Category: Monetary and Financial Institutions

My Adventures in CryptoLand – Net Interest

Marc Rubinstein lays out a detailed account of his initial explorations of decentralised finance. His professional background (like mine) is grounded in the conventional financial system so I found this very useful. Even better it is a short read with some hard numbers (time and cost) on the user experience.

My only quibble is that he calls these decentralised financial enties “banks”. Call me pedantic but none of the institutions discussed are banks and I think the distinction still matters if we want to understand how much of conventional banking will remain as this new chapter in financial innovation plays out.
Link to Marc’s blog here – www.netinterest.co/p/my-adventures-in-cryptoland

Tony – From the Outside

JP Koning’s “over consumptionist” theory of Bitcoin and decentralisation

Interesting post by JP Koning exploring the current debate about the value of Bitcoin and its energy demand.

There are two extreme theories about cryptocurrency energy consumption, both of them bitterly opposed to each other. The first I’ll call the big waste theory. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum serve no useful purpose. Yet they are sucking up huge amounts of useful electricity. Let’s ban them.

The second theory is the vital cog theory. Cryptocurrencies are a useful bit of global financial infrastructure. And so the huge amounts of energy that they are consuming is beneficial. Let’s not impede them.

“The overconsumption theory of bitcoin (and decentralization in general)”, JP Koning, May 2021

Koning offers an alternative “overconsumptionist theory” – worth reading

Tony – From the Outside

Mortgage Mayhem – Net Interest

Marc Rubinstein has written another really interesting post on the economics of the American mortgage market which you can find here. The post is useful not only for his account of the mechanics of why the American mortgage market is prone to boom and bust but also for reminding us of some of the ways in which the American approach is very different from that employed in other markets. 

Lending to finance home ownership is an increasingly big part of most modern financial systems but the ways in which the process is done differ a lot more than you might think from casual inspection. I have previously flagged a post that Marc did on financing the American home. Read that in conjunction with a post I did on financing the Danish home. Marc also did an interesting post looking at the tension between competition and financial stability.

Tony – From the Outside

Tether offers a bit more detail on the composition of its reserves

… but Jemima Kelly at FT Alphaville remains a sceptic. I think the FT headline is a bit harsh (“Tether says its reserves are  backed by cash to the tune of . . .  2.9%”). Real banks don’t hold a lot of “cash” either but the securities they hold in their liquid asset portfolios will tend to be a lot better quality than the securities that Tether disclosed.

The role of real banks in the financial system may well be shrinking but the lesson I take from this FT opinion piece is that understanding the difference between these financial innovations and real banks remains a useful insight as we navigate the evolving new financial system.

Let me know what I am missing …

Tony – From the Outside

Explaining the value of Dogecoin

I don’t profess to be able to explain the value of Dogecoin but Matt Levine offers an interesting perspective curtesy of a research report published by Galaxy Digital Research. Apart from the left field explanation of what underpins Dogecoin’s value, the relatively short report (22 pages) offers a useful recap of the story of how this variation of digital money came to be.

Here is a short extract from the report

“When we set out to write this report, we expected to find what we’ve always known: Dogecoin is a joke, but it’s also a joke… not credible, resilient, or adopted. But as we reviewed the data, we found that, despite its deficiencies, Dogecoin has remarkably strong fundamentals and powerful forces supporting its rise: a genuine origin story, longevity, and a growing community of users who appear determined to meme a Shiba Inu-themed global currency into existence. We don’t expect Dogecoin to become the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency any time soon, but DOGE should not be ignored.”

“Dogecoin: The Most Honest Sh*tcoin” by Alex Thorn, Head of Firmwide Research and Karim Helmy, Research Associate, Galaxy Digital Research, 4 May 2021

Matt’s column has a link to the report itself which is worth a read if you are interested in Dogecoin in particular or the broader topic of digital money.

Tony – From the Outside

Central bank digital currency

Izabella Kaminska (FT Alphaville) offers another perspective on what the development of a Central Bank Digital Currency CBDC) by the People’s Bank of China means for China itself, the rest of the world and the USD in particular.

