Kocherlakota on cash

Narayana Kocherlakota, formerly the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and now a prolific economics blogger, penned a recent article on the abolition of cash. Kocherlakota makes the point that if you don't like government meddling in the proper functioning of free markets, then you shouldn't be a big fan of central bank-issued banknotes. For markets to clear, it may be occasionally necessary for nominal interest rates to fall well below zero. Cash sets a lower limit to interest rates, thus preventing this rebalancing from happening.

I pretty much agree with Kocherlakota's framing of the point. In fact, it's an angle I've taken before, both here and in A Libertarian Case for Abolishing Cash. Yes, my libertarian and other free-marketer readers, you didn't misread that. There is a decent case for removing banknotes that is entirely consistent with libertarian principles. If you think usury laws are distortionary because they impose a ceiling on interest rates—and there are some famous libertarians who have railed against usury—then an appeal to symmetry says that you should be equally furious about the artificial, and damaging, interest rate floor set by cash.

Scott Sumner steps up to the plate and defends cash here. He brings up some good points, but I'm going to focus on his last one. Scott says that a cashless economy would create a "giant panopticon" where the state knows everything about you. I quite like Nick Rowe's response in which he welcomes Scott to the Margaret Atwood Club for the Preservation of Currency. In Atwood's dystopian Handmaid's Tale, a theocratic government named the Republic of Gilead has taken away many of the rights that women currently enjoy. One of the tools the Republic uses to control women is a ban on cash, all transactions now being routed digitally through something called the Compubank:

I agree that we don't want to abolish cash if it is only going to lead to Atwood's Compubank. But Scott misses the fact that even though Kocherlakota wants the government to exit the cash business, he simultaneously wants fintech companies to take up the mantle of anonymity services provider. Like Sumner, Kocherlakota doesn't seem to want a Compubank.

For instance, in a recent presentation entitled The Zero Lower Bound and Anonymity: A Monetary Mystery Tour, Kocherlakota highlights the potential for cryptocoins Zcash and Monero to substitute for central bank cash. Unlike bitcoin, these cryptocoins provide full anonymity rather than just pseudonymity. If you want to learn more about Zcash, I just listened to a great podcast with Zcash's Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn here. As for Monero, Bloomberg recently covered its spectacular rise in price.

As Monero illustrates, cryptocoins are incredibly volatile. Is anonymity too important of a good to be outsourced to assets that behave like penny stocks? I'm not sure. And as Nick Rowe points out, the concurrent circulation of deposits (pegged to central bank money) and anonymity-providing cryptocoins would create havoc with the traditional way of accounting for prices. Retailers would probably still set prices in terms of central bank money but anyone wanting to purchase something anonymously would have to engage in an inconvenient ritual of exchange rate conversion prior to consummating the deal. Perhaps these are simply the true costs of enjoying anonymity?

Kocherlakota doesn't mention it explicitly, but should cash be abolished in order to remove the lower bound to interest rates, a potential replacement would be a new central bank-issued emoney, either Fedcoin or what Dave Birch has dubbed FedPesa. A good example of a Fedcoin-in-the-works comes from the People's Bank of China, which vice governor Fan Yifei expects to "gradually replace paper money." As for Birch's FedPesa, a real life example of this is provided by Ecuador's Dinero electrónico, a mobile money scheme maintained by the Central Bank of Ecuador (CBE) for use by the public.

Should a government decide to abolish cash and implement a central bank emoney scheme in its place, it would be possible to set negative interest rates on these tokens while at the same time promising to provide both stability and anonymity. One wonders how credible the latter promise would be. The CBE requires that citizens provide national identity card before opening accounts. And consider that the PBoC's potential cyptocoin will be designed to provide "controlled anonymity," whatever that means. Unless significant safeguards are set, it's hard not to worry that a potential Atwood-style Compubank is waiting in the wings.

An alternative way to coordinate a smooth government exit from the cash business is Bill Woolsey's idea of allowing private banks to step into the role of providing banknotes. In this scenario, the likes of HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, and Royal Bank of Canada would become sole providers of circulating banknotes. Wouldn't this simply re-establish the zero lower bound? Not necessarily. As I wrote back in 2013, the moment a central bank sets deeply negative interest rates, private banks will face huge incentives to either 1. get out of the business of cash or 2. stay in the game while modifying arrangements, the effect being that the zero lower bound is quickly ripped apart.

The provision of anonymity services via the issuance of private banknotes has some advantages over cryptocoins like Zcash. Since they'd be pegged to central bank money, private banknotes would provide 'fixed-price' anonymity. Nor would the public have to constantly do exchange rate conversions between one currency type or the other. On the other hand, Zcash payments can be made instantaneously over long distances; you just can't do that with banknotes. And of course, there's also the stablecoin dream, i.e. the possibility that private cryptocoins like Zcash might themselves be stabilized by pegging them to central bank cash, as Will Luther describes here (for a more skeptical take, read R3's Kathleen B here)

Because of what he calls "over-issue" problems, Kocherlakota is more confident in the prospects for cryptocoins than private banknotes. I'm not so worried. The voluminous free-banking literature developed by people like George Selgin, Larry White, and Kevin Dowd teaches us that as long as silly regulations are avoided, the promise to redeem notes at par in a competitive environment will ensure that the quantity of private banknotes supplied never exceeds the quantity demanded. Don't look to the so-called U.S. Wildcat banking era for proof. During that era, note-issuing banks were too encumbered by strict laws against branch banking and cumbersome backing rules to effectively supply notes, as Selgin points out here. Rather, the Scottish and Canadian banking systems of the 1800s provide evidence that banks can responsibly issue paper money.

Wouldn't the private provision of banknotes require the passing of new laws? Funny enough, U.S. commercial banks can already issue their own banknotes. In a fascinating 2001 article, Kurt Schuler points out that federally-chartered banks have been free to issue notes since 1994 when restrictions on note issuance by national banks was repealed as obsolete by the Community Development Banking and Financial Institutions Act. So the floodgates are open, in the U.S. at least, although as of yet no bank has taken the lead.

If governments are going to remove the zero lower bound by getting out of the business of providing anonymous payments, I say let a thousand flowers bloom. If the void is to be filled, don't put up any impediments to the creation of anonymity-providing fintech options like Zcash, but likewise don't prevent old fashioned banks from getting into the now-vacated banknote game either. Let the market decide which anonymity product they prefer... and celebrate the fact that the government's artificial floor to interest rates has been dismantled.

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P.S. It would be remiss of me to omit pointing out that there are sound ways to dismantle the zero lower bound without removing cash, Miles Kimball's plan being one of them.

Stablecoin

The whippersnappers who work in the cryptocurrency domain are moving incredibly fast.

As I've been saying for a while, assets like bitcoin (or stocks) are unlikely to become popular as exchange media; they're just too damn volatile relative to incumbent fiat currencies. There's a new game in town though: stablecoin. These tokens are similar to bitcoin, but instead of bobbing wildly they have a fixed exchange rate to some other asset, say the U.S. dollar or gold.

Now this is a promising idea. If a crypto-asset can perfectly mimic a U.S. dollar deposit's purchasing power and risk profile, and do so at less cost than a bank, then the monopoly that banks currently maintain in the realm of electronic payments is in trouble. Rather than owning a Bank of America deposit, consumers may prefer to hold an equivalent stablecoin that performs all the same functions while saving on storage and transaction fees. To compete, banks will either have to bribe customers with higher interest rates on deposits, thus putting a crimp in their earnings, or go extinct.

Let's look at these stablecoin options more closely.

Type A: One foot in the legacy banking sector, one foot out

The unifying principle behind each type of stablecoin is the presence of some sort of backing, or security. Bitcoin, by way of comparison, is not backed. Stablecoin backing is typically achieved in two ways. With type A stablecoin, an organization creates a distributed ledger of tokens while maintaining a 1:1 reserve of dollars at a traditional bank. Owners of the tokens can cash out whenever they want into bank dollars at the stipulated rate, thus ensuring that the peg to the dollar holds. Until then, the tokens can be used as a stable medium of exchange. Examples of this are Tether and Ripple U.S dollar IOUs.

