Tape 132 - Watergate; the money crunch
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- | Welcome once again as MIT Professor, | 0:02 |
Paul Samuelson, discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
This series is produced | 0:07 | |
by Instructional Dynamics Incorporated. | 0:08 | |
This program was recorded July 13th. | 0:10 | |
- | One of our subscribers has written in and asked me | 0:15 |
how it feels to be on the enemy List of the White House. | 0:18 | |
Perhaps a word or two about that would be in order. | 0:21 | |
All the jokes that you've heard about whether a person | 0:26 | |
is or isn't included on that list, are true. | 0:30 | |
In the present environment in the country, | 0:34 | |
particularly in the academic liberal circles, | 0:37 | |
it is a mark of honor to be on the list | 0:42 | |
and people's noses are out of joint | 0:44 | |
if they're not on the list. | 0:46 | |
It's no exaggeration, I was in Washington | 0:49 | |
testifying for a committee a couple days ago, | 0:51 | |
and complete strangers came up to me in the airport | 0:53 | |
and shook my hand and congratulated me and so forth. | 0:57 | |
But the more interesting and more serious question is, | 1:01 | |
do I really deserve it? | 1:06 | |
Am I really earning my passage on that list? | 1:08 | |
And so I've tried to go back and review | 1:14 | |
what it is that I've been saying in tapes like these. | 1:20 | |
What it is that I've said in Newsweek columns. | 1:22 | |
What it is that I've written in articles | 1:24 | |
in the English newspapers and the Japanese newspapers | 1:28 | |
and what it is that I've said | 1:33 | |
in various speeches around the country. | 1:34 | |
Well, first I have to make clear, | 1:37 | |
that from the beginning of President Nixon's first term, | 1:41 | |
I have never blamed him for the inflation in being. | 1:45 | |
It seems to me that the least that a fair critic can do | 1:48 | |
is to face up to the fact and admit that in 1969, | 1:52 | |
President Nixon inherited from President Johnson, | 1:59 | |
his predecessor, an inflation in being. | 2:02 | |
An inflation in being which was still primarily | 2:06 | |
of a demand-pull type, | 2:09 | |
attributable in the first instance to the re-acceleration | 2:12 | |
of the Indo-China War in the summer of 1965, | 2:18 | |
and that new increase in the velocity | 2:22 | |
of circulation of money, that new increase | 2:26 | |
in government spending was superimposed upon an economy | 2:28 | |
already approaching very close to full employment. | 2:34 | |
It was not off-set by exceptionally | 2:38 | |
contractionary Federal Reserve Monetary Policy | 2:40 | |
and it was not off-set by an increase in tax rates | 2:44 | |
or a cut in civilian expenditures. | 2:50 | |
So on that point my conscience is clear. | 2:54 | |
I did argue very vigorously in the first year | 2:58 | |
of the Nixon administration | 3:02 | |
that the policy of gradualism was a mistake. | 3:05 | |
That it would not break the back of the inflation, | 3:08 | |
it would only prolong the agony. | 3:13 | |
And I wrote at the end of that period | 3:17 | |
that I suspected when the economic historians | 3:21 | |
look back on that period and look for the single big mistake | 3:24 | |
it would be the extreme gradualism. | 3:28 | |
I don't wanna go into the reasons | 3:33 | |
for aspousal of that policy, | 3:35 | |
although I think I know some of the reasons. | 3:37 | |
In part it was simply an extreme reaction | 3:40 | |
against the arrogant fine-tuning retentions | 3:44 | |
of the previous team of economists in Washington, | 3:48 | |
but it was a little bit more than that. | 3:52 | |
It had to do too, with a rather curious aspect | 3:55 | |
of monetarism, one which I thought at the time | 4:00 | |
had no particular rationale | 4:04 | |
in terms of the causal mechanisms | 4:06 | |
of monetarism which I could discern and respect, | 4:08 | |
namely that you move to higher rates of change. | 4:12 | |
Rates of change, of rates of change | 4:15 | |
and deciding what is or is not stabilizing. | 4:17 | |
And the gradualism which we actually saw | 4:20 | |
in the first year of the Nixon administration, | 4:22 | |
was not as extreme, not as immoderate, not as excessive, | 4:26 | |
as what had actually been recommended | 4:31 | |
in one of the working parties of Candidate Nixon. | 4:34 | |
