Thursday, April 2, 2020

This is not a financial crisis

It is a hospital crisis.

These conditions apply:
1) ll parties know they are stuck with a black swan, says Nash
2) All parties can calculate their own losses, says Fibonacci..
3) Thus, says Coase, each party can easily negotiate a two month adjustment on a party by party basis, if transaction costs are low; much lower than losses.

A financial crisis is a different animal. A financial crisis occurs because bunch of huge financial bets gone bad at the top. We do not have that.

The government 'stimulus' can only do one thing in this case, give all parties legal means to negotiate their way around the mess for two months.  Absent some legal remedy, the other possibility is small claims court is jammed for a year. Liquidity is not bottle necked by bankers, liquidity is bottle necked by the virus and hospitals deal with that.

Call the central hospital doctor for liquidity. Liquidity comes in the form of home triage, betting the covid trials, and minimizing congestion and manufacturing masks and ventilators. Set up a bit of PSST to deal with the virus curve. Government can help (or get out of the way) here.

Kling mentioned a better financial idea  from someone:
  an overdraft protection for two months at very low fee.  If someone does not have an account, then a plastic card will do just fine.

Most regular banks can verify that they have a regular counterparty-party transaction delayed, make the loan and pass the loan up to some designated service bank to provide the over-draft protection, courtesy of Fed losses. Works fine, if you use seigniorage dollars,  use the fed to cover any Nash equilibriated short term Black Swan, and write it off with direct inflation. There is no role for government in a nonexistent financial crisis, except fraud. And that is what is happening, the bailout queue has become a chaotic mess. In sandbox, that queue is the scofflaw queue, we want it stable, always.

In other words, lower transaction costs and Coase applies. In fact, one way to put this is that we suffer a two month jump in transaction costs, not a liquidity shortage. The transaction costs are bank fees needed to grease party and counter party through the two months.  Central banks are in bailout mode, they are raising banker fees, raising transaction costs to the retail sector.

No comments: