Tag: Argentarius

Bitcoin—A New Kind of Money

In the last articles, we discussed what money is and why money was invented. We found that there are different kinds of money. So, what kind of money is Bitcoin?
Is it commodity money? Is it unbacked token money? Or is it something entirely new?

Austrian economists are divided in their assessment of Bitcoin, some see it as the best money ever, while others see it as worthless fraud. As can be visualized by the below tweet from the Swedish Mises Institute.

This goes back to the unfortunate and previously discussed errors/unclarities in Mises’s monetary theory. Which leads many to believe that the only way for sound money to emerge is by means of the regression theorem out of a valuable commodity.

While I agree that the regression theorem accurately describes, how a commodity can become money, it should not be seen as a law that ONLY through it can something become money. Especially since history clearly shows that ledger money is older than commodity money.

The reason for this error according to Argentarius is that most monetary theories only describe what money does and not what it is. He thus separates the concept of money, from the token that represents the money. To make the distinction a bit easier to see, I will call Argentarius’s concept of money “Meta-Money” from here on.

As I laid out in my article “The Evolution of Money”, the reason humans invented the various forms of money, was to represent the virtual Meta-Money. The concept of Meta-Money is brilliantly explained in “The Essence of Money”, I definitely recommend you to read the full book, still let me try to summarize it here:

Meta-Money is the virtual placeholder used when a trade cannot be made directly, but rather needs to be shifted in time, space or party.

A shift in time and place is easy to understand. You deliver 10 crates of beer to your friend’s house on Friday, and the friend pays you back in food and organizing the party at the beach on Saturday.

Meta-Money in this case is the virtual placeholder in your head that says, “I delivered beer, so I am owed food and party.”

Meta-Money is thus a virtual ledger that contains both debts and credits that result from a contract which is only partially fulfilled. One could say that Meta-Money represents the right to just compensation for a service delivered, but not yet paid for.

Tracking this Meta-Money is very difficult as soon as more than a few parties are involved. Especially, if the compensation does not come directly from the person you are trading with.

In the example with the party, this could look as follows:
You deliver 10-crates of beer to your friend’s house and every one of the other guests delivers some food, drink, or snack. The whole stash is then shared at the party. In this case, you deliver the beer to your friend, but the compensation comes not from your friend, but rather from everybody else who attends the party.

Now, how do you track this debt? What do you do, if you brought the beer, but some guests fail to bring the food they promised to bring?

This is the point where money tokens come into play.

The function of a money token is to represent the Meta-Money in a standardized, quantifiable way.

For our party, this could be done by simply issuing a set of vouchers. Everybody who brought his or her promised good, gets 10 vouchers and can thus take ten other food/drink items.

The problem with this approach for said party is obvious: Those who didn’t bring anything will have no fun at all. So, you need to give them a chance to compensate you and the other reliable party goers for your goods.

Conveniently, other monetary tokens already exist, so you can agree on one of the following options:

  1. People who brought nothing can use Euro/Dollar/Bitcoin to purchase vouchers that can then be redeemed for food.
  2. You skip the vouchers entirely and set a fixed fee everybody who brought nothing has to pay to get all-you-can-eat access to the buffet.

After the party, the currencies collected can be split equally between all those who brought food/drinks.

Now, what if people bring unequal amounts? You bring 10 crates of beer, somebody else just one. Another person brings an elaborate 3D modelled cake, vs. somebody else’s $1 store bought cake.

If everybody gets the same compensation, you will rightfully feel betrayed. For beers, this would be easy to resolve. If you brought 10 crates, you obviously get 10x as much, as the person who brought one. But how about the cakes? How many $1 cakes equal the labour-intensive 3D cake?

In the small-scale party situation, this conflict can be very difficult to resolve, since valuations are highly subjective. The creator of the 3D cake may feel it’s 1000x more valuable than the $1 cake, while the dollar cake bringer thinks it’s only 10x and others may call it at 100x.

In nationwide or global economies that use a common money token or currency, this conflict of subjective valuations is resolved by price discovery in the market.

If many people buy and sell goods, even though individual valuations differ, a market price emerges. Which means nothing more than that at the current supply, demand and cost levels, you will likely find a buyer for your goods at that price if you are a seller. And you will find a unit of the good to purchase at this price as a buyer.

The problem with these market prices is that they do not only depend on the demand, supply, and cost structures in the market, but also on the characteristics, of the money token used to express the prices.

In the case of the party, this can be easily seen. If every party goer gets 10 vouchers and there are 10 people at the party, every person can get 1% of the food and drinks.

If now suddenly 10 other persons come to the party and the reckless host just also hands everyone 10 vouchers, everybody suddenly can only get half of a percent of all food and drinks.

So one criterium to measure the accuracy of any money token or currency obviously is the total quantity of tokens. If people who have actually earned a token by a partially fulfilled contract, while other people get tokens without having rendered any service, the consequence is a redistribution from people who have delivered value, to people who have not.

But what is “accurate” money?

As we saw above in the cake example, value is subjective and prices need to be discovered via the market process. Market prices fluctuate over time, so at which point in time you look makes a big difference. So, what is the “just” price?

This may seem like an unresolvable riddle. After all, for the past 100 years, central banks have desperately tried to keep prices “stable” and failed miserably.

Luckily, Argentarius made a discovery that can help us get out of the dilemma. He observed that under a hard money (e.g. gold coins) where the overall supply of money tokens changes very slowly over time, the abstract “value” represented by one token remains extremely stable.

If historically, a pair of boots cost 1 gold coin, as long as the difficulty of making the shoes remained the same, the 1 gold coin price would stay the same for centuries.

Only if it gets significantly easier to produce the boots (automation) or significantly harder (natural disaster destroying leather supply), will the price change accordingly.

This may seem a very strange phenomenon, if you learned in school that price depends solely on supply and demand. The answer to the riddle is the velocity of money.

Unlike the vouchers in the party example, a gold coin does not get destroyed/devalued when it is used. So, 1 Gold coin can be used 100, 1000 or even a million times to buy one pair of boots. The velocity of money (i.e. how often the average coin is spent per year), thus, regulates the amount of Meta-Money represented by the tokens to a consistent level. One could say that the velocity of money automatically adjusts to offset fluctuations in the supply and demand for goods.

If you studied Keynesian economics, this probably will sound like an outrageous claim to you, even though it is not a claim at all, but rather an observation made by Argentarius.

Let me try to explain to you some of the factors that enable this kind of automatic price stability under hard money:

  1. People have an uncanny ability to remember prices of common commodities. Here in Germany, even over two decades into the reign of the Euro, you will still hear people refer to the old, relatively stable Mark prices.
    “What, this costs now €10? That’s 20 Marks, this used to cost only 5 Marks.”
    This price memory is one factor that makes market prices for commodities slow to change under hard money.
  2. Another factor is that, while the velocity of money changes, hard money means that the absolute number of tokens doesn’t change. And every transaction covered in the velocity of money is done by two parties agreeing on a price for a good or service.
    While the subjective valuation, and thus agreed price, may be above or below market price, the “loss” of one party in any given trade means an equal amount of “gain” for the other party. Overall, the net results cancel out and the “value” represented by each money token remains stable.

In a nutshell, this means that hard money does not require a central bank to keep prices stable. Market processes and human psychology automatically regulate the money velocity, so each money token represents a relatively stable purchasing power or “value”.

If a hard money market price goes down long-term, this is not deflation, but rather an indication that the production of a good has gotten easier. Vice versa, if there are sustained price increases it means that it has gotten harder to satisfy the demand, harder to produce the good in question.

If a currency supply expands, the equilibrium is broken and the market will need some time to reprice all the goods in terms of the new total supply of tokens. If the monetary supply is expanding faster than the market can balance itself, the consequence is that the “value” represented, transferred and stored in each money token will be distorted.

The goods and services preferred by the ones closest to the source of tokens will get up first and higher than the goods and services preferred by those furthest from the source. This is known as the Cantillion Effect.

This mechanism is also the reason, why central banks were able to create outrageous amounts of money tokens over the past decades and yet, consumer prices remained relatively low.

The newly created money was parked in assets by the first receivers (banks and large corporations) and did not circulate. Thus, only asset prices exploded, and money velocity was artificially suppressed.

In a nutshell, this is the reason, hard money requires a stable supply to represent Meta-Money accurately:
According to Argentarius, if the supply of a money token is stable (in the ideal case, exactly constant), then that token will represent a constant “value” across the economy that uses that token. And this “value” will stay stable over time and space so that you can use the token as a universal coupon. A coupon that will give you the “just” compensation you are due for services rendered and goods delivered, no matter where, when or with whom you “redeem” it.

From Argentarius findings, it becomes clear that all the different kinds of money, be it Fiat paper money, Gold coins, Mesopotamian clay tablets or Bitcoin are only different money tokens, not different forms of Meta-Money.

The properties of a token only influence how accurately the token can represent the Meta-Money over time, space and party.

Ok, not so fast. Commodity moneys are a special case… While a Fiat money has no other value than the Meta-Money captured, commodities also have a non-monetary value.

This is a point that in my opinion has confused many economists. When you review commodity money, you need to carefully separate the uses and valuations.

If you receive a gold coin, melt it down and make electronic circuits, then you have not used it as money at all, but purely as a commodity. And your valuation of the coin will be based on how useful the commodity “gold” contained in it is to you.

If you receive a gold coin intending to spend it to get other goods, you value it according to the goods you hope to get for it and how valuable these are to you. In that case, it makes no difference (as long as the number of tokens in circulation doesn’t change) whether the coin is made of gold or paper. You value it based on the Meta-Money represented and use it purely as money, not as commodity.

When you use a commodity as money, the physical characteristics of the good do only indirectly influence the value of the money token, not directly as if consumed.

This happens in two ways:
Firstly, the commodity value of the token set’s upper and lower bounds to the amount of Meta-Money it can store.
If the commodity value of gold should get higher than its monetary value (negative monetary premium) than people will stop using it as money token and consume it instead.
If the production cost falls and availability of the commodity gets higher, then the value of the money tokens must fall because people will simply produce more tokens until equilibrium is restored.
Since a scarce good like gold can store much more Meta-Money than its value as commodity, the standard case for any commodity money is a positive and rather large monetary premium. Meaning that the use value is negligibly small compared to the monetary value.

This leads to misallocation of resources, since the monetary use forces commodity consumers to pay a significantly higher price than the “normal” market price of the commodity.
For this reason, among others, usually commodities like gold, silver, or seashells become money, since they are not a vital part of the economy. Times when food, real estate or other basic necessity gain a significant monetary premium are typically desperate times, accompanied by social unrest.

The second way the physical properties of a commodity influence its value as a money token is their usability. How scarce, how divisible, how durable, etc. is a good, determines how well it can be used as money.