I recall because I was asked my opinion of it | 4:42 | |
by an interested member, whether it was really good policy | 4:45 | |
to have as your program, if say, | 4:52 | |
the rate of growth or money supply has been excessive | 4:57 | |
and has been going at nine or 10% a year, | 5:00 | |
can the country really afford | 5:03 | |
to move to six or seven in one year, | 5:05 | |
and then in another year, to four or five | 5:10 | |
and then finally in the third year, to three or four | 5:14 | |
and I argued that was very bad from the standpoint | 5:18 | |
of optimal control theory. | 5:21 | |
That what you wanna do, is to press down hard on the brake, | 5:23 | |
be ready to release your pressing down hard on the brakes, | 5:29 | |
be ready to press your foot again on the accelerator, | 5:34 | |
again pumping on brake alternately, | 5:38 | |
rather than that steady gradualist. | 5:41 | |
Of course I was very familiar | 5:44 | |
with this kind of optimal control problem | 5:46 | |
because during the war, I was engaged in | 5:48 | |
anti-aircraft fire control design | 5:51 | |
and we used the Wiener-Kolmogorov theories | 5:55 | |
which have in the post-war period, | 5:59 | |
in the field of several mechanism, become extremely popular, | 6:01 | |
of how to minimize the squared deviations | 6:04 | |
of your message or of your gunfire, | 6:08 | |
how to separate noise from a signal, | 6:15 | |
when of course you don't know what the future | 6:17 | |
of your system will be but where you do have some idea | 6:20 | |
of what the general statistical properties | 6:23 | |
of the system are as determined by past experience. | 6:25 | |
And so from my feel of the general statistical properties, | 6:30 | |
the auto-correlations, implicit and explicit, | 6:35 | |
in the American GMP Vector, | 6:38 | |
I thought that this was a very bad policy. | 6:41 | |
I noticed that Professor Milton Friedman, | 6:44 | |
in his article earlier this year | 6:47 | |
in the Morgan Guarantee Trust monthly letter, | 6:51 | |
himself has changed his mind in part on this. | 6:57 | |
He doesn't go as far as I'm going here. | 7:01 | |
If I understand his argument, | 7:05 | |
and if I am recollecting it correctly from memory, | 7:07 | |
he now believes it would have been better policy | 7:11 | |
to go from an excessive rate say of 8%, | 7:16 | |
immediately to your goal rate, | 7:22 | |
let's say if your goal rate is 4% for the M1 and 6% for M2, | 7:25 | |
and if you decide that that's the way | 7:35 | |
they're related to each other, then he would say, | 7:36 | |
you should go instantly to that rate and hold to it. | 7:40 | |
Now just what considerations | 7:42 | |
in terms of the auto-correlation | 7:47 | |
of the likely noise-signal data | 7:49 | |
and our ignorance about the future, | 7:54 | |
would lead to that being optimal | 7:56 | |
rather than to an overshoot? | 7:58 | |
I don't know. | 8:00 | |
I think it would be a not difficult exercise | 8:01 | |
to work that out but I think it would be a very odd, | 8:05 | |
a concatenation of circumstances | 8:10 | |
under which that would be the case. | 8:12 | |
So if I were having to defend that particular thesis, | 8:14 | |
I wouldn't do it in terms of its optimal control properties. | 8:16 | |
I would do it in terms of the weakness | 8:20 | |
of the human mind or the weakness of the committee system. | 8:22 | |
That what mankind needs is a very simple, | 8:26 | |
shibboleth and a rule which you can sell | 8:29 | |
in which mankind can understand, which mankind | 8:32 | |
can irrationally adhere to, is needed. | 8:35 | |
So the argument would go and it's better | 8:38 | |
to just always in season and out of season, | 8:40 | |
insist upon absolute the stability | 8:43 | |
of your input that isn't optimal. | 8:47 | |
But given the weakness of men's minds | 8:50 | |
and committees determinations that would be a second best, | 8:54 | |
which could be defended. | 8:59 | |
Well, it's not for me to make such argument as that, | 9:00 | |
but as I look back on that particular period, | 9:05 | |
I am pleased that I spoke out and I wished | 9:07 | |
that I spoken out a more plunging plea. | 9:12 | |
In particular, there was a period back there | 9:16 | |
when the old definition of the money supply, | 9:19 | |
made it seem as if the Federal Reserve | 9:24 | |
was being a rather beastly in the views | 9:27 | |
of those who believe in a standard fixed, | 9:30 | |
