bitcoin

Of Government Taxes, Bitcoin and the Fiction of Money

Anything can be money if individuals on both sides of the economic transaction are ready to accept it as money. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind: “Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.” Of course, for something to emerge as a form of money at a societal level, it needs to be widely accepted.

This is the hope that the believers in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been peddling for a while to make them look like attractive investments. That one day when enough number of people across the world are tired with the government backed fiat money or paper money as it more popularly known, cryptos will take over.

Of course, you can’t wait for that to happen, and you need to buy bitcoin now. This is one of the ways in which the fear of missing out or FOMO, is created.

So how logical is this argument? How much should we trust it? These are questions well worth asking.

If you look at the history of money, different things have been money at different points of time. In the prisoner-of-war camps of the Second World War, cigarettes emerged as a form of money. They are a great example of the fact that anything can be money if both the sides of the economic transaction are willing to accept so. Also, any system where conventional money is not around, like in a prison, does not continue to stay in a vacuum, and newer forms of money emerge.

Different agriculture commodities including tobacco have been money at different points of time. So have been different metals, everything from iron and bronze to silver and gold.

Hence, different things have been money at different points of time, during the course of human history. What this tells us is that as long as enough people accept something as a form of money, it can continue functioning as money, until it doesn’t.

This means that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies can also become a form of money, over a period of time. Nevertheless, if we leave it at just this, it will be lazy reasoning at best. Also, this is where things get a tad complicated.

Allow me to explain.

Pure paper money or fiat money or money not backed by any commodity (gold, silver, tobacco, iron, copper etc.) has been around for many centuries, nevertheless, it has flourished and been widely accepted only in the last hundred years.

Why is that the case? Why do people happily and readily accept money not backed by any commodity as a form of payment, on most days?

As L Randall Wray writes in Modern Money Theory:

“The typical answer provided in textbooks is that you will accept your national currency because you know others will accept it. In other words, it is accepted because it is accepted. The typical explanation thus relies on an “infinite regress”: John accepts it because he thinks Mary will accept it, and she accepts it because she thinks Walmart will probably take it.”

To put it a tad simplistically, paper money is accepted because paper money is accepted. Are we saying there is a mass delusion at work? Is fiat money fiction?

As Jacob Goldstein writes in Money – The True Story of a Made-Up Thing:

“Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. Money is fundamentally, unalterably unalterably social. The social part of money—the “shared” in “shared fiction”—is exactly what makes it money. Otherwise, it’s just a chunk of metal, or a piece of paper, or, in the case of most money today, just a number stored on a bank’s computers.”

Now that maybe true, but that’s not important. What is important is to understand what keeps this shared fiction, this mass delusion, this myth, or whatever else you might want to call it, going. And this is where the government, which issues fiat money and controls the fiat money system, comes in.

For the government, it is important that its citizens continue to believe in the shared fiction of fiat money and continue accepting it as a form of payment. What keeps it going? Before answering this question, it is important to understand that there are three things that make a government a government: a) The right to tax. b) The right to legal violence. c) The right to create money out of thin air.

Two out of three rights are important to the context of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The right to tax and the right to create money out of thin air. In the past, I have talked extensively about the fact that any government letting bitcoin and cryptocurrencies operate smoothly is essentially giving away its right to create money out of thin air. And they aren’t exactly waiting to do it. (You can read about this here, here and here).

So, what about the right to tax that any government has?

As Wray writes:

“One of the most important powers claimed by sovereign government is the authority to levy and collect taxes (and other payments made to government, including fees and fines). Tax obligations are levied in the  national money of account: Dollars in the United States, Canada, and Australia; Yen in Japan; Yuan in China; and Pesos in Mexico. Further, the sovereign government also determines what can be delivered to satisfy the tax obligation. In most developed nations, it is the government’s own currency that is accepted in payment of taxes.”

And not just in developed nations, even in lesser developed ones, the governments accept tax payments in the fiat money of the country. This is what keeps the fiat money system going. As Wray writes: “It is because anyone with tax obligations can use currency to eliminate these liabilities that government currency is in demand, and thus can be used in purchases or in payment of private obligations. The government cannot easily force others to use its currency in private payments, or to hoard it in piggybanks, but government can force use of currency to meet the tax obligations that it imposes.”

In simple terms, government taxes can only be paid in fiat money and that creates demand for fiat money or paper money not backed by anything, and keeps the system going.

A counter argument to this might be that while this might be true in countries where taxes form a significant part of the economy, but how does it work in countries where taxes are not a significant part of the economy. Why does the paper money system still hold?

The answer lies in the overall structure. Companies which operate in a country need to pay taxes to the government in fiat money. So, they carry out their business in fiat money; accept and make payments in it. This means their employees, suppliers (their employees), contractors (their employees), distributors (their employees) and so on, everyone gets paid in or must pay in paper money as well.

When people who are a part of the overall business system, which needs to pay different kinds of taxes, get paid in paper money, they go out and spend that paper money. Hence, individuals and institutions who sell to these people, must then accept paper money. So, the cycle keeps going. And there is demand for paper money or fiat money.

