The Statistical Physics of Stock Markets. Thought of the Day 143.0

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The externalist view argues that we can make sense of, and profit from stock markets’ behavior, or at least few crucial properties of it, by crunching numbers and looking for patterns and regularities in certain sets of data. The notion of data, hence, is a key element in such an understanding and the quantitative side of the problem is prominent even if it does not mean that a qualitative analysis is ignored. The point here that the outside view maintains that it provides a better understanding than the internalist view. To this end, it endorses a functional perspective on finance and stock markets in particular.

The basic idea of the externalist view is that there are general properties and behavior of stock markets that can be detected and studied through mathematical lens, and they do not depend so much on contextual or domain-specific factors. The point at stake here is that the financial systems can be studied and approached at different scales, and it is virtually impossible to produce all the equations describing at a micro level all the objects of the system and their relations. So, in response, this view focuses on those properties that allow us to get an understanding of the behavior of the systems at a global level without having to produce a detailed conceptual and mathematical account of the inner ‘machinery’ of the system. Hence the two roads: The first one is to embrace an emergentist view on stock market, that is a specific metaphysical, ontological, and methodological thesis, while the second one is to embrace a heuristic view, that is the idea that the choice to focus on those properties that are tractable by the mathematical models is a pure problem-solving option.

A typical view of the externalist approach is the one provided, for instance, by statistical physics. In describing collective behavior, this discipline neglects all the conceptual and mathematical intricacies deriving from a detailed account of the inner, individual, and at micro level functioning of a system. Concepts such as stochastic dynamics, self-similarity, correlations (both short- and long-range), and scaling are tools to get this aim. Econophysics is a stock example in this sense: it employs methods taken from mathematics and mathematical physics in order to detect and forecast the driving forces of stock markets and their critical events, such as bubbles, crashes and their tipping points. Under this respect, markets are not ‘dark boxes’: you can see their characteristics from the outside, or better you can see specific dynamics that shape the trends of stock markets deeply and for a long time. Moreover, these dynamics are complex in the technical sense. This means that this class of behavior is such to encompass timescales, ontology, types of agents, ecologies, regulations, laws, etc. and can be detected, even if not strictly predictable. We can focus on the stock markets as a whole, on few of their critical events, looking at the data of prices (or other indexes) and ignoring all the other details and factors since they will be absorbed in these global dynamics. So this view provides a look at stock markets such that not only they do not appear as a unintelligible casino where wild gamblers face each other, but that shows the reasons and the properties of a systems that serve mostly as a means of fluid transactions that enable and ease the functioning of free markets.

Moreover the study of complex systems theory and that of stock markets seem to offer mutual benefits. On one side, complex systems theory seems to offer a key to understand and break through some of the most salient stock markets’ properties. On the other side, stock markets seem to provide a ‘stress test’ of the complexity theory. Didier Sornette expresses the analogies between stock markets and phase transitions, statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, and disordered systems mold the view from outside:

Take our personal life. We are not really interested in knowing in advance at what time we will go to a given store or drive to a highway. We are much more interested in forecasting the major bifurcations ahead of us, involving the few important things, like health, love, and work, that count for our happiness. Similarly, predicting the detailed evolution of complex systems has no real value, and the fact that we are taught that it is out of reach from a fundamental point of view does not exclude the more interesting possibility of predicting phases of evolutions of complex systems that really count, like the extreme events. It turns out that most complex systems in natural and social sciences do exhibit rare and sudden transitions that occur over time intervals that are short compared to the characteristic time scales of their posterior evolution. Such extreme events express more than anything else the underlying “forces” usually hidden by almost perfect balance and thus provide the potential for a better scientific understanding of complex systems.

