Gold, BitCoin and the Dollar.

Connecting some scary dots in the undercurrent of market turmoil.

Are we seeing signs of a return to gold backed currencies? It’s a valid question in the light of a deal now being implemented between China and Russia. China, the world’s biggest oil importer is de-dollarizing its oil bill with its biggest supplier, Russia, by paying in Yuan that can be converted into gold. That, in effect, means gold backing for a major currency in a highly significant international transaction and which will be extended to cover the total $116 billion p.a. Chinese oil bill.

China is expected to buy 1000 tons of gold this year, India a further 900 tons, and Russia has been consistently topping up its gold reserves from an average 715 tons to more than 1700 tons in the last quarter. Together, these three countries have been absorbing gold nearly equal to annual newly mined gold. In addition, China has launched Yuan denominated gold contracts in exchanges in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

These developments have hardly featured in explaining gold’s 11-month high in past weeks, focusing rather on geo-political tensions. It’s another reflection of the short term perspective of derivatives and paper trading which now set a global gold price totally removed from physical supply and demand. This graphic by the London Bullion Market Association published by Zero Hedge and the Bullion Star shows that 15 000 times more unallocated gold is traded than there are reserves. 

Following derivative short-term thinking, gold seems for the most part to be viewed as a palliative for paranoia, ignoring its significant monetary potential as an alternative to paper currencies, especially the United States Dollar.  Yet, how strong is the mighty greenback? And can deliberate de-dollarization by large countries be ignored?

Recent market trends reflect again a simple link between Dollar strength and the performance of the American Economy. GDP growth is the ultimate rain-maker and statistical indicators move markets in short term bursts. Largely ignored is the most important ultimate health of an economy and strength of its currency – the national debt. In the wake of hurricane havoc, $15 billion in victim relief gave good cause to waive the United States government $20 trillion debt ceiling until December. The fact that U.S. Federal government debt has nearly tripled in about 10 years, with little prospect of a slowing down in the next five, must pose a threat to the country’s long term health.

Debt creation is contained by raising interest rates. But that means a substantial proportion of government revenue has to go to debt servicing. (A 1% increase in rates adds $200 billion to interest payment.) It also curtails consumer demand and therefore economic growth. Until recently the Federal Reserve Board has been acting completely counter-intuitively to that but when you approach zero interest rates and keep on adding more debt, you have clearly reached a cross road. The hesitant and modest Fed rate hikes reflect the difficulty in reversing that trajectory.

And then there’s the diminutive bitcoin, now in its third bubble deflation/burst/correction in as many years and punching way above its weight in terms of public attention. It’s a bit sad, really, because it detracts from its still promising potential of revolutionising money. Paul Donovan of UBS Wealth Management believes that it never had and never will have that potential (See Moneyweb Article here). Others, such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and our own Mike Schussler, have weighed in on its alleged fraudulent nature.  

Howard Marks, The Oaktree Capital co-chairman shared that view until a few days ago when he wrote: "Bitcoin fans argue that it qualifies as a currency under these criteria: most importantly, it's something that parties can agree to accept as legal tender and a store of value. That actually seems right."

But then he comes to the crunch: “… I found myself admitting that much of the criticism I had levelled at bitcoin is applicable to the dollar as well.”

The two main functions of money, a stable means of exchange and store of value are flawed even in existing fiat currencies, and crypto has already shown that an alternative is possible. The current rush reflects, at least in part, growing distrust in alternatives. People confuse “store of value” with “appreciating investment”. Store of value simply means being able to store and preserve the value of your cow, chicken, or labour in a safe way. Only then does it live comfortably with means of exchange. When it is subjected to speculative investment its M.O.E status is disturbed, but not necessarily lost.

Crypto is such a new, complicated phenomenon that any speculation about transaction costs, booms and busts, bubbles and bursts, usage, security, ultimate winners and losers, regulatory framework, taxation and indeed the real value of the crypto itself is premature, albeit valuable to its development. With its widely trusted block-chain technology, bitcoin may well morph into something different, or even be replaced. But it will be difficult to replace the decentralized nature of bitcoin. Control of money through central banks, banks and governments is simply no longer trusted. Likewise, central control of a crypto currency will suffer the same fate.

Despite extreme volatility, bitcoin’s price has clearly shown explosive demand. Until one can clearly determine where that demand is coming from, how long it will be sustained and at what price, can one start predicting and charting its course. The same goes for the plethora of other cryptos, some good and some absolutely rotten, that enter this space and dilute the offering.

But it’s a huge playground, as shown in this table of investment and speculative deployment of money. It was extrapolated from a graphic worth looking at here, and published by the Visual Capitalist. The figures are not fully comparable with each other because I updated some of them.

One simply cannot begin to calculate crypto-currencies’ share or potential share of the total and much of the criticism levelled at crypto currencies can be levelled at many of the instruments shown. But connecting some less apparent dots creates a much more disturbing picture: the overwhelming weight of finance over the real economy, which is GDP and key influencing factors such as debt. Clearly finance is no longer being informed and driven by GDP, but is driving it! And in the worst possible way of trying to extract maximum short term, speculative gains! It reverses an old and wise economic law – enterprise leads and capital follows.

It explains a lot about what is wrong with the world.

An age of economic soul-searching.

Was the great recession a bigger game changer than we realise?

