Hacker News Reader

Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

It would be counter productive to society. Put money in a bank, the bank lends it out, the money serves society buy financing a new business or perhaps consumption but either way it is doing something. Lend it to the government in the form of bonds and they'll spend it on something.

If it just goes into the cash account you're describing, it does nothing but exist, in the event of recessions this would be severely dangerous to a countries financial system because it would be the safest place to store your money, safer even than bonds, so at the exact time when the economy needs cheap credit, interest rates would rise as money drains into these electronic cash accounts.

View on HN

That makes sense but I have a follow up question. What forces this? For example, what's to stop a single entity from reaping the rewards of using cash while everyone else buys bonds to keep the economy moving. Is it a government regulation? an agreement between large institutions? or are the gains to each individual entity large enough that the negative yield is worth it?

Cash or a bank demand account is not without their own inherent risks. A fire, robbery, or forced currency exchange could destroy the value of the physical commodity of cash, and the FDIC only insures individual account bank deposits up to a certain limit so a bank institution failure could cause losses to individual accounts.

Ok you're arguing that there is no such thing as a liquid store of value that that offers a better return than a negative yield government bond?

So let's say I'm a bank with a stack of 1B in high denomination central bank notes. I calculate the rate of return as zero minus the annual cost of securing those and the annual risk that they are stolen or destroyed. Inflation isn't a factor because the bond is in the same currency. Based on your explanation that rate of return will be lower than the -0.11% that I would get from a german 30 year bond today. And there's simply nothing I can exchange those central bank notes for that would do any better than the bond.

Like OP I've never understood negative yield debt and I'm trying really hard to.

Arguably, the combined cost and risk of loss when you store a pile of cash in a secured cellar is greater than 11bp.

There's also the fact that bonds can appreciate, so even if on the face of it you're taking an 11bp hit that might not be true in practice.

Not counter productive to the society: as money have nothing behind and central banks can just print it, they can print or electronically grant any amount to anyone needing it. This would not affect the trust in the value of the money because there is no such value. What is $1 or 1 Euro backed by? An ounce of Moon dust?

The fundamental demand for dollars and euros is caused by the fact that every April, you need to have a bunch of them. And if you don't, eventually men with guns will take you to jail.

It is different here, you don't pay the taxes yourself, they are subtracted from your salary by the employer and paid on your behalf. it is not a service you receive, the state does not trust you will pay. When you leave half of the salary on the pay day and then pay another 20% taxes on anything you buy, not many people would pay something in April, even with the men with guns threat.

It’s a funny system where citizens aren’t trusted but corporations are.

In the US, the government also withholds taxes from your paycheck, and in other circumstances.

This is sort of correct, but it also doesn't address the point that this setup can't exist, logically, with fiat currency.

There is no way to hold money that isn't ultimately lent to or borrowed from some other entity. You can store cash under your mattress, but even that's money that you've effectively lent to the government (the seigniorage of storing it under your mattress means that you've now given them the ability to print that same amount of money at zero extra cost).

This is harder to wrap your head around, but once you understand the principle - money is always at work, no matter what form it's in - it's a lot easier to understand the flow of money on a macro or international scale.

> This is sort of correct, but it also doesn't address the point that this setup can't exist, logically, with fiat currency.

Yes, it can. It can't exist with the game playing that exists with most modern fiat currencies to create the illusion that they are something other than fiat of the issuing government, which creates a lot of artificial debt to create the illusion of a government constrained by the same fiscal concerns that apply to a country using commodity or foreign fiat currency rather than its own fiat.

But this is a behavioral hack to reduce the likelihood of a particular undesirable course of monetary policy (unrestrained money printing), not fundamental to the nature of fiat currency.

So people should be forced to invest their money even if they don't think any of the ventures are worthwhile? And physical cash shouldn't exist either?

If you describe negative interest rates as "forcing people to invest their money", how would you describe deflation?

Money is debt. You hold something now and expect somebody else to give you something of value for it in the future. But the future is always uncertain. You may lose out on the deal by holding on to your money. But you seem to be demanding that somebody somehow should guarantee that people never do lose by holding on, no matter what. Who would that somebody be? How could that even work?

Money was debt. It's how it got invented after all.

It's not so clear cut anymore. Most currencies aren't backed by anything anymore nor are they tied to any yearly returns. They've become arbitrary numbers manipulated by central banks to control the economy.

You would have to back the money with something physical such as the Gold Standard. An Oz of gold today will still be an Oz of gold tomorrow. Furthermore, the rarity of gold makes the amount in circulation relatively constant.

The problem is that the purchasing power of gold isn't relatively constant: what you can buy with 1 oz. today and what you can buy with 1 oz. tomorrow are not necessarily the same — so you have much the same problem.

Moreover, the relative constancy of the gold supply is a problem, because as the economy grows that makes each unit of gold more valuable … which leads to deflation, which is far worse than inflation, and can lead to utter economic desolation.

I hate fiat money, I really do: I hate that governments can inflate their way out of debts and inflate away my savings. But gold — appealing as it is — is even worse.

1 oz. of gold doesn't change from day to day, rather, only people's opinion of it changes. In that sense, is there anything you can think of that people would want as much or more in the future than they do today? I can think of maybe 1 thing, sex, but I don't even want to begin to imagine how a system like that would work haha.

Ultimately I agree that fiat currency is a necessary evil because of the ability to expand with the economy.

Gold is essentially the same plus liquidity trap (think of Bitcoin and it's deflationary nature)

> So people should be forced to invest their money even if they don't think any of the ventures are worthwhile? And physical cash shouldn't exist either?

Physical cash is also debt (backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, in the case of the US, or the relevant issuer in the case of other fiat currencies).

Non-central fallacy: Yes, it technically meets one definition of "liability", and is therefore debt; it is not "being invested in a venture" in the sense of this discussion.

> Non-central fallacy: Yes, it technically meets one definition of "liability", and is therefore debt; it is not "being invested in a venture" in the sense of this discussion.

Except it is being invested. That's a major part of the role that the government plays when interacting with the macroeconomy.

Then let me try phrasing it a third way:

So people should be forced to invest their money beyond the extent to which holding that money inherently counts as an investment, even if they don't think any of the ventures that they directly invest in are worthwhile?

The fact that government "is debt backed by full faith and credit etc etc etc" does not answer the substance of the question I was actually asking, and which should have been clear from the context I was asking.

Your job as part of social contract of living in a market-based economy is to allocate capital in the most productive way possible to maximize efficiency of the whole. What this means, is that if you believe no ventures are valuable, you allocate your capital in cash. If you believe ventures will outperform cash, you invest in ventures. So you're "forced" in the same way you're "forced" not to be homeless, have a job, and not hit people. It's a way of life.

Physical cash should exist.

But your first question is much more interesting in what it seems to imply.

If i understand it correctly, the converse would be: entities are free to not invest their money when there are no worthwhile ventures.

This sounds all well and good on an individual level. But by what logic or mechanism can the ~200 countries that exist have the ability to 'hold' money and not 'invest' it?

Of course physical cash should exist. There just isn't enough of it and it isn't practical for large investors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com