steady adhered to rate of growth, the money supply. | 9:34 | |
And there was much grieving if you will remember | 9:37 | |
at that time against the wickedness of the Federal Reserve | 9:40 | |
as being over restrictive this during the 69 inflation, | 9:43 | |
this during, the expansion period. | 9:47 | |
And I didn't feel that way, I felt at the time | 9:52 | |
that if that was the consequence of simple monetarism, | 9:56 | |
then that was the reason for discrediting simple mantras | 9:59 | |
because the economy didn't yet feel | 10:03 | |
as if it was too weak. | 10:06 | |
Well, so I'm glad that I asked for even greater tightness | 10:09 | |
by the Federal Reserve at that time. | 10:17 | |
Of course, in the event it turned out | 10:18 | |
that the rate of growth of the money supply | 10:20 | |
when you properly redefined it | 10:23 | |
so as to include the euro dollar market data | 10:26 | |
was right on target. | 10:29 | |
And of course, right on target at a time | 10:32 | |
when we're on an inflation is according to my notions | 10:33 | |
of good optimal control programming, very bad. | 10:37 | |
You're off target, you should be leaning | 10:41 | |
against the wind at that particular time. | 10:42 | |
So, there too, I don't feel that I in retrospect | 10:45 | |
would want to change my criticisms of the Nixon team policy. | 10:52 | |
We come to a third area, the Nixon team policy. | 11:00 | |
Here I must say, we're in an area that involves | 11:03 | |
considerable amount of value judgments. | 11:06 | |
The earlier Nixon policy | 11:08 | |
was not to have any income as policy. | 11:12 | |
I don't know why Pinera Frei, who was the president's | 11:16 | |
so called official economic spokesman in the last campaign | 11:19 | |
and we've been aboard the campaign party | 11:22 | |
as an advisor in the first campaign. | 11:27 | |
I don't know why he wasn't put on the enemy list | 11:30 | |
because he said harder things | 11:32 | |
about the president personally | 11:35 | |
and much harder things about the president's team. | 11:37 | |
than I have ever dared to say, and you will recall | 11:40 | |
because I've quoted this and I'm only quoted it | 11:44 | |
because Pinera Frei, said it on the airwaves | 11:46 | |
and repeated it and lectures about 10 times twice | 11:51 | |
in my presence that he had gone to President Nixon | 11:53 | |
in the early months of 1969 and then told President Nixon | 11:58 | |
that he must use his presidential leadership | 12:02 | |
to help have some kind of incomes policy, | 12:04 | |
some kind of an informal guidepost guidelines policy | 12:07 | |
to hold down the rate of increase of prices and wages. | 12:11 | |
And that the president had said to him that, | 12:14 | |
no, he wouldn't do that, | 12:18 | |
he didn't believe in anything he would work | 12:19 | |
in any case was against his philosophy. | 12:21 | |
And then Pinera Frei went back and sent telegrams | 12:22 | |
to his 500 or 1000 clients saying raise prices, | 12:26 | |
the White House doesn't care, which he boasted, | 12:29 | |
they proceeded to do. | 12:32 | |
Well in this third area then I did criticize | 12:36 | |
the first game plan | 12:40 | |
for completely turning its back on incomes policy. | 12:41 | |
This, by the way, it was not a monolithic policy | 12:45 | |
inside the administration. | 12:48 | |
It's a nearly kept secret that Paul McCracken | 12:50 | |
and when he saw that the other medicine wasn't working, | 12:53 | |
moved gradually towards favoring | 12:55 | |
some kind of incomes policy. | 12:58 | |
And we know in the end | 13:00 | |
that the Secretary of Treasury, Connolly, a non economist | 13:01 | |
captured the president's agreement | 13:05 | |
in August 15th, 1971 we went into phase one. | 13:08 | |
But the record I think is a little more shameful | 13:13 | |
than that because there were a number of people | 13:16 | |
presidential appointees who were fired for saying under oath | 13:20 | |
before Congress when asked whether they thought | 13:25 | |
that some kinds of incomes policy was a good thing, | 13:28 | |
they grudgingly said, yes, they did. | 13:32 | |
And that was considered grounds for dismissal. | 13:35 | |
Well, the president himself threw away the old game plan. | 13:41 | |
He tore it up in August of 1971. | 13:45 | |
I think he did that because he realized that the election | 13:50 | |
