Sadomonetarism (sadomasochism + monetarism); Sadomonetarist

“Sadomonetarism” (sadomasochism + monetarism) is someone who believes in a monetary policy (such as a tight money supply) for its own sake, even if it causes with great economic pain. English author Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) wrote “From Robbins to Sado-Monetarism” in 1981 and in 1983 that the “age of Sado-Monetarism has begun.” Bradbury probably coined the term.  British Labour politician Denis Healey used the term “sado-monetarist” in September 1982. William Keegan used “sadomonetarism” in The Observer (UK) in December 1982.
 
American economist and New York (NY) Times columnist Paul Krugman popularized “sadomonetarist” and “sadomonetarism” in 2013 and 2014.
 
[This entry was prepared with research assistance from Ian Preston.]
     
 
Wikipedia: Monetarism
Monetarism is a school of economic thought that emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation. It is the view within monetary economics that variation in the money supply has major influences on national output in the short run and the price level over longer periods and that objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply.
 
Monetarism today is mainly associated with the work of Milton Friedman, who was among the generation of economists to accept Keynesian economics and then criticize Keynes’ theory of gluts using fiscal policy (government spending). Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote an influential book, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, and argued “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
 
Wikipedia: Sadomasochism
Sadomasochism is the giving or receiving of pleasure—often sexual—from acts involving the infliction or reception of pain or humiliation. A subset of BDSM, practitioners of sadomasochism usually seek out sexual gratification from these acts, but can also seek out other forms of personal pleasure. While the terms sadist and masochist specifically refer to one who either enjoys giving pain (sadist), or one who enjoys receiving pain (masochist), many practitioners of sadomasochism describe, as can be found with the enjoyment of the experience in other fields of personal gratification activity, can have a spectrum or an activity switch, from someone being 100% active to 100% passive (although there is some reasonable assumption that a passive participant can become very involved in a scene.
 
25 August 1981, Daily Telegraph (London):
“From Robbins to Sado-Monetarism” by Malcolm Bradbury
   
Google Books
The After Dinner Game:
Three Plays for Television
BY Malcolm Bradbury
London: Arrow
1982
Pg. 14:
And there was another reason for seizing the opportunity. The History Man left me with a kind of guilt about my treatment of the subject. It was a book about the way the traditional humanism of the universities had been, over the turn into the 1970s, attacked from within by a new post-humanist radicalism. What it didn’t tell was another story: the way that humanism was also being threatened from without, by something we are all now very familiar with, the new sado-monetarism.
 
4 September 1982, The Guardian (UK), “Healey’s apocalyptic warning of Western banking collapse” by Michael White, pg. 24:
Mr Healey pinned the blame firmly on the governments rather than the banks—particularly the “sado-monetarist” administrations in London and Washington. He accused them of “turning a blind eye to the consequences of their deflationary policies, for a banking system which is dangerously over-stretched by financing the deficits caused by the oil crisis.”
 
19 December 1982, THe Observer (UK), “William Keegan’s View: Backwards over the cliff” by WIlliam Keegan, pg. 15:
Talking of deflation and monetarism, I should like to round off first by congratulating the Commons Select Committee on the Treasury for consistently pinpointing the weak points of the Government’s economic strategy, and secondly to recall, as Christmas approaches, the biblical pattern of seven fat years and seven lean years.
 
The seven lean years of sado-monetarism are nearly up, friends. Happy Christmas.
         
House of Commons (UK)
19 January 1983
Mr. Denis Healey (Leeds, East)
(...) 
Although money supply rose at more than twice the rate set for it by the Government two years ago, rather than having much higher inflation—which is what the Government told us to expect—inflation came down. That is another puzzle for the Prime Minister. But, of course, everyone knows that inflation has fallen partly because of the depth of the recession—there is no inflation in a cemetery—and partly because of a grossly over-valued exchange rate that reduced the cost of our imports. That is another puzzle for the Government and those who believe in sado-monetarism.
 
Google Books
Rates of Exchange
By Malcolm Bradbury
New York, NY: Knopf
1983  
Pg. 20:
The age of Sado-Monetarism has begun; in the corridors of power, they are naming the money supply after motorways, MI and M2 and M3 , to try to map its mysteries better.
 
Google Books
Good Times, Bad Times
By Harold Evans
New York, NY: Atheneum
1984
Pg. 224:
Having lived in the stricken North-East I felt I knew the human consequences of what later became known, in Denis Healey’s phrase, as sado-monetarism (I had also taken my degree in economics at Durham University).
 
Google Books
Industrial Competitiveness Act: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Economic Stabilization of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-eighth Congress, First and Second Sessions, on H.R. 4360 ... Part A, November 16, 1983; January 26 and 31, and February 1 and 2, 1984
United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. Subcommittee on Economic Stabilization
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office
1984  
Pg. 78:
One, of course, is I do not think that any industrial policy, any targeted or sectoral industrial policy, can work effectively in the context of a very bad micropolicy, the kind of — someone I recently heard call — sadomonetarism, that makes money scarce and expensive, can frustrate any policy.
 
