Спиноза, чистый Спиноза !
Спасибо за комплимент, но сегодняшняя экономика регулируется больше принципами Кейнса. Вот привожу некоторые заметки, которые я сделал несколько лет назад из его книг.
Enjoy! ;)
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES The economist as savior 1920 – 1937
By Robert Skidelsky
Note 1
‘Monetary instability undermines the virtue of the capitalist system, and ‘the existence. The prevalence of monetary disorders after the war constituted ‘an essential change in the social structure’.
Deflation, although its immediate evils are greater, was a derived phenomenon, brought about by the inevitable collapse of the inflationary boom. Stable money are is necessary for stable capitalism. Inflation was a device to enable community, for a time, to consume its capital unawares. Both wage-earners and businessmen can make windfall gains at the expense of investors (savers). However, as the cost of borrowing capital rises, the windfall profits disappear, and the struggle between wages and profits starts. If trade unions resist wage reductions, unemployment results. But this can be postponed. Businessmen for some time will accept lower than normal profits rather than close their business; and even when that moment comes, ‘the trade union could then claim government subsidies’. This is a stylized account of what was actually happening in the autumn of 1920.
Governments and municipalities should learn to stop borrowing, though he recognized that balancing the budget can become politically impossible if the system of subsidy has become too widespread. A central bank entirely independent of governments: it should not be required to ‘print notes to meet the requirements of the Treasury’.
Note 2
The duty of the banking system to offset the miscalculations of merchants by raising interest rates ‘at once’ when a boom is in progress and lowering them equally promptly when ‘merchants are depressed by falling prices. The actual conduct of British monetary policy since 1919, with bank rate not put up till April 1920, and then held at 7 per cent for a year, while the economy moved into even deeper depression. Real wages will have to come down, not just in Europe, but in England too. ‘The losses of American speculators have been a useful means of feeding Europe for two years past; but if would be imprudent to rely on this source of income as permanency.
Note 3
In his hopes for convergence he (Keynes) was undoubtedly influenced by his liking for Chicherin, an elegant homosexual of the old school, who came to Genoa as Soviet Russia’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Keynes invited him to dinner on 12 April.
Note 4
Tract on Monetary Reform
The confidence requirements of businessmen could not be met by a monetary standard whose value was subject to the views of ‘experts and politicians’. The cure for currency depreciation was ‘for the Government to stop inflation at home and for the people to export more goods and services and import less – that is, to work and save’. This was the standard view from New York, but not from Yale. The economist Irving Fisher wrote, in support of Keynes, that deflation always and inevitably ‘produces injustice to debtors, stockholders, enterprisers, and similar classes, and so causes depression of trade. No more insane policy for European reconstruction could be proposed than to restore greatly depreciated currencies to their original parties…’
Note 5
Inflation inflicts most injury by altering the distribution of wealth; deflation by retarding the production of wealth. In the first case, businessmen gain at the expense of savers and most workers whose incomes are fixed (in the short run), while their value falls. This is good for business, but undermines capitalism in the long run, by turning entrepreneurs into profiteers and drying up the supply of savings. Falling prices on the other hand injure output and employment by imposing windfall losses on businessmen, whose major costs of production (including wage cost) remain fixed in the short run, while the selling prices of their products fall.
In the deflationary case, ‘the fact of falling prices injures entrepreneurs; consequently the fear of falling prices causes them to protect themselves by curtailing their operations.
Note 6
Raising the value of the pound would have to be offset by a reduction in British costs; and that, experience showed, could be brought about only by a further rise in unemployment.
Yet this was the policy to which British governments were committed. It was what was meant by putting the pound back on the gold standard at its pre-war parity with the dollar; £1 = $4.86, since the suspension of convertibility of the pound into gold in 1919 (ratified by the Gold and Silver Embargo Act of 1920) sterling had floated against the dollar. However, the Cunliffe Report on 1919 proclaimed the goal of returning the pound to the gold standard ‘at parity’.
