Lords of Finance or Sorcerer’s Apprentices

In 1927, in the context of economic weakness, Benjamin Strong the President of the New York Federal Reserve suggested to a counterpart in the Banque de France that a rate cut might give the stock market a ‘petit coup du whisky’. The subsequent rate cut set in train a fierce market rally which, boosted by margin debt, ballooned into a stock market bubble.

According to Liaquat Ahamed’s superb book ‘Lords of Finance’ Federal Reserve officials had considered the ‘coup de whisky’ to be the Fed’s ‘greatest and boldest operation’. Yet, the collapse of this stock market bubble was one of the factors that set in motion the Great Depression.

By comparison to the actions of today’s Fed, Strong’s ‘coup de whisky’ is insignificant when compared to the huge and sustained quantities of monetary morphine that the central bank has dispensed in recent years. The near vertical rise in central bank balance sheets in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis has suppressed market volatility, but, like morphine, it cures few underlying economic illnesses. In fact, with the echo of the Great Depression in mind, it may eventually make them worse.

With the Nasdaq index pushing through all-time highs at the start of last week (and now retreating a little), valuations becoming very stretched and an increasingly well documented retail investor trading frenzy occurring, we are entitled to ask where and when the consequences of aggressive central bank activity will lead?

While the official line at the Federal Reserve and other central banks regarding asset price bubbles is that asset bubbles are hard to identify and harder still to burst in a controlled manner, there are at least two risky side-effects of current policy, and then two potential endgames.

The first risk relates to the consequences of the ‘stupefaction’ of the political economy through monetary policy. For instance, politicians, such as the once fiscally conservative Republican party, seem to care less about rising debt and deficit levels in the face of central bank asset purchases.

In Europe, capital markets union, the consolidation and rebuilding of the banking sector, and more active and sophisticated regulation of fintech and payment systems are half made projects that lack urgency. In general, central bankers seem to focus too much on liquidity, than on the plumbing of market and banking systems.

Another side effect is inequality, in multiple forms. Wealth inequality in the US is the most pronounced since before the Great Depression. Another form is central bank inequality. The monetary aggression of the Fed and ECB makes life difficult for other smaller and less activist central banks, through the resulting fluctuations in their currencies for example. In particular in recent years, the likes of the Norges Bank and Riksbank have struggled with the side-effects of ECB policy.

Central bankers are known to be sensible, rational people and in the face of mounting evidence of the distortions of their work and the hint that they are losing their independence, we might expect them to signal an elegantly coordinated end to extraordinary policy. The opposite is likely to be the case.

The great risk to financial stability is that central bankers continue to internalize the benefits of quantitative easing, to the extent that they go into monetary warp factor and break markets. The Bank of Japan, which now owns nearly 80% of the Japanese ETF market, is a candidate here, given the store it sets by monetary activism and discussions it has conducted on monetizing government debt.

Monetizing government debt is not a free lunch, and if for argument’s sake it were executed by the Bank of Japan it could trigger broad currency volatility, a pensions crisis and a very confused credit market. Risk cannot be made to go away, it is simply distributed by markets and central banks that intervene in this process risk a ‘nuclear’ level financial accident.

The second related risk is indebtedness which before the financial crisis was – in terms of the aggregate world debt to GDP ratio – approaching levels not seen since after the Second World War, and now may be on course to reach levels comparable to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Low rates make this debt load manageable but a credit cycle downturn may result in a market unwind that even the Fed and other central banks cannot forestall. The endgame here may be a severe recession, or an broad debt restructuring conference.

Whether they are ‘Lords of Finance’ or ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentices’ today’s central bankers have contorted the financial world in an effort to stave off another Great Depression, and now having done too much, risk going full circle.

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

Saving the UN from the John Boltons

In a week when John Bolton has revealed the ‘true’ workings of US diplomacy, North Korea cut its border infrastructure with South Korea, Israel prepared to annexe part of the West Bank and when at least twenty troops died in a high altitude confrontation between India and China (regular readers might recall my May 16th post ‘Shemozzle’ on this), one of the few pieces of geopolitical good news last week was the election of Ireland and Norway to the UN Security Council (they take their places in 2021).

Regular readers will also know that I have a bias to small, advanced states in general, and to Ireland in particular, and I am particularly proud of this news and the efforts of our ambassador to the UN, diplomats and politicians.

I am tempted to reflect however, that in the next few years, there will be few places as charged, and as tested, as the Security Council. Indeed, that John Bolton was previously as US ambassador to the UN and wants to abolish it (he declared that if it ‘lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference’) highlights the strains on the organisation. Indeed, as the sands of world power shift, it is not inconceivable that the UK be asked to give up its permanent Security Council seat in favour of India and that France is similarly requested to surrender its seat in favour of the EU.

The tenor of the events debated at the Security Council in coming months will depend heavily on the flashpoints mentioned above, the outlook for Taiwan, and whether Donald Trump manages to stay in power. The addition of Ireland and Norway to the Security Council is novel, and newsworthy in that in a world of mind-numbing policy uncertainty, they are positive contributors to the UN (i.e. peacekeeping) and good examples of policy resilience, especially so in the context of COVID-19.

