One Economist Opposed to Stimulative Monetary Policy in a Depression...
Karl Marx:
Reflections on Money (1851): It would be wrong to say that lack of credit is of paramount importance in times of [commercial] crisis and currency... of no importance.... [T}he amount of currency is then at its lowest ebb... because on the one hand its velocity has decreased and secondly because cash is required in numerous transactions where it was not required previously... this... accentuates the great difference between the amount of money and the value of the operations transacted... a lack of currency and not a lack of capital. Capital loses its value and cannot be turned to account... cannot be transformed into currency, and it is precisely its convertibility which constitutes its value. But in spite of all that, capital exists. The [crisis] shows itself primarily in the refusal to discount bills of exchange.... The real difficulty is the inconvertibility of commodities, i. e. of the actual capital, into gold and bank-notes. It is for this reason that when these phenomena appeared in 1793, 1825 and 1847, it was possible to remedy them, where capital actually existed, by issuing exchequer bills and bank-notes.... The crisis did not end, but the currency crisis did.... Commodities cease to be money, they are not convertible into money. The blame for this Is of course put on the monetary system, on a particular form of this system....
[A]t any particular moment, commodities, i. e. their value, cannot be transformed into gold or silver, and that each intermediate link between the commodities and gold, or each substitute remains only a substitute and hence without value. The principal question therefore always remains the inconvertibility of commodities, of capital itself.... What matters is... that capital ceases to be currency, that it can no longer circulate and has no longer value.... However, there is even more nonsense on the other side. They acknowledge the inconvertibility of capital and make fun of the convertibility of bank-notes. But they want to offset this by some artifice or other and by modifying the monetary system. As if the inconvertibility of capital were not already contained in the existence of any monetary, system, indeed as if it were not contained even in the existence of products in the form of capital. Trying to alter this on the existing basis means depriving money of its monetary qualities, without conferring on capital the quality of always being exchangeable, and moreover at its fair price.
The existence of a monetary system entails not only, the possibility but even the reality of this separation, and the fact that this system exists proves that the inconvertibility of capital, because it is appropriate to money, is already entailed by the existence of capital, and therefore by the entire organisation of production. It would be just as wrong however to say that the pressure on the money, market was simply caused by fraudulent credit operations. Money, as such, implies the credit system. Or both are produced by the same cause. The Birmingham men, 122 who want to do away with the inconveniences of money by putting large quantities of money into circulation, or by lowering the standard of money, are of course fools. Proudhon, Gray and others who want to retain money but in such a way. that it should no longer have the properties of money, are also fools. Since it is in the money market that the entire crisis erupts and the features of bourgeois production recur as symptoms, which, it is true, become incidental causes, nothing is simpler to understand than the fact that it is money that narrow-minded reformers who stick to the bourgeois standpoint want to reform. Because they want to retain value and private exchange, they retain the division between the product and its exchangeability. But they want to modify the token of this division in such a way that it expresses identity.
The complete simpletons, i. e. the staunch ignorant democrats, are familiar only with money as used in the trade between dealers and consumers. They therefore do not know the sphere in which the collisions take place, the tempests of monetary crises and big financial transactions. Thus the problem, just as everything else, appears to these simpletons to be as simple and silly as they themselves are. They regard the trade between dealers and consumers as a straightforward exchange of values, in which the freedom of each individual receives its supreme practical confirmation. Class antagonism is in no way involved in this exchange.... [I]t is a historical fact, which no one can deny, that in all hitherto existing social formations which were based on separation and contradiction between castes, tribes, social estates, classes, etc., money was an essential component of this organisation, and the monetary system was always symptomatic of the heyday or decline of this organisation. It is therefore not our task to prove that the monetary system is based on class contradictions, it is up to the simpletons to prove that, in spite of all previous historical experience, the monetary system can make sense even where there are no class contradictions, and that this particular element present in all social formations up to now will be able to survive in a situation that negates all hitherto existing social formations. To confront complete simpletons with such a task would be too simple. They deal with everything in monosyllables and this constitutes their specific talent. The monetary, system and the entire present system are in their opinion as straightforward and as stupid as they themselves are...
Why he is opposed is really not clear to me...
And one economist in favor of curing a glut of commodities by adding to the supply of money:
John Stuart Mill on "general gluts" (1844):
What they called a general superabundance, was not a superabundance of commodities relatively to commodities, but a superabundance of all commodities relatively to money. What it amounted to was, that persons in general, at that particular time, from a general expectation of being called upon to meet sudden demands, liked better to possess money than any other commodity. Money, consequently, was in request, and all other commodities were in comparative disrepute. In extreme cases, money is collected in masses, and hoarded; in the milder cases, people merely defer parting with their money, or com- ing under any new engagements to part with it. But the result is, that all commodities fall in price, or become unsaleable. When this happens to one single commodity, there is said to be a superabundance of that commodity; and if that be a proper expression, there would seem to be in the nature of the case no particular impropriety in saying that there is a superabundance of all or most commodities, when all or most of them are in this predicament...
