In Defense Of Bitcoin Hoarding

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Foundation of Economic Education,

In Internet slang, they are called the HODLers, the people who are clinging to their Bitcoin and refusing to spend it. Instead, they just refresh their wallet apps, feeling richer by day while deferring consumption. Many of these burgeoning millionaires live like paupers. I’ve met many of them: all over the U.S., in Israel, in Brazil. They believe that every dollar they spend today is two dollars they won’t make in a few months. Probably they are right.

Bitcoin is undergoing a historic deflation, which simply means that its value is growing relative to the goods and services it can purchase.

This is in contrast to inflation, in which the value of the currency falls relative to its purchasing power. Inflation inspires spending – better to get rid of the money while it is more valuable. Deflation inspires saving – better to keep it so that your wealth rises over time.

So there is nothing selfish, strange, or weird about holding an asset that is rising in value. It would be irrational to do otherwise. And there is nothing odd about spending like mad in an inflation either. Our expectations of the future determine what we do today in every life and especially in monetary economics.

Some Money! 

This tendency to hold rather than spend is giving rise to a new claim. Bitcoin isn’t really a viable medium exchange, they say. You can’t buy a sandwich with it. Few people are paid in it. Adoption in the retail sector is slow. The total market capitalization is $219 billion and yet the trade volume nowhere near reflects that.

And it is true that most of the big money people are just holding it. James Mackintosh, writing in the Wall Street Journal, summarizes the conclusion: “It has become a vehicle for hoarding by libertarians for gambling by hordes of speculators attracted to its wild price swings.”

I’m looking now at the total market capitalization of the entire sector of cryptoassets: it approaches $400 billion. That is larger than the market cap of JP Morgan, by the way. That valuation is in private hands, growing in value at incredible rates. It’s risen 1,000% in 2017, and many people are predicting much higher growth in 2018.

The Implications

Under old-style Keynesian theory, economic growth is driven by consumer spending, not saving, so anyone who is hoarding money under the mattress is holding back progress. Hoarders are the enemy. “Every such attempt to save more by reducing consumption will so affect incomes,” wrote J.M Keynes, “that the attempt necessarily defeats itself.” He popularized what became known as the “Paradox of Thrift.”

It’s supposed to be counterintuitive. You think that saving up for the future is a good thing. Whoops, you are hurting others and, in the long run, hurting yourself. You should be spending, even going into debt to spend.

But sometimes “counterintuitive” is just wrong. That is the case here. There is no paradox. The intuition is right. Thrift is a good thing, on the individual level or for the whole society. Deferring consumption is the necessary precondition to permit saving. Saving is never wasteful. It’s true that infinite saving is pointless but that’s not how this works.

You are always saving for something. The end of saving is eventual consumption in some form. More importantly for economic growth, saving is the precondition for investment. Investment is what extends the complexity of the structure of production. This leads to employment, expansion of the division of labor, and the eventual rise of wealth.

 Consider the classic case of Crusoe on the island. Every day he is out catching fish to eat. He doesn’t have time to weave a net because he is always fishing with a pole. But at some point, he realizes that he could catch more with a net. In order to gain time, he has to stop fishing. So he saves up a few days of fish so he can eat without fishing, during which time he weaves a net. That net allows him to multiply his catch by 10 times. The deferring of today’s consumption for great overall wealth later is what makes progress possible.

The Policy of Pillage

Once the wrong (Keynesian) theory took hold in the 1930s, it became national policy to incentivize consumption over spending. Gold was confiscated from people. Government spending, it was believed, would goose the economy to make up for the ability or willingness of people to spend. The gold standard itself was destroyed in order to build a monetary system that could be inflationary – so that the money would be worth less in the future than it is today, thereby motivating the desire to spend.

This whole policy became a disaster for economic growth. After World War II, the US underwent a huge expansion as a result of the hoarding that occurred throughout the Depression and the War, and this was despite (and not because of) federal policy.

