Monetagium

An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins

The way that a modern mafia protection racket works is the mafia starts doing very bad things to regular folks, say you and your business. To stop the damage, you pay them a regular fee. Both sides come out ahead. The mafia earns a tidy stream of income. Your suffering comes to an end.

In feudal Europe, a monetary practice called monetagium worked along the same principles as a mafia protection racket. It began with the feudal lord threatening to do very bad things to the coinage. To prevent these very bad things from happening, the public would pay a fee – monetagium – to the lord. Both sides came out ahead. The lord earned revenue. His vassals avoided a worsening of the coinage.

To better understand the intricacies of monetagium, or monetary blackmail, we need to start off by exploring how the monetary system worked back in the 11th and 12th centuries, in particular the idea of debasement.
 
A feudal lord had a number of ways to earn revenue. These included gabelle, a tax on salt; heriot, a death duty that was paid to the lord upon the death of a tenant; merchet, fee paid on marriage, and the Saladin tithe, a tax paid by all those who did not go on Crusades. Another common revenues source was the prince's monopoly over the coinage. Anyone could bring their personal silver to the royal mints and have it be converted into coins, for a fee. This revenue source was known as seigniorage. The lord of the realm, or seigneur, often outsourced the running of their mints to professional third-parties, or moneyers, who collected the fee and remitted it to the seigneur after subtracting what was needed to pay their own costs and earn a profit.

Seigniorage provided a steady stream of revenue to the lord. But if he really wanted to turbocharge his revenues, a debasement of the coinage could be introduced.

A debasement means a reduction in the silver content of new coins. Post-debasement, a canny merchant could bring a chest full of old silver coins to the mint and get those converted into even more new ones. So for example, if he had 1,000 old coins on hand, and a 20% debasement had been introduced, a merchant would be able to have his 1,000 coins reminted into 1,200 new coins. He might have to pay 50 of those to the lord, leaving 1,150 coins. The extra 150 coins now in his possession provided him with the opportunity to buy more goods & services than before (at least until prices adjusted) and settle more debts.

To take advantage of the opportunity provided by the debasement, a wave of customers would arrive at the mint to convert their silver into new coins, the result being a temporary boost to the seigneur's minting profits. If a single debasement provided a one-time boost to the lord's revenues, a series of such debasements could repetitively turbocharge those revenues. (Henry VIII notoriously used this technique to fund his expensive French wars.)

Patient readers will now begin to understand the idea of monetagium. Debasements may have boosted feudal revenues, but they were generally unpopular with the public, a fact that many writers from that period have commented on. And you can understand why. Debasing the coinage caused inflation, or a rise in the price level, and in no age has inflation ever been popular. Furthermore, the penny was the unit of account, or the means by which people reckoned and computed their financial lives. As the penny was mutated, its ability to serve as a measuring tool was compromised.

By the 11th century, Normandy's dukes had been resorting to regular debasements as a revenue device for some time. But they soon had an epiphany. They realized that they needn't enact an actual debasement to earn a profit. Instead, they could just threaten to enact one, and then extort the public for a ransom to prevent it from going through.

This tax, or extortion payment, was referred to as monetagium. By the late 11th century, monetagium was being levied on Norman citizens every three years in return for the Duke's promise not to reduce the silver content of the coinage. The tax worked out to 12 pennies per household, or hearth, which according to historian Thomas Bisson amounted to the wages of "a day's field work per year." Knights and the clergy were exempt. In scope, monetagium was an "important but unspectacular financial resource," says Bisson, raising a fraction of the much larger land tax on farms.

In other parts of France, including Orléans and Paris, the monetagium was known as the "tallage on bread and wine," writes Bisson. Calculated based on the amount of provisions that subjects had on hand, including measures of winter wheat and spring oats, the bread and wine tax was justified to the population as the king's generous substitute for debasement.

From the perspective of the king or feudal lord, monetagium must have been a superior tax policy to debasing the coinage. Gone was the need to force the population to trudge each few years with their silver coins to the mint for recoinage every three years. And the coinage at least stayed constant, removing the difficulties and uncertainties imposed by inflation on the feudal economy. But while monetagium was less capricious, it was still abusive – in the same way that the mafia's protection payments are abusive. This was especially apparent to the inhabitants of England.

There is evidence that the Normans exported the practice of monetagium to England after William the Conqueror's successful invasion of the island in 1066. The English version of monetagium appears to have operated on slightly different principles than the Norman one, however.

Whereas Normandy had a long history of debasement, England's coinage up till 1066 had remained relatively consistent in weight and purity, a tradition that the English expected the Norman invaders  to uphold, which they did. Unable to credibly use the threat of a debasement to extract monetagium, England's new Norman lords came up with another excuse.

For almost a century prior to the Norman invasion, the English coinage had been regularly renewed each three years. That is, a new version of the penny was regularly issued, the imagery being updated but the silver content staying the same. This was not debasement, but rather akin to the modern practice of periodically issuing new versions of dollar bills. In feudal England, the older versions of the penny were generally allowed to stay in circulation, although from time-to-time the most dated coins would be declared void, says W.J. Andrew, a numismatist. Once they ceased to be legal tender, citizens were required to bring in these discontinued coins to be reminted into new ones, for a fee. The fees earned from demonetization were one of the ways the English kings earned income.

According to Andrew, this English tradition of recurring triennial renewals, or renovatio monetae, gave the Norman kings the missing hook they needed to extract monetagium from the English population. By declaring all coin types to be void each three years (instead of just some of the oldest ones), as was his right, England's new Norman kings could place a costly burden on the population. English-folk would have to regularly haul all their coins to the local mint for costly conversion. To avoid this burden they were proffered an alternative: pay the monetagium every three years instead, and in return the king would let old pennies remain as legal tender.
 
This was not a popular practice with the English. When Henry I came to power in 1100 he would officially end it, proclaiming the following: "The common monetagium... which was collected through the cities and through the counties, which did not exist in Kind Edward's time, this I utterly abolish from now on."

The phenomenon of monetagium also pops up in Denmark in the 13th century in the form of a "plough tax," as recounted by historian Sture Bolin. Like many parts of Europe, Denmark's coinage was subject to renovatio monetae whereby it was routinely recalled and cancelled. The conversion rate was costly; for every three demonetized coins submitted, a Dane might receive only two in return. The policy of renovatio monetae was brought to an end in 1234 by King Valdemar II. In its place, a new tax was levied such that for every plough owned, Danes had to pay one öre in coin. Valdemar justified the plough tax to his Danish subjects as the price they had to pay to enjoy permanent coinage.

Notably, the coins that Valdemar issued in 1234 have the distinction of being the first European coins in the Christian era to have a date stamped on them. In the image below, they are dated MCCXXXIIII, although I must confess that I can't quite make it out. (This source may help you pick out the numerals.)