was going to be, goes badly in 72 | 13:55 | |
if the country was still doing this badly. | 13:58 | |
And I came out with the writings in which I gave | 14:01 | |
two cheers for his policy. | 14:06 | |
So I don't think that that's a very weak support | 14:09 | |
in this particular case. | 14:14 | |
I very rarely give three cheers to very few of the things | 14:15 | |
that President Johnson, for example, did. | 14:19 | |
Now, as long as we're going into this aspect | 14:24 | |
of political economy, | 14:28 | |
at the time that I received the Nobel award | 14:29 | |
in October of 1970, I was besieged by the press | 14:32 | |
and had press conferences and there was there I think | 14:36 | |
a professional even ethical issue as to whether | 14:41 | |
one should use an occasion like that | 14:44 | |
for giving opinions on policy. | 14:47 | |
You certainly were deluged by questions | 14:49 | |
with respect to policy. | 14:51 | |
And I'll remind you that, that was at the bottom | 14:53 | |
of the recession of 1969 and 1970. | 14:56 | |
We now know, we came out of it in November of 1970 | 15:01 | |
when the General Motors strike was a settled. | 15:05 | |
And I spoke out very strongly and critically. | 15:08 | |
And there I think that, depending upon how you feel | 15:12 | |
about this ethical professional issue, | 15:17 | |
you might fairly introduce some | 15:20 | |
(mumbles) | 15:23 | |
criticism of my particular stand. | 15:25 | |
Well, one could go on and I guess I conclude | 15:30 | |
as I look back over my writings | 15:38 | |
that I feel on the whole, I pulled my punches | 15:41 | |
rather than went out slugging. | 15:46 | |
But I feel on the whole I would do the same thing again | 15:49 | |
because I think you actually gain a credence | 15:51 | |
and you gain weight in political, economical discussions. | 15:54 | |
If you take the less polemical line, | 16:00 | |
what you gain by the polemical clever arguments and humor, | 16:05 | |
in the short run, I think you lose in the longer run | 16:10 | |
and what you lose in the short run, | 16:14 | |
by playing it straight and being if anything | 16:16 | |
leaning over backwards, I think that, you may hope | 16:22 | |
to gain in the long run. | 16:26 | |
In any case, it's a matter of temperament. | 16:28 | |
Now let's turn to more interesting matters | 16:30 | |
to exactly what seems to be going on | 16:35 | |
in the American economy in the summer of 1973. | 16:39 | |
Two things are note-worthy | 16:43 | |
and worth commenting on it this time. | 16:46 | |
First, the suspected weakness in real growth | 16:48 | |
in the second quarter seems now to have been confirmed | 16:51 | |
by the preliminary estimates | 16:54 | |
that are beginning to come out. | 16:56 | |
We went from 7.9% real growth | 16:58 | |
in the first quarter of the year, | 17:02 | |
which is pretty much the way we've been going along | 17:04 | |
for the previous four or five quarters down to below 4%, | 17:06 | |
It now appears. | 17:12 | |
We don't have the official first estimate, | 17:15 | |
but that is the way the experts seem to be sizing this up. | 17:17 | |
We have to ask ourself what that means. | 17:24 | |
Secondly, we've had some developments | 17:27 | |
with respect to the so-called monetary crunch | 17:29 | |
and that's worth commenting on. | 17:32 | |
Let me begin with the second point. | 17:33 | |
You will remember in earlier tapes | 17:37 | |
I discussed the extremely interesting view of Albert Wildgen | 17:40 | |
one of the First Boston Corporation. | 17:45 | |
He held as early as April of this year, | 17:50 | |
but even earlier, but I quoted his April speech in Boston | 17:54 | |
that in mid-year we'd be in a money crunch. | 17:59 | |
And just two weeks ago, | 18:02 | |
I commented as to whether that had really happened. | 18:04 | |
Well, perhaps we are in a money crunch. | 18:07 | |
It depends semantically on how you define the word crunch, | 18:10 | |
but at least I've seen people in Wall Street | 18:15 | |
use that word as if it was here and now. | 18:18 | |
The Lehman Weekly, a letter on the bond market | 18:21 | |
and interest rates, by Mr. Santo and others, | 18:27 | |
spoke bluntly of our being in a money crunch. | 18:31 | |
What was involved was federal funds rates | 18:36 | |
that aren't six, 7%, aren't eight or 9%, but are at 10% | 18:40 | |
and even for a short periods may go to 15%. | 18:46 | |
