The case for banning gold mining

The Kalgoorlie Super Pit Mine in Australia

Does the world need gold mining?

Let's think about what a world without farming look like. If all farming came to a stop, we'd soon use up all of our inventories of wheat, soy, rice, and vegetables. Mass starvation would rapidly ensue. A world without crude oil production wouldn't be much better. We have plenty of the stuff above-ground. But since oil products are destroyed in usage, we'd run out pretty quick. Society would grind to a halt.

But if gold mining were to suddenly stop, nothing bad would happen.

The unique thing about gold is that it doesn't get used up. The main way we consume the yellow metal is by storing it, say in vaults or by wearing it as jewellery. Compared to how we use an industrial metal like copper, this sort of usage is very safe. Copper parts in machinery, for instance, are dissipated by abrasion and wear. But gold just sits there, untouched.

Nor does gold depreciate. Unlike most materials, it is almost indestructible. Copper corrodes, steel rusts, wood rots, and concrete crumbles. But a gold coin from 200BC is still perfectly lustrous.

Nor does the yellow metal suffer from technological obsolescence. Gold keeps doing the same thing it has done for thousands of years.

And obviously we don't eat the stuff.

The upshot of all of this is that most of the gold that has ever been mined continues to exist in the form of bullion or jewellery. The World Gold Council estimates this amount to be around 190,000 tonnes. This above-ground stock of the metal dwarfs the amount of new mine production, which runs around 3,000 tonnes per year.

Were this 3,000 tonne trickle were to come to an end, we'd still have plenty of the yellow metal to meet our needs. The existing stock of gold is incredibly flexible and can repurposed into whatever form we want. Gold fillings can be melted down to mint coins, which can be recycled to produce circuits. Circuitry can be melted down to form bars, which can be melted down to gold fillings.

There is a second reason why we don't need new gold mining.

Our demand for most things is defined in terms of physical units. But our demand for gold is expressed in terms of dollars.

Let me give a better explanation for this difference. To make breakfast for a gathering of friends, say that I plan to get a package of bacon, a dozen eggs, and a litre of milk. When I arrive at the grocery store I discover that the price for these things is higher than I thought, and I can't afford everything on my list. It'll be a disappointing breakfast for my friends.

But our demand for gold is different. Say that I want to buy some gold to hold in a vault. It doesn't make a difference to me that the price is higher than I planned for. If the price is $1000, I'll buy 1 ounce. If it's risen to $2000 I'll buy 0.5 ounces. Either way I end up with the same $1000 worth of gold. I'm perfectly indifferent between these two states of the world.

Because our demand for gold is expressed in dollar amounts, there can never be a shortage of the stuff. If everyone on earth suddenly wakes up wanting to own twice as much gold as before, the price of gold can rise to whatever price is necessary to meet that demand. Not so with pork, or eggs, or milk. If everyone suddenly wants to eat twice as much pork, there's nothing that can satisfy that demand except for a huge ramp up in production.

So to reiterate, society doesn't need new gold mining. The stuff is virtually indestructible, and any increase in demand can be instantly satisfied by a rise in price, not new production.

By the way, I'd have a different opinion on this if we were still on a gold monetary standard. Under a gold standard, all goods & services prices are defined in terms of a fixed amount of gold. A steady stream of new gold from mines would help mute large fluctuations in the demand for gold, thus making the general level of consumer prices more stable. But ever since 1968 the gold link has been severed.

Now let's go onto the next issue. If we don't need new gold, why not just ban gold mining?

Mining imposes many costs on society. To begin with, mining is incredibly invasive. Pascua Lama, a project in Chile that has yet to be developed, originally envisioned relocating entire glaciers to get at the underlying gold formations. The Donlin mine in Alaska involves moving "one mountain to another." Clearing out mine sites destroy forests, wetlands, and displaces wildlife.

When rock is processed to retrieve gold, the uneconomic reminder, known as the tailings, must be kept in large reservoirs know as tailings ponds. Dangerous chemicals like cyanide are required to "leach" gold from rock. The breach of a tailings pond at the Mt Polley gold mine in British Columbia, Canada led to 10 million cubic metres of water contaminated with arsenic leaking into nearby lakes and rivers.

Mt Polley before and after a tailings pond leak

Earthworks, an environmental group, calculates that 20 tons of toxic waste are produced for every 0.333-ounce gold ring.

Finally, the various steps in producing gold—mining, milling, and smelting—create large amounts of green house gases, as does the associated usage of electricity to power a mine.

So to review, banning gold production won't hurt society—we don't need more of the stuff. To boot, we'd be getting rid of an activity that hurts the environment.

Yes, there are drawbacks to a ban, too.

Mining provides employment. Not only would a ban destroy the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of miners. All the related businesses that depend on the local gold mine, say restaurants or local retailers, would collapse.

To avoid mass dislocation, gold mining bans would have be carried out slowly. Perhaps existing mines could be allowed to operate until they are no longer economic, but gold prospecting, mine extensions, and new mines banned. These policies would have to be accompanied by large budgets for relocation and retraining. 

But even if dislocation could be managed, there remain other problems.

The production of drugs like cocaine is illegal, but this hasn't stopped drugs from being produced. The same applies to gold. No doubt production bans would be fairly effective in countries like Canada and the U.S., but what about Kazakhstan and Guyana?

Unfortunately, a ban on global gold mining could end up replacing relatively safe and clean gold production with dirtier and more dangerous types of mining. A small but significant chunk of global production is carried out by artisanal miners; family-run outfits that do not exist in an official capacity. Because they are small and agile, artisanal producers could more easily evade a ban. Unfortunately these black market producers are not likely to be held to the same environmental and labour standards as large multinational miners.

A ban on gold production could create a more general problem. Historically we have banned products that are dangerous to consumers, say like drugs. But in this case we'd be introducing a new set of criteria for instituting a ban; because some product serves no purpose. Maybe you think that zombie movies are a waste. Does that mean we should stop allowing producers to make new zombie films? This may be a door we don't wish to open.

So as you can see, banning gold production has merits and warts.

But in theory, the idea makes a lot of sense. If something is indestructible, and we only want dollar amounts of it rather than ounces, why the devil are we wasting time and resources producing it? As long as we can successfully shift gold mining communities to other forms of employment, then ending global gold production makes a lot of sense.

Failed monetary technology

Archaic and ignored monetary technologies can be very interesting, especially when they teach us about newer attempts to update our monetary system. I recently stumbled on a neat monetary innovation from the bimetallic debate of the late 1800s, Nicholas Veeder's Republic of Eutopia coin:

During the bimetallic debates of the late 1800s, one of the more interesting compromises put forward was Nicolas Veeder's cometallic standard. His model 'Republic of Eutopia' coins (1866) had a plug with 12.9 grains of gold and ring with 206¼ grains of silver. A good idea or no? pic.twitter.com/6eZN2YAq6o

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 28, 2018

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that I like to talk about monetary technology. Unlike financial technology, monetary tech involves a technological or sociological upgrade to the monetary system itself. And since we are all unavoidably users of the monetary system—we all think and calculate in terms of our nations unit of account—each of us is immediately affected by the change.

Veeder's Eutopia coin is an old monetary technology that was never adopted. More recent examples of unadopted (or as-yet not adopted) montech include Fedcoin, NGDP futures targeting, or Miles Kimball's technique for evading the zero-lower bound, which would decouple the value of paper money from electronic money. Examples of recent monetary tech that went on to be adopted include the switch from paper to plastic banknotes, the replacement of older end-of-day clearing systems to real time gross settlement systems, and inflation targeting.

Fintech is more limited in scope than monetary tech. Only that portion of the population that uses these innovations is affected—everyone else's financial habits continues on as before. Recent examples include bitcoin, p2p lending, and roboadvisors. (If bitcoin ever became the standard unit of account, it would have made the trek over to becoming monetary technology, and not just fintech.)