A penny from Roskilde, Denmark dated 1234 holds the honor of being the earliest Anno Domini dated coin in the history of European coinage Source: Reddit

Bolin suggests that the novelty of coin dating was intended to commemorate both the permanent nature of Danish coinage and the simultaneous introduction of the plough tax, or monetagium.

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So what are we to make of all this today? Modern democracies are not feudal mafioso, yet they often face the similar dilemma of what mix of revenue sources to rely on, one of those sources being monetary debasement. A literal debasement of the coinage is no longer a policy that can be pursued – our currencies are no longer metallic. The modern equivalent would be for a democratic government to lean on the central bank to fund government spending, too much of this resulting in inflation.

In general, democracies have not resorted to modern version of debasement as a revenue source due to the unpopularity of rising prices. Instead, contemporary policymakers tend to rely on income taxes, consumption taxes, and property taxes. I suppose we can think of these obligations as our modern version of monetagium. They are the "better taxes," akin to the Danish plough tax or the Parisian bread and wine tax, that we subject ourselves to instead of the not-so-good taxes that get levied via the monetary system.

Renovatio monetae

This silver pfennig from the Archbishopric of Magdeburg (1152-1192) was subject to a policy of renovatio monetae. Twice a year whoever held it had to bring it in to be changed for new coins at a rate of four old coins to three new coins. That suggests an annualized tax rate on coinage of 44%. Image source: British Museum

This is another post in a series that explores how European monarchs harnessed the minting of coins to earn revenues for their coffers. 

A king or queen generally resorted to two different strategies for profiting from the mints. The first was to mint long-lived coinage. The second involved issuing short-lived coinage subject to a policy of renovatio monetae, which is the topic of this post. These aren't mutually exclusive buckets. It's possible for elements of both policies to be blended together.

Almost everything I've written about medieval coinage on this blog has been about the long-lived sort, because that was the dominant pattern in Europe. Under a long-lived coinage system, once a coin had been minted it remained in permanent legal circulation. For example, England's long-lived coinage policy meant that an English penny produced in 1600 would have been just as valid a hundred years later, in 1700, as a penny produced in 1699.

The monarch earned a one-time fee from the original minting of the coin. More specifically, a citizen who brought raw silver to the royal mint left with that same amount of silver now transformed into coin form, less a small part going to the crown. This profit was known as seigniorage. In England, the seigniorage rate on silver typically hovered around 5%, my source for this number being The Debasement Puzzle by economists Rolnick, Velde, and Weber. Once a particular coin was produced, however, the king or queen no longer earned revenue from it.

As society grew and more coins were needed, raw silver was constantly brought to the royal mints by the public in order to be coined, the monarch earning a steady stream of income. This was known as free coinage, since everyone had the right to access the royal mints.

Short-lived coinage subject to a policy of renovatio monetae was an entirely different manner. Under this model, coins didn't circulate permanently. When a king or queen announced what was known as a renovatio monetae, or a renewal of the coinage, all existing coins had to be brought back to the mint to be recoined into new coins. The monarch collected a fee upon each renovatio monetae. 

To help reinforce the monarch's ability to collect a profit, only the most recent coin was allowed to be used within the monarch's domain. Older local coins and coins from other realms were illegal. To distinguish the new version from the outgoing version, the new type was stamped with a different pattern. The penalties for not obeying the rules of renovatio could be harsh. According to Philip Grierson, a numismatist, anyone caught using expired coinage could face imprisonment, a fine, or have their face branded with the old pattern of coin.

Source: Svensson

The period of time between one renovatio monetae and the next varied widely. In England, the monarch initially adopted an interval of nine years, beginning in 973 AD with Edgar. Later on, this was shortened to just three years. In many parts of Germany and Poland, renovatio monetae occurred yearly, as recounted by economist Roger Svensson in his wide-ranging book on the topic. In the Archbishopric of Magdeburg it was carried out twice a year, coinciding with important market days in the spring and autumn. The Teutonic order in Prussia used a much slower ten-year cycle, according to Svensson. 

The date for the switch was often chosen to occur just prior to annual tax payment day or, as in the case of Magdeburg, ahead of a regularly occurring market or festival (see figure above). Requiring that all tax payments or market transactions be conducted with new coins reinforced the necessity of  bringing in old coinage to be melted down into new coinage, thus guaranteeing a boost to the monarch's revenues.

The coinage that prevailed in Poland and Germany from the 12th century almost seems to have been designed with a short lifespan in mind, since it is leaf-thin and fragile. Coins minted in this style are known as bracteates, one of which can be seen below. Svensson speculates that the bracteate format was better suited for the purposes of renovatio monetae than standard coins since the costs of periodically reforming silver into thin and pliable coin would have been lower than heavier coins. 

Leaf-thin bracteates from Frankenhausen. Source: Svensson

 

How much profit did the monarch collect from renovatio monetae? 

For many years the Teutonic order in Prussia used a conversion rate of seven old coins to six new ones, says Svensson. Combined with the fact that renovatio only occurred every ten years, the effective tax rate was relatively light. According to Christine Desan, a law professor, English royal profits amounted to 25% of the metal minted (she cites Spufford), but recall that this tax was levied only every three years so that works out to a yearly tax of around 8%. (Some people may notice the similarity of renovatio monetae to ideas promulgated by Silvio Gesell, who came up with the idea of stamped scrip—money that depreciates.)

In some cases, though, the conversion rate bordered on exploitative. Svensson says that a common exchange rate in Germany was four old bracteates for three new ones. Given two renovatio per year in places like Magdeburg, that works out to a yearly tax rate on coinage of 44%! If a citizen of Magdeburg started the year with 16 bracteates in their stash, and they complied with both renovatio, by year-end target would only have nine bracteates.

This may have created a very weird effect whereby coins became "cheaper and cheaper" over the course of the year in anticipation of the inevitable withdrawal day, according to historian Sture Bolin. Since everyone would have known ahead of time that there was to be a 4:3 conversion on a fixed date, and no one wanted to be stuck holding coins and bearing the conversion tax, sellers would only accept coins at a discount to compensate them for conversion. That discount varied with time. As the final day approached, it would have got progressively wider.

In modern times we don't have to deal with the hassles of renovatio monetae. The coins and banknotes we use are long-lasting: a nickel from 1956 is just as valid as one from 2022. Or consider that while the $1 note is no longer printed in Canada, anyone can still bring them to a bank to be deposited for free. If a policy of renovatio monetae were to be announced by the Bank of Canada in 2025, and Canadians were required to bring our coins and banknotes in each year to be exchanged for new ones, there would probably be a revolt against the inconvenience of it, especially if the fee was high.

