How the economic machine works in 30 minutes. The economy works like a simple machine but many people don’t understand it or they don’t agree on how it works, and this has led to a lot of needless economic suffering. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to share my simple but practical economic template. Though it’s unconventional, it has helped me to anticipate and to side step the global financial crisis and it has worked well for me for over 30 years. Let’s begin. Though the economy might seem complex, it works in a simple mechanical way, it’s made up of a few simple parts and a lot of simple transactions that are repeated over and over again a zillion times. These transactions above all else are driven by human nature and they create three main forces that drive the economy. Number one, productivity growth. Number two, the short term debt cycle. And number three the long term debt cycle. We’ll look at these three forces and how laying them on top of each other creates a good template for tracking economic movements and figuring out what’s happening now. Let’s start with the simplest part of the economy, transactions.
Ray Dalio: Economics 101
An economy is simply the sum of the transactions that make it up and a transaction is a very simple thing. You make transactions all the time. Every time you buy something, you create a transaction. Each transaction consists of a buyer exchanging money or credit with a seller for goods, services, or financial assets. Credit spends just like money, so adding together the money spent and the amount of credit spent, you could know the total spending. The total amount of spending drives the economy. If you divide the amounts spent by the quantity sold, you get the price and that’s it, that’s a transaction. It’s the building block of the economic machine. All cycles and all forces in an economy are driven by transactions. So, if we can understand transactions, we can understand the whole economy. A market consists of all the buyers and all the sellers making all transactions for the same thing. For example, there is a (wheat) market, a farm market, a stock market and markets from millions of things. An economy consists of all of the transactions and all of its markets. If you add up the total spending and the total quantity sold in all of the markets, you have everything you need to know to understand the economy, it’s just that simple.
People, businesses, banks and governments all engage in transactions the way I just described. Exchanging money and credit for goods, services and financial assets. The biggest buyer and seller is the government which consists of two important parts. A central government that collects taxes and spends money and a central bank, which is different from other buyers and sellers because it controls the amount of money and credit in the economy, it does this by influencing interest rates and printing new money. For these reasons as we’ll see, the central bank is an important player in the flow of credit. I want you to pay attention to credit. Credit is the most important part of the economy and probably the least understood. It’s the most important part because it’s the biggest and most volatile part. Just like buyers and sellers go to the market to make transactions, so the lenders and borrowers. Lenders usually want to make their money into more money and borrowers usually want to buy something they can afford, like a house or a car, or they want to invest in something like starting a business.Credit can help both lenders and borrowers get what they want. Borrowers promise to pay the amount they borrow called principal, plus an additional amount called interest. When interest rates are high, there is less borrowing because it’s expensive. When interest rates are low, borrowing increases because it’s cheaper. When borrowers promise to repay and lenders believe them, credit is created. Any two people can agree to create credit out of thin air, that seems simple enough but credit is tricky because it has different names, as soon as credit is created, it immediately turns into debt. Debt is both an asset to the lender and a liability to the borrower. In the future, when the borrower repays the loan plus interest, the asset and the liability disappear and the transaction is settled. So why is credit so important? Because when a borrower receives credit, he is able to increase his spending, and remember, spending drives the economy. This is because one persons spending is another person’s income. Think about it, every dollar you spend, someone else earns and every dollar you earn, someone else’s spend. So when you spend more, someone else earns more. When someone’s income rises, it makes lenders more willing to lend them more money because now he’s more worthy of credit. A credit worthy borrower has two things, the ability to repay and collateral.
Ray Dalio: Income relation to debt
Having a lot of income in relation to his debt, gives him the ability to repay. In the event that he can’t repay, he has valuable assets to use as collateral that can be sold. This makes lenders feel comfortable lending him money. So increased income, allows increase borrowing, which allows increase spending and since one person’s spending is another person’s income, this leads to more increase borrowing and so on. This self free enforcing pattern leads to economic growth and it’s why we have cycles. In a transaction, you have to give something in order to get something, and how much you get depends on how much you produce. Over time we learn and that accumulated knowledge, raises our living standards, we call this productivity growth. Those who were inventive and hardworking, raise their productivity and their living standards faster than those who are complacent and lazy but that isn’t necessarily true over the short run. Productivity matters most in the long run, but credit matters most in the short run. This is because productivity growth doesn’t fluctuate much, so it’s not a big driver of economic swings, debt is, because it allows us to consume more than we produce when we acquire it and it forces us to consume less than we produce when we have to pay it back.
