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.

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Indecent Bazaars. Thought of the Day 113.0

Peripheral markets may be defined as markets which generate only a small proportion of their financial inflows from local business and investors, but which attract the interest of ‘global’ investors. Emerging markets and markets for financial exotica such as financial derivatives are examples of such peripheral markets. Because emerging markets are largely dependent upon attracting international funds in order to generate increases in securities prices and capital gains which will attract further funds, they are particularly good examples of the principles of Ponzi finance at work in securities markets.

A common characteristic feature of peripheral markets is that they have no history of returns to financial investment on the scale on which finance is drawn to those markets in a time of capital market inflation. Such returns in the future have to be inferred on the basis of conjecture and fragmentary information. Investment decisions are therefore more dependent on sentiment, rather than reason. Any optimism is quickly justified by the rapid increase in asset prices in response to even a modest excess net inflow of money into such a market.

Emerging markets illustrate this very clearly. Such markets exist in developing and semi-industrialized countries with relatively undeveloped pensions and insurance institutions, principally because only a small proportion of households earn enough to be able to put aside long-term savings. The first fund manager comes upon such a market in the conviction that a change of government or government policy, or some temporary change in commodity prices, has opened a cornucopia of profitable opportunities and therefore warrants the dismissal of a history of economic, financial and political instability. If he or she is able with buying and enthusiasm to attract other speculators and fund managers to enter the market, they may drive up asset prices and make the largest capital gains. The second and third fund managers to buy into that market also make capital gains. The emulatory competition of trading on reputation while competing for returns makes international investment managers especially prone to this kind of ‘herd’ investment.

For a while such capital inflows into the market make everyone happy: international fund managers are able to show good returns from the funds in their care; finance theorists can reassure themselves that greater financial risks are compensated by higher returns; the government of the country in which the emerging market is located can sell its bonds and public sector enterprises to willing foreign investors and use the proceeds to balance its budget and repay its debts; the watchdogs of financial prudence in the International Monetary Fund can hail the revival of finance, the government’s commitment to private enterprise and apparent fiscal responsibility; state enterprises, hitherto stagnating because of under-investment by over-indebted governments, suddenly find themselves in the private sector commanding seemingly limitless opportunities for raising finance; the country’s currency after years of depreciation acquires a gilt-edged stability as dollars (the principal currency of international investment) flow in to be exchanged for local currency with which to buy local securities; the central bank accumulates dollars in exchange for the local currency that it issues to enable foreign investors to invest in the local markets and, with larger reserves, secures a new ease in managing its foreign liabilities; the indigenous middle and professional classes who buy financial and property (real estate) assets in time for the boom are enriched and for once cease their perennial grumbling at the sordid reality of life in a poor country. In this conjuncture the most banal shibboleths of enterprise and economic progress under capitalism appear like the very essence of worldly wisdom.

Only in such a situation of capital market inflation are the supposed benefits of foreign direct investment realized. Such investment by multinational companies is widely held to improve the ‘quality’ or productivity of local labour, management and technical know-how in less developed countries, whose technology and organization of labour lags behind that of the more industrialized countries. But only the most doltish and ignorant peasant would not have his or her productivity increased by being set to work with a machine of relatively recent vintage under the guidance of a manager familiar with that machine and the kind of work organization that it requires. It is more doubtful whether the initial increase in productivity can be realized without a corresponding increase in the export market (developing countries have relatively small home markets). It is even more doubtful if the productivity increase can be repeated without the replacement of the machinery by even newer machinery.

The favourable conjuncture in the capital markets of developing countries can be even more temporary. There are limits on the extent to which even private sector companies may take on financial liabilities and privatization is merely a system for transferring such liabilities from the government to the private sector without increasing the financial resources of the companies privatized. But to sustain capital gains in the emerging stock market, additional funds have to continue to flow in buying new liabilities of the government or the private sector, or buying out local investors. When new securities cease to attract international fund managers, the inflow stops. Sometimes this happens when the government privatization drive pauses, because the government runs out of attractive state enterprises or there are political and procedural difficulties in selling them. A fall in the proceeds from privatization may reveal the government’s underlying fiscal deficit, causing the pundits of international finance to sense the odour of financial unsoundness. More commonly rising imports and general price inflation, due to the economic boom set off by the inflow of foreign funds, arouse just such an odour in the noses of those pundits. Such financial soundness is a subjective view. Even if nothing is wrong in the country concerned, the prospective capital gain and yield in some other market need only rise above the expected inflation and yield of the country, to cause a capital outflow which will usually be justified in retrospect by an appeal to perceived, if not actual, financial disequilibrium.

Ponzi financial structures are characterized by ephemeral liquidity. At the time when money is coming into the markets they appear to be just the neo-classical ideal of market perfection, with lots of buyers and sellers scrambling for bargains and arbitrage profits. At the moment when disinvestment takes hold the true nature of peripheral markets and their ephemeral liquidity is revealed as trades which previously sped through in the frantic paper chase for profits are now frustrated. This too is particularly apparent in emerging markets. In order to sell, a buyer is necessary. If the majority of investors in a market also wish to sell, then sales cannot be executed for want of a buyer and the apparently perfect market liquidity dries up. The crash of the emerging stock market is followed by the fall in the exchange value of the local currency. Those international investors that succeeded in selling now have local currency which has to be converted into dollars if the proceeds of the sale are to be repatriated, or invested elsewhere. Exchange through the local banking system may now be frustrated if it has inadequate dollar reserves: a strong possibility if the central bank has been using dollars to service foreign debts. In spite of all the reassurance that this time it will be different because capital inflows are secured on financial instruments issued by the private sector, international investors are at this point as much at the mercy of the central bank and the government of an emerging market as international banks were at the height of the sovereign debt crisis. Moreover, the greater the success of the peripheral market in attracting funds, and hence the greater the boom in prices in that market, the greater is the desired outflow when it comes. With the fall in liquidity of financial markets in developing countries comes a fall in the liquidity of foreign direct investment, making it difficult to secure appropriate local financial support or repatriate profits.

