Felix Salmon

I’ve posted a very long piece on bitcoin over at Medium. Obviously, I’d love for you to go over there and read the whole thing — or at least save it somehow for reading later. But here’s the heart of the article:

Volatility is a serious problem, if you’re trying to put together a currency, rather than a vehicle for financial speculation. If the currency of a country ever fluctuated as much as bitcoins did, it would never be taken seriously as a medium of exchange: how are you meant to do business in a place where an item costing one unit of currency is worth $10 one day and $20 the next? Currencies need a modicum of stability; indeed, one of the main selling points of bitcoin was that it couldn’t be destabilized by government institutions. But that comes as scant comfort to people watching the value of a bitcoin behave like some kind of demented internet stock during the dot-com bubble.

In reality, then, bitcoin doesn’t really behave like a currency at all. In terms of its market value, it looks much more like a highly-volatile commodity. That’s by design: bitcoins were created to be the most fungible commodity the world had ever seen – to the point at which they would effectively erase the distinction between a commodity and a currency.

But is that a good idea?

The answer, of course, is no. It’s a bad idea to turn a currency into a commodity, because if the price of the commodity goes up, then everybody using the currency suffers from enormous deflation. Imagine a sucker who took out a loan in bitcoins a few weeks ago — she’d never be able to pay it back today. That’s a pretty good sign that bitcoins don’t work as a currency.

More profoundly, it’s incredibly corrosive to try to build a currency on mistrust, as bitcoin has attempted.

It’s because we place so much trust in banks, after all, that they are forced to take on a great deal of responsibility. Banks and central banks are given an important job to do, are regulated and scrutinized, and can be held responsible for their actions. The population of the entire country, as represented by the government, stands behind bank deposits and promises to honor them even if the bank goes bust. Money, in other words, is a key ingredient in the glue which keeps the social compact together. (What we’re seeing in Cyprus is in large part a demonstration of what happens when that compact starts becoming unglued.)

Bitcoin, in that sense, is anti democratic. It’s based on mistrust rather than trust, it refuses to take any responsibility onto itself – indeed, it doesn’t even have a self to take responsibility onto. It’s nihilistic.

It’s fun to watch the bitcoin bubble, but it’s also important to understand that almost no one actually wants to live in the kind of world that bitcoin enthusiasts are looking forward to. Thankfully, the rising price of bitcoins is not some kind of market signal telling us that we’re closer to that world. But at the same time, it’s certainly not something to celebrate.

When I wrote my blog entry on currency ETCs yesterday, I wasn’t aware of the various carry-trade products available on US exchanges. But after a very informative conversation with Morningstar’s Bradley Kay this morning, I’m now much more up to speed. And while there’s nothing in the US quite like the UK products, there are still a fair few carry-trade vehicles to choose from.

First though it’s worth looking at some well-established ETFs which are very bad ways to play the carry trade: the Currency Shares suite of ETFs which aim to mirror the performance of nine different currencies. Of those nine, six pay essentially no interest at all, and the amount of interest they pay is basically at the discretion of Currency Shares. “They should be paying interest,” says Kay, “it’s only when I run the graph and I look at them that I say wow, over periods when there should be positive carry, there’s really nothing there.”

The Currency Shares ETFs, then, are a good way to make a short-term bet on currency movements. But they’re not a good way to play the carry trade in particular, which involves taking advantage of the higher interest rates available in foreign currencies.

Then there are a couple of funds which are simply plays on the direction of the dollar. The PowerShares dollar index funds (UUP is bullish, UDN is bearish) are based on futures, and therefore do accrue local-currency interest in much the same way that the ETCs do. But they’re fundamentally trading vehicles designed to make bets on the direction of the dollar, not to use low dollar interest rates to fund investments in foreign currencies.

Finally there’s a pair of funds which specifically seek to replicate the carry trade — the PowerShares G10 Currency Harvest fund (DBV), and the iPath Optimized Currency Carry fund (ICI). Both of them use futures to capture the full local-currency returns: they’re true carry-trade plays.

There are differences between the two, most notably that DBV is a true ETF, where shareholders own shares in a trust. ICI, by contrast, is an ETN, which means that shareholders are essentially just unsecured creditors of Barclays, who don’t get paid for taking on the Barclays credit risk.

They invest in slightly different things, too: DBV takes the G10 currencies and goes long the three highest-yielding currencies while going short the three lowest-yielding currencies. As a result, it’s either 2x leveraged (if the dollar is not one of those six currencies) or 1.66x leveraged if the dollar is part of the mix. The results can be highly volatile: in the second half of 2008, the fund fell over 30% as the yen (one of the shorts) rose and the Aussie and NZ dollars (the longs) fell.

DBV then is very much a trading vehicle, rather than an investment vehicle. Over the long term it does tend to generate positive returns, and those returns tend to have a nice low correlation with most other asset classes. The problem is that when you really need diversification — when people are panicking and stocks are plunging — is likely to be exactly the same time that this strategy blows up as well, as investors flee risky smaller currencies for the safety of the low-yielding dollar.

ICI is much more conservative, carefully selecting G10 currencies to invest in so as to maximize carry while minimizing volatility. It’s also cheaper than DBV, charging 65bp rather than 75bp per year. But it’s tiny, with a market capitalization of less than $30 million, so I’d stay away for the time being.

And there’s one more fund worth mentioning: the WisdomTree Dreyfus Emerging Currency fund (CEW). It too is quite small, but it invests in all manner of exotic high-yielding currencies, and it’s performed quite well: Kay gives it credit for avoiding the zloty crash. If you really want to play the carry trade, this might be worth a look.

OK, this is getting REALLY annoying — it’s happened again! Why is Ecto killing my posts when I publish them? Here’s a shorter version of my now-lost IOU post:

Yglesias says California’s IOUs are “arguably” unconstitutional. Babcock demonstrates if they’re not unconstitutional already, they will be if California starts accepting them in payment of taxes. Are we moving towards an alternative currency like the patacón? Will California banks start opening IOU-denominated bank accounts? Will California effectively devalue against the dollar? And how can that possibly be good for the nation as a whole? Geithner should put a stop to all this nonsense once and for all, ban the IOUs, and just bail out California already. It’s inevitable he’ll do it sooner or later, so best do it before Americans’ faith in fiat currency is shaken up too much.

Is that a coin in your pocket, or is it a unit of long base metal with an embedded American put option with infinite time to maturity? According to a new paper by Espen Haug and John Stevenson, it’s both. And what’s more, that embedded put is highly volatile:

The value of modern currencies has recently gone from deep in-the-money through at-the-money to deeply out-of- the-money to deep in-the-money again, making the lack of sound analytical treatment all the more surprising.

Haug and Stevenson conclude that central banks should bone up on their option theory before minting new coins:

If the US Mint and other central banks had been fully aware of the embedded option they are issuing in their physical money they may have acted differently in the past.

Don’t they know that they’re giving these options away?