Phase transitions, critical points, extreme events seem to be so pervasive in stock markets that they are the crucial concepts to explain and, in case, foresee. And complexity theory provides us a fruitful reading key to understand their dynamics, namely their generation, growth and occurrence. Such a reading key proposes a clear-cut interpretation of them, which can be explained again by means of an analogy with physics, precisely with the unstable position of an object. Complexity theory suggests that critical or extreme events occurring at large scale are the outcome of interactions occurring at smaller scales. In the case of stock markets, this means that, unlike many approaches that attempt to account for crashes by searching for ‘mechanisms’ that work at very short time scales, complexity theory indicates that crashes have causes that date back months or year before it. This reading suggests that it is the increasing, inner interaction between the agents inside the markets that builds up the unstable dynamics (typically the financial bubbles) that eventually ends up with a critical event, the crash. But here the specific, final step that triggers the critical event: the collapse of the prices is not the key for its understanding: a crash occurs because the markets are in an unstable phase and any small interference or event may trigger it. The bottom line: the trigger can be virtually any event external to the markets. The real cause of the crash is its overall unstable position, the proximate ‘cause’ is secondary and accidental. Or, in other words, a crash could be fundamentally endogenous in nature, whilst an exogenous, external, shock is simply the occasional triggering factors of it. The instability is built up by a cooperative behavior among traders, who imitate each other (in this sense is an endogenous process) and contribute to form and reinforce trends that converge up to a critical point.

The main advantage of this approach is that the system (the market) would anticipate the crash by releasing precursory fingerprints observable in the stock market prices: the market prices contain information on impending crashes and this implies that:

if the traders were to learn how to decipher and use this information, they would act on it and on the knowledge that others act on it; nevertheless, the crashes would still probably happen. Our results suggest a weaker form of the “weak efficient market hypothesis”, according to which the market prices contain, in addition to the information generally available to all, subtle information formed by the global market that most or all individual traders have not yet learned to decipher and use. Instead of the usual interpretation of the efficient market hypothesis in which traders extract and consciously incorporate (by their action) all information contained in the market prices, we propose that the market as a whole can exhibit “emergent” behavior not shared by any of its constituents.

In a nutshell, the critical events emerge in a self-organized and cooperative fashion as the macro result of the internal and micro interactions of the traders, their imitation and mirroring.

 

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Financial Fragility in the Margins. Thought of the Day 114.0

If micro-economic crisis is caused by the draining of liquidity from an individual company (or household), macro-economic crisis or instability, in the sense of a reduction in the level of activity in the economy as a whole, is usually associated with an involuntary outflow of funds from companies (or households) as a whole. Macro-economic instability is a ‘real’ economic phenomenon, rather than a monetary contrivance, the sense in which it is used, for example, by the International Monetary Fund to mean price inflation in the non-financial economy. Neo-classical economics has a methodological predilection for attributing all changes in economic activity to relative price changes, specifically the price changes that undoubtedly accompany economic fluctuations. But there is sufficient evidence to indicate that falls in economic activity follow outflows of liquidity from the industrial and commercial company sector. Such outflows then lead to the deflation of economic activity that is the signal feature of economic recession and depression.

Let us start with a consideration of how vulnerable financial futures market themselves are to illiquidity, since this would indicate whether the firms operating in the market are ever likely to need to realize claims elsewhere in order to meet their liabilities to the market. Paradoxically, the very high level of intra-broker trading is a safety mechanism for the market, since it raises the velocity of circulation of whatever liquidity there is in the market: traders with liabilities outside the market are much more likely to have claims against other traders to set against those claims. This may be illustrated by considering the most extreme case of a futures market dominated by intra-broker trading, namely a market in which there are only two dealers who buy and sell financial futures contracts only between each other as rentiers, in other words for a profit which may include their premium or commission. On the expiry date of the contracts, conventionally set at three-monthly intervals in actual financial futures markets, some of these contracts will be profitable, some will be loss-making. Margin trading, however, requires all the profitable contracts to be fully paid up in order for their profit to be realized. The trader whose contracts are on balance profitable therefore cannot realize his profits until he has paid up his contracts with the other broker. The other broker will return the money in paying up his contracts, leaving only his losses to be raised by an inflow of money. Thus the only net inflow of money that is required is the amount of profit (or loss) made by the traders. However, an accommodating gross inflow is needed in the first instance in order to make the initial margin payments and settle contracts so that the net profit or loss may be realized.

