This week’s note is not about economics nor geopolitics but rather the inspiring Jane Goodall, who very sadly passed away in California this week. I’ve come to know her in the last five years as a trustee of the JG Legacy Foundation, and to add to the great mountain of tributes to her, can attest that she was a remarkable person, which is something we can say of too few figures on the world stage.

Jane was much better known in the Anglophone world than elsewhere, but the contribution of her research is felt internationally. To those who are less familiar with her life, in her early 20’s Jane saved up enough money to travel to Africa to pursue her ambition of studying wildlife (chimpanzees). After a period working with the famous paleoanthropologist  Louis Leakey, she won his support for a solo research trip into the Gombe reserve in Tanzania to study chimps (though her mother came along to keep her company). There is a very good BBC documentary on Jane’s work in Gombe.

This research became her life’s work and changed the way the scientific community regarded animals and the ways in which they were researched. An early National Geographic article by Jane, authored in 1963, is worth a read, not just because it gives a sense of her patience and intrepid curiosity, but for what it teaches us about the relationship between animals and humans, and the revelation (it was at the time) that animals are social, emotional creatures.

The flip side of this thought is that many humans are only a thin veneer away from the behaviour of chimps, and in a world where the law of the jungle is re-asserting itself, there are more and more displays of what we could call primate type behaviour.

Jane Goodall had many qualities – she was, I think very tough, brave and firmly believed in the causes she pioneered and supported. She travelled everywhere – in the past week she went from Bournemouth to New York and then California and was supposed to come to Cork at the end of this month. Though she was welcomed in the very top echelons of world society, she was most certainly not materialistic, save for a weakness for good whiskey.

If I could sum her up, and draw lessons from her life to today’s world, I feel she was otherworldly in respects of her life story, comportment, and influence. Without over-moralising her life, there are at least two observations to make.

The first, given that my inbox is full of tales of the de-humanisation of society – collapsing demographics, job markets deflated by AI, diminished social interaction between young people and other angsts created by social media, is of how Jane is a role model. In this context, Jane Goodall is an example to young and old of a life well lived, and one that has mattered. Two of her qualities that I would stress that can inform people today, are her intellectual curiosity and courage.

The second remark, which is all the more obvious, is that the causes Jane pioneered and the values she personified, are increasingly the exception than the rule. USAID budget cuts will lead to deaths in Africa, conservationism and the cause of the environment are no longer fashionable causes though arguably they are more vital than ever. In politics, there is a narrative that ‘bad things are happening’ without meaningful opposition, serious counterarguments, and meaningful leadership. One of Jane’s noteworthy statements was ‘The biggest danger to our future is apathy’. The analogies to the political and corporate worlds are obvious.

I would like to finish this note by encouraging readers to dip into the story of Jane’s life (again sites like National Geographic are good), and the various projects that she has inspired like Roots and Shoots the movement that helps young people impact their communities, the Jane Goodall Institute and then the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, which will soon start to fund the projects that Jane cared about.

Quite some years ago, at an evening gathering in Moscow, I had the pleasure of interviewing Natalya Kaspersky (in 1997 she founded the cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab with her then husband Eugene – he and many Kaspersky Lab colleagues had previously worked in the KGB).

I put a question to her regarding the growing number of Russian entrepreneurs, who seemed to thrive in a range of countries – the US, Canada, Germany and so on – but I was surprised by her answer – that the talent of the new entrepreneurial class was entirely due to the Russian state, its educational system and various socio-political institutions.

Today, not unlike both America and China, the Russian state and the notion of entrepreneurship are at odds. Many wealthier, young Russians lurk in Dubai, Cyprus, Georgia or parts of Asia, and the domestic labour market in Russia has been badly damaged by the war in Ukraine. Tellingly in the context of Natalya Kaspersky’s comments, much research talent has been directed into military focused technologies, and more broadly Russia’s ‘War Economy’ has become the only game in town.

This has created opportunities and dependencies for Russia. On one hand, together with China, and Iran, Russia is now a key part of an energy empire – that trades commodities, and builds commodity supply chains for at least one half of the world (India is shifting into this sphere). Both Russia and China have their claws into Africa, in a sinister repeat of what Tom Pakenham called the ‘Scramble for Africa’.

In contrast, Russia’s isolation and mono-sectoral economy leave it heavily dependent on China – some 90% of high-tech imports into Russia come from China, and it is yet unclear what financial support it gets from Beijing. In a week when Argentina’s economy and financial markets spluttered to a halt and triggered a rescue by Washington, Russia risks becoming China’s ‘Argentina’ if that makes sense.