Note 7
In his article published in the Nation on 13 November 1926, Keynes contrasted the situation in two decaying industries, coal and cotton. Coal had ruined itself by uncontrolled overproduction, cotton by ‘organized short time extending over five years’. Short time working was made possible by the fact that unemployment benefit could be claimed for the off-days. It was a disguised form of subsidy, which made sense only on the assumption that full-capacity working would soon be restored. It was kept going because no one could think of anything else to do. In 1927 American cotton was hit by Japanese competition.
Note 8
The crisis is brought about by a ‘shortage of real capital’. The crisis comes about, again, because too large a proportion of savings has been transformed into ‘fixed capital’ and not enough left over for ‘circulating capital’. In both cases, crisis, poetically, considered, is ‘one episode in the struggle between the future and the present, of the future which wants to come too quickly…and of present which must first create enough to eat but desires enjoyment’.
Note 9
The loan able funds are divided into two parts – the first made up of ‘real’ savings (stocks), the second of money created by the banks against the security of shares, factories, properties: ‘this is the birth of money. Money is born in a deposit.’ The crisis is precipitated by rise in interest rates, reflecting the shortage of ‘real capital’. ‘Crisis breaks out like a clap of thunder, the scenery falls down. It is the real available capital which could not be seen anywhere, the very existence of which we were beginning to doubt, which suddenly erupts into our perception…
The loans are called in, assets are forcibly sold, inflated share prices collapse, the slump is at hand. American banker saying, ‘If we look at it closely, we invest our savings before we have made them. You in Europe invest your savings after you have made them; that is more down to earth’.
Note 10
By 1913 Robertson had finished his dissertation, A Study of Industrial Fluctuation. His was a ‘real’ theory of the business cycle, in which the cycle is started by genuine investment opportunities (such as new inventions, agricultural abundance or the demand for new capital) but then collapses, because the lumpiness and long gestation period of large fixed capital multiplies the chances for miscalculation and leads to more investment being undertaken than is profitable. Monetary factors play a subordinate, almost insignificant, role. Ralph Hawtrey, by no means over worked at the Treasury, had produced the first English ‘monetary’ theory of the business cycle, in his book Good and Bad Trade. Here the investment boom is triggered off by a change in the quantity of bank credit.
Keynes accepted Robertson’s contention that the investment boom is usually triggered of by ‘real’ factors, such as new inventions or the rundown of existing capital equipment.
Keynes argued that the seeds of disaster lay in the ability of the banks to create credit in excess of what the community voluntarily wished to save – by encroaching on the ‘community’s reserve of free resources’ held in the banking system ‘to be spent or saved as future circumstances may determine’. It was the bankers’ ability to create credit which explained the failure of the cost of borrowing to keep up with the profit rate during the upswing; the equalization of the market rate of interest and the profit rate at the top of the boom explained why the expansion goes into reverse: ‘If in any year the amount invested exceeds the amount saved, this establishes a scale of investment from which there must necessarily be a reaction.’ Thus the business cycle is really a credit cycle, characterized by fluctuations in the flow of investment round a fixed stock of ‘voluntary’ saving. Keynes wrote, ‘One of the characteristics of the boom period… as distinguished from the period of depression is that in the former period investment exceeds saving while in the latter period investment falls short of saving. And it is the machinery of banking which makes this possible.”
Note 11
Credit creation forces up consumer prices. All those who could not increase their money incomes in line with inflation (to some extent wage-earners but particularly bondholders or ‘old widows’) were ‘forced’, by saving to reduce their consumption, to ‘pay’ for the increased spending of entrepreneurs or government to spend what the private consumer has to forgo. To obviate ‘forced saving’ Keynes wanted the Bank of England to keep prices stable.
Keynes denied that inflation as such could create additional resources for investment: it could only redistribute resources between different sections of the community.
Note 12
The rate of interest can fall for either of two reasons. It may fall on account of an abundant supply of savings, i.e. of money available to be spent on investments; or it may fall on account of a deficient supply of investments, i.e. on desirable purpose on which to spend the savings. Now a fall in the rate of interest for the first reason is, obviously, very much in the national interest. But a fall for the second reason, if it follows from a deliberate restriction of outlets for investment, is simply a disastrous method of impoverishing ourselves.
