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With the dollar sinking
to a pathetic 1/783rd of an ounce of gold this week, the inflation in the
U.S. is gathering steam. Is there anything that can be done?
This speech, by Friedrich
Hayek (who won a Nobel Prize for economics in 1974) was given on May 18,
1970. In January, 1970, Fed Chairman William McChesney
Martin was replaced by Arthur Burns. Martin had been defending the gold
standard which kept the dollar in line with gold at $35/oz. through a policy
that resulted in high Fed funds rates. This was probably not necessary, as a
more direct adjustment of base money supply probably would not have led to
such high rates. The high rates were blamed for the recession in 1969-1970,
and indeed they had a significant effect. Burns immediately lowered rates
after entering office, and the dollar began its long decline which continued
until it was momentarily worth only 1/850th of an ounce of gold in early
1980.
By May of 1970, it was
already fairly clear where this was leading, although it was over a year
until the gold peg at $35/oz. was officially discarded.
The most interesting part
of this speech, for our purposes, is the first paragraph. Here it is:
In one sense the question
asked in the title of this lecture is purely rhetorical. I hope none of you
has suspected me of doubting even for a moment that technically there is no
problem in stopping inflation. If the monetary authorities really want to and
are prepared to accept the consequences, they can always do so practically
overnight. They fully control the base of the pyramid of credit, and a
credible announcement that they will not increase the quantity of bank notes
in circulation and bank deposits, and, if necessary, even decrease them, will
do the trick. About this there is no doubt among economists. What I am
concerned about is not the technical but the political possibilities. Here,
indeed, we face a task so difficult that more and more people, including
highly competent people, have resigned themselves to the inevitability of
indefinitely continued inflation. I know in fact of no serious attempt to
show how we can overcome these obstacles which lie not in the monetary but in
the political field. And I cannot myself claim to have a patent medicine
which I am sure is applicable and effective in the prevailing conditions. But
I do not regard it as a task beyond the scope of human ingenuity once the
urgency of the problem is generally understood. My main aim tonight is to
bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable
society of free men. Once this urgent necessity is fully understood, I hope
people will also gather the courage to grasp the hot irons which must be
tackled if the political obstacles are to be removed and we are to have a
chance of restoring a functioning market economy.
First of all, Hayek
identifies inflation as a monetary phenomena -- not caused by Arab oil
embargoes, pushing costs, pulling wages, shortages of this or that,
government deficits, current account deficits, trade imbalances, expansion of
credit, excessive shopping, or any other such nonmonetary factor. This was
exactly correct -- and it amazes me, today, how few people, including
economists, understand even this basic observation. Certainly the stock
market was prepared to party on, and the Nifty Fifty boom lasted until
crushed by inflation in 1974.
Second, Hayek says that
it is easy to fix inflation, and indeed it is. You just adjust
the supply of currency, which in turn affects the value of the currency.
Third, Hayek identifies
exactly what should be done, which is to adjust the "base of the pyramid
of credit," which we call "base money," (the term for real
money) and Hayek correctly identifies this as banknotes and bank reserves.
That alone, as Hayek says, would do the trick.
The use of the term
"base of the pyramid of credit" sounds like Hayek is drifting a bit
into the "money multiplier" theories that we
talked about last week. The effect of contracting the monetary base is NOT to
cause some consequent contraction in credit as a whole. It merely manages the
value of the currency, such that the credit markets can proceed in their
normal fashion, without being molested by variations in currency value.
Now, note what Hayek did not say. He didn't say:
1) "We must reduce our
spending on overseas wars to bring the government's budget deficit into
line."
2) "We must persuade
Japan (China today) to allow its currency to rise to resolve trade
imbalances."
3) "We must reduce
consumer reliance on credit."
4) "We must control
M1, M2, M3 or ...."
5) "We must ask our
friends the Saudis to be more generous with their oil supply or else..."
6) "We must have a
horrible recession to 'break the back of inflation'"
7) "The Fed must raise
its interest rate target."
8) "The government
must sell gold for $35/oz."
9) "We must outlaw
fractional reserve banking."
10) "We must replace
our paper currency with gold coins."
11) "The government
must maintain 100% reserve backing of paper currency."
Compare Hayek's solution,
for example, with that of Gerald Ford in 1974.
