Why sub-zero interest rates are neither unfair nor unnatural
When borrowers are scarce, it helps if money (like potatoes) rots
Feb 3rd 2018
DENMARK’S Maritime Museum in Elsinore includes one particularly unappetising exhibit: the world’s oldest ship’s biscuit, from a voyage in 1852. Known as hardtack, such biscuits were prized for their long shelf lives, making them a vital source of sustenance for sailors far from shore. They were also appreciated by a great economist, Irving Fisher, as a useful economic metaphor.
Imagine, Fisher wrote in “The Theory of Interest” in 1930, a group of sailors shipwrecked on a barren island with only their stores of hardtack to sustain them. On what terms would sailors borrow and lend biscuits among themselves? In this forlorn economy, what rate of interest would prevail?
One might think the answer depends on the character of the unfortunate sailors. Interest, in many people’s minds, is a reward for deferring gratification. That is one reason why low interest rates are widely perceived as unjust. If an abstemious sailor were prepared to lend a biscuit to his crewmate rather than eating it immediately himself, he would deserve more than one biscuit in repayment. The rate of interest should be positive—and the sharper the hunger of the sailors, the more positive it would be.
In fact, Fisher pointed out, the interest rate on his imagined island could only be zero. If it were positive, any sailor who borrowed an extra biscuit to eat would have to use more than one biscuit in the future to repay the loan. But no sailor would accept those terms because he could instead eat one more piece from his own supply, thereby reducing his future consumption by one, and only one, piece. (A sailor who had already depleted his supplies, leaving him with no additional hardtack of his own to eat today, would be in no position to repay borrowed biscuits either.)
That was bad news for thrifty seafarers. But worse scenarios were possible. If the sailors had washed ashore with perishable figs rather than imperishable hardtack, the rate of interest would have been steeply negative. “[T]here is no absolutely necessary reason inherent in the nature of man or things why the rate of interest in terms of any commodity standard should be positive rather than negative,” Fisher concluded.
Two years ago, when the Bank of Japan (BoJ) began charging financial institutions for adding to their reserves at the central bank, its negative-rate policy was harshly criticised for unsettling thrifty households, jeopardising bank profitability and killing growth with “monetary voodoo”. Behind this fear and criticism was perhaps a gut conviction that negative rates upended the natural order of things. Why should people pay to save money they had already earned? Earlier cuts below zero in Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and the euro area were scarcely more popular.
But these monetary innovations would have struck some earlier economic thinkers as entirely natural. Indeed, “The Natural Economic Order” was the title that Silvio Gesell gave to his 1916 treatise in favour of negative interest rates on money. In it, he span his own shipwreck parable, in which a lone Robinson Crusoe tries to save three years’ worth of provisions to tide him over while he devotes his energies to digging a canal. In Gesell’s story, unlike Fisher’s, storing wealth requires considerable effort and ingenuity. Meat must be cured. Wheat must be covered and buried. The buckskin that will clothe him in the future must be protected from moths with the stink-glands of a skunk. Saving the fruits of Crusoe’s labour entails considerable labour in its own right.
Too many Crusoes
Even after this care and attention, Crusoe is doomed to earn a negative return on his saving. Mildew contaminates his wheat. Mice gnaw at his buckskin. “Rust, decay, breakage…dry-rot, ants, keep up a never-ending attack” on his other assets.
Salvation for Crusoe arrives in the form of a similarly shipwrecked “stranger”. The newcomer asks to borrow Crusoe’s food, leather and equipment while he cultivates a farm of his own. Once he is up and running, the stranger promises to repay Crusoe with freshly harvested grain and newly stitched clothing.
Crusoe realises that such a loan would serve as an unusually perfect preservative. By lending his belongings, he can, in effect, transport them “without expense, labour, loss or vexation” into the future, thereby eluding “the thousand destructive forces of nature”. He is, ultimately, happy to pay the stranger for this valuable service, lending him ten sacks of grain now in return for eight at the end of the year. That is a negative interest rate of -20%.
If the island had been full of such strangers, perhaps Crusoe could have driven a harder bargain, demanding a positive interest rate on his loan. But in the parable, Crusoe is as dependent on the lone stranger, and his willingness to borrow and invest, as the stranger is on him.
In Japan, too, borrowers are scarce. Private non-financial companies, which ought to play the role, have instead been lending to the rest of the economy (see chart), acquiring more financial claims each quarter than they incur. At the end of September 2017 they held ¥259trn ($2.4trn) in currency and deposits.
