11/18/13 – Robert P. Murphy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, and our first guest on the show today is our old friend Bob Murphy from the Ludwig von Mises Institute at mises.org and his own great blog at consultingbyrpm.com.
His books are The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and The New Deal, both of which are excellent.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I'm doing great.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
So tell me something.
My whole life, and I'm only about 37.
I like to say only.
I'm feeling a little older.
I'm only about 37, and maybe this is partly just a Texas thing.
I know in the 1980s it had a lot to do with what they called the oil boom and all that, but I was a kid at the time.
I didn't know that much, but I've seen some booms and busts.
I remember in a whole giant part of northwest Austin, they had built all the roads and fire hydrants and even put in the group mailboxes and whatever and built entire subdivisions where there were no houses, and it stayed that way for 10 years.
And you know, I was just wondering, this boom and bust cycle, what causes it?
Well, I subscribe to what's called the Austrian theory of the business cycle that was primarily developed by Ludwig von Mises, and that says that, look, interest rates in a market economy, they have a function.
They do something, and it makes a difference whether interest rates are 7% or 2%.
And so in the conventional view, what do most economists say?
You hear this on CNBC or read the Wall Street Journal or whatever, is they say, oh, if the economy's running slow, well, then the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates and provide some stimulus that way, and let's hope that that works.
And the Austrians say that that's the wrong thing to do.
It's actually the government's manipulation of the interest rate that causes the boom bust cycle.
And specifically, when interest rates are artificially low, that gives this false sense of prosperity.
It causes a boom.
Businesses start hiring.
They expand.
Everything seems great for a while.
But just printing up money or electronically creating more money and sending it into the loan sector, pushing down interest rates, that doesn't actually make us wealthier.
And so it's a boom built on an illusion, and eventually it comes crashing down.
So the way to get rid of the business cycle is to stop tinkering with interest rates and just let prices do their job and tell the truth.
Yeah, but, you know, it seems like there's always so much change and innovation and good things that come out of the booms.
Maybe it has to be that way or else everything would just be stagnant all the time.
Well, I guess there's no way to know unless we didn't have booms and we could see.
But I mean, it doesn't, if you think about it, it's kind of odd that why should there be these recurring periods of the cycle where everybody makes all kinds of mistakes and they get over-optimistic and then there's just an awful economy for a few years later.
The point is, why couldn't you just have innovation in a more stable, sort of accumulative manner where good things keep happening?
And I mean, you don't often see something like that in the natural sciences, for example.
It's not that every few years all of a sudden the physicists all realize they've been wrong for a few years and then there's a depression and the state of science and then it bounces back.
It's constant innovation and discovery and things typically just get better and better.
And so that could happen too in the economy, so long as the foundation were there and you let prices do their job.
Well, you know, when I went to junior college, basically community college, what I learned about it was, and I guess I learned this even in maybe junior high school and high school too, it came up in just social studies class from time to time about booms and busts because that's the history of the world, you know?
And the explanation was always, well, you know, yeah, that's what happens.
And I think this is what you're saying.
The reason we have the system we have is in the name of stopping this from happening because that's what happens.
But what you're saying is the cure is the cause.
Right.
And I think for your listeners in particular, I mean, you can see this in any other area where the government rolls up its sleeves and says, we're going to help, we're going to fix this.
You know, whether it's foreign policy protecting us from terrorism or whether it's domestically to cure poverty or to fix education or to make people healthier, whatever area the government touches, not only is it that the specific thing it's doing today is counterproductive, but then when you sit back and look at history, you realize the very problem that you're looking at has been exacerbated by previous government attempts to so-called fix things.
And so it shouldn't shock us that the same is true when it comes to the business cycle, that far from being a sort of counter cyclical force to lean against the wind and fix what the rascally wildcat free market would do on its own, it's actually the politicians and then their intervention in money and banking that causes or exacerbates the business cycle.
All right.
Well, now, so let's get back to the mechanics of how this is supposed to work a little bit.
The cluster of errors and all that seems like, you know, the basic premise, OK, they hold interest rates too low for too long.
So that makes it seem like money is artificially cheap when the price level on the market would actually be higher to borrow some money.
So people end up overinvesting, something like that.
But well, how come entrepreneurs and businessmen, especially the big businessmen, the big bankers and all them, how come they can't all just see this coming and adjust at all?
You know, Greenspan's got the rate too low for a while now.
