Vivek Kaul
Some of the earliest banks started operating in Italy somewhere in the twelfth and thirteenth century. These banks were essentially banks of deposits. Merchants deposited their money in the form of gold and silver coins and bars with these banks for safekeeping. The bank in return issued a receipt against this deposit. The receipt could be shown when the coin money was to be withdrawn. Hence, the earliest banks were “banks of deposits” or “store houses of wealth”.
As time went by some banks developed a reputation for probity and honesty. This led to merchants who had accounts with these banks simply transferring receipts of these banks when they had to pay one another instead of going to the bank showing their receipt and withdrawing their gold or silver to pay each other.
Hence, these receipts started functioning as “paper” money. In sometime people running these banks also figured out that their depositors do not all come all on the same day asking for their deposits back. So in the intermittent period they could either lend out the gold/silver to others or simply print fake deposit receipts not backed by any gold or silver bars or coins, but which looked exactly like the original deposit
receipt. Of course they charged a fee for this.
A similar trend seems to have played out in London in the seventeenth century where merchants took to depositing money with the goldsmiths. This happened after King Charles I seized around £130,000 in bullion, deposited by the city merchants at the Tower of London in 1640.
Like the Italian bankers the London goldsmiths also figured out that they could keep lending the gold that was deposited or simply issue fake receipts, and make more money in the process. As Hartley Withers writes in his all time classic The Meaning of Money:
The original goldsmith’s note was a receipt for metal deposited. It took the form of a promise to pay metal, and so passed as currency. Some ingenious goldsmith conceived the epoch-making notion of giving notes, not only to those who had deposited metal, but to those who came to borrow it, and so founded modern banking.
This is how banks evolved from being just banks of deposit to being banks which gave out loans as well. And to this day they work in the same way. This change also gave bank a right to create money out of thin air, something only the governments could do till then.
Let’s try and understand how that happens. Let us say an individual/institution/government deposits $1000 with a bank. Let’s assume that the bank in turn keeps 10% of the deposits (for the ease of calculation) and lends out the remaining 90% or$900 in this case. It thus manages to create an asset from someone else’s money. So we also have a situation here were the money supply has increased by $1900 ($1000 money deposited with the bank + $900 loan given by the bank).
The $900 loan gets deposited with another bank which in turn lends $810 (90% of $900) and keeps $90 with itself. The $810 is deposited in another bank and leads to a loan of $729. So the banks can keep creating money out of thin air and the money supply can keep going up.
This ability of banks to create money out of thin air is believed to be behind the boom and bust cycles (also referred to as business cycle fluctuations) that the world economy has seen over the last three decades. As J write in The Chicago Plan Revisited, a research paper released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “sudden increases and contractions of bank credit that are not necessarily driven by the fundamentals of the real economy, but that themselves change those fundamentals.” When banks feel optimistic, they create money out of thin air by lending it and in the process create the boom part of the business cycle. But when the banks feel pessimistic about economies they may call back their loans or not give out loans at all, and in the process create the bust part of the cycle.
The IMF authors feel that this ability of the banks to create money out of thin air needs to be reined in. The ability to create money should rest only with the government. For this to happen they have revisited The Chicago Plan. The plan was first proposed in the aftermath of The Great Depression of the 1930s.
“During this time a large number of leading U.S. macroeconomists supported a fundamental proposal for monetary reform that later became known as the Chicago Plan, after its strongest proponent, professor Henry Simons of the University of Chicago,” write Benes and Kumhof. Over the years Irving Fisher, who was America’s greatest economist of that era, also came to be closely associated with it.
This plan strikes at the heart of how conventional banking works. A bank raises money as deposits and lends it out as loans. The Chicago Plan separates the deposit and lending functions of the bank. So when $1000 is deposited with the bank, the bank will have to hold the entire money with it and act as a “bank of deposit”. It will not be able to lend this money out. So bank deposits cannot fund its loans. This also eliminates the chances of bank run totally. Even if all the customers of the bank come and demand their deposit from the bank at the same time, the bank can easily repay them.
The question that crops up here is that if the bank does not lend out its deposits how does t fund its loans? As per the Chicago Plan the loans will have to be funded separately from sources which are not subject to bank runs. Hence, loans would be funded out of retained earnings of the bank. They could also be funded out of the bank issuing more shares to investors. And a third source of funding, which is at the heart of the Chicago Plan, would come from the government.
The bank will have to borrow money from the government to fund its loans. The government can ‘print’ this money that it will lend to banks. Hence, this is the way the government can control money in the economy. When it wants to expand money supply it can lend more and vice versa. Banks cannot create money out of thin air because they are not allowed to lend their deposits.
“The control of credit growth would become much more straightforward because banks would no longer be able, as they are today, to generate their own funding, deposits, in the act of lending,” write the IMF authors.
Also, the government will lend against certain assets of banks. These assets can be included while calculating the net debt of the government and deducted from its total debt. The government can also buy back government bonds held by banks against the loans it will give to banks to fund their loans. Either ways the net debt of the government could come down dramatically.
The government could also use the same method to buy out private debt from these banks. It could buy back private bonds against cancellation of government loans to these banks. And why would the government do that? “Because this would have the advantage of establishing low-debt sustainable balance sheets in both the private sector and the government, it is plausible to assume that a real-world implementation of the Chicago Plan would involve at least some, and potentially a very large, buy-back of private debt,” write the IMF authors.
That’s the plan. But the bigger question that the plan does not answer is how much can governments be trusted when it comes to printing money?
A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in Daily News and Analysis on October 24, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])
http://money.msn.com/investing/no-debt-no-cuts-no-new-taxes
Daily News and Analysis
Why’s the world going gaga over Gangnam Style?
Vivek Kaul
This year’s top video on YouTube has been Gangnam Style, a South Korean song which has taken the world by storm. And as happens with anything that becomes successful people have started to look for reasons behind its success. The song has been labeled the crossover from the East to the West something that took actor Jackie Chan three decades to achieve.
One article looking into the success of the song pointed out “Yet, its rise to universality is no fluke. Its success occurs when the world is shifting in radical ways, at a time when individuals, empowered by the information technology, can change world history”.
The problem with this argument is that the same information technology was available to other songs and artists. Take the case of the home grown Kolaveri Di which took India by storm early this year. Like Gangnam Style the song had been put up on YouTube and it was trending within days of its upload. But its popularity never spread beyond India and Indians. How do you explain that? If information technology was the only criteria then Kolaveri Di should have been as big a hit as Gangnam Style, perhaps even bigger given that a sufficient number of Indians live in all corners of the globe.
So what is happening here? As Paul Ormerod explains in his new book Positive Linking – How Networks Can Revolutionise the World “As usual, we could in principle always tell a story after the event which purports to the account for the much further greater popularity of one video compared to another.” What this basically means is that it is easy to rationalise success by spinning a story around it once it has happened. But that doesn’t mean that those were the reasons for the success. Like the success of Kolaveri Di was attributed to its KISS (keep it simple stupid) strategy.
But the point is if identifying success was so easy we would all be doing it. Michael Mauboussin has a very interesting example in his soon to be released book The Success Equation – Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing. Llyod Braun, Chairman of ABC Entertainment Group had proposed a show called Lost. It was a cross between Cast Away, a movie that featured Tom Hanks stranded on a desert island, and Survivor, a reality TV show about contestants who compete with one another in the wilderness and then vote to remove members until only one person is left. “Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney…heard the pitch and rated Loss a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst…Eisner later called the show “terrible”…Despite Eisner’s dim view of the show Lost was a smash success…Lost ran for six reasons and improved ABC’s slumping ratings and profits,” writes Mauboussin. The irony was that Braun who had proposed the show had already been fired by then.
So the history of cultural markets is full of such examples which were written off. As Duncan J Watts writes in Everything is Obvious – Once You Know the Answer “The history of cultural markets is crowded with examples of future blockbusters – Elvis, Star Wars, Seinfeld . Harry Potter, American Idol – that publishers and movie studios left for read while simultaneously betting big on total failures.”
Another great example is Slumdog Millionaire which almost did not release and went to DVD straight away. The film went onto to win eight Oscar awards. The Hangover was another such hit. Made at a low budget of $35million, the movie went onto earn close to $468million. Closer to home critics wrote of Sholay as dead ember and Hum Aapke Hain Koun as an extended wedding video. We all know what happened there. And since then scores of Hindi movies which are versions of these two movies have been made.
JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by 12 publishers till Bloomsbury agreed to publish it. The first print run of the book was 1000 copies. Once the book was a super-hit it was deemed as a phenomenon waiting to happen. Michael Maouboussin explains this tendency in a research paper titled Was Harry Potter Inevitable? “Our society often associates success with quality. In a fiercely competitive market, the thinking goes, only the best products rise to the surface. Once a product is a hit, whether a blockbuster movie or a bestselling book, we readily point to the attributes that make it so appealing,” he writes.
Maouboussin gives a more detailed explanation for the phenomenon in his new book. “If you are like me, you have a hard time accepting that there isn’t just a little special about The Da Vinci Code, Titanic, or the Mona Lisa. The very fact that they are so wildly popular seems to be all the evidence you need to conclude that they have some special qualities that makes them stand above all the rest. But all three were surprises. Our minds are expert at wiping out surprises and creating order, and order dictates that these products are special.”
Hence, the reasons highlighted have nothing to do with the success, typically. People like the product (be it a book, a song or a movie) initially and once the product becomes slightly popular they tend to become more popular because they are popular. This is referred to as the Matthew Effect after a verse in the Gospel of Matthew “For whosever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.”
But that clearly doesn’t stop people from coming up with more and more explanations for success. As Watt puts it “In the end, the only honest explanation may be the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold because lots of people bought it.” Similarly Gangnam Style worked because a lot of people heard it. Its success was a total ‘fluke’.
