Doug Henwood's Blog, page 72

Ontario update

Several people have written me to say that all the good stuff I described, via the OECD, about Ontario’s progressive education reform in my previous post is all over. The Liberals have gone American. Sad news.

But it does make you wonder: if American-style ed reform were really about “the kids,” why abandon an experiment that was a model for the world? The suspicion that the U.S. reform agenda is about social discipline and saving money seems more justified than ever.

How much do teacher strikes hurt kids?

A Washington Post blogger named Dylan Matthews posted an attempted heart-tugging piece yesterday arguing that teacher strikes do serious academic damage to young students. This is, of course, part of the elite strategy of discrediting the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike against that city’s public schools: it’s a war declared by callous union bosses against schoolkids and their parents to protect their (thoroughly unearned and undeserved) job security and fat paychecks.

Their paychecks are anything but fat, and the CTU is anything but a selfish, insular union. For proof of the latter, check out their excellent paper, “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve,” which is full of serious criticisms of standardized tests, profound racial and class segregation, and systematic underfunding of the city’s public schools. It does not mince words, and it is an inspiration. If Matthews really cared about Chicago’s public school students, he’d be investigating this instead of smearing teachers.

But, that aside, his claims about strikes doing damage to students are wildly overstated and robbed of context. He cites what he has elsewhere described as “voluminous” research proving his case, but the evidence is a long way from voluminous and far more inconclusive than he claims.

Take an NBER working paper by Michael Baker of the University of Toronto, “Industrial Actions in Schools: Strikes and Student Achievement,” which he spends a couple of paragraphs on. The paper is a study of strikes in Ontario in the 1990s, comparing test scores in districts in which there were strikes with those in which there were none. Baker finds a significant impact on 5th and 6th graders in strike zones.

But neither Baker nor Matthews offer any larger context for these strikes. Fortunately, the OECD wrote up the Ontario experience in its 2011 volume, Lessons from PISA for the United States (‎PDF). (PISA is a set of standardized tests administered via the OECD in a number of mostly rich countries around the world. I’ve written up some of the PISA material here.) I’ve appended some excerpts from the OECD’s chapter below, but I’ll summarize some major points first.

The turmoil of the 1990s was provoked by Mike Harris’ aggressively right-wing government. (A measure of the esteem that Harris held schooling in was that his first Minister of Education, John Snobelen, was a high-school dropout.) Harris imposed an “accountability” agenda on the province’s schools that had a lot in common with approaches in the U.S.: standardized tests, budget cutting, privatization, school closures, demonization of teachers. The agenda provoked enormous fights with teachers’ unions, and, not surprisingly, numerous strikes. Morale hit the basement and parents abandoned the public school system. The schools crisis became a huge political issue, and had a lot to do with the 2002 election defeat of the right wing and the ascension of a Liberal government to power. As the Baker paper notes, though Matthews doesn’t, after the Liberal government took over, strikes came to an end. A paper of this sort, based on a set of depoliticized statistical tests, can make no allowance for these complexities.

The Liberals’ education agenda was in many ways the exact opposite of the U.S. approach—and consciously so. It was supportive, not punitive; worked with teachers, instead of demonizing them; aided troubled schools rather than closing them; emphasized public schools rather than privatization; used sociological models rather than economic ones. You could argue that the unions’ militance laid the groundwork for these very constructive reforms, and whatever minor damage might have been done to a few students has been more than offset by Ontario becoming a model jurisdiction for school reform—and something that the OECD, not the most progressive of organizations, thinks that the U.S. could learn from.

Another paper that Matthews cites comes from the Howe Institute, which is Canada’s Heritage Foundation. Sorry to say, but I just don’t trust the source.

Yet another is a study by Michèle Belot and Dinand Webbink of a six-month strike in Belgium in 1990. Six months! If a six month interruption has no effect then you’d have to wonder what good schools do at all. But despite the duration, Belot and Webbink’s conclusions are far more modest than Matthews lets on: “We find some evidence that the strikes decreased the educational attainment of students, although the estimated effect is somewhat imprecise.” Some evidence, and imprecise at that.

