bubbles

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UBI via Cryptocurrency?

Posted by Peter on July 27, 2018
Posted in: Economics, Politics. Tagged: , , .

Most Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposals look a bit implausible, because they want to solve poverty overnight, and rely on questionable hopes for how much taxpayers can be persuaded to support[1].

They also fall short of inspiring my idealistic motives, because they want to solve poverty only within the countries that implement the UBI (i.e. they should be called national basic income proposals). That means even those of us living in relatively successful countries would be gambling on the continued success of the country they happen to live in. I imagine some large upheavals in the next century or so that will create a good deal of uncertainty as to which countries prosper.

Political movements to create national basic income run the risk of being hijacked by political forces that are more short-sighted and less altruistic.

Whereas I’m more interested in preparing for the more distant risks of a large-scale technological unemployment that might accompany a large increase in economic growth.

UBI without taxation?

Manna is a somewhat better attempt. It’s a cryptocurrency with a one account per human rule, and regular distributions of additional (newly created) currency to each account.

It provides incentives to sign up (speaking of which, I get rewards if you sign up via this link). It’s less clear what incentive people have to hold onto their manna[2].

It’s designed so that, given optimistic assumptions, the price of manna will be stable, or maybe increase somewhat. Note that those optimistic assumptions include a significant amount of altruism on the part of many people.

Cryptocurrencies gained popularity in part because they offered a means of trust that was independent of their creator’s trustworthiness.

Manna doesn’t attempt to fully replicate that feature, because they’re not about to fully automate the one-human-one-account rule. They’ve outsourced a good deal of the verification to cell phone companies, but the system will still be vulnerable to fraud unless a good deal of human labor goes into limiting people to one account each.

The obvious outcome is that people stop buying manna, so it becomes worth too little for people to bother signing up.

I suspect most buying so far has been from people who think any cryptocurrency will go up. That’s typical of a bubble.

That may have helped to jumpstart the system, but I’m concerned that it may distract the founders from looking for a long-term solution.

Why use a cryptocurrency?

Some of what’s happening is that crypto enthusiasts expect crypto to solve all problems, and apply crypto to everything without looking for evidence that crypto is helpful to the problem at hand. The cryptocurrency bubble misled some people into thinking that cryptocurrencies created free lunches[3] (manna comes from heaven, right?), and a UBI is a good use for a free lunch.

I recommend instead that you think of manna as primarily a charity, which happens to get some advantage from using a cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies provide fairly cheap ways of transmitting value.

The open source nature of the mechanism makes it relatively easy to verify most aspects of the system.

These may not sound like terribly strong reasons, but it looks to me like much of the difficulty in getting widespread adoption of valuable new charities is that donors won’t devote much effort to evaluating charities. So only the most easily verified charities succeed on their merits, and the rest succeed or fail mainly on their marketing ability.

Difficulties

It seems almost possible that the price of manna could be stable or rise reliably enough to act as a good store of value.

But it won’t happen via the thoughtless greed that drove last year’s cryptocurrency buying frenzy. It requires something along the lines of altruism and/or signaling.

It seems to require the “central bank” to use charitable donations to buy manna when the price of manna declines.

It also requires something unusual about the average person’s attitude toward manna. Would it be enough for people and businesses to accept manna as payment, for reasons that involve status signaling? That doesn’t seem quite enough.

It’s also important to persuade some people to hold the manna for a significant time.

Strategies

There’s little chance that can be accomplished by making manna look as safe as dollars or yuan. The only possibility that I can imagine working is if holdings of manna provide a good signal of wealth and wealth-related status. Manna seems to be positioned so that it could become a substitute for a fancy car or house as a signal of wealth. With that level of acceptance, it might provide a substitute for bank accounts as a store of value.

Signaling motives might also lead some upper-class people/businesses to use it as medium of exchange.

To work well, manna would probably need to be recognized as a charity, with a reputation that is almost as widely respected as the Red Cross. I.e. it would need to be a fairly standard form of altruism.

The main UBI movement wants to imagine they can solve poverty with one legislative act. Manna uses a more incremental approach, which provides less hope of solving poverty this decade, but maybe a bit more hope of mitigating larger problems from technological unemployment several decades from now.

Doubts?

Manna seems to be run by the first group of people who decided the idea was worth doing. Typically with a new technology, the people who will manage it most responsibly wait a few years before getting involved, so my priors are that I should hesitate before deciding this particular group is good enough.

