financial markets – thinking liberal

Banking crisis: are we in 2008 again?

The US Federal Reserve.
Picture: By AgnosticPreachersKid – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6282818

The more people pop up to say that the situation in financial markets is not like 2008, when the Great Financial Crisis got going, the more we will worry. But while a crisis like that of 2008-10 looks unlikely, a prolonged period of wealth-destruction is in prospect.

The current bout of nerves comes from the collapse of two mid-sized American banks, and from a globally big one: Credit Suisse. Technically Credit Suisse hasn’t gone bust – it was taken over by Swiss rival UBS. But shareholders were bought out very cheaply, and some bondholders were wiped out in a move that has raised a lot of eyebrows. This follows a period of tightening monetary policy, responding to a period of inflation – after a prolonged boom based on very low interest rates. There are many parallels here with 2008. But the differences are striking too.

It’s worth taking a deep breath, stepping back, and trying to get a broad view of what is happening. At issue is the financial system – the world of money, rather than the “real” world of things and services – though there is quite an element of the real directly tied up in finance, which is a substantial employer in many economies. Money is a means to an end, and not an end in itself – in principle anyway. Because of this, economists, especially the macro sort, tend to ignore it, or treat it in a very cursory way with very basic models for money supply. And yet money is essential to the modern way of life; we can do little without it. If the financial system seizes up, disaster strikes. The episode that looms most over economists is the Great Depression of the 1930s, when some little local difficulties within the financial system were allowed to explode, causing mass unemployment. In a depression, lots of people want to work, but can’t; and lots of people want to buy goods and services that employ people, and can’t either. It is a colossal social waste – and one that in the 1930s fed into racism, fascism and ultimately war and genocide. The financial system matters.

At the centre of the financial system are banks. In the days of Henry VIII the monetary system was controlled completely by the state, which had a monopoly on minting coins – and the state has always played a central role in the financial system. But these days money means bank accounts – the role of notes and coins is negligible. Because of their critical role, banks are heavily regulated, with a central bank, accountable to the state, playing a keystone role. Banks provide access to money, but what do they do with it? They can just park the money with the central bank, but they will make no profits that way. So they find various ways of lending it out – further, they may create money through their lending. They make loans directly to members of the public and businesses and to governments, sometimes on a short-term basis, sometimes for terms of many years. This creates a source of instability – if the the public withdraw their deposits, the banks may not be able to liquidate their loans fast enough to give them their money back. But this “maturity transformation” is generally profitable, and it is at the heart of a healthy economy, which allows resources owned by people that have too much to be used by those that have too little.

So far, so good. This is as far as classical economists got. Interest rates are set by a process of supply and demand between lenders and borrowers, spiced up by credit risk. More modern economists then added in a role for government/central bank intervention – monetary policy. By one means or another the government could tighten or loosen monetary conditions, mainly through setting interest rates, or through “quantitative easing” (QE) – the creation of money by the central bank buying bonds through its reserves. In many accounts monetary policy brings back the idea that the government/central bank controls money like Henry VIII and the Royal Mint. The process of QE is often referred to as “printing money”. This conjures up a happy picture of a world of governments, consumers and businesses buying things with banknotes, with banks making loans to cover investments in houses or industrial machinery, or to smooth ordinary cashflow fluctuations of businesses and the public. It is at least easy to visualise this world, but, alas, too many people who should know better seem to get stuck in it.

The trouble is that we don’t use banknotes any more. And banks lend to a range of financial intermediaries rather than to “real” people and businesses; businesses and governments don’t borrow directly from banks but via these intermediaries, often through tradable instruments – “securities”. This creates the modern financial system, and instead of being a simple machine for the transmission of funds from “real” lenders to “real” borrowers it becomes a merry-go-round of speculation fuelled by the chance to make money from trading securities. Money becomes an end in itself, rather than mere lubricant. One spectacular example of this are fans of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, touted as alternatives to “fiat money” created by central banks. They meet scepticism with the rejoinder “Have fun staying poor”. The point for them is to make money as intermediaries, not facilitate financial transactions. The money merry-go-round becomes a complex frenzy when monetary conditions are loose – when banks have more deposits than they know what to do with, either because there is a lack of serious lending opportunities, or because of “liquidity risk” – the risk that depositors will suddenly withdraw their deposits. At this point banks seek out opportunities for short-term speculations based on securities or short-term loans to financial intermediaries.

This was the situation in the run-up to 2008. Monetary conditions had been very loose. The narrative on why this was so varies. Many of a libertarian bent blame irresponsible monetary policy by the developed world central banks trying to fight deflation while asset prices were in a bubble. This was through low interest rates – only in Japan was there serious QE. Others point to the entry of China into the world trading and financial system with its huge excess saving. It brought in vast quantities of funds from its exports, and only used a proportion of these to buy imports, depositing a surplus of money in developed country financial markets. An oil price spike added to this with oil producers generating a similar financial surplus. Banks then had the headache (though mostly they thought of it as an opportunity rather than a problem) of where to put this surplus money and how to make a profit. Quite a lot of money went into sub-prime lending in the US property market. German banks, and others, happily lent money to the Greek government, which had entered the Euro and was fiddling its financial statistics. There was a frenzy of securitisation as banks sought to evade their regulatory straitjackets. It was like picking up pennies from in front of a steamroller. One thing I find striking from reading up my observations at the time was how much “risk management” featured in the jargon of bank professionals. They gave the impression that they had sophisticated risk models which meant that the massive profits they were making were simply the result of increased global productivity from the more efficient use of resources. There are still commentators that look back at the statistics of the mid-noughties and ask why productivity growth has slowed since then – insert pet theory here. It was a work of fiction – the trend in lost productivity growth in the developed world goes way back to way before the financial crash. Massive amounts were being lent off bank balance sheets supposedly to long-term investors like insurance companies. In fact the money was going round in circles amongst thinly capitalised intermediaries which often came back to haunt the banks themselves.

It couldn’t go on forever. Central banks increasingly felt they had to do something about loose financial conditions, especially as that oil price spike was causing headline inflation. In early 2007 the US sub-prime market started to show strain. Then in August 2007 the financial system broke when the interbank market – banks lending to each other to manage daily fluctuations – froze over. The complexity of financial securities meant that nobody knew who owed what to whom. I wrote this in September:

The ship has hit a reef below the waterline. There isn’t much visible sign at first; the ship slows down; it has a slight list, perhaps. But the crew looks worried even as the captain voices reassuring words to the passengers. Will the watertight compartments limit the damage until the ship makes it to port for repairs?