There are however a few lessons for Western policymakers from Russia’s war economy, the first of which relates to debt. An under-remarked point is that Russia’s debt to GDP is only (officially) 20% which at least means it is not constrained by a huge debt burden, unlike the US, Britain, France, China, Italy and Japan. As the historian Niall Ferguson has remarked, no empire that has paid more to service its debt than its military has survived. In the future, indebtedness and military strength will be inter-related.

In 2008, after its partial invasion of Georgia, a post-mortem took place on the relatively poor state of the army (its training, equipment, and tactics) and hence began a modernization process in earnest. Many critics would say that elements of this – such as the structure and training of the army have failed completely, but other elements, notably military technology are a lot better. Germany, Spain, and Italy all need, or are about to embark on modernizations of their armies, while other countries like Ireland will need to remake their armies almost from scratch. In this respect, in a more contested world, there is a premium on getting military modernization right.

The second element of this, which is being felt in cities like Copenhagen, Warsaw and Berlin this week is Russia’s conception of total war. In 2021, a few months before the invasion of Ukraine we wrote (from Great War to Total War )about the now Russian army chief General Gerasimov’s doctrine of total war, which is a view of conflict that covers many strategies such as cyber, border testing, propaganda, and covert attacks, for example. This approach is very much on display across Eastern Europe – the encouragement of discord in Bosnia, the hollowing out of Hungarian politics and in particular the harnessing of Belarus as a form of geopolitical attack dog against the EU.

In this regard, the incursion of drones and jets into European airspace, with the added spice of cyber-attacks, is a sign of Russia stressing and probing European defences, and most importantly, testing the commitment of the US to NATO. My worry is that an accident or an escalation cannot be far off, and the risk that the Ukraine conflict spills into Europe cannot be ignored. Indeed, military planners in Germany and France are warning of the need for thousands more hospital beds to accommodate the casualties that might result from conflict with Russia.

European military planners should focus more on disabling Russia’s economy, which is struggling.

While GDP growth just popped into positive territory, the economy is in a rolling recession of sorts, or at best a period of impoverished stagflation. The labour market, banking sector and consumer sector are points of vulnerability. A longer-term effect is that the potential of the economy is being hollowed out by the effects of military Keynesianism. The US department of war has started to add financial market experts to its strategy teams to plot the vulnerability of enemy economies, Europe should do the same. Its sanctions regime is only half baked, and there is still plenty of low hanging fruit – such as the enablement of Russian oil and gas exports by Greek ship owners, the ongoing flux of Russian money through Austria, Cyprus and other EU states, not to mention the flow of Russian tourists.

Then, there’s plenty more that can be done to disable Russian banks and companies, and to stop proxy trade across parts of Eastern Europe and the ‘Stans’. Europe is already in a shadow war with Russia and will get little help from the current US administration. It needs to focus on Russia’s weak points.

Have a great week ahead, Mike 

One of the pleasures of writing this note is the feedback from readers and the subsequent debate – usually by email, sometimes over a coffee or pint, depending on my travels. The latest such exchange – from a reader in Australia, too far for a pint – related to the looming fiscal catastrophe that uniquely grips most of the major G7 economies and China. Some 60% of the world’s GDP is encumbered by debt to GDP of 100% or more, and untypically large deficits in the context of a business cycle expansion phase.

The question from Australia was ‘how does it all kick off?’ in the sense of when does the next debt crisis begin? I’ve been pondering this since making the BBC documentary ‘Waking up to World Debt? but still don’t have a clear view on what might trigger a crisis, and am mindful of Rudiger Dornbusch’s maxim that imbalances accumulate for longer than you think, and then turn sharply quicker than one would think.

In that respect I think a debt crisis will be soap operatic, and unravel in various stages, not unlike a good Netflix series. In particular it will have a number of distinct characteristics – the historically unprecedented fact that so many large economies are indebted and will all try to escape the debt trap at the same time, and the potential transfer in economic power between corporates (not hugely indebted).

There are a few potential starting points. A dramatic one could be a loss of faith in a major central bank, from the point of view of markets losing confidence that the likes of the Bank of Japan can continue to hoover up that nation’s bond market, without financial consequence.

A more conventional scenario, from an orthodox point of view, is the idea of sustainability, which Keynes defined curtly as ‘‘when it has become clear that the claims of the bondholders are more than the taxpayers can support’. A lumpier definition comes from institutions like the IMF and World Bank whose standard analysis aims to assess whether

‘In general terms, public debt can be regarded as sustainable when the primary balance needed to at least stabilize debt under both the baseline and realistic shock scenarios is economically and politically feasible, such that the level of debt is consistent with an acceptably low rollover risk and with preserving potential growth at a satisfactory level.”