Google Books
Masterplots II. British and Commonwealth fiction series
Edited by Frank N. Magill
Pasadena, CA: Salem Press
1987
Pg. 1393:
In a world of sadomonetarism, as Bradbury has called it, the individual has become not merely subordinate to economic and political reality — openly in Eastern Europe, more subtly in the West — but expendable as well, as expendable, in fact, as the liberal humanism that Bradbury espouses ...
 
Google Books
Labourism and the English Genius:
The Strange Death of Labour England?
By Gregory Elliott
London: Verso
1993
Pg. 90:
As Healey’s subsequent taunt of ‘sadomonetarism’ from the safety of the Opposition benches intimated, the difference between the two was one of degree, not kind.
 
25 January 1995, Aiken (SC) Standard, “No Reward For Missteps In Mexico” by Tony Snow, pg. 4, col. 4:
His program of sado-monetarism quickly took its toll.
   
The Guardian (UK)
Letters
The Guardian, Friday 13 January 2012 16.00 EST
(...)
• While agreeing, as usual, with my good friend and colleague Larry Elliott over the stance of economic policy both here and in the eurozone (Merkel holds whip hand in orgy of masochism, 9 January), I seem to recall that Denis Healey coined the term “punk monetarism”, not “sado-monetarism”. The phrase “sado-monetarism” was coined in the Observer during the early 1980s by… Yours Truly,
William Keegan
Senior economics commentator, the Observer
   
Twitter   
Doug Henwood
‏@DougHenwood
@gavinsaywhat @Newyorkist My best foreign language is German. I could become a sadomonetarist in my exile.
4:19 PM - 2 Aug 2012
 
New York (NY) Times—The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman 
The Sadomonetarists of Basel
MAY 16, 2013, 2:44 PM
The WSJ highlights a speech by Jaime Caruana, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, warning of the dangers of easy money and the need to raise rates now to avert … something or other.
 
New York (NY) Times—The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman 
Hard Hearts, Soft Heads
NOVEMBER 21, 2013, 8:30 AM
(...)
What it comes down to is that Weidmann — like, I’m afraid, much conventional opinion in Europe — has thrown analysis out the window in favor of a peculiar form of wishful thinking. What’s peculiar about this wishful thinking is that it doesn’t consist of fantasies about the existence of easy, painless solutions; it consists of fantasies about the absence of easy solutions, even when the evidence says very clearly that such solutions exist. Instead of a weak-minded search for pleasure without pain, it’s a search for reasons to inflict pain regardless of the actual economic situation.
 
Yes, it fits the definition of sadomonetarism.
 
Twitter
Joris Zwart
‏@joriszwart
People who insist on tight monetary policy seem to believe in pain for the sake of it - Sadomonetarism,acc to Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/hard-hearts-soft-heads/?_r=0 …
9:46 AM - 22 Nov 2013
 
New York (NY) Times
Sweden Turns Japanese
By Paul Krugman
APRIL 20, 2014
(...)
In short, this was a classic case of sadomonetarism in action.
 
I’m using that term (coined by William Keegan of The Observer) advisedly, not just to be colorful. At least as I define it, sadomonetarism is an attitude, common among monetary officials and commentators, that involves a visceral dislike for low interest rates and easy money, even when unemployment is high and inflation is low.
 
New York (NY) Times—The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman
Further Notes on Sweden
APRIL 20, 2014, 3:10 PM
I’m still thinking about Sweden’s slide into deflation, which actually offers several lessons relevant to the rest of us.
 
First, it’s an object lesson in the power of sadomonetarism, the desire of many monetary officials to raise interest rates because, well, because.
     
Twitter 
Dan Kervick
‏@DanMKervick
@dandrezner @squarelyrooted @ATabarrok Sadomonetarism and its opposite hedomonetarism are two sides of the same dumb monetarist coin.
5:59 PM - 21 Apr 2014
 
Twitter
Louise Lucas
‏@louiseflucas
sadomonetarism an attitude that involves a visceral dislike for low int rates & easy money: #Krugman on Sweden/Japan http://ow.ly/w0MBz
8:18 PM - 21 Apr 2014
 
Twitter
Iskren Penchev
‏@IskrenPenchev
Don’t really care about sadomonetarists, but keeping the rates higher is in no case worse than keeping them lower.  #sweden #sadomonetarism
1:18 PM - 22 Apr 2014
 
Twitter
Ian Preston
‏@IanPPreston
@barrypopik Used by Healey in Commons Jan 19 1983 http://is.gd/VXvA40  but coinage claimed by W Keegan http://is.gd/uIkmod
5:36 PM - 22 Apr 2014