Skip to main content

Money Market Funds, Part I

 
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, pictured here, whose writings for the mainstream press have made him easily the most visible Keynesian of our day, issued a challenge to Austrian economists recently.

For those of you who may be new to such discussions, I'll explain the jargon. The Austrian school is the tradition of Hayek and Von Mises, [and for the record, Hayek too received a Nobel Prize], a school built on a subjective understanding of economc value, that is, the view that something has value because one or more individuals want it -- regardless of, say, how much labor or how impressive a technology was necessary to create it. Also integral to the "Austrian" school are distinctive views about economic calculation, the demand for hard or honest money, the bases of interest rates, and certain meta-theoretical ideas as to how economics ought to be studied.

What especially sticks in Krugman's craw, though, is the Austrian view of the business cycle. Austrians view central banking and money creation as the cause of the disease it affects to cure. Policies designed by central planners/bankers to stimulate an economy inevitably lead to a boom-and-bust cycle. They ceate bubbles which must inevitably burst. People later remember the good times at the start of the cycle and the planners pat themselves on the back for those fond memories, justifying themselves in cranking up the machinery again.

But the wild party is the cause of the hangover. Here's an amusing discussion of the point, in the form of a musical debate between Keynes and Hayek.

But let's get back to Krugman. He said in his blog recently that it is a "peculiarity" of the Austrian school that it treats "fractional reserve banking" as "an artificial creation of government." He then said that this is wrong as a matter of history, but it is "deep enough in the past for that wrongness to get missed." That led him to money market funds, which have gotten their start only in quite recent times yet which have repeated the magic of fractional reserve banking, creating bank-like checks-written-on-it money seemingly out of thin air.

Do Austrians want to shut down MMFs, Krugman asks? If so, that doesn't sound very laissez-faire of them. If not, and if they think the MMF industry exists because it serves a market demand: how do they explain the magic of it? The central Austrian idea of honest money seems to melt into air. [Okay, I just appropriated that last expression from Marx. It must be public domain by now.]

I admire and approve of Mark Thornton's recent answer to Krugman, and I'll discuss it tomorrow.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more