In that respect, the conditions for a debt bust might start with a recession, where two problems might occur – the lack of fiscal space to cushion a recession and the political side-effects of this (from riots to split governments), and the immediate ‘discovery’ by markets of those bond markets that are still considered safe havens and those where country credit risk is high (i.e. France).

In particular, the inability of some governments to stimulate their economies without taking on more debt could lead to a deeper recession that might trigger a significant drop in asset values (bad for real estate loans and private credit). Concurrently a new set of bond safe havens might emerge (Norway, Ireland, Netherlands and Germany), whilst previously stable markets (Belgium) might sell-off.

At this early stage, a lot of focus will be on central banks, and those with the credibility and capacity to act to absorb market stress, will likely see their currencies well bid (the euro could be a surprise here). My instinct is that in the case of the Federal Reserve, which might well be a component of the US Treasury under the Trump administration, the fear of highly unorthodox policies will drive the dollar down, rather than upwards as is often the case in a crisis.

A further concern is that in a break with the last seventy or so years of policy making, the US will no longer act as the coordinator of a crisis rescue plan. International economics is becoming more competitive and more game theoretic, such that a debt crisis rescue plan will look more like the COVID crisis, where there is a stark lack of collaboration between the large economies, who will tend to prefer their own, localised rescue plans. To this end, currencies will be very volatile. And that’s just for a start.

Have a great week ahead, Mike

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In ten or so years’ time, the question that business leaders, some politicians and policymakers, not to mention the public at large in the Western world, will likely have on their minds is ‘Is a Restoration Possible?’

This thought was prompted by a visit through some of the older parts in England -Salisbury and Dorset, followed by a trip to New York for the McKinsey Global Strategy Summit. There are parallels between the two worlds.  

In the middle of 17^th century England, the arrest (in 1646) and subsequent death of King Charles I, led to a historic experiment with democracy (in which the Levellers were prominent),., which took a wrong turn (Cromwell positioned himself as Lord Protector). This period was known as the Interregnum – a bit like the current German concept of Zeitenwende – and came to an end after the death of Cromwell and the return of monarchy with the installation of Charles II as king in 1660 (The Restoration).

In many parts of England, notably Dorset, the Restoration was problematic because of lingering political and religious divides owing to the rivalries that were bred by the civil war. The overturning of Puritan laws and social restrictions was also controversial in parts, though the Restoration also produced a mini cultural renaissance.

The story of the transition from the uncertainty and experimentation of the Interregnum to the old order of the Restoration might appear interesting but obscure to some readers, but as a template, it doesn’t fit badly on the new, evolving world order. We have left the thirty-year-old ‘regime’ of globalisation and are moving into the Interregnum – which will see the old order unravel and may not provide many clear indications as to what kind of equilibrium the world settles into.

The transition through the Interregnum will have many wondering if a return to the many boons and benefits of globalisation is possible (‘a Restoration’), whilst others may believe that the vandalization of globalisation produces changes that are so profound that they are irreversible (A Restoration is not possible).

A Restoration would see a rebound in the health of democracy, civil public life, a trade outlook characterised by a reversal of tariffs, greater freedom of labour and better policing of trade conflicts. Two of the great bonuses of globalization, low, stable inflation and the absence of major wars, would return.

At this point, some seven months into the second Trump administration, we are accelerating away from the rosy Restoration scenario. If anything, there is an emerging sense of an ideological consistency across the administration (some people still mention Project 2025 for instance), and an accompanying desire to reshape America permanently.

An extrapolation of the events of the past few weeks might see the following trends – a breakdown of NATO, the IMF and World Trade Organisation, an open conflict between Europe and Russia, the emergence of a regional consensus between China and the larger countries across Asia, huge currency volatility (around the generally weaker dollar), the arrival of a major African power (Nigeria?), the collapse in late 2026 of the AI Bubble, the existence of the most extreme levels of wealth inequality (mostly in the US and India) ever recorded and the attendant socio-political consequences of this, and finally, to maintain the cheery tone, the undermining of the notion of the international rule of law and corporate contract law. I am very likely erring on the pessimistic side for dramatic effect, but few of these trends lead to a ‘Restoration’.

A less dramatic outlook, is that the path towards a ‘new world order’ (we have sketched this path out in a previous note ‘Are We There Yet?’) could still shift towards a ‘Restoration’ but it will first be strewn with several mountain like obstacles (a friend invoked James Martin’s similar idea of a canyon – from Martin’s book ‘The Meaning of the 21^st Century’).

