13/5/2012: Village Magazine May 2012: Fiscal Rules & actual outruns

This is an unedited version of my article for Village magazine, May 2012.

However one interprets the core constraints of the Fiscal Compact (officially known as the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union), several facts concerning Ireland’s position with respect to them are indisputable.

Firstly, the new treaty will restrict the scope for the future exchequer deficits. This has prompted the ‘No’ side of the referendum campaigns to claim that the Compact will outlaw Keynesian economics. This claim is a significant over-exaggeration of reality. Combined structural and general deficit targets to be imposed by the Compact would have implied a maximum deficit of 2.9-3.0 percent in 2012 as opposed to the IMF-projected general government net borrowing of 8.5 percent of GDP. With the value of the Fiscal Compact-implied deficit running at less than one half of our current structural deficit, the restriction to be imposed by the new rules would have been severe. However, in the longer term, fiscal compact conditions allow for accumulation of fiscal savings to finance potential liabilities arising from future recessions. This is exactly compatible with the spirit of the Keynesian economic policies prescriptions, even though it is at odds with the extreme and fetishized worldview of the modern Left that sees no rational stops to debt accumulation on the path of stimulating economies out of recessions and broader crises.

Secondly, the Fiscal Compact will impose a severe long-term debt ceiling, but that condition is not expected to be satisfied by Ireland any time before 2030 or even later.

One interesting caveat relating to the 60 percent of GDP bound is the exact language employed by the Treaty when discussing the adjustment from excess debt levels. The ‘Yes’ camp made some inroads into convincing the voters to support the Compact on the grounds that debt paydowns required by the debt bond will involve annually reducing the overall debt by 1/20^th of the debt level in excess of 60% bound. However, the Treaty itself defines “the obligation for those Contracting Parties whose general government debt exceeds the 60 % reference value to reduce it at an average rate of one twentieth per year as a benchmark” (page T/SCG/en5). Thus, there is a significant gap between the Treaty interpretation and its reality.

Another debt-related aspect f the treaty that is little understood by the public and some analysts is the relationship between deficit break, structural deficits bound and the long-term debt levels that are consistent with the economy growth potential. Based on IMF projections, our structural deficit for 2014-2017 will average over 2.7% of GDP, which implies Fiscal Compact-consistent government deficits around 1.6-1.7% of GDP. Assuming long-term nominal growth of 4-4.5% per annum, our ‘sustainable’ level of debt should be around 38-40% of GDP. Tough, but we have been at public debt to GDP ratio of below 40 percent in every year from 2000 through 2007. It is also worth noting that we have satisfied the Fiscal Compact 60% debt bound every year between 1998 and 2008.

Similarly, the Troika programme for fiscal adjustment that Ireland is currently adhering to implies a de facto satisfaction of the Fiscal Compact deficit bound after 2015, and non-fulfilment of the structural deficit rule and the debt rule any time between now and 2017. In other words, no matter how we spin it, in the foreseeable future, we will remain a fiscally rouge state, client of the Troika and its successor – the ESM.

On the negative side, however, the aforementioned 1/20^th rule would be a significant additional drag on Ireland’s economic performance into the future, compared to the current Troika programme. If taken literally, an average rate of reduction of the Government debt from 2013 through 2017, required by the Compact would see our state debt falling to 87.6% of GDP in 2017, instead of the currently projected 109.2%. In other words, based on IMF projections, we will require some €42 billion more in debt repayments under the Fiscal Compact over the period of 2013-2012 than under the Troika deal.

On the net, therefore, the Compact is a mixture of a few positive, some historically feasible, but doubtful in terms of the future, benchmarks, and a rather strict short-term growth-negative set of targets that may, if satisfied over time, convert into a long-term positive outcomes. Confused? That’s the point of the entire undertaking: instead of providing clarity on a reform path, the Compact provides nothing more than a set of ‘if, then’ scenarios.

Let me run though some hard numbers – all based on IMF latest forecasts. Even under the rather optimistic scenario, Ireland’s real GDP is expected to grow by an average of 2.27% in the period from 2012 through 2017. This is the highest forecast average rate of growth for the entire euro area excluding the Accession states (the EA12 states). And yet, this growth will not be enough to lift us out of the Sovereign debt trap. Averaging just 10.3% of GDP, our total investment in the economy will be the lowest of all EA12 states, while our gross national savings are expected to average just 13.2% of GDP, the second lowest in the EA12.

