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More than just printing money: This article is enough for modern monetary theory.

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Overview</b></p><p>Contrary to popular belief, the currently popular modern monetary theory is not \"modern,\" or rather, not new at all. In fact,<b>Modern monetary theory originated from the post-Keynesian school and believes that it is the best in-depth interpretation and follower of Keynesian theory.</b>However, the main ideas of modern monetary theory remained unpopular and even marginalized for nearly 60 years after Keynes, and only in recent years have they finally found a place in international political and economic discussions. Of course, this shift is also closely related to the predicament currently encountered by mainstream macroeconomics. After all, macroeconomics has not won the Nobel Prize for many years and needs to be combined with practice to find new directions. Regardless, criticism of modern monetary theory persists, as the famous commentary states:<b>\"The correct parts of MMT aren't new and the new parts aren't correct.\" What they are right about modern monetary theory is not new, and what is new is not correct.</b></p><p>If we could summarize the most important viewpoint of modern monetary theory in one sentence, it would be very simple:</p><p><i><b>For countries with their own currencies, their governments do not need to worry about their own debts and expenditures, because they can always pay the interest on all their debts by printing money directly by the government. Therefore, the only constraint on how much money the government prints is inflation. As long as the needs and purposes created by printing money can be met by existing labor and equipment, keeping inflation within a controllable range, then the government of this country can support all its purposes and expenditures by printing money directly.</b></i></p><p>Upon seeing this, I think most people's first reaction would be dismissive. However, events such as the Latin American crisis, Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and the European debt crisis immediately come to mind as counterexamples. Calm down. The core purpose of modern monetary theory is not to try to prove that governments can print money and spend indefinitely without any consequences.<b>In the next paragraph, we will outline the important viewpoints and logical frameworks of modern monetary theory for your discussion.</b></p><p><b>II. Theoretical perspectives</b></p><p><b>II.1 Tax-Driven Money</b></p><p>Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s and the decoupling of the US dollar from gold, the exploration of the core value of fiat currencies has never reached a clear conclusion.<b>Modern monetary theory has established a complete theoretical system based on its unique interpretation of the core attributes and value of money.</b></p><p><b>Why would anyone be willing to accept the government's legal tender?</b>People usually just passively accept this and rarely think about it. When the government is building roads and aircraft carriers, when the central bank is buying Treasury Bond and quantitative easing, are they actually paying out currency from a certain account? The answer is clearly no.</p><p><b>So why can the government create money out of thin air like this?</b></p><p>Hyman Minsky once said, \"Everyone can create money, but the question is whether it will be accepted.\" You can create a \"currency\" denominated in yuan by writing \"I owe 10 yuan\" on a piece of paper, but the question is whether you can get others to accept it—for example, whether someone is willing to accept the IOU and sell you a pancake.</p><p><b>MMT believes that the core reason the government is able to do this is that we all have to pay taxes to the government.</b>Note that in most cases, governments only accept their own currency when taxing, so in order to avoid punishment for tax evasion (such as imprisonment), citizens of a country must find a way to obtain the government's currency to pay taxes. The point here is,<b>Even if it cannot easily force people to use their own legal tender in private transactions, governments can still force people to use legal tender to pay taxes when they levy taxes.</b>This fact will naturally create a huge demand for the country's fiat currency among the population. In conclusion,<b>In order for the issued currency to be accepted, the government does not actually need to store precious metals or foreign currency, nor does it need unnecessary laws to guarantee it. It simply needs to force people to pay taxes in fiat currency.</b></p><p><b>Therefore, we can conclude that \"tax-driven currency\" means that if rulers have the right to levy taxes, they can create demand for fiat currency. Because it is easy for the government to \"ensure that people use legal tender when paying the government\".</b></p><p>Building on the above discussion, it becomes clear that, from the perspective of the currency issuer, the government established the monetary system to allow resources to flow to the public sector, and this was facilitated by the demand for money (paper printed by the government) created by taxes.<b>It can be said that governments establish taxes not only to increase fiscal revenue, but also to encourage people to sell labor, resources, and products in order to obtain the paper (money) they print. Most people believe that government taxes are only for generating revenue to cover fiscal expenditures. However, from an MMT perspective, the purpose of taxation is very subtly different.</b></p><p>It is well known that the government will not spend all the \"necessary funds,\" but the public's willingness to sell more labor, resources, or products in order to obtain money may be exhausted (for a similar view, please refer to another article on the official account, which is not as terrible as the financial crisis). In order to be able to continuously transfer resources, the government can try to raise the price paid (which, if it fails, will trigger inflation) or increase taxes. But in any case, we must remember,<b>In MMT's understanding, the main purpose of increasing taxes is not to generate revenue, but to stimulate demand for money.</b></p><p>In this way,<b>MMT self-consistently provides a theoretical framework for government money, taxation, and inflation.</b>We can simply put it this way: the government creates demand for the currency it prints through taxation. The ability to collect taxes determines the government's ability to transfer resources, which in turn determines the creditworthiness of the government's currency. The level of this creditworthiness determines the final demand for the currency, thus directly affecting the nominal inflation of the currency. If the public accepts this currency, inflation will be controlled; otherwise, it will enter a negative feedback spiral of rising inflation—a further reduction in the credit of the currency and the government.</p><p><b>This framework actually exists in reality.</b>The credibility of the US dollar is built on the United States' leading global comprehensive strength since World War II, on the price settlement mechanism for almost all commodities, on the existence of aircraft carriers, Tesla, Google, and Coca-Cola, and even on the ability to require all residents of the world, regardless of nationality, to file a w8ben form to file taxes with the US government when investing in US dollar assets. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government has printed an unprecedented amount of money in the past two years, causing some people who are not familiar with the system to panic that the credibility of the dollar will be lost and the dollar will become waste paper.<b>Little did they know that the US dollar was inherently worthless paper, and it was the facts mentioned above that gave worthless paper credibility. If these capabilities of the United States do not change, then the fundamental credibility of the dollar will not be destroyed.</b>Those who hastily concluded that the dollar would lose its credibility simply because the United States printed too much money are probably already busy adjusting their expectations after the recent cycle.</p><p>However, while the Federal Reserve's money printing will not shake the credibility of the US dollar, nor will it cause hyperinflation and render the dollar worthless, China's rise could shake these relative advantages of the United States. From the highest perspective, the global drama of the next 5-10 years may unfold in this dimension. Let's consider discussing this topic in other articles.</p><p>Incidentally, contrary to what many people perceive, it is easy to see that the monetary perspective under the MMT framework described above actually denies the monetary function of the currently hottest digital assets and Bitcoin (again, government and taxes drive money). Due to space limitations, we won't go into detail here. (It reminds me of the pretentiousness at the edge of Fermat's Last Theorem; we always know too much, but have the time to write down too little.)</p><p><b>II.2 The Basic Framework of Modern Monetary Theory</b></p><p>Let's explain the analytical logic of MMT in detail.</p><p>First of all, we all know that in society, one party's financial assets will always correspond to the other party's financial liabilities. thereupon<b>We can divide the world very simply into three sectors: the domestic private sector, the domestic public sector, and the \"other national sector\" made up of foreign governments, companies, and households.</b></p><p>Therefore, if we sum up the assets and liabilities of each department, the following identity will always hold:</p><p><i><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></i></p><p>This is actually a<b>accounting identity</b>It does not depend on any theoretical model. To give a perhaps enlightening example, assume that the foreign sector spends less than revenue and has a budget surplus of $50 billion, while the domestic government spends less than revenue and has a fiscal budget surplus of $20 billion. Then the above identity tells us that during the same period, the domestic private sector, which we care about most, must have a budget deficit of $50 + 20 = $70 billion.</p><p>This could create a \"dilemma\": if one of these three sectors has a surplus, then at least one other sector has a deficit.<b>In other words, no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to achieve a universal harmony in the same period of time where all the sectors we consider ideal are surplus.</b></p><p>So when we arrived here, an idea seemed to be vaguely emerging in our minds—<b>Since someone will always need to borrow money, then let's just let the government borrow it. Then everyone in our country's private sector will have the surplus and assets we most look forward to!</b></p><p>If things were that simple, we would only need accounting, not MMT.</p><p>At the beginning of the article, we said that MMTs are followers of Keynesian theory because they believe in the following conclusions that continue from Keynesianism.</p><p><b>1. From an overall economic perspective, the causal relationship in the private sector is that overall spending determines overall income (Keynesian paradox of thrift).</b></p><p>This conclusion is not very intuitive, because for each individual, income always determines expenses: for example, if you win 5 million yuan in the lottery, why don't you have to add an extra portion of meat to eat Lanzhou beef noodles tonight?</p><p>However, once we add up all individuals, we find that while individual households can clearly decide to reduce spending in order to save more money to cope with the anticipated crisis, if all households try to reduce spending, total consumption and national income will decline. At this point, companies will be forced to reduce output, lay off employees, and lower wages, which will lead to a decrease in household income. This will force family members to further reduce spending, and a cruel negative feedback loop will begin.</p><p><b>This is Keynes's \"thrift paradox,\" his most important lesson and explanation of the Great Depression—trying to save money by reducing total consumption will not only not increase savings, but will actually reduce income.</b></p><p><b>2. Social deficit spending determines the accumulation of financial wealth (savings).</b></p><p>Keynesians argued that only when a sector of the economy decides to spend more than it earns through deficits will its lender accumulate net financial wealth in the form of deficit spender liabilities.<b>That is, this decision to spend in deficit is what creates net financial wealth. Unless one party is willing to spend in deficit, others cannot do so, no matter how much they want to accumulate financial wealth.</b></p><p><b>3. The government's inability to accurately control the deficit (tax revenue) creates an \"Automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>We won't go into too much detail about the government's inability to accurately grasp deficits (we can go deeper into the Chicago School and the Laffer curve if we want), but will only discuss some more intuitive inferences.</p><p>It needs to be acknowledged that the government's capacity has limits.<b>Even the government cannot precisely control fiscal and tax revenues, which seem entirely determined by itself.</b>The government can indeed decide to spend more and raise tax rates, but when government spending and tax rates change, other social variables, such as income, sales, wealth, etc., that is, the overall tax base of society, will change accordingly. These variables are not under the control of the government.<b>Therefore, whether the fiscal budget has a deficit, a balance, or a surplus is not something the government can decide independently.</b></p><p>Combining the above identities and discussions, let's assume that we temporarily disregard the surplus of the foreign sector. When a recession hits, the domestic private sector will begin to cut spending and increase savings. This will increase the domestic private sector balance, which will directly lead to a decrease in the domestic government sector balance in the identity. As a result, the government's budget deficit will spontaneously increase. This part of the growth is not controlled by the government, but it has played a role in smoothing out the fluctuations in the balances of various sectors of society when faced with cycles. Past data also confirms this relationship—<b>This means that tax revenue grows rapidly during periods of economic prosperity and falls rapidly during periods of economic depression, making the government's fiscal budget a powerful automatic stabilizer. This is the \"automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>Therefore,<b>The best domestic policy is to pursue full employment and price stability, rather than a sustainable government deficit path or a controllable overall debt ceiling. Because the latter is mostly the result of automatic stabilizers and is not something the government can decide on its own.</b></p><p><b>4. Simple expansion of identities</b></p><p>For ease of expression, we rewrite the important identities above, introducing S (private sector savings), C (private sector consumption expenditure), I (private sector investment), T (government taxes), G (government expenditure), IM (domestic imports), and EX (domestic exports), thus obtaining...</p><p><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></p><p><b>S – C – I</b> <b>+</b> <b>T – G</b> <b>+</b> <b>IM – EX</b> <b>=0</b></p><p>At this point, we can basically draw the most important ideological conclusion of modern monetary theory:</p><p><b>If you have the tax revenue and the ability to create your own currency described in II.1, then when you face an economic downturn or negative external shocks (such as the subprime mortgage crisis or the COVID-19 crisis), you can better weather the crisis through regulation by your own government departments.</b></p><p>When a crisis comes, II.2.1 tells us that because overall private sector spending determines overall income, the most important thing is to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline, especially to avoid falling into a negative feedback loop where spending/income declines simultaneously. II.2.2 tells us that to avoid panic caused by a sharp drop in social wealth, we need a certain sector of the economy to proactively provide deficit spending. So combine them,<b>The only person likely to take on this deficit spending task is the government sector, which needs to transfer wealth to the private sector to repair the decline in overall spending.</b></p><p>The identity in II.2.4 further confirms that, in order to achieve this, domestic private sector surpluses need to be returned to the desired equilibrium level.<b>Then we should minimize our domestic government sector surpluses and our foreign sector surpluses (which, from a domestic perspective, are current account deficits).</b></p><p>But because<b>Exogenous uncertainty of exports</b>(For example, if a large economy like the United States tries to reduce imports, it may affect the income of other countries, thereby affecting its own exports to other countries around the world.)<b>The best course of action would be to reduce the surplus of our own government departments.</b>It is worth emphasizing here that under the mainstream macroeconomic view, countries should strive to pursue current account surpluses, while modern monetary theorists have conducted more in-depth theoretical discussions on foreign sector surpluses and ultimately arrived at contradictory conclusions. In other words, when the government has free control over the surplus of its own government departments, the external current account surplus is not important, which is actually the development path that the United States has actually taken since the 21st century.</p><p><b>Finally, II.1 and II.2.3 tell us that when governments expand deficits to increase private sector spending, we do not need to consider whether the deficit is too large, because sovereign countries can issue an unlimited number of currencies without affecting credit. There is no need to worry about how the deficit will shrink in the future, because when the crisis is over and the economy returns to a growth cycle, the automatic stabilizer will naturally reduce the country's deficit and return it to an equilibrium level.</b></p><p><b>When we compare the above conclusions and approaches with the way the United States and Western countries have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can immediately understand why mainstream Western economies have now opened a new paradigm in modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>Taking the United States as an example, during this COVID-19 crisis, the United States immediately ignored all the constraints of government deficit paths and debt ceilings, turned the money printing press to its limit, and launched multiple trillion-dollar government spending plans. Not only did it not set an upper limit on the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, but it also allowed the Federal Reserve to directly intervene to purchase high-yield corporate bonds and guarantee private sector deficit investment. The United States has abandoned the previous path of QE transmission through banks, directly cutting interest rates to the lower limit, while also implementing an unprecedented \"helicopter money-dropping\" approach, directly transferring funds to people's personal accounts.<b>We don't care about a flood of gold, but we must act with lightning speed to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline.</b></p><p>It can be said that, given the current situation, the paradigm of modern monetary theory has achieved very good practical results. Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US economy has not only achieved a smooth transition, but is also likely to resume growth very quickly (in 2021). It's no wonder that Yellen, the newly appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary, publicly stated that the government debt ceiling is not that important, and that ensuring that the government's annual fiscal revenue can cover Treasury Bond interest is a sustainable path.<b>It is expected that within the next 5-10 years, the paradigm of modern monetary theory will establish a firm position in the practice of Western central banks.</b></p><p><b>II.3 The Boundaries of Government Debt – The Path to Fiscal Sustainability</b></p><p><b>Inflation caused by excessive money printing and a sustainable path to government debt should be the two areas where \"traditional\" theories most concentrate their questioning of modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>First and foremost, it must be clarified that we do not believe that modern monetary theory has a very scientific and perfect explanation and response to these questions, but its answers to these questions do have some merit.</p><p>Let's start by quoting a very intuitive macroeconomic conclusion:</p><p><i><b>When an economy's interest rate r is higher than its growth rate g, its debt ratio will continue to grow. (This can be intuitively understood as the fact that the new money (g) the economy earns each year cannot repay the interest (r), so the debt ratio can only keep rising.) Therefore, if r > g is always the case, then the government's room for further increasing debt is relatively limited.</b></i></p><p>For more academic readers, you can take a closer look at James Galbraith's classic model regarding this conclusion:</p><p>△ d = -s + d * [ (r -g) / (1 + g) ]</p><p>Where d is the initial debt-to-GDP ratio, s is the ratio of fiscal surplus to GDP after deducting net interest expenses, r is the real interest rate, and g is the real GDP growth rate.</p><p><b>We can clearly see that when r < g, the debt-to-GDP ratio is also negative, meaning that debt is gradually decreasing in a healthy manner.</b></p><p>So how can this be achieved? One situation that the government can naturally control is to keep the interest rate r as low as possible, so that g is more likely to be greater than r. Therefore, in the nearly ten years following the financial crisis, we have seen a significant decline in benchmark interest rates in all countries around the world. After the COVID-19 crisis interrupted the US rate hike process, we have once again seen benchmark interest rates in all developed countries drop to a level where there is no way to lower them, which is basically zero. Meanwhile, countries such as the European Union, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland have further explored negative interest rates. This has to be said to be a result of the modern monetary theory paradigm gaining practice.</p><p>So what if r has already dropped to such a low level, and the actual growth rate g still cannot be greater than r? Friends, this is the most cutting-edge academic question that modern monetary theory is still exploring. As far as we know, the current MMT theory cannot provide a definitive answer.</p><p>It must be noted here that, despite the constraints of liquidity traps,<b>However, r is controlled by the government, and there is no absolute lower limit.</b>For example, when it feels that even 0 is not low enough, the Federal Reserve can easily announce that it will lower the benchmark interest rate to -10% overnight. When we consider situations where all immediate consumption is stimulated in this absolutely frenzied manner, we return to the fundamental difference between modern monetary theory and traditional macroeconomics: the source of government credit—government organization and tax-driven money—which is the greatest cornerstone of modern monetary theory. It can be said that at this point, what we need to face is no longer essentially an economic problem, but a sociological problem. Specifically, countries like the United States and the US dollar, which have political, technological, and military foundations, may not face any difficulties. However, in some small countries, they will face the risk of losing both regime rule and the validity of fiat currency due to the loss of trust in their currencies and governments by the public or other economies around the world. However, within the theoretical framework of MMT, there are solutions to the problem of government fiscal sustainability, but the consequences and constraints it brings may require a sociological perspective to further improve and support. (A theoretical framework similar to behavioral economics requires the introduction of psychological theories to support it.)</p><p><b>II.4 The Boundaries of Government Debt – Inflation</b></p><p>Finally, let's explore the biggest intuitive question everyone has about modern monetary theory:<b>The problem of inflation.</b></p><p>As Friedman famously said, \"Inflation is a monetary phenomenon whenever and wherever.\" So how does modern monetary theory, while proposing to lift the government spending and debt ceiling and print money on a large scale when necessary, ensure that countries do not enter a vicious spiral of self-reinforcing inflation?</p><p><b>In fact, modern monetary theory is very descriptive in answering questions related to inflation; in fact, it can be said that modern monetary theory itself is merely a description of how sovereign money operates.</b>As mentioned above, it has a good theoretical and ideological framework to explain how sovereign states and their currencies operate, but it lacks sufficient scientific and quantitative means to draw insurmountable boundaries for this way of operation.</p><p>The discussion of inflation in modern monetary theory can be roughly divided into:<b>Two directions.</b></p><p><b>The first approach avoids directly answering the inflation question, instead rejecting the current mainstream macroeconomic framework, arguing that the relationship between inflation and employment revealed by the Phelps curve can be completely avoided through government intervention.</b></p><p>The founder of this direction was the renowned economist A. Lerner and his proposals.<b>\"Functional Fiscal Theory\"</b>。 In his theory, Lerner emphasized that the government should focus on its economic function when formulating a fiscal budget, rather than adding restrictions on fiscal balance. This is a perfect match for the rejection of fiscal sustainability paths in modern monetary theory discussed in the previous section. Therefore, subsequent researchers of modern monetary theory have proposed, based on Lerner...<b>\"Employment Security/Ultimate Employer\" Model</b>。</p><p>Given that this is a brand new framework, we will not go into detail here but instead describe the main logic of this pattern intuitively.</p><p>From the above,<b>According to the framework of modern monetary theory, we know that governments can issue their own currencies indefinitely, so why not make the government the ultimate employer and promise to provide job opportunities for all qualified and willing citizens of the country?</b>In this way, the unemployment rate will be directly reduced to 0, and a moderately prosperous society will be directly achieved.</p><p>In this theoretical framework,<b>All unemployed people in the country are employed by the government as their ultimate employer and are provided with a minimum wage equivalent to job security.</b>The private sector can then select and hire workers from this government-employed population by offering wages higher than the job guarantee.