After the initial boost in economic growth, the Federal Reserve began its inflationary path. The personal savings rate peaked at 15% but then savers were blindsided by a wicked hyperinflation that hit in the late seventies, pillaging the savings that had been built up for the last two decades. No surprise: personal saving fell and fell, incomes flattened, and economic growth became ever more of an uphill climb. In our own times, inflation has been fixed but now we deal with near-zero interest rates, which harms saving as well.

As you can see in the chart, the economic crisis of 2008 traumatized a generation to the point that people began to save at much greater rates. No more would be trust the system to take care of them. It was exactly at this point that Bitcoin came into being, and created something that is really the opposite of the dollar: a currency designed to rise in value over time.

Many of the metaphors surrounding Bitcoin were drawn from the old-world gold standard. We speak of mining, for example, and proof of work (think of miners wearing jeans, panning gold from stream or banging picks into mountains). As with gold, there is a limit on the amount that can be created. And there are multiple levels of standards to determine authenticity and truth in accounting. In some ways, Bitcoin was invented to be the ultimate anti-Keynesian monetary praxis.

Up with Thrift

Now we see the results. Bitcoiners are HODLers. They save. They hoard. They have turned against consumption in favor of saving. I see it myself all around me. Young people who are invested in Bitcoin turn down luxury consumption. They don’t own cars. They bike and walk. They don’t spend big on dinners. They live off cheap groceries. They know that everything they consume today eats into their capacity for consumption, investment, and building wealth for the future.

So much for the Paradox of Thrift. Bitcoin is about the Virtue of Thrift. The pundits can decry it all day. Bitcoin doesn’t care. What’s more, you don’t need economic theory to understand this. You only have to follow the money.

If you ever despair of the future, just consider how much capital is currently being built up in the crypto sector. There will come a time, maybe in five to 15 years, when all this deferred consumption is going to be unleashed on the world economy in the form of real capital to build wealth and prosperity. And consider too: this is not about one economy, not about one nation. It’s about the whole world, capital and prosperity without borders.

The pundits can fulminate all they want. Technology doesn’t care.

UBS Makes A Striking Discovery: Ex-Energy, US GDP Growth Is The Slowest Since 2010

Last week, UBS released its Global Economic Outlook forecast for 2018-2019, which coming in at over 220 pages and with more than 270 charts, is rather "difficult to summarize" as UBS" chief economist Arend Kapteyn snarkily notes. Still, as Kapteyn helpfully summarizes, the 3 charts below capture some of the main themes from the report, the first of which is a doozy and crushes the Trump "economic recovery" narrative .

Message 1: The 2017 global growth acceleration was largely (70%) a commodity bounce. This applies even to the US which was 20% of the global growth improvement but, as the 1st chart below shows, it was entirely energy investment. Once you strip that out "underlying" growth is only 1% or so (ex inventories) - the slowest since 2010 - and a significant amount of rotation now needs to take place from energy to non-energy investment just to sustain the current growth pace. The surveys suggest that is possible but the surveys have also consistently overstated growth so far. As Kapteyn adds, due to "skepticism about that rotation is why we are about 20bp below consensus for US growth next year." It also means that contrary to conventional wisdom, the US consumer has not only not turned the corner, but continues to retrench and with the personal savings rate plunging to 10 years lows, there is little hope that personal consumption expenditures will be a significant driver of US growth for the foreseeable future.

More details from UBS:

In Figure 5 we show what we think the contributions to US headline growth have been from the energy sector (structures and equipment investment combined). This is depicted as the grey area. The blue line is headline growth (ex-inventories) and the red line is headline growth minus the energy sector investment contribution, which we call "underlying growth ex-energy". Taken at face value, the chart suggests underlying US growth has been slowing dramatically, from about 2.6% in 2015 to only around 1% in 2017. We do not quite interpret it that way, and view it more as a story of stability and "adding-up constraints". The economy can only produce so much, and when one sector is strong (energy), it absorbs labour disproportionately, while other sectors pull back. Furthermore, when investment is weak the consumer accelerates. US growth post-crisis has hovered around a 2% average and nothing in our recession probability models suggests that there is anything ominous going on. But the point of Figure 5 is to show that as energy investment runs out of steam, other sectors will need to accelerate 

significantly to maintain the current pace of growth.