In short, even absent the Fiscal Compact, our real economy will be bled dry by the debt overhang – a combination of the protracted deleveraging and debt servicing costs. It is the combination of the government debt and the unsustainable levels of households’ and corporate indebtedness that is cutting deep into our growth potential, not the austerity-driven reduction in public spending. In this sense, Fiscal Compact-induced acceleration of debt repayments will exacerbate the negative effect of fiscal deleveraging, while delaying private debt deleveraging.

However, on the opposite side of the argument, the alternative to the current austerity and the argument taken up by the No camp in the Fiscal Compact campaigns, is that Ireland needs a fiscal stimulus to kick-start growth, which in turn will magically help the economy to reduce unsustainable debt levels accumulated by the Government.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the suggestion that increasing the national debt beyond the current levels or that increasing dramatically tax burden on the general population – the two measures that would allow us to slow down the rate of reductions in public expenditure planned under the Troika deal – can support any appreciable economic expansion. The reason for this is simple. According to the data, smaller advanced economies with the average Government expenditure burden in the economy of ca 31-35% of GDP have expected growth rates averaging 3.5% per annum. Countries that have Government spending accounting for 40% and more of GDP have projected rates of growth closer to 1.5% per annum. Ireland neatly falls between the two groups of states both in terms of the Government burden and the economic growth rate. So, if we want to have growth above that projected under the current forecasts, we need (a) to accept the argument that growth is not a matter of the stimulus, but of longer-term reforms, and (b) to recognize that for a small open economy, higher levels of Government capture of economy is associated with lower growth potential.

Despite our already deep austerity and even after the Compact becomes operational, Irish Exchequer will continue running excess spending throughout the adjustment period. Between 2012 and 2017, Irish government net borrowing is expected to average 4.7% of GDP per annum, the second highest in the EA12 group of countries. Between this year and 2017, our Government will spend some €47.4 billion more than it will collect in taxes, even if the current austerity course continues. Of these, €39 billion of expenditure will go to finance structural deficits, implying a direct cyclical stimulus of more than €8.4 billion. The Compact will not change this. In contrast, calling on the Government to deploy some sort of fiscal spending stimulus today is equivalent to asking a heart attack patient to run a marathon in the Olympics. Both, within the Compact and without it, the EU as well as the IMF will not accept Irish Government finances going into a deeper deficit financing that would be required to ‘stimulate’ the economy.

The structural problem we face is that under current system of funding the economy and the Exchequer, our exports-driven model of economic development simply cannot sustain even the austerity-consistent levels of Government spending. IMF projects that between 2012 and 2017 cumulative current account surpluses in Ireland will be €40 billion. This forecast implies that 2017 current account surplus for Ireland will be €10 billion – a level that is 56 times larger than our current account surplus in 2011. If we are to take a more moderate assumption of current account surpluses running around 2012-2013 projected levels through 2017, our Government deficits are likely to be closer to €53 billion. Our entire exporting engine will not be able to cover the overspend of this state. In short, there is really no alternative to the austerity, folks, no matter how much we wish for this not to be the case.

Instead, what we do have is the choice of austerity policies we can pursue. We can either continue to tax away incomes of the middle and upper-middle classes, or we cut deeper into public expenditure.

The former will mean accelerating loss of productivity due to skills and talent outflows from the country, reduced entrepreneurship and starving the younger companies of investment, rising pressure on wages in skills-intensive occupations, while destroying future capacity of the middle-aged families to support themselves through retirement. Hardly trivial for an economy reliant on high value-added exports generation, higher tax rates on upper margin of the income tax will act to select for emigration those who have portable and internationally marketable skills and work experience. Given that much of entrepreneurship is formed on the foot of self-employment, high taxation of individual incomes at the upper margin will further force outflow of entrepreneurial talent. In addition, to continue retaining high quality human capital here, the labour markets will have to start paying significant wages premia to key employees to compensate them for our tax regime. All of these things are already happening in the IFSC, ICT and legal and analytics services sectors.

The latter is the choice to continue reducing our imports-intensive domestic consumption, especially Government consumption, and cutting the spending power of the public sector employees, while enacting deep structural reforms to increase value-for-money outputs in the state sectors. This, in effect, means increasing the growth gap between externally trading sectors and purely domestic sectors, but increasing it on demand and skills supply sides, while hoping that corrected workplace incentives will lift up the investment side of domestic enterprises.

