The Squeeze of '79

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The trouble is that the kinds of "cash" being developed in the world's leading consumer economy are proliferating faster than the money managers can find ways to measure them. Among other elements in this unmeasured or "invisible" money stock are the credit lines consumers get with their Visa or Master Charge cards, the borrowing they do with a second or even third mortgage on a home, and the ability of companies to borrow on a line of bank credit, in the commercial paper market or even through an overseas financing subsidiary.

Moreover, the definitions of money do not include a whole array of newfangled financing and banking techniques. These include money market mutual funds, which have grown from nothing seven years ago to more than $36 billion now. The funds put investor deposits into government and corporate securities that pay more than twice what is available in regular bank savings accounts; they also permit check writing against the investments, making the whole concept rather like super high-paying checking accounts. People are now putting money into these funds at the rate of $500 million a week.

All this invisible money is, of course, available any time to buy a car or a TV or a vacation in Miami, or to finance a corporate takeover on Wall Street. The policy danger posed by this credit proliferation is that a tight money strategy may indeed cut down the growth of the Fed's "official money," but spending would just keep on surging and spurring inflation anyway. Urges Wall Street Economist Henry Kaufman, an internationally respected expert on interest rates and credit: "What we need now is a new monetary growth target that I call the 'debt proxy.' It would include not just currency and deposits but all private domestic debt as well, a figure that is already at $2.2 trillion, or almost exactly the nation's entire G.N.P."

While Volcker's retooling of Fed policy may lead to surer control of the money supply, critics are worried that the steps he has taken to limit the inflationary flow of Eurodollars into the economy do not go far enough. In London, Geneva and other offshore finance centers, no sooner were the Fed's money-tightening moves announced than finance men began huddling with their lawyers, looking for ways to circumvent the new rules. Reports TIME'S European economic correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer from Brussels: "The game of the week is finding loopholes in the Fed's effort to keep Eurodollars out of the U.S. Like water finding the same level in connected containers, an ocean of money can flow through even the smallest opening."

The ultimate challenge to the Fed's bold new initiative is, of course, the sheer virulence of the nation's inflationary malaise. In the short run, skyrocketing interest rates will just make the plague worse, since rising interest simply pushes up the cost of money. In fact, the new boost in rates makes it even more certain that the actual amount of inflation this year will far exceed the Administration's official forecast; it still maintains that the rise in prices for all of 1979 will be no more than 10.6%.