The Biggest Obstacle to Texan Independence

Suppose you were a patriotic Texan, planning on how to make your state independent. As Tinkzorg likes to put it, in politics (not just in war), the professionals think mostly about logistics. This comprises two parts. First, the grassroots aspect of how do you build up enough internal support to make independence a concrete aim of a sufficient number of Texans. On this aspect, the people you want are (in Henry Sumner Maine’s phrase) “the wire-pullers”, the successful manipulators of public opinion, and the people capable of building organizations to expand out such messages and grow power. I have no skill nor inclination in that regard.

But there is a second aspect that’s more interesting to me. How do you plan in advance for likely hostile responses from USG? If such responses don’t happen once your Texan mob/democratic expression of sovereignty arises, happy days! In that case, the first step of building support is the only one that matters. But since you probably won’t have too many cracks at this, one needs to plan for how to overcome Yankee resistance.

I suspect that said resistance initially won’t be military. It may not be military at all. The reason this whole thing is interesting is that the level of committed energy seems so low on both sides. This is true across most of the western world. The number of people in Texas willing to die to ensure their state’s freedom is likely very low. But so is the number of New Yorkers or Californians willing to die to keep Texans in the union. So inertia rules the day at the moment. It’s like a market that’s very illiquid in both buyers and sellers. Small changes in demand or supply can result in large price swings in either direction, which is what makes it a live issue. Sure, the Californians hate the Texans. But this version of “Fuck you, Dad!” could just as easily manifest as “Fuck you, I won’t [let you] do what you tell me”, or “Fuck you, you’re not invited to family thanksgiving anymore”.

The default Yankee instinct, however, is probably power and control. It is impossible to have a federal, live-and-let-live model of each state making up their own mind on gay rights, or abortion, or most politically charged issues (including, once upon a time, slavery). And while not every issue resolves itself at the level of the Supreme Court, progressive soft power is directed at solving the monstrous corollary to MLK. That is, if injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then only total global domination of the levers of power is sufficient to ensure my security in the Upper East Side, or Georgetown, or Malibu. It’s for my own safety, and the cause of justice, you see, that I must rule you.

If you add this up, the likely USG response is probably to apply unpleasant non-military pressure, and try to make life maximally unpleasant for Texans in a way likely to cause them to either relent, or just blame matters on the independence supporters.

So what are those ways, and how might you circumvent them?

One guide is to look at what they do to foreign states they don’t like, and want to apply pressure to. Of the toolkit they like the most, it’s sanctions, and especially financial sanctions. In the recent case of Russia, USG threatened to cut off their banks from the SWIFT system. This would leave them isolated from US financial institutions, and force other countries’ banks to effectively decide (presumably on threat of the punishment being extended to them too) whether they’d rather do business with US banks or Russian ones. Whatever you think about the long-term consequences of the Fed’s print-a-palooza, right now, that’s not a difficult decision for a Swiss Bank.

(As an aside, if I were the Chinese, I would think about making an explicit threat that if the US cut off Russia, Chinese banks would only do business with Russian banks and not US ones. Let the US find out if it’s actually cutting off Russia from America, or cutting off America from the rest of the world).

But assuming the Chinese gambit doesn’t happen, for Russian banks, being cut off from SWIFT would be seriously inconvenient, but probably wouldn’t precipitate a domestic banking collapse. Inside Russia, their customers can still withdraw their rubles just fine. In the Republic of Texas, cutting off all Texas banks would potentially precipitate a bank run / panic, if people worry that their US dollars are about to be replaced with some new currency that’s worth less. Though if withdrawals are simply frozen or drastically limited (as Greece did briefly in 2012 in the run-up to their vote on whether to leave the Euro), things would probably be okay in the short run.

Weirdly, things would get funky based on the fact that the concept of “Russian banks” is much more coherent than “Texan banks”. Mostly what you have is Texan branches of national or regional banks. The big question is who controls the computer systems. If you’re, say, Bank of America in North Carolina, and the federal men with guns (or just a furious Fed banking regulator) call up and demand that you turn off all the computers of all branches in Texas, you’ll probably comply (unless the systems don’t make that straightforward to do, which is quite possible). Of course, Texas has USAA and Comerica and the rest of the banks headquartered there, which also operate regionally or nationally. Presumably men with guns will be doing the same thing there, dictating what those banks have to do.

The standard way to solve this problem of bank runs in the past was to print up a new currency quickly, and order the banks to start paying deposits only in the new currency, which we’ll call Texars. There is some difficulty in printing sufficient volume of not-easily-forgeable currency in a raging hurry, but presumably you can make do in a pinch. Effectively you confiscate local dollar deposits and forcibly convert them to Texars. People will be pissed, but eventually they’ll adjust.

But I think that it’s a mistake to focus on bank runs and bank stability as the main obstacles in the modern era. These are problems, but they’re manageable problems. Rather, what’s harder to actually solve is payment rails. Most money is already electronic, primarily through credit and debit cards. And for anything online, this is the only game in town. A currency is both a store of value and a medium of exchange, but between the two aspects, the latter is a much more acute problem if it starts to fail. Hurt the banks, the banking industry suffers, and people worry about their savings. But if you cut off payment mechanisms, pretty much all business grinds to a halt. People don’t need to access all their savings immediately, but they do need to be able to fill up their car at the gas station. If they can’t do that, this probably guarantees either capitulation, or military escalation. If you’re Free Texas, you don’t want either. You want to be able to maintain business as usual, and dare USG to go kinetic first, hoping that they don’t have the stones. And every day they wait, you can solidify your local control.

The single biggest obstacle to Free Texas right now is the hegemony of Visa and Mastercard. The extent of the power that these firms have over everyday commerce is colossal and not widely appreciated. They run your credit cards and debit cards, which have moved from being ways to extend credit to ways to pay for anything, anywhere. Not only that, but the US has past form on successfully pressuring these companies to cut off foreign businesses they don’t like (Pokerstars, Tradesports, etc.). They would absolutely do this with Free Texas, probably as their opening salvo.

The challenge is that any electronic payment system needs both a digital currency in question, a mechanism for transferring that currency between buyer and seller, and the technology in each store and consumer’s wallet to make such transfers. When you spell it out this way, you can see why this is incredibly difficult to conjure up in a hurry. Much, much harder than printing up new banknotes and forcing everyone to take them. This also poses a problem even to people who want to use things like Bitcoin. Even if you did everything on the lighting network so there were very low fees and short confirmation times, how long is it going to take for every gas station or website in Texas to be set up to accept this kind of payment? How long is it going to take to get every boomer or retirement home resident to get a wallet capable of spending it at said gas station? How long is it going to take them to get the actual bitcoin to spend? What happens if you're the last grandma in line to convert their dollars over to bitcoin, and the price of bitcoin has gone up 50% from the massive influx of demand?

In some sense, you need the incredibly hard ask of a payment system that can be turned on at the drop of a hat once you declare independence. The crude version is just reverting to cash under newly printed Texars. This will probably work for an initial period of emergency, but you need some way of rolling things out, and it’s not clear that the task gets obviously easier after a few weeks. Not only that, ideally the system can be developed with plausible deniability for its true purpose.

I have only vague ideas about how to do this, and I don’t know which one is best. But I am strongly convinced that this honestly may be the single most important problem to figure out a solution to.  A significant part of the challenge is that many of the initial steps look like a huge needless expansion in wasteful reporting and intrusive data collection.

One such component is that you probably need to set up daily reporting requirements for all bank branches in Texas to a parallel system. You could maybe do this through some local institution you had control over (the Dallas Fed, maybe? Probably too converged), or some new regulatory agency. Every day, banks must report their closing balances for all customers to the State of Texas. This ensures that when you declare independence, you at least have a snapshot of what amount to credit everyone’s account with in Texars. You would probably want to also measure people’s equity holdings too – it’s doubtful you can stop USG expropriating these, but at least if you have records, you can figure out some kind of compensation scheme. Most likely, I would reassign expropriated Yankee-owned shares in every publicly traded Texan firm to Texas residents that had lost equity holdings from the Yankee confiscation. People might not be thrilled that their shares in Microsoft have been converted to shares in Texas Instruments or whatever, but it’s sure better than nothing.

From there, you’ll need to decide what the payment system is. This is where I’m less sure. There are various options, with their own levels of difficulty.

You could try to repurpose the existing Visa and Mastercard networks. The advantage here is that the tech is already out there, both in terms of cards and payment machines. Existing bank relationships with national banks (both cardholder and merchant) could be set up with existing Texas banks. The problem is the Visa and Mastercard networks, which is how the banks communicate with each other. You could create your own one of these and somehow repurpose the machines to transmit through it. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I suspect that reverse engineering this stuff as the State of Texas may be harder than reinventing things from square one.

My guess is that the easier setup (though still extremely hard!) is to actually just set up a central bank digital currency from scratch. In other words, the Texas Central Bank keeps a central database of all dollar amounts that people have in bank deposits (which, remember, it has records of already). A “central bank digital currency” in its most minimal form is just a computer at the Texas Central Bank (TCB hereafter) that anyone can open up an account with. If the Fed let you and I open up the same kinds of Fed accounts with it that Citibank has, America would already have a central bank digital currency.