Contrary to Matthews’ assertion that the evidence of negative effects is voluminous, Belot and Webbink say this:

To our knowledge, there are no studies evaluating the long-term effect of teacher strikes on educational achievements of students. The challenges in assessing their effect are similar to those mentioned above. Strikes do not occur randomly and are likely to be correlated with other factors affecting educational outcomes, thereby compromising the identification of a causal effect. A before–after comparison might be biased by other unobserved factors that changed after the strikes.

Matthews breathes not a word of these other factors that might compromise the cause–effect relation. One hopes that he read beyond the abstract.

The CTU’s strike, led by a vigorous reform leadership, is quite explicitly about lots more than the wages and working conditions of teachers. It’s about fighting the privatization and union-busting agenda of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel—which he shares with other big-city mayors like Michael Bloomberg, as well as his comrade Barack Obama. By circulating bogus stories about the damage the union is doing to the children of Chicago, Matthews is offering cover to this odious agenda.

_________

excerpts from the OECD chapter on Ontario

Ontario benefits from a set of background conditions that helped to facilitate much of its success. Politically, the McGuinty Liberal premiership benefitted from following a conservative government that was extremely unpopular with teachers and others working in the sector. The conservative government is generally credited with having created a province-wide curriculum and instituted an accompanying assessment and accountability framework, but it alienated the education community in the process by cutting funding, reducing professional development time by half, running television ads demonising teachers, and increasing support for private schools. During this period 55 000 students left the public system, and polls suggested that more than 15% of public school parents were actively considering private school options. there were several teacher strikes, including a two-week work stoppage protesting government legislation in 1997. morale was extremely low and the relationship between the government and teachers was highly acrimonious. Union leader Rhonda Kimberly Young, former President of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, had this to say when interviewed for this report about the years before McGuinty government took over:

Then we got the conservatives and they came in on what they called a “common sense revolution” which implied that there was going to be a miracle. They could lower everybody’s taxes. they could cut waste. they could do more with less – better quality services at lower cost. unfortunately, they were able to sell this idea to the voters. When they took office mike harris was the premier and the first education minister that he appointed was a high school dropout. We saw that as fairly indicative of their approach to education. [That they were not] going to be looking at pedagogy, research and those sorts of things but rather were coming in with a hammer…and they did. in 1998 we had a province wide walkout – it was a political protest. (interview conducted for this report)

In this highly polarised environment the Liberal Party made an early decision to make education the central issue in the next provincial election. As opposition leader, McGuinty made a major policy speech in 2001 committing the party to a quite specific set of reforms, including class size reductions, should they be elected. This speech was followed up by the development of a very detailed education platform with 65 policy proposals. By the time the liberals took office in 2003 they believed they had a strong reform mandate.

…

To achieve sustained change, then, would require:

• Strategies directly focused on improving the act of teaching.

• careful and detailed attention to implementation, along with opportunities for teachers to practice new ideas and learn from their colleagues.

• a single integrated strategy and one set of expectations for both teachers and students.

• Support from teachers for the reforms.

Both province and district policies would need to be crafted with all of these goals in mind.

Of all of these points, the last one (gaining teacher support) was perhaps most important to the new strategy. to improve skills across 5 000 schools would require a continuous and sustained effort by hundreds of thousands of teachers to try to improve their practice. this, they thought, could only happen if teachers were “onside” (to use their word).

To this end, the ministry drew a sharp contrast between its capacity-building approach to reform and the more punitive versions of accountability used in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. They chose to downplay the public reporting of results, and they emphasised that struggling schools would receive additional support and outside expertise rather than be punished or closed.

…

The Ontario strategy differs from a number of other reform efforts, particularly in the United States, in its lack of punitive accountability, performance pay, and competition among schools. Very broadly speaking, the architects of the reforms seem to take more of a “homo sociologicus” than a “homo economicus” view of reform. the architects of the reforms drew upon organisational theorists like Peter Drucker and Edwards Deming rather than economists. from this viewpoint, the problem was more to do with lack of knowledge than lack of will, and the key to motivation was not individual economic calculations but rather the chance to be part of successful and improving schools and organisations. this meant that the key ideas were less about “hard” concepts like accountability and incentives and more about “softer” ideas like culture, leadership and shared purpose. the key challenge was to create layers of organisations directed towards systemic improvement. there is also little emphasis in the ontario strategy on “getting better people”; instead the idea is to work with what you have and upgrade their skills. in all of these respects, the ontario model challenges more market-based theories of reform.