Gesell worried that hoarding money in this way perverted the natural economic order. It let savers preserve their purchasing power without any of the care required to prevent resources eroding or any of the ingenuity and entrepreneurialism required to make them grow. “Our goods rot, decay, break, rust,” he wrote, and workers lose a portion of their principal asset—the hours of labour they could sell— “with every beat of the pendulum”. Only if money depreciated at a similar pace would people be as anxious to spend it as suppliers were to sell their perishable commodities. To keep the economy moving, he wanted a money that “rots like potatoes” and “rusts like iron”.
The BoJ shuns such language (and, in the past, has at times seemed determined to keep the yen as hard as a ship’s biscuit). But in imposing a negative interest rate in 2016 and setting an inflation target three years before, it is in effect pursuing Gesell’s dream of a currency that rots and rusts, albeit by only 2% a year.
How to interpret a market plunge
Whether a sudden sharp decline in asset prices amounts to a meaningless blip or something more depends on mass psychology
Feb 6th 2018
by R.A. | WASHINGTON
FOR much of the past two years, market watchers have had little to write about, apart from the passing of one stock-index milestone after another. The events of the past week, however, have shaken the financial world awake. A recent, upward zag in bond yields seemed to signal the arrival of a new theme in market movements. Stock prices confirmed it, and then some. Over the past week, American stocks have dropped about 7%, punctuated by a breathtaking, record-setting plunge on Monday. The Dow Jones stock index recorded its largest ever one-day drop, of more than 1,000 points. In percentage terms the decline, of more than 4%, was the biggest since 2011.
The swoon set tongues to wagging, about its cause and likely effect. There can be no knowing about the former. Markets may have worried that rising wages would crimp profits or trigger a faster pace of growth-squelching interest-rate increases, but a butterfly flapping its wings in Indonesia might just as well be to blame. There is little more certainty regarding the latter. Commentators have been quick to pull out the cliches: that “the stock market is not the economy”, and that “stocks have predicted nine out of the past five recessions”. These points have merit. A big move in stock prices can signify some change in economic fundamentals, but it can just as easily signify nothing at all. For those not invested in the market, or whose investments consist mostly of retirement savings plunked into index funds, Monday���s crash matters about as much as Sunday’s Super Bowl result.
A drop like this is not entirely without economic risk, however. And that is because the ebb and flow of the business cycle is to a large degree about mood management. And mood management is hard.
Recessions occur when a little slowdown in spending in an economy feeds on itself. Businesses get a little more cautious in their hiring, so vulnerable workers do a little more precautionary saving, so businesses become more cautious still, and so on. There is nothing structurally broken about the economy when this happens; factories work like they did before and workers have the same skillsets. But because everyone worries and saves a little more, and invests and spends a little less, the economy gets stuck in a downturn. Recessions are an outbreak of collective madness.
Governments and economists have discovered that these outbreaks can be fought. They can be fought by replacing the lost spending directly (that is, by having the government pick up the slack) but also by persuading everyone that their worry is misplaced, that things are actually fine, and that they should go back to being cheerful and optimistic. Central banks do this by having public policy targets that they promise to hit and by announcing the policy steps they take to hit them (like changes in interest rates). Keeping an economy out of recession, in other words, is in large part a matter of psychology. It is about coordinating everyone’s expectations, so that everyone believes the economy will continue to chug along—and that any stumble will quickly and adeptly be managed by governments and central banks.
What could change the mood? An unexpected bank failure might. Or a spike in the price of oil. Or butterfly wings. Lots of things conceivably could, and a dramatic drop in stock prices is certainly among them. For a drop to have that effect, however, would require some extenuating circumstances. A folk-wisdom sense that the economy was “due” for a downturn might contribute. Or another random piece of bad news. But critical to a broader shift in mood would be the notion, lingering across markets and the public as a whole, that the government or the central bank might not quite be prepared to swing into mood-elevating activity. It’s like a trust exercise: you might lean a bit just to see if a friend is prepared to catch you, but not so much that you cannot recover, then a bit more, then maybe you start to worry that actually the friend seems frankly lackadaisical in his reaction, and then oof, over you go.
Why might a central bank underreact? It might not detect a shift in mood until it is too late, particularly if hard data across the economy look strong. It might not wish to be seen to be beholden to markets: willing to slash rates or take other action the moment stock indexes slip (particularly if the personnel making monetary-policy decisions are relatively new to their roles and keen to establish their independence). It might even welcome a bit of a droop in mood if it is concerned that growth has been too fast, unemployment too low, and inflation about to spike as a consequence.
It is hard to imagine that a tumble in stock prices—even one as dramatic as Monday’s—could shake economic sentiment enough that policy-makers would need to try to lift anyone’s spirits, given how robust economic figures have been of late. To say the fundamentals are strong tempts fate, but the fundamentals are as strong as they have been in over a decade. Of course, it is when things seem rosiest that policy-makers are most prone to underreact to a bump in the road. This crash is probably nothing. But they always are, except for the times when they aren’t.
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