</p><p>Imagine if the Chinese government implemented this framework now, all unemployed people in the country could get a job from their local government, with a salary of 2,000 yuan per month paid by the government. Specific jobs can include local agricultural harvesting tailored to local conditions, unified allocation through government-sponsored infrastructure projects, or simply becoming a food delivery rider, with the government distributing this employment security salary through platform companies like Meituan.</p><p>Looks like,<b>Within this theoretical framework, inflation does indeed become less relevant.</b>During economic booms, private sector employers can hire workers from employment programs by offering them higher wages than the employment guarantee wage (2,000 yuan/month). For example, Meituan can offer 3,000 yuan/month to hire efficient riders into its company. During economic recessions, the private sector can lay off workers and return them to the government's final employer program to receive at least 2,000 yuan per month in employment-guaranteed wages. In this way, job-guaranteed wages will reduce inflationary pressures during economic booms and deflationary pressures during recessions.</p><p><b>Thus, the modern monetary theory framework was finally able to find an \"anchor\" for a sovereign currency by establishing government-guaranteed wages. Under this complete MMT framework, the marginal value of a sovereign currency is equal to the amount of labor it can employ. The government has achieved full employment through planning and can perfectly control inflation by adjusting the marginal value of labor by adjusting the employment guarantee wage.</b></p><p><b>However, the problems with this ideal state theory are also obvious—even setting aside the problems that MMT faces when government spending is too high, such as exchange rates and inflation, which were discussed in II.3, one important fact we still need to note is that this framework ignores the subjective initiative of all individuals and the incentives for employment.</b></p><p>For example, if a government-provided job requires 12 hours of hard labor, then if an individual believes that earning only 2,000 yuan for those 12 hours of labor is too little, they will automatically withdraw from the employment security program. This will directly cause the real unemployment rate to rise again.</p><p>For example, Meituan's employment security riders don't need to do much; they can earn 2,000 yuan per month by delivering three orders a day. In a competitive market environment, Meituan riders who would normally need to deliver 30 orders a day to earn 5,000 yuan per month might choose to give up and join the employment security program, thus distorting the overall efficiency and demand of society.</p><p>Furthermore, this employment security/ultimate employer program is actually a typical \"big government\" framework. To be effectively enforced, the government needs to possess highly monopolistic rights and resources. In his new book, Capital and Ideology, Piketty explores this situation in depth, pointing out the apocalyptic ideological dilemma faced by the framework of big government after the collapse of the Soviet Union through the changing views of the left and right in modern society.<b>Therefore, this employment security/ultimate employer model will likely exist only in the paper utopia of some modern monetary theorists for a long time to come.</b></p><p>Since it is impossible to completely break free from the framework of mainstream monetarist theory in practice in the short term, modern monetary theorists have also followed the mainstream framework.<b>The second direction</b>The inflation issue was explained as much as possible.</p><p>In our view,<b>The academic significance of this part of the explanation is somewhat lackluster, because the theoretical framework of MMT has never proposed a clear method for calculating the upper limit of sovereign government spending.</b>Therefore, the arguments of MMT supporters in this direction mainly...<b>Focus on practical experience</b>。 Noting that for the past 40 years or so, major global economies have generally been in an environment of extreme lack of inflation, and even after large-scale money printing, there have been no signs of inflation rising, they believe that, considering unknown factors such as oversupply in modern society and changes in production factors,<b>It is very difficult for a sovereign government to increase its deficit and print money to trigger inflation.</b>Historically, hyperinflation has occurred because, firstly, the number of cases has been relatively small; secondly, it has mostly occurred in developing countries with overly fragile economies, such as Zimbabwe and Brazil, and in most cases, it has occurred when the country has been subjected to unusual domestic and international geopolitical or political shocks. Therefore...<b>It is not universal.</b></p><p>Although this explanation is vague and somewhat dishonest, it would be unfair to criticize modern monetary theorists based on it.<b>After all, mainstream monetarists' explanations of the effects of quantitative easing and how it transmits to the real economy are not outstanding.</b>For example, why did the massive amounts of money issued by central banks around the world in response to the 2008 financial crisis never lead to an increase in inflation in these countries? In response to this question, mainstream academia has never found a convincing theoretical framework to provide an answer. Regarding this point, the most perplexed people are probably Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda. The Bank of Japan's money printing level has long exceeded the fiscal deficit ceiling considered by traditional monetarism, and has even reached the point of nationalizing the entire Japanese business community, yet people still cannot find any signs of rising inflation in Japan.</p><p>From this perspective,<b>This COVID-19 crisis may be a litmus test for modern monetary theory.</b>Because, at least as of the second quarter, in the unprecedented largest wave of global monetary easing, we finally saw some signs of inflation rising. However, currently, even with these small signs, the mainstream expectations of the Federal Reserve and the market remain...<b>Inflation is \"temporary\".</b>After the pandemic ends and monetary policy marginally normalizes, it will fade away on its own.</p><p><b>If the story really progresses this way, then in the spirit of scientific practicality, the constraints and criticisms of inflation on modern monetary theory may truly be ineffective. After all, the government is currently providing a generous employment guarantee salary by dropping money by helicopter without requiring people to find employment. This level of monetary easing has actually far exceeded the imagination of modern monetary theorists on paper. If we don't see inflation even under these circumstances, then traditional monetarists can indeed burn Friedman's quantity theory of money and embrace a new era of macroeconomics.</b></p><p><b>III. Summary</b></p><p>This article tries to sort out the modern monetary theory paradigm, which is currently the most popular macro-monetary theory in global discussion and practice, and explains the theoretical foundation and important framework of modern monetary theory in a popular way, as well as discusses its limitations.</p><p><b>The conclusions of modern monetary theory shocked those who had only been exposed to traditional monetary views. It challenges the orthodox view of government finances and budget deficits, the trade-off between employment and inflation established by the Phillips curve, and the pursuit of current account surpluses.</b></p><p><b>However, it is essentially an orthodox continuation of Keynesianism, whose understanding of how a sovereign state's treasury and central bank should coordinate their operations and their respective responsibilities significantly transcends the limitations of classical monetarism.</b></p>","source":"lsy1624936809849","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>More than just printing money: This article is enough for modern monetary theory.</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nMore than just printing money: This article is enough for modern monetary theory.\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">动物精神Animal...</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-06-29 11:23</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p>As global monetary policy sinks deeper into the zero-interest-rate trap, coupled with the massive global easing brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, relevant...<b>The discussion of modern monetary theory (MMT) has become increasingly popular recently, and it has caused great controversy during its dissemination.</b>In this context,<b>We will try to explore the basic framework, ideological purpose, and practicality of modern monetary theory in a relatively simple and easy-to-understand way, while maintaining logical rigor.</b></p><p><b>I. Overview</b></p><p>Contrary to popular belief, the currently popular modern monetary theory is not \"modern,\" or rather, not new at all. In fact,<b>Modern monetary theory originated from the post-Keynesian school and believes that it is the best in-depth interpretation and follower of Keynesian theory.</b>However, the main ideas of modern monetary theory remained unpopular and even marginalized for nearly 60 years after Keynes, and only in recent years have they finally found a place in international political and economic discussions. Of course, this shift is also closely related to the predicament currently encountered by mainstream macroeconomics. After all, macroeconomics has not won the Nobel Prize for many years and needs to be combined with practice to find new directions. Regardless, criticism of modern monetary theory persists, as the famous commentary states:<b>\"The correct parts of MMT aren't new and the new parts aren't correct.\" What they are right about modern monetary theory is not new, and what is new is not correct.</b></p><p>If we could summarize the most important viewpoint of modern monetary theory in one sentence, it would be very simple:</p><p><i><b>For countries with their own currencies, their governments do not need to worry about their own debts and expenditures, because they can always pay the interest on all their debts by printing money directly by the government. Therefore, the only constraint on how much money the government prints is inflation. As long as the needs and purposes created by printing money can be met by existing labor and equipment, keeping inflation within a controllable range, then the government of this country can support all its purposes and expenditures by printing money directly.</b></i></p><p>Upon seeing this, I think most people's first reaction would be dismissive. However, events such as the Latin American crisis, Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and the European debt crisis immediately come to mind as counterexamples. Calm down. The core purpose of modern monetary theory is not to try to prove that governments can print money and spend indefinitely without any consequences.<b>In the next paragraph, we will outline the important viewpoints and logical frameworks of modern monetary theory for your discussion.</b></p><p><b>II. Theoretical perspectives</b></p><p><b>II.1 Tax-Driven Money</b></p><p>Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s and the decoupling of the US dollar from gold, the exploration of the core value of fiat currencies has never reached a clear conclusion.<b>Modern monetary theory has established a complete theoretical system based on its unique interpretation of the core attributes and value of money.</b></p><p><b>Why would anyone be willing to accept the government's legal tender?</b>People usually just passively accept this and rarely think about it. When the government is building roads and aircraft carriers, when the central bank is buying Treasury Bond and quantitative easing, are they actually paying out currency from a certain account? The answer is clearly no.</p><p><b>So why can the government create money out of thin air like this?</b></p><p>Hyman Minsky once said, \"Everyone can create money, but the question is whether it will be accepted.\" You can create a \"currency\" denominated in yuan by writing \"I owe 10 yuan\" on a piece of paper, but the question is whether you can get others to accept it—for example, whether someone is willing to accept the IOU and sell you a pancake.</p><p><b>MMT believes that the core reason the government is able to do this is that we all have to pay taxes to the government.</b>Note that in most cases, governments only accept their own currency when taxing, so in order to avoid punishment for tax evasion (such as imprisonment), citizens of a country must find a way to obtain the government's currency to pay taxes. The point here is,<b>Even if it cannot easily force people to use their own legal tender in private transactions, governments can still force people to use legal tender to pay taxes when they levy taxes.</b>This fact will naturally create a huge demand for the country's fiat currency among the population. In conclusion,<b>In order for the issued currency to be accepted, the government does not actually need to store precious metals or foreign currency, nor does it need unnecessary laws to guarantee it. It simply needs to force people to pay taxes in fiat currency.</b></p><p><b>Therefore, we can conclude that \"tax-driven currency\" means that if rulers have the right to levy taxes, they can create demand for fiat currency. Because it is easy for the government to \"ensure that people use legal tender when paying the government\".</b></p><p>Building on the above discussion, it becomes clear that, from the perspective of the currency issuer, the government established the monetary system to allow resources to flow to the public sector, and this was facilitated by the demand for money (paper printed by the government) created by taxes.<b>It can be said that governments establish taxes not only to increase fiscal revenue, but also to encourage people to sell labor, resources, and products in order to obtain the paper (money) they print. Most people believe that government taxes are only for generating revenue to cover fiscal expenditures. However, from an MMT perspective, the purpose of taxation is very subtly different.</b></p><p>It is well known that the government will not spend all the \"necessary funds,\" but the public's willingness to sell more labor, resources, or products in order to obtain money may be exhausted (for a similar view, please refer to another article on the official account, which is not as terrible as the financial crisis). In order to be able to continuously transfer resources, the government can try to raise the price paid (which, if it fails, will trigger inflation) or increase taxes. But in any case, we must remember,<b>In MMT's understanding, the main purpose of increasing taxes is not to generate revenue, but to stimulate demand for money.</b></p><p>In this way,<b>MMT self-consistently provides a theoretical framework for government money, taxation, and inflation.</b>We can simply put it this way: the government creates demand for the currency it prints through taxation. The ability to collect taxes determines the government's ability to transfer resources, which in turn determines the creditworthiness of the government's currency. The level of this creditworthiness determines the final demand for the currency, thus directly affecting the nominal inflation of the currency. If the public accepts this currency, inflation will be controlled; otherwise, it will enter a negative feedback spiral of rising inflation—a further reduction in the credit of the currency and the government.</p><p><b>This framework actually exists in reality.</b>The credibility of the US dollar is built on the United States' leading global comprehensive strength since World War II, on the price settlement mechanism for almost all commodities, on the existence of aircraft carriers, Tesla, Google, and Coca-Cola, and even on the ability to require all residents of the world, regardless of nationality, to file a w8ben form to file taxes with the US government when investing in US dollar assets. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government has printed an unprecedented amount of money in the past two years, causing some people who are not familiar with the system to panic that the credibility of the dollar will be lost and the dollar will become waste paper.<b>Little did they know that the US dollar was inherently worthless paper, and it was the facts mentioned above that gave worthless paper credibility. If these capabilities of the United States do not change, then the fundamental credibility of the dollar will not be destroyed.</b>Those who hastily concluded that the dollar would lose its credibility simply because the United States printed too much money are probably already busy adjusting their expectations after the recent cycle.</p><p>However, while the Federal Reserve's money printing will not shake the credibility of the US dollar, nor will it cause hyperinflation and render the dollar worthless, China's rise could shake these relative advantages of the United States. From the highest perspective, the global drama of the next 5-10 years may unfold in this dimension. Let's consider discussing this topic in other articles.</p><p>Incidentally, contrary to what many people perceive, it is easy to see that the monetary perspective under the MMT framework described above actually denies the monetary function of the currently hottest digital assets and Bitcoin (again, government and taxes drive money). Due to space limitations, we won't go into detail here. (It reminds me of the pretentiousness at the edge of Fermat's Last Theorem; we always know too much, but have the time to write down too little.)</p><p><b>II.2 The Basic Framework of Modern Monetary Theory</b></p><p>Let's explain the analytical logic of MMT in detail.</p><p>First of all, we all know that in society, one party's financial assets will always correspond to the other party's financial liabilities. thereupon<b>We can divide the world very simply into three sectors: the domestic private sector, the domestic public sector, and the \"other national sector\" made up of foreign governments, companies, and households.</b></p><p>Therefore, if we sum up the assets and liabilities of each department, the following identity will always hold:</p><p><i><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></i></p><p>This is actually a<b>accounting identity</b>It does not depend on any theoretical model. To give a perhaps enlightening example, assume that the foreign sector spends less than revenue and has a budget surplus of $50 billion, while the domestic government spends less than revenue and has a fiscal budget surplus of $20 billion. Then the above identity tells us that during the same period, the domestic private sector, which we care about most, must have a budget deficit of $50 + 20 = $70 billion.</p><p>This could create a \"dilemma\": if one of these three sectors has a surplus, then at least one other sector has a deficit.<b>In other words, no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to achieve a universal harmony in the same period of time where all the sectors we consider ideal are surplus.</b></p><p>So when we arrived here, an idea seemed to be vaguely emerging in our minds—<b>Since someone will always need to borrow money, then let's just let the government borrow it. Then everyone in our country's private sector will have the surplus and assets we most look forward to!</b></p><p>If things were that simple, we would only need accounting, not MMT.</p><p>At the beginning of the article, we said that MMTs are followers of Keynesian theory because they believe in the following conclusions that continue from Keynesianism.</p><p><b>1. From an overall economic perspective, the causal relationship in the private sector is that overall spending determines overall income (Keynesian paradox of thrift).</b></p><p>This conclusion is not very intuitive, because for each individual, income always determines expenses: for example, if you win 5 million yuan in the lottery, why don't you have to add an extra portion of meat to eat Lanzhou beef noodles tonight?</p><p>However, once we add up all individuals, we find that while individual households can clearly decide to reduce spending in order to save more money to cope with the anticipated crisis, if all households try to reduce spending, total consumption and national income will decline. At this point, companies will be forced to reduce output, lay off employees, and lower wages, which will lead to a decrease in household income. This will force family members to further reduce spending, and a cruel negative feedback loop will begin.</p><p><b>This is Keynes's \"thrift paradox,\" his most important lesson and explanation of the Great Depression—trying to save money by reducing total consumption will not only not increase savings, but will actually reduce income.</b></p><p><b>2. Social deficit spending determines the accumulation of financial wealth (savings).</b></p><p>Keynesians argued that only when a sector of the economy decides to spend more than it earns through deficits will its lender accumulate net financial wealth in the form of deficit spender liabilities.<b>That is, this decision to spend in deficit is what creates net financial wealth. Unless one party is willing to spend in deficit, others cannot do so, no matter how much they want to accumulate financial wealth.</b></p><p><b>3. The government's inability to accurately control the deficit (tax revenue) creates an \"Automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>We won't go into too much detail about the government's inability to accurately grasp deficits (we can go deeper into the Chicago School and the Laffer curve if we want), but will only discuss some more intuitive inferences.</p><p>It needs to be acknowledged that the government's capacity has limits.<b>Even the government cannot precisely control fiscal and tax revenues, which seem entirely determined by itself.</b>The government can indeed decide to spend more and raise tax rates, but when government spending and tax rates change, other social variables, such as income, sales, wealth, etc., that is, the overall tax base of society, will change accordingly. These variables are not under the control of the government.<b>Therefore, whether the fiscal budget has a deficit, a balance, or a surplus is not something the government can decide independently.</b></p><p>Combining the above identities and discussions, let's assume that we temporarily disregard the surplus of the foreign sector. When a recession hits, the domestic private sector will begin to cut spending and increase savings. This will increase the domestic private sector balance, which will directly lead to a decrease in the domestic government sector balance in the identity. As a result, the government's budget deficit will spontaneously increase. This part of the growth is not controlled by the government, but it has played a role in smoothing out the fluctuations in the balances of various sectors of society when faced with cycles. Past data also confirms this relationship—<b>This means that tax revenue grows rapidly during periods of economic prosperity and falls rapidly during periods of economic depression, making the government's fiscal budget a powerful automatic stabilizer. This is the \"automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>Therefore,<b>The best domestic policy is to pursue full employment and price stability, rather than a sustainable government deficit path or a controllable overall debt ceiling. Because the latter is mostly the result of automatic stabilizers and is not something the government can decide on its own.</b></p><p><b>4. Simple expansion of identities</b></p><p>For ease of expression, we rewrite the important identities above, introducing S (private sector savings), C (private sector consumption expenditure), I (private sector investment), T (government taxes), G (government expenditure), IM (domestic imports), and EX (domestic exports), thus obtaining...</p><p><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></p><p><b>S – C – I</b> <b>+</b> <b>T – G</b> <b>+</b> <b>IM – EX</b> <b>=0</b></p><p>At this point, we can basically draw the most important ideological conclusion of modern monetary theory:</p><p><b>If you have the tax revenue and the ability to create your own currency described in II.1, then when you face an economic downturn or negative external shocks (such as the subprime mortgage crisis or the COVID-19 crisis), you can better weather the crisis through regulation by your own government departments.</b></p><p>When a crisis comes, II.2.1 tells us that because overall private sector spending determines overall income, the most important thing is to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline, especially to avoid falling into a negative feedback loop where spending/income declines simultaneously. II.2.2 tells us that to avoid panic caused by a sharp drop in social wealth, we need a certain sector of the economy to proactively provide deficit spending. So combine them,<b>The only person likely to take on this deficit spending task is the government sector, which needs to transfer wealth to the private sector to repair the decline in overall spending.</b></p><p>The identity in II.2.4 further confirms that, in order to achieve this, domestic private sector surpluses need to be returned to the desired equilibrium level.<b>Then we should minimize our domestic government sector surpluses and our foreign sector surpluses (which, from a domestic perspective, are current account deficits).</b></p><p>But because<b>Exogenous uncertainty of exports</b>(For example, if a large economy like the United States tries to reduce imports, it may affect the income of other countries, thereby affecting its own exports to other countries around the world.)<b>The best course of action would be to reduce the surplus of our own government departments.</b>It is worth emphasizing here that under the mainstream macroeconomic view, countries should strive to pursue current account surpluses, while modern monetary theorists have conducted more in-depth theoretical discussions on foreign sector surpluses and ultimately arrived at contradictory conclusions. In other words, when the government has free control over the surplus of its own government departments, the external current account surplus is not important, which is actually the development path that the United States has actually taken since the 21st century.</p><p><b>Finally, II.1 and II.2.3 tell us that when governments expand deficits to increase private sector spending, we do not need to consider whether the deficit is too large, because sovereign countries can issue an unlimited number of currencies without affecting credit. There is no need to worry about how the deficit will shrink in the future, because when the crisis is over and the economy returns to a growth cycle, the automatic stabilizer will naturally reduce the country's deficit and return it to an equilibrium level.