The unavailability of certain credit | 18:52 | |
is beginning to be reported | 18:55 | |
in different parts of the country. | 18:57 | |
So some of the conditions which the economic historians | 18:59 | |
use to define a money crunch may already be in the scene. | 19:04 | |
We'll have no argument at all if we say that tight money | 19:11 | |
as measured by a high interest rates, | 19:15 | |
by rising interest rates, | 19:18 | |
by tougher rationing of credit is here. | 19:20 | |
If you wanna call that a crunch, | 19:25 | |
then we are in a money crunch. | 19:27 | |
If you wanna play it safer | 19:29 | |
and speak of pre-crunch conditions | 19:31 | |
as Dr. Otto Eckstein does, | 19:33 | |
then we are further along in the pre-crunch syndrome | 19:37 | |
in the development. | 19:42 | |
This is beginning to have its toll. | 19:44 | |
Just as an example, when I was coming up in the airplane | 19:47 | |
from Washington a couple of days ago, | 19:51 | |
sitting next to me was a civil servant economist | 19:56 | |
in the government and we just happened | 20:02 | |
to spring up a conversation and he told me | 20:04 | |
that his wife was in the real estate business. | 20:06 | |
She is a broker in the selling of houses, | 20:09 | |
and he said that in the last two weeks | 20:11 | |
that money had dried up completely. | 20:14 | |
I said, does that mean she can't sell houses? | 20:16 | |
And he said, of course she can't sell anything | 20:18 | |
unless the buyer will take back a first mortgage | 20:20 | |
for the amount, then he can't sell. | 20:24 | |
Now, economists know from experience | 20:28 | |
that if this happens in the short run, | 20:32 | |
if you wait at a higher and higher price, | 20:35 | |
you'll be able to get some kind of accommodation. | 20:38 | |
Not everybody but people with good jobs and so forth. | 20:41 | |
But in the meantime, there's the real estate agent | 20:45 | |
doing no business, and there are people who want | 20:49 | |
to get rid of their homes who are locked in. | 20:52 | |
That is typical of a crunch when it develops. | 20:55 | |
I mentioned to you that the ramblings that I get | 20:59 | |
from the West Coast, show that already | 21:02 | |
for the purpose of a promotion, | 21:04 | |
you can't any longer raise money | 21:11 | |
for a new suburban shopping market development. | 21:13 | |
This is just not the time. | 21:19 | |
Now, what we haven't got yet is the bank's breathing | 21:21 | |
very hard on dealers in the money market | 21:25 | |
and saying, because your old customers, | 21:28 | |
because we've been dealing with you for years, | 21:31 | |
we'll accommodate you, | 21:32 | |
but we really don't want your business, | 21:33 | |
we want you to cut down. | 21:35 | |
And when that happens, that's very typical of a real crunch. | 21:36 | |
Then these dealers in the money market, | 21:40 | |
no longer will make a market. | 21:42 | |
In other words, somebody comes in with a batch of bonds | 21:44 | |
and wants to sell them ordinarily, | 21:46 | |
they position these but when the friendly banker | 21:48 | |
isn't so friendly and is breathing very hard down on them, | 21:53 | |
then they just won't put in a bid and you can get | 21:56 | |
for a day or two or several days in a row, | 22:00 | |
just sort of no bottom in the bond market. | 22:03 | |
We've had a condition in which government bonds | 22:07 | |
have gone down 100 basis points in a day in recent times. | 22:09 | |
So, measured by what seems to be happening | 22:13 | |
to the rates quoted for loans | 22:17 | |
for investments and the rationing, | 22:23 | |
you would say we were in very tight money and you know, | 22:26 | |
there are at least two different definitions of tight money. | 22:30 | |
There's the effect of interest rates, | 22:32 | |
but there's the other definition which monetarists | 22:34 | |
would insist is the primary one. | 22:36 | |
Some would say it's the only one | 22:39 | |
which they will have any interest in at all | 22:40 | |
and that is what's happening | 22:43 | |
to the rate of growth of money supply. | 22:44 | |
And so paradoxically, we've been having very high rates | 22:46 | |
of growth of the money supply in recent months | 22:50 | |
after low rates in the first quarter of the year. | 22:53 | |
At the same time that interest rates are shooting upward. | 22:56 | |
Presumably, if the Federal Reserve had achieved | 23:00 | |