I don't agree with
everything Hayek had to say, but this speech really hit the target at the
right time. Today, we can still avoid an inflation. The process is just as
simple and easy as it was in May, 1970. You just reduce the rate of base
money expansion -- or even reduce base money if necessary -- to bring the
currency's value back into line. Although the economy as a whole is still
aligned with a dollar worth $350-$400/oz. of gold, in my estimation,
realistically the deflation (dollar rise) necessary to return to that level
could be quite disastrous given the precarious credit conditions in the U.S.
Alas, inflation is often a one-way street for that reason. Thus, I would
target a rise to about the $650/oz. of gold level. We could repeg to gold at those levels, or perhaps, over a period
of years (after today's credit situation is better resolved), aim for a
return to more like the $500/oz. level, and repeg
there.
As Hayek said 37 years
ago, the problem is not technical, it is political. I wouldn't say there is
so much opposition to proper monetary management. Rather, the level of
ignorance is so great that hardly anyone is even aware that this option
exists.
Here's the rest of
Hayek's speech.
Can We Still Avoid
Inflation?
Friedrich A. Hayek
In one sense the question asked in the title of this lecture is purely
rhetorical. I hope none of you has suspected me of doubting even for a moment
that technically there is no problem in stopping inflation. If the monetary
authorities really want to and are prepared to accept the consequences, they
can always do so practically overnight. They fully control the base of the
pyramid of credit, and a credible announcement that they will not increase
the quantity of bank notes in circulation and bank deposits, and, if
necessary, even decrease them, will do the trick. About this there is no
doubt among economists. What I am concerned about is not the technical but
the political possibilities. Here, indeed, we face a task so difficult that
more and more people, including highly competent people, have resigned
themselves to the inevitability of indefinitely continued inflation. I know
in fact of no serious attempt to show how we can overcome these obstacles
which lie not in the monetary but in the political field. And I cannot myself
claim to have a patent medicine which I am sure is applicable and effective
in the prevailing conditions. But I do not regard it as a task beyond the
scope of human ingenuity once the urgency of the problem is generally understood.
My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we
are to preserve a viable society of free men. Once this urgent necessity is
fully understood, I hope people will also gather the courage to grasp the hot
irons which must be tackled if the political obstacles are to be removed and
we are to have a chance of restoring a functioning market economy.
In the elementary
textbook accounts, and probably also in the public mind generally, only one
harmful effect of inflation is seriously considered, that on the relations
between debtors and creditors. Of course, an unforeseen depreciation of the
value of money harms creditors and benefits debtors. This is important but by
no means the most important effect of inflation. And since it is the
creditors who are harmed and the debtors who benefit, most people do not
particularly mind, at least until they realize that in modern society the
most important and numerous class of creditors are the wage and salary
earners and the small savers, and the representative groups of debtors who
profit in the first instance are the enterprises and credit institutions.
But I do not want to
dwell too long on this most familiar effect of inflation which is also the
one which most readily corrects itself. Twenty years ago I still had some
difficulty to make my students believe that if an annual rate of price
increase of five per cent were generally expected, we would have rates of
interest of 9-10 per cent or more. There still seem to be a few people who have
not yet understood that rates of this sort are bound to last so long as
inflation continues. Yet, so long as this is the case, and the creditors
understand that only part of their gross return is net return, at least short
term lenders have comparatively little ground for complaint?even
though long term creditors, such as the owners of government loans and other
debentures, are partly expropriated.
There is, however,
another more devious aspect of this process which I must at least briefly
mention at this point. It is that it upsets the reliability of all accounting
practices and is bound to show spurious profits much in excess to true gains.
Of course, a wise manager could allow for this also, at least in a general
way, and treat as profits only what remains after he has taken into account
the depreciation of money as affecting the replacement costs of his capital.
But the tax inspector will not permit him to do so and insist on taxing all
the pseudo-profits. Such taxation is simply confiscation of some of the
substance of capital, and in the case of a rapid inflation may become a very
serious matter.