The article originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis dated October 22, 2012. http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_whys-the-world-going-gaga-over-gangnam-style_1754813
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and he can be reached at [email protected])
‘Opium profits funded many banks, insurance, and shipping companies in Bombay and Calcutta’
Tirthankar Roy teaches economic history at the London School of Economics Science. His book The Economic History of India 1857-1947, has changed the way Indian economic history is studied and taught worldwide. He is also the author of the The East India Company – The World’s Most Powerful Corporation (Penguin Allen Lane 2012). In this interview he speaks to Vivek Kaul on the way the East India Company operated in India and the impact it had on Indian business and economy.
How and when was the East India Company formed? What were its initial goals?
The English East India Company was formed in 1600, after a series of informal and formal meetings between ship captains, merchants, and bankers of the City of London, all of whom wanted to develop trade with Asia, in particular, to procure more black pepper from the Indonesian islands, which sold at an astronomical price in Europe.
Gurcharan Das in the introduction to your book writes “The modern corporation is, indeed, a child of the East India Company and there is much to learn from the mother’s failures and successes.” Could you elaborate on that?
Mr. Das is quite right; the Company was the first multinational, in that its London head office and its offices and warehouses in India were all parts of the same firm, thoughlocated thousands of miles apart in different countries. As in a modern multinational, the head office appointed the key officers who would run the operations in India. It was also a joint stock firm, that is, it pooled in the capital of many shareholders, which gave it much greater economies of scale and more capacity to absorb risks than a partnership or family firm of the time.
How similar or different is the East India Company from the modern multinational?
There was a difference between the Company and the modern multinational. In the case of the Company, the head office did not have full knowledge of what the branches were doing, and did not have complete command and control over the operations of the branches. This imperfect command problem arose partly because of physical distance which made travel and communication between the head and the braches very slow by modern standards.
Were there any other reasons for the problem?
Partly, the problem arose due to a social reason. The shareholders of the Company who controlled the London end of the operation and the rank and file in the branch offices came from different social classes. They did not completely trust each other. The shareholders were wealthy merchants and bankers, the rank and file came from poorer backgrounds and often joined the firm as sailors and soldiers. There was also a conflict of interest in the Indian side. The employees were paid small salaries, on the understanding that they would make some money by trading on the side. But then too much trade on the side hurt the Company’s own interest. How much is too much? There was constant tension over this question.
You mentioned initially that the Company initially started by trading pepper. It bought pepper in Indonesia and then sold it in Britain. You also write about the initial fleet of the East India Company coming back with pepper alone which was valued at a million pounds. How did the company decide on trading pepper? And why was pepper so much in demand?
Pepper was hugely valuable in Europe partly because it was thought to be the best ingredient available to hide the smell of slightly stale meat in cooked dishes, and partly because spices were demanded as a luxury article by the rich people. But alongside demand, there were supply side reasons as well for the high prices. Pepper and aromatic spices did not grow everywhere. They could not be easily cultivated either. They had to be procured from remote islands in the Indonesian archipelago or the mountains of Kerala in India, where climate and topography were favourable for growing spices. Not everyone had easy access to these sources. On top of that, the little pepper that came overland into Europe was solidly controlled by the merchants of Genoa and Venice, who were not friends of the English. That control also created monopoly prices.
In the second half of the 1500s, a leading explorer of the time, Ralph Fitch, travelled from London to Southeast Asia via India to explore the prospects of an English trade there. Fitch wrote a book on return, which was read, among others, by William Shakespeare. This book and some of the members of the tour were influential behind the start of the East India Company.
The Company eventually evolved a three cornered system of doing business. What was that? How did it help them?
The Company soon discovered that the means of payment for spices needed to be found within Asia itself, because not all peoples in Asia could be paid with European goods. Europeans could bring some woollen goods, but who will buy woollens in Indonesia or India? Therefore, it was looking for suitable Asian goods to exchange for spices. In particular, Indian textiles sold well in all of Southeast Asia, and both the Dutch and the English companies became interested in Indian cloth in order to use these to buy spices. Not only that; for some time, horses were purchased from Persia for sale to India, cotton textiles were purchased in exchange, and the textiles were exchanged for spices. Horses were in great demand in India, because the main armies consisted largely of cavalry, and there were no indigenous breed of warhorses. This was the three cornered system.
The company eventually built forts in Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Madras (now Chennai) and primarily operated out of these forts. Can you discuss this portion in some detail?
The Company initially negotiated trading rights with local states, like the Mughal province of Gujarat, the Emperor’s court in Delhi or Agra, or the provincial Governor of the Golconda state. They sought permission to trade from an established port that belonged to these powers. The three major ports were Surat, Masulipatnam, and Hooghly.But the need to defend themselves against the Dutch and the Portuguese, occasionally, threats from the Mughals and local rulers, and increasingly the need to run their own place by means of their own laws all led the Company to lease in or buy lands where it could create its own ports, docks, and naval stations. This is how Madras and Calcutta came up. Bombay’s origin was similar, except that it was initially received by the English King as a dowry in a royal marriage. Not knowing how he could use this place, the King handed it over to the Company. Because of the defence motive and the wish to create a government on a tiny scale, these towns always started with the construction of forts.