Manna currently isn’t fair to people who can’t afford a cell phone, but if other aspects of manna succeed, it’s likely that cell phone companies will find a way to get cell phones to essentially everyone, since the manna will pay for the phones. Also, alternatives to cell phones will probably be implemented for manna access.

The high-level rhetoric says any human being is eligible for manna, but a closer look shows that anyone under 18 is treated as only partly qualified – manna accumulates in their name, and they get access to the manna when they come of age. The arbitrariness of this threshold is unsettling. We’ll get situations where people become parents, yet don’t have access to manna. Or maybe that’s not much of a problem because someone else will enable children to borrow, using their manna as collateral?

The problems will become harder if someone needs to figure out what qualifies a human being in an Age of Em, where uploaded minds (human, and maybe bonobo) can be quickly duplicated.

I’m not too clear on how the governing board will be chosen – they say something about voting, which sort of suggests a global democracy. That runs some risk of short-sighted people voting themselves more money now at the cost of a less stable system later. But the alternative governing mechanisms aren’t obviously great either.

I’d have more confidence if manna were focused exclusively on a UBI. But they want to also enable targeted donations, by providing verified age, gender, location, and occupation data, and “verified needy” status indications generated by other charities. Maybe a one or two of those would work out well, but I see some important tension between them and the “NO DISCRIMINATION” slogan on the home page.

The people in charge also want to solve “instability … resulting from too much money being held in too few hands and used for reckless financial speculation” without convincing me they understand what causes instability.

I’d be concerned about macroeconomic risks in the unlikely event that manna’s use became widespread enough that wages were denominated in it. Manna’s creators express Keynesian concerns about aggregate demand, suggesting that the best we could hope for from a manna monetary policy is that it would repeat the Fed’s occasional large mistakes. I’d prefer to aim for something better than that.

Current central banks have enough problems with promoting monetary stability. If they’re replaced by an organization which has a goal that’s more distinct from monetary stability, I expect monetary stability to suffer. I don’t consider it likely that manna will replace existing currencies enough for that to be a big concern, but I find this scenario hard to analyze.

Like most charities, it depends more on support from the wealthy than from the average person. Yet the rhetoric behind Manna seems designed to alienate the wealthy.

Is current People’s Currency Foundation sufficiently trustworthy? Or should someone create a better version?

I don’t know, and I don’t expect to do enough research to figure it out. Maybe OpenPhil can investigate enough?

Is this Effective Altruism?

The near-term benefits of Manna or something similar appear unimpressive compared to GiveDirectly, which targets beneficiaries in a more sophisticated (but less transparent?) way.

But Manna’s simpler criteria make it a bit more scaleable, and make it somewhat easier to gain widespread trust.

The main costs that I foresee involve the attention that is needed to shift people’s from charities such as the Red Cross or their alma mater as the default charity, toward manna. Plus, of course, whatever is lost from the charities who get fewer donations. There’s no shortage of charities that produce less value than a well-run UBI would, but the social pressure that I’m imagining is too blunt an instrument to carefully target the least valuable charities as the things that manna should replace.

Conclusion

I don’t recommend significant purchases of manna or donations to the People’s Currency Foundation now. Current efforts in this area should focus more on evaluating these ideas further, figuring out whether a good enough implementation exists, and if it should be scaled up, then we should focus more on generating widespread agreement that this is a good charity, and not focus much on near-term funding.

I give Manna a 0.5% chance of success, and I see an additional 1% chance that something similar will succeed. By success, I mean reliably providing enough income within 30 years so that at least 10 million of the world’s poorest people can use it to buy 2000 calories per day of food. That probability seems a bit higher than the chance that political action will similarly help the world’s poorest.

Footnotes

[1] – e.g. pointing to tax rates that were tolerated for a while after a world war, without noticing the hints that war played an important role in getting that toleration, and without noting how tax rates affect tax avoidance. See Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, figures 13.1 and 14.1, for evidence that tax rates which are higher than current rates haven’t generated more revenues.

[2] – Wikipedia says of the original manna: ‘Stored manna “bred worms and stank”‘.

[3] – or maybe the best cryptocurrencies do create free lunches, but people see more free lunches than are actually created. The majority of cryptocurrencies have been just transfers of money from suckers to savvy traders.

Another housing bubble?

Posted by Peter on March 24, 2018
Posted in: Economics, Investing. Tagged: , .