Both choices are painful and short-term recessionary, but only the latter one leads to future growth. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of economics would know that the sole path out of structural recession involves currency devaluation. And anyone with an ounce of understanding of economics would recognize that the effects of such devaluation would be to reduce imports, increase differential in earnings in favour of returns to human capital and drive a wider gap between domestic and exporting sectors. The former choice of policies is only consistent with giving vitamins to a cancer-ridden patient – sooner or later, the placebo effect of the ‘stimulus’ will fade, and the cancer of debt overhang will take over once again, with even greater vengeance.

Looking back over the Fiscal Compact, the balance of the measures enshrined in the new treaty is most likely not the right – from the economic point of view – prescription for Ireland today. It is probably not even a correct policy choice for the future. But the reasons for which the treaty is the wrong ‘medicine’ for Ireland have nothing to do with the austerity it will impose onto Ireland. Rather, the really regressive feature of the Treaty is that it will make it virtually impossible for our economy to deal with the issue of private debt overhang and to properly restructure our taxation system to create opportunities for future growth.

CHARTS:

Update:  In the above, I reference the 1/20th rule and identify it as 'taken literally'. This can cause some confusion for the readers. To clarify the matter, here is the discussion of the rule as 'taken' literally' as opposed to 'taken as implied' under the Treaty. The article has been filed before the linked discussion took place. Additional material on this can be found on Professor Karl Whelan's blog here.

It is also worth pointing out that I have consistently (until April 26th blogpost) referenced the 1/20th rule as applying to debt portion in the excess over 60% bound. This referencing traces back to my comments on the issue to the Prime Time programme for which I commented on the issue back in late January 2012. However, subsequent reading of the document has shown very clearly that the primary language of the Treaty clearly references one rule in the preamble, while the conditional statement in the Treaty article itself references the other. On the balance, I agree with Karl Whelan, that the implied and valid wording should relate to 1/20th of the excess over 60% bound.

Really shoddy job done by those who wrote this Treaty.

13/5/2012: Sunday Times 06/05/2012: Irish labour costs competitiveness

This is my Sunday Times column from May 6, 2012 (last week), unedited version.

Latest research from ESRI shows that, contrary to the prevalent opinion in the media and official circles labour earnings in Ireland have been rising, not falling, during the early years of the crisis. This trend, on the surface, appears to contradict claims of wages moderation in the private sector, the very same claims that have been repeatedly used to argue that structural reforms and changes in Ireland during the crisis have seen a dramatic return of productivity growth.

The ESRI research, carried out by Adele Bergin, Elish Kelly and Seamus McGuinness used data from the National Employment Surveys on the changes in earnings and labour costs between 2006 and 2009. Per authors, “despite an unprecedented fall in output and rise in unemployment, both average earnings and average labour costs increased marginally over the period.”

Surprising for many outside the economics profession, these findings actually confirm what we know from Labour Economics 101.

Firstly, wages and earning are sticky when it comes to downward adjustment. In other words, while wages inflation can be rampant, wages deflation is a slow and economically painful process. This is precisely why currency devaluations are always preferred to cost deflation (or internal devaluations) as the means for correcting recessionary and structural imbalances.

Secondly, wages deflation  is even slower in the economies where collective bargaining is stronger. Ireland is a strong candidate for this with its Social Partnership and tenure-linked pay structures.

Thirdly, average earnings movements reflect not only changes in wages, but also changes in the composition of the national and sectoral employment. More specifically, as the ESRI study concludes, the core drivers of rising earnings during 2006-2009 period were “increases in both the share of and returns to graduate employment and a rising return to large firm employment”. Of course, both of these factors are correlated with the destruction of lower-skilled and less education-intensive construction and domestic services jobs.

Lastly, increases in part-time employment also drove up average earnings. In fact, the latest figures from the Eurostat show that a total of 7.4% of our currently employed workers are classified as part-time employees willing to work longer hours, but unable to secure such employment. This is the highest proportion in the entire EU27, and well above the 3.9% reading for Greece.

Overall, ESRI researchers concluded that “a good deal of the downward wage rigidity observed within Irish private sector employment since the onset of the recession has largely been driven by factors consistent with continued productivity growth.”