</b></p><p><b>When we compare the above conclusions and approaches with the way the United States and Western countries have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can immediately understand why mainstream Western economies have now opened a new paradigm in modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>Taking the United States as an example, during this COVID-19 crisis, the United States immediately ignored all the constraints of government deficit paths and debt ceilings, turned the money printing press to its limit, and launched multiple trillion-dollar government spending plans. Not only did it not set an upper limit on the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, but it also allowed the Federal Reserve to directly intervene to purchase high-yield corporate bonds and guarantee private sector deficit investment. The United States has abandoned the previous path of QE transmission through banks, directly cutting interest rates to the lower limit, while also implementing an unprecedented \"helicopter money-dropping\" approach, directly transferring funds to people's personal accounts.<b>We don't care about a flood of gold, but we must act with lightning speed to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline.</b></p><p>It can be said that, given the current situation, the paradigm of modern monetary theory has achieved very good practical results. Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US economy has not only achieved a smooth transition, but is also likely to resume growth very quickly (in 2021). It's no wonder that Yellen, the newly appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary, publicly stated that the government debt ceiling is not that important, and that ensuring that the government's annual fiscal revenue can cover Treasury Bond interest is a sustainable path.<b>It is expected that within the next 5-10 years, the paradigm of modern monetary theory will establish a firm position in the practice of Western central banks.</b></p><p><b>II.3 The Boundaries of Government Debt – The Path to Fiscal Sustainability</b></p><p><b>Inflation caused by excessive money printing and a sustainable path to government debt should be the two areas where \"traditional\" theories most concentrate their questioning of modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>First and foremost, it must be clarified that we do not believe that modern monetary theory has a very scientific and perfect explanation and response to these questions, but its answers to these questions do have some merit.</p><p>Let's start by quoting a very intuitive macroeconomic conclusion:</p><p><i><b>When an economy's interest rate r is higher than its growth rate g, its debt ratio will continue to grow. (This can be intuitively understood as the fact that the new money (g) the economy earns each year cannot repay the interest (r), so the debt ratio can only keep rising.) Therefore, if r > g is always the case, then the government's room for further increasing debt is relatively limited.</b></i></p><p>For more academic readers, you can take a closer look at James Galbraith's classic model regarding this conclusion:</p><p>△ d = -s + d * [ (r -g) / (1 + g) ]</p><p>Where d is the initial debt-to-GDP ratio, s is the ratio of fiscal surplus to GDP after deducting net interest expenses, r is the real interest rate, and g is the real GDP growth rate.</p><p><b>We can clearly see that when r < g, the debt-to-GDP ratio is also negative, meaning that debt is gradually decreasing in a healthy manner.</b></p><p>So how can this be achieved? One situation that the government can naturally control is to keep the interest rate r as low as possible, so that g is more likely to be greater than r. Therefore, in the nearly ten years following the financial crisis, we have seen a significant decline in benchmark interest rates in all countries around the world. After the COVID-19 crisis interrupted the US rate hike process, we have once again seen benchmark interest rates in all developed countries drop to a level where there is no way to lower them, which is basically zero. Meanwhile, countries such as the European Union, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland have further explored negative interest rates. This has to be said to be a result of the modern monetary theory paradigm gaining practice.</p><p>So what if r has already dropped to such a low level, and the actual growth rate g still cannot be greater than r? Friends, this is the most cutting-edge academic question that modern monetary theory is still exploring. As far as we know, the current MMT theory cannot provide a definitive answer.</p><p>It must be noted here that, despite the constraints of liquidity traps,<b>However, r is controlled by the government, and there is no absolute lower limit.</b>For example, when it feels that even 0 is not low enough, the Federal Reserve can easily announce that it will lower the benchmark interest rate to -10% overnight. When we consider situations where all immediate consumption is stimulated in this absolutely frenzied manner, we return to the fundamental difference between modern monetary theory and traditional macroeconomics: the source of government credit—government organization and tax-driven money—which is the greatest cornerstone of modern monetary theory. It can be said that at this point, what we need to face is no longer essentially an economic problem, but a sociological problem. Specifically, countries like the United States and the US dollar, which have political, technological, and military foundations, may not face any difficulties. However, in some small countries, they will face the risk of losing both regime rule and the validity of fiat currency due to the loss of trust in their currencies and governments by the public or other economies around the world. However, within the theoretical framework of MMT, there are solutions to the problem of government fiscal sustainability, but the consequences and constraints it brings may require a sociological perspective to further improve and support. (A theoretical framework similar to behavioral economics requires the introduction of psychological theories to support it.)</p><p><b>II.4 The Boundaries of Government Debt – Inflation</b></p><p>Finally, let's explore the biggest intuitive question everyone has about modern monetary theory:<b>The problem of inflation.</b></p><p>As Friedman famously said, \"Inflation is a monetary phenomenon whenever and wherever.\" So how does modern monetary theory, while proposing to lift the government spending and debt ceiling and print money on a large scale when necessary, ensure that countries do not enter a vicious spiral of self-reinforcing inflation?</p><p><b>In fact, modern monetary theory is very descriptive in answering questions related to inflation; in fact, it can be said that modern monetary theory itself is merely a description of how sovereign money operates.</b>As mentioned above, it has a good theoretical and ideological framework to explain how sovereign states and their currencies operate, but it lacks sufficient scientific and quantitative means to draw insurmountable boundaries for this way of operation.</p><p>The discussion of inflation in modern monetary theory can be roughly divided into:<b>Two directions.</b></p><p><b>The first approach avoids directly answering the inflation question, instead rejecting the current mainstream macroeconomic framework, arguing that the relationship between inflation and employment revealed by the Phelps curve can be completely avoided through government intervention.</b></p><p>The founder of this direction was the renowned economist A. Lerner and his proposals.<b>\"Functional Fiscal Theory\"</b>。 In his theory, Lerner emphasized that the government should focus on its economic function when formulating a fiscal budget, rather than adding restrictions on fiscal balance. This is a perfect match for the rejection of fiscal sustainability paths in modern monetary theory discussed in the previous section. Therefore, subsequent researchers of modern monetary theory have proposed, based on Lerner...<b>\"Employment Security/Ultimate Employer\" Model</b>。</p><p>Given that this is a brand new framework, we will not go into detail here but instead describe the main logic of this pattern intuitively.</p><p>From the above,<b>According to the framework of modern monetary theory, we know that governments can issue their own currencies indefinitely, so why not make the government the ultimate employer and promise to provide job opportunities for all qualified and willing citizens of the country?</b>In this way, the unemployment rate will be directly reduced to 0, and a moderately prosperous society will be directly achieved.</p><p>In this theoretical framework,<b>All unemployed people in the country are employed by the government as their ultimate employer and are provided with a minimum wage equivalent to job security.</b>The private sector can then select and hire workers from this government-employed population by offering wages higher than the job guarantee.</p><p>Imagine if the Chinese government implemented this framework now, all unemployed people in the country could get a job from their local government, with a salary of 2,000 yuan per month paid by the government. Specific jobs can include local agricultural harvesting tailored to local conditions, unified allocation through government-sponsored infrastructure projects, or simply becoming a food delivery rider, with the government distributing this employment security salary through platform companies like Meituan.</p><p>Looks like,<b>Within this theoretical framework, inflation does indeed become less relevant.</b>During economic booms, private sector employers can hire workers from employment programs by offering them higher wages than the employment guarantee wage (2,000 yuan/month). For example, Meituan can offer 3,000 yuan/month to hire efficient riders into its company. During economic recessions, the private sector can lay off workers and return them to the government's final employer program to receive at least 2,000 yuan per month in employment-guaranteed wages. In this way, job-guaranteed wages will reduce inflationary pressures during economic booms and deflationary pressures during recessions.</p><p><b>Thus, the modern monetary theory framework was finally able to find an \"anchor\" for a sovereign currency by establishing government-guaranteed wages. Under this complete MMT framework, the marginal value of a sovereign currency is equal to the amount of labor it can employ. The government has achieved full employment through planning and can perfectly control inflation by adjusting the marginal value of labor by adjusting the employment guarantee wage.</b></p><p><b>However, the problems with this ideal state theory are also obvious—even setting aside the problems that MMT faces when government spending is too high, such as exchange rates and inflation, which were discussed in II.3, one important fact we still need to note is that this framework ignores the subjective initiative of all individuals and the incentives for employment.</b></p><p>For example, if a government-provided job requires 12 hours of hard labor, then if an individual believes that earning only 2,000 yuan for those 12 hours of labor is too little, they will automatically withdraw from the employment security program. This will directly cause the real unemployment rate to rise again.</p><p>For example, Meituan's employment security riders don't need to do much; they can earn 2,000 yuan per month by delivering three orders a day. In a competitive market environment, Meituan riders who would normally need to deliver 30 orders a day to earn 5,000 yuan per month might choose to give up and join the employment security program, thus distorting the overall efficiency and demand of society.</p><p>Furthermore, this employment security/ultimate employer program is actually a typical \"big government\" framework. To be effectively enforced, the government needs to possess highly monopolistic rights and resources. In his new book, Capital and Ideology, Piketty explores this situation in depth, pointing out the apocalyptic ideological dilemma faced by the framework of big government after the collapse of the Soviet Union through the changing views of the left and right in modern society.<b>Therefore, this employment security/ultimate employer model will likely exist only in the paper utopia of some modern monetary theorists for a long time to come.</b></p><p>Since it is impossible to completely break free from the framework of mainstream monetarist theory in practice in the short term, modern monetary theorists have also followed the mainstream framework.<b>The second direction</b>The inflation issue was explained as much as possible.</p><p>In our view,<b>The academic significance of this part of the explanation is somewhat lackluster, because the theoretical framework of MMT has never proposed a clear method for calculating the upper limit of sovereign government spending.</b>Therefore, the arguments of MMT supporters in this direction mainly...<b>Focus on practical experience</b>。 Noting that for the past 40 years or so, major global economies have generally been in an environment of extreme lack of inflation, and even after large-scale money printing, there have been no signs of inflation rising, they believe that, considering unknown factors such as oversupply in modern society and changes in production factors,<b>It is very difficult for a sovereign government to increase its deficit and print money to trigger inflation.</b>Historically, hyperinflation has occurred because, firstly, the number of cases has been relatively small; secondly, it has mostly occurred in developing countries with overly fragile economies, such as Zimbabwe and Brazil, and in most cases, it has occurred when the country has been subjected to unusual domestic and international geopolitical or political shocks. Therefore...<b>It is not universal.</b></p><p>Although this explanation is vague and somewhat dishonest, it would be unfair to criticize modern monetary theorists based on it.<b>After all, mainstream monetarists' explanations of the effects of quantitative easing and how it transmits to the real economy are not outstanding.</b>For example, why did the massive amounts of money issued by central banks around the world in response to the 2008 financial crisis never lead to an increase in inflation in these countries? In response to this question, mainstream academia has never found a convincing theoretical framework to provide an answer. Regarding this point, the most perplexed people are probably Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda. The Bank of Japan's money printing level has long exceeded the fiscal deficit ceiling considered by traditional monetarism, and has even reached the point of nationalizing the entire Japanese business community, yet people still cannot find any signs of rising inflation in Japan.</p><p>From this perspective,<b>This COVID-19 crisis may be a litmus test for modern monetary theory.</b>Because, at least as of the second quarter, in the unprecedented largest wave of global monetary easing, we finally saw some signs of inflation rising. However, currently, even with these small signs, the mainstream expectations of the Federal Reserve and the market remain...<b>Inflation is \"temporary\".</b>After the pandemic ends and monetary policy marginally normalizes, it will fade away on its own.</p><p><b>If the story really progresses this way, then in the spirit of scientific practicality, the constraints and criticisms of inflation on modern monetary theory may truly be ineffective. After all, the government is currently providing a generous employment guarantee salary by dropping money by helicopter without requiring people to find employment. This level of monetary easing has actually far exceeded the imagination of modern monetary theorists on paper. If we don't see inflation even under these circumstances, then traditional monetarists can indeed burn Friedman's quantity theory of money and embrace a new era of macroeconomics.</b></p><p><b>III. Summary</b></p><p>This article tries to sort out the modern monetary theory paradigm, which is currently the most popular macro-monetary theory in global discussion and practice, and explains the theoretical foundation and important framework of modern monetary theory in a popular way, as well as discusses its limitations.</p><p><b>The conclusions of modern monetary theory shocked those who had only been exposed to traditional monetary views. It challenges the orthodox view of government finances and budget deficits, the trade-off between employment and inflation established by the Phillips curve, and the pursuit of current account surpluses.</b></p><p><b>However, it is essentially an orthodox continuation of Keynesianism, whose understanding of how a sovereign state's treasury and central bank should coordinate their operations and their respective responsibilities significantly transcends the limitations of classical monetarism.</b></p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> source：<a href=\"https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7xkjnL08zcFJcRhUMIn7zw\">动物精神Animal...</a></p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3cfac405d9968bb68cea6d74e9f4c711","relate_stocks":{},"source_url":"https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7xkjnL08zcFJcRhUMIn7zw","is_english":false,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1172774847","content_text":"随着全球货币政策在零利率陷阱中越陷越深，叠加新冠疫情带来的全球大放水，有关现代货币理论（MMT）的探讨近来愈加兴起，且在传播过程中引起了非常大的争议。在本文中，我们会尝试在保持逻辑严谨性的前提下，用比较通俗易懂的方式来探究现代货币理论的基础框架、思想宗旨与实用性。\nI. 概述\n同大众的看法相反，当下为人所乐道的现代货币理论并不“现代”，或者说根本不新。事实上，现代货币理论脱胎于后凯恩斯学派，并认为自己才是凯恩斯理论最好的深入诠释与追随者。然而，现代货币理论的主要思想在凯恩斯之后的近60年时间中一直不受待见，甚至被边缘化，直到近些年才终于在国际政治与经济的讨论中有了一席之地。当然，这种转变也与目前主流宏观经济学遇到的困境息息相关，毕竟宏观经济学已经很多年没有拿到过诺奖了，需要结合实践去寻找新的方向。但无论如何，各界对现代货币理论的批评声始终不绝于耳，正如那句著名的评论所说：“The correct parts of MMT aren’t new and the new parts aren’t correct。”（有关现代货币理论，他们正确的地方并不新，而新的地方并不正确。”）\n如果用一句话来概括现代货币理论最主要的观点说了什么，那其实非常简单：\n对于拥有自己货币的国家来说，其政府无需在乎自己的负债与支出，因为他们永远可以通过政府直接印钱的方式来支付所有负债的利息。于是，对政府印多少钱的唯一束缚只有通胀。只要印钱创造出来的需求与目的可以被现有的劳动力与设备满足，使通胀保持在一个可控的范围，那么这个国家的政府便可以通过直接印钱来支撑自己的所有目的与支出。\n看到这里，我想大多数人的第一反应大抵都是不以为然，而拉美危机，魏玛德国，津巴布韦，欧债危机等等事件作为反例便立刻涌上心头。稍安勿躁，其实现代货币理论的核心宗旨并不是在尝试证明政府可以无限地印钱支出而不必承担任何后果。在下一段中，我们会梳理现代货币理论的重要观点与逻辑框架，供大家探讨。\nII. 理论观点\nII.1 税收驱动货币\n自二十世纪70年代布莱顿森林体系解体，美元与黄金脱钩以来，有关法定货币核心价值的探究便始终没有一个明确的结论。而针对货币的核心属性与价值，现代货币理论以其独到的解释为基础建立了一整套理论体系。\n为什么会有人愿意接受政府的法定货币？人们通常对此只是被动接受，而甚少思考。当政府在修路，在造航母，当央行在购买国债，在量化宽松的时候，他们是否真的从某个账户对外支付货币呢？答案显然是否定的。\n那么政府为什么可以这样凭空创造货币？\n海曼.明斯基曾说过，“每个人都可以创造货币，但问题在于其是否会被接纳。”你可以通过在一张纸条上写“欠款10元”来创造一种以元来计价的“货币”，但问题在于能否做到让其他人接受它 —— 例如，是否有人愿意接受这一张欠条，并且卖给你一个煎饼。\nMMT认为，政府能够做到这一点的核心原因在于我们所有人都要向政府纳税。注意到，绝大多数情况下，政府征税时都只接受自己印发的货币，所以，一国民众为了免受逃税的惩罚（如进监狱等），就必须设法获得该政府货币以支付税款。此处的重点在于，即便无法轻易地强制民众在私下交易时使用其发行的法定货币，政府依然可以在征税时迫使人们使用法定货币来支付税收。而这个事实将天然地在民众中创造出一个对该国法定货币的巨量需求。总而言之，为使所发行的货币被接受，政府其实既不需要储存贵金属或者外币，也不需要多余的法律来保证。它只需要强制民众用法定货币来履行纳税义务即可。\n于是我们可以得出“税收驱动货币”的结论：如果统治者有征税的权利，便能够创造对法定货币的需求。因为对政府而言，“确保人们在付钱给政府时使用法定货币”，这点是很容易做到的。\n在上述讨论的基础上稍作衍生就会发现，以货币发行者的角度来看，政府建立货币体系的目的在于让资源向公共部门流动，而税收创造的货币（政府印出来的纸张）需求则促成了这一点。可以说，政府设立税收并不单是为了增加财政收入，也是为了促使人们为获得其印刷出来的纸张（货币）而出卖劳动力，资源和产品。大多数人认为，政府征税仅是为了创收以弥补财政支出。但从MMT的角度来看，税收的目的则有非常微妙的区别。\n众所周知，政府并不会花光“所需资金”，但公众为了获得货币而出卖更多劳动力、资源或产品的意愿却可能耗尽（类似观点可以参考公众号之前的另外一篇文章，并没有那么可怕的金融危机）。为了能够持续转移资源，政府可以尝试提高支付的价格（如果失败，则会引发通胀），或者增加税收。但不管怎样，我们必须记住，在MMT的理解中，增加税收的主要目的不是创收，而是为了刺激货币需求。\n这样一来，MMT自洽地给出了一个政府货币、税收与通胀的理论框架。我们可以简单表述为，政府通过税收为自己印刷的货币创造需求，而征税的能力决定了政府资源转移的能力，也就进一步决定了该政府货币的信用，而这一信用的高低决定了这种货币的最终需求，从而直接影响着该货币的名义通胀。民众认可这种货币，通胀便可控，反之便会进入通胀上升——货币与政府信用进一步降低的负反馈螺旋。\n这个框架在现实中是实际存在的，美元的信用构建在二战后美国全球最领先的综合实力上，构建在几乎所有大宗商品的价格结算机制上，也构建在航空母舰、特斯拉、Google与可口可乐的存在上，甚至构建在要求全球所有居民，无论国籍，进行美元资产投资必须填写w8ben表格来向美国政府报税的能力上。为了应对新冠疫情，美国政府在近两年内印刷出了前所未有的钱，这让一些不了解这个体系的人甚感恐慌地喊着美元的信用会丢失，美元会变成废纸。殊不知美元本就是废纸，是上面所说的这些事实让废纸拥有了信用。如果美国的这些能力没有发生变化，那么美元的基础信用是不会被毁灭的。那些单纯地因为美国印了太多钱，便慌忙下结论喊着美元将要丢失自己信用的人，最近这一个周期过去，恐怕已经在忙着调整预期了。\n不过，虽然美联储印钱不会动摇美元的信用，也不会让大通胀到来并让美元成为废纸，但是中国的崛起却有可能动摇上述这些美国的相对优势。从最高的视角看，未来5-10年的全球大剧情也许就会在这个维度上演绎了，这个话题让我们考虑在其他文章中展开来讲吧。\n顺便提一句，可能与许多人的认知不同，我们很容易就会发现，上面叙述的MMT框架下的货币观点其实是否认现在最火热的数字资产与比特币的货币职能的（再次强调，政府与税收驱动货币）。篇幅有限，我们也不展开讲了。（想起费马大定理那个页面边缘的装逼，我们总是懂的太多，而有时间写下来的太少。）\nII.2 现代货币理论的基础框架\n让我们详细的阐述一下MMT的分析逻辑。\n首先我们都清楚，在社会中，一方的金融资产总会对应到另外一方的金融负债。于是我们可以把世界非常简单地划分为三个部门：本国私营部门，本国公共部门以及由外国政府、公司与家庭构成的“其他国家部门”。\n那么如果我们把各个部门的资产与负债加总，下面这条恒等式便会始终成立：\n本国私营部门结余 + 本国政府部门结余 + 国外部门结余 = 0\n这实际上是一个会计恒等式，不依赖于任何理论模型。举一个可能比较有启发的例子，假设国外部门支出小于收入，有500亿美元的预算盈余，同时本国政府部门支出小于收入，有200亿美元的财政预算盈余，那么上述恒等式告诉我们，在同一时间段内，我们最在乎的本国私营部门必须拥有500+200=700亿美元的预算赤字。\n这可能就造成了一个“困境”，在这三个部门中，如果一个部门出现盈余，那么至少有另外一个部门出现赤字。换句话说，无论我们怎么努力，在同一个时间段中，都不可能同时出现我们脑海中认为最理想的所有部门都盈余的天下大同的情况。\n所以到这里的时候，我们的脑海中似乎隐隐约约有一个想法呼之欲出——既然总有人要借钱，那么就TMD让政府借啊，然后我们作为本国私营部门的每个人就会有最期待的盈余和资产了啊！\n如果事情这么简单，我们就只需要会计，而不需要MMT了。\n在文章的起初，我们便说了MMT是凯恩斯理论的追随者，原因便是，他们相信下面这些由凯恩斯主义延续下来的结论。\n1.  从整体经济层面来看，私人部门的因果关系是，整体支出决定整体收入（凯恩斯节约悖论）\n这个结论不太直观，因为就我们每个个体而言，总是收入决定支出的：例如你中了500万的彩票，咋的晚上吃兰州牛肉面还不得多加份肉啊。\n然而，一旦我们把全部的个体加总就会发现，虽然个体家庭可以明确地决定减少支出，以便储蓄更多的钱来应对预期中的危机，但如果所有的家庭都试图去减少支出，总消费和国民收入将会下降。这时，公司将被迫减少产出，裁退员工，降低工资，从而导致家庭收入的降低，这将导致家庭成员被迫进一步减少支出，一个残酷的负反馈循环便开始了。\n这便是凯恩斯的“节约悖论”，即他对于大萧条最重要的教训及解释——试图通过降低总消费的方式存钱，不仅不会增加储蓄，反而会减少收入。\n2.  社会赤字开支决定金融财富的累积（储蓄）。\n凯恩斯主义者认为，只有当经济体中某个部门决定通过赤字的方式让支出多于收入时，借钱给他的对手方才会以赤字开支者负债的形式累积起金融财富净额。即赤字开支的这个决定才是创造出金融财富净额的原因。除非有一方愿意进行赤字支出，否则，无论其他人多么想累积金融财富，他们都无法做到这一点。\n3.  政府无法精确掌握赤字（税收收入），存在“自动稳定器”(Automatic Stabilizers)效应\n我们不过多展开政府无法精确掌握赤字这点（愿意的话，可以从芝加哥学派和Laffer curve出发展开到很深的程度），我们只谈一些比较直觉的推论。\n需要承认，政府的能力是有边界的。即便是对看似完全由自己决定的财政税收收入，政府也无法精确掌控。政府确实可以决定支出更多，也可以决定提高税率，但当政府支出与税率改变之后，其他的社会变量，例如收入，销售，财富等等，也就是社会的整体税基都会对应改变。而这些变量并不在政府的掌控之中。因此，财政预算无论出现赤字、均衡还是盈余，都并非政府可以自主决定的。\n结合上面的恒等式与探讨，假设我们暂时不考虑国外部门的结余，当衰退来临时，本国私营部门便会开始削减支出、增加储蓄。这会让本国私营部门结余上升，从而直接导致恒等式中的本国政府部门结余下降。如此一来，政府的财政预算赤字就会自发地增加。这部分增长并不由政府掌控，但却起到了平抑社会各部门结余在面对周期时所产生的波动的作用。过往的数据也确认了这一关系——即税收收入在经济繁荣时期迅速增长，在经济萧条时期迅速下跌，使得政府的财政预算变成了一个强大的自动稳定器。这便是“自动稳定器”效应。\n因此，最佳的国内政策是追求充分就业和物价稳定，而不是追求政府可持续赤字路径或者可控的整体债务上限。因为后者大多数情况下是自动稳定器的结果，并不是政府可以自主决定的。\n4.  恒等式的简单展开\n为了表述观点方便，我们将上面重要的恒等式进行改写，引入S（私人部门储蓄），C（私人部门消费支出），I（私人部门投资），T（政府部门税收），G（政府部门支出），IM（本国进口），EX（本国出口），于是有\n本国私营部门结余 + 本国政府部门结余 + 国外部门结余 = 0\nS – C – I + T – G + IM – EX = 0\n到这里，我们便基本可以得出现代货币理论最为重要的思想结论了：\n如果你拥有II.1中描述的税收与创造自己货币的能力，那么当你面对一个经济萧条周期或者负外部冲击时（类似次贷危机或者新冠危机），你可以通过本国政府部门的调控来更好地度过危机。\n当危机到来时，II.2.1告诉我们因为私人部门的整体支出决定整体收入，所以最重要的事情是保证私人部门的整体支出不下降，尤其是避免陷入支出/收入同时下降的负反馈循环。II.2.2则告诉我们，为了避免社会财富骤降引起的恐慌，我们需要经济体的某个部门来主动提供赤字支出。那么结合起来，唯一的可能承担这一赤字支出任务的便是政府部门，它需要将财富转移给私人部门，以此来修复整体支出的下降幅度。\nII.2.4的恒等式进一步验证了，为了做到这些，让本国私营部门结余回到应有的均衡水平，那么我们应当让本国政府部门结余与国外部门结余（以本国角度来看便是经常账户赤字）尽量减少。\n但因为出口的外生不确定性（例如美国这样庞大的经济体如果尝试减少进口，那么可能会影响到其他国家的收入，从而影响到自己对于世界其他国家的出口），最好的应对办法便是减少本国政府部门结余了。在这里值得强调一下，主流宏观经济学观点下，国家应当尽量追求经常账户盈余，而现代货币理论学者对国外部门结余进行了更多深入的理论探讨，最后得出了相悖的结论。也就是在政府可以自由掌控本国政府部门结余的情况下，对外的经常账户盈余并不重要，而这其实也正是21世纪以来，美国实际走过来的发展路径。\n最后，II.1与II.2.3告诉我们，在政府扩大赤字以提升私人部门支出这个过程时，我们无需考虑赤字是否过大，因为主权国家在不影响信用的情况下可以无限发行货币；也无需考虑未来赤字会如何缩减，因为当危机过去，经济恢复到增长周期的时候，自动稳定器自然会让国家的赤字缩小回归至均衡水平。\n当我们把上述的结论和思路与美国及西方国家本次应对新冠疫情冲击的方式进行对比，便能立刻明白为什么说现在西方主流经济体开启了现代货币理论的新范式。\n以美国为例，在本次新冠危机中，美国第一时间忽略了所有政府赤字路径和债务上限的束缚，把印钞机开到极限，发起了多个万亿级别的政府支出计划，不仅不为美联储资产负债表规模设置上限，并且允许美联储直接下场购买企业高收益债券，为私营部门赤字投资进行担保；美国摒弃了过往QE通过银行传导的路径，直接降息至利率下限，同时史无前例地执行“直升机撒钱”行为，直接打款至民众的个人账户。不在乎水漫金山，但一定要以雷霆之势确保私人部门的整体支出不下降。\n可以说，就目前的情况来看，现代货币理论的范式还是取得了非常良好的实践效果的。在新冠疫情这样剧烈的冲击下，美国经济不但实现了平稳的过渡，并且很可能在极快的时间内（2021年）恢复增长。这也难怪临危受命的美国新任财政部长耶伦会公开表明，政府债务的上限并没有那么重要，只要确保政府每年的财政收入可以覆盖国债的利息便是可持续路径了。预计在未来5-10年的时间内，现代货币理论的范式将在西方国家央行的实践中确立一个牢固的地位。\nII.3 政府负债的边界 – 财政可持续路径问题\n过度印钱引发的通胀与政府负债的可持续路径应该是“传统”理论对现代货币理论质疑最集中的两个方面。\n首先要明确的是，我们并不认为现代货币理论对这些质疑有非常科学完美的解释和回应，但是它对这些问题的回答也存在着一定的可取之处。\n我们先直接引用一个非常符合直觉的宏观经济学结论：\n当经济体的利率r高于其增长率g，它的负债率便会一直增长。（可以直觉地理解为，经济体每年新赚到的钱(g)无法偿还利息(r)，所以负债率只能一直上升），所以如果始终处于r > g的情况下，那么政府继续新增负债的空间就比较有限了。\n【对于学术一点的读者有关这个结论可以详细看一下James Galbraith的经典模型：\n△d = -s + d * [ (r -g) / (1 + g) ]\n其中d是负债对GDP的初始比率，s是减去净利息支出后的财政盈余对GDP的比率，r是实际利率，g是GDP的实际增长率】\n而我们可以很直观地看到当r < g时，负债对GDP的比率也是负值，也就是负债在健康地逐渐减少。\n那么如何实现呢？一个能让政府很自然的掌控的情形便是让利率r尽量地小，这样g不就更容易大于r了嘛。因此，在金融危机后的近十年时间中，我们看到了全球所有国家的基准利率显著地下降。在新冠危机打断了美国加息进程之后，我们又一次看到了所有发达国家的基准利率降低到了基本等于0的降无可降的位置。而欧盟，日本，瑞典，瑞士等国家则更进一步打开了对负利率的尝试。这不得不说是现代货币理论范式获得实践的一个结果。\n那么如果r已经降低到了这么低的位置，实际增长率g还是无法大于r怎么办呢？朋友们，这便是目前现代货币理论尚在探讨的最前沿的学术问题了，就我们所知，目前的MMT理论无法给出一个明确的答案。\n这里必须要说明的是，尽管有流动性陷阱的约束，但是r是由政府来掌控的，并不存在一个绝对的下限。比如当觉得0都不够低的时候，美联储是完全可以宣布把基准利率一夜之间降到-10%的。当考虑以这种绝对疯狂的姿态来刺激所有即时消费的情形时，我们便反而回到了现代货币理论同传统宏观经济学的根本区别上，即政府信用的来源——政府组织与税收驱动货币这个现代货币理论最大的基石。可以说，这时我们需要面对的本质上不再是经济学问题，而是社会学意义上的问题。具体而言，美国与美元这样有政治，科技与军事基础支撑的国家可能并不会出现什么困难，但在某些小国家，因民众或者世界其他经济体丧失对该国货币与政府的信任，他们将面临同时失去政权统治与法定货币效力的危险。但无论如何，在MMT的理论框架中，政府的财政可持续路径问题是有解决方式的，但其带来的后果与约束可能需要社会学的辅助视角来进一步完善与支撑。（类似行为经济学的理论框架需要引入心理学的理论来支撑。）\nII.4 政府负债的边界 – 通胀问题\n最后让我们来探讨一下所有人在直觉上对于现代货币理论的最大质疑：通货膨胀问题。\n如弗里德曼那句著名的话一样：“通货膨胀无论何时何地都是一种货币现象”，那么现代货币理论在提出必要情况下解除政府支出和债务上限大规模印钱的同时，又是如何确保国家不进入通货膨胀自我强化的恶性螺旋的呢？\n事实上，在回答与通胀有关的问题方面，现代货币理论是非常描述性的，甚至可以说，现代货币理论本身便仅仅是对于主权货币运行方式的描述。如上文所述，它有很好的理论与思想框架来解释主权国家及其货币如何运作，但是却没有足够科学与量化的手段来为这种运作方式划下不可逾越的边界。\n现代货币理论中对于通货膨胀问题的探讨大概分为两个方向。\n第一个方向避免了直接回答通胀问题，而是否定了现行的主流宏观框架，认为菲尔普斯曲线揭示的通胀与就业的关系完全可以通过政府的干预来避免。\n这个方向的奠基人便是著名的经济学家勒纳(A.Lerner)及其提出的“功能财政理论”。勒纳在其理论中强调了政府在制定财政预算时，应从其对经济的功能来着手，而不应该加入财政收支平衡的限制。这与上一小节中探讨的现代货币理论对于财政可持续路径的摒弃简直是天作之和，也因此，后续的现代货币理论研究者在勒纳的基础上提出了“就业保障/最终雇主”模式。\n考虑到这是一个崭新的框架，所以在这里我们不深入展开而是从直观上描述一下这种模式的主要逻辑。\n从上文中，根据现代货币理论的框架，我们知道了政府是可以无限发行本国货币的，那么为什么不让政府作为最终雇主并承诺为本国全部符合资格且有工作意愿的公民提供工作机会呢？这样失业率便会直接降低为0，小康社会也就直接实现了。\n在这个理论框架中，全国所有的失业人口会被政府作为最终雇主雇佣，并且提供等同于就业保障的最低薪资。而后私营部门可以通过提供高于就业保障的薪资来从这部分政府雇佣的人群中择优筛选劳动力进行雇佣。\n想象一下，如果现在我国政府执行这个框架，那么全国所有失业人口都可以去本地政府领取到一份工作，薪资为政府支付的2000元/月。具体工作可以是因地制宜的本地农业采摘，也可以由政府支出主导的基建项目统一调配，或者干脆成为外卖骑手，由政府把这部分就业保障薪资透过像美团这样的平台公司来发放。\n看起来，在这样的理论框架下，通胀确实变得不那么相关了。在经济繁荣期，私营部门的雇主可以通过为工人提供比就业保障薪资（2000元/月）更高的工资来从就业计划中雇佣工人，例如美团可以提供3000元/月的薪资来把效率高的骑手雇佣到自己公司内。而在经济衰退期，私人部门可以辞退工人，让他们返回政府的最终雇主计划以获取至少2000元/月的就业保障薪资。这样一来，就业保障薪资将在经济繁荣时降低通货膨胀的压力，并在经济衰退时降低通货紧缩的压力。\n于是，现代货币理论框架通过设立政府保障薪资终于得以找到一个主权货币的“锚”。在这套完整的MMT框架下，主权货币的边际价值便等于其可以雇佣的劳动力数量。政府通过计划实现了充分就业，并且可以通过调整就业保障薪资来调整边际劳动力价值来完美控制通胀。\n但是这套理想国理论的问题也显而易见——即便抛开汇率与通胀这类在II.3中讨论过的MMT在政府开支过大时所面临的问题不谈，我们依然需要注意的一个重要事实是，这套框架忽略了所有个体的主观能动性与就业的激励问题。\n比如政府提供的工作需要进行12小时的艰苦劳动，那么如果一个个体认为这12小时的劳动仅仅获得2000元的工资太少了，那么他便会自动从就业保障计划中退出。这将直接造成实际失业率重新上升。\n又比如美团的就业保障骑手不需要做太多事情，一天送3单就可以领取2000元/月的工资，那么本来在市场竞争环境下需要一天送30单才可以领取5000元/月工资的美团骑手可能便愿意选择躺平以加入就业保障计划，从而使社会的整体效率与需求被扭曲。\n另外这套就业保障/最终雇主计划其实是一种典型的“大政府”的框架。为了有效得到执行，政府需要拥有高度垄断的权利与资源。针对这种情形，Piketty在其新书Capital and Ideology中进行了深入的探讨，他通过对于近代社会左派与右派主张观点的变迁指出了大政府的框架在苏联解体后面临的末日般的意识形态困境。也因此，这套就业保障/最终雇主模式恐怕很长一段时间只能存在于部分现代货币理论学者的纸面理想国中了。\n既然短期无法在实践中彻底跳出主流货币主义理论的框架，现代货币理论学者们也在主流框架中沿着第二个方向尽可能地解释了通胀问题。\n在我们看来，这部分解释的学术意义多少有些乏善可陈，因为MMT的理论框架中始终没有提出一个明确的方法去计算出主权政府的可支出上限。因此在这个方向上，MMT支持者们的论据主要集中在实践经验上。注意到在过往的大概40年时间里，全球主流经济体基本上都处于极度缺乏通胀的环境中，甚至在大规模印钱后，依然没有看到通胀上升的迹象，所以他们认为，考虑到现代社会供给过于充分，生产要素变革等未知因素，主权政府提升赤字印钱是非常难以引发通胀的。而历史上出现过的恶性通胀，一是数量并不多，二是多发生在津巴布韦、巴西等自身经济体系过于脆弱的发展中国家，而且多数情况下往往发生于该国受到了不寻常的国内外地缘或政治冲击的时候，因此并不具有普遍性。\n尽管这种解释模糊而有点近乎耍赖，但如果基于这点而对现代货币理论学者们进行指责也有失公平，毕竟主流货币主义学者们对于量化宽松的效果以及其如何传导到实体经济的解释也并不出色。例如，为什么全球各国央行为了应对2008年金融危机而发行的天量货币始终没有导致这些国家的通胀上升？针对这一问题，主流学界始终没有找到令人信服的理论框架来给出回答。关于这一点，想来最困惑的人应当是安倍与黑田东彦，日本央行的印钱水平早已远远打破传统货币主义认为的财政赤字上限，甚至到了即将把整个日本企业界国有化的程度，但是人们却依然找不到日本通胀上升的蛛丝马迹。\n从这点来看，本次新冠危机可能是现代货币理论的一个试金石，因为起码截止二季度，在史无前例的全球最大放水浪潮中，我们终于看到了一点点通货膨胀起来了的迹象。但是目前，就是这一点点迹象，美联储与市场的主流预期依然是，这些通胀是“暂时性”的，在疫情结束，货币政策边际正常化后便会自行褪去。\n如果故事真的如此进展，那么本着科学实用的精神，通货膨胀对于现代货币理论的桎梏与批判可能真的无效了，毕竟政府目前在不要求人们就业的情况通过直升机撒钱的方式直接就给出了一个丰厚的就业保障薪资，这种放水程度其实已经远超现代货币理论学家们之前纸面上的想象。倘若在如此情况下都看不到通胀，那么传统货币主义学家们确实可以烧掉弗里德曼的货币数量论来拥抱宏观的新时代了。\nIII．小结\n本文尽可能地梳理了现代货币理论范式这一目前全球探讨与实践最为火热的宏观货币理论，尽可能通俗地阐述了现代货币理论的理论基础与重要框架，并对其局限性进行了探讨。\n现代货币理论的结论使那些只接触过传统货币观点的人感到震惊。它挑战了关于政府财政和财政预算赤字的正统观点，挑战了菲利普斯曲线确立的就业与通胀的权衡关系，也挑战了争取经常账户盈余的行为。