Scott Sumner asks whether those of us[1] who talked about a housing bubble are predicting another one now.

Sumner asks “Is it possible that the housing boom was not a bubble?”.

It’s certainly possible to define the word bubble so that it wasn’t. But I take the standard meaning of bubble in this context to mean something like a prediction that prices will be lower a few years after the time of the prediction.

Of course, most such claims aren’t worth the electrons they’re written on, for any market that’s moderately efficient. And we shouldn’t expect the news media to select for competent predictions.

Sumner’s use of the word “bubble” isn’t of much use to me as an investor. If prices look like a bubble for a decade after their peak, that’s a good reason to have sold at the peak, regardless of what happens a decade later.

If I understand Sumner’s definition correctly, he’d say that the 1929 stock market peak looked for 25 years like it might have been a bubble, then in the mid 1950s he would decide that it had been shown not to be a bubble. That seems a bit strange.

Even if I intended to hold an investment for decades, I’d care a fair amount about the option value of selling sooner.

2.

The U.S. is not currently experiencing a housing bubble. I can imagine a small housing bubble developing in a year or two, but I’m reasonably confident that housing prices will be higher 18 months from now than they are today.

Several signs from 2005/2006 that I haven’t seen recently:

I mostly used to attribute the great recession to the foolish leverage of the banking system and homebuyers, who underestimated the risks of a significant decline in housing prices.

I’ve somewhat changed my mind after reading Sumner’s writings, and I now think the Fed had the power to prevent most of the decline in gdp, unless it was constrained by some unannounced limit on the size of its balance sheet. But I still think it’s worth asking why we needed unusual Fed actions. The fluctuations in leverage caused unusual changes in demand for money, and the Fed would have needed to cause unusual changes in the money supply to handle that well. So I think the housing bubble provides a good explanation for the timing of the recession, although that explanation is incomplete without some reference to the limits to either the Fed’s power or the Fed’s competence.

[1] – he’s mainly talking about pundits who blamed the great recession on the housing bubble. I don’t think I ever claimed there was a direct connection between them, but I did imply an indirect connection via banking system problems.

Warnings

Posted by Peter on January 22, 2018
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Investing, Mideast, Miscellaneous, Politics. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes, by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy.

This book is moderately addictive softcore version of outrage porn. Only small portions of the book attempt to describe how to recognize valuable warnings and ignore the rest. Large parts of the book seem written mainly to tell us which of the people portrayed in the book we should be outraged at, and which we should praise.

Normally I wouldn’t get around to finishing and reviewing a book containing this little information value, but this one was entertaining enough that I couldn’t stop.

The authors show above-average competence at selecting which warnings to investigate, but don’t convince me that they articulated how they accomplished that.

I’ll start with warnings on which I have the most expertise. I’ll focus a majority of my review on their advice for deciding which warnings matter, even though that may give the false impression that much of the book is about such advice.
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Cryptocurrencies

Posted by Peter on January 16, 2018
Posted in: Investing. Tagged: .

I’ve donated/sold more than 80% of my cryptocurrency holdings (Ripple and Bitcoin) over the past two weeks, after holding them without trading for around 4 years.

When I last blogged about Bitcoin, I said I would buy Bitcoin soon. That plan failed because I didn’t manage to convince the appropriate company that I’d documented my identity, so I didn’t find a way to transfer money from a bank to an account from which I could buy Bitcoin. (Difficulties like that were one reason why cryptocurrencies used to be priced too low). I procrastinated for two years, then found a convenient opportunity when MIRI needed to unload some Ripple.

My guess is that the leading cryptocurrencies will be somewhat higher a decade or two from now, but the prospects over the next year or two seem fairly poor compared to the risks.

Much of my expected value for the cryptocurrencies used to come from a 2+% chance of a hundred-fold rise. But a hundred-fold rise from current levels seems a bit less than 1% likely.

I compare cryptocurrency trends mainly to the gold bubble of 1980, since gold is primarily a store of value that pays no income, and is occasionally used as a currency.

I made some money once before by predicting that an unusual market pattern would repeat, with the same seasonal timing. So I’ve been guessing that cryptocurrencies would peak in mid-January. Yes, that’s pretty weak evidence, but weak evidence is all I expect to get.

I’ve also tried to extract some evidence from price trends. That usually provides only a tiny benefit in normal markets, but I suspect I get some value in high-volume inefficient markets (mainly ones where it’s hard to short) by detecting how eager traders are to buy and sell.