So we've got to say for a rainy day because we know that Bob's right and the bust is coming.
Well, I think that there is that element involved as well.
And so you just get in this game of chicken where the Fed has to, quote, stimulate even harder to get the same result compared to what it would have had to do decades ago before people started really analyzing this pattern and getting it.
But I mean, think about it.
So think about like with the price of crude oil, for example, if if the Fed came in and just started buying certain options in order to suppress the price of crude oil and get it to go down to $50 a barrel and people really could go into the market and get oil at that price, you couldn't expect everyone to say, now, now, guys, come on, let's just pretend the price really is whatever, you know, $95 a barrel and just buy it if that were the real price.
You couldn't expect people to do that because people would cheat.
Somebody would say, well, I don't know.
I really can't right now go get it for 50.
So I'm going to go ahead and do that and move to the head of the line.
And then also on top of that, you don't know what the actual real price should be.
So even if we see that Bernanke is pumping in $85 billion a month and so we know interest rates are lower than they otherwise would have been, we don't know exactly what the level should have been.
I mean, in other words, if you don't actually need the market price to know what it should be, well, then the market price serves no purpose.
But the point is, people do rely on actual market prices to help adjust their behavior.
And so if the price is wrong at best, then the signal is noisier than it otherwise would be.
For all those reasons, that if interest rates really are basically 0% and the big banks and whoever has access to the Fed, they are able to borrow with that.
And they might know it's a bubble, but they're going to say, well, so what?
I can still get in and hopefully I'll get out before the thing blows up.
Hmm.
Well, you know, 100 years ago when they passed this thing, they pointed at all these panics that happened before they passed it and said, this is why we got to pass it, Bob.
So it can have been their fault for the panic of 19 this and that before they ever existed.
Right.
So that's a good point.
So one thing is, even on their own terms, if the point of establishing the Fed, which they say happened in the end of 1913, was to provide stability to the business or to the economy, macro economy, and to smooth out the business cycle, well, then clearly they failed.
Because by anyone's reckoning, the two worst crises in U.S. history and world history happened after the Fed was formed.
Right.
So they clearly have not done their jobs to preventing catastrophic business collapses and so on.
But then beyond that, more accurately, what the Austrian theory of the business cycle says is that it's artificially low interest rates caused by credit expansion.
So the existence of a central bank systematically makes that more severe than it would be if you didn't have a central bank.
But the actual culprit is to have interest rates that are below the market level.
And so that can happen when governments give privileges to commercial banks, even if there is no central bank there.
Right.
In other words, as long as the government says that they can create it out of nothing, then they can loan it out at really low rates, because who cares?
They're making a thousand percent interest anyway.
Right.
So a lot of it here, you get into fine distinction.
So some Austrian economists, you know, they don't all come down exactly on the same page on this issue.
But you're right.
The problem here is what's called fractional reserve banking, where the bankers are allowed to effectively, as you say, create money out of thin air, the metaphor we use, that in the very act of giving a loan to somebody, the banks create that money effectively.
And so from their accounting point of view, the bank's assets and liabilities go up simultaneously, which other businesses don't have the power to do that legally.
And so different Austrians come down as to whether that's a fine thing and just you have to have market discipline or whether it should be illegal.
But the point is, governments historically have not made banks satisfied their legal contracts.
In other words, when there's been a panic, typically governments have relieved banks of their contractual obligations and they're able to just shut their doors and say, well, we can't pay you right now.
Come back later and maybe we will.
And so it's that sort of thing that allows banks to get away with this and cause this boom-bust cycle.
All right.
Now, they've been creating a lot of money since the collapse of 08, and it doesn't seem like an artificial boom right now.
It seems like a jobless recovery.
People blowing their brains out.
So where's the big bubble?
We want to ride a fake bubble for a while as long as they're inflating.
Where's our end of this thing?
Yeah.
So that's a great question.
I have a couple of responses.
So first, let me inject some humility that I did think we were going to see more price inflation by this point than we have.
And so I do want to admit that.
But there's a couple of things going on.
So one is, I think there is a bubble.
I think it's in the dollar and in the U.S. Treasury market in particular.
So in other words, I think interest rates would be a lot higher on federal government debt if you didn't have the Fed sitting in the wings gobbling up so much of it all the time that they're artificially propping up the Treasuries, which is the same thing as keeping their yields lower.
And also the dollar, I think people, it has this unwarranted stability in the international markets in that I think people will eventually come to realize that, yeah, this is crazy.
