The Fire Burning Beneath Crypto’s Meltdown
The cryptocurrency implosion followed rampant creation of new digital money, something that never ended well in the traditional world.
4 min
One of the simplest lessons of stock market history is that innovations often lead to bubbles and busts, from new tulip bulbs through canals and railways to the internet. Less well understood is that financial innovations count for double, as new tools expand the supply of what looks like money, allowing the bubble to grow larger—and the bust to be even more serious.
The cryptocurrency implosion currently underway followed rampant creation of new digital money, something that never ended well in the traditional world either.
The question for crypto enthusiasts is which lesson they should take from history. Are bitcoin and other crypto tokens crashing because of the usual excesses that accompany advances in finance? Or do they have the sort of fundamental flaws that will see them join cowrie shells and Sweden’s 20 kg copper coin as historical relics? I lean toward the latter.
Start with the positive view, such as it is. There was a massive bubble in bitcoin and crypto in general as speculators piled in with the hope of getting rich. It was accentuated by a failure to learn lessons from history, as decentralised finance (defi) reinvented many of the problems of excessive leverage and liquidity mismatches that have bedevilled traditional finance for hundreds of years.
So much, so normal. Pile on too much leverage, use short-term borrowing to finance longer-term lending, and disaster eventually results.
Crypto supporters point to previous “crypto winters” that eventually came good again, and say prices will recover. But this blowout and bust is different, because of defi.
In the booms and busts of the past decade crypto prices were pushed up and fell back down based on the level of interest, rather like Pokémon cards or Beanie Babies.
Defi changed everything, by creating a parallel crypto banking system—without any of the limits or safety nets that have been introduced in the real world in response to past busts. Only now are we starting to find out some of the problems, as brokers and lenders freeze withdrawals, multibillion-dollar “stablecoins” designed to hold a fixed value vanish, and wild leverage leads to widespread forced selling.
At the very minimum this suggests the new crypto winter will be worse than the last few. Defi speeded the bubble’s expansion, and now it is accelerating the deflation.
The irony in all this is that part of the original appeal of crypto was the cap on how many bitcoin can ever exist, something supposed to prevent the sort of unlimited money creation that worries many critics of government-issued, or “fiat,” currencies. Rather than unlimited creation of bitcoin, crypto ended up with unlimited proliferation of new tokens. The new structures of intermediaries and defi tools allowed even bitcoin to be reused or lent on, meaning multiple people thought they owned the same token. Lender Celsius Network is an extreme example: Those who deposited bitcoin and other tokens there were promised high interest rates, but have been unable to get their coins—which Celsius lent out—back.
In the 19th century, the Bank of England discovered that the private spread of bills of exchange could overcome limits on official money-printing set by the backing of gold. Crypto owners are finding something similar, as monetary innovation got round their favourite claim, that the value of their bitcoin was underpinned by its protection from debasement.
The biggest booms and busts in monetary history led to the total destruction of currencies, and that’s already happening to some of the flakier cryptocurrencies.
The hope for crypto is that the speculators who used too much borrowed money are cleared out, the proliferation of tokens is pared back, prices reset lower and the core cryptocurrencies can continue with their grand monetary experiment. Sure, they’re worth less, but survive.
The trouble is that crypto’s problems run deep. Bitcoin started in the hope that it would act as the equivalent of online notes and coins, offering sellers the security of knowing that a transaction couldn’t be reversed, unlike credit and debit cards. It failed to take off as a medium of exchange, as it is clunky and costly to use. Other cryptocurrencies are somewhat more practical for transactions, but all suffer from a core problem: The more they are used, the more expensive transactions become as a way to regulate capacity on the network. Like Uber, Bitcoin has surge pricing built in.
“In a way congestion is a feature, not a bug,” says Hyun Song Shin, economic adviser and head of research at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. For normal currencies “network effects mean the more the merrier, but crypto achieves exactly the opposite, the more the sorrier.”
The BIS on Tuesday laid out a program for taking the best parts of crypto and using them in digital dollars, pounds or other currencies that could be issued electronically by central banks.
The other trouble with crypto: bitcoin advocates tried to overcome the cryptocurrency’s lack of use as a currency by rebranding it as “digital gold.”
The appeal of gold today is that it acts as a haven in bad times, and typically acts as a partial hedge against inflation. Bitcoin holders have discovered that not only is it not a hedge against inflation, it isn’t a haven either. Its price tends to move in line with risky assets, not safe ones. The gold price is up 4% in the past 12 months as inflation has soared, against a fall of 12% in the S&P 500 and a 43% loss for bitcoin. Digital, sure. Gold, not so much.
None of this means bitcoin or its cousins are definitely doomed. If people keep buying into the story of digital gold despite the evidence, it might thrive. If there’s a new burst of speculative hysteria, its volatility makes it attractive to gamblers. Or its supporters, desperate to find some value in the long strings of numbers they paid so much for, might come up with a new spin to tempt buyers back.