Would it be fare to compare these cities to special economic zones of today?
These three cities did share something in common with today’s SEZs, in that both tend to be export-oriented. But then, inside the SEZs, conditions of business depend on state policy. In these three port cities, there was no well-defined economic policy in existence.
How did opium come into the scheme of things for the East India Company?
Opium would grow in Bihar or Malwa (near Indore in central India), reach Calcutta or Bombay, was auctioned to overseas merchants, who would then take it abroad in special ships that were made to be defended against pirates of the China Sea. Once in China, the opium will be taken inland by the Hong merchants of Canton (Guangzhou/Guandong). It was an illegal substance in China, and the business in the interior could be done only by politically connected individuals. The Hong merchants fitted that role. They also had a lot of money. The opium was purchased with silver, which was then be used to buy Chinese tea. Tea, again, was sent back to England for resale to America. The tax on tea was a valuable income to the government. When these taxes were raised in 1773, the angry consumers staged the famous Boston Tea Party, where British tea chests arriving in Boston were thrown into the waters. That event again led to the American Revolution. In this way Asian trade changed world politics.
It is said that some of the biggest family owned businesses in India made their first fortunes in opium. It was that money which was used to expand into other businesses. What do you have to say about that?
This is true of some of the Parsee firms, especially the Tatas, even though the Tatas reduced their opium ties when the firm was actively moving into industry. Apart from individual firms, opium profits funded many banks, insurance, and shipping companies in Bombay and Calcutta.
Which were the communities that gained the most because of their association with the East India company?
The Parsees have been mentioned. They were mainly based in Surat and Bombay, and worked for the Company both as agents and contractors and also as shipwrights. In Calcutta, many prominent Bengali and North Indian merchants in the 1700s were friends of the Company. They actively helped the Company take over political power in 1757. This group included the largest firm of the time, the Jagatseths, who were a sort of banker to the court. In Madras, Telugu merchants were partners of the Company, and some of them acquired great wealth and power. Any direct link between gainers in the 1700s and successful firms today cannot be drawn, because Indian business world has diversified so much away from the old-style commodity trade.
You give credit to the East India Company for introducing the entire system of contracts in India. Why did India not have such a system earlier?
The idea of the contract, and probably some kind of law as well, did exist in India from before. But apart from loan transactions, in the matter of sale of goods, these rules were not very actively in use. Certainly there were no known state courts that settled merchant disputes over contracts. The Company needed to use contract heavily because it operated on a very large scale in a limited range of goods. It needed to buy cloth from hundreds of thousands of weavers made according to exact specification. It could not possibly do bulk purchases of cloth and maintain quality without some kind of advance agreements.
The problem, though, was that the Company was using contracts on a larger scale than any Indian firms without a proper commercial law. So, it exposed itself to numerous disputes over quality, quantity, delayed delivery of cloth, and clandestine deals between weavers and the Company’s rivals, the Dutch or the French.
You write towards the concluding part of your book that “the return of that process of skill-building is being reaped today in the form of net income that India receives by selling highly skilled services to the world”. Could you explain this portion in some detail?
In the 1800s, India exported a lot of commodities to Britain. The textile export trade had ended, but opium, indigo, tea, cotton, and later, wheat and rice, took its place. With the export surplus, India purchased skilled services from Britain. These payments were for the services of British military and administrative officers who ran the government, the services of scientists, engineers, doctors, and professors, again working for the government, as well as for foremen, engineers, and partners who were working in the private industries. These purchases were condemned by Indian nationalists as wasteful expenditure or a ‘drain’ of resources. But the drain theory is an exaggeration. Much of this payment went to hire a variety of skills that India did not have. These skilled people contributed to industrialization, big engineering works like irrigation canals and railways, and a university and a hospital system that were far ahead in the developing world of the 1800s in terms of quality.
And how did all this benefit India?
Today, India derives a lot of mileage in the world economy from the strengths built up a hundred or more years ago thanks to these purchase of British services. Its engineering schools, university education, scientific research, and the Indians’ head-start with English language, were all examples of the positive effects of what the nationalists called drain. The fact that Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras started modern factory industry already in the 1800s had much to do with the ability of India to buy knowhow and hire manpower from Britain in that time.
Does India suffer from the East India Company syndrome where we remain suspicious of foreign business?
The superstitious fear of the foreigner runs deep in the mind of the Indian populace and is constantly exploited by politicians and corporates today who do not want foreign competitors. They distort history in their favour, as many angry or fearful people often do. The uniformly negative light in which the Company is seen adds to this sentiment. Much of that sentiment formed in the 1920s and 1930s during India’s nationalist struggle. Important writers, including Jawaharlal Nehru, blamed the foreigners for the poverty of the Indians. This was a politically useful line then and a politically correct line even now. But it is bad history nonetheless.
