Gerry Jackson
27/7/20

Bill Mitchell, like the great majority of economists, is an ardent opponent of the gold standard. He is also one of the world’s leading modern monetary theorists and a professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. He wrote an article attacking the gold standard, an article that revealed not only a staggering ignorance of its history but also how it functioned. This response is the first in a series that exposes Professor Mitchell’s errors.

He began his attack with the glaring blunder that the gold standard was in “vogue” in the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, that its acceptance was due to a shortage silver  and that “Britain adopted the gold standard in 1844”. After that, his argument continued downhill. Unfortunately, the number of economists who share Professor Mitchell’s ignorance of the history and economics of the gold standard, including those on the right, and what it means for the business cycle is truly disheartening. Continue reading Professor Bill Mitchell, a Modern Monetary Theory exponent, gets the gold standard badly wrong: Part 1 →

14/7/20

Come 27/7/20I shall post the first of a number of articles dealing with contentious economic issues and theories that have serious political ramifications. What follows will provide readers with a brief introduction to each subject.

Professor Bill Mitchell (University of Newcastle, NSW) is one of the world’s leading proponents of MMT (modern monetary theory). As part of an effort to popularise MMT he posted articles¹ that painted a grotesque picture of what is called the classical gold standard. His most egregious error is his assertion that it had a natural tendency to cause depressions. This is utter nonsense. It was deviations from the gold standard that resulted in depressions, not the gold standard itself. It is clear that Professor Mitchell’s ill-founded attack on the gold standard is part of an attempt to justify MMT policies.

My rebuttal of Professor Mitchell’s anti-gold thesis will deal in detail with all of its errors. Unfortunately, he is far from being alone in his ignorance of how the gold standard really functioned. Professor Sinclair Davidson (RMIT) is every bit his equal in that regard. It was he who unequivocally asserted that the gold standard was a bad idea without being able to explain why.² He also blamed Australia’s sluggish growth rate in the late 1920s on the country’s return to gold. (This stuff is on par with Professor Mitchell’s gold standard nonsense.) Elsewhere, Professor Davidson emphatically stated that Australia’s recovery from the Great Depression was caused by Australia leaving the gold standard in January 1931 which he thinks led to the devaluation of the Australian pound. This is an extraordinary assertion  when one considers that the country left the gold standard in December 1929, some 28 months or so before the recovery³. How Professor Davidson was able to confuse the abandoning of gold with the date the exchange rate was revalued is therefore something only he can explain. Continue reading Economic errors and fallacies concerning the gold standard, the Great Depression, Keynesianism, post-Keynesians, MMT, free trade, Austrian economics, immigration →