Have you ever wonder why economists and policy makers are so obsessed with economic growth? Why is it such an acute problem if the economy is not in a treadmill of growth (i.e. ever-lasting increase in the quantity of goods and services produced)? What is so bad with zero economic growth (i.e. an economy that takes it free and easy)?
As one of our readers wrote in our previous article,
This is all to say that the [modern capitalist] system is much more fragile than anyone would have guessed and that the cult of markets and efficiency have left the world with a system that is less and less resilient. The crisis that has begun over the last couple years begins to bear that out. In fact we’ve become dependent on efficiency and without it the system may just fail under it own weight. Time will tell but the process has begun.
Why?
We believe the root of the problem lies in the monetary system. Today, we have a monetary system that is at its heart a system of credit. That is, the ‘money’ that flows around the system is loaned out of existence. To understand what this means, read on…
Originally, mankind started with commodity money. Money was a physically tangible thing. In the 15th century, Spain found gold in the New World. As gold was money back then, Spain found a lot of money and became ‘rich’ as a result. Today, most of our money has become virtual, intangible and in the form of electronic information. The overwhelming values of transactions are made in the form of electronic fund transfers instead of exchange in physical paper cash.
Now, think of your cash at bank- it is an asset to you and a liability of the bank. Say, when you make a non-cash purchase (either with cheque, credit card, bank transfer, etc), that transaction ultimately becomes a transfer of liability from one entity to another. This text-book idea implies that assets have to exist first before it can be loaned out as someone’s else’s liability.
The real world does not conform to this text-book idea: liabilities are created by banks first (in the form of loans) before the assets exist (we recommend you read Marc Faber vs Steve Keen in inflation/deflation debate- Part 1: Steve Keen’s model if you need a deeper understanding). After the liabilities are created out of thin air, the bank then go hunting for the assets by borrowing from another entity (e.g. central bank, depositors, another bank, investors, etc). Ultimately, either directly or indirectly, that asset (currency) originates from the central bank.
The central bank is the only institution that can create assets (currency) out of thin air to be loaned out as liabilities. Imagine you are a central bank- all you need to do is to declare $100 into existence, lend it to the banking system and then have the power to demand that the money (which you created out of thin air) to be paid back to you at an interest rate that you decide.
The observant reader will then be asking this question: “If the entire economy pays back all the currency that was borrowed into existence, but still owes the interest, where does it get the currency to pay the interest?” The answer is startling simple: more currency has to be borrowed into existence to pay back the original interest!
Now, you can see that total debt in the economy will grow exponentially (compounded interest) continuously and can never be repaid fully. That means the economy has to grow continuously in order to generate the income to pay back the continuously growing debt. Since the physical world has a finite quantity of resources, the quantity of goods and services produced in the economy cannot always grow fast enough to match the continuously growing debt. Therefore, the only way to keep the system running is to add in price inflation (growth in the nominal value of the goods and services produced) so that the nominal value of the continuously growing debt can be repaid. That’s why, as our reader observed, the “cult of markets and efficiency” in the modern capitalistic economy is there by necessity to keep the economy growing continuously.
For the past decade, total private debt is growing at a speed far in excess of GDP growth (i.e. growth in income). For a while, it seemed sustainable because asset prices (most notably, house prices) were rising fast enough to keep the financial system solvent (i.e. able to pay back the continuously growing compounding debt in nominal terms). As you can see by now, if asset prices stops rising in the context of adequate economic growth, the game is over. That game-over situation is what we all know as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
The GFC trigger the economic phenomenon called deflation. Once the debtors (e.g. banks, households, businesses) become insolvent, they can cause their creditors to become insolvent, who in turn threaten the creditors’ creditors with insolvency. This systemic debt defaults will now reverse the debt growth, which means the currencies that are loaned into existence will be written off into non-existence, which means money supply will shrink, which in turn will cause vast tracts of the economy to shave off its productive capacity (e.g. unemployment, idle factories, excess capacity).
If the economy is not expected to grow sufficiently and the government wants to keep the wheel running, what would they do? The only course of action is run the money printing press (i.e. create currencies out of thin air, pump them into the system for free). The risk is that without a properly growing economy, they risk igniting another asset price bubble. An asset price bubble may seem to ‘work’ because they can keep the system solvent for a while, until the bubble burst and restart the deflation nightmare again. The government will then have to start the monetary printing press again while the economy shaves its productive capacity the second time. If this process is repeated umpteen times, it will come to a point whereby the only thing to keep the system running is rising asset prices and not economic growth. When that happens, it is hyperinflation.
The current asset price rebound around the world is the stage where rising asset prices are keeping the debt wheel running. We don’t know how long that gig will keep running.
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