In women’s month, on a cold Sunday night in the farm-workers’ compound, cheap wine-fuelled joviality again turns to discord. A stone is thrown in drunken fury. A skull is crushed. A young women dies. A young man ends in jail. One life is ended, another destroyed. Neighbours and co-workers become sworn enemies. Tranquillity in the small community is shattered.  

A few more decibels are added to the clamour about gender violence. Another line is written in the tome of hazy hopelessness that is the life of a very large part of a young generation. And just as many in the final generation, those whose formative years were marked by much post-war deprivation but large promise of “never again”, reflect sadly on what has been done to that promise. It’s a global story. The content may differ, but the context is the same: a fractured, disconnected, economically malfunctioning world.  Is the new normal, as Dutch economist, Servaas Storm says: “radical inequality, suffocating debt, job uncertainty, secular stagnation and a vanishing middle-class”? Theories abound. Purists argue that their elixirs were never purely administered. Solutions exceed the problems themselves, but none has proved to be a lasting absolute truth. Some hope that the current few green shoots in the desert will still the dissent.

We are not too afraid of “unchartered waters”, drawing some comfort from history that we have been in unfamiliar places before, and somehow emerged with new approaches and discoveries. This time is no different. But perhaps it is in the scale and depth of questioning all assumptions about economics and about ourselves as a species. The view increasingly being seen is through an evolutionary rather than the traditional reactive quantitative lens – do we evolve or construct on statistical models? This lens is being captured in research directions and discoveries within evolutionary economics and complexity economics, and driven by a number of institutions and scholars.

Eric Beinhocker Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University, believes the financial crisis of 2008 and the momentous global political shifts last year, have heralded a collapse of major economic-political ideologies that have dominated the 20^th century. Older economies in particular are searching for a completely new paradigm that can show a better way for all. Such as the OECD’s NAEC (New approaches to Economic Challenges) which says: “We need a full re-vamp of our analytical frameworks and the assumptions that we make, to better capture the reality. Economic models that rely only on inputs such as GDP, income per capita, trade flows, resource allocation, productivity, representative agents, and so on can tell a part of the story, but they fail to capture the distributional consequences of the policies we make, and do not address the  fact that the growth process has only benefited a few.”

It will be a mistake to see these shifts in economic introspection in an ideological context, and brand them as “socialist” or “left”. Indeed our sometimes powerfully drawing biases are the biggest barriers to discovery. According to Beinhocker, it’s time for new economic thinking based on the best science available, not Ideology. “It should be highly interdisciplinary” he says, “involving not only economists, but psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others across the social and physical sciences”. He notes that over the past several decades a number of Nobel prizes have been given to researchers working in what today might be called the new economics tradition.

Beinhocker reflects a common thread followed by economic evolutionary advocates in developing a view of the economy as an evolutionary system of cooperative problem solving. Prosperity is seen as “solutions to human problems” and cooperation is the key to solving more and more complex problems thus increasing prosperity.

“Economics has painted itself as a detached amoral science, but humans are moral creatures. We must bring morality back into the centre of economics in order for people to relate to and trust it,” he says.

Oxford and Cambridge Research Associate, Kate Raworth in following that thought in her latest book, suggests dumping GDP as the holy grail and setting a “far more ambitious and global economic goal: meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet”. She then explores a seven step approach to achieving that.

In this article, David Wilson, renowned biologist and anthropologist at Binghamton University, suggests not only that Adam Smith’s invisible hand is dead, and always fails, but that the metaphor itself has caused much harm. “We are different from other primate species,” he argues, “because we are so cooperative. Why are we so cooperative? Because it is so easy to regulate each other’s behaviour in small face-to-face groups.” Wilson’s brave challenge of the “invisible hand” has another context: Smith’s assumption of high moral standards in humanity, which precluded seeing “the hand” as an instrument of pure self-gain and unbridled selfishness.

“Moral systems evolve in societies because they enhance group cohesion and survival.

Implications of evolutionary thinking for economics and the social sciences have only partially been explored.” (Geoffrey M. Hodgson, research professor at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, England.)

One of the more telling indictments of orthodox economic models is from complexity economics of which Steve Keen, Kingston University economist and author of Debunking Economics is a leading advocate. He believes economists have to embrace complexity to avoid disaster and the fact that they don’t, explains why most were caught flatfooted by the speed, depth and length of the great recession. “Macroeconomic models are painstakingly derived from microeconomic foundations, in the false belief that it is legitimate to scale the individual up to the level of society.” Using his own simulations, Keen shows a number of cases (see essay here) where generally accepted assumptions at a micro level, including important ones such as price and demand, simply don’t hold true at a macro level.

It is extremely difficult to do this important subject justice in a broad sweep such as I have made here. Essays and articles on the website evonomics.com bear testimony to the weight, depth and breadth of a perspective that is perhaps not new but compelling, profound and refreshing in today’s context. It does offer a framework of thought for South Africa’s own Radical Economic transformation, but with a huge caveat – the need for a trustworthy government. I have frequently argued that radical government transformation is an absolute prerequisite for RET. (See article here.)

What remains unchallenged and perhaps gains significance is that economics itself is built on the enduring principle of adding value to each other’s lives. This should put business and companies at the core of any economic construct seen through any lens.

From a relationship point of view, they are after all, and irrespective of motive, an inclusive collective of people serving people.