A country is enriched not by the mere negative act of an individual not spending all his income on current consumption. It is enriched by the positive act of using these savings to augment the capital equipment of the country.
It is not miser who gets rich; but he who lays out his money in fruitful investment.
The policy of trying to lower the rate of interest by suspending new capital improvements and so stopping up the outlets and purposes of our savings is suicidal… if outlets for investment at home are stopped up, savings flow abroad on scale disproportionate to our favorable balance of trade, with the result that the Bank of England tends to lose gold. To counteract this position, the bank rate has to be raised.
Note 13
The great virtue of the bank rate was that it acted simultaneously to correct both a country’s capital and income account imbalance. In the short run, raising bank rate attracts extra foreign funds to London; in the long run, it lower internal costs. ‘So the bank rate’, he told the Committee, ‘sets in motion rapid forces to diminish the calls on us to lend abroad, and slow forces which will have the effect of increasing our ability to lend abroad by reducing our price level to a competitive level with the outside world. Domestic costs can be reduced only by paying factors ‘less for their efforts’ – by lowering profits or wages. Bank rate’s only direct power was to reduce profits by increasing the cost of borrowing. Thus ‘there is no other way by which bank rate brings down prices except through the increase of unemployment. It is the increase in unemployment which brings down wages, makes exports more competitive and increase our ability to invest abroad, enabling bank rate to be lowered, ‘having done its work’ – with foreign lending equal to the exports surplus, and full employment restored.
However, if, as a matter of fact, selling prices are flexible, and wage costs fixed, all raising bank rate does is to reduce profits and increase unemployment.
Note 14
Government action to stimulate domestic investment was needed to break the ‘vicious circle’ of deflation and restore business profits to normal; after that it should be possible ‘gradually to diminish the amount of Government intervention’, subject to the proviso of not allowing foreign lending at will.
Note 15
Dennis Robertson really echoed the Bank’s view in his evidence, given on 8 May 1930. Cheap money might not succeed against the ‘unwillingness of business men to borrow even at very low rates of interest if prices are falling, or expected to go on falling, rapidly’ even in a ‘closed system’. In such a situation, public works were the only remedy.
Note 16
Prices could be raised only by increasing spending, preferably investment spending. If government spending was ruled out the banks must act ‘to increase the quantity and reduce the cost of banking credit’.
Note 17
Thus ‘the hole matter may be summed up by saying that a boom is generated when investment exceeds saving and a slump… when saving exceeds investment. Keynes assumed that savings vary less than the amount of investment over the cycle, ‘except… towards the end of a slump [when the country] is very impoverished indeed. Negative saving’ by government on the dole eventually reduces the ‘net volume of saving’ to to equality with reduced investment, thus allowing an ‘equilibrium point of decline’ to be reached. A little later Keynes described this automatic unbalancing of the budget in face of declining revenues as ‘Nature’s way’ of halting the rundown of the economy. There can, however, be no permanent recovery till fixed investment has recovered to the level of full-employment savings.
The full-employment condition in the Treaties is that saving equals investment. If saving and investment, therefore, are equalized by the ‘impoverishment’ of the community, the resulting situations by definition one of full employment. Employment is only a proxy for income in the short run. In long run, a low-income equilibrium not need mean an unemployment equilibrium.
Note 18
Hawtrey was also the first to point out that the excess of saving over investment was simply another name for business losses.
Note 19
By the autumn of 1932 the brief British recovery had fizzled out. Real interest rates had come down dramatically, but, following a flurry of activity after devaluation, output fell to its lowest point in August/September 1932 (though the fall was nothing as severe as in 1921) and unemployment remained above 20 per cent of the insured labour force from January 1931 to May 1933. And this was despite the ‘confidence ‘ generated by the national government with its balanced budget and huge Conservative majority. Keynes now had a much firmer theoretical basis for arguing that increased government spending was the only way to full employment; for, with private spending so depressed by the fall in national income, where were the spontaneous forces to bring recovery?
