Trading for Power

City commentators, the market makers of those who earn their cash in the casino economy, are torn during these days of high-level political negotiations. At no other time can the illusion of our democracy have been clearer. We will not be allowed to have a government of which the markets do not approve.

But which government should the market men go for? At first blush, you might think they would favour the fiscal probity and pro-City inclination of the Conservatives. The top line of their rhetoric is usually about the need for stability and a strong pound. This is the cover story, for in reality the city can make far more money from turbulent times. In the words of a friend whose main target is political corruption: 'The disgusting sight of the bond markets opening during the night to speculate at our expense demonstrates starkly what we are up against: the return of the casino economy backed by a neoliberal coalition government.'

The traders who speculated against Greek bonds until they - and the country they represened - was destroyed, were able to profit vastly from this sport. As they gradually reduced the 'credit rating' with one hand, with the other they were able to extract higher interest-rate payments for holding those bonds. The working people of Greece must pay that interest - and suffer the disastrous social consequences of the battle over the corpse of their country's economy.

In the UK, even greater profits can be made, since speculation can be against both the glinting gilts of the Treasury bonds and the pound. If currencies maintain stable values against each other then the scope for buying cheap and selling dear is automatically reduced. The volatility in the currency markets is an opportunity for currency traders to thrive.

Even at a superficial level, the easy way in which young men from the City pass judgement on negotiations about the future of what we like to think of as our democracy is disturbing. Beneath this lies the disturbing truth that a summer of civil unrest and union activity might be exactly what they want. Such turbulence can offer them the opportunity to feed once again off the working people of this country. Tweet

One Day All Money Will be Created this Way

In an earlier post I questioned what might be the limitation on the policy agreement between the Bank of England and the UK Debt Management Agency that one can create money from thin air which is then used to buy UK national debt. For a while I have been calling for a transparent process to reduce the the level of this debt from the unpayable quantities announced in the Budget. I now realise that there is a very murky version of such a policy already in operation.

So what prevents the UK government from eliminating the whole of our national debt in this way, by creating money from thin air, or what Mary Mellor calls 'fresh air money'? The traditional response would have been 'Inflation' - because 'once the economy picks up again' there will be too much money in the system. The created money is buying debt that was generated to pay the debts of the banks. So the fact that the Bank of England is countenancing this suggests that nobody expects the 'assets' that we have bought from those banks to ever be worth anything. They are not a future inflation risk because they are as worthless as we always expected - debt and definitely not assets.

Such a policy of creating money to repay our own debt cannot possibly make the UK less solvent, since it is removing the quantity of debt and thus improving out balance-sheet. So why is Standard & Poors threating to downgrade our credit-worthiness as a nation from three stars to two? Leaving aside the question of how much weight we should attach to the views of these agencies that were quite happy with the banks' utterly worthless assets, why should they be making this announcement now?

It seems that there is a struggle going on at the heart of capitalism and this is a shot across the bows of governments that are reneging on the deal they made with corporate investors and the sovereign wealth funds controlled by national governments - the two groups who buy UK national debt.

How does it affect the corporate bond-holders if much of our national debt is simply eliminated by sleight-of-hand? One would have thought that it would have increased their ability to extract work from the labourers of Britain to pay the interest on their gilts, since they are now competing with fewer holders of gilts for their share of this value.

As for national governments holding sterling as reserves, they may become uneasy (queasy?) about the value of these assets, since the QE buy-back policy suggests an inability to support the levels of debt that have been taken on by the UK government. But again, the reality is that as the level of debt is managed down, the ability of UK plc to make good on what remains is increased.

The real issue is a political one. Money is being created from thin air to enable banks that extracted huge amounts of value during the asset bubble to carry on functioning - to maintain themselves as ongoing concerns that can thus continue to hold these 'assets'. What must really frighten the board of Global Capital Inc. is the thought that we, the revolting peasants of these islands, might demand that money is created in a similar way to pay for schools, hospitals and the others services that are so under-financed.

