EZ money – you can Bank on it!

It is just like a circus act – spinning plates as the audience waits for one to fall. When one falls, the act is over and they all fall. The plates – the Eurozone and banks – are spinning still – just – but the spinner is tiring, there is less time to go and the plates are shaking wildly.

 

Both the European banking system and its impact on the Eurozone are in critical mode. The illnesses are not being treated – we are merely ameliorating the symptoms. The new package of measures announced on 29^th June provide some breathing space but the banks are the same banks as they were before and the Eurozone has exactly the same problems as it did on the 28^th June.

 

Twin Devils: EZ and Banking

 

Banking is a devilish concoction – see my earlier posting: https://jeffkaye.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/banks-and-time-travel/

which focuses on the Mephistophelean trade that banking makes with us – the bringing forward of tomorrow’s wealth into today (with our soul in return). No government since money was invented has properly understood banking or had the ability to control it and democracies are ill-suited to manage the banks, the bankers or their products (although that is not a case made for ending democracy!).

 

On the same day that the EZ nations announced their new answers to the EZ crisis, UK banks were being vilified for their LIBOR manipulations and for wrongly selling interest rate insurance to small businesses (many of which collapsed under the strain of the repayments when interest rates collapsed under the banking-induced downturn in 2008). It couldn’t be made up!

 

The EZ nations horse-trade over more loans to the banks which bypass the sovereign debt obligations of Italy and Spain, amongst others. Banks will get loans directly from the ECB (for example) – which means that Germany will guarantee 50% of the loans, but France, Italy and Spain will also carry a burden.

 

The twin devils are fighting for their existence and the markets applaud every move – but, the problems persist.

 

Twin headache

 

Banks have existed far longer than the EZ and will outlive it. The likelihood is that the EZ nations, fighting for the survival of the Euro, will continue to miss the point. Banks are not, in the main, national entities, they form part of a world-wide consortium. Banks are a supra-economy and their product – money – can be created easily and changes time – lending and borrowing transform today’s problems into tomorrow’s – in a way that nothing else in economics can do.

 

Banks’ ability to transform time (the magical transformation that lending and, to some extent, insurance provides) is exactly what has provided the EZ with its problems – and the issue that wrecked Lehmans and nearly wrecked the US banking system. The banks’ inability to control themselves within reasonable and rational limits of lending has now been transferred to the countries where they are based. Sovereign debt has been amassed to cover the time travelling antics of the banks. Twin problems.

 

Paying it Back

 

Most economists are unclear about the problems that banks provide when unregulated on a macro-economic scale – all governments suffer the same lack of understanding, Money is not just easily created and employed, it effects transfers between time that equilibrium-based traditional economics does not understand. A loan provided to a company at an interest rate with payments spread over many years represents the ability of that company to achieve something now rather than later. The debt is paid off through interest (the economist’s price of money) and over time. Discounted cash flow techniques (based on interest rates) debase the future – eventually, it completely discounts it as though it was worthless.

 

But, the price of money is not just the interest rate. Price is repaid from tomorrow’s debt mountain when the debts pile up beyond the ability of payers to pay. The devastation of the Greek economy and young people’s work prospects in Spain testify ingloriously to this. The price is a heavy burden when the macro-economic effects of out of control banks are misunderstood. Supply and demand curves for money are meaningless when money is more or less free and money becomes free very often in society – which assumes a zero risk. It happened in the 1990’s and it happened just prior to 2007/8 – money was free because it was being created from nothing – by new forms of leveraging in secondary and tertiary markets that no-one understood. Interest rates were of no use as bankers and financiers scoured the market for easy bets (for that is what they were).

 

Now, we face many years of deleveraging – where yesterday’s over-leveraging is paid back – where time travel gets reversed. It must be that the discounted cash flow calculations were wrong – the assumptions were riddled with errors.

 

3D Chess played with blindfolds in different time zones

 

Economic management of banks and of sovereign debt makes assumptions based on projections that are misunderstood. Fund flows and interest rates that are meant to cover the supply and demand parameters miss the critical build-up of debts at a national level and at an international level. It is the mass of debt and the difficulty of managing that debt pile against a continuously changing assembly of poorer and poorer borrowers that constantly defeats bank management. The constant desire to bring forward projects from tomorrow into today – whether by an individual or a company or a government – feeds that process. It is the drive to consume now, the size, complexity and continuous shifts that make the problem so much greater than it was in the 19^th Century.

 

3D Chess played with blindfolds and over different time zones looks easy in comparison and the answers are not easy to come by. The answers being implemented are micro-economic in the way that individual banks are required to increase capital ratios, for example.