Also, it is worth mentioning here that taxes form a significant part of the economy in any developed country in the world. For any monetary revolution to happen, the governments in these countries need to buy the idea of bitcoin and other cryptos, and also actively promote them. El Salvador classifying bitcoin in a legal tender isn’t going to help that cause. Or the fact that Nigerians have taken on to bitcoin like no one else. These are exceptions to the rule.

The larger point here is that the structure of fiat money being needed to pay government taxes, keeps the paper money system going and will continue to keep it going in the time to come. The demand for fiat money will remain. As long as that is the case, bitcoin and other cryptos will be a sideshow at best, keeping the believers interested, at least for a while.  

Also, governments are not going to give up on their right to create money out of thin air. This explains why money central banks are now in the process of planning and/or launching their respective central bank digital currencies.

Of course, people who do not like to pay their fair share of taxes also do not like the idea of being a part of the formal financial system (which is what fiat money system on its whole is at the end of the day). Therefore, people who are a part of the black economy like to convert their profits on which they haven’t paid cash, into other assets like real estate (held benami), gold (easy to store), precious stones (easy to move around) etc. It also explains why people operating in the black illegal economy love bitcoin and other new forms of crypto.

On the flip side, those who run the fiat money system have been abusing it post 2008, when the financial crisis broke out, and post late 2019, when the world was hit by the Covid pandemic.

A lot of fiat money has been created out of thin air, to get economic activity and economic growth going again. This is offered as a major reason by crypto believers, as to why the world should be shunning paper money and buying bitcoin and other cryptos. There is a lot of paper money being created out of thin air, but only 21 million bitcoin are only ever going to be mined.

Hence, the cryptosystem is built around the concept of scarcity whereas with more and more paper money being created, high inflation can become the order of the day and wealth stored in fiat money can lose value at a very fast pace.

The trouble with this argument is that while more bitcoin cannot be created, anyone and everyone, who understands these things, can create a new cryptocurrency. Which is why there are thousands of cryptos going around. As renowned investor Ray Dalio put it in a note on bitcoin: “Competition will, play a role in determining bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices. In fact, I assume that better ones will come along and displace this one because that is the way the evolution of everything works.” Given this, in the years to come, gold will still be around, about bitcoin, we really don’t know.

So, the point is you don’t know which crypto is going to be around in the days to come. And given that, how do can you ensure that the value of your wealth remains the same, by investing in crypto. Plus, at the risk of sounding cliched, the price volatility of cryptos continues to remain a huge risk.

Something which falls by 50% in a matter of months, cannot even aim to be an asset class, forget being a form of money. The crypto believers now offer the example of stablecoins, which are basically cryptos pegged to paper or fiat money. They have price stability. But their stability comes from being linked to fiat money in the first place. 

As Mark Carney writes in Value(s) — Building a Better World For All: “The highest-profile examples of stablecoins… are best thought of as payments systems rather than money per se since they derive their moneyness from the underlying sovereign currencies.”

To conclude, a small story. Before the crypto crash happened, a gentleman on Twitter very confidently told me that he would rather buy dogecoin, which was launched as a joke on bitcoin, than the US dollar. This is because the dogecoin wasn’t being created out of thin air (which is not true, given that the amount of dogecoin goes up every year, but we will ignore that here) and the dollar was.

His point was that the US dollar was not backed by anything. The US dollar is not backed by anything in the physical sense of the term, but it is backed by the US sovereign, the biggest economy in the world, perhaps the most innovative economy in the world and the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Also, the dollar has an exorbitant privilege. While other countries need to earn it, the US can simply print it. Which explains why the demand of for the dollar continues to remain solid, despite its abuse.

Yes, to that extent, it is not backed by anything and bitcoin and other cryptos are backed by everything.

What I can’t get my head around is that if you can’t trust the government (and there are reasons not to), how can you trust a few random guys launching their own crypto in their own backyard. Something which can be moved up and down by a few tweets. How is this fiction better than the government’s fiction? I really don’t have an answer for that.

What Other Countries Will Learn from Chinese Crackdown on Cryptos

The Chinese government has been cracking down on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This, along with a few other reasons, has led to cryptocurrencies crashing from their all-time high levels over the last few months.

The question is why is the Chinese government doing this? The simplest answer lies in the fact, and as I have explained on multiple occasions before, up until cryptocurrencies came along, the right to create money out of thin air was only with the governments.

Cryptocurrencies challenge that hegemony, and which has been their basic selling point over the years. The trouble is that the right to create money out of thin air is something any government isn’t going to give up on easily. The history of money tells us that while different forms of money emerge privately, it is the government which usually controls the monetary system.

This is a point that the economist John Maynard Keynes made in A Treatise on Money, in which he said that all modern states have had the right to decide what is money and what is not, and they have had it “for some four thousand years at least”. This is a point most crypto bulls don’t seem to get.

Another reason offered behind the Chinese crypto crackdown is that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are coal intensive. This is something that entrepreneur Elon Musk also said when he tweeted on bitcoin around a month back.