Eggs are terrible monetary tokens, they are too readily available, not divisible and spoil fast.
Gold is a very good monetary token because it is scarce, lasts forever and is relatively easily divisible.
Still, gold is far from perfect. It is too valuable given its density, which is why historically small purchases were done in Silver, which is not quite as scarce as gold and almost as durable.
Furthermore, Gold is quite hard to ship globally and easily stolen, which makes it awful to carry for daily groceries or use in international trade.

A significant downside of all commodities is that the difficulty of production changes with time. Problematic are especially big technological breakthroughs that can make a formerly scarce token abundant and thus worthless (see Rai Stones, Cowrie Shells).

NOTE: Gold is not safe from this fate either, asteroid mining is probably just a few decades away and earth is not fully explored yet.

In comparison to commodities, Fiat, debt-based and ledger currencies have the advantage that the total supply is not dependent on any natural/industrial process, but in theory can be set to a fixed amount.

The problem with that however is that until Bitcoin came along, you always had to trust somebody to keep the ledger honest and not expand the amount of money tokens.
So far, every human organization in charge of the money supply has miserably failed in keeping the money honest and limited in the long run. Thus, Fiat currencies were almost always bad stores of value and extremely inaccurate in representing Meta-Money.

The best theoretical money would be a hypothetical god-money. A token, created by an incorruptible deity who ensures that a fixed number of tokens exist and smites anybody who dares try to forge new tokens.

Bitcoin is as close to god-money, as one can get, without having a trustable deity to control the money.

The great differentiator in Bitcoin is the difficulty adjustment. No matter, how efficient miners get or if countries ban mining. Every 2016 blocks, difficulty is adjusted based on the time between blocks in the last period, to keep the time at an average of 10 minutes per block.

This, combined with the overall incentive structure Bitcoin provides, makes it almost impossible to change the schedule of Bitcoin issuance or expand the total supply.

Bitcoin is an unprecedented, wholly new kind of money which has both the advantages of commodity money and Fiat money, without the individual downsides and many never before seen upsides.

This all makes Bitcoin the most accurate money token ever invented, maybe even the best token possible.

The more Bitcoin grows in usage, the more monetary premium it will absorb from commodities and other forms of money. Until hopefully in the future, we will have the whole Meta-Money of the global (or perhaps interplanetary) economy accurately represented by Bitcoin.

We will discuss this future and its implications in one of the upcoming articles. If you don’t want to miss any new articles, please subscribe to my newsletter below.

The Evolution of Money

How was money invented? Why do we need currencies? What is the best money?

In a previous article, I explained the differences in monetary theory between Mises (Austrian School) and Argentarius.
Recent discussions between me and proponents of Mises’s theory have shown me that there are several points that are not entirely clear. So today I would like to dive a bit deeper and show on practical examples, how and why money evolved and what good money is.
Furthermore, I will try to show exactly at which points the two theories diverge and where I see the problems with Mises’s explanation.

Throughout all our examples, we will use the four Persons A, B, C and D. You can see the goods they start out with, in the below picture.
The transaction we want to resolve is that Person B wishes to buy a pair of shoes from Person A.

Example 1

The First Example will be simple. Person A and B do a direct barter trade. So, A and B simply draft a contract. Since C and D are not involved in this trade, we will omit their balance sheets for now.

NOTE: Historically these types of trade were done verbally, so the contracts and balance sheets in Examples 1, 2 and 2a are only for visualization. Practically, they would usually be in memory only.

Once the contract is signed, the goods are exchanged. Once both have delivered, the debts from the contract are erased and the trade is done.

Example 2

In the next example, we increase difficulty. Person A now doesn’t want eggs, but rather grain, which only Person C can provide.
To facilitate this trade, Person A negotiates a three party barter contract.

To fulfil the contract, first A and B need to exchange goods, and then A and C exchange goods.

As you can see, arranging a three party barter trade is already rather difficult, and if not all goods are available at the same time, the Person facilitating the trade must take quite some risk, since they need to trust their partners and give them credit.

This method of trading gets impractical quickly once more than three parties are involved.

Example 2a

So, if Person A is not willing to set up a three-party contract, the other option for B is to acquire the goods A wants in a separate trade.

To reduce the risk of giving credit, the three parties meet at one place and goods are exchanged directly.

While this is a safer way to trade, it’s even less practical to arrange, the more parties and different types of goods are involved.

Example 3

To resolve this issue, humanity invented the balance sheet and the debt transfer.
Archaeologist have found clay tablets, showing such trades were done as much as 5000 years ago.

Let’s have a look how such a clay tablet trade works:

This is much more practical, but since clay tablets are not too easily edited, another trick needed to be invented.

Example 4

Instead of rewriting clay tablets to represent who owes who, we will now simply use a Coupon redeemable in grain, signed by Person C as medium of exchange.

To spice things up a little, we will assume now that A doesn’t want to redeem the grain coupon, but they rather want Gold, which is available from D who in turn wants grain.

Such a coupon system is already the beginning of a commodity money, slowly turning into a currency.

The main evolutionary step from coupons/commodities functioning as money to currency, is the market process by which a commodity—like gold—becomes so widely accepted that everybody accepts the commodity as payment, even without any intention to directly exchange it for a good they actually need.

Example 5

If we do the same exchange of goods like in Example 4, but with Gold as widely accepted medium of exchange, it will look like this:

As you can see, this is a way easier way to trade that does not require any balance sheets or tracking of debts.
With this system, it is also possible to have the commodity money—Gold—change hands thousands, even millions of times, before the commodity actually reaches somebody who wants the Gold as a commodity itself and not for the monetary function.

