Antal Fekete, Gold, and Central Banks
On the fourteenth of October 2020, Antal E. Fekete, the Hungarian-Canadian economist who saw himself as a monetary theorist following the tradition of Carl Menger, died in Budapest. Behind him was an eventful and fruitful life which was quite typical of the crazy last century. His experiences eventually filled Fekete with dark forebodings for the current century. We can only hope that this crazy year won’t become characteristic of an entire era, as his year of birth did.
Antal Endre Fekete was born on the eighth of December 1932 in Budapest. Mass unemployment was rife in the midst of a deep global economic crisis. Hungary was heading towards National Socialism on the back of a severe banking crisis. The totalitarian, anti-Semite Gyula Gömbös had taken over the government shortly before Fekete’s birth. All around, belief in the omnipotence of politics was leading to a spiral of interventionism and polarization which would ultimately lead to the old Europe being destroyed by totalitarianism and war. Monetary policy played a role in this that is underestimated to this day.
Fekete was one of the few old Europeans to recognize the central role of money, on the positive side as a means of amicable division of labor, on the negative side as a casualty and lever of political intervention spirals. This led the mathematician to monetary theory, in which he sought to expand and update the old Austrian school of economics. As with all original contributions, it is too soon to definitively assess whether he introduced new errors and what these errors were. Yet his prominence as a sharp thinker who combined theory with profound historical knowledge is undervalued. This is partly due to his quarrelsome personality, which came between him and almost all of his comrades in arms and companions…
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