So the downgrading of national debt is a shot across the bows of a government that has increased investment in the public sector in recent years - the lastest move by the privateers to establish their power over our national economic life following a time when the government was forced to introduce a de facto socialist regime. It reinforces that massive transfer of value to the rich that the bank bailout represents, and reinforces the rules of the capitalist game that those who earn must work for their living, while those who own need not. Creating money directly is a head-on challenge to these rules and this is why it must be undermined. Tweet

Gilty Secrets of the Treasury

For those whose interest in what the hell the government is up to with our monetary policy continues, I offer the Debt and Reserves (as if!) Management Report 2009/10 from the government's Debt Management Agency. I bet that looked like a cushy number when the tender went out.

There are some great data and graphics indicating the horrendous debt situation we are in. The report also informs us that the some of the auctions of government debt have had ‘largeer than average tails’ as a result of ‘volatile gilt market conditions’. A helpful note informs us that ‘the tail is the yield at the lowest accepted price less the yield at the average accepted price’, in other words the debt is getting harder to shift. This is confirmed by the admission that there was an ‘uncovered’ auction on 25th March, i.e. some of the debt remained unsold. (This is illustrated in the second reproduced graphic.)

Here is how the report describes the introduction of quantitative easing:

On 19 January 2009, the Government established the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) to enable the Bank of England to ease credit conditions in corporate debt markets by making purchases of private sector assets. On 5 March 2009, the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England (MPC) announced its decision to use the APF for monetary policy purposes by purchasing £75 billion of assets (the majority of which would be gilts) in the following three months financed by the provision of central bank reserves. The asset purchases are designed to influence the quantity of broad money as a supplement to setting the level of the Base Rate.

In February Mervyn King got the wind up about the buying back of our own debt and wrote to the Chancellor to require that ‘It should not alter its issuance strategy as a result of the transactions undertaken through the Asset Purchase Facility for monetary policy purposes.’ The Chancellor maintained that the objectives of monetary policy had remained the same, and that these remained ‘to minimise, over the long-term, the costs of meeting the Government’s financing needs, taking into account risk, whilst ensuring that debt management policy is consistent with the aims of monetary policy’.

I'm afraid I can only bear so much of this deliberately obfuscatory prose. It does nothing to change my view that we need to have an up-front and just negotiation about how the debt is removed from the economy, together with a revision to the money-creation system that makes a similar bust impossible in future.

Yesterday, the Treasury Select Committee criticised the Treasury for focusing the money created through the QE policy on managing the monetary aspect of the problem, rather than supporting the real economy, which was the justification for the policy and the reason the Bank of England agreed to it. So far of the money created £2.8bn. has been spent on corporate debts, compared with £51bn. used to buy up government debt. Tweet

Would you buy a used economy . . .?

I am faintly tempted to make some sort of connection between the budget and the scrappage scheme, which might get as far as a joke if it weren't such a desperately serious business. The blogosphere is full of confident experts selling their opinions but I feel fairly comfortable letting on that I don't really know what it feels like when your economy goes bust. Perhaps we should be looking across the Irish Sea to get a few hints.

As usual the main budget stories have been apolitical and have avoided the most important issue, but tucked away inside the Guardian we find an article that tells us what the financial markets made of it. They weren't impressed. The result was an increase in the cost of insuring UK debt, which is now considered riskier than that of Spain and almost twice as risky as that of Unilever or France.

On the one hand you might be tempted to laugh this off, given that the risk is measured in terms of the very credit-default swaps that got the global economy into this mess and by the people who considered Lehman Brothers in good health the weekend before it went bust. On the other, as in all matters of economic confidence, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since as our IOUs become riskier they become more expensive to sell. So we have to work harder to pay off the debt that was taken on in our name, and a default is more likely.