I watched the markets nervously in December, thinking that a significant bubble was developing, but seeing signs that any peak was still at least weeks in the future. Then I got nervous enough on January 2 to donate some Ripple to CFAR, even though I still saw signs that the market hadn’t peaked.

By January 5, I stopped seeing signs that the trend was still up, but I waited several days before reacting, hoping for rebounds that ended up being weaker than I expected. I ended up selling at a lower average price than CFAR got for what I donated to them, because dissatisfaction with the lower-than-recent price made me hesitant to sell.

An important lesson to draw from this is to always try to sell financial assets before the peak. Endowment effect is hard to avoid.

P.S. – It’s unclear whether cryptocurrencies are important enough to influence other stores of value. My best guess is that gold would be 5 to 10% higher today if it weren’t for cryptocurrencies. And the recent rise in cryptocurrencies coincides with a rise in expected inflation, but that’s more likely to be a coincidence, than due to people abandoning dollars because they see cryptocurrencies as a better store of value.

The Midas Paradox

Posted by Peter on May 6, 2016
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, by Scott B Sumner.

This is mostly a history of the two depressions that hit the U.S. in the 1930s: one international depression lasting from late 1929 to early 1933, due almost entirely to problems with an unstable gold exchange standard; quickly followed by a more U.S.-centered depression that was mainly caused by bad labor market policies.

It also contains some valuable history of macroeconomic thought, doing a fairly good job of explaining the popularity of theories that are designed for special cases (such as monetarism and Keynes’ “general” theory).

I was surprised at how much Sumner makes the other books on this subject that I’ve read seem inadequate.
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Inflation targeting compared to NGDP targeting

Posted by Peter on March 24, 2016
Posted in: Economics. Tagged: , .

[See my previous post for context.]

I started out to research and write a post on why I disagreed with Scott Sumner about NGDP targeting, and discovered an important point of agreement: targeting nominal wages forecasts would probably be better than targeting either NGDP or CPI forecasts.

One drawback to targeting something other than CPI forecasts is that we’ve got good market forecasts of the CPI. It’s certainly possible to create markets to forecast other quantities that the Fed might target, but we don’t have a good way of predicting how much time and money those will require.

Problems with NGDP targets

The main long-term drawback to targeting NGDP (or other measures that incorporate the quantity of economic activity) rather than an inflation-like measure is that it’s quite plausible to have large changes in the trend of increasing economic activity.

We could have a large increase in our growth rate due to a technology change such as uploaded minds (ems). NGDP targeting would create unpleasant deflation in that scenario until the Fed figured out how to adjust to new NGDP targets.

I can also imagine a technology-induced slowdown in economic growth, for example: a switch to open-source hardware for things like food and clothing (3-d printers using open-source designs) could replace lots of transactions with free equivalents. That would mean a decline in NGDP without a decline in living standards. NGDP targeting would respond by creating high inflation. (This scenario seems less likely and less dangerous than the prior scenario).

Basil Halperin has some historical examples where NGDP targeting would have produced similar problems.

Problems with inflation forecasts?

Critics of inflation targeting point to problems associated with oil shocks or with strange ways of calculating housing costs. Those cause many inflation measures to temporarily diverge from what I want the Fed to focus on, which is the problem of sticky wages interacting with weak nominal wages to create unnecessary unemployment.

Those problems with measuring inflation are serious if the Fed uses inflation that has already happened or uses forecasts of inflation that extend only a few months into the future.

Instead, I recommend using multi-year CPI forecasts based on several different time periods (e.g. in the 2 to 10 year range), and possibly forecasts for time periods that start a year or so in the future (this series shows how to infer such forecasts from existing markets). In the rare case where forecasts for different time periods say conflicting things about whether the Fed is too tight or loose, I’d encourage the Fed to use its judgment about which to follow.

The multi-year forecasts have historically shown only small reactions to phenomena such as the large spike in oil prices in mid 2008. I expect that pattern to continue: commodity price spikes happen when markets get evidence of their causes/symptoms (due to market efficiency), not at predictable future times. The multi-year forecasts typically tell us mainly whether the Fed will persistently miss its target.

Won’t using those long-term forecasts enable the Fed to make mistakes that it corrects (or over-corrects) for shorter time periods? Technically yes, but that doesn’t mean the Fed has a practical way to do that. It’s much easier for the Fed to hit its target if demand for money is predictable. Demand for money is more predictable if the value of money is more predictable. That’s one reason why long-term stability of inflation (or of wages or NGDP) implies short-term stability.

