keeping interest rates high at the expense of a trade deficit and growing pressure for protectionism. This dilemma will continue until we stabilize the dollar, end the inflation/deflation cycle, and bring down interest rates with the right kind of monetary reform.”

###

Bitcoin, Cybercurrencies and Blockchain

What would we do without money/currency? Money is the unit in which we express prices (making it easer to compare the relative cost of things) and the asset with which we pay for our purchases and debts. A good currency has a stable value relative to goods and services (low or zero inflation) and is universally (or very widely) accepted in payment. The U.S. dollar receives high marks by these criteria. Bitcoin, however, fails miserably in all of these respects.

Why would anyone want to hold a highly volatile “currency” whose value one year ago was $1,230, then rose to $19,343 on December 16, 2017, dropped to $6,915 February 5 of this year and is now $9,364 (March 10, 2018). In addition, bitcoin is not accepted in payment almost anywhere? See my earlier explanation of bitcoin: “Cryptocurrencies-the bitcoin phenomena”

Bitcoin is better characterized as a security – an investment asset. It’s sort of like an option on a lottery, except that a lottery promises to pay something to the lucky person(s) holding the ticket. Bitcoin doesn’t promise to pay out anything to anyone. Its value is simply what you can get someone else to pay you for a bitcoin you want to sell. Buying bitcoin is a bet that its value will rise for some reason while you own it. Its ideological appeal for some is that it exists and functions totally independent of government; and its economic appeal is that it allows the transfer of funds (illegally gained or not) without much chance of being detected. For an excellent review of these points see Peter Morici’s: “Bitcoin-investors-have-reason-to-worry”.

Even if bitcoin had a well-behaved value and was widely accepted, the engine for maintaining and delivering it, a permissionless distributed public ledger of all bitcoin transactions linked together in blocks attached to an ever growing chain (blockchain), is deeply flawed. Records of who owns bitcoins and all transactions involving them are maintained in a database (ledger) copied to everyone with a bitcoin address (account). The system is open to everyone (permissionless) and not dependent on trusting any participants. Each bitcoin transaction is directly between the seller (or payer) and the buyer (payee) peer-to-peer without passing through a central registry such as would be maintained by a bank. Given the ease with which electronic data can be copied, preventing the spending of the same money multiple times when it openly exists in thousands of copies one as official as the other (the so-called double spending problem) in an environment where no one is trusted by design is the main challenge that blockchain ledgers need to overcome.

The majority of payments today are made by digitally transferring the ownership of digital records of money, i.e. electronic transfers of bank deposits. Our deposits of money with banks, which are a bit over half of so-called narrow money in the U.S. (M1= Currency outside of banks + demand deposits in banks), exist as digital records in each bank’s central deposit registry. Banks are so called trusted third parties responsible for insuring that our deposits are not touched and moved without our permission and are responsible for resolving any disputes or problems with regard to our deposits.

If we are paying money to someone who has their account in the same bank, we can go on line and transfer the money from our account to theirs in a millisecond without a service charge. These central registries are fortified with very robust protocols that insure their safety. The process is a bit more complicated if we are making a payment to someone whose account is in a different bank and there is scope for the speed, efficiency and cost of such interbank payments to be improved.

Blockchain’s claim to eliminate the need for trusted third parties by transferring ownership (e.g. of bank balances) directly peer to peer and publishing copies of the ledger containing the record of our transactions and resulting ownership in hundreds of nodes (our computers) around the world. The objective of a system that eliminates the need to trust anyone to safeguard your money from double spending necessitates some very complex and costly operations to substitute for a trusted third party.

For bitcoin, so called, miners are given increasingly difficult mathematical problems to solve to establish that the latest blockchain transaction is unique rather than a copy. The first miner to solve the problem cryptographically stamps the digital transaction record as genuine (in effect notarizes it) adding a new block of transactions to the chain and distributes it publically to all nodes. The winning miner is rewarded with new bitcoin (for as long as they continue to be created). Not only is the manpower and computer capacity required for this competition enormous, but the electricity consumed in bitcoin mining is now greater than is consumed in all of Ireland. https://powercompare.co.uk/bitcoin/