 

The complexity in a period of deleveraging allied to a need for growth is enormous. Governments cannot (over time) have it both ways. Most developed nations are over-leveraged having borrowed far too much out of tomorrow’s wealth. At the same time, we are being told that we need more growth to help repay the debts. There is a limited intelligence involved here – or just maybe that the limited intelligence of politics is competing with economic reality. We should all be aware that for those countries in a downward spiral there are but three ways out of this: to deleverage (i.e. pay back debts); to reflate and debase a currency; to default – or a mix of the three. In the US and UK, reflation and currency debasement has been attempted; in Greece, there has been a default; elsewhere in Europe, the can keeps getting kicked but it looks more and more likely that German taxpayers will pay out for Italian and Spanish profligacy without the huge institutional and cultural changes that would make the investment worthwhile.

 

What’s the answer?

 

Governments have been trying to control banks for hundreds of years and failed. In the 21^st Century, complexity has risen as has the ability of major banks and their staff to manipulate markets and manipulate customers.

 

This is not just a banking or EZ crisis – we have now to question our economic judgement and whether capitalism as we have practiced it for the last fifty years works. Just like corruption, banks and bankers will swarm into any gap that the market allows. It is not much use to anyone to swing the pendulum back and forth on regulation as economies grow or splutter.

 

After all, the problems in banking and in the EZ are problems of economies and problems that are due to a laissez faire relationship with growth as measured by….money (GDP). The only targets that we (not just the UK but world-wide) measure our success in is in money. The only targets are GDP targets – growth targets are GDP.

 

What is the answer? The answer lies in our ability to bring quality (and ethics) into our economic affairs.

 

Quality vs Quantity

 

As the Chinese and other developing nations rise up the GDP scale and as the world continues to use up its natural resources, we have not assessed why we continue to follow 19^th Century economic principles that propose that we spend our way to happiness. GDP growth is important as societies develop – as hunger is eradicated, shelter is found, clothing is ensured and jobs provided. How important it is when we are “grown” is the debate that is now needed. Growth in what?

 

The rush for money (what seems to be the mainstay of society) is what has rushed the banks and EZ into the mire. We don’t understand the impact we are having on the next generation and beyond in terms of debts built-up and resources squandered.

 

We now have a quality vs quantity argument that underlies all the short-term “solutions” that we read about. The right answers require the right questions and the right questions may include something like: “do we need to use up tomorrow?” – that is what banking is, a discounted cash flow estimate of the future where everything is translated into numbers and where quality is completely overcome by the quantitative.

 

Numbers are in charge – and therefore banks (based solely on numbers) are at the forefront of such an economy. EZ crises are based on money and the addiction to numbers – GDP and growth. While this continues, so will our willingness to allow banks to seek out new methods of extracting tomorrow’s benefits to today.

 

To untangle societies from the rush for loans and products that banks supply (and EZ countries end up securing – and paying back through taxation) we should address the root cause – our predilection to the amassing of tomorrow’s money or its equivalent at the expense of tomorrow’s quality of life. Our kids and their kids deserve better – ask young Greeks or Spaniards.

 

 

The Affluent Society and Social Balance

Public goods and market products – and what else?

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society” wrote how the obsession with production was getting out of hand and that there had to be a rebalancing between social goods and products. The absence of this balancing would be seen by ever growing debt burdens as individuals chased products which provided ever diminishing value to them. At the same time, social goods – such as education, street lighting, rubbish collection – would suffer because the focus was always on products. Debt burdens would end only with economic depression – before rising again as the economy improved.

“The Affluent Society” was written in 1958 and revised in 1973. Forty years’ later, much of the book reads as if it was written today – or, at least the analysis section of the book. Galbraith’s analysis was right as far as it went, but the prescriptions for change were never likely to be implemented.

Galbraith’s focus was on products and how our wealth was fixated on production – production that the “market” determined was needed. As wealth grew, so the market for goods is increasingly the subject of corporate advertising in order to promote goods that we may not need – but believe we do.

Public goods – such as education and anything produced by the public sector – was deemed wasteful and could never compete with corporate advertising. So, taxation (whether national or local) was harmful in most eyes as it deprived the payer of marketed products and was spent on ill-conceived public goods (such as education, waste collection and keeping the streets clean – or, worse, providing a baseline of income for those most in need). Other than defence spending, which Galbraith believes is wasted, he contends that a “social balance” is needed between the market for products and social goods.

He also saw the problems caused at the intersection of public sector and the market – two estranged bedfellows who often wake to find themselves in the same bed but unable to understand why or how to cope.

A good example of this was recently seen in London’s Heathrow Airport where lines / queues at customs on entry were up to 3 hours. Businesses impacted by such horrors in the year of the Queen’s Jubilee and the 2012 Olympics were outraged at the inefficiency of Government – who control customs. Heathrow is a business – a travel and shopping centre. It is also the key entry point for people from across the world and Government is responsible for who enters the country. This intersection of the two clearly shows the difficulty of creating the “social balance” between government and the market.