But all this is familiar ground?matters of which I merely wanted to remind you
before turning to the less conspicuous but, for that very reason, more dangerous
effects of inflation. The whole conventional analysis reproduced in most
textbooks proceeds as if a rise in average prices meant that all prices rise
at the same time by more or less the same percentage, or that this at least
was true of all prices determined currently on the market, leaving out only a
few prices fixed by decree or long term contracts, such as public utility
rates, rents and various conventional fees. But this is not true or even
possible. The crucial point is that so long as the flow of money expenditure
continues to grow and prices of commodities and services are driven up, the
different prices must rise, not at the same time but in succession, and that
in consequence, so long as this process continues, the prices which rise
first must all the time move ahead of the others. This distortion of the
whole price structure will disappear only sometime after the process of
inflation has stopped. This is a fundamental point which the master of all of
us, Ludwig von Mises, has never tired from
emphasizing for the past sixty years. It seems nevertheless necessary to
dwell upon it at some length since, as I recently discovered with some shock,
it is not appreciated and even explicitly denied by one of the most
distinguished living economists. [1]
That the order in which a continued increase in the money stream raises the
different prices is crucial for an understanding of the effects of inflation
was clearly seen more than two hundred years ago by David Hume?and
indeed before him by Richard Cantillon. It was in
order deliberately to eliminate this effect that Hume assumed as a first
approximation that one morning every citizen of a country woke up to find the
stock of money in his possession miraculously doubled. Even this would not
really lead to an immediate rise of all prices by the same percentage. But it
is not what ever really happens. The influx of the additional money into the
system always takes place at some particular point. There will always be some
people who have more money to spend before the others. Who these people are
will depend on the particular manner in which the increase in the money
stream is being brought about. It may be spent in the first instance by
government on public works or increased salaries, or it may be first spent by
investors mobilizing cash balances or borrowing for the purpose; it may be
spent in the first instance on securities, on investment goods, on wages or
on consumer's goods. It will then in turn be spent on something else by the
first recipients of the additional expenditure, and so on. The process will
take very different forms according to the initial source or sources of the
additional money stream; and all its ramifications will soon be so complex
that nobody can trace them. But one thing all these different forms of the
process will have in common: that the different prices will rise, not at the
same time but in succession, and that so long as the process continues some
prices will always be ahead of the others and the whole structure of relative
prices therefore very different from what the pure theorist describes as an
equilibrium position. There will always exist what might be described as a
prices gradient in favor of those commodities and services which each
increment of the money stream hits first and to the disadvantage of the
successive groups which it reaches only later?with
the effect that what will rise as a whole will not be a level but a sort of
inclined plane?if we take as normal the system of
prices which existed before inflation started and which will approximately
restore itself sometime after it has stopped.
To such a change in
relative prices, if it has persisted for some time and comes to be expected
to continue, will of course correspond a similar change in the allocation of
resources: relatively more will be produced of the goods and services whose
prices are now comparatively higher and relatively less of those whose prices
are comparatively lower. This redistribution of the productive resources will
evidently persist so long, but only so long, as inflation continues at a
given rate. We shall see that this inducement to activities, or a volume of
some activities, which can be continued only if inflation is also continued,
is one of the ways in which even a contemporary inflation places us in a
quandary because its discontinuance will necessarily destroy some of the jobs
it has created.
But before I turn to
those consequences of an economy adjusting itself to a continuous process of
inflation, I must deal with an argument that, though I do not know that it
has anywhere been clearly stated, seems to lie at the root of the view which
represents inflation as relatively harmless. It seems to be that, if future
prices are correctly foreseen, any set of prices expected in the future is compatible
with an equilibrium position, because present prices will adjust themselves
to expected future prices. For this it would, however, clearly not be
sufficient that the general level of prices at the various future dates be
correctly foreseen, and these, as we have seen, will change in different
degrees. The assumption that the future prices of particular commodities can
be correctly foreseen during a period of inflation is probably an assumption
which never can be true: because, whatever future prices are foreseen,
present prices do not by themselves adapt themselves to the expected higher
prices of the future, but only through a present increase in the quantity of
money with all the changes in the relative height of the different prices
which such changes in the quantity of money necessarily involve.
More important, however,
is the fact that if future prices were correctly foreseen, inflation would
have none of the stimulating effects for which it is welcomed by so many
people.
Now the chief effect of
inflation which makes it at first generally welcome to business is precisely
that prices of products turn out to be higher in general than foreseen. It is
this which produces the general state of euphoria, a false sense of
wellbeing, in which everybody seems to prosper. Those who without inflation
would have made high profits make still higher ones. Those who would have
made normal profits make unusually high ones. And not only businesses which
were near failure but even some which ought to fail are kept above water by
the unexpected boom. There is a general excess of demand over supply?all is saleable and everybody can continue what he
had been doing. It is this seemingly blessed state in which there are more
jobs than applicants which Lord Beveridge defined
as the state of full employment?never understanding
that the shrinking value of his pension of which he so bitterly complained in
old age was the inevitable consequence of his own recommendations having been
followed.
