Coppola Comment

  A cryptocurrency has just re-enacted the Weimar hyperinflation. Yesterday, the price of the cryptocurrency TITAN crashed to zero, and its related stablecoin IRON fell off its USD peg, trading as low as 69 cents to the dollar. It was a sudden and dramatic collapse that left investors shocked and bewildered. Equally shocked and confused, the coins' issuer launched an immediate investigation:  Iron Finance issued its post mortem a few hours later. This is the key paragraph: Later, at around 3pm UTC, a few big holders started selling again. This time, after they started, a lot of users panicked and started to redeem IRON and sell their TITAN. Because of how the 10mins TWAP oracle works, TITAN spot price drops even further in comparison to the TWAP redemption price. This caused a negative feedback loop, as more TITAN was created (as a result of IRON redemptions) and the price kept going down. A classic definition of an irrational and panicked event also known as a bank run. At the ti

Gabriel Sterne complains about economists' loose use of mathematical terminology:  Of course, it's not just economists who use "increase" and "accelerate" interchangeably. But economics is a mathematical discipline, and in mathematics, "increase" and "accelerate" mean different things. So is Gabriel's observation true, and if it is, is it a problem? To test Gabriel's hypothesis, I ran a little Twitter test. I asked this question:  This was of course far from rigorous: the sample was self-selecting, there was no way of restricting it to economists (though I did ban finance tweeps from answering), and it all depended who was on Twitter this morning. And the terminology I used was itself confusing - deliberately so, since this is how economists often write.  But the results were nevertheless interesting. Most non-economists got the answer right. Physicists, in particular, understood it straight away. But most economists who answered

We don't understand inflation. Those who lived through the high inflation of the 1970s are convinced that inflation is always and everywhere caused by wage-price spirals. Germans, economic Austrians and Bitcoiners are convinced that inflation is always and everywhere caused by central bank money printing. Small-state supporters are convinced that inflation is always and everywhere caused by profligate governments borrowing and spending excessively. Hard money enthusiasts are convinced that inflation is always and everywhere caused by currency devaluation. Every school of economics has its own theory of inflation. We don't even know what we mean by inflation. As the Cleveland Fed  entertainingly discusses , inflation originally meant expansion of (paper) currency in a manner that resulted in higher prices. But over time, that definition has widened to mean anything and everything that raises prices, not just monetary expansion. And not only consumer prices, either. We now

In my recent Forbes post about Venezuela , I said that neither the exchange rate policy nor the government's fiscal policy were sustainable, and the Maduro regime would eventually be forced to devalue and enact painful fiscal reforms. In the comments, Alexander Guerrero observed that it is already too late for this, because the economic mismanagement of the last few years has all but destroyed the supply-side of the economy: devaluation now would be likely to result in hyperinflation and default.  The tragedy is that what is playing out now in Venezuela has happened many times before. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.....and nowhere is that more true than in Latin America. In this paper from 1989, Dornbusch & Edwards examine the reasons for the parlous state of Peru's economy at that time in the light of the economic collapse of Chile in the early 1970s. These comments set the scene (my emphasis): Our purpose in setting out these experie

"Debt isn't always bad, fearing inflation is stupid and governments should spend far more, suggest top economists", reads a headline in the Guardian. Reporting on proceedings at the Lindau Economics Meeting last week, Philip Inman highlights Christopher Sims's lecture "Inflation, Fear of Inflation and Public Debt", in which Sims argues that fear of both inflation and government debt is driving the developed world into a never-ending slump. As Inman explains, the timing and location of this speech are particularly telling: Sims was well aware he was speaking in a Germany that fears inflation much as the villagers in the Asterix comic books fear the sky falling on their heads. Without naming Angela Merkel, he said anyone who feels threatened by inflation is stupid. Ouch. But actually it is worse than that. Fear of inflation is not just stupid, it is dangerous. And the Germans above all should understand this. Popular mythology in Germany has it that th

My latest at Pieria picks apart the irrational basis for beliefs about inflation: "So we don't understand the causes of inflation, we don't agree about what we mean by inflation and we have no reliable means of measuring it. Yet we are absolutely terrified of it. And we want government (via its central bank) to make sure that inflation NEVER HAPPENS. How very dare government rob us of our precious savings by means of inflation! Underlying this statement, and indeed all statements about the control of inflation, is a powerful and fundamentally irrational belief. Inflation can be prevented by government. Therefore, if inflation happens, it is because government has allowed it to. Inflation is therefore always and everywhere a POLITICAL phenomenon." There is lots more - and a worrying conclusion. Read the whole piece here . 

In recent articles in the Telegraph and the FT , Andrew Sentance called for the (permanent) end of quantitative easing and a return to higher interest rates in 2013 to counteract inflationary pressures in the UK economy. His reason for this is that that UK inflation has been higher than the Government's 2% target for most of the last five years, despite the Bank of England continually forecasting its imminent fall, and there are developing domestic and global pressures which will push up inflation over the next few months. The Bank of England recognises these in its short-term inflation forecasts but is still forecasting lower inflation over the medium term. However, it is fair to say that the Bank of England's record on inflation forecasting is somewhat tarnished, and Sentance is a reputable economist and a former member of the MPC. So his argument in favour of tighter monetary policy deserves careful consideration. The first thing to consider is Sentance's analysis of

In my post " The Nature of Money " I noted that money's use as a store of value is secondary to its function as a medium of exchange, and commented that long-term savings should not be held as "money" but rather as hard assets or investments in productive activities. I made it clear that my personal belief is that the latter is far preferable, because it benefits not only the holder but the rest of society too. This attracted the attention of a number of people who appear to have an almost religious belief in the virtue of gold as a store of value. The result was a bruising three days of intense debate on twitter, which was only ended when I blocked several of these people and warned off the rest. I was frankly shocked by the fervour of their belief: the more convinced they were that eventually I would "see the light" the less I wanted to have anything to do with them. I felt much as an agnostic must feel when subjected to the attempts of religious c