From Alasdair Macleod at cobdencentre.org:
Last week, the ECB extended its monetary madness, pushing deposit rates yet more negative. It is extending quantitative easing from sovereign debt into non-financial investment grade bonds, while increasing the pace of acquisition to €80bn per month. The ECB also promised to pay the banks to take credit from it in “targeted longer-term refinancing operations”.
Any Frenchman with a knowledge of his country’s history should hear alarm bells ringing. The ECB is running the Eurozone’s money and assets in a similar fashion to that of John Law’s Banque Generale Privée (renamed Banque Royale in 1719), which ran those of France in 1716-20. The scheme at its heart was simple: use the money-issuing monopoly granted to the bank by the state to drive up the value of the Mississippi Company’s shares using paper money created for the purpose. The Duc d’Orleans, regent of France for the young Louis XV, agreed to the scheme because it would provide the Bourbons with much-needed funds.
This is pretty much what the ECB is doing today, except on a far larger Eurozone-wide basis. The need for government funds is of primary importance today, as it was then.
In Law’s day, France did not have a central bank, such as the Bank of England, managing the issue of government debt, let alone a functioning government bond market. The profligate spending of Louis XIV had left the state three billion livres in debt, which was the equivalent of 1,840 tonnes of gold. This was about 85% of the world’s estimated gold stock at that time, at the livre’s conversion rate into Louis d’Or. John Law would almost double that by June 1720, with unbacked livre notes issued by his bank.
Today, the assets being overvalued for the governments’ benefit are government bonds themselves, but the principal is the same. There is no need to use a separate, Mississippi-style vehicle, because there is a fully functioning government bond market.
Banque Generale created the bank credit for France’s upper and middle classes to buy Mississippi Company shares, driving up the price and making yet higher prices a certainty. Law had set up a money-making machine for those with a modicum of wealth, but the ten per cent down-payment required to subscribe for Mississippi shares made speculation available to the servant classes as well. The result was virtually everyone in Paris was caught up in the speculative fever, and Mississippi shares increased from the 15 livres deposit to 18,000 livres fully paid at the peak in June 1720. The term “millionaire” dated from that time.
Today, the ECB is doing things a little differently, creating money to buy government bonds from the banks, enabling governments to continue to spend without the threat of a funding crisis. Basel III banking regulations, which exempt banks from having to apply a risk weighting to government bonds, ensures that the bonds are also in great demand as collateral, further guaranteeing that the banks will continue to buy them.
However, in common with Law’s scheme, the ECB needs new suckers all the time to keep the market from stalling, so the ECB is extending the scheme beyond sovereign debt by buying up investment grade bonds as well. And since it can conjure up money out of thin air, it will also pay the commercial banks interest to borrow from it, ensuring the yields on all bonds purchased with this finance will continue to fall in line with negative interest rates.
To continue reading: The ECB and John Law