In other words, we currently have an extraordinarily cumbersome payments processing system because we launder the entire thing between thousands of banks that all need to communicate with each other, verify balances, etc. But if you were redesigning the system from scratch, and especially if you need a system that you can get up and running quickly, you don’t want to duplicate all this stuff. Just let the TCB store all the accounts. Then payment processing is just transferring trivially from one register in a database to another register in the same database.

In this framework, the process is at least simplified – instead of trying to run things through the combination of every bank’s existing legacy IT infrastructure, you just need a way for each consumer and merchant to communicate with the TCB. The simplest way to do this is with an app. Download it, and use the camera to take photos of your Texas drivers license, plus your face next to your ID, plus whatever sequence of random requirements are selected (e.g. take a photo with your ID where you close your left eye, put your right index finger on your nose etc.). Then you’ve got access to your existing bank balance.

Want to pay for a purchase? The vendor generates a QR code that contains the amount of the purchase, and the account to have it credited to. You use your phone on the app to take a photo of the QR code. An alert comes up – do you wish to send $12.95 to “McDonalds Plano, TX”? Click yes, take a photo of your face to confirm your identity, and the purchase is complete.

In this version, the role of banks is significantly scaled back. You go to a bank if you actually want to deposit your money into a savings product with a higher rate of interest, with the money being lent out to borrowers. If you want an actual credit card, you have some arrangement with the bank where they pay for your stuff at the TCB using their own funds, and you pay them back on whatever arrangement you negotiate with the bank. I suspect the demand for this service specifically is actually quite low, and a lot of current credit card demand is really just demand for easy electronic payments. Sure, there are airline miles and other reward programs, but this is just a roundabout way to maintain the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard by effectively fleecing cash-paying customers by a small amount. If all this nonsense disappeared, the system would probably be better off. 

In the medium term, you're going to have the problem that taking all this money out of the banking system will likely increase interest rates, by reducing the amount of funds banks hold at any time that they can loan out. That's a problem (unless you're an Austrian economist, in which case it's a feature), but it's not an immediate problem, and can be mitigated down the line with TCB monetary policy or direct lending to banks. There’s nothing to stop consumers keeping more money in an actual bank earning interest by making risky loans. But if you just want to make and receive payments, you can now do it without a bank. There’s also a longer run risk of centralisation of all money in the hands of the new Texas government. I suspect this already exists with current banks, but people just don't think about it much (ask Conrad Black, when they froze all his assets before his trial which made it difficult to mount an expensive legal defense).

At first, there will be a challenge figuring out the various anti-fraud measures, dispute resolution stuff that banks have worked out for ages. Even getting the whole thing into the hands of consumers is hard, and making sure it scales But it’s at least feasible. The challenges are basically:

-Design an app

-Design a database that stores all the balances.

-Design an API for stores to generate transactions  

-Get customers and businesses to download the app

Then every transaction just requires two people holding smartphones, which they already have. Figuring this out from the business end might be a little complicated, but the consumer end at least doesn’t require sending plastic cards to every person in Texas, or new payment machines to every business. The minimum viable product is that each restaurant has one guy holding a smartphone that implements all their transactions until they can redesign their IT systems to make it smoother.

I mean, this is a several year project! I don’t mean to minimize how hard it is. It's also a long way from the core competency of any government, let alone a future government. It seems likely that you'd need to develop it in secret with some rich, sympathetic Texan fintech CEO or something similar. But the hard work is all doable beforehand. Once it’s go time, you just need everybody to download the app (though you should assume that they’ll also prevent you pushing it to App Store or Google Play, and have plans in place for that).

This isn’t the only variant on the plan. I’m sure crypto boosters can imagine some kind of crypto version where you fork Bitcoin and airdrop tokens to all the existing bank account holders. I suspect the challenges of getting this up and running are quite a bit harder than my version, but who knows.

I am actually less wedded to the specific solution that I propose than I am sure that the problem is probably the most important problem to be solved. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a new breakaway country that set up in the age of digital finance against the wishes of USG. If you want to be the first, you would do well to ponder the paraphrased version of Jonathan Swift:

“They have his soul,
Who have his payment rails.”

The Lessons of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is, without any question, one of the most remarkable financial stories of our lifetimes. Simply by running some code on your laptop back in 2010, or putting a few grand into the earliest bitcoin markets, you could be worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars today. Even quite a bit later in the process, a bold bet that you hung on to could have easily brought you life-changing amounts of money. 

Did you make life-changing amounts of money from Bitcoin?

I didn't. 

I think about that quite a lot.

I made good money from it, in the category of "moving some moderate financial milestones forward a couple of years", which is great. I bought it around the time I wrote this, which still summarises my thoughts on it pretty well. I sold it in February 2018, not long after I wrote this, which I also still like. Short run, the sale was a good call. Longer run, it was a catastrophe.  

If I'd played my cards better and more boldly, at earlier times, I could have ended up with "fuck you" money. For someone writing a pseudonymous blog in 2021, that sure would be handy.

This may sound like a humblebrag, but I promise it's not meant that way.  Internally it feels much more like failure. Chances to make life-changing amounts of money do not come along very often. This was one, and I missed it.

Bitcoin was almost unique in the sense that, to become fabulously rich:

i) you didn't need to have very much money early on (in fact, at the start, you didn't need any at all, just some kind of computer)

ii) you didn't need to risk very large amounts of your wealth to make it happen

iii) everything you needed to do it was publicly searchable on the internet

iv) chances to wind up happily rich persisted for years, including after you probably first heard of bitcoin.

Assuming you didn't make fuck you money from Bitcoin, it's worth pondering what the lessons of this are.

The most obvious instinct, which I fall into from time to time, is essentially just "if only" fantasies. If only I could somehow travel back in time and tell 2010 Shylock to start mining bitcoin! Or to put his life savings into it as soon as possible (and not sell it, and not store it on Mt Gox).

This is the worst kind of loser mentality, taking nothing but fantasy and daydreams from the story. Imagine I had all the future knowledge! Imagine I won the lottery!

But, as it turns out, you don't need to actually transform the question very much for it to be profoundly useful. 

Instead, one is much better off asking "what changes in behavior, mindset and reading habits would I have needed so that I would have actually discovered bitcoin on my own early on and invested in it?"

The reason is that this might actually help you find the next bitcoin. It's possible that buying bitcoin now will still make you rich, but it probably won't make you life changingly-rich (certainly not without risking your whole life savings on it).

The bad news is that it probably will require some hard work and luck. 

It's useful to break the question into two parts:

1. What realistic changes could I have made that might have caused me to come across bitcoin-like ideas earlier than I did?

2. What realistic changes might have shortened the time between first hearing about it and investing (or investing more, or holding it longer)?

At a high level, the answer to #1 is that you need to be reading weirder, different stuff. If you wait to read about an investment idea in the New York Times, it will be long after all the major gains have been made. 

To have been reading about it really really early, you had to be both technically very adept, and reading widely outside the box. Like this guy. Or this guy. Are your reading lists as varied and out there as blog.jim? Somehow I doubt it.

Strangely enough, you might have done extremely well multiple times over since bitcoin became popular even if you just learned the rather narrow lesson "I should learn up to the absolute cutting edge of cryptocurrency, so that I can meaningfully contribute to the small group conversations about what might be the next development in the crypto space". You might have gotten in at the ground floor on Ethereum, or Polkadot, or Chainlink, or a number of others. You might still get in on the next shitcoin to explode. 

In my case, the thing that tipped me over the edge for investing was in 2017 I finally got around to reading Moldbug's essays on bitcoin. I'd read through most of his archives starting in around 2013, but to my great regret, looked at the vaguely finance stuff and decided "eh, I already understand finance, I'm going to skip it." Ha! If there's a single lesson from Bitcoin, it's that in 2009 nobody much understood how money worked. As it turns out, Moldbug's description of bitcoin was entirely correct, he just seemed to me (certainly by 2017) to be wrong about the likelihood of the US government shutting it all down. It seems like hard work, and it's easier to just tax it and enforce know-your-customer requirements on fiat exchanges (which is what happened). 

A related lesson is "you should read more Moldbug, and consider investing in things he talks about, though still take what he says with a grain of salt". That still might yet be a highly lucrative lesson in the fullness of time. 

But I think the real place to improve is actually in #2. 

There are many people who heard about bitcoin back in, say 2013, and thought it sounded pretty weird, and probably likely to collapse. But if they were pushed on the issue at the time, you could have likely gotten them to agree that it was at least worth a punt for a few hundred bucks. 

The question is, how many people actually had that subsequent thought themselves? And moreover, how many actually followed through on it?

Smart people with all the information in front of them frequently fail at both hurdles. They fail to recognise the investment implications of the things they already know, especially when what they know to be true seems strange and unpopular to most people, and thus less likely to be priced in. And they fail to pull the trigger on it in a timely manner. 

The same is true, incidentally, from Covid. A few days after I wrote the post linked, I bought put options on the S&P 500. The thought process initially was "Huh, Covid could be a huge problem, I should buy N95 masks.". It took a couple of days for the follow-on thought (which should have been obvious) to occur "Wait, why am I hedging extreme left tail outcomes in goods markets, but not also hedging (and profiting from) moderate left tail outcomes in financial markets?". That also made me a decent but not life changing amount of money too, about a quarter of which I lost by holding onto my short positions too long instead of buying back in once I sensed that peak panic was passed (the losses are much larger in alpha terms, since you should include the opportunity cost of not being long in April and May 2020, which was huge).   