Now what does this mean?

Over the years, it has become more and more difficult to mine bitcoin. These days bitcoin farms with giant racks of mining computers are needed to mine bitcoins.

As Jacob Goldstein writes in Money – The True Story of a Made-Up Thing:

“People started building special computers optimized to mine bitcoin… Then they started filling giant warehouses full of racks of those mining computers. The computers sucked up so much energy that miners began seeking out places in the world where power was cheap, to lower their costs of mining. Vast mining operations sprung up in Iceland, Mongolia, and, especially, China.”

The point being bitcoin mining ends up using a lot of electricity. And most of this electricity is generated through fossil fuels. 36% of the electricity worldwide is generated through the use of coal and 23% through the use of natural gas. The burning of fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases.

As Bill Gates writes in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster:

“Greenhouse gases trap heat, causing the average surface temperate of the earth to go up. The more gases there are, the more the temperature rises. And once greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they stay there for a very long time; something like one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emitted today will still be there in 10,000 years.”

Bitcoin mining adds to this pollution.

As Dylan Grice writes in the latest edition of the Popular Delusions newsletter: “China is also concerned that bitcoin mining in the country is coal intensive and that is complicating efforts to reduce pollution.”

While this is an extremely valid argument, the trouble is all this has been well known for a while. So, why is it being brought up now? And that’s where things get interesting. It is being brought up now simply because the Chinese governments cannot openly talk about the real reason behind cracking down on bitcoin and other cryptos.

And what’s the real reason?

The success of cryptocurrencies has made governments realise that they need to be in on the game as well. This has led to governments and central banks, including that of China, planning their own digital currencies.

What is a central bank digital currency?

As Mark Carney writes in Value(s)—Building a Better World For All:

“A central bank digital currency would be an electronic form of central bank money that could be used by the public to make digital payments. Currently when we make payments with our debit cards or mobile phones we are using private money originally created by banks. Our only access to the ultimate risk-free asset of the central bank is when we use physical cash.”

The use of physical cash is declining rapidly and central banks feel that they need to get into that space by creating their own digital currency. If they don’t get into that space and people start using other digital currencies, it creates a problem for them, albeit minor one initially, but still a problem.

As mentioned earlier, the governments have the right to create money out of thin air, and sharing that with others is something that they are obviously not comfortable with.

As Grice writes: “From what we can glean from our friends in China, its motivation [behind the crackdown] was partly related to the roll-out of its own digital currency.” China is planning to launch its own central bank digital currency and given that it wants to wean off its citizens from the various cryptocurrencies that they are currently using.

In fact, China is already testing its digital currency. A report on CNBC.com points out that the plan is to hand out 40 million renminbi (or around $6.2 million) to a group of people in a lottery. The money can then be spent with selected merchants.

Also, there is another factor at play. China has one of the highest investments to gross domestic product (GDP) ratios in the world. Data from World Bank points out that in 2019, the ratio for China stood at 43.3%, when the global ratio was at 24.4%.

Hence, a bulk of Chinese savings get channelised into investments and this has over the years helped create massive economic growth. Bitcoin and other cryptos allow the Chinese to tunnel their money out of China, something that the Chinese government isn’t comfortable with. And like the Chinese government most governments won’t be comfortable with this.

As Grice writes: “It [i.e. the Chinese government] wants to ensure that growing familiarity with digital currency among its population doesn’t translate into growing use of digital currencies to evade China’s capital controls.”

These are the lessons that other governments and central banks around the world can easily pick up from the latest Chinese crackdown on cryptos. Hence, in the time to come, the government crackdown on cryptos will only go up.

On Confidence

Around mid-November 2020, I spoke to a bunch of macroeconomics students at IIM Ahmedabad on data in economics. After I had spoken, one of the questions asked was how can we use data to say things with absolute certainty (or something along similar lines).

My simple straightforward answer to the question was that we can’t. Over the years, economists had ended up portraying their subject as a science simply because it has a lot of mathematical equations built into it. But macroeconomics was always more of an art. Hence, we could say things with a reasonable amount of confidence, but never with total confidence.

I don’t think the student was convinced about what I said. And I don’t blame him for it because in the world that he lives in, economists, investors, analysts, politicians and just about everyone speaking to the world at large, is saying things with total confidence.

Let’s take the case of economists. Their economic growth forecasts are made to the precision of a single decimal point.

If we talk about investors, they forecast a stock market index reaching a particular level in a certain amount of time, with total confidence.

Analysts forecast the price of a stock or a commodity reaching a certain level at a certain point of time.

And let’s leave politicians out of this. Untangling their confidence levels will take a book.

The trouble is all this confidence comes in a world that keeps rapidly changing, where if we stick to our ideas all the time, we will largely turn out to be wrong.

As Dan Gardner writes in Future Babble—Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why Believe Them Anyway:

“The simple truth is no one really knows, and no one will know until the future becomes the present. The only thing we can say with confidence is that when that time comes, there will be experts who are sure they know what the future holds and people who pay far too much attention to them.”