\n但它本质上却是凯恩斯主义的正统延续，其对于一个主权国家财政部与中央银行该当如何协调运作与各自权责义务的理解显著超脱了经典货币主义的局限。","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":4022,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":199155992,"gmtCreate":1620692476716,"gmtModify":1704346736614,"author":{"id":"3577221458132518","authorId":"3577221458132518","name":"更深得蓝","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577221458132518","authorIdStr":"3577221458132518"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"mark","listText":"mark","text":"mark","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/199155992","repostId":"1190822039","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1190822039","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1620652366,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1190822039?lang=en_US&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-05-10 21:12","market":"fut","language":"zh","title":"Goldman Sachs In-Depth Report: Rising Commodities, Chaos in the US? How much room is left for the surge?","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1190822039","media":"格隆汇","summary":"越是泡沫与牛市傻傻分不清楚的时候，幺蛾子就越多。","content":"<p>Author: Sansi Macroeconomics</p><p>The core logic of this article is based on Goldman Sachs' bullish report last month, but due to the recent rapid rise in commodities, many stocks...<b>In just one month, it exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target for increases.</b></p><p>Therefore, our current views differ from those when this article was first published on Knowledge Planet on April 15th.</p><p>There are many unexpected events in the later stages of a bull market. Although the overall bullish outlook remains unchanged, please remain vigilant against certain stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>Regarding the trade proposed by Goldman Sachs last month, we do not intend to take profits immediately; we intend to fly in the bull market bubble for a while longer.</p><p>However, we also do not recommend that individual investors who have not previously joined the trend follow suit at this time.</p><p>A simple truth: when a single conference call can attract more than 4,000 investors, it is clearly no longer a good place to build a position.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5000bb6a5f8d798bcaa39f04e9461bc7\" tg-width=\"408\" tg-height=\"384\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>preface</b></p><p>The sharp rise in commodity prices has attracted much attention in recent times. Despite repeated calls from national ministries to cool down the commodity market, it has not stopped the sharp rise in the prices of commodities such as copper, iron ore, crude oil, and agricultural products, which inevitably makes people rethink the logic behind the rise in commodities.</p><p>Sansi Society has discussed commodities and inflation several times in previous articles.</p><p>On April 13, Goldman Sachs released another major report, \"Copper is the New Oil\" (see chart below). The report analyzed the supply and demand outlook for copper from the perspective of carbon emission reduction and green energy transition, and raised the target price for copper to $11,000 for the next 12 months.</p><p>Since the report was released, copper prices have risen steadily, with an increase of 20%.</p><p>Image: The image below is a screenshot of the candlestick chart on May 5th.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d207689a018d4f149a60ec1b6f6f35f4\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"569\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>But Goldman Sachs' bullish moves did not stop there.</p><p>Before the May Day holiday, Goldman Sachs once again released a special report, continuing to be bullish on commodities.</p><p>The report is highly practical, breaking out of the traditional framework and offering many insights and reflections in light of the new policy environment, with its viewpoints being quite insightful.</p><p>Today we have extracted the core points of this Goldman Sachs report for your reference.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e75a75763fdb6d43c33bf6758adf235e\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"293\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>Article</b></p><p><b>1) Commodities have a 13.5% upside potential.</b></p><p>In the two months leading up to the report's release (April 13), commodity prices had been consolidating (see the candlestick chart above). The reasons for the consolidation, besides digesting the previous round of gains, are more importantly fundamental factors: the re-lockdown in Europe has led to stagnant demand growth, as well as macroeconomic resistance brought about by rising interest rates and a stronger dollar.</p><p>However, these factors are now gradually reversing. Economic activity, as measured by travel metrics, is returning to an upward trajectory, especially after Europe accelerated vaccination. Meanwhile, a seasonal recovery in transportation, manufacturing, and construction has also begun and will continue to accelerate until June this year.</p><p>Figure 1: Global Travel Index by Region (left) & the US Dollar Index and Commodity Index (right)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0114a3921f19a70c8d6c5cd030bf5886\" tg-width=\"1027\" tg-height=\"348\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Commodity prices are driven by quantity (or the level of demand). When demand exceeds supply, a scarcity premium (i.e., the spot premium) appears, and this premium is difficult for the market to price in advance. Because commodity supply lacks elasticity in the short term, the extent of supply shortages in the face of upcoming large-scale demand growth is easily underestimated. Because suppliers cannot dig a new mine or grow a new crop in a few months.</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that overall commodity prices will rise by 13.5% over the next six months (compared to April 28, when the report was released), with oil prices reaching $80 per barrel (CME group' WTI crude oil price at $75 per barrel) and copper prices (CME group ticker symbol HG) reaching $11,000 per ton.</p><p>Figure: Goldman Sachs' price forecast table for major commodities</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>2) Tightening supply and demand support spot premiums</b></p><p>Since the surge in economic activity was fully anticipated by the market, why didn't commodity prices immediately reflect this? (Cashing out has already begun this month)</p><p>Before the commodity spot premium can be sustained, inventory reduction will inevitably occur. If the spot price is higher than the forward price, the surplus inventory of physical goods will be released and sold at the higher spot price, pushing the market back to its initial level (Figure 2).</p><p>Figure 2: Destocking and Price Curve</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/793f9e6761c22130c4fcc177e6735efd\" tg-width=\"784\" tg-height=\"508\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, only physical shortages can sustain spot premiums. Currently, more than half of the commodity markets have spot premiums, especially in agricultural products (Figure 3). The spot premium rate of commodities on major exchanges such as CME, ICE, and LME has reached a 15-year high (Figure 4).</p><p>Figure 3: Commodity spot premium rate</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/fcc075f153ff86f0b4b3a58b0376c42f\" tg-width=\"518\" tg-height=\"378\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Figure 4: Global commodity spot premium rates</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/43262a854e47779ee6ff339a88e6de03\" tg-width=\"631\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs believes that the continued spot premium indicates that the commodity market is experiencing insufficient inventory and a tightening spot market.</p><p><b>3) The wealth gap and the commodity bull market</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the shortage of commodities will not only affect the entire commodities industry, but also multiple regions and industries, from the United States, China and Europe to construction, automobiles and retail. The surge in demand is everywhere, and the core reason is that policymakers are more inclined to solve social problems than to focus on macroeconomic stability.</p><p>From the EU Recovery Fund allocating 50% of its funds to Italy and Spain to President Biden’s latest economic stimulus package, low-income families have clearly received policy favoritism. Over the past month, Powell has visited homeless people in Washington multiple times and frequently mentioned “forgotten corners” of the economy, indicating that the Federal Reserve’s policy focus has shifted towards employment and is more concerned with the balance of economic recovery than inflation.</p><p>Policies that address income and wealth inequality transfer the excess savings of a few high-income households to low-income households with a higher marginal propensity to consume, whether through debt, taxation, or other means, almost always ensure strong demand growth, which is precisely what underlies the overheated economy and real inflationary pressures. This can be seen everywhere in the United States, from rising gasoline demand to meat consumption increasing demand for grain feed.</p><p>Image: American residents primarily consume chicken, and the price of boneless chicken breast in the United States has recently doubled.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/09adea1a029ae67905475213f9709bf9\" tg-width=\"625\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It is not difficult to see that every major commodity bull market and economic inflation in history has been accompanied by populist policies that reduce people's income, increase wealth inequality, and redistribute wealth (Figure 5).</p><p>Figure 5: Narrowing the income gap mainly during periods of economic overheating</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/feae6950164428c16dddb04dde09fe33\" tg-width=\"754\" tg-height=\"395\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>4) China is no longer the only source of growth</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the commodity bull market of the first decade of this century was the result of global redistribution.</p><p>After China joined the WTO, as manufacturing jobs and wages flowed from the West to China, income and wealth shifted from American workers to a large number of low-paid Chinese workers.</p><p>Although multinational corporations have profited handsomely, the Western working class has also been impacted. The loss of jobs has accelerated the decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate, while at the same time, demand from China has begun to boom (Figure 6).</p><p>Figure 6: US-China Labor Market and Commodity Bull Market</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ed6517258040a669a3d62731f3f6f12f\" tg-width=\"1036\" tg-height=\"322\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It's not just government-led infrastructure projects; Chinese households have also begun to buy large quantities of physical goods after gaining new income, just as low-income households in the United States and Europe did in the late 1960s and 1970s.</p><p>Under this trend, China has become the dominant force in commodity demand over the past 20 years, and China has also become synonymous with commodity demand. Many investors regard Chinese demand trends – whether in terms of credit, policy, or trade – as a leading indicator of commodity prices.</p><p>However, after two decades of record export-led growth, the 'arbitrage window' between China and the West has largely closed. Not only is real wage growth in China 22 times faster than in the United States, but policymakers on both sides of the Pacific are also beginning to realize the drawbacks of this 'open arbitrage'.</p><p>On the one hand, Trump's protectionist trade policies are aimed at addressing job losses and wage stagnation in the U.S. manufacturing sector. On the other hand, China is also tired of the high environmental costs it incurs in dealing with the world's waste and producing highly polluting products. In a series of policies introduced over the past three years, China has closed its doors to imports of foreign waste and cut capacity in highly polluting and energy-intensive industries such as steel to improve the quality of life for its residents.</p><p>These policies will not stop China's economic growth, but they will slow China's demand for physical goods. As China gradually shifts towards an information-based, renewable energy-dominated economy, it will no longer be the sole major source of growth in commodity demand over the next decade (Figure 7).</p><p>Figure 7: Major Sources of Future Commodity Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6857fd14772a6f89394c6a7434fbf128\" tg-width=\"1016\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>5) Decarbonization becomes the keynote of macroeconomic policy</b></p><p>From Biden's Green New Deal to China's industrial policies based on carbon emission reduction and energy transition, \"decarbonization\" is becoming the global macroeconomic policy tone, which means that the left-tail risk of green capital expenditure has been greatly reduced.</p><p>When Biden wrapped up his climate summit last month, he focused on how green capital spending would create jobs, not unlike past power infrastructure projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority under the New Deal, which also addressed both environmental and social issues at the time.</p><p>Extending to trade policy, following areas related to traditional protectionist policies such as agriculture, technology transfer, and manufacturing employment, the United States, China, and Europe have all begun to focus their trade policy debates on carbon border taxes and strategic competitiveness.</p><p>In fact, \"carbon security\" is now becoming an important issue for a country—do countries have the opportunity to acquire low-carbon technologies and raw materials to develop key green industries within their countries?</p><p>According to the attitudes of the Biden administration and the Chinese government, industries that cannot decarbonize are at risk before the imposition of a carbon emissions tax.</p><p>While setting provincial emissions targets, China has also set caps on national emissions capacity, laying the foundation for tightening commodity supplies.</p><p>Among industrial metals, steel (accounting for 17% of China's carbon emissions) and aluminum (accounting for 4% of China's carbon emissions) were most affected (Figure 8).</p><p>Unlike the supply-side reforms of 2016, the long-term nature of the decarbonization target means that capacity constraints will persist, thus having a more lasting impact on fundamentals and prices.</p><p>Figure 8: Main sources of carbon emissions in China</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ae2613c479ee4e2a82dd9ab00f2d8f96\" tg-width=\"1011\" tg-height=\"413\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>6) Economic restart and oil price reassessment</b></p><p>Over the past six months, global crude oil demand has remained at around 95 million barrels per day (see chart below). Goldman Sachs predicts a sharp rebound in global crude oil demand in the coming months (Figure 9).</p><p>Figure 9: Global crude oil demand will rebound sharply in the second quarter.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3c0daa427227ee5704db352496678890\" tg-width=\"502\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>First, the impact of the pandemic on economic/travel activities is diminishing due to more targeted pandemic prevention policies and a continued increase in vaccinations. There is clear evidence that countries with leading vaccination rates (the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom) are traveling more. For example, gasoline demand in the United States is approaching 2019 levels (Figure 10), and aviation fuel demand has also increased by 20% since March.</p><p>Figure 10: US Gasoline Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e979bd8b0d58e5f3f2c757004bab8197\" tg-width=\"816\" tg-height=\"834\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>In addition, the epidemics in South America and Europe have also reached a turning point, and the growth rate of the epidemic in India has finally slowed down.</p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs expects global oil demand to increase significantly starting in June, from the current 94.5 million barrels per day to 99 million barrels per day in the third quarter.</p><p>As the pace of vaccination accelerates in Europe, pent-up travel demand will be released. In particular, the easing of international travel restrictions starting in May is expected to lead to a recovery of 1.5 million barrels per day in global aviation fuel demand (although it is still 30% lower than pre-pandemic levels).</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that Brent crude oil prices will reach $80 per barrel in the next six months, and CME group' WTI crude oil prices will reach $75 per barrel.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>7) Copper is the new oil</b></p><p>Finally, we return to the central theme of this report: 'Copper is the new oil'.</p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that green capital spending is the theme of the next commodity supercycle, with copper being a top priority.</p><p>However, what is worrying is that copper is facing supply pressure due to severe underinvestment. After experiencing the trauma of the price crash in the mid-2010s, copper miners have been cautious about increasing capital support, and are now just over two years away from the peak of copper supply.</p><p>Goldman Sachs pointed out that a record high in copper prices is the only way to solve the supply crisis. Just as oil exhibited during the commodity super bull market of the first decade of the 21st century.</p><p>Goldman Sachs estimates that the green revolution will spur the strongest decade of growth in copper demand history, with the share of green demand rising from 3% now to 16% by 2030 (Figure 11).</p><p>Figure 11: Changes in Copper Demand and Share of Green Energy Capacity</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5a149e30db025e20fed7325e1dcfe0c1\" tg-width=\"1034\" tg-height=\"372\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Since last year, the stimulus policies accompanying the pandemic have supported a demand recovery despite stagnant supply (China has contributed significantly), leading to a further intensification of the copper deficit. These dynamics will peak just as the copper market experiences its largest medium- to long-term deficit in history.</p><p>The Chinese spot market is currently in a brief period of weakness, providing investors with a short buying window (this report was first published in mid-last month) until destocking is completed and replenishment begins, which will continue into the second half of the year.</p><p>Against this backdrop, Goldman Sachs has raised its copper price target for the next 12 months to $11,000/ton, compared to $11,875/ton in 2022, $12,000/ton in 2023, $14,000/ton in 2024, and $15,000/ton in 2025.</p><p>However, it should be noted that within a month of Goldman Sachs releasing its report, copper prices had risen by more than 20%. Although the long-term outlook remains positive, the short-term gains are relatively large.</p><p><b>8) Are the agricultural products overheated?</b></p><p>It's not just copper. The tightening supply outlook for agricultural products, coupled with a surge in Chinese imports and severe weather in Brazil and the United States, led to further increases in grain and oilseed prices in April, with corn prices exceeding $6.50 per bushel and soybeans exceeding $15 per bushel, the highest prices since the drought in early 2010 (Figure 12).</p><p>Figure 12: Agricultural product price increases (Data from the CME website, as of April 28, prices are much higher today)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f45b49342b1bf36ccd462d062b25e6c2\" tg-width=\"643\" tg-height=\"277\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Following this surge in grain prices, the market will face two prospects. If the U.S. crop harvest is poor in the summer (a freeze warning has been issued in the U.S. corn belt, and 8% of planted crops are at risk of early damage), inventories will drop to extremely low levels, and prices will need to rise further first to suppress demand. Then, the expected yield after expanding the planting area may bring corn and soybean prices down to $4.50 and $13.50, respectively.</p><p>In addition, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that rising ethanol consumption and strong demand for soybean oil have boosted soybean crushing profits. Therefore, at current price levels, it is difficult to maintain market equilibrium by suppressing demand for older crops.</p><p>Given the extremely tight supply and demand of soybeans in the United States, and the recent better performance of new corn prices than soybeans, which will lead to a shift in crop planting area towards corn (Figure 13), this indicates that soybean futures prices (the CME soybean futures price expiring in November used by Goldman Sachs) will catch up with the increase in corn prices in the coming months.</p><p>Figure 13: Soybean/Corn Price Ratio</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/1222688aa1ac4b2958d90ff1a1554bfe\" tg-width=\"529\" tg-height=\"414\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Goldman Sachs has raised its recent corn price target to $7.30 per bushel to reflect reduced competition from Brazilian exports in the summer.</p><p>Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs raised its soybean price forecasts for the next 6 months and 12 months to $14.80 and $14.00, respectively, to reflect the impact of limited planting area expansion.</p><p>Similarly, based on severe cold weather in winter wheat-producing areas and the substitution effect of wheat for corn, Goldman Sachs raised its wheat target prices for March, June, and December to $7.40, $7.30, and $7.20, respectively.</p><p>In addition, Goldman Sachs is optimistic about cotton prices, citing the recent low cotton prices that will lead to a large-scale reduction in cotton planting area.</p><p>However, in the past few days, CME soybean, corn, and wheat futures prices have all exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target price. Whether the market is overbought or Goldman Sachs is being conservative is for readers to consider.</p><p><b>9) The battle for digital currencies</b></p><p>Since early March, Bitcoin has stagnated relative to gold (Figure 14), and Goldman Sachs believes there are two main reasons behind this:</p><p>First, due to the surge in global COVID-19 cases, risk sentiment has become more cautious, the market has returned to favoring defensive assets, and risky assets are losing momentum.</p><p>Figure 14: Bitcoin Gold Price Ratio (Shallow) & Goldman Sachs Risk Appetite Indicator (Deep)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/182c60f92df9d71310a21c4fa0eae0ca\" tg-width=\"511\" tg-height=\"329\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Secondly, Bitcoin has given way to other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH), highlighting the fact that competition among cryptocurrencies for store-of-value dominance still exists, and holding Bitcoin adds an additional source of risk.</p><p>Traditional long-term stores of value, such as gold, art, diamonds, wine, and collectibles, have use value in addition to being stores of value. Use value is important because utility demand can absorb fluctuations caused by investment demand, thus smoothing out price fluctuations, which means that asset prices are unlikely to be zero. Therefore, it is too early for Bitcoin and gold to compete for safe-haven demand, but the two can coexist.</p><p>While Bitcoin has benefited from loose liquidity, its high energy consumption, lack of practical value, and weak ESG score make its store of value needs easily replaced by another, better-designed cryptocurrency.</p><p>Bitcoin has significantly underperformed Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, this year, with Ethereum (ETH) prices continuing to hit new highs after the May Day holiday.</p><p>It's not just the price; Ethereum's trading volume is also climbing. Since CME group (CME) launched ETH futures in February, the product's trading volume and open interest have continued to climb (Figure 15), indicating that market acceptance of ETH is increasing.</p><p>Figure 15: ETH futures trading volume and open interest</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/dc492e64bba846c7aa673c29b59f3d32\" tg-width=\"571\" tg-height=\"319\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Note: Data is from the CME website and is current as of April 28.</p><p>The following table shows the basic elements of ETH futures in CME group.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f072fb91a65dbd153a4dbe30a308111c\" tg-width=\"428\" tg-height=\"162\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>We've discussed some of the hot applications of Ethereum before, but this rapid increase still exceeded our expectations.</p><p>Overall, Goldman Sachs' two reports are quite good in terms of both theoretical viewpoints and practical results.</p><p>However, please remain vigilant against these stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>The more confusing the distinction between a bubble and a bull market, the more trouble there will be.</p>","source":"gelonghui_highlight","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Goldman Sachs In-Depth Report: Rising Commodities, Chaos in the US? How much room is left for the surge?</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nGoldman Sachs In-Depth Report: Rising Commodities, Chaos in the US? How much room is left for the surge?\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">格隆汇</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-05-10 21:12</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p>Author: Sansi Macroeconomics</p><p>The core logic of this article is based on Goldman Sachs' bullish report last month, but due to the recent rapid rise in commodities, many stocks...<b>In just one month, it exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target for increases.</b></p><p>Therefore, our current views differ from those when this article was first published on Knowledge Planet on April 15th.</p><p>There are many unexpected events in the later stages of a bull market. Although the overall bullish outlook remains unchanged, please remain vigilant against certain stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>Regarding the trade proposed by Goldman Sachs last month, we do not intend to take profits immediately; we intend to fly in the bull market bubble for a while longer.</p><p>However, we also do not recommend that individual investors who have not previously joined the trend follow suit at this time.</p><p>A simple truth: when a single conference call can attract more than 4,000 investors, it is clearly no longer a good place to build a position.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5000bb6a5f8d798bcaa39f04e9461bc7\" tg-width=\"408\" tg-height=\"384\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>preface</b></p><p>The sharp rise in commodity prices has attracted much attention in recent times. Despite repeated calls from national ministries to cool down the commodity market, it has not stopped the sharp rise in the prices of commodities such as copper, iron ore, crude oil, and agricultural products, which inevitably makes people rethink the logic behind the rise in commodities.