Dear Fellow Investor
If you have been reading my newsletter for a while you may have noticed that I am very fond of articles written by Tim Price Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in London.
Past articles I have shared with readers are:
Happy New Fear
All are definitely worth a few minutes of your time.
What I like about Tim’s writing is that he tells you exactly how he sees it even if it may be to his determent.
This is very rare in today’s investment world where every so called investment expert spins current market developments to exactly fit with the latest product her company has developed.
In the article below Tim writes about a very important lesson a lot of central bankers around the word seem to have forgotten?.
all except for one man, Axel Weber, the president of the German Bundesbank (Central Bank). Maybe because Germany suffered extensively when the lesson was forgotten the last time.
The lesson everyone seems to have forgotten is what happens?
When the government starts printing money.
Of course it is not called printing money any more they have found a much better word for it. It’s now called quantitative easing.
Here is part of the definition from the Financial Times Lexicon:
“When interest rates are close to zero there is another way of affecting the price of money: Quantitative Easing (QE). The aim is still to bring down interest rates faced by companies and households and the most important step in QE is that the central bank creates new money for use in an economy.
Only a central bank can do this because its money is accepted as payment by everybody. Sometimes dubbed incorrectly “printing money” a central bank simply creates new money at the stroke of a computer key, in effect increasing the credit in its own bank account.
It can then use this new money to buy whatever assets it likes: government bonds, equities, houses, corporate bonds or other assets from banks. With the central bank weighing in, the price of the assets it buys should rise and the yield, or interest rate, on that asset will fall. Companies for example with a willing central bank seeking to buy its bond, will be able to pay a lower interest rate when new bonds are issued or existing bonds come to the end of their life and need to be replaced.
With cheaper borrowing the hope is that the central bank will again encourage greater spending, putting additional demand into the economy and pulling it out of recession. As the money ends up in bank deposits, banks should also find their funding position improved and make them more willing to lend.
A side effect will be that this new money is expected to raise consumer prices giving people another incentive to buy now rather than later.”
On to Tim’s article (emphasis mine)
Money-printing: a warning from history
12th July 2010
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
“Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
– John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, 1919.
Last week, on a sultry summer’s evening in London, I had the pleasure of attending the re-launch party of Adam Fergusson’s “When Money Dies: the nightmare of the Weimar hyper-inflation”.
This ?ber-cautionary tale was originally published in 1975 by William Kimber & Co. Having fallen out of print, second-hand editions were changing hands, amongst those who could locate copies, for several hundred pounds each. It has now, happily, been republished by Old Street Publishing Ltd., for the very affordable price of ?12.99. Suffice to say that every reader of this commentary is gently encouraged to purchase a copy.
That said, reading, and digesting, “When Money Dies” is not particularly easy. In financial terms it is the equivalent of a snuff movie. For the sensitive of spirit, the experience is truly heart-rending. For this is not a fictional phantasmagoria; the extraordinary sequence of events within it genuinely happened, to real people.
As those schoolchildren who are still taught anything are told, the seeds of the Weimar hyper-inflation, like those of the Second World War, were sown in the ashes of the First World War, and most pressingly by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies, and most notably the French, were determined to bleed Germany dry. Be careful what you wish for…
Germany could never hope to make good on the burden of Allied reparations forced on her. But few, Keynes perhaps apart, could have foreseen the extraordinary sequence of events that were to culminate in the economic firestorm of Weimar 1923, when sovereign allegiance to the printing press caused an entire currency and national economy to implode upon themselves.
A few examples from Adam Fergusson may convey in some small way the surreal horror of what came to befall the largely unwitting populace, and political base, of Germany:
“In October 1923 it was noted in the British Embassy in Berlin that the number of marks to the pound equalled the number of yards to the sun. Dr Schacht, Germany’s National Currency Commissioner, explained that at the end of the Great War one could in theory have bought 500,000,000,000 eggs for the same price as that for which, five years later, only a single egg was procurable. When stability returned, the sum of paper marks needed to buy a gold mark was precisely equal to the quantity of square millimetres in a square kilometre. It is far from certain that such calculations helped anyone to understand what was going on…”
A young Ernest Hemingway happened to be travelling, with his wife, through history in the making. The following is the anecdote of the many from Adam Fergusson’s book that, perhaps perversely, I find most moving of all.] Working for the Toronto Daily Star, Hemingway crossed the frontier from France during the monetary horror and had the following experience:
“There were no marks to be had in Strasbourg, the mounting exchange had cleared the bankers out days ago, so we changed some French money in the railway station at Kehl. For 10 francs I received 670 marks. Ten francs amounted to about 90 cents in Canadian money. That 90 cents lasted Mrs Hemingway and me for a day of heavy spending and at the end of the day we had 120 marks left!
“Our first purchase was from a fruit stand… We picked out five very good looking apples and gave the old woman a 50-mark note. She gave us back 38 marks in change. A very nice looking, white bearded old gentleman saw us buy the apples and raised his hat.
“Pardon me, sir, ” he said, rather timidly, in German, ?how much were the apples?”
“I counted the change and told him 12 marks.
“He smiled and shook his head. “I can?t pay it. It is too much.”
“He went up the street walking very much as white bearded old gentlemen of the old regime walk in all countries, but he had looked very longingly at the apples. I wish I had offered him some. Twelve marks, on that day, amounted to a little under 2 cents.
The old man, whose life savings were probably, as most of the non-profiteer classes are, invested in German pre-war and war bonds, could not afford a 12 mark expenditure. He is the type of the people whose incomes do not increase with the falling purchasing value of the mark…”
This anecdote perhaps best summarises the crushing and unpitying aspect of hyper-inflation. Those citizens who had been among the most virtuous, who had saved and patriotically supported their country by buying its debts, were wiped out in the financial holocaust. [Someone may care to send a copy of the book to “Sir” Fred Goodwin, if they can find out in which foreign bolt-hole he is currently sheltering from his fans.]
The Weimar experience is cautionary, and perhaps, as Adam Fergusson suggests, its protagonists genuinely did not understand the hyper-inflationary mechanisms ? money-printing without limit ? by which they forcibly impoverished a country and above all its middle class (then, as now, economics was not a science ? if science at all ? well understood).
But that excuse will not serve for those administrations determinedly taking us down what looks optically like a very similar path. Deficit financing; quantitative easing; monetary stimulus ? these are all Orwellian weasel coinages that barely disguise the reality at the heart of current administrative desperation in the face of a colossal financial crisis: the somewhat forlorn hope that ongoing money printing will mysteriously solve, other than to extinguish the real value of, a super-abundance of both corporate, individual, and sovereign debt.
But that would be getting ahead of ourselves.
The immediate threat is not inflationary, but deflationary: broad money growth is contracting across the developed world, and bringing the prospect of recession if not depression in its wake.
Yet this does not absolve western central banks and politicians from the required responsibility to save their currencies and economies from both their own malign influence and from that of the bankers, who have displayed much of the same self-serving behaviour as German industrialists did during the Weimar experience.
Adam Fergusson’s book serves as the ultimate warning against the debauchery of currency in the name of shorter term political expediency.
The question is, are the politicians and central bankers of today ready, willing or able to learn anything from such a monstrous historical example?
Tim Price
Director of Investment
PFP Wealth Management
Email: [email protected]
Weblog: http://thepriceofeverything.typepad.com
Important Note:
PFP has made this document available for your general information. You are encouraged to seek advice before acting on the information, either from your usual adviser or ourselves. We have taken all reasonable steps to ensure the content is correct at the time of publication, but may have condensed the source material. Any views expressed or interpretations given are those of the author. Please note that PFP is not responsible for the contents or reliability of any websites or blogs and linking to them should not be considered as an endorsement of any kind. We have no control over the availability of linked pages. ? PFP Group – no part of this document may be reproduced without the express permission of PFP. PFP Wealth Management is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority, registered number 473710.Ref 1053/10/JD 120710.
________________________________________________
On this less than positive note that’s it for this week.
Your inflationary analyst
Tim du Toit