It takes around ten minutes to confirm the authenticity of a bitcoin transaction on average. Ten minutes standing at the check out counter waiting for your payment to be confirmed is an unacceptable eternity. “A familiar critique of Bitcoin is that “it does not scale” in the sense that, as it is currently implemented, the network is not capable of supporting a global payments system that requires many thousands of transactions per second. At the moment, this is true; Bitcoin can support up to 7 transactions per second as compared to the 2,000 transactions per second typically processed by Visa (with the potential to scale to an estimated 56,000 per second).” “The-bitcoin-scaling-debate”

Moreover, most bitcoin users don’t have the IT sophistication to operate and manage their own copy of the blockchain and thus deposit their bitcoins (or other cyptocurrencies) with exchanges that manage transactions for them. These trusted third parties in all but name are in effect banks (though they do not lend your bitcoins to others while waiting for you to use them). “Every-disadvantage-has-its-advantage-reviewing-blockchain”

To participate in the bitcoin system (to buy, use or sell bitcoin, to take the example of the best known cybercurrency) you must register to obtain an address (account). It is a closed system in that you can only deal in bitcoin with other registrants (account holders). If a central bank, for example, issued a digital version of its currency, it would also be a closed system in the same way. Participants would need to be registered with it (i.e. open accounts with it) in order to participate and could only use this Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) with other account holders.

When problems arise or views differ on whether and what changes might be desirable in the permissionless blockchain world, there is no one responsible to address it. There is no trusted third party to take responsibility. The bitter disputes among bitcoin “leaders” and its several hard forks (breaking off different versions of bitcoins) illustrate the seriousness of this problem.

The claim is often made that even if blockchain-DLT systems are fatally flawed as the vehicle for making payments, the blockchain technology may have revolutionizing uses for other public records such as property ownership and its transfers. However, the blockchain has so many serious disadvantages that even this more limited claim is very doubtful. “Blockchain Demystified”

To address or minimize these serious drawbacks of Distributed Ledger Technology, cryptocurrencies (there haven’t been any other applications of blockchain after ten years talking about it) have been rapidly moving away from the purer, permissionless, Proof of Work version used by bitcoin to more restricted and limited permissioned, Proof of Stake approaches. None of these to date are as efficient and secure as centralized ledges of the sort used by our banks. “What-if-blockchain-is-useless?”  “Ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain”

This is not to say that exciting things aren’t happening in the ownership registry area. Digitizing ownership records introduces dramatic economies in tracking ownership and transfers of ownership. Automating many or all of the steps involved in real estate sales with the use of digitized smart contracts can significantly shorten the time and cost of the many steps (mortgage loan agreement and disbursement, collateral confirmation, settlement, title transfer, etc.). “A-pioneer-in-real-estate-blockchain-emerges-in-Europe.” In addition, a number of central banks are considering issuing digital versions of their currencies. These will probably use central registries rather than blockchains. “Central Bank Digital Currency: Bordo-Levin.” But does blockchain technology have any advantages to outweigh the many disadvantages that can’t be achieved quicker, cheaper and more securely with central registries operated by trusted third parties. Probably not. Project Jasper of the Bank of Canada concluded that: “the versions of distributed ledger currently available may not provide an overall net benefit when compared with existing centralized systems for interbank payments.  Core wholesale payment systems function quite efficiently.”  https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fsr-june-2017-chapman.pdf    “SWIFT says blockchain not ready”

Sound Money

Philadelphia Society Address on Oct 14, 2017

Introduction

Sound money is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a healthy economy. How can we best achieve and maintain it?

For almost two hundred years the gold standard did a good job of producing sound money but its weaknesses ultimately led to its abandonment and exchange rates were allowed to float.

The movement in the 1980s to independent central banks with a stable price level mandate, such as an inflation target, delivered several decades of sound money—this was called the great moderation. But is came at the expense of increased exchange rate volatility and asset bubbles.

We need to return to a monetary regime with a hard anchor. But money fixed in price to a single commodity, such as gold, will not provide as stable a value as a price fixed to a larger basket of goods.

The discretion of the central bank to control the supply of money should be replaced with market determination of the money supply. To achieve this money should be issued under currency board rules. Specifically the public should be able to buy all of the currency they want at the currency’s official prices and redeem any of it they no longer want at the same price.