Message 2: The one (developed market) country that no one thinks can generate inflation (Japan) is likely to create more inflation than any other developed market.

"Japan is cyclically 2 years ahead of most other countries and it has a textbook Phillips curve with higher Phillips curve wage and price coefficients than all the other countries we looked at. The labour market is already extraordinarily tight."

If unemployment goes to 2.5% by end-2018 UBS sees (BoJ) core inflation going up towards 1.5% (70bp above consensus) and Yield Curve Control starting to get tweakend (10y  JGB to drift higher.

Message 3 : The Fed is going to $4 trillion in US Treasuries by 2025 even absent a recession, $1.5 trillion more than they hold today. The is because the Fed will hit a trough determined by the "floor system" for monetary policy coupled with some other balance sheet changes, of around $ 3 ¼ trillion by mid-2020 and currency in circulation growth then starts to drive the dynamics of the balance sheet. If they still want to roll off the MBS book they need to buy UST. That is part of the reason that the aggregate size of the G3 central balance sheet by 2025 will still be roughly as large as where it was late last year. And that"s with some fairly aggressive assumptions about BoJ balance sheet roll-off. So good for term premium.

Brits Have Suddenly Stopped Buying Cars

 Unless the press or Robert Mueller come up with a smoking gun, a dead body, and a cache of rubles, we can assume Donald Trump will be our president for a full four-year term. But Trump as President continues to sabotage himself. He risks becoming irrelevant because no one will take him seriously. Which might be a good thing.

U.S. Restaurant Industry Stuck In Worst Collapse Since 2009

Shortly after we reported that the "restaurant industry hasn"t reported a positive month since February 2016", we can add one more month to the running total: according to the latest update from Black Box Intelligence"s TDn2K research, in July both same-store sales and foot traffic declined once again, and this time the slide was more pronounced, tumbling by -2.8% and -4.7% compared to declines of "only" -1% and -3% in June, respectively, in the process extending the stretch of year-over-year declines for the US restaurant industry to 17 consecutive months - the longest stretch since the financial crisis.

Source: @GS_CapSF

Sales rose in only 12 markets while declining in 183 with the Midwest - the worst region in the US - suffering a 3.6% and 5.2% decline in sales and traffic respectively, while even the best region, California", posted a decline in both sales (-0.7%) and traffic (-3.6%).

Source: TDn2K

Unlike last month, not even Black Box Intelligence"s TDn2K research tried to spin the data, noting that the "sales rebound optimism was short lived" as "July restaurant sales tumbled."

“July proved to be a tough month for chain restaurants,” said Victor Fernandez, Executive Director of Insights and Knowledge for TDn2K.

“Based on recent trends, we were cautiously optimistic that the tide was turning a bit, especially since brands were comparing against weaker comps in 2016.” But not so much any more.

According to Black Box, calculated on a two-year basis, sales in July 2017 were down -4.2% compared with July of 2015, in other words there has been no growth in over two years. The data is even worse for same-store traffic, which was down -8.7% for that same period. These are the weakest two-year growth rates in over three years, additional evidence that the industry has not reversed the downward trend that began in early 2015.

In light of the surprisingly poor monthly results, the consultant appear to have not only given up on any recovery in the restaurant sector, but are now extrapolating the weakness to the broader economy.

"While the economy keeps growing at a moderate pace and job gains remain strong, the consumer seems to be on vacation – literally and figuratively,” said Joel Naroff, President of Naroff Economic Advisors and TDn2K economist whose Industry Snapshot tracks sales at 27,000 restaurant units from 155 brands, generating $67 billion in annual revenue. That’s about 10% of total “eating and drinking places” revenues as tracked by the Commerce Department

“One of the clearest indicators that households are spending cautiously is the softening of big-ticket purchases. In July, for the eleventh month out of the last twelve, vehicle sales were below the rate posted the year before. Home sales, while still trending up, are now expanding at a decelerating pace.”