The Ontario strategy is perhaps the world’s leading example of professionally-driven system change. Through consistent application of centrally-driven pressure for higher results, combined with extensive capacity building, in a climate of relative trust and mutual respect, the Ontario System was able to achieve progress on key indicators, while maintaining labour peace and morale throughout the system.

…

However, its response to weak performance has consistently been intervention and support, not blame and punishment. one of its major successes in the early years was to reduce dramatically the number of low-performing schools, not by threatening to close them (as often happens in the US), but by flooding the schools with technical assistance and support. the underlying assumption of ontario’s leaders seems to be that teachers are professionals who are trying to do the right thing, and that performance problems are much more likely to be a product of lack of knowledge than lack of motivation. consequently, teachers seem to take more responsibility for performance than is often the case in countries with a more punitive approach to external accountability.

Presidential economics, 2004 vintage

Mike Tomasky writes with some surprise in The Daily Beast (“The 24 and the 42 million, and Basic Competence”) that both the job market and the stock market have done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican. He comments: “ And yet, no one in America knows. No one.”

That’s not true. Subscribers to Left Business Observer knew that years ago. I first reviewed the post-World War II record of the two parties in 1996, and updated the study in 2004. The results: Dems are better for growth in both jobs and GDP, and for stock returns as well. Reps are better for the bond market and excel at getting inflation down.

I’m too lazy to turn the 2004 article into a web posting, but I’ve posted a PDF of that issue of LBO. I will be updating the numbers in October, just before the election.

Note: LBO has been on hiatus for several months now. But it’s coming back very soon. Subscribe now and mention this post in the comments field and your first issue is free.

Here’s the issue. “Presidential economics” begins on p. 3.

LBO109

From the vault: the gold fetish

With the Republicans indulging their gold fetish, I thought this would be a good time to reprint the “currencies” section of the first chapter of my book Wall Street (Verso, 1997). The book is available for free download here. Numbers and institutional details are, of course, out of date, but the conceptual frame is as fresh as a daisy. For a psychoanalysis of money, credit, and gold, see From the vault: money and the mind, a psychoanalysis.

currencies

Trading in currencies is the largest and probably the oldest market of all. It used to be that the buying and selling of foreign exchange (a/k/a forex or FX) was an intermediate process, a step between, say, liquidating a U.S. Treasury bond and buying shares of Matsushita in its place, or between a multinational corporation’s taking its profits in German marks and shipping them back to headquarters in London. Now, however, hedge funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors have increasingly been treating foreign exchange as an asset class in itself, separate from any underlying stock or bond (Bank for International Settlements 1993, p. 7). That means that trading in money itself, rather than monetary claims on underlying real assets, is now one of the most fashionable strategies available to big-time plungers.

Trade in foreign currencies is ancient — and not only in coins and bills, but in financial exotica. As Marcello de Cecco (1992a) noted, Aristotelian, [1] Christian, and Islamic restrictions on usury prompted clever forex transactions, so priced and structured as to allow the furtive bearing of interest. That means that from the outset, FX markets were only partly about the cross-border trade in real goods; financial considerations have long been central.

With the breakup of the Roman empire, currencies proliferated, as did opportunities to profit from their exchange and transformation. Italians were well placed to profit from the new trade — Italy being the center of the former empire, and also the home of the church doctors, who were adept at devising schemes for evading usury prohibitions. As the church ban began to lose its bite, and as the center of European economic activity moved north and west, Italian dominance of FX waned; first Belgian and Dutch dealers inherited the business, only to lose dominance to London, where it pretty much remains, though of course there’s still plenty to go around.

In myth, the old days were ones of monetary stability, with gold acting as the universal equivalent for all national monetary forms. In fact, the temptation of states to manipulate their currencies — to declare their coins’ purchasing power to be greater than the intrinsic value of their metal — is ancient and nearly irresistible, and the more insulated a country is from FX markets, the less resistible it seems to be. The triumph of the international gold standard was the result of the Enlightenment and the consolidation of British industrial and financial power; the political economists of the 18th and early 19th centuries provided the theory, and the development of capitalist finance provided the impetus from practice.

