Don't kill the $100 bill

Last week I asked whether the Federal Reserve could get rid of the $100 bill. This week let's discuss whether it should get rid of the $100. I don't think so. The U.S. provides the world with a universal backup monetary system. Removing the $100 would reduce the effectiveness of this backup.

Earlier this week the New York Times took up the knell for eliminating high value bank notes, echoing Larry Summers' earlier call to kill the $100 in order to reduce crime which in turn was a follow up on this piece from Peter Sands. More specifically, Summers says that "removing existing notes is a step too far. But a moratorium on printing new high denomination notes would make the world a better place."

As an aside, I just want to point out that Summers' moratorium is an odd remedy since it doesn't move society any closer to his better place, a world with less crime. A moratorium simply means that the stock of $100 bills is fixed while their price is free to float. As population growth boosts the demand for the limited supply of $100 notes, their price will rise to a premium to face value, say to $120 or $150. In other words, the value of the stock of $100 bills will simply expand to meet criminals' demands. Another problem with a moratorium is that when a $100 bill is worth $150, it takes even less suitcases of cash to make large cocaine deals, making life easier—not harder—for criminals. To hurt criminals, the $100 needs to be withdrawn entirely from circulation, a classic demonetizaiton.

With that distinction out of the way, let's deal with three of the motivations for demonetizing high denomination notes: to reduce criminality, to cut down on tax evasion, and to help remove the effective lower bound.

Criminality

Summer's idea is to kill the $100 bill so that criminals have to rely on smaller denominations like $20s. Force criminals to conduct trade with a few suitcases filled with $20 bills rather than one suitcase filled with $100 bills and they'll only be able to jog away from authorities, not sprint. What sorts of criminals would be affected? The chart below (from this article by Peter Sands) builds a picture of cash usage across the different types of crime.

As the chart illustrates, the largest illegal user of cash is the narcotics industry. So presumably the main effect of a ban of $100s will be to raise the operating costs of drug producers, dealers, and their clients.

But should we be sacrificing the benefits of the $100 bill in the name of what has always been a very dubious enterprise; the war on drugs? An alternative way to reduce crime would be to redefine the bounds of punishable offences to exclude the narcotics trade, or at least certain types of drugs like marijuana. Law enforcement officers could be re-tasked to focus on the cash intensive crimes that remain, like human trafficking and corruption. In that way crime gets more costly and we get to keep the $100 to boot, which (as I'll show) has some very important redeeming qualities.

Tax Evasion

Cash is certainly one of the best ways to evade taxes, but there are other methods to reduce tax evasion. For instance, Martin Enlund draws my attention to a tax deduction implemented by Sweden in 2007 for the purchase of household related services, or hushållstjänster, including the hiring of gardeners, nannies, cooks, and cleaners. In order to qualify the services must be performed in the taxpayer’s home and the tax credit cannot exceed 50,000 SEK per year per person. This initial deduction, called RUT-avdrag, was extended in 2008 to include labour costs for repairing and expanding homes and apartments, this second deduction called ROT-avdrag.*

Prior to the enactment of the RUT and ROT deductions, a large share of Swedish home-related purchases would have been conducted in cash in order to avoid taxes, but with households anxious to get their tax credits, many of these transactions would have been pulled into the open.

We can evidence of this in the incredible decline in Swedish cash demand ever since:

@t0nyyates @jp_koning Starting in July 2007 it became 50% cheaper to buy services (cleaning, ironing, baby-sitting) pic.twitter.com/4EHshRAHWR

— Martin Enlund (@enlundm) February 18, 2016

Sweden has the distinction of being the only country in the world with declining cash usage. The lesson here is that it isn't necessary to sacrifice the $100 in order to reduce tax evasion. Just design the tax system to be more lenient on those market activities that can most easily be replaced by underground production.

Escaping the lower bound

Yep, those advocating a removal of $100s are right. Central banks can evade the effective lower bound on interest rates and go deeply negative if they kill cash, starting with high denomination notes.

But as economists such as David Beckworth have pointed out, you can keep cash and still go deeply negative. All a central banker needs to do is adopt Miles Kimball's proposal to institute a crawling peg between cash and central bank deposits. This effectively puts a penalty on cash such that the public will be indifferent on the margin between holding $100 bills or $100 in negative yielding deposits.

Another way to fix the lower bound problem is a large value note embargo whereby the Fed allows its existing stock of $100 bills to stay in circulation but doesn't print new ones (much like Summers' moratorium). This means that if Yellen were to cut deposit rates to -2% or so, the price of the $100 would quickly jump to its market-clearing level, cutting off the $100 as a profitable escape route. As for the lower denominations, the public wouldn't resort to them since $20s are at least as costly to hold as the negative rate on deposits. Unlike Miles' proposal a large value note embargo doesn't allow for a full escape from the lower bound, but it does ratchet the bound downwards a bit, and it keeps the $100 in circulation.

