Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis (34 page)
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Authors: James Rickards
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BOOK: Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis
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Tainter’s main point is that the relationship between people and their society in terms of benefits and burdens changes materially over time. Debates about whether government is “good” or “bad” or whether taxes are “high” or “low” are best resolved first by situating society on the return curve. In the beginning of a civilization, returns to investment in complexity, usually in the form of government, are typically extremely high. A relatively small investment of time and effort in an irrigation project can yield huge returns in terms of food output per farmer. Short periods of military service shared across the entire population can yield huge gains in peace and security. A relatively lean bureaucracy to organize irrigation, defense and other efforts of this type can be highly efficient as opposed to ad hoc supervision.
At the beginning of civilization, the research budget for the invention of fire was zero, while the benefits of fire were incalculable. Compare this to the development costs of the next generation of Boeing aircraft relative to the small improvements in air travel. This dynamic has enormous implications for the presumed benefits of increases in government spending beyond some low base.
Over time and with increasing complexity, returns on investment in society begin to level off and turn negative. Once the easy irrigation projects are completed, society begins progressively larger projects covering longer conduits with progressively smaller amounts of water produced. Bureaucracies that started out as efficient organizers turn into inefficient obstacles to improvement more concerned with their own perpetuation than with service to society. Elites who manage the institutions of society slowly become more concerned with their own share of a shrinking pie than with the welfare of society as a whole. The elite echelons of society go from leading to leeching. Elites behave like parasites on the host body of society and engage in what economists call “rent seeking,” or the accumulation of wealth through nonproductive means—postmodern finance being one example.
By 2011, evidence had accumulated to show that the United States was well down the return curve to the point where greater exertions by more people produced less for society while elites captured most of the growth in income and profits. Twenty-five hedge fund managers were reported to have made over $22 billion for themselves in 2010 while forty-four million Americans were on food stamps. CEO pay increased 27 percent in 2010 versus 2009 while over twenty million Americans either were unemployed or had dropped out of the labor force but wanted a job. Of Americans with jobs, more worked for the government than in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined.
One of the best measures of the rent seeking relationship between elites and citizens in a stagnant economy is the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality; a higher coefficient means greater income inequality. In 2006, shortly before the recent recession began, the coefficient for the United States reached an all-time high of 47, which contrasts sharply with the all-time low of 38.6, recorded in 1968 after two decades of stable gold-backed money. The Gini coefficient trended lower in 2007 but was near the all-time high again by 2009 and trending higher. The Gini coefficient for the United States is now approaching that of Mexico, which is a classic oligarchic society characterized by gross income inequality and concentration of wealth in elite hands.
Another measure of elite rent seeking is the ratio of amounts earned by the top 20 percent of Americans compared to amounts earned by those living below the poverty line. This ratio went from a low of 7.7 to 1 in 1968 to a high of 14.5 to 1 in 2010. These trends in both the Gini coefficient and the wealth-to-poverty income ratio in the United States are consistent with Tainter’s findings on civilizations nearing collapse. When society offers its masses negative returns on inputs, those masses opt out of society, which is ultimately destabilizing for masses and elites.
In this theory of diminishing returns, Tainter finds the explanatory variable for civilizational collapse. More traditional historians have pointed to factors such as earthquakes, droughts or barbarian invasions, but Tainter shows that civilizations that were finally brought down by barbarians had repelled barbarians many times before and civilizations that were destroyed by earthquakes had rebuilt from earthquakes many times before. What matters in the end is not the invasion or the earthquake, but the
response
. Societies that are not overtaxed or overburdened can respond vigorously to a crisis and rebuild after disaster, while those that are overtaxed and overburdened may simply give up. When the barbarians finally overran the Roman Empire, they did not encounter resistance from the farmers; instead they were met with open arms. The farmers had suffered for centuries from Roman policies of debased currency and heavy taxation with little in return, so to their minds the barbarians could not possibly be worse than Rome. In fact, because the barbarians were operating at a considerably less complex level than the Roman Empire, they were able to offer farmers basic protections at a very low cost.
response
. Societies that are not overtaxed or overburdened can respond vigorously to a crisis and rebuild after disaster, while those that are overtaxed and overburdened may simply give up. When the barbarians finally overran the Roman Empire, they did not encounter resistance from the farmers; instead they were met with open arms. The farmers had suffered for centuries from Roman policies of debased currency and heavy taxation with little in return, so to their minds the barbarians could not possibly be worse than Rome. In fact, because the barbarians were operating at a considerably less complex level than the Roman Empire, they were able to offer farmers basic protections at a very low cost.