The ship limped on for more than a year, as market professionals and commentators went through the process of denial and then attempted to negotiate with their fate. And then the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008 created a free fall. If governments had not indulged in massive bailouts of the system, the 1930s might have been repeated with institutions essential to our way of life going down. Alas that meant many undeserving people made out like bandits. The crisis kept going for two or more years, with the drama moving to the Eurozone in 2009.

So how do things compare in 2023? We are similarly in a period of monetary tightening following period of very loose policy, this time featuring the heavy use of QE in every major developed country market. Things were loose before the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, but this stayed the hands of central bankers, and unleashed a flood of fiscal intervention by the government to offset the effects of lockdowns as well as the direct impact of the disease. And then Russia started a war with Ukraine which completely disrupted the markets for oil and natural gas, forcing yet more fiscal interventions. This loose policy similarly unleashed a riot of financial speculation. But it is different this time. Banks are better regulated, though regulation of mid-sized banks in the US is still too light. There seems to be a lot less off-balance sheet lending. Paradoxically it is good thing that banks don’t tout sophisticated risk management these days – in 2007 this was justification of excessive risk. But inflation is much higher, and nominal interest rates have gone up much more, with big losses on government (and other) bonds that was not evident in 2007-08. This played a critical role in the demise of Silicon Valley Bank. Others presumably have similar exposures. There may be no substantial sub-prime market in the US, but many are worried about US commercial property lending.

And then there is the madness of cryptocurrency. I have not written much on this craze of the last few years. It is such deep, multi-layered nonsense that I couldn’t bring myself to take it seriously enough to write about it. The problem is that more respectable institutions started to take the phenomenon seriously and lent money to facilitate speculation. One of the biggest blots against current British prime minister and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak is that he wanted to make Britain a crypto hub. This is going predictably badly – an idea billed as an escape from the the tyranny of fiat money turns out to be even more dependant on fiat than fiat money itself. I understand that it contributed to both US bank collapses.

But the biggest difference between now and 2008 is that in 2023 we are in the shadow of the Great Financial Crisis, which remains in recent memory to those in charge. This is evident in the extraordinary level of intervention by the US Federal Reserve, in effect guaranteeing all bank deposits, even those outside the scope of deposit insurance. This has prevented such spectacular events as the freezing of the interbank market which led to my holed below the waterline image. A more apt image is the one conjured up by FT columnist Megan Greene: Schrödinger’s cat. We don’t know whether the system is stable or not – so it is both at once.

The striking thing is that with each crisis in the financial system the power of the central banks seems to grow. At the start of the 20th century the Americans didn’t even think they needed a central bank. Now the west seems to be converging with communist China in the use of both formal and informal state power. But power does not necessarily mean control, and the Federal Reserve especially is confronted with a series of very difficult choices. Inflation remains rampant but the banking system is fragile.

As I reflect on this the more it seems to me that the modern banking system is not fit for purpose. Steadily essential parts of the system are being nationalised. We are slowly moving to a system whereby deposits are in effect placed with the central bank – something which is happening rather rapidly in the US as the Federal Reserve gives support to money market funds. How, then, do banks fund loans? This is a role that central banks are ill-equipped to perform and should not be nationalised beyond a few specialist agencies. I guess they will need to provide longer term investment products – but the transition is bound to create casualties – and destabilise the banking system.

For now though we must expect this period of wealth-destruction to continue. Bank deposits may be safe, but inflation is eating their value away, as the prospect of positive real interests diminishes. Bond markets are undermined by the cessation and reversal of QE. Share markets need a growing economy. A weakened financial system will undermine property prices. And yet unemployment is low, minimum wages are in place and there are strong social safety nets. It is, surely, the wealthy that are being squeezed. That is not a bad thing.

An economic storm is coming – could this favour the Lib Dems?

Image: Whoisjohngalt, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A bull market ends when the last bear has been beaten into submission. It felt that way last autumn. In 2020 I was astonished when, after an initial fall in response to the emerging covid crisis, financial markets bounced back and then became positively buoyant. How was this a rational response to the the catastrophe enveloping the world? But the bull market just went on.

Then last autumn I started to read articles suggesting that investors must fundamentally re-evaluate asset prices upwards. The argument was based on the idea that interest rates were fundamentally lower than historically, so we shouldn’t be using historical comparisons of yield and other such ratios, which were pointing to over-valuation. This felt a lot like the last bear caving in. There was certainly something crazy about financial markets at the time – shown not least by the craze for crypto-currencies. All this was reminiscent of the insane world of the tech bubble at the end of the 1990s. Loss is the new profit, and so on.

There is something very odd about the way the interest rate argument is used to justify high valuations. The logic is superficially soound. Anybody with a training in finance is familiar with valuation models based on a discount rate – which is the rate you should receive by investing your money in a zero-risk alternative. The lower the discount rate, the higher the valuation. But lower interest rates also suggest low rates of return on investing your money. So how is that investors get richer when returns fall? Common sense would suggest that a world in which the risk-free rate of return on investment is near zero (or negative after inflation) is one that is going to hell in a handcart. Something, somewhere is not making sense. In fact we should be expecting profits and rental incomes to stagnate or fall, and this should undermine valuations.

But asset prices are not set by the use of logically rigorous financial models. They are set by the laws of supply and demand. The modern economy is generating a lot of funds for investment, but there is an unwillingness for investors to use this for good old-fashioned projects that might generate a cash surplus at a future date. That leaves too much money sloshing around in bank accounts or low risk assets such as government bonds. That keeps low-risk returns down, and it also means that banks are willing to loan money at low rates of return. This generates demand for assets that might generate a return at expense of risk (though still not those boring real-economy projects, apparently). This does not necessarily lead to an asset-price bubble: investors could just be more patient. But it clearly has.

Central banks can do something to restore order by pushing commercial banks to raise interest rates, in their role as their regulator and the banker’s banker. For the last three decades they have chosen not to, using various arguments either to deny that there is a bubble, or to say that it isn’t their job to act against it – instead focusing on consumer price inflation and unemployment. It is difficult theoretical terrain, but it is hard not to see politics and the vested interests of the finance industry behind this.