Up to this point, the theories of Argentarius and Mises agree. The differences begin, once there is a standard medium of exchange.

Mises would now argue that you can simply write the transaction from Example 1 as follows:

Argentarius however would argue we would still need to take the full chain into account as shown in Example 5. If this example was rewritten to just show Person A’s and B’s direct trades, it would look like this:

This way of looking at things may look like nitpicking to you, but it is crucial, once inflation and changing production methods come into play.
If you use the Mises style analysis in times of high inflation, you will be selling yourself poor.

As Argentarius records, during the Weimar inflation days, business owners accounted by simply adding a profit margin to their costs.
While this is quite a common practice and not necessarily harmful in times of low inflation, as soon as inflation becomes faster than your business cycle, it will lead to the “selling poor” effect.

What this effect means can be seen in the chart below. The grey line represents the material costs, which after 1 year of no inflation start to inflate at 10% per month.

The orange line is a merchant who has a 3-month production cycle and calculates his prices based on 30% margin on cost.

The yellow line is a merchant who calculates his prices after production by what he expects to be the next month material cost.

As you can see, at such high inflation rates, the orange merchant rapidly falls into the “selling poor” zone, where despite a 30% profit on paper, his stock dwindles, and he has to go out of business.

Of course, it is not always possible to accurately predict inflation and such high inflation rates are rare.

Nevertheless, this example highlights the differences between Mises and Argentarius.

Mises operates under the framework of Praxeology. While this is a great tool to evaluate economic processes, like any model it makes simplifications.
These simplifications are necessary to have any chance at analysis of complex systems.
In edge cases, such simplifications can lead to erroneous results, which is why you always need to stay aware of these assumptions.

As Rothbard explained, Praxeology, unlike Psychology, does only concern itself with how people act, not with why they act as they do.

This can be a problem, when it comes to analysing contractual relationships. A contract is nothing more than a declaration of what two parties want.
So, when judging the quality of a contract, it’s important to check whether all parties received the result desired from the contract.

Unfortunately, humans are not always fully aware of their intentions, so contracts can be written in a way that looks acceptable to all parties, but in fact turns out to have been contrary to the intent of the parties.

This can be clearly seen in the above example.

The merchant, who calculates 30% profit on cost, does so, not because he wanted to have the money, but because he wanted to restock, pay his bills and maybe save or invest a little.

Basically, he wanted to do a multi party barter trade. He intended not to have any money token or currency, but rather to exchange finished goods, for raw materials, factories, machine depreciation, etc.

He only used money as a placeholder, due to convenience. Since the money worked for a while, the merchant fell into the trap where he forgot that the money was not the good he actually desired and thus sold himself poor.

Conclusion
Money tokens were invented to facilitate multi party barter trades. Their function is just a placeholder. Thus, the best money token is the one that most accurately transports a barter “value” over time, space and party.

In the next article, we will discuss what this means for the engineering of sound money.

Rome Falls—Euro-Dollar Hyperinflation

When analysing the current macroeconomic environment, there seem to be two camps. One compares the current state of the Euro-Dollar system to the 1970s, the other to the 1940s post-war inflation.

In my not so humble opinion, both are wrong.

While the current situation is historically unique, as I have laid out previously, the only remotely comparable situation in history was the Fall of Rome.

Why?

If you give me a few minutes of your precious time, I will explain to you, why Rome is about to fall, again.

To understand what is currently going on, we need to have a look at which economic and cycles are currently converging.
The first such cycle is the civilizational cycle, which lasts around 1 to 2 millennia and is accompanied by large shifts in how society is structured.

The last such cycle began with the rise of the Greek and Roman empires and ended when Rome fell, so one could say that cycle ran about from 600 BC to 600 CE.
Since this turning point, humanity has been busy recouping the losses in knowledge from Antiquity and in many areas we have now managed to be near the heights of Roman civilization, in others we are already beyond and declining.

While the sociological implications of this cycle are very intriguing, for clarities’ sake, we will focus on the purely economical aspects today.

The great rise of Rome was possible, thanks to a hard currency on a gold and silver bimetallic standard. The most important coin was the Denarius, which was a Silver coin which was the backbone of Roman and international trade, until it began to be debased and was literally copper with silver traces by the end of the third century CE.

By Nicolas Perrault III – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67224989

Later, the Denarius was accompanied by the smaller Sestertius and the golden Aureus. The Sestertius was launched as a silver coin, but after the Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire, within a few generations of Imperators, it quickly became a brass Fiat coin.

Let us pause history here for a moment and draw some parallels and highlight some differences:
Like in Rome, the Dollar also started as a gold and silver currency and later became devalued.
In Rome, the authoritarian push that allowed for the devaluation was the power grab of Julius Caesar and his successors, who ended democracy. In the US, it was the establishment of the undemocratic FED and thus the slide into oligarchy.
The FED devalued the Dollar, by artificially expanding dollar supply, through fractional reserve banking (with an ever decreasing backing). Up to the point, where countries who had entrusted the US with their gold reserves got nervous and requested their money back. Being unable to actually fulfil the gold promises on the circulating Dollar notes, Nixon had to pull the plug and turn the Dollar into an outright Fiat currency in 1971.

The most significant difference between ancient Rome and the modern Euro-Dollar system, is that the Dollar is a “world reserve currency”. In contrast, the Denarius, Sestertius and Aureus certainly were accepted and held by major traders all around the then known world, international trade was largely done based on the metal content of individual currencies, however. The actual backbone of the financial system were precious metals.
The Dollar, on the other hand, was forced upon the world in 1944 at Bretton-Woods. A condition by the USA, who then held the other Allied Nations in their hands, as only they had the economic and military power to defeat Hitler.