</p><p>Sansi Society has discussed commodities and inflation several times in previous articles.</p><p>On April 13, Goldman Sachs released another major report, \"Copper is the New Oil\" (see chart below). The report analyzed the supply and demand outlook for copper from the perspective of carbon emission reduction and green energy transition, and raised the target price for copper to $11,000 for the next 12 months.</p><p>Since the report was released, copper prices have risen steadily, with an increase of 20%.</p><p>Image: The image below is a screenshot of the candlestick chart on May 5th.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d207689a018d4f149a60ec1b6f6f35f4\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"569\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>But Goldman Sachs' bullish moves did not stop there.</p><p>Before the May Day holiday, Goldman Sachs once again released a special report, continuing to be bullish on commodities.</p><p>The report is highly practical, breaking out of the traditional framework and offering many insights and reflections in light of the new policy environment, with its viewpoints being quite insightful.</p><p>Today we have extracted the core points of this Goldman Sachs report for your reference.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e75a75763fdb6d43c33bf6758adf235e\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"293\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>Article</b></p><p><b>1) Commodities have a 13.5% upside potential.</b></p><p>In the two months leading up to the report's release (April 13), commodity prices had been consolidating (see the candlestick chart above). The reasons for the consolidation, besides digesting the previous round of gains, are more importantly fundamental factors: the re-lockdown in Europe has led to stagnant demand growth, as well as macroeconomic resistance brought about by rising interest rates and a stronger dollar.</p><p>However, these factors are now gradually reversing. Economic activity, as measured by travel metrics, is returning to an upward trajectory, especially after Europe accelerated vaccination. Meanwhile, a seasonal recovery in transportation, manufacturing, and construction has also begun and will continue to accelerate until June this year.</p><p>Figure 1: Global Travel Index by Region (left) & the US Dollar Index and Commodity Index (right)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0114a3921f19a70c8d6c5cd030bf5886\" tg-width=\"1027\" tg-height=\"348\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Commodity prices are driven by quantity (or the level of demand). When demand exceeds supply, a scarcity premium (i.e., the spot premium) appears, and this premium is difficult for the market to price in advance. Because commodity supply lacks elasticity in the short term, the extent of supply shortages in the face of upcoming large-scale demand growth is easily underestimated. Because suppliers cannot dig a new mine or grow a new crop in a few months.</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that overall commodity prices will rise by 13.5% over the next six months (compared to April 28, when the report was released), with oil prices reaching $80 per barrel (CME group' WTI crude oil price at $75 per barrel) and copper prices (CME group ticker symbol HG) reaching $11,000 per ton.</p><p>Figure: Goldman Sachs' price forecast table for major commodities</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>2) Tightening supply and demand support spot premiums</b></p><p>Since the surge in economic activity was fully anticipated by the market, why didn't commodity prices immediately reflect this? (Cashing out has already begun this month)</p><p>Before the commodity spot premium can be sustained, inventory reduction will inevitably occur. If the spot price is higher than the forward price, the surplus inventory of physical goods will be released and sold at the higher spot price, pushing the market back to its initial level (Figure 2).</p><p>Figure 2: Destocking and Price Curve</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/793f9e6761c22130c4fcc177e6735efd\" tg-width=\"784\" tg-height=\"508\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, only physical shortages can sustain spot premiums. Currently, more than half of the commodity markets have spot premiums, especially in agricultural products (Figure 3). The spot premium rate of commodities on major exchanges such as CME, ICE, and LME has reached a 15-year high (Figure 4).</p><p>Figure 3: Commodity spot premium rate</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/fcc075f153ff86f0b4b3a58b0376c42f\" tg-width=\"518\" tg-height=\"378\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Figure 4: Global commodity spot premium rates</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/43262a854e47779ee6ff339a88e6de03\" tg-width=\"631\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs believes that the continued spot premium indicates that the commodity market is experiencing insufficient inventory and a tightening spot market.</p><p><b>3) The wealth gap and the commodity bull market</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the shortage of commodities will not only affect the entire commodities industry, but also multiple regions and industries, from the United States, China and Europe to construction, automobiles and retail. The surge in demand is everywhere, and the core reason is that policymakers are more inclined to solve social problems than to focus on macroeconomic stability.</p><p>From the EU Recovery Fund allocating 50% of its funds to Italy and Spain to President Biden’s latest economic stimulus package, low-income families have clearly received policy favoritism. Over the past month, Powell has visited homeless people in Washington multiple times and frequently mentioned “forgotten corners” of the economy, indicating that the Federal Reserve’s policy focus has shifted towards employment and is more concerned with the balance of economic recovery than inflation.</p><p>Policies that address income and wealth inequality transfer the excess savings of a few high-income households to low-income households with a higher marginal propensity to consume, whether through debt, taxation, or other means, almost always ensure strong demand growth, which is precisely what underlies the overheated economy and real inflationary pressures. This can be seen everywhere in the United States, from rising gasoline demand to meat consumption increasing demand for grain feed.</p><p>Image: American residents primarily consume chicken, and the price of boneless chicken breast in the United States has recently doubled.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/09adea1a029ae67905475213f9709bf9\" tg-width=\"625\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It is not difficult to see that every major commodity bull market and economic inflation in history has been accompanied by populist policies that reduce people's income, increase wealth inequality, and redistribute wealth (Figure 5).</p><p>Figure 5: Narrowing the income gap mainly during periods of economic overheating</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/feae6950164428c16dddb04dde09fe33\" tg-width=\"754\" tg-height=\"395\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>4) China is no longer the only source of growth</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the commodity bull market of the first decade of this century was the result of global redistribution.</p><p>After China joined the WTO, as manufacturing jobs and wages flowed from the West to China, income and wealth shifted from American workers to a large number of low-paid Chinese workers.</p><p>Although multinational corporations have profited handsomely, the Western working class has also been impacted. The loss of jobs has accelerated the decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate, while at the same time, demand from China has begun to boom (Figure 6).</p><p>Figure 6: US-China Labor Market and Commodity Bull Market</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ed6517258040a669a3d62731f3f6f12f\" tg-width=\"1036\" tg-height=\"322\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It's not just government-led infrastructure projects; Chinese households have also begun to buy large quantities of physical goods after gaining new income, just as low-income households in the United States and Europe did in the late 1960s and 1970s.</p><p>Under this trend, China has become the dominant force in commodity demand over the past 20 years, and China has also become synonymous with commodity demand. Many investors regard Chinese demand trends – whether in terms of credit, policy, or trade – as a leading indicator of commodity prices.</p><p>However, after two decades of record export-led growth, the 'arbitrage window' between China and the West has largely closed. Not only is real wage growth in China 22 times faster than in the United States, but policymakers on both sides of the Pacific are also beginning to realize the drawbacks of this 'open arbitrage'.</p><p>On the one hand, Trump's protectionist trade policies are aimed at addressing job losses and wage stagnation in the U.S. manufacturing sector. On the other hand, China is also tired of the high environmental costs it incurs in dealing with the world's waste and producing highly polluting products. In a series of policies introduced over the past three years, China has closed its doors to imports of foreign waste and cut capacity in highly polluting and energy-intensive industries such as steel to improve the quality of life for its residents.</p><p>These policies will not stop China's economic growth, but they will slow China's demand for physical goods. As China gradually shifts towards an information-based, renewable energy-dominated economy, it will no longer be the sole major source of growth in commodity demand over the next decade (Figure 7).</p><p>Figure 7: Major Sources of Future Commodity Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6857fd14772a6f89394c6a7434fbf128\" tg-width=\"1016\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>5) Decarbonization becomes the keynote of macroeconomic policy</b></p><p>From Biden's Green New Deal to China's industrial policies based on carbon emission reduction and energy transition, \"decarbonization\" is becoming the global macroeconomic policy tone, which means that the left-tail risk of green capital expenditure has been greatly reduced.</p><p>When Biden wrapped up his climate summit last month, he focused on how green capital spending would create jobs, not unlike past power infrastructure projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority under the New Deal, which also addressed both environmental and social issues at the time.</p><p>Extending to trade policy, following areas related to traditional protectionist policies such as agriculture, technology transfer, and manufacturing employment, the United States, China, and Europe have all begun to focus their trade policy debates on carbon border taxes and strategic competitiveness.</p><p>In fact, \"carbon security\" is now becoming an important issue for a country—do countries have the opportunity to acquire low-carbon technologies and raw materials to develop key green industries within their countries?</p><p>According to the attitudes of the Biden administration and the Chinese government, industries that cannot decarbonize are at risk before the imposition of a carbon emissions tax.</p><p>While setting provincial emissions targets, China has also set caps on national emissions capacity, laying the foundation for tightening commodity supplies.</p><p>Among industrial metals, steel (accounting for 17% of China's carbon emissions) and aluminum (accounting for 4% of China's carbon emissions) were most affected (Figure 8).</p><p>Unlike the supply-side reforms of 2016, the long-term nature of the decarbonization target means that capacity constraints will persist, thus having a more lasting impact on fundamentals and prices.</p><p>Figure 8: Main sources of carbon emissions in China</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ae2613c479ee4e2a82dd9ab00f2d8f96\" tg-width=\"1011\" tg-height=\"413\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>6) Economic restart and oil price reassessment</b></p><p>Over the past six months, global crude oil demand has remained at around 95 million barrels per day (see chart below). Goldman Sachs predicts a sharp rebound in global crude oil demand in the coming months (Figure 9).</p><p>Figure 9: Global crude oil demand will rebound sharply in the second quarter.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3c0daa427227ee5704db352496678890\" tg-width=\"502\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>First, the impact of the pandemic on economic/travel activities is diminishing due to more targeted pandemic prevention policies and a continued increase in vaccinations. There is clear evidence that countries with leading vaccination rates (the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom) are traveling more. For example, gasoline demand in the United States is approaching 2019 levels (Figure 10), and aviation fuel demand has also increased by 20% since March.</p><p>Figure 10: US Gasoline Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e979bd8b0d58e5f3f2c757004bab8197\" tg-width=\"816\" tg-height=\"834\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>In addition, the epidemics in South America and Europe have also reached a turning point, and the growth rate of the epidemic in India has finally slowed down.</p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs expects global oil demand to increase significantly starting in June, from the current 94.5 million barrels per day to 99 million barrels per day in the third quarter.</p><p>As the pace of vaccination accelerates in Europe, pent-up travel demand will be released. In particular, the easing of international travel restrictions starting in May is expected to lead to a recovery of 1.5 million barrels per day in global aviation fuel demand (although it is still 30% lower than pre-pandemic levels).</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that Brent crude oil prices will reach $80 per barrel in the next six months, and CME group' WTI crude oil prices will reach $75 per barrel.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>7) Copper is the new oil</b></p><p>Finally, we return to the central theme of this report: 'Copper is the new oil'.</p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that green capital spending is the theme of the next commodity supercycle, with copper being a top priority.</p><p>However, what is worrying is that copper is facing supply pressure due to severe underinvestment. After experiencing the trauma of the price crash in the mid-2010s, copper miners have been cautious about increasing capital support, and are now just over two years away from the peak of copper supply.</p><p>Goldman Sachs pointed out that a record high in copper prices is the only way to solve the supply crisis. Just as oil exhibited during the commodity super bull market of the first decade of the 21st century.</p><p>Goldman Sachs estimates that the green revolution will spur the strongest decade of growth in copper demand history, with the share of green demand rising from 3% now to 16% by 2030 (Figure 11).</p><p>Figure 11: Changes in Copper Demand and Share of Green Energy Capacity</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5a149e30db025e20fed7325e1dcfe0c1\" tg-width=\"1034\" tg-height=\"372\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Since last year, the stimulus policies accompanying the pandemic have supported a demand recovery despite stagnant supply (China has contributed significantly), leading to a further intensification of the copper deficit. These dynamics will peak just as the copper market experiences its largest medium- to long-term deficit in history.</p><p>The Chinese spot market is currently in a brief period of weakness, providing investors with a short buying window (this report was first published in mid-last month) until destocking is completed and replenishment begins, which will continue into the second half of the year.</p><p>Against this backdrop, Goldman Sachs has raised its copper price target for the next 12 months to $11,000/ton, compared to $11,875/ton in 2022, $12,000/ton in 2023, $14,000/ton in 2024, and $15,000/ton in 2025.</p><p>However, it should be noted that within a month of Goldman Sachs releasing its report, copper prices had risen by more than 20%. Although the long-term outlook remains positive, the short-term gains are relatively large.</p><p><b>8) Are the agricultural products overheated?</b></p><p>It's not just copper. The tightening supply outlook for agricultural products, coupled with a surge in Chinese imports and severe weather in Brazil and the United States, led to further increases in grain and oilseed prices in April, with corn prices exceeding $6.50 per bushel and soybeans exceeding $15 per bushel, the highest prices since the drought in early 2010 (Figure 12).</p><p>Figure 12: Agricultural product price increases (Data from the CME website, as of April 28, prices are much higher today)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f45b49342b1bf36ccd462d062b25e6c2\" tg-width=\"643\" tg-height=\"277\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Following this surge in grain prices, the market will face two prospects. If the U.S. crop harvest is poor in the summer (a freeze warning has been issued in the U.S. corn belt, and 8% of planted crops are at risk of early damage), inventories will drop to extremely low levels, and prices will need to rise further first to suppress demand. Then, the expected yield after expanding the planting area may bring corn and soybean prices down to $4.50 and $13.50, respectively.</p><p>In addition, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that rising ethanol consumption and strong demand for soybean oil have boosted soybean crushing profits. Therefore, at current price levels, it is difficult to maintain market equilibrium by suppressing demand for older crops.</p><p>Given the extremely tight supply and demand of soybeans in the United States, and the recent better performance of new corn prices than soybeans, which will lead to a shift in crop planting area towards corn (Figure 13), this indicates that soybean futures prices (the CME soybean futures price expiring in November used by Goldman Sachs) will catch up with the increase in corn prices in the coming months.</p><p>Figure 13: Soybean/Corn Price Ratio</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/1222688aa1ac4b2958d90ff1a1554bfe\" tg-width=\"529\" tg-height=\"414\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Goldman Sachs has raised its recent corn price target to $7.30 per bushel to reflect reduced competition from Brazilian exports in the summer.</p><p>Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs raised its soybean price forecasts for the next 6 months and 12 months to $14.80 and $14.00, respectively, to reflect the impact of limited planting area expansion.</p><p>Similarly, based on severe cold weather in winter wheat-producing areas and the substitution effect of wheat for corn, Goldman Sachs raised its wheat target prices for March, June, and December to $7.40, $7.30, and $7.20, respectively.</p><p>In addition, Goldman Sachs is optimistic about cotton prices, citing the recent low cotton prices that will lead to a large-scale reduction in cotton planting area.</p><p>However, in the past few days, CME soybean, corn, and wheat futures prices have all exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target price. Whether the market is overbought or Goldman Sachs is being conservative is for readers to consider.</p><p><b>9) The battle for digital currencies</b></p><p>Since early March, Bitcoin has stagnated relative to gold (Figure 14), and Goldman Sachs believes there are two main reasons behind this:</p><p>First, due to the surge in global COVID-19 cases, risk sentiment has become more cautious, the market has returned to favoring defensive assets, and risky assets are losing momentum.</p><p>Figure 14: Bitcoin Gold Price Ratio (Shallow) & Goldman Sachs Risk Appetite Indicator (Deep)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/182c60f92df9d71310a21c4fa0eae0ca\" tg-width=\"511\" tg-height=\"329\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Secondly, Bitcoin has given way to other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH), highlighting the fact that competition among cryptocurrencies for store-of-value dominance still exists, and holding Bitcoin adds an additional source of risk.</p><p>Traditional long-term stores of value, such as gold, art, diamonds, wine, and collectibles, have use value in addition to being stores of value. Use value is important because utility demand can absorb fluctuations caused by investment demand, thus smoothing out price fluctuations, which means that asset prices are unlikely to be zero. Therefore, it is too early for Bitcoin and gold to compete for safe-haven demand, but the two can coexist.</p><p>While Bitcoin has benefited from loose liquidity, its high energy consumption, lack of practical value, and weak ESG score make its store of value needs easily replaced by another, better-designed cryptocurrency.</p><p>Bitcoin has significantly underperformed Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, this year, with Ethereum (ETH) prices continuing to hit new highs after the May Day holiday.</p><p>It's not just the price; Ethereum's trading volume is also climbing. Since CME group (CME) launched ETH futures in February, the product's trading volume and open interest have continued to climb (Figure 15), indicating that market acceptance of ETH is increasing.</p><p>Figure 15: ETH futures trading volume and open interest</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/dc492e64bba846c7aa673c29b59f3d32\" tg-width=\"571\" tg-height=\"319\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Note: Data is from the CME website and is current as of April 28.</p><p>The following table shows the basic elements of ETH futures in CME group.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f072fb91a65dbd153a4dbe30a308111c\" tg-width=\"428\" tg-height=\"162\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>We've discussed some of the hot applications of Ethereum before, but this rapid increase still exceeded our expectations.</p><p>Overall, Goldman Sachs' two reports are quite good in terms of both theoretical viewpoints and practical results.</p><p>However, please remain vigilant against these stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>The more confusing the distinction between a bubble and a bull market, the more trouble there will be.</p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> source：<a href=\"https://www.gelonghui.com/p/464985\">格隆汇</a></p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/bac730ff187b3128886ce735bf21c2b8","relate_stocks":{".DJI":"道琼斯"},"source_url":"https://www.gelonghui.com/p/464985","is_english":false,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/6b8fa6424aebe95f6781d04ef17a1852","article_id":"1190822039","content_text":"作者：三思宏观人‍‍本文的核心逻辑乃基于高盛上月的看多报告，但由于近期大宗商品涨幅过快，不少标的仅一个月就超过了高盛提出的一年目标涨幅。因此，我们现在的观点，已与本文在4月15日首发在知识星球的时候有所不同。牛市后期幺蛾子多，虽然整体看多的方向不变，但对于某些涨幅过快的标的，大家请保持警惕。对于高盛上月提出的这套交易，我们并不打算马上止盈，打算再在牛市泡沫中飞一会。但是，我们也不建议之前没有上车的个人投资者在这个时间点还来跟风参与。一个简单的道理：当一次电话会议就能吸引4000多位投资人参会的时候，已明显不再是一个好的建仓点。前言过去一段时间，大宗商品价格大幅上涨备受关注。尽管国家部委多次发声给大宗商品市场降温，却依然挡不住铜、铁矿石、原油和农产品等大宗商品价格的猛烈上涨，这不免让人重新思考大宗商品上涨的逻辑。关于大宗商品和通胀，三思社已在往期内容中有过多次讨论了。在4月13号，高盛再次发布了一篇重磅报告《铜是新的石油》（见下图），报告从碳减排、绿色能源转型的角度分析铜的供需前景，并将未来12个月铜目标价提升至11000美元。报告发布后，铜价一路上涨至今，涨幅达20%。图：下图为5月5日K线截图。但高盛的多头动作并未止步于此。五一节前，高盛再一次发布专题报告，继续看多大宗商品。该报告实战性较强，跳出了传统框架，结合新的政策环境提出了不少洞见和思考，观点颇具启发性。今天我们把这篇高盛报告的核心观点提炼出来，供各位参考。 正文1）大宗商品存在13.5%的上涨空间在报告（4月13日）发布前的两个多月，大宗商品的价格一直在盘整（见上图的K线走势）。盘整的原因，除了消化上一轮的涨幅以外，更重要还是基本面因素：欧洲重新封锁导致需求增长停滞以及利率上升、美元走强带来的宏观阻力。然而现在，这些因素正在逐步逆转。以出行指标衡量的经济活动正在重回上升轨迹，尤其在欧洲加速接种疫苗之后，这种势头越发强劲。与此同时，交通运输、制造业和建筑业的季节性复苏也已开始，而且会在今年六月前持续加速。图1：全球各地区出行指数（左）&美元指数与大宗商品指数（右）大宗商品价格是由量（或者需求水平）驱动的，当需求量超过供应量，稀缺性溢价（即现货溢价）就出现了，而这种溢价又很难在事前被市场定价。由于大宗商品供应在短期内缺乏弹性，面对即将到来的大规模需求增长，供应不足的程度很容易被低估。因为供给方不可能在几个月时间里就新挖一座矿或者新种一种农作物。高盛预计，在未来6个月，大宗商品的整体价格存在13.5%的上行空间（相较于报告发布的4月28日），油价将达到80美元/桶（芝商所旗下的WTI原油价格为75美元/桶），铜价（芝商所代码为HG）将达到1.1万美元/吨。图：高盛对主要大宗商品的价格预测表2）供需趋紧支撑现货溢价既然经济活动激增已被市场充分预期，那为什么大宗商品价格没有立即反映这一点?（这个月已开始兑现）在大宗商品现货溢价得以持续之前，必定会出现去库存。如果即期价格高于远期，实物商品的库存盈余将会出库，在较高的即期价格下被出售，将市场推回到初始水平(图2)。图2：去库存与价格曲线因此，只有实物短缺才能使现货溢价持续，而目前超过一半的大宗商品市场存在现货溢价，尤其农产品较为突出(图3)，CME、ICE、LME等几大交易所的大宗商品现货溢价率已经创下15年新高(图4)。图3：大宗商品现货溢价率图4：全球大宗商品现货溢价率因此，高盛认为：持续的现货溢价表明，大宗商品市场正处于库存不足、现货趋紧的状态。3）贫富差距与大宗商品牛市高盛认为，大宗商品的紧俏不仅会波及整个大宗行业，还会影响从美国、中国和欧洲到建筑、汽车和零售等多个地区和行业。需求井喷的状况随处可见，核心原因是决策者更倾向于解决社会问题，而不是聚焦宏观稳定。从《欧盟复苏基金》将50%的资金分配给意大利和西班牙，到总统拜登最新经济刺激方案，低收入家庭明显受到了政策倾斜。过去一个月，鲍威尔多次访问华盛顿的无家可归者，频繁提及经济中“被遗忘的角落”，表明美联储政策重心已经向就业倾斜，更关注经济复苏的均衡性而不是通胀问题。解决收入和财富不平等的政策将少数高收入家庭的多余储蓄，转移到边际消费倾向更高的低收入家庭，无论是通过负债、征税还是其他方式实现，它几乎总能确保强劲的需求增长，而这正是经济过热和实物通胀压力背后的原因。这一点在美国随处可见，从汽油需求增长到肉类消费提高谷物饲料需求。图：美国居民以鸡肉消费为主，而近期美国的无骨鸡胸肉已涨价一倍。不难发现，历史上每一次大的商品牛市和经济通胀，都无一例外的伴随着百姓收入减少、财富不平等、财富再分配的民粹主义政策(图5)。图5：缩小收入差距主要在经济过热时期4）中国不再是唯一增长源高盛认为，本世纪头十年的大宗商品牛市，就是全球再分配的结果。中国加入世贸组织后，随着制造业工作机会和工资从西方流向中国，收入和财富从美国工人转向大量低报酬的中国工人。虽然跨国企业从中获利颇丰，但西方的劳工阶层也受到冲击。就业机会的流失加速了美国劳动参与率下降，而与此同时，来自中国的需求开始繁荣(图6)。图6：中美劳动力市场与大宗商品牛市不只是政府主导的基建工程，中国家庭在获得了新收入后，也开始大量购买实物商品，正如上世纪60年代末和70年代美国和欧洲低收入家庭所做的那样。在这趋势下，中国在过去20年里成为了大宗商品需求的霸主，中国也成了大宗商品需求的代名词。许多投资者将中国需求动向——无论是信贷、政策还是贸易——视为衡量大宗商品价格的前瞻指标。然而，在经历了二十年创纪录的出口导向型增长之后，中西方之间的‘套利窗口‘已基本关闭。不仅中国的实际工资增长速度比美国快22倍，太平洋两岸的政策制定者也开始意识到这种'开放套利'的弊端。一方面，特朗普的贸易保护主义政策旨在应对美国制造业就业流失和工资停滞。另一方面，中国也已厌倦了为处理世界垃圾和生产高污染产品所承担的高昂环境成本。在过去三年颁布的一系列政策中，中国关闭了洋垃圾进口的大门，并削减高污染高耗能行业譬如钢铁行业的产能，以提高居民的生活质量。这些政策不会阻止中国的经济增长，但它将减缓中国对实物商品的需求。随着中国逐渐转向以信息为基础、可再生能源为主导的经济体，下个十年的中国，将不再是大宗商品需求的唯一主要增长源(图7)。图7：未来大宗商品需求主要来源国5）脱碳成为宏观政策的基调从拜登的绿色新政到中国基于碳减排和能源转型的产业政策，“脱碳”正成为全球宏观的政策基调，这意味着绿色资本支出的左尾风险大大降低。拜登在上个月的气候峰会做总结时，重点谈到了绿色资本支出将如何创造就业，这与过去的电力基础设施项目没有什么不同，比如罗斯福新政中的田纳西河谷管理局，它当时也同时解决了环境问题和社会问题。延伸到贸易政策，自农业、技术转让和制造业就业等与传统保护主义政策相关的领域之后，美国、中国和欧洲都开始将贸易政策的争论焦点围绕碳边境税和战略竞争力展开。事实上，“碳安全”现在正成为一个国家的重要问题——各国是否有机会获得低碳技术和原材料，以发展国内的关键绿色行业?根据拜登政府和中国政府的态度，征收碳排放税之前，无法脱碳的行业都存在风险。中国在制定省级排放目标的同时，也对全国排放能力设定了上限，这为大宗商品供应收紧奠定了基础。在工业金属中，钢铁(占中国碳排放的17%)和铝(占中国碳排放的4%)受影响最大(图8)。与2016年的供给侧改革不同，脱碳目标的长期性质意味着产能限制将持续存在，进而对基本面和价格产生更持久的影响。图8：中国碳排放主要来源6）经济重启与油价重估过去6个月，全球原油需求水平一直保持在约9500万桶/天的水平（下图）。高盛预计未来几个月全球原油需求将出现大幅反弹(图9)图9：全球原油需求二季度将大幅反弹首先，疫情对经济/出行活动的影响正在减弱，原因是防疫政策更有针对性和疫苗接种持续增加。有明确的证据表明，疫苗接种领先的国家(美国、以色列、英国)出行活动更多，例如，美国的汽油需求已接近2019年的水平(图10)，航空的燃油需求也自3月份以来增长了20%。图10：美国汽油需求此外，南美和欧洲的疫情也已出现拐点，印度疫情也终于增速放缓。因此，高盛预计6月份开始全球石油需求将大幅增加，从目前9450万桶/天增加到第三季度9900万桶/天。随着欧洲疫苗接种步伐加快，被抑制的旅行需求将得到释放。特别是，预计5月份开始的国际旅行限制放松，将导致全球航空油需求恢复150万桶/天(尽管仍比疫情前的水平低30%)。高盛预计，在未来6个月，布伦特原油价格将达到80美元/桶，芝商所旗下的WTI原油价格将达到75美元/桶。7）铜是新的石油终于回到了本报告的中心主旨：'铜是新的石油'。高盛认为绿色资本支出是下一轮大宗商品超级周期的主旨，而铜则是重中之重。但令人担忧的是，铜正面临严重投资不足的供应压力。在经历了2010年代中期价格暴跌带来的创伤后，铜矿企业对增加资本开支持谨慎态度，现在距离铜矿供应峰值只有两年多的时间。高盛指出，铜价飙出历史新高是解决供应危机的唯一途径。就像石油在21世纪头十年的大宗商品超级牛市中所呈现的那样。高盛估计绿色革命将催生铜需求历史上最强的十年增长期，绿色需求份额将从现在的3%上升到2030年的16%(图11)。图11：绿色能源产能的铜需求量及份额变化去年以来，相伴于疫情的刺激政策在供应停滞的情况下支撑了需求复苏（中国贡献很大），导致铜赤字进一步强化，这些动态正好将在铜市场出现有史以来最大的中长期赤字时达到顶峰。中国现货市场目前处于短暂疲软阶段，为投资者提供了短暂的买入窗口（本报告于上月中旬首发），直到去库存结束并开始补库存，后者将持续到下半年。