Why should we keep it?

The $100 bill is the monetary universe's Statue of Liberty. In the same way that foreigners have always been able to sleep a little easier knowing that Ellis Island beckons should things go bad at home, they have also found comfort in the fact that if the domestic monetary authority goes rotten, at least they can resort to the $100 bill.

The dollar is categorically different from the yen, pound or euro in that it is the world's back-up medium of exchange and unit of account. The citizens of a dozen or so countries rely on it entirely, many more use it in a partial manner along with their domestic currency, and I can guarantee you that future citizens of other nations will turn to the dollar in their most desperate hour. The very real threat of dollarization has made the world a better place. Think of all the would-be Robert Mugabe's who were prevented from hurting their nations because of the ever present threat that if they did so, their citizens would turn to the dollar.    

I should point out that the U.S. gets compensation for the unique role it performs in the form of seigniorage. Each $100 is backed by $100 in bonds, the interest on which the U.S. gets to keep. So don't complain that the U.S. is providing its services as backup monetary system for free.

Foreigners who are being subjected to high rates of domestic inflation will find it harder to get U.S dollar shelter if the $100 is killed off; after all, it costs much more to get a few suitcases of $20 overseas than one case of $100. This delayed onset of the appearance of U.S. dollars as a medium of exchange will also push back the timing of a unit of account switch from local units to the dollar. As Larry White has written, money's dual role as unit of account and medium of exchange are inextricably linked. People will only adopt something as a unit of account after it is has already been circulating as a medium of exchange. A switch in the economy's pricing unit is a vital remedy for the nasty calculational burden imposed on individuals and businesses by high inflation. The quicker this tipping point can be reached, the less hardship a country's citizens must bear. The $20 doesn't get us there as quick as the $100.

So contrary to Summers, I think we should think twice before killing the $100. The U.S. has a very special to role to play as provider of the world's backup monetary system; it should not take a step back from that role. Criminals, tax evaders, and the lower bound can be punished via alternative means. I'd be less concerned about killing other high denomination notes such as the €500, 1000 Swiss franc, or ¥10,000. That's because inflation-prone economies don't euroize or yenify—they dollarize.


Addendum: If Summers is genuinely interested in combing the world of coins and bills for what he refers to as a 'cheap lunch', then there's nothing better the U.S. can do than stop making the 1 cent coin, which is little more than monetary trash/financial kipple. Secondly, replace the $1 bill, which is made out of cotton and supported by the cotton lobby, with a $1 coin. The U.S. lags far behind the rest of the world in enacting these simple cost cutting efforts.


*See here and here for more details on RUT and ROT avdrag,
** Martin Enlund has a great post here on Sweden's cash policies.

Is the U.S. dollar in the midst of the longest Wile E. Coyote moment ever?

It would be wrong to blame the economics blogosphere's failure to foresee the 2008 credit crisis on complacency. Better to say that bloggers were distracted. Instead of sifting through sub-prime and CDO data, they were grappling with an entirely different threat, the impending Wile E. Coyote moment in the U.S. dollar. The perpetual racking-up of ever larger debts by the U.S. to the rest of the world for the sake of funding current consumption, and the eventual dollar collapse that this implied, was believed to be tripping point numero uno at the time. Look no further than Paul Krugman, who in September 2007 (in just his fourth blog post) had this to say:

The argument I and others have made is that the U.S. trade deficit is, fundamentally, not sustainable in the long run, which means that sooner or later the dollar has to decline a lot. But international investors have been buying U.S. bonds at real interest rates barely higher than those offered in euros or yen — in effect, they've been betting that the dollar won’t ever decline.

So, according to the story, one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges. In this case, investors suddenly realize that Stein’s Law applies — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – and they realize they need to get out of dollars, causing the currency to plunge. Maybe the dollar’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived – although, again, I've been wrong about this so far. 

He wasn't alone in this belief.* As we all know, the U.S. did eventually run off a cliff—but it wasn't the cliff that everyone expected. Instead of a dollar crisis, we had a financial and banking crisis. As for the dollar, it has since raced to its highest point in more than a decade.

Since 2008 the ensuing slow recovery has dominated the blogosphere. And now we are hearing about an impending secular stagnation, a new macroeconomic dystopia that has been manufactured by many of the same folks who contributed to the debate surrounding the econ blogosphere's first great macroeconomic bogeyman, U.S. dollar imbalances.