It would be a bit safer to target nominal wage rate forecasts rather than CPI forecasts if we had equally good markets forecasting both. But I expect it to be easier to convince the public to trust markets that are heavily traded for other reasons, than it is to get them to trust a brand new market of uncertain liquidity.

Fed Policy and Inflation Forecasts

Posted by Peter on February 25, 2016
Posted in: Economics, Investing, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , , .

NGDP targeting has been gaining popularity recently. But targeting market-based inflation forecasts will be about as good under most conditions [1], and we have good markets that forecast the U.S. inflation rate [2].

Those forecasts have a track record that starts in 2003. The track record seems quite consistent with my impressions about when the Fed should have adopted a more inflationary policy (to promote growth and to get inflation expectations up to 2% [3]) and when it should have adopted a less inflationary policy (to avoid fueling the housing bubble). It’s probably a bit controversial to say that the Fed should have had a less inflationary policy from February through July or August of 2008. But my impression (from reading the stock market) is that NGDP futures would have said roughly the same thing. The inflation forecasts sent a clear signal starting in very early September 2008 that Fed policy was too tight, and that’s about when other forms of hindsight switch from muddled to saying clearly that Fed policy was dangerously tight.

Why do I mention this now? The inflation forecast dropped below 1 percent two weeks ago for the first time since May 2008. So the Fed’s stated policies conflict with what a more reputable source of information says the Fed will accomplish. This looks like what we’d see if the Fed was in the process of causing a mild recession to prevent an imaginary increase in inflation.

What does the Fed think it’s doing?

  • It might be relying on interest rates to estimate what it’s policies will produce. Interest rates this low after 6.5 years of economic expansion resemble historical examples of loose monetary policy more than they resemble the stereotype of tight monetary policy [4].
  • The Fed could be following a version of the Taylor Rule. Given standard guesses about the output gap and equilibrium real interest rate [5], the Taylor Rule says interest rates ought to be rising now. The Taylor Rule has usually been at least as good as actual Fed policy at targeting inflation indirectly through targeting interest rates. But that doesn’t explain why the Fed targets interest rates when that conflicts with targeting market forecasts of inflation.
  • The Fed could be influenced by status quo bias: interest rates and unemployment are familiar types of evidence to use, whereas unbiased inflation forecasts are slightly novel.
  • Could the Fed be reacting to money supply growth? Not in any obvious way: the monetary base stopped growing about two years ago, M1 and MZM growth are slowing slightly, and M2 accelerated recently (but only after much of the Fed’s tightening).

Scott Sumner’s rants against reasoning from interest rates explain why the Fed ought to be embarrassed to use interest rates to figure out whether Fed policy is loose or tight.

Yet some institutional incentives encourage the Fed to target interest rates rather than predicted inflation. It feels like an appropriate use of high-status labor to set interest rates once every few weeks based on new discussion of expert wisdom. Switching to more or less mechanical responses to routine bond price changes would undercut much of the reason for believing that the Fed’s leaders are doing high-status work.

The news media storytellers would have trouble finding entertaining ways of reporting adjustments that consisted of small hourly responses to bond market changes. Whereas decisions made a few times per year are uncommon enough to be genuinely newsworthy. And meetings where hawks struggle against doves fit our instinctive stereotype for important news better than following a rule does. So I see little hope that storytellers will want to abandon their focus on interest rates. Do the Fed governors follow the storytellers closely enough that the storytellers’ attention strongly affects the Fed’s attention? Would we be better off if we could ban the Fed from seeing any source of daily stories?

Do any other interest groups prefer stable interest rates over stable inflation rates? I expect a wide range of preferences among Wall Street firms, but I’m unaware which preferences are dominant there.

Consumers presumably prefer that their banks, credit cards, etc have predictable interest rates. But I’m skeptical that the Fed feels much pressure to satisfy those preferences.

We need to fight those pressures by laughing at people who claim that the Fed is easing when markets predict below-target inflation (as in the fall of 2008) or that the Fed is tightening when markets predict above-target inflation (e.g. much of 2004).

P.S. – The risk-reward ratio for the stock market today is much worse than normal. I’m not as bearish as I was in October 2008, but I’ve positioned myself much more cautiously than normal.

Notes:

[1] – They appear to produce nearly identical advice under most conditions that the U.S. has experienced recently.

