22. The "Trade Cycle"

0:00Chapter 22. The Trade Cycle.

0:10A sudden collapse of the marginal efficiency of capital? Keynes begins his Chapter 22, Notes on the Trade Cycle, by telling us that if his theory of what determines the volume of employment is right, It must be capable of explaining the phenomena of the trade cycle. Though this chapter professes to be merely an application of the theories hitherto expounded, it actually adds many new errors. I doubt whether many avowed Keynesians have ever really worked through the general theory, But most of them have probably read this chapter, which is one of the least technical in the book, or at least popularizations of it.

1:01It contains the essence of those practical recommendations that have done so much harm. The essential character of the trade cycle, Keynes begins by telling us, and especially the regularity of time sequence and of duration, which justifies us in calling it a cycle, is mainly due to the way in which the marginal efficiency of capital fluctuates. The trade cycle is best regarded, I think, as being occasioned by a cyclical change in the marginal efficiency of capital. Page 313 Now, as we have already pointed out, the marginal efficiency of capital, like most of the key Key Keynesian terms, is vague, and is used by Keynes in several different senses.

1:52At one time it seems to mean the actual present yield of capital assets, at another time the expected future yield of specific capital assets, and at still another time it seems seems to mean merely the outlook for business profits, regardless of the specific return to a specific capital asset. If we give the marginal efficiency of capital this broad meaning, it does not make much sense whether we say that changes in the marginal efficiency of capital cause the trade cycle, However, that changes in the trade cycle cause changes in the marginal efficiency of capital, because in this broad sense, changes in the marginal efficiency of capital and changes in the business outlook turn out to mean pretty much the same thing.

2:47If, however, Keynes's proposition were that trade cycle movements are caused, initiated and led by independent changes in the specific returns to specific capital assets, it would be too implausible on its face to be worth disproving. Keynes's belief that there is some recognizable degree of regularity in the time sequence and duration of the upward and downward movements, page 314, of the business cycle is debatable. The closer the investigation, the less regular the duration that seems to emerge. The first problem is that of agreeing upon any specific way of measuring the length of business cycles.

3:37The possible indices or combinations thereof are infinite. Taking Koch production as one index, Burns and Mitchell found that, from 1914 to 1932, The length of the expansion phase of what they distinguished as five distinct cycles varied between fifteen and forty-four months, of the contraction phase between ten and thirty-seven months, and of the full cycle between twenty-six and fifty-seven months. These ranges would no doubt be greater if more cycles were studied. Moreover, the peak and trough months of these cycles do not correspond very closely if we shift to other indices, such as coal production, steel production, petroleum output, cotton stocks at mills, calves slaughtered under federal inspection, etc.

4:39Passing over these difficulties, what seems to be true is that business cycles are phenomena that occur typically over a period of a few years, rather than over a period measured in days or weeks on the one hand, or decades on the other. This is particularly because this is the amplitude and type of fluctuation we have arbitrarily decided to call the trade cycle or business cycle and partly because there is a certain viscosity in the economic system so that changes at any point normally take a certain time to make their effects felt more generally. There are exceptions even to this.

5:24A labor strike or an enemy bombing or a flood or a fire or an earthquake or even a holiday may bring business almost to a halt in a single day from a period of great activity, and activity may just as promptly be restored. But we ordinarily do not count such changes when we study business cycles. Keynes's belief in the regularity of duration of trade cycles, however, is an important part of the theory he puts forward to explain them. A more typical and often the predominant explanation of the crisis is, he declares, not primarily a rise in the rate of interest, but a sudden collapse in the marginal efficiency of capital.

6:15Page 315. Now, the truth or importance that we attach to this statement depends once more upon the interpretation we give to Keynes's ambiguous term, the marginal efficiency of capital. If it means merely the outlook for business profits, which in this context it does seem to mean, then it is true but obvious. For a collapse in the outlook for business profits is in turn merely another name for a collapse of confidence. A collapse in the state of confidence is of course an inherent part of the crisis. But this merely raises the question, what caused confidence to collapse?