The thing that may or may not be surprising to you is that I know a fair number of people who read about Covid in early February 2020 and didn't act on it financially at all. I actually understand this. It took me several days to think of it, and I may easily have not done it, or not had the stones. Even when I did, I did it in a panicked and dumb way, just shorting the market. Not airlines, or cruise lines, or buying Zoom. Or, what would have been even better, credit default swaps (if you were one of the big boys ) or call options on the VIX if you weren't. I also managed to predict the wrong thing about Covid, namely that it was going to have a massively high death rate, and managed to screw up most of the market timing decisions I made over the course of 2020. One big good decision, managed to outweigh a considerable number of smaller bad ones, but I definitely didn't come out of 2020 thinking that I needed to do more market timing.

To be honest, the regular reading of weird twitter feeds is one of the things I miss since giving up twitter. It was a complete sewer, a cesspit of aggravation deliberately made to encourage rage-clicks and anxiety, run by people who hate me, and you, and everyone reading this. And yet, there is still material on there that you just can't find anywhere else. 

If you read the same things as everyone else, you will think the same things as everyone else. Not many of those people acquire life-changing amounts of money, except by pure chance.

Tether - risky, but probably not for the reasons they keep telling you

I keep being forwarded this article that came out in Medium recently. It poses as a big expose of tether, the stablecoin that powers lots of cryptocurrency transactions. We learn that it's a scam and a fraud, and about to crash the price of bitcoin.

The very short tl;dr on tether is that it's a cryptocurrency whose value is kept at a stable $1 USD. Why would you want this? Well, lots of people want to transact electronically in something that's basically dollars, but without the insanely anachronistic mess that is the actual US banking system. But USG has aggressively gone after money laundering by controlling the interface of the banking system and crypto exchanges. In other words, control the fiat/crypto interface tightly, and the rest of legal compliance will follow (apparently). If you as a company anywhere in the world take money from the banking system, you get aggressive demands from USG officials that you comply with US "Know-Your-Customer" (KYC) anti-money-laundering legislation. 

So some exchanges like coinbase specialize in being places that comply openly with the law, where you can hold your crypto and feel like there's a lower chance that it will be stolen, because coinbase is possibly about to become publicly listed, a good hallmark of establishment reliability. And others specialize in the opposite of this - transact there while being less legible to US regulators, take on massive leverage on your trades, pay lower fees due to regulatory arbitrage of not complying with US financial laws. So far, they've been able to do this, barely, because they follow the golden rule of "never touching actual US dollars". Just exchange one digital asset (e.g. bitcoin) for another (e.g. tether), and you never directly interact with the standard financial system. So tether ends up being the numeraire good, the medium of exchange on lots of these platforms. Hence why there's so much demand for it.

It's important to note that the way tether is priced at a dollar is that tether, the company, will (so far!) redeem them for exactly a dollar. As long as this promise is viewed as credible, they'll trade at $1, and they roughly do. Tether rather speaks out of both sides of its mouth on this - in marketing materials they tend to emphasize that tethers can be redeemed for the same number of dollars, and in practice they pay out your redemptions, but in the fine print they say that this isn't necessarily, technically, something promised.

So far, so good.

Well, what's the claimed problem? Here's the article's summary:

Tether Ltd. also says one Tether is worth exactly one US dollar. Can they do that? Well they say they can, because they hold $1 worth of assets for each Tether. But are those assets actual dollars? No, they are not. So what if the assets go down in value? Don’t worry; they will not. Okay, but can we at least see the assets? No, you may not.

Who in their right mind would use something like Tether? Well, the short answer is that many people use Tethers to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The long answer, though, is astounding — but more on that later.

Because Tether sounds exactly like a currency fraud, it may not surprise you to learn that Tether Ltd. is currently under investigation by the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York. That investigation was announced to the public on April 25th, 2019.

As an aside, the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York are a pack of assholes who feel justified in arresting anybody on the planet who so much as looks at a financial transaction in a way they don't like, on the highly compelling theory that a) Manhattan has a lot of banks, and b) Manhattan is the center of the universe. If you are not utterly cynical about their press releases by now, I don't know what to tell you. 

And from there follows a very breathless and interesting read of all the ways that tether has been printing tether coins, and this is pumping up the price of bitcoin, and it's all likely to collapse because it's a giant scam. 

 "Nonetheless, based on this evidence, I concluded my risk was now too great. I was long Bitcoin up to my eyeballs; Bitcoin was clearly correlated with Tether; Tether was clearly being issued at a frantic rate; and that issuance had a high probability of being backed by nothing at all."

Have a read. There are a lot of interesting facts in there. In fact, if you feel yourself well versed in finance, go away and read the article and try and find the big glaring conceptual error in it, then come back.  

I am in two minds about this article. 

On the one hand, the author is likely right that tether has a non-trivial chance of being shut down by USG, that it fuels a large amount of leveraged trades in crypto, and that the loss of tether would likely cause a big deleveraging that would probably be disastrous for bitcoin prices

On the other hand, the reasons he thinks this will happen are moronic, ludicrous and risible. They are a great example of a certain kind of stupidity that is annoying prevalent in crypto communities. 

What is the first order problem with the whole discussion?

The gigantic blind spot is that he, like lots of crypto people, seems to not notice the obvious fact that tether is simply a bank. The tether coin itself is a demand deposit, just transformed into cryptocurrency form. It's hard to think of a cleaner example of the hypothesis that money itself started as debt that began to circulate. The company keeps a certain amount in reserves to fund these possible redemptions, and then invests the rest. This is how basically every bank in the world works.

The reason that so few people spot this is that the world is roughly partitioned into 

-people who like cryptocurrencies and who think that all "fractional reserve banks" are scams, and

-people who like mainstream banking, and think that cryptocurrencies are scams.

So as a result, the number of people who are both knowledgeable and agnostic on both fractional reserve banking and crypto is surprisingly few. 

And when you see it this way, a huge amount of the apparent mysteries immediately get resolved. This comparison ought to be obvious, but it’s not, because guys like this tend to have completely moronic ideas about what a bank actually is, and simply think that all banks of any form are “scams”, regardless of how well capitalized they are. He has some huge hard-on of this idea of himself as the narrator in the Big Short, but somehow never learned how a bank actually works. 

Go back to the quote above. Banks are partitioned into two types. Those where every dollar of deposits is backed by 100% literal cash US dollars in a vault, and those where it is “backed by nothing at all.”

Like…did you consider any other possible bank balance sheets? Are these the only two possible cases? 

His idealized type of bank (assuming he even realizes that this is what he's describing, which I doubt) is called a narrow bank. In practice you should be able to set up a bank that just takes investors deposits, in turn deposits them at the Fed, and earns the interest the Fed pays on reserves. Why can't you do that? Well, the Fed has denied licenses to such banks, with largely spurious reasons given as to why, in ways that smell like corruption, even to very mainstream economists like John Cochrane.

So since we don't have that option, every bank is a fractional reserve bank. To a banking agnostic, the crucial question is not "is it a scam engaged in maturity transformation?". Rather, the question is "given how well capitalized the bank is, how likely is it that there will be a bank run that causes depositors to not get paid back in full?".

Suppose tethers are only backed 74 cents in the dollar by actual USD, a claim that’s floated around here. Here’s the question. They took in 100 cents in the dollar in cash. They now hold 74 cents. What does this guy think they did with the remaining 26 cents? Blew it all on coke?

No, what they very likely did is buy the exact cryptocurrencies that the guy laboriously shows that tethers are being used to purchase.

So at the time they bought it, their portfolio was most likely something like 74c cash, 26c BTC or whatever.

Now, a sensible risk weighting would assign a big haircut to these BTC assets, given how risky they are. Sure. But what this guy does, along with places who should know better like Bloomberg, is downweight every single asset that's not cash to a risk-weighted collateral value of zero. This is, to not put too fine a point on it, imbecilic. 

And the reason this is even more egregious is the following. Ex post, what happened to the price of that BTC? It went up like crazy. 

Assuming this much is roughly true, this would make tether among the best capitalized banks in the world. As a betting man, I’d wager pretty strongly that the value of their crypto is way higher than the missing 26c in the dollar or whatever of liabilities they owe, probably by a factor of 2-10.

Buddy, if you think tether is a scam, let me tell you about Citibank. 

So what do you do if you’re now a bank who's crazily over-capitalized, and holding a lot of crypto assets? Well, one option is to say “sod it, let’s print some more tether liabilities, and use those to buy more crypto”.

Absent government regulations, this is an entirely sensible thing to do. The timeline above explains every single “suspicious” fact that this guy points to.

The risk that tether, left to its own business operations, is about to go bust, seems quite low, as long as they’ve likely been using part of their cash to purchase crypto that’s since risen greatly in price. It's true, there hasn't been a proper audit, so we don't know for sure what they've been buying or holding. Maybe they really have just spent it all on hookers. But the strongest bet to me, for a variety of reasons (including those floated by tether skeptics) is that tether has been buying crypto assets. If they've bought some kind of diversified crypto portfolio before March 2020, happy days. Strongly well-capitalized banks do not tend to collapse in bank runs. I would wager quite heavily that, at current prices, they have way more crypto assets than they need to pay off every possible tether holder (even if, as is true, liquidating said assets all at once would cause a big price drop).

