Edward Hadas

There is only one good, proven, way to organise a political economy in the modern world – and that’s via the Big Honest State. Right now, one key aspect of the BHS is under serious threat.

What is the BHS? As the name suggests, it is large. In quantity, the various organs of a BHS account for 30-60 percent of GDP. In quality, the state dominates education, health care, industrial policy and the financial system. The BHS is also trustworthy. Its official bureaucracies are expected to be, and mostly are, meritocratic and dedicated to the common good. A BHS, though, is far from the total government of fascists and communists. One of the defining facets of the BHS, indeed, is that it works alongside a vibrant non-state sector.

The basic BHS model has been adopted in all advanced economies and it is aspired to by most leaders in almost every developing country. Universal adoption is easy to explain: the BHS works well. It has delivered a reasonable mix of prosperity, protection and social support. It has proved remarkably sturdy. Since the Second World War, no BHS country has had collapsed into chaos, become impoverished or suffered fundamental social breakdown. The system is also popular with voters, even if many government-hating Americans hate to admit it.

However, the BHS is vulnerable to moral decay. It relies on professional integrity and hard work. Such virtues are easily lost, either through corruption or a more insidious failure of will. It is the latter, what old fashioned philosophers called spiritual sloth, that threatens the monetary side of the BHS. Until recently, the BHS was able to produce money which basically kept its value and a financial system which served the common good. If politicians and regulators don’t wake up fairly soon, these accomplishments could be lost.

There are four threats. The first is fiscal laxity. Politicians around the world have become blasé about deficits. To be fair, the record deficits have as yet done no obvious harm and the mechanism which can turn unbalanced government spending into high inflation is poorly understood. Nonetheless, the lack of concern is disturbing, and the willingness of many American politicians to drive the government to the edge of a fiscal cliff is positively alarming.

Why has the recovery from the financial crisis of 2008 been so slow? To answer that question, it helps to reflect on two items in the newly opened Citi Money Gallery at London’s British Museum. The first is a photograph of a two-tonne carved stone which once served as money on the Pacific island of Yap. The second is the exhibit of counterfeit notes and coins.

Yap’s use of big rocks as currency poses some obvious problems, but the carved stones, known as rai or fei, did not actually pass from owner to owner. Possession was merely noted down by inscriptions. The economist Milton Friedman wrote an elegant paper about the Yap arrangement in 1991, explaining that the system worked because of the Yap residents’ “unquestioned belief” in it.

Friedman realised that modern monetary systems are also faith-based. The faith used to reside in the value of gold and silver, whether minted in coins or held in central bank vaults and represented by paper. Now people are asked to believe in the value of a currency which is almost entirely intangible and which can be created and destroyed by the fiat of central banks.

The headline could have come from a hundred places any time in the last hundred years. “Market has gone wild”, it read. The accompanying news report explains that the price of a crucial financial asset is in “free fall”. Traders and businessmen are calling on the government to step in.

The asset in question could be peripheral euro zone government debt today, global equity markets in early 2009. The wild market could have been soaring rather than falling: the stocks of 1929 and 1999, the house prices in Florida or London in the 2000s, or the supposedly safe government bonds today.

The actual headline comes from a Hong Kong newspaper in 1983, when investors in the then British colony began to fear the worst from a Chinese takeover. The UK’s Minister of State told the locals to “have confidence in yourselves”, but, as today’s Spanish and Italian politicians can ruefully confirm, such rhetoric is not enough to stop an investor stampede. A few weeks later, the Hong Kong authorities did indeed take the matter out of traders’ hands – they fixed the exchange rate between Hong Kong and U.S. dollars.