But, and this brings me to my next point, "full employment" in his
sense requires not only continued inflation but inflation at a growing rate.
Because, as we have seen, it will have its immediate beneficial effect only
so long as it, or at least its magnitude, is not foreseen. But once it has
continued for some time, its further continuance comes to be expected. If
prices have for some time been rising at five percent per annum, it comes to
be expected that they will do the same in the future. Present prices of
factors are driven up by the expectation of the higher prices for the product?sometimes, where some of the cost elements are
fixed, the flexible costs may be driven up even more than the expected rise
of the price of the product?up to the point where
there will be only a normal profit.
But if prices then do not
rise more than expected, no extra profits will be made. Although prices
continue to rise at the former rate, this will no longer have the miraculous
effect on sales and employment it had before. The artificial gains will
disappear, there will again be losses, and some firms will find that prices
will not even cover costs. To maintain the effect inflation had earlier when
its full extent was not anticipated, it will have to be stronger than before.
If at first an annual rate of price increase of five percent had been
sufficient, once five percent comes to be expected something like seven
percent or more will be necessary to have the same stimulating effect which a
five percent rise had before. And since, if inflation has already lasted for
some time, a great many activities will have become dependent on its
continuance at a progressive rate, we will have a situation in which, in
spite of rising prices, many firms will be making losses, and there may be
substantial unemployment. Depression with rising prices is a typical
consequence of a mere braking of the increase in the rate of inflation once
the economy has become geared to a certain rate of inflation.
All this means that,
unless we are prepared to accept constantly increasing rates of inflation
which in the end would have to exceed any assignable limit, inflation can
always give only a temporary fillip to the economy, but must not only cease
to have stimulating effect but will always leave us with a legacy of postponed
adjustments and new maladjustments which make our problem more difficult.
Please note that I am not saying that once we embark on inflation we are
bound to be drawn into a galloping hyper-inflation. I do not believe that
this is true. All I am contending is that if we wanted to perpetuate the
peculiar prosperity-and-job-creating effects of inflation we would have
progressively to step it up and must never stop increasing its rate. That
this is so has been empirically confirmed by the Great German inflation of
the early 1920s. So long as that increased at a geometrical rate there was
indeed (except towards the end) practically no unemployment. But till then
every time merely the increase of the rate of inflation slowed down,
unemployment rapidly assumed major proportions. I do not believe we shall
follow that path?at least not so long as tolerably
responsible people are at the helm?though I am not
quite so sure that a continuance of the monetary policies of the last decade
may not sooner or later create a position in which less responsible people
will be put into command. But this is not yet our problem. What we are
experiencing is still only what in Britain is known as the
"stop-go" policy in which from time to time the authorities get alarmed
and try to brake, but only with the result that even before the rise of
prices has been brought to a stop, unemployment begins to assume threatening
proportions and the authorities feel forced to resume expansion. This sort of
thing may go on for quite some time, but I am not sure that the effectiveness
of relatively minor doses of inflation in rekindling the boom is not rapidly
decreasing. The one thing which, I will admit, has surprised me about the
boom of the last twenty years is how long the effectiveness of resumed
expansion in restarting the boom has lasted. My expectation was that this
power of getting investment under way by a little more credit expansion would
much sooner exhaust itself?and it may well be that
we have now reached that point. But I am not sure. We may well have another
ten years of stop-go policy ahead of us, probably with decreasing
effectiveness of the ordinary measures of monetary policy and longer
intervals of recessions. Within the political framework and the prevailing
state of opinion the present chairman of the Federal Reserve Board will
probably do as well as can be expected by anybody. But the limitations
imposed upon him by circumstances beyond his control and to which I shall
have to turn in a moment may well greatly restrict his ability of doing what
we would like to do.