So what’s the actual problem with tether?

First, while they are a bank, they don’t say they’re a bank. They tend to imply, falsely, that they’re more like a money market fund, just holding cash and cash equivalents.

Second, if they are a bank, they run the risk of being regulated like a bank, and they sure as hell haven’t been complying with banking regulations, notwithstanding that they’re probably very well capitalized.

Third, their whole business model smells like know-your-customer violations.

All of this means that there’s a decent chance of them getting boned by some up-and-coming NY DA, running the same playbook as for Tradesports, and World Star Poker, and a bunch of others. Freeze assets. Destroy your business because you can't access any of your assets. You dip into some of the reserve cash to stay afloat. They declare you a ponzi scheme, improperly stealing customer funds, and say you collapsed for this reason. Whether you were or weren’t (and in the case of tether, there’s good reasons to think they have more assets than they need, not less), the proximate cause of the collapse is government.

Where this guy is right, is that tether fuels a lot of the levered bets people make on dodgy exchanges. Take away the tether that fuels these exchanges, and you probably get a massive deleveraging. I’d bet on this being a Mt Gox level event for BTC if it happens. If the only demand is now coming from unlevered, KYC compliant bets on Coinbase, that’s a big reduction in likely demand.

At the end, the big irony is that

a) he's right that you should be worried about tether, about the prospect of it being closed down, and the likely impact of this on BTC prices, but

b) the one thing tether gets the most flack for is the one bit that seems least likely to be true - being massively undercapitalized, and unable to pay back depositors. 

On the Surprisingly Apolitical Nature of the Fed

The eternal question about the civil service is its level of competence. At one end of the spectrum is the curmudgeonly woman at the DMV. At the other is the Hollywood depiction of the CIA. Reality seems to vary by department, and is usually somewhere in between. I think a lot of conservatives tend to be skeptical of government in general partly because the bits of government that they are forced to interact with are so woeful. Waiting hours in line at the DMV to fill in a form that should be able to be done online, for instance. The ridiculous and inefficient security theatre of the TSA, staffed by inept, surly, disgruntled buffoons. The post office managing to screw up deliveries at a far higher rate than FedEx or UPS. It’s only natural that this perception is extrapolated to all the bits of government that we don’t actually interact with personally.

But to a large extent, this is a function of the types of people these places hire. There’s some aspects of government that will inevitably involve distorted incentives and poor performance from a lack of competition. But even if the difference with the private sector is always there, the level doesn’t have to be appalling. In Singapore, government jobs seem to be viewed as prestigious and well-paying, and so attract relatively talented and competent people. Or, to go back further, you would give your left nut to have Evelyn Cromer administering the USA, rather than any of the leaders we’ve had since I’ve been alive. In other words, it certainly doesn’t always have to be as bad as the modern US.

When the US scrapped the civil service exams, it ended up having the biggest effect on low level jobs that you can’t sneak in other requirements like college degrees. This is how the DMV and the TSA got so awful – it turns out that IQ matters, even in low level clerical or customer service jobs. In this respect, the Fed has held out incredibly well by virtue of the fact that a lot of its jobs require a PhD in finance or economics from a top university. PhD programs have so far mercifully been largely spared the wrath of the Cultural Marxist need to bring in diversity even at the cost of competence. Moreover, even if you get in, you still need to pass, and convince the hiring committee that your thesis is actually good. In this sense, the Fed is largely drawing on a fairly talented pool of people who are pretty well versed in current economic research (for what that’s worth).

So if the Fed has avoided the obvious failure mode of being staffed by imbeciles, how does it fare on other measures? The interesting one is regulatory capture. Like any regulator, it can be captured by its employees, by politicians (which, ironically, is how the system is meant to work, but which in practice is usually treated as a design defect), or by the companies and groups that it’s meant to be regulating.

In terms of being captured by its own employees, this is hard to discern clearly, but I think that this has happened less than at most agencies. The biggest reason is that, other than the Fed Board, the regional Feds are notionally private, and so can set their own salaries and hiring/firing conditions. Even the Board seems to pay approximately market rates for the people it hires. This seems to gets rid of a decent amount of the insanity of the public service working conditions. When you can’t pay employees more, they extract concessions in the form of goofing off, unions to make it so they can’t get fired, etc etc. But they’d probably rather take the costs just in the form of more cash. This doesn’t have the deleterious effect that them simply being lazy has – it’s at least a transfer, rather than deadweight loss.

The biggest surprise about the Fed, however, is the fact that it seems to have been able to maintain relative political independence up to now. Independent central banks were a radical idea in the 19th century, where monetary policy was hot button political issue. William Jennings Bryan effectively wanted loose monetary policy (in the form of bi-metalism) to inflate away the debts of farmers. Letting a bunch of PhDs just run the show was probably not likely to be viewed as a compromise answer. But oddly, this kind of redistributive aspect of monetary policy doesn’t get thought about a ton anymore. Instead, the main effect seems to be about what monetary policy does to people’s 401K plans via the level of the stock market. This may be dumb short-termism, but at least everyone is on pretty much the same side.

In the modern ear, Donald Trump has decided, at least via twitter, to talk derogatively about the Fed’s policy, and suggest that they need lower interest rates. I don’t think the Fed takes this especially seriously. Which is fortunate, to be honest. Whatever you think about the Fed’s monetary policy since the great recession, you’d have to be incredibly optimistic to think that Congress or the Presidents would have done a better job. Instead, you can see exactly what the pressure would have been – lower interest rates before an election, consequences be damned. If it creates inflation, well too bad for the next guy. In other words, we could have the same level of far-sighted statesmanship that we currently observe with the US fiscal deficit, but with monetary policy as well. What a delight that would be.

At least on the monetary side, part of the reason the Fed seems to have stayed largely professional and apolitical is that it really has only one main button it can press – interest rates up, or interest rates down. And while people debate furiously over the relationship between that and the state of the economy, most people are agreed on at least the outcome they’re aiming it, namely high growth, low unemployment, and price stability, currently taken to mean low but positive inflation. It seems likely that the Fed has only an approximate idea of the relationship between the variables in question. But then again, it doesn’t seem like most of the public has any better idea either, and so are largely content to let them do what they think is best as long as things aren’t collapsing.

The main people with strong views on the matter seem to be people that want the Fed abolished and US dollars replaced with gold or bitcoin. I tend to think monetary policy when implemented sensibly is a useful tool, and giving it up for a fixed money supply would probably cause more harm than good. That said, my priors are pretty wide on what a fixed money supply would actually do for an economy. I found the Friedman case pretty convincing that letting the banks fail in the 1930s was one of the worst things the government did, and contributed significantly to prolonging the depression. But even if you disagree on this (and plenty of smart Austrians do) the Austrians’ view seems especially far-fetched on a political economy basis. When the world is melting down, governments are always going to do something, even if that something turns out to be significantly counterproductive. Even from an Austrian perspective, lowering interest rates is probably among the less harmful knee-jerk policies one could imagine, compared with, say, nationalizing industry or applying across-the-board price controls.

The more interesting question, and the one that’s harder to answer, is whether the Fed has been captured by the banks. In terms of the broad question of monetary policy, and whether and how to intervene during financial crises, there’s probably not a lot of disagreement between major banks and the Fed. If you think that they’re both wrong, this understandably looks like collusion and regulatory capture. But I think it’s more likely that both groups tended to come from the same business schools and economics departments, and this is largely what gets taught there. And while there is reasonable agreement between banks and the Fed on what should happen ex-post in a crisis (grumblingly bail out failed banks), the ex-ante question is not nearly so clear. In particular, most banks would probably like to see capital requirements cut significantly, and scrap the various costly stress tests that the Fed does on major banks. I’m not saying this is a major bone of contention, but it’s not exactly like banks get everything they want either. 

The stronger case, however, seems to involve some of the current implicit subsidies given to banks. I’m not even talking about deposit insurance, which is related to the “letting the banks fail” question above. Rather, the decision since the crisis to start paying interest on reserves looks a lot like a back-door bailout and subsidy. No no, they say, it’s just an important aspect of unconventional monetary policy. Great! So can I, as an individual deposit my own money at the Fed to take advantage of this same policy? Ha ha, no, of course not! Also, we’ll continually shut down any bank that tries to just operate as a pass-through entity to enable this, a proposal called narrow banking. When even John Cochrane is saying this makes you as the Fed look dumb and crooked, you should probably take heed.

But that’s the messy nature of regulation. You’re never going to get all of what you want, and sometimes dumb things happen anyway, usually for a mix of motives. In other words, the Fed isn’t the Hollywood version of the CIA, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it could be. I almost keep expecting it to get gutted and politicized at some point, and end up as some social justice economic group like the CFPB. It could be worse. It probably will be worse.

Contra Chinese folk wisdom, may you continue to live in uninteresting economic times.

War-gaming the Chinese Nuclear Option with US Treasuries

[ In the quite useful parlance of Scott Alexander, the epistemic status of this post is fairly uncertain, so take with a grain of salt.] 

As the economic tension between the US and China slowly ratchets up, I've found myself thinking recently about the financial nuclear option that China has, and how it might play out. 

What I mean by the nuclear option is China strategically using its large reserves of US Treasury Bonds and Bills to cause maximum economic and financial chaos in the US. This is something one occasionally hears about, but the discussion seems to be split between serious economists who blithely assume it will never happen, and doomsayers that think it will be the end of the world. As you'll see, I'm somewhere in the middle. 