Before allowing the sec stag story to scare our pants off, shouldn't we be asking what happened to the first bogeyman? Given the econ blogosphere's silence on the topic of U.S. dollar imbalances, one could be forgiven for assuming that these imbalances had been resolved. But they haven't. Sure, the U.S.'s current account deficits aren't as high as before. But the stock measure of U.S. indebtedness, its net international investment position (NIIP), continues to fall to increasingly negative levels. Ten years ago, when bloggers were focused on the issue, the U.S. owed $2 trillion more than foreigners owed it, about 15-20% of GDP. The NIIP now clocks in at 39% of GDP, or $7 trillion. See chart below. So if anything, the stock measures that worried so many economists in 2005 have only gotten worse.

What I have troubles understanding is why folks like Larry Summers are having so much success selling the world on their newest bogeyman—secular stagnation—when they have never properly atoned for the bland ending to their first story. Why has growing U.S. international indebtedness never led to a U.S. dollar collapse as predicted? What mistakes did these prognosticators make? Or should we think of the the dollar's Wile E.Coyote moment as just an extended one—for the last ten years the greenback has been hanging in air, not realizing that it's been slated for a collapse.  Reading through old blog posts and articles written circa 2006, the dollar's blithe disregard of its eventual demise was often met by invocations of Stein's law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop" or Rudi Dornbusch’s first corollary of Stein’s Law: “Something that can’t go on forever, can go on much longer than you think it will.” It could be that the doomsayers still invoke these quotations, but surely there's a statute of limitations on invocations of Wile E. Coyote.

If the creators of the first bogeyman are just the victims of awful timing, then the net stock data on which they initially based their initial pessimism has only worsened. This means that they should be doubling down on their warnings of impending dollar doom. Instead, we get a steady stream of warnings over a totally different macroeconomic disaster; secular stagnation.

The other side to the story is that maybe we aren't in the midst of the longest Wile E. Coyote moment ever. Maybe the U.S. dollar bears were wrong about imbalances all along.

The fact that foreigners are willing to perpetually buy U.S. financial assets and fund a reckless U.S. consumption binge seems, on the surface, to be a violation of the eternal rule of quid pro quo—an even exchange of one thing for another. In return for a mere promise of distant consumption, Americans are getting valuable foreign labour and goods. 

But what if something is missing to this story? Consider that a financial asset isn't a mere IOU. Rather, it is an IOU twinned with a durable consumption good. This very special good is called liquidity. Workers in the financial industry incur a significant amount of time and energy in fabricating this component. They expend this effort because people will pay good money to consume liquidity. Just like having a fire extinguisher or a revolver on hand provides a measure of relief, the possession of liquidity provides its owner with a stream of comfort.

Unfortunately, liquidity is never sold as a stand-alone product. Like a room with a view—you can't buy the view without also getting the room—people who want to own liquidity must simultaneously buy the attached financial asset.

It just so happens that the Yankees are the world's leading manufacturer of liquidity premia. This means that foreigners may be gobbling up such incredible amounts of American financial assets not because they have an urge for U.S. IOUs per se, but because they desire to consume the liquidity premia that go along with those IOUs. The U.S.'s NIIP, which is supposed to include only financial assets, is effectively being contaminated by consumption goods. Specifically, some portion of U.S.'s liabilities to the rest of the world is actually comprised of accumulated exports of liquidity premia. Rather than classifying these liquidity services as a stock of financial assets/liabilities, they should be reclassified as a flow of liquidity services and moved to the current account side of the U.S.'s balance of payments, along with the rest of the U.S.'s goods & services exports. This would have the effect of making the U.S.'s NIIP much less abysmal then it appears. Rather than Americans living beyond their means, this allows us to tell a story in which foreign goods and services are being bartered for liquidity premia which, like machines or wheat or apple pie, require the toil and sweat of American laborers to produce. This isn't an extravagant privilege, it's honest quid pro quo.**

We can argue about the size of the liquidity premia that the U.S. exports. On the one hand, these premia may outweigh the value of goods & services that the U.S. imports, indicating that rather than being profligate, Americans are tightwads. Or this number may be relatively small, indicating that while Americans are less spendthrift than is commonly assume, they still aren't models of prudence.

I'm not sure if the creators of the blogosphere's first great bogeyman would agree with any of this, since not only have they gone silent on the topic—they've switched to talking about a new bad guy.*** Interestingly, if exports of liquidity premia explain why the U.S.'s negative NIIP is not a catastrophe in the making but a stable equilibrium, those same liquidity premia can explain some of the stylized symptoms of so-called secular stagnation—namely persistently falling interest rates. 

Liquidity is static, it interferes with many of the supposedly clear signals we get from data. If liquidity led economists astray in the last decade by creating what seemed to be ominously extreme dollar stock imbalances, it may be leading them astray this decade by creating what seem to be ominously low real interest rates. The last thing we want is a repeat of the previous decade in which economists missed out on the big one because they were so focused on what, in hind sight, seems to have been a bogus threat.