The Gold Standard

The essence of the gold standard was the obligation of the issuer of gold backed money to redeem it for gold at an officially fixed price. This limited the amount of money that could be issued.  The United States set the price of fine gold at $19.49 per ounce in 1791 and raised it to $20.69 in 1834. The Gold Standard Act of 1900 lowered it slightly to $20.67.  In 1934, Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act, which raised the price of gold to $35 an ounce and prohibited private ownership of gold in the United States.  Lyndon Johnson’s guns and butter deficit spending over heated the U.S. economy, which raised doubts about the U.S.’s ability to honor its gold commitments. By late 1971 the U.S. no longer had enough gold to honor its redemption commitment, and President Richard Nixon suspended the U.S. commitment to buy and sell gold at its official price. Yet, an official price remained, and was raised to $38.00 per ounce in 1971 and to $42.22 in 1972. In 1974, President Ford abolished controls on and freed the price of gold, which rose to a high of $1,895 in September 2011 before falling back to $1,304 this morning (October 14, 2017). More importantly, as gold has never been very representative of prices in general, prices of goods and services on average in the U.S. rose 500% over the 45 years since Nixon closed the gold window.

Floating Exchange Rates and Inflation Targets

When Nixon closed the gold window he also imposed wage and price controls, which lasted for three years. The dollar no longer had a “hard” anchor. It was no longer redeemable for anything and new policies were needed to regulate its supply. Over this period the Fed implemented monetary policy via adjustments in the overnight interbank lending rate (the Fed funds rate) in light of, among other things, its objectives for the growth of monetary aggregates. When wage and price controls were finally lifted the CPI increased a staggering 12% in 1974.

In the face of the Fed’s persistent over shooting of its narrow and broad money target ranges and the entrenching of higher and higher inflation expectations in wage and price increases, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker led the Board and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on October 6, 1979 in a dramatic change in the Fed’s approach to implementing monetary policy by shifting to an intermediate, narrow money target, operationally implemented via a target for non-borrowed reserves. The new approach required the Fed to relax its Fed funds rate targets and it increased the band set by the FOMC for the Fed funds rate from 0.5% to 4%. However, the fed funds rate rose temporarily to over 22% and GDP fell by over 2% in 1982—actual and expected inflation were reversed and fell below 2.5% by 1983. The new approach had defeated inflation but it was not easy to implement and by the end of 1989 the Fed abandoned it for the more traditional fed funds rate targeting.

At about the same time radical innovations in the development of monetary policy rules were launched by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, which came to be known as explicit inflation targeting. An inflation target provides a clear and explicit rule that permits flexible operational approaches to its achievement. Given Friedman’s long and variable lags in the effect of monetary policy on prices, setting monetary operational targets (almost always the equivalent of a fed funds rate) must be based on the best model assisted forecast of its consistency with the inflation target one to two years in the future. A longer target horizon provided more scope for smoothing any output gap (employment). Full transparency of the policy and the data and reasoning underlying policy settings is required to gain the benefits of the alignment of market inflation expectations with the policy target.

The RBNZ’s development and adoption of inflation targeting was an important development in the pursuit of rule based monetary policy with floating exchange rates that accommodated flexible implementation. It swept the world of central banking. While the Fed did not adopt explicit inflation targets until 2012, it clearly pursued an implicit inflation target long before that.

Monetary stability, defined as price level stability, improved significantly, but exchange rate volatility increased. The Great Moderation of the 1990s and early 2000s that resulted from more stable domestic prices was followed by the Great Recession. The Great Recession of December 2007 to June 2009 highlighted the failure of inflation targeting to take account of asset price bubbles and “inappropriate responses to supply shocks and terms-of trade shocks”.[1]

What followed can only be described as a nightmare (largely because of the over leverage and other weaknesses in the U.S. financial system). After properly and successfully performing its function of a lender of last resort and thus preventing a liquidity-induced collapse of the banking system, the Fed went on to undertake ever more desperate measures to reflate the economy. These Quantitative Easings (QEs)—quasi-fiscal activities—have been widely discussed and have contributed little to economic recovery.[2]

The conclusion from the above history is that monetary policy is being asked to deliver more than it is capable of delivering. Central banks are generally staffed by very capable people, but they can never know all that they need to know to keep the economy at full employment as employers and jobs keep changing. The quality of forecasting models has greatly improved in recent years, but they remain unreliable. The policy strategy and intentions of the Fed and other inflation targeting central banks have become admirably transparent, but given the uncertainty of its next policy actions, markets remain spooked by every new data release and speech by Fed officials. Yet inflation in the U.S. and Europe remain below the 2% targets of the Fed and of the ECB.