Could you explain that in some detail?
It was then and it is now misinformed about the real story of the Company and its contributions to the making of modern India. When we think of the legacy of the Company, we should think of Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Without the East India Company, these places would in all likelihood have still remained the fishing villages that they were in the 1600s. Because of the Company they emerged not only as cities, but also huge cosmopolitan hubs of Indo-European business and the true symbols of globalization.
East India Company was the first MNC in the world. What can Indian corporations which are going global learn from it?
The Company’s business history tells us that doing business in another country always needs local partners and agents, and these partnerships are never easy relationships, because the partners can take advantage of the greater knowledge of the local scenario. Similarly, political tendencies in the country of operation are also a cause for concern to the MNC. Today’s MNCs are still subject to the same kind of uncertainty. Why do many joint ventures fail?
How do you compare the “crony capitalism” practiced during the times of the East India Company to the kind that is practiced in India now?
Business always needs to keep good relations with those who run governments, and governments also want friends in business. After all, a lot of tax comes from the corporates, and quite often, bureaucrats and politicians join private enterprise. This is a common factor between the world in the 1600s and the world in the 2000s. The difference is that in the earlier days, everything depended on informal negotiations. There was a big role for conspiracy and intrigue. Today, these relationships are, at least partly, based on legal principles.
The interview originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis on October 22, 2012. http://www.dnaindia.com/money/interview_opium-profits-funded-many-banks-insurance-and-shipping-firms-in-bombay-and-calcutta_1754808
(Interviewer Kaul is a writer and he can be reached at [email protected])
Napier sees all equity markets falling
Stock markets and economies do not always go together. Take the case with India right now. The stock markets have done reasonably well this year. The economy clearly hasn’t with economic growth slowing down to around 5.5%.
As Russell Napier a consultant with CLSA and a financial historian of repute puts it “I maintain a very positive long term view on India and the Indian economy and how it develops. But, and it’s a big but, that financial history tells you that economic growth and return from equities are not linked at all.” Napier is also the author of the bestselling Anatomy of the Bear – Lessons from Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms.
The most important thing is to buy equities when they are cheap because when they are cheap that’s when you make good return, feels Napier.
So how cheap are Indian stocks? “Indian equities haven’t been cheap for a very very long period. And the best measure of cheapness that I look at is the cyclically adjusted price to earnings (PE) ratio because it has been a good guide in America for future returns. In India the cyclically adjusted PE is now at 24. If you look at the history of America that is right at the top end of the range. And suggests that we are going to have pretty poor lowish returns from India over a prolonged period of time,” says Napier. Cyclically adjusted PE is calculated by using ten year rolling average earnings. India is now on 24 times cyclically adjusted PE.
This number has to fall if Indian stocks are to become attractive investment propositions. “The volatility of the market though is great, and I think and I hope we will get a chance to buy Indian equities cheaper, and get them cheaper sometime soon,” feels Napier. “Certainly if they ever get below 15 times cyclically adjusted PE you should be looking to buy some of them. And there is every reason to think that they will go lower than that, and then you should be buying a lot of them,” he adds.
Napier is looking at a global deflation shock and the stock markets falling all over the world. As he says “I see all the markets global equity markets coming down to the extent of this global shock.”
Despite the fact Napier feels that Indian stocks are expensive he would rather buy Indian stocks than Chinese. “Chinese are stocks probably at very viable sort of valuation levels. But I wouldn’t buy any of them because I don’t consider them to be corporations. I don’t consider the management to wake up in the morning and seek to push up the return on capital to the benefit of shareholders. And therefore those equities are cheap I don’t fundamentally want to buy,” explains Napier.
And how is India different? “Not every Indian company as you are also aware is going to do the best for all its shareholders. But because Indian companies come from the private sector so it is more likely you are going to find companies in India who work to benefit there shareholders and not just the small family unit in the company,” says Napier. “Hence when it comes to buying stocks cheaply I want to do that in India and not in China. But in India at the minute they remain still very expensive,” he concludes.
The article originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) on October 15, 2012. http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_russell-napier-sees-all-equity-markets-falling_1752478
Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]
“We are in for another deflation shock…So actually it’s time to own cash”
Russell Napier a consultant with CLSA and one of the finest financial minds in the world, sees another deflationary shock coming. “Yes I am looking at a global deflation shock. So I see all the markets global equity markets coming down,” he says. When asked to predict a level he adds “I will just go back to my book the Anatomy of the Bear which was published in 2005 and in the book I forecast that the equity market, the S&P 500(an American stock market index constructed from the stock prices of the top 500 publicly traded companies) will fall to 400 points (On Friday the S&P 500 closed at 1,428.5 points)….So I am happy to stick with the number of 400 and then just tell everybody else who sort of reads this interview to work out what that means for the rest of the world,” he told Vivek Kaul in an exhaustive free wheeling interview.
How do you see thing in Europe right now?
