An age-old relationship between interest rates and prices

Jon Banking, Economy, Gold, Market Commentary, Precious Metals

The chart displayed near the end of this discussion is effectively a pictorial representation of what Keynesian economists call a paradox* (‘Gibson’s Paradox’) and Austrian economists call a natural and perfectly understandable relationship.
Gibson’s Paradox was the name given by JM Keynes to the observation that interest rates during the gold standard were highly correlated to wholesale prices but had little correlation to the rate of ‘inflation’, that is, that interest rate movements were connected to the level of prices and not the rate of change in prices. It was viewed as a paradox because most economists couldn’t explain it. According to conventional wisdom, interest rates should have been positively correlated with the rate of ‘price inflation’.
The problem is that most economists did not – and still do not – understand what interest rates are.
First and foremost, interest rates are the price of time. They reflect the fact that, all else being equal, humans place a higher value on getting something now than on getting exactly the same thing at some future time. Interest rates transcend money, because they exist even when money does not. With or without money and all else being equal, getting something now will always be worth more than getting the same thing in the future**. This is called time preference.
Time preference is the root of interest rates and the natural interest rate is a measure of societal time preference. That is, the natural interest rate is a measure of the general urgency to consume in the present or the amount that would have to be paid, on average, to make saving (the postponement of consumption) worthwhile. For example, the average 7-year-old child has a very high time preference, in that if you give the kid a choice between getting a desirable toy today or getting something more in 3 months’ time, the ‘something more’ option won’t be chosen unless it is a LOT more, whereas a middle-aged adult with substantial savings is likely to have low time preference.

This post was published at GoldSeek on 15 February 2017.