Debt swings occur in two big cycles. One takes about five to eight years and the other takes about 75 to a hundred years, while most people feel the swings, they typically don’t see them as cycles because they see them too up close, day by day, week by week. In this chapter, we’re going to step back and look at these three big forces and how they interact to make up our experiences. As mentioned, swings around the line are not due to how much innovation or hard work there is, they’re primarily due to ho much credit there is. Let’s for a second imagine an economy without credit, in this economy, the only way I can increase my spending is to increase my income which requires me to be more productive and do more work. Increase productivity is the only way for growth. Since my spending is another person’s income, the economy grows every time I or anyone else is more productive. If we follow the transactions and play this out, we see a progression like the productivity growth line but because we borrow, we have cycles. This isn’t due to any laws or regulations, it’s due to human nature and the way that credit works. Think of borrowing as simply a way of pulling spending forward. In order to buy something you can’t afford, you need to spend more than you make. To do this, you essentially need to borrow from your future self. In doing so, you create a time in the future that you need to spend less than you make in order to pay it back, it very quickly resembles a cycle. Basically, anytime you borrow you create a cycle. This is as true for an individual as it is for the economy. This is why understanding credit is so important because it sets into motion, a mechanical, predictable series of events that will happen in the future, this makes credit different from money. Money is what you settle transactions with. When you buy a beer from a bartender with cash, the transaction is settled immediately but when you buy a beer with credit, it’s like starting a bar tab. You’re saying you promise to pay in the future, together you and the bartender create an asset and a liability, you just created credit out of thin air. It’s not until you pay the bar tab later, that the asset and the liability disappear, the debt goes away and the transaction is settled.
The reality is, that most of what people call money is actually credit. The total amount of credit in the United States is about 50 trillion dollars and the total amount of money is only about three trillion dollars. Remember, in an economy without credit the only way to increase your spending is to produce more, but with an economy with credit, you can also increase your spending by borrowing. As a result, an economy with credit has more spending and allows incomes to rise faster than productivity over the short run but not over the long run. Now don’t get me wrong, credit isn’t necessarily something bad but just causes cycles. It’s bad when it finances over a consumption that can’t be paid back, however it’s good when it efficiently allocates resources and produces income, so you can pay back the debt. For example, if you borrow money to buy a big TV, it doesn’t generate income for you to pay back the debt. But if you buy money to, say buy a tractor, and that tractor let’s you harvest more crops and earn more money, then you could pay back your debt and improve your living standards. In an economy with credit, we can follow the transactions and see how credit creates growth.
Ray Dalio: The borrowing cycle
Let me give you an example, suppose you earn $100,000 a year and have no debt, you are credit worthy enough to borrow $10,000, say on a credit card. So, you can spend $110,000 even though you only earn $100,000, since your spending is another person’s income, someone is earning $110,000. The person earning $110,000 with no debt can borrow $11,000, so he can spend $121,000 even though he has only earned $110,000. His spending is another person’s income, and by following the transactions, we can begin to see how this process works in a self reinforcement pattern. But remember, borrowing creates cycles and if the cycle goes up, it eventually needs to come down, this leads us into the short term debt cycle. As economic activity increases, we see an expansion, the first phase of the short term debt cycle. Spending continues to increase and prices start to rise, this happens because the increase in spending is fueled by credit, which can be created instantly out of thin air. When the amount of spending and income grow faster than the production of goods, prices rise, when prices rise, we call this inflation.
The central bank doesn’t want too much inflation because it causes problems. Seeing prices rise, it raises interest rates. With higher interest rates, fewer people can afford to borrow money and the cost of existing debts rises. Think about this as the monthly payments on your credit card going up. Because people borrow less and a higher debt repayments, they have less money left over to spend, so spending slows. And since one person’s spending is another person’s income, incomes drop and so on and so forth. When people spend less, prices go down, we call this deflation. Economic activity decreases and we have a recession. If the recession becomes too severe and inflation is no longer a problem, the central bank will lower interest rates to cause everything to pick up again. With low interest rates, debt repayments are reduced, and borrowing and spending pick up and we see another expansion. As you can see, the economy works like a machine. In the short term debt cycles, spending is constrained only by the willingness of lenders and borrowers to provide and receive credit. When credit is easily available, there is an economic expansion. When credit isn’t easily available, there is a recession and note that this cycle is controlled primarily by the central bank.