Tainter makes one additional point that is particularly relevant to twenty-first-century society. There is a difference between civilizational collapse and the collapse of individual societies or nations within a civilization. When Rome fell, it was a civilizational collapse because there was no independent society to take its place. Conversely, European civilization did not collapse again after the sixth-century AD, because for every state that collapsed there was another state ready to fill the void. The decline of Spain or Venice was met by the rise of England or the Netherlands. From the perspective of complexity theory, today’s highly integrated, networked and globalized world more closely resembles the codependent states of the Roman Empire than the autonomous states of medieval and modern Europe. In Tainter’s view, “Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
In sum, Chaisson shows how highly complex systems such as civilizations require exponentially greater energy inputs to grow, while Tainter shows how those civilizations come to produce negative outputs in exchange for the inputs and eventually collapse. Money serves as an input-output measure applicable to a Chaisson model because it is a form of stored energy. Capital and currency markets are powerful complex systems nested within the larger Tainter model of civilization. As society becomes more complex, it requires exponentially greater amounts of money for support. At some point productivity and taxation can no longer sustain society, and elites attempt to cheat the input process with credit, leverage, debasement and other forms of pseudomoney that facilitate rent seeking over production. These methods work for a brief period before the illusion of debt-fueled pseudogrowth is overtaken by the reality of lost wealth amid growing income inequality.
At that point society has three choices: simplification, conquest or collapse. Simplification is a voluntary effort to descale society and return the input-output ratio to a more sustainable and productive level. An example of contemporary systemic simplification would be to devolve political power and economic resources from Washington, D.C., to the fifty states under a reinvigorated federal system. Conquest is the effort to take resources from neighbors by force in order to provide new inputs. Currency wars are just an attempt at conquest without violence. Collapse is a sudden, involuntary and chaotic form of simplification.
Is Washington the New Rome? Have Washington and other sovereigns gone so far down the road of higher taxes, more regulation, more bureaucracy and self-interested behavior that social inputs produce negative returns? Are certain business, financial and institutional elites so linked to government that they are aligned in the receipt of outsized tribute for negative social utility? Are so-called markets now so distorted by manipulation, intervention and bailouts that they no longer offer reliable price signals for the allocation of resources? Are the parties most responsible for distorting the price signals also those receiving the misallocated resources? When the barbarians arrive next time, in whatever form, what is the payoff for resistance by average citizens compared to allowing the collapse to proceed and letting the elites fend for themselves?
History and complexity theory suggest that these questions are not ideological. Instead they are analytic questions whose relevance is borne out by the experience of scores of civilizations over five millennia and the study of ten billion years of increasing complexity in nature. Science and history have provided a complete framework using energy, money and complexity to understand the risks of a dollar collapse in the midst of a currency war.
What is most important is that the systems of immediate concern—currencies, capital markets and derivatives—are social inventions and therefore can be changed by society. The worst-case dynamics are daunting, but they are not inevitable. It is not too late to step back from the brink of collapse and restore some margin of safety in the global dollar-based monetary system. Unfortunately, the deck is stacked against commonsense solutions by the elites who control the system and feed at the trough of complexity. Diminishing marginal returns are bad for society, but they feel great for those on the receiving end of the inputs—at least until the inputs run dry. Today, the financial resources being extracted from society and directed toward elites take the form of taxes, bailout costs, mortgage frauds, usurious consumer rates and fees, deceptive derivatives and bonuses. As citizens are crushed under the weight of this rent extraction, collapse grows more likely. Finance must be returned to its proper role as the facilitator of commerce rather than a grotesque end in itself. Complexity theory points the way to safety through simplified and smaller-sized institutions. Incredibly, Treasury Secretary Geithner and the White House are actively facilitating a larger-scale and more concentrated banking industry, including a protoglobal central bank housed at the IMF. Any success in this endeavor will simply hasten the dollar’s dénouement.
