How I learned to stop worrying and accept deflation

Why can't we create inflation anymore? Maybe it's because money isn't what it used to be.

Money used to be like a car; the market expected it to depreciate every day. When we buy a new car we accept a falling resale value because a car provides a recurring flow of services over time; each day it gets us from point a to point b and back. And since these conveniences are large, the market prices cars such that they yield a steady string of capital losses.

Money, like cars, used to provide a significant flow of services over time. It was the liquidity instrument par excellence. If a problem popped up, we knew that money was the one item we could rapidly exchange to get whatever goods and services were necessary to cope. Given these characteristics, the market set a price for money such that it lost 2-3% every year. We accepted a sure capital loss because we enjoyed a compensating degree of comfort and relief from having some of the stuff in our wallets.

These flows of services are called a convenience yield. Assets that throw off a convenience yield, like cars and money, typically have negative expected price paths. Let's call them Type 1 assets.

Type 2 assets, things like stocks and bonds, don't boast a convenience yield. Without a convenience flow, people only buy them because they promise a real capital return. One way a Type 2 asset provides a capital return is via a positive expected price path. We only hold Google shares because we expect them to rise by around 5-10% a year. Same with treasury bills. The government issues a bill at, say, $97, and they mature a year later at $100.

Another way for a Type 2 asset to provide a capital return is via periodic payments. A bond or an MBS doesn't rise over time. Rather, it provides its return in the form of regular coupon payments.

Could it be that money has steadily lost its convenience yield? If so, it's shifted from being a Type 1 asset with a negative expected price path towards being a Type 2 asset. That would explain our new deflationary era. In the same way that Type 2 assets like Google and t-bills have to offer a positive expected price path if they are to be held, the purchasing power of money needs to improve over time. And since everything in the world is priced in terms of money, that means that the price level can no longer inflate, it has to deflate.

Where has money's once considerable convenience yield gone? The costs of creating liquidity have been steadily diminishing. Wall Street has been able to make a wide variety of assets like stocks and bonds much more liquid at less cost. So whereas money was once the liquidity instrument par excellence, people now have a multitude of liquid instruments that they can choose from. At the same time, central banks, via quantitative easing, have create massive amounts of central bank liabilities. With a sea of liquid assets, maybe liquidity just isn't a valuable commodity anymore.

Welcome to deflation, folks. Into the vacuum left by money's retreating convenience yield, a promise of capital returns has sprung up.

Reversing deflation?

Even if money has become a Type 2 asset, central bankers can still get the inflation rate back to 3%. To do so, they'd have to change the nature of the capital return that it offers. Like Google shares, money now seems to promise a rising expected price path (i.e. deflation). Central bankers need to switch that out with a bond-style promise of juicier periodic payments. This would involve a central banker ratcheting up the interest rate on money balances, or reserves, to an above-market level. Only with an unusually high interest rate on reserves would people once again accept a declining expected price path for money (i.e. inflation).

For an analogy, imagine that tomorrow the U.S. Treasury were to issue a new 10-year bond with an outlandishly high 10% coupon. With the market-clearing yield on existing 10-year bonds sitting at just 2%, the new bond would start trading at a large premium to its $1000 face value and slowly fall over time. Likewise, money that sports an outlandishly high interest rate would steadily lose purchasing power. 

Ratcheting up rates in order to get us back to a 3% inflation path could be a ghastly experience. Before it can start rolling down the hill again, money's purchasing power would have to rise sharply in value. But money is the unit in which everything else is priced, which means the price level would need to rapidly deflate. If prices are sticky, this could result in a glut of unsold labour and goods; a recession.

Alternatively, might a central bank rekindle inflation by forcing interest rates below their market level? In the short term we'd get a quick one-time dose of inflation. But after the adjustments had been made the price level would only continue its previous deflationary descent. A central banker would have to consistently ratchet down interest rates to generate a perpetual series of one-time inflationary pops in order to keep hitting its 2-3% inflation target. This strategy would run into problems. Go much below -1% and a central bank will hit the lower bound. Unless it wants to risk mass cash storage, it won't be able to go further. Even if a central bank devises ways to get below -1%, it'll have to perpetually ratchet rates down in order to spur the next one-time pop in inflation. Once it hits -20%, or -30%, one wonders whether the market won't simply adopt an alternative currency.

Given that these two options don't seem too comforting, maybe we should just get used to a bit of deflation.


Tony Yates responds here and here.

The final chapter in the Zimbabwe dollar saga?

Here's an interesting fact. Remember all those worthless Zimbabwe paper banknotes? The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), Zimbabwe's central bank, is officially buying them back for cancellation. According to its recent monetary policy statement, the RBZ will be demonetizing old banknotes at the "United Nations rate," that is, at a rate of Z$35 quadrillion to US$1. Stranded Zimbabwe dollar-denominated bank deposits will also be repurchased.

As a reminder, Zimbabwe endured a hyperinflation that met its demise in late 2008 when Zimbabweans spontaneously stopped using the Zimbabwe dollar as either a unit of account or medium of exchange, U.S. dollars and South African rand being substituted in their place. Along the way, the RBZ was used by corrupt authorities to subsidize all sorts of crazy schemes, including farm mechanization programs and tourism development facilities.

Upon hearing about the RBZ's buyback, entrepreneurial readers may be thinking about an arbitrage. Buy up Zimbabwe bank notes and fly them back to Zimbabwe for redemption at the RBZ's new official rate, making a quick buck in the process. But don't get too excited. The highest denomination note ever printed by the RBZ is the $100 trillion note. At the RBZ's demonetization rate, one $100 trillion will get you... US$0.003. With these notes selling for US$10 to $20 as collectors items on eBay, forget it—there's no money to be made on this trade. If you've already got a few $100 trillion Zimbabwean notes sitting in your cupboard, you're way better off hoarding them than submitting them to the RBZ's buyback campaign.

But this does give us some interesting data points about the nature of money. Last year I wrote two posts on the topic of whether money constituted an IOU or not. With the gold standard days long gone, central banks no longer offer immediate redemption into some underlying asset. But do they offer ultimate redemption into an asset? A number of central banks—including the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve—make an explicit promise that notes constitute a first claim or paramount lien on the assets of the central bank. This language implies that banknotes are like any other security, say a bond or equity, since each provides their owner with eventual access to firm assets upon liquidation or windup of the firm.

George Selgin is skeptical of the banknotes-as-security theory, replying that a note's guarantee of a first claim on assets is a mere relic of the gold standard. However, the Bank of Canada was formed after Canada had ceased gold convertibility. Furthermore, modern legislation governing central banks like the 2004 Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) Law declares that banknotes "shall be a first charge on the assets of the CBI." [See pdf]. So these promises certainly aren't relics of a bygone age. The Zimbabwean example provides even more evidence that a banknote constitutes a terminal IOU of sorts. After all, Zimbabwean authorities could have left legacy Zimbabwe dollar banknotes to flap in the wind. But for some reason, they've decided to provide an offer to buy them back, even if it is just a stink bid.

Given that banknotes are a type of security or IOU, how far can we take this idea? For instance, analysts often value a non-dividend paying stock by calculating how much a firm's assets will be worth upon break up. Likewise, we might say that the value of Zimbabwean banknotes, or any other banknote, is valued relative to the central bank's liquidation value, or the quantity of central bank assets upon which those notes are claim when they are finally canceled. If so, then the precise quantity of assets that back a currency are very important, since any impairment of assets will cause inflation. This is a pure form of the backing theory of money.