These obstacles are, in my view, a climate crisis, a debt crisis and a crisis of democracy or governance. The way in which the international community tackles these crises will determine whether we get to a Restoration or not, and the key policy characteristic will be collaboration across the major regions. In this context, one of the early confirmations that globalization was dead, was the absence of cooperation between the US, China and to a less extent Europe, during the COVID crisis.

To take the example of a debt crisis, the absence of a ‘committee to save the world’ would likely see far greater market volatility, far greater damage to asset prices and a post crisis environment where banking systems and economies take longer to recover, do so unevenly and adopt more localised corporate governance regimes in the post-crisis period (China is the critical country here). Alternatively, collaboration across central banks, an internationally adjudicated resolution to a (government debt crisis) would lessen the financial damage, and potentially provide the context for a more global financial system, post the crisis.

I have only started to mull the concept of a Restoration, but my fear is that a full, coherent Restoration will only occur after various crises, and all of the bad options have first been exhausted.

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

Oscar Wilde’s line that ‘to lose one parent is a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness’ can be applied to politics, notably to France’s earnest President Emmanuel Macron, who may lose his fourth prime minister in just over eighteen months when Francois Bayrou submits his government to the mercy of parliament next week.

The likely fall of the Bayrou cabinet may see another powerless coalition cobbled together, or even a general election. In the near term the risk is of a collision between Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement (old Front National), the bond market and the French state.

That also most surely means the end of the ‘Macronie’, in the sense that Macron is in office but not in power. Polls suggest that few French people would regret or contest this.

It should not have come to this. Unlike many of its neighbours France has generally very good public services, transport and education systems, and Macron has manifestly enlivened the private investment and technology sectors of the economy. Economic growth has been decent by comparison to the UK and Germany at least. Compared to many of its peers and competitors, France is an agreeable and affordable place to live.

However, on Macron’s watch, France has become imperilled financially, the issue of immigration and identity still taxes public life to the extent that the Rassemblement is now the largest single party in parliament, and in foreign policy, France has lost sway in Africa and the Middle East, and more generally on the world stage. Another omission, where the broader elite is complicit, is the failure to reform the French democratic system.

In that context, there are perhaps three lessons from the wimpering end to the Macron era.

The first is that the major economies are now well and truly in the ‘Age of Debt’, where the consequences of indebtedness pervade and dominate politics, financial markets, geopolitics and society. The large economies of the world have never been so indebted, and the fact that they are at the same time will ultimately make debt reduction more disorderly. The Trump administration recognises this and is adopting highly unorthodox, risky measures to make its debt load less unsustainable. In Britain, there is widespread recognition of the country’s fiscal fragility, but policy makers are yet highly risk averse in tackling it. That France is in denial will only make the correction all the more painful.

In France, there is scant willingness on the part of the policy elite nor any of the political parties to seriously address France’s financial situation, and like a fancily dressed pauper, it continues to live beyond its means. For the time being, it can hide behind the euro, but its fellow euro-zone member states will soon become vigilant that France does not trigger another European financial crisis. The upshot of this is the loss of economic autonomy for France.

The second lesson is for centrist parties in the dwindling number of democracies in the world. In the context of the unravelling of the old, globalised order, amidst interference in European affairs from larger countries, government of the centre need to tackle problems like immigration, debt and geopolitics head on, with more aggression, else the parties of the fringe will capitalise on their inaction. Concretely, this amounts to a very different tempo of politics in Europe, and one that is ultimately more singular.

The third lesson, which is specifically European but that will strike a lesson with many Americans, is that European needs to take control of and change the narrative on its own destiny. European leaders have been far too reactive to the demands of the White House, and the violence of the Kremlin.

A lot of hope was placed on Macron to shape a narrative for Europe in the world, notably so in the absence of clarity of thought and leadership from many other European countries like Germany. Europe’s narrative should be that increasingly, for valuable public goods – democracy, the rule of law, education, healthcare and culture – it is the best place in the world. The problem is in paying for it.

Michael O’Sullivan is co-author, with Pierre Charles Pradier, of ‘L’Accord du Peuple’ (Calman-Levy).

I’ve spent a bit of the summer re-reading the work of Charles Kindleberger, an important economist whose career intersected monetary systems and stock market bubbles, two issues that are top of mind for investors and economists today (see last week’s note ‘Stable Genius’).

Kindleberger had an interesting career. His PhD advisor at Columbia was Henry Parker Willis (a key architect of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 and the first Secretary of the Federal Reserve Board that became what we now know as the ‘Fed’). Then in one of his first jobs at the US Treasury, Kindleberger worked for Harry Dexter White, the interlocutor and ‘rival’ of JM Keynes at the Breton Woods conference.