Another factor which contributes to the fragility of peripheral markets is the opaqueness of financial accounting in them, in the sense that however precise and discriminating may be the financial accounting conventions, rules and reporting, they do not provide accurate indicators of the financial prospects of particular investments. In emerging markets this is commonly supposed to be because they lack the accounting regulations and expertise which supports the sophisticated integrated financial markets of the industrialized countries. In those industrialized countries, where accounting procedures are supposed to be much more transparent, peripheral markets such as venture capital and financial futures still suffer from accounting inadequacies because financial innovation introduces liabilities that have no history and which are not included in conventional accounts (notably the so-called ‘off-balance sheet’ liabilities). More important than these gaps in financial reporting is the volatility of profits from financial investment in such peripheral markets, and the absence of any stable relationship between profits from trading in their instruments and the previous history of those instruments or the financial performance of the company issuing them. Thus, even where financial records are comprehensive, accurate and revealed, they are a poor indicator of prospective returns from investments in the securities of peripheral markets.

With more than usually unreliable financial data, trading in those markets is much more based on reputation than on any systematic financial analysis: the second and third investor in such a market is attracted by the reputation of the first and subsequently the second investor. Because of the direct connection between financial inflows and values in securities markets, the more trading takes place on the basis of reputation the less of a guide to prospective returns is afforded by financial analysis. Peripheral markets are therefore much more prone to ‘ramping’ than other markets.

Why would such a crisis of withdrawal not occur, at least not on such a scale, in the more locally integrated capital markets of the advanced industrialised countries? First of all, integrated capital markets such as those of the UK, and the US are the domestic base for international investors. In periods of financial turbulence, they are more likely to have funds repatriated to them than to have funds taken out of them. Second, institutional investors tend to be more responsive to pressure to be ‘responsible investors’ in their home countries. In large measure this is because home securities make up the vast majority of investment fund portfolios. Ultimately, investment institutions will use their liquidity to protect the markets in which most of their portfolio is based. Finally, the locally integrated markets of the advanced industrialized countries have investing institutions with far greater wealth than the developing or semi-industrialized countries. Those markets are home for the pension funds which dominate the world markets. Among their wealth are deposits and other liquid assets which may be easily converted to support a stock market by buying securities. The poorer countries of the world have even poorer pension funds, which could not support their markets against an outflow due to portfolio switches by international investors.

Thus integrated markets are more ‘secure’ in that they are less prone to collapse than emerging or, more generally, peripheral markets. But precisely because of the large amount of trade already concentrated in the integrated markets, prices in them are much less likely to respond to investment fund inflows from abroad. Pension and insurance fund practice is to extrapolate those capital gains into the future for the purposes of determining the solvency of those funds. However, those gains were obtained because of a combination of inflation, the increased scope of funded pensions and the flight of funds from peripheral markets.

Banking and Lending/Investment. How Monetary Policy Becomes Decisive? Some Branching Rumination.

Among the most notoriously pernicious effects of asset price inflation is that it offers speculators the prospect of gain in excess of the costs of borrowing the money to buy the asset whose price is being inflated. This is how many unstable Ponzi financing structures begin. There are usually strict regulations to prevent or limit banks’ direct investment in financial instruments without any assured residual liquidity, such as equity or common stocks. However, it is less easy to prevent banks from lending to speculative investors, who then use the proceeds of their loans to buy securities or to limit lending secured on financial assets. As long as asset markets are being inflated, such credit expansions also conceal from banks, their shareholders and their regulators the disintermediation that occurs when the banks’ best borrowers, governments and large companies, use bills and company paper instead of bank loans for their short-term financing. As long as the boom proceeds, banks can enjoy the delusion that they can replace the business of governments and large companies with good lending secured on stocks.

In addition to undermining the solvency of the banking system, and distracting commerce and industry with the possibilities of lucrative corporate restructuring, capital market inflation also tends to make monetary policy ineffective. Monetary policy is principally the fixing of reserve requirements, buying and selling short-term paper or bills in the money or inter-bank markets, buying and selling government bonds and fixing short-term interest rates. As noted in the previous section, with capital market inflation there has been a proliferation of short-term financial assets traded in the money markets, as large companies and banks find it cheaper to issue their own paper than to borrow for banks. This disintermediation has extended the range of short-term liquid assets which banks may hold. As a result of this it is no longer possible for central banks, in countries experiencing capital market inflation, to control the overall amount of credit available in the economy: attempts to squeeze the liquidity of banks in order to limit their credit advances by, say, open market operations (selling government bonds) are frustrated by the ease with which banks may restore their liquidity by selling bonds or their holdings of short-term paper or bills. In this situation central banks have been forced to reduce the scope of their monetary policy to the setting of short-term interest rates.

Economists have long believed that monetary policy is effective in controlling price inflation in the economy at large, as opposed to inflation of securities prices. Various rationalizations have been advanced for this efficacy of monetary policy. For the most part they suppose some automatic causal connection between changes in the quantity of money in circulation and changes in prices, although the Austrian School of Economists (here, here, here, and here) tended on occasion to see the connection as being between changes in the rate of interest and changes in prices.

Whatever effect changes in the rate of interest may have on the aggregate of money circulating in the economy, the effect of such changes on prices has to be through the way in which an increase or decrease in the rate of interest causes alterations in expenditure in the economy. Businesses and households are usually hard-headed enough to decide their expenditure and financial commitments in the light of their nominal revenues and cash outflows, which may form their expectations, rather than in accordance with their expectations or optimizing calculations. If the same amount of money continues to be spent in the economy, then there is no effective reason for the business-people setting prices to vary prices. Only if expenditure in markets is rising or falling would retailers and industrialists consider increasing or decreasing prices. Because price expectations are observable directly with difficulty, they may explain everything in general and therefore lack precision in explaining anything in particular. Notwithstanding their effects on all sorts of expectations, interest rate changes affect inflation directly through their effects on expenditure.

The principal expenditure effects of changes in interest rates occur among net debtors in the economy, i.e., economic units whose financial liabilities exceed their financial assets. This is in contrast to net creditors, whose financial assets exceed their liabilities, and who are usually wealthy enough not to have their spending influenced by changes in interest rates. If they do not have sufficient liquid savings out of which to pay the increase in their debt service payments, then net debtors have their expenditure squeezed by having to devote more of their income to debt service payments. The principal net debtors are governments, households with mortgages and companies with large bank loans.

With or without capital market inflation, higher interest rates have never constrained government spending because of the ease with which governments may issue debt. In the case of indebted companies, the degree to which their expenditure is constrained by higher interest rates depends on their degree of indebtedness, the available facilities for additional financing and the liquidity of their assets. As a consequence of capital market inflation, larger companies reduce their borrowing from banks because it becomes cheaper and more convenient to raise even short- term finance in the booming securities markets. This then makes the expenditure of even indebted companies less immediately affected by changes in bank interest rates, because general changes in interest rates cannot affect the rate of discount or interest paid on securities already issued. Increases in short-term interest rates to reduce general price inflation can then be easily evaded by companies financing themselves by issuing longer-term securities, whose interest rates tend to be more stable. Furthermore, with capital market inflation, companies are more likely to be over-capitalized and have excessive financial liabilities, against which companies tend to hold a larger stock of more liquid assets. As inflated financial markets have become more unstable, this has further increased the liquidity preference of large companies. This excess liquidity enables the companies enjoying it to gain higher interest income to offset the higher cost of their borrowing and to maintain their planned spending. Larger companies, with access to capital markets, can afford to issue securities to replenish their liquid reserves.

If capital market inflation reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy against product price inflation, because of the reduced borrowing of companies and the ability of booming asset markets to absorb large quantities of bank credit, interest rate increases have appeared effective in puncturing asset market bubbles in general and capital market inflations in particular. Whether interest rate rises actually can effect an end to capital market inflation depends on how such rises actually affect the capital market. In asset markets, as with anti-inflationary policy in the rest of the economy, such increases are effective when they squeeze the liquidity of indebted economic units by increasing the outflow of cash needed to service debt payments and by discouraging further speculative borrowing. However, they can only be effective in this way if the credit being used to inflate the capital market is short term or is at variable rates of interest determined by the short-term rate.

Keynes’s speculative demand for money is the liquidity preference or demand for short-term securities of rentiers in relation to the yield on long-term securities. Keynes’s speculative motive is ‘a continuous response to gradual changes in the rate of interest’ in which, as interest rates along the whole maturity spectrum decline, there is a shift in rentiers’ portfolio preference toward more liquid assets. Keynes clearly equated a rise in equity (common stock) prices with just such a fall in interest rates. With falling interest rates, the increasing preference of rentiers for short-term financial assets could keep the capital market from excessive inflation.

But the relationship between rates of interest, capital market inflation and liquidity preference is somewhat more complicated. In reality, investors hold liquid assets not only for liquidity, which gives them the option to buy higher-yielding longer-term stocks when their prices fall, but also for yield. This marginalizes Keynes’s speculative motive for liquidity. The motive was based on Keynes’s distinction between what he called ‘speculation’ (investment for capital gain) and ‘enterprise’ (investment long term for income). In our times, the modern rentier is the fund manager investing long term on behalf of pension and insurance funds and competing for returns against other funds managers. An inflow into the capital markets in excess of the financing requirements of firms and governments results in rising prices and turnover of stock. This higher turnover means greater liquidity so that, as long as the capital market is being inflated, the speculative motive for liquidity is more easily satisfied in the market for long-term securities.

Furthermore, capital market inflation adds a premium of expected inflation, or prospective capital gain, to the yield on long-term financial instruments. Hence when the yield decreases, due to an increase in the securities’ market or actual price, the prospective capital gain will not fall in the face of this capital appreciation, but may even increase if it is large or abrupt. Rising short-term interest rates will therefore fail to induce a shift in the liquidity preference of rentiers towards short-term instruments until the central bank pushes these rates of interest above the sum of the prospective capital gain and the market yield on long-term stocks. Only at this point will there be a shift in investors’ preferences, causing capital market inflation to cease, or bursting an asset bubble.

This suggests a new financial instability hypothesis, albeit one that is more modest and more limited in scope and consequence than Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis. During an economic boom, capital market inflation adds a premium of expected capital gain to the market yield on long-term stocks. As long as this yield plus the expected capital gain exceed the rate of interest on short-term securities set by the central bank’s monetary policy, rising short-term interest rates will have no effect on the inflow of funds into the capital market and, if this inflow is greater than the financing requirements of firms and governments, the resulting capital market inflation. Only when the short-term rate of interest exceeds the threshold set by the sum of the prospective capital gain and the yield on long-term stocks will there be a shift in rentiers’ preferences. The increase in liquidity preference will reduce the inflow of funds into the capital market. As the rise in stock prices moderates, the prospective capital gain gets smaller, and may even become negative. The rentiers’ liquidity preference increases further and eventually the stock market crashes, or ceases to be active in stocks of longer maturities.

At this point, the minimal or negative prospective capital gain makes equity or common stocks unattractive to rentiers at any positive yield, until the rate of interest on short-term securities falls below the sum of the prospective capital gain and the market yield on those stocks. When the short-term rate of interest does fall below this threshold, the resulting reduction in rentiers’ liquidity preference revives the capital market. Thus, in between the bursting of speculative bubbles and the resurrection of a dormant capital market, monetary policy has little effect on capital market inflation. Hence it is a poor regulator for ‘squeezing out inflationary expectations’ in the capital market.

(Il)liquid Hedge Lock-Ups. Thought of the Day 107.0

Hedge funds have historically limited their participation in illiquid investments, preferring to match their investment horizon to the typical one-year lock-up periods that their investors agree to. However, many hedge funds have increasingly invested in illiquid assets in an effort to augment returns. For example, they have invested in private investments in public equity (PIPEs), acquiring large minority holdings in public companies. Their purchases of CDOs and CLOs (collateralized loan obligations) are also somewhat illiquid, since these fixed income securities are difficult to price and there is a limited secondary market during times of crisis. In addition, hedge funds have participated in loans, and invested in physical assets. Sometimes, investments that were intended to be held for less than one year have become long-term, illiquid assets when the assets depreciated and hedge funds decided to continue holding the assets until values recovered, rather than selling at a loss. It is estimated that more than 20% of total assets under management by hedge funds are illiquid, hard-to-price assets. This makes hedge fund asset valuation difficult, and has created a mismatch between hedge fund assets and liabilities, giving rise to significant problems when investors attempt to withdraw their cash at the end of lock-up periods.

Hedge funds generally focus their investment strategies on financial assets that are liquid and able to be readily priced based on reported prices in the market for those assets or by reference to comparable assets that have a discernible price. Since most of these assets can be valued and sold over a short period of time to generate cash, hedge funds permit investors to invest in or withdraw money from the fund at regular intervals and managers receive performance fees based on quarterly mark-to-market valuations. However, in order to match up maturities of assets and liabilities for each investment strategy, most hedge funds have the ability to prevent invested capital from being withdrawn during certain periods of time. They achieve this though “lock-up” and “gate” provisions that are included in investment agreements with their investors.

A lock-up provision provides that during an initial investment period of, typically, one to two years, an investor is not allowed to withdraw any money from the fund. Generally, the lock-up period is a function of the investment strategy that is being pursued. Sometimes, lock-up periods are modified for specific investors through the use of a side letter agreement. However, this can become problematic because of the resulting different effective lock-up periods that apply to different investors who invest at the same time in the same fund. Also, this can trigger “most favored nations” provisions in other investor agreements.

A gate is a restriction that limits the amount of withdrawals during a quarterly or semi- annual redemption period after the lock-up period expires. Typically gates are percentages of a fund’s capital that can be withdrawn on a scheduled redemption date. A gate of 10 to 20% is common. A gate provision allows the hedge fund to increase exposure to illiquid assets without facing a liquidity crisis. In addition, it offers some protection to investors that do not attempt to withdraw funds because if withdrawals are too high, assets might have to be sold by the hedge fund at disadvantageous prices, causing a potential reduction in investment returns for remaining investors. During 2008 and 2009, as many hedge fund investors attempted to withdraw money based on poor returns and concerns about the financial crisis, there was considerable frustration and some litigation directed at hedge fund gate provisions.

Hedge funds sometimes use a “side pocket” account to house comparatively illiquid or hard-to-value assets. Once an asset is designated for inclusion in a side pocket, new investors don’t participate in the returns from this asset. When existing investors withdraw money from the hedge fund, they remain as investors in the side pocket asset until it either is sold or becomes liquid through a monetization event such as an IPO. Management fees are typically charged on side pocket assets based on their cost, rather than a mark-to-market value of the asset. Incentive fees are charged based on realized proceeds when the asset is sold. Usually, there is no requirement to force the sale of side pocket investments by a specific date. Sometimes, investors accuse hedge funds of putting distressed assets that were intended to be sold during a one-year horizon into a side pocket account to avoid dragging down the returns of the overall fund. Investors are concerned about unexpected illiquidity arising from a side pocket and the potential for even greater losses if a distressed asset that has been placed there continues to decline in value. Fund managers sometimes use even more drastic options to limit withdrawals, such as suspending all redemption rights (but only in the most dire circumstances).

Option Spread. Drunken Risibility.

The term spread refers to the difference in premiums between the purchase and sale of options. An option spread is the simultaneous purchase of one or more options contracts and sale of the equivalent number of options contracts, in a different series of the class of options. A spread could involve the same underlying:

•  Buying and selling calls, or
•  Buying and selling puts.

Combining puts and calls into groups of two or more makes it feasible to design derivatives with interesting payoff profiles. The profit and loss outcomes depend on the options used (puts or calls); positions taken (long or short); whether their strike prices are identical or different; and the similarity or difference of their exercise dates. Among directional positions are bullish vertical call spreads, bullish vertical put spreads, bearish vertical spreads, and bearish vertical put spreads.

If the long position has a higher premium than the short position, this is known as a debit spread, and the investor will be required to deposit the difference in premiums. If the long position has a lower premium than the short position, this is a credit spread, and the investor will be allowed to withdraw the difference in premiums. The spread will be even if the premiums on each side results are the same.

A potential loss in an option spread is determined by two factors:

• Strike price
• Expiration date

If the strike price of the long call is greater than the strike price of the short call, or if the strike price of the long put is less than the strike price of the short put, a margin is required because adverse market moves can cause the short option to suffer a loss before the long option can show a profit.

A margin is also required if the long option expires before the short option. The reason is that once the long option expires, the trader holds an unhedged short position. A good way of looking at margin requirements is that they foretell potential loss. Here are, in a nutshell, the main option spreadings.

A calendar, horizontal, or time spread is the simultaneous purchase and sale of options of the same class with the same exercise prices but with different expiration dates. A vertical, or price or money, spread is the simultaneous purchase and sale of options of the same class with the same expiration date but with different exercise prices. A bull, or call, spread is a type of vertical spread that involves the purchase of the call option with the lower exercise price while selling the call option with the higher exercise price. The result is a debit transaction because the lower exercise price will have the higher premium.

• The maximum risk is the net debit: the long option premium minus the short option premium.
• The maximum profit potential is the difference in the strike prices minus the net debit.
• The breakeven is equal to the lower strike price plus the net debit.

A trader will typically buy a vertical bull call spread when he is mildly bullish. Essentially, he gives up unlimited profit potential in return for reducing his risk. In a vertical bull call spread, the trader is expecting the spread premium to widen because the lower strike price call comes into the money first.

Vertical spreads are the more common of the direction strategies, and they may be bullish or bearish to reflect the holder’s view of market’s anticipated direction. Bullish vertical put spreads are a combination of a long put with a low strike, and a short put with a higher strike. Because the short position is struck closer to-the-money, this generates a premium credit.

Bearish vertical call spreads are the inverse of bullish vertical call spreads. They are created by combining a short call with a low strike and a long call with a higher strike. Bearish vertical put spreads are the inverse of bullish vertical put spreads, generated by combining a short put with a low strike and a long put with a higher strike. This is a bearish position taken when a trader or investor expects the market to fall.

The bull or sell put spread is a type of vertical spread involving the purchase of a put option with the lower exercise price and sale of a put option with the higher exercise price. Theoretically, this is the same action that a bull call spreader would take. The difference between a call spread and a put spread is that the net result will be a credit transaction because the higher exercise price will have the higher premium.

• The maximum risk is the difference in the strike prices minus the net credit.
• The maximum profit potential equals the net credit.
• The breakeven equals the higher strike price minus the net credit.

The bear or sell call spread involves selling the call option with the lower exercise price and buying the call option with the higher exercise price. The net result is a credit transaction because the lower exercise price will have the higher premium.

A bear put spread (or buy spread) involves selling some of the put option with the lower exercise price and buying the put option with the higher exercise price. This is the same action that a bear call spreader would take. The difference between a call spread and a put spread, however, is that the net result will be a debit transaction because the higher exercise price will have the higher premium.

• The maximum risk is equal to the net debit.
• The maximum profit potential is the difference in the strike
  prices minus the net debit.
• The breakeven equals the higher strike price minus the net debit.

An investor or trader would buy a vertical bear put spread because he or she is mildly bearish, giving up an unlimited profit potential in return for a reduction in risk. In a vertical bear put spread, the trader is expecting the spread premium to widen because the higher strike price put comes into the money first.

So, investors and traders who are bullish on the market will either buy a bull call spread or sell a bull put spread. But those who are bearish on the market will either buy a bear put spread or sell a bear call spread. When the investor pays more for the long option than she receives in premium for the short option, then the spread is a debit transaction. In contrast, when she receives more than she pays, the spread is a credit transaction. Credit spreads typically require a margin deposit.

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.

Credit Bubbles. Thought of the Day 90.0

At the macro-economic level of the gross statistics of money and loan supply to the economy, the reserve banking system creates a complex interplay between money, debt, supply and demand for goods, and the general price level. Rather than being constant, as implied by theoretical descriptions, money and loan supplies are constantly changing at a rate dependent on the average loan period, and a complex of details buried in the implementation and regulation of any given banking system.

Since the majority of loans are made for years at a time, the results of these interactions play out over a long enough time scale that gross monetary features of regulatory failure, such as continuous asset price inflation, have come to be regarded as normal, e.g. ”House prices always go up”. The price level however is not only dependent on purely monetary factors, but also on the supply and demand for goods and services, including financial assets such as shares, which requires that estimates of the real price level versus production be used. As a simplification, if constant demand for goods and services is assumed as shown in the table below, then there are two possible causes of price inflation, either the money supply available to purchase the good in question has increased, or the supply of the good has been reduced. Critically, the former is simply a mathematical effect, whilst the latter is a useful signal, providing economic information on relative supply and demand levels that can be used locally by consumers and producers to adapt their behaviour. Purely arbitrary changes in both the money and the loan supply that are induced by the mechanical operation of the banking system fail to provide any economic benefit, and by distorting the actual supply and demand signal can be actively harmful.

Credit bubbles are often explained as a phenomena of irrational demand, and crowd behaviour. However, this explanation ignores the question of why they aren’t throttled by limits on the loan supply? An alternate explanation which can be offered is that their root cause is periodic failures in the regulation of the loan and money supply within the commercial banking system. The introduction of widespread securitized lending allows a rapid increase in the total amount of lending available from the banking system and an accompanying if somewhat smaller growth in the money supply. Channeled predominantly into property lending, the increased availability of money from lending sources, acted to increase house prices creating rational speculation on their increase, and over time a sizeable disruption in the market pricing mechanisms for all goods and services purchased through loans. Monetary statistics of this effect such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for example, are however at least partially masked by production deflation from the sizeable productivity increases over decades. Absent any limit on the total amount of credit being supplied, the only practical limit on borrowing is the availability of borrowers and their ability to sustain the capital and interest repayments demanded for their loans.

Owing to the asymmetric nature of long term debt flows there is a tendency for money to become concentrated in the lending centres, which then causes liquidity problems for the rest of the economy. Eventually repayment problems surface, especially if the practice of further borrowing to repay existing loans is allowed, since the underlying mathematical process is exponential. As general insolvency as well as a consequent debt deflation occurs, the money and loan supply contracts as the banking system removes loan capacity from the economy either from loan repayment, or as a result of bank failure. This leads to a domino effect as businesses that have become dependent on continuously rolling over debt fail and trigger further defaults. Monetary expansion and further lending is also constrained by the absence of qualified borrowers, and by the general unwillingness to either lend or borrow that results from the ensuing economic collapse. Further complications, as described by Ben Bernanke and Harold James, can occur when interactions between currencies are considered, in particular in conjunction with gold-based capital regulation, because of the difficulties in establishing the correct ratio of gold for each individual currency and maintaining it, in a system where lending and the associated money supply are continually fluctuating and gold is also being used at a national level for international debt repayments.

The debt to money imbalance created by the widespread, and global, sale of Asset Backed securities may be unique to this particular crisis. Although asset backed security issuance dropped considerably in 2008, as the resale markets were temporarily frozen, current stated policy in several countries, including the USA and the United Kingdom, is to encourage further securitization to assist the recovery of the banking sector. Unfortunately this appears to be succeeding.

Crisis. Thought of the Day 66.0

Why do we have a crisis? The system, by being liberal, allowed for the condensation of wealth. This went well as long as there was exponential growth and humans also saw their share of the wealth growing. Now, with the saturation, no longer growth of wealth for humans was possible, and actually decline of wealth occurs since the growth of capital has to continue (by definition). Austerity will accelerate this reduction of wealth, and is thus the most-stupid thing one could do. If debt is paid back, money disappears and economy shrinks. The end point will be zero economy, zero money, and a remaining debt. It is not possible to pay back the money borrowed. The money simply does not exist and cannot be printed by the borrowers in a multi-region single-currency economy.

What will be the outcome? If countries are allowed to go bankrupt, there might be a way that economy recovers. If countries are continuing to be bailed-out, the crisis will continue. It will end in the situation that all countries will have to be bailed-out by each-other, even the strong ones. It is not possible that all countries pay back all the debt, even if it were advisable, without printing money by the borrowing countries. If countries are not allowed to go bankrupt, the ‘heritage’, the capital of the citizens of countries, now belonging to the people, will be confiscated and will belong to the capital, with its seat in fiscal paradises. The people will then pay for using this heritage which belonged to them not so long time ago, and will actually pay for it with money that will be borrowed. This is a modern form of slavery, where people posses nothing, effectively not even their own labor power, which is pawned for generations to come. We will be back to a feudal system.

On the long term, if we insist on pure liberalism without boundaries, it is possible that human production and consumption disappear from this planet, to be substituted by something that is fitter in a Darwinistic way. What we need is something that defends the rights and interests of humans and not of the capital, there where all the measures – all politicians and political lobbies – defend the rights of the capital. It is obvious that the political structures have no remorse in putting humans under more fiscal stress, since the people are inflexible and cannot flee the tax burden. The capital, on the other hand, is completely flexible and any attempt to increase the fiscal pressure makes that it flees the country. Again, the Prisoner’s Dilemma makes that all countries increase tax on people and labor, while reducing the tax on capital and money. We could summarize this as saying that the capital has joined forces – has globalized – while the labor and the people are still not united in the eternal class struggle. This imbalance makes that the people every time draw the short straw. And every time the straw gets shorter.

Pareto Optimality

There are some solutions. (“If you don’t give a solution, you are part of the problem”). Most important: Human wealth should be set as the only goal in society and economy. Liberalism is ruinous for humans, while it may be optimal for fitter entities. Nobody is out there to take away the money of others without working for it. In a way of ‘revenge’ or ‘envy’, (basically justifying laziness) taking away the hard-work earnings of others. No way. Nobody wants it. Thinking that yours can be the only way a rational person can think. Anybody not ‘winning’ the game is a ‘loser’. Some of us, actually, do not even want to enter the game.

Yet – the big dilemma – that money-grabbing mentality is essential for the economy. Without it we would be equally doomed. But, what we will see now is that you’ll will lose every last penny either way, even without divine intervention.

Having said that, the solution is to take away the money. Seeing that the system is not stable and accumulates the capital on a big pile, disconnected from humans, mathematically there are two solutions:

1) Put all the capital in the hands of people. If profit is made M’-M, this profit falls to the hands of the people that caused it. This seems fair, and mathematically stable. However, how the wealth is then distributed? That would be the task of politicians, and history has shown that they are a worse pest than capital. Politicians, actually, always wind up representing the capital. No country in the world ever managed to avoid it.

2) Let the system be as it is, which is great for giving people incentives to work and develop things, but at the end of the year, redistribute the wealth to follow an ideal curve that optimizes both wealth and increments of wealth.

The latter is an interesting idea. Also since it does not need rigorous restructuring of society, something that would only be possible after a total collapse of civilization. While unavoidable in the system we have, it would be better to act pro-actively and do something before it happens. Moreover, since money is air – or worse, vacuum – there is actually nothing that is ‘taken away’. Money is just a right to consume and can thus be redistributed at will if there is a just cause to do so. In normal cases this euphemistic word ‘redistribution’ amounts to theft and undermines incentives for work and production and thus causes poverty. Yet, if it can be shown to actually increase incentives to work, and thus increase overall wealth, it would need no further justification.

We set out to calculate this idea. However, it turned out to give quite remarkable results. Basically, the optimal distribution is slavery. Let us present them here. Let’s look at the distribution of wealth. Figure below shows a curve of wealth per person, with the richest conventionally placed at the right and the poor on the left, to result in what is in mathematics called a monotonously-increasing function. This virtual country has 10 million inhabitants and a certain wealth that ranges from nearly nothing to millions, but it can easily be mapped to any country.

Figure 1: Absolute wealth distribution function

As the overall wealth increases, it condenses over time at the right side of the curve. Left unchecked, the curve would become ever-more skew, ending eventually in a straight horizontal line at zero up to the last uttermost right point, where it shoots up to an astronomical value. The integral of the curve (total wealth/capital M) always increases, but it eventually goes to one person. Here it is intrinsically assumed that wealth, actually, is still connected to people and not, as it in fact is, becomes independent of people, becomes ‘capital’ autonomously by itself. If independent of people, this wealth can anyway be without any form of remorse whatsoever be confiscated and redistributed. Ergo, only the system where all the wealth is owned by people is needed to be studied.

A more interesting figure is the fractional distribution of wealth, with the normalized wealth w(x) plotted as a function of normalized population x (that thus runs from 0 to 1). Once again with the richest plotted on the right. See Figure below.

Figure 2: Relative wealth distribution functions: ‘ideal communist’ (dotted line. constant distribution), ‘ideal capitalist’ (one person owns all, dashed line) and ‘ideal’ functions (work-incentive optimized, solid line).

Every person x in this figure feels an incentive to work harder, because it wants to overtake his/her right-side neighbor and move to the right on the curve. We can define an incentive i(x) for work for person x as the derivative of the curve, divided by the curve itself (a person will work harder proportional to the relative increase in wealth)

i(x) = dw(x)/dx/w(x) —– (1)

A ‘communistic’ (in the negative connotation) distribution is that everybody earns equally, that means that w(x) is constant, with the constant being one

‘ideal’ communist: w(x) = 1.

and nobody has an incentive to work, i(x) = 0 ∀ x. However, in a utopic capitalist world, as shown, the distribution is ‘all on a big pile’. This is what mathematicians call a delta-function

‘ideal’ capitalist: w(x) = δ(x − 1),

and once again, the incentive is zero for all people, i(x) = 0. If you work, or don’t work, you get nothing. Except one person who, working or not, gets everything.

Thus, there is somewhere an ‘ideal curve’ w(x) that optimizes the sum of incentives I defined as the integral of i(x) over x.

I = ∫₀¹i(x)dx = ∫₀¹(dw(x)/dx)/w(x) dx = ∫_x=0^x=1dw(x)/w(x) = ln[w(x)]|_x=0^x=1 —– (2)

Which function w is that? Boundary conditions are

1. The total wealth is normalized: The integral of w(x) over x from 0 to 1 is unity.

∫₀¹w(x)dx = 1 —– (3)

2. Everybody has a at least a minimal income, defined as the survival minimum. (A concept that actually many societies implement). We can call this w₀, defined as a percentage of the total wealth, to make the calculation easy (every year this parameter can be reevaluated, for instance when the total wealth increased, but not the minimum wealth needed to survive). Thus, w(0) = w₀.

The curve also has an intrinsic parameter w_max. This represents the scale of the figure, and is the result of the other boundary conditions and therefore not really a parameter as such. The function basically has two parameters, minimal subsistence level w₀ and skewness b.

As an example, we can try an exponentially-rising function with offset that starts by being forced to pass through the points (0, w₀) and (1, w_max):

w(x) = w0 + (w_max − w0)(e^bx −1)/(e^b − 1) —– (4)

An example of such a function is given in the above Figure. To analytically determine which function is ideal is very complicated, but it can easily be simulated in a genetic algorithm way. In this, we start with a given distribution and make random mutations to it. If the total incentive for work goes up, we keep that new distribution. If not, we go back to the previous distribution.

The results are shown in the figure 3 below for a 30-person population, with w₀ = 10% of average (w₀ = 1/300 = 0.33%).

Figure 3: Genetic algorithm results for the distribution of wealth and incentive to work (i) in a liberal system where everybody only has money (wealth) as incentive. 

Depending on the starting distribution, the system winds up in different optima. If we start with a communistic distribution of figure 2, we wind up with a situation in which the distribution stays homogeneous ‘everybody equal’, with the exception of two people. A ‘slave’ earns the minimum wages and does nearly all the work, and a ‘party official’ that does not do much, but gets a large part of the wealth. Everybody else is equally poor (total incentive/production equal to 21), w = 1/30 = 10w₀, with most people doing nothing, nor being encouraged to do anything. The other situation we find when we start with a random distribution or linear increasing distribution. The final situation is shown in situation 2 of the figure 3. It is equal to everybody getting minimum wealth, w₀, except the ‘banker’ who gets 90% (270 times more than minimum), while nobody is doing anything, except, curiously, the penultimate person, which we can call the ‘wheedler’, for cajoling the banker into giving him money. The total wealth is higher (156), but the average person gets less, w₀.

Note that this isn’t necessarily an evolution of the distribution of wealth over time. Instead, it is a final, stable, distribution calculated with an evolutionary (‘genetic’) algorithm. Moreover, this analysis can be made within a country, analyzing the distribution of wealth between people of the same country, as well as between countries.

We thus find that a liberal system, moreover one in which people are motivated by the relative wealth increase they might attain, winds up with most of the wealth accumulated by one person who not necessarily does any work. This is then consistent with the tendency of liberal capitalist societies to have indeed the capital and wealth accumulate in a single point, and consistent with Marx’s theories that predict it as well. A singularity of distribution of wealth is what you get in a liberal capitalist society where personal wealth is the only driving force of people. Which is ironic, in a way, because by going only for personal wealth, nobody gets any of it, except the big leader. It is a form of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Banking? There isn’t much to it than this anyways.

Don’t go by the innocuous sounding title, for this is at its wit alternative. The modus operandi (Oh!, how much I feel like saying modis operandi in honor of the you Indians know who?) for accumulation of wealth to parts of ‘the system’ (which, for historic reasons, we call ‘capitalists’) is banking. The ‘capitalists’ (defined as those that skim the surplus labor of others) accumulate it through the banking system. That is nearly an empty statement, since wealth = money. That is, money is the means of increasing wealth and thus one represents the other. If capitalists skim surplus labor, it means that they skim surplus money. Money is linked to (only!) banks, and thus, accumulation is in the banks.

If interest is charged, borrowers will go bankrupt. This idea can be extended. If interest is charged, all money is accumulated in banks. Or, better to say, a larger and larger fraction of money is accumulated in the banks, and kept in financial institutions. The accumulation of wealth is accumulation of money in and by banks. It can only be interesting to see whom the money belongs to.

By the way, these institutions, the capitalists naturally wanting to part with as little as possible from this money, are often in fiscal paradises. Famous are The Cayman Islands, The Bahamas, The Seychelles, etc. With the accumulated money the physical property is bought. Once again, this is an empty statement. Money represents buying power (to buy more wealth). For instance buying the means-of-production (the Marxian mathematical equation raises its head again, MoP), such as land, factories, people’s houses (which will then be rented to them; more money). Etc.

Also, a tiny fraction of the money is squandered. It is what normally draws most attention. Oil sheiks that drive golden cars, bunga-bunga parties etc. That, however, is rather insignificant, this way of re-injecting money into the system. Mostly money is used to increase capital. That is why it is an obvious truth that “When you are rich, you must be extremely stupid to become poor. When you are poor, you must be extremely talented to become rich”. When you are rich, just let the capital work for you; it will have the tendency to increase, even if it increases slower than that of your more talented neighbor.

To accelerate the effect of skimming, means of production (MoP, ‘capital’), are confiscated from everything – countries and individual people – that cannot pay the loan + interest (which is unavoidable). Or bought for a much-below market value price in a way of “Take it or leave it; either give me my money back, which I know there is no way you can, or give me all your possessions and options for confiscation of possessions of future generations as well, i.e., I’ll give you new loans (which you will also not be able to pay back, I know, but that way I’ll manage to forever take everything you will ever produce in your life and all generations after you. Slaves, obey your masters!)”

Although not essential (Marx analyzed it not like this), the banking system accelerates the condensation of wealth. It is the modus operandi. Money is accumulated. With that money, capital is bought and then the money is re-confiscated with that newly-bought capital, or by means of new loans, etc. It is a feedback system where all money and capital is condensing on a big pile. Money and capital are synonyms. Note that this pile in not necessarily a set of people. It is just ‘the system’. There is no ‘class struggle’ between rich and poor, where the latter are trying to steal/take-back the money (depending on which side of the alleged theft the person analyzing it is). It is a class struggle of people against ‘the system’.

There is only one stable final distribution: all money/capital belonging to one person or institute, one ‘entity’. That is what is called a ‘singularity’ and the only mathematical function that is stable in this case. It is called a delta-function, or Kronecker-delta function: zero everywhere, except in one point, where it is infinite, with the total integral (total money) equal to unity. In this case: all money on one big pile. All other functions are unstable.

Imagine that there are two brothers that wound up with all the money and the rest of the people are destitute and left without anything. These two brothers will then start lending things to each-other. Since they are doing this in the commercial way (having to give back more than borrowed), one of the brothers will confiscate everything from the other.
Note: There is only one way out of it, namely that the brother ‘feels sorry’ for his sibling and gives him things without anything in return, to compensate for the steady unidirectional flow of wealth….