Meanwhile, reading between the news, we find that the 'quantitative easing' programme, where the government invents money and uses it to buy the national debt, is expanding to twice the originally planned level. So it is only the sleight-of-hand process of removing some of the unwanted debt that is keeping the price as high as it is. The interesting question for puzzled economy-watchers is how long this bizarre stealing from Peter to pay Paul can carry on? And who will take the decision to call a halt to the game? Answers on a postcard, or in a comment. Tweet

The Q&A of the Borrowing

I was recently commissioned to answer some questions about where on earth the government is getting all of this money from - a question asked by many in pubs and on buses up and down the land. Irritatingly, they did not then publish the answers I had spent time considering, so I offer it now, in a temporary change to the style of the blog. Comments and corrections are welcome.

What is government borrowing?

When I learned my economics this was called the PSBR or ‘public sector borrowing requirement’ but it has since been renamed the PSNCR or ‘public-sector net cash requirement’. These renamings usually have political intent and in this case I’m guessing it it is to get away from the unhealthy concept of ‘borrowing’. This is the annual amount that central government, local government and the public services borrow each year to keep themselves going. The ‘national debt’ is the accumulated total money that government has borrowed over the years which it couldn’t afford to pay back. Sometimes it goes down but, since the Bank of England was set up in 1694, the trend has been steadily upwards.

Where does this money come from?

The government has three sources of revenue: taxation, where it takes money directly from companies or individuals; from selling government bonds; and from printing money directly. The last of these has become increasingly unpopular since the Second World War, but is in fact a liberating way for government to create money without putting anybody into debt. At present government only creates note and coin in this way, which represents around 3% of total money.

What role do gilts play?

Gilts is just another name for government bonds—gilt-edged securities—because they are safer than anything else, since so long as the country doesn’t sink the government is bound to pay interest twice a year on them. Investors will get their money back after a certain fixed time specified on the bond, however before that time the value of the bonds will fluctuate, depending on the rate of UK interest rates. If interest rates are expected to fall, investors will tend to buy bonds because they are likely to be worth more in the future.

Who is stumping up?

This is an interesting question. Why should anybody want to invest in UK bonds when our economy is clearly short of a paddle and in unpleasant surroundings? If you are somebody with plenty of money to invest your primary concern at the moment is going to be security, so bonds might look quite attractive compared to stock in a corporation. So your gamble is likely to be about which countries bonds are most attractive, based on your view of how the interest rates of countries are going to move. Given that all countries are cutting interest rates one would assume that all national bonds are equally (un)attractive.

This question makes it clear how we are all entangled in the same mess. China owns a vast quantity of US treasuries (their name for government bonds) and if it chose could sell these and destroy the US economy. But if it did that it would lose its main export market and its own economy would falter. So, on a global basis, owning more stock doesn’t necessarily make you more powerful. Remember the old adage: if you own £1m. the bank owns you, but if you owe £1bn you own the bank!

Why should anybody buy our national debt?

Your ability to sell you bonds depends on the general perception of your reliability as an economy. This was the problem Iceland faced, being a volcanic rock with a population the size of Bristol and no resources other than fish and hot water, it couldn't realistically stand behind the debts that its entrepreneurs had racked up. A country’s ability to do this depends on its perceived power in the global capital market. The most powerful economies are those that control the ‘reserve currencies’—the dollar, euro, pound, yen and Swiss franc. These are currencies other governments hold their national reserves in and therefore are good for massive debts. The US is in a special position because in 1944 it negotiated that its currency would actually be held as equivalent to gold in reserve terms. It had to maintain a link between its currency and gold to back this up, but broke that rule in 1971 and since then has been able to print paper and get massive amounts of resources in exchange for it.

The UK is therefore in a strong position in increasing its national debt. One important way of measuring this is comparing the amount our economy produces each year with the size of our national debt—the so-called debt-to-GDP ratio. Ours is currently around 40% and is predicted to go above 50% as the recession deepens. Argentina went bust in 2001 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of less than 40% and a healthy level of exports and resources. The difference was it did not have a reserve currency and when speculators targeted the peso the government could not defend it. So it is really about political rather than economic power.