This led to the unique situation that in the 1970s, with the Dollar now a Fiat currency, the IMF launched a crusade against gold, thus leaving us, for the first time in history, with a purely Fiat world.

Back to ancient Rome.

After Rome had slipped into currency debasement, the government played a hypocritical game. While they paid their soldiers and trade partners in Fiat as much as they could, taxes would be collected in gold and silver.

This is again a move that can be seen today, where Russia will accept only a gold pegged Rouble, gold, or Bitcoin as payment for their energy, while trying to keep their citizens from holding either.
The same can be seen in Ukraine, where the government begged international donors to donate to them, gladly taking Bitcoin, but trying to hinder their citizens from rescuing their savings from the war into Bitcoin.

In Rome, the Fiat system, coupled with the bimetallic tax system, eroded the morals, infrastructure, and power of the Roman Empire. Something that could be seen again—in a fast-forward mode—during the Weimar Hyperinflation.
This ultimately lead to Rome being invaded several times and the Empire ultimately breaking into two, where the Western Part completely dissolved, while the Eastern Part lasted for a while longer in the form of the Byzantine Empire.

Why the difference?

The Byzantine emperor Constantine was smart enough to copy the Aureus and launch a gold currency in the form of the Solidus. This made Byzantium one of the most powerful trade hubs until well after the year 1000, when the solidus was again debased.

Can you already see the pattern?

The long civilizational cycles tend to be synchronized with the shorter cycles of empires by the debasement of currency. The main difference between the cycles being that when an empire falls, this is largely contained in the nation and its colonies, while the demise of an era like the Greco-Roman age of philosophy, throws back human culture around the world.

One of these 100+ year cycles is also coming to an end now, due to the US Empire loosing its grip on their debt colonies.

The next smaller cycle converging with the others is the 4-generational cycle, called “Fourth Turning”. Such a cycle is often aligned with a smaller cycle of monetary and currency rise and decline, as laid out by Argentarius.

Finally, a fourth economic cycle is currently coming to an end, namely the boom-and-bust cycle induced by Keynesian economics. These last usually about 7 to 10 years, but after the financial crisis in 2008, the central banks around the globe have warped the economy with quantitative easing.

As real economists have warned the Keynesian clowns for years, QE does not solve any crisis, but rather only delays and multiplies the negative consequences.

Having laid out the parallels and differences, let’s start conjecture time… How will the Fall of Washington likely go?

From my perspective, the demise of the US hegemony is already in full swing. And the attack of Russia on Ukraine, as well as the lockdowns in China, are part of the East stealthily launching economic war (as I laid out → here).

These attacks, combined with the already disrupted global supply chains, are poised to bring about the worst economic disaster in recorded history. I fully expect Western economies to decline at rates comparable to the Great Depression this decade, while at the same time, one national currency after the other will fall and go into hyperinflation.

What makes this process so hard to predict, is that—as I explained above—a world without gold currencies is unprecedented. Normally, the harder currency nations raise severe tariffs against the debasing states, thus draining their adversaries of intellectual property and capital.

Under a Fiat to Fiat system, this is not as straightforward, but it turns out that the biggest loser is the reserve currency nation. Having the reserve currency is called an “exorbitant privilege” because initially the world needs your currency. So for the first years the US was able to export their worthless paper and get back real goods and services.

If you stop there, it really may seem like a great deal. You just have to print, and others will work for your painted paper. This is a common error that even economists as great as Ludwig von Mises have made. (See my article about this → here)
Money tokens or currencies, are never the actual ends desired by market participants, even if the market participants aren’t aware of this. As Argentarius correctly stated, every transaction ultimately gets settled in goods or services.

In Weimar Germany, the nation exported cheap goods, to get enough gold to pay their war debt, which led to other nations exploiting the weak Mark and purchasing German stocks, real estate, etc. at dumping prices.
For the US, it has been China who sent them worthless junk in exchange for worthless Dollars, which the Chinese then sold for Gold, US and EU company shares, as well as real estate.

This process can be expected to pick up speed, as more and more nations dump their Dollar reserves on the market to diversify their holdings, as can be seen in Israel. Secondly, since the US stock and real estate market are already in a Bubble, China and Russia are bound to focus more on doing the same attack on the Euro. This strategy has, of course, been hampered by the Western sanctions on Russia, among other things by the freezing of Russian foreign currency assets.

A move that surprised me and probably also Russia, it being a de facto declaration by the US and several EU countries that both the Euro and Dollar are IOUs that can be voided arbitrarily and instantly.
To this day, I am uncertain whether this move was out of hybris or sheer incompetence. No matter which is the case, in the mid- to long-term, this will likely turn out to be one of the biggest blunders the Euro-Dollar governments could have possibly made.

Russia promptly took advantage of this mistake by simultaneously asking for their energy to be paid in Roubles and coupling the Rouble to gold at a fixed rate.

This essentially puts Germany—which is highly dependent on Russian gas—in the same trap, as the Weimar Republic was in due to the Versailles treaty. The difference being that this time, Germany is coupled to the rest of Europe via the Euro.

Thus, the ECB is in the worst catch any central banker can imagine. On the one hand, Germany is subsidizing Southern Europe and stabilizing the Euro with its strong economy. Something that is only possible due to low interest rates and ECB asset purchases.
On the other hand, the energy price inflation thanks to the gold-pegged Rouble can quickly grind Germany’s economy to a halt. Which needs to be addressed with higher interest rates and a stop to asset purchases.