7:00What caused the outlook for profits to turn sour? What brought on the sudden collapse in the marginal efficiency of capital? This is merely one more illustration of the confusions Keynes gets into through the ambiguity of his own terms. If the marginal efficiency of capital means the expected yield of capital assets, as Keynes frequently tells us it does, then it is an expectation, a psychological phenomenon, dependent on the general outlook for business profits as businessmen estimate that outlook correctly or incorrectly. If the marginal efficiency of capital means, as it seems on its face to mean, the present If it is not the physical productivity of capital assets, then clearly it is not this that collapses in the crisis, either as cause or consequence.

7:59If, finally, the marginal efficiency of capital means the present monetary value of the goods that capital instruments helps to produce, The collapse in that monetary value may cause a collapse in the marginal efficiency of capital, but the causation is not the other way round. In sum, Keynes's explanation of the crisis as a sudden collapse of the marginal efficiency of capital is either a useless truism or an obvious error, according to the interpretation we give the phrase, the marginal efficiency of capital. When Governments Control Investment It is significant that Keynes's explanation of the crisis exonerates a rise in the rate of interest as the chief culprit, in spite of his tendency elsewhere to make excessive interest rates and liquidity preference the main cause of unemployment.

9:00We have been accustomed in explaining the crisis, he writes, to lay stress on the rising tendency of the rate of interest under the influence of the increased demand for money both for trade and speculative purposes. At times this factor may certainly play an aggravating and occasionally perhaps an initiating part. Page 315 But when this happens, he neglects to point out, or perhaps does not understand, that it is precisely because the rate of interest had previously been kept too low, and credit had been freely extended to marginal and other dubious projects incapable of earning a realistic rate of interest or surviving, except under conditions of inflation.

9:51The high rate of interest then gets the blame for the collapse of the marginal or unsound projects that were launched only under the illusions created by the preceding inflationary low rate of interest. Insofar as Keynes presents any clear theory of the trade cycle whatever, it is the theory that the economy cannot be trusted to private hands, It is of the nature of organized investment markets under the influence of of purchasers, largely ignorant of what they are buying and of speculators who are more concerned with forecasting the next shift of market sentiment than with a reasonable estimate of the future yield of capital assets that, when disillusion falls upon an over-optimistic and over-bought market, it should fall with sudden and even catastrophic force.

11:09pages 315 through 316. It is not so easy to revive the marginal efficiency of capital, determined as it is, by the uncontrollable and disobedient psychology of the business world. It is the return of confidence to speak an ordinary language which is so insusceptible to control an economy of individualistic capitalism. Page 317 One incidental point brought out in this passage is that it extends the phrase the marginal efficiency of capital to the point where it means in ordinary language merely confidence. But what the passage reveals most of all in the words I have italicized is the essentially authoritarian nature of Keynes's thought.

12:03In free markets, purchasers are largely ignorant of what they are buying. The business world is uncontrollable and disobedient, like a naughty child. Obviously, in such a world, investors cannot be trusted to invest their own money, or entrepreneurs to make their own decisions. Keynes does not flinch from drawing the logical conclusion. I conclude that the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands. Page 320 Whoever controls investment controls the direction and nature of production, decides what is to be made and sold and what is not, what consumers are to be permitted to have and in what volume, and Keynes does not shrink from this corollary either, except for a certain lack of clarity and candor, but begins to talk lightly of supporting all sorts of policies for increasing the propensity to consume, page 325, and redistributing the wealth.

13:12In existing conditions where the volume of investment is unplanned and uncontrolled, subject to the vagaries of the marginal efficiency of capital as determined by the private judgment of individuals ignorant or speculative, the least he would support is, a socially controlled rate of investment, pages 324-325. All this implies, once more, not only that entrepreneurs, businessmen, investors and and speculators are ignorant, mercurial, and irresponsible, but that there exists a class of people, perhaps economists very much resembling Lord Keynes, who are completely informed, rational, balanced, wise, who have means of knowing at all times exactly how much investment is needed, and in exactly what amounts it should be allocated to exactly which industries and Projects, and that these managers are above corruption and above any interest in the outcome of the next election.