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To make sense of Veeder's Republic of Eutopia coin, we need to understand the problem that his monetary innovation was meant to solve. Most nations were on a gold standard by the 1870s, and with the price of gold rising, the world price level was generally falling. This development provided an unexpected boost to the creditor class, who were owed gold, while hurting the debtor class, who owed gold. A higher price for the yellow metal meant that the loan contract to which a debtor had signed their name now required them to work that much harder to pay it off.

In that context, a broad popular movement for the remonetization of silver emerged. Prior to being on gold standards, nations were generally on a pure silver standard or a bimetallic standard. On a gold standard the debtor class had only one way to settle the debt, by providing the proper amount of gold coins. But if silver coinage was reintroduced at the old rate of sixteen-to-one, debtors could instead sell their labour to buy cheap silver, have it minted into legal tender silver coins, and use those silver coins to pay off the debt. Paying their debts with silver rather than gold meant they'd have a bigger amount of wealth remaining in their pocket.

The movement to restore bimetallism wasn't purely a populist one. The smartest economists of the time--folks like Irving Fisher, Leon Walras, and Alfred Marshall--also preferred bimetallism. A bimetallic standard recruits more monetary material into service than a gold standard. This is advantageous because, as Fisher put it, it "spreads the effect of any single fluctuation over the combined gold and silver markets." In other words, the evolution of the price level under a bimetallic system should be more stable—and thus more fair—than under a monometallic system, since it can absorb larger shocks.

The problem with bimetallism is that it very quickly runs smack into Gresham's law. The traditional way to bring the two metals into service as monetary material was to offer to mint both high denomination gold coins and lower denomination silver coins. So if a merchant needed £20 worth of coins, he could bring either a chunk of raw gold to the mint, or an even bigger chunk of pure silver, and the mint would convert either chunk into £20 for him. The specified amounts of raw silver or raw gold that were required to get a certain number of £-denominated coins constituted the mint's official gold-to-silver exchange rate.

Inevitably the market's gold-to-silver exchange rate would diverge from the mint's official exchange rate, effectively over- or undervaluing one of the two metals. In this situation, no one would bring any of the overvalued metal to the mint to be turned into coins. After all, why bother minting a chunk of gold (assuming the yellow metal was the overvalued one) into £20 worth of coins if that same amount of gold has far more purchasing power overseas? The overvalued metal would thus disappear as it was hoarded and exported, leaving only the undervalued metal in circulation. A monometallic standard had accidentally emerged, and all the benefits of bimetallism were for not.

To prevent Gresham's law from being engaged, the mint had to constantly adjust its official rate so that it stayed in-line with the ever-evolving market rate. Not only would these changes have been politically costly, but they would required an expensive series of recoinages in order to ensure that coins always had the proper amount of silver or gold in them.

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Enter Veeder's Eutopia coin. Nicholas Veeder was no economist, but an executive at C.G. Hussey, a copper rolling mill in Pittsburgh. In 1885, he published a pamphlet with the wordy title Cometallism: A Plan for Combining Gold and Silver in Coinage, for Uniting and Blending their Values in Paper Money and For Establishing a Composite Single Standard Dollar of Account.

Rather than defining a dollar as simultaneously a fixed amount of gold OR a fixed amount of silver, Veeder's pamphlet suggested defining it as a fusion of the two together. Specifically, Veeder's dollar was to contain 12.9 grains of gold AND 206.25 grains of silver. It's worth noting that under a proposed cometallic standard, paper dollars needn't be redeemed with actual Eutopia coins, but could be converted into separate silver and gold bars or coins. The important rule was that each dollar's worth of debt had to be discharged with 12.9 grains of gold and 206.25 grain of silver.

A model of a cometallic gold certificate, from page 60 of Veeder's pamphlet on cometallism

Veeder's cometallic scheme was a neat way to keep all the benefits of bimetallism with none of its drawbacks. Cometallism would draw on the combined supplies of the gold and silver markets, so that the system would be much more elastic than a pure gold standard, and thus fairer to both creditors and debtors. At the same time, Gresham's law would be avoided. Under traditional bimetallic coin systems, the mint established an exchange rate between the two metals. This rate inevitably became the system's undoing when it diverged from the true rate.

But a mint that was operating under a cometallic standard would only accept fixed quantities of silver AND gold before it would mint a $1 coin, and so it would no longer be setting an exchange rate between the two precious metals. The undervaluation of one of the metals, a key ingredient for Gresham's law, could never emerge under cometallism.

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A year after Veeder published his pamphlet, Alfred Marshall—one of the world's leading economists—described a remarkably similar system. Here is part of his response to the Royal Commission on the Depression in Trade and Industry in 1886, which had been convened to address the Long Depression:

"I propose that currency should be exchangeable at the Mint or Issue Department not for gold, but for gold and silver, at the rate of not £1 for 113 grains of gold, but £1 for 56^ grains of gold, together with, say, twenty times as many grains of silver. I would make up the gold and silver bars in gramme weights, so as to be useful for international trade. A gold bar of 100 grammes, together with a silver bar, say, twenty * times as heavy, would be exchangeable at the Issue Department for an amount of the currency which would be calcalated and fixed once for all when the scheme was introduced. (It would be about .€28 or .€30 according to the basis of calculation)."

Marshall's proposal was later dubbed symmetallism. (I wrote about it here.) If you study monetary systems, you'll run into the gold & silver basket idea sooner or later. The concept is invariably refereed to as symmetallism (and not cometallism) and attributed to Marshall (not Veeder). In the 1800s academics were not required to provide references, and from what I understand plagiarism was rampant. Did Marshall develop his idea separately from Veeder, or did he rip it off? Whatever the case, Veeder was an unknown executive at a small manufacturing concern, whereas Marshall a world famous academic. Celebrity carried the day.

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Interestingly, Veeder himself probably borrowed the idea, or at least part of it, from someone else. Almost a decade earlier, William Wheeler Hubbell had tried to get the U.S. congress to adopt the so-called "goloid dollar," a coin containing silver and gold alloyed together.

Another proposed fix was William Hubbell's "goloid" metric dollar (1878). This specimen is 1 part gold, 16.1 parts silver, and 1.9 parts copper. Whereas Vedeer's dollars kept the metals apart, Hubbel's intermingled them. https://t.co/qXpE7EbQrk pic.twitter.com/csNahz1Hhq

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 29, 2018

Hubbell owned the patent to the goloid alloy, so he would have made a good profit if the goloid dollar had been adopted by the U.S. Treasury. Unlike Veeder, Hubbell doesn't seem to have been a very good monetary economist, and the case he makes for goloid misses much of nuances of the benefits of bimetallism and the hazards of Gresham's law. He lists a number of advantages for his proposed coin, including: superior durability to gold and silver coins; not susceptible to oxidization (unlike silver); a goloid dollar was smaller than a silver dollar and thus more convenient for consumers to carry around; the mint would be able to make more goloid dollars than silver dollars with its existing capacity; and goloid coins could not be easily melted down for usage in the arts as was the case with gold and silver coins.

Hubbell's idea foundered on the fact that a goloid coin, despite containing gold, has almost the exact same colour as a silver coin. Hubbell's critics believed this set the coin up to be widely counterfeited. A counterfeiter could make a replica with lower gold content, this alteration unlikely to be noticed by the public since the colour of a genuine goloid coin and the fake would be the same.

The difficulties that Hubbell experienced alloying gold and silver were not lost on Veeder. In has pamphlet he mentions that "my first approach, as with many other persons, was to combine the two metals as an alloy for coinage, but, owing to certain difficulties... this idea was soon considered impracticable and abandoned." To avoid Hubbell's color problem, Veeder ended up mechanically wedding the two metals rather than chemically combining them, the Eutopia coin being comprised of a ring of silver and a gold plug embedded inside.

