Why did the British insist on returning to gold at the old, overvalued par? Partly it was a vain desire to recapture old glories, to bring back the days when London was the world’s financial center. The British did not seem to realize fully that the United States had emerged from the war as the great creditor nation, and financially the strongest one, so that financial predominance was inexorably moving to New York or Washington. To recapture their financial predominance, the British believed that they would have to bring back the old, traditional, $4.86. Undoubtedly, the British also remembered that after two decades of war against the French Revolution and Napoleon, the pound had quickly recovered from its depreciated state, and the British had been able to restore the pound at its pre-fiat money par. This restoration was made possible by the fact that the post–Napoleonic War pound returned quickly to its prewar par, because of a sharp monetary and price deflation that occurred in the inevitable postwar recession.9 The British after World War I apparently did not realize that (a) the restoration of the pre–Napoleonic War par had required a substantial deflation, and (b) their newly rigidified war structure could not easily afford or adapt to a deflationary policy. Instead, the British would insist on having their cake and eating it too: on enjoying the benefits of gold at a highly overvalued pound while still continuing to inflate and luxuriate in cheap money.
Another reason for returning at $4.86 was a desire by the powerful city of London—the financiers who held much of the public debt swollen during the war—to be repaid in pounds that would be worth their old prewar value in terms of gold and purchasing power. Since the British were now attempting to support more than twice as much money on top of approximately the same gold base as before the war, and the other European countries were suffering from even more inflated currencies, the British and other Europeans complained all during the 1920s of a gold “shortage,” or shortage of “liquidity.” These complaints reflected a failure to realize that, on the market, a “shortage” can only be the consequence of an artificially low price of a good. The “gold shortage” of the ‘20s reflected the artificially low “price” of gold, that is, the artificially overvalued rate at which pounds—and many other European currencies—returned to gold in the 1920s, and therefore the arbitrarily low rate at which gold was pegged in terms of those currencies.
More particularly, since the pound was pegged at an overvalued rate compared to gold, Britain would tend to suffer in the 1920s from gold flowing out of the country. Or, put another way, the swollen and inflated pounds would, in the classic price-specie-flow mechanism, tend to drive gold out of Britain to pay for a deficit in the balance of payments, an outflow that could put severe contractionary pressure upon the English banking system. But how could Britain, in the postwar world, cleave to these contradictory axioms and yet avoid a disastrous outflow of gold followed by a banking collapse and monetary contraction?
RETURN TO GOLD AT $4.86: THE CUNLIFFE COMMITTEE AND AFTER
Britain’s postwar course had already been set during the war. In January 1918, the British Treasury and the Ministry of Reconstruction established the Cunliffe Committee, the Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges After the War, headed by the venerable Walter Lord Cunliffe, retiring governor of the Bank of England. As early as its first interim report in the summer of 1918, and confirmed by its final report the following year, the Cunliffe Committee called in no uncertain terms for return to the gold standard at the prewar par. No alternatives were considered.10 This course was confirmed by the Vassar-Smith Committee on Financial Facilities in 1918, which was composed largely of representatives of industry and commerce, and which endorsed the Cunliffe recommendations. A minority of bankers, including Sir Brien Cockayne and incoming Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, argued for an immediate return to gold at the old par, but they were overruled by the majority, led by their economic adviser, the distinguished Cambridge economist and chosen successor to Alfred Marshall’s professorial chair, Arthur Cecil Pigou. Pigou argued for postponement of the return, hoping to ease the transition by loans from abroad and, particularly, by inflation in the United States. The hope for U.S. inflation became a continuing theme during the 1920s, since inflated and depreciated Britain was in danger of losing gold to the United States, a loss which could be staved off, and the new 1920s system sustained, by inflation in the United States. After exchange controls and most other wartime controls were lifted at the end of 1919, Britain, not knowing precisely when to return to gold, passed the Gold and Silver Export Embargo Act in 1920 for a five-year period, in effect continuing a fiat paper standard until the end of 1925, with an announced intention of returning to gold at that time. Britain was committed to doing something about gold in 1925.11
The United States and Great Britain both experienced a traditional immediate postwar boom, continuing the wartime inflation, in 1919 and 1920, followed by a severe corrective recession and deflation in 1921. The English deflation did not suffice to correct the overvaluation of the pound, since the United States, now the strongest country on gold, had deflated as well. The fact that sterling began to appreciate to the old par during 1924 misled the British into thinking that the pound would not be overvalued at $4.86; actually, the appreciation was the result of speculators betting on a nearly sure thing: the return to gold during 1925 of the pound at the old $4.86 par.
