Spitznagel - Interventionist Policies Cause Of, Not Cure For, Busts

By Mark Spitznagel
Investors.com
October 7, 2013

Time is nearly up for Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve who supposedly applied his scholarly knowledge of the Great Depression to steer the U.S. to safety after the financial crisis.

In truth, Bernanke navigated a monetarist course that favored intensive intervention, following in the footsteps of many mainstream economists who grossly misunderstood the lessons of the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing malaise.

That lesson is that when corrective crashes occur, intervention is far from the cure — it is the cause.

Until we learn from the past, we will continue to expose ourselves to devastating booms and busts. The Bernanke-led Fed has only exacerbated the problem, leading us to the brink of an even worse correction.

To capture the lessons learned, we turn to a scholar of the Great Depression: Murray Rothbard of the Austrian School of Economics, who refutes the common misconception that "laissez-faire capitalism was to blame."

His contrarian and far less popular — yet more accurate — view is that the booms and busts of the business cycle result from shocks to the system caused by monetary intervention.

Specifically, Rothbard blames the 1929 Crash on loose monetary policy during the 1920s. For Rothbard, the boom was the problem; once the Fed pushed asset prices up to unsustainable levels, a crash was inevitable.

Without the meddling of central-bank intervention, the market — like any natural homeostatic system — can reestablish equilibrium on its own by allowing its natural entrepreneurial "governors" to work. Greater savings prompts longer-term production for future greater consumption (and the inverse). The natural order trumps intervention every time.

Laissez-faire, however, gets a bad rap because it has been erroneously attributed to President Hoover, who supposedly did little or nothing to "save" the U.S. after the Crash of 1929.

In this popular and convenient narrative, Hoover sat back and did nothing as the U.S. sunk into the depths of the Depression, while the activist Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally "got us out of the Depression" with the New Deal.

Hoover, however, was nothing if not an interventionist — and his actions prevented what could have been the "downturn of 1929-30" from resolving itself, just as the recession of 1920-21 had.

Instead, it was the government to the rescue, and the downturn became a depression.

The events leading up to the Crash and Depression form an incriminating trail. The Federal Reserve expanded bank reserves and its holdings of government securities, creating excess liquidity that flowed into a land boom in Florida followed by a stock bubble — the signature traits of mal-investment.