As we will see later, there is a way out with Bitcoin, but I doubt the EU will take it.

Rather, I expect the ECB to first continue on their suicidal printing spree, well into a German depression and then steer back too hard, crushing the whole EU economy. The end game for the Euro will probably be another 180° swing towards QE and a Euro hyperinflation.

Before the Euro hyperinflates, however, I expect weaker currencies to be crushed in a similar manner. The Turkish Lira is already bordering on hyperinflation, many others will follow. The interesting thing will be to see, if the Bank of Japan manages to hold out longer than the Euro, but I doubt it.

Historically, the only way a nation can get out of hyperinflation is a monetary reform. Such a reform only works lastingly, if it is towards a gold or silver standard.

This time there is a another, even harder currency to turn to—Bitcoin.

While Bitcoin will still be a bit too young to have the same trust as gold, when this global monetary crash plays out (most likely this and next decade), there are many reasons for nations to prefer Bitcoin to gold.

The first is simply that Bitcoin is a better, harder currency. Some may even argue that it is the hardest theoretically possible currency.
The reason most countries will be led by is more of a practical nature. Most nations have gold reserves that are smaller than their share of the global economy. If they switch to a gold standard, they are thus at a serious disadvantage against a China or Russia, who have over proportionally much Gold.

The nation worst of are the United States themselves.

They had to declare gold bankruptcy already in ’71 and since then, the US has dumped so much physical gold onto the market to stabilize the dollar that I fully expect the national and international reserves in Fort Knox and co. to largely exist on paper only.

To make matters worse, Nixon didn’t really end the gold peg, he only “temporarily” paused it. This means, if the Dollar was to return to a gold standard, creditors of the US would likely demand to get the old value. Something that probably all the gold on the planet wouldn’t suffice to do.

The big chance the US (and other gold poor nations) have is to use Bitcoin. At about one Trillion Dollar market cap, BTC is still cheap enough that a government can easily acquire a large stake.

The first big nation to announce that they have a stack of 5+ Mio. Bitcoin and declares it legal tender, will be the dominant economic force of the century, if not the millennium.

If the US does this, before the Dollar hyperinflates against a gold backed Chinese currency, then they can avoid a lot of the pain they otherwise get and simultaneously rid themselves of most of their debt.

They could simply declare that a Dollar is henceforth exchangeable for Bitcoin at one Dollar per Satoshi (or 100,000,000 Dollars per Bitcoin). This would leave creditors with the choice to either accept the Bitcoin valuation and take the hard money, or take the dollar and sell it before it reaches that valuation by sheer self-fulfilling prophecy and US economic power.

The biggest danger for the US is, if China should manage to acquire more Bitcoin than the United States and pegs its currency to it (or maybe a double gold and Bitcoin peg). If this happens, the Dollar will soon enter hyperinflation and the US Empire will be over.

If the latter happens, we can only hope that the consequences are not as devastating as when Rome fell. Unfortunately, I expect that, if China wins, we will enter a very dark age of global surveillance and totalitarianism.

Next time we will take a deeper look, at how the best case for the US might go on a Bitcoin standard. If you don’t want to miss it, please consider subscribing to my Newsletter.

Monetary Theory—Argentarius vs. Mises

What is money? Many economists have tried to define this omnipresent tool of human trade. Few have come close to a comprehensive analysis. The two men who in my opinion did the best job so far were Ludwig von Mises and Alfred Lansburgh (better known under his pen name “Argentarius”).

Mises as one of the most famous representatives of the Austrian School is of course more well known than Lansburgh, but while I greatly admire the man, this time I need to side with Argentarius.

The two theories are rather close and not entirely incompatible, but a few key differences exist, and I think they are due to Argentarius seeing what Mises overlooked. Let me explain…

While Mises traces money back to the value of the underlying commodity (Regression theorem), Argentarius adds another layer to the analysis. He does not dispute the history, how commodities became monetary tokens, he rather claims that the concept of money is entirely separable from the underlying commodity and much older.

While I cannot lay out in a few lines, what Lansburgh explained in an entire series of books, let me try to rephrase how he claims money evolved.

Why are money tokens even necessary?

Whenever you trade with other people or render them services, one side will inevitably need to grant the other side credit at some point. Few goods can be exchanged one to one at the spot.
If you pay for a pair of shoes with eggs, for example. It will neither be practical nor helpful, if you deliver the payment of a thousand eggs at once in exchange for the shoes.

Rather, you will make a deal with the shoemaker, where either you deliver 1000 eggs first, in household quantities, over say a year (i.e., you give the shoemaker credit) or you get the shoes first and then pay off the debt with eggs over time (the shoemaker gives you credit).

In ancient human history, such debts were either remembered by people or chalked down. We know that as much as 5000 years ago, people would use clay tablets to record ledgers of such commodity debt contracts, e.g., in Mesopotamia.

This debt is what Argentarius calls “money”. Or more precisely, the debt that results from a contract that has been partially fulfilled. Looking at archaeological findings, it seems that Argentarius is indeed correct, and these ledger-based debts go back further than commodity money.

Of course, we need to note here, that what we colloquially call “money” is different from Lansburgh’s definition. In day to day life, we usually equate the money tokens or currency with “money”.
So, when we compare the different theories, we need to keep in mind that Argentarius calls the virtual debt “money” and the physical currencies “money tokens”.

Why and how did humans even switch from a virtual, ledger-based debt “money” to token money?