Could stablecoin be a bank killer?

We can think of a bank as enjoying stock and flow benefits from its deposit base. The existence of a stock of deposits provides it with a cost of funding advantage while the flow of those deposits from person to person generates fees.

Type A stablecoin pose no threat to the stock benefits that banks enjoy. After all, each stablecoin is always backed by an equivalent bank deposit held in reserve. If people want more stablecoin, the deposit base will have to grow, and that makes traditional bankers happy.

The flow benefits, however, are where the fireworks start. At the outset, people who receive stablecoin--through lack of familiarity--will probably choose to quickly cash out into good old fashioned deposits. But if stablecoin provides an extra range of services relative to deposits, rather than "kicking" back into the bank deposit layer, more people may choose to keep their liquid capital in the overlying stablecoin layer. Merchants will have more incentives to accept stablecoin, only adding to the snowball effect. Once all transactions are routed through the stablecoin layer, underlying deposits will have become entirely inert. While banks will continue to harvest the same stock benefits that they did before, they'll have effectively yielded up all the flow benefits to the upstarts.

So while Type A stablecoin doesn't kill banks, it certainly knocks them down a few wrungs.

By constructing a new layer on top of the deposit layer, stablecoin pioneers would be cribbing off the same playbook that bankers have been using since the profession emerged. Centuries ago, the first bank deposit layer was built on top of an original base money layer. Base money consisted then of gold and silver coin, but in more recent times it morphed into central bank banknotes and deposits. Because bank deposits inherited the price stability of base money (thanks to the promise to redeem in base money), and were highly convenient, bankers succeeded in driving transactions out of the base coinage layer and into the deposit layer. That's why gold and silver rarely appeared in circulation in the 19th century, being confined mostly to vaults. Perhaps one day stablecoin innovators will succeed in confining bank deposits to the "vault" in favour of mass stablecoin circulation. If this sort of displacement hadn't already been done before, I'd be more skeptical.*

Type B: Both feet out of the banking sector

More ambitious are type B stablecoin, which try to liberate themselves entirely from the traditional banking layer. Rather than using old-fashioned bank deposits as backing, a pre-existing issue of distributed digital tokens is used to secure the stablecoin's value.

As an example, take bitShares, a brand of bitcoin-like unbacked tokens. These tokens are every bit as volatile as bitcoin, up 10% one day and down 10% the next. Here's a chart. So far nothing new here, there are literally hundreds of bitcoin look-alikes.

The unique idea is to turn volatile water into stable wine by requiring that a varying amount of bitShares be used to back a second type of token, bitUSD. A bitUSD is a digital token that promises to provide its owner with a U.S. dollar-equivalent return. As long as each bitUSD is secured by, say, $3 worth of bitShares, the owner of one bitUSD will be able to cash out (into one U.S. dollar worth of bitShares) whenever they want and the peg to the U.S. dollar will hold.**

My understanding is that bitUSD, which debuted last year, is coming close to consistently hitting its peg. If bitUSD were to catch on as an alternative transactions layer, banks would lose not only their flow benefits but also stock benefits. After all, a bitUSD-branded stablecoin is not linked to an underlying deposit. We're talking complete devastation of the banking industry.

The system has some warts, however. If the market price of bitShares starts to fall, the scheme requires that more collateral in the form of bitShares be stumped up by the issuer of a bitUSD. This makes sense, it protects the peg. But what if the value of bitShares falls so much that the total market capitalization of bitShares is insufficient to back the total issue of bitUSD? At that point, bitUSD "breaks the buck." A bitUSD will be only worth something like 60 cents, or 30 cents, or 0 cents. Breaking the buck is what a U.S. money market mutual fund is said to do when it can't guarantee its one-to-one peg with the U.S. dollar.   

I'm skeptical of type B stablecoin for this very reason. Cryptocoin like bitcoin and bitShares are plagued by the zero problem; a price of nothing is just as good as a price of $100. They thus make awful backing assets, and any stablecoin that uses them as security has effectively yoked itself to the mast of the Titanic. A breaking of the buck isn't just probable, it is inevitable. Stability is an illusion. Maybe I'd get a bit more bullish on type B stablecoin if there emerged a brand that used digital backing assets not subject to the zero problem.

Anyways, keep your eye on these developments. Like I say, the young whippersnappers who are working on these projects aren't slowing down.

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*In principle, type A stablecoin ideas are very similar to m-Pesa and Paypal. Both of these services construct new banking layers, but keep one leg back in the the existing banking infrastructure by ensuring that each Paypal or m-Pesa deposit is fully backed by deposits held at an underlying brick & mortar bank. See Izabella Kaminska, for instance, on m-Pesa.
 ** For those who like central bank analogies, this is an example of indirect convertibility, whereby a central bank sets market price of its liabilities in terms of, say, a bundle of goods, but only offers redemption in varying amounts of gold. See Woolsey and Yeager.  
*** Another working examples of Type B stablecoin is NuBits. Conceptual versions include Robert Sam's Seignorage Shares, the eDollar, and Vitalik Buterin's Schellingcoin.

A libertarian case for abolishing cash

Last week Citi's Willem Buiter published a note on the three ways to get rid of the effective lower bound to nominal interest rates, one of which is to abolish cash. He goes on to say that

politically, the abolition of currency would run into opposition from some of the legitimately cash-dependent poor and elderly, from those for whom the anonymity of cash is desired because they are engaged in illegal activities and from libertarians. The first constituency can be helped, the second can be ignored and the third one should take one for the team.

I think that Buiter is wrong to characterize libertarians as necessarily opposed to the abolition of cash. Their take on cash is probably (or at least should be) a bit more nuanced. Since libertarians generally advocate government withdrawal from lines of business like health care or liquor retailing, an exit of central banks from the cash business should be a desirable outcome.

What Buiter is advocating is a bit more extreme than just government exit, however. An across-the-board banning of cash would not only take the government out of the cash business but also prevent individuals and businesses from entering the product niche. The participation of the private sector in the provision of cash isn't just science fiction. Historically, commercial banks were intimately involved in the production of paper currency. In modern times, the majority of banknotes that circulate in Scotland are issued by three private banks—the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Clydesdale Bank, while in Hong Kong, the major commercial banks are charged with issuing currency.

Buiter would probably object to private banknotes. After all, if private banks are able to issue negotiable bearer instrument that pay a zero nominal interest rate, a central banker will continue to be plagued by the problem that he/she can't reduce interest rates below zero—instead of fleeing into 0% government paper, the public will hide in private banknotes. It's the same liquidity trap as before, with private currency in the place of central bank currency.

However, there would be one key difference. Private banks must abide by the Darwinian calculus of profit and losses, central banks don't have to. Take a world with privatized cash. A recession hits and the rate of return on capital falls plummets. At the same time, the central bank drops its deposit rate deep into negative territory. As a private bank tries to match with deposit rate reductions of its own, say to -2%, customers will convert negative yielding deposits into the bank's higher-yielding 0% bank notes. The bank, whose survival depends on a healthy spread between the rates on borrowing and lending, faces a sudden spike in borrowing costs to 0%, the rate on their cash base. Spreads will shrink, even invert. Bankruptcy looms.

In order to avert this disaster, private issuers will quickly institute limits on their cash business. This could involve adopting any one of Buiter's three remedies: 1) cancel their note issue; 2) impose a fee on cash, or; 3) remove the fixed exchange rate between deposits and cash. Thus,the lower bound probably wouldn't be a problem in a banking system characterized by privatized paper issuance. The necessity of maintaining a spread would force private banks to rapidly innovate any one of these three escapes come recession and negative nominal rates. Upon recovery, they can remove these limitations and continue with their regular cash business.

Imagine that private banks all choose the first option when nominal rates fall below zero, cancellation. With cash no longer in existence, banks will have succeeded in restoring their margins to health. The population, however, will have effectively lost their ability to make anonymous transactions. This puts a libertarian in a tough philosophical position. On the one hand, a cashless world poses a serious threat to personal liberty. John Cochrane calls it an "Orwellian nightmare," and Chris Dillow has referred to banning cash as "a grossly illiberal measure - the banning of capitalist acts between consenting adults."