14:21Great Britain, unfortunately, decided to try the Keynesian remedy. The results are now known. I present herewith an analysis by Professor Eli Devon of the University of Manchester, which appeared in Lloyd's Bank Review of London, 4 July 1954. It is now generally acknowledged that there are no objective criteria by which the government can decide what is the right amount of investment in total, but it is still sometimes argued that it is possible by statistical analysis to decide on the distribution of investment. If the government in its control over investment merely wants to imitate market procedure and to select the right lines of investment that will pay best, then it might try to work out rates of return on the various projects submitted to it and use such rates as the criteria for selecting which to approve.

15:24Even on this basis, however, prospective rates of return could be calculated only with very

16:00The controlling authority tries to select on the basis of the public interest or of social priorities. It is extremely difficult to see how social priorities or social rates of return can be measured statistically. How does one compare statistically the social rate of return from building more houses with or the social rate of return from more investment on road building and repair, or compare the social rate of return from additional investment in the coal industry with investment in engineering or textiles. Whether or not it is possible to measure social rates of return statistically, there is in any case little evidence that such calculation ever played an important rule in the deliberations of the Capital Issues Committee and the Investments Program Committee.

16:59Little has been published about the proceedings of these two important committees and the criteria which they used in arriving at their decisions, but I suspect that the allocation of investment is much better thought of as the result of political and administrative struggles and pressures than as a rational choice determined by the statistical measurement of Rates of Social Return. Each industry or line of investment is the administrative responsibility of some government department, and in the argument about the investment program, each department would fight for the interests for which it was responsible. Every argument would, of course, be used to demonstrate that the investment being sponsored is vital to the economy because it would relieve a potential bottleneck, result in export expansion or dollar saving.

17:55The strength of this case, the efficiency with which it is presented, the power and energy of the minister in charge, public pressure and generally accepted but vaguely expressed ideas of what is essential and inessential, would all go to determine how each particular The Request for Inclusion in the Investment Program was treated. No doubt argument before these committees would be dressed up in statistics, since every official knows that a statistical case always makes an impression, and, if all those concerned play the statistical game correctly, especially if they are not sure that they are playing a game, then an apparent error of deciding the issues rationally in terms of quantitative Estimates of the results of alternative lines of action may easily be maintained.

18:50The Life of Durable Assets So much for one of the main economic policies Keynes advocated, now let us return to some of the technical economic analysis upon which his astonishing conclusion was based. Keynes, as we have seen, believed in regularity in the duration of the business cycle. Specifically, he believed that the duration of the downward movement had an order of magnitude which is not fortuitous, but which shows some regularity of habit between, let us say, three and five years. Page 317. Characteristically, he presents no statistical evidence of this, nor does he refer to any and a source where the statistical evidence can be found.

19:41The extreme difficulty even of measuring business cycle durations is brought out by Burns and Mitchell in Measuring Business Cycles. Table 56 on page 221 of that volume shows that the contraction phase of 15 American One cycle, as measured by monthly pig-iron production between 1879 and 1933, ranged from five months to 44 months, as compared with Keynes's three to five years. Jeffrey H. Moore, continuing the statistical studies of the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds that the average duration of the downward movement of the 24 cycles in the period from 1854 to 1954 was just 20 months.

20:33But this statistical average conceals a wide range of duration. The contraction beginning in August 1918 lasted only 7 months. That beginning in October 1873 lasted 65 months. In spite of Keynes's impression of regularity, here is a difference in duration of almost Just ten times as much in one case as in another. Had Keynes been discussing the average duration of the whole cycle, instead of merely the downward phase, his guess would have come near the mark. The expansion and contraction phase together of the twenty-four cycles add up to just fifty months or slightly over four years, but this average again conceals wide differences, for Whereas the average expansion phase of the 24 cycles lasted 30 months, the range was from as low as 10 months to as long as 80 months.

21:35Now Keynes tries to explain his assumed regularity by the influences which govern the recovery of the marginal efficiency of capital, page 317. But here, he shifts once more from the wider interpretation of that phrase as equivalent merely to the state of confidence to the narrow interpretation of the specific productivity of specific capital assets. He concludes that the duration of the slump has a definite relationship to the length of of Life of Durable Assets, page 318, and also to The Carrying Costs of Surplus Stocks, page 317.