Then again, I'm not a macroeconomist, so take my views as just an educated guess. Perhaps the easiest way to do it is just to assume that I'm playing the Chinese, and that I wanted to cause maximum carnage. What would I do, and how would it play out? I am almost certain that I'm not giving the Chinese any new ideas here, and since I'm John Q. Nobody in any case, I don't feel particularly guilty at writing this publicly. For instance, here's a recent statement from a Chinese diplomat [Update: Cui Tiankai is actually the Chinese Ambassador to the US, so this is pretty close to the official position of the Chinese Government]:

Cui said he did not believe Beijing was seriously considering using its massive US Treasury debt holdings as a trade war weapon, citing concerns that such a move would destabilize financial markets.

Translated back from Diplomat language, this means: We'd like to remind you that we could use our massive US Treasury Debt holdings as a trade war weapon. 

So without further ado, here's how I'd play the Chinese side. 

The first thing to realize here is the poker mindset. You don't want to be thinking of your chips as money. The money is spent when you walk in. Once you sit down, the chips are ammunition, used to defeat other players at the table. What you get at the end is the prize, but if you're thinking on every raise about the rent money, you're toast.

So it is here. If I were China, I would assume that the current holdings of US Treasury debt are like an ICBM. We're no longer trying to maximise the value of the holdings, or even preserve the value of the holdings as a strategic asset of China. We're treating the assets as already worth zero. Because, as we shall see, the policies designed to keep the value of the assets high are almost the exact opposite of the ones aimed at causing carnage.

US Treasury obligations play a very important role in the financial system. In many applications, we need to know a "risk-free" interest rate, and typically the rate on short term (i.e. 30 day ) US Treasury Bills is used as a proxy for this. They're denominated in dollars, which are fiat, so the Treasury can just print as many as it wants. Even "print" is a euphemism - press a button, and the dollars electronically appear. So there's very little reason why the US ever couldn't pay its short term obligations. It might choose not to, either because it went crazy (e.g. during the Clinton government shutdown, or the debt ceiling debate), or because the amount of dollars required to print would cause massive inflation whose cost would be worse than defaulting on the debt, but again, it nearly always could pay. And in practice, it always has paid. Which is why short term US T-Bills are treated as a proxy for the risk-free rate in lots of financial models, such as those used by banks.

But this interest rate is determined by supply and demand in the market for Treasury assets. China has accumulated a ton of them, and could dump them on the market at any time. In bond terms, the yield or interest rate* is inversely related to the price (assuming a zero coupon bond, as is the case for short term obligations like T-Bills, though the logic is similar for coupon bonds). Dump lots of T-Bills on the market, the price drops, and the interest rate rises. When the interest rate rises, every bank who has a short term financing gap that they were planning on covering on the overnight lending market is suddenly in a huge hole. Chaos ensues. 

So I'm China. As a preparatory step, beforehand I'd take all my own financial institutions and ensure that they're not holding any US treasuries privately as collateral on anything. Slowly switch to safe stuff for my own accounts - gold, Euro bonds, whatever. The point is that we're going to screw everyone holding treasuries, and everyone else too. But we definitely want to minimise our own banks' exposure. We want to try to get the financial side of the Chinese economy as close to self-sufficient as possible. 

The basic step is dumping Treasury assets. If we do it right, the first asset dump will be a surprise attack that will spook the market as much as possible. To ensure maximum carnage, I'd begin my sales at maybe 3pm EST. The aim is to do it shortly before market close in the US, when lots of financial institutions have to mark their accounts to market at the end of the day. 

So, first step, I would start with a massive dump of Treasuries on the market. Not the whole amount  - one must always keep troops in reserve. But enough to cause a big spike in short term interest rates, and enough to panic everyone in the market.

So, this happens at say 3pm. The other reason to do it close to the end of day is as follows. We cannot raise interest rates forever. Indeed, we may not even be able to raise them for very long. The reason is that whoever is playing the US Fed has an obvious countermove. As soon as they realise what's going on, they'll step into the Treasury market themselves and start buying treasuries to raise the price and lower the interest rate. Remember, they're doing this with printed dollars, which are in an almost infinite supply, up to the point of causing inflation. And if you're the Fed, the tradeoff between inflation versus short term market chaos is like worrying about becoming addicted to morphine when you've just been shot in the leg. The choice is obvious - they'll buy, in whatever quantity needed to prevent interest rates from going through the roof.

If they can do this, what's the play? Well, first of all, there's the surprise attack. We're gambling that they don't necessarily have a plan set up to immediately deal with this and implement the massive purchases necessary. Maybe they do, in which case the first round effects aren't as dramatic as we'd hoped. But we can help ourselves by giving them a limited amount of time before market close - just enough time for everyone to react and price in the carnage, but ideally not enough time for them to respond properly.

The aim is that every bank who's long in Treasury assets and has borrowed against them (which is a lot of them) was accounting for this collateral at a low interest rate, and a high price. Suddenly, with minutes left on the equity clock, they realise they're on track to be insolvent by the end of the day, as the collateral on their obligations is rapidly dropping. Loans get called in. Prices of their equities fall, making everyone else panic, making the market as a whole crash. 

So, that's the aim. How would I ensure this gets played up?

Having done the initial dump at 3pm, I would make an announcement at 3:15 or 3:30 or so. The Chinese government is planning to liquidate all its remaining US Treasury obligations and US Dollar denominated assets, immediately. Moreover, we will be switching to Euro Bonds and Euros.

What's the point of this?

In normal trading times, this would be crazy. You're just inviting people to front run your trades, selling before you sell so you get a worse price and then buying back off you later at a profit.

But in chaotic times, this is ideal. We're trying to maximise price impact, not trying to maximise value. By announcing our intentions, we tell the whole market - lots more treasury sales are on the way. What will they do? Start dumping their own Treasury assets, pronto, and switching to Euro ones. In this way, we're not just using our own Treasury reserves. Now the second round of selling is coming from every other financial institution with a fast-moving trader and a desire to stay solvent. Of course, this still doesn't count for squat if the Fed puts in an infinitely large buy order, but there's a long term point. We want as many financial institutions as possible to stop holding US Treasury assets, so the Treasury is basically having to hold the whole lot themselves. This is functionally equivalent to just printing money to cover the entire deficit. They'll do it if they have to, but they don't really want to.

And in the mean time, now the Fed is not only trading against us, but trading against lots of other people in the Treasury market as well. Which makes it harder for them to just take steps that would somehow freeze us out of the market. 

Anyway, let's assume we're playing against a highly competent Fed. Unbeknownst to us, they have contingency plans in place to send enormous buy orders if the price drops sufficiently, and so we don't get anywhere much in terms of disrupting the Treasury market. What then? Has the plan failed?

No. The Treasuries are only step one. The real action is in the foreign exchange market. The Fed is going to have to provide me as China with lots of US Dollars to purchase all the Treasury assets off me. As they do, what's my response? Immediately start selling those US Dollars and buying Euros. In large quantities, as fast as possible.

In other words, we're trying to tank the US dollar. And this is something the Fed has a much weaker position on. Why? Because while they can print up an infinite amount of US Dollars to purchase treasuries, they can't print up any Euros at all to buy US Dollars. Sure, they have some reserves, and you can bet your ass they'll use them. But now there's a finite target. We may even have some idea of how much we're having to trade against, yet in any event, it's a finite and achievable task. And the more they support the T-Bill, the more they give us ammunition to attack the currency.

Which gets to the other point - why buy Euros? Why not buy Renminbi?

Because China wants a weak dollar, but it doesn't really want a strong Renminbi. When the dollar weakens, the US gets imported inflation on its many foreign goods. It also makes it easier for US exporters, so it's not all bad (we have to assume that trade between the US and China will be totally frozen, so it's just other countries we're thinking about). So a big drop in the US Dollar will cause significant inflation in the US.

China relies on exporting industries, so it generally wants a weak Renminbi. Instead, the aim is to make the Euro strong instead.

You might wonder, would the Europeans actually want this? What if they started printing Euros to resist it? 

Well, they might. But I'm not so sure. What we're really trying to accomplish as China is a shift in the question of who gets to be the global reserve currency. It's not going to be China. But it may easily be Europe. A large part of the Euro project was trying to set up a global counterweight to US financial hegemony. There are probably a fair number of Euro policy-makers that would be quite pleased to see the US dollar get displaced. The main advantage of being the global reserve currency, when we're talking fiat, is getting to run enormous ongoing deficits without creating inflation. If the US can't sell its Treasury debt to global investors any more, it runs a real risk that printing more money will result in inflation. As the reserve currency, so far this hasn't happened. 

Indeed, this was surprising to many people during the financial crisis - the Fed was printing like crazy and buying up all sorts of things. Why didn't it result in lots of inflation? Well, part of the reason is that the dollars weren't circulating back into the US economy in the same way. Foreigners buy up the debt. If they bought Euro debt instead, European countries would face much lower borrowing costs, the famous exorbitant privilege that the US currently has. Not only that, but being the reserve currency means that other countries want to invoice in your currency, and hold assets in your currency to hedge against this risk, and have banking services with your country. So being the global reserve asset fosters the development of your financial sector. If the US Dollar goes out of fashion, expect New York to become significantly less important relative to Frankfurt and London as the place of global financial markets. 