On the other hand, if cash threatens a bank's existence, no libertarian would advocate the use of force to prevent said bank from exiting the business of cash provision. Capitalistic acts cannot be forced upon non-consenting adults, or, put differently, Jack's desire for anonymity-providing products doesn't justify Jill being put into chains in order to provide those products. Therefore, a withdrawal of cash by banks as nominal rates fall below zero, and the loss of anonymity that comes with it, is consistent with libertarianism.

So oddly, Buiter's proposed end point—a cancellation of cash in order to rid the world of the lower bound—is very similar to what a libertarian end point could look like. Both institutions will elect to withdraw cash from circulation because it interferes with their institutional prerogatives. For a central bank, this mission boils down to the targeting of some nominal variable like inflation while in the case of a private bank it is its ability to earn a competitive return. That's not to say that a libertarian ought to support Buiter's abolition, only that the subject is more nuanced than it might seem upon a superficial reading.  

As a postscript, it's worth noting that neither Buiter's central banker nor a libertarian's private banker need go as far as abolishing cash in order to remove the effective lower bound. Buiter provides two other options, the best of which (in my opinion) is removing the fixed exchange rate between cash and deposits. Miles Kimball has gone through this option exhaustively. I've outlined some even less invasive, though not as effective, options here.

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Related links: 

Does the zero lower bound exist thanks to the government's paper currency monopoly? (link)
Is legal tender an imposition on free markets or a free market institution? (link)
Bill Woolsey on how the private sector would withdraw cash at negative rates (link | link )
FTAlphaville: Buiter on the death of cash ( link )

Note: I changed some wording on September 26, 2015. The message remains the same.

Sweden and peak cash

The Swedes really don't like cash. First, consider that Sweden is the only country in the world that I'm aware of where reliance on paper money is in decline. Second, no country's central bank has produced a nominal deposit rate as negative as Sweden's, for as long. Yet even at -0.85% per year, Swedish banks who own those deposits haven't fled into 0% cash, providing some indication of the degree to which they hold banknotes in disdain.

ABBA won't accept paper

As the chart below shows, cash outstanding continues to grow in almost every country except Sweden. Japan and Denmark are the only countries that come close to pacing the Swedes, although both nations continue to show incremental growth in demand for banknotes. Even Kenya, where m-pesa has taken hold, shows strong cash demand.

Sweden reached "peak-cash" somewhere between 2007 and 2008. The reason for this change of heart is public preferences, not government diktat. The monetary authorities can only indirectly influence the demand for cash, say by introducing/removing various banknote denominations, or altering the quality of its note issue (say by making notes harder to counterfeit). By virtue of deposits being convertible into cash whenever the depositor desires (and vice versa), the allocation between cash and deposits is primarily up to the public, not the monetary authorities.

One theory is that Sweden become more law-abiding in 2008, thus reducing their demand for paper kronor. Cash is typically demanded by criminals and tax evaders to avoid creating a paper trail. That Sweden's underground element suddenly decided to go legit doesn't seem very plausible to me. Demographics is a more likely contributor to peak cash. As a nation's population growth slows, the demand for cash peters off with it. This can't be the entire explanation, however, since other countries that also suffer from poor population growth profiles (like Canada) show rising cash demand. This leaves technology as the most likely culprit. As electronic payment options improve, it makes little sense to endure the hassle of withdrawing and holding a small horde of dirty paper in one's wallet.

According to a MasterCard study, 89% of transactions in Sweden are cashless, compared to 80% in the U.S. Situation Stockholm, the street paper sold by homeless vendors in Sweden's capital, can be purchased with a card rather than cash, and while London's buses went cash-free earlier this year, bus fares disappeared several years ago in Stockholm. Unlike the U.S. and other laggards, Sweden has a near real-time person-to-person payments system called Bankgirot which has been active since 2011. Bank customers can download an app called Swish, which allows them to make immediate mobile payments over the Bankgirot network. In southern Sweden, Vicar Johan Tyrberg has installed a card reader to make it easier for worshipers to make offerings. And finally, despite having a hit song entitled Money, Money, Money, ABBA refuses refuses to accept cash at the ABBA Museum. Apparently ABBA member Bjorn Ulvaeus is leading a crusade against banknotes after his son's apartment was burgled twice.

No zero lower bound, at least not yet

As a second illustration of Swedish cash abhorrence, consider that no other central bank has maintained a negative deposit rate as low as Sweden's central bank, the Riksbank, for as long. The Riksbank reduced its deposit rate to -0.85% this month after having maintained it at -0.75% since October 2014. A few nations come close. The Swiss, for instance, reduced rates to -0.75% in January, as have the Danes—but both are behind the pace set by the Swedes.

The key point here is that with Riksbank deposits being penalized 0.85% per year, one would assume that that they'd be quickly converted into Swedish banknotes. Cash, after all, pays 0% a year, superior to -0.85%. But that hasn't happened. As the chart below shows, cash left on deposit at the Riksbank stands at around 150 million kr, roughly the same level it has been at for the last twelve months (and far above 2008-2012 levels).

Who keeps funds on deposit at the Riksbank? As the business day progresses and Swedes make payments among each other, banks who maintain settlement accounts at the Riksbank will find themselves in a surplus or deficit position. While those in surplus can elect to park their excess at the Riksbank's overnight deposit facility, they'll usually try to lend these positions to deficit banks in the interbank lending market or participate in Riksbank fine-tuning operations at the end of the day, both of which provide superior returns to the deposit rate. For whatever reason, Swedish banks typically leave a small portion of their surplus in the deposit facility, bearing the awful return on deposits for the sake of enjoying whatever conveniences the deposit facility offers.

That this 150 million kr in -0.85% yielding deposits hasn't been converted into cash is an indication of just how low Swedish opinion on cash has sunk. Consider the myriad number of costs a bank that wants to cash out its balance will have to incur. A Brinks truck must be hired in order to transport the cash to the bank's vaults. The cash must be counted, requiring a diversion of tellers' resources from other important activities. With the majority of Swedish bank branches having gone cashless, they may need to reinvest in handling infrastructure before they can take delivery of a truck full of banknotes. Next, that cash needs to be vaulted, which means displacing other valuables from being safeguarded (like a client's jewels), forcing the bank to forfeit a vaulting fee. Finally, the cash needs to be insured from theft. No wonder Swedish banks continue to use the Riksbank's deposit facility, even at a -0.85% rate; like the public, banks don't consider cash to be a convenient option.

Could Swedes one day re-embrace cash?

Swedes are proud of their move towards digital payments, but this trend could very rapidly come to an end. In an effort to hit its inflation target, the Riksbank may have to push interest rates even deeper into negative territory. At much lower levels, even the most cash-hating Swedes will have to re-consider their aversion to paper. The consequences could be significant. While only a small quantity of deposits are kept in the Riksbank's deposit facility, much larger amounts—around 30 billion krone—are invested at the Riksbank via overnight fine-tuning repos, which currently pay -0.2%. If the Riksbank reduced the fine-tuning rate much lower (say to around -1.5%), these repos would be rapidly converted into cash by banks. The public holds many hundreds of billions more worth of deposits at Swedish commercial banks. Should Riksbank rate reductions force banks to respond by ratcheting down their own deposit rates to -1 or -2%, how long before Swedes empty out their bank accounts, turning Sweden into a cash-only economy?

To avoid reverting to a cash-only economy at extreme negative rates, the Riksbank would do well to hitch itself to the cashless trend. One way to go about this without calling in all banknotes would be to reign in the number of paper products the central bank currently offers consumers, in particular high denominations of notes. Just stop allowing conversions into the 1000 krona note, and maybe the 500 krona note too, or consider canceling these large denominations outright. Not only would this reduce the central bank's printing costs, but it would provide more room for further rate cuts into negative territory—without the threat of a mad dash into Swedish cash.