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The topic of goloid and Eutopia dollars seem a bit obscure, but the issues of stability and fairness that concerned monetary technologists in the late 1800s remain relevant today.

Today, most western central banks define the national currency in terms of a basket of consumer goods and services rather than a fixed amount of gold (gold monometallism) or a basket of gold & silver (cometallism, symmetallism). This makes a lot of sense. If we want to create a stable monetary standard, one that provides creditors and debtors with an even playing field, better to use a broad basket of stuff that regular people buy than a narrow basket of metals. That way all parties to a contract know many years ahead of time exactly how much consumer goods they will get (if they are creditors) or give up (if they are debtors). Knowing how much gold and silver baskets they will owe or be owed is less relevant to the average person, since gold and silver are a very small part of most people's day-to-day consumption profiles.

There is an important debate going on today about whether to continue defining national currencies in terms of a consumer goods & services basket, or whether to move to something more fluid like a nominal gross domestic product (NGDP), or output. One problem with using a consumer goods basket is that, in the event of a large economic shock that leads to significant loss of jobs, debtors take on all the macroeconomic risk. After all, they owe just as many CPI baskets as before, but have less capacity to meet that obligation because they might not have a job. This doesn't seem like a fair splitting up of risks and rewards.

The nice thing about defining the national currency in terms of NGDP, or output, is that the risk of a large shock, and the associated loss of jobs, is shared between creditors and debtors. This is because if a recession occurs, debtors will owe a smaller amount of real wealth to creditors than they otherwise would. And during a boom, when the job offers are rolling in, creditors will owe more.

Cometallism was never adopted. Perhaps it was a bit too fancy. NGDP is a bit exotic too, but then again so were many forms of monetary technology, until they were actually adopted and became part of the background. We'll have to see what happens.

The evolution of the Federal Reserve's promises as recorded on their banknotes

Since they began to be produced in 1914, Federal Reserve notes have always had a promise or obligation printed on their face. But over time this promise has changed. I thought it would be fun to go through the evolution of the promise as an exercise in understanding how the U.S.'s monetary plumbing has changed.

The original 1914 series of Federal Reserve notes had the above stipulation printed on it. It's tough to read, so I've reproduced it in full below:

"This note is receivable by all national and member banks and Federal Reserve Banks and for all taxes, customs and other public dues. It is redeemable in gold on demand at the Treasury Department of the United States in the city of Washington, District of Columbia or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank."

There were really four promises here. The first was that all banks who were members of the Federal Reserve system would accept notes at their counter, as would the Reserve banks themselves—i.e. the twelve district banks. The second promise was that the government would accept the notes in payment of taxes. This is what I described in last week's post as twintopt, or the MMT/Wicksteed idea of tax receivability. The third promise was to uphold the gold standard, both the Fed and the Treasury being obliged to redeem notes with the yellow metal. And the fourth and final promise was to redeem notes with something called lawful money.

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Let's focus on this last promise, which is the most curious. What does lawful money mean? The Fed gives a brief description in their FAQ, the summary of which is: it's complicated.

Before the Fed's founding in 1913, the U.S. issued a smorgasbord of different government currencies, as the chart below illustrates. The most important of these issues was United States notes, otherwise known as greenbacks. The Treasury was first authorized to issue them when the Civil War broke out, and only in 1994 was it relieved of its its obligation to redeem old United States notes with new ones.

The 1862 act that authorized United States notes declared them to be lawful money and a legal tender, phraseology that implied that to be lawful was distinct from being legal tender. While the act never explicitly defined lawful money, legal tender was already a well-known term—meaning any instrument that by default can be used to discharge a debt. So if James owns Judith $20, legal tender is any instrument that Judith cannot refuse to accept when James wants to discharge his debt.

People often assume that government money and legal tender are synonymous, but in actuality there are many examples of government banknotes that have not been legal tender. Take Scotland, for instance, where neither Scottish banknotes nor Bank of England notes currently have legal tender status. U.S. silver and gold certificates, two forms of circulating paper money that were issued by the Treasury through the 19th and 20th century, were not legal tender—at least not till 1919 in the case of gold, and 1934 for silver. Nor were National bank notes a form of legal tender. These were private banknotes issued by banks chartered under the National Bank Act (see chart above). The Treasury promised to accept National bank notes at par in discharge of most Federal taxes, effectively adopting them as their own IOU, yet refused to grant them legal tender status.

While there is no formal definition of lawful money in the 1862 act, we know that it wasn't necessarily legal tender, and we do know that greenbacks fell into said category. Thus a narrow reading of the lawful money promise on a 1914 Federal Reserve note simply meant that they were convertible into United States notes, which by chance happened to be legal tender.

A much broader definition of lawful money would emerge later. By 1935, Fed Chair Mariner Eccles included not only United States notes—greenbacks—but also silver certificates and National bank notes in the category of lawful money (see pdf). William McChesney Martin, who served as Chair from 1951 to 1970, defined lawful money as "any medium of exchange which frequently circulates from hand to hand as money under sanction of the law." (pdf) By this generous definition, lawful money referred to the entire mongrel collection of government currencies, including legal tender United States notes and non-legal tenders such as silver/gold certificates and National bank notes, and finally legacy notes no longer being printed including Treasury notes of 1890, fractional currency, and old demand notes.

The upshot is that the original promise to redeem Federal Reserve notes with lawful money effectively linked what was then a novel currency to the medley of recognizable government currencies already in use. This promise would have provided the public with much-needed continuity between the familiar and not-so-familiar. After all, the Fed was a new institution that had not yet earned credibility. Tying its obligations closely together with greenbacks and/or every bit of paper then in existence would have helped its cause.

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Having dealt with the idea of lawful money. Let's go on to look at how the promises on Fed notes changed after 1914. I've included the 1928, 1934, and 1963 series:

You can see that the 1928 series no longer included either the first (receivability at banks) or second promises (tax receivability). This was probably for brevity's sake. Even though these promises no longer appeared on Fed notes, they continue to be enshrined in Section 16.1 of the Federal Reserve Act. So when you do your taxes in 2018, the Treasury is obligated to accept notes as payment, just as they were in 1914, even though this isn't indicated on the face of a banknote.

When the 1934 series was printed, the third promise—to redeem in gold on demand—was dropped, both from the face of banknotes and the Federal Reserve Act itself. The U.S. had formally gone off the gold standard that year. Where before any member of the public could have walked into any Treasury office or Federal Reserve district bank and asked to have their banknotes redeemed with gold, neither institution was obligated to uphold this promise anymore. As of 1934, the Treasury would only buy gold from miners and other central banks at a rate of $35 per ounce—but this obligation didn't show up on the face of a Federal Reserve note, nor in the Federal Reserve Act. The promise to purchase gold at $35 was an informal one, with President Roosevelt remarking that the price "may be changed by the Secretary of the Treasury at any time without notice."

In addition to removing the gold redemption promise from the face of a Federal Reserve note, the 1934 series included a new feature: Federal Reserve notes were now legal tender for all debts public and private. It may seem strange to us now, but for the first twenty years of the Fed's existence, Federal Reserve notes could not legally discharge a debt. If James owed Judith $20, Judith could refuse to accept Federal Reserve notes from James, asking for something else instead, say United States notes which were legal tender. Thanks to the 1933 Thomas Amendment (pdf), Judith was now obligated to accept James's Fed notes as payment for the debt. I can only speculate on why Federal Reserve notes weren't originally made legal tender, but one reason is probably due to the memories of the inflation in the 1860s caused by legal tender greenbacks. If something isn't granted legal tender status, it can't do as much damage to the price level.

For almost thirty years nothing changed on the face of Federal Reserve notes until 1963 when the redeemable in lawful money promise was dropped, leaving only the stipulation that a note was legal tender for all debts, public and private.