With Sir Isaac Newton as Master of the Mint, Britain set the value of the pound sterling at 123.274 grains of gold at the beginning of the 18th century. That standard was suspended in 1797, because of the financing needs of the Napoleonic Wars. When peace came, creditors’ calls for restoration of the gold standard were resisted by industrialists and landowners. In 1818, the government faced major funding difficulties, and was forced to return to the old formula. The ensuing deflation savaged home demand, forcing British industrialists to search abroad for export markets.

The classical gold standard was nowhere near as stable nor as universal as it’s usually painted by metal fetishists. Wild booms alternated with equally wild busts. And while the Bank of England stood at the center of the world gold market, silver prevailed elsewhere, especially in France, which provided Britain with a reservoir of liquidity in tight times.

And then there was America, which was constantly disrupting things throughout gold’s heyday. The often imprudent, even anarchic American credit system helped finance the country’s extraordinary growth, but the system’s indiscipline led to manias and panics in near-equal measure.[2] The Bank of England was often forced to act as a lender of last resort to the U.S., which had no central bank, and often little sense of fiscal management (de Cecco 1992b). Had America been forced by some pre-modern IMF to act according to modern orthodox principles, the U.S. and perhaps even the world would be a poorer place — at least in monetary terms.

The U.S. went off gold during the Civil War — war, it seems, is the greatest enemy of financial orthodoxy — and didn’t return until 1879, with most other countries following suit. That began the period of the high classical gold standard, which lasted only until 1914, when it was destroyed by the outbreak of war — a much shorter reign than the propaganda of modern goldbugs suggests. There were attempts to put it back together between the two world wars, but countries set their currencies’ values (relative to gold) unilaterally, with no sense of how the values fitted together. That system collapsed in the 1930s, and there was no stable global monetary order until after World War II, when the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system was established. Unlike the classic gold standard, in which all countries expressed their national currency in terms of gold, the Bretton Woods system used the dollar as the central value, and the dollar in turn was fixed to gold. Countries could hold dollar reserves in their central bank for the settlement of international trade and finance on the knowledge that they could cash those dollars in for a fixed amount of gold. The dollar, as was said, was as good as gold.

The designers of the Bretton Woods system feared floating rate systems were unstable, undermining trade through uncertainty and market overreactions. Keynes wanted a much more elastic system than the U.S. paymasters would permit; ironically, though, the emergence of the dollar as the central reserve currency meant that world reserves were essentially a matter of U.S. monetary policy, and the U.S. did not stint on supplying these. From soon after the war was over until today, the U.S. has acted as the final source of world demand. There was the Marshall Plan, global military expansion, investment abroad by newly globalizing U.S. multinationals, and always more and more imports — all of which scattered dollars around the world. That cascade of greenbacks, plus rising domestic inflation, meant that the dollar was no longer worth as much as it was supposed to be — that is, the gold price was artificially low — and that cashing in dollars for gold at posted prices was a marvellous deal. (No one took more pleasure in pointing this out than Charles de Gaulle.) Strains began appearing in the system in the late 1960s; the outflow of gold from the U.S. to London was so great during the week of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam (March 1968) that the floor of the Bank of England’s weighing room collapsed (O’Callaghan 1993, p. 19). The German mark broke free and appreciated in 1969, and repeated the breakout in 1971. The French cashed in dollars for gold, and there were rumors that Britain was next. So in August 1971, Nixon closed the Treasury’s gold window, ending the sale of cheap gold. After some attempts at patching the system together, currrencies began floating, one by one, in 1973. Now the value of a dollar or a D-mark is set by trading on this vast market.

While governments are not free to set the value of their national currencies, they aren’t as powerless as casual opinion has it. Policies to manage the major currencies have been fairly successful since the major powers agreed to the gradual devaluation of the dollar in 1985 (the so-called Plaza agreement, named after the New York hotel where they met). Nor is central bank intervention necessarily the fruitless and expensive thing it’s thought to be. From the last quarter of 1986 to the first of 1996, the U.S. government made over $10 billion on exchange market interventions, mainly to support a falling dollar (by buying lots of dollars).[3] The profits, divided about equally between the Treasury and the Fed, were added to the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund — $28 billion in D-marks, yen, and Mexican pesos — and the Fed’s holdings of $21 billion in FX reserves, denominated in the same currencies (Fisher 1996).[4]