As for the rest of us...

As in Sweden, I'm pretty sure that cash demand in places like Canada and the US will eventually peak as continued advances in payments technology and a more rapid adoption of those technologies lead consumers to demand less of the stuff. Central banks might consider adapting to this trend ahead of time by reducing the number of paper products they offer to the public. Do the Swiss really need a 1000 SFr note? Do Europeans need a €500 note, and Canadians $100 notes? Alternatively, why not do what Bill Woolsey advocates? Let's gradually privatize the issuance of paper currency. If anyone can make cash relevant again, it's innovators in the private sector. And if they can't, then maybe the banknote deserves to die a slow death.

Secondly, Sweden shows that the so-called zero-lower bound isn't actually at zero, but some distance below that. Cash is awfully burdensome, as evidenced by Swedish banks who are willing to hold deposits at -0.85% despite the option to earn 0%. Central bankers at the Federal Reserve, ECB, and elsewhere would do well to heed this Swedish data point. If they need to loosen monetary policy in order to hit their targets, they can go well below -0.5% before having to fear mass conversion into cash. The world's central bankers have much more interest rate ammunition than they let on.

Credit cards as media of account

What is this gas station using as a medium of account? Visa/Mastercard dollars or Federal Reserve dollars?

In this post I'll argue that in many cases, a nation's medium-of-account doesn't consist of base money issued by its central bank, but credit card money created by Visa and Mastercard. This may have some interesting implications for monetary policy. Whoever issues, creates, or manages a nation's medium-of- account determines the general level of prices, and this makes it a monetary superpower.

But before I get to that, let's revisit the meaning of the word medium-of-account.

I've written a number of posts on the idea of medium-of-account because it has always seemed to me like an important concept, although admittedly it's taken me a while to zero-in on a satisfactory understanding of the term. What I like about medium-of-account is that along with the ideas of unit-of-account and moneyness, it allows us to pretty much remove "money" from the list of terminology we use when talking about monetary phenomena. No single word is so widely-used yet so imprecise as money. And because of this, no word has bred as many bitter econblog battles. By splitting apart the various ideas associated with "money" and passing these meanings on to alternative words like medium-of-account, some of this morass can hopefully be unclogged.

Without further ado, here are the definitions. By the way, these aren't mine. I've picked them up from folks like Jurg Niehans, who coined the term medium-of-account; Scott Sumner; and Bill Woolsey—hopefully nothing has been lost in translation.

The unit-of-account is a word or symbol like $, ¥, £. Inherent in the idea of UOA is the subdivision of the unit, so that $1 is comprised of 100 cents. (1)

The thing (or things) that defines that unit is (are) the medium-of-account. When a merchant chooses to sell a painting for $100, for instance, he is selecting the unit in which he prices, say the $, as well as the specific medium that defines the $ unit. This last choice is important because dollars might appear in any number of different mediums, or forms, including Federal Reserve paper money, Federal Reserve deposits, branded private bank deposits, cheques, credit cards, and more.

Isn't it the case that a merchant chooses "all of the above media of account" when choosing to price in dollars? After all, one dollar is just as good as another.

Not necessarily. For instance, we know that in the early to mid-19th century a plethora of dollar-denominated exchange media circulated, much like now. There were dollar coins, which the U.S. Mint coined out of a certain number of grains of silver and/or gold. There were also privately-issued dollar banknotes, these being the most prevalent exchange media since coins rarely circulated. However, when merchants set sticker prices, the medium they had in mind when defining the $ unit was the less-common coin, not the more-prevalent notes. Notes were only accepted by merchants at varying discounts to their face value, despite the fact that most banknotes were branded as "dollars".

For example, if our merchant listed a painting for $100, then it could be purchased with one-hundred one dollar coins, or, alternatively, $102 in banknotes from a certain bank, or $103 from another.

If the value of all banknotes simultaneously inflated, what would happen to prices? Given that the value of the coin had remained constant, the merchant's price as well as the general price level would not have changed during this inflation. All that would adjust would be the varying discounts applied to the whole range of private banknotes. The painting would still be listed at $100, and it could still be purchased with the same quantity of coins, but it might take $110 or $115 worth of notes to purchase it.

However, if the U.S. Mint had chosen to reduce the quantity of gold or silver in a coin, then the merchant would increase his sticker price for the painting to $110 or so. The general price level would inflate.

So a unique feature of the medium of account is that the general price level pivots around the MOA's value. If the owner or issuer of the medium of account, in our example the U.S. Mint, has the wherewithal, it can control these economy-wide price changes by modifying the nature of the media it emits, say by reducing the metal content of coins. Few institutions have this sort of monetary superpower because only a few institutions create media that also happen to be media-of-account. Because 19th century private banks didn't issue media of account, they were not monetary superpowers.

Let's bring this back to the present. What is the modern medium of account? Who controls it and thereby earns the mantle of the U.S.'s reigning monetary superpower? Scott Sumner argues that central bank base money serves as the medium of account. I don't doubt that he's right. But in a large subset of transactions, I'd argue that Visa and Mastercard dollars are the medium of account. And this means that Visa and Mastercard rival (in theory at least) the Fed as monetary superpowers.

To understand why Visa and Mastercard dollars serve as media of account, you need to know a bit about how credit cards work. Merchants who accept credit cards as payment must pay a small percentage of each transaction's value to the credit card networks (comprised of the Visa and Mastercard associations, plus the banks that issue cards and process payments). So if someone buys $1.00 worth of stuff, the merchant might get $0.995, the remaining half cent going to the card network.

The fee that the merchant must pay varies by the quality of card. Basic cards might result in the merchant giving up 0.5% to 1% to the card network while premium cards, those offering better rewards, might bring a fee of 2-4%. Merchant fees have been rising over time, especially as card rewards become more exotic.

Merchants hate seeing credit cards, especially premium cards. They hate them because they are required to pay the card fees but cannot pass these costs off to the customer. Why? Well the best way to pass these costs off would be for the merchant to put a surcharge on each credit card transaction equal to the fee the card network charges the merchant. A surcharge policy would mean that it would cost any customer wishing to buy a $100 painting with Visa or Mastercard $102 or $103.

However, as a condition of using the card networks, merchants are prohibited from discriminating against card users. Surcharges are 'illegal'. Visa and Mastercard can extract these sorts of promises from merchants because they are oligopolies. If you are exiled from their networks for breaking their rules, you're as good dead.

So the upshot is that if a customer buys a $100 painting with cash (or debit), the merchant gets $100; if they buy it with a basic Visa card, the merchant might get $98; but if the customer buys it with a premium card, the merchant will only get $96. I'd hate premium cards too if I only got 96 cents on the dollar.

To get around these rules, merchants who accept cards have come up with an ingenious strategy: change the medium of account. Basically, the unit of account that merchants use, the $, stays the same, but whereas the merchant's original medium of account was Federal Reserve dollars, they now switch over to defining the $ in terms of Visa/Mastercard dollars. In the eyes of a merchant, a credit card dollar is only worth around 97 or 98 cents. Having adopted Visa/Mastercard as his MOA, our merchant will proceed increase his sticker prices by a percent or two across the board. The painting which retailed for $100 is now priced at ~$102. When someone buys the painting with a credit card, two dollars of this amount goes to the card network, leaving the merchant with $100. He earns the same real income as before.

This switch in MOAs allows our merchant to inflate their prices and thereby pass off card fees to their customers without illegally imposing surcharges. Fed cash has ceased to be the MOA, but will still be a popular exchange medium. But now customers who prefer paying in cash must request a cash discount at the merchant's till. Given the $102 sticker price on the painting, they should be able to buy the painting for around ~$100 Fed dollars.

Since Visa and Mastercard now manage the medium of account for a large proportion of American merchants, they have become monetary superpowers and can exercise their own brand of monetary policy. If Visa and Mastercard increase the rewards on their cards, merchants will be docked larger fees. Merchants will react by increasing sticker prices across the board. Thus we get inflation. If rewards are lowered so that the merchant is penalized less, then merchants will lower their sticker prices. This is deflation. These price changes are independent of any action taken by the Federal Reserve.