And people pay far too much attention to experts who predict/forecast/comment confidently simply because confidence convinces. The audience is looking for a buy in and nothing helps get that more than the confidence of the expert talking.

Also, in these days of the social media, many a time we are simply looking for a confirmation of something that we already believe in. If the expert ends up saying something along those lines, he tends to become our go to man. Our echo chambers are really small.

Let’s take the case of the investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a man known to make confident bold statements when it comes to the Indian economy and the stock market. He recently forecast that India will overtake China in the next 25 years. As he put it: “You may call me a fool… but I can tell you one thing – India will overtake China in the next 25 years.”

The media and the investors as usual lapped it up, without putting that simple question to him: How?

The Indian gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 was at $2.94 trillion. And that of China was at $11.54 trillion (World Bank data, 2010 constant US dollars). What this means is that if Chinese GDP stagnates at its current level for the next 25 years, India still needs to grow at 5.62% every year for the next 25 years to get where China currently is.

So, the chances of something like this happening are minimal, given the current state of things. But Mr Jhunjhunwala might know something that ordinary mortals like you and I, probably don’t.

The funny thing is that the Big Bull, as the media likes to call him, has made similar such forecasts in the past, which have gone horribly wrong. In October 2007, he had forecast that the Sensex will touch 50,000 points in the next six to seven years.

And he is not the only one making such forecasts. In June 2014, the domestic brokerage Karvy had forecast that the Sensex will touch 1,00,000 points by December 2020.

People making a living out of the stock market (or any other market for that matter) have an incentive in saying that future will be better than the present is. Many analysts make a living by simply doing this on the business news TV channels, on a regular basis.

The media looking for bold headlines to run, laps it up. And the investors who are more like sheep ready to be slaughtered, follow the sheep in front of them.

In fact, the trick is to make bold bigger forecasts and not small ones. I mean, if you currently forecast that Sensex is going to touch 55,000 points this year, no one is going to pay interest. But if you say Sensex is going to cross 1,00,000 points by 2023 or 2024, everyone is going to sit up and take interest.

An excellent example of this is Jhunjhunwala’s 2014 forecast on the stock market index Nifty touching 1,25,000 points by 2030.

Of course, if he turns out to be right, everyone will be dazzled by the forecast he had made. If he turns out to be wrong, no one will remember. Did you remember that Karvy had forecast the Sensex touching 1,00,000 points by December 2020? That’s how the game is played.

Big investors are trying to drive up stock prices, so that their investment portfolios can also gain in the process, which is why they publicly need to be seen as being confident.

A similar game is now played on the social media where traders claim to have generated a humongous amount of return in a short period of time. Of course, there is no way to verify this, except believing him or her.

This is accompanied by other confident predictions of how the future is going to be. The idea is to sell some training programme that they are offering. And no one is going to buy a training programme from a trader who doesn’t sound confident.

For the economists, the game is a little different. They tend to treat their pet theories as gospel. So, an economist who believes in free markets will keep parroting the free market line on everything.

As Scott Galloway writes in his excellent book Post Corona—From Crisis to Opportunity:

“The libertarian argument… is that…regulation and redistribution is inefficient, that left to its own devices the market will regulate itself. If people value clean rivers, the argument goes, they won’t buy cars from companies that pollute. But history and human nature shows that this does not work.”

An excellent example of this is the river Ganga in India, which people keep polluting despite the fact that at the same time they look it as a holy river.

Galloway offers a few more examples. “Nobody wants to see children working eighteen hours a day in a clothing factory, but at the H&M outlet, the $10 T-shirt is an unmissable bargain… Nobody wants to die in a hotel fire, but after a long day of meetings, we aren’t going to inspect the sprinkler system before checking in.” The point being that some sort of regulation is necessary.

There is economic theory and then there is how things play out in real life. As Adam Grant writes in Think Again—The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know: “In theory confidence and competence go hand in hand. In practice, they often diverge.”

Other than continuing to believe in their pet theories, there is one more reason for economists to portray confidence. Over the years, they have sold their subject as a science, if not to others, at least to themselves in their heads. I mean the first step before convincing anyone else is to convince oneself first.

Hence, the economic growth figure is forecast to the precision of one decimal point. I have always wondered about how economic growth, which is something very complex and is impacted by so many factors, can be forecast in such a precise way.

Now, this is not to say that the forecasting economic growth is not important. It is very important, simply because without that governments and corporations won’t be able to plan for the future.

Without knowing the economic growth number for the next year, a government wouldn’t be able to forecast its fiscal deficit or the difference between what it earns and what it spends expressed as a percentage of the country’s GDP. Without forecasting the fiscal deficit, the government wouldn’t know what kind of money it has to borrow in order to meet this gap. Without the government knowing the government’s borrowing target, the country’s central bank won’t be able to set the country’s monetary policy. And so on.

Nevertheless, the world would be a much better place if the economists started forecasting in ranges. Like, in 2020-21, the Indian economy is likely to contract by 8-10% or even 8-9%, rather than saying something as specific like the Indian economy is likely to contract by 8.3%.  In this scenario, the governments could also forecast a range when it comes to their fiscal deficit.