Despite the huge increase in the Fed’s balance sheet, which banks are largely holding as excess reserves at the Fed, monetary growth in the U.S. averaged only about 5.5 to 6% over the past four years or about the same as its long run average (for M2). My assessment of the slow pace and modest size of the economic recovery in the U.S. is that regulatory burdens have discouraged investment while many internet related investments continue to drive down costs of many economic activity (a sort of unrecorded productivity increase).  Easy money is once again inflating asset prices (stocks and to a lesser extend again real estate).  But who knows for sure?

The idea that central banks can micro-manage monetary conditions to smooth business cycles is a conceit. In my opinion, central banks have given their price stability mandates their best shot and failed. The successful, countercyclical management of the money supply with floating exchange rates is simply beyond the capacity of mortals.

Return to a Hard Anchor

The Fed should give up its management of the money supply and return to a system of money redeemable for something of fixed value – a so-called hard anchor for monetary policy. This means linking the value of money to something real and managing its supply consistent with that value (exchange rate). Such regimes do not magically overcome an economy’s many and continuous resource allocation and coordination challenges, but by providing a stable unit in which to value goods and services and to evaluate investment options, and sufficient liquidity with which to transact, such regimes facilitate the continuous adjustments private actors need to make for an economy to remain fully employed and to grow.

But fixed exchange rate regimes, including the gold standard in one of its forms or another, have historically had their problems as well. These problems generally reflected one or the other of two factors. The first was the failure of the monetary authorities to play by the rules of a hard anchor, which is to keep the supply of money at the level demanded by the public at money’s fixed value. The pressure to depart from the rules of fixed exchange rates generally came from fiscal imbalances or mistaken Keynesian notions of aggregate demand management. However, even when central banks aimed actively to match the supply of its currency to the market’s demand with stable prices it proved beyond their capacity to do so.

The second source of failure came from fixing the value of money to an inappropriate anchor. When the exchange rate of a currency is fixed to another currency or to a commodity whose value changes in ways that are inappropriate for the economy, domestic price adjustments can become difficult and disruptive. Fixing the exchange rate to a single commodity, as with the gold standard, transmitted changes in the relative price of gold to prices in general, which imposed costly adjustments on the public.

These historical weaknesses of monetary regimes with hard anchors can be overcome by choosing better anchors and by replacing central bank management of the money supply with market control via currency board rules.

Currency board rules give control of the money supply to the market—to the public. As an example, a strict gold standard operated under currency board rules would increase the money supply whenever the public wanted more and was willing to buy it with gold at the fixed gold price of a dollar. If the public found it held more money than it wanted it would redeem the excess for gold at the same price.

I led the IMF teams that established the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina with currency board rules, and it functions in exactly this way. It has no monetary policy other than issuing or redeeming its currency for Euro at a fixed exchange rate in passive response to market demand. It has worked very well. I was also involved in establishing currency board rules for the Central Bank of Bulgaria, which has also enjoyed stable money ever since.

The hard anchor should not be just one thing. The relative price of any individual good or commodity will vary relative to prices in general. Thus a small representative basket of goods should be chosen for the anchor. Earlier proposals for broader baskets suffered from the assumption that buying and redeeming the currency should be against all of the items in the basket. That would be cumbersome and storage and security would be costly. Currency board rules should provide for indirect redeemability, by which the currency would be purchased with or redeemed for designated AAA securities (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills) at their current market value.

Exchange Rate Volatility or a Global Currency

A major cost of the current system of floating exchange rates with inflation or other targets is the uncertainly and wide swings of exchange rates. Over the last decade the USD/Euro exchange rate varied over 40 percent. The classical gold standard was associated with a flourishing of foreign trade in part because the gold standard was a world currency, which there for eliminated exchange rate risk. There would be considerable benefit to world trade, economic efficiency, and growth if all or most countries adopted the same hard anchor for their currencies. The International Monetary Fund’s SDR already exists for this purpose but would need to be modified in several important ways in order to operate under currency board rules and to change its valuation basket from a basket of currencies to a basket of goods.

