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3 Main Drivers of the Economy
Main Drivers of the Economy: 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 sidestep the global financial crisis, and 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 are above all else driven by human nature, and they create 3 main forces that drive the economy.
1: Productivity growth
2: The Short term debt cycle and
3: 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
Transactions
Let’s start with the simplest part of the economy: Transactions. 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 can know the total spending. The total amount of spending drives the economy. If you divide the amount spent by the quantity sold, you get the price. And that’s it. That’s a transaction. It is the building block of the economic machine.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 transactions for the same thing.
For example, there is a wheat market, a car market, a stock market and markets for millions of things. An economy consists of all of the transactions in 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
People, businesses, banks and governments all engage in transactions the way I just described: exchanging money and credit for goods, services and financial assets.
a Central Government
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 is the most important part because it is the biggest and most volatile part.Main Drivers of the Economy
Just like buyers and sellers go to the market to make transactions, so do lenders and borrowers. Lenders usually want to make their money into more money and borrowers usually want to buy something they can’t afford, like a house or 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 repay the amount they borrow, called the principal, plus an additional amount, called interest. When interest rates are high, there is less borrowing because it’s expensive.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 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 person’s spending is another person’s income.
Think about it, every dollar you spend, someone else earns. and every dollar you earn, someone else has spent. So when you spend more, someone else earns more. When someone’s income rises it makes lenders more willing to lend him money because now he’s more worthy of credit. A creditworthy borrower has two things: the ability to repay and collateral.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 increased borrowing which allows increased spending. And since one person’s spending is another person’s income, this leads to more increased borrowing and so on. This self-reinforcing pattern leads to economic growth and is 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 learned and that accumulated knowledge raises are living standards we call this productivity growth those who were invented and hard-working 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 pay it back. Debt swings occur in two big cycles. One takes about 5 to 8 years and the other takes about 75 to 100 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 are 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 how much credit there is. Let’s for a second imagine an economy without credit.Main Drivers of the Economy
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. Increased 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 regulation, it’s due to human nature and the way that credit works.Main Drivers of the Economy
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.Main Drivers of the Economy
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.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 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 and the total amount of money is only about $3 trillion. Remember, in an economy without credit: the only way to increase your spending is to produce more.
But in 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
Now, don’t get me wrong, credit isn’t necessarily something bad that just causes cycles. It’s bad when it finances over-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 borrow money to buy a tractor — and that tractor let’s you harvest more crops and earn more money — then, you can 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.
Let me give you an example: Suppose you earn $100,000 a year and have no debt. You are creditworthy enough to borrow $10,000 dollars – say on a credit card – so you can spend $110,000 dollars even though you only earn $100,000 dollars.Main Drivers of the Economy
Since your spending is another person’s income, someone is earning $110,000 dollars. The person earning $110,000 dollars with no debt can borrow $11,000 dollars, so he can spend $121,000 dollars even though he has only earned $110,000 dollars. His spending is another person’s income and by following the transactions we can begin to see how this process works in a self-reinforcing 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 incomes 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
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 have higher debt repayments, they have less money leftover 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
As you can see, the economy works like a machine. In the short term debt cycle, spending is constrained only by the willingness of lenders and borrowers to provide and receive credit. When credit is easily available, there’s an economic expansion.
When credit isn’t easily available, there’s a recession. And note that this cycle is controlled primarily by the central bank. The short term debt cycle typically lasts 5 – 8 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.Main Drivers of the Economy
Why? Because people push it — they have an inclination to borrow and spend more instead of paying back debt. It’s 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 everybody thinks things are going great! People are just focusing on what’s been happening lately. And what has 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 values soar. People borrow huge amounts of money to buy assets as investments causing their prices to rise even higher. People feel wealthy.Main Drivers of the Economy
So even with the accumulation of lots of debt, rising incomes and asset values help borrowers remain creditworthy for a long time. But this obviously can not 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 creditworthy causing borrowing to go down. you can read more about Main Drivers of the Economy here. you can watch more about Main Drivers of the Economy:
