Where are the customers' rate increases?

U.S. banks are at it again. Inflation is at its highest level in decades. At the same time, interest rates on deposits at the Fed, Treasury bills, bonds and mortgages are rising rapidly to compensate. Yet banks are still in a holding pattern when it comes to the interest rates they pay to customers on savings accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), and interest-checking accounts.

Here's the chart, which uses FDIC data from FRED. Note how customer deposit rates (in red) have hardly budged, despite the Fed beginning to raise rates last summer. This same sluggishness also occurred in 2015, the last time the Fed began to hike rates. Banks didn't boost savings accounts rates till two years later, in 2017!

 

Historically, rates on CDs seem a little more responsive. But they're still sluggish. The average 6-month CD still only yields a scrawny 0.09%, whereas the yield on a 6-month Treasury bill is now at 1.4%.

This stickiness wouldn't be such a big deal if banks were also slow to reduce interest rates on customers' accounts – win some, lose some, right? But take a look at what happened when the Fed began to cut rates in mid-2019. Banks didn't hold off. They immediately started to pass lower rates on to their customers, and only became more aggressive when COVID hit in March 2020.

So for bank depositors, it's all lose. U.S. banks are slow to increase rates on checking accounts, CDs, and savings accounts, but quick to reduce them. I wrote about this sad lack of symmetry back in 2020. Do go back and read it.

This observation isn't something that economists have ignored. In a paper entitled "Sticky Deposits", Federal Reserve economists John Driscoll & Ruth Judson found that rates are "downwards-flexible and upwards-sticky." This stickiness has consequences for regular Americans. If rate stickiness didn't exist, the authors estimate that U.S. depositors would have received as much as $100 billion more in interest per year!

Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them

Chase Sunset & Vine, 2012. Painting by Alex Schaefer

There is a fundamental asymmetry to banking. Banks don't like to share higher interest rates with their customers who have checking and savings accounts. But they are quick to pass off lower interest rates to us.

This asymmetry is good for bank shareholders, but bad for customers.

To illustrate this asymmetry, I'll start by showing how banks modified interest rates on savings and checking accounts as the Federal Reserve, the U.S.'s central bank, went through a long period of hiking interest rates from 2015 to 2019.

The Federal Reserve's first rate increase (from 0.25% to 0.5%) was in December 2015. It increased rates once more in 2016 and three times in 2017. But the interest rate on the average U.S. savings account and interest checking account didn't start to rise till spring 2018, two and a half years after the Fed's first rate hike.

This irked me and I tweeted about it over a year ago:

Any day now, banks.

I understand why the rate that banks pay to savers is below the rate that the Fed pays banks (they need to cover costs). But I find it kind of shocking that banks don't match the pace of Fed rate increases. Shouldn't savings accounts by yielding ~1% by now? pic.twitter.com/ctK35xkvmc

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) May 17, 2019

If you're like me, you'd assume some sort of direct linkage between: 1) the interest rate that the Federal Reserve pays its customers (i.e. banks) and 2) the rate that these same banks pay their customers, you and me. Just like we have a checking account at a bank, banks maintain checking accounts at the Federal Reserve. They earn interest on balances held in those accounts. This rate is known as the Fed's interest rate on reserves, or IOR. As the Fed increases the interest rate that it pays on these checking accounts, the banks earn more from the Fed. But for some reason the banks are slow in passing these earnings on to the public.

Although the delay in pass-through irked me, I didn't take it too seriously, figuring it was due to some sort of institutional inertia. Banks are slow monolithic beasts. If they're slow to increase rates, at least they're slow to chop them, too, right? So on net, we customers aren't any worse off over the full economic cycle.
 
But if banks are slow to increase rates, is it indeed the case that they are also slow to reduce rates? Well, the results are in. The Fed began to cut rates in mid-2019, just around the time of my initial tweet. There were another few cuts in the latter half of 2019. Then COVID-19 hit in March, and the Fed rapidly ratcheted the rate it pay banks down from 1.6% to 0.1%. Banks went from earning around $38 billion in interest on their checking accounts at the Fed (in fiscal year 2018) to almost nothing.

If banks are generally lethargically about passing on rate changes to their customers, it should have taken them three or four years to reduce rates on savings and checking accounts back to where they had started. Nope. In just a month or two, the banks obliterated all the interest rate gains that customers with savings account had enjoyed since 2018:

Thanks for nothing, banks.

From 2016 to 2019, U.S. banks slowly passed on Fed rate increases to their customers. Look how fast they passed on Fed rate reductions in 2020! pic.twitter.com/jt8hHgvL7F

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) June 3, 2020

So no, banks aren't lethargic beasts that are universally slow to change interest rates enjoyed by savers. They seem to have a strategy of increasing rates slowly, and then reducing them rapidly. Assholes.

Note that the savings rate I am using is from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's website. FDIC takes the simple average of rates paid by all insured depository institutions and branches for which data are available.

By the way, this data probably doesn't represent the experience of the minority of financial sticklers who make an effort to locate high-interest rate savings accounts at online-only banks. JP Morgan's Goldman Sachs's Marcus currently offers 1.03%, much higher than the 0.10% that the Fed pays to Goldman JP Morgan. Ally offers 1.10%. But the average savings account holder doesn't bank at these institutions. They stick to Bank of America or Wells Fargo, which both offer a measly 0.01%.

This asymmetry is not a new phenomenon. In "Sticky Deposits", Federal Reserve economists John Driscoll & Ruth Judson found that rates are "downwards-flexible and upwards-sticky."

More specifically, the authors used proprietary data from 1997 to 2007 to show that interest rates on bank accounts and other retail deposits adjust about twice as frequently during periods of falling Fed interest rates as they do in rising ones. They estimate that this sluggish pass-through from rising Fed rates to customer rates costs American consumers around $100 billion per year!

My favorite chart from Driscoll & Judson is below:

Source: Judson & Driscoll

At left, we see the number of weeks it takes for banks to decrease the rate on interest checking accounts in response to a cut in the Fed's interest rate. At right we see the converse, how long it takes increase rates in response to higher Fed rates. Decreases tend to happen quickly (the purple bars in the left chart congregate closer to zero weeks) whereas increases are slow (the purple bars in the right chart congregate close to 100 weeks).

More specifically, during Fed easing cycles, checking deposit rates are updated on average every 22 weeks, but during tightening cycles it takes an average of 50 weeks.

So what explains this asymmetry? A lack of competition perhaps? If I had to guess, I'd say low financial education and dearth of customer attention. Banks can afford to be assholes because most customers either don't understand what is happening, or don't notice.

If the banks are taking advantage of their customers' ignorance and inattention to the tune of $100 billion per year, should something be done?

One option would be to provide a government savings option that 'corrects' for this asymmetry. Like digital savings bonds. Or maybe a government prepaid debit card with a built-in savings account. These cards would offer an interest rate that is linked to the Federal Reserve's interest rate, but only available to those below a certain income ceiling.

Or what about setting statutory minimum interest rates on savings accounts? In Brazil, for instance, banks are obligated to link the rate they pay on savings accounts to the central bank's interest rate:

In the US, interest rates on savings accounts are minuscule. This would be illegal in Brazil, where banks must set rates using a formula linked to SELIC, the central bank's policy rate: https://t.co/3bupDm4L8f

SELIC is 6.5%. Savings accounts must yield 70% of that, or 4.55%. pic.twitter.com/EPkkbROQvY

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) May 17, 2019

Or maybe it starts with education. As part of its new financial literacy drive, Ontario will teach children how to identify Canadian coins and bills and compare their values in Grade 1, saving and spending from Grade 4, how to budget starting in Grade 5, and financial planning starting in Grade 6. If the result is a more savvy population, banks may face more pressure to pass on higher interest rates.

