Austrian_Econ_Deflation

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1. Introduction

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ILL THE

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a sustained period of inflation ordeflation, or perhaps hyperinflation? This is the subject of the great monetary debate of our day. It comprehends in its consequence nothing less than thefate of the world’s most important markets; from the international currency market to the US stock and bond markets to labor markets across the globe. The fate of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the viability of thesubsisting monetary order rest on the denouement of the monetary processbeing debated.In late 2007, in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the housing crash,the Federal Reserve began a series of interventions in the US economy,ultimately expanding its balance sheet to approximately 2 trillion dollarsunder a policy known as “quantitative easing”. Since the inception of theFed’s policy of quantitative easing, the inflation versus deflation debate hasraged in the blogosphere, the economics profession and in the halls of power.Much of the analysis devoted to the inflation-deflation debate in theeconomics profession is neoclassical in nature, focusing on economicaggregates such as employment, GDP, CPI and their ostensible correlations. This method of economic analysis is fundamentally flawed. It is not merely that the aggregates themselves are misleading and often manipulated, asKevin Phillips points out in his exposition of “forty years of economic and

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Vijay Boyapati ( vijayb@gmail.com ) is a former Google engineer pursuing anindependent study in Austrian Economics.C

ITE THIS ARTICLE AS

: Vijay Boyapati, “Why Credit Deflation Is More Likely than Mass Inflation: An Austrian Overview of the Inflation Versus DeflationDebate,”

Libertarian Papers

2, 43 (2010). O

NLINE AT

:libertarianpapers.org . T

HIS ARTICLE IS

subject to

a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License( creativecommons.org/licenses ).

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but, more significantly, that neoclassical economicsfails to capture the

causal

factors that determine the course of economicevents. The Austrian school of economics provides an alternate means of understanding economic phenomena based on laws of economic causality derived from the actions and motivations of individuals. As Dolan writes:

[Austrian economics] insists on laying bare the true causalrelationships at work in the social world and is not content to simply establish empirical regularities among dubious statistical aggregates.

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The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the inflation-deflation debate from an “Austrian” perspective and to provide anexplanation for why, contrary to the predictions of many Austrianeconomists, credit deflation is more likely than mass inflation. The articlebegins by defining the Austrian usage of the terms inflation and deflation toavoid confusion with their more common and imprecise usage. This isfollowed by a description of fractional reserve banking and its inflationary effect on the supply of money. A short history of banking in the UnitedStates is then provided to give the context in which fractional reserve banking has been employed and the development of the banking system into itscontemporary form. The money multiplier theory of credit expansion, whichaims at describing how inflation is directed by the Federal Reserve in ourcurrent banking system, is described and then criticized for being an incorrectcausal theory of current commercial banking lending practice. A review of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is presented to shed light on the correcttheory of commercial bank lending and the implications this theory has forthe inflation versus deflation debate. The review is followed by an analysis of Quantitative Easing and whether the Federal Reserve’s policy to combat thebust phase of the business cycle will produce mass inflation. The articleconcludes with an analysis of the politics of deflation and provides a classtheory which suggests that the Federal Reserve is more likely to pursue apolicy of “controlled deflation” than one of mass inflation or hyperinflation.

2. Inflation and Deflation Defined

Among the difficulties plaguing a resolution to the inflation-deflationdebate is a widespread confusion regarding what inflation and deflation

1

Phillips, K. “Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know .”Harper’s Magazine, May 2008.

2

Dolan, E.G.

Austrian Economics as Extraordinary Science

. In

The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, Collected Essays

, 1976.

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3actually are. In the popular media and much of the economics profession,“inflation” is taken to mean an overall increase in prices, typically asmeasured by a price aggregate such as CPI

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. This unfortunate definition hidesthe causal relation that produces general increases in prices—namely anincrease in the supply of money within an economy. The great Austrianeconomist Ludwig von Mises bemoaned the “semantic revolution” thatswept away the erstwhile usage of the term “inflation” in the field of economics.

What many people today call inflation or deflation is no longer thegreat increase or decrease in the supply of money, but its inexorableconsequences, the general tendency toward a rise or a fall incommodity prices and wage rates. This innovation is by no meansharmless. It plays an important role in fomenting the populartendencies toward inflationism.

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Mises’s point was more than just a definitional quibble; he insisted onshifting the focus from prices

per se

to the causal effects that money has as itenters and leaves an economy. In contrast to monetarists, such as MiltonFriedman, who relied on the spurious quantity theory of money

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, Mises notedthat money is

not

“neutral” and that as new money enters an economy itdisrupts the prices of some goods before others, thereby altering thestructure of production

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. To understand the specific mechanism by whichmoney enters a modern economy, and the implications this mechanism hasfor the inflation-deflation debate, we must understand Fractional ReserveBanking

3. Fractional Reserve Banking

Fractional Reserve Banking is a practice where banks keep only afraction of the deposits they receive on reserve to satisfy potential customer withdrawals. The fraction of each deposit that must be kept on reserve iscalled the “reserve requirement”, while the rest may be lent to borrowers inthe economy.

3

Horwitz, S. “Deflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly .”

The Freeman

60,Issue 1, January/February 2010.

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Mises, L.

Human Action

. Scholar’s edition p. 420.

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Friedman, M.

The Optimum Quanity of Money

. Transaction Publishers, fourthprinting, 2009. Cf. pp. 4