That's not to say that the Fed would have lost its monetary superpowers. It can still cause inflation or deflation by engaging in open market operations are adjusting the interest rate on reserves. However, in an extreme scenario, we could imagine the Fed's effort to increase prices being offset by Visa and Mastercard's efforts to decrease prices. A monetary battle of sorts could erupt.

I think that a good analogy to help understand this is to return to the 19th century example of dollar coins issued by the U.S. Mint. If gold prices rose, the price level would fall. But if the U.S. Mint were to simultaneously reduce the gold content of dollar coins, the MOA, it could entirely offset this fall and create stable prices. Just like the U.S. Mint can offset any change in the value of gold by increasing or decreasing gold content of coins, Mastercard and Visa as issuers of MOA can (in theory at least) offset any change to the value of Fed dollars by increasing or decreasing the reward content of Visa/Mastercard dollars.

An interesting bit of news worth pointing out is that in 2013, Visa and Mastercard finally allowed U.S. merchants to introduce surcharges on credit card transactions. I'd expect that merchants will slowly start to transition back to using Federal Reserve dollars as their medium of account. We should see the various types of credit cards dollars being priced at varying discounts to Federal Reserve dollars, similar to how banknotes in the 19th century were priced, with each note earning a discount relative to the dollar coin. Premium cards will face large surcharges, and regular cards small surcharges.

This means that in the U.S., Visa and Mastercard have effectively lost their monetary superpowers. They can no longer effect the general price level. In other places like Canada, however, courts have allowed the no-surcharge policy to continue, which means that Visa and Mastercard dollars will continue to be MOA. The card networks will remain as Canadian monetary superpowers.

There's a lot more material that I'd like to add to this already-dense post, but I'll hold off for now. In sum, in this post I'm "kicking the tires" of the basic definitions that folks like Scott Sumner and Bill Woolsey provide us. In applying them to the world around us, it sure seems to me like credit card media-of-account currently coexist with the standard Fed dollar medium-of-account. But I'm curious to see if others agree with my interpretation.

P.S. Here are two interesting tangents I plan on writing about next month:

1) A bimetallic monetary system has two media of account; gold and silver. When the market rate between gold and silver shifts, the system suffers from Gresham's Law. If we have a monetary system that uses Federal Reserve dollars and Visa/Mastercard dollars as the two media of account, what does a modern version of Gresham's Law look like?

2) The Fed gathers price data so it can better target a 2% decline rate in the CPI value of the "dollar". But if some merchants are pricing goods in terms of a different dollar medium of account, isn't the Fed gathering inappropriate data? If credit card networks are pushing up prices via fee increases, the Fed might misinterpret these changes as being Fed-inspired and adopt the wrong monetary policy. How might the Fed adjust its methodology to account for the use of credit card MOA?

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(1) As Tom Brown points out, some economists describe the unit-of-account not just as a sign, but also as a fixed quantity of the medium-of-account. So if the unit of account is the $, and the medium-of-account is gold, than the number of grains of gold that defines the dollar is rolled into the concept of unit-of-account. Alternatively, we can leave the unit-of-account as a mere sign, and refer to the medium-of-account not just gold but a given quantity of gold grains. Thirdly, we could give the quantity of the medium of account that defines the $ an entirely different term, say the "Tom Brown multiple". As long as we remember that there's a sign, the thing that represents that sign, and the quantity of that thing then we can avoid unnecessary semantic debates

Separating the functions of money—the case of Medieval coinage

Florentine florin

Last year Scott Sumner introduced the econ blogosphere to what he likes to call the medium-of-account function of money, or MOA, defined as the sign in which an economy's sticker prices and debts are expressed. Here and here are recent posts of his on the subject.

I think Scott's posts on this subject have added a lot of depth to the interblog monetary debates. However, I've never been a big fan of Scott's terminology. As I've pointed out before, what Scott calls MOA, most modern economists would call the unit-of-account function of money. Older economists like Jevons and Keynes[1] referred to the unit-of-account as the money-of-account, and modern economic historians also prefer money-of-account. Terminological differences aside, in today's post I want to focus on what I'll call from here on in the unit-of-account function of money.

Scott's UOA posts often emphasize the idea of separating the unit-of-account function from the medium-of-exchange. This isn't a new approach. Back in the 1980s, a trend in monetary economics began whereby economists began to dissociate the various bundled functions of money into constituent components. In fact, a few contributors to the modern econ blogosphere were participants in what was then called "New Monetary Economics", or NME, including Tyler Cowen, Bill Woolsey (pdf), Scott, and Lawrence White (pdf). White, it should be noted, was a critic. Cowen doesn't blog much about NME these days, his last post on the subject was in 2011, but I'm sure every time he goes to a restaurant he can't help but wonder what the world might be like if the menu prices were in different units than the media he expected to pay with. Here is an old Cowen paper (with Krozner) on NME that is worth reading, as well as the bibliography which serves as a good jumping off point to understand more about NME.

But let's turn to an actual example. The separation of the medium-of-exchange from the unit-of-account envisioned by NME isn't mere speculation. Indeed, such a separation has been very much the norm over the last thousand years or so. The medieval monetary system operated with what was essentially a number of heterogeneous media of exchange and an independent unit of account.

Medieval Europe was politically fragmented and many different mints issued coins. Einaudi (pdf) tells us that some 22 gold coins and 29 silver coins (most of them foreign) circulated in the Duchy of Milan alone in the 18th century. This does not include the many varieties of copper coins that would also have been current. Weber (pdf) describes Basel in the 1400s, which had a heterogeneous coinage acquired through trade that included florin and ducats from Italy, and German rhinegulden, along with the local silver penny.

Because most of these coins had different metallic content, and the market value of coins was determined to a large extent by the quantity of metal therein, would this not have caused a terrific amount of confusion? Silver and gold traded at a constantly fluctuating ratios, contributing to the calculational morass. How could shopkeepers and shoppers keep track of the prices at which transactions were to be consummated with such an incredible variety of ever changing units?

The answer is that prices were expressed in terms of a universal unit of account. The name for this unit was the pound, or in French, the livre. The pound (and livre) were further divisible into 20 shillings (sous) and each shilling into 12 pence (deniers). A pound was therefore divisible into 240 pence. Prices and debts were recorded not in terms of individual circulating coins, but in terms of this pound unit of account. Indeed, pound coins never actually existed in Medieval Europe, the pound being a purely abstract accounting unit.

According to Einaudi, local mint officials maintained a list of coin ratings whereby each coin in local circulation was rated at a certain amount of £/s/d. Officials determined the rating by assaying the quantity of gold or silver in each coin. Thus a shopkeeper need only list the price for, say, a horse in terms of the universal unit of account, say 1 pound 6 shillings. A buyer need only look at the 1£ 6s sticker price, determine what sorts of coins he had in his pocket, refer to their public ratings, and compute the proper number of coins to hand over as payment.

Over time, the precious metals content of coins would deteriorate as people 'sweated' coins, filed them, clipped them, or bathed them in aquafortis [2]. The price ratio of gold to silver would often change subject to the whims of market demand as well as mine supply. Sometimes a sovereign might call in an existing issue of coins and reissue them with more or less precious metals therein. When the metallic content of a given coin was changed, or when the market silver-to-gold ratio fluctuated, local mint officials would quickly account for this change by re-rating the altered coin in terms of the £/s/d unit of account.

The advantage to shopkeepers with this system is that they needn't update their sticker prices. After all, via constant re-ratings, the prices of coins were made to fluctuate around the unit of account. For example, if the Spanish doubloon was re-rated due to a debasement in its gold content, our horse-seller could keep his 1 pound 6 shilling price constant, and need simply ask for more doubloons [3]. In this way, the chaos of the medieval coinage system was rendered orderly by a universal £/s/d unit of account.