By 1963, America's mongrel currency was pretty much a thing of the past. Ever since 1934 it had been illegal for gold certificates to circulate publicly. As for National bank notes, they had begun to be retired in 1935. The effort to remove silver certificates in denominations of $5 and above was initiated by John F. Kennedy in 1961. Getting rid of the $1 silver certificate was a bit more tricky. Believe it or not, but at the time there was no such thing as a $1 Federal Reserve note. For decades the nation's entire demand for $1 notes had been met solely by the Treasury's silver certificates. However, in 1963 the Fed finally debuted its first $1 note, upon which the Treasury began to cancel $1 silver certificates.

The Fed didn't start issuing $1 bills till 1963. Before then, all $1 notes were in the form Treasury-issued silver certificates (see top). pic.twitter.com/AZEEwPLKVX

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 3, 2017

With most of the government's parallel currencies retired, the promise to redeem Federal Reserve notes in lawful money probably seemed pointless, if not confusing. Thus it no longer shows up on bills, despite being still encoded in section 16 of the Federal Reserve Act. In 2017, you can bring your note to a Federal Reserve for redemption in lawful money, but they will only give you another Fed note in return. The category of lawful money is meaningless.

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Most members of the public don't know how the underlying monetary systems work, but they do see what is printed on its banknotes. To the public, the morphing set of promises on the face of a Federal Reserve note would have been one of the more visible manifestations of a shift from a mish mash of paper currencies issued by two different institutions and pegged to gold... to one single legal tender currency issued by the U.S.'s now-dominant monetary institution, the Fed—the Treasury receding into the background.

It's been over fifty years since the promise on Federal Reserve notes was last changed. What promises will be printed on U.S. money in the future? That's hard to say since we don't even know if paper money will be a part of the future. If the Fed were ever to update its currency by introducing a digital version to circulate along with its paper issue, those in charge of its design would have to think hard about the sorts of promises that will be granted to the bearer of those tokens. Would they be lawful money, tax receivable, and/or legal tender? These are questions that U.S. monetary authorities haven't had to ask themselves in a long time, not since the mongrel currency era when new money was introduced every decade or two.

An example of tax-driven money during the greenback era

Cartoon from 1864 poking fun at politicians and greenbacks (source and explanation)

During the greenback era, the Union government issued irredeemable paper money to help pay for its war against the Confederates. What many people don't realize is that there were actually two different strains of greenbacks—those printed before March 1862 and those printed after. Although these two strains had only slightly different properties, they were not fungible with each other and would go on to have drastically different values in the marketplace. Looking at the respective properties of each type gives some insights a thorny problem: why do colored bits of paper money have value?

One classic explanation for the value of fiat money is so-called 'tax-backing.' If the government stipulates that taxes must be paid using government-issued chits of paper, then that will be sufficient to give those chits a positive value. Back in 1910 economist Philip Wicksteed was one of the first economists to champion this explanation:

The Government, then, levying taxes upon the community, may say: "I shall take from you, in proportion to your resources, as a tribute to public expenses, the value of so much gold. You may pay it to me in actual metallic gold or you may pay it to me in anything which I choose to accept in lieu of the gold. If you do not give it me I shall take it from you, in gold or any other such articles as I can find, and which would serve my purpose, to the value of the gold. But if you can give me a piece of paper, of my own issue, to the face value of the gold that I am entitled to claim of you, I will accept that in payment." Now, as these demands of the Government are recurrent, there will always be a set of persons to whom the Government paper stamped with a unit weight of gold is actually equivalent to that weight of gold itself, because it will secure immunity from requisitions to the exact extent to which the gold would secure it. - The Common Sense of Political Economy, Book II Ch 7

The idea that a tax obligation can be the basis of money, or what Randall Wray has termed twintopt, is at the core of modern monetary theory, or MMT.

Let's see how the tax backing theory holds up during the greenback period. To set the context, South Carolina had seceded from the Union in December 1860, soon followed by ten other states. Hostilities between the Union and newly-formed Confederate states began in April 1861. To help fund the Union side of the war effort, an initial $50 million issue of greenbacks was authorized in July. This was to be the first government paper money emitted since the Second Bank of the United States had been wound up.

The act ruled that these notes were to be redeemable on demand in gold, a promise that was also inscribed on the face of each note (see below). They thus earned the nickname demand notes. This promise meant that, at the outset at least, their price could not deviate from par since any movement above or below their gold value would be arbitraged away. When redemption was rescinded a few months later on December 30, 1861, demand notes began to trade at a 1-2% discount to their face value in gold.

Greenbacks were introduced in 1861. Note the progression from the first issue—ie 'demand notes'—to the second in 1862—'legal tender notes'. pic.twitter.com/ELnSg3QRtB

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) October 10, 2017

The second vintage of greenbacks, known as legal tender notes, was authorized two months later by the Legal Tender Act of February 25, 1862. This act provided for an issue of $150 million, much larger than the first vintage. One novelty is that the second batch of notes was declared legal tender, which meant that a creditor could not refuse to receive them at par in discharge of a debt. The legal tender property was extended to demand notes in March 1862. The second vintage of notes was also irredeemable, putting them on the same basis as the demand notes, which became irredeemable at the end of 1861.

What distinguished legal tender notes from demand notes? As the tweet above shows, the two vintages had visible differences—unlike demand notes, legal tender note did not have the promise to redeem on demand printed on their face. Demand notes also had an extra promise inscribed on them: "receivable in payment of all public dues". What this meant in practice is that the government accepted demand notes in payment for all taxes, including customs dues, whereas legal tender notes were only receivable in a narrow range of internal revenue taxes—and not for customs dues—which at the time made up the majority of Union tax revenues.

Receivability for customs dues was an important point of departure between demand notes and legal tender notes. Duties were priced in gold and could also be discharged with gold coins. So if an importer was on the hook for $x in custom duties, they could certainly scrounge up $x in gold coin to get rid of the obligation, but $x in demand notes would be sufficient to "secure immunity" from the tax. Not so with legal tender notes.

A given importer might only need a small portion of the demand notes in his possession to pay customs duties. Anything above that amount would be worth less than their face value to him, since gold—not demand notes—was necessary to buy goods internationally. However, if that importer could find other importers who were themselves under obligation to pay customs duties, and who would therefore value his remaining stash of demand notes for their tax receivability, then he might sell them his remaining demand notes at a price quite close to the value of gold coins.

So all that was needed to have irredeemable demand notes trade near the value of gold was a permanent market of tax payers who demanded those notes, and a flow of new notes that did not exceed the rate of drainage provided by the tax outlet. After all, if the supply of notes overwhelmed the amount of tax that needed to be paid, then notes would accumulate in importers pockets with no one willing to bid for them. Once everyone's taxes had all been paid up, demand notes would trade at a discount to gold coins. 

Tax receivability was successful in keeping the value of demand notes close to their gold value. The chart below shows the price of both demand notes and legal tender notes relative to gold through 1862-63.  Demand notes never fell to more than a 10¢ discount relative to gold coin. Calomiris blames this discount on the risk that receivability for customs duties would be revoked by the government before notes had been paid in.

Legal tender notes, however, fell to an ever larger discount relative to both gold coin and demand notes, reaching a 40¢ discount by March 1863. While legal tender notes were receivable for domestic taxes, these taxes did not account for a very large share of government revenues. Nor were these taxes priced in gold. Which meant that, unlike demand notes, legal tender notes were not benchmarked to some real good or price index.

So what, if anything, determined the price of legal tender notes? Here I'll introduce another theory for the value of money; the metallist viewpoint. Rather than tax receivability driving a currency's value, a metallist looks to the currency's intrinsic value. When banknotes are fully redeemable, their intrinsic value is determined by the underlying gold on which the note is a claim, the value of which is set in the market for precious metals in technology and the arts.

