Booms and Busts

The headlines of the business pages have been trumpeting the arrival of recovery now for months. How do the experts decide when recession has turned to recovery? By looking at the data, which come in packages labeled in various ways: the GDP, the leading indicators, the unemployment rate, industrial production, housing starts, commercial borrowings, office vacancy rates, and a host of others. If these tend in the negative direction, we are said to be entering a recession. If they move in a positive direction, it is said that we are recovering.

What may be the more important factor in manufacturing future Enrons is the role of government in fostering the boom-bust cycle. Enron, then, is just one casualty of many--albeit the largest so far--of massive credit expansion and of manipulation of interest rates by the central bank.

While it is perfectly clear that an individual capitalist or speculator may make losses on the stock exchange, it is very doubtful whether "society" can make such losses. The question with which we are concerned here is whether an individual's losses from domestic stock exchange transactions represent a loss to the society to which that individual belongs.

The policies the Fed cooked up during the mid-1990s that brought on the unsustainable boom (mistakenly called the "New Economy") are also the policies that Greenspan employed in the last year, ostensibly to give us a "soft landing."  The government is now engaged in a number of foolish regulatory ventures that certainly will make economic life more difficult as we seek to climb out of this latest downturn.

Opponents of the market say we have to stop another Enron from happening again. Yet all the government's watchdog agencies completely missed Enron. The system of cronyism in Washington, D.C., made the debacle possible and made it harder for the public to find out what was going on. Existing laws will put Enron executives behind bars, but they won't touch any of Enron's accomplices in Washington.

It is time for Argentines to cash in their experience with government power, government law, government regulation, government money, and government care. They attended a hard school and paid high tuition. It taught all who cared to learn that, after every conceivable political device has been tried and found wanting, there remains freedom.

The prolonged Japanese economic slump is not due to price deflation but is the product of aggressive fiscal and monetary policies aimed at arresting the general fall in prices of goods and services. Contrary to the popular view, as a rule, price deflation is always good news for the economy. Thus, when prices are falling in response to the expansion of real wealth, this means that people's living standards are rising.

While assorted financial journalists, market pundits, policy wonks, Fed governors and even mainstream macroeconomists have been thrown into a panic by the slight whiff of price deflation they detected in the last few months in the U.S. economy, they have almost completely ignored the wrenching confiscatory deflation that is now going on in Argentina

As the history of America's Great Depression is one long regret of political follies and blunders that aggravated the suffering, so is the story of the Japanese recession from the 1990s to the present.  The Japanese government tried to spend its way out of the recession, but instead merely prolonged it and created a mountain of debt.

Economists are fond of writing open letters to politicians in attempts to lead them down "proper" policy paths. In 1930, a thousand economists signed an open letter to President Herbert Hoover asking him not to sign the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Hoover signed it anyway, creating one more disastrous policy mistake that ultimately created the Great Depression.