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*Here is DeLong. It was one of Brad Setser's favorite topics. Non-bloggers including Rogoff and Summers also questioned the ability of the U.S. to generate perpetual current account deficits.
** The idea that the U.S. is exporting something unseen in the official data isn't a new idea. In this 2006 paper, Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger were one of the first to discuss the idea of "dark matter." This stuff is comprised of U.S. exports of expertise and knowledge, liquidity services, and insurance services. Ricardo and Hausmann believed that dark matter increased the value of U.S. assets held overseas, but it seems to me that dark matter, namely liquidity premia, does the opposite: it decreases the value of U.S. liabilities to foreigners.
*** At the time, Krugman, Setser, DeLong, and Hamilton criticized the dark matter idea. Buiter, publishing through Goldman Sachs, also criticized the idea here. 

Liquidity as static

In his first blog skirmish, Ben Bernanke took on Larry Summers' secular stagnation thesis, generating a slew of commentary by other bloggers. If the economy is in stagnation, the econ-blogosphere surely isn't.

I thought that Stephen Williamson had a good meta-criticism of the entire debate. Both Bernanke and Summers present the incredibly low yields on Treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS) as evidence of paltry real returns on capital. But as Williamson points out, their chosen signal is beset by static.

Government debt instruments like TIPS are useful as media of exchange, specifically as collateral, goes Williamson's argument. Those who own these instruments therefore enjoy a stream of liquidity services that gets embodied in their price as a liquidity premium. Rising TIPS prices (and falling yields) could therefore be entirely unrelated to returns on capital and wholly a function of widening liquidity premia. Bernanke and Summers can't make broad assumptions about returns on capital on the basis of market-driven yields without knowing something about these invisible premia. (Assiduous readers may remember that I've used a version of the liquidity premium argument to try to explain the three decade long bond bull market, as well as the odd twin bull markets in bond and equity prices.)

Riffing on Williamson, liquidity premia are a universal form of static that muddy not only bond rates but many of the supposedly clear signals we get from market prices. Equity investors, for instance, need to be careful about using price earnings ratios to infer anything about stock market valuations. The operating assumption behind something like Robert Shiller's cyclically adjusted PE (CAPE) measure is that rational investors apply a consistent multiple to stock earnings over time. When CAPE travels out of its historical average, investors are getting silly and stocks are over- or undervalued.

But not so fast. Since a stock's price embodies a varying liquidity premium, a rise in equity prices relative to earnings may be a function of changes in liquidity premia, not investor irrationality. Until we can independently price these liquidity services, CAPE is useless as a signal of over- or undervaluation, a point I've made before. Hush, all you Shiller CAPE acolytes.

Liquidity also interferes with another signal dear to economists and finance types alike; expectations surrounding future inflation. The most popular measure of inflation expectations is distilled by subtracting the nominal yield on 10-year Treasuries from the equivalent yield on 10-year TIPS. The residual is supposed to represent the value of inflation protection offered by TIPS. But it is a widely known fact that this measure is corrupted by the inferior liquidity in TIPS markets. See commentary here, here, and here. The upshot is that a widening in TIPS spreads—which is widely assumed to be an indicator of rising inflation expectations—could be due to a degeneration  improvement in the liquidity of TIPS relative to the liquidity of straight Treasuries.

Interestingly, the Cleveland Fed publishes a measure of inflation expectations that tries to "address the shortcomings" of rates derived from TIPS by turning to data from a different source: inflation swaps markets. In an inflation swap, one party pays the other a fixed rate on a nominal amount of cash while the other returns a floating rate linked to the CPI. Given the market price of this swap, we can extract the market's prediction for inflation. According to the people who compile the Cleveland Fed estimate, inflation swaps are less prone to changes in liquidity than TIPS yields, thus providing a true signal of inflation expectations.

But how can that be? Surely the prices of swaps and other derivatives are not established independently of market liquidity. After all, like stocks and bonds, derivatives are characterized by bid-ask spreads, buyers strikes, and runs. Sometimes they are easy to buy or sell, sometimes difficult. When I first thought about this, it wasn't immediately apparent to me what liquidity premia in derivative markets would look like. With bond and equity markets, its easy to determine the shape and direction of the premium. Since liquidity is valuable, buyers compete to own liquid stocks and bonds while sellers must be compensated for doing without them. A premium on top of a security's fundamental value develops to balance the market.