Or maybe nothing. In which case one hopes that over time the combination of better financial technology, branchless banking, and competition from Silicon Valley will eventually result in better pass-through and more symmetry in interest rates.

Esperanto, money's interval of certainty, and how this applies to Facebook's Libra

Facebook recently announced a new cryptocurrency, Libra. I had earlier speculated about what a Facebook cryptocurrency might look like here for Breakermag.

I think this is great news. MasterCard, Visa, and the various national banking systems (many of which are oligopolies) need more competition. With a big player like Facebook entering the market, prices should fall and service improve, making consumers better off.

The most interesting thing to me about Facebook's move into payments is that rather than indexing Libras to an existing unit of account, the system will be based on an entirely new unit of account. When you owe your friend 5 Libras, or ≋5, that will be different from owing her $5 or ¥5 or £5.  Here is what the white paper has to say:

"As the value of Libra is effectively linked to a basket of fiat currencies, from the point of view of any specific currency, there will be fluctuations in the value of Libra."

So Libra will not just be a new way to pay, but also a new monetary measurement. Given how Facebook describes it in the brief quotation provided, the Libra unit will be similar to other unit of account baskets like the IMF's special drawing right (SDR), the Asian Monetary Unit (AMU), or the European Currency Unit (ECU), the predecessor to the euro. Each of these units is a "cocktail" of other currency units.

Facebook's decision to build its payments network on top of a new unit of account is very ambitious, perhaps overly so. When fintechs or banks introduce new media of exchange or payments systems, they invariably piggy back off of the existing national units of account. For instance, when PayPal debuted in 2001, it didn't set up a new unit called PayPalios. It used the dollar (and for the other nations in which is is active, it used the local unit of account). M-Pesa didn't set up a new unit of account called Pesas. It indexed M-Pesa to the Kenyan shilling.

I couldn't find a good explanation for why Facebook wants to take its own route. But I suspect it might have something to do with the goal of providing a universal monetary unit, one that allows Facebook users around the globe to avoid all the hassles of exchange fluctuations and conversions.

Global monetary harmony an old dream. In the mid 1800s, a bunch of economists, including William Stanley Jevons, tried to get the world to adopt the French 5-franc coin as a universal coinage standard. Jevons pointed out that the world already had international copyright, extradition, maritime codes of signals, postal conventions—so why not international money too? He wrote of the "immense good" that would arise when people could understand all "statements of accounts, prices, and statistics." It would no longer be necessary to employ a skilled class of foreign exchange specialists to take on the "perplexing" task of converting from one money to the other.

But the plan to introduce international money never worked out. (I wrote about this episode for Bullionstar).

Global money like Libra might seem like a great idea. But ultimately, I suspect that the decision to introduce a new unit of account will prevent Libra from ever reaching its full potential. Units of account are a bit like languages. If you are an English speakers, not only do you communicate to everyone around you in English, but you also think in English. Likewise with the dollar or yen or pound or euro. If you live in France, you're used to describing prices and values to friends and family in euros. You also plan and conceptualize in terms of them.

It's hard to get people to voluntarily switch to another language or unit of account once they are locked into it. For instance, in the 1800s L.L. Zamenhof attempted to get the world to adopt Esperanto as a language in order to promote communication across borders. To help facilitate adoption, Zamenhof designed it to be easy to learn. But while around 2 million speak Esperanto, it never succeeded in becoming a real linguistic standard. The core problem is this: Why bother learning a new language, even an easy one, if everyone is using the existing language? 

Facebook's Libra project reminds me of Zamenhof's Esperanto project. Nigerians already talk and compute in naira, Canadians in dollars, Indonesians in rupiahs, and Russians in rubles. Why would any of us want to invest time and effort in learning a second language of prices?

Let me put it more concretely. I do most of my families grocery shopping. Which means I keep track of an evolving array of maybe 30 or 40 food prices in my head. When something is cheap relative to my memory of it, I will buy it—sometimes multiple versions of it. And when it is expensive, I avoid it. But this array is entirely made up of Canadian dollar prices. I don't want to have to re-memorize that full array of prices in Libra terms, or keep two arrays of prices in my head, a dollar one and a Libra one. I'm already fluent in the Canadian dollar ones.

Nor will retailers like Amazon or the local corner store relish the prospect of having to advertise prices in both the local unit of account and Libra, plus whatever unit Google and Netflix choose to impose on us. 

So Facebook is inflicting an inconvenience on its users by forcing us to adopt a new unit of account. To make for a better user experience, it should probably index the Libra payments network to the units of account that we're all used to. 

If not, here is what is likely to happen. We'll all continue to think and communicate in terms of local currency. But at the last-minute we will have to make a foreign exchange calculation in order to determine out how much of our Libra to pay at the check-out counter. To do this calculation, we'll have to use that moment's Libra-to-local currency exchange rate. This is already how bitcoin transactions occur, for instance.

But this means that Libra users will lose one of the greatest services provided by money: money's interval of certainty. This is one of society's best free lunches around. It emerges from a combination of two fact. First, most of us don't live in a Libra world in which we must make some sort of last-minute foreign exchange calculation before paying. Rather, we live in a world in which the instruments we hold in our wallet are indexed to the same unit of account in which shops set prices.

Monetary economists call this a wedding of the medium-of-exchange and unit-of-account functions of money. This fusion is really quite convenient. It means that we don't have to make constant foreign exchange conversions every time we pay for something. A bill with a dollar on it is equal to the dollars emblazoned on sticker prices.

Secondly, shops generally choose to keep sticker prices fixed for long periods of time. Even with the growth of Amazon and other online retailers, Alberto Cavallo (who co-founded the Billion Prices Project) finds that the average price in the U.S. has a duration of around 3.65 months between 2014-2017. So for example, an IKEA chair that is priced at $15 will probably have this same price for around 3.65 months. This is down from 6.48 month between 2008-10. But 3.65 months is still a pretty long time.

Prices are getting less sticky thanks to online shopping: https://t.co/AVikQrJjJ6

A price change endured for 7 months back in 2008. It now lasts just 3.7 months. This effect is particularly strong in sectors where Amazon has high market share i.e. electronics & household goods. pic.twitter.com/ncAYkagA0b

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) June 25, 2019

Why do businesses provide sticky pricing? In the early 1990s Alan Blinder asked businesses this very question. He found that the most common reason was the desire to avoid "antagonizing" customers or "causing them difficulties." Blinder's findings were similar to Arthur Okun's earlier explanation for sticky prices whereby business owners maintain an implicit contract, or invisible handshake, with customers. If buyers view a price increase as being unfair, they might take revenge on the retailer by looking for alternatives. (I explore these ideas more here).

Anyways, the combination of these two factors—sticky prices and a wedding of the unit of account and medium of exchange—provides all of us with an interval of certainty (or what I once called money's 'home advantage'). We know exactly how many items we can buy for the next few weeks or months using the banknotes in our wallet or funds in our account. And so we can make very precise spending plans. In an uncertain world, this sort of clarity is quite special.

Given Libra's current design, the interval of certainty disappears. Store keepers will still keep prices sticky in terms of the local unit of account, but Libra users do not benefit from this stickiness because Libras aren't indexed to the same unit as sticker prices are. Anyone who has ≋100 in their account won't know whether they can afford to buy a given item two weeks from now. But if they hold $100, they'll still have that certainty, since dollar prices are still sticky.

If money's interval of certainty is important, it is particularly important to the poor. The rich have plenty of savings that they can rely on to ride out price fluctuations. The fewer resources that a family has, the more it must carefully map out the next few day's of spending.  The combination of sticky prices and a wedding of the unit-of-account and medium-of-exchange affords a vital planning window to those who are just barely getting by.

