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The long history of money

June 19, 2021

The long history of money

We are approaching a critical turning point in the history of financial systems.

Since the Great Financial Crisis, central banks have exerted control over the financial markets through their QE-programs and plan to extend their influence over the monetary system through the introduction of national digital currencies.  Opposing forces include, as usual, those of financial innovation, which include independent cryptocurrencies.

In the June issue of our Q-Review series, we will delve deep into the world of digital currencies and the future of monetary systems. To accompany our report, we intend to publish a series of blogs which examine the long history of monetary and financial systems.

Today we will start with a brief summary of the history of money.

The early days

Current archaeological research has established that the measurement of economic interactions, i.e. accounting, predates writing. The clay tablets discovered at the birthplace of Mesopotamia, the Temple of Uruk, were used as an accounting tool for commodities and even for human labor as early as 3100 B.C.

The foundations of banking practices were developed in Ancient Greece, in the harbor city of Piraeus, where the local bankers, or trapezitai, took deposits and provided loans. While borrowing and lending in commodities follows the principles of banking practices then in use in Mesopotamia, the establishment of the concept of a unified monetary value for all economic units, such as commodities, assets, services, human labor, etc. was created in Ancient Greece. This also made the eventual emergence of modern banking practices possible later.

Still, the first banks known that truly resembled modern banks operated in Imperial Rome. It has been said that Rome’s financial system was so sophisticated that it was matched only by the banking sector created during the Industrial Revolution over a millennium later.

Birth of fractional reserve banking

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The worst economic collapse ever?

April 8, 2020

The worst economic collapse ever?

Country after country has reported extremely dark economic numbers. The gigantic jobless claims, 6.6 million from the U.S. last week, are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, the service sector PMIshave been simply ghastly across the globe. We are now in a crisis of epic proportions.

But, how massive can the crisis eventually get? Since our inception, in 2012, we have contemplated three scenarios as a part of our quarterly forecasts. While we have not referred to them in each report, we have repeated them periodically. They are:  the optimistic, the most probable and the pessimistic.

But at this point our main worry is the approaching realization of the pessimistic, or the worst, scenario.  It’s likelihood, while still low, is increasing fast in our estimate.

Underpinning its severity is not the virus, but the fragility of the global economy.

Breeding chaos:  failed clean-ups and bad policies

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was considered a Black Swan event to many. However, it was no such thing. It was a massive failure of hedging and diversification within the global banking system, most notably in the U.S., and a number of prominent analysts saw it coming. See our blog, 10 years from Lehman. And nothing has been fixed, for an insight view on that crisis.

While banks were wound down and recapitalized in the U.S. after the GFC, an equivalent restructuring did not happen in Europe. Stricken European banks were left to linger in a state of permanent financial distress. 

“Outright Monetary Transactions” or “OMT”, negative interest rates, and ECB’s QE program all aggravated the predicament of European banks.  The failure to resolve the 2008 crisis ‘zombified’ the European banking sector, a situation which persists today. (See Q-Review 3/2019 for a detailed account).

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Coronavirus and the world economy

January 30, 2020

Coronavirus and the world economy

The outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China has shaken the global asset markets—and with good reason. The coronavirus has the potential of being the ‘trigger’ which will push the world into a global depression.

Here, we briefly explain why.

The outbreak

It looks that the virus spreads very easily, through droplet infection and with a “latency” period that allows infected people to spread the virus before they themselves exhibit symptoms. This implies that the virus has already spread much more widely  than original estimates indicate. The individual cases popping up across the globe are one confirmation of this.

Fortunately, the fatality rate is still relatively low:  under 2 percent. However, this can change, especially if the virus mutates, and there’s already speculation, whether the figures provided by China can be trusted.

China in trouble

As we have been warning through 2019 (see, e.g., this and this), China’s economy is ripe for a serious downturn. Beijing used most of its remaining firepower last year, when it desperately tried to postpone the inevitable recession, probably to appear strong in the trade negotiations.

Despite record-breaking stimulus enacted in 2019, the Chinese economy has grown at a sub-par rate of around six percent. And this is according to the official statistics!  In reality, the actual Chinese growth rate has probably been much lower.

As China’s State-Owned Enterprises, or “SOEs”, have become riddled with debt, their ability to increase production has stagnated. This has also contributed to the broader stagnation of productivity growth in China (see Figure 1). After the growth of SOEs faltered in 2017, the Chinese consumer has become an important driver of the economy.