what must have been its open market committee's | 23:05 | |
primary targets, which we'll read about in 90 days, | 23:08 | |
90 days after the fact, then if they'd held the rate | 23:13 | |
of growth the money supply down to what I've supposed | 23:18 | |
as Dr. Arthur Burns and his colleagues have been aiming at, | 23:20 | |
which would be not more than 6%. | 23:24 | |
If they had achieved that instead of the 9% numbers, | 23:28 | |
which were actually realized, then one has to suppose | 23:31 | |
that in the short run, the interest rates | 23:34 | |
would be shooting upward even more strongly. | 23:36 | |
People ask me, what's the matter with the Federal Reserve? | 23:42 | |
Don't they know that the first quarter, | 23:45 | |
second quarter rate of growth of the real output is down? | 23:47 | |
Don't they know that most of the experts | 23:50 | |
using computer models or judgmental models | 23:54 | |
expect that we are already moving | 23:56 | |
into a mini recession and growth recession? | 23:59 | |
Some think we're moving into a real a recession. | 24:02 | |
Why then do they let this money crunch develop? | 24:06 | |
And I think the answer is at first, that the first signs | 24:11 | |
of a turn do not mean that with confidence | 24:16 | |
you can be sure that the turn is already taken place. | 24:18 | |
The Federal Reserve doesn't know | 24:20 | |
that we're now in a mini recession. | 24:21 | |
All it knows is that a very strong, | 24:24 | |
excessively strong first quarter | 24:26 | |
was followed by some relaxation in the second quarter | 24:28 | |
and it will take a good deal more confirmation | 24:32 | |
than that for them to really shift completely around. | 24:36 | |
Secondly, we still have | 24:42 | |
miserable behavior on the price front. | 24:43 | |
The Department of Agriculture has now, so to speak, | 24:47 | |
thrown in the sponge, they've just come out | 24:50 | |
with their very important announcement | 24:53 | |
and what's going to happen to the crop estimates. | 24:54 | |
This is something that every speculator | 24:59 | |
and the Board of Trade waits for anxiously. | 25:00 | |
A scandal like Watergate would be nothing | 25:04 | |
compared to a scandal in which this particular information | 25:06 | |
was made available to private traders for their profit | 25:09 | |
in advance of the official release. | 25:12 | |
Of course that didn't happen. | 25:14 | |
Well, we got the news, namely that the crops | 25:16 | |
look to be good, look to be better than last year. | 25:19 | |
The wheat crop has been marvelous | 25:23 | |
and there's been a lot of acreage. | 25:25 | |
And even though it's a little bit late, | 25:26 | |
in going in the ground, | 25:29 | |
the general total soy bean allocation, | 25:30 | |
corn and so forth, looks to be good. | 25:36 | |
But the spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, | 25:38 | |
I guess the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture | 25:41 | |
had to say at the same time, nevertheless, | 25:43 | |
it looks if food prices are going to go up | 25:45 | |
because this increase in grain will not show itself | 25:48 | |
in the form of an increase in meat, red meat | 25:54 | |
coming on the market. | 25:56 | |
Chickens, broilers in time to dampen down | 25:57 | |
and reduce the very high prices, | 26:03 | |
which we're now having anyway. | 26:05 | |
So it's widely expected outside of Washington | 26:06 | |
and inside of Washington, | 26:09 | |
that after the freeze period is over, | 26:11 | |
which will be very soon after | 26:12 | |
I'm now talking to you, on this morning | 26:14 | |
that there's going to be some kind | 26:17 | |
of upward bulge in prices. | 26:20 | |
Well, the Federal Reserve has a duty to try | 26:23 | |
to keep employment high, | 26:27 | |
to try to keep the unemployment rate down, | 26:30 | |
but it also has a duty and a concern | 26:32 | |
to worry about inflation and increase in price level. | 26:35 | |
Federal Reserve is being screamed at from Paris, | 26:41 | |
from Frankfurt, from Basel because the dollar, | 26:44 | |
except for three days strength based upon a rumor | 26:48 | |
that there was intervention by the central banks | 26:51 | |
of the governments that in other words, | 26:55 | |
if you were having a dirty float, | 26:57 | |
except for those three days, | 26:59 | |
the dollar has been extremely weak. | 27:00 | |