I'm not quite willing to take this idea that far. While banknotes do appear to constitute a first claim on a central bank's assets, the central bank documents that I'm familiar with give no indication of the nominal quantity of central bank assets to which a banknote is entitled come liquidation. So while it is realistic to say that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe always had a terminal offer to buy back Zimbabwe dollars, even during the awful hyper-inflationary period of 2007 and 2008, the lack of a set nominal offer price meant that the value of that promise would have been very difficult to calculate. More explicitly, on September 30, 2007, no Zimbabwean could have possibly know that, when all was said and done, their $100 trillion Zimbabwe note would be redeemable for only US$0.003. The difficulty of calculating this terminal value is an idea I outlined here, via an earlier Mike Friemuth blog post.

While the final chapter of the Zimbabwe dollar saga is over, the first chapter of Zimbabwe's U.S. dollar standard has just begun. Gone are the days of 79,600,000,000% hyperinflation. Instead, Zimbabweans are experiencing something entirely new, deflation. Consumer prices have fallen by 1.3% year-over-year, one of the deepest deflation rates in the world and the most in Africa. With prices being set in terms of the U.S. dollar unit of account, Zimbabwean monetary policy is effectively held hostage to the U.S. Federal Reserve's 12 member Federal Open Market Committee. Most analysts expect the Fed to start hiking rates this year, so I have troubles seeing how Zimbabwean prices will pull out of their deflationary trend. Few people have experienced as many monetary outliers as the citizens of Zimbabwe over such a short period of time. I wish them the best.

On vacation since 2010

On a recent trip to Ottawa, I stopped by the Bank of Canada. The door was locked and the building empty. Odd, I thought, why would the Bank be closed in the middle of a business day? A security guard strolled up to me and told me that the entire staff packed up back in 2010 and left the country. He hadn't seen them since. Bemused I walked back to my hotel wondering how it was that with no one guiding monetary policy, the loonie hadn't run into either hyperinflation or a deflationary spiral.

Exactly 175 months passed between February 1996, when the Bank of Canada began to target the overnight rate, and September 2010, the date of the Bank's last rate change. Some 63 of those months bore witness to an interest rate change by the Bank, or 36% of all months, so that on average, the Governor dutifully flipped the interest rate switch up or down about four times a year. Those were busy years.

Since September 2010 the Governor's steady four-switches-a-year pace has come to a dead halt. Interest rates have stayed locked at 1% for 51 straight months, more than four years, with nary a deviation. I enclose proof in the form of a chart below. Not only has the Bank of Canada been silent on rates, it hasn't engaged in any of the other flashy central bank maneuvers like quantitative easing or forward guidance. In the history of central banking, has any bank issuing fiat money (ie. not operating under a peg) been inactive for so long?

Worthwhile Canadian chart: The Bank of Canada overnight rate target

Now the Bank of Canada will of course insist that you not worry about the lack of activity, its staff is still toiling away every day formulating monetary policy. But maybe the security guard was right. How do we know they haven't all been on an extended four-year vacation, hanging out in Hawaii or Florida? Who could blame them? Ottawa is awfully cold in the winter! With no one left at the Bank to flip the interest rate switch, that's why it remains frozen in time at 1%.

In theory, the result should be disastrous. With no one manning the interest rate lever, the price level should have either accelerated up into hyperinflation or downwards into a deflationary spiral. Why these two extreme results?

Economists speak of a "natural rate of interest". Think of it as the economy-wide rate of return on generic capital. The governor's job is to keep the Bank's interest rate, or the rate-of-return on central bank liabilities, even with the rate-of-return on capital. If the rate of return on central bank liabilities is kept too far below the rate on capital, everyone will want to sell the former and buy the latter. Prices of capital will have to rise ie. the purchasing power of money will fall. This rise will not close the rate-of-return differential between central bank money and capital. With the incentives to shift from money to capital perpetually remaining in effect, hyperinflation will be the result. Things work in reverse when the governor keeps the rate-of-return on central bank liabilities above the rate-of-return on capital. Everyone will try to sell low-yielding capital in order to own high-yielding money, the economy descending into crippling deflation.

In theory, there is no natural escape from these processes. The Bank needs to intervene and throw the interest rate lever hard in the opposite direction in order to pull the price level out of its hyperinflationary ascent or deflationary descent.

By the way, if this is all a bit boring, you can get a good feel for things by playing the San Francisco Fed's So you want to be in charge of monetary policy... game for a while. When you play, try keeping the interest rate unchanged through the course a game—you'll set off either a deflationary spiral or hyperinflation. Be careful, this game can get a bit addicting.

The upshot of all this is that with the Bank of Canada policy team on holiday and the policy rate stuck at 1%, any rise (or fall) in the Canadian natural interest rate is not being offset by an appropriate shift in the policy rate. Prices should be trending sharply either higher or lower.

However, a glance at core CPI shows that Canadian inflation has been relatively benign. Canada has somehow muddled through four years with no one behind the monetary rudder. How unlikely is that? Imagine Han Solo falling asleep just prior to entering an asteroid field only to wake up eight hours later to discover he'd somehow brought the ship through unscathed. We already know that the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one—and that's with Han awake. If he's asleep, the odds are even lower. By pure fluke, each asteroid's trajectory would have to avoid a sleeping Han Solo's flight path in order for the Millennium Falcon to get through.

Success seems just as unlikely for the Bank of Canada. For us to have gotten this far with no one behind the wheel, the return on capital must not have changed at all over the last four years, the flat 1% interest rate thus being the appropriate policy. Either that or the return on capital zigged only to zag by the precise amount necessary to cancel out the zig's effect on the price level. However, I find it unlikely that the economy's natural rate of interest would stay unchanged for so long, or that its zig zagging was so fortuitous as to preclude a change in rates.

Alternatively, it could be that Canadians assume that the Bank is being vigilant despite the fact that the entire staff has skipped town. Even if a difference between the rate of return on capital and a rate of return on money arises thanks to normal fluctuations in natural rate of interest, Canadians might not take the obvious trade (buy higher yielding capital, sell low-yield money) because they think that the Bank will react, as it usually does, in the next period by increasing the rate of return on money. And with no one taking the trade, inflation never occurs. But is it safe to assume that people are willing to leave that much money on the table?

Another possibility is that the traditional way of thinking about monetary policy needs updating. I considered this possibility here. In short, when the return on Bank of Canada liabilities lags the return on capital, rather than a perpetual acceleration developing the price level stabilizes after a quick jump. This sort of effect could arise from central bank liabilities having some sort of fundamental value. Once the purchasing power of these liabilities falls low enough, their fundamental value kicks in, closing the rate-of-return differential between capital and money and preventing a hyperinflation from developing. So even with no one manning the Bank of Canada interest rate lever, the fundamental value of Bank of Canada liabilities provides an anchor of sorts, explaining why prices have been stable over the last few years.

I may as well come clean about the Bank of Canada. They haven't all gone to Hawaii. The real reason its HQ on Wellington Street was shut the day I visited is that it's being renovated. Rest assured the whole crew is hard at work at a temporary spot elsewhere. But does it make a difference? The monetary policy staff may just as well have gone to Hawaii in 2010. With the interest rate lever neglected and rates frozen at 1%, the evidence shows that prices would not have been sent off the rails, despite the fact that returns on capital surely jumped around quite a bit. It's all a bit odd to me.