Derivatives are different. Take a call option, where the writer of the option, the seller, provides the purchaser of the option the right to buy some underlying security at a certain price. In theory, the more liquid the option, the higher the price the purchaser should be willing to pay for the option. After all, a liquid option can be sold much easier than an illiquid one, a benefit to the owner. But what about the seller? I risk repeating myself here, but a seller of a stock or bond will require a *higher* price if they are to part with a more liquid the security. However, in the case of the option, the writer (or seller) will be willing to accept a *lower* and inferior price on a liquid option. After all, the writer will face more difficulties backing out of their commitment (by re-selling the option) if it is illiquid than if it is liquid.

This creates a pricing conundrum. As liquidity improves, the option writer will be willing to sell for less and the purchaser willing to buy for more. Put differently, the value that the writer attributes to the option's liquidity and the concomitant liquidity premium this creates drives the option price down, while the value the purchaser attributes to that same liquidity engenders a liquidity premium that drives the option price up. What is the net effect?

I stumbled on a paper which provides an answer of sorts (pdf | RePEc). Drawing on data from OTC options markets, the authors finds that illiquid interest rate options trade at higher prices relative to more liquid options. This effect goes in the opposite direction to what is observed for stocks and bonds, where richer liquidity means a higher price. The authors' hypothesis is that the liquidity premium of an option is set by those investors who, on the margin, are most concerned over liquidity. Given the peculiarities of OTC option markets, this marginal investor will usually be the option writer (or seller), typically a dealer who is interested in reversing their trades and holding as little inventory as possible, thus instilling a preference for liquidity. Buyers, on the other hand, tend to be corporations who are willing to buy and hold for the long term and are therefore less concerned with a fast getaway. The net result is that for otherwise identical call options, the overriding urgency of dealers drives the price of the more liquid option down and illiquid one up.

Anyone who has dabbled in futures markets may see the similarity in the story just recounted to a much older idea, the theory of normal backwardation. The intuition behind normal backwardation is that a futures contract, much like a call option, has two counterparties, both of whom need to be rewarded with a decent expected return in order to encourage them to enter into what is otherwise a very risky bet. If both require this return, then how does an appropriate "risk premium" get embodied in a single futures price?

None other than John Maynard Keynes hypothesized that the two counterparties to a futures trade are not entirely symmetrical. Hedgers, say farmers (who are normally short futures), simply want a guaranteed market for their goods come harvest and are willing to provide speculators with the extra return necessary to induce them to enter into a long futures position. Farmers create this inducement by setting the current price of a futures contract a little bit below the expected spot price upon delivery, thus providing speculators with a promise of extra capital returns, or a risk premium. That's why Keynes said that futures markets are normally backwardated.

Options writers who desire the comforts of liquidity are playing the same game as farmers who desire a guaranteed price. They are inducing counterparties to take the other side of the deal, in this case the liquid one, by pricing liquid options more advantageously than illiquid but otherwise identical options. And while I don't know the peculiarities of the various counterparties to an inflation swap, I don't see why the same logic that applies to options wouldn't apply to swaps.

So returning to the main thread of this post, just as the signals given off by TIPS spreads are beset by interference arising from liquidity phenomena, the signals given off by inflation swaps are also corrupted. A widening in inflation swap spreads could be due to changing liquidity preference among a certain class of swap counterparties, not to any underlying change in inflation expectations. Its not a clear cut world.

What about the most holy of signals given off by derivative markets: the odds of default as implied by credit default swap spreads? A CDS is supposed to indicate the pure credit risk premium on an underlying security. But if the marginal counterparty on one side of a credit default swap deal is typically more interested in liquidity than the other counterparty, then CDS prices will include a liquidity component. According to the paper behind the following links ( pdf | RePEc ), it is the sellers of credit default swaps, not the buyers, who typically earn compensation for liquidity, the theory being that sellers are long-term players with more wealth than buyers. The paper's conclusion is that CDS spreads cannot be used as frictionless measures of default risk.

Liquidity is like static, it blurs the picture. The clarity of the indicators mentioned in this post—Bernanke & Summers' real interest rates, stock market price earnings ratios, inflation expectations implied by both TIPS and swap markets, and finally the odds of default implied in corporate default swap spreads—are all contaminated by liquidity premia that vary in size over time. Models created by both economists and financial analysts contain abstract variables that map to these external data sources. I doubt that this data is irrevocably damaged by liquidity, but it may be warped enough that we should be wary about drawing strong conclusions from models that depend on them as input.

Before I slide too far into economic nihilism, there may be a way to resuscitate the purity of these indicators. If we can calculate the precise size of liquidity premia in the various markets mentioned above, then we can clean up the real signals these markets give off by removing the liquidity static.

