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Fear Doesn’t Glitter

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“All money is a matter of belief.”
– Adam Smith

Gold is taking a solid beating these days. It’s been slipping for a while, but when China revealed that it’s reserves were less than believed it really fell – quickly slipping below $1,100 per ounce when one mysterious trader dumped everything. It’s now more than a third off its 2010 peak and nearly everyone believes that it’s doomed to slip below $1,000 per ounce by the end of the year.

What happened? Isn’t gold the ultimate money in an unstable world? The short answer is no, and this has as much to do with the rise of the US Dollar as anything. But in the end gold is not as much a form of money as it is a barometer of fear – a commodity that appears to be in much shorter supply today than it was just a few years ago.

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Chinese Meltdown, Latin America Next?

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The long anticipated meltdown in Chinese stocks has accelerated this week, although it took a break today. Whether or not it has implications for the broader economy in China and around the world is unclear, given how little China relies on its stock market for financing and growth.

It’s all about the “carry trade”, or ability to borrow money in a foreign currency (usually US Dollars) at low interest rates and invest it at home in the hope that the local currency (Renminbi, or “people’s currency”) will become more valuable relative to the foreign currency later. It’s a two-fer if you can invest it in something that appears to be gaining in value, such as local stocks, and Chinese investors went for it bigtime.

Yes, it was all another bubble waiting to pop, which it appears to be doing now. But can this hurt us? Speculation has centered on trade with Latin America, which has its own uneven growth and a growing reliance on China. But this is silly for a lot of reasons. It’s worth looking at Latin America as a unit and seeing what effects we can really expect.

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Shadow Banking

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In the old days, if you needed money you went to a bank. They might loan you money for your home, your car, or your business based on an interest rate slightly higher than the net paid out for deposits. They made their money on the “spread” between the two, matching up assets they had with liabilities (like you) outstanding. It was a quiet, conservative life. It was boring.

Today, most loans wind up not being held by banks in anything like the traditional sense. Nearly all liabilities are packaged up and sold to a “shadow banking” system where people buy these “asset backed securities” and make money based on the float. It’s a more flexible system that allows nearly all risk to be offloaded onto investors – who bear it as a system. It’s good for the borrower, it’s good for the bank – but the risk is held by the investment world as a whole.

That “brittleness” is the bane of the modern financial world – and the future. How we learn to manage it is the future of finance and the difference between a world that is stable and reliable or capricious and impossible to understand.

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Bizarro World Finance

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This last week, the yield on a 2-year Irish Government bond turned negative, garnering a rate of -0.007%. That means that if you want to loan the Irish government some of your money, you have to pay for the privilege of doing so. Negative interest rates are not exactly new, but in the case of Ireland it’s particularly bizarre. Just three years ago, amid a potential default crisis, the same bonds were yielding 23%.

What changed? The short answer is no one knows. Shiela Kinsella, an Economics Professor at the University of Limerick, was exasperated. “The market is still in an irrational stage. It’s telling me that markets are lumping the same countries in again, and it’s just proof that nothing is ever learnt.”

Why did this happen? Investors in the Eurozone still can’t find anything to invest in as the European Central Bank (ECB) started a weak bond-buying program to goose investment. It’s a last ditch attempt to goose the economy and produce much needed jobs. But all it has created so far is a Bizarro World in finance.

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Banking (and Insurance) Should Be Boring

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Man Behind Desk:  “Mr. Brain, As you know, we here at Fiero & Company are re-re-insurers.    We provide insurance to re-insurers, who insure insurance companies.”
Brain:  “Is that lucrative?”
Man:  “Take a look.” (opens drawer)
Brain:  (big eyed smile) “Ahem!”
– Pinky and the Brain, S1E2, “Of Mice and Man”

One of the basic principles of Barataria is that “Banking should be boring”.  The main argument against financial regulation is that it stifles innovation.  Yet that hallmark of the 2000s has been the source of excessive risk and nearly all the trouble we find ourselves in today.  When banking is boring, the world is quiet and stable and those of us not in financial dealings have a decent chance of actually getting ahead.

The same is true of insurance.  That’s not only true as a matter of policy, it’s apparently true as a matter of making a lot of dough.

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