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Grab the Reins on the Dollar, Part 2
I hadn’t meant to do a ‘part 2’ on the dollar, but I wanted to clear something up.
Some comments on yesterday’s article have suggested that a strong dollar is a global deflationary event, and vice-versa. But this is incorrect.
The global level of prices is determined by the amount of money, globally, compared to global GDP. But the movements of currencies will determine how that inflation or deflation is divvied up. Let us look at a simplified (economist-style) example; I apologize in advance to those who get college flashbacks when reading this.
Consider a world in which there are two countries of interest: country “Responsible” (R), and country “Irresponsible” (I). They have different currencies, r in country R and i in country I (the currencies will be boldface, lowercase).
Country R and I both produce widgets, which retail in country R for 10 r and in country I for 10 i. Suppose that R and I both produce 10 widgets per year, and that represents the total global supply of widgets. In this first year, the money supply is 1000r, and 1000i. The exchange rate is 1:1 of r for i.
In year two, country I decides to address its serious debt issues by printing lots of i. That country triples its money supply. FX traders respond by weakening the i currency so that the exchange rate is now 1:2 of r to i.
What happens to the price of widgets? Well, consumers in country R are still willing to pay 10 r. But consumers in country I find they have (on average) three times as much money in their wallets, so they would be willing to pay 30 i for a widget (or, equivalently, 15 r). Widget manufacturers in country R find they can raise their prices from 10 r, while widget manufacturers in country I find they need to lower their price from 30 i in order to be competitive with widget manufacturers in R. Perhaps the price in R ends up at 26r, and 13i in I (and notice that at this price, it doesn’t matter if you buy a widget in country R, or exchange your currency at 1:2 and buy the widget in country I).
Now, what has happened to prices? The increase in global money supply – in this case, caused exclusively by country I – has caused the price of widgets everywhere to rise. Prices are up 30% in country R, and by 160% in country I. But this division is entirely due to the fact that the currency exchange rate did not fully reflect the increased money supply in country I. If it had, then the exchange rate would have gone to 1:3, and prices would have gone up 0% in country R and 200% in country I. If the exchange rate had overreacted, and gone to 1:4, then the price of a widget in country R would have likely fallen while it would have risen even further in country I.
No matter how you slice it, though – no matter how extreme or how placid the currency movements are, the total amount of currency exchanged for widgets went up (that is, there was inflation in the price of widgets in terms of the average global price paid – or if you like, the average price in some third, independent currency). Depending on the exchange rate fluctuations, country R might see deflation, stable prices, or inflation; technically, that is also true of country I although it is far more likely that, since there is a lot more i in circulation, country I saw inflation. But overall, the “global” price of a widget has risen. More money means higher prices. Period.
In short, currency movements don’t determine the size of the cake. They merely cut the cake.
In a fully efficient market, the currency movement would fully offset the relative scarcity or plenty of a currency, so that only domestic monetary policy would matter to domestic prices. In practice, currency markets do a pretty decent job but they don’t exactly discount the relative changes in currency supplies. But as a first approximation, MV≡PQ in one’s own home currency is not a bad way to understand the movements in prices.
Life is Like a Box of Bitcoin
Whether the evaporation of popular Bitcoin marketplace Mt. Gox (which may have nothing to do with the Gox in Dr. Seuss’s beloved One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish[1]) is due to fraud, hacking, incompetence, or some combination of all three – it appears it may have been hacked three years ago, and have been insolvent since then before vanishing from the Internet last night – doesn’t really matter. Either way, investors/speculators with money at Mt. Gox got MFGlobaled. The money wasn’t segregated (if it was money at all, and if it can be segregated at all), there was no audit (if there can be an audit trail for something that doesn’t have a known origin or destination), and the firm was not overseen in any fashion (if it is even possible to oversee something that exists mainly because it is difficult to oversee).
Like Schrödinger’s cat, it was kinda there, until someone actually looked and discovered it was dead.
I have carefully eschewed writing about Bitcoin in the past, though people have asked me to do so. I chose not to write about it because I had no wish to be filleted by one side or the other in the argument. But what I would have said would have been a series of simple observations that have nothing to do with how Bitcoin is mined, managed, or mishandled:
- This is hardly the first currency that has been outside of government control. Currencies existed outside of government control before they existed under government fiat.
- Historically speaking, there is a reason that government-sponsored currencies won, and it wasn’t because they were backed with gold. It was because people trusted the government when it said the currency was backed with gold.
- Trusted banks were issuers of currency for a long time. The coin of the realm has always been trust – and even if a currency is limited, or backed by limited metal, or whatever, you still need trusted institutions through which the coin flows, or it doesn’t work. Where is the trusted institution in Bitcoin’s case?
- So what’s the big deal?
This isn’t schadenfreude. I don’t care if Bitcoin succeeds or not; I don’t think its success or failure has anything to do with whether fiat currencies succeed or blow up. I don’t think Bitcoin is a “safe haven” any more than gold is a safe haven.
But at least I can touch gold. At least I know that gold will have some value in exchange, whereas I don’t know that Bitcoin will, tomorrow. And now, indeed it may not. Surely no institutional investor can now invest in Bitcoin deposits without answering the following question to the satisfaction of its board: “How can we be sure that our money won’t go the way of Mt. Gox?” And institutional acceptance is a huge hurdle for the future success of this substitute currency. Ditto firms using Bitcoin for transactions – a daylight overdraft that can go to zero overnight is a big risk for a bank.
And so, what I think was always the not-so-subtle problem for Bitcoin or any crypto-currency remains: for it to succeed, a trusted institution needs to be involved. Trust can’t be distributed across a network. And if an institution is involved, then the idea of a “people’s currency” loses weight. Bitcoin wasn’t the first of these attempts, and it won’t be the last, but in my mind that is the challenge. You can’t make money that only is used by the credulous and the gullible. It must be used by the incredulous and the suspicious. It is adoption by those people which defines the success or failure of a currency.
(Unfortunately, this puts certain elements at my alma mater in the former category. In our January 2014 alumni magazine was an article on Bitcoin. In the information bar “Bitcoin Dos and Don’ts”, the first point was “Do your research first! More information is available on Bitcoin.it, a wiki maintained by the bitcoin community. For Americans, the most popular and trustworthy place to buy and sell Bitcoins has historically been mtgox.com.” Whoops! Do your research first – popular does not imply trustworthy unless the thing is popular with people whose trust is hard to win!)
[1] “I like to box. How I like to box! So, every day, I box a Gox. In yellow socks I box my Gox. I box in yellow Gox box socks.”