A crucial point: while prices and wage rates rose together in England during the wartime and postwar inflationary boom, they scarcely fell together. When commodity prices fell sharply in England in 1920 and 1921, wages fell much less, remaining high above prewar levels. This rise in real wage rates, bringing about high and chronic unemployment, reflected the severe downward wage rigidity in Britain after the war, caused by the spread of trade unionism and particularly by the massive new unemployment insurance program.12
The condition of the English economy, in particular the high rate of unemployment and depression of the export industries during the 1922–1924 recovery from the postwar recession, should have given the British pause. From 1851 to 1914, the unemployment rate in Great Britain had hovered consistently around 3 percent; during the boom of 1919–1920, it was 2.4 percent. Yet, during the postwar “recovery,” British unemployment ranged between 9 and 15 percent. It should have been clear that something was very wrong.
It is no accident that the high unemployment was concentrated in the British export industries. Compared to the prewar year of 1913, most of the domestic economy in Britain was in fairly good shape in 1924. Setting 1913 as equal to 100, real gross domestic product was 92 in 1924, consumer expenditure was 100, construction was 114, and gross fixed investment was a robust 132. But while real imports were 100 in 1924, real exports were in sickly shape, at only 72. Or, in monetary terms, British imports were 111 in 1924, whereas British exports were only 80. In contrast, world exports were 107 as compared to 1913.
The sickness of British exports may be seen in the fate of the traditional, major export industries during the 1920s. Compared to 1913, iron and steel exports in 1924 were 77.5; cotton textile exports were 65; coal exports were 80; and shipbuilding exports a disastrous 35. Consequently, Britain was now in debt to such strong countries as the United States, while a creditor to such financially weak countries as France, Russia, and Italy.13
It should be clear that the export industries suffered particularly from depression because of the impact of the overvalued pound; and that furthermore the depression took the form of permanently high unemployment even in the midst of a general recovery because wage rates were kept rigidly downward by trade unions, and especially by the massive system of unemployment insurance.14
There were several anomalies and paradoxes in the conflicts and discussions over the Cunliffe Committee recommendations from 1918 until the actual return to gold in 1925. The critics of the committee were generally discredited for being ardent inflationists as well as opponents of the old par. These forces included J.M. Keynes; the Federation of British Industries, the powerf
ul trade association; and Sir Reginald McKenna, a wartime chancellor of the Exchequer and after the war head of the huge Midland Bank. And yet, most of these inflationists and antideflationists (with the exception of Keynes and of W. Peter Rylands, Federation of British Industries president in 1921) were willing to go along with return at the prewar par. This put the critics of deflation and proponents of cheap money in the curiously anomalous position of being willing to accept return to an overvalued pound, while combating the logic of that pound—namely, deflation in order to attain English exports competitive in world markets. Thus McKenna, who positively desired a policy of domestic inflation and cheap money and cared little for exchange-rate stability or gold, was willing to go along with the return to gold at $4.86. The Federation of British Industries, which recognized the increasing rigidity of wage costs, was fearful of deflation, and its 1921 President Peter Rylands argued forcefully that stability of exchange “is of far greater importance than the re-establishment of any prewar ratio,” and went so far as to advocate a return at the far more sensible rate of $4.00 to the pound:
We have got accustomed to a relationship... of about four dollars to the pound, and I feel that the interests of the manufacturers would be best served if it could by some means be fixed at four dollars to the pound and remain there for all time.15
But apart from Rylands, the other antideflationists were willing to go along with the prewar par. Why?
The influential journal, the Round Table, one of their number, noted the anomaly:
[W]hile there is a very large body of opinion which wants to see the pound sterling again at par with gold, there are very few so far as we know, who publicly advocate in order to secure such a result an actively deflationary policy at this particular moment, leading to a further fall in prices.16
There are several solutions to this puzzle, all centering around the view that deflationary adjustments from a return to the prewar par would be insignificant. In the first place, there was a confident expectation, echoing the original view of Pigou, that price inflation in the United States would set things right and validate the $4.86 pound. This was the argument used on behalf of $4.86 by the Round Table, by McKenna, and by his fellow dissident banker, F.C. Goodenough, chairman of Barclays Bank.
A second reason we have already alluded to: the inevitable rise in sterling to par as the return date approached misled many people into believing that the market action was justifying the choice of rate. But a third reason for optimism particularly needs exploring: that the British were subtly but crucially changing the rules of the game, and returning to a very different and far weaker “gold standard” than had existed before the war.