One way to go about calculating the size of a liquidity premium is by polling the owners of a given security how much they must be compensated for doing without the benefits of that security's liquidity for a period of time. Symmetrically, a potential owner of that security's liquidity is queried to determine how much they are willing to pay to own those services. The price at which these two meet represents the pure liquidity premium. Problem solved. We can now get a pure real interest rate, a precise measure of inflation expectations, a true measure of credit default odds, or a liquidity-adjusted price-to-earnings multiple.

Unfortunately, its not that easy. The only way to properly discover the price at which a buyer and seller of a particular instrument's liquidity services will meet is by fashioning a financial contract between them,  a financial derivative. These derivatives will trade in a market for liquidity or 'moneyness' that might look something like this. And therein lies the paradox. Much like the option and CDS of our previous example, this new derivative will itself be characterized by its own liquidity premium, thus impairing its ability to provide a clean measure of the original instrument's liquidity premium. We could fashion a second derivative contract to measure the liquidity premium of the first derivative contract, but that too will be compromised by its own liquidity premium, taking us down into an infinite loop of imprecision.

So... back to economic nihilism. Either that or a more healthy skepticism of those who confidently declare the economy to be in stagnation or the stock market to be a bubble. After all, there's a lot of static out there.

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Note: David Beckworth has also written about the difficulties of using bond yields as indicators of secular stagnation. (1)(2)(3). And now Nick Rowe has a post on secular stagnation and liquidity.

A growing liquidity-premium on land

The Cider Mill, by Robin Moline

In general, the real price of land has been increasing all over the world, especially since the early 1990s. (Japan and Germany are the exception). The recent credit crisis hurt this trend in a few countries like Ireland, Spain, Netherlands, and the US, but in other countries like Belgium, Canada, Sweden, and Australia the secular rise in housing prices remains intact.

A popular explanation for the rise in land prices are the various versions of the secular stagnation thesis advocated by folks like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers. According to Krugman, if the natural rate of interest has become persistently negative—i.e. new capital projects are expected to yield a negative return—then investors will look to existing durable assets like gold or land that yield no less than a 0% return. The prices of these goods will be bid upwards, bubble-like. Or, as Summers puts it, if the return on capital is below the economy's growth rate, then intrinsically valueless ponzi assets may be recruited as stores of value to bridge the distance between an individual's present and the future. (Krugman and Summers's ideas are a bit hard to follow, but Nick Rowe has a bunch of helpful posts on these ideas).

In short, these theories explain the paradoxical conjunction of bubbles with a sluggish economy and low inflation.

I think that a better explanation for the rise in real land prices is the emergence of large liquidity premium on land. This premium isn't an irrational "bubble" phenomenon. Rather, over the last decade or two finance and real estate professionals have put in large amounts of time, sweat, and tears to improve the underlying infrastructure that facilitates the transfer of residential land. A few of these improvements include the optimization of the mortgage lending process by the adoption of automated underwriting systems, the development of mortgage scoring, higher loan-to-value ratios on mortgage loans, and the creation of the mortgage-backed securities market.

All these improvements mean that your parcel of land is not like your grandfather's parcel—it can be sold off, parceled up, rented out, collateralized, and re-hypothecated faster than ever. In short, land has become more like cash. Whereas in the past the purchase of a house made you dramatically less liquid, these days that same house impairs your liquidity position much less.

Like any other asset owner, land owners expect to enjoy three services: a pecuniary return such as capital appreciation, a non-pecuniary consumption yield, and liquidity services. In a world in which arbitrage ensures that all assets provide roughly the same return, any improvement in the liquidity services provided by land reduces the amount of capital appreciation people expect to earn on their land parcel (we'll assume the consumption return is constant). This reduction in expected capital appreciation comes about via a rise in land prices now relative to their expected future price. So the steady improvements in the liquidity services thrown off by land have created a stepwise rise in land prices. This rise might appear to be a bubble, but it's only the market's warm response to the finance industry's consistent upgrades to the mechanisms that facilitate transfers of land.

If you believe John Maynard Keynes, what we're seeing now is just a reversion to ancient times. In Chapter 17 of his General Theory, Keynes wrote: "It may be that in certain historic environments the possession of land has been characterized by a high liquidity-premium in the minds of owners of wealth..." He goes on to note that the high liquidity premiums formerly attaching to the ownership of land are now attached to money. It may be the case that in modern times these liquidity premia are detaching from traditional forms of money like deposits and returning to land, the evidence being the rise of land prices and decline in traditional deposit banking.

When a market bursts, the stagnation thesis has it that people have spontaneously switched from one bubble to a new one, or that the underlying features of the economy (i.e the negative natural interest rate) have changed. If land price increases are being driven by improvements in liquidity services rather than low-to-negative rates of return and resulting bubble-seeking behavior, than snap-backs may occur when the underlying architecture supporting that liquidity fails. Alternatively, different networks of finance professionals may be working hard to build up their own asset's liquidity, thus competing away the liquidity premium of the incumbent asset.