This clashes with one of Libra's founding principles: to help the world's 1.7 billion unbanked. Here is David Marcus, Libra's project lead:

3/ Because it's time for the internet to have a protocol for money, and it's time to try something new for the 1.7 billion people who are still unbanked 30 years after the invention of the web.

— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) June 18, 2019

Most of the world's unbanked people are poor. But Libra won't be doing the poor much of a favor by choosing to void the interval of certainty that they rely on. If Facebook and David Marcus truly wants to help the unbanked, it seems to me that it would better to index Libras to the various local units of account.

I suppose there is an argument to be made that Libras could provide poor people in nations with bad currencies a haven of sorts. Better Libras than Venezuelan bolivars, right? But the nations with the world's largest unbanked populations—places like India, Nigeria, Mexico, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia—all have single digit inflation, or close to it. Extremely high inflation is really just a problem in a few outliers, like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Besides, providing those who endure high inflation with a better unit of account isn't the only way to help them. Offering locally-denominated Libras that offer a compensating high rate of interest would probably be more useful. Not only would these types of Libra offer inflation protection, but they would preserve the interval of certainty.

Thankfully, I suspect that Libra is very much a work-in-progress. The current whitepaper seems to give only a hint of what the project might become. If so, one of the changes I suspect Facebook will have to make if it wants to get traction is to link the Libra network to already-existing units of account. A new unit of account is just too Utopian.

The dematerialization of cash

"One dollar bill," watercolour by Adam Lister (source)

R3, a company specializing in distributed ledger technology, has just posted a paper I wrote for them entitled Fedcoin: A Central Bank-issued Cryptocurrency. And here is a nice write-up on the Fedcoin idea in American Banker, which unfortunately is behind their paywall.

The paper is pretty wide-ranging, but one thing that's worth focusing on is the ability of Fedcoin to provide some of the same features as banknotes, in particular anonymity and censorship resistance. That a Fedcoin system can be designed to provide the same degree of privacy as cash runs counter to some of its early critics, who see in Fedcoin a coming financial panopticon.

One really neat things about good ol' cash is that, like bitcoin, it is a decentralized network. The opposite of this is a centralized network, say something like the deposit banking system. In the banking system, storage of value is handled by the issuing bank through accounts hosted on the bank's database. Conversely, in a banknote system, the issuing central bank offloads the task of storing value onto us. We the public—think of us as nodes in a decentralized network—are responsible for choosing how and where to keep our cash, say in a wallet, or under our bed, or in a safety deposit box, as well as bearing those storage costs. The central bank doesn't care how we manage this task, though they'd prefer that we don't mangle the notes too much.

Or take the process of securely transferring value. Centralized actors like banks handle all the stages of moving deposits from a buyer to a seller, including verifying identities, ensuring adequate account balances, updating ledger entries etc. But in a transfer of banknotes, the transaction process is entirely devolved to the buyer and seller, who must physically move the cash to the right location, count out by hand the necessary quantity of banknotes, and then come to a consensus that the transaction has been settled. As for the central bank's ledger of notes, there is nothing that needs updating. Unlike private bankers, central bankers don't care who owns their circulating liabilities.

The task of screening for counterfeit notes is also outsourced to the public. Each time a shopper accepts a banknote, say as change, they'll give it a once-over to verify that it hasn't been run off by a teenager using an inkjet printer. Retailers deal in cash all day and are familiar with banknote anti-counterfeiting devices, and thus can exercise more judgement in checking for fakes. And banks, the recipient of notes from retailers at the end of the day, will catch many of the counterfeits that have slipped through the system.

Banknote systems aren't entirely decentralized, of course. The central bank has the final say on whether a note is counterfeit or not. It also regulates the purchasing power of those banknotes, either by toggling interest rates higher or lower, repurchasing money using its portfolio of assets, or issuing more money in return for assets.

Because they are at least partly decentralized, banknote systems inherit two nice features: anonymity and censorship resistance. The first feature is self-explanatory: the central issuer makes no effort to determine the identity of a banknote owner. Proceeding from this, the issuer lacks enough information to censor, or prevent any particular party, from using the banknote network. These are completely open systems. By contrast, centralized systems like banks can easily censor members of the public from making payments. Take the Huntingdon Live Sciences episode in 2001, for instance, in which a UK-based company involved in drug-testing was cut off by British banks in response to pressure from animal rights activists. Other examples of censorship by banks include the blockade of Wikileaks and the monetary embargo of Iran.

Now in theory a banknote system could be modified by introducing more centralization, thus removing anonymity and introducing censorship. Each banknote has a unique serial number. The central bank could set a rule that for every cash transaction, the buyer and seller are obligated to log in to a government-provided account where they register the note's serial number into a tracking database. To get these accounts, users would be required to submit documents and ID. This would destroy the anonymity of cash users and open the door for censorship. In practice, though, the guardians of banknote systems have chosen to preserve anonymity by ignoring serial numbers.

One of the major trends over the last decades has been dematerialization, the replacement of paper by bits and bytes as a medium for holding data. This saves on costs like printing, storage, and distribution; improves speed; and reduces waste. We saw it with stock & bond certificates a few decades ago, books, newspapers, music, record keeping, bills. And one day we may see it with cash. The question is: how to allow for the dematerialization of cash without losing its useful features like anonymity and censorship resistance?.

Bitcoin is one answer. But Bitcoin only goes half-way to solving the problem since it does not recreate one of cash's other key features, its stability. A nation's prices are conveniently denominated in terms of its paper money (i.e. U.S. retailers set prices in dollars, Japanese retailers in yen), and since prices tend to stay sticky for 4.3 months or so on average, the public has a huge degree of certainty over the medium-term purchasing power of the money in their wallets. This is a very nice feature. Bitcoin prices? Not so stable.

Fedcoin may be able to recreate this stability while still providing anonymity and censorship resistance. A government copies the source code of a proven cryptocoin (maybe bitcoin, maybe zcash, maybe ethereum), boots the system up, and promises to peg the price of each coin to its existing banknotes, say 1 coin = $1 banknote.

As with bitcoins, anyone would be able to hold Fedcoins without the necessity of providing identification. And like Bitcoin, Fedcoin could be designed in such a way that a distributed collection of Fedcoin nodes (or miners) validate transactions by referring to the system's shared history. Remember how the Fed allows banknote users to anonymously come to a consensus about the validity of a banknote transactions i.e. they do not have to log in to an account to register note serial numbers? Likewise, Fedcoin could be designed in a way that nodes have the ability to remain anonymous. This would preserve a degree of censorship resistance and openness. After all, if validators must unveil themselves, governments and other powerful actors might compel those nodes to censor transactions.

This is just one way of setting up anonymous central bank money. I'm sure there are many others. There are also ways to set up non-anonymous central bank money, but these are less interesting to me, a point I made here. As I point out in the R3 paper, I think my preferred set-up would be to allow individuals a rationed amount of anonymity, targeting some sort of “sweet spot” such that there is enough anonymity-providing exchange media for regular consumers but not enough for criminals. But I can't wrap my head around how to design something like this. Anyways, go read the paper, there's plenty more.

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PS: I also recently had an article on bitcoin published in the Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis.

And since we're on the theme, I should link to some other public appearances by yours truly, including recent-ish podcasts with David Beckworth and Alex Millar.

A modern example of Gresham's Law

Sir Thomas Gresham

Anyone who makes an effort to study monetary economics quickly encounters the concept of Gresham's law, or the idea that bad money can often chase out good. Gresham's law is usually used to explain the failures of bygone monetary systems like bimetallic and coin standards. But the phenomenon isn't confined to ancient times. I'd argue that a modern incarnation of Gresham's law is occurring right now in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe's stock market has blown away all other stock markets by rising 30% in the last month-and-a-half. The chart below compares the Zimbabwe Industrial index to the U.S. S&P 500, both of which are denominated in U.S. dollars. I'd argue that the extraordinary performance of Zimbabwean stock is an instance of Gresham's law. With the imminent arrival of newly printed Zimbabwean paper money, known as bond notes, "bad" paper money is poised to chase out "good" money, stocks being one of the few places where Zimbabweans can protect their savings.