Central banks can’t change the underlying fundamentals that drive currency values — like productivity, inflation rates, and political stability — but they can influence the speed and gentleness of adjustment. But it’s worth saying a few words about those fundamentals. As loopy as currency trading can get from day to day, it’s no surprise that economic crises often take on the form of a foreign exchange melodrama. Despite all the hype about a borderless global economy, the world is still organized around national economies and national currencies; the foreign exchange market is where national price systems are joined to the world market. Problems in the relation between those countries and the outside world often express themselves as currency crises. Two recent examples of this are the European monetary crisis of 1992 and the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. In both cases, one could blame the turmoil on speculators, and one would be partly right — but also in both cases, the political momentum for economic integration had gotten way ahead of the fundamentals. Weaker economies like Italy’s and Britain’s were being thrust into direct competition with Germany’s, just as Mexico was being thrown into competition with the U.S. The relative productivity of the weaker partners in both cases wasn’t up to the valuations implied by the exchange rates prevailing before the outbreak of the crisis. Something had to give, and it did, with seismic force.

But day-to-day trading in money itself typically proceeds with little regard for such real-world considerations. That trading in money takes many forms. The longest-established are the spot and forward markets, dominated by the world’s major commercial banks. A spot contract allows a customer to buy a specified amount of foreign exchange — a million U.S. dollars’ worth of German marks, for example — for immediate delivery at prevailing market rates. (In practice, “immediate” usually means two business days.) The full amount involved actually changes hands. Conceptually, forward contracts are simple enough — they’re a kind of delayed spot deal, with buyers today fixing a price today for a deal to be consummated in a month or three. In practice, such straightforward forward deals have been eclipsed by swaps, in which the two parties agree to exchange two currencies at a certain rate on one date, and then to reverse the transaction, usually at a different exchange rate, some specified time in the future. The “price” of a forward contract — the difference between the forward and spot prices — is determined largely by the difference in interest rates in the two currencies, with an adjustment for the markets’ expectations of where the currencies are going in the near future. There are also futures and options contracts traded on the major currencies, and, of course, exotic custom derivatives are available as well.

A survey by the Bank for International Settlements (1993, pp. 109–137) reported that on an average day in the rather placid month of April 1992, $880 billion in currencies changed hands, up from $620 billion in 1989, an increase of only 42% — insignificant compared to the doubling between 1986 and 1989.[5] To put that $880 billion in perspective, it means that the currency markets turned over an amount equal to annual U.S. GDP in about a week, and world product in about a month. Turnover almost certainly rose dramatically after 1992; the daily volume on the Clearing House Interbank Payment System (CHIPS), the network connecting all the major banks doing business involving U.S. dollars, hit $1.29 trillion in March 1995, up from just under $1 trillion at the time of the 1992 BIS survey and around $700 billion at the time of 1989’s (Grant 1995).

Britain (mainly London) was the biggest FX market, accounting for 27% of turnover; the U.S. (mainly New York) was next, with 19%; and Japan (mainly Tokyo) third, with 16%. So the big three centers accounted for 57% of world currency trading; surprisingly, Germany accounted for only 5% of the total, less than far smaller economies like Singapore, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. London’s dominance of the game is revealed by two striking facts: more U.S. dollars are traded in London than in New York, and more D-marks than in Frankfurt.

According to the BIS survey, 47% of the turnover was in the spot market, 7% in the outright forward markets (which are dominated by real-world customers, doing actual trading of goods and services), 39% in the swap markets, 5% in options, and only 1% in futures — though “only” 1% meant almost $10 billion in daily turnover. Around 75% of total daily turnover was between foreign exchange dealers themselves, and another 9% with other financial institutions. Only 12% involved real-world “customers.”

Around 83% of all trades in the 1992 survey involved the U.S. dollar. While this is down from 90% three years earlier, it’s evidence that the dollar is still the dominant world currency by far; even something as decentered as the FX market needs a fixed referent. Part of this dominance, however, is the result of “vehicle trading” — the practice of using the dollar as an intermediary currency. Instead of someone who wants to buy lire for D-marks waiting to find someone eager to sell D-marks for lire, the trader exchanges D-marks for dollars, and then dollars for lire. The dollar is also the world’s main reserve currency — according to the IMF, 55% of world foreign exchange reserves were held in dollars in 1993, down from 70% in 1984; the European currencies and their synthetic unit, the Ecu, gained market share. Press reports during the early 1995 dollar selloff said that Asian central banks were major sellers of dollars for yen. Loss of the dollar’s role as a reserve and vehicle currency would decrease demand, and would probably depress the price and push up U.S. interest rates, since reserves are usually invested in Treasury paper.