As John Maynard Keynes is said to have supposedly remarked: “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

Hence, forecasting ranges and pointing towards the right direction is more important than being extremely precise about the economic growth.

As Tom Bergin writes in Free Lunch Thinking—How Economics Ruins the Economy:

“If economic models or theories can point us in the right direction and give us a reasonable estimate of the scale of a force or impact, they’re helpful. For example, if consumers are building up levels of personal debt that will require ever-rising house prices and wages to sustain – think the United States in 2006 –economists don’t need to tell us exactly how much a drop in GDP this situation will likely result in. If they can simply show the risks are unsustainable and material, this can prompt and inform government action and protect society.”

I learnt this the hard way. In 2013, when I first started writing about real estate, looking at the situation at hand, I started predicting a real estate bust very confidently. In the years to come, I turned out to be partly right, with parts of the country seeing a substantial fall in prices.

But the deep state of Indian real estate (the bankers, the builders and the politicians) essentially ensured that a real bust never really came. Of course, having learnt from this, now I point out more towards the perils of owning real estate at a price you cannot really afford because that is point people looking to buy a house to live in, essentially need to understand.

Also, one can more confidently say that the real estate sector will continue to remain moribund in the days to come, than confidently predict a bust. As far as investors are concerned, the real estate story has been over for a while.

Sometimes the confidence of economists comes from the prevailing narrative. As Daniel Acemoglu and James A Robinson write in Why Nations Fail – The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty:  

“The most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize-winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition, there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012.”

Of course nothing of this sort happened, and the Soviet Union broke up in December 1991. But those were the days, and the narrative framed around the success of the Soviet style of economics, driven by its Five-Year Plans, was very popular. Samuelson was not the only one to be seduced by it. In fact, an entire generation was.

Interestingly, the economist Phillip Tetlock has carried out extensive research on experts and their predictions. Gardner, from whose book I have quoted above, documents this in Future Babble.

As he writes:

“Tetlock recruited 284 experts— political scientists, economists, and journalists—whose jobs involve commenting or giving advice on political or economic trends…Over many years, Tetlock and his team peppered the experts with questions. In all, they collected an astonishing 27,450 judgments about the future.”

It turned out that the expert predictions were no more accurate than random guesses. As Gardner writes: “Experts who did particularly badly… were not comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. They sought to “reduce the problem to some core theoretical theme.” This means that they had this one big idea and they stuck to it, without trying to realign their view to the new information coming in.

An excellent example of this is all the gold bulls who came out of the woodwork post the financial crisis of 2008. They talked about gold reaching very high price levels (The highest I encountered was $55,000 per ounce).

As a journalist I interviewed many such individuals and the confidence they had in their forecasts was amazing. In that round, gold didn’t even touch $2,000 per ounce. But the audience lapped the interviews I did. Why? Because these experts exuded confidence in their interviews, even though they eventually turned out to be wrong.

In 2012, when I turned into a freelance writer, I exuded the same confidence on gold while writing about it. And when the prices actually started to fall, it sort of struck at a core belief I had developed over the years and it took me a couple of years to get around to the whole thing.

As Grant writes: “When a core belief is questioned… we tend to shut down rather than open up. It’s as if there’s a miniature dictator living inside our heads, controlling the flow of facts to our minds.” This is referred to as totalitarian ego and a decade later I can see this ego among many bitcoin experts, whenever one questions the entire idea of bitcoin as money, and that has me worried.

Now getting back to Gardner and Tetlcok. Experts who did better than the average of the group that Tetlock had recruited had no template or no big idea. They tried to synthesise information from multiple sources.

As Tetlock writes: “Most of all, these experts were comfortable seeing the world as complex and uncertain—so comfortable that they tended to doubt the ability of anyone to predict the future. That resulted in a paradox: The experts who were more accurate than others tended to be much less confident that they were right.”

This explains why most business TV news anchors, podcasters, YouTuber, social media influencers, etc., who are popular, sound very confident. They believe in this one big idea, which sounds sensible to people, irrespective of whether it is right in the real world or not, and they keep hammering it over and over again, to their audience.

It also explains why guys who are normally right about things aren’t really popular with the media or the public at large. This is simply because they are not totally confident about what they are saying. They have their ifs and buts built into what they say and are constantly revising the information in their heads. And as and when they feel like it, they are ready to revise their views as well. This constant revision comes across as lack of confidence to the world at large. Tetlock called such experts foxes and experts who believed in that one big thing as hedgehogs.

The categorisations were from an essay written by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in which Berlin had recalled a small part of an ancient Greek poem. “The fox knows many things… but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” After knowing this, it is easy to figure out who is a fox and who is a hedgehog.

As Gardner writes:

“If you hear a hedgehog make a long-term prediction, it is almost certainly wrong. Treat it with great skepticism. That may seem like obscure advice, but take a look at the television panels, magazines, books, newspapers, and blogs where predictions flourish. The sort of expert typically found there is the sort who is confident, clear, and dramatic. The sort who delivers quality sound bites and compelling stories. The sort who doesn’t bother with complications, caveats, and uncertainties. The sort who has One Big Idea.”