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The (ominous) problem with global liquidity

October 20, 2018

The (ominous) problem with global liquidity

Market liquidity is crucial for well-functioning capital markets. There has been a quite lot of talk about diminished market liquidity and the role of machines in it (see, e.g. Q-review 4/2017, this and this). These are worrying developments.

However, while market liquidity is crucial for markets, global financial flows, i.e. liquidity, is also essential to the real economy and for global economic growth. The availability of credit on a global basis fuels investments and growth around the world.  Such financial flows fell by a massive 90 % during the 2008 crisis, which quickly translated into a global recession.  Investment and consumption collapsed almost everywhere, with the exception of China where a massive credit stimulus was enacted.

Since then, there has been an uneven recovery. Cross-border bank lending has never really recovered (see Q-review 1/2017), but the issuance of vast amounts of government and corporate debt has taken its place. This creates a serious risk for the global real economy if highly over-valued capital markets crash.

The metamorphosis of global liquidity

In its recent quarterly report, the Bank of International Settlements, or BIS, raises three crucial points for global liquidity:

  1. Global outside-US dollar denominated debt has risen to a record.
  2. The role of non-bank institutions on providing funding has increased.
  3. The composition of international credit has shifted from bank loans to debt securities.

Combined with the asset purchase programs of central banks (QE) these developments have far-reaching consequences for the global economy.

Currently, non-banking institutions and households outside the US hold over 11.5 trillion worth of dollar-denominated debt—a record. The “shadow banking” sector could conceivably hold the same amount. This means that all policies affecting global dollar liquidity, will have a large effect on the global economy.

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Turkey: A harbinger of a global debt crisis?

August 18, 2018

Turkey: A harbinger of a global debt crisis?

The economic crisis brewing in Turkey seems to have surprised many. This was probably, at least partly, due to the ‘period of tranquility’ created by the central banks with theirs ‘unorthodox measures’. Many seem to have imagined that the “synchronized global growth” spurt were here to last. But, it was just a mirage, run by the stimulus of China and the major central banks.

As we warned in May, the global quantitative tightening will bring an end to the current business cycle. This is for a multitude of reasons (see Q-review 1/2018), but the most pressing of them is the fact that QT will raise interest rates and suppress liquidity. It will raise the costs of indebted companies, drive zombie companies to insolvency and ultimately crash the asset markets. A global debt crisis of epic proportions and depression are likely to follow. Turkey is showing what it might look like.

The debt conundrum

The current business cycle has had two exceptional features. First has been the steep rise in the balance sheets of central banks and the second the very fast growth of the non-financial sector debt, especially in the emerging economies. Figure 1 presents the private non-financial sector debt as a percentage of GDP in advanced and emerging economies. It shows the miniscule deleveraging in advanced economies and the harrowing rise in the private non-financial debt in the emerging economies since 2009.

Figure 1. Credit (debt) to non-financial private sector as a share of GDP in advanced and emerging economies. Source: GnS Economics, BIS

The rise of the non-financial private debt in emerging economies coincides with the QE programs of the major central banks.

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The crash of 1929

April 27, 2018

The crash of 1929

In the 4th of February, we published a blog entry detailing the similarities of the current stock market environment with that before the stock market crash in 1987. On February 5th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) experienced the worst daily point decline of its history. Since then, the stock market has recovered, but are we out of the woods?

At the aforementioned entry, we also warned that the situation in the global economy actually resembles more of the time before the Great Depression than that before of the Black Monday in 1987. Worryingly, the same holds for the US equity markets. In fact, almost all of the developments that led to the Great Crash of 1929 are already visible in the US. We may thus be heading towards the worst asset market crash in 90 years.

Prequisites: The ‘Roaring Twenties’

The 1929 crash marked the end of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. The era got its name from consumer and stock market booms driven by the automobile and building sectors. The gold standard and the neutralization of all gold purchases from abroad by the newly created central bank, Federal Reserve or Fed, controlled the consumer price inflation. Due to low inflation, Fed had only limited incentives to intervene on the speculation by increasing the short-term interest rates. The easy credit era was let to persist fueling the boom in the consumer durables, commercial property market, automobile industry and the stock markets.

The tide switched in January 1928. The Fed decided that the boom had gone far enough and started to raise its discount rate and sell its holdings of government securities in effort to stem the speculation. But, rising money market rates made the brokers’ loans viable options for the bank loans because the former were mostly funded by the large balance sheets of corporations.

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