#174. American disequilibrium

THE IMBALANCE MENACING THE US ECONOMY

At a time when tens of millions of Americans are unemployed, with millions more struggling to make ends meet, it‘s been well noted that the response of the Federal Reserve has been to throw $2.9 trillion in financial subsidies, not at the economy itself, but at a tiny elite of the country’s wealthiest. Another astute observer has set out reasons why Fed intervention couldn’t – even if so intended – pull the US economy out of its severe malaise.

The discussion which follows assesses the American situation from a perspective which recognises that the economy is an energy system. It concludes that the US has responded particularly badly to the onset of de-growth, something which has been induced, not by choice, but by a deteriorating energy equation.

An insistence on using financial manipulation as a form of denial of de-growth has increased systemic risk whilst exacerbating differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots”.

De-growth has, of course, been a pan-Western trend, one which has now started to extend to the emerging market (EM) economies as well. But few if any other countries have travelled as far as the US down the road of futile and dangerous denial.

Whatever view might be taken of Fed market support policy on grounds of equity, the huge practical snag is that this approach has created a dangerously unsustainable imbalance between the prices of assets and all forms of income.

If the Fed withdraws incremental monetary support to the markets, the prices of stocks, bonds and property will crash back into equilibrium with wages, dividends and returns on savings. If, on the other hand, the Fed persists with monetary distortion of asset prices, the resulting inflation will push nominal wages and other forms of income upwards towards the re-establishment of equilibrium.

Either way, the apparent determination to sustain asset prices at inflated levels can only harm the US economy through an eventual corrective process that cannot escape being hugely disruptive.

The irony is that, whether the outcome is a market crash or an inflationary spiral, the biggest losers will include the same wealthy minority whose interests the Fed seems so determined to defend and promote.

At a crossroads

Critics have spent the best part of two centuries writing premature obituaries for the United States, and that certainly isn’t the intention here. Along the way, various candidates have been nominated as potential inheritors of America’s world economic, financial and political ascendancy, but the latest nominee, China, looks no more credible a successor than any of the others, having severe problems of her own. These lie outside the scope of this analysis, but can be considered every bit as acute as those facing the United States.

This said, it would be foolish to deny that America faces challenges arguably unprecedented in her peacetime history. The Wuhan coronavirus pandemic has struck a severe blow at an economy which was already seriously dysfunctional. Anger on the streets is a grim reminder that, 155 years on from the abolition of slavery, and half a century after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, American society continues to be blighted by racial antagonism. In the political sphere, party points-scoring continues to be prioritised over constructive action, whilst even the most inveterate opponent of Donald Trump would be hard-pressed to name any question to which “Joe Biden” is an answer.

The focus here is firmly on the economy, and addresses issues which, whilst by no means unique to the United States, are perhaps more acute there than in any other major economy. By way of illustration, the last two decades have seen each additional dollar of manufacturing output dwarfed by $11.60 of increased activity in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sectors. Moreover, each dollar of reported growth has come at a cost, not just of $3.80 in new debt, but of a worsening of perhaps $3.40 in pensions provision shortfalls.

Most strikingly of all, America’s economic processes no longer conform to any reasonable definition of a market economy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in capital markets, which have been stripped of their price-discovery and risk-calibration functions by systematic manipulation by the Fed.

Another way of putting this is that America has been financialised, with the making of money now almost wholly divorced from the production of goods and services. There are historical precedents for this financialization process – and none of them has ended well.

The economy – in search of reality

What, then, is the reality of an economy which, in adding incremental GDP of $7 trillion (+51%) since 1999, has plunged itself deeper in debt to the tune of $27tn (+105%), and is likely to have blown a hole of about $25tn in its aggregate provision for retirement?

To answer this, we need to recognise that economies are energy systems. They are not – contrary to widespread assumption – monetary constructs, which can be understood and managed in financial terms.

For those not familiar with this interpretation, just three observations should suffice to make things clear.

The first is that all of the goods and services which constitute economic output are the products of energy. Nothing of any utility whatsoever can be produced without it.

The second is that, whenever energy is accessed for our use, some of that energy is always consumed in the access process (a component known here as the Energy Cost of Energy, or ECoE).

Surplus energy (the total, less the ECoE component) drives all economic activity other than the supply of energy itself. This surplus energy is, therefore, coterminous with prosperity.

The third is that, lacking intrinsic worth, money commands value only as a ‘claim’ on the output of the ‘real’ (energy) economy. Creating ‘new’ money does nothing to increase the pool of goods and services against which such claims can be exercised. If, as has been the case in the US, newly-created money is injected into capital markets, the result is the creation of unsustainable escalation in the prices of assets.

Once these processes are appreciated, the mechanics of economic prosperity become apparent, as does the futility of trying to tackle them with financial gimmickry. This understanding provides insights denied to ‘conventional’ economic thinking by its obsession with money, and its treatment of energy as ‘just another input’.

The faltering dynamic

Ever since their low-point in the two decades after 1945, worldwide trend ECoEs have been rising exponentially, a process reflecting rates of depletion of low-cost energy from oil, gas and coal. SEEDS analysis indicates that, in highly complex advanced economies, prosperity ceases to grow, and then turns downwards, at ECoEs between 3.5% and 5.0%. By virtue of their lesser complexity, emerging market (EM) countries are more ECoE-tolerant, hitting the same prosperity climacteric at ECoEs of between 8% and 10%.

These trends are illustrated in the following charts, each of which compares economies’ trend ECoEs with prosperity per capita, calibrated in thousands of dollars, pounds or renminbi at constant (2018) values.

In the United States, prosperity has been deteriorating ever since ECoE hit 4.5% back in 2000. A similar fate overtook the United Kingdom in 2003 (when ECoE was 4.2%), and – pre-crisis – was expected to impact China during 2021-22, when ECoE was projected to reach 8.8%.

Critically, there is nothing that can be done to circumvent this physical equation. Prosperity can, of course, be managed more effectively, and distributed more equitably, but it cannot be increased once the energy equation turns against us. Though their development is highly desirable, renewable energy (RE) sources are not going to restore overall ECoEs to the ultra-low levels at which then-cheap fossil fuels powered prior increases in prosperity.

Technology, such as the fracking techniques used to extract oil and gas from US shale formations, cannot overturn cost parameters set by the physical characteristics of the resource. The idea that we can somehow “de-couple” economic activity from the use of energy is a definitional absurdity, and efforts to prove otherwise have rightly been described as “a haystack without a needle”.

For these reasons, the onset of “secular stagnation” in the Western economies from the mid-1990s had a perfectly straightforward explanation, albeit one wholly lost on those who, having coined this term, were unable to understand the processes involved.

The narrative over the subsequent twenty-five years – in the United States as elsewhere – has been one of trying to manufacture “growth” where the capability for continued increases in prosperity has ceased to exist.

Struggling in a trap

The situation from the mid-1990s, then, was that theory and reality were pulling apart. Conventional thinking stated that growth could continue in perpetuity, but this thinking had never taken into account the energy basis of economic activity. Hitherto, ECoE had been small enough to pass unnoticed within normal margins of error, and only now was it starting to act as an insuperable block to expansion. In their contention that the world would never ‘run out of’ oil, opponents of the ‘peak oil’ thesis had supplied the right answer to the wrong question.

This, moreover, was a period of remarkable hubris. The collapse of Soviet communism seemed to demonstrate the final victory of the ‘liberal’ economic model over its collectivist rival, so much so that some even opined that history was now ‘over’. “De-regulation”, it was argued, could be equated with economic vibrancy and, together with enlightened monetary policy, could prolong, in perpetuity, the “great moderation” which, in a brief sweet-spot in the early 1990s, had seemingly combined robust growth with low inflation.

Those who remained critical had, in any case, another target for their invective – globalisation. This was indeed a faulted model, and was always bound to use cheap credit to fill the gap between Western production (which had been outsourced), and consumption (which had not). But globalisation remained a symptom, whilst the malaise itself, which was a deteriorating energy dynamic, went almost wholly unnoticed.

Accordingly, ‘solutions’ to the problem of “secular stagnation” were sought in monetary and regulatory policy. From the late 1990s, the Fed embarked on a process of credit adventurism, keeping rates low, and making credit easier to obtain than it had ever been in living memory.

Between 1999 and 2007, American GDP grew at rates of close to 3%, which seemed pretty satisfactory. Unfortunately, borrowing was growing a lot more quickly than recorded output. Through the period between 1999 and 2019 as a whole, when US growth averaged 2.1%, annual borrowing averaged 7.8% of GDP, whilst aggregate debt increased by $27tn to support economic growth of just $7.1tn.

Along the way, de-regulation weakened and, in many cases, severed altogether the necessary linkages between risk and return. Risk became both mis-priced and increasingly opaque, leading directly, of course, to the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008.

This presented the authorities with two alternative courses of action. One of these, which was rejected, was to accept a ‘reset’ to the conditions which preceded the debt-fuelled boom of the pre-GFC years. The other, adopted enthusiastically by the Fed and other central banks, was to compound credit adventurism with its monetary counterpart.  As well as slashing policy rates to all but zero, QE was used to bid bond prices up, and thus force yields downwards. The result was ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), effectively negative (NIRP) in ex-inflation terms.

Remarkably, nobody in a position of authority seems to have thought it in any way odd that people and businesses should be paid to borrow.

The result, inevitably, has been increasing financial and economic absurdity. The necessary process of creative destruction has been stymied by the supply of credit cheap enough to keep technically defunct ‘zombie’ companies in being, whilst investors and lenders have seen merit in using ultra-cheap capital to finance ‘cash-burners’, confident that any losses will be handed back to them by a beneficent Fed.

Another, barely noticed consequence has been the emergence of huge gaps in the adequacy of pension provision. In a report appropriately dubbed the Global Pension Timebomb, the World Economic Forum calculated that the shortfall in US retirement provision stood at $28tn as of 2015, and was set to reach a mind-boggling $137tn by 2050.

Though other factors have been involved, a critical role has been played by a collapse in returns on invested capital. The WEF stated that forward real returns on American equities had slumped to 3.45% from a historic 8.6%, whilst bond returns had crashed from 3.6% to just 0.15%. On this basis, we can calculate that a person who hitherto had invested 10% of his or her income in a pension would now need to save about 27% to attain the same result at retirement, a savings ratio which, for the vast majority, is wholly impossible.

Faking it

Analytically, though, by far the most important aspect of US economic mismanagement has been the manufacturing of “growth” by the injection of cheap credit and cheaper money. The direct corollary of this process has been the driving of a wedge between asset prices and all forms of income.

This process goes far beyond the simple “spending of borrowed money”, which creates activity that could not have been afforded had consumers’ expenditures been limited to their own resources. Since asset prices are, to a very large extent, an inverse function of the cost of money, revenues in all asset-related activities, most obviously in financial services such as banking, insurance and real estate, have been inflated, directly and artificially, by ultra-loose monetary policies. Even the few who have not been sucked into this borrowing binge are almost certain to have benefited from employers or customers who have.

Using the SEEDS model, the following charts illustrate how monetary manipulation has driven a wedge between reported GDP and underlying or “clean” levels of output. In the absence of this manipulation, growth between 1999 and 2019 wouldn’t have averaged 2.1%, but just 0.8%.

At the household level, this means that increases in the average American’s income have been far exceeded by an escalation in his or her liabilities. These liabilities embrace not just personal credit but the individual’s share of corporate and government indebtedness, and include the pensions gap as well.

This process helps explain why mortgage, consumer, auto and student loans have soared, and why cheap (but inflexible) debt has been used to destroy costlier (but shock-absorbing) equity in the corporate sector.

The popular notion that these increases in liabilities have been offset by rises in the values of homes and equities is wholly mistaken, because it ignores the fact that these are aggregate values calculated on the basis of marginal transactions.

An individual can sell his or her home, or unload a stock portfolio, but the entirety of the housing stock, or the whole of the equity market, cannot be monetised, because the only possible buyers are the same people to whom these assets already belong.

By applying the ECoE deduction to the ‘clean’ level of output (C-GDP), we can identify what has really happened to the prosperity of the average American over the past two decades. In 2019, prior to the current pandemic crisis, his or her annual prosperity stood at an estimated $44,385, which was $3,660 (8%) lower than it had been back in 2000. Over the same period, taxation per capita increased by $3,485, so that the average person’s discretionary (‘left in your pocket’) prosperity is lower now by more than $7,100 (22%) than it was in 2000.

Meanwhile, each person’s share of America’s household, business and government debt has risen from $94,000 to more than $160,000 (at constant values), and nobody has yet proposed a workable solution to a rapidly rising pension gap which probably stands at more than $35tn, or $107,000 per person.

This predicament, which is summarised in the final set of charts, is beyond uncomfortable – and even this, of course, preceded the economic hurricane of the coronavirus pandemic.

The lethal disequilibrium

As well as understanding what these circumstances mean in practical terms, we need to note another consequence of using financial adventurism in the face of deteriorating prosperity. This is the way in which the relationship between incomes and assets has been bent wholly out of shape.

It’s an essential prerequisite of a properly functioning economy that there is a stable and workable balance between, on the one hand, all forms of income and, on the other, the valuation of assets, including equities, bonds and property. The problem facing anyone trying to calculate this relationship is that financial adventurism has falsified some forms of income in much the same way that it has distorted GDP. This is where prosperity, calibrated using an energy-based model such as SEEDS, is particularly important.

Essentially, equity prices need to be low enough to give stockholders a satisfactory real return on their investment, with much the same applying to bonds. Meanwhile, if typical property prices become too high in relation to median earnings, the market becomes dysfunctional, because it prices out new buyers, leaving owners vulnerable to any weakening in monetary support.

When – as has happened in the United States and elsewhere – monetary manipulation distorts these relationships, one of three things must happen. First, the authorities need to carry on, indefinitely, making incremental additions to their monetary largesse. Second, and if ever they cease to do this, then asset prices must correct downwards into equilibrium with all forms of income. Third, nominal incomes must be increased to restore equilibrium, something which, with prosperity no longer increasing, can only happen through rising inflation.

For as long as a disequilibrium between asset prices and incomes continues, the effect is to benefit asset owners to the detriment of those depending on incomes (which may be wages, dividends, profits, pensions or returns on savings). Accordingly, a wealthy elite becomes the beneficiary of processes whose outcomes are negative for those with little or no ownership of assets.

Put another way, inequalities will continue to widen – even if the authorities don’t adopt policies aimed deliberately at such an outcome – until a financial pendulum effect restores equilibrium.

What now?

From the foregoing, it will be apparent that America’s current predicament is by no means wholly a function of the coronavirus pandemic, or of the latest upsurge in racial tensions. Rather, the US is at the culminating point of a series of adverse trends:

First, the energy dynamic which determines prosperity has turned down, and a failure to recognise this climacteric has driven the authorities, in the US as elsewhere, into a chain-reaction of mistaken policies.

Second, the financialization of the economy has hidden underlying fundamentals from view, whilst simultaneously creating enormous systemic risk.

Third, failed monetary policies have driven a wedge between those who own assets, and those who depend either on wages or on other forms of income.

Fourth, and most dangerously of all, policy has created a dangerous disequilibrium between asset prices and incomes. It is no exaggeration to say that this disequilibrium is poised over the US economy like the Sword of Damocles.

Along the way, America has allowed market principles to be over-ruled by financial engineering, something typified by the way in which markets have become extensions of monetary policy.

The danger implicit in the latter point, in particular, is that monetary manipulation will be relied upon to resolve issues that lie outside its competence. There are strong reasons to believe that the US has reached a point of ‘credit exhaustion’, after which households refuse to take on any more debt, however cheap and accessible it may become. That is the point at which monetary policy becomes akin to “pushing on a string”.

This futility implies that either (a) the authorities give up on monetary stimulus, at which point asset markets crash, or, and more probably, (b) they ramp up injections of liquidity to a point at which dollar credibility implodes.

This creates a very realistic possibility that deflationary pressures push the Fed into the creation of new money on such a scale that inflation accelerates.

It is particularly worrying that a combination of self-interest and the polarisation of opinions prevents the adoption of pragmatic policies which, even at this very late stage, might manage the economy back into equilibrium.

 

 

#156. Actual fantasy

OUR URGENT NEED FOR RATIONAL ECONOMICS

Everyone knows the quotation, of course, which says that “when it gets serious, you have to lie”.

Actually, when it gets even more serious, we have to face the facts.

I’m indebted to Dutch rock music genius Arjen Lucassen for the observation that the counterpart to “virtual reality” is actual fantasy – and that’s where the world economy seems to be right now.

You may think it’s imminent, or you might believe that it still lies some distance in the future, but I’m pretty sure you know that we’re heading, inescapably, for “GFC II”, the much larger (and very different) sequel to the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC).

SEEDS 20 – the latest iteration of the Surplus Energy Economics Data System – has a new module which calculates the scale of exposure to “value destruction”. This exposure now stands at $320 trillion, compared with $67tn (at 2018 values) on the eve of GFC I at the end of 2007.

How this number is reached, and what it means, can be discussed later. Additionally, potential for value destruction needn’t mean that this is the quantity of value which actually will be destroyed when a crash happens. Rather, it gives us a starting order-of-magnitude.

For now, though, we can simply note that risk exposure seems now to be at least four times what it was back in 2008. Moreover, interest rates, now at or close to zero, cannot be slashed again, as they were in 2008-09. Neither can governments again put their now-stretched balance sheets behind their banking systems, even if global interconnectedness didn’t render such actions by individual countries largely ineffective.

Finally – in this litany of risk – two further points need to be borne in mind. First, global prosperity is weakening, and has been falling in most Western economies for at least a decade, so any new crash will test an already-weakened economic resilience.

Second, and relatedly, any attempt to repeat the rescues of 2008 would be unlikely to be accepted by a general public which now – and, in general, correctly – characterises those rescues as ‘bail-outs for the wealthy, and austerity for everyone else’.

The high price of ignorance

It’s tempting – looking at a world divided between struggling, often angry majorities, and tiny minorities rich beyond the dreams of avarice – to think the surreal state of the world’s financial system reflects some grand scheme, driven by greed. Alternatively, you might feel that far too many countries are run by people who simply aren’t up to the job.

Ultimately, though – and whilst greed, arrogance, incompetence and ambition have all been present in abundance – the factor driving most of what has gone wrong in recent years has been simple ignorance. For the most part, disastrous decisions have been made in good faith, because thinking has been conditioned by the false paradigm which states that ‘economics is the study of money’, and which adds, to compound folly still further, that energy is ‘just another input’.

I don’t want to labour a point familiar to most regular readers, so let’s wrap up recent history very briefly.

From the late 1990s, as “secular stagnation” kicked in (for reasons which very few actually understood, then or now), the siren voices of conventional economics argued that this could be ‘fixed’ by making it easier for people to borrow than it had ever been before. This created, not just debt escalation, but a lethal proliferation and dispersal of risk, which led directly to 2008.

In response, the same wise people, those whose insights caused the crisis in the first place, now counselled yet more bizarre gimmicks, the worst of which was that we should pay people to borrow, whilst simultaneously destroying the ability to earn returns on capital. Nobody seems to have wondered (still less explained) how we were supposed to operate a capitalist economy without returns on capital – and that, by the way, is why what we have now isn’t remotely a capitalist system based on properly-functioning markets.

When GFC II turns up, it’s as predictable as night following day that the zealots of the ‘economics is money’ fraternity will come up with yet more hare-brained follies. We already know what some of these are likely to be. There are certain to be strident calls for yet more money creation (but this time with a label saying that “it’s not QE – honest”). Some will advocate ‘helicopter money’, perhaps calling it ‘peoples’ QE’. There will be calls for negative nominal interest rates, with the necessary concomitant of the banning of cash. Ideas even more barking mad than these are likely to turn up, too.

Ultimately, what’s likely to happen is that the authorities will respond to GFC II by pouring into the system more additional money than the credibility of fiat currencies can withstand.

We know, of course, that any new gimmicks, just like the old ones, won’t ‘fix’ anything, and can be expected to make a bad situation even worse.

So the question facing everyone now – but especially decision-makers in government, business and finance, and those who influence their decisions – is whether we abandon conventional economics before, or after, the next mad turn of the roulette wheel.

Put another way, should the creators of “deregulation”, QE and ZIRP – and the facilitators of sub-prime and “cash-back” mortgages, collateralised debt obligations and the alphabet soup of “financial weapons of mass destruction” – be allowed to introduce yet more insanity into the system?

Before making this decision, there’s one further point that everyone needs to bear in mind. In 2008, financial gimmickry nearly, but not quite, destroyed the banking system. The only reason why this didn’t happen was that fiat money retained its credibility. But, whilst the follies which preceded the GFC imperilled only the credit (banking) system, those which have followed have put the credibility of money itself at risk.

This is perhaps the most powerful reason of all for not letting the practitioners of ‘conventional’ economics have another swing at the wrecking-ball.

I hope that, reflecting on this, you’ll agree with me that we can no longer afford the folly of financial economics.

Moreover, we need to say so, making fundamental points forcefully, and resisting any temptation to wander off into esoteric by-ways.

A scientific alternative?

If there can be no doubt at all that money-based interpretation of the economy has ended in abject failure, there can be very little doubt that a workable alternative is ready and waiting. That alternative is the recognition that the economy is an energy system.

This idea is by no means a new one and, though I’d prefer not to particularize, it’s been pioneered by some truly brilliant people. If those of us who base our interpretations on the energy-economics paradigm can see a long way into the future, it’s because we’re “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Moreover, much of the work of the pioneers is rooted in solid science, meaning that, for the first time, there is the prospect of a genuine science of economics, firmly located within the laws of thermodynamics. This has to be a more rational option than continuing to rely on economic ‘laws’ which try to impute immutable patterns to the behaviour of money – something which is, after all, no more, than a human construct.

I like to think that my much more modest role in this direction of travel has been to recognize that, if energy economics is going to transition from the side-lines of the debate to its centre, it needs to tackle conventional economics on its own turf.  That means that, whilst as purists we might prefer to set out our findings in calories, BTUs and joules, we have to talk in dollars, euros and yen if we’re to secure a hearing. It also means that we need models of the economy based firmly on energy principles.

If you’re a regular visitor to this site then the basics of what I call surplus energy economics will be familiar. Even so, and with new visitors in mind, a brief summary of its main principles seems apposite.

Core principles

The first principle of surplus energy economics is that everything that constitutes the economy is a function of energy. Literally nothing – goods, services, infrastructure, travel, information – can be supplied without it. Even in the most basic aspects of our lives, everything that we need – including somewhere to live, food and water – is a product of the application of energy. The more complex a society becomes, the more energy it requires, even if this is sometimes masked when energy-intensive activities are outsourced to other countries. The idea that we can somehow “decouple” economic activity from the use of energy has been debunked comprehensively by the European Environmental Bureau as “a haystack without a needle”.

You need only picture a society even temporarily deprived of energy to see the reality of this. Without energy, food cannot be grown, processed or delivered, water fails when the pumps stop working, our homes and places of work become cold and dark, and schools and hospitals cease to function. Without continuity of energy, machinery falls silent, nothing can move from where it is to where it is needed, individuals lose the mobility that we take for granted, and, in a pretty short time, social order fails and chaos reigns.

Ironically, financial systems are amongst the first to collapse when the energy plug is pulled. People cannot even write learned papers telling us that energy is ‘just another input’ when their computer screens have just gone down.

The second principle of surplus energy economics is that, whenever energy is accessed, some of that energy is always consumed in the access process. Stated at its simplest, you cannot drill an oil or gas well, excavate a mine, or manufacture a wind turbine or a solar panel without using energy. Much of this energy goes into the provision of materials, of which just one example is copper. This is now extracted at ratios as low as one tonne of copper from five hundred tonnes of rock. Supplying copper, then, cannot be done with human or animal labour – and, of course, even if this were possible, the need for nutritional energy would keep the circular, ‘in-out’ energy linkage wholly in place.

Taken together, these principles dictate a division of available energy into two streams or components.

The first is the energy consumed in the access process, known here as the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE).

The second – constituting all available energy other than ECoE – is known as surplus energy. This powers all economic activity, other than the supply of energy itself.

This makes ECoE an extremely important component, because, the higher ECoE is, the less surplus energy remains for those activities which constitute prosperity.

Four main factors drive trends in ECoEs. Taking oil, gas and coal as examples, these energy sources benefited in their early stages from economies of scale and expanding geographic reach. Latterly, though, with these drivers exhausted – and as a consequence of the natural process of using the most attractive sources first, and leaving costlier alternatives for later – ECoEs have been driven upwards relentlessly by depletion.

A fourth factor, technology, accelerates movement along the early, downwards ECoE trajectory, and then acts to mitigate subsequent increases. Mitigation, though, is all that technology can accomplish, because the scope for technological improvement is bounded by the envelope of the physical properties of the energy resource itself.

Lastly on this, because the four factors driving ECoEs – reach, scale, depletion and technology – all act gradually, ECoEs evolve, and need to be measured as trends.

Application – the money complication

With the basic principles established, and the role of ECoE understood, it might seem that, to arrive at a measure of prosperity, all we need do now is to subtract ECoE from economic activity. That would indeed be the case – if we had a reliable data series for output.

But this is something that we simply don’t possess, least of all in reported GDP. Essentially, GDP has been manipulated for the best part of two decades, and, arguably, for even longer than that.

By manipulation, I’m not referring to tinkering at the production boundary, or understating the deflator necessary for making comparisons over time.

The kind of manipulation I have in mind is the simple matter of pillaging the future to inflate perceptions of the present.

Expressed in PPP-converted dollars at constant 2018 values, reported world GDP increased by 36% between 2000 and 2008, and has grown by a further 34% since then. During those same periods, though, world debt increased by, respectively, 50% and 58%. Each $1 of incremental GDP between 2000 and 2008 was accompanied by $2.30 of net new borrowing, a number that has increased to more than $3 in the decade since then. Sustaining annual “growth” of about 3.5% in recent years has required annual borrowing of about 9% of GDP.

In short, GDP and growth have been faked by the simple spending of borrowed money. This exercise in cannibalising the future to sustain the present would look even more extreme were we to include in the equation the creation of huge holes in pension provision.

In this context, we need to answer two questions before we can calculate a useful output metric against which ECoE can be applied.

First, what would happen now, if we stopped piling on yet more debt?

Second, where would GDP be today if we hadn’t embarked on a massive borrowing spree?

You’ll understand, I’m sure – with government, business and finance still hamstrung by the failed economic methodologies of the past – why I won’t go into details here about the SEEDS algorithms which provide answers to these questions.

What I can say, though, is that, in the absence of further net borrowing, growth in world GDP would fall from a reported level of around 3.5%, to about 1.2% now, decreasing to just 0.6% by 2030.

On the second question, setting growth since 2000 of $61tn against borrowing of $167tn over the same period puts in context quite how far reported GDP has been inflated by the spending of borrowed money – and, if this borrowing binge hadn’t happened, GDP now would be 30% below the numbers actually recorded. Instead of “GDP of $135tn PPP, growing at 3.5% annually”, we’d have “GDP of $94tn, growing at barely 1%”.

Prosperity – the ECoE connection

When we set growth in real, “clean” GDP (C-GDP) of 31% since 2000 against a global trend ECoE that has risen from 4.1% to 7.9% over the same period – and stir a 23% increase in population numbers into the pot as well – you’ll readily understand why people have started to become poorer.

This is set out in fig. 1. In the left-hand chart, the gap between reported GDP (in blue) and C-GDP (black) represents the compound rate of divergence in a period when debt of $167tn has been injected into the system, together with large amounts of ultra-cheap liquidity.

If we were now to unwind these injections, GDP would fall to (or below) the black C-GDP line, over whatever period of time the debt reduction was spread. The gap between C-GDP (black) and prosperity (red) shows the impact of rising ECoEs, and illustrates how the worsening ECoE trend is set to turn low (and faltering) growth in C-GDP into a deteriorating prosperity trend.

The middle chart adds debt, to set these trends in context. In the right-hand chart, per capita equivalents illustrate how the average person has been getting poorer, albeit – so far – pretty gradually.

Fig. 1

Comparing 2000 with 2018 (in constant PPP dollars), a rise of 31% in C-GDP has been offset by an ECoE deduction that has soared from $2.7tn to $7.4tn. Aggregate prosperity has thus increased from $69tn ($71.9tn minus ECoE of $2.7tn) in 2000 to $86tn ($93.5tn minus $7.4tn) last year.

This is a rise of 26%, only slightly greater than the increase (of 23%) in world population numbers between those years. In fact, SEEDS indicates that global prosperity per capita peaked in 2007, at $11,720, and had fallen to $11,570 by last year.

On the cusp of degrowth

This, to be sure, has been a very small decrease, essentially meaning that per capita prosperity has plateaued for slightly more than a decade. Before drawing any comfort at all from this observation, though, the following points need to be noted.

First, the post-2007 plateau contrasts starkly with historic improvements in prosperity. The robust growth of the first two decades after 1945, for instance, coincided with a continuing downwards trend in overall ECoE, as the ECoEs of oil, gas and coal moved towards the lowest points on their respective parabolas.

Second, the deterioration in prosperity, though gradual, has taken place at the same time that debt has escalated. Back in 2007, and expressed at 2018 values, the prosperity of the average person was $11,720, and his or her debt was $27,000. Now, though prosperity is only $140 lower now than it was then, debt has soared to $39,000.

Third, these are aggregated numbers, combining Western economies – where prosperity has been falling over an extended period – with emerging market (EM) countries, where prosperity continues to improve. Once EM economies, too, pass the climacteric into deteriorating prosperity – and that is about to start happening – the global average will fall far more rapidly than the gradual erosion of recent years.

Fourth, as these trends unfold we can expect the rate of deterioration to accelerate, not least because our economic system is predicated on perpetual expansion, and is ill-suited to managing degrowth. In a degrowth phase, in which utilization rates slump and trade volumes fall, increasing numbers of activity-types will cease to be viable (a process that has already commenced). Additionally, of course, we ought to expect the process of degrowth to damage the financial system and this, amongst other adverse effects, will put the “wealth effect” – such as it is – into reverse.

The differences between Western and EM economies is illustrated in fig. 2, which compares the United States with China. On both charts, prosperity per person is shown in blue, and ECoE in red.

In America, prosperity turned down from 2005, when ECoE was 5.6%. In China, on the other hand, SEEDS projects a peaking of prosperity in 2021, by which time ECoE is expected to have reached 8.8%. The reason for this difference is that complex Western economies have far less ECoE-tolerance than less sophisticated EM countries.

As a rule of thumb, prosperity turns downwards in advanced economies at ECoEs of between 3.5% and 5.5%, with the United States far more resilient than weaker Western countries, most notably in Europe. The equivalent band for EM countries seems to lie between 8% and 10%, a threshold that most of these countries are set to cross within the next five or so years.

Where China is concerned, it’s noteworthy that, with ECoE now hitting 8%, there are very evident signs of economic deterioration, including debt dependency, increasing liquidity injections, and falling demand for everything from cars and smartphones to chips and components.

Fig. 2

The energy implications

In conjunction with the SEEDS 20 iteration, the system has adopted a new energy scenario which differs significantly from those set out by institutions such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency.

Essentially, SEEDS broadly agrees with EIA and IEA projections showing increases, between now and 2040, of about 38% for nuclear and 58% for renewables, with the latter defined to include hydroelectricity.

Where SEEDS differs from these institutions is over the outlook for fossil fuels. Using the median expectations of the EIA and the IEA, oil consumption is set to be 11% higher in 2040 than it is now, gas consumption is projected to grow by 32%, and the use of coal is expected to be little changed.

Given the strongly upwards trajectories of the ECoEs of these energy sources, it’s becoming ever harder to see where such increases in supply are supposed to come from. With the US shale liquids sector an established cash-burner, and with most non-OPEC countries now at or beyond their production peaks, it may well be that far too much is being expected of Russia and the Middle East. The oil industry may, in the past, have ‘cried wolf’ over the kind of prices required to finance replacement capacity, but we cannot assume that this is still the case.

The implication for fossil fuels isn’t, necessarily, that worsening scarcity will cause prices to soar but, rather, that it will become increasingly difficult to set prices that are at once both high enough for producers (whose costs are rising) and low enough for consumers (whose prosperity is deteriorating). It’s becoming an increasingly plausible scenario that the supply of oil, gas and coal may cease to be activities suited to for-profit private operators, and that some form of direct subsidy may become inescapable.

Conclusions

It is to be hoped that this discussion has persuaded you of two things – the abject failure of ‘conventional’, money-based economics, and the imperative need to adopt interpretations based on a recognition of the (surely obvious) fact that the economy is an energy system.

Until and unless this happens, we’re going to carry on telling ourselves pretty lies about prosperity, and acting in ways characterised by an increasingly desperate impulse towards denial. Many governments are already taxing their citizens to an extent that, whilst it might seem reasonable in the context of overstated GDP, causes real hardship and discontent when set against the steady deterioration of prosperity.

Meanwhile, risk, as measured financially, keeps rising, and the cumulative gap between assumed GDP and underlying prosperity has reached epic proportions. Expressed in market (rather than PPP) dollars, scope for value destruction has now reached $320tn.

Only part of this is likely to take the form of debt defaults, though these could take on a compounding, domino-like progression. Just as seriously, asset valuations look set to tumble, when we are forced to realise that unleashing tides of cheap debt and cheaper money provides no genuine “fix” to an economy in degrowth, but serves only to compound the illusions on which economic assumptions and decisions are based.

 

#154. An autumn nexus

A CONVERGENCE OF STRESS-LINES

If you’ve been following our discussions here for any length of time, you’ll know that the main focus now is on the need for energy transition. This is a challenge made imperative, not just by environmental considerations but, just as compellingly, by the grim outlook for an economy which continues to rely on energy sources – oil, gas and coal – whose own economics are deteriorating rapidly.

These, of course, are long-term themes (though that’s no excuse for the gulf between official and corporate rhetoric and delivery). But the short term matters, too, and an increasing number of market participants and observers have started to notice that a series of significant stress-lines are converging on the months of September and October, much as railway lines converge on Charing Cross station.

The context, as it’s understood from an energy economics perspective, is that a fracture in the financial system is inevitable (though ‘inevitable’ isn’t the same thing as ‘imminent’). Properly understood, money has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as a claim on the output of the ‘real’ economy of goods and services. Whilst the mountain of monetary claims keeps getting bigger, the real economy itself is being undermined by adverse energy economics.

Ultimately, financial crises happen as correctives, when the gap between the financial and the ‘real’ economies becomes excessive.

This is what happened with the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), which followed a lengthy period of what I call “credit adventurism”. A sequel to 2008, known here as “GFC II”, is the seemingly inevitable consequence of the “monetary adventurism” adopted during and after 2008. This, incidentally, is where the parallels end because, whilst credit adventurism put the banking system in the eye of the storm in 2008, the subsequent adoption of monetary recklessness implies that GFC II will be a currency event.   .

An understanding of the inevitability of GFC II doesn’t tell us when it’s likely to happen. All that I’ve ventured on this so far is that a ‘window of risk’ has been open since the third quarter of 2018. Whether that window has yet opened wide enough to admit GFC II is a moot point. But the converging stresses are certainly worthy of consideration.

Chinese burns

Three of the most important lines of stress originate in China.

As we’ve seen – and with the country’s Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE) now in the climacteric range at which prosperity growth goes into reverse – there’s no doubt at all that the Chinese economy is in trouble. After all (and expressed at constant 2018 values), China has added debt of RMB 170 trillion (+288%) over a period in which reported GDP has expanded by RMB 47 tn (+114%), and no such pattern can be sustained in perpetuity.

This is complicated by Sino-American trade tensions, and, given the huge divergence between Chinese and American priorities, there seems little prospect that these can be resolved in any meaningful way.

The third and newest component of the Chinese risk cocktail is unrest in Hong Kong. Few think it likely that Beijing would be reckless enough to make a forceful intervention there, but it’s a risk whose relatively low probability is offset by the extremity of consequences if it were to happen.

In this context, it’s interesting to note that markets initially responded euphorically to Mr Trump’s delaying of new sanctions, seemingly interpreting it as some kind of ‘wobble’ on his part. It looks a lot more like a Hong Kong-related cautionary signal, seasoned with a twist of gamesmanship and soupçon of characteristic showmanship.

Whilst I’m not one of Mr Trump’s critics, it does seem undeniable that he makes too much of the (actually very tenuous) relationship between economic performance and the level of the stock market. This adds his voice to the chorus of those advocating ever cheaper money.

When the next crash does, come, of course, this chorus will rise to a crescendo, but central bankers will in any case have started pouring ever larger amounts of liquidity into the system in an effort to prop up tumbling asset prices. This, in turn, is likely to lead to a flight to perceived safe havens, one of which is likely to be the dollar, whilst other currencies come under the cosh.

But this is to look too far ahead.

“Brexit” blues

The focus in Europe, of course, is on “Brexit”. I’m neither an admirer nor a critic of Boris Johnson, any more than I’m a supporter or an opponent of “Brexit” itself (a subject on which I’ve been, and remain, studiously neutral).

This said, Mr Johnson is surely right to assert that you’ll never get anything out of negotiations if you start off by committing yourself to accept whatever the other side deigns to offer. This does indeed look like brinkmanship on his part, but it’s remarkable how often negotiations, be they political or commercial, do go “right down to the wire”, being settled only when time presses hard enough on the parties involved.

I’ve said before that the EU negotiators worry me more than their British counterparts in this process. The British side has, of course, mishandled the “Brexit” situation, but this can have come as no great surprise to anyone familiar with Britain’s idiosyncratic processes of government.

Unfortunately, British floundering has been compounded by remarkable intransigence on the EU side of the table. The attitude of the Brussels apparatchiks, all along, has been ‘take it or leave it’, and this seems to have been based on two false premises.

The first is that the British have to be ‘punished’ to deter other countries from following a similar road. This is a false position, because influencing how French, Spanish, Italian and other citizens cast their votes in domestic elections is wholly outside Brussels’ competence.

In any case, ‘punishment’ should not be part of the lexicon of any adult participant in statesmanship.

The second false premise is that Britain attends the negotiating table as a supplicant, because a chaotic “Brexit” will inflict far more economic harm on the United Kingdom than on the other EU member countries.

My model suggests that this is simply not true. The country at single greatest risk is Ireland, whose economy is far weaker than its “leprechaun economics” numbers suggest, and whose exposure, both to debt and to the financial system, is as worrying as it is extraordinary.

Ireland is followed, probably in this order, by France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. The French economy looks moribund, despite its relentlessly-increasing debt, and the prosperity of the average French person has been subjected to a gradual but prolonged deterioration, a process so aggravated by rising taxes that it has led to popular unrest.

Though its economy is stronger, the Netherlands is exposed, by the sheer scale of its financial sector, to anything which puts the global financial system at risk.

Germany, whose own economy is stuttering, must be wondering how quite much of the burden of cost in the wider Euro Area it might be asked to bear.

Moreover, the European Central Bank’s actions endorse the perception that the EA economy is performing poorly. The ECB has made it clear that there is no foreseeable prospect of the EA being weened off its diet of ultra-cheap liquidity.

This makes it all the more remarkable (in a macabre sort of way) that none of the governments of the most at-risk EA countries have sought to demand some pragmatism from Brussels. What we cannot know – though it remains a possibility – is whether the ever-nearer approach of ‘B-Day’ will energise at least, say, Dublin or Paris into action.

Madness, money and moods

Long before the markets took fright at the inversion of the US yield curve, the financial system (in its broadest sense) has looked bizarre.

In America, the corporate sector is engaged in the wholesale replacement of flexible equity with inflexible debt, whilst investors queue up to support “cash burners”, and buy into the IPOs of deeply loss-making debutants. The BoJ (the Japanese central bank) now owns more than half of all Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) in issue, acquired with money newly created for the purpose.

Around the world, more than $15 trillion of bonds trade at negative yields, meaning that investors are paying borrowers for the privilege of lending them money. The only logic for holding instruments this over-priced is the “greater fool” theory. This states that you can profit from buying over-priced assets by selling them on to someone even more optimistic than yourself. There’s something deeply irrational about anything whose logic is founded in folly.

The same ultra-low interest rates that have prompted escalating borrowing have blown huge holes in pension provision – and have left us in a sort of Through the Looking Glass world in which we’re trying to operate a ‘capitalist’ system without returns on capital.

Until now, markets seem to have been insouciant about the bizarre characteristics of the system, for two main reasons.

First, they seem to assume that, whatever goes wrong, central banks will come to the rescue with a monetary lifeboat. To mix metaphors, this attitude portrays the system as some kind of kiddies-fiction casino, in which winners pocket their gains, but losers are reimbursed at the door.

If, as seems increasingly likely, we’ve started a ‘race to the bottom’ in currencies, this should act as a reminder that the value of any fiat currency depends, ultimately, entirely on confidence – and central bankers, at least, ought to understand that excessive issuance can be corrosive of trust.

The markets’ second mistake is a failure to recognize the concept of “credit exhaustion”. The assumption seems to be that, just so long as debt is cheap enough, people will load up on it ad infinitum. What’s likelier to happen – and may, indeed, have started happening now – is that borrowers become frightened about how much debt they already have, and refuse to take on any more, irrespective of how cheap it may have become.

A measured way of stating the case is that, as we look ahead to autumn, we can identify an undeniable convergence of stress-lines towards a period of greatly heightened risk.

This perception is compounded by a pervading mood of complacency founded on the excessive reliance placed on the seaworthiness of the monetary lifeboat.

I’m certainly not going to predict that a dramatic fracture is going to occur within the next two or three months at the nexus of these stress lines. We simply don’t know. But it does seem a good time for tempering optimism with caution.

 

#152: Stuffed

WHY THE MONETARY LIFEBOAT WON’T FLOAT

The global financial system has come to rest on a single complacent assumption, one which is seldom put explicitly into words, but is remarkably implicit in actions.

This assumption is that the authorities have, and are willing to deploy, a monetary ‘fix’ for all ills.

Accordingly, the system has come to be seen as a bizarre casino, in which winning punters keep their gains, but losers are sure that they’ll be reimbursed at the exit-door.

So ingrained has this assumption become that it’s almost heresy to denounce it for the falsity that it is.

The theme of this discussion is simply stated. It is that the complacent assumption of a monetary fix is misplaced. The authorities, faced with a crash, might very well try something along these lines, and might even adopt one or more of its most outlandish variants.

But it won’t work.

The reason why no monetary expedient can provide a “get out of gaol free” card is that the economy and the financial system are quite different things.

The complacent rush in  

You can see financial manifestations of mistaken complacency wherever you look.

It emboldens those who have lent most of the $2.9 trillion that, over the last five years, American companies have ploughed into the insane elimination of flexible equity in favour of inflexible debt.

It informs those who pile into the shares of cash-burners, or queue up to buy into overpriced IPOs.

It reassures those long of JPY, despite the monetization of more than half of all outstanding JGBs by the BoJ.

It tranquilizes those who, unable to see the contradiction between gigantic financial exposure and a stumbling economy, remain long of GBP.

It blinds those to whom the Chinese economic narrative remains a miracle, not a credit-fueled bubble.

The aim here is a simple one. It is to counter this complacency by explaining why economic problems cannot be solved with monetary tools, and to warn that efforts to do so risk, instead, the undermining of the credibility of currencies.

A casino which hands back losers’ money belongs in the realm of pure myth.

The secondary status of money

Money has no intrinsic worth. Someone adrift in a lifeboat in mid-Atlantic, or stranded in the Sahara, would benefit from an air-drop of food or water, but even a gigantic amount of money descending on a parachute would do nothing more than allowing him or her to die rich.

Conventionally, money has three roles, but only one of these is relevant. Fiat money has been an atrociously bad ‘store of value’, and money is a very flawed ‘unit of account’. Money’s only relevant role is as a ‘medium of exchange’.

For this to work, there has to be something for which money can be exchanged.

This means that money has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as a claim on the products of the economy. If you build up a structure of claims that the economy cannot honour, then that structure must – eventually, and in one way or another – collapse.

Conceptually, it’s useful to think in terms of ‘two economies’. One of these is the ‘real’ economy of goods and services, its operation characterised by the use of labour and resources, but its performance ultimately driven by energy.

The other is the ‘financial’ economy of money and credit, a parallel or shadow of the ‘real’ economy, useful for managing the real economy, but wholly lacking in stand-alone substance.

To be sure, the early monetarists oversimplified things with the assertion that inflation could be explained in wholly quantitative monetary terms. The price interface between money and the real economy isn’t determined by the simple division of the quantity of economic goods into the quantity of money.

Rather, it’s the movement or use of money that matters. The quantitative recklessness of Weimar would not have triggered hyperinflation had the excess been locked up in a vault, or in some other way not put to use. It’s not hair-splitting, but an important distinction, that Weimar’s true downfall was not that excess money was created, but that it was created and spent.

The process of exchange, which really defines the role of money, makes the interface dynamic, and, as such, introduces behavioural considerations. The creation of very large amounts of new money needn’t destabilize the price equilibrium if people hoard it, but a lesser increment can be extremely destabilizing if is spent with exceptional rapidity. This is why the simple quantitative interpretation needs to be modified by the inclusion of velocity, making Q x V a much more useful monetary determinant.

Behaviourally, velocity falls when people turn cautious – they did this during and after the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), a tendency which reduced the inflationary risk of the loose money responses deployed at that time.

Even so, claims that the monetary adventurism unleashed at that time did not trigger inflation are simply untrue, unless you accept a narrow definition of inflation. To be sure, retail prices haven’t surged since 2008, but asset prices most certainly have, the truism being that the inflationary effects of the injection of money turn up at the point at which the money is injected.

Additionally, inflation is influenced by expectations – which have been low in an era of ’austerity’ – and by the performance of the economy. An economy which is performing weakly puts downwards pressure on inflation.

What it does not do, though, is to eliminate latent inflation. Any erosion of faith in the reliability of money would cause velocity to spike, as people rush out to spend it whilst it still has value.

Fiat fallacy

One of the analytically adverse side-effects of monetary manipulation is that it inflates apparent activity. Globally, and expressed in constant 2018 PPP dollars, the $34tn increase in recorded GDP since 2008 cannot be unrelated to the $110tn escalation in debt over the same period. According to SEEDS, most (67%) of the “growth” recorded over that period was nothing more than the simple effect of spending borrowed money.

This matters, first because a cessation in credit injection would undermine supposed rates of “growth” and, second, because a reversal would put much prior “growth” into reverse.

By falsifying GDP, this ‘credit effect’ also falsifies any relationships based on it – so the ‘comfortable’ 218% global ratio of debt-to-GDP masks a real ratio which is nearer to 340%, and higher by more than 100% than it was ten years ago (236%). It also distorts the measurement of financial exposure, so lulling us into misplaced insouciance about those countries (such as Ireland and Britain) whose financial assets stand at huge multiples to the real value of their economies.

Behind the mask of ‘the credit effect’, global economic performance is at best lacklustre, growing at about 0-9-1.3% annually whilst population numbers are growing by 1.0%.

Moreover, these numbers disguise regional disparities – whilst the average Chinese or Indian citizen continues to become more prosperous (for now, anyway), the average Westerner has been getting poorer for at least a decade.

Of course, there’s a countervailing ‘wealth effect’, giving false comfort to those whose assets have soared in price – and few, if any, of them appear to wonder what would happen if there was a rush to monetize inflated values.

But the drastic distortion in the relationship between asset values and incomes has real downsides exceeding its (illusory anyway) upside. Policymakers and their advisers may remain ignorant of the deterioration in Western prosperity, but to voters it is all too real, something which has been a major contributor to those changes in voter responses which have informed “Brexit”, Mr Trump’s ascent to the White House, and the rolling repudiation of established political parties across much of Europe.

The decline of “stuff”

The weakness of the underlying picture has now started showing up unmistakeably in weakening in demand for everything from cars, domestic appliances and smartphones to chips and drive-motors. Logically, deterioration in the economy of “stuff” will extend next into commodities because, if you’re making less “stuff”, you need less minerals, less plastics and, critically, less energy with which to make it.

Whilst all of this is going on in plain view, markets and policymakers alike are failing to recognize the risks implicit in the widening gap between a stumbling economy and escalating financial exposure. As well as borrowing an additional $110tn since 2008, we’ve blown a not-dissimilar-sized hole in pension provision, because the same low cost of capital which has incentivized borrowing has also crippled the rates of return on which pension accrual depends.

Additionally, of course, the prices of equities and property have reached heights from which any descent into rationality would have devastating direct and collateral consequences.

When the next crisis (GFC II) shows up, the complacent expectation is that everything can be ‘fixed’ with even looser monetary policy. Some of the more bizarre suggestions aired in 2008 – including ‘helicopter money’, and NIRP (negative interest rate policy, with its implicit need to outlaw cash) – will doubtless come to the fore again, accompanied by a whole crop of new ‘innovations’. The authorities are likely, in the stark despair which follows protracted denial, to act on at least some of these follies.

The trouble is that it won’t work.

You might as well try to rescue an ailing pot-plant with a spanner as try to revive an ailing economy with monetary innovation.

The form that failure takes need not necessarily involve massive inflation, though this is the only non-default route down from the debt mountain. Authorities capable of believing that EVs are “zero emissions”, or that we can overcome the environmental challenge with some form of “sustainable growth” (rather than degrowth), are perfectly capable of also believing that we can fix economic problems with monetary recklessness.

If inflation doesn’t spoil the party, two other factors might. One is credit exhaustion, in which massively indebted borrowers refuse to take on yet more debt, irrespective of how cheap the offer may be.

The other factor might well be a loss of faith in money, which might also be accompanied by a ‘flight to quality’, perhaps favouring the dollar (as ‘the prettiest horse in the knackers’ yard’), whilst hanging weaker currencies out to dry.

However it pans out, though, we know that an economy whose prosperity is faltering cannot indefinitely sustain an ever-growing burden of financial promises. By definition, whatever is unsustainable eventually fails, and this is as true of monetary systems as of anything else.

#149: The big challenges

HOW THE ECONOMICS OF ENERGY VIEWS THE AGENDA

As regular readers will know, this site is driven by the understanding that the economy is an energy system, and not (as conventional thinking assumes) a financial one. Though we explore a wide range of related issues (such as the conclusion that energy supply is going to need monetary subsidy), it’s important that we never lose sight of the central thesis. So I hope you’ll understand the need for a periodic restatement of the essentials.

If you’re new to Surplus Energy Economics, what this site offers is a coherent interpretation of economic and financial trends from a radically different standpoint. This enables us to understand issues that increasingly baffle conventional explanations.

This perspective is a practical one – nobody conversant with the energy-based interpretation was much surprised, for instance, when Donald Trump was elected to the White House, when British voters opted for “Brexit”, or when a coalition of insurgents (aka “populists”) took power in Rome. The SEE interpretation of prosperity trends also goes a long way towards explaining the gilets jaunes protests in France, protests than can be expected in due course to be replicated in countries such as the Netherlands. We’re also unpersuaded by the exuberant consensus narrative of the Chinese economy. The proprietary SEEDS model has proved a powerful tool for the interpretation of critical trends in economics, finance and government.

The aim here, though, isn’t simply to restate the core interpretation. Rather, there are three trends to be considered, each of which is absolutely critical, and each of which is gathering momentum. The aim here is to explore these trends, and share and discuss the interpretations of them made possible by surplus energy economics.

The first such trend is the growing inevitability of a second financial crisis (GFC II), which will dwarf the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), whilst differing radically from it in nature.

The second is the progressive undermining of political incumbencies and systems, a process resulting from the widening divergence between policy assumption and economic reality.

The third is the clear danger that the current, gradual deterioration in global prosperity could accelerate into something far more damaging, disruptive and dangerous.

The vital insight

The centrality of the economy is the delivery of goods and services, literally none of which can be supplied without energy. It follows that the economy is an energy system (and not a financial one), with money acting simply as a claim on output which is itself made possible only by the availability of energy. Money has no intrinsic worth, and commands ‘value’ only in relation to the things for which it can be exchanged – and all of those things rely entirely on energy.

Critically, all economic output (other than the supply of energy itself) is the product of surplus energy – whenever energy is accessed, some energy is always consumed in the access process, and surplus energy is what remains after the energy cost of energy (ECoE) has been deducted from the total (or ‘gross’) amount that is accessed.

This makes ECoE a critical determinant of prosperity. The distinguishing feature of the world economy over the last two decades has been the relentless rise in ECoE. This process necessarily undermines prosperity, because it erodes the available quantity of surplus energy. We’re already seeing this happen – Western prosperity growth has gone into reverse, and progress in emerging market (EM) economies is petering out. Global average prosperity has already turned down.

The trend in ECoE is determined by four main factors. Historically, ECoE has been pushed downwards by broadening geographical reach and increasing economies of scale. Where oil, natural gas and coal are concerned, these positive factors have been exhausted, so the dominating driver of ECoE now is depletion, a process which occurs because we have, quite naturally, accessed the most profitable (lowest ECoE) resources first, leaving costlier alternatives for later.

The fourth driver of ECoE is technology, which accelerates downwards tendencies in ECoE, and mitigates upwards movements. Technology, though, operates within the physical properties of the resource envelope, and cannot ‘overrule’ the laws of physics. This needs to be understood as a counter to some of the more glib and misleading extrapolatory assumptions about our energy future.

The nature of the factors driving ECoE indicates that this critical factor should be interpreted as a trend. According to SEEDS – the Surplus Energy Economics Data System – the trend ECoE of fossil fuels has risen exponentially, from 2.6% in 1990 to 4.1% in 2000, 6.7% in 2010 and 9.9% today. Since fossil fuels continue to account for four-fifths of energy supply, the trend in overall world ECoE has followed a similarly exponential path, and has now reached 8.0%, compared with 5.9% in 2010 and 3.9% in 2000.

For fossil fuels alone, trend ECoE is projected to reach 11.8% by 2025, and 13.5% by 2030. SEEDS interpretation demonstrates that an ECoE of 5% has been enough to put prosperity growth into reverse in highly complex Western economies, whilst less complex emerging market (EM) economies hit a similar climacteric at ECoEs of about 10%. A world economy dependent on fossil fuels thus faces deteriorating prosperity and diminishing complexity, both of which pose grave managerial challenges because they lie wholly outside our prior experience.

Mitigation, not salvation

This interpretation – reinforced by climate change considerations – forces us to regard a transition towards renewables as a priority. It should not be assumed, however, that renewables offer an assured escape from the implications of rising ECoEs, still less that they offer a solution that is free either of pain or of a necessity for social adaption.

There are three main cautionary factors around the ECoE capabilities of solar, wind and other renewable sources of energy.

The first cautionary factor is “the fallacy of extrapolation”, the natural – but often mistaken – human tendency to assume that what happens in the future will be an indefinite continuation of the recent past. It’s easy to assume that, because the ECoEs of renewables have been falling over an extended period, they must carry on falling indefinitely, at a broadly similar pace. But the reality is much more likely to be that cost-reducing progress in renewables will slow when it starts to collide with the limits imposed by physics.

Second, projections for cost reduction ignore the derivative nature of renewables. Building, say, a solar panel, a wind turbine or an electrical distribution system requires inputs currently only available courtesy of the use of fossil fuels. In this specialised sense, solar and wind are not so much ‘primary renewables’ as ‘secondary applications of primary fossil input’.

We may reach the point where these technologies become ‘truly renewable’, in that their inputs (such as minerals and plastics) can be supplied without help from oil, gas or coal.

But we are certainly, at present, nowhere near such a breakthrough. Until and unless this point is reached, the danger exists that that the ECoE of renewables may start to rise, pushed back upwards by the rising ECoE of the fossil fuel sources on which so many of their inputs rely.

The third critical consideration is that, even if renewables were able to stabilise ECoE at, say, 8% or so, that would not be anywhere near low enough.

Global prosperity stopped growing before ECoE hit 6%. British prosperity has been in decline ever since ECoE reached 3.6%, and an ECoE of 5.5% has been enough to push Western prosperity growth into reverse. As recently as the 1960s, in what we might call a “golden age” of prosperity growth, ECoE was well below 2%. Even if renewables could stabilise ECoE at, say, 8% – and that’s an assumption which owes much more to hope than calculation – it wouldn’t be low enough to enable prosperity to stabilise, let alone start to grow again.

SEEDS projections are that overall world ECoE will reach 9% by 2025, 9.7% by 2030 and 11% by 2040. These projections are comparatively optimistic, in that progress with renewables is expected to blunt the rate of increase in trend ECoE. But we should labour under no illusion that the downwards tendency in prosperity can be stemmed, less still reversed. Renewables can give us time to prepare and respond, but are not going to take us back to a nirvana of low-cost energy.

This brings us to the three critical issues driven by rising ECoE and diminishing prosperity.

Challenge #1 – financial shock

An understanding of the energy basis of the economy puts us in possession of a coherent narrative of recent and continuing tendencies in economics and finance. Financially, in particular, the implications are disquieting. There is overwhelming evidence pointing towards a repetition of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), in a different form and at a very much larger scale.

From the late 1990s, with ECoEs rising beyond 4%, growth in Western prosperity began to peter out. Though “secular stagnation” was (and remains) the nearest that conventional interpretation has approached to understanding this issue, deceleration was noticed sufficiently to prompt the response known here as “credit adventurism”.

This took the form of making credit not only progressively cheaper to service but also much easier to obtain. This policy was also, in part, aimed at boosting demand undermined by the outsourcing of highly-skilled, well-paid jobs as a by-product of ‘globalization’. “Credit adventurism” was facilitated by economic doctrines which were favourable to deregulation, and which depicted debt as being of little importance.

The results, of course, are now well known. Between 2000 and 2007, each $1 of reported growth in GDP was accompanied by $2.08 of net new borrowing, though ratios were far higher in those Western economies at the forefront of credit adventurism. The deregulatory process also facilitated a dangerous weakening of the relationship between risk and return. These trends led directly to the 2008 global financial crisis.

Responses to the GFC had the effect of hard-wiring a second, far more serious crash into the system. Though public funds were used to rescue banks, monetary policy was the primary instrument. This involved slashing policy rates to sub-inflation levels, and using newly-created money to drive bond prices up, and yields down.

This policy cocktail added “monetary adventurism” to the credit variety already being practiced. Since 2007, each dollar of reported growth has come at a cost of almost $3.30 in new debt. Practices previously confined largely to the West have now spread to most EM economies. For example, over a ten-year period in which growth has averaged 6.5%, China has typically borrowed 23% of GDP annually.

Most of the “growth” supposedly created by monetary adventurism has been statistically cosmetic, consisting of nothing more substantial than the simple spending of borrowed money. According to SEEDS, 66% of all “growth” since 2007 has fallen into this category, meaning that this growth would cease were the credit impulse to slacken, and would reverse if we ever attempted balance sheet retrenchment. As a result, policies said to have been “emergency” and “temporary” in nature have, de facto, become permanent. We can be certain that tentative efforts at restoring monetary normality would be thrown overboard at the first sign of squalls.

Advocates of ultra-loose monetary policy have argued that the creation of new money, and the subsidizing of borrowing, are not inflationary, and point at subdued consumer prices in support of this contention. However, inflation ensuing from the injection of cheap money can be expected to appear at the point at which the new liquidity is injected, which is why the years since 2008 have been characterised by rampant inflation in asset prices. Price and wage inflation have been subdued, meanwhile, by consumer caution – reflected in reduced monetary velocity – and by the deflationary pressures of deteriorating prosperity. The current situation can best be described as a combination of latent (potential) inflation and dangerously over-inflated asset prices.

All of the above points directly to a second financial crisis (GFC II), though this is likely to differ in nature, as well as in scale, from GFC I. Because “credit adventurism” was the prime cause of the 2008 crash, its effects were concentrated in the credit (banking) system. But GFC II, resulting instead from “monetary adventurism”, will this time put the monetary system at risk, hazarding the viability of fiat currencies.

In addition to mass defaults, and collapses in asset prices, we should anticipate that currency crises, accompanied by breakdowns of trust in currencies, will be at the centre of GFC II. The take-off of inflation should be considered likely, not least because no other process exists for the destruction of the real value of gargantuan levels of debt.

Finally on this topic, it should be noted that policies used in response to 2008 will not work in the context of GFC II. Monetary policy can be used to combat debt excesses, but problems of monetary credibility cannot, by definition, be countered by increasing the quantity of money. Estimates based on SEEDS suggest that GFC II will be at least four orders of magnitude larger than GFC I.

Challenge #2 – breakdown of government

Until about 2000, the failure of conventional economics to understand the energy basis of economic activity didn’t matter too much, because ECoE wasn’t large enough to introduce serious distortions into its conclusions. Put another way, the exclusion of ECoE gave results which remained within accepted margins of error.

The subsequent surge in ECoEs, however, has caused the progressive invalidation of all interpretations from which it is excluded.

What applies to conventional economics itself applies equally to organisations, and most obviously to governments, which use it as the basis of their interpretations of policy.

The consequence has been to drive a wedge between policy assumptions made by governments, and underlying reality as experienced by individuals and households. Even at the best of times – which these are not – this sort of ‘perception gap’ between governing and governed has appreciable dangers.

Recent experience in the United Kingdom illustrates this process. Between 2008 and 2018, GDP per capita increased by 4%, implying that the average person had become better off, albeit not by very much. Over the same period, however, most (85%) of the recorded “growth” in the British economy had been the cosmetic effect of credit injection, whilst ECoE had risen markedly. For the average person, then, SEEDS calculates that prosperity has fallen, by £2,220 (9%), to £22,040 last year from £24,260 ten years previously. At the same time, individual indebtedness has risen markedly.

With this understood, neither the outcome of the 2016 “Brexit” referendum nor the result of the 2017 general election was much of a surprise, since voters neither (a) reward governments which preside over deteriorating prosperity, nor (b) appreciate those which are ignorant of their plight. This was why SEEDS analysis saw a strong likelihood both of a “Leave” victory and of a hung Parliament, outcomes dismissed as highly improbable by conventional interpretation.

Simply put, if political leaders had understood the mechanics of prosperity as they are understood here, neither the 2016 referendum nor the 2017 election might have been triggered at all.

Much the same can be said of other political “shocks”. When Mr Trump was elected in 2016, the average American was already $3,450 (7%) poorer than he or she had been back in 2005. The rise to power of insurgent parties in Italy cannot be unrelated to a 7.9% deterioration in personal prosperity since 2000.

As well as reframing interpretations of prosperity, SEEDS analysis also puts taxation in a different context. Between 2008 and 2018, per capita prosperity in France deteriorated by €1,650 which, at 5.8%, isn’t a particularly severe fall by Western standards. Over the same period, however, taxation increased, by almost €2,000 per person. At the level of discretionary, ‘left-in-your-pocket’ prosperity, then, the average French person is €3,640 (32%) worse off now than he or she was back in 2008.

This makes widespread popular support for the gilets jaunes protestors’ aims extremely understandable. Though no other country has quite matched the 32% deterioration in discretionary prosperity experienced in France, the Netherlands (with a fall of 25%) comes closest, which is why SEEDS identifies Holland as one of the likeliest locales for future protests along similar lines. It is far from surprising that insurgent (aka “populist”) parties have now stripped the Dutch governing coalition of its Parliamentary majority. Britain, where discretionary prosperity has fallen by 23% since 2008, isn’t far behind the Netherlands.

These considerations complicate political calculations. To be sure, the ‘centre right’ cadres that have dominated Western governments for more than three decades are heading for oblivion. Quite apart from deteriorating prosperity – something for which incumbencies are likely to get the blame – the popular perception has become one in which “austerity” has been inflicted on “the many” as the price of rescuing a wealthy “few”. It doesn’t help that many ‘conservatives’ continue to adhere to a ‘liberal’ economic philosophy whose abject failure has become obvious to almost everyone else.

This situation ought to favour the collectivist “left”, not least because higher taxation of “the rich” has been made inescapable by deteriorating prosperity. But the “left” continues to advocate higher levels of taxation and public spending, an agenda which is being invalidated by the erosion of the tax base which is a concomitant of deteriorating prosperity.

Moreover, the “left” seems unable to adapt to a shift towards prosperity issues and, in consequence, away from ideologically “liberal” social policy. Immigration, for example, is coming to be seen by the public as a prosperity issue, because of the perceived dilutionary effects of increases in population numbers.

The overall effect is that the political “establishment”, whether of “the right” or of the “the left”, is being left behind by trends to which that establishment is blinded by faulty economic interpretation.

The discrediting of established parties is paralleled by an erosion of trust in institutions and mechanisms, because these systems cannot keep pace with the rate at which popular priorities are changing. To give just one example, politicians who better understood the why of the “Brexit” referendum result would have been better equipped to recognize the dangers implicit in being perceived as trying to thwart or divert it.

The final point to be considered under the political and governmental heading is the destruction of pension provision. One of the little-noted side effects of “monetary adventurism” has been a collapse in rates of return on invested capital. According to the World Economic Forum, forward returns on American equities have fallen to 3.45% from a historic 8.6%, whilst returns on bonds have slumped from 3.6% to just 0.15%. It is small wonder, then, that the WEF identifies a gigantic, and rapidly worsening, “global pension timebomb”. As and when this becomes known to the public – and is contrasted by them with the favourable circumstances of a tiny minority of the wealthiest – popular discontent with established politics can be expected to reach new heights.

In short, established political elites are becoming an endangered species – and, far from knowing how to replace them, we have an institutionally-dangerous inability to appreciate the factors which have already made fundamental change inevitable.

Challenge #3 – an accelerating slump?

Everything described so far has been based on an interpretation which demonstrates an essentially gradual deterioration in prosperity. That, in itself, is serious enough – it threatens both a financial system predicated on perpetual growth, and political processes unable to recognise the implications of worsening public material well-being.

For context, SEEDS concludes that the average person in Britain, having become 11.5% less prosperous since 2003, is now getting poorer at rates of between 0.5% and 1.0% each year. EM economies, including both China and India, continue to enjoy growing prosperity, though this growth is now decreasing markedly, and is likely to go into reverse in the not-too-distant future.

Is it safe to assume, though, that prosperity will continue to erode gradually – or might be experience a rapid worsening in the rate of deterioration?

For now, no conclusive answer can be supplied on this point, but risk factors are considerable.

Here are just some of them:

1. The worsening trend in fossil fuel ECoEs is following a track that is exponential, not linear – and, as we have seen, there are likely to be limits to how far this can be countered by a switch to renewables.

2. The high probability of a financial crisis, differing both in magnitude and nature from GFC I, implies risks that there may be cross contamination to the real economy of goods, services, energy and labour.

3. Deteriorating prosperity poses a clear threat to rates of utilization, an important consideration given the extent to which both businesses and public services rely on high levels of capacity usage. Simple examples are a toll bridge or an airline, both of which spread fixed costs over a large number of users. Should utilization rates fall, continued viability would require increasing charges imposed on remaining users, since this is the only way in which fixed costs can be covered – but rising charges can be expected to worsen the rate at which utilization deteriorates.

4. Uncertainty in government, discussed above, may have destabilizing effects on economic activity.

There is a great deal more that could be said about “acceleration risk”, as indeed there is about the financial and governmental challenges posed by deteriorating prosperity.

But it is hoped that this discussion provides useful framing for some of the most important challenges ahead of us.

 

 

#133: An American hypothesis

IS DONALD TRUMP THE FIRST ‘ECONOMIC REALIST’?

When the historians of the future get around to writing up our current era, one of the things likeliest to strike them will be the difference between what is actually happening and what most decision-makers think is happening. Historically, it is fascinating to speculate on how many of the worst decisions of governments have sprung from false interpretation and incorrect information.

From a contemporary perspective, what is evident now is an ever-widening chasm between conventional economic evaluation and the actual trend of events. Where conventional interpretation sees growing prosperity and contained financial risk, you don’t have to step very far outside the box to see a process of economic deterioration, elevated risk and, most seriously of all, a growing threat to the stability of currencies.

For regular readers, of course, this is familiar fare. We know that an economy hampered by a rising trend in the energy cost of energy (ECoE) is being subjected to an ultimately-futile process of denial based on credit and monetary adventurism.

Rather than revisiting this strategic theme, the aim here is to pose a theoretical question, and see where it leads.

Here is the question – what would a government do if it did recognise these realities, and came to understand that prosperity is already declining in the West, and may, before long, turn downwards in the emerging market (EM) economies, too?

It is beyond doubt that such a recognition would bring about drastic changes, both in assumptions and in policy. What follows is an examination of what those changes might be. It’s also safe to assume that these changes would be resented by those still wedded to the conventional, and that their mystification would lead rapidly to anger, suspicion and hostility.

It is suggested here that, if any government anywhere in the world is behaving in ways which are consistent with this pattern, it is the Trump administration. To what extent can Mr Trump be credited with – or, by some, accused of – acting on the basis of ‘new reality’?

What if understanding dawned somewhere?

If a government did discover the processes that are at work in the economy, the first conclusion that such a government would reach is that prosperity has become, at best, a zero-sum game. This would mean that, instead of the world becoming more prosperous in shared progression, the prosperity of one country can only be enhanced at the expense of others.

This, of course, is anathema to conventional economics, which pins its faith in David Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” theory. Essentially, Ricardo argues that we all get richer if we all concentrate on what we’re, so to speak’, ‘most best at’. From this, it follows that maximising trade between nations is to the benefit of all. This has long been an article of faith for economists.

What Ricardo did not have to consider, though, was the concept of a world with finite characteristics. It’s a reasonable hypothesis that constraints on the maximum availability of resources (such as land, water and, above all, energy) might render the law of comparative advantage inoperable. In short, once you postulate limits to potential prosperity, ‘all in it together’ quickly becomes ‘every man for himself’.

Trade, currencies and national advantage

If a government did arrive at the ‘zero-sum prosperity’ conclusion, it would concentrate on pursuing national advantage in trade. Governments already do this, of course, but they are in general influenced sufficiently by the Ricardian calculus to pursue national advantage in a mutual context. Whilst they want to skew trade agreements in their own favour, they do so from an assumption that there are mutual benefits to be accrued from such agreements.

The various trade deals pursued by the Obama administration illustrate this. Though these deals undoubtedly had a pro-American bias, they were nevertheless framed in an ‘internationalist’ way, based on assumptions of potential mutual benefit.

Our imaginary zero-sum prosperity government would differ radically, because its disbelief in mutual advantage would result in an instinctive preference, if not for outright protectionism, then at least for blatantly one-sided arrangements. The result would be a more aggressive stance on trade, characterised by an undisguised pursuit of national benefit, almost heedless of what the consequences for other countries might be.

This government would also want to leverage whatever benefits it might get from the relative strength of its currency. Under normal circumstances, a strong currency is bad for trade, making home-produced goods costlier than foreign alternatives. That matters a lot less, though, if you use tariffs to decide what you do and do not want to buy from overseas. For example, you might decide that a strong currency helps you purchase resources from abroad, but the strength of the currency needn’t suck in more manufactured goods because, if this starts to happen, you simply stick tariffs on them.

It need hardly be stated that the politics and the rhetoric accompanying this stance would be nationalist in tone. Moreover, this nationalist approach towards trade would be certain to show up, too, in other, non-trade aspects of foreign policy, including areas such as diplomacy and the management of alliances. Neither is it at all fanciful to assume that this nationalism would be replicated in domestic policies. Politicians often ‘wave the flag’ in pursuit of votes – the only difference about a government founded on a zero-sum prosperity assumption would be that the nationalism invoked would be the real thing.

The emphasis on nationalism described here need not, though, result in bellicosity. Indeed, it is likelier to take the form of isolationism or, at least, of a reluctance to expend “blood and treasure” in ways that do not benefit the country’s prosperity.

Thus far, we have envisaged a government determined to use trade to pursue national prosperity – and, implicitly, broader national advantage as well – on the basis of zero-sum world potential. As well as being implicitly inimical to free trade in goods and services, this argues for an equally restrictive attitude towards the movement of capital and labour.

For a start, the government we are envisaging would not want foreign investors acquiring domestic assets. At the same time, it would not want to see its businesses investing overseas rather than at home, something which they might well be inclined to do if costs elsewhere were lower, a differential that would be exaggerated by a strong currency.

Likewise, such a government would be inimical to the free movement of labour. If its preference was for businesses to invest at home – rather than moving their operations to lowest-cost locations – then it would be equally opposed to that cheap labour being imported through immigration. It would see large-scale immigration as the domestic face of a globalist calculus that it wished to disrupt.

Battle lines

What we are envisaging here is a government which – by interfering with the flow of trade, capital and labour – is challenging the most treasured objectives of the ‘globalists’.

In critical ways, some demarcations are being drawn here between our theoretical government and those who, either in principle or in pursuit of profit, work from diametrically opposite assumptions. A nationalist stance, reinforced by opposition to immigration, plays to a domestic audience often branded “populist” by its increasingly unpopulist opponents.

Essentially, then, any government operating on the premise of nationalism founded on a zero-sum prosperity calculus would face fervent opposition, both at home and abroad. Opponents would fall into two main categories – those who benefit from the globalist model, and those who are internationalist out of conviction. Those persuaded by internationalism out of conviction overlap extensively with those whose policies are self-defined as ‘liberal’.

What emerges from this is that the opponents of our theoretical government might be defined as ‘liberal globalists’. Since this essentially defines the long-established political and economic consensus of the Western world’s ruling elites, the government that we are envisaging would, of necessity, be ‘anti-establishment’, challenging both the vested interests and the conventional assumptions which favour globalism.

Donald Trump – theory into practice?

Just to recap, then, a government which became persuaded about zero-sum global prosperity could be expected to ditch huge swathes of what has been the economic consensus for more than three decades.

It would pursue policies of national advantage which would be hostile to free trade, and opposed to the free movement of capital and labour. It would abandon the substance (and, very probably, the rhetoric, too) of mutuality. It would face very stiff, often visceral opposition both from internationalist and from globalist persuasions.

So much for theory – what about practice?

The government which comes closest to our theoretical outline is the Trump administration. Mr Trump’s political platform can be described as ‘populist-nationalist’, and his opposition to globalisation is palpable. If Mr Trump has an identifiable enemy, that enemy resides, not in Beijing or in Moscow, but in Davos.

This interpretation has been influenced by a two-part essay by analyst Thierry Meyssan. His argument is that Mr Trump’s political stance, developed over the fifteen years before he entered the White House, is based on opposition to American ‘imperial’ behaviour and a renewed focus on domestic prosperity alone. As Mr Meyssan puts it, Mr Trump is “a politician who refuse[s] to engage his country in the service of transnational elites”.

It is certainly striking that, unlike his predecessors, Mr Trump shows no appetite for military interventions, in the Middle East or anywhere else. He certainly does not want America to be ‘the world’s policeman’, especially if what is being policed benefits globalist corporates a lot more than it benefits Americans

Ideologically, some of this puts Mr Trump in some positions which, at first sight, can look pretty bizarre. For example, it seems unlikely in the extreme that Lenin was ever one of the President’s favourite authors, but Thierry Meyssan is surely on to something when he cites this passage by the Soviet leader at the start of his second essay:

 

“Imperialism is capitalism which has arrived at a stage of its development where domination by monopolies and financial capital has been confirmed, where the export of capital has acquired major importance, where the sharing of the world between international trusts has begun, and where the sharing of all the territories of the globe between the greatest capitalist countries has been achieved”

 

Brought forward into the circumstances of today, references to monopolies, the dominant role of international capital and the free flow of capital between countries are indeed redolent of what Davos likes, and Mr Trump, instinctively and perhaps calculatedly, does not.

According to Mr Meyssan, the President’s election was based on a “promise to return to the earlier state of Capitalism, that of the ‘American dream’, by free market competition”. Thus interpreted, Mr Trump opposes the small number of “multinational companies [which] gave birth to a global ruling class which gathers every year to congratulate itself, as we watch, in Davos, Switzerland. These people do not serve the interests of the US population, and in fact are not necessarily United States citizens themselves, but use the means of the US Federal State to maximise their profits”.

Synthesis

Thus far, we have been examining two distinct issues.

The first is an interpretation of what a government might do, if it became persuaded that the scope for growth in global prosperity has been exhausted.

The second is Thierry Meyssan’s acute interpretation of Donald Trump as a nationalist opponent of globalisation and its attendant ideologies and policies.

What is surely very striking is how these two strands intersect. It’s doubtful if Mr Trump and his advisors are familiar with the energy-based interpretation of economics, certainly as discussed here, and modelled by SEEDS. But it’s by no means improbable that he has arrived at similar conclusions by different routes.

It certainly seems apparent that the consensus symbolised by Davos is vehemently opposed to Mr Trump’s apparent agenda. Moreover, if he has indeed picked a fight with “Davos man”, he could hardly have chosen a more formidable opponent. What we do know is that he has already thrown some big spokes into the wheel of a model which favours the global flow of goods, capital and labour on a basis geared towards the maximisation of the share of GDP which goes into corporate profits rather than labour.

If this interpretation is correct, we should anticipate efforts to break up some of the most powerful global corporations with large shares in their respective markets. Mr Trump might not have read Lenin, but he certainly seems to understand Adam Smith’s emphasis on the primary importance of competition, free, fair, and unfettered by excessive concentration. Once that is understood, trust-busting becomes logical.

Outcomes

Fascinating though the politics of all this undoubtedly are, the decisive issue is likely to be economic. Essentially, can nationalism deliver more for American voters than globalisation has achieved?

The reality is that, in pure economic terms, globalisation isn’t a hard act to follow. The essential premise of globalisation is that profits can be increased by locating production in the cheapest places, whilst continuing to sell goods and services in the (relatively) wealthy West.

There was always a huge contradiction at the heart of this philosophy – essentially, if well-paid jobs are shipped out of Western markets, how are Western wage-earners supposed to carry on with high levels of consumption? Thus far, the answer has been to make credit cheaper, and more readily accessible, than it has ever been before. This strategy has landed us with extraordinary levels of debt, unprecedentedly cheap money, and all of the risks associated with financial adventurism.

According to SEEDS, the United States has not bucked the trend towards lower prosperity in the West. Whilst not as badly affected as, say, Britain or Italy, SEEDS indicates that the average American is 7.7% ($3,380) poorer than he or she was back in 2005.

Though GDP data appears to contradict this calculation, two factors can be cited to support it. First, an overwhelming majority (93%) of all growth in American GDP in recent years has come from internally-consumed services (ICS) – such as finance, real estate and government – whilst the aggregate contribution to growth of hard-priced, globally marketable output (GMO), such as manufacturing, construction, agriculture and the extractive industries, has been zero. (The other 7% came from increased exports of services).

Second, growth in GDP has been far exceeded by an ongoing escalation in debt. Comparing 2017 with 2005, GDP has grown by $3.25tn, but debt has expanded by $14tn, a ratio of $4.30 of new debt for each $1 of reported growth. By definition – and, latterly, based on experience as well – pouring cheap credit into the system to sustain consumption in the face of deteriorating wages is not a sustainable way of running the economy.

In short, there is a compelling case to be made that Americans are significantly poorer now than they were twelve years ago – and, were this not the case, there has to be a strong possibility that Mr Trump would not have become President.

The first conclusion we can reach seems to be that, in linking prosperity with nationalism, Mr Trump has been pushing at an open door. We cannot know whether his policies can deliver more for Americans than globalisation, but it won’t be all that long before we find out. Obviously, nobody should underestimate the opposition that Mr Trump will go on encountering from those whose economic interests he threatens.

 

#130: Grand Bargains, dangerous choices?

THE SHARED CHALLENGES OF CHINA AND DONALD TRUMP

One of the most ill-informed critiques of China says that, as a one-party Communist state, the government need take no notice of public opinion. The reality is quite different. It is that a ‘grand bargain’ exists between the state and the public. For their part, citizens accept the denial of certain rights which are taken for granted in many Western countries. In return, the government delivers steady improvements in prosperity.

There’s a striking parallel to this in the United States, because the presidency of Donald Trump is founded on a very similar ‘grand bargain’. Voters disaffected with a self-serving establishment have trusted Mr Trump to restore prosperity. Just like Beijing, he has to deliver.

It’s a measure of America’s political disconnect that, right from the start of his campaign, self-styled ‘experts’ dismissed Mr Trump as a “joke candidate” with no chance whatsoever of making it to the White House. This mis-reading of Mr Trump – and the consequent shock of his victory – was more than just wishful thinking. It was based on a misunderstanding of the central issue at stake.

This issue was, and is, prosperity. Whatever conventional economic statistics may say, Americans have been getting poorer over an extended period. This, plus anger at the perceived enrichment of a tiny minority, was the driver behind the Trump victory. It helped, of course, that his opponent seemed to many symbolic of an entrenched and privileged elite. Ultimately, though, “make America great again” translates as ‘make Americans prosperous again’.

In the same box

This interpretation puts America and China in the same box. Both are regimes whose imperative is the delivery of prosperity for the average citizen. In America, SEEDS analysis indicates that Mr Trump cannot deliver (and, in fairness, neither could anybody else), because trends that have made the average American 7.5% poorer since 2005 look irreversible. For China, average prosperity has increased – by 41% over the last ten years – but continuing to deliver has already become very hard indeed, and isn’t going to get any easier.

The parallel goes at least two stages further, the operative terms being energy and debt. Chinese energy consumption has increased by 46% over a decade (and it’s far from coincidental that prosperity has expanded by a similar 41% over the same period). But sustaining this critical growth-driver is looking distinctly problematic. Whilst China will seek out every oil supply deal it can get its hands on – helped, perhaps, by the mutual hostility between Washington and Tehran –  switching towards coal seems the favoured strategy. America, too, may re-emphasise coal. In neither instance, though, is coal likely to be an effective fix.

Thus far, America has benefited enormously from the dramatic expansion in shale oil output. In this, the United States can be grateful for the irrationality of investors, who have been prepared to pour enormous quantities of capital into a sector which is, by definition, a cash-burner, never having covered its capital costs from operating cash flows even when oil prices were well above $100/b. Tolerance of cash-burning is, of course, a direct corollary of ultra-cheap money.

The fundamental problem with shales is the ultra-rapid rate at which production from individual wells declines. This puts operators on a ‘drilling treadmill’ which requires ever more drilling just to sustain output, never mind increasing it.

It helps shales, of course, that investor generosity looks almost limitless. Anyone who can ignore the mismatch between record equity values and deteriorating prosperity – and who can meanwhile buy in to the issuance of perhaps $1 trillion of debt for no better reason than stripping equity out of corporate capital structures – isn’t likely to baulk quickly at cash-burning by shale companies. Even so, there must be limits to how quite much more capital shale drillers will be allowed to burn their way through.

Fortunately or not – and from what we can judge from their actions – America’s military leaders seem more realistic, certainly where shales are concerned. Service chiefs, it seems, have never bought in to the “Saudi America” narrative of energy independence. The Navy’s carrier groups, costly assets whose main functions include both power projection and the defence of seaborne energy supplies, have not been sent to the scrap-yards. Neither has America de-emphasised the policy importance of the Middle East.

Fundamentally, both Beijing and the Trump administration need to deliver prosperity – and energy is the greatest single threat to their ability to do so. The real issue here isn’t just the maintenance of supplies, but cost. The relentless rise in ECoEs is felt first in the cost of essentials, not just energy itself but utility bills and all the other non-discretionary outlays which drive a wedge between income and prosperity. ECoE is the big problem, for Mr Trump as much as for Beijing.

Debt and self-deception

If energy is one problem facing both America and China, another is debt. More specifically, it’s dependency on a continuing process of credit creation, a dependency which lies at the heart of the “monetary adventurism” which has characterised the economic landscape since the 2008 global economic crisis (‘GFC I’).

Here, time-sequencing has differed between China and the United States. Between 2000 and 2007, America (and most other Western economies) went on a debt binge. In the US, and stated at constant 2017 values, debt grew by $12 trillion over a period in which GDP expanded by only $2.6tn. This – helped, of course, by acquiescence in increasingly dangerous practices – led straight to GFC I.

Prior to 2008, Chinese policy on debt had been fairly conservative. What we’ve witnessed since has been a truly breath-taking change. Stated at 2017 values, Chinese GDP and debt in 2007 were, respectively, RMB 37 trillion and RMB 60tn. Today, those numbers are RMB 81tn (a 120% rise in GDP) and RMB 251tn (a 320% leap in debt). Whilst GDP has expanded by RMB 44tn, debt has soared by RMB 191tn.

Even more strikingly, the rate at which China has been borrowing over the last decade has averaged RMB 19tn annually. GDP has averaged RMB 60tn over the same period. So, on average, China borrows close to 32% of GDP each year.

Nobody else comes anywhere near. America typically borrows 5.8% of GDP annually. That’s more than twice the rate of the most optimistic interpretation of growth, so it’s not sustainable, and highlights how much “growth” has been nothing more than the simple spending of borrowed money. But it’s nowhere near the 31.8% of GDP borrowed annually by China since 2007. The global equivalent is 9%, but that, of course, is heavily skewed by China.

It has been suggested that China is throttling back on its propensity to pile up debt. There’s limited truth in this, in that China borrowed “only” 30% of GDP last year, compared with 38% in 2016 and 35% in 2015. But the numbers continue to look bizarre, unsustainable, and – potentially – lethal.

The United States, meanwhile, looks increasingly likely to revert to pre-2008 borrowing patterns. The budget outlook is for much higher levels of annual borrowing by government, whilst there seems to be no end in sight to the irrationality of converting corporate capital from equity into debt, not to mention the continued willingness of investors to finance cash-burners.

(In fairness to investors, it should be recognised that ultra-cheap monetary policy has presented them with ‘no good choices’, only bad ones or worse ones).

Both public and private borrowing – and especially the latter – keep injecting yet more leverage into a system already awash with risk.

China – the why?

As we’ve seen, the sheer rate at which China borrows looks reckless in the extreme. But ‘reckless’ isn’t an adjective that many would apply to the government in Beijing. Why, then, has China seemingly turned into a debt-junkie?

The answer lies in the prosperity imperative of the ‘grand bargain’. For the average Chinese citizen, prosperity has three main meanings – employment, wages and household expenses (which include housing itself). Of these, employment predominates. What this means for the government is that employment must continue to grow. It must grow at rates which not only exceed the rate at which population numbers are expanding, but must also increase at least as quickly as workers migrate from the countryside to the cities.

In stark contrast to Western profit orientation, this makes China a volume-seeker. If employment is the overriding objective, profit matters less. For businesses heavily influenced by state objectives, expanding employment (and hence growing output volumes) is an imperative, almost irrespective of profitability. An enterprise succeeds by this criterion if it grows employment, even if this achieved at a loss.

This shows up in the figures, where business has accounted for most (68%) of all of the RMB 191tn borrowed over the last ten years. Essentially, business has borrowed for the twin purposes of financing losses and expanding capacity. The latter, of course, has the by-product of depressing margins, often pushing returns on assets to levels well below the cost of capital. China is therefore in something of a vortex, where new capacity requires borrowing whilst simultaneously undermining the ability to service existing debt. An apparent effort to convert debt into equity failed pretty spectacularly, when it came close to crashing Chinese equity markets.

In one sense, this use of debt to sustain and grow volumes has a direct corollary in the West, where “zombie” companies have been kept alive both by ultra-low interest rates and by the willingness of banks to roll over (by adding interest to capital) debts which would otherwise have had to be recognised to be non-performing.

In another way, using debt to finance capital investment may seem very different from the West’s use of credit to bolster consumption. The difference narrows, though, when it is recognised that the Chinese version, too, uses debt to underpin the incomes of working people.

Moreover, the priority placed on volumes over profits has implications for trade, where Washington, at least, isn’t prepared to accept the continued influx of products seemingly produced ‘at a loss’.

Any way out of the box?

As we’ve seen, America and China are in the same box, both having an imperative need to deliver prosperity at a time when this is becoming ever harder to achieve. In both instances, debt is simply a time-buying expedient, creating apparent prosperity in the short term, but at severe expense and risk to the collective balance sheet.

These debt-based responses are not just unsustainable but are highly risky, too. According to SEEDS, the sheer scale of indebtedness – and the truly shocking rate of ongoing credit dependency – puts China in the highest-risk category, along with Ireland, Britain and Canada. America’s level of risk isn’t quite so elevated, and it’s no coincidence at all that the energy challenge, too, is less acute for the United States (for now, anyway) than it is for China. Another big difference is that China’s ills are the product of circumstances, whereas much of the escalation in American risk is self-inflicted.

It’s interesting to speculate on quite how far the parallel risks of America and China are recognised at the level of policy. From the Chinese side, we can be very confident that the energy challenge is recognised, and we can assume, too, that Beijing is well aware of the debt problem. Here, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that the issue isn’t simply the absolute quantum of debt but the extent of dependency on the supply of credit continuing at quite extraordinary levels. (This is why SEEDS measures these two risks independently).

The combination of risk and sheer size must put China near the top of the watch-list for those monitoring the likeliest epicentre for the start of GFC II. Whilst we cannot rule out, for instance, market slumps in the United States, a property price crash in Canada, debt problems and instability in the Euro Area, and further rapid economic deterioration in Britain, the combination of energy and debt risk in China dwarfs these threats, serious though they are.

It is sometimes observed that China’s banks are, in effect, under state control, as though this makes a potential rescue a simple and painless matter. In reality, the difference between the Chinese and Western positions is far less than it appears. Western governments, no less than Beijing, would have to stand behind their banks in the event of a wave of cascading defaults. It’s pretty easy to envisage a Western government having to nationalise (by whatever name) a bank whose equity value has disappeared.

The obvious solution might appear to be for the Chinese government to simply take bank debt onto the public balance sheet. The snag is that this involves issuing RMB to the extent of the banks’ uncovered liabilities. This reminds us of the observation that, in the end, the world’s debt problem is going to turn into a currency credibility problem.

The claim that money creation through QE ‘isn’t inflationary’ rests on a narrow definition of inflation. If your definition of inflation includes only CPI, this assertion may be true. But, if it is recognised that asset price inflation matters at least as much as retail prices, QE has already been extremely inflationary. Using monetary issuance to tackle stratospheric debt levels and bloated banking systems cannot be undertaken without severe currency risk.

What we are left with is that, on a worldwide basis, we have compounded “credit adventurism” with “monetary adventurism” in trying to square the circle of deteriorating prosperity. The snag is that neither credit nor money can resolve a problem which has its roots in energy.

Ultimately, rising ECoE is making us poorer, and is doing so in ways that may not be acceptable politically, but which cannot, without grave and compounding risk, be wished or manipulated away with monetary tinkering.

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SEEDS 2.19 China 030718

 

#129: Why, what, how?

SEEDS AND THE CHASM IN ECONOMIC UNDERSTANDING

Regular visitors will know that, since the recent completion of the development programme, SEEDS – the Surplus Energy Economics Data System – forms the basis of almost every subject that we discuss here. For anyone new to this site, though, what is SEEDS? What does it do, and how important might it be?

The aim in this longer-than-usual article is to explain SEEDS, starting with some of what it tells us before examining how it reaches these conclusions. The methodologies of the system are discussed here, with the exception of a small number of technical points of which detailed disclosure would be unwise.

Before we start, new visitors need to know that the divergence between SEEDS and “conventional” economics has now become so wide that it’s almost impossible to place equal faith in both. If SEEDS is right – and that’s for you to decide – then much of the conventional economics approach is simply wrong.

The question thus becomes that of which interpretation best fits what we see happening around us.

“Shocks” that are no surprise

A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, and the following charts demonstrate quite how radically SEEDS differs from conventional economic interpretation.

These charts set prosperity (as calculated by SEEDS) against published GDP per capita for the United Kingdom and the United States. With this information, you can see that, for SEEDS, the so-called “shocks” of the “Brexit” vote, and the election of Donald Trump, were no surprise at all.

Rather, popular discontent with the political establishment is to be expected when the prosperity of the average person has been declining relentlessly, and over an extended period. In Britain, the voters’ decision to leave the European Union reflected a deterioration of 9.7% (£2,380 per person) in prosperity since 2003. In the US, the decline in prosperity began later than in the UK, but the average American was still 7.3% ($3,520) poorer in 2016 than he or she had been back in 2005.

Obviously, economic hardship wasn’t the only issue at stake in either case. But it has to be highly likely that it tipped the balance. Similarly, recent events in Italy must in large part reflect a big (12.1%, or €3,300) slump in average prosperity per person since 2001 – which, coincidentally (or not?) was the year before Italy joined the euro.

In short, the SEEDS interpretation is that the rise of so-called “populism” across much of the West reflects a deterioration in prosperity which conventional economics is wholly unable to capture.

This means that policymakers are trying to make decisions in a context quite different from the information that they have to go on.

The main purpose of SEEDS isn’t political prediction, though the system’s track-record in this field is rather impressive. Rather, the aim is to calibrate prosperity – something which conventional economics has become increasingly unable to do – and to draw economic and financial conclusions on this basis.

China – some warning signs

The next pair of charts, which look at China, display SEEDS’ interpretative capability on an issue of current importance. The first chart illustrates that, whilst GDP per capita continues to grow at rates of over 6% per annum, prosperity is increasing at a much more sedate pace, trending higher at rates of around 2% annually.

Meanwhile, and as shown in the second chart, China is paying a huge price for growth in GDP, having added RMB 4.30 of net new debt for each RMB 1.00 of reported growth over the last ten years. Put another way, a large proportion of “growth” in recorded GDP amounts to nothing more than the simple spending of borrowed money.

This is by no means unique to China, of course. Before 2008, pouring credit into the economy, and calling the result “growth”, was a practice largely confined to the West. Since GFC I, this practice has spread to much of the emerging world.

Meanwhile, the West has moved on to new follies. To the “credit adventurism” which preceded the first crash has been added the even more dangerous “monetary adventurism” which is likely to trigger the second.

Watching this progression, you might well conclude that those deciding policy are ‘making it up as they go along’. That, of course, is about all they can do, if the interpretations on which they base their thinking have ceased to be valid.

Risk recalibrated

Where China is concerned, SEEDS puts a wholly different slant on risk exposure. The ratio of debt to prosperity has climbed from 217% back in 2007 to 613% now, and is set to reach 660% by the end of this year. These compare with debt-to-GDP ratios of 162% in 2007, and 309% now.

You don’t need to be unduly pessimistic to appreciate that this trajectory has become wholly unsustainable – and by no means just in China. Yet this scale of risk is something that the preferred conventional measure – the ratio of debt to GDP – simply fails to capture. Much the same applies to the measurement of systemic risk in banking, where comparing financial assets with prosperity shows levels of risk far higher than are indicated by ratios based on GDP.

This is a subject for a future discussion, but we can observe here that countries whose banking systems are disproportionately large are living with exposure whose severity cannot be measured realistically with established techniques.

Debt mis-measured

The explanation for the mismatch in debt ratios, by the way, is pretty simple. Much of any increase in debt finds its way into expenditure, thus pushing up apparent GDP in a way which damps down the measured implications of debt escalation. As we’ll see, where SEEDS differs is that it uses underlying or “clean” output numbers, adjusted to exclude the way in which GDP is boosted by the simple spending of borrowed money.

Given the sheer scale of worldwide borrowing in recent years, understanding how the conventional debt-to-GDP measure is flawed helps us to appreciate why the next financial crisis (“GFC II”), when it comes, will doubtless be regarded as just as much of an ‘unpredictable’ event as the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). Though there are many ‘popular misconceptions’ in this area (including the ‘safety’ supposedly conferred on the banking system by higher reserve ratios), the debt-to-GDP ratio remains one of the most misleading of the lot.

The reality is that, far from taking us by surprise, many events and trends are eminently predictable. Looking back at the British chart, for instance, you’ll readily appreciate why customer-facing sectors such as retailing, pubs and restaurants are going through a fire-storm of failures and closures. Contrary to ‘expert’ opinion, this melt-down owes very little to “Brexit” (yet, anyway), and almost everything to the erosion of customers’ ability to spend.

Globally, SEEDS reveals levels of risk exposure that are very different from anything you can glean from conventional econometrics. Taking debt as an example, the ratio of debt to world GDP now stands at 215% of GDP, a ratio not dramatically worse than it was in 2007 (179%). For SEEDS, though, the ratio of debt to prosperity is not only much higher (327%) than the conventional measure, but has worsened very markedly since 2007 (229%).

How, then, does SEEDS arrive at these conclusions?

“Something missing”

Put simply, SEEDS fills a gaping hole in how the economy is understood. It’s become increasingly clear, over an extended period, that the ability of conventional economics to provide interpretation and guidance has been breaking down. Policy levers that once worked pretty well seem now to have lost their effectiveness. This means that individuals and businesses, no less than governments, are unable to grasp what is really going on in the economy and finance.

Since the interpretive and predictive abilities of conventional economics are failing, it’s clear that “something is missing” from accepted thinking. Equally clearly, this missing component has now assumed greater importance than it had in the past. So what we’re for looking is a gap in understanding which is more important today than it was, say, twenty years ago.

The view taken here is that the missing ‘something’ is energy. There are at least two reasons why this ought to come as no surprise at all.

First, it’s observable, throughout history, that three data series have progressed in something very close to lock-step. These series are: energy consumption; population numbers; and the economic output that supports that population. From the late 1700s, when first we accessed the huge amounts of energy tied up in fossil fuels, all three series have become exponential. This is illustrated in the next chart, which compares population and energy consumption over two millenia. (For much of the early period, energy wasn’t traded, so we can’t quantify exactly how much was used, but we do know that the numbers were extremely small).

Second, you only have to picture an economy suddenly starved of power to appreciate quite how utterly dependent all economic, financial, social and political systems are on the continuity of energy supply. Cut off this supply in its entirety for as little as 24 hours and chaos would ensue. It’s likely that a relatively short period without energy would be enough to turn chaos into collapse.

Both observations are so obvious that the absolute primacy of energy in the economy should be clear to everyone. The idea that energy is somehow ‘just another input’ is facile in the extreme. There is literally no service or commodity than can be supplied without it. Clearly, energy is much more important than just one a part of a sub-set of materials, itself one of the five inputs to economic activity (the others being labour, capital, knowledge and management).

What has changed?

We can be confident, then, that energy is the ‘something’ that is missing from the conventional understanding of the economy. Equally, though, if it’s missing now, then it was missing in the past, too – yet its absence has become more important over time.

So it’s not just energy itself that has been left out of the equation, but something dynamic (changing) within energy itself.

A long-standing interpretation of the energy economy has been scarcity. It’s logical that reserves of fossil fuels are finite; that consumption has increased exponentially over time; and that we’ve exploited the most economically attractive resources first, leaving less profitable alternatives for later. This process is known as depletion, and is the logic informing ‘peak oil’ – a thesis that ‘cornucopians’ dispute, but which may yet turn out to have been right all along.

The critical issue – cost

SEEDS, though, isn’t based on resource exhaustion. Where the critical role of energy is concerned, the alternative (though not necessarily conflicting) interpretation is that it’s cost, rather than quantity, which is critical.

Whenever we access energy, some of that energy is always consumed in the access process, and what remains – surplus energy – is the enabler of all economic activity, other than the supply of energy itself.

This relationship is often measured as a ratio known as EROEI (the Energy Return on Energy Invested, sometimes abbreviated EROI). The scientific argument supporting EROEI is compelling, and is stated superbly here.

SEEDS uses an alternative measure, ECoE (the Energy Cost of Energy), which expresses cost as a percentage of the gross energy accessed.

Because the world economy is a closed system, ECoE is not directly analogous to ‘cost’ in the usual financial sense. Rather, it is an economic rent, limiting the choice we exercise over any given quantity of energy. If we have 100 units of energy, and the ECoE is 5%, we exercise choice (or ‘discretion’) over 95 units. If ECoE rises to 10%, we now have discretion over only 90 units, even though the gross amount remains 100.

This is loosely analogous to personal prosperity. If someone’s income remains the same, but the cost of essentials rises, that person is worse off, even though income itself hasn’t changed.

Understanding ECoE

ECoE evolves over time. In the early stages of any given resource, ECoE is driven downwards by geographic reach, and by economies of scale. Once maturity is reached, depletion takes over as the driver, pushing ECoE upwards.

In the pre-maturity phase, technology accelerates the fall in ECoE driven by reach and scale. Post-maturity, technology acts to mitigate the rise caused by depletion. But – and this is often misunderstood – the capabilities of technology are limited to the envelope of the physical characteristics of the resource.

Over time, the trend in ECoE is parabolic (see illustration). Today, renewables remain on the downwards slope, but the ECoEs of fossil fuels are now emphatically on the upwards curve.

The same is true of overall ECoE, because fossil fuels still account for nearly 90% of energy supply, whilst renewables contribute less than 4%.

Even though renewables’ share of total energy supply is rising, it’s unlikely that this will stem, let alone reverse, the upwards trend in overall ECoE. Critically, technologies such as wind and solar power remain substantially dependent on inputs sourced from ‘legacy’ energy. We have yet to demonstrate that we can build solar panels, wind turbines or their associated infrastructure without recourse to energy from oil, gas or coal.

To this extent, the outlook for ECoEs in the renewables sector remains geared to the ECoEs of fossil fuels.

A critical point here is that, once on the upwards slope of the parabola, the rise in ECoE is exponential. According to SEEDS, global ECoE has risen from 3.5% in 1998 to 5.4% in 2008 and 8.0% now, and is projected to reach 10% by 2028.

For obvious reasons, details of the ECoE calculations used by SEEDS are not disclosed. This said, separate trajectories for fossil fuels and renewables are published, as are the global ECoE curve, and its national equivalents. (The aim is to give readers the maximum information consistent with not enabling any organisation to build a SEEDS-type system).

Some pointers, however, can be provided.

First, ECoEs are calculated on a fuel-by-fuel basis over time.

Second, and reflecting the nature of the main drivers, ECoEs evolve gradually, so SEEDS always cites trend ECoEs.

Third, the ECoE for any given country at any given moment, and the way in which this number changes over time, are determined by the mix of energy sources used, and by trade effects, where the country is a net importer or exporter of energy.

Relating ECoE to output – clean GDP

With ECoE established, it might appear that all we need to do now is deduct this number from GDP to arrive at prosperity, which is the corollary of surplus energy, expressed in monetary units.

Unfortunately, things are not this simple.

As we’ve seen, the tendency over an extended period has been to boost apparent GDP though processes known here as credit and monetary adventurism. The adoption of these policies can be seen, in part at least, as a response to a deterioration in rates of growth which began to take effect in or around the late 1990s, as rising ECoEs started to bite.

Comparing 2008 with 2000, reported “growth” of $26 trillion was accompanied by a $58tn increase in debt. The ratio between the two was thus $2.20 of new debt for each $1 of reported growth, though ratios were far higher than this in most Western economies.

Between 2008 and 2017, the ratio of borrowing to growth rose to 3.26:1, with $94tn of debt added alongside growth of $29tn. Furthermore, the latter period also witnessed the emergence of enormous shortfalls in the adequacy of pension provision, which have worsened by close to $100tn since 2008. This destruction of pension value is almost wholly attributable to a policy-induced collapse in returns on investment.

It almost defies credulity that we are asked to accept “growth” of $29tn as genuine whilst ignoring $94tn of net new debt, $28tn of newly-created QE liquidity and the destruction of almost $100tn of pension value.

According to SEEDS, real growth over that period wasn’t $29tn but $9.9tn, and even this calculation might be generous when set against the scale at which the aggregate balance sheet has been trashed over that period.

This calculation also means that GDP, reported at $127tn for 2017, falls to just $90tn on a clean, ex-manipulation basis – and even this, of course, is before we allow for ECoE, whose global cost has increased by 58%, from $4.5tn in 2008 to $6.9tn last year.

The following charts illustrate this situation, expressed in PPP-converted dollars at constant 2017 values. The left-hand chart shows GDP, both as reported and as adjusted by SEEDS to exclude the impact of the simple spending of borrowed money. The second chart shows debt, both as actual numbers and as the trend that would have occurred had debt grown at the same annual rates as reported GDP.

The difference between the red and black debt lines thus corresponds to debt growth in excess of percentage increases in GDP.

When examining these charts, it’s important to note the differences in the vertical axes, meaning that we’re dealing with movements at different orders of magnitude.

Between 2000 and 2017, GDP (as reported) increased by $55tn (76%) in real terms. But debt more than doubled, growing by 126%, or $152tn, from $121tn in 2000 to $273tn in 2017.

Borrowing $152tn to achieve growth of $55tn is not only unsustainable, but surely makes it clear beyond doubt that most of the supposed “growth” in GDP is simply the effect of pouring borrowed liquidity into the economy.

Implications of credit-fuelled GDP

From this, two things follow. The first is that a cessation of debt escalation would reduce growth dramatically – if debt ratios remained at current levels, no longer increasing, then GDP might continue to expand, but probably at rates of barely 1% annually, compared to the 3% and more claimed by reported numbers. Without continued increases in indebtedness, GDP could be expected to fall in most Western economies, whilst rates of growth in the emerging economies would slow markedly.

The second is that, if the excessive borrowing of recent years were to be reversed, GDP would slump, laying bare the extent to which the “growth” recorded since 2000 has been debt-inflated. On this latter point, debt stood at 168% of GDP in 2000, and now stands at 215%. Getting back to the 168% level would require deleveraging of almost $60tn, and the consequences of this for GDP are best left to the imagination.

If you put this $60tn figure alongside the scale of QE (about $28tn) – and add the massive (perhaps $100tn) of pension adequacy impairment, too – you’ll see how far out of reach any definition of financial ‘normality’ really is.

For all practical purposes, we are stuck with negative (sub-inflation) interest rates, ultra-cheap credit and negligible returns on invested capital until this combination of forces reaches its logical conclusion.

Corroboration

The calculation of ‘clean’ – ex-borrowing – output is undertaken using an algorithm which it would be folly to disclose, because to do so would be to hand an important methodology to those who don’t have an equivalent (though, pretty obviously, they need one).

But this doesn’t mean that we’re without at least three forms of corroborative evidence.

The first is to be found in the content of the “growth” reported in recent years. Data for the United States for the period between 2006 and 2016 illustrates this point.

Over that period, the American economy grew by $2.3tn at constant values. Of this growth, increases in the net export of services contributed 7%, or $159bn. The remaining 93% ($1.97tn) came from internally-consumed services (ICS), including finance and real estate (+$628bn) and government activity (+$272bn, excluding transfer payments).

Together, the combined contribution to this growth from globally-marketable output (GMO) – that is, manufacturing, construction, agriculture and the extractive industries, all of which are traded on a worldwide basis – was zero.

In other words, virtually all growth has occurred in activities where Americans pay each other for services that cannot be marketed to foreign customers. This is the classic profile of an economy relying for growth on ramping up its debt.

This has by no means been a phenomenon limited to the United States. Rather, it’s been visible across the West. In the emerging economies, and especially in China, the pattern has been different, with borrowed funds being channelled into the creation of capacity. But this borrowing, too, inflates consumption, because these activities act as conduits which push borrowed money into the pockets of those employed building capacity.

A second way of corroborating the debt-funded nature of reported “growth” is to examine the circumstances of the average person. If GDP growth (and, therefore, its per capita equivalent) was organic and sustainable, prosperity would be rising as well. That this isn’t the case is apparent in various metrics. One of these is real wages, and another is the comparison between incomes and the cost of essentials.

Critically, debt per person has risen by much more than per capita GDP, something which isn’t consistent with the improving prosperity implied by reported GDP. Again using the United States as an example, and stating all numbers at 2017 values, GDP per capita increased by 6.5%, or $3,620, between 2007 and 2017. But debt per capita was $22,400 (18%) higher at the end of 2017 than it had been ten years earlier.

Prosperity

To get from GDP to prosperity, then, two stages are involved. The first is to arrive at a ‘clean’ GDP number by removing the distortions introduced by pouring cheap credit into consumption. The second is to deduct ECoE from this underlying number.

The results show a deterioration in prosperity across all major Western economies other than Germany. Typically, Western citizens are getting poorer at rates of between 0.5% and 1% annually.

Moreover, the share of debt – personal, business and government – that these citizens are required to support on the back of dwindling prosperity has grown markedly. Because servicing this debt at normal (above-inflation) interest rates has become impossible, we are locked into monetary policies which are themselves destructive.

Though the citizens of emerging economies continue to enjoy increasing prosperity, their debt, too, is rising. For example, the average Chinese person is 41% more prosperous than he or she was back in 2007 – but the per capita equivalent of debt has quadrupled over the same period.

Worldwide, continued growth in EM prosperity has matched the deterioration in the developed West, meaning that average prosperity has flat-lined – but the ratio of debt to world prosperity has continued to rise markedly.

So, globally, we’re not getting richer, and we’re not getting poorer – but we are getting ever further into debt, whilst pension provision is falling ever further away from where it ought to be.

In short, SEEDS concludes that a string of observations often taken for granted are simply misleading. Output per capita isn’t growing, and most Westerners are getting poorer, not richer.

Take these observations on board and a lot of things that might have seemed inexplicable – including political outcomes, rising trade conflicts and many other stresses – all of a sudden fit into a logical pattern.

And it’s a pattern that‘s looking ever less sustainable.

 

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#129 stats annex 20062018