In the case of legal tender notes, which were no longer redeemable, the realization of intrinsic value had only been delayed to some future point in time when gold convertibility would be re-adopted. This eventual re-mooring date was in turn a function of the Union government's ability to win the war, among other factors. According to this theory, the steady decline in the gold value of legal tender notes in the chart above can be blamed on the realization by the public that the war would last much longer than most originally thought, pushing the re-mooring date ever further into the future.

While the 1861 issue of demand notes had all been bought back and cancelled by the government by mid-1863, greenbacks remained outstanding even after the war had been won. Their discount to gold continued to widen till July 1864 at which point their price steadily rose. See the chart below. The steady return to par probably can't be explained by the tax-backing theory. Improved odds that the government's fiscal situation would allow it to resume gold convertibility—an event that finally occurred in 1879—is a better explanation. There have been a few interesting accounts written about the value of greenbacks over the full 1862-1879 period, including Wesley Clair Mitchell's A History of the Greenbacks in 1903, but also more recent contributions here (Calomiris), here (Smith & Smith) and here (Willard et al).

In sum, the U.S. government was issuing three non-fungible currencies by 1862. Coins and legal tender notes operated under the principles of a metallic money whereas the third, demand notes, seems to have been a purely tax-driven money as described by Wicksteed. So what about a modern dollar note? Is a Federal Reserve note like an 1861 demand note and mostly tax-driven, or like legal-tender notes and operating on a metallic basis?

I'm not entirely sure, but my guess is that it is a messy combination of both. When it comes to money, I'm not a believer in any one theory. Although the odds of a future return to the old 1972 gold redemption rule of 0.024 ounces per dollar is non-existent, the metallic explanation for the dollar's value continues to be relevant. Instead of redeeming currency with fixed amounts of metal as in days of yore, modern central banks repurchase notes with financial assets held in their vault in a manner that is consistent with hitting an inflation target. This is very much like 1800s-style metallism, except with an ever-shrinking CPI basket in the place of a fixed amount of gold.   


Sources:

Wesley Clair Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks

PS: I recently started a discussion board here. Feel free to bring up topics not covered on my more recent blog posts, suggest posts, or discuss ideas that appear on my Twitter feed. I don't like Twitter for long-form discussion; I'd much rather divert them to the board.

PPS: Nathan Tankus responds here.

Chain splits under a Bitcoin monetary standard

The recent bitcoin chain split got me thinking again about bitcoin-as-money, specifically as a unit of account. If bitcoin were to serve as a major pricing unit for commerce on the internet, we'd have to get used to some very strange macroeconomic effects every time a chain split occurred. In this post I investigate what this would look like.

While true believers claim that bitcoin's destiny is to replace the U.S. dollar, bitcoin has a long way to go. For one, it hasn't yet become a generally-accepted medium of exchange. People who own it are too afraid to spend it lest they miss out on the next boom in its price, and would-be recipients are too shy to accept it given its incredible volatility. So usage of bitcoin has been confined to a very narrow range of transactions.

But let's say that down the road bitcoin does become a generally-accepted medium of exchange. The next stage to becoming a full fledged currency like the U.S. dollar involves becoming a unit of account—and here things get down right odd.

A unit of account is the sign, or unit, used to express prices. When merchants set prices in a given unit of account, they tend to keep these prices sticky for a while. A few of the world's major units of account include the $, £, €, and ¥. These units of account are conventional ones because there is an underlying physical or digital token that represents them. The $, for instance, is twinned with a set of paper banknotes issued by the Federal Reserve, while ¥ is defined by the Bank of Japan's paper media. Unconventional units of account do not have underlying tokens, but I'll get to these later.

So let's go ahead and imagine that bitcoin had succeeded in becoming the unit of account on the internet. The most commonly heard complaint of bitcoin-as-unit of account—a bitcoin standard so to say—is that it would be inflexible, more so than even the gold standard. It would certainly be more volatile, since the supply of bitcoin—unlike gold—can't be increased in response to prices. And those are fair criticisms. But there's a less-talked about drawback of a bitcoin standard: when a chain split occurs, all sorts of confusing things begin to happen that wouldn't occur in a conventional monetary system.

For those not following the cryptocurrency market, a chain split is when a new cryptocurrency is created by piggy-backing off an existing cryptocurrency's record of transactions, or blockchain, thus creating two blockchains. Luckily for us, a bitcoin chain split occurred earlier this month and provides us with some grist for our analytical mill. On August 1, 2017 anyone who owned some bitcoins suddenly found that not only did they own the same quantity of bitcoins as they did on July 31, but they had been gifted an equal number of "bonus" tokens called Bitcoin Cash, henceforth BCH. Both cryptocurrencies share the same transaction history up till July 31, but all subsequent blocks of transaction added since then have been unique to each chain.

This doesn't seem to be a one-off event. Having just passed through a split this August it is likely that Bitcoin will undergo another one in November. The history of Bitcoin is starting to resemble that of Christianity; a series of contentious schisms leading to new offshoots, more schisms, and more offshoots:

Source

Here's the problem with chain splits. Say that you are a retailer who sells Toyotas using bitcoin, or BTC, as your unit of account. You set your price at 10 BTC. And then a chain split occurs. Now everyone who comes into your shop holds not only x BTC but also x units of Bitcoin Cash. How will your set your prices post-split?

The most interesting thing here is that an old bitcoin is not the same thing as a new bitcoin. Old bitcoins contained the entire value of Bitcoin Cash in them. After all, the August 1st chain split was telegraphed many months ahead—so everyone who held a few bitcoins knew well in advance that they would be getting a bonus of Bitcoin Cash. Because a pre-split price for the soon-to-be tokens of $300ish had been established in a futures market, people even knew the approximate value of that bonus. This anticipated value would have been "baked into" the current price of bitcoins, as Jian Li explain here. Then, once the split had occurred and Bitcoin Cash had officially diverged from the parent Bitcoin chain, the price of bitcoins would have fallen since they no longer contained an implicit right to get new Bitcoin Cash tokens. 

Thus, BTCa = BTCb + BCH, or old bitcoins equals the combined value of new bitcoins and Bitcoin Cash.*

As a Toyota salesperson, you'd want to preserve your margins throughout the entire splitting process. In the post-split world, if you continue to accept 10 BTC per Toyota you'll actually be making less than before. After all, if one BTC is worth ten BCH in the market, then a post-split bitcoin—which is no longer impregnated with a unit of BCH—is worth just nine-tenths of a pre-split bitcoin. In real terms, your income is 10% less than what is was pre-split.

You have two options for maintaining your relative position. Option A is to continue to price in current BTC, but jack up your sticker price by 10% to 11 BTC. Customers will now owe you more bitcoins per Toyota, but this only counterbalances the fact that the bitcoins you're getting no longer have valuable BCH baked into them.

This would make for quite an odd monetary system relative to the one we have now. If everyone does the same thing that you do—mark up their sticker prices the moment a split occurs—the economy-wide consumer price level will experience a one-time shot of inflation. Given that bitcoin schisms will probably occur every few years or so, the long-term price level would be characterized by a series of sudden price bursts, the size depending on how valuable the new token is. When splits are extremely contentious, and the new token is worth just a shade less than the existing bitcoin token, the price level will have to double overnight. That's quite an adjustment!

We don't get these sorts of inflationary spasms in modern monetary systems because there is no precise analogy to a chain split. When August 1st rolled around, Bitcoin supporters could not invoke a set of laws to prevent Bitcoin Cash from being created on top of the legacy blockchain. In fiat land, however, a set of actors cannot simply "fork" the Canadian dollar or the Chinese yuan and get off scot-free. The authorities will invoke anti-counterfeiting laws, which come with very heavy jail sentences.**

The closest we get to chain splits in the real world are when the monetary authorities decide to undergo note redenominations. Central bankers in economies experiencing high inflation will sometimes call in—say—all $1,000,000 banknotes and replace them with $10 banknotes. And to compensate for this lopping-off of zeroes, merchants will chop price by 99.999% overnight. But redenominations are very rare, especially in developed countries. Up until it dollarized in 2008, even Zimbabwe only experienced three of them. Under a bitcoin standard, they'd be regular events.