While food and alcohol sales were down, prices once again rose, with the the average amount per check rising 1.8% in July, which once again was not enough to make up for the decline in customer count, confirming that restaurants have little to no pricing power to even stay up with inflation. Black Box adds that the growth in check averages has slowed in recent months "as brands fight the tide of continuing traffic declines."

Check increases in 2015 and 2016 were largely an effort to maintain margins in the face of higher labor costs. The slowdown in check growth may be a combination of value platforms and increased deal activity aimed at increasing visitation frequency. It may also be recognition that top-line increases are under more scrutiny despite the potential impact to operating margins. Given that grocery prices have been dropping year over year, it is no surprise that restaurants have been compelled to review their value proposition

More troubling, Naroff pointed out something we first observed two weeks ago: the dramatic revision lower in the US personal savings rate, which wiped out $250 billion from what the Department of Commerce had previously calculated was a healthy personal savings backdrop:

“Households are currently maintaining their lifestyles by reducing their savings rate and that is likely restraining spending on discretionary goods. We may have to wait until the fall or early winter, assuming wage gains accelerate by then, to see any pick up in restaurant sales.”

Here, as Wolf Richter laconically adds, "everyone is waiting for wage increases for the lower 80% of the wage earners that will finally outgrow inflation. That’s all it would take to crank up the economy, and even the restaurant business. People have been waiting for years for these real wage increases. But it’s just not happening."

Furthermore, it goes without saying that the above assumption is a substantial problem for the roughly half of American households who have no savings in which to "dip" and fund discretionary purchases.

Meanwhile, as the vast majority of the US population struggles to make ends meet and digs into their meager savings, the far smaller group of high wage earners continue to spend generously at fine dininf establishments. Indeed, fine dining was the only segment up in July (0.4 percent) even as upscale casual was down fractionally. Still, the slowdown in fast casual sales noted in the past continued in July, as did softness for quick service. While much of fast casual’s headwinds are a result of rapid segment growth, the steady performance decline in lower PPA segments will be important to follow. Both segments outperformed the industry in 2015 and 2016, but trail through July of this year.

As reported last month, the pain among chain restaurants is due to a combination of factors, including:

• The surge of independent restaurants, from high-end to delis.


• “Grab-and-go” prepared foods available at every grocery store.


• VC-funded meal replacement kits, such as Blue Apron, one of the most anticipated IPOs this year that has now totally crashed.


• Convenience stores and food trucks

Meanwhile, as the government reported recently, June sales for "food service and drinking places" held at $56.0 billion, were flat with November 2016, a period of 8 months without growth. They were down 0.6% from January but still up 1.7% year-over-year. This weakness in nominal sales is also evident in the latest retail sales data which has been on a steady decline for the past two years.

... a fact corroborated by Bank of America"s internal spending data

Ironically, in addition to challenges from falling guest counts, the inability to pass through price increases, rising competition and declining overall spending, strong challenges continue to confront restaurants in both staffing and retaining enough qualified workers.   We say ironically, because as we showed after the latest jobs report, restaurant/fast food/waiter/bartender hiring remains the only strong spot in the US labor market. As the chart below shows, starting in March of 2010 and continuing through June of 2017, there have been 89 consecutive month of payroll gains for America"s waiters and bartenders, an unprecedented feat and an all time record for any job category. Putting this number in context, total job gains for the sector over the past 7 years have amounted to 2.4 million or over 14% of the total 16.7 million in new jobs created by the US over the past 89 months. Needless to say, these jobs fall within leisure and hospitality, that sector pays the worst wages, an average of $13.35 an hour, and $331.08 a week

And yet, according to BlackBox, restaurant operators are pessimistic regarding the difficulty of recruiting in the upcoming quarters. According to TDn2K’s People Report, 63 percent of companies reported an increase in difficulty recruiting qualified employees to staff their restaurants during the second quarter of 2016. Additionally, the expectations component of the index predicts continued job growth for the industry, with 47 percent of restaurant companies anticipating an increase in their number of hourly jobs. 42 percent reported an expected increase in their net number of restaurant management jobs.