Hence, the kind of expert found in the media is the kind of expert who is more likely to be wrong. One of the key findings that emerged from Tetlock’s data was: “The bigger the media profile of an expert, the less accurate his predictions are.”

In a world filled with confident forecasts, this is a very important point that needs to be kept in mind. If we really need to make sense of the world we are in, we need to figure out who the foxes are and follow them, however mentally disconcerting it might be. The hedgehogs need to be discarded.

Central Banks, Helicopter Money and How Not to Spot Bubbles

The idea for this piece came after reading the latest edition of Dylan Grice’s fantastic newsletter Popular Delusions. It took my mind back to some stuff I had written about, a while back, in the second volume of the Easy Money trilogy. Now what do they say about the more things change the more they remain the same?

Anyway, Grice’s latest newsletter starts with a comment made by Jerome Powell, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank.

As Powell said on CNBC:

“The big picture is still that we’ve seen … three decades, a quarter of a century, of lower and more stable inflation and we’ve seen really the last decade be characterized by global disinflationary forces and large advanced economy nations struggling to reach their 2% inflation goal from below.”

He further said:

“If the economy reopens, there’s quite a lot of savings on peoples’ balance sheets… you could see strong spending growth and there could be some upward pressure on prices. Again though, my expectation would be that that would be neither large nor sustained.”

How do we interpret the above statements in simple English?

1) What Powell is basically saying here is that all the money printing carried out by central banks across the world over the last decade, hasn’t really led to high inflation. In fact, the inflation has constantly been less than the 2% level targeted by the Western central banks (a disinflationary environment as Powell put it).

And he is right. Take a look at following graph which basically plots inflation in the United States, as measured by the core personal expenditures index excluding food and energy. This is the index followed by the Federal Reserve when it comes to inflation.

Since 2008, the year when the financial crisis broke out, the only year in which inflation in the US touched 2%, was 2018. Clearly, the trillions of dollars printed by the Fed since then haven’t led to a high inflation at the consumer level.

I clearly remember that when the Fed started printing money post the breakout of the financial crisis, many writers (including yours truly) said very high inflation was on its way as too much money would end up chasing the same amount of goods and services, and this would drive up prices. But nothing like that happened. (The good bit is that the newspaper I wrote all this in, has since shutdown. So, finding evidence of it won’t be easy :-))

2) Powell also said that while he expects some inflation as people go back to leading normal lives once again post covid, but that’s not something to worry about because it would neither be large nor sustained. Hence, Powell expects the inflation to rise and then settle down.

This leads to the question why inflation has continued to remain less than 2% all these years through much of the Western world, despite the massive amount of money printing that has been carried out.

In an essay written in 1969, the economist Milton Friedman came up with the concept of the helicopter drop of money. As he had written in the essay:

“Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community.”

The idea here was to distribute money to the public, so that they got out there and spend it, in the process creating inflation and economic growth.

The money printing carried out by the Federal Reserve and other central banks in the recent past and since 2008, was supposed to be a version of this helicopter drop. Of course, there was no helicopter going around dropping money directly to citizens, but central banks printed money and pumped that money into the financial system by buying bonds.

This was supposed to drive down interest rates. At lower interest rates people were supposed to borrow and spend, as they had before the financial crisis, and companies were supposed to borrow and expand.

The hope was that the increased spending would create some inflation and some economic growth along the way, like a helicopter drop is expected to.

The trouble with this argument is that it doesn’t take a basic factor into account, which is, when the money is being dropped from a helicopter, who is standing under it. The point being that people standing under the helicopter are likely to collect the money before others do and this changes the situation.

In fact, this possibility was first observed by Richard Cantillon an Irish-French economist, who lived in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, before the era of Adam Smith as well as helicopters. Clearly, economists of the modern world, have forgotten him, which is hardly surprising given that economists these days rarely read any history.

When central banks print money, they do so with the belief that money is neutral. So, in that sense, it does not really matter who is standing under the helicopter when the money is printed and dropped into the economy, but Cantillon showed that money wasn’t really neutral and that it mattered where it was injected into the economy.

Cantillon made this observation based on all the gold and silver coming into Spain from what was then called the New World (now South America). When money supply increased in the form of gold and silver, it would first benefit the people associated with the mining industry, that is, the owners of the mines, the adventurers who went looking for gold and silver, the smelters, the refiners, and the workers at the gold and silver mines.

These individuals would end up with a greater amount of gold and silver, that is, money. They would spend this money and thus drive up the prices of meat, wine, wool, wheat, etc. Of course, everyone in the economy had to pay these higher prices. ((I came to know of this effect from Dylan Grice, after having interviewed him many years back and then starting to read his newsletter regularly).

The Cantillon effect has played out since 2008. When central banks printed and pumped money into the financial system, the large institutional investors, were the ones standing under the helicopter.

They borrowed money at cheap rates and invested across large parts across the world, fuelling stock market and bond market rallies primarily, and a few real estate ones as well.