There is one important issue I haven't dealt with. What defined the medieval pound unit of account? Anyone who's read my old post will know that this question boils down to this—what was the medieval medium of account? The unit of account is always defined in terms of something else, a medium of account, and it is this MOA (which is different from Sumner's MOA) that anchors the price level.

Although city states never minted pounds (and only rarely shillings), they did mint their own pennies. Weber (pdf)(RePEc) and Spufford hypothesize that these pennies served as a foundation, or "link" coin. The penny unit of account was set equal to the penny coin, either spontaneously or via enactment, and thereafter any alteration in the silver quantity of the penny link coin modified the unit of account.

To illustrate, if the sovereign reduced the amount of silver in the local penny, the penny's linkage to the unit of account meant that the penny-as-unit of account now contained a smaller quantity of silver. The pound unit of account (a multiple of 240 pennies) by definition now also contained less silver. So a debasement of the link penny coin meant that all £/s/d sticker prices would need to be raised by shopkeepers if they desired to preserve real purchasing power [4]. In modern days, we call this inflation. Nor was princely debasement of the link coin the sole cause of medieval unit-of-account inflation. After many years of passing from hand to hand, link coin's naturally wore out, and therefore a steady inflation in prices resulted.

A debasement in a foreign penny circulating locally, however, would have no effect on the local unit of account, insofar as the foreign penny didn't serve as the link coin. Rather, a debasement of a foreign penny would result in that particular coin being re-rated in terms of the unit of account. £/s/d sticker prices would stay constant.

In some cases, however, foreign pennies were the link coin, so changes to the silver content of the local penny would have no effect on the price level. Inflation or deflation were imposed exogenously. Even more interesting, in a few rare cases the precious metal content of a famous coin of a previous era that no longer existed was used as the link coin. Monetary historians such as Munro call these "ghost monies". The advantage of having a ghost link coin rather than a current coin is that the unit-of-account could now stay constant over time, preserving the real value of debts and contracts.

To sum up, the medieval unit of account, as we already know, was £/s/d. We also know that there was no single medium of exchange, but a chaotic mix of coin media of exchange. The MOA was a single "index" coin, usually the locally-coined penny, but at other times a foreign coin or an antiquated "ghost coin". While link coins would come and go over the centuries, the £/s/d unit of account stayed constant.

At what point in history did the unit of account and medium of exchange finally fuse together? Weber (pdf) hypothesizes that the Industrial Revolution brought with it improvements in the quality of coin production. Milled edges prevented filing and clipping. The introduction of steam driven coining reduced minting costs and made it more feasible to replace worn coins. These technological improvements meant that it was now possible for coins to serve as stable units of account. The best evidence that Weber finds for this is the appearance of "value marks", or numbers, on the faces of coins. Medieval coins did not carry numbers on them, only the faces and names of the various personages responsible for their issue. The blank nature of these coins allowed the market to determine their exchange rates in terms of the unit of account. The appearance of value marks in the 19th century indicated that the coinage was now of a high enough quality that a separate unit of account was rendered unnecessary. It was now possible to inscribe the unit of account directly on the coin's face.

As a result of these developments, the modern day individual is incapable of imagining a split between the unit-of-account and the media-of-exchange. But this complex institution is something that our ancestors dealt with on a daily basis. Understanding the medieval monetary system is a great way for us to throw off the cobwebs and understand the difference between media-of-exchange and unit-of-account. After all, who knows what future monetary systems might have in store for us — perhaps another divergence between the two functions? It also crystallizes how important the unit-of-account function is. Whoever controls the unit-of-account controls prices, and therefore monetary policy.

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[1] The first line of Keynes's Treatise on Money is: "Money-of-account, namely that in which Debts and Prices and General Purchasing Power are expressed, is the primary concept of a Theory of Money.
[2] Sweating coins involved putting many coins in a sack, shaking the sack, and removing the fine metal grains that shaking had dislodged from the coins. Aquafortis is nitric acid, or HNO3.
[3] The doubloons re-rating due to lower metallic content was called a "crying down" the value of the coin. If the doubloon had been reminted to contain more gold,  its value would have been "cried up". [Editor's Note: this is wrong|
[4] When the link coin's metallic content was debased, this was referred to in the medieval literature as an 'augmentation' or 'enhancement' of prices. When link coin's metallic content was rebased (increased), this was referred to as 'diminution', or 'abatement'. 

Update: By coincidence, Nick Rowe has simultaneously posted on the separation of the functions of money.

Does the zero lower bound exist thanks to the government's paper currency monopoly?

Many moons ago Matt Yglesias wrote that the "zero lower bound is a pure artifact of the existence of physical cash."  In this post I'll argue that the zero-lower bound, or ZLB, is an artifact of our modern central bank-managed monetary system, and not the existence of cash. In a free banking system in which private banks issue banknotes, competitive forces would force bankers to rapidly find ways to pierce below the ZLB, rendering the bound little more than a fleeting technicality.

What is the zero lower bound? When the economy's expected rate of return drops significantly below 0%, interest rates charged by banks should follow into negative territory. But if banks set sub-zero interest rates on deposits, everyone will quickly convert them into central bank-issued paper currency. After all, why hold -2% yielding deposits when you can own 0% yielding cash? The inability to set negative interest rates is the zero-lower bound problem.

As I'll illustrate, the threat of getting stuck at the zero-lower bound would impose such huge losses on private note-issuing banks that bank managers would quickly find creative ways to circumvent the problem. Central bankers, who aren't beholden to the same financial motivations as private bankers, needn't pursue these same zero-lower bound innovations with such zeal. This distinction has significant implications for the economy. Insofar as policies designed to remove the ZLB can prevent large macroeconomic distortions, central bankers are more likely to avoid such policies and destabilize the macroeconomy than private banker who, driven by bottom line concerns, will be quick to adopt ZLB-avoiding innovations.

Let's set up our free banking system. Say that the Fed ceases issuing paper currency and only creates deposits. Into this void, private banks begin issuing their own paper dollar banknotes which can be exchanged for bank deposits at a rate of 1:1. This isn't such a strange idea—for much of its history, Canada has enjoyed a privately-supplied paper currency. A few years later the economy nosedives and pessimism reigns. Private banks are desperate to decrease deposit rates into negative territory, say -4% or so. After all, banks earn income from the spread between the rate at which they borrow and the rate at which they invest. If, during bad times, a banker is investing at a -2% loss, he or she needs to be borrowing at -4% in order to earn spread income.

Unfortunately for our private banker, the intervening ZLB impedes rates from dropping into negative territory. Any attempt to cut to -4% and bank depositors will flock to convert negative yielding deposits into the bank's 0% yielding banknotes. Very quickly the bank's entire liability structure will be comprised of banknotes, a disastrous outcome since a bank that funds itself at 0% while investing at -2% will go broke very quick.

In a negative return world, profit-maximizing private banks would solve their ZLB problem using several strategies:

1. Remove Cash

If banks remove all of their already-issued cash from the economy in return for deposits, the deposits-to-cash escape route will be effectively erased, thereby clearing the way for banks to reduce deposit rates to -4%. One way to do this, courtesy of Bill Woolsey, would be for banks to issue cash with a call feature. Much like a convertible bond allows the bond issuer to force conversion upon investors, bank notes would carry a conversion clause permitting the issuing bank to call in all cash when it desires to reduce deposit rates below zero. [1]

2. Cease conversion into cash

Note-issuing banks might simply close the cash conversion window while allowing existing cash to remain in circulation. This would cut off any rush to convert deposits into cash upon a reduction of deposit rates to -4%. The price of existing cash would jump to a high enough level such that it would be expected to decline at a rate of 4% a year. Conversion stoppages are not without precedent. In 18th century Scotland, banks often issued notes with an option clause that allowed them to cease redemption should a bank run begin.

3. Penalize cash

By penalizing cash, a bank imposes a large enough cost on cash holders so that negative yielding deposits are no longer inferior to cash. There are plenty of ways for a bank to do this. One way is to impose a negative interest rate on cash by requiring cash holders to pay to "update" their bank notes lest they expire. This update fee, which would amount to around 4% a year, would forestall depositors from making a dash for cash when the bank sets deposit rates at -4%. In times past, locally-issued "scrip" like Worgl have had negative interest rates attached to them.