Sign Wars

Does a lowering of a central bank's interest rates create inflation or deflation? Dubbed the 'Sign Wars' by Nick Rowe, this has been a recurring debate in the economics blogosphere since at least as far back as 2010.

The conventional view of interest rate policy is that if a central bank keeps its interest rate too low, the inflation rate will steadily spiral higher. Imagine a cylinder resting on a flat plane. Tilt the plane in one direction —a motif to explain a change in interest rates—and the cylinder, or the price level, will perpetually roll in the opposite direction, at least until the plane's tilt (i.e. the interest rate) has been shifted enough in a compensatory way to halt the cylinder's roll. Without a counter-balancing shift, we get hyperinflation in one direction, or hyperdeflation in the other.

The heretical view, dubbed the Neo-Fisherian view by Noah Smith (and having nothing to do with Irving Fisher), is that in response to a tilt in the plane, the cylinder rolls... but uphill. Specifically, if the interest rate is set too low, the inflation rate will jump either instantaneously or more slowly. But after that, a steady deflation will set in, even without the help of a counter-balancing shift in the interest rate. We get neither hyperinflation nor hyperdeflation. (John Cochrane provides a great introduction to this viewpoint).

Many pixels have already been displayed on this subject, about the only value I can add is to translate a jargon-heavy academic debate into a more finance-friendly way of thinking. Let's approach the problem as an exercise in security analysis.

First, we'll have to take a detour through the bond market, then we'll return to money. Consider what happens if IBM announces that its 10-year bond will forever cease to pay interest, or a coupon. The price of the bond will quickly plunge. But not forever, nor to zero. At some much lower price, value investors will bid for the bond because they expect its price to appreciate at a rate that is competitive with other assets in the economy. These expectations will be motivated by the fact that despite the lack of coupon payments, the bond still has some residual value; specifically, IBM promises a return of principal on the bond's tenth year.

Now there's nothing controversial in what I just said, but note that we've arrived at the 'heretical' result here. A sudden setting of the interest rate at zero results in a rapid dose of inflation (a fall in the bond's purchasing power) as investors bid down the bond's price, followed by deflation (a steady expected rise in its value over the next ten years until payout) as its residual value kicks in. The bond's price does not "roll" forever down the tilted plane.

Now let's imagine an IBM-issued perpetual bond. A perpetual bond has no maturity date which means that the investor never gets their principle back. Perpetuals are not make-believe financial instruments. The most famous example of perpetual debt is the British consol. A number of these bonds float around to this day after having been issued to help pay for WWI. When our IBM perpetual bond ceases to pay interest its price will quickly plunge, just like a normal bond. But it's price won't fall to zero. At some very low level, value investors will line up to buy the bond because its price is expected to rise at a competitive rate. What drives this expectation? Though the bond promises neither a return of principal nor interest payments, it still offers a fixed residual claim on a firm's assets come bankruptcy, windup, or a takeover. This gives value investors a focal point on which they can price the instrument.

So with a non-interest paying perpetual bond, we still get the heretical result. In response to a plunge in rates, we eventually get long term deflation, or a rise in the perpetual's price, but only after an initial steep fall.  As before, the bond's price does not fall forever.

Now let's bring this back to money. Think of a central bank liability as a highly-liquid perpetual bond (a point I've made before). If a central banker decides to set the interest rate on central bank liabilities at zero forever, then the purchasing power of those liabilities will rapidly decline, much like how the cylinder rolls down the plane in the standard view. However, once investors see a profit opportunity in holding those liabilities due to some remaining residual value, that downward movement will be halted... and then it will start to roll uphill. Once again we get the heretical result.

The residual claim that tempts fundamental investors to step in and anchor the price of a 0% yielding central bank liability could be some perceived fixed claim on a central bank's assets upon the bank's future dissolution, the same feature that anchored our IBM perpetual. Or it could be a promise on the part of the government to buy those liabilities back in the future with some real quantity of resources.

However, if central bank liabilities don't offer any residual value whatsoever, then we get the conventional result. The moment that the central bank ceases to pay interest, the purchasing power of a central bank liability declines...forever. Absent some residual claim, no value investor will ever step in and set a floor. In the same way, should an IBM perpetual bond cease to pay interest and it also had all its residual claims on IBM's assets stripped away, value investors would never touch it, no matter how low it fell.

So does central bank money boast a residual claim on the issuer? Or does it lack this residual claim? The option you choose results in a heretical result or a conventional result.

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What does the data tell us, specifically the many cases of hyperinflation? As David Beckworth has pointed out, the conventional explanation has no difficulties explaining the Weimar hyperinflation; the Reichsbank kept the interest rate on marks fixed at very low levels between 1921 and 1923 so that the price level spiraled ever upwards. Heretics seem to have difficulties with Weimar—the deflation they predict never set in.

Here's one way to get a heretical explanation of the Wiemar inflation. Let's return to our analogy with bonds. What would it take for the price of an IBM perpetual bond to collapse over a period of several years, even as its coupon rate remained constant? For that to happen, the quality of the bond's perceived residual value would have to be consistently deteriorating. Say IBM management invested in a series of increasingly dumb ventures, or it faced a string of unbeatable new competitors entering its markets. Each hit to potential residual value would cause fundamental investors to mark down IBM's bond price, even though the bond's coupon remained fixed.

Now assuming that German marks were like IBM perpetual bonds, it could be that from 1921 to 1923, investors consistently downgraded the value of the residual fixed claim that marks had upon the Reichsbank's assets. Alternatively, perhaps the market consistently reduced its appraisal of the government's ability to buy marks back with real resources. Either assumption would have created a consistent decline in the purchasing power of marks while the interest rate paid on marks stayed constant.

Compounding each hit to residual value would have been a decline in the mark's liquidity premium. When the price of a highly-liquid item begins to fluctuate, people ditch that item for competing liquid items with more stable values. With less people dealing in that item, it becomes less liquid, which reduces the liquidity premium it previously enjoyed. This causes the item's purchasing power to fall even more, forcing people to once again turn to alternatives, thus making it less liquid and igniting another round of cuts to its liquidity premium and therefore its price, etcetera etcetera. In Weimar's case, marks would have been increasingly replaced by dollars and notgeld.

So consistent declines in the mark's perceived residual value, twinned with a shrinking in its liquidity premium, might have been capable of creating a Weimar-like inflation, all while the Reichsbank kept its interest rate constant.

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That's not to say that central bank liabilities do have a residual value and that the heretical result is necessarily the right one. Both possibilities make sense, and both can explain hyperinflations. But to determine which is right, we need to go in and do some gritty security analysis to isolate whether central bank money possesses a fixed residual claim on either central bank assets or future government resources. Parsing the fine print in central bank acts and government documents to tease out this data is the task of lawyers, bankers, historians, fixed income analysts, and accountants. And they would have to do a separate analysis for each of the world's 150 or so central banks and currencies, since each central bank has its own unique constituting documents. In the end we might find that some currencies are conventional and others are heretic, so that some central banks should be running conventional monetary policies, and others heretic policies. 

In closing, a few links. I've taken a shot at a security analysis of central bank liabilities in a number of posts (here | here | here), but I don't think that's the final word. And if you're curious how the Weimar inflation ended, go here.

Bitcoin's bootstraps

by Paul Conrad

When we talk about bitcoin, one thing we need to ask ourselves is this: can worthless things circulate and be accepted in trade? If so, how? And can this state of affairs continue indefinitely?