The existence of more traders, and the system for avoiding counterparty risk commonly found in most futures market, whereby contracts are made with a central clearing house, introduce sequencing complications which may cause problems: having a central clearing house avoids the possibility that one trader’s default will cause other traders to default on their obligations. But it also denies traders the facility of giving each other credit, and thereby reduces the velocity of circulation of whatever liquidity is in the market. Having to pay all obligations in full to the central clearing house increases the money (or gross inflow) that broking firms and investors have to put into the market as margin payments or on settlement days. This increases the risk that a firm with large net liabilities in the financial futures market will be obliged to realize assets in other markets to meet those liabilities. In this way, the integrity of the market is protected by increasing the effective obligations of all traders, at the expense of potentially unsettling claims on other markets.

This risk is enhanced by the trading of rentiers, or banks and entrepreneurs operating as rentiers, hedging their futures contracts in other financial markets. However, while such incidents generate considerable excitement around the markets at the time of their occurrence, there is little evidence that they could cause involuntary outflows from the corporate sector on such a scale as to produce recession in the real economy. This is because financial futures are still used by few industrial and commercial companies, and their demand for financial derivatives instruments is limited by the relative expense of these instruments and their own exposure to changes in financial parameters (which may more easily be accommodated by holding appropriate stocks of liquid assets, i.e., liquidity preference). Therefore, the future of financial futures depends largely on the interest in them of the contemporary rentiers in pension, insurance and various other forms of investment funds. Their interest, in turn, depends on how those funds approach their ‘maturity’.

However, the decline of pension fund surpluses poses important problems for the main securities markets of the world where insurance and pension funds are now the dominant investors, as well as for more peripheral markets like emerging markets, venture capital and financial futures. A contraction in the net cash inflow of investment funds will be reflected in a reduction in the funds that they are investing, and a greater need to realize assets when a change in investment strategy is undertaken. In the main securities markets of the world, a reduction in the ‘new money’ that pension and insurance funds are putting into those securities markets will slow down the rate of growth of the prices in those markets. How such a fall in the institutions’ net cash inflow will affect the more marginal markets, such as emerging markets, venture capital and financial futures, depends on how institutional portfolios are managed in the period of declining net contributions inflows.

In general, investment managers in their own firms, or as employees of merchant or investment banks, compete to manage institutions’ funds. Such competition is likely to increase as investment funds approach ‘maturity’, i.e., as their cash outflows to investors, pensioners or insurance policyholders, rises faster than their cash inflow from contributions and premiums, so that there are less additional funds to be managed. In principle, this should not affect financial futures markets, in the first instance, since, as argued above, the short-term nature of their instruments and the large proportion in their business of intra-market trade makes them much less dependent on institutional cash inflows. However, this does not mean that they would be unaffected by changes in the portfolio preferences of investment funds in response to lower returns from the main securities markets. Such lower returns make financial investments like financial futures, venture capital and emerging markets, which are more marginal because they are so hazardous, more attractive to normally conservative fund managers. Investment funds typically put out sections of portfolios to specialist fund managers who are awarded contracts to manage a section according to the soundness of their reputation and the returns that they have made hitherto in portfolios under their management. A specialist fund manager reporting high, but not abnormal, profits in a fund devoted to financial futures, is likely to attract correspondingly more funds to manage when returns are lower in the main markets’ securities, even if other investors in financial futures experienced large losses. In this way, the maturing of investment funds could cause an increased inflow of rentier funds into financial futures markets.

An inflow of funds into a financial market entails an increase in liabilities to the rentiers outside the market supplying those funds. Even if profits made in the market as a whole also increase, so too will losses. While brokers commonly seek to hedge their positions within the futures market, rentiers have much greater possibilities of hedging their contracts in another market, where they have assets. An inflow into futures markets means that on any settlement day there will therefore be larger net outstanding claims against individual banks or investment funds in respect of their financial derivatives contracts. With margin trading, much larger gross financial inflows into financial futures markets will be required to settle maturing contracts. Some proportion of this will require the sale of securities in other markets. But if liquidity in integrated cash markets for securities is reduced by declining net inflows into pension funds, a failure to meet settlement obligations in futures markets is the alternative to forced liquidation of other assets. In this way futures markets will become more fragile.