Who calls in the debt, both to the banks and the government? When?

So long as government continues to pay the interest it owes on the bonds there need never be any ‘calling in’ of the debt. There never has been since this malarkey started in 1694. When the bonds come to the end of their life, the government creates new ones to pay back the people who bought the old ones. The same people probably buy the new ones—at least to some extent.

Aren’t we the taxpayer then going to pay for what we’ve lent?

Yes. Absolutely. This is why Percy Bysshe Shelley called the national debt ‘a system for transferring income from the labouring segment of the population to those who’ had money to lend to government and would thus accrue interest, and who profited from government expenditure in wars. It is a way of transferring money from the poor to the rich and always has been. Amazing how they’ve got away with it for so long isn’t it? I wonder how many people will wise up now.

The banks seem to want to have their cake and eat it; they can take our money but still decide that we’re too much of a risk to invest in?

What is happening with the banks is a bit different. They do not lend pre-existing money but create money through a multiplier process—because they never expect all depositors to come back for their money at the same time. But to accept other banks’ promises to pay requires mutual confidence between the banks and this is lacking. You can see it as rather like a pyramid-selling scheme. While you can find new buyers it works fine, but when the market is exhausted the people at the end of the chain lose their money and the system collapse. That is what just happened. The only way out is for banks to believe in each other again—which is what the government is trying to ensure. Then they will bring money into existence again and the whole upward spiral can start again. So, to be fair, I don’t think the government gave money to the banks to be passed on in loans, but rather to reboot the system. This doesn’t appear to have worked and banks are only following their rulebook in not lending their own money.

Why does government policy on banking keep changing?

When the Rock started the rot the government still believed it could stop the rapid downward spiral if it stood behind just this one bank, initially just in theory. But the bad debts were so frightening to the banks that this didn’t work and it was clear that other banks—-perhaps all the banks—could go down like dominos. At that point it took complete control of Northern Rock. At each stage it has in mind to achieve the rebuilding of confidence as cheaply as possible. Supporting Northern Rock did not rebuild confidence so then they moved to the full-scale bail-out. This also doesn’t seem to be working, since credit is still tight. In a world where businesses rely on debt to survive this is now damaging the real economy that provides goods and services. So the economic bail-out is the latest stage. But it is still jump-starting and is by no means guaranteed. We will have to pay the damage whether or not it succeeds.

There is still no plan to address the problem at source, which is the gap between nominal value in terms of finance and real value in terms of what our economy actually does. On a global basis, 98% of the transactions that take place everyday have nothing to do with the real economy, they are just gambling in the casino economy, most of it speculation in the possible future rises and falls in the value of the various currencies. This is a much more efficient way to make money than actually making stuff.

This sounds like a merry-go round rather than a rescue plan?

It always was a merry-go-round. That is how finance works. It has worked fairly well for the 200-odd years that we have lived in the capitalist economy, but with periodic booms and busts. To achieve a steady-state economy would also require stable money. Government could just create that money by fiat—we would believe it because we believe the government, just like investors believe in the value of government bonds. But this would be money creation without debt. The difference would be that the process would not require our work to pay back the national debt and would therefore undermine the work-money nexus at the heart of capitalism. Sounds tempting doesn’t it?!

Surely the global financial system as currently configured is on any accepted measure a write off?

I agree with you about this. I think the only solution is to go for the full-scale jubilee and go back to the Bretton Woods conference table. We could then reinstate the two major planks of Keynes’s plan at that time: balanced budgets between nations with fines for deficits and surpluses, and a neutral international currency so that no government had the ‘reserve currency’ advantage. In addition I think we could tie this currency to an agreement on climate change and therefore stitch the environmental crisis into the solution too. The main difference between then and now is the liberalization of finance so that it is not under national control. This needs to be reversed with the reintroduction of credit and exchange controls. Without control of finance how can a government claim to be sovereign? And how can we imagine we live in democracies? Tweet