Option B for preserving your relative position is to keep a sticker price of 10 per Toyota, but to update your shop's policy to indicate that your unit of account is BTCa, or old bitcoin, not new bitcoin. Old bitcoin is just an abstract concept, an idea. After all, with the split having been completed, bitcoins with BCH "baked in" do not actually exist anymore. But an implicit old bitcoin price can still be inferred from market exchange rates. When a customer wants to buy a Toyota, they will have to look up the exchange rate between BTCa and new bitcoin (i.e BTCb), and then offer to pay the correct amount of BTCb.

To buy a Toyota that is priced at 10 BTCa, your customer will have to transfer you 10 new bitcoins plus the market value of ten BCH tokens (i.e. 1 bitcoin), for a total price of 11 bitcoins. This effectively synthesizes the amount you would have received pre-split. As the market price of Bitcoin Cash ebbs and flows, your BTCa sticker price stays constant—but your customer will have to pay you either more or less BTCb to settle the deal.

The idea of adopting a unit of account that has no underlying physical or digital token might sound odd, but it isn't without precedent. As I pointed out earlier in this post, our world is characterized by both conventional units of account like the yen or euro and unconventional units of account. Take the Haitian dollar, which is used by Haitians to communicate prices. There is no underlying Haitian dollar monetary instrument. Once a Haitian merchant and her customer have decided on the Haitian dollar price for something, they settle the exchange using an entirely different instrument, the Haitian gourde. The gourde is an actual monetary instrument issued by the nation's central bank that comes in the form of banknotes and coins.***

So in Haiti, the nation's unit of account—the Haitian dollar—and its medium of exchange—the gourde—have effectively been separated from each other. (In my recent post on Dictionary Money, I spotlighted some other examples of this phenomenon.) An even better example of separation between medium and unit is medieval ghost money. According to John Munro (link below), a ghost money was a "once highly favoured coin of the past that no longer circulated." Because these ghost monies had an unchanging amount of gold in them, people preferred to set prices in them rather than new, and lighter, coins, even though the ghost coins had long since ceased to exist.

I love the medieval concept of ghost money: using a long dead coin—say Louis IX's gros tournois—as a unit of account https://t.co/TmCTE7OdBs pic.twitter.com/LUNntsw0l3

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 22, 2017

Unlike option A, which would be characterized by a series of inflationary blips each time a split occurred, option B provides a relatively flat price level over time. After all, the old bitcoin price of goods and services stays constant through each split. However, as the series of chain splits grows, the calculation for determining the amount of new bitcoins inherent in an old bitcoin would get lengthier. In the example above, I showed how to calculate how many bitcoins to use after just one chain split. But after ten or eleven splits, that calculation gets downright cumbersome.

Whether option A or B is adopted, or some mish-mash of the two, a bitcoin standard would be an awkward thing, the economy being thrown into an uproar every time a chain schism occurs as millions of economic actors madly reformat their sticker prices in order to preserve the real value of payments. If bitcoin is to take its place as money, it is likely that it will have to cede the vital unit of account function to good old non-splittable U.S. dollars, yen, and other central bank fiat units. The Bitcoin community is just too sectarian to be trusted with the task of ensuring that the ruler we all use for measuring prices stays more or less steady.

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P.S.: I've focusing on sticker prices here, I haven't even touched on contracts denominated in bitcoin units of account. For instance, if I pay 10 BTC per month in rent for my apartment, what do I owe after a split? Ten old bitcoins? Ten new bitcoins? Or would I have to transfer 10 new bitcoin along with 10 units of Bitcoin Cash? Who determines this? What about salaries? The problem of contracts isn't merely theoretical, it actually popped up in the recent split as some confusion emerged on how to deal with to bitcoin-denominated debts used to fund short sales. Matt Levine investigated this here. 


*There is also the complicating fact that the price of bitcoin didn't seem to fall by the price of Bitcoin Cash, thus contradicting the formula. As Matt Levine recounts:

In a spinoff, you'd expect the original company's value to drop by roughly the value of the spun-off company, which after all it doesn't own any more. 5  BCH spun off from BTC on Tuesday afternoon, and briefly traded over $700 on Wednesday (though it later fell significantly). But BTC hasn't really lost any value since the spinoff, still trading at about $2,700. So just before the spinoff, if you had a bitcoin, you had a bitcoin worth about $2,700. Now, you have a BTC worth about $2,700, and also a BCH worth as much as $700. It's weird free money, if you owned bitcoins yesterday.

**Say counterfeiters do manage to create a large amount of fakes. Even then this "fiat split" would have no effect on the value of genuine notes. Central bank are obligated to uphold the purchasing power of their note issue. They will filter out fakes be refusing to repurchase them with assets, the purchasing power of counterfeits quickly falling to zero, or at least to a large discount. When central banks are fooled by counterfeits they will use up their stock of assets as they erroneously repurchase fakes. But even then they will never lose the ability to uphold the value of banknotes as long as the government backs them up with transfers of tax revenues. Fiat chain splits only begin to have the same sort of effects as bitcoin chain splits when 1) counterfeiting goes unpunished; 2) the central bank can't tell the difference between which notes are genuine and which are fakes; and 3) it lacks the firepower and government support necessary to buy back paper money in sufficient quantity. Only at this point will counterfeiters succeed in driving the economy's price level higher.

This, by the way, is what the Somali shilling looks like... a fiat currency constantly undergoing chain splits. 

*** I get my information on Haiti from this excellent paper by Frederico Neiburg.

The gold trick

Now that the U.S. debt ceiling season is upon us again, I've been wondering if the U.S.'s official gold price is going to finally be revalued from $42.22. Why so?

Since March the U.S. Treasury has been legally prohibited from issuing new debt. Because the government needs to continue spending in order to keep the country running, and with debt financing no longer an option (at least until the ceiling is raised), Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has had no choice but to resort to a number of creative "extraordinary measures," or accounting tricks, to keep the doors open. Here is a list. They are the same tricks that Obama used in his brushes with the debt ceiling in 2011 and 2013.

The general gist of these measures goes something like this: a number of government trusts and savings plans invest in short term government securities, and these count against the debt limit. As these securities mature they are typically reinvested (i.e rolled over). The trick is to neither roll these securities over nor redeem them with cash. Instead, the assets are held in a limbo of sorts in which they don't collect interest—and no longer count against the debt limit. This frees up a limited amount of headroom under the ceiling that the Treasury can fill with fresh debt in order to keep the government functioning.

These tricks provide around $250-300 billion of ammunition. Which sounds like a lot, but in the context of overall government spending of $3.7 trillion or so per year, it isn't. Most estimates have the extraordinary measures only lasting till September or October at which point a default event may occur, unless Congress raises the ceiling.

Not on the official list of measures for finessing the debt ceiling is a rarely-mentioned option that I like to call the gold trick. The U.S. government owns a lot of gold. Beware here, because a few commentators think that the idea behind the gold trick is to sell off some of this gold in order to fund the government. Nope—not an ounce of gold needs to be sold. The only thing that the Treasury need do is raise the U.S.'s official price for gold. By doing so, it automatically gets "free" funding from the Federal Reserve, funding which doesn't count against the debt ceiling.