Moreover, because of the hazardous nature of financial futures, high returns for an individual firm are difficult to sustain. Disappointment is more likely to be followed by the transfer of funds to management in some other peripheral market that shows a temporary high profit. While this should not affect capacity utilization in the futures market, because of intra-market trade, it is likely to cause much more volatile trading, and an increase in the pace at which new instruments are introduced (to attract investors) and fall into disuse. Pension funds whose returns fall below those required to meet future liabilities because of such instability would normally be required to obtain additional contributions from employers and employees. The resulting drain on the liquidity of the companies affected would cause a reduction in their fixed capital investment. This would be a plausible mechanism for transmitting fragility in the financial system into full-scale decline in the real economy.

The proliferation of financial futures markets has only had been marginally successful in substituting futures contracts for Keynesian liquidity preference as a means of accommodating uncertainty. A closer look at the agents in those markets and their market mechanisms indicates that the price system in them is flawed and trading hazardous risks in them adds to uncertainty rather than reducing it. The hedging of financial futures contracts in other financial markets means that the resulting forced liquidations elsewhere in the financial system are a real source of financial instability that is likely to worsen as slower growth in stock markets makes speculative financial investments appear more attractive. Capital-adequacy regulations are unlikely to reduce such instability, and may even increase it by increasing the capital committed to trading in financial futures. Such regulations can also create an atmosphere of financial security around these markets that may increase unstable speculative flows of liquidity into the markets. For the economy as a whole, the real problems are posed by the involvement of non-financial companies in financial futures markets. With the exception of a few spectacular scandals, non-financial companies have been wary of using financial futures, and it is important that they should continue to limit their interest in financial futures markets. Industrial and commercial companies, which generate their own liquidity through trade and production and hence have more limited financial assets to realize in order to meet financial futures liabilities in times of distress, are more vulnerable to unexpected outflows of liquidity in proportion to their increased exposure to financial markets. The liquidity which they need to set aside to meet such unexpected liabilities inevitably means a reduced commitment to investment in fixed capital and new technology.

Modern Monetary Theory. Thought of the Day 92.0

Attempts within Economics to develop a more complete theory of the banking system are broadly categorised under ”exogenous” theories where deposits create loans, and ”endogenous” or post-Keynesian theories where lending creates deposits. Interestingly many endogenous money authors continue the tradition set by Keynes of omitting loan repayment and default, and there seems to be a general aversion to presenting the historical context of a system whose rules vary considerably between time and place. The focus on credit also frequently overlooks the role of money in establishing the price level, and thereby providing a critical economic signal, and the unfortunate reality that credit and money are directly linked within the banking system is rarely addressed simultaneously. Although Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis does consider the role of financial debt relationships relative to financial activity, it does not consider the operational mechanics of the banking system in sufficient detail to uncover the intrinsic mechanisms for this instability.

Both theories of money contain accurate observations of some aspects of the banking systems’ behaviour, but neither offers a complete system analysis, and in a recursively defined system to debate whether loans create deposits or deposits create loans is quintessentially tautologous. Further problems are created by their inclusion within economic theories of supply and demand for money and credit, and definitions of money as debt that can be traced to the origins of money as bills of account. This is particularly noticeable with the proponents of monetary circuit theory and the idea that there is a demand for money and credit which determines the system’s behaviour. Certainly historically there have been periods where physical shortages of money caused significant problems. However one of the considerable advantages of the banking system was that it alleviated these issues, and discussion in particular of the demand for money tends to overlook the interaction with the price level that occurs when the money supply itself increases. Debates over the demand for credit also fail to consider that the system itself provides a very clear signal when insufficient demand occurs (it contracts), absent which behaviour it can be safely assumed that limits on loan supply are dominating.

Even a simple simulation of the textbook model with loan repayments suggests that this is a system whose behaviour is sensitive to many conditions, and it is probably this failure to consider the multiple and separate causes of gross macro-economic features such as price deflation and credit expansion originating from seemingly minor differences between banking systems that have created significant problems for any purely empirically based analysis. Determining how any given currency’s banking system will behave over time is challenging, complete and testable descriptions of their regulatory frameworks are not currently provided by any central bank. There is also considerable confusion in the monetary statistics themselves, with no consistency in either the measures being used, or the components used within them. The definition of M2 used for the Euro for example, is significantly different from that provided by the Federal Reserve Banks for the US dollar, and differs again from that used in other countries.

Austrian Economics. Some Ruminations. Part 1.

Keynes argued that by stimulating spending on outputs, consumption, goods and services, one could increase productive investment to meet that spending, thus adding to the capital stock and increasing employment. Hayek, on the other hand furiously accused Keynes of insufficient attention to the nature of capital in production. For Hayek, capital investment does not simply add to production in a general way, but rather is embodied in concrete capital items. Rather than being an amorphous stock of generalized production power, it is an intricate structure of specific interrelated complementary components. Stimulating spending and investment, then, amounts to stimulating specific sections and components of this intricate structure. Before heading out to Austrian School of Economics, here is another important difference between the two that is cardinal, and had more do with monetary system. Keynes viewed the macro system as vulnerable to periodic declines in demand, and regarded micro adjustments such as wage and price declines as ineffective to restore growth and prosperity. Hayek viewed the market as capable of correcting itself by taking advantages of competitions, and regarded government and Central Banks’ policies to restore growth as sources of more instability.

The best known Austrian capital theorist was Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, though his teacher Carl Menger is the one who got the ball rolling, providing the central idea that Böhm-Bawerk elaborated. For the Austrians, the general belief lay in the fact that production takes time, and more roundabout the process, the more delay production needs to anticipate. Modern economies comprise complex, specialized processes in which the many steps necessary to produce any product are connected in a sequentially specific network – some things have to be done before others. There is a time structure to the capital structure. This intricate time structure is partially organized, partially spontaneous (organic). Every production process is the result of some multiperiod plan. Entrepreneurs envision the possibility of providing (new, improved, cheaper) products to consumers whose expenditure on them will be more than sufficient to cover the cost of producing them. In pursuit of this vision the entrepreneur plans to assemble the necessary capital items in a synergistic combination. These capital combinations are structurally composed modules that are the ingredients of the industry-wide or economy-wide capital structure. The latter is the result then of the dynamic interaction of multiple entrepreneurial plans in the marketplace; it is what constitutes the market process. Some plans will prove more successful than others, some will have to be modified to some degree, some will fail. What emerges is a structure that is not planned by anyone in its totality but is the result of many individual actions in the pursuit of profit. It is an unplanned structure that has a logic, a coherence, to it. It was not designed, and could not have been designed, by any human mind or committee of minds. Thinking that it is possible to design such a structure or even to micromanage it with macroeconomic policy is a fatal conceit. The division of labor reflected by the capital structure is based on a division of knowledge. Within and across firms specialized tasks are accomplished by those who know best how to accomplish them. Such localized, often unconscious, knowledge could not be communicated to or collected by centralized decision-makers. The market process is responsible not only for discovering who should do what and how, but also how to organize it so that those best able to make decisions are motivated to do so. In other words, incentives and knowledge considerations tend to get balanced spontaneously in a way that could not be planned on a grand scale. The boundaries of firms expand and contract, and new forms of organization evolve. This too is part of the capital structure broadly understood.

Hayek emphasizes that,

the static proposition that an increase in the quantity of capital will bring about a fall in its marginal productivity . . . when taken over into economic dynamics and applied to the quantity of capital goods, may become quite definitely erroneous.

Hayek stresses chains of investments and how earlier investments in the chains can increase the return to the later, complementary investments. However, Hayek is primarily concerned with applying those insights to business cycle phenomena. Also, Hayek never took the additional step that endogenous growth theory has in highlighting the effects of complementarities across intangible investments in the production of ideas and/or knowledge. Indeed, Hayek explicitly excludes their consideration:

It should be quite clear that the technical changes involved, when changes in the time structure of production are contemplated, are not changes due to changes in technical knowledge. . . . It excludes any changes in the technique of production which are made possible by new inventions.

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