Conclusion

Experience with monetary regimes with floating exchange rates has been mixed. Almost all major currencies have become more stable in the last three decades but at the expense of increased exchange rate and asset price volatility. The United State, as well as most other countries, would benefit from a return to a monetary system with a hard anchor, but fixed to the value of a small basket of goods rather than to just one, and whose supply is determined by the public’s demand via issuing and redeeming it indirectly for a liquid asset of comparable value according to currency board rules. The benefits of such a system would be increased the more widely it was adopted. One of the virtues of the gold standard was that it was global.

Reference

Warren Coats, “Real SDR Currency Board”, Central Banking Journal XXII.2 (2011), also available at http://works.bepress.com/warren_coats/25

________________, “What’s Wrong with the International Monetary System and How to Fix it?” April 20, 2017. https://works.bepress.com/warren_coats/38/

Jeffrey Frankel. “The Death of Inflation Targeting”. Project Syndicate, May 16, 2012.

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[1] Jeffrey Frankel. “The Death of Inflation Targeting”. Project Syndicate, May 16, 2012.

[2] See for example, Warren Coats, “US Monetary Policy–QE3” Cayman Financial Review January 2013.

My Political Platform for the Nation – 2017

For me, the ideal American government would deliver its important but limited functions efficiently and effectively and would raise the money to pay for these activities with efficient, minimally distorting (neutral), and fair taxes following a principle of maximum subsidiarity (decisions made and services performed at the most local levels possible). The government should do fewer things than it does now but should do them better and should fully pay for them with taxes and fees (cyclically balanced budgets).

My unrestrained, radical platform will be presented here at a high level of general principles. Details need to be refined by a political process involving public discussion and are likely to evolve somewhat over time. Links to earlier articles provide additional details. In the very broadest terms Americans should be self reliant and free to work and play as hard as they choose with the government supporting their choices by providing security, the legal foundation and framework of private property and contracts, and an efficient safety net when individual undertakings are not feasible or fail.

The limited functions of the Federal government are enumerated in Article 1 section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Broadly these are to:

  1. Develop and maintain our relations with other countries and international bodies and to maintain an Army, Navy and Air Force for the purposes of defending and promoting the security of the United States;
  2. Establish and enforce the rights to property and contracts and to adjudicate related disputes;
  3. Provide for public safety;
  4. Provide an efficient and effective social safety net (welfare);
  5. “Regulate commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States;”
  6. “Coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;”
  7. Arrange for the provision of roads and essential infrastructure; and
  8. Tax, borrow, and levy fees and tariffs to pay for these activities.

Our Social Contract

Sovereignty resides with each individual, who have collectively ceded limited powers to government for the general welfare. Each of us is free, within legal limits on doing harm to others, to lead our own lives and build or work at whatever we choose. Thus the government’s laws apply equally to each of us without regard to our race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. From this environment of freedom and innovation, America has built the most successful economy in the world.

When building companies or developing products, many will fail and try again. The government provides the legal framework (bankruptcy) for resolving such failures. The implicit agreement between citizens and their government is that government will provide a floor—a safety net—whenever a person’s efforts fail or when, e.g., for health reasons, a person is unable to provide for him or herself. The level of the safety net should reflect the level of the country’s income and social consensus and should be designed to achieve its objective as efficiently as possible with careful consideration of the incentives it creates.

Income redistribution: taxation and a guaranteed minimum income

All income (personal and corporate) taxes should be replaced with a comprehensive, flat, consumption tax (Value Added Tax—VAT) and limited progressivity introduced by paying every legal man, woman and child resident a guaranteed minimum income. US federal tax policy, Cayman Financial Review July 2009 Each recipient of these monthly guaranteed income payments would be required to set aside a minimum amount for health insurance (chosen by each person or family in the competitive market place) and a minimum amount for retirement (invested in qualifying retirement funds in the competitive market place). Saving social security

As the guaranteed minimum income should be at a level sufficient to minimally support life’s basic needs, supplements such as unemployment or disability insurance would not be needed or provided. However, disabilities acquired from military or public safety service should receive additional income support.

Health care

Each person will be responsible for paying for at least part of routine medical care (the copay required by the insurance they have chosen) and will thus care about its cost. The cheapest insurance policies will be limited to major medical expenses (catastrophic health insurance). As everyone will be required to contribute monthly to a health savings account from their guaranteed minimum income, most people will chose to use such funds to buy health insurance, which would not be tied to employment or an employer.