We need a bit of history to understand the gold trick. Back in 1933 all U.S. citizens were required to sell their gold, gold certificates, and gold coins to the Fed at a rate of $20.67 per ounce. This is the famous gold confiscation that gold bugs like to talk about (see picture at top). The 195 million ounces that the Fed accumulated was subsequently sold to the Treasury. In return, the Treasury provided the Fed with gold certificates obliging the Treasury to pay them back. At the official price of $20.67, these certificates were held on the Fed's books at $4 billion.

The certificates the Fed received were a bit strange. A gold certificate usually provides its owner with a claim on a fixed quantity of gold, say one ounce, or 1/2 an ounce. In this case, the certificates provided a claim on a nominal, not fixed, amount of gold. If the Fed wanted to redeem all its certificates, it couldn't ask the Treasury for the 195 million ounces back. Rather, the certificates only entitled the Fed to redeem $4 billion worth of gold at the official price.

As long as the yellow metal's price stayed at $20.67, this wasn't a big deal. But it had important consequences when the official gold price was changed, which was exactly what happened in January 1934 when President Roosevelt increased the metal's price from $20.67 to $35. At this new price, the stash of gold held at the Treasury was now worth $6.8 billion, up from $4 billion. But thanks to their odd structure, the value of the Fed's gold certificates did not adjust in line with the revaluation—after all, they offered little more than a constant claim on $4 billion worth of gold. The remaining $2.8 billion worth of gold, which had been the Fed's just a month before, was now property of the Treasury.

Almost immediately the Treasury printed $2.8 billion worth of fresh gold certificates, shipped these certificates to the Fed, and had the Fed issue it $2.8 billion in new money. Voila, the Treasury had suddenly increased its bank account, and it didn't even have to issue new bonds, raise taxes, or reduce program spending. All it did was change the official gold price.

(If you want find this description confusing, I explained the gold trick slightly differently in 2012.)

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Even when the U.S. eventually went off the gold standard—unofficially in 1968 and officially in 1971—it still maintained the practice of setting an official gold price. But by then the official price was no longer the axis around which the entire monetary system turned; it was little more than an accounting unit.

As gold's famous 1970s bull market started to ramp up, the authorities tried to keep pace by enacting changes to the official price. When gold hit $55 in May 1972, the official price was bumped up from $35 to $38. They ratcheted it up again in February 1973 to $42.22, although by then gold's market price had advanced to $75. Both of these revaluations resulted in the Fed providing new money to the Treasury, just like in 1934. Albert Berger, a Fed economist, has a good description of these two events:

A 1974 Fed analysis of the effects of raising the official gold price: https://t.co/XP2pka1YoR & my old blog post: https://t.co/G1SLGD6QTH pic.twitter.com/QDdMIsxVLK

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) January 9, 2017

After the 1973 revaluation the government stopped trying to keep up to gold's parabolic rise, and to this day the U.S. maintains an archaic price of $42.22, far below the actual price of $1250 or so.

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Let's bring this back to the present. Come October, imagine that the U.S. Treasury has expended all of its conventional extraordinary measures and Congress—despite having a Republican majority—can't decide on increasing the debt ceiling. Desperate for the cash required to keep basic service open, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin turns to an archaic, long forgotten lever, the official gold price. Maybe he decides to change it from $42.22 to, say, $50, or $100, or $1000—whatever amount he needs in order to fund the government. The mechanics would work exactly like they did in 1934, 1972, and 1973. The capital gain arising from a rise in the accounting price would be credited to the Treasury in the form of new central bank deposits, and these could be immediately deployed to keep the government running.

Any change in the official price of gold needs to be authorized by Congress. Why would the same Congress that can't agree on adjusting the debt ceiling or repealing Obamacare agree to Mnuchin's request to change the price of gold? The Republican party has a long history of advocating for the gold standard; Ronald Reagan, for instance, was a supporter. President Trump himself likes the yellow metal. If you believe him, he once made a lot of money off of it:

Donald Trump, gold speculator. "It's easier than the construction business." https://t.co/3bgcGgo4Yn pic.twitter.com/khBOELaiEH

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) November 29, 2016

As for the Republican's base, many of them are keen on ending the Fed—anything that smells of a return to gold will make them happy. This seems to be a piece of legislation that pleases all factions.

The gold trick only works because the debt issued by the Fed—reserves, or deposits—is not included in the category of debts used to define the debt ceiling. By outsourcing the task of financing government services to the Fed via gold price increases, the Treasury can sneak around the ceiling. This is only cosmetic, of course, because a debt incurred by the Fed is just as real as a debt incurred by the Treasury, and so it should probably be included in the debt ceiling. After all, the taxpayer is ultimately on the hook for debt issued by both bodies.

An increase in the price of gold to its current market price of $1250 would only be a band-aid. While it would provide the Treasury with around $315 billion in new funds from the Fed, this would be enough to evade the debt ceiling for just a few months, maybe half a year. Sure, a few well-time Donald Trump tweets about the greatness of gold might push the price up by $50 to $1300, but even that would only buy the Treasury an extra $13 billion or so in central bank funds.

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The Fed would hate the gold trick.

Much of Fed policy over the last few years has involved communicating with the public about the future size of the Fed balance sheet, which shot up over three rounds of quantitative easing. A sudden $315 billion increase in liabilities outstanding due to a revaluation of the official gold price to $1250 would throw a wrench in this strategy. To the public, it would look QE4-ish.   

QE is reversible. Unlike QE, the Fed would not be capable of reversing a balance sheet expansion caused by a gold revaluation, at least not without the Treasury's help. This would severely damage the Fed's independence. To see why, keep in mind that the Fed can only ever increase the money supply if it gets an asset—a bond, mortgage backed securities, gold, etc—in return. The advantage of having an actual asset in the vault is that it can be sold off in the future should a constriction in the money supply be necessary. Assets also generate income which can be used to pay the Fed's expenses like salaries or interest on reserves. With the gold trick, however, the Fed is being asked to increase the money supply without receiving a compensating asset. This means that, should it be necessary to drastically shrink the money supply in the future, it will only be able to do so by relying on goodwill of the Treasury. So much for being able to act independently of the President.

That the Fed probably prefers that the Treasury avoid a gold revaluation is one reason that it has never become one of the go-to extraordinary measures for finessing the debt ceiling. But I'm not sure that the current administration is one that cares very deeply about what the Fed thinks. If Congress greenlights the revaluation, there's really nothing that Fed Chair Yellen can do except enter-key new money for Mnuchin.

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Earlier I mentioned that adjusting the official price to $1250 would only be a band-aid solution. Here's a bit of speculative fiction: imagine that come October the official price is adjusted up to something like $2000, or $5000, or $10,000. Granted, this would put it far above the market price of $1250--but the official price has been wrong for something like fifty years now; does anyone really care if the error is now to the upside rather than the downside? 

At an official price of $10,000, for instance, the Treasury would get some $2.6 trillion in spending power from the Fed, enough for it to avoid issuing new t-bills and bond in excess of the debt ceiling for several years. The Republicans would save face; they could tell their constituents that they held firm against an increase in the ceiling. When the Democrats--who are no friends of gold--inevitably come back to power, they could simply go back to the tradition of jacking up the debt ceiling.

This would certainly be a strange world. During Republican administrations, bond and bill issuance would slow dramatically, reserves at the Fed expanding in their place. Like the various QEs, there is no reason that these reserve expansion would cause inflation. The Fed would have to be careful that it pays enough interest on reserves that banks prefer to hoard their reserves rather than sell them. This increase in the Fed's interest burden would dramatically crimp its profits, which are paid out as a dividend to the Treasury each year. In fact, all the money the Treasury saved on not paying t-bill and bond interest would be almost precisely cancelled out by a shrinking Fed dividend. There is not much of a free lunch to be had. 

Investor who like to hold government debt in their portfolios would be in a bit of a jam. Everyone can buy a t-bill, but the ability to hold reserves is limited to banks. Unless the Fed were to allow wider access to their balance sheet, Republican administrations resorting to the gold trick would create broad safe asset shortages.