As a result, retention continues to be a major challenge for the industry. Both restaurant management and hourly employee turnover increased again during June. However, the latest indicators may be hinting that increasing turnover rates are beginning to taper off. Still, even if turnover rates reach a plateau at their current levels, which is likely to be the best case scenario, they will remain at record high levels and continue to be a source of headaches for restaurant operators forced to keep raising wages to retain waiters and bartenders.

Putting it all together, we give the last word to Wolf Richter who summarizes the unsustainable situation as follows: "so credit card debt, at $1.02 trillion, has hit an all-time high. Auto loan balances, at $1.13 trillion, have far surpassed any prior all-time high. Housing costs are eating up an ever larger share of incomes. Healthcare costs are soaring. Households with kids in college are paying a big price. Many millennials, even those with good jobs, are buckling under their student loans, which have skyrocketed 164% over the past ten years to $1.45 trillion. And inflation-adjusted discretionary spending such as for restaurants by people at the lower 80% of the income scale is taking a hit. Something has to give. It’s the description of a messed-up economy."

Desperate Americans Are Saving The Least Since The Start Of The Last Two Recessions

The last two times Americans were saving this little in order to maintain their lifetsyles, the US economy was in recession.

According to newly revised government data, Bloomberg reports that American households scaled back their pace of savings to the lowest level in nine years at the end of 2016 as the growth of their wages and salaries slowed.

The personal savings rate was 3.6% in the fourth quarter of 2016, down from a previously published 4.9%, according to somewhat dramatic annual revisions to gross domestic product and related data, released Friday by the Commerce Department. That’s the lowest reading since a 2.8% rate in the final three months of 2007, just as the U.S. was entering a recession.

The saving rate recovered somewhat in the first three months of the year, to 3.9% after a previously reported 5.1% . In the second quarter, it was little changed at 3.8%.

The lower fourth-quarter rate was one of the bigger changes in the government’s annual update of GDP, and paints a quite different picture from the "recovery" images put forward by the Obama administration.

Instead of recovery, as Bloomberg notes, the figures suggest that consumers were saving less to maintain their spending entering 2017. That’s significant because consumption accounts for more than two-thirds of gross domestic product, and the revisions may help explain some of the slowdown in first-quarter purchases.

An Entrepreneur Talks Iran

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

I chatted with Mahdi Kazemzadeh who was recently introduced to me by a mutual friend.

Mahdi is the founder and managing director of Afraz Advisers, a firm providing analytical tools and data services on the Iranian oil and gas industry. Their clients are international companies navigating the Iranian oil and gas industry as well as institutional and private investment funds.

I wanted to talk with Mahdi for a number of reasons, chief among them getting a better understanding of things from the perspective of a Western educated entrepreneur working on the ground in Iran.

Why Iran?

Unless it turns into ground zero for the next mushroom cloud, you"re staring at a country with a massive middle class, great demographics, very high level of education and a very high savings rate. It"s literally the flip side of the West!

I recorded the conversation and after editing out, ahem, private for-your-eyes-only sections I"ve got the finished "product" for you to listen in on.

Highlights Mahdi and I discuss:

• Why Iran could be "yuuuge" for investors (and why the emphasis on "could be")


• A boots-on-the-ground perspective on the effect of the Trump election on Iran.


• Is Iran only an energy play or much more?


• Who"s actually aligning with Iran on the ground (and how does that reflect in various financing projects)?


• Why is Mahdi moving his business to Asia?


• And much more.

(click on the image to listen to the podcast)

Enjoy!

- Chris

"Global investors are never going to see a country of this size and sophistication open up again." — Charles Robertson, Chief Economist, Renaissance Capital

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Disposable Income Per Capita Grows At Weakest Rate Since 2014

For the 3rd month in a row, annual US spending growth has outpaced annual income growth (+4.2% spending vs +3.5% income).

However, both spending and income growth MoM disappointed (with incomes unchanged MoM - the weakest since Feb 2016).

Combine these two and the savings rate in November plunged to its lowest since March 2015.

Finally we note that Disposable Real Personal Income per Capita dropped from 39,292 to 39,247, increasing just 1.5% YoY - the weakest growth since 2014.