Bulls and Bears
Zoological imagery is of course an integral part of stock market culture. Optimistic buyers of stocks are bulls, pessimistic sellers are bears.
Bulls and Bears
On 16 October 1929 Yale University economics professor Irving Fisher declared that US stock prices had ‘reached what looks like a permanently high plateau’. Eight days later, on ‘Black Thursday’, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by 2 per cent. This is when the Wall Street crash is conventionally said to have begun, though in fact the market had been slipping since early September and had already suffered a sharp 6 per cent on 23 October. On ‘Black Monday’ (28 October) it plunged by 13 per cent; the next day by a further 12 per cent. In the of the next three years the US stock market declined a staggering 89 per cent, reaching its nadir in July 1932. The index did not regain its 1929 peak until November 1954. What was worse, this asset price deflation coincided with, if it did not actually cause, the worst depression in all history. In the United States, output collapsed by a third. Unemployment reached a quarter of the civilian labour force, closer to a third if a modern definition is used. It was a global catastrophe that saw prices and output decline in nearly every economy in the world, though only the German slump was as severe as the American. World trade shrank by two thirds as countries sought vainly to hide behind tariff barriers and import quotas. The international financial system fell to pieces in a welter of debt defaults, capital controls and currency depreciations. Only the Soviet Union, with its autarkic, planned economy, was unaffected. Why did it happen?
Some financial disasters have obvious causes. Arguably a much worse stock market crash had occurred at the end of July 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War precipitated such a total meltdown that the world’s principal stock markets - including New York’s - simply had to close their doors. And closed they remained from August until the end of 1914. But that was the effect of a world war that struck financial markets like a bolt from the blue. The crash of October 1929 is much harder to explain. Page 1 of the New York Times on the day before Black Thursday featured articles about the fall of the French premier Aristide Briand and a vote in the US Senate about duties on imported chemicals. Historians sometimes see the deadlock over Germany’s post-First World War reparations and the increase of American protectionism as triggers of the Depression. But page I also features at least four reports on the atrocious gales that had battered the Eastern seaboard the previous day. Maybe historians should blame bad weather for the Wall Street crash. (That might not be such a far-fetched proposition. Many veterans of the City of London still remember that Black Monday 19 October 1987 - came after the hurricane-force winds that had unexpectedly swept the south-east of England the previous Friday.)
Contemporaries sensed that there was a psychological dimension to the crisis. In his inaugural address, President Franklin Roosevelt argued that all that Americans had to fear was ‘fear itself’. John Maynard Keynes spoke of a ‘failure in the immaterial devices of the mind’. Yet both men also intimated that the crisis was partly due to financial misconduct. Roosevelt took a swipe at ’the unscrupulous money changers’ of Wall Street; in his General Theory, Keynes likened the stock market to a casino.
In some measure, it can be argued, the Great Depression had its roots in the global economic dislocations arising from the earlier crisis of 1914. During the First World War, non-European agricultural and industrial production had expanded. When European production came back on stream after the return of peace, there was chronic over-capacity, which had driven down prices of primary products long before 1929. This had made it even harder for countries with large external war debts (including Germany, saddled with reparations) to earn the hard currency they needed to make interest payments to their foreign creditors. The war had also increased the power of organized labour in most combatant countries, making it harder for employers to cut wages in response to price falls. As profit margins were squeezed by rising real wages, firms were forced to lay off workers or risk going bust. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the United States, which was the epicentre of the crisis, was in many respects in fine economic fettle when the Depression struck. There was no shortage of productivity-enhancing technological innovation in the inter-war period by companies like DuPont (nylon), Procter & Gamble (soap powder), Revlon (cosmetics), RCA (radio) and IBM (accounting machines). ‘A prime reason for expecting future earnings to be greater,’ argued Yale’s Irving Fisher, ‘was that we in America were applying science and invention to industry as we had never applied them before.’ Management practices were also being revolutionized by men like Alfred Sloan at General Motors.
Yet precisely these strengths may have provided the initial displacement that set in motion a classic stock market bubble. To observers like Fisher, it really did seem as if the sky was the limit, as more and more American households aspired to equip themselves with automobiles and consumer durables - products which instalment credit put within their reach. RCA, the tech stock of the 1920s, rose by a dizzying 939 per cent between 1925 and 1929; its price-earnings ratio at the peak of the market was 73. Euphoria encouraged a rush of new initial public offerings (IPOs); stock worth $6 billion was issued in 1929, one sixth of it during September. There was a proliferation of new financial institutions known as investment trusts, designed to capitalize the stock market boom. (Goldman Sachs chose 8 August 1929 to announce its own expansion plan, in the form of the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; had this not been a free-standing entity, its subsequent collapse might well have taken down Goldman Sachs itself.) At the same time, many small investors (like Irving Fisher himself) relied on leverage to increase their stock market exposure, using brokers’ loans (which were often supplied by corporations rather than banks) to buy stocks on margin, thus paying only a fraction of the purchase price with their own money. As in 1719, so in 1929, there were unscrupulous insiders, like Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank or William Crapo Durant of GM, and ingenuous outsiders, like Groucho Marx. As in 1719, flows of hot money between financial markets served to magnify and transmit shocks. And, as in 1719, it was the action of the monetary authorities that determined the magnitude of the bubble and of the consequences when it burst.