To that end, Kindleberger had a very strong sense of the creation of the monetary infrastructure that has built today’s economic world, and he then had the opportunity to play a role in this as one of the architects of the Marshall Plan, which did so much to spur growth in post-war Europe and to cement the view of the USA as the benevolent world power. Benn Steil’s book ‘The Marshall Plan: The Dawn of the Cold War’ is worth a read.

Beyond his policy work, Kindleberger is best known for ‘Mania’s, Panics and Crashes’, the best outline of how asset bubbles form and are followed by crashes.

It is highly pertinent today because a variety of stock market valuation indicators (the long-term ‘Shiller Price Earnings ratio’, the ‘Buffet Indicator’ as well as measures of market concentration – the largest ten stocks account for 75% of the entire market), point to the kind of market behaviour seen only in market bubbles (like 2001). Consistent with this, various investors, as well as entrepreneurs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman are warning of a ‘bubble’.

One test of the bubble thesis is to follow Kindleberger’s theory that asset price bubbles follow a common speculative cycle. According to Kindleberger, bubbles often start with an innovation – in a technology (i.e. railways) or a financial policy or market structure, or even a growth ‘miracle’ (note all the Tiger economies from Hong Kong to Ireland have seen boom/bust cycles) towards which investors channel capital, and then even more as asset prices rise and a narrative around the ‘mania’ begins to build.

This effect helps to loosen the strings of the overall economy and financial sector, but around this point asset prices are reaching incredulous levels as investor euphoria intensifies, drawing in further speculation, until prices then turn down, and the house of cards collapses in a crash. The collapse is always greater when households, institutions and individuals have borrowed on the back of high asset prices, and logically there is greater contagion across the economy.

One lesson from the Kindleberger book is that ‘new’ things – inventions or economic policy liberalizations often provide the spark for a new speculative bubble, that can grow and destabilise a financial system if enough speculative capital is driven towards it.

AI is a case in point. For context, Morgan Stanley estimates that over USD 3 trillion will be invested in AI related infrastructure (data centres, energy), with about half of that coming from the cashflow of the large technology companies, and the rest from private credit. It is clear that the large technology firms (from Microsoft to Nvidia) are the driving force behind this boom, especially so in the context of the fiscal weakness of most Western governments.

The recent results season was instructive in this respect. Often in a bubble, the dot.com one being a good example, the earnings associated with the bubble are only ‘prospective’ or somehow inflated. This is not the case with the large technology firms so far – by and large they report very strong earnings, which helps to soften the bubble argument. The catch is the circularity of the capital expenditure by the large technology firms – META for example is spending aggressively on data centres and chips and running down its cash levels. To that extent, the large tech firms are making a bold bet to get ahead in the AI game, but it is a concentrated and possibly existential bet.

If the strong cashflow position of the firms at the centre of this bubble is unusual in the context of the Kindleberger framework, two other factors also stand out as untypical.

The first is that short- and long-term interest rates in the major economies are close to ‘neutral’, neither too hot not too cold. Bubbles are often characterised, or preceded by ‘easy money’, though it has to be recognised that the last decade has been one of near continual stimulus (from QE to fiscal spending).

The other unusual factor is that the stock bubble is occurring against a backdrop of intense geopolitical and economic policy uncertainty – from great power competition to an unravelling trade order to a reconfiguring of America’s role in the world. The one way in which these dislocations fit the bubble narrative is that AI is a strategic asset, a ‘must-have’, that leads to an environment where for example the US government aims to take a strategic stake in Intel.

Having written in early 2024 of a ‘Bubble Brewing’, I think we are now ‘in’ an AI centric  market bubble, though not at the end of it in the sense of there being a ‘mania’ proper. In the short term, we might well see a wobble in AI stocks, before they pick up again.

In a future note I will detail my own experiences of the dot.com and European real estate bubbles, which lead me to think that ‘we are not there yet’ in terms of the evolution of this bubble. It will end with the absurd – Nvidia encroaching on a USD 10 trn valuation, food companies publicly adopting AI and seeing their values double, wild predictions that AI can treble productivity and wipe out the debt, and on the flip side, the structural risks to energy and jobs markets that AI could pose.

But, we are not there yet.

Have a great week ahead, Mike

There should be a rule in financial markets that, at some stage, a financial product or strategy will do the opposite of what its name suggests – we might call it the ‘inverse Ronseal hypothesis’ (Ronseal paint is famous for promising that ‘it does what it says on the tin’). In this sense, think of how the ‘risk free’ assets of the textbooks perform under inflation, how ‘low volatility’ structured products blew up spectacularly and how in the 1980’s America’s Savings and Loan banks went bust, because they failed to save and lend properly.

