ECB Mario Draghi’s Keynesian Fallacies

At the Mises Canada blog, Austrian economist Patrick Barron censures ECB’s Mario Draghi’s justification for launching QE (italics mine)

From today’s Open Europe news summary:

Draghi: ECB ready to initiate QE to counter low inflation

In an interview with Handelsblatt, ECB President Mario Draghi warned that persistently low inflation in the Eurozone meant that “the risk that we do not fulfill our mandate of price stability is higher than six months ago”. Draghi reiterated that the ECB was ready to step in with a programme of Quantitative Easing, noting that “We are in technical preparations to adjust the scope, speed and composition of our measures for early 2015.”

Handelsblatt Reuters Telegraph

ECB President Mario Draghi’s latest statement is full of Keynesian fallacies, to wit:

1. That price stability is a worthy goal. No, monetary stability is essential, so that prices may reflect the true preferences and productive limitations of the market in order to allocate scarce resources to their most important purposes as dictated by the market.

2. That low inflation or even deflation is harmful. No, in a economy with increasing productivity prices will fall, benefiting all of society. Preventing prices from falling or, as ECB President Draghi desires, encouraging price inflation, causes the Cantillon Effect, whereby early receivers of the new money benefit at the expense of later receivers. Continuing monetary expansion will cause the Austrian Business Cycle.

3. That GDP is a good measure of an economy’s success. if this were the case, then Zimbabwe would be a huge success story. GDP simply adds up the monetary prices of goods sold, so higher prices on the same or even slightly lower volume of sales necessarily will be interpreted by Keynesian economists as success.

4. That monetary expansion can spur an economy to greater prosperity. If this were the case, then counterfeiters would be doing all of us a big favor. Monetary expansion distorts the structure of production, sending more resources to the expansion of enterprises further removed from final consumption. This malinvestment eventually will be revealed by losses in these industries. The current collapse of commodity prices and anticipated bankruptcies in commodity production industries are a good illustration of this process and are attributable to massive monetary expansion by central banks since the 2008 great recession.

Let me add J M Keynes quote on inflation: (bold mine)

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

There can be no general prosperity on policies of “legal plunder” channeled through money manipulation. Since there is no such thing as free lunch, central banking’s invisible confiscatory policies eventually unravel. Real time market crashes have been symptoms of these.