It's not just me that thinks this, by the way. This is approximately the argument in the recent Gopinath and Stein paper. They' don't say as much on the question of how one might shift between equilibria, but they more or less agree on the effects of being the dominant currency for trade, invoicing and financial development.

In other words, we're potentially peeling off the Europeans from the Americans. We're saying, hey, don't just instinctively support Uncle Sam here. We think it's probably in your interests to play along with us.

Why might this also be important? Because the other thing that the Fed will probably do in this scenario is call up every other Central Bank in the world and demand that they start buying US dollars with their own currency reserves. Assume that lots of serious threats are made here. If we're China, we can't overwhelm everyone. But if we can convince the Europeans to think twice before buying dollars, then maybe Japan thinks twice too, and India, and Australia, and before you know it, suddenly everyone is holding Euros instead. Russia certainly would be pleased to see the change, so you can count them out. Bye bye US financial hegemony.

Ideally, if I were China, I'd implement this plan when the US was in a recession, or near it. Because this means it's a lot more costly for the US to take the other option to support the currency - let the bond sales go on and interest rates rise. Because this will almost certainly tank the US economy if they do. 

That's the basic play. I think. As I said, I have a lot of uncertainty as to how large the effects would really be, even under the Holmes plan. Maybe global investors believe China won't be able to displace the US, and so don't sell many Treasuries or US Dollars. Maybe they do, and USG threatens their governments that they'll get Color Revolutioned if they don't demand their banks fall into line. This is pretty close to an act of war, so you'd be crazy to do this as China without expecting serious repercussions. And if the aim is to displace the US Dollar as the global reserve currency, you've pretty much only got one shot at it. Once you've fired all your missiles, they're gone. If people stick with the US, in the long run China might end up weakened, and you've destroyed the value of a substantial foreign currency reserve in the process. 

Anyway, this is a guess. Maybe I'm totally wrong, either in what they'd do, or what the consequences would be.

But let's assume for the moment that I'm approximately correct. One obvious question is, would they actually do this?

It's like a nuke. Generally speaking, no. Firstly, the main aim will be short term chaos. The effect on interest rates will likely be temporary, and the Fed will find some excuse to declare that all the financial institutions aren't actually insolvent at 5pm, no matter what market prices say. The currency play is harder for them to deal with, but also speculative as to how big the effect will be, and if its actually worth it. Maybe the US decides its okay with a weak dollar after all? Many other places are okay with this policy. Stranger things have happened.

Actually, it's not even like a nuke, as much as being like two guys in a bar fight, and one of them is threatening to burn the whole bar down, but he's standing closer to the door, so he won't get burned as much. Chinese financial institutions will suffer too. Chinese exports will suffer, big time. And it's a large gamble to see who else goes along, somewhat like a leadership challenge in a parliamentary system. The votes are taken by all the other countries. If you win, you can win big, but if you lose, you're off to the back benches or worse.

But thinking about it in this way misses a larger point. Are nukes pointless simply because in equilibrium its unlikely they'll get used? Wrong. As long as the threat to use them is somewhat credible, they can make excellent negotiating chips.

And this isn't just hypothetical. This actually happened. 

In 1956, during the Suez Canal crisis, Britain, along with France, decided to implement a military initiative to take back the Suez Canal, which Egypt's President Nasser had recently seized off them.

They felt that, as sovereign countries looking out for their own interests, they could just go ahead and do it.

Wrong answer. 

You know who was annoyed at not being consulted? Dwight Eisenhower. So what did he do?  He called up Sir Anthony Eden, and among other things, he threatened to dump the enormous US holdings of British War Debt, while simultaneously cutting Britain off from borrowing. The pound would tank in value, and Britain would be in chaos. The chaos didn't have to be permanent, necessarily, though it might be. But it would certainly last long enough to permanently end the political career of Sir Anthony Eden.

And so Eden backed the @#$% down.

If there was one day where it became completely clear to all concerned that the US was now the world's financial and military hegemon, this was it.

Maybe the Chinese will never do it.

But you'd be a bolder man than I to think that they'd never threaten it. 

All I can say is that I hope some of the smart people at the Fed are thinking about this more than I am.

They have our soul, who have our bonds.

Bitcoin and the Inscrutability of Wealth

Well, it’s been about 6 months since my last Bitcoin post. I think what I wrote back in May stands up pretty well so far. Certainly the price has gone up like crazy, and my modest wager has so far paid off quite handsomely. The tendency towards the disposition effect beats in most human breasts – it is hard to continue to hold your gains as they keep rising, and psychology will push you towards wanting to cash out.

Of course, in this instance it might actually be wise to cash out now – it’s hard to know. My earlier rationale, in broad terms, was that I felt I had figured out why Bitcoin “worked”, and most people hadn’t yet – but they would in time. Well, the number of people who’ve figured out something certainly has gone up an enormous amount since then. One can disagree wildly on what exactly they’ve learned – I suspect a lot have just learned that Bitcoin will go up forever, which seems unlikely. In any case, the number of people still to figure it out has to be smaller than it was back in May. Even if Bitcoin does turn out to be valuable in the long term, this doesn’t mean it’s not facing a crash in the interim. In other words, Bitcoin might end up being Amazon, but you might also be living in the equivalent of November 1999.

I don’t know how to weight these two assessments. At the moment, the deciding factor for me is the influence of long-term vs short-term capital gains taxes. Not really knowing when to call it quits, I’m currently waiting until May or the price goes back to zero, whichever comes first.

But I have been thinking about the question of what makes things valuable, and what this portends for the future of Bitcoin.

In Patrick Wyman’s excellent “Fall of Rome” podcast series, at some point Wyman notes something very interesting about the Roman economy. In his words, the Roman economy was “monetised". This was something that distinguished it both from all the societies that had come before, and most of those that would come afterwards until at least the middle ages.

One way of thinking about monetisation is that people transacted widely in money, instead of just using a barter system. This is true, and important, but it’s not the psychologically most interesting part.

When money becomes used enough for transactions, a subtle shift takes place in terms of how people think about it.

The first step is that people start using money as a denominator of wealth when trading off economic decisions. Wyman describes how rich Roman aristocrats who owned villas and productive lands would begin to make choices based on what would maximize their amount of money – thinking about labor costs in terms of money, thinking about different crop yields and market prices in terms of money, etc.

This may seem obvious to us now, but again, that’s because we take money for granted. This process assuredly would not be so obvious if you lived in a barter economy. You can exchange a certain number of chickens for a certain number of bags of rice, or a certain number of horseshoes or whatever. To trade off the economic costs and benefits in a production process, you need to first convert everything to a given numeraire good, and then keep track of all the prices of inputs and outputs in terms of that good. But would it occur to you to arbitrarily evaluate everything on your farm in terms of horseshoes, and then keep track of horseshoe-prices for every good at each point to make sure you’re trading off things correctly? You might think it would, but I’m not nearly so sure. Yet when you’re already used to thinking in terms of money, it’s a much more natural step to take.

Once this process of trading off benefits and costs in terms of money has been going on for a while, an even more subtle transformation begins to take place, and one with wide-reaching implications. At a certain point, money stops being merely a unit of measuring wealth, and begins to be thought of as the wealth itself. In Rome, this was a quite radical shift. Because up to that point, land was the only real measure of wealth. Moreover, land was something one didn’t buy and sell, it was something that was held over generations. The idea that land might be a commodity that one bought and sold with money is yet one more idea that we take for granted that most humans in history would have viewed as crazy. Even now you see the legacy of this view, with people who think that housing wealth is somehow "real" and "reliable" in a way that other assets aren't.

And you can see that people’s willingness to hold money is radically different if they think of it as a) tokens that you can use to get stuff, vs b) the actual measure of wealth. In the former, an increase in money makes you nervous – you have to get rid of it to transfer it to the actual store of wealth or consumption. In the latter, it just makes you happy – money can always be reliably exchanged for stuff, so if you get more money, great, just hang on to it until you need to spend it.

This latter process is something that I think operates much more widely than just in money. I think something similar has been at play regarding the role of equities over the centuries. Again, nobody thinks of it now. But these days, equities are also wealth. This is opposed to equities being a series of tokens that you hold for a short period, hoping it will go up and then you can convert it into the real measure of wealth.

And this was not always the case. If you look back to 19^th and even early 20^th centuries, equities were mostly considered by prudent investment advisors to be “not even an investment”. Rather, they were just gambling and speculation and nonsense. Safe bonds were an investment. Real estate was an investment. Stocks, however, were speculation. And with speculative assets, you don’t want to hold them long term. You want to hold them for a bit, then ditch them. Now, it’s commonplace for people to leave their retirement assets in equities, and just plan to sell them when and if they need the money. This is what you do, when you view an asset as inherently being wealth, rather than just being a means to wealth.

The rise of “equities as wealth” has been mirrored in a massive rise in the number of equity securities. Most people don’t know it, but  the importance of equities was tiny for a lot of the 19th century. In 1815, the number of shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange was… 8. That’s right, 8, total. There were far more shares listed in Amsterdam or London around the time of the South Sea Bubble, and indeed there were more shares listed when the NYSE first got started in 1792 - the number actually declined by 1815. Partly, equities had just gone out of fashion during this whole period, after the collapse of the South Sea bubble around 1720. Bonds were the instrument of choice to trade and hold. Equities just weren’t interesting to people, and weren’t where they stored most of their wealth.