What bursts bubbles? It is when the funds dry up and more people want to sell riskier assets than buy them, while demand often exceeds supply of less risky assets, causing a scramble. This is usually the result of chickens coming home to roost – high risk investments carry a high risk, after all. The great financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-09 was started by defaults in the US property market. It doesn’t help that in the modern world “funds” is a fluid thing and not the movement of fixed quantities of money as we might intuitively expect. This gives scope for chain reactions that can be global in reach. In the GFC this was truly spectacular and served to expand a minor crisis in US sub-prime real estate into a global banking catastrophe. That was the result of uncontrolled financial engineering across developed economies in the previous decade. There was something of a Ponzi scheme collapsing – but to this day supporters of Britain’s Labour government, which was an active supporter of the country’s role in building the Ponzi scheme (aka world-class financial innovation), insist it was nothing to do with them because it was all about US real estate.

The asset price bubble is clearly bursting now. The proximate cause is inflation, causde by widespread disruption to the supply side of the economy – which I discussed last week. Amongst other effects this is causing central banks to radically change course. Interest rates are starting to go up – though not by very much so far, given the levels of inflation. Perhaps more immediately threatening to markets is that Quantitive Easing (the central banks buying up bonds to keep long term interest rates low) is now moving into reverse. This upsets the balance of supply and demand in asset markets. Meanwhile the convergence of disasters affecting economic supply, from the war in Ukraine to covid in China, are clearly destined to make the world poorer, and this affects how people value assets.

The burning question is just how big will this financial crisis get, and what will its consequences be? I will focus on the UK – as we may find that things unfold quite differently in different countries. On the one hand the financial system is not as dangerously wound up on itself as it was during the GFC, limiting the chain reaction. The world banking system does not look in imminent danger. On the other hand, the outbreak of inflation knocks away one of the props upon which the financial system has been based for 30 years or so – the prospect of ever-lower nominal interest rates. This suggests that the crisis will be slower but longer-lasting. The most sensitive part of this is house prices. In the GFC prices dived rapidly as the financial system froze over and it became very hard to arrange mortgage finance. But conditions quickly eased, and prices bounded back. This time it looks as if nominal interest rates will rise steadily and may well stay up. This will impact new mortgages rather than existing ones, as most mortgages these days are fixed rate. So prices are likely to decline more slowly, but the effect could last longer. It is hard to tell about the wider economy. It depends n the state of business finances. If a harsher financial environment causes widespread bankruptcies, we could experience a significant recession. Otherwise things will be much slower moving and the economy will experience a long period of doldrums.

What will the political impact of these be? The accepted story of politics since the GFC is that the crisis provoked a backlash against metropolitan elites, which were seen as having caused the crisis and escaped its worst impact. It was the political right which managed to exploit this the best, with the rise of populist policies. In Britain this focused on Brexit. The Conservatives were the ultimate beneficiaries. Politically the old liberal elites have taken a pounding, though, and they are not such an obvious target for a backlash. An obvious culprit for the trouble is Brexit but the main opposition parties, Labour and the Lib Dems, are reluctant to invoke the B-word. Their sense is that Britons (especially the English) are reluctant to re-enter the polarisation and political warfare set off by the referendum in 2016. They were accused of trying to overturn a democratically fair decision, and many politicians in these parties have taken this message on board. Anyway, both parties want to win back voters who supported Brexit, as well as those who do not want to reopen the wounds.

But as yet I do not see a clear alternative line of attack. What should the government be doing to face the crisis that it is not? It is not obvious to the public whether the answer is more or less austerity. Swing voters tend not to been drawing non-pension benefits, which look inadequate. As yet there does not seem to be a tide of anger about the failure of the state pension to keep up with inflation. Immigration has failed to present as a burning concern to most. The opposition has to content itself with complaining that the government is incompetent and out of touch. But the public has to be convinced that they would do a better job.

But the point is that public anger is likely to gather pace, and it will attach itself to something – but we don’t know what yet. Where will angry, property-owning former Tory supporters go? Labour has not been positioning themselves for these voters since the departure of Tony Blair in 2007; it may forgotten how to. This could yet be a propitious moment for Lib Dems, who are increasingly focusing on this demographic. They have been courting these voters in by elections and local elections, with some spectacular successes. It is early days. No clear national narrative is emerging from the party. But it is too early for that. They need to understand how resentment at failing house prices and a stagnant economy translates into specific demands. But for the first time in a long time, the period the party spent in coalition with the Conservatives in 2010-15 might be an asset. From the vantage point of 2022, with some selective memory, many Tory voters might remember this as a golden age.

Don’t panic, but look for signs that Britain’s finances are holed below the waterline

Last week, before Britain voted, I suggested that Britain’s finances were vulnerable, and that a vote for Brexit would lead to a financial crisis. After Britain duly voted for Brexit, many commentators have suggested that just such a crisis is unfolding. Is it?

My form on predicting such crises is mixed. I thought that Britain’s failure to join the Euro in 2000 might lead to a crisis in due course, as international investors shunned Sterling. This was very wide of the mark. But in 2007 I correctly foresaw that the apparent calm after the interbank markets froze could lead to a serious financial crisis, moving all my pension fund’s assets to index-linked gilts and cash. Its value rose while most funds were badly battered in the crisis of 2008/09, facilitating my early retirement. So I need to take a deep breath and try to look at this objectively.

First, what do I mean by a financial crisis? There are two things to look out for. First is a collapse in asset prices that causes people who have borrowed to finance assets (which what people usually do for property) difficulties, which in turns affects banks and squeezes demand, causing job losses and recession. The second is one of governmental finance, whereby the government finds it hard to finance the national debt, forcing interest rates up, and a drive to austerity regardless of any need to stimulate demand. This is likely to be combined with pressure on the currency that makes it impossible for monetary policy to take up the slack. The 2008 crisis was of the first type, but the government managed to head off the second type. For the second type examples are Brazil currently, and Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Why did I say Britain was vulnerable? First, the country has a large current account deficit, running at about 7% of GDP, historically high. This suggests that the economy requires substantial amounts of foreign investment to keep going, at a time when uncertainty would put such investment off (both by foreigners and locals’ overseas assets). Second the national debt is high, at over 80% of GDP, and there is still a fiscal deficit; though at 3% this is far from scary, there is not much margin for it to deteriorate into scary territory. Against this Britain’s national financial management, led by the Treasury and the Bank of England, is world class, prepared (unlike the government for Brexit negotiations) and with an excellent track record. British banks are also in much better shape than in 2008, adding to overall resilience. International financial flows are very mysterious, and it is hard to forecast safety or disaster.