In my opinion, this is not a foregone conclusion. Irish labor productivity may have risen during the period of the crisis, but much of that increase is probably accounted for by the very same four forces that drove increases in earnings. Higher proportion of jobs in the economy within the MNCs-dominated exporting sectors, higher survival rate for jobs requiring higher skills, and the nature of the early stages of public sector employment cuts most likely simultaneously explain changes in both earnings and productivity.

The latter aspect is worth explaining. In the early part of the crisis, all public sector employment reductions took place out of cuts to part-time and contract positions, thus most heavily impacting lower earning younger workers. This would simultaneously increase the proportion of higher paid public employees and the average productivity in the sector. Post-2009, cost reductions have been running via early retirement schemes, but these are not reflected in the 2009 data.

In other words, on the surface, it might appear that Irish labour productivity has grown over time, but in reality, it is the reduction in less productive workers’ employment that has been driving these ‘improvements’. Incidentally, this story, not the ESRI conclusion, is consistent with the situation where domestic economic activity has contracted more than domestic employment.

In brief, our ‘productivity gains’ outlined by the ESRI might be a Pyrrhic victory in the Irish economy’s war for internal devaluation.

And the said victories continued since 2009 – the period not covered in the ESRI study.

Since January 2010, earnings have been falling in Ireland as jobs contraction became less pronounced and as public sector entered the stage of early retirement exits. Irish average hourly labour costs peaked at €28.0 per hour in 2009, 5.7% above the Eurozone average. In 2011, however, the average hourly labour cost in Ireland stood at €27.4 per hour, 0.7% below Eurozone average. If in 2009 Ireland had the eighth highest average hourly cost of labour in EU27, by 2011 we were 11^th most expensive labour market.

According to the Eurostat, across the Irish economy, labour costs rose 7.7% in 2007-2009 period followed by a drop of 1.6% in 2010-2011. However, over the period of the entire crisis, the labour costs are still up 5.2%. The only good news here is that our euro area competitors have all posted higher labour costs inflation. The same pattern is repeated in Industry, Services and across the Public Sectors. Only ICT and Financial Services broke this pattern, driven by fixed wages in the state-owned domestic banking, robust demand for IFSC and ICT specialists. In Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities, earnings rose 6.3% between 2007 and 2011, with wages moderation kicking in only from 2010 with a relatively strong decline of 4.8%. Still, this is just half the rate claimed in the official promotional brochures extolling the virtues of decreased labour costs in this area in Ireland.

With relative stabilization of unemployment and longer duration of joblessness, our average earnings are now set to decline over time as younger educated workers come into the workforce to replace retiring older workers. In the mean time, our productivity metrics will continue to improve in specific MNCs-dominated exporting-heavy sub-sectors. Competitiveness will improve, but not because real productivity will expand. Instead, continued re-orientation of economy toward MNCs will drive headline numbers as we become more and more a tax haven, rather than indigenous entrepreneurship engine.

These accounting-styled gains in productivity and cost competitiveness are likely to coincide with stagnation of Ireland’s GNP. In the period since 2007, Irish after-tax earnings have actually suffered significant deterioration compared to our counterparts in Europe. This deterioration is strongly pronounced for demographically most productive part of our workforce – those in the 25-45 years of age.

Eurostat data shows that in 2007-2011, after-tax earnings in Ireland have increased only for single persons with no children earning 50% of the average wage (a rise of 2.3%) and households with two parents and two children on 100% of the average wage income and sole earner (up 1.8%). The smallest declines in after-tax earnings occurred for the category of single person households with no children earning 100% of the average wage (down 0.8%), families with two earners and no children bringing in 200% of the average wage in combined earnings (down 0.8%), and families with similar income (down 0.6%). At the same time, the largest declines in after-tax earnings were recorded for single persons and families with no children and earnings of 167% of the average wage (declines in the range of 2.3% and 3.7%). Above-average after-tax earnings drops were recorded for all other types of households, including families with children on combined earnings in excess of 133% of the average wage. In other words – younger households and households with two earners have been the hardest hit by the recent trends.

With decline in net after-tax earnings, Irish economy is now facing a number of pressures. Costs of living, commuting and housing are likely to continue rising in months and years ahead, driven by the state desire to extract more in indirect taxation and the market structure that is largely captured by the less competitive state enterprises and defunct banks. Direct tax burden will also continue to rise, while pre-tax earnings will fall. These pressures will imply further reductions in consumer spending and domestic savings. The latter means, among other things, that we will see renewed pressure on banks (as part of our savings reflects repayment of household debts) and on domestic investment.