在此背景下，高盛将未来12个月铜目标价提高到1.1万美元/吨，2022年为11875美元/吨，2023年为1.2万美元/吨，2024年为1.4万美元/吨，2025年为1.5万美元/吨。但需注意的是，在高盛发报告后的一个月之内，铜价已涨幅逾20%。虽然仍长期看好，但短期涨幅较大。8）农产品过热了么？不止于铜。由于中国进口激增再叠加巴西和美国的恶劣天气，农产品的供应前景也日益趋紧，这导致4月份谷物和油籽价格进一步上涨，玉米价格超过6.5美元/蒲式耳，大豆超过15美元/蒲式耳，创下自2010年初干旱以来的最高价格(图12)。图12：农产品价格涨幅（数据来自CME官网，数据截至4月28日，今天的价格又高了不少）这次谷物价格大涨后，市场将面临着两种前景。如果夏季美国农作物收成不好（美国玉米带出现冰冻预警，8%的种植作物面临早期受损风险），库存将降至极低水平，价格需要先上涨更多以压抑需求；然后预期扩大种植面积后的产量可能又会使玉米和大豆价格分别降至4.5美元和13.5美元。此外，美国能源情报署(EIA)报告称，乙醇消费量不断上升、豆油需求强劲，这拉升了大豆压榨的利润。因此，在当前的价格水平上很难通过压抑旧作物需求来维持市场均衡。由于美国大豆供需也极度偏紧，以及最近新玉米价格表现好于大豆将导致作物种植面积向玉米倾斜(图13)，这预示着未来几个月，大豆期货价格（高盛用的11月到期的CME大豆期货价格）也将迎头赶上玉米的涨幅。图13：大豆/玉米价格比高盛将近期玉米目标价上调至7.30美元/蒲式耳，以反映夏季来自巴西出口的竞争减少；同时高盛将未来6个月和12个月大豆预测价上调至14.80美元和14.00美元，以反映种植面积扩张受限的影响。同理，基于冬小麦产区出现严寒天气以及小麦对玉米的替代效应，高盛将未来3/6/12月的小麦目标价上调至7.40/7.30/7.20美元。此外，高盛还看好棉花价格，理由是近期棉价低迷会导致棉花种植面积大规模减少。但这几天的CME大豆、玉米、小麦期货价格均已超过了高盛的一年目标价，是市场超买了还是高盛保守了，这就交给各位读者思考了。9）数字货币的争斗自3月初以来，比特币相对于黄金表现已经停滞(图14)，高盛认为这背后主要有两个原因：首先，由于全球新冠肺炎病例激增，风险情绪变得更加谨慎，市场重新青睐防御性资产，风险资产正在失去动能。图14：比特币黄金价格比（浅）& 高盛风险偏好指标（深）其次，比特币让位于以太币(ETH)等其他加密货币，这凸显了一个事实：即加密货币之间对价值储存主导地位的竞争仍然存在，持有比特币增加了额外风险来源。传统的长期价值储存方式如黄金、艺术品、钻石、葡萄酒和收藏品，除了作为价值储存方式外，都具有使用价值。使用价值之所以重要，是因为实用需求能够吸收因投资需求带来的波动，从而抚平价格波动，这意味着资产价格不太可能为零。因此，比特币与黄金争夺避险需求还为时过早，但两者可以共存。虽然比特币受益于流动性宽松，但由于其高能耗，缺少实用价值和较弱的ESG评分，这使得它的价值存储需求很容易被另一种设计更好的加密货币替代。今年以来，比特币表现明显跑输第二大数字货币以太币，在五一假期结束后，以太坊(ETH)价格持续创下新高。不只是价格，以太坊的交易量也在攀升。自芝商所（CME）2月份推出ETH期货以来，该产品成交量和持仓量持续攀升（图15），这表明市场对ETH的接受度正在不断上升。图15：ETH期货成交量和持仓量注：数据来自CME官网，数据截至4月28日下表为芝商所ETH期货的基本要素关于以太坊的一些热点应用，我们在前文有过讨论，但这么迅猛的涨幅还是超出我们预期了。总的来说，高盛的这两篇报告无论是理论观点还是实战效果都是不错的。但是，对于这些涨幅过快的标的，请大家务必保持警惕。越是泡沫与牛市傻傻分不清楚的时候，幺蛾子就越多。","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{".DJI":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":3574,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":325912033,"gmtCreate":1615856987322,"gmtModify":1704787503114,"author":{"id":"3577221458132518","authorId":"3577221458132518","name":"更深得蓝","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577221458132518","authorIdStr":"3577221458132518"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"mark","listText":"mark","text":"mark","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/325912033","repostId":"1147867743","repostType":4,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":3670,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"hots":[{"id":177639298,"gmtCreate":1627206212214,"gmtModify":1703485555231,"author":{"id":"3577221458132518","authorId":"3577221458132518","name":"更深得蓝","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577221458132518","authorIdStr":"3577221458132518"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"mark","listText":"mark","text":"mark","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/177639298","repostId":"1160968458","repostType":4,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":3173,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":154063268,"gmtCreate":1625461054754,"gmtModify":1703742175410,"author":{"id":"3577221458132518","authorId":"3577221458132518","name":"更深得蓝","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577221458132518","authorIdStr":"3577221458132518"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"?","listText":"?","text":"?","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/154063268","repostId":"1172774847","repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1172774847","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624936981,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1172774847?lang=en_US&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 11:23","market":"hk","language":"zh","title":"More than just printing money: This article is enough for modern monetary theory.","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1172774847","media":"动物精神Animal...","summary":"随着全球货币政策在零利率陷阱中越陷越深，叠加新冠疫情带来的全球大放水，有关现代货币理论（MMT）的探讨近来愈加兴起，且在传播过程中引起了非常大的争议。在本文中，我们会尝试在保持逻辑严谨性的前提下，用比","content":"<p>As global monetary policy sinks deeper into the zero-interest-rate trap, coupled with the massive global easing brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, relevant...<b>The discussion of modern monetary theory (MMT) has become increasingly popular recently, and it has caused great controversy during its dissemination.</b>In this context,<b>We will try to explore the basic framework, ideological purpose, and practicality of modern monetary theory in a relatively simple and easy-to-understand way, while maintaining logical rigor.</b></p><p><b>I. Overview</b></p><p>Contrary to popular belief, the currently popular modern monetary theory is not \"modern,\" or rather, not new at all. In fact,<b>Modern monetary theory originated from the post-Keynesian school and believes that it is the best in-depth interpretation and follower of Keynesian theory.</b>However, the main ideas of modern monetary theory remained unpopular and even marginalized for nearly 60 years after Keynes, and only in recent years have they finally found a place in international political and economic discussions. Of course, this shift is also closely related to the predicament currently encountered by mainstream macroeconomics. After all, macroeconomics has not won the Nobel Prize for many years and needs to be combined with practice to find new directions. Regardless, criticism of modern monetary theory persists, as the famous commentary states:<b>\"The correct parts of MMT aren't new and the new parts aren't correct.\" What they are right about modern monetary theory is not new, and what is new is not correct.</b></p><p>If we could summarize the most important viewpoint of modern monetary theory in one sentence, it would be very simple:</p><p><i><b>For countries with their own currencies, their governments do not need to worry about their own debts and expenditures, because they can always pay the interest on all their debts by printing money directly by the government. Therefore, the only constraint on how much money the government prints is inflation. As long as the needs and purposes created by printing money can be met by existing labor and equipment, keeping inflation within a controllable range, then the government of this country can support all its purposes and expenditures by printing money directly.</b></i></p><p>Upon seeing this, I think most people's first reaction would be dismissive. However, events such as the Latin American crisis, Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and the European debt crisis immediately come to mind as counterexamples. Calm down. The core purpose of modern monetary theory is not to try to prove that governments can print money and spend indefinitely without any consequences.<b>In the next paragraph, we will outline the important viewpoints and logical frameworks of modern monetary theory for your discussion.</b></p><p><b>II. Theoretical perspectives</b></p><p><b>II.1 Tax-Driven Money</b></p><p>Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s and the decoupling of the US dollar from gold, the exploration of the core value of fiat currencies has never reached a clear conclusion.<b>Modern monetary theory has established a complete theoretical system based on its unique interpretation of the core attributes and value of money.</b></p><p><b>Why would anyone be willing to accept the government's legal tender?</b>People usually just passively accept this and rarely think about it. When the government is building roads and aircraft carriers, when the central bank is buying Treasury Bond and quantitative easing, are they actually paying out currency from a certain account? The answer is clearly no.</p><p><b>So why can the government create money out of thin air like this?</b></p><p>Hyman Minsky once said, \"Everyone can create money, but the question is whether it will be accepted.\" You can create a \"currency\" denominated in yuan by writing \"I owe 10 yuan\" on a piece of paper, but the question is whether you can get others to accept it—for example, whether someone is willing to accept the IOU and sell you a pancake.</p><p><b>MMT believes that the core reason the government is able to do this is that we all have to pay taxes to the government.</b>Note that in most cases, governments only accept their own currency when taxing, so in order to avoid punishment for tax evasion (such as imprisonment), citizens of a country must find a way to obtain the government's currency to pay taxes. The point here is,<b>Even if it cannot easily force people to use their own legal tender in private transactions, governments can still force people to use legal tender to pay taxes when they levy taxes.</b>This fact will naturally create a huge demand for the country's fiat currency among the population. In conclusion,<b>In order for the issued currency to be accepted, the government does not actually need to store precious metals or foreign currency, nor does it need unnecessary laws to guarantee it. It simply needs to force people to pay taxes in fiat currency.</b></p><p><b>Therefore, we can conclude that \"tax-driven currency\" means that if rulers have the right to levy taxes, they can create demand for fiat currency. Because it is easy for the government to \"ensure that people use legal tender when paying the government\".</b></p><p>Building on the above discussion, it becomes clear that, from the perspective of the currency issuer, the government established the monetary system to allow resources to flow to the public sector, and this was facilitated by the demand for money (paper printed by the government) created by taxes.<b>It can be said that governments establish taxes not only to increase fiscal revenue, but also to encourage people to sell labor, resources, and products in order to obtain the paper (money) they print. Most people believe that government taxes are only for generating revenue to cover fiscal expenditures. However, from an MMT perspective, the purpose of taxation is very subtly different.</b></p><p>It is well known that the government will not spend all the \"necessary funds,\" but the public's willingness to sell more labor, resources, or products in order to obtain money may be exhausted (for a similar view, please refer to another article on the official account, which is not as terrible as the financial crisis). In order to be able to continuously transfer resources, the government can try to raise the price paid (which, if it fails, will trigger inflation) or increase taxes. But in any case, we must remember,<b>In MMT's understanding, the main purpose of increasing taxes is not to generate revenue, but to stimulate demand for money.</b></p><p>In this way,<b>MMT self-consistently provides a theoretical framework for government money, taxation, and inflation.</b>We can simply put it this way: the government creates demand for the currency it prints through taxation. The ability to collect taxes determines the government's ability to transfer resources, which in turn determines the creditworthiness of the government's currency. The level of this creditworthiness determines the final demand for the currency, thus directly affecting the nominal inflation of the currency. If the public accepts this currency, inflation will be controlled; otherwise, it will enter a negative feedback spiral of rising inflation—a further reduction in the credit of the currency and the government.</p><p><b>This framework actually exists in reality.</b>The credibility of the US dollar is built on the United States' leading global comprehensive strength since World War II, on the price settlement mechanism for almost all commodities, on the existence of aircraft carriers, Tesla, Google, and Coca-Cola, and even on the ability to require all residents of the world, regardless of nationality, to file a w8ben form to file taxes with the US government when investing in US dollar assets. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government has printed an unprecedented amount of money in the past two years, causing some people who are not familiar with the system to panic that the credibility of the dollar will be lost and the dollar will become waste paper.<b>Little did they know that the US dollar was inherently worthless paper, and it was the facts mentioned above that gave worthless paper credibility. If these capabilities of the United States do not change, then the fundamental credibility of the dollar will not be destroyed.</b>Those who hastily concluded that the dollar would lose its credibility simply because the United States printed too much money are probably already busy adjusting their expectations after the recent cycle.</p><p>However, while the Federal Reserve's money printing will not shake the credibility of the US dollar, nor will it cause hyperinflation and render the dollar worthless, China's rise could shake these relative advantages of the United States. From the highest perspective, the global drama of the next 5-10 years may unfold in this dimension. Let's consider discussing this topic in other articles.</p><p>Incidentally, contrary to what many people perceive, it is easy to see that the monetary perspective under the MMT framework described above actually denies the monetary function of the currently hottest digital assets and Bitcoin (again, government and taxes drive money). Due to space limitations, we won't go into detail here. (It reminds me of the pretentiousness at the edge of Fermat's Last Theorem; we always know too much, but have the time to write down too little.)</p><p><b>II.2 The Basic Framework of Modern Monetary Theory</b></p><p>Let's explain the analytical logic of MMT in detail.</p><p>First of all, we all know that in society, one party's financial assets will always correspond to the other party's financial liabilities. thereupon<b>We can divide the world very simply into three sectors: the domestic private sector, the domestic public sector, and the \"other national sector\" made up of foreign governments, companies, and households.</b></p><p>Therefore, if we sum up the assets and liabilities of each department, the following identity will always hold:</p><p><i><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></i></p><p>This is actually a<b>accounting identity</b>It does not depend on any theoretical model. To give a perhaps enlightening example, assume that the foreign sector spends less than revenue and has a budget surplus of $50 billion, while the domestic government spends less than revenue and has a fiscal budget surplus of $20 billion. Then the above identity tells us that during the same period, the domestic private sector, which we care about most, must have a budget deficit of $50 + 20 = $70 billion.</p><p>This could create a \"dilemma\": if one of these three sectors has a surplus, then at least one other sector has a deficit.<b>In other words, no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to achieve a universal harmony in the same period of time where all the sectors we consider ideal are surplus.</b></p><p>So when we arrived here, an idea seemed to be vaguely emerging in our minds—<b>Since someone will always need to borrow money, then let's just let the government borrow it. Then everyone in our country's private sector will have the surplus and assets we most look forward to!</b></p><p>If things were that simple, we would only need accounting, not MMT.</p><p>At the beginning of the article, we said that MMTs are followers of Keynesian theory because they believe in the following conclusions that continue from Keynesianism.</p><p><b>1. From an overall economic perspective, the causal relationship in the private sector is that overall spending determines overall income (Keynesian paradox of thrift).</b></p><p>This conclusion is not very intuitive, because for each individual, income always determines expenses: for example, if you win 5 million yuan in the lottery, why don't you have to add an extra portion of meat to eat Lanzhou beef noodles tonight?</p><p>However, once we add up all individuals, we find that while individual households can clearly decide to reduce spending in order to save more money to cope with the anticipated crisis, if all households try to reduce spending, total consumption and national income will decline. At this point, companies will be forced to reduce output, lay off employees, and lower wages, which will lead to a decrease in household income. This will force family members to further reduce spending, and a cruel negative feedback loop will begin.</p><p><b>This is Keynes's \"thrift paradox,\" his most important lesson and explanation of the Great Depression—trying to save money by reducing total consumption will not only not increase savings, but will actually reduce income.</b></p><p><b>2. Social deficit spending determines the accumulation of financial wealth (savings).</b></p><p>Keynesians argued that only when a sector of the economy decides to spend more than it earns through deficits will its lender accumulate net financial wealth in the form of deficit spender liabilities.<b>That is, this decision to spend in deficit is what creates net financial wealth. Unless one party is willing to spend in deficit, others cannot do so, no matter how much they want to accumulate financial wealth.</b></p><p><b>3. The government's inability to accurately control the deficit (tax revenue) creates an \"Automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>We won't go into too much detail about the government's inability to accurately grasp deficits (we can go deeper into the Chicago School and the Laffer curve if we want), but will only discuss some more intuitive inferences.</p><p>It needs to be acknowledged that the government's capacity has limits.<b>Even the government cannot precisely control fiscal and tax revenues, which seem entirely determined by itself.</b>The government can indeed decide to spend more and raise tax rates, but when government spending and tax rates change, other social variables, such as income, sales, wealth, etc., that is, the overall tax base of society, will change accordingly. These variables are not under the control of the government.<b>Therefore, whether the fiscal budget has a deficit, a balance, or a surplus is not something the government can decide independently.</b></p><p>Combining the above identities and discussions, let's assume that we temporarily disregard the surplus of the foreign sector. When a recession hits, the domestic private sector will begin to cut spending and increase savings. This will increase the domestic private sector balance, which will directly lead to a decrease in the domestic government sector balance in the identity. As a result, the government's budget deficit will spontaneously increase. This part of the growth is not controlled by the government, but it has played a role in smoothing out the fluctuations in the balances of various sectors of society when faced with cycles. Past data also confirms this relationship—<b>This means that tax revenue grows rapidly during periods of economic prosperity and falls rapidly during periods of economic depression, making the government's fiscal budget a powerful automatic stabilizer. This is the \"automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>Therefore,<b>The best domestic policy is to pursue full employment and price stability, rather than a sustainable government deficit path or a controllable overall debt ceiling. Because the latter is mostly the result of automatic stabilizers and is not something the government can decide on its own.</b></p><p><b>4. Simple expansion of identities</b></p><p>For ease of expression, we rewrite the important identities above, introducing S (private sector savings), C (private sector consumption expenditure), I (private sector investment), T (government taxes), G (government expenditure), IM (domestic imports), and EX (domestic exports), thus obtaining...</p><p><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></p><p><b>S – C – I</b> <b>+</b> <b>T – G</b> <b>+</b> <b>IM – EX</b> <b>=0</b></p><p>At this point, we can basically draw the most important ideological conclusion of modern monetary theory:</p><p><b>If you have the tax revenue and the ability to create your own currency described in II.1, then when you face an economic downturn or negative external shocks (such as the subprime mortgage crisis or the COVID-19 crisis), you can better weather the crisis through regulation by your own government departments.</b></p><p>When a crisis comes, II.2.1 tells us that because overall private sector spending determines overall income, the most important thing is to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline, especially to avoid falling into a negative feedback loop where spending/income declines simultaneously. II.2.2 tells us that to avoid panic caused by a sharp drop in social wealth, we need a certain sector of the economy to proactively provide deficit spending. So combine them,<b>The only person likely to take on this deficit spending task is the government sector, which needs to transfer wealth to the private sector to repair the decline in overall spending.</b></p><p>The identity in II.2.4 further confirms that, in order to achieve this, domestic private sector surpluses need to be returned to the desired equilibrium level.<b>Then we should minimize our domestic government sector surpluses and our foreign sector surpluses (which, from a domestic perspective, are current account deficits).</b></p><p>But because<b>Exogenous uncertainty of exports</b>(For example, if a large economy like the United States tries to reduce imports, it may affect the income of other countries, thereby affecting its own exports to other countries around the world.)<b>The best course of action would be to reduce the surplus of our own government departments.</b>It is worth emphasizing here that under the mainstream macroeconomic view, countries should strive to pursue current account surpluses, while modern monetary theorists have conducted more in-depth theoretical discussions on foreign sector surpluses and ultimately arrived at contradictory conclusions. In other words, when the government has free control over the surplus of its own government departments, the external current account surplus is not important, which is actually the development path that the United States has actually taken since the 21st century.</p><p><b>Finally, II.1 and II.2.3 tell us that when governments expand deficits to increase private sector spending, we do not need to consider whether the deficit is too large, because sovereign countries can issue an unlimited number of currencies without affecting credit. There is no need to worry about how the deficit will shrink in the future, because when the crisis is over and the economy returns to a growth cycle, the automatic stabilizer will naturally reduce the country's deficit and return it to an equilibrium level.</b></p><p><b>When we compare the above conclusions and approaches with the way the United States and Western countries have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can immediately understand why mainstream Western economies have now opened a new paradigm in modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>Taking the United States as an example, during this COVID-19 crisis, the United States immediately ignored all the constraints of government deficit paths and debt ceilings, turned the money printing press to its limit, and launched multiple trillion-dollar government spending plans. Not only did it not set an upper limit on the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, but it also allowed the Federal Reserve to directly intervene to purchase high-yield corporate bonds and guarantee private sector deficit investment. The United States has abandoned the previous path of QE transmission through banks, directly cutting interest rates to the lower limit, while also implementing an unprecedented \"helicopter money-dropping\" approach, directly transferring funds to people's personal accounts.<b>We don't care about a flood of gold, but we must act with lightning speed to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline.</b></p><p>It can be said that, given the current situation, the paradigm of modern monetary theory has achieved very good practical results. Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US economy has not only achieved a smooth transition, but is also likely to resume growth very quickly (in 2021). It's no wonder that Yellen, the newly appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary, publicly stated that the government debt ceiling is not that important, and that ensuring that the government's annual fiscal revenue can cover Treasury Bond interest is a sustainable path.<b>It is expected that within the next 5-10 years, the paradigm of modern monetary theory will establish a firm position in the practice of Western central banks.</b></p><p><b>II.3 The Boundaries of Government Debt – The Path to Fiscal Sustainability</b></p><p><b>Inflation caused by excessive money printing and a sustainable path to government debt should be the two areas where \"traditional\" theories most concentrate their questioning of modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>First and foremost, it must be clarified that we do not believe that modern monetary theory has a very scientific and perfect explanation and response to these questions, but its answers to these questions do have some merit.</p><p>Let's start by quoting a very intuitive macroeconomic conclusion:</p><p><i><b>When an economy's interest rate r is higher than its growth rate g, its debt ratio will continue to grow. (This can be intuitively understood as the fact that the new money (g) the economy earns each year cannot repay the interest (r), so the debt ratio can only keep rising.) Therefore, if r > g is always the case, then the government's room for further increasing debt is relatively limited.</b></i></p><p>For more academic readers, you can take a closer look at James Galbraith's classic model regarding this conclusion:</p><p>△ d = -s + d * [ (r -g) / (1 + g) ]</p><p>Where d is the initial debt-to-GDP ratio, s is the ratio of fiscal surplus to GDP after deducting net interest expenses, r is the real interest rate, and g is the real GDP growth rate.</p><p><b>We can clearly see that when r < g, the debt-to-GDP ratio is also negative, meaning that debt is gradually decreasing in a healthy manner.</b></p><p>So how can this be achieved? One situation that the government can naturally control is to keep the interest rate r as low as possible, so that g is more likely to be greater than r. Therefore, in the nearly ten years following the financial crisis, we have seen a significant decline in benchmark interest rates in all countries around the world. After the COVID-19 crisis interrupted the US rate hike process, we have once again seen benchmark interest rates in all developed countries drop to a level where there is no way to lower them, which is basically zero. Meanwhile, countries such as the European Union, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland have further explored negative interest rates. This has to be said to be a result of the modern monetary theory paradigm gaining practice.</p><p>So what if r has already dropped to such a low level, and the actual growth rate g still cannot be greater than r? Friends, this is the most cutting-edge academic question that modern monetary theory is still exploring. As far as we know, the current MMT theory cannot provide a definitive answer.</p><p>It must be noted here that, despite the constraints of liquidity traps,<b>However, r is controlled by the government, and there is no absolute lower limit.