Though some sentimentalists still cling to the barbarous relic, the gold market is a fairly small one. Still, it remains a kind of money, worthy of discussion here rather than with more routine commodities like crude oil and pig parts. Trading takes the usual array of forms, from the spot and forward exchange of physical bullion — done mainly with the exchange of titles and warehouse certificates, rather than actual physical movement — to futures and options on futures. In 1989, total trading on world futures and options exchanges alone was the equivalent of 21 times the world supply of new gold, and about 38% of the total above-ground supply. That trading, plus trading in other markets, far outstrips the total of all the gold ever mined (about 80% of which is thought to be accounted for; people rarely lose or waste gold). Despite this vigorous trading, the world gold stock is not that impressive. At $400 an ounce, the total world supply of gold is worth about $1.5 trillion — about a quarter as much as all U.S. stocks are worth, less than half the value of all U.S. Treasury debt, and also less than half the U.S. M2 money supply.[6]

But not all the world’s gold is available for trading. The leading holders are central banks, with 27% of the total world stock; they liquidate their holdings periodically, but are not major traders. Other official holders like the IMF account for another 6% of the world supply, meaning a third of all the world’s gold is in the hands of state institutions, even though goldbugs celebrate their metal for its freedom from the state. Jewelry accounts for nearly a third (31%), and industrial use, another 12%. That leaves less than a quarter (24%) of the world’s gold stock — under $400 billion, or not much more than the U.S. currency supply — in what are called “private stocks,” those that are likely to be traded. London’s annual bullion turnover alone accounts for all this easily tradeable supply, and derivatives account for another 160%. Every grain of gold is spoken for many times, but as long as everyone doesn’t demand physical delivery at once, the market will behave.

Despite the small physical foundation on which the gold market is built, the metal still has a psychological grip on financial players, who view its rise as a portent of inflation or political problems, and view its fall as a sign of deflation and placidity. Calls for a return to a gold standard regularly emanate from the right wing of Wall Street — supply-siders like Jude Wanniski and Larry Kudlow adore gold, and even Fed chair Alan Greenspan professes to be fond of paying close attention to it when setting monetary policy.[7]

Gold remains, in Keynes’ (CW VI, p. 259) phrase, an important “part of the apparatus of conservatism,” and in more senses than one. Attend a conference of goldbugs and you are likely to be surrounded by the most fervent denizens of the far right, who love not only the austerity that gold symbolizes, but also the fact that it’s a non-state form of money. In a tremendous reversal of 19th century populist ideology, which was feverishly anti-gold, many of today’s right populists are very pro-gold, as the only antidote to the parasitical rule of Washington and Wall Street. A cultural bonus to right-wing goldbugs was the large presence of South Africa in the industry and of South Africans at their conferences; many, though certainly not all, aurophiles were admirers of apartheid. Ironically, many leftish South Africans now root for monetary disorder in the North, which would result in heavy demand for gold, allowing the country to play the role of a “prosperous undertaker at a funeral.” Though South African mines are getting pretty tapped out, the six largest South African firms controlled over a quarter of world gold production in 1993, with the huge Anglo-American combine alone responsible for over 18%. Canada, with 8%, and the U.S., with 7%, were a distant second and third (Tegen 1994).

Gold’s actual performance is a source of constant frustration to goldbugs. The metal’s main charm is that it retains its purchasing power over time; should inflation soar or the banking system implode, gold will not vanish like a paper claim. But its drawbacks are plentiful, and good reasons why all societies have gravitated to state-sponsored money. Gold pays no interest, is bulky, requires assay, and must be stored. It is heavy and physical in a world that tends towards ever more immateriality. Something that normally does no better than shadow the general price level is no fun, though goldbugs are always imagining some disaster — hyperinflation, the collapse of the state, climatic catastrophe — that will bring their beloved metal back to life.