22:21Here again, no statistical evidence is offered, and it may be questioned whether any is possible. There is no meaningful average length of life of durable assets, and no meaningful average period of getting rid of surplus stocks. Every capital instrument has a different economic life span, not necessarily coincident with its physical life span. Even durable assets of approximately the same life span were bought and installed at different times, and therefore need replacement at different times. The average life expectation of a human being is, say, 70 years, but under normal conditions Canes approximately the same percentage and numbers of men and women die and are replaced each year at a fairly even rate.

23:15They do not die all at once and get replaced each 70th year. Canes has not only got his elementary arithmetic mixed up, but has reversed economic cause and effect. The amount of new and durable assets or current inventories purchased depends on the state of Expectations, the state of confidence rather than the other way round. Whether a manufacturer keeps his old equipment for another year or two or buys new equipment depends less upon the physical age of his equipment than upon his expectations regarding the future of sales, costs and prices. Whether people keep their old automobiles or buy new ones depends more upon their own on Present Income or Estimate of Future Income than upon the precise age of their old car.

24:11There is no point at which people are compelled to buy new cars or at which a manufacturer is compelled to buy new equipment. This depends chiefly upon his estimate of future conditions in his business. The same reasoning applies even more to inventories. There is no meaningful average time for getting rid of them. Nothing is gained by averaging the time it takes a department store to get rid of an excess inventory of bedsheets with the time it takes a Cadillac dealer to get rid of an excess stock of cars. And in any case, each specific time period depends more upon the purchasing power and and State of Expectations of Buyers and upon the willingness of sellers to cut prices for clearance, than upon the need of buyers to replace their own stocks.

25:08In brief, while the length of life of durable assets perhaps has some relationship to the duration of a slump, it is only one of many factors, and seldom the most important. Nor does there appear to be any statistical way of determining its exact relationship or relative importance. A Policy of Perpetual Inflation Keynes's theory of the crisis, like his theory of so many other things, consists merely in a contramundum attitude, a denial of nearly every doctrine that is orthodox or established. If one truth concerning economic crises has been established in recent years, it is that they are typically brought on by cheap money, i.e. low interest rate policies, that encourage excessive borrowing, excessive credit expansion, imprudent speculation, and all the distortions and instabilities in the economy that these finally bring about.

26:17It follows that such crises can be prevented by keeping money sufficiently tight, so that credit expansion, reckless speculation and harebrained ventures are not encouraged in the first place. It follows also that when such symptoms of an inflationary boom appear, a timely increase in money rates can prevent them from running too far and dampen down the boom before it has run to excessive lengths. All this, of course, Keynes rejects. He treats the whole thing as a strange and perverse theory. It may appear extraordinary that a school of thought should exist which finds the solution for the trade cycle in checking the boom in its early stages by a higher rate of interest.

27:05Page 326. Keynes professes to be totally incapable of understanding the reasoning of this school The only line of argument along with any justification for this policy can be discovered is that put forward by Mr. D. H. Robertson, who assumes in effect that full employment is an impracticable ideal and that the best that we can hope for is a level of employment much more stable then at present and averaging perhaps a little higher, pages 326 through 327. Now whether full employment as conceived by the Keynesians is a practicable or even a definable ideal is a question we shall later examine, and whether or not Keynes correctly states Robertson's argument is a question with which we are here not concerned.

28:05We need merely point out that this is not the real line of argument for checking the boom in its early stages by a higher rate of interest. The real objection to keeping rates of interest too low too long is that they encourage excessive borrowing, inflationary price and wage rises, speculative projects that cannot pay their way, and illusions, instabilities and distortions throughout the economy that are bound to lead eventually to a crash. But Keynes professes to believe that those who are opposed to inflationary bubbles are opposed to full employment. The austere view, which would employ a high rate of interest to check at once any tendency in the level of employment to rise appreciably above the average of, say, the previous decade, is, however, more usually supported by arguments which have no foundation at all apart from from Confusion of Mind, p. 327-328. Now, I know of no one who advocates or ever advocated raising the rate of interest in order to lower the level of employment. If Keynes knew of

29:21such an economist, he should have quoted him. Economists have advocated raising the rate of interest in order to slow down or to halt or to prevent in the first place a a money and credit inflation, with the instabilities and final crisis to which such an inflation always leads. They want the rate of interest raised to a non-inflationary level so as not to be confronted with a crisis and heavy unemployment when the inflationary bubble bursts. Keynes's economics is the economics of wish-fulfillment, the economics of the land of cocaine, where Every problem can be solved by a rhetoric. Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest, but a lower rate of interest, for that may enable the so-called boom to last.

