What if Apple pegged its stock price at $1?

 Would it make sense for Apple to peg its stock price at $1? If so, how would it go about doing this?

From the perspective of shareholders, there's an advantage to a firm's shares being valued not only as a pure store of value but also as useful in trade, or as money. All things staying the same, the increase in demand that is created by the monetary usefulness of a share will ratchet up the multiple applied to a firm's earnings, resulting in a higher market capitalization and richer (and happier) shareholders. As long as the costs of making shares more moneylike aren't too high (I'll assume they aren't), Apple will prefer that its shares be ubiquitous and pervade all corners of an economy, much like a U.S. dollar note or a bank deposit.

The problem is that people aren't fond of unstable exchange media (see here & here). Bills and deposits tend to show low price variability. And because retailers keep prices sticky in terms of the unit of account, a $100 deposit or $100 bill is guaranteed to purchase $100 worth of stuff one month hence. Unlike bills and deposits, volatile assets like Apple shares can crater at any moment, thus ruining their effectiveness as a monetary medium.

Could Apple solve this problem? If Apple were to peg its stock price at $1, it would provide individuals with all the benefits of a dollar bill or deposit. Add in some infrastructure for allowing payment via stock (say a permissioned block chain), and demand for Apple shares would treble as they stole business from banks. Apple's market cap would spike.

What about investors, say hedge funds and mutual funds? Why would they want to own an asset that never deviates from $1? They need a return, after all, to justify holding Apple in their portfolio. The answer, in short, is that the peg wouldn't reduce Apple's return to zero; rather, it would change the form of the return. Instead of rewarding shareholders with a higher share price, Apple management would reward them by augmenting the quantity of stable-value shares they own.

Say Apple's earnings are to grow 10% over the course of a year. Without a peg, investors expect one share of Apple, currently trading at $1, to be worth $1.10 in one year, providing a 10% return. With a peg, investors will instead expect the quantity of $1 shares in their portfolio to grow from 1 to 1.1, thus providing the same 10% return. Think of the 0.1 increase in shares as a stock dividend to all existing shareholders.

If Apple has a blowout year and earnings grow 20% rather than just 10%, investor demand for Apple shares will rise, putting upwards pressure on the peg. Management will grant existing owners whatever extra stock dividends are necessary to relieve the pressure. Likewise, a rise in the monetary demand for Apple shares, perhaps due to a liquidity crisis, will by counterbalanced by a stepped up pace of stock dividends, ensuring the peg's integrity.

Conversely, downwards pressure on the peg will be relieved with a series of reverse stock dividends. Shareholders will find that, where before they had $1 share worth $1, they have been docked 0.01 shares and only have 0.99 shares worth $1 dollar.

For the public to accept Apple's pegged shares as an exchange medium, they need to suffer from some sort of money illusion. After all, even though Apple is enforcing its $1 peg and providing nominal stability, this is little more than an illusion. The reverse stock dividend mechanism threatens to reduce the quantity of shares in each individual's portfolios, thus diminishing their overall purchasing power. Will people be fooled by the $1 price? I don't know, but if so, Apple can increase its market capitalization for free and thus enrich its shareholders.

This leads into a bigger question that I'll let others try and answer. What quirks of human psyche (or institutions) lead publicly traded companies to universally set a floating stock price and a fixed quantity of shares? Why not let the quantity float and the price stay fixed? If we were perfectly logical beasts, we should be indifferent between the two.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

You may know by now that the final revision of U.S. first quarter GDP revealed a shocking 2.9% decline while its mirror image, gross domestic income (GDI), was off by 2.6%.

As Scott Sumner has pointed out twice now, the huge decline in GDI is almost entirely due to a fall in corporate profits. Whereas employee compensation, the largest contributor to GDI, rose from $8.97 to $9.04 trillion between the fourth quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014, corporate profits fell from $2.17 to $1.96 trillion (see blue line in the above chart) This incredible $198 billion loss represents a 36% annualized rate of decline!

A number of commentators have pointed out the difficulty in squaring this data bloodbath with reality. After all, Wall Street has not been announcing 36% quarter on quarter profit declines. Rather, earnings per share growth has been pretty decent so far this year. If earnings were off by so much, then why are equity markets at record highs? Why have there been no layoffs? It's hard to believe that a bomb has gone off when there's no smoke and debris. Investors are patting themselves down to make sure they had no wounds or broken body parts and, coming up clean, are shrugging and buying more stocks.

I'm going to argue that the odd disjunction between the numbers and reality may have arisen due to something called money illusion. We live in a historical-cost accounting world in which stale prices are used as the basis for much of our profit and loss calculations. But the gunshot rang out in a different universe, one in which accountants rapidly mark costs to market. At some point we in the historical-cost world will feel the repercussions of the gunshot since everything is eventually marked to market. For now, however, no one seems to have noticed because we're all caught up in an the illusion created by accountants focused on the ghost of prices past.

More specifically, the folks at the Bureau of Economic Analysis who compile GDI report a different corporate profit number than the profit numbers being bandied around on Wall Street during earnings season. Wall Street profits are by and large paid out after depreciation expenses, and these have been accounted for on a historical-cost basis. This is the red line in the above chart. The BEA's number, represented by the blue line in the chart above, represents the profits that remain after depreciation expenses have been marked to market. The choice between mark-to-market depreciation accounting and historical-cost accounting can result in large differences in bottom-line profit, as the last data point in the chart illustrates.