Into this realm steps the ‘stablecoin’, an asset that is growing speedily and that is forecast to become the solution to many problems – the US national debt, a sluggish and conservative banking system and the impoverishment of emerging economies.

A neat way to think of stablecoins is to first consider the gold standard – money backed by physical holdings of gold – and then conceive of them as a digital coin (token or ‘betting chip’) that is backed by a well-established, reputable asset (increasingly, US Treasuries).

The idea is that because they are backed by a stable financial asset, the value of the stablecoin should not fluctuate and should therefore form the basis for transfers of money and value. Yet, some stablecoins are not fully backed by Treasuries and others are backed by crypto ‘money’, which quite obviously renders them less than stable. Bear in mind that a crypto coin called ‘FartCoin’ is inexplicably worth USD 1.4 bn, which is a lot of comedy value compared to zero intrinsic value.

In the past year, the use of stablecoins has surged, notably so in the case of those backed by Treasuries.  Stablecoins are now the 18^th largest holder of Treasuries (with USD 150bn) just after Norway, India and Brazil.

The vast majority of stablecoins are used in crypto trading, but the potential they hold to revolutionise the payments industry is startling. Payments by stablecoin are nearly instantaneous (as opposed to having to wait 1-5 days with banking systems), carry a very low transaction charge and should make payments across borders easier. Indeed, the volume of stablecoin transactions is creeping close to the activity that the major credit card firms – Visa and MasterCard generate (Visa has its own crypto/stablecoin division).

Consistent with the instinct that is prevalent in markets and politics to see all new things as solutions to old problems, stablecoins are being promoted as a new source of demand for Treasuries, and therefore a new channel through which the US national debt can be nourished.

This is a dangerous idea, because whilst stablecoins are a digital join between the old financial world (Treasuries) and the new (‘defi’ or decentralised finance), their growth may set in train a situation where the tail starts to wag the dog. What I mean by this is that even though an individual stable coin, backed 100% by Treasuries is stable, the infrastructure and the people behind the stablecoin network, and the crypto world, may not themselves be stable.

There are several risks.

One relates to Gresham’s Law, which stated that ‘bad money, will drive out the good’. In the same way that 16^th century bankers and traders had an incentive to use coins (which all had the same face value) with some lower quality metal. Equally, certain stablecoin providers will have an incentive to only partially back coins with reliable assets or to misreport the extent to which coins are backed by ‘good assets’, and in the event – a recession or financial crisis – that these assets are ‘called’, there could very easily be a bank run style collapse in a few stablecoins, with contagion across the field.

As such, the large stablecoin providers may submit themselves to central bank regulation, to ensure that there is hard evidence that coins are backed by stable assets – but the quid pro quo of this (that they surrender details of the people using stablecoins) may be unpalatable.

It is also worth recalling that over the past five years, there have been a range of scandals in the crypto world, and many crypto exchanges have collapsed or been shut down by regulators. To that end there is a counterparty risk inherent in the stablecoin system. Also, the loss or theft of wallets and keys to crypto assets makes the stablecoin system highly vulnerable, at a time when financial institutions are investing even more in security.

From a macro pint of view, it is more likely that stablecoins effectively digitise the grey and black economies (so that there is no net financial or economic effect) or that they have very strong appeal in emerging economies with poor financial infrastructure. If that is the case, the economic effect will be to draw capital out of emerging market economies, enfeebling them (and their currencies and bond markets). Tether is very popular in Turkey, whose financial system has been significantly weakened by the current government, whose autocratic style incentivises business to transact ‘outside’ the existing economic system.

The other major risk is that the obvious attractions of stablecoins as cheap and speedy means of switching money, implies an undercutting of the profitability of banks and payment companies, especially if savers can start to earn yield (technically called a ‘reward’) on stablecoins. The incumbent financial system will not like this, and whilst the larger financial institutions will likely adapt to them, many smaller ones will suffer. From a regulatory point of view, a weaker banking system is unwelcome, and the very fact that fewer dollars are taken ‘out of sight’ of regulators is not good either. There are already a number of regulatory frameworks for stablecoins, ‘MICA’ in Europe and the Genius Act in the US for instance.

In these ways, stablecoins can make financial systems more volatile, and of diminished quality, and higher volatility, unless they are brought under the wing of regulators (which is anathema to most in the crypto world) or adopted by the large, incumbent financial institutions. Reflecting this, researchers at the ECB^[1] found that in periods where crypto assets (i.e. Bitcoin) were volatile, stablecoins exhibited volatility that was not evident in the assets used to back them (Treasuries).