Another creative way for a banker to penalize cash is to impose a capital loss on cash holders. Rather than offering permanent 1:1 cash-to-deposit exchanges, banks might commit themselves to buying back cash (ie. redeeming it) in the future at an ever worsening rate to deposits. As long as the loss imposed on cash amounts to around 4% a year, depositors will not convert their deposits to cash en masse when deposit rates are cut to 4%.

In sum, a number of innovative routes are available for note-issuing banks to let their borrowing costs drop into negative territory. By necessity, private note-issuing banks will adopt these strategies in order to protect their shareholders from the painful effects of mass conversion of cheap deposit funding into relatively costly 0% cash.

That's all fine and dandy, but our note-issuing mechanism is run by a centralized monopoly, not competing private banks. Because the ZLB is no less binding for central banks than it is for free banks, over the last few years economists and pundits have come up with all sorts of draconian techniques for central banks to escape the ZLB. There have been calls to ban cash, penalize it, and destroy it. At first I was somewhat appalled by these ideas as they seemed to be gross infringements on people's ability to use cash. Over time I've realized that these authoritarian solutions are, somewhat paradoxically, the very same innovations that competing bankers would devise in a free banking world in order to free themselves of the ZLB problem. In other words, we can back out what a monopolist currency issuer *should* be doing  to combat the ZLB by imagining what a network of competing banks *would* do. [2]

For instance, in a negative rate world a central bank ban on paper currency would be the equivalent of competing note-issuing banks simultaneously calling in their entire issue of paper currency in order to protect their solvency. If free banks were to penalize cash by redeeming it at ever deteriorating rates, this would be exactly the same strategy that Miles Kimball advocates central banks adopt in order to escape the ZLB.

That central banks have been so slow to evolve strategies for escaping from the ZLB could be due to any number of factors. Central banks aren't privately owned nor are they disciplined by competition, and central bankers don't have a mandate to turn a profit. Free banks, burdened by all of these checks, would be forced to rapidly adopt ZLB-escaping strategies or perish.

Further hampering efforts to get central banks like the Fed to innovate solutions to the ZLB is that these efforts might conflict with other goals. Withdrawing cash, penalizing it, or limiting conversion will put an end to, or at least diminish, the circulation of US paper dollars overseas. It might even result in the circulation of some other nation's 0% yielding currency in the US. But the universal circulation of greenbacks is one of the most potent symbols of US hegemony, real or perceived. In the interests of protecting this symbol, innovations for escaping the ZLB may get short shrift. In a free banking system, these sorts of non-pecuniary motives are unlikely to outweigh the profit and loss calculation that dictates the necessity of adopting such innovations.

So the zero lower bound problem isn't a problem with cash per se, it's just a function of monopolistic intransigence. If you really want to short circuit the ZLB, better to devolve the provision of notes to profit-seeking private banks. Until then, hopefully evangelists like Miles Kimball succeed in getting central banks to adopt  free banking-style contingency plans in preparation for the next time we experience a crisis that necessitates sub-zero interest rates.

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[1] I confess that much of this post was inspired by ideas in two Bill Woolsey posts that I thought deserved wider circulation.

[2] The idea that harsh central bank policies like banning cash or penalizing currency might mimic free banking responses is a recurring theme on this blog. Here, I hypothesized that in a world characterized by free banking, legal tender laws might evolve naturally as the result of market choice. It's a strange world.

Discussions of the medium-of-account could be more well-done

Nick Rowe, Scott Sumner, and most recently, David Glasner, all say that the US's current medium of account is the dollar. I disagree. I think that the current medium of account is CPI units. Here's why.

First, there's been some sloppiness with definitions in the links above, so let's define the term. The medium of account is whatever defines the unit of account. I think this a pretty standard definition. That's Bill Woolsey's definition here. David echoes this definition in his comment here.

Take an old-style central bank that holds 100% gold reserves in its vault. It chooses the word "dollar" to stand as the unit of account. The bank then goes on to define the dollar as equal to x grains of gold. Thus the medium of account is gold. Our central bank issues paper notes which are to be used as the medium of exchange. Shopkeepers post prices in terms of the unit of account, the dollar, and accept notes as payment. Some shopkeepers might even choose to post prices in grains of gold rather than the dollar unit of account. If they do, this won't affect the fact that gold remains the medium of account.

Inspired by the Bank of Canada, our 100% gold bank chooses to sell all its gold for bonds. Next it chooses to redefine the value of the dollar as an idealized basket of consumer goods that declines in size by 3% a year. It threatens to do open market operations in a manner that ensures that its definition sticks.

What has changed? Shopkeepers continue posting prices in the unit of account, the dollar. Notes issued by the central bank are still the medium of exchange. But the definition of the dollar, the medium of account, has changed from a quantity of gold to a gradually shrinking quantity of consumer goods.

Some shopkeepers might even post prices in terms of this imaginary basket of goods. When shoppers arrive at the till to pay, they obviously can't hand over CPI baskets. Rather, the shopkeeper will download the central bank's most recent CPI-to-dollar ratio and quote the customer their final price in terms of notes, the medium of exchange.

To sum up, in moving from a fully-reserved gold bank to a modern CPI targeter, all that's happened is that our central bank has changed the medium of account from gold to CPI. Nick has to understand where I'm coming from since I'm just using the same technique he used in this post.

Bimetallism redux

Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint

Miles Kimball's proposal for subordinating paper money to electronic money sounds to me a bit like abandoning bimetallism.

Beginning in 1717, Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint, put England on a bimetallic standard. Under bimetallism, the pound sterling was defined as a fixed quantity of silver or gold. In other words, where before England's medium of account was a certain quantity of silver, the new medium of account was a certain quantity of both metals. The unit of account through all of this remained pounds. As the market prices of gold and silver varied due to technological advances and new discoveries, the fixed silver-to-gold ratio meant that one or the other would be undervalued relative to its actual market price. As a result, the entire nation's stock of circulating coin would either flip to gold (if gold was overvalued by the mint) or silver (if silver was overvalued). After all, why bring your silver to the Royal Mint in London when you might sell it for more overseas? The overvaluation of gold, which in England's case was accidental and not intended, quickly moved the nation from a mixed standard to a gold based monetary system.

Just as England once fixed the quantity of gold equal to a quantity of silver, the modern Bank of England declares a fixed relationship between a paper pound and an electronic deposit at the Bank. The relationship is 1:1. This fixed relationship causes significant problems at the zero-lower bound. Say interest rates on BoE deposits fall below zero. At this point, the entire nation's stock of circulating pounds will be converted into paper pounds. Why hold a -2% deposit when you can hold cash at 0%? Very quickly, England will have moved from a mixed deposit/currency standard to a straight paper currency standard. It's exactly like the old bimetallic flips of yore.

The way to solve the bimetallic switching problem was to periodically adjust the fixed ratio between gold and silver to approximate actual market rates. That way neither of metals would ever be undervalued and, as a result, England would have been able to stay on a mixed standard with both silver and gold coinage. Miles's proposal is very much the same. If you relax the 1:1 ratio between Bank of England deposits and Bank of England paper currency, then as rates fall you can prevent the flip to paper currency from happening. Say rate on deposits falls to -2%. The Bank can declare that paper currency is now only worth 0.98 of a deposit, nipping at the bud the incentive to switch into paper currency. With neither asset superior to the other, people will choose to hold the same mix of currency and deposits as before.

The other way to solve the switching problem was to simply get rid of bimetallism altogether. Define the pound in terms of only one metal and let the free market take care of dealings in the rest. This is Bill Woolsey's answer to the modern zero-lower problem (here and here). It's similar in nature to Miles's. Have the central bank cease all dealings in paper currency and define the pound only in terms of deposits at the BoE. Private banks will take over the business of issuing 0% paper money. When rates fall to zero, private banks will immediately contract their issues of outstanding paper currency to nothing since maintaining a stock of 0% liabilities when the assets that support them are also paying 0% is not profitable.