The answer lies in the growth of civilization. While, a debt denominated in individual goods and services and recorded in virtual or physical ledgers, may work for a city or even a state, the bigger and wider trade networks become, the less practical it becomes—especially for small transactions.

Just imagine either a harbour innkeeper having to know all his customers and remember their tabs, or a central national clay-tablet database recording every beer drunk in the nation and not yet paid for.

Thus, tradesmen started to seek for a standardized medium of account, similar like kings standardized length measurements to multiples of their foot. The problem with value is that it is subjective, however.
As Mises correctly points out, all humans rank their possessions hierarchically, but cannot quantify them because there is no SI unit for “value”.

Your kid is hopefully more valuable to you than a donkey you own, but if you had to put a numerical value on either, you wouldn’t be able to. Unless, of course, you compare it to a good or service you need right now that is of equal or greater value to you.

If there is a famine, you will probably first sell your donkey for grain because the grain is more valuable to you than the donkey. And the grain and donkey are both less valuable than your kid, so you don’t even consider selling the kid at first.
If the famine continues, however, you may come to a point, where you start to think about how much food you could get—for you, your wife and your four eldest children—if you sell the fifth and youngest kid.

I know, this example may sound cruel to us today, but it was a tough choice people often faced historically and even in Central Europe as recent as 150 years ago children were still occasionally sold to feed families.

So, how exactly do we calculate values, prices, debts in a standardized way then?

How many money tokens equal one child, and how many money tokens equal one loaf of bread? If we want to express values comparably, we need to develop a solution to this, we need to find a common denominator.

This is especially important for an economy, since something as valuable as a child, is worth more than a single merchant can supply in useful goods. If we wish to trade extremely high-value goods, for relatively low-value ones, we need a standardized way to express value and debt, so we can defer a transaction in party.

What do I mean by that?

In our example, even if the grain merchant offers you 5 tons of corn for your child, this will not help you feed your family. You are unable to transport and store 5 tons of grain, and you will need other goods, like drinkable water, basic shelter etc. that the corn trader cannot deliver.

A good money token thus needs to allow not only for the monetary functions of the historical ledger-based money (transferring a transaction in time and place), but also to transfer a transaction in party, i.e., a way to collect debts from another person than the one you are directly trading with.

One way this has been achieved is that traders of staple commodities, like grain, would give out coupons redeemable for their good instead of the good itself.

In our example, this means that instead of 5 tons of grain, the father receives 5000 coupons redeemable for 1 kg of grain each.
With these coupons, the father can then pay the shoemaker for new shoes, the well owner for some drinking water etc. This works because all of these merchants also need grain.

While this coupon money, solves the problem of transferring a transaction in party to some extent, it still does not solve the issue of a universal medium of exchange. Only people needing grain and trusting the merchant issuing the coupons will accept the coupons as payment.
(Of course, some will also just trade the coupons, but for brevities’ sake, we will exclude this from our analysis here.)

Furthermore, the validity of such coupons will be limited geographically. A merchant 500 miles away, is not likely to take a coupon he can only redeem by travelling to a far away city and redeem with a merchant, he does not personally know.

Thus, the market found a solution in money tokens which had some market value independent of the exchange value guaranteed by some central entity. Historically, precious stones, cowrie shells and metals like Gold and Silver were chosen. Why and how specific goods were favoured over others, is explained brilliantly by Mises, so I won’t go into it here.

Once a money token or commodity money gets dominant in a region, either by market choice or by government decree, it finally evolves further into a “medium of exchange”. This means nothing more than that the money token (e.g., a gold mark or paper mark) is universally accepted as a placeholder in transactions and every good or service over time establishes a “market price”, denominated with the token.

The market price of a good or service, is the closest approximation one can objectively make to the subjective concept of “value”. This does not mean that every person values the same good or service at this market price, but rather that on average the marginal utility of both sellers and buyers of the commodity meet at this price, under current conditions.

So with the “market price” a medium of exchange finally allows us to express the “value” of things in a standardized, quantifiable manner and transfer transactions in time, space and party.

In a nutshell, this means that whatever good or service you are trying to exchange for whatever other good or service, you can just use the dominant money token instead.

The implication of this being that instead of having your employer pay you for your work in shelter, food, clothing, etc. You can receive your salary in the money token and then exchange the token for the desired goods at any merchant.

Up to this point, Mises and Argentarius largely agree, even though they place their emphasis on different aspects of the process.

Let us recap:
Argentarius traces the history of money back to “contractual debt”, tracked mentally or on clay tablets, which then became coupon money and then commodity money and then by choice or decree a medium of exchange.
Mises, on the other hand, traces the evolution of commodity money, by a free market process. Defining this type of money token as “money” if it is used as “universally employed medium of exchange”.

Both economists agree that a monetary token dominant in a given market/country becomes a universal medium of exchange. They disagree in the core definition of money.

To Argentarius, “money” is an abstract concept. A placeholder for a debt in an open transaction. Money gets born when somebody renders someone else a service and has not yet received the compensation. As soon as the transaction is completed, i.e., the debt is paid, the virtual money disappears. A money token in this context is used only to represent and quantify the abstract money.
The implication of this is that any given transaction is only finalized, once both parties have received the actual goods and services desired by the transacting individuals.

So, in the case of the shoemaker, it does not change the transaction, whether the shoes are paid for in eggs or whether the eggs are sold for a money token and then the shoes bought for such a token. The transaction is only finalized once the shoemaker in turn has exchanged the money token for eggs.