On an earlier occasion on
which several of you were present, I have compared the position of those
responsible for monetary policy after a full employment policy has been
pursued for some time to "holding a tiger by the tail." It seems to
me that these two positions have more in common than is comfortable to
contemplate. Not only would the tiger tend to run faster and faster and the
movement bumpier and bumpier as one is dragged along, but also the prospective
effects of letting go become more and more frightening as the tiger becomes
more enraged. That one is soon placed in such a position is the central
objection against allowing inflation to run on for some time. Another
metaphor that has often been justly used in this connection is the effects of
drug-taking. The early pleasant effects and the later necessity of a bitter
choice constitute indeed a similar dilemma. Once placed in this position it
is tempting to rely on palliatives and be content with overcoming short-term
difficulties without ever facing the basic trouble about which those solely
responsible for monetary policy indeed can do little.
Before I proceed with
this main point, however, I must still say a few words about the alleged
indispensability of inflation as a condition of rapid growth. We shall see
that modern developments of labor union policies in the highly industrialized
countries may there indeed have created a position in which both growth and a
reasonably high and stable level of employment may, so long as those policies
continue, make inflation the only effective means of overcoming the obstacles
created by them. But this does not mean that inflation is, in normal
conditions, and especially in less developed countries, required or even favorable
for growth. None of the great industrial powers of the modern world has
reached its position in periods of depreciating money. British prices in 1914
were, so far as meaningful comparisons can be made over such long periods,
just about where they had been two hundred years before, and American prices
in 1939 were also at about the same level as at the earliest point of time
for which we have data, 1749. Though it is largely true that world history is
a history of inflation, the few success stories we find are on the whole the
stories of countries and periods which have preserved a stable currency; and
in the past a deterioration of the value of money has usually gone hand in
hand with economic decay.
There is of course, no
doubt that temporarily the production of capital goods can be increased by
what is called "forced saving"?that is, credit expansion can be
used to direct a greater part of the current services of resources to the
production of capital goods. At the end of such a period the physical
quantity of capital goods existing will be greater than it would otherwise
have been. Some of this may be a lasting gain?people
may get houses in return for what they were not allowed to consume. But I am
not so sure that such a forced growth of the stock of industrial equipment
always makes a country richer, that is, that the value of its capital stock
will afterwards be greater?or by its assistance
all-round productivity be increased more than would otherwise have been the
case. If investment was guided by the expectation of a higher rate of
continued investment (or a lower rate of interest, or a higher rate of real
wages, which all come to the same thing) in the future than in fact will
exist, this higher rate of investment may have done less to enhance overall
productivity than a lower rate of investment would have done if it had taken
more appropriate forms. This I regard as a particularly serious danger for
underdeveloped countries that rely on inflation to step up the rate of
investment. The regular effect of this seems to me to be that a small
fraction of the workers of such countries is equipped with an amount of
capital per head much larger than it can hope within the foreseeable future
to provide for all its workers, and that the investment of the larger total
in consequence does less to raise the general standard of living than a
smaller total more widely and evenly spread would have done. Those who
counsel underdeveloped countries to speed up the rate of growth by inflation
seem to me wholly irresponsible to an almost criminal degree. The one
condition which, on Keynesian assumptions, makes inflation necessary to
secure a full utilization of resources, namely the rigidity of wage rates
determined by labor unions, is not present there. And nothing I have seen of
the effects of such policies, be it in South America, Africa, or Asia, can
change my conviction that in such countries inflation is entirely and
exclusively damaging?producing a waste of resources
and delaying the development of that spirit of rational calculation which is
the indispensable condition of the growth of an efficient market economy.
The whole Keynesian
argument for an expansionist credit policy rests entirely and completely on
the existence of that union determined level of money wages which is
characteristic of the industrially advanced countries of the West but is
absent in underdeveloped countries?and for
different reasons less marked in countries like Japan and Germany. It is only
for those countries where, as it is said, money wages are "rigid
downward" and are constantly pushed up by union pressure that a
plausible case can be made that a high level of employment can be maintained
only by continuous inflation?and I have no doubt
that we will get this so long as those conditions persist. What has happened
here at the end of the last war has been that principles of policy have been
adopted, and often embodied in the law, which in effect release unions of all
responsibility for the unemployment their wage policies may cause and place
all responsibility for the preservation of full employment on the monetary
and fiscal authorities. The latter are in effect required to provide enough
money so that the supply of labor at the wages fixed by the unions can be
taken off the market. And since it cannot be denied that at least for a
period of years the monetary authorities have the power by sufficient
inflation to secure a high level of employment, they will be forced by public
opinion to use that instrument. This is the sole cause of the inflationary
developments of the last twenty-five years, and it will continue to operate
as long as we allow on the one hand the unions to drive up money wages to
whatever level they can get employers to consent to?and
these employers consent to money wages with a present buying power which they
can accept only because they know the monetary authorities will partly undo
the harm by lowering the purchasing power of money and thereby also the real
equivalent of the agreed money wages.