Ray Dalio: Short term debt cycle
The short term debt cycle typically lasts five to eight years and happens over and over again for decades, but notice that the bottom and top of each cycle finish with more growth than the previous cycle and with more debt. Why? Because people push it. They have an inclination to borrow and spend more instead of paying back debt, its human nature. Because of this, over long periods of time, debts rise faster than incomes creating the long term debt cycle. Despite people becoming more indebted, lenders even more freely extend credit, why? Because everyone thinks things are going great. People are just focused on what’s been happening lately, and what’s been happening lately? Incomes have been rising, asset values are going up, the stock market roars, it’s a boom. It pays to buy goods, services and financial assets with borrowed money. When people do a lot of that, we call it a bubble. So, even though debts have been growing, incomes have been growing nearly as fast to offset them.
Let’s call the ratio of debt to income the debt burden. So, long as incomes continue to rise, the debt burden stays manageable, at the same time, asset value soar. People borrow huge amounts of money to buy assets as investments causing their prices to rise even higher, people feel wealthy. So even with the accumulation of lots of debt, rising incomes and asset values, help borrowers remain credit worthy for a long time, but this obviously cannot continue forever, and it doesn’t. Over decades, debt burdens slowly increase creating larger and larger debt repayments. At some point, debt repayments start growing faster than incomes, forcing people to cut back on their spending. And since one person’s spending is another person’s income, incomes begin to go down, which makes people less credit worthy, causing borrowing to go down. Debt repayments continue to rise, which makes spending drop even further and the cycle reverses itself. This is the long term debt peak, debt burden have simply become too big. For the United States, Europe and much of the rest of the world, this happened in 2008, it happened for the same reason it happened in Japan in 1989 and in the United States back in 1929, now the economy begins deleveraging. In a deleveraging, people cuts spending, incomes fall, credit disappears, asset prices drop, banks gets squeezed, the stock market crashes, social tensions rise and the whole thing starts to feed on itself the other way. As incomes fall and debt repayments rise, borrowers gets squeezed, no longer credit worthy, credit rise up and borrowers can no longer borrow enough money to make their debt repayments.
Ray Dalio: When do borrowers sell assets
Scrambling to fill this hole, borrowers are forced to sell assets. The rush to sell assets floods the market at the same time as spending falls. This is when the stock market collapses, the real estate market tanks and banks get into trouble. As asset prices drop, the value of the collateral borrowers can put up drops, this makes borrowers even less credit worthy, people feel poor, credit rapidly disappears. Less spending, less income, less wealth, less credit, less borrowing, and so on, it’s a vicious cycle. This appears similar to a recession but the difference here is that interest rates can’t be lowered to save the day. In a recession, lowering interest rates works to stimulate borrowing, however in deleveraging, lowering interest rates doesn’t work because interest rates are already low and soon hits zero percent, so the stimulation ends. Interest rates in the United States hits zero percent during deleveraging of the 1930’s and again, in 2008. The difference between a recession and a deleveraging is that in the deleveraging, borrowers debt burdens have simply gotten too big and can’t be relieved by lowering interest rates.
Lenders realize that debts have become too large to ever be fully paid back. Borrowers have lost their ability to repay and their collateral has lost value. They feel crippled by the debt, they don’t even want more, lenders stop lending, borrowers stop borrowing. Think of the economy as being not credit worthy, just like an individual, so what do you do about a deleveraging? The problem is that debt burdens are too high and they must come down. There are four ways this can happen, one, people, businesses and governments cut their spending. Two, debts are reduced through defaults and restructuring. Three, wealth is redistributed from the have’s to the have not’s and finally four, the central bank print new money. These four ways have happened in every deleveraging in modern history. Usually spending is cut first, as we just saw people, businesses and even governments tighten their belts and cut their spendings, so that they can pay down their debt. This is often referred to as austerity. When borrowers stop taking on new debts and start paying down old debts, you might expect a debt burden to decrease but the opposite happens because spending is cut and one man’s spending is another man’s income, it causes incomes to fall. They fall faster than debts are repayed and the debt burden actually gets worse. As we’ve seen, this cut in spending is deflationary and painful, businesses are forced to cut costs, which means less jobs and higher unemployment. This leads to the next step, debts must be reduced.
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