When the British government made its final decision to return to gold at $4.86 in the spring of 1925, Colonel F.V. Willey, head of the Federation of British Industries, was one of the few to register a perceptive warning note:
The announcement made today... will rapidly bring the pound to parity with the dollar and will... increase the present difficulties of our export trade, which is already suffering from a greater rise in the value of the pound than is justified by the relative level of sterling and gold prices.17
The way was paved for the final decision to return to gold by the Committee on Currency and Bank of England Note Issues, appointed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden on May 5, 1924, at the suggestion of influential British Treasury official Sir Otto Niemeyer. The committee, known as the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee, was co-chaired by former Chancellor Sir Austen Chamberlain and by Sir John Bradbury, a former member of the old Cunliffe Committee. Also on the new committee were Niemeyer and Professor Pigou of the Cunliffe group. We have a full account of the testimony before the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee, and of the arguments used to induce Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill to go back to gold the following year. It is clear from those accounts that the dominant theme was that deflation and export depression could be avoided because of expected rising prices in the United States, which would restore the British export position and avoid an outflow of gold from Britain to the United States. Thus, Sir Charles Addis, a member of the old Cunliffe Committee, a director of the Bank of England, and the director upon whom bank Governor Montagu Norman relied most for advice, called for a return to gold during 1925. Addis welcomed any deflation as a necessary sacrifice in order to restore London as the world’s financial center, but he expected a rise in prices in the United States. After listening to a great deal of testimony, the committee leaned toward recommending not a return to gold but waiting until 1925 so as to allow American prices to rise. Bradbury wrote to Gaspard Farrer, a director of Barclays and a member of the Cunliffe Committee, that waiting a bit would be preferred: “Odds are that within the comparatively near future America will allow gold to depreciate to the value of sterling.”18 In early September 1924, Pigou stepped in again, reworking an early draft by the committee secretary to make his economist’s report. Pigou once more asserted that an increase in U.S. prices was likely, thereby easing the path toward restoration of gold at $4.86 with little needed deflation. Acting on Pigou’s recommendation, the Chamberlain-Bradbury Committee in its draft report in October urged a return to $4.86 at the end of 1925, expecting that the alleged gap of 10 to 12 percent in American and British price levels would be made up in the interim by a rise in American prices.19
Even influential Treasury official Ralph Hawtrey—a friend and fellow Cambridge apostle of Keynes, an equally ardent inflationist and critic of gold, and chief architect of the European gold-exchange standard of the 1920s—favored a return to gold at $4.86 in 1925. He differed in this conclusion from Keynes because he confidently expected a rise in American prices to bear the brunt of the adjustment.20
The British Labor government fell in early October 1924, and the general election in late October swept a conservative government into power. After carefully listening to Keynes, McKenna, and other critics, and after holding a now-famous dinner party of the major advocates on March 17, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, made the final decision to go back to gold on March 20, announcing and passing a gold standard act, returning to gold at $4.86 on April 28, and putting the new gold standard into effect immediately.21
It cannot be stressed too strongly that the British decision to return to gold at $4.86 was not made in ignorance of deflationary problems or export depression, but rather in the strong and confident expectation of imminent American inflation. This dominant expectation was clear from the assurances of Sir John Bradbury to Churchill; from the anticipation of even such cautious men as Sir Otto Niemeyer and Montagu Norman; from the optimism of Ralph Hawtrey; and above all in the official Treasury memorandum attached to the Gold Standard Act of 1925.22, 23
AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR THE RETURN TO GOLD AT $4.86: THE MORGAN CONNECTION
Why were the British so confident that American prices would rise sufficiently to support their return to gold at the overinflated $4.86? Because of the power of the new United States central bank, the Federal Reserve System, installed in 1914, and because of the close and friendly relationship between the British government, its Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve. The Fed, they were sure, would do what was necessary to help Britain reconstruct the world monetary order.
To understand these expectations, we must explore the Federal Reserve–Bank of England connection, and particularly the crucial tie that bound them together: their mutual relationship with the House of Morgan. The powerful J.P. Morgan and Company took the lead in planning, drafting the legislation, and mobilizing the agitation for the Federal Reserve System that brought the dubious benefits of central banking to the United States in 1914. The purpose of the Federal Reserve was to cartelize the nation’s banking system, and to enable the banks to inflate together, centralizing and economizing reserves, with the Federal Reserve as “lender of last resort.” The Federal Reserve’s new monopoly of note issue took the de facto place of gold as the nation’s currency. Not only were th
e majority of Federal Reserve Board directors in the Morgan orbit, but the man who was able to become the virtually absolute ruler of the Fed from its inception to his death in 1928, Benjamin Strong, was a man who had spent his entire working life as a leading Morgan banker.24
A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II Page 31