Her column is titled “Is the central bank panic about the PBOC coin justified?”. It is not clear that central banks are actually panicking at this stage (equally I am not sure that Isabella has 100% control over the titles her sub-editors apply to her articles). The article does however offer some balance to the narrative that sees China’s moves in this space forcing other central banks to follow suite.

I am yet to fully come to terms with the questions posed in her article but this (for me at least) is definitely an area to watch and seek to understand.

Izabella has been a reliable source of insight on this and the broader questions associated with the increased role of fintech in our payment systems. I can also recommend a column she wrote in July 2019 titled “Why dealing with fin techs is a bit like dealing with pirates”. A paper by Tobias Adrian and Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli titled “The Rise of Digital Money” is also worth reading if you are interested in this topic (one of my posts offers a short overview of the paper and a link to the original).

Tony – From the Outside

Andrew Haldane

Claire Jones writing for the Financial Times Alphaville column confesses a fondness for the speeches of Andrew Haldane (departing chief economist at the Bank of England) . She offered a selection of favourites (you can access her column by signing up to Alphaville if you are not an FT subscriber).

I also rate pretty much everything he writes as worth reading often more than once to reflect on the issues he raises. To her top three Haldane speeches, I will add one he did in 2016 titled “The Great Divide” which explored the gap between the way banks perceive themselves and how they are perceived by the community.

Tony – From the Outside

Fed money printing and inflation

I will always worry about inflation but I found a post by Morgan Housel offering an interesting counter perspective on what the Fed is doing with the money supply

“The risk of rising inflation over the next few years is probably the highest it’s been in decades. Inflation happens when too much money chases too few goods, and Covid-19 closed a lot of businesses and gave people an unprecedented amount of money. The stars align.

That out of the way, let me cool things down: The Fed is printing a lot of money, but not nearly as much as it looks.”

The short version is that the dramatic increase in recent times can be attributed to a redefinition of savings accounts in the US – link to the post here. The inflation question is obviously way more complex than this simple data point but the post is short and worth reading.

Tony – From the Outside

Another reason why monetary authorities might not like stablecoins

Marc Rubinstein’s post (here) on Facebook’s attempt to create an alternative payment mechanism offers a useful summary of the state of play for anyone who has not had the time, nor the inclination, to follow the detail. It includes a short summary of its history, where the initiative currently stands and where it might be headed.

What caught my attention was his discussion of why central banks do not seem to be keen to support private sector initiatives in this domain. Marc noted that Facebook have elected to base their proposed currency (initially the “Libre” but relabelled a “Diem” in a revised proposal issued in December 2020) on a stable coin approach. There are variety of stable coin mechanisms (fiat-backed, commodity backed, cryptocurrency backed, seignorage-style) but in the case of the Diem, the value of the instrument is proposed to be based on an underlying pool of low risk fiat currency assets.

A stable value is great if the aim for the instrument is to facilitate payments for goods and services but it also creates concerns for policy makers. Marc cites a couple of issues …

But this is where policymakers started to get jumpy. They started to worry that if payments and financial transactions shift over to the Libra, they might lose control over their domestic monetary policy, all the more so if their currency isn’t represented in the basket. They worried too about the governance of the Libra Association and about its compliance framework. Perhaps if any other company had been behind it, they would have dismissed the threat, but they’d learned not to underestimate Facebook.”

“Facebook’s Big Diem”, Marc Rubinstein – https://netinterest.substack.com/p/facebooks-big-diem
One more reason why stable coins might be problematic for policy makers responsible for monetary policy and bank supervision?

Initiatives like Diem obviously represent a source of competition and indeed disruption for conventional banks. As a rule, policy makers tend to welcome competition, notwithstanding the potential for competition to undermine financial stability. However “fiat-backed” stable coin based initiatives also compete indirectly with banks in a less obvious way via their demand for the same pool of risk free assets that banks are required to hold for Basel III prudential liquidity requirements.

So central banks might prefer that the stock of government securities be available to fund the liquidity requirements of the banks they are responsible for, as opposed to alternative money systems that they are not responsible for nor have any direct control over.

I know a bit about banking but not a lot about cryptocurrency so it is entirely possible I am missing something here. If so then feedback welcome.

Tony – From the Outside