They've just been printing money.
That's their only strategy.
And the dollar will crash at some point.
And so I think looking back, people will say right now we were in a huge bubble and people didn't realize it, or not many people realized it.
But the other thing too is, what's your baseline?
If they had done nothing in 2008 and just let nature take its course, prices would have fallen dramatically.
You know, CPI could have fallen 15, 20 percent.
And so the fact that it has steadily risen year after year from that point actually does mean that they inflated and made prices a lot higher than they otherwise would have been.
It's just that the baseline would have fallen through the floor.
So that's sort of like, well, you know, I'm the world's worst amateur at this, but if I understand it right, that's sort of like the history of the early and mid-20s before the real big boom in the stock market that they engineered from about 27 through 29 to help the British.
But before that, they were, you know, after the last collapse from 2021, they were inflating and inflating and inflating, but there was so much new prosperity, real wealth being built and expansion and productivity and all that across the country where prices would have been rapidly falling.
They were staying right about the same.
And so the distortion was the same, but it seemed like stability when really things should have been a little bit unstable due to all the rapid advancements in different areas of the economy.
Yeah, that's a great point, and you're right to draw that analogy.
So what happened in the 1920s, so coming out of World War I, the U.S. had a huge, the government had a huge debt, tax levels were very high, and so under Calvin Coolidge in particular, the government started acting what nowadays we would call extremely fiscally conservative.
They were cutting marginal income tax rates, and the Coolidge administration just ran a string of budget surpluses.
And so, and then you had all sorts of, like you say, innovations during the 1920s.
It was the Roaring Twenties.
People were getting electricity, you know, car production was up, people, more people getting radios and things like that.
So it was really a huge innovation, a very prosperous decade by many, under many criteria.
And you're right.
What would have happened had the money supply been fairly stable, this huge increase in the output of real production would have meant prices would have been falling, that even if people at their jobs got the same paycheck year after year, measured in dollars, they would be able to buy a lot more at the store.
But actually, as you said, CPI was fairly stable over this period, and that's why guys like Irving Fisher, the Chicago School economist, he made those what are now in retrospect outrageously bad predictions, like almost a few weeks before the huge stock market crash in 29 where he was saying, everything's rosy, I see, you know, stock prices have reached a permanent plateau and so forth.
And partly why he, it wasn't just he was throwing the darts at a board and was just wrong, he had a model where he thought as long as the Fed kept consumer prices stable, that that's all you could ask for in terms of ensuring stability.
Whereas it was Austrian economists who were saying, you know, in real time, before the crash happened, they weren't just ex post explaining what happened, they were warning that no, this stability of consumer prices is masking the underlying inflation of money and credit.
And this is distorting the capital structure in the economy, and a crash is going to come at some point, because this is unsustainable.
And that's where we're at right now.
Right.
So I think people should not, like guys like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong are running around saying, aha, we haven't had consumer prices blow up over the last few years.
So clearly the Fed hasn't done any harm.
In their mind, the Fed needs to do more.
Because for them, and it's not just for Keynesians, it's also for a lot of supply side economists too, they think that the only downside to the Fed printing a bunch of money is that all you'll see prices rise really quickly at the grocery store.
So don't get me wrong, that is a bad thing, but the Austrian point is that if the new money's coming in through the loan market, through the credit channels, which it normally does in the way our system works, then beyond all those other problems of just debasing the dollar, it screws up investment.
Investment goes into the wrong lines, and over time, with the wrong interest rates in place, the capital structure becomes unsustainable.
Again, interest rates do something, they serve a purpose, and so if interest rates are basically zero for several years, when they should have been 3 or 4 percent or whatever, that's going to have an impact.
It's not just, oh, it could be whatever they need to be.
But maybe you were right, not wrong, but they were listening to you, and listening to Ron Paul, and Ron Paul was screaming in Ben Bernanke's ear, this is like a little Ron Paul on Ben Bernanke's shoulder, you're gonna cause a terrible inflation, stop it!
And so he came up with this brilliant scheme, what he would do is he would listen to you and Ron, not in Abolish His Office and Resign or anything, but what he would do is he would pay the banks to keep the money on the shelf at the Fed.
So he would give them enough of our money that they would all be made whole for all the bad bets they made, no matter how many trillions of dollars worth of bad bets they made.
But, like you just said, well, if the money is coming out into the market through the loan system and whatever, it's a problem, but it's not, right?
