Berry Eichengreen, in Golden Fetters:
The gold standard is the key to understanding the Depression.
The gold standard of the 1920s set the stage of the Depression of the 1930s by heightening the fragility of the international financial system. The gold standard was the mechanism transmitting the destabilizing impulse from the United States to the rest of the world. The gold standard magnified that initial destabilizing shock. It was the principal obstacle to offsetting action. It was the binding constraint preventing policymakers from averting the failure of banks and containing the spread of financial panic. For all these reasons, the international gold standard was a central factor in the worldwide Depression. Recovery proved possible, for these same reasons, only after abandoning the gold standard.
Or here’s Ben Bernanke - though you may not appreciate his point of view given his position, his view originates with Milton Friedman:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm
EXCERPT:
[i]The second monetary policy action identified by Friedman and Schwartz occurred in September and October of 1931. At the time, as I will discuss in more detail later, the United States and the great majority of other nations were on the gold standard, a system in which the value of each currency is expressed in terms of ounces of gold. Under the gold standard, central banks stood ready to maintain the fixed values of their currencies by offering to trade gold for money at the legally determined rate of exchange.
The fact that, under the gold standard, the value of each currency was fixed in terms of gold implied that the rate of exchange between any two currencies within the gold standard system was likewise fixed. As with any system of fixed exchange rates, the gold standard was subject to speculative attack if investors doubted the ability of a country to maintain the value of its currency at the legally specified parity. In September 1931, following a period of financial upheaval in Europe that created concerns about British investments on the Continent, speculators attacked the British pound, presenting pounds to the Bank of England and demanding gold in return. Faced with the heavy demands of speculators for gold and a widespread loss of confidence in the pound, the Bank of England quickly depleted its gold reserves. Unable to continue supporting the pound at its official value, Great Britain was forced to leave the gold standard, allowing the pound to float freely, its value determined by market forces.
With the collapse of the pound, speculators turned their attention to the U.S. dollar, which (given the economic difficulties the United States was experiencing in the fall of 1931) looked to many to be the next currency in line for devaluation. Central banks as well as private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve’s gold reserves. The speculative attack on the dollar also helped to create a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew their funds from U.S. banks in order to convert them into gold or other assets. The worsening economic situation also made depositors increasingly distrustful of banks as a place to keep their savings. During this period, deposit insurance was virtually nonexistent, so that the failure of a bank might cause depositors to lose all or most of their savings. Thus, depositors who feared that a bank might fail rushed to withdraw their funds. Banking panics, if severe enough, could become self-confirming prophecies. During the 1930s, thousands of U.S. banks experienced runs by depositors and subsequently failed.
Long-established central banking practice required that the Fed respond both to the speculative attack on the dollar and to the domestic banking panics. However, the Fed decided to ignore the plight of the banking system and to focus only on stopping the loss of gold reserves to protect the dollar. To stabilize the dollar, the Fed once again raised interest rates sharply, on the view that currency speculators would be less willing to liquidate dollar assets if they could earn a higher rate of return on them. The Fed’s strategy worked, in that the attack on the dollar subsided and the U.S. commitment to the gold standard was successfully defended, at least for the moment. However, once again the Fed had chosen to tighten monetary policy despite the fact that macroeconomic conditions–including an accelerating decline in output, prices, and the money supply–seemed to demand policy ease.
…
As I have already mentioned, the gold standard is a monetary system in which each participating country defines its monetary unit in terms of a certain amount of gold. The setting of each currency’s value in terms of gold defines a system of fixed exchange rates, in which the relative value of (say) the U.S. dollar and the British pound are fixed at a rate determined by the relative gold content of each currency. To maintain the gold standard, central banks had to promise to exchange actual gold for their paper currencies at the legal rate.
The gold standard appeared to be highly successful from about 1870 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. During the so-called “classical” gold standard period, international trade and capital flows expanded markedly, and central banks experienced relatively few problems ensuring that their currencies retained their legal value. The gold standard was suspended during World War I, however, because of disruptions to trade and international capital flows and because countries needed more financial flexibility to finance their war efforts. (The United States remained technically on the gold standard throughout the war, but with many restrictions.)