This combination of exploitation and inconvenience may explain why the English abandoned renovatio monetae in the middle of the 12th century in favor of permanent coinage. "The renovatio monetae witnessed to the extent of royal control and suggests that coining was routinely coercive," writes Desan. "This new system reduced the burdens placed on people required so frequently to remint their money at a cost."   

However, if renovatio monetae was inconvenient (and frequently exploitative), it also had a key benefit. As silver coins passed from hand to hand, they suffered from natural wear and tear. On top of that, bad actors regularly clipped off their edges, keeping the silver shavings for themselves. By renewing the coinage every year or two, the monarch ensured that the coinage was kept in relatively good condition.

Alas, the same can't be said for long-lived coinage systems, which were particularly prone to the wear and tear problem. After a decade or two of circulating, a typical coin would have lost a significant amount of its original silver content, at which point it would no longer be equal in weight to new coins. This meant that the realm's coins were no longer fungible, or interchangeable, with each other. The familiar problem of Gresham's law would now begin to plague the monetary system, whereby the "bad" coins, which meant the old underweight coins, drove out the "good" coins, the new full-weighted ones. With only shabby coins being used in trade, the money supply was more prone to counterfeiting and clipping, leading to an even shabbier coin supply, and more counterfeiting and clipping. 

Mind you, there were ways to defend against the inevitable downward spiral of long-lived coinage. By adopting a policy of defensive debasements, which I've written about before, the fungibility of coins could be restored.

Nor were long-lived coinage systems spared from being exploitative in nature. The method of abuse was different than that used to exploit short-lived coinage, involving a policy of repetitive debasements in the silver content of coinage.

As an example of this, I wrote a post last year exploring how Henry VIII financed his wars in France using debasement of his long-lived coinage. Do read it, but in short the trick was to increase the number of people visiting the royal mints to convert raw silver into new coins. This would in turn boost the monarch's profits. After all, he or she earned a 5% cut from each new coin produced.  The rush to the mint was linked to the fact that, post-debasement, the public could now get more silver pennies from the mint than before for a given quantity of silver, which in turn allowed them to buy more goods and services than they would have otherwise been able to purchase.

After a series of such debasements, Henry VIII was much richer, but the coinage was debauched. Going into 1542, for instance, the English penny contained 92.5% silver. Nine years later its purity stood at just 25% silver, the majority being base metal such as copper. 

To sum up, short-lived coinage issued under a policy of renovatio monetae was one of several ways to administer the monetary system. It had some advantages over other methods, but was also easily abused. This abuse was linked to the fact that coinage was simultaneously a crucial tool for day-to-day commerce, both as a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and also a way for the monarch to fund itself. Maximizing its latter role by relying on frequent and onerous renovatio may have done severe damage to money's capacity to perform the former role. 

This tension was not necessarily resolved with the move towards long-lived coinage, as Henry VIII demonstrates. And while we may think we have left these these medieval issues behind in the 21st century, I don't think that we can ever fully escape the tensions embodied in money's dual roles as crucial tool of commerce and source of government funding.

Inflation as a tax

Last week I explored how Henry VIII resorted to coin debasement as a way to raise revenues in order to fight his wars. This provided Henry with the financial firepower to annex the city of Boulogne from the French in 1544, albeit at the price of England experiencing one of its greatest inflations ever.

Zoom forward five hundred years and Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the UK, has ignited a controversy by referring to inflation as a tax, and further suggesting that the "best tax cut I can deliver for the British people is to halve inflation." His BBC interviewer disputed the claim, saying that inflation isn't a tax, a stance that the BBC upholds on its fact checking page.

Rishi Sunak, "The best taxt cut that I can deliver for the British people is to halve inflation."

Laura Kuenssberg, "Inflation is not a tax"

Rishi Sunak, "Inflation is a tax" pic.twitter.com/6LgMbeaprY

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) October 1, 2023

If you recall, my previous article showed how Henry VIII's debasement functioned very much like a tax, say a new customs duty on wine or a beard tax. It did so by incentivizing people to flock to English mints to have their precious metals turned into coinage, Henry extracting a small fee on each coin. But the 21st century monetary system is very different from that of the middle ages. Is Rishi Sunak right to characterize inflation as a tax?

First, we need to better define our terms.

What do the BBC interviewer and Sunak mean by inflation? In the western world, prices have been rising at a regular pace of 2-3% each year for decades as result of central bank policy, which targets a low and steady inflation rate. Is this the definition they are using? Alternatively, Sunak and his interviewer may be referring to inflation as a *change in the change* in price. Since 2022 or so, that 2-3% rate has leapt to 8-9% all over the western world. Is it this jump that Sunak and his interviewer are talking about?

For the sake of this article, we'll assume that the conversation between Sunak and the BBC refers to the latter, a spike in the rate of inflation.

Secondly, what is meant by the word tax? Sometimes when we say that something is a tax we mean that it causes suffering. That is, inflation is taxing: it makes people's lives harder by increasing the cost of living, with salaries failing to keep up. It creates unfair changes in winners and losers.

Fair enough. But the more precise view I want to broach in this article is that inflation is actually a tax, where we define a tax as a formal charge or levy, set by the political process, that leads to cash flowing from the population to the government.

What does the data show?

Interestingly, a surprise jump in inflation leads to the very same effects as a new tax. All things staying the same, a new tax leads to an increase in government revenues. This improves the government's fiscal balance, or the difference between its revenues and expenses. A recent IMF paper by Daniel Garcia-Macia using data from 1962 to 2019 shows how an inflation shock typically achieves this exact same end result, boosting government revenues and improving its fiscal balance. This effect lasts for a few quarters, even up to two or three years, then recedes.

The IMF's chart below breaks down exactly how an inflation shock tends to improve government finances using quarterly data going back to 1999:

Charts source: IMF

Total tax revenue (the first panel) immediately begins to rise after the inflation shock at about the same rate as inflation.That's because most taxes are set by reference to values or prices, say like the prices of goods and services, or the price of labor, or the value of corporate profits. Since inflation pushes these amounts higher, this gets quickly reflected in tax revenues.

Income taxes and profits taxes (the second panel) rise particularly fast. Inflation is presumably pushing tax payers into higher income tax brackets, a process known as "bracket crreep," and so the government very quickly starts to collect a proportionally-larger amount of income tax.

Meanwhile, the government's total expenditures, the third panel, typically stay flat or only marginally rises in the quarters after the inflation shock hits. Notably, the amount of wages that are paid to government employees and social benefits (panels 4 & 8) tend to fall.

The net effect is an improvement in the government's fiscal balance. More specifically, for a 1% increase in inflation, the government's overall balance tends to improve by about 0.5% of GDP. And so an inflationary shock ends up at the same endpoint as a new tax: higher revenues and a better budget. That doesn't necessarily mean that inflation is itself a tax. Taxes have a degree of intentionality. They get implemented through a political process that has a certain set of goals in mind. By contrast, the extra revenue that an inflation shock raises is often (though not always) accidental, the result of external forces rather than political decision making.