For metallists, there were no better days than the 1970s. Gold first began trading freely in 1968, and it immediately broke away from the classic $35 an ounce price, set in 1934, when the Roosevelt administration banned private ownership of monetary gold. The price rose slowly, breaking gently above $40 as the decade turned. Once the U.S. abandoned convertibility, however, gold started a ripping bull market. Reaching a first peak just under $200 in oil-shocked 1974, the price settled back with the recession, and turned up with the world economy in 1976. in a spectacular rise that ended at $850 an ounce in January 1980. From there, when the Volcker clampdown took hold, gold sank almost unrelievedly to below $300 in 1985. After 1985, it spent ten years going nowhere — which should be no surprise over the long term, given the metal’s reputation as a sterile repository of value. Despite all the gyrations in between, the average gold price of $397 in early 1996’s was hardly different from 1934’s $409 (in constant 1996 dollars). Seen in a long-term perspective, the 1970s merely corrected the steady erosion of the metal’s purchasing power during the four previous decades when the price was fixed by law. From here on out, gold should rise with the average price level — making allowance, of course, for the occasional war, revolution, hyperinflation, or financial panic.

[1] “Aristotle thought that only living beings could bear  fruit. Money, not a living being, was by its nature barren, and any attempt to make it bear fruit (tokos, in Greek, the same word used for interest), was a crime against nature” (de Cecco 1992a).

[2] Nearly half of the late 19th century in the U.S. was spent in periods of recession or depression; since World War II, only about a fifth of the time has been.

[3] The Fed does not make it easy to get this information. Calls to the press office inquiring about profits and losses from FX interventions are met with the declaration that the Fed isn’t in that business to make money, and no further help is offered. My research assistant, Josh Mason, was able to put together figures going back to 1986 at the New York Fed library, but the staff made it very hard to get earlier information.

[4] Dollar policy is the only area where the Fed takes instructions from the elected government, specifically the Secretary of the Treasury. On domestic monetary policy the Fed is largely its own boss. The ESF was tapped by the Clinton administration for the 1995 Mexican bailout, when it was prevented by Congress from using conventional sources of funding.

[5]These figures are adjusted to eliminate all forms of double-counting (i.e., in which the same trade might be reported by both sides and counted twice). Gross reported turnover, before this adjustment, was nearly $1.4 trillion.

[6]  U.S. figures are end-1994. Governments typically value gold reserves at well below market rates; the Fed values U.S. gold at $42.22 an ounce.

[7] Greenspan was an early acolyte of Ayn Rand, and wrote enthusiastically about the virtues of gold. He viewed the inflation that comes with loose money as a revenge of the have-nots on the haves, and saw gold a heavy weapon in the hands of the haves. He no longer speaks with that clarity, but his 2% inflation preference speaks for itself.

Wall Street (the book) going for almost $1,000

This screenshot just taken on Amazon.com:

This is, of course, preposterous. But ego gratifying. And it also means that the four or five copies that were priced around $50 the other week just after the marvelous Justin Fox Review appeared actually sold.

But really, how are these things priced? Are their bot-driven algorithms, like on the stock market?

“Behind the News” now on Stitcher

“Behind the News” is now available via Stitcher.com, a source for all kinds of radio shows. You can listen via the web, or on your iPhone or Android. For general info on Stitcher, click here.

Fresh audio content: David Frum

Just posted to my radio archives:

August 9, 2012 Partial conservative renegade and former Bush speechwriter David Frum on the right, and his roman à clef about Washington, Patriots. [The text of the intro, in which I recount my history on the right in condensed form, is here. The headnote includes links to longer versions of the story.]

My history on the right: the potted version

This was part of the introduction to my interview with David Frum, the conservative writer and now partial renegade, on my August 9 radio show. This is mostly a condensed version of two longer pieces, one in Bad Subjects, and the other in The Nation. My good friend Michael Pollak asked me to post the text, so here it is.

Before David Frum, a few words about my own right-wing past. In 1972, I cast my first ever presidential vote against Richard Nixon, because he wasn’t conservative enough.

I wasn’t always a right-winger. My eighth-grade world history teacher devoted a full period one day to a sympathetic lecture on Marx. When I got home, I announced to my parents that I was now a Marxist, and, supplemented by a bit of reading, thought of myself as one for the next four years.

But sometime in my senior year in high school — in 1970, when the world was largely in rebellion — I had a collision with one of William Buckley’s collections and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Subscriptions to National Review and The American Spectator soon followed. By graduation I was a raving libertarian.

