Over and above all, it remains to be seen how far the super-Bank will make use of its immense facilities for credit expansion. This is the aspect of the scheme which deserves the most attention, as it opens up a vista of alarming possibilities. The scheme itself is sound, and it is far from its authors’ intention to make of the Institution a means for international credit inflation. But then, the bank scheme of John Law was also in itself sound....It also remains to be seen whether the scheme of our modern John Laws -- however sound their intention may be -- will not be brought to shipwreck...
-- Is Libra really the world’s most ambitious international settlement system? FT Alphaville
Technology is possibility. Technology is potential. Technology is hope. It drives out inefficiencies. It destabilizes authority. It rights wrongs. We've witnessed examples of all of these things in the last two-and-a-half decades, sometimes in dramatic fashion. They seem to occur at an ever accelerating rate.
Among the things that makes any technology magical is its ability to elevate each and every individual user to the center of the universe. One of the ways a technology does this is by rapidly and iteratively incorporating things users ask for. Short delivery times allow for feedback from a wide variety of current and potential users to be factored, explored, and refined continuously - and equitably - into the software. This gives iterative tech the unique capability of placing every individual at the center of value delivery, as there are many intersection points of features and types of user. When done well, there isn't a single person imposing their vision of what users should do, but community preferences and desires crowdsourced to achieve a goal state. This is the egalitarianism of technology, manifested through a product mindset and Agile practices.
Little wonder that tech sports a halo in the eyes of economists, politicians, and the masses alike. Yet we know from experience that tech is not a one way trip to a universally better tomorrow.
We think of technology as a force for good because of the benefits we have seen it yield, but we do not often consider the problems it is likely to leave in is wake. Cheap capital flooded into sales-tax free e-commerce at the cost of brick-and-mortar firms and their employees, and by extension the municipal & state coffers to which those firms and employees contributed taxable sales and incomes. Using advertising to subsidize innocuous user activities like information or product search gave rise to creepy surveillance capitalism. Energy-efficient buildings don't fulfill their promise because "buildings don't use energy -- people do." It's a phenomenon called the rebound effect: tech-driven advances in energy efficiency result in increased rather than decreased consumption. "[P]redicting what people will do is notoriously difficult."
Tech firms advocate big tech solutions to big economic and societal problems. Somebody thinks people pay too much in fees to transfer money, so they propose to "revolutionize payments" through cryptocurrencies. Somebody thinks that asset prices are too high, so they propose to "revolutionize asset ownership" through fractionalization. Somebody thinks that low-risk borrowers are penalized by being pooled with high-risk borrowers; somebody else thinks that too many high-risk borrowers are excluded from credit markets, so each build technology products targeted at the margins of credit markets.
Because people have limited capacity to comprehend the world in a state differently than how it exists today (a phenomenon known as regulatory capture), the debate focuses on the past and present, not what the brave new world of "revolutionized payments" or "revolutionized credit formation" will mean.
Here is what those things mean. Unrestricted movement of capital across borders is a pro-cyclical driver of capital flight; that amplifies currency fluctuations and interest rate volatility. Siphoning off the extremes of the credit pool removes high quality borrowers and encourages loans to borrowers of extremely low credit quality; that increases interest rates charged to middle- and high-risk borrowers because it takes low-risk borrowers out of the pool. It also enables unregulated institutions to write usurious loans that find their way into the mainstream financial system because the notes are ultimately bought by banks. Banks will not write the loans due to the credit worthiness of the borrower, and banks will not write the loans because regulatory agencies prohibit charging the concomitant interest rate banks would need to charge given the credit worthiness of the borrower. Ironically, banks can (and do) buy the loans ultimately provided to those borrowers by unregulated financial institutions and put the loans on the books as high-yield assets. Fringe financial institutions win, banks win, borrowers lose.
Big tech solutions to problems real or perceived on the margins amplify volatility. That makes them contributors and potentially generators of Black Swan events. The technologies that aspire to increase accessibility or reduce friction in isolation of other market characteristics such as regulation actually contribute to volatility in the markets they allege to optimize. True, they may do so at their own expense: marketplace lenders, dependent on banks to buy the loans they write, are extremely vulnerable to the credit cycle they promised to circumvent. But as big tech is a winner-take-all-loser-take nothing proposition, and as big tech harvests rather than liberates the individual, big solutions from big tech are a one-way proposition that transfers income from the core of an economy to the big tech company that ultimately wins out.
Can technology make improvements in payments and credit formation? Sure. But perhaps better to take an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary approach. Lots of innocent people get hurt badly in revolutions. They are powerless to defend their interests.
Oh, and about that quote to start this blog. You might be thinking it's about Libra. It isn't. It was written in 1972 about the Bank of International Settlements. Plus ça change...