So the Federal Reserve has that reason, | 27:02 | |
to continue to let interest rates rise | 27:04 | |
if that's the way they seem to wanna do | 27:10 | |
when the rate of growth of the money supply | 27:12 | |
is at reasonable level. | 27:15 | |
But the final reason I think why the Federal Reserve | 27:21 | |
is behaving the way that it is, | 27:23 | |
is that although money is very tight, and even crunchy | 27:27 | |
in the credit cost of credit sense, this is all taking place | 27:33 | |
with very rapid increases in the aggregate money magnitudes. | 27:38 | |
In other words, M1 is leaping forward at a very high rate. | 27:44 | |
And as long as that's the case, the Federal Reserve | 27:47 | |
having been under pressure, by the monetarists | 27:49 | |
and by eclectic economists for many years | 27:52 | |
to pay lot of attention to the total of the rate of growth, | 27:55 | |
of money supply, this means that it's more or less | 27:59 | |
in a cliff, a stick. | 28:02 | |
Well now, I haven't much time left, | 28:05 | |
let me in the remaining minutes which I do have, | 28:08 | |
just comment a little bit on what we can conclude | 28:12 | |
from the second quarter weakness in the rate of growth. | 28:17 | |
They're two completely different interpretations possible. | 28:24 | |
First interpretation is the rosy one. | 28:27 | |
I've mentioned this before, | 28:30 | |
I think that Dr. Otto Eckstein | 28:31 | |
of the Data Resources Incorporated, leans towards this, | 28:34 | |
namely that this is moderating the excesses | 28:39 | |
of the boom and it's a good thing. | 28:43 | |
So we should feel a little more cheerful today | 28:46 | |
than we did two months ago. | 28:49 | |
The opposite interpretation is that of Alberti Summers | 28:52 | |
of the Conference Board. | 28:56 | |
I've quoted his memoranda earlier, | 28:57 | |
on many an occasion because they're worth quoting. | 29:00 | |
Well, I have here his most recent that of July 6th, | 29:03 | |
devoted to what's going to happen in the next 18 months. | 29:07 | |
And to summarize it very briefly, | 29:10 | |
he says that we're still in a raging boom. | 29:12 | |
That the weakness of growth of output is a supply, | 29:17 | |
not a demand effect. | 29:21 | |
I called attention to that and wondered | 29:23 | |
why more people weren't looking into that question. | 29:25 | |
Well, Dr. Summers has looked into the question | 29:28 | |
and as far as he's concerned, | 29:32 | |
it's still is economy running all out | 29:36 | |
and the best thing that can happen | 29:42 | |
would be for the Federal Reserve | 29:44 | |
to be even tighter than it is now. | 29:45 | |
Let me in the remaining moment, | 29:48 | |
just quote the last paragraph of his very interesting piece. | 29:50 | |
The model described here, an economy, | 29:56 | |
that's the model that he's describing | 30:00 | |
in which inflationary excesses and cyclical expansion | 30:01 | |
are being confronted | 30:05 | |
by disinflationary policy much too late. | 30:06 | |
The consequences are a tough than prolonged struggle | 30:10 | |
with inflation and almost inevitable recession. | 30:13 | |
In fact, it would in the end be less painful | 30:17 | |
if policy now we're to relinquish | 30:20 | |
its concern over recession and focus on the need | 30:21 | |
to build a sustainable longer term relationship | 30:24 | |
between demand and supply, | 30:27 | |
that does not depend on mandatory price controls. | 30:28 | |
Any resort to tax increases or selective controls, | 30:32 | |
will bring recession nearer. | 30:34 | |
It would also bring stability and order nearer. | 30:36 | |
For this reason, the application of such devices | 30:39 | |
should be cause for celebration in financial markets. | 30:41 | |
One is tempted to say that recession | 30:45 | |
is no longer a fear of financial markets. | 30:46 | |
It is now nearly a hope. | 30:49 | |
For industrial markets too, the great threat | 30:51 | |
is not recession, but the boundless capabilities | 30:54 | |
for mischief that reside in direct price controls. | 30:56 | |
- | If you have any comments or questions | 31:01 |
for Professor Samuelson, | 31:03 | |
address them to Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 31:04 | |
166 East Superior Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 31:07 |
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