An intrinsically useless, unbacked, and costless fiat object might be accepted in trade, but only if it already has a positive price. A history of positive prices will generate sufficient expectations among potential acceptors that they will be able to trade that object on tomorrow. But how might our fiat object earn a positive price to begin with? If we reply that early adopters expected it to be widely accepted by others in trade, how did these early adopters ever form these expectations if that object didn't already have a positive price? We're dealing with a problem of circularity. There is no way to "break into" a dynamic that might generate a positive value for a fiat object. So logically, worthless things cannot trade in the market at a positive value.

However, fiat objects like dollars and yen do seem to have a positive value. Two types of economists, Austrians and MMTers, recognize the circularity dilemma that emerges when trying to explain the positive price of a useless fiat object. Both solve the circularity problem in different ways.

Austrians say that when early adopters first acquired the fiat object, it was not yet intrinsically useless, unbacked, or costless. Thanks to its original commodity nature, or perhaps its status as a backed financial asset, it already traded at a positive price. Even if that character is lost, the object suddenly becoming a fiat one, it may still be widely accepted in trade on the basis of people's memory of its pre-fiat price. Thus the circle can be broken into, and worthless bits of paper can legitimately have a positive value in trade. This is Ludwig von Mises's famous regression theorem.

MMTers solve the circularity problem by bringing in the tax authority. As long as some agency like the government imposes an obligation on people to pay taxes with these fiat objects, that will be enough to drive their positive value.

I should point out that I don't think we actually face a circularity problem with modern central banknotes since they aren't worthless bits of paper but rather exist as a liability of their issuer. But we do run into the problem with bitcoin. Here we have an unbacked, intrinsically useless, stateless fiat object trading at $950 or so, not to mention a legion of copycat coins trading at various positive prices. [1]

Austrians are all over the board on bitcoin. Because their solution to the circularity problem is to invoke the legacy commodity value of a fiat object, bitcoin poses some theoretical hurdles for them since it is by no means clear whether bitcoin ever had an original commodity value. Bob Murphy for one argues here that bitcoin may have earned its first foothold thanks to non-pecuniary ideological reasons. However, there seems to be no consensus among Austrians on that point. MMTers seem to genuinely dislike bitcoin since their preferred tax obligation story can't bear the load of explaining bitcoin's price. Here is L. Randall Wray who says that bitcoin is a test of the "infinite regress view of money", then gleefully points to its falling price as evidence that the taxed backed theory is the dominant theory (it later rebounded).

Let's move on from MMTers and Austrians. George Selgin recently came up with an interesting way to explain how bitcoin might have earned its all important original positive price:

Records show that a just a few persons took part in most early Bitcoin transfers, and especially in the larger-volume ones. My guess is that they all knew each other, and that those trades were more-or-less fictitious, with large values being traded and then traded back again, with the intent of enhancing the prominence of the positive-value equilibrium by drawing attention away from the much larger set of inactive Bitcoin markets. Bitcoin’s inventors, I’m now almost certain, were making conspicuous leaps onto their own bandwagon, so as to encourage others to do so, whether to express themselves or to profit by doing so. In short, a clever marketing strategy, including a little strategic sleight-of-hand, can substitute for history in putting a positive sign on the expected value of an otherwise useless potential exchange medium.

Here we have neat way to break into the circle. Have a group of insiders trade the fiat object amongst each other in order to generate an artificial history of positive prices, at which point outsiders will be willing to accept it in trade based on the expectation that others will repurchase it from them later.

Making "conspicuous leaps onto one's own bandwagon," as Selgin calls it, is a well worn tactic. In stock markets, the term wash trading refers to the illegal practice whereby an individual or group of schemers trade an illiquid, often worthless, stock back and forth among different accounts. The goal is to give the illusion of activity, thereby attracting innocent traders who would otherwise pass up the stock. A more colourful term for this is "painting the tape", which refers to the old ticker tape of yore.

Another way to paint the tape is to high close a stock. Using this technique, a trader or group of traders will buy a stock in the closing seconds of the day, pushing its price up. Since media outlets tend to focus on a stock's daily closing price, and stock charts depend on the daily close, high closing may be a cost effective strategy for traders to create and benefit from the positive price momentum that news of a high closing price engenders.

Auction markets, say in livestock or art, are sometimes populated with confederates—those who work in conjunction with a seller to provide fictitious bids so as to drive some object's price, say a dubious piece of abstract art, or a lame horse, far higher than it would otherwise be worth. Should the confederate's bid be the only bid, the worst that happens is that the schemers get their own painting or horse back, upon which they can try the same trick over again in the next auction. If their bidding excites someone else to add a bid, then they've succeeded in earning something for nothing.

In any case, all of these techniques can push a worthless object's price above zero, at which point that object may have generated enough of a history of positive prices that it will be valued by enough outsiders that it will join the mass of non-fiat objects in circulation. From nothing, our worthless item it has pulled itself up by its own bootstraps.

Which explains bitcoin's incredible volatility. A bootstrapped object can just as easily let go of its own straps and fall back to zero. Without some real use or backing, there's nothing to catch it on the way to $0. And at $0, there's no guarantee of re-bootstrapping bitcoin back to some positive price. As such, Bitcoin users justifiably expect incredible returns from bitcoin holdings in order to bear the risk of a zero-value equilibrium. Expected hyperdeflation is the carrot that must be proffered up for risky cryptocoins to be held. When those expectations of price appreciation aren't met, a large crash in the current price (relative to its future expected price) is necessary in order to tempt the next crop of speculators to hold it again. Thus bitcoin's pattern of incredible rises, or hyperdeflation, followed by 50% flash crashes, followed by the next round of hyperdeflation.

So if unbacked, useless, and costless objects can be imbued with a positive price via Selgin's painting-the-tape story, why isn't everyone doing it? But they are! Attracted by the potential for large gains, plenty of people are creating alt-coins, as I wrote here and here. In theory, their combined greediness should have the effect of swamping the market with fiat objects, driving their price towards the cost of production. The idea here is similar to the Somali shilling story, in which continual counterfeiting of old fiat shilling notes drove their price down to the cost of production, namely the costs of paper, printing, and shipment.

This hasn't happened yet with bitcoin, which is hovering at around $950. In my old post Milton Friedman and the mania in "copy-paste" cryptocoins, I hypothesized that the seeming inability of competitors to drive bitcoin prices down had something to do with the unassailable benefits that bitcoin enjoys as being the first mover, including superior security and liquidity. Tyler Cowen has some interesting thoughts on this. Bitcoin has a market cap of about $20 billion. As long as Bitcoin's entrenched advantages are so supreme that it would cost $20 billion to create a competitor, then there's no profit in tackling its niche. Cowen, however, thinks that the cost of mimicking bitcoin is far less than this. Rather than being in equilibrium, the cryptocurrency market is currently working itself via a process of "supply-side arbitrage" to a new equilibrium at which bitcoin will be worth far less.

On this same topic, Nick Rowe suggests that a BackedCoin might be one of the competitors capable of carrying of this feat. I agree with Cowen and Rowe —that's why I mostly sold out of bitcoin last year, and why I plan to eventually sell my litecoin. Of course, I'm the dummy who sold BTC back at $100, so my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.