The best thing to do from where I’m sitting, without high powered computer models, is to describe the danger signals, and keep a watchful eye. This means keeping an eye on some key statistics.

First there are share values. The FTSE100 is a darling of journalists, because it is so accessible. It also tells us not very much, since many of its components are multinationals and not really British. Last Friday was not a good day for share markets, but nothing out of the ordinary either. Today is also bad, with the more representative FTSE 250 falling by 4.6% in three hours (the 100 fell by an unremarkable 1.3%). If these sorts of falls persist, then that could be a wider sign of poor business confidence, which will affect all important investment. But for an asset based crisis it is real estate that is much more important, and this moves at a more sedate pace. Too early to tell there.

Next, there is the pound Sterling. This is much more important. A weak pound will feed through to inflation, for example in petrol prices. This could put pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates, which would have all sorts of nasty knock-on effects. But I think that risk is overdone in market commentary – it is very 20th Century. These days employers do not feel the need to match price rises with wage rates, which puts a cap on general inflation. In the recent crisis the Bank was able to ignore rises in consumer prices without risk. But it will mean the public faces a squeeze, which will reduce domestic demand. A second issue with the pound is any effect it has on investment; a weak Sterling will reduce the attractiveness of gilts (government bonds) as a safe haven asset.

The pound had a bad day on Friday, though that was partly because markets were so confident of a Remain victory. But is has continued its fall this morning; if this trend persists there is serious trouble ahead. But there is no sign that the pound’s troubles are affecting gilt prices; they have risen, as they are still regarded as a safe haven. If this continues the government stands a good chance of weathering the crisis. So far it is definitely a case of Don’t Panic.

Looking further ahead, there are two statistics to keep an eye on. One, inevitably, is GDP. The stats here are wobbly and don’t deserve the attention they get. But if growth slows or even goes into reverse, then the government will be under pressure either to extend austerity or to provide Keynesian stimulus, depending on its reading of the situation. The second, more relevant , statistic is tax collections. If this is under pressure then there is a risk of government finances spiralling out of control.

The first question is when the short term reaction to the vote overwhelms the country’s financial system, causing emergency measures. Based on the gilt yields this looks highly unlikely, even in today’s febrile conditions. The more important question is whether, having survived the immediate storm, the financial system is holed below the waterline, to use a nautical metaphor. When a ship is holed below the waterline, it sails serenely on, with only fairly minor signs of damage. But it is taking in water that may cause it to keel over later, if it does not make to safety in time. This was how the world financial system looked to me in 2007 – while many fund managers were saying that the crisis had passed. And the drying up of inward investment could make that metaphor appropriate to the British financial system now.

So my message is this. Don’t panic, but look at for small but significant signs of longer term trouble.

Afterthought

What I probably should have emphasized is that I think it is gilt yields/prices that are the critical statistic to watch. If these stay low (yields) or high (prices) than it indicates that the government can readily borrow Sterling, which gives it the scope to manage the financial situation. If they go in the opposite direction, then it could be a sign of a more serious crisis.

2016 is nothing like 2008, but there’s trouble ahead for the world economy

In my New Year post I did not write much about finance, but made some rather throwaway comments that the economy could take a turn for the worse in 2016. Having just read Martin Wolf’s rather sanguine piece in the FT, I hadn’t quite understood that my views were in line with conventional wisdom in the financial markets – and this not at all a position I like to be in. But pessimism is in, and reflected by lower share prices worldwide. This has filtered through to left wing commentators, like Will Hutton, who gleefully want to show that “austerity” or “neoliberalism” is leading to a repeat of the 2008 crash (though Mr Hutton is too good a writer to use those particular totems). This is definitely company I don’t want to keep. Time to dig a bit deeper.

It helps to think back to what happened in the last turndown, the crash of 2008 – as this is foremost on people’s minds. At the start of 2008 the banking system was in deep trouble, although on the surface things were quite calm, if gently sinking. “Holed below the waterline” was the description that I used at the time – alas I was not publicly blogging until three years later, or my reputation might have been made. Trust was breaking down because the banks were dealing a lot with each other, or off-balance sheet offshoots, rather than with the public or businesses. And things were starting to go wrong, beginning with US sub-prime mortgages. The huge tangle of interbank transactions and derivatives meant that nobody knew how the losses would play out or where – so everybody was tainted. Things kept superficially calm until quite late in 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, threatening a chain reaction that would have brought much of the world’s banking system to a screeching halt. Since the banking system is at the centre of everyday life in developed economies the result could have been catastrophic.

That catastrophe was largely avoided, but only because governments bailed banks out to keep the whole system afloat. Even then the damage to the non-banking economy was severe, and government finances, especially here in the UK, were ruined. What was so alarming about the whole episode was that a fairly routine downturn in the business cycle infected part of the US mortgage market, which then completely disproportionately went on threaten the whole system. Defenders of Britain’s Labour government still can’t believe it was anything to do with them – though in fact ten years of complacent economic management had left the country highly vulnerable to such a chain reaction.

Why are people worried now? Well one thing that helped the ameliorate the disaster in 2008 was that emerging markets, especially China, were less badly affected, and in China’s case, government stimulus helped keep things afloat. Now that side of things is unravelling. The Chinese economy is slowing, and in the process it is undermining world markets for commodities such as oil, which presents the threat of widespread damage in the developing world. The Chinese situation arises partly because the country has hit an awkward point in the evolution of its development, and partly because their stimulus package after 2008 was largely wasted and bad debts are threatening its banking system. Indeed the whole soundness of China’s growth strategy is coming into question (its second, state-directed phase , rather than Deng Xiaoping’s original liberalisation from 1978).

This is serious, and no mistake. The role China has played in the world economy in the last quarter century is hard to exaggerate. What is happening there is much bigger than the US subprime crisis that was at the heart of the 2008 debacle. But it doesn’t have the same destabilising features that caused such a fierce chain reaction – which were in plain view as 2008 started. China is not at the heart of a cat’s cradle of complex derivatives sitting in off-balance sheet funds, with almost every international bank taking part. And the huge power of the Chinese state, and the depth of its financial reserves, means that the country’s financial system will collapse slowly rather than suddenly. The western banking system is a much soberer thing than it was in 2008 too, even if many left wing commentators would have you believe that nothing has changed. For these reasons 2016 does not look like 2008. A meltdown, or near meltdown, does not look likely.