But in the long run, crypto’s best hope of survival is to come up with some useful function in the real world. That will require another round of innovation, and there’s no reason to think it will be the existing cryptocurrencies, let alone bitcoin, that will be the winners.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: June 22, 2022.
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Food prices continue to rise at a rapid pace, surprising central banks and pressuring debt-laden governments
4 min
LONDON—Fresh out of an energy crisis, Europeans are facing a food-price explosion that is changing diets and forcing consumers across the region to tighten their belts—literally.
This is happening even though inflation as a whole is falling thanks to lower energy prices, presenting a new policy challenge for governments that deployed billions in aid last year to keep businesses and households afloat through the worst energy crisis in decades.
New data on Wednesday showed inflation in the U.K. fell sharply in April as energy prices cooled, following a similar pattern around Europe and in the U.S. But food prices were 19.3% higher than a year earlier.
The continued surge in food prices has caught central bankers off guard and pressured governments that are still reeling from the cost of last year’s emergency support to come to the rescue. And it is pressuring household budgets that are also under strain from rising borrowing costs.
In France, households have cut their food purchases by more than 10% since the invasion of Ukraine, while their purchases of energy have fallen by 4.8%.
In Germany, sales of food fell 1.1% in March from the previous month, and were down 10.3% from a year earlier, the largest drop since records began in 1994. According to the Federal Information Centre for Agriculture, meat consumption was lower in 2022 than at any time since records began in 1989, although it said that might partly reflect a continuing shift toward more plant-based diets.
Food retailers’ profit margins have contracted because they can’t pass on the entire price increases from their suppliers to their customers. Markus Mosa, chief executive of the Edeka supermarket chain, told German media that the company had stopped ordering products from several large suppliers because of rocketing prices.
A survey by the U.K.’s statistics agency earlier this month found that almost three-fifths of the poorest 20% of households were cutting back on food purchases.
“This is an access problem,” said Ludovic Subran, chief economist at insurer Allianz, who previously worked at the United Nations World Food Program. “Total food production has not plummeted. This is an entitlement crisis.”
Food accounts for a much larger share of consumer spending than energy, so a smaller rise in prices has a greater impact on budgets. The U.K.’s Resolution Foundation estimates that by the summer, the cumulative rise in food bills since 2020 will have amounted to 28 billion pounds, equivalent to $34.76 billion, outstripping the rise in energy bills, estimated at £25 billion.
“The cost of living crisis isn’t ending, it is just entering a new phase,” Torsten Bell, the research group’s chief executive, wrote in a recent report.
Food isn’t the only driver of inflation. In the U.K., the core rate of inflation—which excludes food and energy—rose to 6.8% in April from 6.2% in March, its highest level since 1992. Core inflation was close to its record high in the eurozone during the same month.
Still, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey told lawmakers Tuesday that food prices now constitute a “fourth shock” to inflation after the bottlenecks that jammed supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in energy prices that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and surprisingly tight labor markets.
Europe’s governments spent heavily on supporting households as energy prices soared. Now they have less room to borrow given the surge in debt since the pandemic struck in 2020.
Some governments—including those of Italy, Spain and Portugal—have cut sales taxes on food products to ease the burden on consumers. Others are leaning on food retailers to keep their prices in check. In March, the French government negotiated an agreement with leading retailers to refrain from price rises if it is possible to do so.
Retailers have also come under scrutiny in Ireland and a number of other European countries. In the U.K., lawmakers have launched an investigation into the entire food supply chain “from farm to fork.”
“Yesterday I had the food producers into Downing Street, and we’ve also been talking to the supermarkets, to the farmers, looking at every element of the supply chain and what we can do to pass on some of the reduction in costs that are coming through to consumers as fast as possible,” U.K. Treasury Chief Jeremy Hunt said during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London.
The government’s Competition and Markets Authority last week said it would take a closer look at retailers.
“Given ongoing concerns about high prices, we are stepping up our work in the grocery sector to help ensure competition is working well,” said Sarah Cardell, who heads the CMA.
Some economists expect that added scrutiny to yield concrete results, assuming retailers won’t want to tarnish their image and will lean on their suppliers to keep prices down.
“With supermarkets now more heavily under the political spotlight, we think it more likely that price momentum in the food basket slows,” said Sanjay Raja, an economist at Deutsche Bank.
It isn’t entirely clear why food prices have risen so fast for so long. In world commodity markets, which set the prices received by farmers, food prices have been falling since April 2022. But raw commodity costs are just one part of the final price. Consumers are also paying for processing, packaging, transport and distribution, and the size of the gap between the farm and the dining table is unusually wide.
The BOE’s Bailey thinks one reason for the bank having misjudged food prices is that food producers entered into longer-term but relatively expensive contracts with fertilizer, energy and other suppliers around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in their eagerness to guarantee availability at a time of uncertainty.
But as the pressures being placed on retailers suggest, some policy makers suspect that an increase in profit margins may also have played a role. Speaking to lawmakers, Bailey was wary of placing any blame on food suppliers.
“It’s a story about rebuilding margins that were squeezed in the early part of last year,” he said.
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