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Henry Calvert Simons (October 9, 1899 – June 19, 1946) was an American economist at the University of Chicago. His anti-trust and monetarist models influenced the Chicago school of economics. Simons is noted for a definition of economic income, developed in common with Robert M. Haig, known as the Haig–Simons equation; this definition of income has strongly influenced the modern American tax structure. In one of his better known essays, ''A Positive Program for Laissez Faire'' (1934) Simons set out a program of reform to bring private enterprise back to life during the Great Depression. Eliminate all forms of monopolistic market power, to include the breakup of large oligopolistic corporations and application of anti-trust laws to labor unions. A Federal incorporation law could be used to limit corporation size and where technology required giant firms for reasons of low cost production the Federal government should own and operate them... Promote economic stability by reform of the monetary system and establishment of stable rules for monetary policy... Reform the tax system and promote equity through income tax... Abolish all tariffs... Limit waste by restricting advertising and other wasteful merchandising practices. Henry Simons argued for changing the financial architecture of the United States to make monetary policy more effective and mitigate periodic cycles of inflation and deflation. The goal of changing the "monetary rules of the game" in this way was to "prevent… the affliction of extreme industrial fluctuations"—in other words, the business cycle. ==Corporate finance and the business cycle== According to Simons, financial disturbances in the economy are perpetuated by "extreme alternations of hoarding and dishoarding" of money. Short-term obligations (loans) issued by banks and corporations effectively create "abundant (fiat) money substitutes during booms". When demand becomes sluggish, a sector of the economy undergoes a shrinkage, or the economy as a whole begins to lapse into depression, "hopeless efforts at liquidation" of the secondary monies, or "fire sales," result. Simons believed that a financial system so structured would be "repeatedly exposed to complete insolvency". In due course, government intervention would inevitably be necessary to forestall insolvency due to traders' bad bets and margin calls by lenders. A recent example would be the $10 billion bailout by the Federal Reserve of Bear Stearns, a multinational global investment bank, in 2008. John Mauldin, a senior member of the financial services industry, writes: "If Bear had not been put into sound hands and provided solvency and liquidity, the credit markets would simply have frozen… The stock market would have crashed by 20% or more… We would have seen tens of trillions of dollars wiped out in equity holdings all over the world." The Bear Stearns debacle was a watershed event in a housing market crisis that precipitated massive devaluations, left the economy reeling, and required massive government action. This is precisely the chain of events predicted by Henry Simons in the event of a large-scale liquidation of inflated securities such as mortgage loans. In Economic Policy for a Free Society Simons writes that all it takes to precipitate a massive liquidation of securities is "a relatively small decline of security values". Simons is emphatic in pointing out that corporations that traded on a "shoestring of equity, and under a mass of current liabilities" are "placing their working capital precariously on call," and hence at risk, in the event of the slightest financial disturbance. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Henry Calvert Simons」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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