While it is not the job of members of the Security Council to reform the UN itself, there is a need for this world institution to be enlivened. The ongoing debate on this might focus on the following points.

The first point concerns organisations under the UN umbrella such as the WHO (World Health Organisation) and World Bank. Here, one suggestion is to physically relocate bodies like the World Bank to Africa, which is the continent that needs it most. In addition, some of the research efforts of the World Bank, IMF and WHO should be repurposed and focused on a handful of larger emerging countries with positive demographics, emerging consumer tastes and yet underdeveloped financial and social welfare systems. These countries collectively (e.g. Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Bangladesh) constitute the next wave in human development and wealth creation, and need careful, practical policy advice on the path ahead.

Then the UN will have to deal with new forms of war, one of which is cyberwarfare and where there is a need for a credible, coherent set of ‘rules of the game’ that encompasses governments, technology companies and private contractors. In the past week there have been cyber-attacks on financial institutions in the US, and a large scale one on institutions across Australia, and in the recent past the UN has suffered severe cyber-attacks.

There is already a policy discussion on cyberwarfare at the UN, and its Secretary General spoke publicly on the topic last November. There is room for the UN to think more clearly about ‘cyber peacekeeping’ in the sense of adapting its current peacekeeping framework to the internet.

The UN may also have to deal with the side-effects of new forms of military tactics. In his excellent book ‘The Dragons and the Snakes’ David Kilcullen describes in detail the tactics used by the likes of Russia for testing and agitating the borders of neighbouring ‘Western’ countries, like Norway. It strikes me that, in the light of India’s closer ties to the US and ambitions to host global supply chains, this is also China’s tactic. It is not war but controlled, thinly disguised, conflict, that in the case of the two most populous countries in the world could have adverse consequences.

A further challenge, that has become more evident in the fallout from the coronavirus crisis, is what are international public goods (the UN debated this back in 2006) and how are they best built and allocated. We could argue that in a hyper financialised world, cheap money is a global public good though I suspect this argument will not find much favour.

A better starting point, especially in the light of the debate on the future of the WHO, is to ask whether clear healthcare advice and health related education are public goods (I think so) and whether vaccines for pandemics like the coronavirus should be global public goods (which if this is to be the case would drastically change the way they are researched, produced and manufactured).

A final thought for the UN, and a provocative one, is to return to another quote from John Bolton that ‘There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along’. How will the UN cope with the demise of US foreign policy?

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

The Madness of Crowds

We are not yet half way through the year and, to put it mildly, quite a lot has happened. One very powerful lens with which to view 2020 so far is through the notion of crowd behavior – crowds rushing to buy toilet paper, crowds obediently dispersing into lockdown for two months and crowds in a frenzy to buy penny stocks in the US.

There is a growing literature on the behavior of crowds or how collective consciousness works, but some of the older texts are still worth a read. Gustav Le Bon’s ‘The Crowd – a study of the popular mind’ written in 1895 is one, and a much older one which I recommend is Charles MacKay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ written in 1841. It is a vivid history of asset price bubbles going back as far as the time of the Crusades, and MacKay, having published it likely hoped that people would learn from it and not repeat mistakes of the past.

MacKay would have been alarmed though not surprised at some market behavior seen this year, an initial wave of euphoria pushing stock prices higher in February as the coronavirus crisis was unfolding, and then recent aggressive buying of bankrupt companies like Hertz and Cheasapeake Energy, and the tenfold rise in the share price of Chinese construction company FANGDD because its name resembles the FAANG acronym (its stands for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google).

Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the number of retail brokerage accounts at onlne broker Robinhood has nearly quadrupled (there is a Robinhood Tracker app which shows what stocks are most in and out of favour with the Robinhood crowd), with other brokerage sites also seeing a rise in accounts. Apparently, half of those who open new accounts have never invested before. The only rationale for such behavior is that having bought a stock like Hertz, a ‘greater fool’ will come along to buy it at a higher price.

There is a strong sense that some stimulus cheques, and the effect of the Federal Reserve’s huge liquidity injection into markets are having the effect of encouraging reckless speculation.

If this is a cautionary tale for the Fed, its Chair Jerome Powell showed little sign of acknowledging it in his recent press conference.

With the US stock market near all time high valuations, the Fed openly risks creating an asset bubble, further deflating its own credibility and independence, not to mention spurring inefficient use of capital in the midst of a deep recession. The Fed is also guilty of reinforcing the crowd behavior or groupthink amongst central banks that blind buying of assets constitutes effective monetary policy.

If the Fed and US policymakers have enabled bad crowd behavior, what is more interesting are examples of positive collective behavior, the most remarkable of which is the way in which hundreds of millions of people have adhered to lockdown rules.

Some of the early crowd behavior during the crisis illustrates how crowds follow narratives based on short-termism and fear – such as the toilet paper mania of March – there is also a need to focus on the wisdom of crowds. A good recent example is the way that the majority of race related protests in the US, and the reaction of the police to them, have transformed from violent to peaceful protest.