The only people getting it are the banks, and the money's just sitting there, or am I wrong about that, and actually loans are being made to heavy industry and that kind of thing right now?
Okay, well, you're certainly right that the vast bulk of the money that Bernanke has, and of course we say Bernanke, we mean the Fed, has pumped in, is not in turn being used as the basis for further loans by commercial banks to their customers.
So that's certainly true, and there's lots of reasons for that.
Some is just that I think that the loan prospects are bad and the commercial bankers are skittish and say, well, no, we're afraid of making these kind of loans, but also, as you say, the Fed is literally paying bankers not to make new loans.
And so that's another factor on top of all this that just makes it so ridiculous that they sold all this stuff as a way to resuscitate the lending to Main Street to make sure that pipeline of small businesses stays intact, which is crazy, as they were saying that they were setting up a plan to literally pay the banks to not make new loans.
Although, really, it would have been worse if they had gone ahead and inflated Main Street too, right?
Well, yeah.
In a sense, given what they were doing, it probably, well, it depends what you mean by worse or not, because this just allowed them to do it longer, and so now when the problem comes to a head, it's going to be that much worse.
So I'm not sure, but I understand what you're asking, that yeah, the problem of what they were doing and inflating all that, putting all that money in, would have been more apparent right away had those banks in turn just gone out and lent that money and used it as the basis of making loans to their customers, because then you would have seen prices at the grocery store rise rapidly and so on.
So yeah, they're trying to do what they can.
They deal with one problem, and then that has unintended consequences over here, so they patch that up and they're just running around like a doctor who's just injecting their patient with all sorts of different drugs and trying to deal with all the different side effects, and eventually they're going to run out of options.
So one thing that I think is probably puzzling to a lot of people is that Ben Bernanke and Greenspan before him, I mean I know that Bill Clinton reappointed him or whatever, but Greenspan was originally chosen by the Republicans, right?
And Ben Bernanke's a Republican, and yet you're talking about these, maybe it's not right to call them Reaganites.
I think they're Reaganites, Chicago school guys, but you're talking about them like they're a bunch of stinking liberal Democrats, like this new chairman of the Fed that's coming in to replace Ben Bernanke, when really, the right is the total opposite of the left, Bob.
Yeah, it's funny, when it comes to monetary policy and the actions of Federal Reserve officials in particular, the standard left-right paradigm, not that the paradigm holds up in other areas very well either, but here it really does break down that whether it's people in the Obama administration or people in the Bush administration, everybody is bailing out Wall Street.
You know, it's not that either one of them was really hostile to the big banks or whatever, they like to talk to the public and make it look like they are really cracking down, when at the same time they're shoveling billions of dollars into their pockets.
And so, and the same thing too, that the allegedly free market Chicago school approach, hey, hands off, let the market do everything, they also think that, oh no, the one place where you can't let the market do something is in the production of money, that's where you need to have a centrally planned system where the government has a monopoly on the issuance of currency and you have to have central planners setting interest rates.
So I mean, not that it makes any sense in terms of the standard rhetoric, but that's the way it plays out in U.S. politics.
Well, and so now let me ask you this, because, well, I think that's such an important point, just to harp on it a little bit more, that people know that, oh yeah, there's a big old fight between the Democrats and the Republicans, the Keynesians and the Chicago school about this stuff.
But meanwhile, the Austrian school is over here having, you know, completely on the outside of that argument and completely on the outside of power and getting it right.
And I think that's kind of a wake up call for people who sort of, you know, when they're going from a, you know, especially talk radio people, when they're going from listening to Rush Limbaugh and thinking the Republicans are somehow the cure for the Democrats or something like that, that's how they start realizing, like, wait a minute, the Republicans' economics are just as statist and socialist and inflationary and really look and feel exactly the same as what liberals think they ought to be doing, too.
You know, I've heard a lot of conservatives react that way, that, you know, when it comes down to, well, not everything, but something very important like central banking and how it works and inflation and counter-cyclical this and that and whatever, all this business cycle stuff, when they realize that the Republicans and the Republican economists are just as bad as the liberals on this stuff, I think it really helps bring them our way, you know, probably not when they hear me talk about it.