Where will the competition come from? Robert Sams makes a good argument for why bitcoin knock offs like litecoin, sexcoin, etc., though costless to produce, can't easily compete with bitcoin itself. The mining power that goes into maintaining the integrity of the various blockchains is in scarce supply. Merchants will always congregate to the blockchain with the most security, since that will be the coin that guarantees that the threat of double-spending is the smallest. While clones can be created with a few key strokes, good security can't be bought. Thus bitcoin's price can't be competed down to $0ish by alt-coins.

I think I buy Sams's point. However, he couches his argument within the existing universe of bitcoin and its clones. I'd make the argument that the crypto phenomena through which "supply-side arbitrage" will be carried out could be something entirely different than bitcoin, say Ripple or something we haven't yet seen. Ripple for one isn't constrained by the supply of existing mining power, or hashing, since the Ripple blockchain is maintained via consensus, not by hashing miners. Is this type of security cheaper? I'm no techie, so I won't speculate. But it is something different. And though it may take a while, at some point new and different will also be cheaper.

Another bonus of the Ripple system is that the crypto currency it creates are not bootstrapped assets, they are redeemable IOUs (let's not confuse Ripple IOUs and XRP!). In Rowe's UnbackedCoin vs BackedCoin world, Ripple IOUs are the equivalent of BackedCoin. It is their backing that should protect the exchange value of Ripple IOU from the threat of competition. This very same backing frees them from the hyperdeflation-crash-hyperdeflation patten that bootstrapped coins tend to display, stability being a desirable feature among  those who want to hold an inventory of media of exchange. As long as Ripple IOUs are just as transferable & secure as bitcoin and other alt-coins, this stability will be the edge that pushes them above the crypto competition.

So in sum, worthless assets can be kickstarted into circulation, say by a group of confederates who paint the tape in a way to attract outsiders. The riskiness of these bootstrapped assets requires that they yield incredibly high returns, or constant price appreciation. However, this state of affairs can't last forever since others will be eager to issue their own competing fiat objects, including superior non-volatile competitors. If I'm right, in the future bitcoin will be a smaller part of the cryptocoin world than it it now, whereas stable-value non-bootsrapped crypto assets, like Ripple IOUs, will be a larger part of that world.

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[1] Bitcoin may not be entirely intrinsically worthless. I have floated the idea before that bitcoin has commodity value as a symbol of geek cred.

Does QE actually reduce inflation?

There's a counterintuitive meme floating around in the blogosphere that quantitative easing doesn't do what we commonly suppose. Somehow QE reduces inflation or causes deflation, rather than increasing inflation. Among others, here are Nick Rowe, Bob Murphy, David Glasner, Stephen Williamson, David Andolfatto, Frances Coppola, and Bill Woolsey discussing the subject. Over the holidays I've been trying to wrap my head around this idea. Here are my rough thoughts, many of which may have been cribbed from the above sources, though I've lost track from which ones.

Let's be clear at the outset. Inflation is a rise in the general price level, deflation is a fall in prices. QE is when a central bank purchases assets at market prices with newly issued reserves.

In equilibrium, the expected returns on all goods and assets must be equal. If they aren't equal then people will rebalance towards superior yielding assets until the prices of these assets have risen high enough to iron out their superior return (and away from low yielding assets until their prices have fallen enough so that their expected return is once again competitive with all other assets).

Central bank reserves are one of the many assets whose yield is included in this calculus of returns. The return on reserves can be decomposed into two specific categories of return: expected capital gains, or price appreciation, and a liquidity return, sometime referred to on this blog as a monetary convenience yield.

Regarding the first return, this is typically negative. People expect the purchasing power of central bank reserves to be lower in the future than in the present—they anticipate inflation.*

The liquidity return exists because reserves are highly marketable. The ability to quickly mobilize reserves to deal with unanticipated events yields a flow of liquidity services, specifically the alleviation of felt uncertainty. The expected return on these liquidity services outweighs the expected capital loss on reserves, providing reserve owners with a combined return that is competitive with other assets like cars, olive oil, education, t-bills or houses.

When a central bank conducts QE, the quantity of reserves in the economy increases so that they are less scarce. All else staying the same, the marginal value that people attribute to the flows of liquidity services provided by reserves declines. With their liquidity return having fallen, reserves now yield a lower overall return than competing assets.

Given these unequal returns, reserve owners will want to rebalance their portfolios into higher yielding alternatives. However, existing owners of these assets will be unwilling to accept this trade since the return they can expect to receive on reserves is no longer competitive with the return on the assets that they would be forgoing. Reserve owners will have to sweeten the deal by offering potential counterparties an improved return on reserves held. The way they can do this is to offer to sell their reserves at a reduced price today relative to their price tomorrow. In doing so, reserve owners are offering counterparties an improved potential for capital appreciation to counterbalance the diminished liquidity return on reserves.

Another way to describe this trade is that reserve owners must create some inflation, or a higher price level, in order to attract interested buyers. From this higher plateau, prices will rise at a much slower rate than before, or, put differently, the purchasing power of reserves will fall much slower than previously expected. The new expected price trajectory of reserves may even be a deflationary one—the market anticipating prices tomorrow to be lower than those today. In any case, only when the expected capital gain on reserves has been sweetened enough to sufficiently compensate would-be owners of reserves for bearing their diminished liquidity return will potential counterparties be willing to trade away their existing assets for reserves.

So back to our initial question: does QE reduce inflation? Not quite. By diminishing the liquidity return on reserves, QE reduces *expected* inflation. This change in expected inflation occurs via a leap in inflation in the present. Subsequent rounds of QE will continues to breed inflation and lower expected inflation until the liquidity return has been reduced to zero, at which point further QE will have no effect.

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But let's introduce another wrinkle. What happens if other assets also carry a liquidity return? And let's assume that there are different kinds of liquidity returns, so that the liquidity services provided by one asset can't be easily substituted with the liquidity services of another. Thus, when the economy is flooded with reserves and their marginal liquidity return hits zero, the liquidity return on alternative assets needn't also decline to zero.

Let's take up where we left off. QE has reduced the liquidity return on reserves to zero and subsequent rounds of QE no longer cause inflation or reduce expected inflation. Let's assume that short term bills, specifically those issued by, say, Microsoft, provide a unique set of collateralizability services, and therefore yield a liquidity return > 0.

When our central bank purchases Microsoft bills, the supply of Microsoft collateral in the economy shrinks, which increases the liquidity return on Microsoft bills. The total return on Microsoft bills, the sum of their liquidity return and expected capital gain, is now superior to all other assets. This spawns a mass effort by investors to sell other assets for Microsoft bills. The only way that existing bill owners will agree to sell away their superior yielding Microsoft debt is if potential buyers offer to pay a higher price. As short term Microsoft bill prices are bid up, the expected capital gain on bills is reduced, counterbalancing the higher liquidity return. At some appropriately higher bill price, the total expected return on bills will be reduced to a level competitive with all other assets, restoring equilibrium.

This process, however, doesn't have any impact on inflation. All that is happening is that the relative price of a certain asset—the short term Microsoft bill—is rising.

Subsequent rounds of QE will further reduce the supply of short term Microsoft bills, increasing their liquidity return and eventually driving their price above par. At any price above par, capital returns on bills are effectively negative—bills, after all, never pay out more than their par value. People will continue to be attracted to a <0% yielding short term bill as long as it sports a sufficiently large liquidity return. The latter can outweigh the negative capital return, providing a total return that is competitive with other assets.