CHARTS: 

Box-out:

The latest Community Innovation Survey for Ireland for the period of 2008-2010 has been released by the CSO, detailing some very interesting trends in overall innovation activity in Irish economy. Headline figure shows that 28% of enterprises in the industrial and selected services sectors had product innovations in 2008-2010, with 33% of enterprises engaged in process innovations. However, only 18% of enterprises were engaged in both process and product innovations. Not surprisingly, foreign-owned enterprises led Irish-owned enterprises in terms of product innovation 38% to 25%, in process innovation 40% to 30%, and in dual product and process innovation 25 to 16%. Irish-owned enterprises derived slightly more of their total turnover from adopting innovations new to the firm, while foreign-owned enterprises led strongly (more than 2.5 times) in terms of new to market innovations. This suggests that Irish enterprises strength remained in adopting new innovations developed outside, while foreign-owned enterprises are strong leaders in creating new products, services and processes for the market. Not surprisingly, of €2.5 billion spent on innovation in 2010, just 49% went to finance in-house R&D. The most innovation-intensive sector of the MNCs-dominated economy was, not surprisingly Manufacture of petroleum, chemical, pharmaceutical, rubber and plastic products (72.5% of enterprises with technological innovation activities), while the most intensive traditional sector was Manufacture of beverages and tobacco products (91.7%). Did someone mention booze and pills sciences?

11/5/2012: Ignoring that which almost happened?

In recent years, I am finding myself migrating more firmly toward behavioralist views on finance and economics. Not that this view, in my mind, is contradictory to the classes of models and logic I am accustomed to. It is rather an additional enrichment of them, adding toward completeness.

With this in mind - here's a fascinating new study.

How Near-Miss events Amplify or Attenuate Risky Decision Making, written by Catherine Tinsley, Robin Dillon and Matthew Cronin and published in April 2012 issue of Management Science studied the way people change their risk attitudes "in the aftermath of many natural and man-made disasters".

More specifically, "people often wonder why those affected were underprepared, especially when the disaster was the result of known or regularly occurring hazards (e.g., hurricanes). We study one contributing factor: prior near-miss experiences. Near misses are events that have some nontrivial expectation of ending in disaster but, by chance, do not."

The study shows that "when near misses are interpreted as disasters that did not occur, people illegitimately underestimate the danger of subsequent hazardous situations and make riskier decisions (e.g., choosing not to engage in mitigation activities for the potential hazard). On the other hand, if near misses can be recognized and interpreted as disasters that almost happened, this will counter the basic “near-miss” effect and encourage more mitigation. We illustrate the robustness of this pattern across populations with varying levels of real expertise with hazards and different hazard contexts (household evacuation for a hurricane, Caribbean cruises during hurricane season, and deep-water oil drilling). We conclude with ideas to help people manage and communicate about risk."

An interesting potential corollary to the study is that analytical conclusions formed ex post near misses (or in the wake of significant increases in the risk) matter to the future responses. Not only that, the above suggests that the conjecture that 'glass half-full' type of analysis should be preferred to 'glass half-empty' position might lead to a conclusion that an event 'did not occur' rather than that it 'almost happened'.

Fooling yourself into safety by promoting 'optimism' in interpreting reality might be a costly venture...

9/5/2012: Carat, Stick, Gold, Council Estate. Boom!

This week, Irish Times have ventured to cover gold in an article titled “The carat and stick approach to investment".  

Please see my disclaimer at the bottom of this post.

We can debate the semantics of the Irish Times headline, but the ‘stick’ suggests some sort of compulsion for investors to purchase gold. 

In reality, few dealers in Ireland actually offer direct access to properly stored gold at an affordable margin. I have not seen any ‘Buy Gold, or Else...’ marketing campaigns, comparable in the force of conviction or compulsion to the tsunami of sell-side promotions unleashed onto Irish investors in property and banks shares in the recent past. Irish Times does not have a dedicated portal 'MyGold.ie' or a special 'Buy Gold' supplement where gold dealers can advertise their coins, nuggets, bars, etc. When gold is covered on the pages of the Irish business press, it is almost invariably painted in apocalyptic terms.