So while it may not fall under the dictionary definition of a tax, the tax implications of a modern inflation shock resemble that of a new tax.

Everything I've written above applies to an inflation shock, say a rise from a 2-3% to 8-9%. Next I want to show that even constant 2-3% inflation can have the same revenue implication as a tax. Here's how.

Banknotes and seigniorage

Governments usually have a monopoly over the issuance of two key financial instruments: banknotes and settlement balances (also known as reserves). We all know what banknotes are, but what are settlement balances? Commercial banks find it useful to keep a stock of settlement balances on hand to make crucial large-value payments to other banks. The central bank, which the government controls, is the monopoly provider of these balances. (Sometimes banks are required by law to keep a a fixed number of settlement balances on hand, often above and beyond their day-to-day needs, a policy referred to as required reserves.)

Historically, interest rate on both types of central bank-issued money have been set at 0%. At the same time, the rates on short-term credit instruments (Treasury bills, commercial paper, bankers acceptances, etc) are determined by the market, typically hovering at a positive rate ranging between 0.25% to 5% over the last thirty years. These yields are priced to compensate investors for inflation.
 
The interest rate gap this gives rise to allows central banks to earn a steady stream of revenues, borrowing at an artificially cheap rate of 0% from both the banknote-using public and banks, and reinvesting at, say, 3%. Most of the revenues that the central bank collects from this interest margin flows back to the government. Economists usually refer to these revenue stream as seigniorage.

So seigniorage performs the same function as a consumption tax or an income tax: it takes resources from the public and gives it to the state. Likewise, a reduction in seigniorage would be very much like a tax cut.

If politicians wanted to, they could do away entirely with this form of raising government revenues. They have two ways of going about this. One way would be to have the central bank reduce price inflation to zero. By doing so, the interest rate on short-term credit instruments like Treasury bills would also fall to 0%, or thereabouts, since these instruments no longer need to compensate investors for inflation. And so the gap between the 0% rate at which central bank fund themselves and the rate at which they reinvest would cease to exist, seigniorage effectively shrinking to zero.

Over the last few decades, governments have taken a second route to removing seigniorage: they have begun to pay a market-linked yield on settlement balances. Canada, for instance, adopted this policy in 1999, and the Bank of England did so in 2006. By paying a market-based return, central banks no longer extract seigniorage from banks by forcing them to hold 0% assets. 

However, that still leaves banknotes as a significant source of seigniorage. We can calculate how much the UK government roughly earns from banknote seigniorage. With £95 billion in banknotes outstanding in October, and interest rates at 5.1%, the Bank of England's banknote-related seigniorage comes out to around £5 billion per year, much of which flows back to the government. That sounds like a lot, but it's only a small chunk of the £790 billion in taxes the UK government collected last year.

Banknote seigniorage isn't set in stone. It's a policy choice. If governments wanted to, they could reduce this form of seigniorage by paying interest on banknotes. One way to go about this would be to introduce a banknote serial number lottery. This lottery would offer around £5 billion in cash prizes to holders of winning banknote serial numbers, equating to a 5% interest rate on banknotes. Doing so would be akin to enacting a tax cut on British citizens.

To sum up, the fact that both an inflation shock and steady 2-3% inflation have implications for government revenues suggests that while inflation may not quite qualify as a tax, it is certainly tax-like.

How to debase the coinage in order to pay for wars

Henry VIII, after Hans Holbein the Younger

It's fun to imagine traveling back in time and engaging with the then-prevailing technologies. Would you be able to ride a boneshaker or use a counting board? It's probably harder than you think: kids today can't even use a 1980s rotary phone. In this post I'm going to write about one specific techno-institution, the mint, and a particular function that it sometimes played many centuries ago; funding wars.

If you had to go back to 16th century Europe, and you were asked to operate the mints in a way such that they raised enough revenues so that your patron, the king, could wage war against a neighbouring country, how would you go about that?

I think the general sense that most of us have is that you'd need to somehow "debase" the coinage. The majority of coins back then were made of precious metals. If you could sneakily remove some of the silver and gold from each coin, and replace it with cheaper copper, then you'd be able to amass a hoard for the king (albeit at the expense of the public), and he could use that to hire an army.  

Now, if you went back in time with the above hazy notion of debasement, you wouldn't have much luck, and might even get your head chopped off. There's a grain of truth to it, but much of it won't work.

So before you head off in a time machine, here's what you need to know about the business of minting.

The first thing you need to know is that the King (or Queen) owns the royal mints, which they rent out to private parties to operate. Another important fact is that the public brings their own personal supply of precious metal – raw silver, silver cutlery and dishes, old coins, etc – to the mint, and then after waiting a week or two for the order to be processed, walks out with the final product; newly-minted coins.

But the mint's customers don't leave with as much silver (or gold) as they arrived. For each ounce of precious metals that gets minted into coin, the King collects a fee, known as "seigniorage", usually around 5% in the case of silver. The private individual who runs the mints gets a much smaller cut too, called brassage.  

If you're scrambling for a modern analogy, I suppose you could think of the medieval business of minting as very much like a modern laundromat, where customers bring their clothes, have them processed, and leave with their clothes, paying a small fee to the laundromat owner, who in turn pays a big chunk of this to the franchisor.

Like a laundromat owner, the monarch would have earned a fairly steady stream of revenues from their mints. Coins were more useful and liquid than raw silver, so there was an ever-present demand to convert raw silver into coin for transactional purposes. But remember, the challenge you face isn't just to generate regular profit. The king wants a massive surge in revenue. He's got a war to wage. How are you going to repurpose the mints to provide this gusher?

Your first attempt to raise money for the king might be to boost the minting fee from the low single digits to 20-25%. That might work. And you wouldn't be the first to go this route. For centuries, the English seigniorage rate on silver typically hovered around 5%, as illustrated in the chart below from a paper entitled The Debasement Puzzle, by Rolnick, Velde, and Weber. For gold, the minting fee was typically at 0.5% to 2%. To help fund his war against the Scots and the French, Henry VIII raised the seigniorage on silver to a remarkable 50-60% in the 1540s. Gold fees skyrocketed to 15%.

Source: Rolnick, Velde and Weber [pdf]

Mind you, fee hikes alone aren't going to work. Dissuaded by sky-high costs, many people will stop bringing their silver and gold to the mint to be coined, and the King's seigniorage revenues will dry up. A bothersome coin shortage will probably develop, too. Off with your head! says the King.

After thinking about it some more, you realize that, like a modern laundromat owner keen to make more revenue, you need to dramatically increase the amount of material going through the mint. How to do so?

You've got a few levers to increase throughput. One option is to introduce new products. If you offer new denominations of coins, for instance, people may bring more silver to the mint because those denominations are useful to them.

There's certainly precedent for that. To help pay his armies, Henry VIII brought back the testoon, a coin worth 12 pennies (or a shilling) in the hope that there would be significant demand for them, and that this would boost throughput and thus mint revenues. Testoons complemented Henry's silver halfpennies, pennies, groats (4 penny pieces), and sixpence (six pennies), in addition to a range of high denomination gold coins.

Below is an example of one of Henry's testoons, first minted in 1542. Because they had so much copper in them (more on that later), many of the testoons that exist today have a greenish tinge (due to copper oxidation). In the 1540s, Henry VIII's silver coins still hadn't turned green, but had a reddish tinge, which tended to reveal itself on his nose. Which is why Henry's nickname was Old Coppernose.

English groat (4 pence) issued 1547-49. Source: The British Museum

But introducing new denominations probably isn't going to generate a huge rush to the mints, since a new denomination will to some extent cannibalize existing demand for other denominations. Anyone who orders more testoons is likely to order fewer groats, for example. You'll have to do more.

In addition to introducing new coins, another strategy you might try is to cancel old ones. By having the King demonetize a popular coin, or declare it to be "no longer current," those coins will cease being legal tender or acceptable for taxes. The public will be forced to bring their demonetized coins to the mint to be converted into legal coins, the rush to do so creating a revenue windfall for the King.

And indeed, Henry VIII's successor Edward VI (who continued his father's wars) did this exact same move in 1548, declaring the testoons his father had reintroduced just four years before to be no longer current, as recounted in a paper by C.E. Challis (1967). I've clipped the relevant part below:

The demonetization of testoons is announced. Source: C.E. Challis

But we still haven't broached the main method: debasement. This is where the gusher begins.

Together with the King, you announce to the public that anyone who brings precious metals to the mint will now get more coins than before, for the same weight of precious metal. So for example, if someone used to be able to bring, say, 10 grams of pure silver to the mint and got 100 pennies minted, now they can bring 10 grams and get, say, 200 pennies. Same amount of silver, more coins.

As the operator of the mint, you could enact this change by cutting the weight of each penny by half, or, if you wanted to be more clever, maintain the same weight but reduce its fineness by 50%, by introducing more cheap copper to the mix. Either way, you've just debased the currency.

But how exactly does this raise revenues for the King?

Let's think about this change from a merchant's perspective. Say that our merchant owes a supplier 1 pound (a pound is 240 pennies). He's about to pay his debt off with everything he has, 240 pennies, when the debasement is announced. He can now bring his 240 pennies to the mint and have them recoined into 480 pennies. That allows him to pay off his debt, which is still denominated at 1 pound, and still have 240 pennies for himself. What a great opportunity! The merchant heads off to the mint with his silver.

Or imagine our merchant need to buy some property that's priced at 10 pounds, or 2,400 pennies. If he has only 1,200 pennies on hand, he can't afford it. But with the debasement having just been announced, the merchant can now convert those 1,200 pennies into 2,400 pennies and make the purchase.

Congratulations, you've created a revenue gusher! What you've effectively done is offer a short-term arbitrage opportunity to those who are paying attention, most likely the rich and well-connected, at the expense of the not-so-aware. To take advantage of a profitable situation, these enterprising individuals will immediately bring all their silver and gold to the mint. And you'll collect a toll on all that metal as it passes through.

But that arbitrage opportunity won't last forever. Debts will be recalibrated to account for the 50% decline in the penny's silver content. Prices of things like property will eventually double to reflect the new true value of the penny. At that point it will no longer be advantageous to bring one's silver to the mint to be recoined, and the revenue gusher you've created will subside.

You might try announcing debasements every few years or so, thus milking your mint's throughput on a continual basis. Too many debasements, though, and this trick will stop working, since that portion of the population that is the victim of the arbitrage you've created – the less aware – eventually wises up and protects itself by quickly increasing prices whenever a debasement occurs.

A constant series of debasements is exactly what Henry VIII and his son Edward enacted between 1542 and 1551 to keep paying their soldiers. Using data from a paper by John Munro, The Coinages and Monetary Policies of Henry VIII, I've charted out (above) how the penny's silver content changed over that time period. Going into the 1500s, an English penny contained 0.72 grams of pure silver. At the end of the Great Debasement, (the term used for Henry VIII's operations on the coinage) the penny contained just 0.11 grams of silver, constituting an 85% reduction in silver content.

We can further split out how Henry VIII's debasements were distributed between changes in fineness and changes in weight. Going into 1542, the English penny was 92.5% fine. Nine years later its purity stood at just 25% silver, the other 75% being base metal such as copper. As for weight, a penny weighed 0.79 grams in the early 1500s, but only 0.43 grams by 1551. 

These changes are illustrated in the chart below.

Thus it was diminutions in purity, not weight, that drove the biggest chunk of the penny's debasement, although weight did have a role to play.

How successful were these policies in creating a financial gusher for Henry and his son?

The charts below from Rolnick, Velde, and Weber (which I've clipped from  a second paper authored by the trio) show how the combination of mintage policies enacted in the 1540s – debasement, new testoons, and a demonetization of the testoon – led to a large influx of silver and gold to the English mints.

Source: Rolnick et al

According to Challis, the combination of these inducements, along with a big boost in fees, resulted in minting profits of £1.3 million for the two kings from 1542 to 1551. This would have paid for a big chunk of the £3.5 million in military expenditures over that same period, much more than actual taxation, which only yielded £976,000.

Of course, the final result of all this was a significant number of deaths, and what one account describes as "an episode of sixteenth-century ethnic cleansing which in its aims and implementation was not dissimilar from ...the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s or, most recently, with the Myanmar government’s actions against the Rohingya." It also caused one of the worst episodes of price inflation that England had ever seen. According to Munro, the English consumer price level rose by 123% between 1541 and 1555.

So there you have it. If you had a time machine, you now know how to go back to medieval Europe and operate the royal mints in order to fund big ticket items like wars. (Whether you should actually do so is another question.)

Is fiat money to blame for the Iraq war, police brutality, and the war on drugs?

I often encounter memes claiming that fiat money is to blame for all sorts of government evils. Here is one example from Kraken bitcoin strategist spokesperson & bitcoin meme factory Pierre Rochard:

The military-industrial complex that deliberately creates wars is financed by inflationary State fiat currencies.

— Pierre Rochard (@pierre_rochard) January 8, 2020

The rough idea behind this family of memes is that the Federal Reserve, the world's largest producer of "fiat" money (i.e. irredeemable banknotes), is responsible for financing all sorts of examples of government over-reach, say foreign invasions, police brutality, and the twin wars on terrorism and drugs. It does so by producing seigniorage, or profit, which it passes on to the state. Replace fiat-issuing central banks like the Fed with bitcoin or a gold standard, and seigniorage would cease to exist. With the government's purse strings having been cut, a relatively peaceful society would be the result.