</b>For example, when it feels that even 0 is not low enough, the Federal Reserve can easily announce that it will lower the benchmark interest rate to -10% overnight. When we consider situations where all immediate consumption is stimulated in this absolutely frenzied manner, we return to the fundamental difference between modern monetary theory and traditional macroeconomics: the source of government credit—government organization and tax-driven money—which is the greatest cornerstone of modern monetary theory. It can be said that at this point, what we need to face is no longer essentially an economic problem, but a sociological problem. Specifically, countries like the United States and the US dollar, which have political, technological, and military foundations, may not face any difficulties. However, in some small countries, they will face the risk of losing both regime rule and the validity of fiat currency due to the loss of trust in their currencies and governments by the public or other economies around the world. However, within the theoretical framework of MMT, there are solutions to the problem of government fiscal sustainability, but the consequences and constraints it brings may require a sociological perspective to further improve and support. (A theoretical framework similar to behavioral economics requires the introduction of psychological theories to support it.)</p><p><b>II.4 The Boundaries of Government Debt – Inflation</b></p><p>Finally, let's explore the biggest intuitive question everyone has about modern monetary theory:<b>The problem of inflation.</b></p><p>As Friedman famously said, \"Inflation is a monetary phenomenon whenever and wherever.\" So how does modern monetary theory, while proposing to lift the government spending and debt ceiling and print money on a large scale when necessary, ensure that countries do not enter a vicious spiral of self-reinforcing inflation?</p><p><b>In fact, modern monetary theory is very descriptive in answering questions related to inflation; in fact, it can be said that modern monetary theory itself is merely a description of how sovereign money operates.</b>As mentioned above, it has a good theoretical and ideological framework to explain how sovereign states and their currencies operate, but it lacks sufficient scientific and quantitative means to draw insurmountable boundaries for this way of operation.</p><p>The discussion of inflation in modern monetary theory can be roughly divided into:<b>Two directions.</b></p><p><b>The first approach avoids directly answering the inflation question, instead rejecting the current mainstream macroeconomic framework, arguing that the relationship between inflation and employment revealed by the Phelps curve can be completely avoided through government intervention.</b></p><p>The founder of this direction was the renowned economist A. Lerner and his proposals.<b>\"Functional Fiscal Theory\"</b>。 In his theory, Lerner emphasized that the government should focus on its economic function when formulating a fiscal budget, rather than adding restrictions on fiscal balance. This is a perfect match for the rejection of fiscal sustainability paths in modern monetary theory discussed in the previous section. Therefore, subsequent researchers of modern monetary theory have proposed, based on Lerner...<b>\"Employment Security/Ultimate Employer\" Model</b>。</p><p>Given that this is a brand new framework, we will not go into detail here but instead describe the main logic of this pattern intuitively.</p><p>From the above,<b>According to the framework of modern monetary theory, we know that governments can issue their own currencies indefinitely, so why not make the government the ultimate employer and promise to provide job opportunities for all qualified and willing citizens of the country?</b>In this way, the unemployment rate will be directly reduced to 0, and a moderately prosperous society will be directly achieved.</p><p>In this theoretical framework,<b>All unemployed people in the country are employed by the government as their ultimate employer and are provided with a minimum wage equivalent to job security.</b>The private sector can then select and hire workers from this government-employed population by offering wages higher than the job guarantee.</p><p>Imagine if the Chinese government implemented this framework now, all unemployed people in the country could get a job from their local government, with a salary of 2,000 yuan per month paid by the government. Specific jobs can include local agricultural harvesting tailored to local conditions, unified allocation through government-sponsored infrastructure projects, or simply becoming a food delivery rider, with the government distributing this employment security salary through platform companies like Meituan.</p><p>Looks like,<b>Within this theoretical framework, inflation does indeed become less relevant.</b>During economic booms, private sector employers can hire workers from employment programs by offering them higher wages than the employment guarantee wage (2,000 yuan/month). For example, Meituan can offer 3,000 yuan/month to hire efficient riders into its company. During economic recessions, the private sector can lay off workers and return them to the government's final employer program to receive at least 2,000 yuan per month in employment-guaranteed wages. In this way, job-guaranteed wages will reduce inflationary pressures during economic booms and deflationary pressures during recessions.</p><p><b>Thus, the modern monetary theory framework was finally able to find an \"anchor\" for a sovereign currency by establishing government-guaranteed wages. Under this complete MMT framework, the marginal value of a sovereign currency is equal to the amount of labor it can employ. The government has achieved full employment through planning and can perfectly control inflation by adjusting the marginal value of labor by adjusting the employment guarantee wage.</b></p><p><b>However, the problems with this ideal state theory are also obvious—even setting aside the problems that MMT faces when government spending is too high, such as exchange rates and inflation, which were discussed in II.3, one important fact we still need to note is that this framework ignores the subjective initiative of all individuals and the incentives for employment.</b></p><p>For example, if a government-provided job requires 12 hours of hard labor, then if an individual believes that earning only 2,000 yuan for those 12 hours of labor is too little, they will automatically withdraw from the employment security program. This will directly cause the real unemployment rate to rise again.</p><p>For example, Meituan's employment security riders don't need to do much; they can earn 2,000 yuan per month by delivering three orders a day. In a competitive market environment, Meituan riders who would normally need to deliver 30 orders a day to earn 5,000 yuan per month might choose to give up and join the employment security program, thus distorting the overall efficiency and demand of society.</p><p>Furthermore, this employment security/ultimate employer program is actually a typical \"big government\" framework. To be effectively enforced, the government needs to possess highly monopolistic rights and resources. In his new book, Capital and Ideology, Piketty explores this situation in depth, pointing out the apocalyptic ideological dilemma faced by the framework of big government after the collapse of the Soviet Union through the changing views of the left and right in modern society.<b>Therefore, this employment security/ultimate employer model will likely exist only in the paper utopia of some modern monetary theorists for a long time to come.</b></p><p>Since it is impossible to completely break free from the framework of mainstream monetarist theory in practice in the short term, modern monetary theorists have also followed the mainstream framework.<b>The second direction</b>The inflation issue was explained as much as possible.</p><p>In our view,<b>The academic significance of this part of the explanation is somewhat lackluster, because the theoretical framework of MMT has never proposed a clear method for calculating the upper limit of sovereign government spending.</b>Therefore, the arguments of MMT supporters in this direction mainly...<b>Focus on practical experience</b>。 Noting that for the past 40 years or so, major global economies have generally been in an environment of extreme lack of inflation, and even after large-scale money printing, there have been no signs of inflation rising, they believe that, considering unknown factors such as oversupply in modern society and changes in production factors,<b>It is very difficult for a sovereign government to increase its deficit and print money to trigger inflation.</b>Historically, hyperinflation has occurred because, firstly, the number of cases has been relatively small; secondly, it has mostly occurred in developing countries with overly fragile economies, such as Zimbabwe and Brazil, and in most cases, it has occurred when the country has been subjected to unusual domestic and international geopolitical or political shocks. Therefore...<b>It is not universal.</b></p><p>Although this explanation is vague and somewhat dishonest, it would be unfair to criticize modern monetary theorists based on it.<b>After all, mainstream monetarists' explanations of the effects of quantitative easing and how it transmits to the real economy are not outstanding.</b>For example, why did the massive amounts of money issued by central banks around the world in response to the 2008 financial crisis never lead to an increase in inflation in these countries? In response to this question, mainstream academia has never found a convincing theoretical framework to provide an answer. Regarding this point, the most perplexed people are probably Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda. The Bank of Japan's money printing level has long exceeded the fiscal deficit ceiling considered by traditional monetarism, and has even reached the point of nationalizing the entire Japanese business community, yet people still cannot find any signs of rising inflation in Japan.</p><p>From this perspective,<b>This COVID-19 crisis may be a litmus test for modern monetary theory.</b>Because, at least as of the second quarter, in the unprecedented largest wave of global monetary easing, we finally saw some signs of inflation rising. However, currently, even with these small signs, the mainstream expectations of the Federal Reserve and the market remain...<b>Inflation is \"temporary\".</b>After the pandemic ends and monetary policy marginally normalizes, it will fade away on its own.</p><p><b>If the story really progresses this way, then in the spirit of scientific practicality, the constraints and criticisms of inflation on modern monetary theory may truly be ineffective. After all, the government is currently providing a generous employment guarantee salary by dropping money by helicopter without requiring people to find employment. This level of monetary easing has actually far exceeded the imagination of modern monetary theorists on paper. If we don't see inflation even under these circumstances, then traditional monetarists can indeed burn Friedman's quantity theory of money and embrace a new era of macroeconomics.</b></p><p><b>III. Summary</b></p><p>This article tries to sort out the modern monetary theory paradigm, which is currently the most popular macro-monetary theory in global discussion and practice, and explains the theoretical foundation and important framework of modern monetary theory in a popular way, as well as discusses its limitations.</p><p><b>The conclusions of modern monetary theory shocked those who had only been exposed to traditional monetary views. It challenges the orthodox view of government finances and budget deficits, the trade-off between employment and inflation established by the Phillips curve, and the pursuit of current account surpluses.</b></p><p><b>However, it is essentially an orthodox continuation of Keynesianism, whose understanding of how a sovereign state's treasury and central bank should coordinate their operations and their respective responsibilities significantly transcends the limitations of classical monetarism.</b></p>","source":"lsy1624936809849","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>More than just printing money: This article is enough for modern monetary theory.</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nMore than just printing money: This article is enough for modern monetary theory.\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">动物精神Animal...</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-06-29 11:23</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p>As global monetary policy sinks deeper into the zero-interest-rate trap, coupled with the massive global easing brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, relevant...<b>The discussion of modern monetary theory (MMT) has become increasingly popular recently, and it has caused great controversy during its dissemination.</b>In this context,<b>We will try to explore the basic framework, ideological purpose, and practicality of modern monetary theory in a relatively simple and easy-to-understand way, while maintaining logical rigor.</b></p><p><b>I. Overview</b></p><p>Contrary to popular belief, the currently popular modern monetary theory is not \"modern,\" or rather, not new at all. In fact,<b>Modern monetary theory originated from the post-Keynesian school and believes that it is the best in-depth interpretation and follower of Keynesian theory.</b>However, the main ideas of modern monetary theory remained unpopular and even marginalized for nearly 60 years after Keynes, and only in recent years have they finally found a place in international political and economic discussions. Of course, this shift is also closely related to the predicament currently encountered by mainstream macroeconomics. After all, macroeconomics has not won the Nobel Prize for many years and needs to be combined with practice to find new directions. Regardless, criticism of modern monetary theory persists, as the famous commentary states:<b>\"The correct parts of MMT aren't new and the new parts aren't correct.\" What they are right about modern monetary theory is not new, and what is new is not correct.</b></p><p>If we could summarize the most important viewpoint of modern monetary theory in one sentence, it would be very simple:</p><p><i><b>For countries with their own currencies, their governments do not need to worry about their own debts and expenditures, because they can always pay the interest on all their debts by printing money directly by the government. Therefore, the only constraint on how much money the government prints is inflation. As long as the needs and purposes created by printing money can be met by existing labor and equipment, keeping inflation within a controllable range, then the government of this country can support all its purposes and expenditures by printing money directly.</b></i></p><p>Upon seeing this, I think most people's first reaction would be dismissive. However, events such as the Latin American crisis, Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and the European debt crisis immediately come to mind as counterexamples. Calm down. The core purpose of modern monetary theory is not to try to prove that governments can print money and spend indefinitely without any consequences.<b>In the next paragraph, we will outline the important viewpoints and logical frameworks of modern monetary theory for your discussion.</b></p><p><b>II. Theoretical perspectives</b></p><p><b>II.1 Tax-Driven Money</b></p><p>Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s and the decoupling of the US dollar from gold, the exploration of the core value of fiat currencies has never reached a clear conclusion.<b>Modern monetary theory has established a complete theoretical system based on its unique interpretation of the core attributes and value of money.</b></p><p><b>Why would anyone be willing to accept the government's legal tender?</b>People usually just passively accept this and rarely think about it. When the government is building roads and aircraft carriers, when the central bank is buying Treasury Bond and quantitative easing, are they actually paying out currency from a certain account? The answer is clearly no.</p><p><b>So why can the government create money out of thin air like this?</b></p><p>Hyman Minsky once said, \"Everyone can create money, but the question is whether it will be accepted.\" You can create a \"currency\" denominated in yuan by writing \"I owe 10 yuan\" on a piece of paper, but the question is whether you can get others to accept it—for example, whether someone is willing to accept the IOU and sell you a pancake.</p><p><b>MMT believes that the core reason the government is able to do this is that we all have to pay taxes to the government.</b>Note that in most cases, governments only accept their own currency when taxing, so in order to avoid punishment for tax evasion (such as imprisonment), citizens of a country must find a way to obtain the government's currency to pay taxes. The point here is,<b>Even if it cannot easily force people to use their own legal tender in private transactions, governments can still force people to use legal tender to pay taxes when they levy taxes.</b>This fact will naturally create a huge demand for the country's fiat currency among the population. In conclusion,<b>In order for the issued currency to be accepted, the government does not actually need to store precious metals or foreign currency, nor does it need unnecessary laws to guarantee it. It simply needs to force people to pay taxes in fiat currency.</b></p><p><b>Therefore, we can conclude that \"tax-driven currency\" means that if rulers have the right to levy taxes, they can create demand for fiat currency. Because it is easy for the government to \"ensure that people use legal tender when paying the government\".</b></p><p>Building on the above discussion, it becomes clear that, from the perspective of the currency issuer, the government established the monetary system to allow resources to flow to the public sector, and this was facilitated by the demand for money (paper printed by the government) created by taxes.<b>It can be said that governments establish taxes not only to increase fiscal revenue, but also to encourage people to sell labor, resources, and products in order to obtain the paper (money) they print. Most people believe that government taxes are only for generating revenue to cover fiscal expenditures. However, from an MMT perspective, the purpose of taxation is very subtly different.</b></p><p>It is well known that the government will not spend all the \"necessary funds,\" but the public's willingness to sell more labor, resources, or products in order to obtain money may be exhausted (for a similar view, please refer to another article on the official account, which is not as terrible as the financial crisis). In order to be able to continuously transfer resources, the government can try to raise the price paid (which, if it fails, will trigger inflation) or increase taxes. But in any case, we must remember,<b>In MMT's understanding, the main purpose of increasing taxes is not to generate revenue, but to stimulate demand for money.</b></p><p>In this way,<b>MMT self-consistently provides a theoretical framework for government money, taxation, and inflation.</b>We can simply put it this way: the government creates demand for the currency it prints through taxation. The ability to collect taxes determines the government's ability to transfer resources, which in turn determines the creditworthiness of the government's currency. The level of this creditworthiness determines the final demand for the currency, thus directly affecting the nominal inflation of the currency. If the public accepts this currency, inflation will be controlled; otherwise, it will enter a negative feedback spiral of rising inflation—a further reduction in the credit of the currency and the government.</p><p><b>This framework actually exists in reality.</b>The credibility of the US dollar is built on the United States' leading global comprehensive strength since World War II, on the price settlement mechanism for almost all commodities, on the existence of aircraft carriers, Tesla, Google, and Coca-Cola, and even on the ability to require all residents of the world, regardless of nationality, to file a w8ben form to file taxes with the US government when investing in US dollar assets. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government has printed an unprecedented amount of money in the past two years, causing some people who are not familiar with the system to panic that the credibility of the dollar will be lost and the dollar will become waste paper.<b>Little did they know that the US dollar was inherently worthless paper, and it was the facts mentioned above that gave worthless paper credibility. If these capabilities of the United States do not change, then the fundamental credibility of the dollar will not be destroyed.</b>Those who hastily concluded that the dollar would lose its credibility simply because the United States printed too much money are probably already busy adjusting their expectations after the recent cycle.</p><p>However, while the Federal Reserve's money printing will not shake the credibility of the US dollar, nor will it cause hyperinflation and render the dollar worthless, China's rise could shake these relative advantages of the United States. From the highest perspective, the global drama of the next 5-10 years may unfold in this dimension. Let's consider discussing this topic in other articles.</p><p>Incidentally, contrary to what many people perceive, it is easy to see that the monetary perspective under the MMT framework described above actually denies the monetary function of the currently hottest digital assets and Bitcoin (again, government and taxes drive money). Due to space limitations, we won't go into detail here. (It reminds me of the pretentiousness at the edge of Fermat's Last Theorem; we always know too much, but have the time to write down too little.)</p><p><b>II.2 The Basic Framework of Modern Monetary Theory</b></p><p>Let's explain the analytical logic of MMT in detail.</p><p>First of all, we all know that in society, one party's financial assets will always correspond to the other party's financial liabilities. thereupon<b>We can divide the world very simply into three sectors: the domestic private sector, the domestic public sector, and the \"other national sector\" made up of foreign governments, companies, and households.</b></p><p>Therefore, if we sum up the assets and liabilities of each department, the following identity will always hold:</p><p><i><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></i></p><p>This is actually a<b>accounting identity</b>It does not depend on any theoretical model. To give a perhaps enlightening example, assume that the foreign sector spends less than revenue and has a budget surplus of $50 billion, while the domestic government spends less than revenue and has a fiscal budget surplus of $20 billion. Then the above identity tells us that during the same period, the domestic private sector, which we care about most, must have a budget deficit of $50 + 20 = $70 billion.</p><p>This could create a \"dilemma\": if one of these three sectors has a surplus, then at least one other sector has a deficit.<b>In other words, no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to achieve a universal harmony in the same period of time where all the sectors we consider ideal are surplus.</b></p><p>So when we arrived here, an idea seemed to be vaguely emerging in our minds—<b>Since someone will always need to borrow money, then let's just let the government borrow it. Then everyone in our country's private sector will have the surplus and assets we most look forward to!</b></p><p>If things were that simple, we would only need accounting, not MMT.</p><p>At the beginning of the article, we said that MMTs are followers of Keynesian theory because they believe in the following conclusions that continue from Keynesianism.</p><p><b>1. From an overall economic perspective, the causal relationship in the private sector is that overall spending determines overall income (Keynesian paradox of thrift).</b></p><p>This conclusion is not very intuitive, because for each individual, income always determines expenses: for example, if you win 5 million yuan in the lottery, why don't you have to add an extra portion of meat to eat Lanzhou beef noodles tonight?</p><p>However, once we add up all individuals, we find that while individual households can clearly decide to reduce spending in order to save more money to cope with the anticipated crisis, if all households try to reduce spending, total consumption and national income will decline. At this point, companies will be forced to reduce output, lay off employees, and lower wages, which will lead to a decrease in household income. This will force family members to further reduce spending, and a cruel negative feedback loop will begin.</p><p><b>This is Keynes's \"thrift paradox,\" his most important lesson and explanation of the Great Depression—trying to save money by reducing total consumption will not only not increase savings, but will actually reduce income.</b></p><p><b>2. Social deficit spending determines the accumulation of financial wealth (savings).</b></p><p>Keynesians argued that only when a sector of the economy decides to spend more than it earns through deficits will its lender accumulate net financial wealth in the form of deficit spender liabilities.<b>That is, this decision to spend in deficit is what creates net financial wealth. Unless one party is willing to spend in deficit, others cannot do so, no matter how much they want to accumulate financial wealth.</b></p><p><b>3. The government's inability to accurately control the deficit (tax revenue) creates an \"Automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>We won't go into too much detail about the government's inability to accurately grasp deficits (we can go deeper into the Chicago School and the Laffer curve if we want), but will only discuss some more intuitive inferences.</p><p>It needs to be acknowledged that the government's capacity has limits.<b>Even the government cannot precisely control fiscal and tax revenues, which seem entirely determined by itself.</b>The government can indeed decide to spend more and raise tax rates, but when government spending and tax rates change, other social variables, such as income, sales, wealth, etc., that is, the overall tax base of society, will change accordingly. These variables are not under the control of the government.<b>Therefore, whether the fiscal budget has a deficit, a balance, or a surplus is not something the government can decide independently.