After 1918, when the war ended, nations around the world made extensive efforts to reconstitute the gold standard, believing that it would be a key element in the return to normal functioning of the international economic system. Great Britain was among the first of the major countries to return to the gold standard, in 1925, and by 1929 the great majority of the world’s nations had done so.
Unlike the gold standard before World War I, however, the gold standard as reconstituted in the 1920s proved to be both unstable and destabilizing. Economic historians have identified a number of reasons why the reconstituted gold standard was so much less successful than its prewar counterpart. First, the war had left behind enormous economic destruction and dislocation. Major financial problems also remained, including both large government debts from the war and banking systems whose solvency had been deeply compromised by the war and by the periods of hyperinflation that followed in a number of countries. These underlying problems created stresses for the gold standard that had not existed to the same degree before the war.
Second, the new system lacked effective international leadership. During the classical period, the Bank of England, in operation since 1694, provided sophisticated management of the international system, with the cooperation of other major central banks. This leadership helped the system adjust to imbalances and strains; for example, a consortium of central banks might lend gold to one of their number that was experiencing a shortage of reserves. After the war, with Great Britain economically and financially depleted and the United States in ascendance, leadership of the international system shifted by default to the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, the fledgling Federal Reserve, with its decentralized structure and its inexperienced and domestically focused leadership, did not prove up to the task of managing the international gold standard, a task that lingering hatreds and disputes from the war would have made difficult for even the most-sophisticated institution. With the lack of effective international leadership, most central banks of the 1920s and 1930s devoted little effort to supporting the overall stability of the international system and focused instead on conditions within their own countries.
Finally, the reconstituted gold standard lacked the credibility of its prewar counterpart. Before the war, the ideology of the gold standard was dominant, to the point that financial investors had no doubt that central banks would find a way to maintain the gold values of their currencies no matter what the circumstances. Because this conviction was so firm, speculators had little incentive to attack a major currency. After the war, in contrast, both economic views and the political balance of power had shifted in ways that reduced the influence of the gold standard ideology. For example, new labor-dominated political parties were skeptical about the utility of maintaining the gold standard if doing so increased unemployment. Ironically, reduced political and ideological support for the gold standard made it more difficult for central banks to maintain the gold values of their currencies, as speculators understood that the underlying commitment to adhere to the gold standard at all costs had been weakened significantly. Thus, speculative attacks became much more likely to succeed and hence more likely to occur.
With an international focus, and with particular attention to the role of the gold standard in the world economy, scholars have now been able to answer the questions regarding the monetary interpretation of the Depression that I raised earlier.
First, the existence of the gold standard helps to explain why the world economic decline was both deep and broadly international. Under the gold standard, the need to maintain a fixed exchange rate among currencies forces countries to adopt similar monetary policies. In particular, a central bank with limited gold reserves has no option but to raise its own interest rates when interest rates are being raised abroad; if it did not do so, it would quickly lose gold reserves as financial investors transferred their funds to countries where returns were higher. Hence, when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 1928 to fight stock market speculation, it inadvertently forced tightening of monetary policy in many other countries as well. This tightening abroad weakened the global economy, with effects that fed back to the U.S. economy and financial system.
Other countries’ policies also contributed to a global monetary tightening during 1928 and 1929. For example, after France returned to the gold standard in 1928, it built up its gold reserves significantly, at the expense of other countries. The outflows of gold to France forced other countries to reduce their money supplies and to raise interest rates. Speculative attacks on currencies also became frequent as the Depression worsened, leading central banks to raise interest rates, much like the Federal Reserve did in 1931. Leadership from the Federal Reserve might possibly have produced better international cooperation and a more appropriate set of monetary policies. However, in the absence of that leadership, the worldwide monetary contraction proceeded apace. The result was a global economic decline that reinforced the effects of tight monetary policies in individual countries.