My focus of the way I try to look at these economies is really to look at the financial conditions, the banking systems, credit availability etc. Those numbers are about bad for Europe. If you look at bank lending in Europe it is contracting to the private sector. The money they are lending is going to the governments. The key issue really is that is lack of credit going to the European private sector due to lack of supply or demand? There is more and more evidence that it is actually demand, and that just makes it just a more difficult problem to solve.
Why is that?
When your banking system is incapable of providing credit there are lots of things you can do to help it. But when people fundamentally don’t want to borrow and corporates don’t want to borrow then it’s a different situation. What would normally happen is quantitative easing and trying to keep money growing at a time when bank credit is contracting. But for political reasons that is difficult in Europe. So Europe is facing a very difficult and nasty economic downturn, and things are going to get significantly worse. It’s worth adding on Europe as well that there is a chance that somebody is going to have to leave the Euro as early as next year. All seventeen members have to ratify the fiscal compact which is a major constitutional change. Still quite a few of them haven’t ratified it and maybe that early as first quarter next year some country may be unable to ratify that fiscal compact. And at that stage we would have a crisis for the euro because the country that fails to ratify wouldn’t be able to stay in the euro. So we are all rolling into a European crisis next year.
So what can keep the euro going?
Ultimately the only thing that can keep Europe going is can they become a Federal States of Europe?
Can they?
No. that is highly unlikely. There are seventeen members of the euro zone and all of them have to make the same constitutional changes and the same surrenders of sovereignty. And this is not an economic call. This is a political and social call. And it is highly unlikely that all sovereign states will end up surrendering their sovereignty to a Federal government of Europe.
How do you see the things in the United States?
There is a much more mixed picture coming out of the United States of America. Bank credit is expanding and the private sector is borrowing. What is interesting is that small and medium enterprises have been borrowing and we have been seeing a growth there for over a year now. That is normally a very good sign of thing because those are normally the people who create jobs.
What about other borrowing?
Banks balance sheets have premium components to them in terms of credit. And one is credit to small and medium enterprises. The other is mortgage credit. There is no sign of growth of mortgage credit. The other is consumer credit. There is no sign of growth in consumer credit either. At this stage one can be more optimistic about the United States simply because small and medium enterprises are borrowing.
But what about the long term view?
I have a longer term problem with the United States which isn’t going to show up quarter to quarter in the growth numbers but it is structurally the most important thing that is going on there. The rate at which foreign central bankers particularly the Chinese are accumulating treasuries has dropped very dramatically. The Chinese are not buying and actually seem to be selling United States treasuries. Along with the Federal Reserve of United States they are the biggest owners of treasuries. They are neck and neck. When the biggest owner of treasuries is effectively a forced seller, it has to make you cautious on America despite the shorter term positive data coming out.
What will be the impact of this?
If the Chinese are not going to be funding the American government it’s more of an onus on the American savers to fund the American government. With savings being a reasonably finite number then there is less to lend to the private sector. I see us already in a larger picture trend of America where the savings of America will be increasingly be funding the American government and not the private sector. At the minute that is not having any negative impact or particularly negative impact on private sector credit availability. But ultimately it will.
That being the case are Americans saving enough to bankroll the American treasury?
The answer to that is no. They are not saving enough to bankroll the American treasury and the private sector. You have to put them both together. If you look at a country like Italy in Europe the government always gets funded. The governments always get funded someway. Likewise, the American government will always be funded. And if has to force the American people to buy treasuries it will force the American people to buy the treasuries. The question is are they saving enough to fund the government and also fund the demand of the private sector for capital as well. My answer to that is definitely no. But if it comes to push whether the government is funded or the private is sector funded, even in America which is ideologically more to the right, more free market than elsewhere, even there you will find the savings are forced towards the government and away from the private sector.
That being the case how do you expect the US government to finance its unfunded liabilities over like social security, mediclaim etc, over the years? One estimate even puts the unfunded liabilities at $222trillion.
In the short term as long as they can keep borrowing at this level they will probably keep borrowing at this level. There is a basic rule. A government that can borrow at 2% will borrow at 2%. That’s an entirely and completely unsustainable path for the American government. But it is just so easy to borrow at 2% that they will continue to do that. So that reality for America will not dawn for unfunded liabilities until it has to borrow at a more realistic interest rate, which is inevitable. The numbers you point out are absolutely huge but it’s becoming incredibly difficult to say when that will happen, when they will have to live with proper real interest rates. It could be several years. It could be several days. But eventually of course they will have to do that. And there is a whole host of solutions for the United States government.
Like what?
There is a thing called financial repression which is effectively forcing people to lend money to the US government or forcing financial institutions to lend money to the US government. That is the path to travel for all the developed world countries. But there will have to be a renegotiation of benefits to the baby boom generation. Every society has to choose where the burden has to fall. Does it fall on tax payers? Does it fall on savers? Or does it fall on people who are recipients of this dole of money from the government. It will be a mix of all of these. So at some stage we will have to see a major renegotiation of the obligations that were signed for the baby boom generation in the 1960s. But it could be many years away. I have to stress that this will be political dynamite. No society wants to withdraw benefits from its retired or elderly population. But the entire western world faces the reality that is exactly what it will have to do.