This is the political fact
which for the present makes continued inflation inevitable and which can be
altered not by any changes in monetary but only by changes in wage policy.
Nobody should have any illusion about the fact that so long as the present
position on the labor market lasts we are bound to have continued inflation.
Yet we cannot afford this, not only because inflation becomes less and less
effective even in preventing unemployment, but because after it has lasted
for some time and comes to operate at a high rate, it begins progressively to
disorganize the economy and to create strong pressure for the imposition of
all kinds of controls. Open inflation is bad enough, but inflation repressed
by controls is even worse: it is the real end of the market economy.
The hot iron which we must grasp if we are to preserve the enterprise system
and the free market is, therefore, the power of the unions over wages. Unless
wages, and particularly the relative wages in the different industries, are
again subjected to the forces of the market and become truly flexible, in
particular groups downwards as well as upwards, there is no possibility for a
non-inflationary policy. A very simple consideration shows that, if no wage
is allowed to fall, all the changes in relative wages which become necessary
must be brought about by all the wages except those who tend to fall
relatively most being adjusted upwards. This means that practically all money
wages must rise if any change in the wage structure is to be brought about.
Yet a labor union conceding a reduction of the wages of its members appears
today to be an impossibility. Nobody, of course, gains from this situation,
since the rise in money wages must be offset by a depreciation of the value
of money if no unemployment is to be caused. It seems, however, a built-in
necessity of that determination of wages by collective bargaining by
industrial or craft unions plus a full employment policy.
I believe that so long as
this fundamental issue is not resolved, there is little to be hoped from any
improvement of the machinery of monetary control. But this does not mean that
the existing arrangements are satisfactory. They have been designed precisely
to make it easier to give in to the necessities determined by the wage
problem, i.e., to make it easier for each country to inflate. The gold
standard has been destroyed chiefly because it was an obstacle to inflation.
When in 1931 a few days after the suspension of the gold standard in Great
Britain Lord Keynes wrote in a London newspaper that "there are few
Englishmen who do not rejoice at the breaking of our gold fetters," and
fifteen years later could assure us that Bretton
Woods arrangements were "the opposite of the gold standard," all
this was directed against the very feature of the gold standard by which it
made impossible any prolonged inflationary policy of any one country. And
though I am not sure that the gold standard is the best conceivable
arrangement for that purpose, it has been the only one that has been fairly
successful in doing so. It probably has many defects, but the reason for
which it has been destroyed was not one of them; and what has been put into
its place is no improvement. If, as I have recently heard it explained by one
of the members of the original Bretton Woods group,
their aim was to place the burden of adjustment of international balances
exclusively on the surplus countries, it seems to me the result of this must
be continued international inflation. But I only mention this in conclusion
to show that if we are to avoid continued world-wide inflation, we need also
a different international monetary system. Yet the time when we can
profitably think about this will be only after the leading countries have
solved their internal problems. Till then we probably have to be satisfied
with makeshifts, and it seems to me that at the present time, and so long as
the fundamental difficulties I have considered continue to be present, there
is no chance of meeting the problem of international inflation by restoring
an international gold standard, even if this were practical policy. The
central problem which must be solved before we can hope for a satisfactory
monetary order is the problem of wage determination.
This essay was originally
given as a lecture before the Trustees and guests of the Foundation for
Economic Education at Tarrytown, New York on May 18, 1970, and was first
published in the first edition of this book.
[1] [See Professor
Hayek's criticism of Sir John Hicks in his article, "Three Elucidations
of the Ricardo Effect," Journal of Political Economy (March-April 1969):
274?ed.]
Nathan
Lewis
Nathan Lewis was formerly the chief international
economist of a leading economic forecasting firm. He now works in asset management.
Lewis has written for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal Asia, the
Japan Times, Pravda, and other publications. He has appeared on financial
television in the United States,
Japan, and the Middle East. About the Book: Gold: The Once and Future
Money (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-470-04766-8, $27.95) is available at
bookstores nationwide, from all major online booksellers, and direct from the
publisher at www.wileyfinance.com or 800-225-5945. In Canada,
call 800-567-4797.
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