This meme's premise is wrong. In practice, central bank seigniorage in both the U.S. and other developed nations is a very small part of overall  government revenues. And so even if fiat money were to be displaced, say by bitcoin or a gold standard, it wouldn't change the state's ability to fund the war on drugs and adventures in the Middle East.

Let's look at the U.S. Below are two charts showing how much income the Federal Reserve has contributed to the Federal government's overall receipts going back to 1950. (Beware. One chart relies on a regular axis, another a logarithmic axis. But they use the same data). The Fed's contribution has been steadily growing over time. In 2019, it sent about $53 billion to the Federal government.

You may be wondering how the Fed generated $53 billion in profit, or seigniorage, in 2019. Most of this income comes from issuing banknotes, or cash. For each $1 in banknotes that it issues to the public, the Fed holds an associated $1 of bonds in its vault. These bond have typically yielded 3-4% in interest. But the Fed only pays 0% interest to the owners of its banknotes. Which means that it gets to keep the entire 3-4% flow of bond interest for itself. It forwards this income to the Federal government at the end of the year.*

Seigniorage tends to grow over time. (But not always. Below I'll show how Sweden's seigniorage has been shrinking). The larger the quantity of banknotes that the public wants to own, the more interest-yielding bonds the Fed gets to hold, which means more seigniorage. In general, banknote demand increases with economic and population growth.

Interest rates are another big driver of seigniorage. If bond interest rates rise from 4% to 8%, the Fed earns more on the bonds it owns in its vault. Banknotes continue to yield 0% throughout, so the Fed keeps the entire windfall for itself (and ultimately for the Federal government).

By the way, a big driver of nominal interest rates is inflation. If inflation is expected to double, then bond owners will require twice the interest to compensate them for inflation risk. So inflation boosts seigniorage (because it boosts the interest rate that the Fed earns on the bonds in its vaults), and deflation hurts seigniorage (because it reduces interest rates). In the chart above, the one with the logarithmic axis, you can see how the Fed's seigniorage increased during the inflationary 1970s. It flatlined from the mid-1980s to the early early 2000s, which coincides with inflation subsiding.

US seigniorage is relatively small. In addition to enjoying revenues from the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Federal government also gets money from individual and corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement receipts, excise taxes, duties, and more. Below I've charted the relative sizes of these contributions.

As you can see, the Fed's contribution (the grey line) is a rounding error.

Below is a chart showing what percentage of total government revenue is derived from the Fed.

In 2019 the Fed contributed just 1.5% of total U.S. Federal government receipts. This contribution has hovered between 1% to 3% over the last four decades. So the meme that fiat money abetted the Iraq War, the expansion of the police state, or the U.S.'s military industrial complex is mostly hyperbole.

What about other developed nations?

The Bank of Canada provided $1.2 billion in earnings to the Canadian Federal government in 2018. But the Federal government took in $313 billion in revenues that year, which means that the Bank contributed a tiny 0.4% fraction of total revenues. The reason for the big gap between the Bank of Canada's tiny 0.4% contribution and the Fed's 1.5% contribution is the global popularity of the US$100 bill. Canadian cash doesn't enjoy a big foreign market.

I mentioned Sweden earlier. Below is a chart of seigniorage earned by the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank.

Sweden's central bank, @riksbanken, used to earn a handsome profit by issuing banknotes, ie seigniorage.

With cash usage wilting & interest rates hitting zero, seigniorage has collapsed. If these trends continue, issuing cash could become a financial burden for the Riksbank. pic.twitter.com/LCYOJ3q8dZ

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) August 28, 2019

Sweden is one of the only countries in the world where banknote ownership has been falling. This de-cashification is compounded by interest rates that have fallen close to 0%. Which means that the Riksbank's bond portfolio isn't earning as much as it used to. This combination has just decimated the Riksbank's seigniorage. In 2018 its seigniorage amounted to a paltry SEK 267 million (US$29 million). This is just 0.00003% of all Swedish central government receipts.

So in sum, central banks in places like the US, Canada, and Sweden are not a big source of government funding. If you want to stop governments from engaging in bad policies like the war on terror, the war on drugs, and foreign meddling, you've got to work within the system. Vote, send letters, go to protests. Sorry, but buying bitcoin or gold in the hope that it somehow defunds these activities by displacing the Fed is not a legitimate form of protest. It's a cop-out.

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P.S. By the way, I am not saying that control of the nation's money supply hasn't been used to finance wars in the past. Obviously it has. Greenbacks helped pay for the Union's war against the Confederates. Henry VIII paid for his wars by dramatically reducing the supply of silver in the English coinage.

*The Fed enjoyed a big spike in seigniorage after the 2008 credit crisis. This is because it issued a bunch of deposits to bank (known as reserves) via quantitative easing. The Fed only had to pay 0.25% interest on these reserves, but the bonds that backed them were earning 2-3%. This QE-related income has declined as the Fed has unwound QE (since reversed) and long-term interest rates have declined.

One country, two monetary systems

I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system.

Yemen uses the Yemeni rial as a unit of account. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Yemen still relies mostly on banknotes to make transactions, which are issued by the Central Bank of Yemen, or CBY.

One of the convenient features of banknotes is their fungibility. This means that one banknote is perfectly interchangeable with another. For a few months now, something strange has happened to Yemen's banknotes. Old rials and new rials have ceased to be fungible. Any rial note that was printed prior to 2016 is now worth around 10% more than newer rial notes.

More generally, the entire Yemeni monetary system has split on the basis of banknote age. From a Western perspective, it would be as if every single U.S. banknote issued with a Steve Mnuchin signature on it, the current Treasury Secretary, were worth 10% less than bills signed five years ago by his predecessor Jack Lew.

Conflicts are always complicated. What follows is a short but drastically simplified explanation of how Yemen's banknote problem began.

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In 2014, the northwestern part of Yemen was taken over by rebel Houthis. They also managed to capture the capital, Sana'a. Meanwhile, an internationally-recognized government occupies the south, the port city of Aden being its capital. Very few people live in eastern Yemen.

Source: Aljazeera

The Central Bank of Yemen has always been located in the capital, Sana'a. It tried to be a neutral party between the two warring sides. This sounds like it must have been a very awkward role to play.

For instance, before the war started the central bank was responsible for paying government salaries, including the army. When the war kicked off some soldiers supported the rebels in the north while others joined the internationally-recognized government in the south. According to Mansour Rageh & coauthors, this meant that the central bank was simultaneously paying the salaries of both sides of the conflict. That's touchy.