In either case, you can get below the zero-lower bound pretty easily. The long gone era of bimetallism isn't as dead as we think. Differentiating between currency and deposits is very much like differentiating between silver and gold.

My synopsis of the MOE vs MOA debate

Bill Woolsey, Scott Sumner (here and here), and Nick Rowe and a debate that was fun to follow. It seems to me that they more or less end up on the same page. Here's my rough synopsis.

The argument seems to have started as a semantic battle over the definition of the word money. Scott holds that money is the medium of account (MOA), Nick and Bill say it's the medium of exchange (MOE). I say ignore this part of the conflict. Pretend the word money doesn't exist. Money. The semantics detract from the main points of the debate which, to me at least, is about how price rigidity, MOA, and MOE interact to cause recessions.

No need to ban cash to avoid the zero-lower bound problem

Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner discuss the idea of abolishing central bank-issued cash. The existence of cash can create problems for monetary policy. Say a central bank wants to reduce the rate it pays on central bank deposits to below zero. If it did so, everyone would immediately convert deposits into cash, since owning 0% yielding paper notes is better than owning an instrument that pays a penalty rate. There appears to be a zero-lower bound to the interest rate on deposits. Ban cash and you might remove that bound.

Tyler points out that the alternative to an outright ban is to put a Silvio Gesell-style tax on cash that brings a bank note's yield to something below 0%. This way, no one will prefer cash to negative yielding deposits. But as he points out, this is slightly "goofy" since it requires serial numbers and scans on all paper notes.

There is a simple alternative that doesn't require a ban, nor does it require that all cash carry sensors, serial numbers, or whatnot. Instead, the central bank can reduce the convenience of cash by constricting the denominations of currency it issues. The Federal Reserve currently prints notes in denominations of $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. Say that the Fed reduces the rate it pays on deposits to -2%. Households, small businesses, large corporations, and banks flock to turn in all their deposits for bills. The kicker is, the Fed will only provide them with cash in $5s.

This imposes a real burden on people because it is more expensive to hold $5s than it is $100s. Banks keep their cash in vaults, but these vaults have been designed to store thousands of $100s, not hundreds of thousands of $5s. Given this inconvenience, deposit holders will be less willing to flee -2% interest rates by moving to cash. Gone is the zero-lower bound problem.

I pointed out here that one problem with this policy is that the entire cash-using sector, particular criminals, might Euroize. Rather than hold, say, thirty US$5 bills, or US$150 in -2% deposits people might choose to hold one €100 bill. This decline in the dollar's "brand" would in turn hurt seignorage earned by the Fed.

In any case, the core issue here is how to reduce the attractiveness of central bank liabilities in a world in which central banks issue two types - cash and deposits. Reducing interest rates on deposits below 0% works only as long as you simultaneously hurt the convenience of cash by doing something like only issuing $5s (or putting a Gesell tax on cash). Alternatively,one can reduce the attractiveness of both notes and deposits in one fell swoop by doing what Scott Sumner advocates: promise to reduce the future purchasing power of all central bank liabilities. I'm on the fence about policy implications of all of this. I'm a macroeconomic agnostic, for the time being at least. But I think the zero-low bound problem is probably an over-exaggerated problem.

Updates: Bill Woolsey has an excellent post on this debate. Other things that can be done to avoid the zero-lower bound apart from taxing or banning cash include ceasing redemptions of deposits for cash. Banks can threaten holders of cash to deposit it now or deposit it later at a discount. Bill also notes that if the quality of bank notes is reduced by making them junior claims on bank assets, then senior claims like deposits can easily yield negative amounts without causing a rush to cash.

What would destroying a central bank's assets do?

Gavyn Davies's post Will central banks cancel government debt? dovetails nicely with the recent fundamental value of fiat money debate. [For commentary on this debate, see Nick Rowe, Paul Krugman, David Glasner, Stephen Williamson here, here, and here, David Andolfatto, Brad DeLong, and Noah Smith]

Let recap the debate first before turning to Gavyn's post. Noah Smith pointed out that since fiat money is fundamentally worth nothing (its future value = 0), then all financial assets are worth zero. Financial assets, after all, are mere promises to receive fiat money. Now back up a second. As I pointed out here, modern central bank money is not fundamentally worthless. Were it to fall to a small discount to its fundamental value, Warren Buffet would buy every bit of money up. Central bank money has a fundamental value because even if it can no longer be passed off to shopkeepers, there are assets in the central bank's kitty. Modern central bank money provides a conditional claim on those assets. David Andolfatto and Stephen Williamson also note the importance of central bank assets.

I got this idea from Mike Sproul. Back in the day, Mike used to start huge comment wars on the Mises blog when he brought up the topic of central bank assets "backing" its liabilities. In fact, here's the post where I first ran into Mike talking about this interesting feature of central bank money. Geez, I sound pretty ornery.

Nick Rowe also brings up central bank assets in his contribution. It's a rendition of his old classic, From gold standard to CPI standard (which I commented on here). In his new post, Nick explains how a modern central bank holds hypothetical CPI baskets in its basement, promising to redeem the liabilities it issues with those CPI baskets at a declining rate 2% every year.

Bill Woolsey gives a similiar story to Nick's in this comment on David Glasner's blog. Bill's point is that if a central bank provides a credible commitment to repurchase and cancel its liabilities should the demand for them evaporate, then central bank money will have value. As he points out, this commitment is only credible as long as the central bank holds (or can get a hold of) the necessary assets to commit to those buy backs.

The point of all this is that central bank assets are important. They are the key for understanding why modern central bank money is different from pure fiat money, why central bank money's future value > 0, and why financial assets (like corporate bonds) that pay out central bank money are not fundamentally worthless. Which brings us back to Gavyn's post.

Gavyn describes a radical idea to reduce UK sovereign debt whereby the Bank of England, the nation's central bank, would cancel part of the government bonds that they've acquired via quantitative easing. By canceling debt held at the BoE, the government's debt-to-GDP ratio comes down. No one in the private sector loses out, since they don't hold any of the canceled debt. The central bank loses out but its loss is counterbalanced by the government's gain such that if you aggregate both under the title "public sector", nothing has happened.

Let's look at this with our previous discussion in mind. With less assets on the BoE's balance sheet, the fundamental value of BoE money would have deteriorated. Why? Should the monetary demand for pounds disappear so that all that remains is fundamental value, the BoE will have fewer assets remaining to commit to repurchases so as to prop up the value of the pound.

Now, it could be that the debt cancellation really means that a formal debt on the asset side of the central bank's books has been replaced by an implicit promise that the government will come to the aid of the central bank during a run on a central bank's liabilities. In that case, holders of BoE money will quickly realize that there is an unwritten and unrecognized asset on the central bank's balance sheet. As a result, the fundamental value ascribed to the central bank liabilities would be damaged somewhat less than a scenario in which the debt was canceled outright. But damaged they would be since implicit guarantees are not as good as real assets.

One reason to make a central bank independent is to cordon off a fixed set of assets that can be used to provide a permanent basis for the fundamental value of central bank money. In this respect, a central bank is like a special purpose vehicle. SPVs are subsidiaries to which a parent company has transferred specific assets. The vehicle has been structured to prevent the parent from tampering with the assets after the fact. The SPV issues its own liabilities to other investors using these ring-fenced assets as backing. A central bank, much like an SPV, has been hived off from its parent, the government, and as a result the holders of its liabilities, the public, can be sure that they have claim to a secure set of assets. If an SPV suddenly had its assets removed by its parent with no guarantee of replacement, the liabilities issued by that SPV would suffer. Same with the liabilities of a central bank.

Gavyn worries that the destruction of central bank assets would unleash inflation. He also points out that there are people who are worried about deflation, and they would welcome a destruction of central bank assets. Whichever way you stand, the point here is that central bank money has a fundamental value. The proof of this would be what Gavyn describes: a scenario in which the value of central bank money declines as central bank assets are destroyed.

Update: Britmouse and Nick Rowe have blog posts on these issues too.