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Vitalik Buterin had a thought-provoking tweet a few days back about interest rates. Lending DAI to Compound offers 11.5% annual interest. US 10 year treasuries offer 1.5%. Why the discrepancy? — Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) August 23, 2019 Today's post explores what goes into determining interest rates, not blockchain stuff. So for those who don't follow the blockchain world, let me get you up to speed by decoding some of the technical-ese in Buterin's tweet. DAI is a version of the U.S. dollar. There are many versions of the dollar. The Fed issues both a paper and an electronic version, Wells Fargo issues its own account-based version, and PayPal does too. But whereas Wells Fargo and PayPal dollars are digital entries in company databases, and Fed paper dollars are circulating bearer notes, DAI is encoded on the Ethereum blockchain. Buterin points out that DAI owners can lend out their U.S. dollar lookalikes on Compound , a lending protocol based on Ethere...

Why can't we create inflation anymore? Maybe it's because money isn't what it used to be. Money used to be like a car; the market expected it to depreciate every day. When we buy a new car we accept a falling resale value because a car provides a recurring flow of services over time; each day it gets us from point a to point b and back. And since these conveniences are large, the market prices cars such that they yield a steady string of capital losses. Money, like cars, used to provide a significant flow of services over time. It was the liquidity instrument par excellence. If a problem popped up, we knew that money was the one item we could rapidly exchange to get whatever goods and services were necessary to cope. Given these characteristics, the market set a price for money such that it lost 2-3% every year. We accepted a sure capital loss because we enjoyed a compensating degree of comfort and relief from having some of the stuff in our wallets. These flows of services...

While I may have taken some jabs at the gold bugs in two recent posts, please don't take that to mean that I have it in for the metal itself. Gold is a fascinating topic with a history that is well worth studying. (See this , for instance). In that vein, what follows is some actual gold analysis. Something weird is happening in gold markets. The future price of gold (its forward price) has fallen below the current gold price. Now in fairness, this isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Over the last year or two, the price of gold one-month in the future has traded below the current, or spot price, a number of times. However, this observation has grown more marked as both the three-month and six-month rates have also recently fallen below the spot price. This degree of inversion is rare. Except for a brief flip in 1999 when near-term forward prices fell below zero for a day or two, future gold has almost always traded for more than current gold. See chart below, which illustrates t...

There's a counterintuitive meme floating around in the blogosphere that quantitative easing doesn't do what we commonly suppose. Somehow QE reduces inflation or causes deflation, rather than increasing inflation. Among others, here are Nick Rowe , Bob Murphy , David Glasner , Stephen Williamson , David Andolfatto , Frances Coppola , and Bill Woolsey discussing the subject. Over the holidays I've been trying to wrap my head around this idea. Here are my rough thoughts, many of which may have been cribbed from the above sources, though I've lost track from which ones. Let's be clear at the outset. Inflation is a rise in the general price level, deflation is a fall in prices. QE is when a central bank purchases assets at market prices with newly issued reserves. In equilibrium, the expected returns on all goods and assets must be equal. If they aren't equal then people will rebalance towards superior yielding assets until the prices of these assets have risen high...

Roaming around the econ blogosphere, I often come across what seems to be a sharp divide between those who think monetary policy is all about the manipulation of interest rates and those who think it comes down to varying the quantity of base money. Either side get touchy when the other accuses its favored monetary policy tool, either rates or quantities, of being irrelevant. From my perch, I'll take the middle road between the two camps and say that both are more-or-less right. Either rates, or quantities, or both at the same time, are sufficient instruments of monetary policy. Actual central banks will typically use some combination of rates and quantities to hit their targets, although this hasn't always been the case. Just to refresh , central banks carry out monetary policy by manipulating the total return that they offer on deposit balances. This return can be broken down into a pecuniary component and a non-pecuniary component . By varying either the pecuniary return, t...

Hand operated rolling mill, for putting the edge impression on to coins I've been reading about the medieval monetary system lately. What a fascinating and complex mechanism, and a good reminder that we should not be using the word medieval as a synonym for primitive or unenlightened. Medieval coinage, I've come to discover, is also a highly confusing subject. A quote that John Munro attributes to Karl Helleiner seems apropos: "There are two fundamental causes of madness amongst students: sexual frustration and the study of coinage." Studying odd, imaginary, or historical monetary systems is rewarding not only because of the aha! moment that understanding provides, but also because of what these systems reveal about our modern one. Readers may have noticed that for the last two months I've been posting rather obsessively on monetary policy, a topic I've typically avoided. Here's my attempt to combine monetary policy and medieval coinage into one post,...

...once the supply of reserves is sufficient to drive the short-term riskless rate to zero..., there is no reason to expect further increases in the supply of reserves to increase aggregate demand any further... Once banks are no longer foregoing any otherwise available pecuniary return in order to hold reserves, there is no reason to believe that reserves continue to supply any liquidity services at the margin; and if they do not, the Mod igliani-Miller reasoning applies once again to open market operations that increase the supply of reserves, just as in the model of Wallace. -Michael Woodford, 2012 .   On a whim, I wrote an email to Michael Woodford last week. Woodford, a macroeconomist at Colombia University, is the authour of Interest and Prices ( pdf ), an important contribution to modern monetary policy. I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been able to work my way through his book—too few words and too many equations. But I have read two excellent papers by him. ...

Don Randi Trio +1 at the Baked Potato , Poppy Records, 1971. [ link ] In this post I'll argue that: 1. When it comes to financial assets, the hot potato effect is irrelevant. 2. The hot potato effect is born the moment we begin to talk about non-financial instruments — things you can touch and consume, like gold or cows or houses or whatnot. 3. Because central bank reserves are simultaneously financial assets and a tangible consumables, they are capable of generating a hot potato effect. 4. The moment that central bank money ceases to be valued as a consumer good, its hot potato effect dies. Here's a short illustration of the hot potato effect that should serve as my definition of the term. Imagine that a gold miner finds several huge gold nuggets and quietly brings them to town to sell. The gold miner approaches the town's merchant with an offer to exchange gold for supplies, but at current prices the merchant is already happy with the size of his gold holdings. He wil...

Let's not get carried away by the idea that central banks set overnight interest rates. Central banks exercise direct control over the economy by pushing down on one shiny red button, the convenience yield on reserves . By modifying the convenience yield, a central banker nudges agents to either flee from reserves or flock to them. This causes a change in the purchasing power of reserves, the mirror image of which is the general price level. So how do overnight interest rates like the fed funds rate figure into the picture? Reserves are scarce and convenient, so agents will only part with them if they are compensated with an adequate amount of "rent". The higher the marginal convenience of reserves, the more rent they require. The market in which reserves are rented out for very short periods of time, usually 24 hours, is referred to as the overnight market. By conceptualizing monetary policy this way, it immediately becomes apparent that overnight interest rates are litt...

The lever on which a central bank pushes or pulls in order to keep its target variable (say inflation) on track is commonly referred to as the central bank's policy instrument . The policy instrument is the variable that is under the direct control of a central banker. The classic story is that the pre-2008 Fed conducted monetary policy via its policy instrument of choice—the federal funds rate. By pushing the fed funds lever up or down, the Fed could change the entire spectrum of market interest rates. I think this is wrong. The fed funds rate was never the Fed's actual policy instrument. Now this isn't a novel claim. Market monetarists tend to say the same thing. According to folks like Nick Rowe, the quantity of money has always been the Fed's true policy instrument. The fed funds rate was little more than a useful shortcut (a communications device ) adopted by the Fed to convey to the public what it intended to do. I'm sympathetic to the market monetarist's ...