CHAPTER 11
Endgame—Paper, Gold or Chaos?
“I just want to make it clear to everybody that our policy has been and will always be . . . that a strong dollar is in our interest as a country, and we will never embrace a strategy of trying to weaken our currency to gain economic advantage at the expense of our trading partners.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, April 26, 2011
“No, they cannot touch me for coining, I am the king himself.”
William Shakespeare,
King Lear
King Lear
F
ew economists or policy makers at the IMF or global central banks would subscribe to the complexity-based, money-as-energy model outlined in the previous chapter. Although the physics and behavioral science are well founded, mainstream economists do not greet interdisciplinary approaches warmly. Central bankers do not have a sudden dollar collapse in their models. Yet mainstream economists and central bankers alike are well aware of dollar weakness and the risks to international monetary stability from the new currency wars. Taking a range of views from the conventional to the cutting-edge, we can foresee four outcomes in prospect for the dollar—call them The Four Horsemen of the Dollar Apocalypse. In order of disruptive potential from smallest to greatest, they are: multiple reserve currencies, special drawing rights, gold and chaos.
Multiple Reserve Currenciesew economists or policy makers at the IMF or global central banks would subscribe to the complexity-based, money-as-energy model outlined in the previous chapter. Although the physics and behavioral science are well founded, mainstream economists do not greet interdisciplinary approaches warmly. Central bankers do not have a sudden dollar collapse in their models. Yet mainstream economists and central bankers alike are well aware of dollar weakness and the risks to international monetary stability from the new currency wars. Taking a range of views from the conventional to the cutting-edge, we can foresee four outcomes in prospect for the dollar—call them The Four Horsemen of the Dollar Apocalypse. In order of disruptive potential from smallest to greatest, they are: multiple reserve currencies, special drawing rights, gold and chaos.
A country’s reserves are something like an individual’s savings account. An individual can have current income from a job and have various forms of debt, yet still maintain some savings for future use or a rainy day. These savings can be invested in stocks and commodities or just left in the bank. A country has the same choices with its reserves. It can use a sovereign wealth fund to invest in stocks or other asset classes, or it can keep a portion in liquid instruments or gold. The liquid instruments can involve bonds denominated in a number of different currencies, each called a reserve currency, because countries use them to invest and diversify their reserves.
Since Bretton Woods in 1944, the dollar has been by far the leading reserve currency; however, it has never been the sole reserve currency. The IMF maintains a global database showing the composition of official reserves, including U.S. dollars, euros, pounds sterling, yen and Swiss francs. Recent data show the U.S. dollar comprising just over 61 percent of identified reserves, while the next largest component, the euro, weighs in at just over 26 percent. The IMF reports a slow but steady decline for the dollar over the last ten years; in 2000 the dollar comprised 71 percent of total identified reserves. This decline in reserve status has been orderly, not precipitous, and is consistent with the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia and within Asia itself.
The continuation of the trend toward a diminished role for the dollar in international trade and the reserve balances begs the question of what happens when the dollar is no longer dominant but is just another reserve currency among several others? What is the tipping point for dollar dominance? Is it 49 percent of total reserves, or is it when the dollar is equivalent to the next largest currency, probably the euro?
Barry Eichengreen is the preeminent scholar on this topic and a leading proponent of the view that a world of multiple reserve currencies awaits. In a series of academic papers and more recent popular books and articles, Eichengreen and his collaborators have shown that the dollar’s role as the leading reserve currency did not arise suddenly in 1944 as the result of Bretton Woods, but was actually achieved as early as the mid-1920s. He has also shown that the role of leading reserve currency shifted between the dollar and pounds sterling, with sterling losing the lead in the 1920s but regaining it after FDR’s dollar devaluation in 1933. More broadly, the evidence suggests that a world of multiple reserve currencies is not only feasible but has occurred already, during the course of Currency War I.
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