Doctors and hospitals will be required to make medical service costs transparent. On that basis, patients, in consultation with their doctors, will decide the level of care and treatments to receive. These measures will introduce normal market competition into the provision of medical care that is currently absent, which will improve its quality and lower its cost.

Education

Equal access to quality education is a critical element in maximizing opportunity for all and the wealth of our society and each person in it. The public school system has often failed in this objective. While the wealthy can afford to put their children in private schools when the neighborhood school is of poor quality, lower income families generally cannot. Every K-12 aged child will receive a tuition voucher that covers the cost of state provided education. The amount will generally vary from state to state (or school district to school district). The voucher can be used to attend the local neighborhood public school with no additional cost, or any private school the family chooses, which might incur additional costs. Schools eligible to receive such vouchers must meet minimum education standards set by the state and must disclose the performance of their students on state administered achievement tests. This information must be available to the public. The learning progress of each child is more important than the average level of achievement of each school’s students as some schools might well specialize in slow or problem learners and performance data should reflect this distinction. The neighborhood school has the advantage of being easier to get to every day and will normally be chosen by families if it provides a good education. The argument for universal tuition vouchers goes beyond providing a level playing field to all. It also introduces the competition for students that is the basis for good quality, low cost goods and services in every other area of our economy.

Access to higher education raises different issues. Those with the aptitude and desire for a college or postgraduate degree can significantly increase their lifetime incomes as a result. It would hardly be fair to tax the general public to subsidize the higher education of those who will become wealthier as a result. However, the tuition loans that may be needed by those from lower income families to make this investment would be hard to get without insurance against default. Many states also provide community (or Jr.) colleges at public expense that provide training in various trade skills as well as four year college preparatory courses. These seem to have often been successful in leveling the playing field. The optimal structuring of higher education subsidies (e.g. between insurance guarantees and tuition subsidies) needs further examination.

Monetary and Financial Policies

Government policies that affect business should be as rule based and transparent as possible. Monetary policy stands out as a particularly important area in which clearer rules are needed. A currency with stable real value (purchasing power) is an important part of the foundation of efficient free markets. At the very minimum the Federal Reserve’s mandate should be tightened as provided in the very pragmatic Federal Reserve Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014. This act would require the Fed to chose an operational rule, from which it could depart only with an explanation to Congress of its reasons. A deeper review of options is proposed by the Centennial Monetary Commission Act of 2015. I have proposed a more radical reform in the spirit of the gold standard but with tighter rules and an anchor of a large number of goods rather than just gold. The supply of this currency, which ideally would become the global currency, would be regulated by the market using currency board rules and “indirect redeemability.” A hard anchor for the dollar.

The banking and financial sector are currently smothered with detailed regulations the compliance cost of which are driving smaller banks out of business. Under the Dodd Frank law adopted after the financial crisis of 2008, the largest five American banks have grown even larger (in absolute terms and as a share of the banking sector) than they were in 2008. Regulators, despite (or because of) their detailed banking regulations have failed to make banks safer and have slowed the competitive process of producing better and cheaper services. Bank owners and market preferences should regulate risk taking by banks.

Bank regulation by the government should focus on broad principles with strong owner accountability. Bank capital requirements should be raised and the no bail out rules strengthened. Bank owners and investors should absorb any bank losses. The payment services of banks should be isolated from the rest of its lending and investing business by adopting the Chicago Plan of one hundred percent reserve requirements against current account deposits, and virtually all other regulations (other than accounting and reporting standards) should be dropped. Larger banks will develop their own risk weighted capital requirements for their internal use, but the government’s capital requirements should state the minimum required leverage ratio (ratio of core capital to total assets) and set it at a high level. Changing direction on bank regulation, Cayman Financial Review April 2015. A bill now in congress moves in this direction: The Financial Choice Act

Business activities and regulation

The government should only provide services that that private sector can’t. It should provide the legal and regulatory framework for the private economy rather than compete with it. Though the approaches to providing “public goods” such as police, courts, prisons, firemen, parks, highways, airports, etc. have varied over time, they are almost always paid for by the government (i.e. collectively by tax payers) and should be provided efficiently at the level expected by the public. Publicly funded and privately produced goods and services are often sources of hard or soft corruption. Rather than over charging for services or paying bribes to win contracts (hard corruption), soft corruption exploits influence on government to obtain contract terms or regulations favorable to particular firms (“rent seeking”). The government’s purchases of goods and services from the private sector should be governed by transparent rules that promote competition among suppliers. This is easier said than done. Open the Books