In those days, “movement” conservatism was tiny, though it’s hard to believe that now. I had no idea I was joining what in retrospect looks like a vanguard; then we thought capitalism was doomed, but there was something honorable about a last stand.

The moment I got to college, I joined Yale’s Party of the Right. [The POR no longer has a website; the Wikipedia article is mildly informative, and lists me as a “notable member.” I had nothing to do with that.] In 1971, Yale’s “traditions” were under siege not from a broad social rebellion, much of it anticapitalist. For a kid from an undistinguished New Jersey suburb who (briefly) wanted to join the ruling class, this was sad; the POR served as a repository for the Old Blue heritage.

And what a repository it was. We had Birchers, crypto-Nazis, neo-Confederates, monarchists, and drug-taking and gun-toting libertarians.

I didn’t last long. The milieu gave me the creeps, and I pretty quickly returned to my leftist roots. I did pay my former life a visit back in 2003, when I went to the POR’s 50th anniversary banquet in New Haven. The centerpiece of a POR event is a toasting ritual organized around a “green cup”–a silver cup filled with a vile green punch. Toasts were raised to: the Catholic Church (inspiring some hisses from the Episcopalians); the “possession of absolute truth,” which is one of the “incidental perquisites” of party membership; to the murder of Ben Linder, the American Sandinista sympathizer who was killed by the Nicaraguan contras in 1987; to the Crusades; to the “British empire and its American successor”; and to the prospect of building “a Basilica in Riyadh, and a cathedral in Mecca.” The last prompted a call from the audience, “What about Jerusalem?”

It was time to get on the train back to Grand Central.

Thank you, Justin Fox

About ten days ago, I posted a complaint (“Credit default”), which could perhaps be characterized as “petulant,” about the uncanny resemblance between a Harvard Business Review piece (“What Good Are Shareholders?”) by Justin Fox and Jay Lorsch and my book Wall Street.

Justin Fox has just posted an extremely generous endorsement of my work: The Wall Street Book Everyone Should Read. I am very grateful and flattered and will even forgive his characterization of me as “crotchety.” Thank you, Justin.

Verso let the book go out of print but you can download it here. I apologize for the poor letterspacing—bad things happened to the PostScript code in the transition between PageMaker for Mac OS 9 and InDesign for OS X that I’ve been unable to compensate for.

This just in: the estimable Henry Farrell just posted a plea to me to write a second edition, calling it possibly “the best leftwing book on actually-existing-capitalism that’s been written in the last couple of decades.” Wow. My head swells. Henry suggests a Kickstarter to get it going. Hmm. How much demand is there for this?

Alexander Cockburn

photo by Tao Ruspoli, via Counterpunch

I’m coming late to the business of remembering Alexander Cockburn, but not for lack of respect. I find the task intimidating.

I learned of Alex’s death early on Saturday morning. I was stunned. I admired him a great deal. I started reading him in the Village Voice around 1975, and he changed the way I saw the world. He is probably more than half the reason I took up the lucrative and prestigious career of radical journalism. He was a magnificent writer—but as every Adorno fan could tell you (and Alex was one of those), there’s no separating style from content. His wit and elegance came from political principle—more on that in a moment—but as his niece Laura Flanders wrote, it also came from a wonderful exuberance:

His was the voice that rang out early from the couch: “Are you ready to greet the day with unbridled optimism?” He told me earlier this year he’d never been depressed a day in his life.

The optimism is admirable enough, and something I dearly wish I had in greater quantity, but he maintained that optimism without losing his critical faculties. Almost supernatural.

The best memorial I can think of offering to Alex is this interview I did with him on August 27, 2011. We did it on Skype, with the video on, and so I saw that the bird you hear in the background was his cockatiel, Percy, who spent a good bit of the interview on Alex’s shoulder. Jeff St. Clair told me that Alex taught Percy to whistle “The Internationale.” Marvelous. Though Alex took some strange ideological detours in recent years, as he says in this interview, the erosion of Marxism has been very bad for the left and for radical journalism.

I knew Alex some, though not all that well. But he was a major presence in my mental life for the last 37 years, and I’ll miss him terribly. Here he is, with Percy singing background.

Alex Cockburn interviewed by Doug Henwood, August 27, 2012