Galbraith’s Missing Elements

Forty years ago, four, major elements were missing from or only sidelines in Galbraith’s analysis – issues which have become more central over time:

Global trading – or the Global Social Balance

The errors in GDP accounting – quantity vs quality

The Environment

Civil Society

Global Social Balance

The world is a different one from 1958 or even 1973. We trade globally and the developed nations increasingly use labour from the undeveloped nations to do low-cost, manual work (often in conditions we would not tolerate in our own countries). It is a 19^th Century state of work but internationalised– where now, international companies tend to operate as the mill owners of old.

From a micro-economic sense that is understandable – each company is different and many act responsibly. However, from a macro-economic viewpoint and from an international political viewpoint, there are limited mechanics for equalizing health and safety laws let alone education and pay scales.

Galbraith’s concern was that we produced too much and that we should be able to make less in a country like the USA. When the work goes international, the responses to the problem have to as well.

Production by numbers: quantity versus quality

In an affluent society, production is made the cornerstone of all we do (the economy is central to all our decisions) because work is needed to secure income. Even in an affluent society, income at a certain level is deemed to be critical. Products of progressively less use (or utility) are sold (often solely on the back of advertising) and we buy them and this is meant to keep us in work and more buying goes on.

Of course, in an international labour market, that won’t always work (as Gandhi found out in the early 20^th Century when England produced most of the cotton garments sold in India) and it has become harder to focus just on one country.

However, the global economy does not mean that products become more useful – much of what we make is simply wasting energy and resources. However, it is keeping people in work in many developing nations.

But, growth is measured by GDP and GDP is a poor measure of quality of life or even production. Quality of education, for example, is measured in GDP by its cost (an input) not an output. A £500 handbag is deemed worth the same as £500 worth of essential foods – no difference in utility is assessed.

The felling of a rare tree is “valued” at the cost of felling or its price in the market as a table. The value of a river is missed completely – unless over-polluted when its clear-up costs may enter as a cost in a nation’s GDP.

It is production by numbers, quantity versus quality.

Environmental Balance

While mentioning the issue of environment, the main topic of “The Affluent Society” is the social balance between public goods and market production. All these are made by people – so, the environment in which we live is ignored. The trade-off is not, of course, that simple (even though the Galbraith trade-off has never been seen to function). The environmental trade-off (our need to maintain our natural capital) is now being understood but remains relatively hidden in economic debates. Natural capital needs to be brought into any debate on affluence in society – our quality of life as opposed to the quantity of life.

Civil Society

To Galbraith, the game is between the market and the public sector and to most, this battle still exists as the only one. There was not much mention of civil society – where most of us spend most of our time – except through discussion of leisure time. Here, the trade-off was between productive working and spare time. I expect that this assumes that all non-productive time is spent on hobbies or watching TV.

The creativity and value of civil society – a huge array of organisations from sports to international development, from charities to women’s institutes – is normally missed completely by economists and thinkers on society. The problem is that it does not fit easily into econometricians’ computer simulations: more of the “if you can’t count it, it doesn’t exist” syndrome.

Of course, for centuries, people have been undertaking “good deeds” – the history of the 19^th Century is full of examples of charitable activities. However, society is changing fast and as politics loses its appeal for so many (with parties genuinely fearing for their future), the role of civil society is growing and, in affluent societies, taking back more from the state that it lost to the state in the 20^th Century.

This escape from the centre is to be applauded, but needs to be better understood.

Social Balance

Complete reliance on the market or on the centre (libertarianism or communism) may still appeal to some. The reality is that complexity is the norm. Society is a mixture of competing ideas and competing structures – out of which we muddle through and where individuals take centre stage and form organisations to make their voice louder.

Nevertheless, we should learn from history and our mistakes. Centrism is a doctrine of the defeated; totalitarianism a doctrine of the damned. There is no one answer but a constant mix of opportunities that society provides and where changes are constant in the way we answer our problems.

The mix of competing answers does no longer rest between public and private sector in an affluent society – that is a 20^th Century doctrine or response. The response now has to take into account the social balance we want from our lives between products, social value, natural capital and civil society relationships in a global context not a rigidly national one.

This means being adult about the causes of change and grown-up about the challenges – it means being international in approach and understanding the complexity of the problem – not something that can be understood wholly by quantities or computer simulations.

As we grow materially (i.e. through the quantity of products we are able to manufacture) and bump up against the troubles of environmental degradation and massive disparities of wealth and conditions (on a global scale), the question to be addressed is how does a complex society best form itself to take the decisions it needs to maximize the value we all give and receive from this “affluent society”.

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