In perhaps the most important work of American economic history ever published, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued that it was the Federal Reserve System that bore the primary responsibility for turning the crisis of 1929 into a Great Depression. They did not blame the Fed for the bubble itself, arguing that with Benjamin Strong at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York a reasonable balance had been struck between the international obligation of the United States to maintain the restored gold standard and its domestic obligation to maintain price stability. By sterilizing the large gold inflows to the United States (preventing them for generating monetary expansion), the Fed may indeed have prevented the bubble from growing even larger. The New York Fed also responded effectively to the October 1929 panic by conducting large-scale (and unauthorized) open market operations (buying bonds from the financial sector) to inject liquidity into the market. However, after Strong’s death from tuberculosis in October 1928, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington came to dominate monetary policy, with disastrous results. First, too little was done to counteract the credit contraction caused by banking failures. This problem had already surfaced several months before the stock market crash, when commercial banks with deposits of more than $80 million suspended payments. However, it reached critical mass in November and December 1930, when 608 banks failed, with deposits totalling $550 million, among them the Bank of United States, which accounted for more than a third of the total deposits lost. The failure of merger talks that might have saved the Bank was a critical moment in the history of the Depression. Secondly, under the pre-1913 system, before the Fed had been created, a crisis of this sort would have triggered a restriction of convertibility of bank deposits into gold. However, the Fed made matters worse by reducing the amount of credit outstanding (December 1930-April 1931). This forced more and more banks to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity, driving down bond prices and worsening the general position. The next wave of bank failures, between February and August 1931, saw commercial bank deposits fall by $2.7 billion, 9 per cent of the total. Thirdly, when Britain abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, precipitating a rush by foreign banks to convert dollar holdings into gold, the Fed raised its discount rate in two steps to 3.5 per cent. This halted the external drain, but drove yet more US banks over the edge: the period August 1931 to January 1932 saw 1,860 banks fail with deposits of $1.45 billion. Yet the Fed was in no danger of running out of gold. On the eve of the pound’s departure the US gold stock was at an all-time high of $4.7 billion - 40 per cent of the world’s total. Even at its lowest point that October, the Fed’s gold reserves exceeded its legal requirements for cover by more than $1 billion. Fourthly, only in April 1932, as a result of massive political pressure, did the Fed attempt large-scale open market operations, the first serious step it had taken to counter the liquidity crisis. Even this did not suffice to avert a final wave of bank failures in the last quarter of 1932, which precipitated the first state-wide ‘bank holidays’, temporary closures of all banks. Fifthly, when rumours that the new Roosevelt administration would devalue the dollar led to a renewed domestic and foreign flight from dollars into gold, the Fed once again raised the discount rate, setting the scene for the nationwide bank holiday proclaimed by Roosevelt on 6 March 1933, two days after his inauguration - a holiday from which 2,000 banks never returned.
The Fed’s inability to avert a total of around 10,000 bank failures was crucial not just because of the shock to consumers whose deposits were lost or to shareholders whose equity was lost, but because of the broader effect on the money supply and the volume of credit. Between 1929 and 1933, the public succeeded in increasing its cash holdings by 31 per cent; commercial bank reserves were scarcely altered (indeed, surviving banks built up excess reserves); but commercial bank deposits decreased by 37 per cent and loans by 47 per cent. The absolute numbers reveal the lethal dynamic of the ‘great contraction’. An increase of cash in public hands of $1.2 billion was achieved at the cost of a decline in bank deposits of $15.6 billion and a decline in bank loans of $19.6 billion, equivalent to 19 per cent of 1929 GDP.
There was a time when academic historians felt squeamish about claiming that lessons could be learned from history. This is a feeling unknown to economists, two generations of whom have struggled to explain the Great Depression precisely in order to avoid its recurrence. Of all the lessons to have emerged from this collective effort, this remains the most important: that inept or inflexible monetary policy in the wake of a sharp decline in asset prices can turn a correction into a recession and a recession into a depression. According to Friedman and Schwartz, the Fed should have aggressively sought to inject liquidity into the banking system from 1929 onwards, using open market operations on a large scale, and expanding rather than contracting lending through the discount window. They also suggest that less attention should have been paid to gold outflows. More recently, it has been argued that the inter-war gold standard itself was the problem, in that it transmitted crises (like the 1931 European bank and currency crises) around the world. A second lesson of history would therefore seem to be that the benefits of a stable exchange rate are not so great as to exceed the costs of domestic deflation. Anyone who today doubts that there are lessons to be learned from history needs do no more than compare the academic writings and recent actions of the current chairman of the Federal Reserve System.