But there could be a slower moving form of trouble. Secular stagnation, the affliction of the world economy I referred to recently, is here to stay. Western economies will slow. Worse things may be in store in the developing world. Share prices may well fall badly – many markets have been overpriced for some time.

And in Britain? In my New Year post I suggested that 2016 might be the year the economy here started to turn sour. That comment wasn’t based on any deep thinking. Britain is unusually dependent on the international economy, as is evident from persistent trade and current account deficits, and a value for Sterling that is hard to justify based on its “real” economy. So, with things going awry in the world economy, Britain might be vulnerable. The Pound could come under pressure; foreign investors could desert London’s property market causing a chain reaction; or a downturn in the City’s finance sector could do the same thing. On the other hand, capital flight from the developing world could benefit London in particular, allowing the country to weather the storm. Some left wing commentators have been trying to stoke alarm about the level of personal debt – but that doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Neither should we pay much heed to Labour’s economic adviser, David Blanchflower, who on the radio this morning suggested that Britain was less ready to deal with a crisis than in 2008, because interest rates were already rock bottom. That vastly inflates the effects of interest rate policy on crisis management. David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s luck could hold. I struggle to understand the alarmism on the political left – it will merely undermine its already shaky reputation for economic grasp.

it seems to me that 2016 will be the start of a good old-fashioned cyclical downturn for the world economy, with no more than the usual localised financial crises. Personally I think this will morph into a period of more prolonged secular stagnation that will put paid to economists’ lazy assumption that 1-2% rates of growth are a law of nature.

And that should pose some very challenging questions for the art of economics. But that’s a topic for another day. Meanwhile government bonds are a better bet than shares; cash is not a bad bet either; don’t mortgage up to your eyeballs in property; and interest rates aren’t going up.

Slow growth is not bad. If that means debt default, so be it. The world must change

The state of the world economy is worrying economists. GDP growth is lacklustre in the developed world, which in turn poses problems for the developing world. That’s bad enough, but the economist’s nightmare of deflation – prices dropping rather than rising – now beckons around the world. And yet the prescriptions of most economists are shaped by a way of looking at the economy that belongs to the past. A paradigm shift is needed. Debt is at the heart of it, not GDP growth.

For a clear, conventional analysis of the issue read this week’s Economist. Here’s a brief summary. The developed world economies are suffering from deficient demand. In other words, the economies could easily churn out more goods and services, using existing capital and labour, but don’t because people aren’t asking for the stuff or can’t pay for it. Another way of putting this is that the amount of investment (people spending money on building capital rather than the immediate consumption of goods and services) is less than the amount of saving (the amount by which people’s income exceeds the goods and services they consume). This leads to low growth rates. Now inflation is falling and deflation threatens. Deflation is bad, at least when low demand is its cause, because it makes debts more difficult to repay, and this gunges up the financial system, which makes matters worse.

The conventional answer to this problem, which also goes under the name of “secular stagnation”, is to reduce the prevailing rate of interest. This will encourage people to invest more since the returns to investment, compared to simply sitting on piles of money, would then be higher. But deflation, or low inflation, makes this impossible, because it raises the floor – the lowest real (after inflation) interest rate it is possible to charge. Answer: you raise the level of inflation. The method of doing this is to increase the money supply, since inflation is a monetary phenomenon. All sorts of ingenious ways are then dreamt up of how to do this. But this is all the product of a conventional way of thinking based on aggregate economic statistics, rather than what is really happening in developed societies.

There a number of challenges to make:

Stagnation, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing in the developed world. Surely the current level of consumption of goods and services is sufficient, in aggregate, to secure perfectly decent wellbeing for everybody – and economic growth is not the most efficient way to securing improvement to that wellbeing. And as we judge the potentially catastrophic impact of man’s demands on the planet it is clear that a system based on ever increasing consumption cannot end well. We need to make better choices about what we consume, and distribute the consumption more evenly. But economists seem to worry about the speed of the train, rather than where it is going, or even whether it has arrived at where the passengers want it to go.
Inflation in the modern, developed world does not work in the way the economic textbooks suggest. In particular the rate at which monetary wages rise has become detached from the rate of increase of consumer prices. Macro-economic policies, like monetary policy, aimed at increasing inflation may feed through to consumer prices without doing much for wages. This completely undermines the supposed benefits of a little bit of inflation.
Things are no better in capital markets. Reducing interest rates seems to have little effect on levels of genuine, productive investment. Such investment is driven much more by zeitgeist than interest rates. Excess money either chases a relatively fixed pool of existing assets (land and buildings and shares), or it simply piles up in bank accounts. This makes conventional monetary policy very hard.

We can look beyond these challenges to recognise some issues that might be behind these challenges. Interestingly, these are, for the most part, not particularly controversial amongst modern economists – it is just that they seem unable to accept the implications:

Distribution of wealth and income matters more than aggregates. This is the complete opposite of late-20th century conventional economic wisdom. The problem is that wealthy people have too much income to meat their needs, and that there are inadequate channels to invest the surplus productively (as opposed to bidding up property values, etc.). To try and balance out the deadening impact of this, the answer has been to get poorer people to consume more by piling up debt. That would be fine if those poorer people turned into rich people later in their lives – but that is not what is happening. This is unsustainable – and yet most conventional economic advice boils down to cranking this system around one more time.
Modern businesses require much less capital investment than previously. The modern business giants of Microsoft, Apple and Google never needed much debt and did not need much capital to get going. This is simply the way that technology has evolved. There remains demand for public infrastructure: railways, hospitals, power stations and so on, but the risks and returns, and their often monopolistic nature, makes this a difficult area for private businesses, as opposed to governments, to lead. This is one aspect of what economists refer to as “Baumol’s disease” – the paradox that the more productive the efficient areas of an economy become, the more the lower-productivity areas predominate in the economy as a whole.
Globalisation has changed economic dynamics profoundly. Amongst other things it has weakened the bargaining power of workers – one reason that prices and wages are becoming more detached from each other. Also, less talked about and perhaps controversially, I believe that globalised finance means that developed world governments have less control over their currencies and monetary policies. This is one reason why it is more difficult to use monetary policy to manage inflation. It is also the reason that Europe’s currency union makes much more sense than conventional economists allow – but I digress.
Technology is changing the way the jobs market is working. Many middle-range jobs, in both manufacturing and services, are disappearing. This week Britain’s Lloyds Bank announced the loss of 9,000 such jobs in its branches and back office. This, and not the flow of immigrant labour, is the reason why the labour market has turned against so many.
And finally, I think that many consumers appreciate that additional consumption, and the income to support it, are not the answer to improved wellbeing. It is better to stop earning and pursue low-cost leisure activities. I notice this most in middle-aged middle-class types like me – who are retiring early. It is perfectly rational. And yet economists can’t seem to understand why reduced consumption and income might be a rational choice for an individual. There is a tendency to tell us to go out and spend more for the good of the economy. This is a perfectly liberal and rational downward pressure on national income – which surely should be encouraged for the sake of the planet.