In-line with this tradition, the article opens on a horror story of a young couple living on a council estate, all their savings in gold, stored on-site. One has to wonder if Irish Times writings on, say, pet ownership always relay bone-chilling tales of killer pooches attacking unsuspecting elderly owners. One has to wonder, because a gold bar has about as high probability of ending up under the mattress in a council dwelling as an average retiree faces the threat of being mauled by a man-eating Chihuahua.

I actually agree with the article implied thesis that no investor should be advised to put all their savings into gold or any one specific asset or asset class. Such an atrocity of mis-selling should never befall a retail investor.

However, prudent risk management does imply, in my view, that investors should hold a relatively fixed percent of their invested wealth allocation in gold. Not for speculative reasons, but for risk hedging reasons to cover over the long run wealth volatility induced by other assets and the adverse effects of inflation.

Hardly a ‘stick’ approach.

There’s a point about Gold being a rollercoaster-styled investment vehicle compared to stocks and bonds, raised in the article. Indeed, gold prices show high volatility. Less so on the semi-variance side (downside) than on the overall variance side (downside and upside). And less on geometric weighting (that concern wealth preservation) than on arithmetic (the one that is more suited for short-term returns comparatives), but this is too nuanced for a newspaper article.

The Irish Times seems to be unaware of the ‘survivorship bias’. Over the time horizon glimpsed across by the article, many investments in stocks and bonds have gone in value from ‘hero’ to ‘zero’, as companies went bust, sovereigns and local issuers of bonds defaulted or restructured, currencies disappeared and hyper-inflation bouts have demolished the value of assets, banks deposits have been lost, and so on. Pesky gold ‘relic’ is still here.

There is a priceless moment in Simpsons where Montgomery Burns checks his ticker tape to discover his Confederated Slave Holdings has gone bust. On a more serious note, Nassim Taleb wrote books and academic peer-reviewed articles on the stuff. And Taleb also brings up the value of gold as a hedge against such risks.

Irish Times frequently quizzes serious economics luminaries from stockbrokers and real estate agents. And with clear disdain, the article references the opposite sort – the ‘pop economists’. Let's take a look at some of those using historical valuations / references for highlighting gold’s functions in the real world:

• Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell recognizes the value of gold as inflation hedge, stating that “Gold will be part of the structure of the international monetary system in the twenty-first century.” Yep, there’s even a website for this sort of pop populism: http://robertmundell.net/economic-policies/gold/, where he is quoted saying that “When the international monetary system was linked to gold, the latter … established an anchor for fixed exchange rates and stabilized inflation. When the gold standard broke down, these valuable functions were no longer performed and the world moved into a regime of permanent inflation.
• Another pop economist is Professor Roy W. Jastram, University of California, Berkeley. His The Golden Constant shows how gold maintained its purchasing power over very long periods of time.
• Professor Steve Hanke of the populism-swept Johns Hopkins University is another one who argues in favour of gold standard currencies precisely because he believes that gold is a long-term inflation hedge.
• John Nash, an unscrupulous peddler of gold with a Nobel Prize medal around his neck (made of gold, note), has called for a gold standard, presumably to sell more gold bars to London Council flats inhabitants.

Yes, there is much of a debate going on the virtues and pitfalls of gold as an investment vehicle or a monetary base. Yes, both sides of the argument have serious research behind them. But that is not what the Irish Times article portrays. Instead of presenting a debate, or actual evidence on the dangers of over-investing in an asset class, the article draws an extremely selective depiction of reality framed in derogatory terms.

Meanwhile, the article description of various gold investment vehicles is incomplete, omitting, for example, the fact that some gold ETFs are synthetic, rather than physical gold-backed, and that some products available in the market allow to purchase gold on price-averaging basis, reducing exposure to price volatility.

A ‘rollercoaster’ investment vehicle that is gold is the only asset in existence that actually provides a risk hedge and a safe haven over long-term structural adjustments and short-term fluctuations across the majority of other asset classes, including stocks. If the Irish Times want proof of this, they can read research on the topic available on ssrn or repec or econlit. Professor Brian Lucey, researcher and lecturer Fergal O’Connor and myself are co-authoring on a database of studies on gold as an asset class, its properties, behavioural implications and empirical analysis, which is available at http://preciousmetalsresearch.wordpress.com/.

There is a priceless bit in the article on determination of an asset bubble. The author logic goes as follows: “In 2007, more than 80 per cent of the demand for gold was for jewellery and industrial use, while less than 20 per cent of demand was from investors. By 2009, this had changed dramatically. Investment demand had risen to 43 per cent of the total. The rise in demand from investors raises the question as to whether speculation is a key driver of the gold rally.”