What follows is a quick summary of bond notes (alternatively, read my two earlier posts). The Mugabe government, which began discussing the idea of a new paper currency earlier this year, says that it will issue low denomination bond notes into circulation before the end of the November. Recall that Zimbabwe has been using U.S. dollars since 2008 after a brutal hyperinflation destroyed the value of the local currency. The regime claims that a $1 bond note will be worth the same as a regular $1 Federal Reserve note. It says it has received a U.S. dollar line of credit from the African Export-Import Bank that will guarantee the peg.

Enter Gresham's law, which says that if two different media circulate, and the government dictates that citizens are to accept the two instruments at a fixed ratio—say via legal tender laws—then the undervalued medium will disappear leaving only the overvalued one to circulate. So called bad money drives out good.

Medieval coinage systems were often crippled by Gresham's law. For instance, say a new debased silver penny was introduced into circulation along with existing pennies. Because it contained a smaller amount of silver, the new penny was worth less than the old. However, legal tender laws required that all pennies be accepted without discrimination in the settlement of debts. Medieval debtors would thus always prefer to discharge debts with new pennies rather than old ones since they would be giving up less silver. The result was that only "bad money," or debased coinage, circulated. Because "good money," or undebased coinage, was undervalued, people either hoarded it, sent it overseas, exchanged it on the black market at its true value, or melted it down.

The same conditions that created Gresham effects in medieval times are emerging in modern day Zimbabwe. Rather than two different medieval coins, we've got two different types of dollars; bond notes and regular U.S. cash. The next ingredient for Gresham's law is a decree that dictates the rate at which people are to accept the two instruments. In Zimbabwe's case, the government has already declared that bond notes (once they appear) are to be legal tender along with U.S. Federal Reserve notes, which means that Zimbabwean creditors will have to accept bond notes at par as a means of discharging all debts, even if they'd prefer the genuine thing.

Since a chequing deposit is a debt incurred by a bank to a depositor, this means that Zimbabwean banks can—in theory at least—meet depositors' demands for redemption by providing bond notes. So a Zimbabwean bank deposit is no longer just a claim on actual dollars, but a claim on some mysterious as-yet unissued Zimbabwean government liability.

The last ingredient for Gresham's law is an overvaluation of one of the two media. In Zimbabwe, this will most likely occur as the market value of bond notes falls below that of genuine U.S. dollars. While many countries maintain successful currency pegs to the U.S. dollar, they have the resources to do so. I'm skeptical that the isolated and corrupt Mugabe regime has the resources to pull a peg off.

Bond notes have yet to be issued, but because existing bank deposits—or electronic dollars—are likely to be payable in this new paper currency, we can think of deposits as a surrogate for the bond note. The first bit of evidence that Zimbabwe has run into Gresham's law is that physical U.S. dollars are beginning to disappear from circulation, replaced entirely by electronic dollars. Why might this be happening? Start with the assumption that Zimbabwean bank deposits have become "bad," meaning they are worth less than actual physical dollars. If a Zimbabwean citizen needs to buy $100 in groceries, and the grocer is required by law to accept deposits and cash at the same rate, our citizen will naturally spend only overvalued deposits and hoard "good" and undervalued cash.

In fact, we have direct evidence that deposits have become "bad". In the black market, dealers will only sell physical cash at a premium. I've seen anywhere from 5% to 20% mentioned.

More evidence is provided from the stock market. The shares of Old Mutual, a global financial company, trade on both the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE) and the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Because investors have the ability to deregister their shares from one exchange and transfer them for re-registration on the other, arbitrage should keep the prices of each listing in line. After all, if the price in London is too high, then investors need only buy the shares in Zimbabwe, transfer them to London, sell, and repurchase in Zimbabwe, earning risk-free profits. If the price in Zimbabwe is too high, just do the reverse

Oddly, Old Mutual trades in London for around $2.30 per share (after converting into US dollars) whereas it is valued at $3.20 in Zimbabwe. Here's the article that first tipped me off to this. As the chart below shows, this rather large gap has progressively emerged as the introduction of bond notes becomes more likely. Why is no one arbitraging the difference by purchasing Old Mutual in London for $2.30, then transferring it to Zimbabwe to be sold for $3.20? The large discrepancy likely reflects the growing risk that any dollar sent to Zimbabwe is likely to be trapped and re-denominated into a bond note.

The ratio of the two Old Mutual listings implies that the exchange rate between genuine U.S. dollars and dollars held in Zimbabwe is around 0.72:1, i.e. one Zimbabwean U.S. dollar deposit is only worth 72 cents in genuine U.S. dollars. While transaction costs and other frictions may explain part of the gap, this is still an incredibly wide discount.

Those with long memories will remember that during Zimbabwe's last hyperinflation, the cross-rate between Old Mutual listings was a popular way to measure the true exchange rate between the hyperinflating Zimbabwe dollar and the U.S. dollar. The official rate maintained by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was not the true rate as it dramatically overvalued the Zimbabwe dollar. In the chart below of the hyperinflation, pinched from a paper by Steve Hanke, the Old Mutual Implied Rate—or OMIR—appears along with the black market rate for U.S. dollars. (I once discussed the OMIR here. The same trick was used in Venezuela using ADRs.)

From Hanke and Kwok

Once all the ingredients for Gresham's law are in place, inflation is never far behind. Because U.S. dollars are being undervalued, Zimbabweans will refuse to buy stuff with anything other than overvalued deposits. If they don't update their sticker prices, retailers will soon discover that they are receiving fewer real dollars than before. To maintain the real value of their revenues, they will have to mark up their prices, thus compensating for the fact that only "bad" money is flowing into their tills.

While retail prices are usually sticky, financial prices are not. And that may be why we've seen such a huge jump in Zimbabwean stock prices but little movement in Zimbabwean consumer price inflation. With Gresham's law beginning to push good money out of circulation, nimble owners of Zimbabwean shares are demanding a higher share price from potential share buyers in order to compensate for the risk of holding soon-to-be issued bond notes. Less nimble retailers have yet to demand this same compensation from their customers. Don't expect this to last; consumer price inflation can't be too far behind asset price inflation.

Does money enjoy a home advantage?

Do citizens benefit by owning money that is pegged to the nation's own unit of account rather than a foreign unit of account?

Let's start by imagining a money that is not pegged to the national unit of account. Say that U.S. banking giant Wells Fargo establishes branches all over Canada. Instead of issuing chequing accounts that are pegged to the Canadian dollar, it decides that it will steal business from Canadian banks by issuing U.S. dollar-pegged chequing accounts to Canadians. Wells Fargo execs reason that the U.S. dollar is at least as stable as Canadian dollars, if not more so, and this could give their product an edge.

Further imagine that Wells Fargo is able to ensure that its U.S.-denominated money is just as liquid as that of competing Canadian money. Say that Canada's national ATM network is modified to dispense U.S. dollars to Wells Fargo cardholders. Retailers are convinced to accept U.S. dollar electronic payments, and so is Revenue Canada, the national tax authority. The upshot is that within Canadian borders, a U.S. dollar can do anything that a Canadian dollars can. Any Canadian in need of liquidity will be entirely indifferent between regular C$ deposits and Wells Fargo US$ deposits.