Mises, on the other hand, attests the monetary token a marginal utility of its own, reflected in the market prices of all goods and the monetary premium the token has over the commodity it consists of.

Here I see the flaw in Mises’s argument.

If a monetary token is accepted as payment for its own sake—as a commodity—and not to be re-traded for something else, then in this case it has not acted as “money” at all, but as common barter.

When a money token is used as a placeholder in a transaction—to transfer a transaction in party—it is not valued by the parties for its commodity value, but exclusively on its monetary premium.

This monetary premium arises not by the market pricing of the underlying commodity, but rather by the act of capturing the market price of the desired goods.

We do not use a money token because we want to own it, and we don’t price it for its own sake, rather we use the money token because we want to buy something that our trade partner cannot deliver, and we expect the token to have the same “value” as the good we desire.

So, why is the view of Mises—namely that a transaction is finished once a money token has been handed over for a commodity—problematic and factually incorrect?

To see this, we need to study an extreme example:
Let’s say two people, called Alice and Bob, want to do a barter trade. Alice exchanges a Picasso painting for a serial-number-one sports car of Bob’s.

The Picasso is delivered to Bob, but Bob’s wife hates it and immediately trades it for a van Gogh. The sports car is put on a lorry and shipped to Alice.
Unfortunately, the truck has an accident and the car is damaged beyond repair.

Now Bob is in a difficult situation. He does not have the one of a kind commodity he owes, and he also doesn’t have the one of a kind commodity he received, for the transaction to be reversed.
Naturally, Bob offers Alice the van Gogh painting, since to his family it had the same value as the Picasso. Unfortunately, Alice hates van Gogh as patently as Bob’s wife hates Picasso.

How does Bob pay his debt?

The common way to resolve such a dispute is to involve a mediator, often a court. Given that the two parties are unable to agree on a fair substitute for the car, the judge will need to get an appraiser who determines the “value” of the lost vehicle.

According to Mises’s school of thought, this price should be denominated in the dominant medium of exchange of the area, while Argentarius would call for the money token dominant or decreed for the area.

If the two parties come from regions which have different media of exchange, the customary thing to do would be to use Alice’s medium of exchange, for she is the one who is the creditor.

If I explained this case well, you, dear reader, will have probably come to the conclusion that in most cases the two schools of thought will arrive at the same monetary token and valuation in this case.

Yet, the two cases could not be more, different. The problem I see is both of a philosophical and practical nature.

Let us start with the philosophical problem:
Under Mises’s doctrine, a free market process should be completely voluntary. Since he furthermore attests a marginal utility to the monetary token itself, the only way to view a court’s decision as “just” is, to ask Alice whether the marginal utility of the money token is equal or greater than the marginal utility of the lost car. If Alice does not value the possession of the money token itself, the marginal utility of the token is zero and Alice has, in fact, been robbed by the court.

If Alice, however, attributes a value to the money token solely based on the expected resale value, this means that she does not really attribute any marginal utility to the token itself, but rather values the token based on the marginal utility of what she expects it to buy her.

So in the first case, a “just” solution is impossible. In the second case… well, in the second case Argentarius was right all along.

Now, philosophical and moral implications aside. What are the practical issues with Mises’s theory?

To understand the significance, we need to first call to our attention, why economic theories are important.
Over the past few centuries humanity’s standard of living has been rising steadily, thanks in large parts to the advancements of science. If you have a better understanding of how the world works, you can create better products to enable you to satisfy your basic needs easier and to also address higher order needs, otherwise unsatisfied.

In economics, one of the most important pieces of understanding required, is how scarce goods can be best allocated. The best process discovered for this so far is the “free market”. The free market according to Hayek is so good at this because the market price effectively is an aggregate of the knowledge and information possessed by the market participants. With billions of people participating in a free market, it seems obvious, why this process must be better informed than any group of central planers.

But what if market participants are missing a piece of information or collectively share a piece of wrong information?

The inevitable consequence is a misallocation of goods and services. Sub par products will win out over better products, and many innovations will never come to fruition.

This is particularly devastating to humanity, if the error lies in the very tool itself used to express market prices, namely the monetary tokens.

With Mises’s theory of money, you can understand what a “good” token is only to the extent at which it is accepted by market participants as a commodity.
Failing to see the function of a monetary token to quantify and standardize the underlying abstract concept of “money”, it is likely that suboptimal tokens are chosen by market participants and that better tokens only emerge by accident or not at all.

The key difference in the two theories thus is that Argentarius requires a “good” token to be stable in “value” from the time a contract is made to the time it is finalized, which in this case is not the moment the token is handed over, but rather the moment the token itself is redeemed.

Let us look at an example of where the fatal consequences of Mises’s theory become visible, namely the Weimar Hyperinflation.

As early as the year 1921 Lansburgh saw that the majority of people in Germany were confusing monetary tokens with “money”. They bought and sold goods using money, thinking the transaction was finalized when they handed over the Mark bill and overlooked that in reality their intention was not to have a Mark bill, but to spend it.

The consequence of this error was what Argentarius calls “selling themselves poor”. Shopkeepers and industrialists priced their products in Marks, based on the current market value of the Mark, instead of on the expected market value of the Mark when they needed to restock.

Thus, shops often found out only after they had sold their whole inventory that the Mark had fallen so much in value that they couldn’t afford filling up their shelves and had to go out of business.

Enough for today.

Thank you, dear reader, that you stayed with me for this long. In one of the following issues, I plan to go deeper into what a “good” money token is and why the Euro-Dollar system is currently going into hyperinflation.