From a geopolitical, or geo-economic point of view, the spread of stablecoins that are backed by safe dollar based assets (Treasuries) is at least a means of spreading dollarization to grey and emerging economies. The question for central banks like the ECB is how best to approach stablecoins. 

My sense is that there are two avenues to follow. The first is to encourage financial institutions, corporates and banks to develop stablecoins, in a way that permits later adoption of a digital euro. The other is to push a euro-stablecoin into Russia, Belarus, the ‘Stans’ and generally the former USSR countries not in or wanting to get into the EU to deprive the ‘rouble’ zone if we can put it that way, of money that flows through its large grey economy. 

Have a great week ahead

Mike

In ancient Greece the ‘Titanomachy’ was a battle between the Olympian gods (like Zeus) and the older gods, the Titans. Once victorious, Zeus condemned his vanquished opponents, notably Atlas, who was forced to carry the burden of the heavens, for eternity.

Though it is a stretch of the comparison that classical scholars should not forgive, when thinking of Atlas’ feat of endurance, I have central banks in mind, and in particular of the Federal Reserve, which has especially in the past fifty years borne the weight of investor expectations and the hopes of politicians. The importance of the Fed cannot be underestimated – academics have shown that returns, volatility and trading volumes are higher than average around the Federal Open Markets Committee meeting.

The Fed has been at the epicentre of every financial crisis rescue effort through the globalization era – from the Asian, Russia and LTCM crises, to the global financial crisis where the intellectual burden of finding a way of mending markets was shouldered by Ben Bernanke, to the recent responsiveness of the institution during COVID. If anything, the Fed has been guilty of doing too much in recent years, and the consequences of its long deployment of quantitative easing are still becoming evident.

On one hand, the large central banks, led by the Fed, are the glue that has kept the political economic peace throughout this thirty or so year period, but on the other, this peace has permitted the accumulation of huge amounts of debt, and has shielded politicians from the fiscal consequences of their actions.

Now, the independence of the Fed is about to be sacrificed, as the president appoints Stephen Miran to replace Adriana Kugler who is stepping down, and a prospective chair to replace Jerome Powell who is due to step down in a year’s time as head of the Fed. The unwritten assumption is that, like never before, the Fed’s rate setting committee will sway to the mood of the White House. Miran’s appointment is a sure sign of this. 

This is problematic at many levels. The suite of policies enacted by the president – from deportation to tariffs – means that the US economy is now suffering from stagflation (sticky inflation and low growth). Strip away the blinding effect of wild investment in AI and corporate America looks like corporate Europe. 

Stagflation is difficult for investors and central banks to navigate, and markets are pricing out rate cuts from this Fed. Indeed, this is a very strange rate cycle. Historically, the Fed leads rate cutting cycles and other central banks follow, but the Bank of England, ECB, Royal Bank of Canada and other smaller central banks like the SNB, have been hacking away at rates whilst the Fed has not moved this year.

In the long-term, the potential politicisation of the Fed will augment uncertainty. There is already talk in central banking circles that in the event of a financial crisis, the politicised Fed may not be willing to open swap lines with other central banks, which if it occurred would deepen the economic effects of any crisis. Swap lines across the international financial system have been staples of past rescues, and articles of faith for scholars of monetary systems like Charles Kindleberger.

In such a context, the Fed’s job as lender to (US) banks might also become more complex and ineffective if the large banks were to behave in the same way that the technology companies are now doing (Apple looks to have escaped tariffs by presenting a gift to the president in the White House and promising to invest USD 600bn in the US – it currently invests about USD 43bn). So, in a financial crisis, a large American bank could offer a large loan to the Trump family to extend the Mar-a-Lago resort, if the president sanctioned its main national and international rivals (cynics will ask whether something similar happened in 2009).  

My hunch is that beyond the thrill of lower interest rates (which will likely raise inflation and long-term bond yields), the vision that Trump has in mind for the Fed is something along the lines of the Bank of Japan, which in the past ten years has effectively swallowed the Japanese bond market (the BoJ owns just over 50% of the Japanese bond market). Having the Fed as a monetary hoover to keep bond yields stable will help to dampen some of the risks of indebtedness, but will store up greater risks for later.

The appointment of a ‘yes-man’ at the head of the Fed (Kevin Hassett fits this role much more than the other leading candidate Kevin Warsh), will likely spur resistance within the institution, and across the regional Fed banks whose presidents help to make up the rate setting committee. Not only will Fed employees – who are devoted to the institution – worry for their jobs (witness the hollowing out of the Bureau for Labour Statistics), but they will be concerned that the entire macro-landscape is being undermined – by weaker institutions, unreliable data, crypto and other ‘new’ money experiments, the acceptance of corruption and more volatile assets.