Let's also assume that shifting funds between U.S. and Canadian dollars is free, so Canadians who are paid in one unit have no compunctions about exchanging into the other. Apps and other technologies remove all inconveniences of calculating exchange rates. Finally, Wells Fargo's U.S. dollars are FDIC-insured and its Canadian branches have access to the Fed's discount window, making them just as safe as Canadian dollars.

This leaves just one difference between the two types of money; Canadian dollars are the unit of account. This means that retailers set prices in Canadian dollars, not U.S. dollars. Will this feature have any influence on whether Canadian consumers choose to open an account with Wells Fargo or stay with their existing bank?

Consumer prices are peculiar because, unlike asset prices, they stay constant for long spells of time. When examining the frequency of price changes for 350 categories of goods and services, Bils and Klenow found that prices tend to stay fixed for 4.3 months before they are updated.  Coin-operated laundry prices exhibited price spells of 79.9 months, driver's license fees 56.3 months, and newspapers 29.9 months (see below). On the short end of the spectrum, the price spell for gas is just 0.6 months, eggs 1 month, and women's suits 1.6 months.

Source: Bils & Klenow

One reason for this stickiness is that retailers are said to have made an "invisible handshake" with consumers that requires them to avoid raising prices when demand suddenly increases. Retailers bind themselves to this implicit contract because they do not want their loyal customers to view them as being unfair, spitefully bolting to the competition when prices are adjusted. Customers may prefer stable nominal prices because these allow them to carefully match their daily and weekly spending plans with the money currently available in their accounts. Put differently, if you've got $100 in your account, and the set of retailers at which you shop have promised not to budge on pricing for a few weeks, you can determine ahead of time what bundles of goods you can afford. Without the sticky price "handshake," you're in the dark.

So money that is denominated in the unit of account comes with a major ancillary benefit. In Canada's case, the nation's retailers have agreed to offer Canadian dollar owners a convenient planning mechanism, much like a day planner or personal organizer. This mechanism provides anyone who owns Canadian dollars around 4.3 months of  uncertainty alleviation within national borders.

Whereas Canadian sticker prices are characterized by long price spells, the U.S. dollar prices faced by Wells Fargo's Canadian customers will fluctuate by the second. To see why, consider that when a customer wants to pay in U.S. dollars, they will have to indicate their preference at the checkout counter. The retailer inputs the Canadian dollar sticker price of the good, multiplies it by the USD/CAD exchange rate, and arrives at the U.S. dollar price. The foreign exchange market is a 24 hour "flex-priced" market, so the exchange rate--and thus the U.S. dollar sticker price of goods--will always be fluctuating.

Wells Fargo money will therefore not be able to provide the same set of uncertainty-minimizing features that Canadian money provides. Anyone who holds, say, $100 U.S. dollars in their account cannot know ahead of time how much stuff they'll be able to buy over the ensuing three or four days. An equivalent C$100 provides near certainty. Lacking this nice property, Wells Fargo money faces significant headwinds at the outset.

This explains a point I was trying to make in my previous post on bitcoin. Bitcoin's battle to gain general acceptance will be a harder one to win than Wells Fargo's in Canada because the price of bitcoin is so much more volatile than U.S. dollars. Even if bitcoin's price eventually stabilizes so that it is just about as volatile as the U.S. dollar, it must still overcome the same unit-of-account hurdle as Wells Fargo i.e. neither can mimic the 'day planner' properties of the Canadian dollar. I don't think is an easy problem to overcome.

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PS: Another complicating factor is product returns. If someone doesn't like the t-shirt they bought, and they paid in bitcoin, refunds are usually issued in U.S. dollars at the bitcoin-to-dollar conversion rates in play at the time of the transaction. So it's possible to make or lose bitcoin on refunds. For bitcoin owners, this adds an extra degree of uncertainty. Pay in dollars and you can be certain you'll get the exact same nominal amount back if the product is unsatisfactory. Pay in bitcoin and who knows what the amount of bitcoin you'll be refunded.

In praise of anonymous money

A while back I was paying for gas at a nearby gas station when the clerk fumbled my credit card. When he bent down to pick it up he momentarily disappeared behind the counter. Because credit card transactions are always such repetitive affairs, this slight break from routine raised my hackles. Might the clerk have done something with my card while out of sight, perhaps taken a quick photo of it?

Credit and debit payments require the relay of personal information. But this information-richness is also their weakness, since valuable data can be "skimmed" and used to attack the payer later on. That's why an anonymous payments medium is so important; it provides buyers with a shield from everyone else involved in a transaction. The next time I payed for gas at the nearby station, I bought myself some peace of mind by handing the clerk a few $20 notes instead.

Like banknotes, bitcoin is a (near) anonymous payments medium. My gas station doesn't accept bitcoin, however, nor would I be able to pay for a tank of gas with bitcoin since I'm wary of holding more than a few dollars of the volatile stuff. There is no inherent reason that an anonymous digital money must be volatile. David Chaum's eCash, first proposed in the 1990s, was a monetary product that, unlike bitcoin, offered stability while still allowing for anonymity.

Here's a broad-brush description of how eCash worked. A customer would kick the process off by creating $x worth of digital coins, each with a unique serial number. The bank would in turn sign the coins and debit the customer's bank account for that amount. Thanks to Chaum's invention of blind signatures, the bank would not be able to see the serial numbers of the coins it had signed, and thus could not match those coins to a specific person. This 'blinding' provided a measure of anonymity.

What about the double spending problem that bedevils digital cash? Because digital coins can be copied ad infinitum, a mechanism must be introduced to prevent a dishonest actor from buying up the entire world. Chaum solved this by having the bank rig up a database of already-spent coins. When the customer spent $x at a merchant, the merchant would call up the bank and provide it with each coin's unique serial number. The bank would check the number against its database to ensure that the coins had not been spent. If they hadn't, the transaction was free to proceed. The merchant in turn had to return the $x to the bank to be redeemed.

Bitcoin's creator(s) Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't seem to have been a fan of Chaum's eCash. In his famous white paper, Nakamoto says (not referring to eCash in particular) that the "problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank." Later on in a forum post Nakamoto talks about the "old Chaumian central mint stuff," noting that:

a lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990s. I hope it's obvious that it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we're trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.

Nakamoto thus designed Bitcoin so that it had no central points of control. There is no third party database to record serial numbers; instead, the task of validating transactions is outsourced to a distributed network of anonymous miners and nodes. As for the money supply, there is no "Chaumian central mint" that issues and redeems tokens; rather, the evolution of bitcoin supply is set ahead of time by the Bitcoin protocol.

By sacrificing this last central point of control, Nakamoto condemned bitcoin to being a permanently volatile instrument. Unlike eCash, which is stable because the issuing bank pegs its price to that of bank deposits at a 1:1 rate, bitcoin's purchasing power is left entirely to the whims of market demand. Should market demand suddenly rise, bitcoin can double in price. Should it collapse, bitcoin will be worth $0.  

Sacrificing the Chaumian issuer/redeemer leads to another, more nuanced, trade-off. Because bitcoin is not pegged to the dollar, retail prices will always be expressed in dollars with the bitcoin equivalent bobbing up and down every few seconds or so. Put differently, bitcoin users must get accustomed to the unit of account and medium of exchange being divorced from each other.

Contrast this to eCash. Thanks to the peg, the two functions of money—unit of account and medium of exchange—are married. Anyone who owns eCash can relax knowing that they possess the same exact unit that all other economic actors are using to express prices. This provides eCash users with a degree of certainty. As a service to their customers, retailers tend to keep prices sticky in terms of the unit of account for days, even months. So if carrots are going for $2 today, an eCash owner knows that they'll be going for that same amount next week. This fixity makes planning one's life a much easier affair. Those who own bitcoins enjoy no such certainty. Carrots that cost 0.005 bitcoins today may cost 0.01 next week.