Some of the consequences of these trends are straightforward. Redistribution of income and wealth are now at the heart of political and economic policy, rather something that can be ignored. A much greater proportion of economic investment must be government-led, which imposes a massive challenge for political management. Governments and central banks trying to tweak the inflation rate by a few percentage points is a fool’s errand. Also trying to revive the economy by getting the banks to lend more money to poorer people is unsustainable, even if the lending is collateralised on residential property. The appeal by many economists, such as the FT’s Martin Wolf, that developed country governments should borrow more to invest in infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Using monetary policy to help finance such investment makes sense too. Making sure this investment is directed sensibly is a bigger problem than most allow, though.

And the conventional economists are right to worry. A world of stagnant growth and low to negative inflation creates major problems. In particular many debts, in both private and public sector, will not be repayable. At some point there will be default, since the other options, inflation and growth, are off the table. Or to put it another way, much of the financial wealth that many people currently think is quite secure is anything but, in the longer term. This may a problem for many pension and insurance schemes, as well as wealthy individuals and corporations.

The consequences of this are quite profound. Our society must break its addiction to debt. The banks and the financial sector must shrink. “Leverage” should be a rude word in finance. If low growth is the result, or if a new financial crisis is hastened, then so be it. Let us learn to manage the consequences better. Borrowing to support genuine productive investment (not excluding the building of new houses where they are needed) is to be encouraged, including government borrowing to finance public infrastructure. But other borrowing must be discouraged. Taxation should increased, especially on the wealthy. If that causes a loss of productivity, then so be it – this should be compensated by more efficient financial flows from rich to poor. Political reform must run in parallel to ensure that public investment is conducted efficiently, rather than just disappearing into the pockets of the well-connected.

This is a daunting programme. Stagnating national income and deflation are not inevitable consequences – since these policies do address some of the causes of deficient demand. But we must not think that these statistics are the lodestars of public policy. We need a much more nuanced appreciation of the wellbeing of our planet and the people that live on its surface, and put it at the heart of economics.

Such sound eco

The Twitter launch tells you all you need to know about financial markets

Yesterday Twitter launched itself onto the financial markets by offering a small proportion of its share for sale. The company sold them for $26 each. By the close of the day they were being sold for $44; during the day they had been even higher. Last week The Economist carried out a sober assessment of what they thought the shares were worth. They thought that investors should not pay more than $18. So what is going on?

No new information was revealed last week that might raise the share valuations. Instead we get a lot candyfloss arguments about why investors should buy the shares: arguments that taste sweet but disappear as soon as you try to digest them. There is talk of growth potential and strategic value – but studious avoidance of how much these are already built into the price. For those of us brought up to believe that share values reflect the discounted value of future cash flows this sobering. But serious money is behind the price movements. Who is buying at these stupid prices?

The answer is that people are buying because they think they will increase in value in the short term, and that they can sell out at a profit before any trouble starts. They are not watching long term value; they are watching the other guy. This logic may make some sense for an individual investor (or perhaps more correctly “trader”), but collectively it is madness. It simply leads to asset price bubbles. And there is a lot of it about.

This leads to a massive source of instability at the heart of the world’s financial system. But what to do about it? The first thing to say is that the world’s central bankers should stop treating asset price bubbles as a minor aberration of the system whose damaging effects can be contained. They are the big deal: a more important source of instability than the consumer price inflation that they still tend to focus on. Such policies as quantitative easing should be assessed in that light.

You can’t and shouldn’t stop people speculating on financial assets with their own money. Ultimately this leads to more realistic prices. What fuels bubbles is when people speculate with other people’s money: “leverage” in the jargon. Banks and financial institutions should lend money for proper investment projects, and a modest amount for purchases of existing property for people to live in or use productively. They should not be lending to speculators. Since 2008 people are more aware of the dangers. Alas we have a long, long way to go.

Are the Muslims right about debt?

The Biblical invocation against usury, making loans for interest, has been discarded by the two older Abrahamic religions, the Jews and the Christians, though it persists in Islam. I used to think the prohibition was another obsolete idea, based on a misunderstanding of the usefulness of finance. But as time goes by, the more I come to see that the biblical fathers, or God if you prefer, were on to something. The dysfunctional nature of financial markets is one of the modern world’s most pressing problems.

This reflection comes on the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which was the point at which the current financial crisis broke out into the open. This has lead to a flurry of newspaper comment. I was most drawn to an article by Gillian Tett in the FT, covering a talk given by Adair Turner, the former head of Britain’s financial regulator, the FSA. Unfortunately this behind the FT paywall, and I cannot find coverage anywhere else. Lord Turner produced a blog, but this only covers part of the subject matter, and not the most interesting bit reported by Ms Tett. Lord Turner says that we have not really come to grips with the failure of financial markets that became evident with the Lehman episode.

The most eye-catching thing about financial markets, which is the main point made in the blog, is the explosion of private sector debt. In 1960, according to Lord Turner, household debt in the UK was just 15% of total income; by 2008 it has risen to 200%. If you start to add up loans made by financial institutions to each other, then even that figure looks pretty tame (837% according to this rather good Economist School’s Brief on the subject – though this suggests a little confusion in Lord Turner’s numbers on household debt). But the statistic that hit me most forcibly was the claim that only 15% of the money that flows into financial products actually gets invested in proper wealth-creating projects.

Macroeconomists have long been dismissive of the significance of debt and financial markets in their imperious declarations about the state of national and global economies. These are just means to an end, and they all cancel out – one person’s debt is another’s asset; what matters is the real world of what is produced and consumed. Economists are reluctantly having to rethink this, though most would still rather divert the discussion into conventional subjects about austerity and money supply. Lord Turner’s 15% statistic, however, should translate the issue into one which even an old-fashioned macroeconomist can understand. There is a massive gap between what people set aside to save, and what is actually invested. Financial markets are meant to be the channel by which savings are turned into investments – but instead they are simply a smokescreen hiding a black hole, as it were.