The transmission of monetary tightening through the gold standard also addresses the question of whether changes in the money supply helped cause the Depression or were simply a passive response to the declines in income and prices. Countries on the gold standard were often forced to contract their money supplies because of policy developments in other countries, not because of domestic events. The fact that these contractions in money supplies were invariably followed by declines in output and prices suggests that money was more a cause than an effect of the economic collapse in those countries.
Perhaps the most fascinating discovery arising from researchers’ broader international focus is that the extent to which a country adhered to the gold standard and the severity of its depression were closely linked. In particular, the longer that a country remained committed to gold, the deeper its depression and the later its recovery (Choudhri and Kochin, 1980; Eichengreen and Sachs, 1985).
The willingness or ability of countries to remain on the gold standard despite the adverse developments of the 1930s varied quite a bit. A few countries did not join the gold standard system at all; these included Spain (which was embroiled in domestic political upheaval, eventually leading to civil war) and China (which used a silver monetary standard rather than a gold standard). A number of countries adopted the gold standard in the 1920s but left or were forced off gold relatively early, typically in 1931. Countries in this category included Great Britain, Japan, and several Scandinavian countries. Some countries, such as Italy and the United States, remained on the gold standard into 1932 or 1933. And a few diehards, notably the so-called gold bloc, led by France and including Poland, Belgium, and Switzerland, remained on gold into 1935 or 1936.
If declines in the money supply induced by adherence to the gold standard were a principal reason for economic depression, then countries leaving gold earlier should have been able to avoid the worst of the Depression and begin an earlier process of recovery. The evidence strongly supports this implication. For example, Great Britain and Scandinavia, which left the gold standard in 1931, recovered much earlier than France and Belgium, which stubbornly remained on gold. As Friedman and Schwartz noted in their book, countries such as China–which used a silver standard rather than a gold standard–avoided the Depression almost entirely. The finding that the time at which a country left the gold standard is the key determinant of the severity of its depression and the timing of its recovery has been shown to hold for literally dozens of countries, including developing countries. This intriguing result not only provides additional evidence for the importance of monetary factors in the Depression, it also explains why the timing of recovery from the Depression differed across countries.
The finding that leaving the gold standard was the key to recovery from the Great Depression was certainly confirmed by the U.S. experience. One of the first actions of President Roosevelt was to eliminate the constraint on U.S. monetary policy created by the gold standard, first by allowing the dollar to float and then by resetting its value at a significantly lower level. The new President also addressed another major source of monetary contraction, the ongoing banking crisis. Within days of his inauguration, Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday,” shutting down all the banks in the country. Banks were allowed to reopen only when certified to be in sound financial condition. Roosevelt pursued other measures to stabilize the banking system as well, such as the creation of a deposit insurance program. With the gold standard constraint removed and the banking system stabilized, the money supply and the price level began to rise. Between Roosevelt’s coming to power in 1933 and the recession of 1937-38, the economy grew strongly.
…
Some important lessons emerge from the story. One lesson is that ideas are critical. The gold standard orthodoxy, the adherence of some Federal Reserve policymakers to the liquidationist thesis, and the incorrect view that low nominal interest rates necessarily signaled monetary ease, all led policymakers astray, with disastrous consequences. We should not underestimate the need for careful research and analysis in guiding policy. Another lesson is that central banks and other governmental agencies have an important responsibility to maintain financial stability. The banking crises of the 1930s, both in the United States and abroad, were a significant source of output declines, both through their effects on money supplies and on credit supplies. Finally, perhaps the most important lesson of all is that price stability should be a key objective of monetary policy. By allowing persistent declines in the money supply and in the price level, the Federal Reserve of the late 1920s and 1930s greatly destabilized the U.S. economy and, through the workings of the gold standard, the economies of many other nations as well.
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Let’s hope Bernanke remembers his most important lesson from above: price stability should be a key objective of monetary policy.