So these two monetary products provide users with a degree of anonymity while asking them to make very different sacrifices. Bitcoin foregoes both stability and the convenient marriage of unit of account and medium of exchange. Chaum's eCash retains both stability and a marriage but introduces several central points of control that might render it subject to attack. Pick your poison. My gut feeling, however, is that over the long term, the public will prefer to stomach some degree of centralization in return for a stable anonymity product that doesn't suffer from medium of exchange/unit of account divergence. But I could be wrong.

Arbitraging the 49th parallel

Thanks to a floating exchange rate and one of the longest undefended frontiers in the world, the U.S.-Canada border is the thoroughfare for what may be one of the world's most popular ongoing consumer arbitrages.

Canada and the U.S. interlist all sorts of goods, services and financial assets. We both sell McDonald's hamburgers, we both offer tickets to NHL games, and we both list Valeant Pharmaceutical shares. The relative price of Valeant shares, which trade in New York and Toronto, will rapidly adjust to any change in the exchange rate. If not, then upon an appreciation of the U.S. dollar an investor will be able sell Valeant short in New York at an artificially high price, buy Canadian dollars with the proceeds, and acquire shares in Toronto on the cheap, using those shares to cover the short position in New York at a profit. Exploitation of this opportunity will realign Valeant's New York and Toronto share price until the window closes, thus cannibalizing the potential for arbitrage gains. This process takes seconds.

Financial prices are set "immorally." In the moral economy of Main Street, goods and services prices stay fixed for long periods of time. At time = 0, say that Big Macs and hockey tickets have the same real price in the U.S. and Canada so that people have no reason to prefer shopping in one country or the other. The moment that the Canadian dollar appreciates, a consumer arbitrage window opens that allows Canadians a chance to boost their welfare. Since sticker prices in the U.S. don't change, Canadians can now cross the border and buy more Big Macs and hockey tickets than they could if they had stayed parked in Canada. So much for the law of one price. This window will stay open for quite some time. Bils and Klenow (pdf), for instance, report that lunch menu prices in the U.S. only change once every 10.6 months while sporting event admission prices only adjust once every 3.9 months. (That's almost eleven months of free lunches.)

The chart below, which uses data from the Canadian Border Services Agency, illustrates how North American migration patterns fluctuate as the arbitrage window switches in favor of either the U.S. or Canada.

As the chart shows, the difference between Canadians visiting the U.S. and Americans visiting Canada (the green dotted line) is correlated to movements in the exchange rate. A weak loonie in the early 1980s and 1992-2002 encouraged more Americans to visit Canada while decimating the hoards of snowbirds headed south. The strong Canadian dollar from 1986-1992 and 2002-2011 did the opposite, stifling American visits while inspiring Canadian exits. The loonie's plunge over the last twelve months, aggravated by the collapse in crude oil prices, has finally begun to bring increasing amounts of Americans over the border for the first time in over a decade.

Going forward, expect to see more stories like this ("explosive growth" in Alberta ski hill bookings for this winter), this (Montreal sees best tourism season in years), this (Thunder Bay's tourism picks up) and this (bad news for Buffalo's airport).

Or course, you can't get something for nothing forever. Prices are rationing devices. When a good's price is fixed at an artificially low level then costly lineups will develop, substituting for price signals as a rationing device. The sudden undervaluation of goods & services on either side of the 49th parallel as the exchange rate fluctuates should give rise to congestion at the border, modulating the size of the consumer arbitrage window.

By the way, the chart above illustrates one of the advantages of having a floating exchange rate. Without a collapse in the loonie, price ratios between the U.S. and Canada would have remained much more rigid over the last twelve months, preventing the emergence of a consumer arbitrage opportunity in favour of American consumers. Canadian aggregate demand, already depressed by weakness in the energy sector, wouldn't be benefiting from an influx of American shoppers and returning Canadians. Unemployed oil workers in Fort McMurray wouldn't be getting the opportunity to find work on Banff's booming ski hills.

Are prices getting less sticky?

Sticky prices illustrated, from Eichenbaum, Jaimovich, and Rebelo (link)

What makes ride sharing firm Uber interesting is not just its use of new technology to mobilize unused car space, but the method it uses to price its services. Uber's surge pricing algorithm varies cab fares dynamically. To get from A to B, the car that you hired this morning for $10 could end up costing $100 this afternoon.

How unlike the traditional taxi fare it is displacing! In their 2004 paper on sticky prices, economists Bils and Klenow found that taxi fares tended to remain at the same level for 19.7 months before being adjusted. Getting from A to B pretty much costs you the same price day-in-day-out for almost two years.

In our internet age, are prices getting less sticky? 

At first glance no. Alberto Cavallo, who along with Roberto Rigobon created the Billion Prices Index (the bane of all inflationistas), has analyzed scraped data from the websites of retailers who continue to sell mostly through bricks & mortar stores, say like Walmart. Cavallo finds that U.S. online prices stay fixed for 42 days, about the same as offline prices.

On the other hand, Gorodnichenko, Sheremiro, and Talavera find that online prices exhibit more flexibility than offline prices. Unlike Cavallo, the authors analyze data from an online-only store, say like an Amazon (they aren't permitted to disclose which store). However, while Gorodnichenko et al find that online prices are less rigid than bricks & mortar prices, they still exhibit unusually long price spells, or periods of fixity. These spells tend to endure for about 7 to 20 weeks, two-thirds shorter than offline spells when the effect of discounts/sales has been removed. The result is counter-intuitive, say the authors, given that online stores have the technology to cheaply adjust prices as supply and demand change, yet for some reason choose not to.

Even though both papers were published in 2015, Cavallo and Gorodnichenko are using relatively stale data. The first dataset runs between October 2007 and August 2010 while the latter spans the period between May 2010 and February 2012. This delay is unfortunate as the online world is changing fast. Recent industry articles point to a large ramp-up in the use of dynamic pricing by retailers over the last few years. For instance, Profitero, a price intelligence provider, charts out a step-wise change in the pace of Amazon's price changes beginning in late 2012. According to competing price intelligence company 360pi, by 2014 some 18% of Amazon's prices were changing daily.

The same goes for an old dinosaur like Sears. While Sears' online prices rarely underwent changes in the earlier part of this decade, around 18% of its prices are now being adjusted each day, on par with Amazon. And now Sears is trying out digital signs in its bricks & mortar stores to ensure quicker offline price changes.

The moral economy

If we are indeed entering an Uber-style flex-price world, what underlying factors had to change for this to happen? It's not technology—we've always had the means to set rapidly changing prices, just look at financial markets. If anything had to bend in order for pricing patterns to change, it was the ethics of price setting.

To understand why, we need to explore one of the enduring questions in economics: why goods & services prices remain fixed in the face of continuously changing demand and supply conditions. When economist Alan Blinder polled businesses in the early 1990s to find out why they kept prices unchanged for long periods of time, the most common answer was the desire to avoid "antagonizing" customers or "causing them difficulties." Blinder's findings evoked Arthur Okun's earlier (1981) explanation for sticky prices whereby business owners maintain an implicit contract, or invisible handshake, with customers. If buyers view a price increase as being unfair, they might take revenge on the retailer by looking for alternatives. A retailer who promises to adjust prices rarely and only when costs justify it thereby avoids antagonizing customer sensibilities, and in return the customer provides a degree of loyalty.

The idea that prices are set within an overall moral framework predates Blinder and Okun. Nobel Prize winning economist John Hicks, for instance, once wrote that the notion that all prices are perfectly flexible was highly unrealistic and attributed rigidity to legislative control, monopolistic action "of the sleepy sort which does not strain after every gnat of profit, but prefers a quiet life," and "lingering notions of a ‘just price’."