Note 20
Wall street started booming, much to Keynes’s benefit. Industrial production almost doubled between March and July. Government was in charge again, not events.
Note 21
Keynes also attacked faults in Roosevelt’s technique of recovery. Recovery meant increased output. Rising prices were a natural counterpart of increasing output. Trying to raise prices by restricting output by inflating the currency was also the wrong way around: ‘it is like trying to get fat by buying a larger belt’. This was a dig at Roosevelt’s gold-buying policy; the ‘gold standard on the booze’ Keynes called it.
Under the influence of an agricultural economist, George F. Warren, Roosevelt had adopted a plan to inflate crop prices quickly. The idea was that if the government bought gold at rising prices, domestic commodity prices would soar as the gold value of the dollar fell. The price of gold was gradually raised from $20 an ounce in March 1933 to $35 an ounce by January 1934. Keynes acknowledged the possible benefit to America’s exports, but insisted that ‘exchange depreciation should follow the success of your domestic [recovery] policy as its natural consequence, and should not be allowed to disturb the whole world by preceding its justification at an entirely arbitrary pace.
Note 22
Keynes understandably found ‘much pessimism prevalent because costs [were] increasing faster than incomes and fear [of] inflation causes hoarding of money’.
Note 23
‘output and employment cannot increase unless entrepreneurs anticipate an increased effective demand and prepare to meet it.’ In American conditions this anticipation depended on the scale of government loan expenditure. On his estimate of the American multiplier, $400m. a month would do the trick; $300m. was too little. All government loan expenditure, including spending on relief, should be treated as equivalent to investment ‘at least when… considering short-run effects’. He explained that a part of the increased expenditure would be taken up by increased production, a part of would go to raising prices. The price effect would become greater as recovery proceeded and bottlenecks were encountered. Anticipating chapter 19 of the General Theory he argued that ‘true’ inflation was not possible till full employment occurred. ‘When a point has been reached at which the whole of the labor and capital equipment of the community are employed, further increases in effective demand would have no effect whatever except to raise prices without limit.’
Note 24
The investor should buy, not sell, on a falling market; the expectation of picking up bargains was more rational than yielding to the panic psychology of the crowd.
Note 25
If the inducement is weak relative to the propensity to save, the result is a deficiency of effective demand which leads to diminished employment; and the unemployment is increased by whatever figure is necessary so to impoverish the community as to reduce the amount people desire to save to equality with the amount they are willing to invest.
Note 26
The government has to do things to encourage spending like reducing interest rates, cutting taxes, or increasing its own spending to get the wheels of industry turning again.
Note 27
All these paradoxes depend on a single point: that an increase in the propensity to save does little or nothing to reduce the rate of interest. Keynes writes that the ‘influence of moderate changes in the rate of interest on the propensity to consume is usually small. The influence of the rate in interest on the amount saved, however, is very great, and in the opposite direction to that usually supposed; for a rise in the rate of interest, by causing a fall in investment’. Thus ‘the more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more our incomes will have to fall when interest rises relatively to the marginal efficiency of capital. Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward. For the result is inevitable. The aggregate amount saved is ‘mere residual. The decisions to consume and the decisions to invest between them determine incomes.
Note 28
The rejection of the idea that interest is reward for saving makes the ‘encouragement of thrift… no longer a virtue but a vice in a depressed economy’ since it ‘does not bring a lowering of the rate of interest and a subsequent encouragement of invest’. The possible inefficacy of monetary policy to secure the same result reinforces the case for fiscal policy in combating depression.
Note 29
Pigou agreed that employment could and should be much fuller than in had recently been, but warned that, as employment improves, wage-earners regain control over their own level of employment – that is, their own real wage. Any attempt by banking policy to force a higher level of employment than was desired, Pigou implied, would simply lead to inflation.
Note 30
Great wars destroy not only savings, but, if, as is normal, they are financed by inflation, the incentive to save too.