As economist Bill Bonner put it in a 2013 column:

“The Fed creates new money (not more wealth … just new money). This new money goes into the banking system, pretending to have the same value as the money that people worked for. And people with good connections to the banks take advantage of the cheap credit this new money creates to aid financial speculation.”

After the large institutional investors came the corporates, who were expected to borrow money and expand, and create jobs and economic growth in the process. What they did instead was borrow money to buyback their shares.

When companies announce a decision to buyback their shares, it pushes up the possibility of their earning per share going up and this leads to higher stock prices, benefitting the top management of the company who owns company stock. Of course, the company ends up with lesser equity and more debt in the process. But that is a problem for a later date, by which time the top management would have moved on.

So, instead of consumer price inflation, what the world got was asset price inflation, with the values of financial assets, totally out of whack from the underlying fundamentals.

This dynamic has played out again since the beginning of 2020, in the post-covid world. Once the covid pandemic broke out, central banks decided to print and pump money into the financial system, like they had after the financial crisis. The US Federal Reserve has printed more than three trillion dollars and the Bank of Japan has printed more than 100 trillion yen, in the last one year.

And guess who was standing beneath the helicopter this time around? …

But along with this something else happened. The governments of the Western world also decided to send cheques directly to people, so that they could spend money directly and help boost economic activity. .

The trouble was with the pandemic on, people were stuck at homes. Hence, the money got saved and invested. Along with the institutional money, retail money also flowed into financial markets all across the world.

This has sent prices of financial assets soaring. As of March 2, the total market capitalization of the US stock market stood at 191.5% of its gross domestic product. The long term average of this ratio is 85.55%.

As Grice puts it in his latest newsletter:

“As the stock market makes new all-time highs… The IPO market is hot, credit markets are hot, commodity markets are hot, the crypto markets are hot. Everything, it seems is hot.”

Of course, other than the inflation as the Fed likes to measure it, which continues to be under 2%. And given that, all is well.

In every era when the prices of financial assets go up substantially, people forget history. This is not the first time that the Fed and other central banks are ignoring financial inflation and looking only at consumer price inflation.

Something similar happened both before the dotcom and telecom bubble, which burst in 2000 and 2001, and the sub prime and real estate bubble, which burst in 2007 and 2008. The Fed kept ignoring the bubbles while waiting for the inflation to cross 2%. This time is no different. (For details you can refer to the third volume of the Easy Money trilogy).

Inflation targeting as a policy, worked when inflation was high and central banks wanted to bring it down. This happened right through the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.

Since the mid-1990s, inflation has been low in much of the Western world thanks to Chinese imports and outsourcing. As Niall Ferguson writes in The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World: “Chinese imports kept down US inflation. Chinese savings kept down US interest rates. Chinese labour kept down US wage costs.”

This has led to inflation targeting being used in reverse. Instead of trying to control inflation, Western central banks have been trying to create it, using the same set of tools.

As Gary Dugan, who was the CIO, Asia and Middle East, RBS Wealth Division, told me in a 2013 interview:

“We got inflation which was too low. So, we have changed it all around to actually try to create inflation, rather than to dampen it. I don’t think they know what tools they should be using. The central banks are using the same tools they used to dampen inflation, in a reverse way, in order to create it. And that is clearly not working.”

What was true for 2013 is also true for 2021. The playbook of central banks continues to remain the same. As I wrote in a recent piece for the Mint, the whole situation reminds me of the Hotel California song, where The Eagles sang, you can check out any time you want but you can never leave.

The trouble is that along with the money printing there is something else at play this time around. A large part of the global population has been stuck at their homes for more than a year. As they get vaccinated and start living normal lives again, a huge amount of pent-up demand is going to hit the market .

This might lead to inflation as the bond market investors have been fearing for a while, given that supply is not expected to keep up with demand. A higher inflation will mean higher interest rates, something which is not good for the stock market as a whole.

But there is another important factor that needs to be kept in mind. People will be spending their savings . And this means that they will be cashing in on their investments, be it stocks, bitcoin or whatever.

The greater the pent-up demand that hits the market, the higher will be the savings that will be cashed out on and more will be the pressure on the financial markets.

This is an important dynamic that investors need to keep in mind this year.

Bitcoin Without Monetary Ambition is Just Another Ponzi Scheme

There has been a lot of talk around the government banning bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In fact, as the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently told the Rajya Sabha: “”A high-level Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) constituted under the Chairmanship of Secretary (Economic Affairs) to study the issues related to virtual currencies and propose specific actions to be taken in the matter recommended in its report that all private cryptocurrencies, except any virtual currencies issued by state, will be prohibited in India.”

There is no scope for confusion in this statement. It’s saying that the government is gearing up to ban all cryptocurrencies including bitcoin. The only cryptocurrencies it will allow are those issued by it. (A government issuing a cryptocurrency is a joke, but then let me not go there for the time being. We will tackle it as and when it happens).

If bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are banned by the government then all the bitcoin brokers through which investors trade, will need to shut down. Hopefully, the government will allow investors some sort of an exit option.

