Bitcoin: A Solution to Excess Wealth?
Canada is planting 30 million trees this season. The purpose is to build a powerful carbon sink.
3 min
Carbon is not the only thing that modernity produces in excess. There is a surfeit of capital. Absorbing it has become a major challenge and threatens financial stability. There are more than $13 trillion of negative-yielding bonds in the world. Despite claims of exorbitant privilege, the U.S. government pays about 1.5% interest to borrow for a decade, historically low and below the Federal Reserve’s inflation target. Japan and Germany, the next largest market economies, can borrow at considerably lower rates. Germany charges investors nearly 20 basis points, or 0.2%, annually for the privilege of lending to it. It is not coincidental that cryptocurrencies were born in an age in which savings are abundant.
Capital is subject to the same law of supply and demand as other sectors of society. Capital is cheap because it is abundant. Large companies have more money than they know what to do with, so they return it to shareholders in stock buybacks and dividends. The drive to improve returns fuels mergers and acquisitions.
Equity valuations are stretched. House prices in many countries are rising quickly. Credit spreads, which measure how much one is paid for a unit of risk, are historically tight.
Excess capacity is another expression of surplus savings, that is, overinvestment. The U.S. economy is roughly the size it was on the eve of the pandemic. Yet around 7.5 million fewer people are working. Despite a booming economy, the U.S. is using a little more than three-quarters of its industrial capacity. Even at the end of 2019, it was just above 76%.
Capital is abundant because market-based economies are huge wealth creators. By applying science to production and finance, capitalism has been incredibly successful. And it turns out that to succeed, capitalism does not need to permit slavery, employ children, or deny women the right to vote. It can provide unemployment insurance, social security, and head-start services without being dictated to or sacrificing personal liberty. Its plasticity confounds critics. It can be reformed.
However, capitalism’s biggest weakness grows out of its most powerful strength, one that cannot be reformed away. It produces wealth on levels heretofore inconceivable. We live in an epoch that King Midas would recognize. We are choking on our wealth. Even if one does not recognize the disease (the idea of surplus capital is still controversial in some circles), the symptoms are undeniable. The return to capital is low, whether it is interest rates or profit margins. Redundant investment (excess capacity) is another symptom. Efforts to rationalize industries are part of the M&A wave. Corporations have become net providers of capital, no longer net borrowers. Speculation is extensive, and the gamification of “investing” began long before Robinhood and the legalization of sports betting in the U.S.
If we will not address the underlying distributional issues and the disparity of income, wealth, and power, then we need to channel the surplus savings away from those expressions that help fuel economic and political instability. What is needed is a vehicle that does to savings what trees do to carbon. Voilà! Enter crypto.
Some diehards continue to insist that crypto is money. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele recently pushed through plans to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender. More than two-thirds of the nation’s population lacks bank accounts or credit cards. Bitcoin rose about 270% from mid-December to mid-April and has since been halved. Volatility makes this a dangerous experiment. Let’s see if it lasts longer than Tesla’s offer to sell cars for Bitcoin.
Perhaps the function of crypto is to redirect savings from lifting equities to even more stretched values, or pushing nominal and real rates lower, or creatively destroying goodwill in acquisitions. Some have said that blockchain was a solution looking for a problem. The problem that crypto may attempt to address is the need for a new asset to absorb the wealth in a nonthreatening, ideologically safe way.
Crypto was born during a period of great concentrations of wealth, and it cannot help but reflect that origin. Despite the talk of decentralized finance, ownership of crypto, let alone trading, appears highly concentrated. One recent study found that more than 72% of Bitcoins (now about $33,000 each) are owned by those with 100 or more Bitcoins, along with miners and brokers. Nearly 32% are owned by those with 1,000 or more Bitcoins. A recent survey by Gemini, a crypto exchange, found that the “average” crypto trader was a 38-year-old male whose household made about $111,000, roughly 60% more than the median family income in the US.
The volatility and environmental issues of some models (proof-of-work) suggest that even as a centralized store of value, crypto’s role as a savings trap may be limited. It will not solve the challenge of capitalism’s unparalleled ability to produce wealth. The current steep decline in the face of strong price pressures weakens arguments of a hedge against inflation and as store of value. Ultimately, crypto is another expression of the surfeit of capital.
Marc Chandler is chief market strategist, Bannockburn Global Forex.
Reprinted by permission of Barron’s. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: June 28, 2021.
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Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
4 min
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