Let’s pause for breath, and look at the problem from another angle. One of the critical points of economics, too often forgotten, is that money and financial assets have no intrinsic value. They are simply useful tools by which we can coordinate the process of producing work and consuming its output. You can think of it as being a bit like electricity. You cannot store it. If people want work now, and consume later at leisure, the simple act of putting aside money won’t do the trick. You have to persuade other people to be around to do the work for you when you want to do your consumption. The wider purpose behind financial products is to help us to do this, to balance our over-production now (i.e. saving) with over-consumption later, or vice versa. Theses activities depend on coordination with people who want to do the opposite, and that is what financial markets are meant to do. How? Through investment. Investment is work that is done now to produce things that can be consumed later. This allows production without consumption in money terms to be balanced by a real world equivalent. Maynard Keynes’s great breakthrough was understanding that the failure of the money and real worlds to match was the main cause of recessions.

So if 85% of savings are not actually invested, there is a problem. Where does the money go? There seem to be two main places. Firstly a lot of it consumed by intermediaries – those fat-cat salaries included – to no real purpose. Secondly a lot of it goes into inflating the prices of assets, real estate or financial assets, that exist already. In other words it is a colossal waste of time which simply serves to make a lucky few rich. And meanwhile huge volumes of debt are being created, much of which can never be repaid. Or, to put it another way, we have manufactured vast banks of financial assets which are not worth anything like what we think.

This spells trouble ahead, as this situation will only resolve itself through, one way or another, debt being forgiven and assets written down. The owners of those assets show no sign that they understand this; or if they do, they simply assume that it is somebody else that will pay. Meanwhile the best we can do is not to make things worse. Amongst other things that means continuing to make life miserable for the banks and the financial sector, and hope that, as they shrink, they concentrate on the more socially useful aspects of it work.

What those old Jewish and Christian fathers understood, and Islamic scholars still understand, is that debt creates moral problems by dehumanising the relationship between debtor and creditor. Financial assets are in fact human relationships between real people, which we are attempting to abdicate responsibility for. Alas though, it is unthinkable that our current economic system, with its manifold benefits, can be created or sustained without them. But we would all be better off if we understood the moral and personal implications, and consequent limitations, of financial assets and the markets through which we acquire them.

Does Britain need the City?

The British governing class has reacted furiously to the European Parliament’s attempt to limit bankers’ bonuses. Once again their central argument is that it is a threat the wholesale financial services businesses that are based in the City of London, which they say is critical to the British economy as a whole. This is an argument that is regularly wheeled out by not just the establishment, but even by normally sensible commentators such as The Economist. The British public at large seems largely unmoved, however. This is a topic that could do with closer examination.

The City is an astonishingly successful business cluster, where I worked for 18 years up to 2005. The main controversy surrounds an very well-paid elite of traders, fund managers and investment bankers. These people, or the businesses they are part of, contribute disproportionately to national income – though exactly how much I am less clear about. Financial services consist of nearly 10% of the country’s GDP, but this includes a lot of businesses that are clearly not part of the City (retail bankers, estate agents, financial advisers, and so on), in spite of attempts by many commentators to conflate the two. But their high income reminds me of the joke about Bill Gates wandering into your local bar and the average income there soaring (this joke needs updating – Bill Gates’s income will have dropped alot in the last few years). If the City bankers leave, the country’s GDP may suffer, but that doesn’t been that everybody else is necessarily poorer.

But, the argument goes, these well-paid people spend their money here and create jobs. This argument is much weaker than it first appears. Rich people don’t spend all that much of their incomes on the sorts of things that create local jobs. A lot of their income is saved, with little of this saving going into productive investment in the UK economy. A more immediate problem is that a lot of their money is going into property, and other things where supply is limited (plumbers, school teachers at private schools, etc). All this does is bid up the price and put them out of reach of ordinary people. Still, if these businesses really are global, and having them on British soil contributes to the British trade balance, then some sort of net economic benefit is plausible.

A sounder argument can be made through taxes. City businesses and their employees pay a lot of tax under Britain’s progressive tax system (mostly income tax and national insurance on those bonuses – global businesses are very slippery on the matter of corporate taxes). How much? I don’t know: but it could amount to 1-2% of GDP (that’s guesswork working from the 10% of GDP for financial services income as a whole). There is an irony here. Very often we hear that our high taxes are damaging the City – but if they didn’t pay tax there would be little point in having it.

But behind this there is a deeper question. Are the services the City provides socially useful? In principle they should be. Our complex economy depends on finance to link those with surplus money with those who have productive investment projects to get off the ground. It’s what pays most people’s pensions. In principle fund managers, even those in hedge funds and private equity, should be helping this along. But a great deal of scepticism is in order. Too much energy is wasted in various intermediate devices – such as derivatives – whose value is difficult to see. Too much money is lost between one end of the process and the other. High profits, an economist will tell you, are a sign of economic inefficiency. It is the industry operators that are getting rich, not their clients. The aim of public policy should be to bear down on the industry to make it much less profitable, while maintaining its socially useful purpose.

But if it a global industry, can’t the British economy rake in the benefits of this inefficiency at the expense of the rest of the world? There are problems. First is that as global governments get to grips with the dysfunctional wholesale finance industry, it will gradually become less profitable, and the benefit reduces. The EU tussle on bonuses is but one part of this process, even if it is badly directed. The second problem is that the British taxpayer can become more embroiled in the industry than it should be. The bailout of British banks in 2009 surely wiped out many years of tax revenues derived from them. In any case income from financial services tends to be volatile, and so less useful – it disappears when you need it most. A further problem is that high City pay diverts the brightest local people away from more socially useful work.

So overall I find the case for special treatment for the City to be unpersuasive. What we actually want is for London to be a global hub for a smaller, less profitable and more functional financial services industry. The government is doing some quite sensible things: raising capital requirements, and separating investment from retail banking. This should limit the government’s exposure to bailouts, and reduce the level of finance (“leverage” in the jargon) available for trading operations, which believe is the critical issue. Other actions are more ambiguous: tougher regulation sounds fine, but it is in danger of harming decent retail banking businesses and reducing the level of competition as a by-product.

And as for the EU bonus regulations: I don’t think they will help much. They do not tackle the central issue, which is why banks are making so much money in the first place, and able to pay such large bonuses. But neither do I think they will do any real harm. Lower variable pay, and hence higher fixed pay, for banks may sound as if it increases risk, but it will force managers to ask more searching questions about what they are doing. And if more whiz-kids go to Singapore, so be it.