One problem with QE is that it drives the price paid for the liquidity service on Microsoft short term bills above the cost that Microsoft must incur in maintaining those liquidity services. People are effectively paying more to enjoy Microsoft liquidity services than they would in a competitive economy in which prices are pushed down to the cost of production. The artificially high price for bills that has been caused by QE incentivizes people to acquire a smaller flow of Microsoft liquidity services than they would otherwise prefer. This represents a deadweight loss to the economy, or what is termed an allocative inefficiency by economists. The surplus that consumers enjoy is smaller than it would be in a world in which large scale purchases of Microsoft bills had not pushed their liquidity return to artificially high levels.

This loss of allocative efficiency, however, does not equate to deflation. While QE involving Microsoft bills may not be ideal for the economy, it doesn't cause the price level to fall.

Given QE's effect on Microsoft bills, it would be odd if Microsoft did not choose to continually issue new short term bills until the marginal value of liquidity services yielded by bills was driven back down to the cost of maintaining those services. This would goose Microsoft's profits while simultaneously increasing the consumers' surplus, removing all of the inefficiency created by QE.

However, if the issuer of these unique collateralizable bills is the government, not Microsoft, things might be different. Because the government isn't profit-driven, it may be less motivated to issue new bills and reduce the allocative inefficiency created by QE. Is this a big deal? The excess of liquidity's price over cost is similar to any other monopolistic distortion, take for intance the diamond or potash oligopolies that price their products above cost. Situations like these are unfortunate, but I'm not so sure that they have large macroeconomic consequences. The benefit of not doing QE because one might create inefficiencies in a few lone markets for collateral are surely not as large as the benefits of doing QE in order to boost the economy's price level.

So the best I can do in my mental meandering is that QE either produces inflation or is irrelevant. It does not cause lower inflation or deflation. The by-product of any QE-inspired jump in inflation is lower *expected* inflation than before. A few inefficiencies may be created in various markets targeted by purchases, but as interesting as these inefficiencies are I don't see how they produce severe macroeconomic consequences.

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*For the sake of simplicity I assume that reserves don't pay interest.

Ghost Money: Chile's Unidad de Fomento

Santiago skyline

This post continues on the topic of the separation of the medium-of-exchange function of money from the unit-of-account function. My previous post discussed how the medieval monetary order was characterized by both a medley of circulating coins and one universal £/s/d unit of account. This post introduces a modern example of medium-unit divergence: the Chilean peso and Chile's Unidad de Fomento. I'll explain how the Chilean system works and end off by asking some questions about the macroeconomic implications of this separation, specifically what happens at the zero lower bound.

Like most modern currencies, the peso is issued by the nation's central bank; the Banco Central de Chile. Local banks offer peso-denominated chequing and savings accounts. Chileans use these pesos as the nation's medium-of-exchange. They pay their bills with pesos, settle rent with it, and buy food with it.

The differences between Chile's monetary system and those of other nations only emerges when we begin look at the unit in which goods are priced. Most nations have one unit-of-account, but Chile has two. While many Chilean prices are expressed in terms of the peso, or P, a broad range of prices are expressed in an entirely different unit, the Unidad de Fomento, or UF. Real estate, rent, mortgages, car loans, long term gov securities, taxes, pension payments, and alimony are all priced using UF. As examples, this real estate website sets prices in UF terms, and this car rental business levies insurance in UFs. On the other hand, wages, consumer good prices, and stock prices are expressed in peso terms.

So what is the UF? The UF was introduced in 1967 by the Chilean government, though it only came into wide use as a unit-of-account in the 1980s. There are no UF coins or notes circulating in the Chilean economy. Rather, the Unidad de Fomento exists as a purely abstract, or indexed, unit-of-account, totally divorced from any media-of-exchange. Goods and services quoted in terms of the UF can only be purchased with an entirely different medium — pesos.

The UF is defined as the amount of currency units, or pesos, necessary for Chileans to buy a representative basket of consumer goods. The amount of pesos in one UF, or the peso-to-UF exchange rate, is calculated daily, and is published on the Banco Central's website. The daily value is interpolated from the previous month's consumer price index, or the Indice de Precios al Consumidor (IPC). If you go to this website, you can see the current peso-to-UF rate and how it has been adjusted over the last week.

This all sounds quite odd, so let's use an example to get a better idea for how the system functions. When a Chilean seller prices something in UF, they are indicating that they expect to receive a fixed quantity of CPI basket-equivalents as payment. For instance, say that a landlord advertises an apartment in downtown Santiago at a monthly rate of 10 UF. A potential renter, curious about the price, checks the UF-to-peso exchange rate at the central bank's website. He sees that today's rate stands at 23,000. Using a cellphone app (in real life, the rate will probably not be a convenient round number), he multiplies 10 UF x 23,000 P/UF to arrive at the current monthly rate in pesos, or 230,000P (this is about US$450). Deciding that the price is good, the renter signs a lease and starts to pay UF-denominated rent each month in pesos.

Say that the Banco Central adopts an easy money policy and six months later the Chilean peso's purchasing power has fallen by around 10%. Rent is still priced at 10 UF. But now the peso content of the UF has risen —after all, it takes about 10% more pesos to buy the same consumer basket. The computed rate on the central bank's website is now 25,000 P/UF. The monthly amount in pesos that the renter must make out to the landlord now comes out to 250,000P (10UF x 25,000 P/UF), up from 23,000. However, while the rent payment is nominally higher, the payment's UF value is constant. In other words, the transaction represents the exact same quantity of CPI baskets as six months before.

It works the same way when the with a tight money policy. Imagine a 10% peso deflation. The UF sticker price stays constant while the conversion rate to pesos on the central bank's website falls by 10%. Rent is nominally lower in peso terms but in terms of representative consumer baskets it has stayed constant.

The UF/P system is similar in many ways to a partially dollarized economy in which the US dollar has been adopted as the unit in which to price long term contracts while the local currency is used to price current goods and services. What makes Chile different from partially dollarized economies is that the dollar tends to circulate along with the local currency as a medium-of-exchange. Thus there are two different units-of-account corresponding to two different media-of-exchange. Chile's UF, on the other hand, is a purely abstract unit with no corresponding medium of its own.

Irving Fisher was skeptical of medium-unit divergence and declared so in his 1913 paper The Compensated Dollar:

Not only would the multiple standard necessitate much laborious calculation in translating from the medium of exchange into the standard of deferred payments, and back again but, if, as has been suggested, the employment of a multiple standard were at first optional, the result would be that many business men whose prosperity depended on a narrow margin between their expenses and receipts would be injured rather than benefited by having one side of their accounts predominantly in the actual dollar and the other in the ideal unit.

Fisher went on to propose his compensated dollar scheme, which was essentially a combined unit-of-account/medium-of-exchange dollar. The real purchasing power of the compensated dollar would stay constant over time, much like the UF/peso combination, but without the necessity of imposing the laborious calculations involved in medium-unit divergence. That Chileans did choose to adopt a somewhat laborious mechanism that involves conversion from/to pesos to/from the ideal UF demonstrates the degree to which they were willing to free themselves of the burdens imposed by the 1970s inflation of the peso. The practice of publishing the UF-to-peso rate on a daily basis—which began in 1977— may have also encouraged UF adoption. Prior to then, the UF had only been calculated monthly.

