The Confidence Game

Back in the early 1900, the renown economist Irving Fisher lost the equivalent of 10o million USD in the crash of 1929. He is also famous for his theory of debt deflation. Almost 100 years later, is there anything we can learn for Fisher? Steve Keen thinks so:

Fisher’s confidence led him to hang on to his margin-financed stocks (worth over $100 million in 2000-dollar terms). Despite his confidence, the stock market continued its plunge from its peak of 31.3 in July 1929 to the nadir of 4.77 in May of 1932, while unemployment rose from zero to 25 percent. Fisher was wiped out financially, and left to ponder how he could have got the behaviour of the market, and the economy, so badly wrong.

Three years later, he reached the conclusion that he had been misled by two core elements of the neoclassical theory he had helped build: the beliefs that the economy was always in equilibrium, and that the debt commitments borrowers had entered into to purchase financial assets were based on correct forecasts of future economic prospects.

On equilibrium, he reasoned, even if it were true that the economy tended towards equilibrium, random events alone would ensure that all economic variables were either above or below their equilibrium levels. Therefore economic theory had to be about disequilibrium rather than equilibrium:

“Theoretically there may be— in fact, at most times there must be—  over- or under-production, over- or under-consumption, over- or under spending, over- or under-saving, over- or under-investment, and over or under everything else. It is as absurd to assume that, for any long period of time, the variables in the economic organization, or any part of them, will “ stay put,”  in perfect equilibrium, as to assume that the Atlantic Ocean can ever be without a wave.” (Fisher 1933)

This realisation in turn put paid to any notion that today’s debt commitments were based on an accurate prediction of tomorrow’s economic outcomes. Instead, he identified over-indebtedness as one of the two key causes of Great Depression:

“two dominant factors [are ...] over-indebtedness to start with and deflation following soon after… these two economic maladies, the debt disease and the price-level disease, are, in the great booms and depressions, more important causes than all others put together.

Thus over-investment and over-speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money. That is, over-indebtedness may lend importance to over-investment or to over-speculation.

The same is true as to over-confidence. I fancy that over-confidence seldom does any great harm except when, as, and if, it beguiles its victims into debt.” (Fisher 1933)

One would hope that economic theory had learnt from the Great Depression, and in particular from Fisher’s insights. Unfortunately, economics was eager to unlearn these lessons, because the very phenomenon of a Depression was anathema to a profession that had always sought to eulogise the market economy, rather than to understand it. Equilibrium came back again in the guise of the “Neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis” in the 1950s. By the 1990s, all vestiges of Keynes had been thrown away–and nothing of Fisher had been even assimilated in the first place (skerricks of his thought are percolating through now though: see The Economist for a pretty good overview of Fisher).

Today, macroeconomic models like TRYM (the TReasurY Macroeconomic model that is used to prepare the Australian Federal Budget) presume that the economy tends towards a “long run equilibrium”. The apparent dynamics such models display are simply the convergence of the model from an initial starting point to the assumed long run equilibrium.

For example, the figure below shows the TRYM model’s predictions for unemployment from March 1995 till March 2010 (Figure 10: Dynamic Adjustment towards Steady State - Unemployment; Modelling Section, Macroeconomic Analysis Branch, Commonwealth Treasury, The Macroeconomics Of The Trym Model Of The Australian Economy,  Commonwealth of Australia 1996). The model “predicted” that unemployment would fall from around 9 percent in 1995 to just below 7 percent in 2010, simply on the basis that unemployment was assumed to converge to an a long run equilibrium rate of 7 percent over time (the actual level fell well below this, and the  assumed equilibrium unemployment rate–the “NAIRU”–was therefore later reduced to 5.25 percent).

Virtually everyone knows Keynes’s quip that “in the long run we are all dead”. Yet very few realise that Keynes’s target was precisely this approach to economic modelling–of assuming that the economy would simply tend to return to equilibrium after any disturbance:

“ But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”   (Keynes, 1923)

Hobbled by this naive belief in equilibrium, the economics profession was as unprepared for today’s crisis as it had been for the Great Depression. Now that the crisis is well and truly with us, all conventional “neoclassical” economists can offer is the hope that the crisis can be overcome by a good, strong dose of confidence.

From Fisher’s point of view, such a belief is futile. In an economy with an excessive level of debt and low inflation, he argued that confidence was irrelevant–and in fact dangerously misleading, as he knew from painful personal experience. Given over-indebtedness and low levels of inflation, a “chain reaction” would occur in which: 

“(1) Debt liquidation leads to distress selling and to

(2) Contraction of deposit currency, as bank loans are paid off, and to a slowing down of velocity of circulation. This contraction of deposits and of their velocity, precipitated by distress selling, causes

(3) A fall in the level of prices, in other words, a swelling of the dollar. Assuming, as above stated, that this fall of prices is not interfered with by reflation or otherwise, there must be

(4) A still greater fall in the net worths of business, precipitating bankruptcies and

(5) A like fall in profits, which in a “ capitalistic,”  that is, a private-profit society, leads the concerns which are running at a loss to make

(6) A reduction in output, in trade and in employment of labor. These losses, bankruptcies, and unemployment, lead to

(7) Pessimism and loss of confidence, which in turn lead to

(8) Hoardinq and slowing down still more the velocity of circulation.The above eight changes cause

(9) Complicated disturbances in the rates of interest, in particular, a fall in the nominal, or money, rates and a rise in the real, or commodity, rates of interest.” (Fisher 1933; The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions)