Consequences of a Disincentive To Save
Forcing everyone to live in a world in which money loses value creates a negatively reinforcing feedback loop; by eliminating the very possibility of saving money as a winning proposition, it makes all outcomes far more negative in aggregate. Just holding money is a non-credible threat when money is engineered to lose its value. People still do it, but it’s a losing hand by default. So is perpetual risk-taking as a forced substitute to saving. Effectively, all hands become losing hands when one of the options is not winning by saving money. Recall that each individual with money has already taken risk to get it in the first place. A positive incentive to save (and not invest) is not equivalent to rewarding people for not taking risk, quite the opposite. It is rewarding people who have already taken risk with the option of merely holding money without the express promise of its purchasing power declining in the future.
In a free market, money might increase or decrease in value over a particular time horizon, but guaranteeing that money loses value creates an extreme negative outcome, where the majority of participants within an economy lack actual savings. Because money loses its value, opportunity cost is often believed to be a one way street. Spend your money now because it is going to purchase less tomorrow. The very idea of holding cash (formerly known as saving) has been conditioned in mainstream financial circles to be a near crazy proposition as everyone knows that money loses its value. How crazy is that? While money is intended to store value, no one wants to hold it because the predominant currencies used today do the opposite. Rather than seek out a better form of money, everyone just invests instead!
“I still think that cash is trash relative to other alternatives, particularly those that will retain their value or increase their value during reflationary periods” — Ray Dalio (April 2020)
Even the most revered Wall St. investors are susceptible to getting caught up in the madness and can act a fool. Risk taking for inflation’s sake is no better than buying lottery tickets, but that is the consequence of creating a disincentive to save. Economic opportunity cost becomes harder to measure and evaluate when monetary incentives are broken. Today, decisions are rationalized because of broken incentives. Investment decisions are made and financial assets are often purchased merely because the dollar is expected to lose its value. But, the consequence extends far beyond savings and investment. Every economic decision point becomes impaired when money is not fulfilling its intended purpose of storing value.
All spending versus savings decisions, including day-to-day consumption, become negatively biased when money loses its value on a persistent basis. By reintroducing a more explicit opportunity cost to spending money (i.e. an incentive to save), everyone’s risk calculus necessarily changes. Every economic decision becomes sharper when money is fulfilling its proper function of storing value. When a monetary medium is credibly expected to maintain value at minimum, if not increase in value, every spend versus save decision becomes more focused and ultimately informed by a better aligned incentive structure.
“One of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results” — Milton Friedman
It is a world that Keynesian economists fear, believing that investments will not be made if an incentive to save exists. The flawed theory goes that if people are incentivized to “hoard” money, no one will ever spend money, and investments deemed “necessary” will not be made. If no one spends money and risk-taking investments are not made, unemployment will rise! It truly is economic theory reserved for the classroom; while counterintuitive to the Keynesian, risk will be taken in a world in which savings are incentivized.
Not only that, the quality of investment will actually be greater as both consumption and investment benefit from undistorted price signals and with the opportunity cost of money being more clearly priced by a free market. When all spending decisions are evaluated against an expectation of potentially greater purchasing power in the future (rather than less), investments will be steered toward the most productive activities and day-to-day consumption will be filtered with greater scrutiny.
Conversely, when the decision point of investment is heavily influenced by not wanting to hold dollars, you get financialization. Similarly, when consumption preferences are guided by the expectation that money will lose its value rather than increase in value, investments are made to cater toward those distorted preferences. Ultimately, short-term incentives beat out long-term incentives; incumbents are favored over new entrants, and the economy stagnates, which increasingly fuels financialization, centralization and financial engineering rather than productive investment. It is cause and effect; intended behavior with unintended but predictable consequences.
Make money lose its value and people will do dumb shit because doing dumb shit becomes more rational, if not encouraged. People that would otherwise be saving are forced to take incremental risk because their savings are losing value. In that world, savings become financialized. And when you create the incentive not to save, do not be surprised to wake up in a world in which very few people have savings. The empirical evidence shows exactly this, and despite how much it might astound a tenured economics professor, the lack of savings induced by a disincentive to save is very predictably a major source of the inherent fragility in the legacy financial system.
The Paradox of a Fixed Money Supply
The lack of savings and economic instability is all driven by the broken incentives of the underlying currency, and this is the principal problem which bitcoin fixes. By eliminating the possibility of monetary debasement, incentives that were broken become aligned; there will only ever be 21 million and that alone is sufficiently powerful to begin to reverse the trend of financialization. While each bitcoin is divisible into 100 million units (or down to 8 decimal points), the nominal supply of bitcoin is capped at 21 million. Bitcoin can be divided into smaller and smaller units as more and more people adopt it as a monetary standard, but no one can arbitrarily create more bitcoin. Consider a terminal state in which all 21 million bitcoin are in circulation; technically, no more than 21 million bitcoin can be saved, but the consequence is that 100% of all bitcoin are always being saved — by someone at any particular point in time. Bitcoin (including fractions thereof) will transfer from person to person or company to company but the total supply will be static (and perfectly inelastic).
By creating a world in which there is a fixed money supply such that no more or no less can be saved in aggregate, the incentive and propensity to save increases measurably on the individual level. It is a paradox; if more money cannot be saved in aggregate, more people will save on an individual basis. On one hand, it may appear to be a simple statement that individuals value scarcity. But in reality, it is more so an explanation that an incentive to save creates savers, even if more money can’t be saved in aggregate. And in order for someone to save, someone else must spend existing savings. After all, all consumption and investment comes from savings; the incentive to save creates savers, and the existence of more savers in turn creates more people with the means to consume and invest. At an individual level, if someone expects a monetary unit to increase in purchasing power, he or she might reasonably defer either consumption or investment to the future (the key word being ‘defer’). That is the incentive to save creating savers. It doesn’t eliminate consumption or investment; it merely ensures that the decision is evaluated with greater scrutiny when future purchasing power is expected to increase, not decrease. Imagine every single person simultaneously operating with that incentive mechanism, compared to the opposite which exists today.
While Keynesians worry that an appreciating currency will disincentivize consumption and investment in favor of savings and to the detriment of the economy at large, the free market actually works better in practice than it does when applying flawed Keynesian theory. In practice, a currency that is appreciating will be used everyday to facilitate consumption and investment because there is an incentive to save, not despite that fact. High present demand for both consumption and investment is dictated by positive time preference and there being an express incentive to save; everyone is always trying to earn everyone else’s money and everyone needs to consume real goods every day.
Time preference as a concept is described at length in the Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. While the book is a must read and no summary can do it justice, individuals can have lower time preference (weighting the future over the present) or a higher time preference (weighting the present over the future), but everyone has a positive time preference. As a tool, money is merely a utility in coordinating the economic activity necessary to produce the things that people actually value and consume in their daily lives. Given that time is inherently scarce and that the future is uncertain, even those that plan and save for the future (low time preference) are predisposed to value the present over the future on the margin. Taken to an extreme just to make the point, if you made money and literally never spent a dime (or a sat), it wouldn’t have done you any good. So even if money were increasing in value over time, consumption or investment in the present has an inherent bias over the future, on average, because of positive time preference and the existence of daily consumption needs that must be satisfied for survival (if not for want).
Now, imagine this principle applying to everyone simultaneously and in a world of bitcoin with a fixed money supply. 7 billion plus people and only 21 million bitcoin. Everyone both has an incentive to save because there is a finite amount of money and everyone has a positive time preference as well as daily consumption needs. In this world, there would be a fierce competition for money. Each individual would have to produce something sufficiently valuable in order to entice someone else to part with their hard-earned money, but he or she would be incentivized to do so because the roles would then be reversed. That is the contract bitcoin provides.
The incentive to save exists but the existence of savings necessarily requires producing something of value demanded by others. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The interests and incentives align perfectly between those that have the currency and those providing goods and services, particularly because the script is flipped on the other side of each exchange. Paradoxically, everyone would be incentivized to “save more” in a world in which more money technically could not be saved. Over time, each person would hold less and less of the currency in nominal terms on average but with each nominal unit purchasing more and more over time (rather than less). The ability to defer consumption or investment and be rewarded (or rather simply not be penalized) is the lynchpin that aligns all economic incentives.
Bitcoin and the Great Definancialization
The primary incentive to save bitcoin is that it represents an immutable right to own a fixed percentage of all the world’s money indefinitely. There is no central bank to arbitrarily increase the supply of the currency and debase savings. By programming a set of rules that no human can alter, bitcoin will be the catalyst that causes the trend toward financialization to reverse course. The extent to which economies all over the world have become financialized is a direct result of misaligned monetary incentives, and bitcoin reintroduces the proper incentives to promote savings. More directly, the devaluation of monetary savings has been the principal driver of financialization, full stop. When the dynamic that created this phenomenon is corrected, it should be no surprise that the reverse set of operations will naturally course correct.
If monetary debasement induced financialization, it should be logical that a return to a sound monetary standard would have the opposite effect. The tide of financialization is already on its way out, but the groundswell is just beginning to form as most people do not yet see the writing on the wall. For decades, the conventional wisdom has been to invest the vast majority of all savings, and that doesn’t change overnight. But as the world learns about bitcoin, at the same time that global central banks create trillions of dollars and anomalies like $17 trillion in negative yielding debt continue to exist, the dots are increasingly going to be connected.
“The market value of the Bloomberg Barclays Global Negative Yielding Debt Index rose to $17.05 trillion [November 2020], the highest level ever recorded and narrowly eclipsing the $17.04 trillion it reached in August 2019.”
— Bloomberg News
More and more people are going to begin to question the idea of investing retirement savings in risky financial assets. Negative yielding debt doesn’t make sense; central banks creating trillions of dollars in a matter of months doesn’t make sense either. All over the world, people are beginning to question the entire construction of the financial system. It might be conventional wisdom, but what if the world didn’t have to work that way? What if this whole time it were all backwards, and rather than everyone buying stocks, bonds and layered financial risk with their savings, all that was ever really needed was just a better form of money?
Rather than taking open-ended risk, if each individual had access to a form of money that was not programmed to lose value, sanity in an insane world could finally be restored and the byproduct would be greater economic stability. Simply go through the thought exercise. How rational is it for practically every person to be investing in large public companies, bonds or structured financial products? How much of it was always a function of broken monetary incentives? How much of the retirement risk taking game came about in response to the need to keep up with monetary inflation and the devaluation of the dollar? Financialization was the lead up to, and the blow up which caused, the great financial crisis. While not singularly responsible, the incentives of the monetary system caused the economy to become highly financialized. Broken incentives increased the amount of highly leveraged risk taking and created a broad-based lack of savings, which was a principal source of fragility and instability. Very few had savings for a rainy day, and everyone learns the acute difference between monetary assets and financial assets in the middle of a liquidity crisis. The same dynamic played out early in 2020 as liquidity crises re-emerged.
Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, the saying goes. It all comes back to the breakdown of the monetary system and the moral hazard introduced by a financial system that spawned as a result of misaligned monetary incentives. There is no mistaking it; the instability in the broader economic system is a function of the monetary system, and as more of these episodes continue to play out, more and more people will continue to seek a better, more sustainable path forward. Now with bitcoin increasingly at center stage, there is a market mechanism that will de-financialize and heal the economic system. The process of definancialization will occur as wealth stored in financial assets is converted into bitcoin and as each market participant increasingly expresses a preference for holding a more reliable form of money over risk assets. Definancialization will principally be observed through growing bitcoin adoption, the appreciation of bitcoin relative to every other asset and the deleveraging of the financial system as a whole. Almost everything will lose purchasing power in bitcoin-denominated terms as bitcoin becomes adopted globally as a monetary standard. Most immediately, bitcoin will gain share from financial assets, which have acted as near stores of value; it is only logical that the assets which have long served as monetary substitutes will increasingly be converted to bitcoin. As part of this process, the financial system will shrink in size relative to the purchasing power of the bitcoin network. The existence of bitcoin as a more sound monetary standard will not only cause a rotation out of financial assets, but bitcoin will also impair future demand for the same type of assets. Why purchase near-zero yielding sovereign debt, illiquid corporate bonds or equity-risk premium when you can own the scarcest asset (and form of money) that has ever existed?
It might start with the most obviously over-priced financial assets, such as negative yielding sovereign debt, but everything will be on the chopping block. As the rotation occurs, non-bitcoin asset prices will experience downward pressure, which will similarly create downward pressure on the value of debt instruments supported by those assets. The demand for credit will be impaired broadly, which will cause the credit system as a whole to contract (or attempt to contract). That in turn will accelerate the need for quantitative easing (increase in the base money supply) to help sustain and prop up credit markets, which will further accelerate the shift out of financial assets and into bitcoin. The process of definancialization will feed on itself and accelerate because of the feedback loop between the value of financial assets, the credit system and quantitative easing.
More substantively, as time passes and as knowledge distributes, individuals will increasingly opt for the simplicity of bitcoin (and its 21 million fixed supply) over the complexity of financial investing and structured financial risk. Financial assets bear operational risk and counterparty risk, whereas bitcoin is a bearer asset, perfectly fixed in supply, highly divisible, and easily transferable. The utility of money is fundamentally distinct from that of a financial asset. A financial asset has a claim on the income stream of a productive asset, denominated in a particular form of money. The holder of a financial asset is taking risk with the goal of earning more money in the future. Owning and holding money is just that; it is valuable in its ability to be exchanged in the future for goods %story% services. In short, money can buy groceries; your favorite stock, bond or treasury cannot, and there’s a reason.
There is and always has been a fundamental difference between saving and investment; savings are held in the form of monetary assets and investments are savings which are put at risk. The lines may have been blurred as the economic system financialized, but bitcoin will unblur the lines and make the distinction obvious once again. Money with the right incentive structure will overwhelm demand for complex financial assets and debt instruments. The average person will very intuitively and overwhelmingly opt for the security provided by a monetary medium with a fixed supply. As individuals opt out of financial assets and into bitcoin, the economy will definancialize. It will naturally shift the balance of power away from Wall St. and back to Main St.
The banking sector will no longer reside at the epicenter of the economy as a rent-seeking endeavor, and instead, it will sit alongside every other industry and more directly compete for capital. Today, monetary capital is largely captive to the banking system, and that will no longer be true in a bitcoinized world. As part of the transition, the flow of money will increasingly disintermediate from the banking sector; money will more freely and directly flow among the economic participants that actually contribute value.
The function of credit markets, stock markets and financial intermediation will still exist, but it will all be right-sized. As the financialized economy consumes fewer and fewer resources and as monetary incentives better align with those that create real economic value, bitcoin will fundamentally restructure the economy. There have been societal consequences to disincentivizing savings, but now the ship is headed in the right direction and toward a brighter future. In that future, gone will be the days of everyone constantly thinking about their stock and bond portfolios, and more time can be spent getting back to the basics of life and the things that really matter.
The difference between saving in bitcoin (not taking risk) and financial investing (taking risk) is night and day. There is something cathartic about saving in a form of money that works in your favor rather than against it. It is akin to a massive weight being lifted off your shoulders that you didn’t even know existed. It might not be apparent immediately, but over time, saving in a form of money with proper incentives ultimately allows one to think and worry about money less, rather than obsess over it. Imagine a world in which billions of people, all using a common currency, can focus more on creating value for those around them rather than worrying about making money and financial investing. What that future looks like exactly, no one knows, but bitcoin will definancialize the economy, and it will no doubt be a renaissance.
Therefore, having a nonzero exposure to Bitcoin is basically a bet that Bitcoin’s network effect and use case will continue to grow until it reaches some equilibrium where it has lower volatility and is more stable. For now, it has plenty of volatility, and it needs that volatility if it is to keep growing. Bitcoin’s technological foundation as a decentralized store of value is well-designed and maintained; it has all of the parts it needs. It just needs to grow into what it can be, and we’ll see if it does.