I expect inflation targeting to be modestly safer than NGDP targeting. I may get around to explaining my reasons for that in a separate post.

[2] – The link above gives daily forecasts of the 5 year CPI inflation rate. See here for some longer time periods.

The markets used to calculate these forecasts have enough liquidity that it would be hard for critics to claim that they could be manipulated by entities less powerful than the Fed. I expect some critics to claim that anyway.

[3] – I’m accepting the standard assumption that 2% inflation is desirable, in order to keep this post simple. Figuring out the optimal inflation rate is too hard for me to tackle any time soon. A predictable inflation rate is clearly desirable, which creates some benefits to following a standard that many experts agree on.

[4] – providing that you don’t pay much attention to Japan since 1990.

[5] – guesses which are error-prone and, if a more direct way of targeting inflation is feasible, unnecessary. The conflict between the markets’ inflation forecast and the Taylor Rule’s implication that near-zero interest rates would cause inflation to rise suggests that we should doubt those guesses. I’m pretty sure that equilibrium interest rates are lower than the standard assumptions. I don’t know what to believe about the output gap.

Manias, Panics and Crashes

Posted by Peter on February 12, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, Investing, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises 6th ed., by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber.

The book starts with a good overview of how a typical bubble develops and bursts. But I found the rest of the book poorly organized. I often wondered whether the book was reporting a particular historical fact as an example of some broad pattern – if not, why weren’t they organized in something closer to chronological order? It has lots of information that is potentially valuable, but not organized into a useful story or set of references.

This Time is Different

Posted by Peter on March 11, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , .

Book review: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.

This book documents better than any prior book the history of banking and government debt crises. Most of it is unsurprising to those familiar with the subject. It has more comprehensive data than I’ve seen before.

It is easier reading than the length would suggest (it has many tables of data, and few readers will be tempted to read all the data). It is relatively objective. That makes it less exciting than the more ideological writings on the subject.

The comparisons between well governed and poorly governed countries show that governments can become mature enough that defaults on government debt and hyperinflation are rare or eliminated, but there is little different in banking crises between different types of government / economies.

They claim that international capital mobility has produced banking crises, but don’t convince me that they understand the causality behind the correlation. I’d guess that one causal factor is that the optimism that produces bubbles causes more investors to move money into countries they understand less well than their home country, which means their money is more likely to end up in reckless institutions.

The book ends with tentative guesses about which countries are about to become mature enough to avoid sovereign debt crises. Among the seven candidates is Greece, which is now looking like a poor guess less than a half year after it was published.

Chinese Stock Bubble

Posted by Peter on October 23, 2007
Posted in: China, Investing. Tagged: , , .

Up to two months ago, I was not too excited by the claims of a bubble in the Chinese stock market. Maybe the stocks that trade only in China were at bubble levels, but the ones that trade in the U.S. or Hong Kong still looked like mostly good investments.
Much has changed since then. On October 17, PetroChina rose 14.5%, more than doubling in about two months. That was a one day gain in market capitalization of almost $60 billion, and a two month gain of $247 billion (doubling the market capitalization). I’ve seen similar but less dramatic rises in smaller Chinese stocks that trade in the U.S., but less on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
By comparison, the largest rises in market capitalization that I’ve been able to find in the technology stock bubble of 1999-2000 were a $50 billion one day rise in Microsoft on December 15, 1999, and a $250 billion rise (doubling) in Cisco which took four months.
I’m not saying that Chinese stocks are clearly overvalued yet, and I’m still holding some stocks in smaller Chinese companies that I don’t feel much urgency about selling. But the unusually strong and long lasting Chinese economic expansion, combined with the unusually frothy action in the stock market, are what I’d expect to be causes and symptoms of a bubble.
Bubbles in the U.S. have peaked when real interest rates rise to higher than normal levels. The Chinese government is keeping real interest rates near zero, and seems to think it can keep nominal interest rates stable and reduce inflation. That would be an unusual accomplishment under most circumstances. When combined with a stock market bubble, I suspect it could only be accomplished with drastic restrictions on economic activity, which would involve instabilities that the Chinese government has been trying to avoid by stabilizing things such as interest rates.
Without a rise in interest rates or drastic restrictions of some sort, it’s hard to see what will stop the rise in Chinese stocks. So I’m guessing we’ll see a bigger bubble than the U.S. has experienced. It’s effects will likely extend well beyond China.