Written by Philip Pilkington, Fixing the Economists Article of the Week

This is the second part of my criticism of Glasner and Zimmerman’s paper. The first part can be found here and should be read and understood before proceeding with the second part. Glasner and Zimmerman note that Ludwig Lachmann tried to rescue Hayek’s theory by introducing market arbitrage.

They quote Lachmann thusly:

If there is a multiple of commodity rates, it is evidently possible for the money rate of interest to be lower than some but higher than others. What, then, becomes of monetary equilibrium? . . . It is not difficult, however, to close this particular breach in the Austrian rampart. In a barter economy with free competition commodity arbitrage would tend to establish an overall equilibrium rate of interest. Otherwise, if the wheat rate were the highest and the barley rate the lowest of interest rates, it would become profitable to borrow in barely and lend in wheat. Inter-market arbitrage will tend to establish an overall equilibrium in the loan market such that, in terms of a third commodity serving as numéraire, say, steel, it is no more profitable to lend in wheat than in barley. (p15)

This seems to not be a criticism of Sraffa at all. The own rates of interest still differ it is just that the differences are perfectly reflective of the knowledge that prices will fall in the future as the market equilibrates. Lachmann says this explicitly when he writes:

This does not mean that actual own-rates must all be equal, but that the disparities are exactly offset by disparities between forward prices. The case is exactly parallel to the way in which international arbitrage produces equilibrium in the international money market, where differences in local interest rates are offset by disparities in forward rates. In overall equilibrium, it must be impossible to make gains by “switching” commodities as in currencies. (p15 — My Emphasis)

It is interesting to note that Lachmann is invoking the empirically untrue theory of Purchasing Power Parity (a critique can be found here), but let us ignore this for the moment. Anyway, the above quote is not a critique of Sraffa. This is exactly what Sraffa was arguing. What is so surprising is that Glasner and Zimmerman actually quoted Sraffa saying this four pages beforehand. Here is that quote again:

Suppose there is a change in the distribution of demand between various commodities; immediately some will rise in price, and others will fall; the market will expect that, after a certain time, the supply of the former will increase, and the supply of the latter fall, and accordingly the forward price, for the date on which equilibrium is expected to be restored, will be below the spot price in the case of the former and above it in the case of the latter; in other words, the rate of interest on the former will be higher than on the latter. (p11 — My Emphasis)