While a small increase in the official gold price may be part of Mnuchin's backup plan, a large increase to the official gold price is just speculative fiction. After all, a boost in the official price of gold to $10,000 would create an entirely different monetary system. Alternative systems are certainly worth exploring for what they teach us about are own system, but one would hope that the actual adoption of one would come after long debate and not as a result of opportunistic politics.

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P.S. After writing this post, I stumbled on a paper by Fed economist Kenneth Garbade which describes how Eisenhower finessed the debt ceiling by using a version of the gold trick. Unlike 1972 and '73 the gold price was not increased. Instead, the Treasury was able to make use of unused space from the 1934 revaluation. A large portion of the gold the Treasury owned had not yet been monetized by writing up gold certificates and depositing them at the Fed. In late 1953, with the debt ceiling biting, around $500 million in gold certificates were exchanged with the Fed for deposits.

From ancient electrum to modern currency baskets (with a quick detour through symmetallism)

Electrum coins [source]

First proposed by economist Alfred Marshall in the late 19th century as an alternative metallic standard to the gold, silver and bimetallic standards, symmetallism was widely debated at the time but never adopted. Marshall's idea amounted to fusing together fixed quantities of silver and gold in the same coin rather than striking separate gold and/or silver coins. Symmetallism is actually one of the world's oldest monetary standards. In the seventh century B.C., the kingdom of Lydia struck the first coins out of electrum, a naturally occurring mix of gold and silver. Electrum coins are captured in the above photo.

While symmetallism is an archaic concept, it has at least some relevance to today's world. Modern currencies that are pegged to the dollar (like the Hong Kong dollar) act very much like currencies on a gold standard, the dollar filling in for the role of gold. A shift from a dollar peg to one involving a basket of other currencies amounts to the adoption of a modern version of Marshall's symmetallic standard, the euro/yen/etc playing the role of electrum.

The most recent of these shifts has occurred with China, which late last year said it would be measuring the renminbi against a trade-weighted basket of 13 currencies rather than just the U.S. dollar. Thus many of the same issues that were at stake back at the turn of the 19th century when Marshall dreamt up the idea of symmetallism are relevant today.

So what exactly is symmetallism? In the late 1800s, the dominant monetary debate concerned the relative merits of the gold standard and its alternatives, the best known of which was a bimetallic standard. The western world, which was mostly on a gold standard back then, had experienced a steady deflation in prices since 1875. This "cross of gold" was damaging to debtors; they had to settle with a higher real quantity of currency. The reintroduction of silver as legal tender would mean that debts could be paid off with a lower real amount of resources. No wonder the debtor class was a strong proponent of bimetallism.

There was more to the debate than mere class interests. As long as prices and wages were rigid, insufficient supplies of gold in the face of strong gold demand might aggravate business cycle downturns. For this reason, leading economists of the day like Alfred Marshall, Leon Walras, and Irving Fisher mostly agreed that a bimetallic standard was superior to either a silver standard or a gold standard. (And a hundred or so years later, Milton Friedman would come to the same conclusion.)

The advantage of a bimetallic standard is that the price level is held hostage to not just one precious metal but two; silver and gold. This means that bimetallism is likely to be less fickle than a monometallic standard. As Irving Fisher said: "Bimetallism spreads the effect of any single fluctuation over the combined gold and silver markets."  Thus if the late 1800s standard had been moved from a gold basis to a bimetallic one, the stock of monetary material would have grown to include silver, thus 'venting' deflationary pressures.

Despite these benefits, everyone admitted that classical bimetallism had a major weakness; eventually it ran into Gresham's law. Under bimetallism, the mint advertised how many coins that it would fabricate out of pound of silver or gold, in effect setting a rate between the two metals. If the mint's rate differed too much from the market rate, no one would bring the undervalued metal (say silver) to the mint, preferring to hoard it or export it overseas where it was properly valued. The result would be small denomination silver coin shortages, which complicated trade. What had started out as a bimetallic standard thus degenerated into an unofficial gold standard (or a silver one) so that once again the nation's price level was held hostage to just one metal.

The genius of Alfred Marshall's symmetallic standard was that it salvaged the benefits of a bimetallic standard from Gresham's law. Instead of defining the pound as either a fixed quantity of gold or silver, the pound was to be defined as a fixed quantity of gold twinned with a fixed quantity of silver, or as electrum. Thus a £1 note or token coin would be exchangeable at the Bank of England not for, say, 113 grains of gold, but for 56 grains of gold together with twenty or so times as many grains of silver. The number of silver and gold grains in each pound would be fixed indefinitely when the standard was introduced.

Because symmetallism fuses gold and silver into super-commodity, the monetary authority no longer sets the price ratio between the two metals. Gresham's law, which afflicts any bimetallic system when one of the two metals is artificially undervalued, was no longer free to operate. At the same time, the quantity of metal recruited into monetary purposes was much larger and more diverse than under a monometallic standard, thus reducing the effect of fluctuations in the precious metals market on aggregate demand.

While symmetallism was an elegant solution, Alfred Marshall was lukewarm to his own idea, noting that "it is with great diffidence that I suggest an alternative bimetallic scheme." To achieve a stable price level, Marshall preferred a complete separation of the unit of account, the pound, from the media of exchange, notes and coins. This was called a tabular standard, a system earlier proposed by William Stanley Jevons. The idea went nowhere, however; the only nation I know that has implemented such a standard is Chile. As for Fisher, he proposed his own compensated dollar standard plan, which I described here.

The urgency to adopt a new standard diminished as gold discoveries in South Africa and the Yukon spurred production higher, thus reducing deflationary pressures. None of these exotic plans—Marshall's symmetallism, Jevons tabular standard, or Fisher's compensated dollar—would ever be adopted. Rather, the world kept on limping forward under various forms of the gold standard. This standard would be progressively modified through the years in order to conserve on the necessity for gold, first by removing gold coin from circulation and substituting convertibility into gold bars (a gold bullion standard) and then having one (or two) nations take on the task of maintaining gold convertibility while the remaining nations pegged to that nation's currency (a gold exchange standard).

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Let's bring this back to the present. In the same way that conditions in the gold market caused deflation among gold standard countries in the late 1800s, the huge rise in the U.S. dollar over the last few years has tightened monetary conditions in all those nations that peg their currency to the dollar. To cope, many of these countries have devalued their currencies, a development that Lars Christensen has called an 'unraveling of the dollar bloc.'

A more lasting alternative to re-rating a U.S. dollar peg might be to create a fiat version of electrum; mix the U.S. dollar with other currencies like the euro and yen to create a currency basket and peg to this basket. China, which has been the most important member of the dollar bloc, has turned to the modern version of symmetallism by placing less emphasis on pegging to the U.S. dollar and more emphasis on measuring the yuan against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. This means that where before China had a strictly made-in-the U.S. monetary policy, its price level is now determined by more diverse forces. Better to put your eggs in two or three baskets than just one.

Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are also members of the dollar bloc. Kuwait, however, links its dinar to a basket of currencies, a policy it adopted in 2007 to cope with the inflationary fallout from the weakening U.S. dollar. In an FT article from April entitled Kuwaiti currency basket yield benefits, the point is made that Kuwait has enjoyed a more flexible monetary policy than its neighbours over the recent period of U.S. dollar strength. Look for the other GCC countries to mull over Kuwaiti-style electrum if the U.S. dollar, currently in holding pattern, starts to rise again.

Modern day electrum can get downright exotic. Jeffrey Frankel, for instance, has suggested including commodities among the basket of fiat currencies, specifically oil in the case of the GCC nations. Such a basket would allow oil producing countries to better weather commodity shocks than if they remained on their dollar pegs. If you want to pursue these ideas further, wander over to Lars Christensen's blog where Frankel's peg the export price plan is a regular subject of conversation.