For instance, consider a manufacturing company that earns revenues of $100 per year from a machine that it bought for $600. It depreciates the machine by $60 each year over 10 years, earning a steady $40 in profits ($100 - $60). Now imagine that all over the world machines of this type are suddenly sabotaged so that, due to their rarity, the cost of repurchasing a replica doubles to $1200. If the manufacturing company uses historical cost deprecation, it will continue to bring in revenues of $100 a year, deducting the same $60 in depreciation to show $40 in earnings. All is fine in the world. But if the firm uses mark-to-market depreciation, the cost of using up the machine will now reflect the true cost of replacing it: $120 a year ($1200/10 years). Subtracting $120 from the annual $100 in revenues means the company is losing $20 a year, hardly a sign of health.

It's easy to work out an example that shows the opposite, how a glut in machinery supply (which would drive the replacement cost of the machine down) is quickly reflected in a dramatic improvement in earnings after mark-to-market depreciation expenses, but earnings after historical-cost depreciation show nothing out of the ordinary.

Thus we can have one profit number that tells us that all is fine and dandy, and another that indicates the patient is on death's door. An individual's perception of the situation depends on which universe they live in, the historical cost universe or the mark-to-market one. The GDI explosion has gone off in the latter (the BEA uses a mark-to-market methodology), but since we experience only the former (the Wall Street earnings parade is entirely a celebration of historical-cost earnings per share data) we haven't really felt it... yet.

Yet? Even a company that lives in a historical cost accounting universe will eventually have to face the market price music. Imagine our sabotage example again. If our company uses mark-to-market accounting, it will immediately know it is facing a problem since its $100 revenue stream is failing to offset the $120 cost of machinery depreciation. However, if it uses historical cost accounting then our company continues to enjoy what it perceives to be a revenue stream that more than offsets its historically-fixed $40 cost of machinery. However, once that machine inevitably breaks down and needs to be replaced with a $1200 machine, a new historical cost base will be established and depreciation will suddenly rise to $120. Several quarters too late the company will realize that it is now operating in the red. Had it marked deprecation to market, that realization would have come much sooner.

If I had to speculate, here's a more detailed story about the last quarter. US corporate revenues were particularly underwhelming between Q4 2013 and Q1 2014 due to the cold weather. At the same time, we know that a number of government stimulus acts that had introduced higher than normal historical cost depreciation allowances (this allows firms to protect their income from taxes) were rolling off. Flattish revenues were therefore offset by smaller deprecation costs, resulting in a decent bump to headline earnings numbers, as the red line in the chart shows. Everything looked great to majority of us who inhabit the historical cost accounting universe.

However, mark-to-market depreciation accounting used by the BEA strips out the effect of the expiring depreciation allowances, thereby removing the bump. The combination of flattish revenues and higher market-based depreciation expenses (perhaps due to some inflation in the cost of capital goods) would have conspired to create a fall in the blue earnings series, and therefore a groaningly bad quarter in our mark-to-market universe.

In any case, the crux of the issue is that Wall Street's headline numbers indicate that corporate America did a better job in the first quarter of 2014 generating the cash necessary to replace worn out capital than it did in Q4 of 2013. The BEA numbers are telling us the opposite, that corporate America did a poorer job of covering the costs of wear & tear. Neither of the two numbers is wrong per se, but as I've already point out in my example, mark-to-market methodology is the first to reveal problems while historical cost accounting will follow after a lag.

As I've already hinted, the fact that Wall Street hasn't yet noticed that it just lived through a miserable quarter can be attributed to money illusion: a phenomenon whereby people focus on nominal rather than real values. In this specific instance, investors are so obsessed with headline changes in earnings that they fail to adjust that number for the true cost of using up machinery. Irving Fisher himself described a version of this mistake in his book The Money Illusion:

...during inflation the cost of raw materials and other costs seem to be lower than they really are. When the costs were incurred the dollar was worth more than it is later when the product is sold, so that the dollars in the original cost and the dollars in the later sale are not the same dollars. The manufacturer is deceived just as was the German shopkeeper or the Austrian paper manufacturers who thought they were making profits.

How likely is it that Wall Street, full of so many bright individuals, is being fooled by money illusion? It's not inconceivable. Even Scott Sumner volunteers that he doesn't believe the BEA's numbers due to soaring stock prices and strong earnings, thus falling prey to that very same affliction that serves as his blog's namesake. Money illusion can happen to the best of us.

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.

North and South Euros

I had an interesting conversation with Miles Kimball at his blog concerning his idea of splitting the Euro into a North Euro zone and a South Euro zone. This seems like a far more realistic solution than reintroducing drachmas, punts, pesos, and lira. Nevertheless, there are some thorny issues here which Miles says he will address in future blog posts.

In short, a South Euro will quickly depreciate. Because wages are sticky, exports from the southern Euro zone will be relatively cheaper than exports elsewhere, providing a short to medium term boost to Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

One concern here is that the continued circulation of North Euros in South Euroland, as well as the North Euro's continued use as a unit of account in South Euroland, would make those living in South Euroland highly cognizant of nominal changes and therefore less likely to fall prey to the degree of money illusion that is necessary to drive an export-led recovery.

Of course, as Miles points out, his is a fourth best solution, so one should only nitpick so much, never mind the fact that it takes a solution to beat a solution, and I don't have one.