The ultimate objective of ‘politicising’ the Fed, if that is what is at stake, is to make sure that the next crisis doesn’t happen on Donald Trump’s watch. The risk is that when that crisis does happen, the Fed will be part of the problem rather than the solution. 

James Thurber’s famous book ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ is yet another book I would recommend to readers, to continue a recurring theme of recent weeks. It is especially apt in the context of the US-EU trade deal.

Walter Mitty appeared at the end of the 1930’s, a decade that was shaped by Herbert Hoover’s tariff policy, and that was marked by profound economic and geopolitical tensions. Mitty’s fantasies were provoked by the reality of his pedestrian, harangued life – which will appeal to European leaders who care to dream of better days. Equally, the giddiness of Mitty’s fantasies has its equivalent in the promises that Donald Trump has elicited from the EU – namely, to buy and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in energy.

One week on, reaction to the US-EU trade deal is still mixed, and it is not quite clear who has ‘won’. This may be because it is not a trade deal in the classical sense – at least in the sense of the laborious trade deals that the EU is used to striking, partly because a large facet of the ‘deal’ is based on a promise and also because the optics of the deal are quite depressing for Europe.

At the headline level, EU exports into the US will be met with a 15% tariff to be paid by the US consumer, not unlike the Japanese ‘deal’. Auto companies will not be displeased with a 15% tariff. Wines and spirits, steel and notably pharmaceuticals have yet to have tariff levels finalised and there will be some relief on the confirmation of 15% tariffs on pharmaceuticals, though the investigation into pharmaceutical exports back to the US is a tail risk. Interestingly, the EU has resisted attempts to water down its digital regulations.

Politically the spin that the EU is putting on the agreement is that it was the best possible outcome in a difficult geopolitical climate (recall that the recent EU-China summit was a damp-squib). While there were some public expressions of dismay, notably from the French prime minister Francois Bayrou – these can be seen to be largely aimed at the public, rather than Brussels.

Though Ursula von der Leyen is unpopular with EU governments for the singular way she runs her office – it is populated with officials who are close to national government (i.e.  Alexandre Adam one of von der Leyen’s key deputies is an arch Macronist) – there is no sense that the large countries were left out of the negotiation process, and any effort to isolate von der Leyen for blame, is ignoble.

However, amongst the professional trade staff, there is still some despair at the humiliating optics of the deal, the fact that it is in many ways not binding, and the risk that there is no undertaking that it is final in the sense that another round of tariffs is imposed later.

On the positive side for Europe, and flipping to the ‘Mitty-esque’ part of the deal, two of the key undertakings in the deal – that European companies invest USD 600 bn in the US, in addition to a commitment to purchase microchips, as well as a commitment from the EU to buy USD 750bn in energy from the US over the course of the Trump presidency – are not at all clear in their implementation, and very much open to a fudge, with the right accounting treatment. In particular the energy purchase commitment is unrealistic because it exceeds what the EU spends on energy in a given year and US energy firms do not have the capacity to service a commitment of USD 250bn in demand from Europe, whilst also serving other markets.  

In my view there are several aftershocks to watch for. The first is that the deal further damages trans-Atlantic relations, and the level of trust between the EU and the US is likely the lowest it has ever been, and this has strategic implications as far afield as Russia/Ukraine and the Middle East. One other implication may be a drift, by government and consumers, away from US brands – as this may well be an effect that is seen in other regions.

Two financial market implications are that the dampening of growth in Europe will maintain downward pressure on rates in Europe. More importantly, in the context of a very oversold dollar, there is now an incentive for EU policy makers to try hard to talk down the euro, and we may see a short-term rebound in the currency pair.

On the whole, if this is a ‘final’ deal and the topic of tariffs does not re-emerge in the next three years, it is not a bad deal for the semi’s, autos and aerospace sectors in Europe, though the public optics are not good for the EU. The best parts of the deal for Europe are the fantastical claims of incoming European investment and energy purchases in the US. This is a Mitty style fairy tale that the Europeans hope Mr Trump believes in.

The telling factor is that this deal has now emptied all goodwill from the trans-Atlantic relationship, and effectively completes another diplomatic rupture by President Trump.  From a European point of view, this is yet another ‘wake up call’ and the best that can be hoped for is that it accelerates projects like the savings and investment union and ‘strategic autonomy’. European leaders and the European policy elite keep talking about this, but until we see hard evidence (for example, German real GDP over the last five years is close to zero), they are the fantasists.

Have a great week ahead

Mike