This balancing act eventually broke down in 2016 when the internationally-recognized government forced the central bank to move to Aden. Rageh et al explain how this happened. In short, the government convinced the international community to block the Sana'a branch's access to foreign reserves. It also prevented the branch from getting new banknotes printed.
 
So by late 2016 we've got two different branches of the central bank, one controlled by the rebels and the other by the internationally-recognized government. The latter controls most monetary functions.

With the stage set, we can now start to get into the meat of why old rial notes are worth more than new ones. After the Aden branch of the CBY had established itself in 2016, one of the first things it did was order a bunch of new banknotes to be printed up by Russian note printer Goznak. These arrived in Aden in early 2017. They looked like this:

Source: Banknote News

You can see that there are some differences between the new 1000 rial note and the old one, pictured below:

Source: Banknote News

The rebels were not happy with the new notes. It's easy to guess why. Fresh money could be used to pay government fighters, not rebel fighters. This "blood money" would then cheekily flow north via trade. Since anyone who holds a banknote is by definition funding the government that issues it with a no-interest loan, the rebel north was financing its own enemies. (The technical term for this sort of financing is seigniorage).

In 2017, the rebels began to limit the ability of northern civilians to use the newly issued banknotes. This mostly affected banks and other large businesses in the northern Yemen, which were now required to avoid dealing in the new notes. Anthony Biswell of the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies has a much weightier explanation of this transition. Do read his article if you want to learn more about this topic.

Anyways, on December 18, 2019 the rial spat crescendoed into a full out ban. The rebel government announced that everyone in the north had thirty days to turn over new notes at any of 300 agents located across the region. In return they would get an equivalent amount of old banknotes, if available, up to 100,000 rials per person. That's around US$170.

Anything above this 100,000 rial limit would have to be converted into a digital rials. These would be supplied by one of three privately provided electronic wallets. Unfortunately, Yemen has almost no digital payments infrastructure, so these balances wouldn't be of much use.

Thanks to the December 2019 ban, the price of old and new rial banknotes has completely diverged. Below is a chart from the World Bank.

Source: World Bank

We can surmise why a big gap has developed between the two types of notes. The stock of old pre-2016 banknotes is fixed. It can't grow. But the supply of new banknotes is not fixed. The Aden branch of the CBY can get Goznik to print as many notes as it wants. So the rare rials, the old ones, are worth more.

I'd expect Gresham's law to kick in, too. Gresham's law says that if a government stipulates that two payment instruments are to circulate at the same rate, but one is worth fundamentally more than the other, then the "bad" one drives out the "good". More specifically, the undervalued money will be hoarded (or exported), leaving only the overvalued one in circulation.

In Aden's case this is likely to translate into "bad" rials (the post-2016 ones) driving "good" rials (the pre-2016 notes) out of circulation. Since the Aden government treats both old and new banknotes as interchangeable, but old ones are worth more, the old ones will all be exported to the north.

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Where might all this lead? With the Sana'a branch having declared war on new notes, the Aden branch may do the opposite and try to hurt the old ones. This would involve orphaning all of its pre-2016 banknotes. That is to say, the Aden branch will demonetize them; cease accepting old notes as its liability or obligation.

But even if they were to be demonetized, orphaned rials would still circulate.

The topic of "orphaned" currency has popped up before on this blog. The Somalian central bank ceased to exist in 1991. Yet even though the Somali shilling now lacked a central bank sponsor, they continued to be used in Somalia as a medium of exchange, as recounted by Will Luther here.

A new Somali central bank has stated that it will re-adopt these old shillings and replace them with new currency. To date, this hasn't happened.

Along these same lines, even though Saddam Hussein disowned Iraqi dinars that had been printed in Switzerland, these so-called "Swiss Dinars" continued to circulate in northern Iraq. After Saddam was deposed by the Americans in 2003, the new central bank re-adopted all of the orphaned Swiss dinars.

If the Aden government is going to disown old Yemeni rials, I wouldn't expect them to remain orphaned for long. The Sana'a branch of the Central Bank of Yemen would quickly adopt them as their own obligation. At which point Yemen's unofficial two-currency system would become official. The Sana'a branch might even try to get its own version of the rial printed up. If so, it would have to rely on printers other than Goznak.

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Yemenis already face so many difficulties. The sudden emergence of a dual-currency regime only compounds their plight. Prices are a language. We become fluent in this language as we engage in our commercial habits of buying, selling, and appraising. The sudden rial split forces Yemenis to start "speaking" in two different price arrays (three if the U.S. dollar is included). It's terribly inconvenient.

There are also costs to renegotiating rial-denominated debts. If one Yemeni owes the other, are they to pay in old rials or new ones? Debtors will always prefer the debased currency, new rials, but creditors will ask for the stronger one, old rials. Somehow a decision will have to be made.

Finally, a dual currency regime means that Yemenis will be forced to convert from one type of currency to another to make payments. That means incurring fees, hassles, and waiting time.

In the west, we take fungibility for granted. To achieve monetary standardization, a big investment in technology and coordination is required. The fact that a dollar is worth the same in Los Angeles as it is in New York, or Vancouver as it is in Halifax, is worth celebrating.

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P.S. Yemen's old rials are really old. See image below. Dilapidated banknotes are a major problem. They make trade harder and allow for easier counterfeiting.

ولا شي لا تفتجعش، بياس ابو خمسين pic.twitter.com/ljMmZuTxjY

— فرانز عبدالستّار النمساوي (@DerOsterreicher) May 20, 2020

Starbucks, monetary superpower

I recently spent some time on Twitter discussing the monetary wonders of Starbucks. In this post I'll bring a bunch of tweets together into a single blog post.

I don't go to Starbucks very often, so I only recently learnt that the company has succeeded in getting many of its customers to stop using cash and debit/credit cards to buy coffee. Instead, they are using  Starbucks's own payments option:

Wow Starbucks, what a great gig.

Starbucks has ~$1.6 billion in 'stored value card liabilities' i.e. the Starbucks Card. So ~6% of the firm's liabilities are comprised of coffee addicts paying 0% for the privilege of lending to their supplier.
Source: https://t.co/nGH2arujYz pic.twitter.com/cGcSW3L4MM

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 11, 2019

Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities.

This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances  simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.

Starbucks isn't the only firm to get free lending from its customers. So does PayPal. That's right, customers who hold PayPal balances are effectively acting as PayPal's creditors. Customer loans to PayPal currently amount to over $20 billion. Like Starbucks, PayPal doesn't pay its customers a shred of interest. But Starbucks's gig is way better than PayPal's. PayPal is required to store customer's funds in a segregated account at a bank, or invest them in government bonds (see tweet below). So unfortunately for PayPal, it earns a paltry amount of interest on the funds that customers have lent it.

PayPal is a good example of a modern 'narrow bank'. Customers have deposited ~US$20 billion at PayPal. And PayPal invests these funds in very boring things listed below, like bank deposits, time deposits, government debt etc.