Hicks' use of the word 'lingering' refers to the extended lineage of the concept of the just price. The belief that it is in some way sinful to sell a product for more than its fair price is a very old one, going back to early economic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas. In the age that Aquinas inhabited the economic roles that individual were permitted to play and the prices they could set were determined by tradition and custom. Historian E.P Thompson once referred to this as the "moral economy." For example, medieval English farmers could not sell their corn directly from their fields but had to bring it in bulk to the local "pitching market." Speculation, or the practice of "withholding" in the anticipation of better prices, was prohibited. Once at market, no sales of corn could be made before stated times. When the bell rang, the poor had the first chance to buy, and only after could larger dealers make purchases. These various market structures were designed to ensure a just price and fair profits.

Even as these structures were slowly unwound, writes Thompson, the English populace clung to the old morality, the physical incarnation of this being food riots which swept the countryside during the 18th century. These riots weren't random attempts to pilfer. Rather, they were relatively sophisticated affairs whereby rioters would organize to set the price of a good, in effect forcing the offending retailer to sell their wares at the level deemed just rather than at its much higher market-determined rate.

In the same way that 17th century rioters self-regulated markets by threatening to set the price for corn or bread, modern shoppers who encounter an unjust price threaten to cross the aisles towards the competition. Eager to avoid being punished by their customers' wrath, retailers implicitly promise to keep their prices fixed for long periods of time.

I find it interesting that even when we start from scratch, the notion of a just price quickly emerges. In his account of a temporary P.O.W. camp economy in which cigarettes circulated as money, R.A. Radford notes that:

There was a strong feeling that everything had its "just price" in cigarettes. While the assessment of the just price, which incidentally varied between camps, was impossible of explanation, this price was nevertheless pretty closely known. It can best be defined as the price usually fetched by an article in good times when cigarettes were plentiful. The "just price" changed slowly; it was unaffected by short-term variations in supply, and while opinion might be resigned to departures from the "just price," a strong feeling of resentment persisted. A more satisfactory definition of the "just price" is impossible. Everyone knew what it was, though no one could explain why it should be so.

Behavioral economists also find evidence of a just price mentality. Using telephone surveys, Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler were able to isolate community standards of price fairness. Generally, consumers feel they are entitled to their reference price, or past price. They also believe firms are entitled to their reference profit and deem it fair for a firm to raise prices to protect that profit, say because the firm's costs have increased. A firm that takes advantage of an increase in demand by raising its price and makes more than its reference profit is, however, breaking the rules of the game and acting unfairly.

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So let's bring this back to Uber surge pricing and Amazon/Sears dynamic pricing.

I see two angles here. After centuries of a just price morality, perhaps we are inching towards an alternative framework. Maybe we've finally overcome our revulsion to an 'unfair price' that varies according to fluctuations in demand. Instead of the 19.7 month price spells of yore, we're now willing to endure 19.7 minute price spells. Morality changes, after all; slavery and death penalties used to be common, abortion was prohibited. If so, Uber and Amazon's pricing policy are emblematic of this underlying morality switch.

Or maybe we haven't switched at all and are still operating under the old rules of the moral economy. If so, the new pricing technologies adopted by Amazon and Uber are destined to be met by a titanic wave of consumer revulsion. This may be already happening; Uber's surge pricing policy has attracted plenty of negative press (here and here). Morality is a powerful force; unless they want to be dashed to pieces, the offenders will have to relent and make their prices more sticky.

Freshwater macro, China's silver standard, and the yuan peg

1934 Chinese silver dollar with Sun Yat-sen on the obverse side. The ship may be in freshwater.

I have been hitting my head against the wall these last few weeks trying to understand Chinese monetary policy, a project that I've probably made harder than necessary by starting in the distant past, specifically with the nation's experience during the Great Depression. Taking a reading break, I was surprised to see that Paul Krugman's recent post on the topic of freshwater macro had surprising parallels to my own admittedly esoteric readings on Chinese monetary history.

Unlike most nations, China was on a silver standard during the Great Depression. The consensus view, at least up until it was challenged by the freshwater economists that people Krugman's post, had always been that the silver standard protected China from the first stage of the Great Depression, only to betray the nation by imposing on it a terrible internal devaluation as silver prices rose. This would eventually lead China to forsake the silver standard. This consensus view has been championed by the likes of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their monumental Monetary History of the United States.

This consensus view is a decidedly non-freshwater take on things as it it depends on features like sticky prices and money illusion to generate its conclusions. After all, given the huge rise in the value of silver, as long as Chinese prices and wages—the reciprocal of the silver price—could adjust smoothly downwards, then the internal devaluation forced on China would be relatively painless. If, however, the necessary adjustment was impeded by rigidities then prices would have been locked at artificially high levels, the result being unsold inventories, unemployment, and a recession.

Just to add some more colour, China's internal devaluation was imposed on it by American President Franklin D. Roosevelt in two fell swoops, first by de-linking the U.S. from gold in 1933 and then by buying up mass quantities of silver starting in 1934. The first step ignited an economic rebound in the U.S. and around the world that helped push up all prices including that of silver. As for the second, Roosevelt was fulfilling a campaign promise to those who supported him in the western states where a strong silver lobby resided thanks to the abundance of silver mines. The price of silver, which had fallen from 60 cents in 1928 to below 30 cents in 1932, quickly rose back above its 1928 levels, as illustrated in the chart below. According to one contemporary account, that of Arthur N. Young, an American financial adviser to the Nationalist government, "China passed from moderate prosperity to deep depression."

As I mentioned at the outset, this consensus view was challenged by the freshwater economists, no less than the freshest of them all, Thomas Sargent (who was once referred to as "distilled water"), in a 1988 paper coauthored with Loren Brandt (RePEc link). New data showed that Chinese GDP rose in 1933 and only declined modestly in 1934, this due to a harvest failure, not a monetary disturbance. So much for a brutal internal devaluation.

According to Sargent and Brandt, it appeared that "that there was little or no Phillips curve tradeoff between inflation and output growth in China." In non econo-speak, deflation.not.bad. They put forth several reasons for this, including a short duration of nominal contracts and village level mechanisms for "haggling and adjusting loan payments in the event of a crop failure." In essence, Chinese prices were very quick to adjust to silver's incredible rise.

Four years later, Friedman responded (without Schwartz) to what he referred to as the freshwater economists' "highly imaginative and theoretically attractive interpretation." (Here's the RePEc link). His point was that foreign trade data, which apparently has a firmer statistical basis than the output data on which Sargent and Brandt depended, revealed that imports had fallen on a real basis from 1931 to 1935, and particularly sharply from 1933 to 1935. So we are back to a story in which, it would seem, the rise in silver did place a significant drag on the Chinese economy, although Friedman grudgingly allowed for the fact that perhaps he may have "overestimated" the real effects of the silver deflation.

So this battle of economic titans leads to a watered-down story in which Roosevelt's silver purchases probably had *some* deleterious effects on China. China would go on to leave the silver standard, although what probably provided the final nudge was a bank run that kicked off in the financial centre of Shanghai in 1934. Depositors steadily withdrew the white metal from their accounts in anticipation of some combination of a devaluation of the currency, exchange controls, and an all-out exit from the silver standard, a process outlined in a 1988 paper by Kevin Chang (and referenced by Friedman). This self-fulfilling mechanism, very similar in nature to the recent run on Greece, may have encouraged the authorities to sever the currency's linkage to silver and put it on a managed fiat standard. The Chinese economy went on to perform very well in 1935 and 1936, although that all ended with the Japanese invasion in 1937.

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As I mentioned at the outset, these events and the way they were perceived by freshwater and non-freshwater economists seem to me to have some relevance to modern Chinese monetary policy. As in 1934, China is to some extent importing made-in-US monetary policy. The yuan is effectively pegged to the U.S. dollar, so any change in the purchasing power of the dollar leads to a concurrent change in the purchasing power of the yuan.