30:13The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump, but in abolishing slumps This sounds more like the wind-up speech of a political candidate at the final rally of a campaign than like the statement of a serious economist. Of course, the economic ideal is to keep maximum production and even full employment sensibly defined all the time. But Keynes proposes to do this, in effect, by a policy of perpetual inflation, of keeping the interest rate low by a constant expansion of the money and credit supply, for that is what a policy of perpetual cheap money means.

31:06But this would not bring maximum balanced production of the products that consumers most wanted, nor steady employment. It is a policy of boom and bust, with the method correctly described. And Keynes solves the trade cycle problem rhetorically by the simple device of never once mentioning in this chapter the level of wage rates. Never once does he ask what would happen if wage rates in this full employment boom started racing ahead of prices and wiping out profit margins. Never once does he say what he would do to stop this from happening. In the Keynesian system, the level of wage rates and their effect on employment is the great unmentionable.

31:52Keynes's theory of the trade cycle, including his theory of interest rate policy, is crowded with contradictions. The rate of interest, according to him, should be low in the depression, low in the boom, and low in the crisis. His remedy is to keep the boom going by encouraging overinvestment and malinvestment, and then, when the boom cracks, to keep it going by lowering the rate of interest still more to encourage still more overinvestment and malinvestment. He refused to recognize the rate of interest as a payment for anything real, whether the productivity or rental value of the capital assets that could be bought with the borrowed Funds, or the Payment for Generalized Time Usance.

32:42He failed to recognize that the rate of interest is a market phenomenon like any other. He was opposed to clapping on a high rate of interest, which would probably deter some useful investments, page 321. Forgetting that any market price for anything cuts off all the possible purchasers who are or unwilling or unable to pay that price, but if the total supply is sold, the commodity nonetheless goes into presumably its most productive uses. What confused Keynes was the belief that money was not anything real, but merely pieces of paper that could be turned out at will by the printing press. He was capable of writing, for example.

33:29For again, the evil is supposed to creep in if the increased investment has been promoted by a fall in the rate of interest engineered by an increase in the quantity of money. Yet there is no special virtue in the pre-existing rate of interest, and the new money is not forced on anyone. Page 328 Here Keynes clearly acknowledges that he favors artificially cheap money, even if it is brought What about by direct monetary inflation? As a matter of fact, this is the only way in which a cheap money policy can be made effective. Either the supply of money and or credit has to be increased to keep the interest rate down or the artificially low interest rate, if it is effective at all, will stimulate increased borrowing and a consequent increase in the money and credit supply.

34:25True, there is no special virtue in the pre-existing rate of interest, but there is at least a negative virtue in a rate of interest which is not inflationary. More Carts Before Horses There are some incidental fallacies in section 6 of chapter 22 that are worth noticing cheatfully The Theory of Money and Credit This is disingenuous, not only because Keynes Mises himself defined investment and savings in this special sense in his treatise on money, but because notwithstanding his formal definitions of saving and investment in section two of chapter six, according to which they must always be equal, the whole thesis of the general theory which makes saving sinful and investment virtuous depends constantly on the tacit assumption that one can, in fact, occur without the automatic occurrence of an equal amount of the other.

35:53The truth, as we saw in our Chapter 16, is that in a boom, monetary investment can outrun previous genuine saving, provided new money or bank credit has been meanwhile created, provided in other words, there is monetary inflation. Again, Keynes makes some astonishing statements on page 328. In the short period, supply price usually increases with increasing output, on account either of the physical fact of diminishing return or of the tendency of the cost unit to rise in terms of money when output increases. But in the typical Keynesian situation, after there has been unemployment and unused capacity, Unit costs of production fall when output increases because of the reduction of unit overhead costs.

