MUST READ - Inflation’s Moral Hazard

Runaway inflation in Germany, which turned money into wallpaper, undermined the Weimar Republic and led to Hitler’s rise.

"An age of loose money not only destroys savings; it corrodes character."

Information from the most diverse sources sometimes coalesces and provokes reflection on a subject to which one has not previously given sufficient thought. This happened to me recently with regard to the effect of monetary inflation on human character. With many observers predicting a substantial rise in inflation as a result of various government spending programs undertaken to reverse the current global downturn, the topic is anything but academic.

During the sixties and seventies, the sums of money of which everyone spoke increased, first by a little and then by a lot (and how nonchalantly we now speak of trillions of dollars or euros!). All that had seemed solid, to paraphrase Marx, melted into air.

Inflation has overturned centuries of economic wisdom, or at least prejudice. When Polonius conferred his parting platitudes on Laertes, one was to “neither a lender nor a borrower be,” and this because a “loan oft loses both itself and friend.” A quarter of a millennium later, Mr. Micawber famously asserted that the secret of happiness was to live within one’s means; and while credit is obviously essential for economic growth, an intuitive difference exists between borrowing to consume beyond one’s means and borrowing to increase one’s means.

Inflation has blurred that intuitive difference. Many times I have received advice, from friends and banks, to borrow as much as I could so that I might buy the best and most expensive house possible. And for many years it seemed good advice, for what could be more advantageous than to buy an appreciating asset with depreciating currency, especially when my income was likely to appreciate faster than the currency depreciated? It was a painless way to become rich.

I did not take the advice—not entirely, anyway. I remained sufficiently a child of the regime of constant prices that I found it difficult to imagine how a sum that seemed vast now would seem trifling in just a few years: caution seemed wiser. Even so, I borrowed within what I thought to be my means, and thereby accumulated assets of a value that I could not have obtained by the steady buildup of savings. The curious result has been that at no point in my career could I have afforded to buy the real estate that I now own, whose value—even now, after a precipitate post-financial-crisis decline—greatly exceeds my cumulative income over the years. If my borrowing had been bolder, the value would exceed my earnings even more.

My situation is no different from that of millions of others, of course. And since we are all richer than we should otherwise be, is there anything, really, to complain about? The problem is that this “richer” represents a curious kind of wealth. I must live somewhere, after all, and everywhere else has appreciated in value, too. I don’t live any better in my house than I did before simply because it is worth three times what I paid for it. Its increase in value is thus of no use to me, unless I want to sell it to live in a less valuable house and invest the difference. An increase in the value of one’s house is therefore a bit like fool’s gold.

During those fat years, a man could sit at home watching television and imagine that he was growing richer thereby. I remember an eminent professor’s telling me, with a barely concealed exultation, that he was making nearly $1,000 per day, week after week, merely by owning a very large house in a fashionable area: an amount that, needless to say, dwarfed any savings he might salt away from his salary. The government could not have been better pleased, for the majority of the population, who owned their own homes, felt prosperous as never before and attributed their affluence to the government’s wise economic guidance.

But asset inflation—ultimately, the debasement of the currency—as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, thrift becomes improvidence, sobriety becomes mean-spiritedness, modesty becomes lack of ambition, self-control becomes betrayal of the inner self, patience becomes lack of foresight, steadiness becomes inflexibility: all that was wisdom becomes foolishness. And circumstances force almost everyone to join in the dance.

Continue reading - Inflation’s Moral Hazard by Theodore Dalrymple