Here's an interesting data point: While almost every western nation experienced a housing price boom between the mid 1990s and 2008, Germany somehow missed the boat.

From the Economist's very useful housing price chart tool.

Was Germany somehow exempt from the stagnation that other Western nation's face? Perhaps Germans selected a different bubble asset than land? Or did the underlying mechanics governing the liquidity of the German market for residential land stay constant whereas those of most nation's improved?

We know that while MBS markets were deepening all over the world, German law did not permit MBS issuance until 1997, putting it far behind the mortgage slicing & dicing eight-ball. Rather, German residential real estate finance continued to be underpinned the centuries old pfandrief, or covered bond. While  the originator of an MBS can parcel away mortgages into a bankrupt-remote entity, the assets underlying a pfandriefe are required by law to stay on the issuer's balance sheet. The mortgages comprising MBS often have up to 100% loan-to-value ratios, but German law requires that pfandbriefe be backed by mortgage loans with a maximum of 60% of the home's "lending value" (lending value is more conservative than market value), which in practice means that Germans often have to put up 60-70% cash to buy a home. Such high requirements would surely stifle the liquidity of residential land, especially compared to places like Canada where permitted LTVs went from 80% to 100% in the space of ten years.

So while Keynes's liquidity premium may have migrated back to land in much of the western world, this doesn't seem to be the case in Germany. There are surely advantages to having avoided a rise in housing prices. On the other other hand, owning a liquid house rather than an illiquid one is a boon—it provides an individual with a fluid asset for dealing with an uncertain future. From this perspective, any attempt to stifle some asset's liquidity by limiting the finance industry's ability to innovate reduces the range of coping mechanisms that  a society is presented with.

P.S. I already wrote versions of this post. Here are these ideas applied to equity markets, here they are applied to bond markets. Same idea, different day, different market.

A stock portfolio is a bad hedge against inflation

Once in a while I veer out of the realm of abstraction into the land of usefulness. This post is meant to be helpful for anyone currently invested in stocks. Contrary to what you might think, your stock portfolio is not a hedge against inflation. This won't be a big deal if you're not concerned about inflation. If you are, read on.

In an ideal world, stocks would be great inflation hedges. Take a business with revenues of $100, costs of $50, and earnings of $50. After inflation doubles all prices, the business's revenues now amount to $200, its costs $100, and earnings $100. Adjusting for inflation, the firm's earnings power has stayed constant. In this ideal world, a stock is a 100% inflation hedge.

In our not-so-perfect world, companies must pay taxes. This alone isn't sufficient to turn stocks into poor inflation hedges, but when we mix taxes with historical cost accounting, the distortions can be dramatic. The actual accounting details behind this may seem achingly boring, but they're worth running through at least once in your life. I'll try to make the process as hassle free as possible. If accounting just doesn't do it for you, then skip to some of the solutions I give at the bottom of this post.

The Problem

A company's tax bill is calculated based on what remains after costs of goods sold (COGS) and depreciation have been subtracted from revenues.

Lets start with COGS. When an electronics distributor sells a TV from inventory for $250, it has to match the sale of that TV with a corresponding cost. While it would make sense to take today's wholesale market price as a measure of true cost, accountants prefer backwards-looking measures and will try to match the sale of a good against its historical, or book value. Book value refers to the original price paid by the wholesaler for the TV. If the historical cost was $200, then the $250 sale is matched against that $200 cost, for a gross margin of $50.

Here's how historical cost accounting of COGS introduces major discrepancies during inflation. Say that a year has passed, prices have doubled, and our distributor is now selling the same TV today for $500. Since the distributor booked that TV into inventory at $200, the firm reports $300 in operating income ($500-$200). Quite the profit! But historical cost accounting disguises the fact that inflation will have also increased the wholesaler's true costs of replenishing inventory. After all, the wholesaler now has to pay $400 to their supplier to replace the same TV, not $200. Using replacement value rather than historical costs, the sale of a TV for $500 will only earn our distributor a $100 margin at current market prices.

During inflation, historical cost accounting of COGS provides a deceivingly rosy picture of our distributor's financial position. A healthy $300 margin is reported whereas the true margin is only $100. In accounting-land appearances can be deceiving.

This deception wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that the firm's tax bill is calculated based on the unrealistically healthy snapshot provided by historical cost accounting, not the more accurate snapshot provided by market based costing. Remember that prior to inflation, our distributor was earning a $50 margin. Assuming that its tax bracket is 50%, that means that it was sending a $25 cheque to the government. After inflation hits, our distributor is now earning a $300 margin on the same TV. Its tax bill now amounts to a whopping $150 ($300 x 50%), an increase of 500%! This bloated tax bill is simply not merited: if we were to value COGS at market prices, it would be evident that our distributor was earning only $100 per TV, and that its tax bill should be $50, not $150. Thanks to historical cost accounting, the real value of its tax bill has tripled, even though the company's true fortunes have neither improved nor deteriorated.

The upshot is that during inflation, historical cost accounting of COGS has the effect of sucking wealth out of a company by forcing it to pay excess taxes on fake accounting profits. Inflation always makes firms and their shareholders worse off.

The same dynamic that governs COGS applies to depreciation. Depreciation represents the cost of using up capital equipment like machinery. Under historical cost accounting, depreciation is calculated as a percentage of the original cost of acquiring that machine.

Say that our distributor has a forklift that it paid $1000 for last year, and it depreciates this forklift at a rate of $100 a year. Inflation hits and all prices double. The replacement value of the forklift is now $2000 and the true economic rate at which the forklift is used up has increased to $200. Yet historical cost accounting requires that our distributor continue to use the historic $1000 cost of the forklift and depreciates it at a measly $100.

Much like COGS, this has the effect that our distributor's depreciation expense will remain unrealistically low during inflation, resulting in excess accounting profits on which taxes must be paid. Were depreciation allowances and COGS to increase with inflation rather than stay fixed at historical levels, they would simultaneously offset the rise in revenues and our distributor would not report phantom profits, nor incur unnecessary tax outflows.

Got it? In a nutshell, the combination of historical cost accounting and inflation are bad for stocks. Inflation acts as a tax increase on anyone who uses historical cost accounting. If we were to experience a series of inflation surprises to the upside over the next few years, all else staying the same it's very likely that the real value of your stock portfolio will fall. This is pretty much what happened in the 1970s, the last period of high and rising inflation. As the chart below demonstrates, the Dow failed miserably in keeping up with CPI.

It wasn't until the late 1980s, that stocks finally caught up to the consumer price index, long after Volcker had succeeded in reigning in inflation. Volcker was one of the best things that ever happened for the stock market, since by reducing inflation, he effectively reduced taxes on anyone forced to use historical cost accounting, which amounted to most of corporate America.


Solutions

What should you do if you're worried about inflation but want to stay invested in stocks? Easy. Choose companies that are less likely to suffer from historical cost corruption.

Here's an idea for dealing with the COGS problem. Accountants can choose either of two ways of measuring historical inventory costs: first-in-first-out (FIFO) or last-in-last-out (LIFO). Say that our distributor sells a TV to a customer. FIFO accounting matches that sale against the book value of the first, or oldest, TV in inventory. LIFO, on the other hand, matches that sale against the cost of the most recent TV brought into inventory. During an inflation, the most recent TVs brought into inventory will have the highest costs, which means that LIFO permits COGS to accelerate far more quickly than FIFO. This means that a firm that uses LIFO during inflation has a far lower likelihood of reporting unnatural profits and paying unmerited tax than a firm using FIFO.

Just to illustrate how important these effects can be, I'm posting a table that is taken from an early Larry Summers paper on the effects of inflation on stocks.* For each company listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Index in 1978, Summers calculated the implied percent decrease in stock value caused by the interaction  of inflation and historical cost accounting. The losses due to COGS and depreciation are listed respectively. Note that the majority of Dow companies were protected from the inventory effect because they used LIFO, not FIFO. Chrysler, which used FIFO, faced an implied 49% decrease in stock price in 1978 due to +10% inflation!

So if you're worried about inflation, invest in companies that use LIFO. This won't always be easy. IFRS currently prohibits LIFO, which means it'll be tough to find the right companies. The only jurisdictions in which you will typically get firms using LIFO is the US.** Caterpillar Inc, for instance, used LIFO for 60% of its inventories in 2012. Rumour has it that the US could be putting an end to LIFO soon, so this useful investment tool may be forever dismantled. Even if LIFO does disappear, there are a few other tricks that investors can use to avoid COGS-related historical cost corruption.

How to get around the depreciation problem? You tell me in the comments. I've got a few tricks up my sleeve, but I ain't going to give them all away.
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*Larry Summers cut his teeth on the topic of inflation and corporate equities. His first few published papers deal with the issue, including Inflation and the Valuation of Corporate Equities (1978). Some are written with Martin Feldstein, including Inflation, Tax Rules, and the Long Term Interest Rate (1981). Feldstein also wrote a solo paper on the topic: Inflation and the Stock Market (1978). Note the dates on these papers. A broad literature on the topic developed in the 1970s, but now you hear nothing about the effects of inflation and historical cost inflation on profits and taxes.

**I've heard that Japan allows it too.