While the idea of separating the unit from the medium is not a common one, when it does arise it tends to have been inspired by the desire to avoid the deleterious effects of inflation. Widespread use of the UF, as pointed out earlier, came about as a response to 500%+ peso inflation of the 1970s. Robert Shiller, the most vocal modern advocate of unit/medium separation, has also been motivated by concerns over the deleterious effects of inflatio. Shiller believes that because people tend to succumb to money illusion when dealing with inflationary episodes, the adoption of indexed units-of-account may be the most palatable way to reduce the problem.

Just as interesting, however, is the idea of separating the unit-of-account and medium-of-exchange to help cope with deflationary episodes and the zero-lower bound problem

First, let's set up a hypothetical scenario without the UF and a combined peso unit-of-account and medium of exchange. Say the Chilean economy suddenly collapses. Pessimistic Chileans expect to earn a negative return on projects and investments. Peso cash provides a superior return in this environment since it pays 0%—hardly great, but 0% is better than -x%! Peso prices need to fall dramatically in order to restore equilibrium. Put differently, the value of the peso needs to rise to a level at which it is expected to decline at the same rate as all other projects and investments. Yet peso-denominated sticker prices are rigid, preventing the necessary adjustment. What should be a short period of sharp adjustment turns into a long painful period of high unemployment and idle resources.

Now let's assume that all prices are expressed in UF while actual transactions are conducted in pesos. The same shock hits the Chilean economy. Once again the negative yield on projects and investments is overwhelmed by the 0% yield on peso cash. Peso prices need to fall dramatically in order to equilibrate the peso's return with all other yields. As before, sticker prices are rigid.

Here's the difference between our first and second scenarios. In a world with an ideal unit-of-account and no related medium-of-exchange, it really doesn't matter that prices can't adjust. This is because prices are no longer expressed in terms of 0%-yielding peso cash. Rather, they are expressed in terms of UF. Because the UF lacks a physical counterpart, there are no equivalent UF instruments that might also hit the zero-lower bound. The peso's outsized 0% return relative to all other negative yielding assets, which before was the root of the problem, will be quickly equilibrated as the peso-to-UF exchange rate published on the central bank's website jumps higher.

So a shock to an economy in which a combined medium-of-exchange and unit-of-account prevails can quickly become a tragedy. The 0% nature of the former interferes with the stickiness of the latter. But when the medium-of-exchange is divorced from the unit-of-account, the 0% nature of the former will quickly be resolved since stickiness is now in terms of an ideal unit, and not in terms of pesos.

Medium/unit separation, it would seem, could be yet another foolproof way of escaping deflation and the zero-lower bound.

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References:
1. Robert Shiller, Indexed Units of Account: Theory and Assessment of Historical Experience, 1997. [RePEc]
2. Robert Shiller, Designing Indexed Units of Account, 1998. [RePEc]
3. Robert Hall, Controlling the Price Level, 2002. [RePEc]
4. Stephen Davies, National money of account, with a second national money or local monies as means of payment: a way of finessing the zero interest rate bound, 2004

Bitcoin's hyperdeflationary recession?

The Telegraph's Willard Foxton writes that Silk Road, a venue where people exchange drugs for bitcoin, is in a recession of sorts. He blames this on higher bitcoin prices:

Following the recent surges in the value of Bitcoin, people have been selling less and less, initially because the value of the Bitcoins was going up so fast people were unwilling to part with them; then, once the Bitcoin price started crashing, dealers were unwilling to part with valuable drugs for Bitcoins worth who-knows-what.

I find Foxton's claim unlikely. Yes, in a regular economy, soaring demand for dollars may cause recessions because certain prices are sticky. But the bitcoin universe isn't a sticky price universe. Silk Road sellers will quickly reprice their product in order to convince buyers to part with their bitcoin. Buyers will modify their bids in order to convince sellers to part with their drugs. As bitcoin prices rise or fall, the real value of transactions in the Bitcoin universe should be constant.

What are my assumptions? I think that people who participate in the bitcoin universe are incredibly savvy about exchange rates and real values. They have to be. Fluctuations in BTC prices are so extreme that anyone suffering from money illusion, or a failure to adequately adjust prices, will quickly die off. In the dollar/euro universe, on the other hand, money illusion is common. Being fooled by nominal prices changes isn't life-threatening, so sufferers aren't weeded out. They never learn because they don't have to.

That's the theory, but what do the numbers say? Foxton provides no evidence for his hoarding claim. Silk Road sales data would suffice. Neither do Izabella Kaminska and Joe Weisenthal who quote Foxton as an authority on the perverse hyperdeflationary effects. [I could digress on the echo chamber effect here, but I'll resist].

Here's my attempt to pin down a few datapoints showing the real value of transactions in the bitcoin universe. SatoshiDice, a bitcoin gambling website, is one of the bitcoin universe's largest companies. Unlike Silk Road, it is public. So we can get good information on its operations. Around 50-60% of all bitcoin transactions involve SatoshiDICE, so it surely serves as an appropriate bellwether for spending activity in the bitcoin universe.

The chart below shows the daily real, or US dollar, value of all SatoshiDICE bets over time.

A number of "whales" (large bettors) placed bets in December and January (see discussion here and here) which may explain the large spikes in bet value around that time. We should ignore these spikes. Looking at the base level of transactions, we can see a gradual increase in real betting value over time, despite the rising bitcoin price. No evidence of a recession here.

Another way to verify the claims of a bitcoin recession would be to look at the value of bitcoin-denominated stock prices over time, specifically the stocks of those companies whose revenues are in bitcoin, not fiat. A decline in stock prices as bitcoin rises would validate the recession hypothesis. What do the numbers tell us? Shares of Vircurex, a cryptocurrency exchange, are up since its February IPO. SatoshiDice is unchanged since January 1. Havelock, a bitcoin miner, has traded between $1.20-2.00 for months. Lastly, MPOE, a bitcoin stock and options exchange, keeps tearing it up.

If people were hoarding such that bitcoin velocity was declining, the prices of all these stocks should have fallen dramatically. That they haven't would seem to indicate that changes in bitcoin price are largely neutral. Those claiming that bitcoin's skyrocketing price is decreasing bitcoin velocity and causing aggregate demand shortfalls, or recessions, need to show more evidence for their claims.

Making connections: Irving Fisher and the Great Depression

Garett Jones did a podcast on Irving Fisher at Econtalk last week. He talked about the Great Depression and Fisher's debt deflation theory. Jonathan Catalan and Daniel Kuehn also discuss the podcast.

Jones focuses on Fisher's 1933 paper The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions.

Two interesting quotes from Fisher's paper popped out at me:

Those who imagine that Roosevelt's avowed reflation is not the cause of our recovery but that we had "reached the bottom anyway" are very much mistaken. At any rate, they have given no evidence, so far as I have seen, that we had reached the bottom. And if they are right, my analysis must be woefully wrong. According to all the evidence, under that analysis, debt and deflation, which had wrought havoc up to March 4, 1933, were then stronger than ever and, if let alone, would have wreaked greater wreckage than ever, after March 4. Had no "artificial respiration" been applied, we would soon have seen general bankruptcies of the mortgage guarantee companies, savings banks, life insurance companies, railways, municipalities, and states.

It's worth overlaying Fisher's words with the charts of the Great Depression I posted here.

The next quote:

If reflation can now so easily and quickly reverse the deadly down-swing of deflation after nearly four years, when it was gathering increased momentum, it would have been still easier, and at any time, to have stopped it earlier. In fact, under President Hoover, recovery was apparently well started by the Federal Reserve open-market purchases, which revived prices and business from May to September 1932. The efforts were not kept up and recovery was stopped by various circumstances, including the political "campaign of fear."