36:50The rise of prices is merely a by-product of the increased output. But increased output, demand remaining unchanged, means a fall of prices. No one has a legitimate vested interest in being able to buy at prices which are only This is a reversal of cause and effect. When output is low, it is usually because prices are low, because demand is low. When statements about elementary economic relationships are so slovenly and confused, it is hardly surprising that we should encounter so much confusion and fallacy in the discussion of more complicated problems.

37:37Sunspots Before the Eyes The final section of Chapter 22 on the supposed connection of the size of crops with the business cycle is irrelevant to the main themes of the general theory and need detain us only as a further illustration of the slipshod and offhand theorizing that Keynes seems to think good enough for economics. Keynes takes off from the theory of W. Stanley Jevons, presented in 1878, that the trade cycle was primarily due to the fluctuations in the bounty of the harvest, and these in turn to a sunspot cycle. Keynes restates and defends the theory in this form.

38:26When an exceptionally large harvest is gathered in, an important addition is usually made to the quantity carried over into later years. The proceeds of this addition are added to the current incomes of the farmers and are treated by them as income, whereas the increased carryover involves no drain on the income expenditure of other sections of the community, but is financed out of savings. That is to say, the addition to the carryover is an addition to current investment. This conclusion is not invalidated even if prices fall sharply. Thus, it is natural that we should find the upward turning point to be marked by bountiful harvests and the downward turning point by deficient harvests.

39:14Pages 329 through 330 Now, such a theory, to be even superficially plausible, calls first of all for an inductive or statistical support. It would be necessary to show a direct correspondence or at least a positive correlation, simultaneous or lagging, between the size of crops and the degree of prosperity, at least an approximate correspondence between the total size of crops and the size of the carryover from them, at least an approximate correspondence between the total size of a crop and the volume of of Bank Loans for Carrying the Carryover, and 4, a correlation between the annual changes in the volume of agricultural loans for carrying crops and the annual changes in the total volume of bank loans for all purposes.

40:12Not one of these statistical comparisons is made by Keynes or even suggested. Yet, these statistics are all easily available, at least on a national scale, and some of The total monetary value of a crop, and there is no other practicable way of measuring the value except in monetary terms, bears no direct correspondence with the size of the crop. Thus, in the decade 1876 to 1885, to take figures from Jevons Owen period, period. The annual production of wheat in the United States averaged 448,337,000 bushels, and the annual farm value averaged $413,730,000. But in the decade 1886 through 1895, the annual The annual average production of wheat in the U.S. rose to 526,076,000 bushels, whereas the annual average farm value fell to $356,288,000.

41:27I could cite any number of similar falls in total farm value of crops when the crops themselves increased. Speaking broadly, in fact, the farmer's total income from crops does not vary either directly or inversely with the total size of the crops. The conditions of demand in any year and changes in the value of the monetary unit itself are just as important as changes in crop supply. Secondly, there is no necessary correspondence between the total size of a crop and the size The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit

42:34The American wheat crop rose to 1,184,749,000 bushels and the average size of the carryover fell to 281,603,000 bushels. In 1948, the new wheat crop was 1,294,911,000 bushels and the carryover 307,285,000 bushels. In 1949, the new crop fell to 1,098,415,000 bushels, but the carryover rose to 424,714,000 bushels.

43:23I need not go on to show the lack of correspondence between the total size of crops or carryovers with total bank loans year by year. After all, it is the business of the propounder of a theory to present at least the prima facie reasons that make it seem plausible before it becomes incumbent on anybody else to present an elaborate disprove. Keynes's deductive argument for his modernized version of the Javonian trade cycle theory is implausible even in the absence of statistical disprove. It is based on the tacit assumptions, never spelled out, that large crops lead to a corresponding automatic increase in the volume of bank loans, that this increase adds to the volume of monetary purchasing power, and also that, for some mysterious reason, none of this purchasing power is ever tied up by the holding of the crops themselves.

44:24In fact, Keynes contends that the reduction of redundant stocks to a normal level actually has a deflationary effect, page 331. It is, on the contrary, surplus stocks hanging over the market that have the deflationary effect. Prices of any commodity tend to rise as such surplus stocks are worked off. These are facts known to every informed speculator or businessman, but they were apparently never called to Lord Keynes's attention.