A tale of two City rogues

Too often people condemn City financiers without asking what it is that they do. But we must try to distinguish the good from the bad. The tale of two larger than life City financiers who have got into trouble brings this into focus rather neatly.

The first is Conservative donor and hedge fund manager Lewis Chester. He, or rather the fund he manages, has been hit with a massive fine by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for abusive trading in mutual funds, the US equivalent of unit trusts and OEICs. These collective funds provide opportunities for retail investors to take a share in a portfolio of investments without owning the shares individually, and are one of the best ways for ordinary investors (even very wealthy ones) to invest. But they aren’t priced real-time, and that can leave them open to abuse. In this case Mr Chester’s fund is supposed to have bought stakes late in the day, after prices had been fixed but when there was reason to think that they were under priced. The fund was able to make a handy profit by selling the stake back later – but it came at the expense of the fund’s ordinary investors.

Hedge funds are investment funds given an unconventional or aggressive brief compared to the plodding ordinary funds which merely manage portfolios of shares and bonds. Often the exploit pricing anomalies. This isn’t very pretty, but usually it’s a way of transmitting information across financial markets and ensuring that everybody gets a fairer price. On balance this is positive. But when it comes to exploiting anomalies in mutual fund pricing there is no such information transmission. It is simply theft, and there are rules against it. And even if rules aren’t actually broken, it is unethical, and anybody perpetrating it should be shunned by respectable society.

In this case Mr Chester still seems to be denying wrongdoing, dismissing his rather juicy emails as “banter” (gems like: Poor souls, working past cookie and milk time…for once in your lives, you can work like real men and do a proper day’s work. (You really are a bunch of women of the first order).). But it’s gone through four years of judicial process and the fine has ended up at $100 million – though an appeal may be on its way. I really hope that our own FSA is on his case, as if this is true he is hardly a fit and proper person to be conducting business here.

The second case is receiving much more attention, including two opinion pieces in todays FT. It is Ian Hannam, a specialist in mining investments and friend of David Davis, the Conservative MP. Like Mr Davis, and unlike Mr Chester, he is not a classic City smoothie who came up through the usual channels. He got his boots dirty by travelling out to various dodgy parts of the world to take a closer look at the investments he was advising on, and talk tot he people that matter. This is a striking contrast to so much of the City game of trawling through statistics and devising new computer programs. He advised on investments and facilitated big deals. Not pretty I’m sure, but you can see how this type of work can justify a big salary. The net result is that more resources get mined to keep the world going in the style to which it has become accustomed.

Mr Hannam has been fined by the FSA £450,000 for flouting rules on insider information, for revealing too much about deals he was working on to clients. I have no feel for the facts of this case, and Mr Davis has leapt to Mr Hannam’s defence. What I do know is that the rules on insider information are tricky, and that there is a lot of grey in amongst the black and white. If well connected insiders are getting all the best deals and making money out of the outsiders, this undermines confidence in markets. But information is the lifeblood of markets, and restrict it, even amongst insiders, and markets will suffer. It is already becoming more and more difficult for smaller companies to go public due largely to restrictions on information flow – and this will have a baleful influence on innovation. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of Mr Hannam’s case the rules seem to be drawn too restrictively at the moment.

The last few decades have seen astonishing advances in the battle against world poverty. A more globally integrated economy has been a key part of this, and global finance has been a key facilitator. It has also been wildly abused, with too many fortunes being made to no socially useful end. The public needs to take a closer interest in what goes on, to condemn the unethical (whatever side of the law they are on), but admire the people that genuinely make new connections and keep things moving – even if they cross the odd arbitrary line and get themselves into trouble.

Markets aren’t people – BBC’s Peston is taking anthropomorphism too far

Yesterday there were some rather worrying developments in the market for Euro area bonds, affecting even French and Dutch government stock. This caught the journalists on BBC Radio 4 off guard, including the famed Robert Peston. They quickly fell into the lazy habit of describing the markets as if they were thinking and breathing people, albeit in a plural form, like “Bond markets looked on the Italian government’s plans sceptically and yields rose over 7%”. This formula is usually used to link the movements in market prices to some new information or news event, regardless of whether any such link is actually significant. The idea of this mythical person or people breathing down the the necks of governments is clearly an attractive way to communicate a point. The trouble this morning was that there was no such easy link to make…which led at least one commentator to go a bit apocalyptic, that “the markets” had lost faith in the Euro completely and were expecting it to break up. This was more or less where Mr Peston ended up.

I have always hated this anthropomorphism of markets, which is by no means confined to journalists – market participants clearly enjoy the false sense of power it gives them. But markets are not people, they are mechanism by which buy and sell orders (in this case for securities) are resolved by striking a mutually acceptable price, often by computers these days. When nobody is buying or selling much, and market makers have to quote prices, then indeed human sentiment plays a major part in price movements. The market makers are usually part of a small and social group where collective sentiment can develop and they don’t mind telling outsiders. Journalists can find out what these sentiments are by talking to a couple of people. In this case the anthropomorphism does bear some resemblance to reality.

But as soon as the real money enters the market, then all this sentiment is mere chatter. And it often takes a bit of time for the real reasons for market price movements to emerge. People have to guess, and journalists usually go no further than to tap into the chatter. What moves the money? There are whole variety of things, many which economists would not recognise as rational – like a fund manager simply dumping shares to avoid an awkward situation with a client. Or, sometimes it can be plain errors. Then, of course, with so much automated trading it can simply be the unforeseen interaction of computer algorithms- as happened in the notorious “flash crash” in May 2010.

So what happened yesterday? I don’t know, of course. But the best explanation came to me via the Economist’s Buttonwood column, itself quoting one Michael Derks at a company called fxpro. In essence the Euro zone recapitalision of banks is having some malign effects. The idea was that banks should reserve more capital against their assets, so that they are better able to withstand losses. Reasonable enough (and vital to bring incentives at banks back into the real world, in my view), but banks can comply by dumping assets instead of increasing capital. That is what many banks are doing, and they are choosing relatively liquid government bonds to dump – including those of the French and Netherlands governments, as well as the usual suspects of Italy and Spain. It is a battle to prevent bank ownership being diluted, not a considered opinion on the future of the Euro.

Mr Peston should have known better, and helped his listeners try to understand what was going on, instead simply plugging this lazy and narcissistic drivel Shame on him!