I think this kind of psychology is especially important for impacting price movements. The more people are willing to hold an asset long term, the higher its price will be, and the more stable its price will be. A willingness to hold long-term adds a large amount of permanent demand for the asset that doesn’t budge much with news. This is much more likely to result in sustained high prices than a view that any price rises should be considered as merely a sign that you have more tokens to convert to the “real wealth”, because the tokens themselves are not sufficiently reliable.

And I think something similar is playing out, to an uncertain conclusion, with Bitcoin.

To wit, people’s beliefs about the question I opened this essay with are likely to be very important for what happens next as the price of Bitcoin continues to rise. In other words, is Bitcoin inherently wealth? Or is Bitcoin merely a means to wealth? Put differently, if I hold a decent amount of Bitcoin and the price rises, do I need to convert it to some other asset? Or should I only sell it if I plan to spend the money?

There is always a question of portfolio rebalancing, but that’s not the whole issue. You will find no shortage of people who own huge real estate holdings that they lease out. To them, the real estate is wealth – if it rises in price, they don’t inherently feel the need to sell some of their properties. The question is, will the same psychology hold for Bitcoin?

In some sense, this gets to the question of “if you sold it, and you weren’t planning on spending the money, what other asset would you buy, absent a specific forecast of short term price movements in that asset?”. That other asset is what you think of as wealth. This contrast becomes especially stark if you think that selling bitcoin and putting the money in gold is a potentially sensible idea, since gold is a “safe asset”. As I’ve argued, in terms of fundamentals, Bitcoin is gold. The difference is only jewellery and psychology, with the latter being more important in my opinion. Gold has the considerable advantage that everybody has a relatively fixed idea of what it is and has a general sense that it's valuable, so it's unlikely to revert back to jewellery-only value. In addition, the big holders of it (central banks) are long-term, stable holders, so the price isn't crazily volatile. 

And strangely enough, this question is probably one of the big risks of Bitcoin today. I think the time-series here is very different from equities, where I suspect over the years people got gradually more used to holding the asset, and then viewed it as inherent wealth, which made prices and realized returns high during the latter half of the 20^th century.

Instead, I suspect that many of the initial holders of Bitcoin did view it as wealth – they planned to hold it for a very long time, if not indefinitely. But I strongly suspect that most of the people who have been piling into Bitcoin in the past 6 months aren’t thinking of it the same way. They are much more likely to view it as an instrument to wealth, a way to make a quick buck in the short term. And when something is merely an instrument to wealth, add in the disposition effect and suddenly you’ve got a lot of instability baked in. People have a base view that the price will keep going up, but they also have a nervous impulse to sell, and a vague feeling that the price rise can’t last forever. That makes crash risk higher.

In other words, I think that an important metric of whether Bitcoin is ultimately likely to succeed as a long term asset is whether it is viewed as wealth on its own. Whether, in other words, people are comfortable with the idea that a large fraction of their savings is in Bitcoin, and they’ll only sell it when they need the money.

This can happen to assets where it didn’t used to be true – again, look at equities, or before that, gold coins. Will it? Your guess is as good as mine. But as the number of people still to be exposed to the idea of Bitcoin gets smaller and smaller, I suspect this will increasingly become the first-order question as to what happens next.

The economist's case for at least agnosticism about Bitcoin

As far as I can tell, the primary problem with Bitcoin is that after you've bought it, you become medically incapable of shutting the @#$% up about Bitcoin. So it goes.

It took me a long time to buy any bitcoin, but I should have done it about three years ago. This isn't cheap talk, by the way. I know exactly why I should have bought it back then, based on the knowledge I had at the time (which is the only criterion by which you ought to regret any decision). To wit: I considered myself a Bitcoin agnostic. This made me more optimistic than perhaps 99% of finance people I spoke to. But then again, 99% of finance people I spoke to also couldn't easily explain why Bitcoin existed in the first place. 3 years later, all of the above is still true, but I finally got off my butt and did something about it, albeit after an enormously costly delay.

The standard economics textbook description of money says that it tends to arise because it helps facilitate exchange. If we need to barter goods with each other, it's hard for me as a blacksmith to obtain wheat unless I can find a wheat farmer who also coincidentally needs blacksmithing services. But if I can exchange my blacksmithing services for some asset money (as yet undefined as to what that is) and then turn the money into wheat down the line, this greatly allows us to trade more and grow the economy. So far so good. But what exactly makes something money?

The standard economics textbook definition of money says that it has to fulfill 3 purposes, namely

#1. It has to be a unit of account - a way of measuring how much of something you have

#2. It has to be a medium of exchange - a means for people to transact amongst each other and exchange goods and services indirectly, rather than directly through barter

#3. It has to be a store of value - that is, have some worth derived from an alternative use other than the monetary aspect itself, to ensure that people will be willing to hold it.

Under this standard narrative, bitcoin fails. #1 is fairly easy to meet, but bitcoin's big strength is in #2, which it passes with flying colours. Importantly, however, it fails badly on #3. Digital bits have no inherent value, and no external use to make them a store of value. Ergo, it should have no value above zero, and anything else is a bubble about to collapse. So goes the standard story.

Gold originally fulfilled all three purposes. You could weigh it, and trade accordingly. Turning gold into gold coins helped with 1 and 2, so drove out raw gold. It was easier to transact and measure in coins. Of course, the problem with coins is that they could get filed away at the edges to steal some of the gold, but still be worth approximately one coin. So eventually the coins got replaced with pieces of paper that were claims on gold in a government vault. At the start, you could actually make the conversion. Then conversion became increasingly a fiction, before FDR decided to do away with the pretense of convertibility, suspending the conversion and limiting the ability of private individuals to hold gold.

 At this point, you may be wondering how US dollars continue to meet the 3 definitions above. After all, they kept being used as money, and economists didn't all seem in a raging hurry to update their definitions. So the standard answer is that the 'store of value' aspect is that the government, who has guns, will accept USD as a means of paying taxes (and indeed demands that form). Because they have a guaranteed value for that, they have a guaranteed value for everything else.

To me, this seems to have a definite flavour of ex-post rationalisation. My hunch is that if you asked people 100 years ago whether they would still be equally willing to hold dollars if they were backed by nothing at all, they would have answered strongly in the negative. In the end, they were prohibited from switching into gold at the time, so it was a moot point. But what about now, when they could switch? I highly doubt that many people today would explicitly state that they're willing to hold dollars because they can pay their taxes in them. 100 years ago, they probably would have laughed you out of the room.

The economists are right in a narrow sense, of course (as they often are). Bitcoin does indeed fail as a store of value, and, technically, the dollar does not.

And yet, here is some evidence that ought give you pause, assuming you're not an economist in the midst of full-blown cognitive-dissonance-induced denial:

This is Bitcoin today, stubbornly refusing to prove economists right by ceasing to exist. As a matter of fact, since the coinbase time series starts in January 2013, it's up some 19,000% or so.

Don't look at the graph and ask if you think it's about to drop. Look at the graph and ask how much it would have to drop to get to where it was in 2013 (let alone 2009).

At a certain point, it seems prudent to at least consider the possibility that there might be something going on here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones? Or at a minimum, ask the following question - what level of future growth would you need to see to change your mind? Another 100%? Another 1000%? Can we agree on it now, so that if it eventually happens, you might reconsider the question?

The null hypothesis here is not in much doubt. Bitcoin is a bubble, and will eventually collapse.

Actually, the true null hypothesis is a little more specific, at least if you believe standard economics. Bitcoin should have a price of zero. It has no value except as a currency, and it is worthless as a currency.

So what is the alternative hypothesis?

The alternative hypothesis is that Bitcoin is likely to stay at a non-zero value for quite a long time, if not indefinitely, and moreover may end up being worth a lot. That may sound woolly and hand-wavy, so let me explain.

First off, how many things can you name that truly have a value of zero?

It's surprisingly hard. If you don't believe me, here's a photo of cans of air from the top of Mount Fuji selling for ¥500

And things like rubbish or nuclear waste have definitively negative prices - you have to pay to get rid of them. They're still not exactly zero.

The point is that "fundamental value" is a concept that, in my opinion, creates at least as much confusion as it dispels.

The primary value of an asset today is what you think someone will pay for it tomorrow. If they can use the asset for some external purpose, and you have a guide to what that external purpose is likely to be worth to them, you have a guide to what it will be trading at tomorrow. But that's all it is. If you have some other way of estimating what people will pay for the asset tomorrow, then you don't need the intermediate heuristic of fundamental value. (This is especially true for assets which don't directly produce cash flows - for ones that do, there's a better case that you should just value the cash flows, but even then, you still need to know tomorrow's willingness to pay unless you're able to hold the asset to infinity to collect all the future cash flows).

So in that case, what should Bitcoin be worth? Whatever people are willing to buy it for tomorrow. And what number is that? Well, that's the rub. But at least we know the right question to ask now.

As a consequence, we can begin to formulate an alternative definition of requirement #3 for money that we started with. Specifically:

#3A - If you accept the asset today in exchange for giving up valuable goods or services, you have to have a very strong belief that you will be able to exchange said asset tomorrow for someone else's goods and services, and receive approximately the same value as what you exchanged today.