Yeah, and if I could just elaborate on that, like, a classic example would be TARP, where a lot of so-called progressives were okay with that, whereas it was the Libertarian Austrian School economists who were saying from the beginning, even in the midst of the crisis, when everyone was telling us the world was falling apart, who were saying, no, you can't do that, you can't have the government assume ownership of banks, and so it's odd that you had so-called liberal progressives doing that who were okay with bailing out all these evil fat cats on Wall Street, but at the same time, too, since it was a Republican office at the time, you had all of these right-wingers, these commentators, who were okay with it as well.
And but, you know, if some dictator in South America had nationalized banks during a crisis like that, the people of the Wall Street Journal and on CNBC would have no problem denouncing the guy as a socialist and, you know, say we should probably start bombing this country.
But since it was the Bush administration that did it, it was, well, you know, we have to do this, we can't just let markets collapse.
So it was, once again, the Austrian school libertarian economists, you can say they're crazy and they have extreme views, but at least they actually are consistent with their own rhetoric, whereas the progressives and so-called fiscal conservatives, when it was their people in power, they conveniently do things that violate what they say they believe in.
Yeah.
And what's so crazy about anything that the Austrians have been saying this whole time?
I mean, maybe we shouldn't invade the Middle East and all that?
I don't know.
I thought that was pretty reasonable.
And really, that's my last question, too, is, you know, there's this book, The Great Deformation, and I'm under the impression that the author talks, it's making a big splash around.
I'm under the impression that the author covers the empire quite a bit in there.
I haven't had a chance to read it, but I do know about the deformation of which he speaks, at least the militarist part of it.
And, you know, I talked with Michael Swanson, the author of The War State, and we did like a four-part interview about his new book.
And it's all about the rise of the military industrial complex and the military economy.
And it's been almost 70 years.
And so I think what I want to ask you is, what if, you know, all of a sudden, Ron Paul became president after all, something, go back in time or another dimension or something, and all the militarism is just abolished?
The Pentagon and the national security state and the homeland security state, all of y'all got to go get real jobs.
That's it.
As Ron Paul once told the Washington Post, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
So my question is, after 70 years of building up a gigantic world empire and military state, how bad of a deformation is it?
And how bad would it hurt, all other things being equal, how bad would it hurt to make a severe adjustment like that, right?
Like I Dream of Jeannie style.
That's it.
It's just gone.
And all those people got to do something else for a living now.
What do you think would happen?
Well, it would, on paper, there would be a bad recession, you know, in terms of the conventional statistics, because the way they measure GDP, a dollar of government spending is automatically counted as a dollar of output.
And so if the military budget gets slashed by whatever, 400 billion a year or whatever number they pick, then automatically that's going to be a drop.
But those resources would then now be available for use in the private sector.
So rather than going into building bombs and things that aren't directly useful to anybody, they would go into making TVs and cars and microwaves and things like that that people do directly value.
So I think the analogy would be in 1946, where there was a huge rollback in the size of the U.S. federal government as World War II had ended.
And on paper, there was a recession, but people don't think of the late 40s as a return of the Depression.
And a lot of Keynesian economists warned, as the war was winding down, that, you know, we better switch over and start spending on social programs or domestic programs, because what got us out of the Depression was the wartime spending.
And now, as we have peace looming, we're going to go right back to the Depression if we just cut the budget foolishly.
But they were wrong.
That didn't happen.
The soldiers coming home were able to get reabsorbed back into the economy and productive lines and so forth.
So the economy can be resilient and the market works, but you have to let it work.
You can't have price control, you can't have the government trying to steer resources where the politicians think best.
If you just, if the government stopped spending money and let things go to where the market directed them, you'd get a pretty fast recovery.
Well, now, but wasn't that just another boom at that point?
Another fake boom?
I mean, in 1946, weren't they just inflating?
Well, yeah, I mean, they were.
There's two different things.
There's one thing about the government spending money that it gets through taxing and borrowing.
And then, so if it switches over, there's a adjustment period, but that doesn't cause the whole private sector to be artificially maladjusted the way artificially low interest rates are.
So it's true that during wartime you have both things going on at the same time, that the government's spending a bunch of money and typically the central bank has helped financing it by screwing with interest rates.
So the problem with monetary distortion is that even private sector channels get messed up because the interest rate is wrong.
Right.
All right.
Well, and with that, we got to stop because we're all out of time.
But thanks very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Bob.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right.
That is a great, Bob Murphy.
He's the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism and the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.
They're both really, really good.
I highly suggest you read them and give them to your friends and family for Christmas.
He writes at FreeAdviceConsultingByRPM.com.
We'll be right back.
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