I might be a complete monetary nerd, but I truly happy when I receive a new working paper in the mail from Douglas Irwin on Gustav Cassel. That happened tonight. I have been waiting for the final version of the paper for a couple weeks. Doug was so nice to send me a “preview” a couple a weeks ago. However, now the paper has been published on Dartmouth College’s website.

Lets just say it at once – it is a great paper about the views and influences of the great Swedish economist and monetary expert Gustav Cassel.

Here is the abstract:

“The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a depression (bust following an investment boom) but not how to get out of one (liquidation). Keynesians could explain how a country might get out of a depression (government spending on public works) but not how it got into one (animal spirits). By contrast, the monetary approach of economists such as Gustav Cassel has been ignored. As early as 1920, Cassel warned that mismanagement of the gold standard could lead to a severe depression. Cassel not only explained how this could occur, but his explanation anticipates the way that scholars today describe how the Great Depression actually occurred. Unlike Keynes or Hayek, Cassel explained both how a country could get into a depression (deflation due to tight monetary policies) and how it could get out of one (monetary expansion).”

Douglas Irwin has written a great paper on Cassel and for those who do not already know Cassel’s important contributions not only to the monetary discussions in 1920s and 1930s, but to monetary theory should read Doug’s paper.

Cassel fully understood the monetary origins of the Great Depression contrary to the other main players in the discussion of the day – Hayek and Keynes. From the perspective of today it is striking how we are repeating all the discussions from the 1930s. To me there is no doubt Gustav Cassel would have been as outspoken a critique of both Keynesians and Austrians as he was in 1930s and I am pretty sure that he would have been a proud Market Monetarist. In fact – had it not been for the fantastic name of our school (ok, I got a ego problem…) then I might be tempted to say that we are really all New Casselian economists.

Cassel clearly explained how gold hoarding by especially the French and the US central banks was the key cause for the tightening of global monetary conditions that pushed the global economy into depression – exactly in the same way as “passive” monetary tightening due to a sharp rise in money demand generated deflationary pressures that push the global economy and particularly the US and the European economies into the Great Recession. I my mind Cassel would have been completely clear in his analysis of the causes of the Great Recession had he been alive today.

In fact even though I think Market Monetarists tell a convincing and correct story of the causes for the Great Recession and I also sure that Gustav Cassel would have helped Market Monetarists in seeing the international dimensions of the crisis – particular European demand for dollars – better.

Douglas Irwin has written an excellent paper and it should be read by anyone who is interested monetary theory and monetary history.

Thank you Doug – you did it again!

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See a couple of previous comments on Doug’s work and on Cassel:

Hawtrey, Cassel and Glasner

“Our Monetary ills Laid to Puritanism”

“Calvinist economics – the sin of our times”

“Gustav Cassel on recessions”

“France caused the Great Depression – who caused the Great Recession?”