It would have been still easier to have prevented the depression almost altogether. In fact, in my opinion, this would have been done had Governor Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York lived, or had his policies been embraced by other banks and the Federal Reserve Board and pursued consistently after his death.

The May to September 1932 open market purchases was the first real quantitative easing, or QE-zero. You can read about their ineffectiveness in this post. Fisher says the recovery was well-started from May to September, but the data doesn't show that.

Zero percent interest rates forever

Noah Smith asks what would happen if the Fed kept interest rates at zero forever. Specifically:

Suppose that the Fed targets only one interest rate, a short-term nominal interest rate, and that its only tool is Open Market Operations (it cannot provide any "forward guidance" or communicate with the public at all). Suppose that at date T, the Fed decides to keep the interest rate at zero in perpetuity, and remains unwaveringly committed to this decision for all time > T.

He asks this because Nayarana Kocherlakota, head of the Minneapolis Fed, once said, somewhat counter-intuitively, that over the long run, a low fed funds rate must lead to consistent—but low—levels of deflation. This seems odd at first blush because we've been conditioned to assume that low interest rates lead to inflation, not deflation.

I'm going to try and give an answer that financial types will understand. The spoiler is... over the short term we'd have inflation, but Kocherlakota is probably right that after some time passes, an artificially low federal funds rate will lead to a steady deflation.

Imagine that you're an investor who can hold either deposits at the central bank or units of some durable good. In order for these two assets to be willingly held by both you and your fellow investors, each must provide attractive returns. If one of these assets provides excess returns, arbitrage dictates that you'll all try to switch to that asset until those excess returns cease to exist.

A bank deposit's return can be decomposed into an interest component, expected capital appreciation (or depreciation), and a liquidity yield. Liquidity is a special benefit that a deposit provides since it more marketable than most assets. The durable good, assume it costs nothing to store, provides a return in the form of capital appreciation (or depreciation), but no interest and a liquidity yield that is so minimal that it may as well be nothing.

At the outset, the returns on the two assets are already equal. But the central bank suddenly lowers the interest component of the return it pays on deposits to nothing, catching the investment community by surprise. As an investor you're distraught. The deposit you held just prior to the announcement yielded, say, 5%, and now it yields just 0%. You'd like to sell it for the durable good, since the return on the durable good (which is composed, say, of expectations of 10% price appreciation) is superior. But investors holding the durable good won't sell to you, simply because the return they require on the 0% deposit must be similar to the return on the durable good they already own. And it isn't.

To convince them to accept your 0% deposit for their good, you must increase its return. You can do this by increasing the expected capital appreciation provided by the deposit. By marking down the current price of the deposit relative to its expected future price, you provide your trading partner with the necessary potential capital appreciation. Whoever buys the deposit can be sure that even though it yields an interest rate of 0%, it will provide a commensurate capital return of 5% or so.

In knocking down the market price of the deposit, you've caused immediate inflation. The purchasing power of money (the deposit) has fallen such that you can't buy as many durable goods with it as you could before. At the same time, you've cleared the stage for future expectations of deflation. That's because in low-balling the offer price for your deposit to attract buyers, you've increased the expected capital appreciation provided by the deposit. You've caused inflation in order to promise deflation.

Maybe the entire process happens immediately. But economists like to divide things into the short and long run. In the short run, all you'll see is inflation as the market gropes for a new and lower clearing price for deposits. At first, perhaps, most investors think that the central bank will only keep rates at 0% for a year and then set them back at their normal rate. But when the next year comes and the bank surprises the market by keeping those rates at zero, once again you'll have to rapidly lower the price of your deposit so as to provide potential deposit buyers with enough capital appreciation to compensate for the disappointing yield on deposits.

This yearly pattern of lowering the price you offer on your deposits continues until the market is no longer surprised by the central bank's intentions to keep rates at 0% for eternity. Only then will the inflation end. Deposits, which by now have been bid down to some terminally low level, will slowly and steadily appreciate. This is the "consistent deflation" that Kocherlakota describes.

There is one interesting caveat here. I started out the example by pointing out that one component of a deposit's return is its liquidity yield. Because the market puts a premium on liquid assets —a liquidity premium, so to say —deposits and other liquid assets can provide lower interest rates than not-so-liquid assets.

But if deposits (or any other money-like object) are constantly plunging in value, they cease to be attractive as medium of exchange. In general, people prefer to transact with relatively stable monies. Thus each time you mark down the deposit's value, its liquidity premium deteriorates as the market searches out for other assets that can serve as better mediums of exchange. With the decline in its liquidity yield, the overall return from holding deposits declines even further. This inferior return can only be compensated by a promise of more capital appreciation ie. yet another fall in today's market price relative to expected future prices. This process feeds on itself as the falling value of a liquid assets renders it less liquid which causes it to fall further in price. At some point, the deposit risks being demonetized.

What comes first? Will the deposits reach a terminally low price from which they commense their rise? Or will they become demonetised and valueless? What about the assets that back deposits... might these provide some lower limit for the price of a deposit, even if it pays 0% loses its entire liquidity premium? Fun questions, but I'll leave those for someone else.


Related blog posts:
Karl Smith here and here, and Andy Harless here.

Tipsy TIPS spreads

David Glasner noticed a very interesting anomaly yesterday. In short, 5-year TIPS rates seem to be rising while 10-year TIPS have been falling. He encouraged his readers to do some investigating to find out why. See my findings below.

Thinking in terms of stocks: From Fisher to Fischer

In an older post, Scott Sumner had an interesting comment:

The most recent inflation rate in Greece is 1.7%, whereas Spain has 1.9% inflation. I don’t know about you, but I find those figures to be astounding. That’s not deflation, and yet Tyler’s clearly right that they are being buffeted by powerful deflationary forces. I’d make several observations:

1. This shows the poverty of our language. Economics lacks a term for falling NGDP, even though falling NGDP is arguably the single most important concept in all of macro, indeed the cause of the Great Depression. So we call it “deflation” which is actually an entirely different concept. I wouldn’t be the first to find connections between the poverty of our language and the poverty of our thinking.

Japan, Productivity Norm, and Deflation

Lars Christensen teaches me some interesting things about Japan and deflation in Did Japan have a “productivity norm”?

See also an older post here titled Japan’s deflation story is not really a horror story.

This involves George Selgin's idea of the productivity norm. See Less than Zero (pdf).

I notice that Paul Krugman has also chimed in on Japan, charting GDP per working age citizen rather than GDP so as to adjust for demographics.

*Update: Lars has responded to the Krugman post here, and includes another chart. As I pointed out in the comments, I am not entirely convinced by his chart because he computes it on a per capita basis, not a per worker basis. Krugman's chart measures the ratio of Japan's per worker GDP to that of the US, which is a more powerful way to visually tell the tale. Unfortunately the time axis's resolution is by the decade in Krugman's chart, which gives no granularity, and he only includes the US.

So I made my own chart.

I think it's worth noting that, in regards to Lars's post, Japan's relative per worker GDP bottomed in 1999 and began to rise, which was before quantitative easing began in 2001. 

As for Krugman, my chart doesn't show the same large rise in Japanese per worker GDP relative to the US in the 2000s that his chart shows. It was more of a pause. But I am using World Bank data, and Krugman is using something else. Note also how Japan has done far better than Germany, France, and Italy.

**Update: Krugman has another post, More On Japan (Wonkish).