Of course, if you are trading bitcoin through a broker then you are speculating and do not really believe in the philosophy with which bitcoin was designed and launched (even if you think you do).

Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator (or creators for that matter, given that we don’t know), didn’t like the ability of the government and the central banks to create paper money out of thin air by printing it (or creating it digitally for that matter).

As he wrote on a message board in February 2009: “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.”

This happened in the aftermath of the financial crisis that broke out in September 2008, after which the Western central banks started printing massive amounts of money to drive down interest rates, in the hope of people and businesses, borrowing and spending money, in order to revive their respective economies.

Nakamoto looked at a central bank’s ability to debase paper money (by creating it out of thin air), as an abuse of the trust people had in it. And Bitcoin was supposed to be a solution for this breach of trust; a cryptocurrency which did not use banks or any third party as a medium and the code for which has been written in such a way that only 21 million units can be created.

The moment you are using a broker to buy bitcoin, you become a part of the conventional financial system and you really don’t remain anonymous anymore as was the idea originally.

A few bitcoin believers who have interacted (a fairly euphemistic word) with me on the social media have told me that there are ways of continuing to buy and sell bitcoin, even if the government bans them. So, they are really not perturbed by the idea of the government banning bitcoin.

The trouble with this argument is that if you continue to trade bitcoin after the ban, you are breaking the law. You might feel that the law isn’t fair, but a law is a law. One way of continuing to trade bitcoin is to legally move money abroad (up to a limit of $2,50,000) and use that money to trade bitcoin.

While this is possible, at some point of time the need to bring money back to India might arise, so, under what head of income will one declare it? If the gains are substantial, won’t the taxman come calling in these days of big data? (Or even if you regularly keep moving a good amount abroad every year).

Believers might still figure out ways to get around the system, but for most normal souls this is not worth the trouble. This is something that the bitcoin believers haven’t gotten their heads around to (yes, yes, yes, have fun stay poor).  Like one individual told me that he can simply bribe the taxman (I mean, yes, you can also do hawala and get your money in cash).

Another factor that needs to be kept in mind here is that the government in the next few years is going to be desperate for tax revenues. I guess I will leave this point here.

The bitcoin brokers in India are desperately trying to spin the usefulness of bitcoin in many interviews in the mainstream media. In fact, in one interview, Sumit Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder of CoinDCX, pointed out that there are 75 lakh bitcoin investors in India. A report in The Times of India puts the number at 1 crore. No source has been provided for these numbers.

The interesting thing is that Gupta feels that “there is a lot of confusion in calling bitcoin as cryptocurrency and not calling it an asset.” He wants bitcoin in India to be considered as an asset and be regulated. He doesn’t want it to be considered as money.

If something like this where to happen, it changes quite a few things.

When an investor buys a company’s stock, he is buying a share in the future earnings of the company. When he buys mutual funds, he is indirectly buying stocks or other financial securities issued by companies or even something like gold. When he buys gold, he buys gold.

When he buys derivatives, he is either hedging against price fluctuation or speculating on the price of a certain commodity. When he buys real estate he buys a home to live in or as a physical asset to profit from in the years to come. I mean one can go on and on here.

(Charles Ponzi on whom the Ponzi scheme is named). 

What does one buy, when one buys bitcoin as an investment asset? Nothing. It would be fair to say that if you take out bitcoin’s or for that matter any other cryptocurrency’s ambition to emerge as a parallel form of money out of the equation, it simply becomes a Ponzi scheme. (Don’t think Gupta realised this while making the point that he did). (You can read why I think bitcoin will never be money, here and here).

A Ponzi scheme is a financial scheme, where a fraudulent promoter promises very high return in a very short period of time to investors. He has no business model to earn this money in order to deliver returns.

The money being brought in by the second set of investors is used to pay off the first set. Or they are encouraged to roll over. As the news of high return spreads, more and more investors get sucked into the scheme, with the greed of earning potentially very high returns driving their investment.

This continues until the money being brought in by the new set of investors is less than the money being redeemed to the older set. Then the scheme collapses. Of course, most promoters disappear with the money before reaching such a stage.

Bitcoin without monetary ambitions is exactly like that. Money being brought in by newer investors pushes the price up, given the limited supply and prices go up very quickly, allowing existing investors to benefit.

As long as money being brought in by fresh investors is higher than money being taken out by existing ones, bitcoin keeps going up. When the equation changes, just like in a Ponzi scheme, bitcoin price crashes.

It’s basically the Ponzi scheme structure of bitcoin which explains its huge volatility on the price front. On February 21, the price of bitcoin was $57,434. Six days later on February 27, it was down by nearly a fifth to $46,345. Or take the period of six days between February 15 and February 21, when the price of bitcoin rose by a fifth (or 20%) to $57,434.

Of course, unlike normal Ponzi schemes, there is technology and thinking behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But that doesn’t make them any less a Ponzi scheme.

Given this, it’s time that the government steps into ban bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. India has enough Ponzi schemes to deal with already. There is no point in adding more to the list.