Viewed from this angle, we can see that requirement #3A is at heart a co-ordination problem. Once we all agree on something being money, it becomes money. More importantly, we can see why people mistakenly viewed #3 as being the requirement. In essence, being a store of value is one way of solving the co-ordination problem. If it's common knowledge that some people will be willing to accept gold because it's useful for jewellery, most people who don't value it for jewellery are nonetheless willing to hold it.

But this isn't a strict requirement. Once the belief is established, it becomes self-fulfilling. When you accept US dollars, you aren't doing the iterations and thinking that it will eventually be exchangeable for taxes. You're just accepting it because you can buy your groceries with it tomorrow. Now, in the long run, it's true that if the US government collapses, you don't want to be holding US dollars, so in that sense the economists are right. But this is a long way from most people's actual calculation.

In the case of Bitcoin, a belief that Bitcoin will retain some value tomorrow can justifiably be sustained as long as I know that there's a decent number of drug dealers and corrupt Chinese officials who want to hold Bitcoin because it's (sort-of) anonymous and can be easily taken out of the country when the porridge hits the propeller. But in the short run, I hold Bitcoin because I think that people tomorrow will hold Bitcoin.

In fact, it's stronger than that. Like a classic bubble, people actually believe that more people will want to purchase bitcoin tomorrow, and at higher prices. In other words, the supply is fixed, and the more the price goes up, the more people begin to think "Huh, maybe I should hold at least a few grand worth of Bitcoin, just in case." If more people begin to think that, the price will indeed keep rising. Of course it can't rise like that forever.

But even if you think of Bitcoin as a bubble, it behooves you to notice something rather different about it from most bubbles, like the tech boom. In the case of Bitcoin, it seems to me from anecdotal experience that many, if not most, of the people buying bitcoin today are planning to hold it for a long time, if not forever. And this is definitively not true for most bubbles. People generally ride bubbles planning to get out once it's gone up enough, then go back to holding cash, or houses, or whatever. If that's what most people are thinking, the belief structure becomes very unstable, as any dip in price suddenly might cause a lot of people to switch to selling. Even if Bitcoin is a bubble, if most of its adherents plan to hold onto it for a long time, regardless of current price levels, then this reduces the likelihood of a complete collapse when everyone rushes for the exits.

In other words, even if this is a bubble, it may be a surprisingly durable one.

And the reason that "bubble" here is not necessarily a pejorative term is a point made by Moldbug - that money is the bubble that doesn't have to pop. In other words, there will be at least one good that is held in excess of its demand for other uses, because of its use for transactional purposes.

It may seem strange to reference Moldbug, since he comes out as a skeptic, based on his guess that the government will outlaw it.

But there is a counter-argument to that - the Uber problem. Namely, the government has a limited amount of time in which it can easily ban Bitcoin. The reason is that as the price gets high enough, enough people have enough to lose that it becomes politically costly to ban it. And so at some point, you get a compromise answer, like Coinbase seems to have done - you have to submit ID, it's linked to your bank account, and you have to give a social security number. The US Government levels capital gains taxes, everyone is happy. Why ban something if you can make more money by taxing it instead?

Because there is one rhetorical claim about Bitcoin made by its proponents that I think has caused more confusion than any other. It was this realisation that made me change my mind and invest in it. (Which, to emphasise, I'm not encouraging you to do. I'm some stranger talking smack on the internet, and this is not financial advice. But still)

It is this:

Bitcoin is not going to be a substitute for the dollar.

Bitcoin is going to be a substitute for gold.

Which is to say, the reserve asset that you hold in some amount as a hedge against the @#$% hitting the fan. This is of course, mid-level @#% hitting the fan, such as large-scale financial instability - if things really get hairy, the only worthwhile assets will be guns, ammunition, antibiotics, water purification tablets, and that kind of thing. But again, the same holds true for gold. If you honestly think that in a post apocalyptic New York there's going to be a vibrant demand for gold for jewellery purposes, perhaps you would do better investing your savings in shares in the Brooklyn Bridge.

Put another way, the case for Bitcoin in concise terms is that Bitcoin is to gold what neocameralism is to monarchy.

That is to say, it's what you get if you took an old but existing arrangement, and instead of trying to mimic it exactly, you thought about how you would design a modern version of it that a) retained the essential strengths while b) utilising technological innovation since the early form to overcome its weaknesses. (Some thoughts of mine on the neocameralism vs monarchy comparison are here).

In the view of Bitcoin, the essential aspect of gold is its relatively fixed supply. So let's go one better, and make a mathematically fixed supply. Rather than gold coins, let's create highly divisible bitcoins that can be traded across borders costlessly. Rather than measure purity over and over, let's create a blockchain to solve the problem of double-spending and transactions between mutually suspicious parties. Meanwhile, the fact that it can be mined by anyone easily at first, but only with more difficulty later, encouraged people to get in on the action early.

If you thought an essential aspect of gold was its value in jewellery, then you'd be a skeptic.

Rather, the other essential aspect of bitcoin was its first-mover advantage. Sure, someone else might invent other coins (and they have), but because Bitcoin was the first to market, it already has the advantage of incumbency. And in a co-ordination game, that's a huge deal.

And I think phrasing the question this way to economists helps to clarify the issue. In other words, if you're a Bitcoin skeptic and think its a bubble that's inevitably going to burst, I would ask you: is gold a bubble? This is harder to prove than in the case of Bitcoin, because it does have a fundamental value from other uses, so its value shouldn't go to zero. As a consequence, evaluating whether it's a bubble is much more thorny and more subjective. But it seems pretty clear to me that central banks aren't holding gold because they're about to turn their bullion into wedding rings. As Moldbug points out, in 2011 gold reserves were 50 times annual production. For silver, they were twice annual production. Assuredly there is something unusual about people's desire to invest in gold. So if you think that this is creating excess demand, surely this is pushing up the price, no? Supply is pretty fixed in at least the short term, if not the medium term too. And isn't excess demand pushing up prices the definition of a bubble? The point, of course, is that with gold this state of affairs has persisted for an extraordinarily long time. Is there any particular reason to assume that gold is about to disappear as a hedge asset? Not to me.

But I know my economist friends well, and I know their objection to the above reasoning, which makes Bitcoin different from gold. Which is to say, without a fundamental source of value other than as a money-like good, isn't the whole thing liable to unravel really quickly? Put differently, you and I might be willing to hold Bitcoin because we assume that there's reserve demand from Chinese officials and drug dealers, but why are the Chinese officials and drug dealers themselves willing to hold it?

This is another way of saying, why don't we all iterate backwards and realise that without an ultimate holder of the good from some other source, the value to everyone should be zero? Suppose we have a game where if we co-ordinate on a good being money, it gives value to both of us, but in the final round whoever is holding it ends up with a worthless asset.

If the game is finitely repeated, the economists are absolutely right. If everyone correctly performs backward induction, you'd predict a) Bitcoin should never have a positive value to begin with, and b) even if it does, this should be rather fragile. If it's an infinitely repeated game, then the Nash Equilibrium has more possibilities, as it usually does. In this case, if there is no final period, then it seems more like a straight one-shot co-ordination game where if we both agree, we both benefit. But let's take the finitely repeated version with a penalty for holding in the last round, as the logic is stricter there. And the logic dictates that since no-one is willing to hold in the last round, they don't want to hold in the second last either, and so on.

But here is the trillion dollar question - how much do people actually perform backward induction? And if they don't, how should you act in response?

The classic version of this is the iterated Prisoner's dilemma. Suppose two people are playing against each other 100 times in a row. The economist's answer is that if we're only playing a finite number of times, there's only one Nash Equilibrium to this game. We both defect in the last round. Knowing this, we both defect in the second last round, and the third last round, and thus in all rounds.

And yet... people don't. They routinely co-operate, and only begin defecting towards the end. This is why tit-for-tat works so well in practice. Because most people don't actually do backwards induction for more than a few iterations. This is why they don't start defecting until close to the end.

And bear in mind that, unlike Prisoner's Dilemma, Bitcoin is a co-ordination game, meaning it actually is a Nash Equilibrium for us all to believe in Bitcoin, at least in the one shot version. In the case of Prisoner's Dilemma, you can mathematically prove that people aren't acting rationally, and yet they still do it just the same. Here, it at least can be rational.

Now, bear in mind, the economists aren't wrong on the bigger picture - it still might collapse, for all the reasons they say. But that's not the same as saying that it has to collapse. I would guess, rather, that the opposite is likely to be true. The longer it goes without collapsing, the stronger the self-fulfilling aspect of the belief becomes, and the more stable it becomes.

Mainstream economists and finance types are looking at Bitcoin continuing to rise in price, yelling that this is a stupid and unstable equilibrium and that people should all start defecting immediately.

This is just like the economist watching two people play prisoner's dilemma and continue to co-operate round after round. You can laugh and call them morons, but a betting market just opened up. It's round 43 of 100. They both co-operated last round. Rubber to the road, what would you bet they're going to do this time?

After eight years of people continuing to not defect in Bitcoin, perhaps, dear economist, it's time to re-examine your assumptions.

Updated: On the other hand, if you wanted to make a concise case for a bubble, just check out some of the bizarre creations down at the lower market cap end of the cryptocurrency list. $10 million of FedoraCoin, you say? It's woefully underperforming PepeCash at $13 million. Hmm.