Source: https://t.co/snJel203QM pic.twitter.com/EDfMA2Wkux

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 21, 2019

Starbucks, on the other hand, doesn't have to keep customer funds in a low yielding segregated account or government bonds. Why is that? PayPal allows people to cash-out of PayPal dollars into regular dollars, so for regulatory purposes it must keep an adequate reserve on hand to facilitate redemptions. But the only way to cash out of Starbucks balances is to buy a coffee--a promise that Starbucks can always keep! And so Starbucks can immediately put its customer loans to work in higher-yielding opportunities like funding its operations and expansion.

In addition to borrowing from its customers, Starbucks also borrows from professional investors. Here's a list Starbucks's long-term debt:

Starbucks is paying an interest to bond and note-holders that ranges as low as 0.46% (on its yen notes maturing in 2024) to 4.5% (on its 2048 notes). You can see why borrowing from customers in the form of stored value card liabilities is the better option. By expanding its borrowing from its non-professional lenders and using the proceeds to cancel its debts to professional lenders, Starbucks can make an immediate profit.

But there's more. As I pointed out in the following tweet, don't forget breakage. Bond and note holders are pros. They don't forget about debts. But customers aren't so exact. They are sloppy, or busy, or forgetful, which means that many gift cards and balances will go unspent:

Few companies can get that much free financing. But don't forget breakage—balances that will never be redeemed. In 2018 Starbucks recorded breakage of $155 million,~10% of all card balances.

So the true rate at which customers are lending to Starbucks is probably closer to -10%. pic.twitter.com/hRaN7LGoEf

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 11, 2019

Each year Starbucks recognizes that a portion of its stored value liabilities will be permanently lost. This is known as breakage. Starbucks recognizes this amount as profit. In 2018 the company recognized $155 million in breakage, around 10% of all stored value balances. Wow! Starbucks already pays just 0% on its debts to customers, but add in breakage and that equates to a roughly -10% interest rate!

On Twitter, Wayne points out to me that I need to add back the impact of Starbucks rewards. App users receive stars on each purchase which can be saved up for free coffee. This functions as a form of implicit interest that Starbucks pays to its customers.

I earn about 50% equivalent interest per year on my Starbucks card. 2 Americanos per week earns me a free one about once every 3 months. Roughly $12 per year in free purchases. I keep between $10-$25 balance on the card. Earning $12/year on a $25 investment is a good return.

— Wayne Culbreth (@wayne_culbreth) August 11, 2019

That's a good point. But if were going to bring rewards into our calculation, then there are other non-pecuniary flows that need to be added in too. Keep in mind that each payment made through the Starbucks app is a payment that isn't made by credit card. Since each credit card payment will cost Starbucks 1-2% in interchange fees paid to the card networks and banks, the company saves a lot of money by guiding customers to its payments app. As for Wayne, while he may earn an implicit interest return in the form of Starbucks points, by forgoing a card payment he's giving up on the associated cash-back or airline points.

Another flow that needs to be accounted for is data. By capturing the customer's wallet, Starbucks is getting loads of free but valuable personal information that would otherwise be lost, or for which it would have to pay. Any customer who pays with cash forgoes rewards, but at least they get to retain their information. 

Adding all of this up, (0% interest + breakage - rewards + interchange savings + customer information), Starbucks's stored value liabilities are a terrific liability to have.

More generally, I think this calculation demonstrates how providing financial services to a retail customer base is a great business. Retail customers don't seem to be too fussy about the return they get. And they are busy and distracted and sloppy and forgetful. Take central banking, for instance, which serves a retail clientele. People are pretty happy to hold banknotes that pay 0%. But you never see businesses or professional investors hoarding banknotes. They quickly return the cash they take in during the course of the day to their bank so that they can harvest interest. Commercial banking is also a good example. Like Starbucks, banks are able to borrow from their retail customers at a measly rate approaching 0%. But professionals who lend to banks by purchasing their bonds require a much higher rate. To top it off, retail customers unnecessarily sign up for high-fee products and avoid changing banks when there is a cheaper option.  

Why doesn't every retail chain try get into this game? By borrowing as much as they can from the non-professional public, they'd steal plenty of profitable business from central banks and retail banks. Well they do. Gift cards are a big business. And if you think about it, retailers are perfect candidates for providing monetary services to the masses. Like banks, they already have a network of physical stores. But none of them have been successful at it as Starbucks. Walmart is much bigger than Starbucks, for instance, but it has just as many gift card balances outstanding:

Starbucks is really good at harvesting seigniorage.

Walmart's annual sales are 20x larger than Starbucks sales (~$500b vs $25b). But Walmart only has $1.9 billion in unredeemed gift card balances, not much more than Starbucks. Source: https://t.co/LBs6DE1cGq pic.twitter.com/wtJltMt26L

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 11, 2019

Perhaps Starbucks's success has to do with the regularity and homogeneity of Starbucks purchases? And so customers are willing to preload a dedicated account? I'm not sure.

In any case, there are probably a few Starbucks executives who'd love to grow the amount of negative yielding liabilities that the firm issues. Why stop at $1.6 billion in stored value liabilities? Why not grow the program to $5 billion, $10 billion, or $100 billion? It would be a terrific business line to get into.

The problem here is that Starbucks only sells coffee. Coffee is great, but the demand for dollars that are only useful for buying coffee will always be limited. To really grow the amount of stored value liabilities it issues, Starbucks would have to increase the usefulness of Starbucks dollars. One way to do this would be to open up the Starbucks app up to other stores. If consumers could also buy Big Macs with the balances on Starbucks App, this would increase the demand for Starbucks balances. To secure McDonald's cooperation, Starbucks would have to share the savings, breakage, and data. Maybe companies like Home Depot and Costco would join the Starbucks-McDonald's alliance. (And other chains, say Kroger and Burger King, might join the competing Walmart Pay alliance).

Sure, each of these companies could simply pursue their own independent stored-value liability programs. But wouldn't an alliance be better? From the customer's perspective, balances held in a single payments app that can be spent at Starbucks, McDonald's, Home Hardware, or Costco would be far more useful then dollars held in four separate and walled-off apps. And so collectively these stores should be able to get the public to hold more stored value card liabilities than they could individually. Which means more breakage, free loans, and data for everyone (and less for the banks, card networks, and central banks).

Who knows if it would be successful. And it might not even be possible from a regulatory perspective. But it would be tempting, no? In a world where most debtors have to pay interest, being  a debtor who earns interest is pretty hard to beat.

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*I believe that current portion of deferred revenue is equal to around $174 million. This comes courtesy of the current portion of an up front royalty payment from Nestlé. So the stored value card liability is actually closer to $1.46 billion. Still pretty high.