Do you see what they call the American dream changing?
It has massively changed over the last two decades already. American people sustained by going from one person working to two persons working and then adding significant leverage to it. So the dream has been extended through those two mechanisms and clearly it is not going to go much further from here. It’s a much harder slog from here given excessive levels of debt on the starting position. It’s not only an American phenomenon but it’s a developed world phenomenon. It’s easy to be negative but the only possible positive way out of this is some technological innovation which gives us some very high levels of no inflationary growth and very high levels of productivity.
Could you elaborate on that?
If you read financial history sometimes these things just come along. They surprise everybody. One thing that is that could do it is cheap energy. Shale oil and shale gas are the main places we would be looking at for cheap energy. But it is worth stressing that we are going to need a very high level of real economic growth. So in America it will have to be in excess of 4% or maybe as high a 4.5%. That’s the sort of real economic growth that would help countries grow their way out of the debt problem and meet most of the potential liabilities going forward. One shouldn’t rule out that we have that wonderful outcome but it still does seem like very unlikely.
Talking about technological innovation can you give me some examples from the past?
Yeah absolutely. They have really been energy related. In United Kingdom the canals were such a revolution that the transportation cost collapsed. The price of coal in some major cities came down by 60-70% due to the introduction of canals. Obviously when energy prices fall by that much you get a productivity revolution. The railways had several impacts. Electricity which we didn’t really get going into the industrial process until the start of the last century, had a major impact. The automobile had a major impact. These are the types of major technological innovations which can change the world. When you can give the world cheap energy then that’s when you can begin to talk about much higher levels of growth. It is almost impossible to tell where these things come from but one that is sort on the horizon is shale oil and shale gas and potentially what that can do. But I want to stress it is going to have to produce levels of real economic activity in America, which haven’t seen for a very very long period of time, perhaps ever.
Do you the American government defaulting on all the debt it has accumulated?
They will not default in the technical term of the word default which obviously means refusing to pay back in dollars the debt in principle. That would be definition of default. That seems unlikely. But we are already in a situation where the Federal Reserve of the United States has intervened in the treasury market to hold the treasury yield below the level of inflation. Now that is not a default. But if you own treasuries and the yield is below the rate of inflation then the real value of your investment is declining in dollar terms. In terms of you and I investing in that treasury market it means that we are losing capital and therefore I would call this a democratic default. The second democratic default which I will come to America and the whole developed world will eventually be restrictions of free movement of capital. We are heading towards a world of controls and capital restrictions, which was a norm from 1945 to 1980-81.
Do you see them printing money to repay all the accumulated debt?
The answer is that partially they are already doing it. Quantitative easing is a form of printing money. Therefore you can say that is a process that is underway. So I have no doubts whatsoever that the Americans will be printing money to satisfy their foreign creditors.
Do you see that leading to a hyperinflation kind of scenario?
No. It is always assumed that if there is a dramatic sale of the treasuries by the Chinese, the Federal Reserve will simply buy all those treasuries and simply create lots of money in the process. If that mechanism happened you would end up with hyperinflation. But it’s worth remembering that there is a technical definition of hyperinflation and that is a rate of inflation of 50% per month or more. So it’s a very high number. Sometime people think that 20% per annum is hyperinflation but its 50% per month technically. The Federal Reserve is not stupid enough to do that. It would not simply print all the money it could to do to repay its creditors.
So what will happen?
What will happen is that there will be some money printing and as I stressed inflation will be higher than yield of treasuries. But Plan B is financial repression which is to effectively force the financial institutions and the people of America to buy the treasuries. Now this does not involve printing of money. I am sure that if the Federal Reserve sees inflation climbing to anywhere near 10% it would go to the government and say that we cannot continue to print money to buy these treasuries and we need to force financial institutions and people to buy these treasuries. In India you must be aware that banks have to compulsorily buy government debt. We can force banks and government companies to have a minimum amount of their assets in government debt. The road to hyperinflation is well known by central bankers. It has never ended well even though it can wipe out your debt very very rapidly indeed. Nevertheless, the political and social implications of that are truly dire. It tends to throw up despots and destroy democracies. Financial repression if you are a saver is a terrible but is much less painful than hyperinflation.
But what about the Western world practicing austerity to repay its debt?
True austerity is when you if you simply closed down on the government spending and accepted the economic consequences of that and still kept taking in the tax revenues. But that’s apolitically painful way of doing it. True austerity is highly unlikely. What Europe has nothing like sufficient austerity to take them to a situation where they can repay the government debt. So the only way out is repression, which is simply funding the government by forcing the people and financial institutions to buy government securities. That’s a very painful thing if you are a saver, but so much better than austerity, default and hyperinflation. It is ultimately the most acceptable form of getting out of this problem. Even with repression we are talking about a couple of decades before we could gain levels of gearing in the developed world drawn towards normal levels.
