>>99934
>All of the bankers are expecting free money from the central bank and the Cantillon Effect
>suddenly the artificial credit disappears
>OH NOES, HARD MONEY CAUSED A DEPRESSION!
There has to be a slowdown in order to reallocate malinvested capital to more productive uses if you've spent years distorting the economy. I invite you to consider the Analogy of the Master Builder:
>The single best analogy for the Austrian business-cycle theory comes from Mises himself, and I will take some creative liberties with his original exposition for our purposes. Imagine a master builder. He has at his disposal the labor of many workers, as well as a collection of bricks, shingles, panes of glass, and so on. Mises then asks us to suppose that the subordinate in charge of counting the available supply of bricks inflates the number by 10 percent. Thus the master builder draws up the blueprint for the house, erroneously thinking he has more bricks to work with than he really does. Because of this error, he embarks on a building plan that is unsustainable; there are not enough bricks to finish the house as it is designed on the blueprint.
>Now obviously, the sooner the builder learns of the mistake, the better. If he finds out immediately after the excavators have dug the hole for the foundation, the waste will consist merely of the extra labor and gasoline needed to use the earth movers to put back some of the dirt and make the hole smaller.
>But suppose the builder doesn't find out until after he has already laid the foundation and erected the frame of the whole house. Now of course the waste is much worse. Given the materials at his disposal—and we assume that he can't go onto the market and buy more—the builder must now make some very tough choices. He probably will decide to leave the foundation as is, even though it is bigger than he would have designed it, had he known the true number of bricks from the beginning. He will have to redo the blueprints, naturally, and scale down the size of the house, though keeping the same size foundation. Some of the lumber already used might be salvageable, though some will have to be torn down and discarded. And of course, the finished house will be inferior in quality to the house the builder would have designed originally, had he known the true amount of his various supplies.
>Now consider the scenario where the subordinates realize their mistake, but the master builder has not yet discovered it. They decide to deceive him as long as possible, by using tarps to cover up gaping holes in the stockpile of remaining bricks. "After all," they convince themselves, "look at how happy everyone on the site is, coming to work in the morning and building this fine house! Imagine how furious the master would be, if he learned that we don't have as many bricks as the blueprint calls for! Why, whole teams of the construction crew might be thrown out of work if that happened! He's got three guys alone working on the paneling for the third-floor balcony, but there might not even be a third floor in the revised plan. So let's just keep the good times going as long as possible, lest we end up with a bunch of guys standing around with nothing to do."
>In Mises's story, it is clear that the builder's error is not overinvestment, but malinvestment, of resources. It isn't a question of how many bricks should be used on the house as a whole. Rather, the mistake is that the builder allocated too many bricks to the first floor. With each subsequent brick that his men put in place, following the original (and flawed) blueprint, the options for salvaging the project become narrower and narrower. In the worst-case scenario, the builder would only learn of the inflated brick count the moment he had laid the last brick—at this point, no subterfuge by his subordinates could deny the fact that they were physically out of bricks. And at that horrible point, the builder would have to survey the remaining materials littering the yard, hoping to be able to at least seal the unfinished house to keep the rain out. Whatever the outcome, the builder would have sorely preferred learning of the brick shortage much earlier.
The glut of easy credit created by central banks keeping interest rates artificially low results in the malinvestment described in the above example. Removing the central bank and the "soft money" which facilitated this will of course result in a temporary slowdown, but it's far more mild than the depression the bank would cause on its own should it be allowed to continue its policies of easy money.