There's an asterisk to this. In 1934, China was a relatively open economy whereas today China makes use of capital controls. By immobilizing wealth, these controls make cross-border arbitrage more difficult, thus providing Chinese monetary authorities with a certain degree of latitude in establishing a made-in-China monetary policy.  But capital controls have become increasingly porous over the years, especially as the effort to internationalize the yuan—which requires more open capital markets—gains momentum. By maintaining the peg and becoming more open, China's monetary policy is getting ever more like it was in 1934.

As best I can tell, the monetary policy that Fed Chair Janet Yellen is exporting to China is getting tighter. One measure of this, albeit an imperfect one, is the incredible rise of the U.S. dollar over the last year. Given its peg, the yuan has gone along for the ride. Another indication of tightness in the U.S. is Scott Sumner's nominal GDP betting market which shows nominal growth expectations for 2015 falling from around 5% to 3.2%. That's quite a decline. On a longer time scale, consider that the Fed has been consistently missing its core PCE price target of 2% since 2009, or that the employment cost index just printed its lowest monthly increase on record.

If Chinese prices are as flexible as Brandt and Sargent claimed they were in 1934, then the tightening of U.S. dollar, like the rise in silver, is no cause for concern for China. But if Chinese prices are to some extent rigid, then we've got a Friedman & Schwartz explanation whereby the importation of Yellen's tight monetary policy could have very real repercussions for the Chinese economy, and for the rest of the world given China's size.

Interestingly, since 2014 Chinese monetary authorities have been widening the band in which the yuan is allowed to trade against the U.S. dollar. And the peg, which authorities had been gently pushing higher since 2005, has been brought to a standstill. The last time the Chinese allowed the peg to stop crawling higher was in 2008 during the credit crisis, a halt that Scott Sumner once went so far as to say saved the world from a depression.

Chinese GDP [edit: GDP growth] continues to fall to multi-decade lows while the monetary authorities consistently undershoot their stated inflation objectives. In pausing the yuan's appreciation, the Chinese authorities could very well be executing something like a Friedman & Schwartz-style exit from the silver standard in order to save their economy from tight U.S. monetary policy. This time it isn't an insane silver buying program that is at fault, but the Fed's odd reticence to reduce rates to anything below 0.25%. Further tightening from Yellen may only provoke more offsetting from the Chinese... unless, of course, the sort of thinking underlying Wallace and Brandt takes hold and Chinese authorities decide to allow domestic prices to take the full brunt of adjustment.

There won't be a drachma-induced recovery

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I catch both Lars Christensen and Brad DeLong making the claim that an introduction of the drachma will work wonders for Greece. Lars, for instance, says that:

However, Grexit will also remove the monetary straitjacket, which has had caused an enormous amount of economic hardship in Greece since 2008. The removal of this straitjacket will cause a significant easing of Greek monetary conditions, which in my view very likely will cause a sharp rise in nominal GDP in Greece in the coming years.

I hate to rain on the party, but even if a drachma is introduced and it collapses in value there won't necessarily be a drachma-induced recovery. Greece is currently in a straitjacket because its monetary standard -- the system for measuring and conveying economic value -- is a euro standard. Think of the euro as being akin to the metric system, a standard for measuring weights and distances, or dots per inch, a standard for measuring print resolution. An introduction of drachmas banknotes into circulation is simply not a sufficient condition to create the sort of effects that Brad and Lars want. To get their recovery, Brad and Lars need an all out monetary standard switch. But as long a Greek prices continue to be expressed in euros, drachmas will simply swim within the existing euro standard fish bowl. All sorts of mountains must be crossed before the penultimate switch of standards. This isn't "snap of the fingers" territory.

Drachma as another bitcoin

To better understand the destiny of a new drachma, its nice to have an example. Lucky for us, we can find one in the recent emergence of one of the world's newest currencies, bitcoin. Now Lars assumes that a collapse in the drachma will have all sorts of beneficial effects on the Greek economy. But does the world economy roar when bitcoin plunges? No, and here's why.

While merchants accept bitcoin as payment, they haven't accepted it as a standard. Sticker prices continue to be set in units like dollars, yen, pounds, etc., Bitcoin swims within the existing fiat standard. To accommodate those who want to pay in bitcoin, merchants will typically use the last-second bitcoin-to-dollar exchange rate (taken from foreign exchange markets) as the basis for the bitcoin price of their goods. Which means that as bitcoin plunges in value, the amount of bitcoin that retailers ask for their stuff is immediately adjusted upwards by a concomitant amount.

This is important because implicit in Brad and Lars's drachma recovery story is a certain degree of price stickiness. As the fundamental value of the standard unit plunges, sticker prices are slow to adjust upwards. Knowing that sticker prices will at some point start to catch up, people spend their currency now before it loses value, thus stoking an economic boom as merchants' inventories are drawn down. This sticky price effect is entirely lacking in bitcoin. Given a sickening collapse in bitcoin, those who own the stuff have no reason to spend it on before it loses value. After all, the amount of bitcoin that retailers require is adjusted every second, so prices in terms of bitcoin don't stay sticky. A bitcoin collapse therefore has no real effects on the world economy.

Applying this lesson to Greece, there's no guarantee that a decline in the drachma will boost the Greek economy. The appearance in circulation of drachma banknotes needn't mean that sticker prices will be set in drachmas. To determine how many drachmas Greeks must pay for an item, retailers may simply refer to its euro sticker prices and convert that amount into drachma by glancing at the last-second drachma-to-euro exchange rate. If so, then just as bitcoin prices are not sticky, neither will drachma prices. Without the requisite stickiness, a collapse in drachmas will not have the real effects that Lars and Brad want. Only a collapse in the euro, the monetary standard, will harness the sticky price effect the two implicitly invoke. But that effectively means Greece remains in its monetary straitjacket, despite having debuted a drachma.

Hurdles to switching

I've talked about the network externalities involved in switching standards before. Take an incumbent standard and a new standard. Even if the quality gap between the novel standard and the inferior incumbent is quite high, the costs of coordinating everyone onto the new standard may be too onerous for adoption to occur. Hysteresis, or lock in, is the result.

Switching to a drachma standard requires that a strong third party step in to overcome these network externalities. They need to punish, or credibly threaten to punish, those who refuse to comply. The Greek government, which has already demonstrated an inability to execute on basic tasks like tax collection, could very well lack the resources that are necessary to adequately perform the tasks of a third party.

Further militating against a drachma standard is its massive quality gap. A monetary standard should be as nuisance-free as possible. Merchants do not want to be adjusting their prices every day, and customers want to know that the blender they saw on a store's shelves on Tuesday will be worth the same amount when they go back on Wednesday. If sticker prices must be adjusted hourly, or even by the minute, the amount of time and mental space that people must allocate to calculation and measurement will displace other more meaningful activities. Like bitcoin, the drachma would probably be a one of the world's most volatile currencies; the incumbent euro one of its steadiest. So rather than improving on the euro standard, a drachma standard would represent a regression in quality.

Given that a strong government must spend a significant amount of resources getting its population to adopt a better standard, it's hard to imagine that a weak government will ever be able to foist an inferior standard on its population without facing a backlash. So contrary to Lars and Brad, there is no guarantee that issuing drachmas offers an ultimate salvation. In the end, there's probably very little difference between a Greece that introduces a drachma or one that doesn't, since either way the incumbent euro standard will likely stick around.


Note: This is very similar to my previous post on the topic. I've introduced the bitcoin analogy, which I think helps drive home the point, and also brought the quality gap to the forefront. 

Nick Rowe comments here.