While the government is involved in and trying to do far too many things, it doesn’t do many of them very well. Of those services the government needs to provide, states generally perform better than the federal government though performance varies across states. In Maryland, where I live, I was able to register my Limited Liability Company on line in about 30 minutes start to finish. Registering my car and updating my driver’s license is quick and easy. However, it took me months to obtain a statement of my residency from the U.S. Treasury and a personal trip to the State Department to have it certified to provide to the National Bank of Kazakhstan before they could pay me for my services. Getting a passport or green card is more complicated and takes longer than they should. The government should do much less and do it much better.

Those in the government who believe they can judge better than competitive private markets how best to allocate resources (what to invest in and produce) are generally wrong. Moreover, they establish an opportunity and thus incentive for corruption.

The government’s regulation of private businesses in the interest of public safety, environmental protection, and market competition should be limited and subject to very serious cost/benefit tests. Cost/benefit analysis unavoidably reflects subjective judgments but their role should be limited to the extent possible by full transparency of the basis of any assessment. Competitive capitalism vs. the other kinds.

Foreign policy and national security

The purpose of our foreign policy is to serve American security interests and the international rule of law under which American’s can explore the world and American businesses can compete globally on a level playing field. Our security requires a strong military, but it also requires the skillful use of diplomacy. Our military must be structured for defense, not offensive wars of our choosing. Our 2003 war in Iraq and subsequent developments in the Middle East have cost many lives (some American) and treasure, undermined our moral authority, and seriously damaged our security. Our foreign policy should be one of “restraint.”

Our relations with other countries should be based on shared interests consistent with our respect for individual dignity and the rule of law. We should support and, where appropriate, lead international bodies dedicated to developing, promoting, and overseeing compliance with the rule of law internationally. Our international leadership should rest, in addition to our economic and military strength, on our commitment to broadly shared values and standards of behavior. Just as we give up limited amounts of our individual sovereignty to our own government when it serves our individual and collective interests, so should we give up limited amounts of our national sovereignty to international bodies when it serves our national and international interests.

Our economic strength depends in part on providing for a sufficiently strong military in the most economical way possible. Money spent on tanks can be spent on building other businesses and producing goods that we enjoy. The very nature of the relationship between our military and the industries that supply it, what President Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex,” makes achieving this objective very difficult. As argued above, clear rules and transparency are important tools. Our unsupportable empire

Trade

Next to the right to personal property, nothing is as central to our liberty and well being as the right to trade. It is the basis of virtually all of our enormous increase in productivity and thus our standard of living. The government impedes our right to trade with a wide range of often unnecessary or excessive regulations. Restricting our freedom to trade across national borders is also a mistake that reduces our standard of living from its potential.

Trade has destroyed some jobs while creating others. “Since 1900, the portion of the U.S. workforce in agriculture has declined from 41 percent to less than 2 percent. Output per remaining farmer and per acre has soared since millions of agricultural workers made the modernization trek from farms to more productive employment in city factories…. Manufacturing’s postwar share of the labor force peaked at about 30 percent” in 1953 and has since declined to less than 9 percent while manufacturing output continued to climb. “Of the 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, trade accounted for 13 percent of job losses and productivity improvements accounted for more than 85 percent.” George Will, Washington Post.

As with domestic, competitive trade, those out-performed in competitive markets suffer, at least temporarily. The safety net for “losers” in the competitive process discussed above is an important feature in our willingness to unleash the benefits of free trade. We must insure that they are adequate. We should support the World Trade Organization (WTO) as well as regional and bilateral agreements that reduce the barriers to trade and promote freer trade. Save trade. Globalization and nationalism-good and/or bad?. Trade and globalization

Conclusion

Our government should assume that each of us is capable of and has the right to make our own decisions and lead our own lives as we see fit. Its role is to protect those rights, in part by protecting us from others, foreign and domestic, who would violate them. We are, however, part of and best flourish within broader communities. Our government should develop legal frameworks to facilitate our interactions and relationships within and across societies both business and personal. Our successful flourishing will also depend greatly on a shared culture of mutual respect and comity.