This does a number of things:

•  It answers a question with a question.
•  It also suggests that investor demand is always speculative.
• It confuses speculation, investment and bubble formation. 90%-plus of equities (other than retained shares) and 100% of bonds are held by investors, and yet Irish Times does not call equities or bonds bubbles every day of the week.
•  It ignores the other side of the equation, what happens with the non-investment demand for gold.

Let me provide some more numbers:

Between 2002 and 2007, demand for physical use gold (jewellery, dentistry and technological) has declined on average at the rate of 1.5% pa, since 2008 through 2011 the rate of decline was -4.42%. At the same time, demand for gold bars and coins rose at 4.83% pa on average in 2002-2007 and at 41.93% pa on average in 2008-2011. Demand for ETFs-held gold, meanwhile, more directly instrumenting ‘speculative’ (or shorter-term) investments has 79.9% pa on average in pre-2007 period and at 5.14% pa on average in 2008-2011 (or crisis period).

Drama all around, unless you look slightly deeper into demand drivers.

Physical gold demand has been abating over the 2000s primarily due to diversification in jewellery demand away from gold (rise of prominence of platinum during the years of 2002-2007 and silver in the latter years, driven by tastes and price effects, plus recession-related income effects and tax and local currency considerations). A quick read through demand drivers analysis from the World Gold Council would help here.

In addition, it is wrong to classify sales of bars and coins as ‘speculative’. Behavioural studies suggest that sales of bars & coins are driven strongly by savers, rather than traditional speculative investors. These ‘savers’ are more often than not wealthier individuals (especially in the case of bars buyers) who tend to hold both instruments over longer horizon. Coins holdings are even less sensitive to price changes than demand for bars. For example, coins demand for US Mint Eagles has spiked around 1997-2000 with no reaction in the coins price. I doubt even the Irish Times would have spotted a bubble there. (chart).

These are not to be ignored, as roughly 20% of the investment gold demand is accounted for by coins and medals.

Lastly, one has to distinguish between speculative (capital gains-driven) investments and short-term risk management objectives (such as flight to safety or flight to quality considerations). These factors are hard to control for, but smoothing demand for investment gold in 2008 and 2011 – the two core years of the crisis, using historical trend suggests that the ‘hedging’ demand for gold to cover the spikes in markets volatility around the equities and sovereign crises peaks accounts for about 9-10% of total gold demand at the end of 2011.

A quick note below the post does some back-of-the-envelope illustration on price-demand links.

In brief, the issue of gold valuation is complex and very much open to the debate. I, personally, have no opinion on whether gold price today is a bubble or not. It might be, it might be at the beginning of the bubble formation or at the tail end of it. I have no idea. Nor do I have any idea where the gold price will be in 3 months time.

What I can say is what I keep repeating any time someone asks me about gold: gold is a wealth management tool suited for risk hedging and wealth preservation, not for chasing speculative gains.

Disclaimer:
1) I am a non-executive member of the GoldCore Investment Committee.
2) I am a Director and Head of Research with St.Columbanus AG, where we do not invest in any individual commodity.
3) I am long gold in fixed amount over at least the last 5 years with my allocation being extremely modest. I hold no assets linked to gold mining or processing companies.
4) I have done and am continuing doing academic work on gold as an asset class, but also on other asset classes. You can see my research on my ssrn page the link to which is provided on this blog's front page.

5) I receive no compensation for research appearing on this blog. Everything your read here is my own personal opinion and not the opinion of any of my employers, current, past or future.

6) None of my research - including that on gold - should be considered as an investment advice or an advise to buy or invest in any asset or asset class.

Note: using annual data we can look at the relationship between demand for gold by various types and prices. Chart below illustrates.

Three things are relatively clear: 

1. Between 2002 and 2011 there is a rather strong positive relationship between gold price and demand for bars and coins;
2. Between 2002 and 2011 there is relatively strong negative relationship between gold price and demand for physical use gold;
3. Between 2002 and 2011 there is relatively weak relationship between gold price and demand for gold by investment funds

Now, here's a question, if bubble in gold is to be traced to 'speculative' demand spikes in response to the price movement, why on earth would there be less of a relationship between price and the most speculative type of gold investment - the ETFs and more of a relationship between less speculative physical demand for gold and price of gold?