Do you see the paper money system surviving?
Yes I do see the paper money system surviving. To say that it doesn’t survive means we replace it with something that is based or anchored on metal. But the history of the paper currency system or the fiat currency system is really the history of democracy. Within the metal currency there was very limited ability for the elected governments to manipulate that currency. And I know this is why people with savings and people with money like the gold standard. They like it because it reduces the ability of politicians to play around with the quantity of money. But we have to remember that most people don’t have savings. They don’t have capital. And that’s why we got the paper currency in the first place. It was to allow the democracies. Democracy will always turn towards paper currency and unless you see the destruction of democracy in the developed world and I do not see that we will stay with paper currencies and not return to metallic currencies or metallic based currencies.
What about gold?
Gold is never easy to predict and it is particularly difficult at the moment. In the long run view which I have just run through that repression is ultimately the best choice for democracies, gold is the best asset class. It is the standout asset class. In a world of negative real interest rates prolonged for some decades gold does really well. And secondly in a world where tax rates are going up where the government needs to get more private wealth under its own control then gold is small, portable and hidable and therefore becomes an asset of choice. So my long term prognosis for gold remains very good. In the short run I am concerned that if we get another economic setback from here and we see growth coming down from here, the price of gold may come down. But I would say any declines in the price of gold are wonderful opportunities to buy some more and for the long term holder gold remains essential.
What are the other asset classes you would bullish is on?
I tend to believe that we are in for another deflation shock. The Asian crisis of 1998 was a deflation shock and we had one in 2002 when the American economy slowed and Mr Bernanke had to make his helicopter speech. We had another one post Lehman Brothers. So what you would want to look at is what asset classes did well during those periods? And really very little does well when we have deflation shocks. Whether deflation turns up or not the shock is very bad for pro-growth assets. So actually it’s time to own cash. Cash has historically been a good preserver of health during periods of deflation. It is worth buying debt of some of the governments that don’t have very much debt. There are some countries out there with small amount of government debts and they are small such as Singapore and Norway. So I would recommend cash and very small holding in government debt in markets where the governments don’t have very much debt. Also when markets have come down a bit we are looking to buy equities and we are looking to buy gold.
By when do you see this deflationary shock coming?
Well its coming. It is very rare for these things to erupt in the morning. Lehman Brothers was the exception a bank with $600billion of liabilities going bust suddenly threatens the stability of the entire financial system. Sometimes it happens like that but rarely. It happened like that in the 1930s with the bankruptcy of Creditanstalt (An Austrian bank which went bankrupt in 1931 and started a chain of bankruptcies). Occasionally it can be a major event. But it can be just like it was in 2003 just slower and slower growth. The only sort of one red flag which could suddenly jump and signal deflation is if someone leaves the euro because clearly if it’s a major currency leaving the euro they will be re-denominating their debts in their domestic currency which is tantamount to a large default on the global banking system. That is a small chance of that early next year.
What if the country is Greece?
Frankly Greece defaulting on its debts isn’t going to make much difference to a banking system but makes a big difference to the IMF and the government. But more likely it’s just going to be slower and slower growth coming forward particularly in China. The world has bet a lot on Chinese growth. The more the growth slows in China and capital flows out of China, the more the world begins to realise that its China which has been the source of global growth and global inflation, and if that’s not there we are more likely to get deflation. So that’s the more likely scenario rather than a Lehman Brothers style event.
So you are basically saying that the high Chinese growth rates will now be a thing of the past?
Yes unless they do some major reforms. And in my opinion that they need to do is reforms which will encourage private Chinese capital to remain in China and invest in China. And at the minute where is very limited reason for the Chinese private capital to remain in China because the returns are so poor. So anything they could do to open up the financial system for private sector investment and private sector competition would be good. And more importantly allow the private sector to take over some state owned enterprises and restructure them. If they are prepared to make that giant leap in terms of reforms then there is every prospect that keep they will keep capital in China. The good thing is we are getting a new administration. The bad thing is it is very difficult to predict what a new Chinese administration stands for. But soon enough we will know and if they come up with some policies like this, then there are many reasons to be more optimistic about the outlook for global growth.
By what levels do you see the stock markets falling in the coming deflationary shock?
I will just go back to my book the Anatomy of the Bear which was published in 2005 and in the book I forecasted that the equity market, the S&P 500(an American stock market index constructed from the stock prices of the top 500 publicly traded companies) will fall to 400 points (On Friday the S&P 500 closed at 1,428.5 points). As you know in March 2009 it got to 666points. It got somewhere there but it did not get to 400. So I am happy to stick with the number of 400 and then just tell everybody else who sort of reads this interview to work out what that means for the rest of the world.
The interview originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis on October 15, 2012. http://www.dnaindia.com/money/interview_we-are-in-for-another-deflation-shock-so-actually-its-time-to-own-cash_1752471
(Interviewer Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])