I hope that in the future more behavioural and political scientists will dig more into this area. In this respect, one theme to emerge from the crisis is the sense that ‘country resilience’ matters in coping with crises. Amongst the components of this resilience are good education systems, credible institutions, clear and fair laws and a high level of trust across society. I suspect, without having yet looked into any evidence, that high trust societies tend to produce ‘wise’ as proposed to ‘mad’ crowds.

‘Mad’ crowds do not need to be preordained. One noteworthy research project that has come to my attention recently is the work of Gary Slutkin’s Cure Violence project (cvg.org) that seeks to break down the transmission of the culture of violence through communities (and by extension ‘crowds’). Another which I have mentioned here before is the way in which social media is being used to ‘crowd think’ laws, charters and constitutions (thegovlab.org). As the desire for political change grows across many countries, crowds will be used in more productive ways.

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

Is inequality a part of the American Dream, or its end?

A quote that has been rattling around my head recently is ‘aside from the moral case against it, inequality above a moderate level creates a kind of society that even crusty conservatives hate to live in, unsafe and unpleasant’. It comes from a 2004 paper entitled ‘Is globalization reducing poverty and inequality?’ by LSE Professor Robert Hunter Wade.

It has come to mind for obvious reasons – namely the behavior of crusty conservatives in America in the face of stark inequalities across race and class, and the risks that extreme inequality poses to the US.

While on one hand 43 million Americans having now claimed unemployment benefit and on the other, the ratio of the size of the US stock market to GDP (one of Warren Buffet’s favourite indicators of ‘value’) is the most stretched ever, the topic of inequality should rise to the top of the US political agenda, with the death of George Floyd a very grim expression of this.

In the US, and in some emerging countries, inequality, in different forms is rife. Much has been written on income inequality (Branko Milanovic’s work is to be recommended) and there is also increasingly good data to show that wealth inequality is the most stretched in close to a century in the US, and the likes of Russia. What is less widely debated publicly are the other ways in which inequality expresses itself.

Health is one area. Angus Deaton and Anne Case’s work is now well known (he won the Nobel Prize) and shows the deterioration in health conditions, especially those relating to mental health, for middle-aged white men and women in the United States. The mortality rate for this cohort has increased sharply owing to drug, opioids and alcohol poisoning, suicides and diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver. Groups with lower levels of education saw a sharper rise in mortality. The coronavirus crisis reinforced this trend.

Another more detailed example of health-care inequality is in dental care. Mary Otto’s book Teeth shows the startling differences in dental health across social classes and reports that they spring from differences in education, diet, and upbringing. In her book Otto tells of a boy who died when a tooth infection, undetected because his parents had no dental-care insurance, spread to his brain.

Technology is another factor that may help cement existing inequalities. For example, in her book Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks describes how automation of welfare services through the growing use of algorithms to sift welfare recipients, and in areas like medical insurance assessments, can lead to institutionalized inequalities (the algo- rithm throws out the more needy welfare applicants) and injustice. She describes a regime of data analytics that, through design or error, denies assistance to those in poverty, with low education levels or poor computer literacy, or with a history of mental health issues.

Another example of technology-driven inequality comes from Joy Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, whose research initially discovered that facial recognition software was much more accurate at recognizing white faces than black faces. Inaccuracies in algorithmic-based identification can translate into denial of access to social welfare, or misclassification of an innocent person in criminal records.

There is likely much more to describe inequalities that disadvantage according to race, class and sex for instance. The important issue is what is done about them. In the context of the US, the first task is to recognize that inequalities do not stem from globalization but rather how individual countries manage it. The coronavirus crisis illustrated this. A common problem was dealt with in very different ways with disparate results.

Small, advanced economies like Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands are amongst the most globalized in the world and have relatively well contained levels of (post-tax) income inequality for example. In addition, they are sources of policy ideas on how to combat various forms of inequality.

To understate the matter, I do not expect the current administration to tackle inequality. Indeed the persistence of deep inequalities following the eight years of the Obama presidency shows how entrenched it can be, and I am not sure that the Biden team will make an immediate impact on inequality – to do so would require a radical change in corporate taxes (higher), federal spending (higher) and regulation (especially of tech).

To that end, the persistence of an overly accommodative central bank, a two tiered health system, a technology sector that hoovers up the gains from innovation and a ‘star’ takes all approach in the banking, sports, media and tech industries point unfortunately towards ongoing inequalities in race and class.

In turn, as the election of Donald Trump has shown, the persistence of inequality, will produce radical political choices. My guess is that America has not seen the end of political volatility, and that increasingly new blood, and new parties will enter the political scene.

Until then, America will remain divided. To return to Robert Wade’s quote, crusty conservatives don’t get it. On Friday Fox News displayed a disgraceful graphic of the performance of the stock market in periods immediately after the king of a black man (From Martin Luther King to the recent death of George Floyd).

Have a great week ahead,

Mike