</b></p><p>Combining the above identities and discussions, let's assume that we temporarily disregard the surplus of the foreign sector. When a recession hits, the domestic private sector will begin to cut spending and increase savings. This will increase the domestic private sector balance, which will directly lead to a decrease in the domestic government sector balance in the identity. As a result, the government's budget deficit will spontaneously increase. This part of the growth is not controlled by the government, but it has played a role in smoothing out the fluctuations in the balances of various sectors of society when faced with cycles. Past data also confirms this relationship—<b>This means that tax revenue grows rapidly during periods of economic prosperity and falls rapidly during periods of economic depression, making the government's fiscal budget a powerful automatic stabilizer. This is the \"automatic stabilizer\" effect.</b></p><p>Therefore,<b>The best domestic policy is to pursue full employment and price stability, rather than a sustainable government deficit path or a controllable overall debt ceiling. Because the latter is mostly the result of automatic stabilizers and is not something the government can decide on its own.</b></p><p><b>4. Simple expansion of identities</b></p><p>For ease of expression, we rewrite the important identities above, introducing S (private sector savings), C (private sector consumption expenditure), I (private sector investment), T (government taxes), G (government expenditure), IM (domestic imports), and EX (domestic exports), thus obtaining...</p><p><b>Domestic private sector surplus + domestic government sector surplus + foreign sector surplus = 0</b></p><p><b>S – C – I</b> <b>+</b> <b>T – G</b> <b>+</b> <b>IM – EX</b> <b>=0</b></p><p>At this point, we can basically draw the most important ideological conclusion of modern monetary theory:</p><p><b>If you have the tax revenue and the ability to create your own currency described in II.1, then when you face an economic downturn or negative external shocks (such as the subprime mortgage crisis or the COVID-19 crisis), you can better weather the crisis through regulation by your own government departments.</b></p><p>When a crisis comes, II.2.1 tells us that because overall private sector spending determines overall income, the most important thing is to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline, especially to avoid falling into a negative feedback loop where spending/income declines simultaneously. II.2.2 tells us that to avoid panic caused by a sharp drop in social wealth, we need a certain sector of the economy to proactively provide deficit spending. So combine them,<b>The only person likely to take on this deficit spending task is the government sector, which needs to transfer wealth to the private sector to repair the decline in overall spending.</b></p><p>The identity in II.2.4 further confirms that, in order to achieve this, domestic private sector surpluses need to be returned to the desired equilibrium level.<b>Then we should minimize our domestic government sector surpluses and our foreign sector surpluses (which, from a domestic perspective, are current account deficits).</b></p><p>But because<b>Exogenous uncertainty of exports</b>(For example, if a large economy like the United States tries to reduce imports, it may affect the income of other countries, thereby affecting its own exports to other countries around the world.)<b>The best course of action would be to reduce the surplus of our own government departments.</b>It is worth emphasizing here that under the mainstream macroeconomic view, countries should strive to pursue current account surpluses, while modern monetary theorists have conducted more in-depth theoretical discussions on foreign sector surpluses and ultimately arrived at contradictory conclusions. In other words, when the government has free control over the surplus of its own government departments, the external current account surplus is not important, which is actually the development path that the United States has actually taken since the 21st century.</p><p><b>Finally, II.1 and II.2.3 tell us that when governments expand deficits to increase private sector spending, we do not need to consider whether the deficit is too large, because sovereign countries can issue an unlimited number of currencies without affecting credit. There is no need to worry about how the deficit will shrink in the future, because when the crisis is over and the economy returns to a growth cycle, the automatic stabilizer will naturally reduce the country's deficit and return it to an equilibrium level.</b></p><p><b>When we compare the above conclusions and approaches with the way the United States and Western countries have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can immediately understand why mainstream Western economies have now opened a new paradigm in modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>Taking the United States as an example, during this COVID-19 crisis, the United States immediately ignored all the constraints of government deficit paths and debt ceilings, turned the money printing press to its limit, and launched multiple trillion-dollar government spending plans. Not only did it not set an upper limit on the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, but it also allowed the Federal Reserve to directly intervene to purchase high-yield corporate bonds and guarantee private sector deficit investment. The United States has abandoned the previous path of QE transmission through banks, directly cutting interest rates to the lower limit, while also implementing an unprecedented \"helicopter money-dropping\" approach, directly transferring funds to people's personal accounts.<b>We don't care about a flood of gold, but we must act with lightning speed to ensure that overall private sector spending does not decline.</b></p><p>It can be said that, given the current situation, the paradigm of modern monetary theory has achieved very good practical results. Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US economy has not only achieved a smooth transition, but is also likely to resume growth very quickly (in 2021). It's no wonder that Yellen, the newly appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary, publicly stated that the government debt ceiling is not that important, and that ensuring that the government's annual fiscal revenue can cover Treasury Bond interest is a sustainable path.<b>It is expected that within the next 5-10 years, the paradigm of modern monetary theory will establish a firm position in the practice of Western central banks.</b></p><p><b>II.3 The Boundaries of Government Debt – The Path to Fiscal Sustainability</b></p><p><b>Inflation caused by excessive money printing and a sustainable path to government debt should be the two areas where \"traditional\" theories most concentrate their questioning of modern monetary theory.</b></p><p>First and foremost, it must be clarified that we do not believe that modern monetary theory has a very scientific and perfect explanation and response to these questions, but its answers to these questions do have some merit.</p><p>Let's start by quoting a very intuitive macroeconomic conclusion:</p><p><i><b>When an economy's interest rate r is higher than its growth rate g, its debt ratio will continue to grow. (This can be intuitively understood as the fact that the new money (g) the economy earns each year cannot repay the interest (r), so the debt ratio can only keep rising.) Therefore, if r > g is always the case, then the government's room for further increasing debt is relatively limited.</b></i></p><p>For more academic readers, you can take a closer look at James Galbraith's classic model regarding this conclusion:</p><p>△ d = -s + d * [ (r -g) / (1 + g) ]</p><p>Where d is the initial debt-to-GDP ratio, s is the ratio of fiscal surplus to GDP after deducting net interest expenses, r is the real interest rate, and g is the real GDP growth rate.</p><p><b>We can clearly see that when r < g, the debt-to-GDP ratio is also negative, meaning that debt is gradually decreasing in a healthy manner.</b></p><p>So how can this be achieved? One situation that the government can naturally control is to keep the interest rate r as low as possible, so that g is more likely to be greater than r. Therefore, in the nearly ten years following the financial crisis, we have seen a significant decline in benchmark interest rates in all countries around the world. After the COVID-19 crisis interrupted the US rate hike process, we have once again seen benchmark interest rates in all developed countries drop to a level where there is no way to lower them, which is basically zero. Meanwhile, countries such as the European Union, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland have further explored negative interest rates. This has to be said to be a result of the modern monetary theory paradigm gaining practice.</p><p>So what if r has already dropped to such a low level, and the actual growth rate g still cannot be greater than r? Friends, this is the most cutting-edge academic question that modern monetary theory is still exploring. As far as we know, the current MMT theory cannot provide a definitive answer.</p><p>It must be noted here that, despite the constraints of liquidity traps,<b>However, r is controlled by the government, and there is no absolute lower limit.</b>For example, when it feels that even 0 is not low enough, the Federal Reserve can easily announce that it will lower the benchmark interest rate to -10% overnight. When we consider situations where all immediate consumption is stimulated in this absolutely frenzied manner, we return to the fundamental difference between modern monetary theory and traditional macroeconomics: the source of government credit—government organization and tax-driven money—which is the greatest cornerstone of modern monetary theory. It can be said that at this point, what we need to face is no longer essentially an economic problem, but a sociological problem. Specifically, countries like the United States and the US dollar, which have political, technological, and military foundations, may not face any difficulties. However, in some small countries, they will face the risk of losing both regime rule and the validity of fiat currency due to the loss of trust in their currencies and governments by the public or other economies around the world. However, within the theoretical framework of MMT, there are solutions to the problem of government fiscal sustainability, but the consequences and constraints it brings may require a sociological perspective to further improve and support. (A theoretical framework similar to behavioral economics requires the introduction of psychological theories to support it.)</p><p><b>II.4 The Boundaries of Government Debt – Inflation</b></p><p>Finally, let's explore the biggest intuitive question everyone has about modern monetary theory:<b>The problem of inflation.</b></p><p>As Friedman famously said, \"Inflation is a monetary phenomenon whenever and wherever.\" So how does modern monetary theory, while proposing to lift the government spending and debt ceiling and print money on a large scale when necessary, ensure that countries do not enter a vicious spiral of self-reinforcing inflation?</p><p><b>In fact, modern monetary theory is very descriptive in answering questions related to inflation; in fact, it can be said that modern monetary theory itself is merely a description of how sovereign money operates.</b>As mentioned above, it has a good theoretical and ideological framework to explain how sovereign states and their currencies operate, but it lacks sufficient scientific and quantitative means to draw insurmountable boundaries for this way of operation.</p><p>The discussion of inflation in modern monetary theory can be roughly divided into:<b>Two directions.</b></p><p><b>The first approach avoids directly answering the inflation question, instead rejecting the current mainstream macroeconomic framework, arguing that the relationship between inflation and employment revealed by the Phelps curve can be completely avoided through government intervention.</b></p><p>The founder of this direction was the renowned economist A. Lerner and his proposals.<b>\"Functional Fiscal Theory\"</b>。 In his theory, Lerner emphasized that the government should focus on its economic function when formulating a fiscal budget, rather than adding restrictions on fiscal balance. This is a perfect match for the rejection of fiscal sustainability paths in modern monetary theory discussed in the previous section. Therefore, subsequent researchers of modern monetary theory have proposed, based on Lerner...<b>\"Employment Security/Ultimate Employer\" Model</b>。</p><p>Given that this is a brand new framework, we will not go into detail here but instead describe the main logic of this pattern intuitively.</p><p>From the above,<b>According to the framework of modern monetary theory, we know that governments can issue their own currencies indefinitely, so why not make the government the ultimate employer and promise to provide job opportunities for all qualified and willing citizens of the country?</b>In this way, the unemployment rate will be directly reduced to 0, and a moderately prosperous society will be directly achieved.</p><p>In this theoretical framework,<b>All unemployed people in the country are employed by the government as their ultimate employer and are provided with a minimum wage equivalent to job security.</b>The private sector can then select and hire workers from this government-employed population by offering wages higher than the job guarantee.</p><p>Imagine if the Chinese government implemented this framework now, all unemployed people in the country could get a job from their local government, with a salary of 2,000 yuan per month paid by the government. Specific jobs can include local agricultural harvesting tailored to local conditions, unified allocation through government-sponsored infrastructure projects, or simply becoming a food delivery rider, with the government distributing this employment security salary through platform companies like Meituan.</p><p>Looks like,<b>Within this theoretical framework, inflation does indeed become less relevant.</b>During economic booms, private sector employers can hire workers from employment programs by offering them higher wages than the employment guarantee wage (2,000 yuan/month). For example, Meituan can offer 3,000 yuan/month to hire efficient riders into its company. During economic recessions, the private sector can lay off workers and return them to the government's final employer program to receive at least 2,000 yuan per month in employment-guaranteed wages. In this way, job-guaranteed wages will reduce inflationary pressures during economic booms and deflationary pressures during recessions.</p><p><b>Thus, the modern monetary theory framework was finally able to find an \"anchor\" for a sovereign currency by establishing government-guaranteed wages. Under this complete MMT framework, the marginal value of a sovereign currency is equal to the amount of labor it can employ. The government has achieved full employment through planning and can perfectly control inflation by adjusting the marginal value of labor by adjusting the employment guarantee wage.</b></p><p><b>However, the problems with this ideal state theory are also obvious—even setting aside the problems that MMT faces when government spending is too high, such as exchange rates and inflation, which were discussed in II.3, one important fact we still need to note is that this framework ignores the subjective initiative of all individuals and the incentives for employment.</b></p><p>For example, if a government-provided job requires 12 hours of hard labor, then if an individual believes that earning only 2,000 yuan for those 12 hours of labor is too little, they will automatically withdraw from the employment security program. This will directly cause the real unemployment rate to rise again.</p><p>For example, Meituan's employment security riders don't need to do much; they can earn 2,000 yuan per month by delivering three orders a day. In a competitive market environment, Meituan riders who would normally need to deliver 30 orders a day to earn 5,000 yuan per month might choose to give up and join the employment security program, thus distorting the overall efficiency and demand of society.</p><p>Furthermore, this employment security/ultimate employer program is actually a typical \"big government\" framework. To be effectively enforced, the government needs to possess highly monopolistic rights and resources. In his new book, Capital and Ideology, Piketty explores this situation in depth, pointing out the apocalyptic ideological dilemma faced by the framework of big government after the collapse of the Soviet Union through the changing views of the left and right in modern society.<b>Therefore, this employment security/ultimate employer model will likely exist only in the paper utopia of some modern monetary theorists for a long time to come.</b></p><p>Since it is impossible to completely break free from the framework of mainstream monetarist theory in practice in the short term, modern monetary theorists have also followed the mainstream framework.<b>The second direction</b>The inflation issue was explained as much as possible.</p><p>In our view,<b>The academic significance of this part of the explanation is somewhat lackluster, because the theoretical framework of MMT has never proposed a clear method for calculating the upper limit of sovereign government spending.</b>Therefore, the arguments of MMT supporters in this direction mainly...<b>Focus on practical experience</b>。 Noting that for the past 40 years or so, major global economies have generally been in an environment of extreme lack of inflation, and even after large-scale money printing, there have been no signs of inflation rising, they believe that, considering unknown factors such as oversupply in modern society and changes in production factors,<b>It is very difficult for a sovereign government to increase its deficit and print money to trigger inflation.</b>Historically, hyperinflation has occurred because, firstly, the number of cases has been relatively small; secondly, it has mostly occurred in developing countries with overly fragile economies, such as Zimbabwe and Brazil, and in most cases, it has occurred when the country has been subjected to unusual domestic and international geopolitical or political shocks. Therefore...<b>It is not universal.</b></p><p>Although this explanation is vague and somewhat dishonest, it would be unfair to criticize modern monetary theorists based on it.<b>After all, mainstream monetarists' explanations of the effects of quantitative easing and how it transmits to the real economy are not outstanding.</b>For example, why did the massive amounts of money issued by central banks around the world in response to the 2008 financial crisis never lead to an increase in inflation in these countries? In response to this question, mainstream academia has never found a convincing theoretical framework to provide an answer. Regarding this point, the most perplexed people are probably Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda. The Bank of Japan's money printing level has long exceeded the fiscal deficit ceiling considered by traditional monetarism, and has even reached the point of nationalizing the entire Japanese business community, yet people still cannot find any signs of rising inflation in Japan.</p><p>From this perspective,<b>This COVID-19 crisis may be a litmus test for modern monetary theory.</b>Because, at least as of the second quarter, in the unprecedented largest wave of global monetary easing, we finally saw some signs of inflation rising. However, currently, even with these small signs, the mainstream expectations of the Federal Reserve and the market remain...<b>Inflation is \"temporary\".</b>After the pandemic ends and monetary policy marginally normalizes, it will fade away on its own.</p><p><b>If the story really progresses this way, then in the spirit of scientific practicality, the constraints and criticisms of inflation on modern monetary theory may truly be ineffective. After all, the government is currently providing a generous employment guarantee salary by dropping money by helicopter without requiring people to find employment. This level of monetary easing has actually far exceeded the imagination of modern monetary theorists on paper. If we don't see inflation even under these circumstances, then traditional monetarists can indeed burn Friedman's quantity theory of money and embrace a new era of macroeconomics.</b></p><p><b>III. Summary</b></p><p>This article tries to sort out the modern monetary theory paradigm, which is currently the most popular macro-monetary theory in global discussion and practice, and explains the theoretical foundation and important framework of modern monetary theory in a popular way, as well as discusses its limitations.</p><p><b>The conclusions of modern monetary theory shocked those who had only been exposed to traditional monetary views. It challenges the orthodox view of government finances and budget deficits, the trade-off between employment and inflation established by the Phillips curve, and the pursuit of current account surpluses.</b></p><p><b>However, it is essentially an orthodox continuation of Keynesianism, whose understanding of how a sovereign state's treasury and central bank should coordinate their operations and their respective responsibilities significantly transcends the limitations of classical monetarism.</b></p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> source：<a href=\"https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7xkjnL08zcFJcRhUMIn7zw\">动物精神Animal...</a></p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3cfac405d9968bb68cea6d74e9f4c711","relate_stocks":{},"source_url":"https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7xkjnL08zcFJcRhUMIn7zw","is_english":false,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1172774847","content_text":"随着全球货币政策在零利率陷阱中越陷越深，叠加新冠疫情带来的全球大放水，有关现代货币理论（MMT）的探讨近来愈加兴起，且在传播过程中引起了非常大的争议。在本文中，我们会尝试在保持逻辑严谨性的前提下，用比较通俗易懂的方式来探究现代货币理论的基础框架、思想宗旨与实用性。\nI. 概述\n同大众的看法相反，当下为人所乐道的现代货币理论并不“现代”，或者说根本不新。事实上，现代货币理论脱胎于后凯恩斯学派，并认为自己才是凯恩斯理论最好的深入诠释与追随者。然而，现代货币理论的主要思想在凯恩斯之后的近60年时间中一直不受待见，甚至被边缘化，直到近些年才终于在国际政治与经济的讨论中有了一席之地。当然，这种转变也与目前主流宏观经济学遇到的困境息息相关，毕竟宏观经济学已经很多年没有拿到过诺奖了，需要结合实践去寻找新的方向。但无论如何，各界对现代货币理论的批评声始终不绝于耳，正如那句著名的评论所说：“The correct parts of MMT aren’t new and the new parts aren’t correct。”（有关现代货币理论，他们正确的地方并不新，而新的地方并不正确。”）\n如果用一句话来概括现代货币理论最主要的观点说了什么，那其实非常简单：\n对于拥有自己货币的国家来说，其政府无需在乎自己的负债与支出，因为他们永远可以通过政府直接印钱的方式来支付所有负债的利息。于是，对政府印多少钱的唯一束缚只有通胀。只要印钱创造出来的需求与目的可以被现有的劳动力与设备满足，使通胀保持在一个可控的范围，那么这个国家的政府便可以通过直接印钱来支撑自己的所有目的与支出。\n看到这里，我想大多数人的第一反应大抵都是不以为然，而拉美危机，魏玛德国，津巴布韦，欧债危机等等事件作为反例便立刻涌上心头。稍安勿躁，其实现代货币理论的核心宗旨并不是在尝试证明政府可以无限地印钱支出而不必承担任何后果。在下一段中，我们会梳理现代货币理论的重要观点与逻辑框架，供大家探讨。\nII. 理论观点\nII.1 税收驱动货币\n自二十世纪70年代布莱顿森林体系解体，美元与黄金脱钩以来，有关法定货币核心价值的探究便始终没有一个明确的结论。而针对货币的核心属性与价值，现代货币理论以其独到的解释为基础建立了一整套理论体系。\n为什么会有人愿意接受政府的法定货币？人们通常对此只是被动接受，而甚少思考。当政府在修路，在造航母，当央行在购买国债，在量化宽松的时候，他们是否真的从某个账户对外支付货币呢？答案显然是否定的。\n那么政府为什么可以这样凭空创造货币？\n海曼.明斯基曾说过，“每个人都可以创造货币，但问题在于其是否会被接纳。”你可以通过在一张纸条上写“欠款10元”来创造一种以元来计价的“货币”，但问题在于能否做到让其他人接受它 —— 例如，是否有人愿意接受这一张欠条，并且卖给你一个煎饼。\nMMT认为，政府能够做到这一点的核心原因在于我们所有人都要向政府纳税。注意到，绝大多数情况下，政府征税时都只接受自己印发的货币，所以，一国民众为了免受逃税的惩罚（如进监狱等），就必须设法获得该政府货币以支付税款。此处的重点在于，即便无法轻易地强制民众在私下交易时使用其发行的法定货币，政府依然可以在征税时迫使人们使用法定货币来支付税收。而这个事实将天然地在民众中创造出一个对该国法定货币的巨量需求。总而言之，为使所发行的货币被接受，政府其实既不需要储存贵金属或者外币，也不需要多余的法律来保证。它只需要强制民众用法定货币来履行纳税义务即可。\n于是我们可以得出“税收驱动货币”的结论：如果统治者有征税的权利，便能够创造对法定货币的需求。因为对政府而言，“确保人们在付钱给政府时使用法定货币”，这点是很容易做到的。\n在上述讨论的基础上稍作衍生就会发现，以货币发行者的角度来看，政府建立货币体系的目的在于让资源向公共部门流动，而税收创造的货币（政府印出来的纸张）需求则促成了这一点。可以说，政府设立税收并不单是为了增加财政收入，也是为了促使人们为获得其印刷出来的纸张（货币）而出卖劳动力，资源和产品。大多数人认为，政府征税仅是为了创收以弥补财政支出。但从MMT的角度来看，税收的目的则有非常微妙的区别。\n众所周知，政府并不会花光“所需资金”，但公众为了获得货币而出卖更多劳动力、资源或产品的意愿却可能耗尽（类似观点可以参考公众号之前的另外一篇文章，并没有那么可怕的金融危机）。为了能够持续转移资源，政府可以尝试提高支付的价格（如果失败，则会引发通胀），或者增加税收。但不管怎样，我们必须记住，在MMT的理解中，增加税收的主要目的不是创收，而是为了刺激货币需求。\n这样一来，MMT自洽地给出了一个政府货币、税收与通胀的理论框架。我们可以简单表述为，政府通过税收为自己印刷的货币创造需求，而征税的能力决定了政府资源转移的能力，也就进一步决定了该政府货币的信用，而这一信用的高低决定了这种货币的最终需求，从而直接影响着该货币的名义通胀。民众认可这种货币，通胀便可控，反之便会进入通胀上升——货币与政府信用进一步降低的负反馈螺旋。\n这个框架在现实中是实际存在的，美元的信用构建在二战后美国全球最领先的综合实力上，构建在几乎所有大宗商品的价格结算机制上，也构建在航空母舰、特斯拉、Google与可口可乐的存在上，甚至构建在要求全球所有居民，无论国籍，进行美元资产投资必须填写w8ben表格来向美国政府报税的能力上。为了应对新冠疫情，美国政府在近两年内印刷出了前所未有的钱，这让一些不了解这个体系的人甚感恐慌地喊着美元的信用会丢失，美元会变成废纸。殊不知美元本就是废纸，是上面所说的这些事实让废纸拥有了信用。如果美国的这些能力没有发生变化，那么美元的基础信用是不会被毁灭的。那些单纯地因为美国印了太多钱，便慌忙下结论喊着美元将要丢失自己信用的人，最近这一个周期过去，恐怕已经在忙着调整预期了。\n不过，虽然美联储印钱不会动摇美元的信用，也不会让大通胀到来并让美元成为废纸，但是中国的崛起却有可能动摇上述这些美国的相对优势。从最高的视角看，未来5-10年的全球大剧情也许就会在这个维度上演绎了，这个话题让我们考虑在其他文章中展开来讲吧。\n顺便提一句，可能与许多人的认知不同，我们很容易就会发现，上面叙述的MMT框架下的货币观点其实是否认现在最火热的数字资产与比特币的货币职能的（再次强调，政府与税收驱动货币）。篇幅有限，我们也不展开讲了。（想起费马大定理那个页面边缘的装逼，我们总是懂的太多，而有时间写下来的太少。）\nII.2 现代货币理论的基础框架\n让我们详细的阐述一下MMT的分析逻辑。\n首先我们都清楚，在社会中，一方的金融资产总会对应到另外一方的金融负债。于是我们可以把世界非常简单地划分为三个部门：本国私营部门，本国公共部门以及由外国政府、公司与家庭构成的“其他国家部门”。\n那么如果我们把各个部门的资产与负债加总，下面这条恒等式便会始终成立：\n本国私营部门结余 + 本国政府部门结余 + 国外部门结余 = 0\n这实际上是一个会计恒等式，不依赖于任何理论模型。举一个可能比较有启发的例子，假设国外部门支出小于收入，有500亿美元的预算盈余，同时本国政府部门支出小于收入，有200亿美元的财政预算盈余，那么上述恒等式告诉我们，在同一时间段内，我们最在乎的本国私营部门必须拥有500+200=700亿美元的预算赤字。\n这可能就造成了一个“困境”，在这三个部门中，如果一个部门出现盈余，那么至少有另外一个部门出现赤字。换句话说，无论我们怎么努力，在同一个时间段中，都不可能同时出现我们脑海中认为最理想的所有部门都盈余的天下大同的情况。\n所以到这里的时候，我们的脑海中似乎隐隐约约有一个想法呼之欲出——既然总有人要借钱，那么就TMD让政府借啊，然后我们作为本国私营部门的每个人就会有最期待的盈余和资产了啊！\n如果事情这么简单，我们就只需要会计，而不需要MMT了。\n在文章的起初，我们便说了MMT是凯恩斯理论的追随者，原因便是，他们相信下面这些由凯恩斯主义延续下来的结论。\n1.  从整体经济层面来看，私人部门的因果关系是，整体支出决定整体收入（凯恩斯节约悖论）\n这个结论不太直观，因为就我们每个个体而言，总是收入决定支出的：例如你中了500万的彩票，咋的晚上吃兰州牛肉面还不得多加份肉啊。\n然而，一旦我们把全部的个体加总就会发现，虽然个体家庭可以明确地决定减少支出，以便储蓄更多的钱来应对预期中的危机，但如果所有的家庭都试图去减少支出，总消费和国民收入将会下降。这时，公司将被迫减少产出，裁退员工，降低工资，从而导致家庭收入的降低，这将导致家庭成员被迫进一步减少支出，一个残酷的负反馈循环便开始了。\n这便是凯恩斯的“节约悖论”，即他对于大萧条最重要的教训及解释——试图通过降低总消费的方式存钱，不仅不会增加储蓄，反而会减少收入。\n2.  社会赤字开支决定金融财富的累积（储蓄）。\n凯恩斯主义者认为，只有当经济体中某个部门决定通过赤字的方式让支出多于收入时，借钱给他的对手方才会以赤字开支者负债的形式累积起金融财富净额。即赤字开支的这个决定才是创造出金融财富净额的原因。除非有一方愿意进行赤字支出，否则，无论其他人多么想累积金融财富，他们都无法做到这一点。\n3.  政府无法精确掌握赤字（税收收入），存在“自动稳定器”(Automatic Stabilizers)效应\n我们不过多展开政府无法精确掌握赤字这点（愿意的话，可以从芝加哥学派和Laffer curve出发展开到很深的程度），我们只谈一些比较直觉的推论。\n需要承认，政府的能力是有边界的。即便是对看似完全由自己决定的财政税收收入，政府也无法精确掌控。政府确实可以决定支出更多，也可以决定提高税率，但当政府支出与税率改变之后，其他的社会变量，例如收入，销售，财富等等，也就是社会的整体税基都会对应改变。而这些变量并不在政府的掌控之中。因此，财政预算无论出现赤字、均衡还是盈余，都并非政府可以自主决定的。\n结合上面的恒等式与探讨，假设我们暂时不考虑国外部门的结余，当衰退来临时，本国私营部门便会开始削减支出、增加储蓄。这会让本国私营部门结余上升，从而直接导致恒等式中的本国政府部门结余下降。如此一来，政府的财政预算赤字就会自发地增加。这部分增长并不由政府掌控，但却起到了平抑社会各部门结余在面对周期时所产生的波动的作用。过往的数据也确认了这一关系——即税收收入在经济繁荣时期迅速增长，在经济萧条时期迅速下跌，使得政府的财政预算变成了一个强大的自动稳定器。这便是“自动稳定器”效应。\n因此，最佳的国内政策是追求充分就业和物价稳定，而不是追求政府可持续赤字路径或者可控的整体债务上限。因为后者大多数情况下是自动稳定器的结果，并不是政府可以自主决定的。\n4.  恒等式的简单展开\n为了表述观点方便，我们将上面重要的恒等式进行改写，引入S（私人部门储蓄），C（私人部门消费支出），I（私人部门投资），T（政府部门税收），G（政府部门支出），IM（本国进口），EX（本国出口），于是有\n本国私营部门结余 + 本国政府部门结余 + 国外部门结余 = 0\nS – C – I + T – G + IM – EX = 0\n到这里，我们便基本可以得出现代货币理论最为重要的思想结论了：\n如果你拥有II.1中描述的税收与创造自己货币的能力，那么当你面对一个经济萧条周期或者负外部冲击时（类似次贷危机或者新冠危机），你可以通过本国政府部门的调控来更好地度过危机。\n当危机到来时，II.2.1告诉我们因为私人部门的整体支出决定整体收入，所以最重要的事情是保证私人部门的整体支出不下降，尤其是避免陷入支出/收入同时下降的负反馈循环。II.2.2则告诉我们，为了避免社会财富骤降引起的恐慌，我们需要经济体的某个部门来主动提供赤字支出。那么结合起来，唯一的可能承担这一赤字支出任务的便是政府部门，它需要将财富转移给私人部门，以此来修复整体支出的下降幅度。\nII.2.4的恒等式进一步验证了，为了做到这些，让本国私营部门结余回到应有的均衡水平，那么我们应当让本国政府部门结余与国外部门结余（以本国角度来看便是经常账户赤字）尽量减少。\n但因为出口的外生不确定性（例如美国这样庞大的经济体如果尝试减少进口，那么可能会影响到其他国家的收入，从而影响到自己对于世界其他国家的出口），最好的应对办法便是减少本国政府部门结余了。在这里值得强调一下，主流宏观经济学观点下，国家应当尽量追求经常账户盈余，而现代货币理论学者对国外部门结余进行了更多深入的理论探讨，最后得出了相悖的结论。也就是在政府可以自由掌控本国政府部门结余的情况下，对外的经常账户盈余并不重要，而这其实也正是21世纪以来，美国实际走过来的发展路径。\n最后，II.1与II.2.3告诉我们，在政府扩大赤字以提升私人部门支出这个过程时，我们无需考虑赤字是否过大，因为主权国家在不影响信用的情况下可以无限发行货币；也无需考虑未来赤字会如何缩减，因为当危机过去，经济恢复到增长周期的时候，自动稳定器自然会让国家的赤字缩小回归至均衡水平。\n当我们把上述的结论和思路与美国及西方国家本次应对新冠疫情冲击的方式进行对比，便能立刻明白为什么说现在西方主流经济体开启了现代货币理论的新范式。\n以美国为例，在本次新冠危机中，美国第一时间忽略了所有政府赤字路径和债务上限的束缚，把印钞机开到极限，发起了多个万亿级别的政府支出计划，不仅不为美联储资产负债表规模设置上限，并且允许美联储直接下场购买企业高收益债券，为私营部门赤字投资进行担保；美国摒弃了过往QE通过银行传导的路径，直接降息至利率下限，同时史无前例地执行“直升机撒钱”行为，直接打款至民众的个人账户。不在乎水漫金山，但一定要以雷霆之势确保私人部门的整体支出不下降。\n可以说，就目前的情况来看，现代货币理论的范式还是取得了非常良好的实践效果的。在新冠疫情这样剧烈的冲击下，美国经济不但实现了平稳的过渡，并且很可能在极快的时间内（2021年）恢复增长。这也难怪临危受命的美国新任财政部长耶伦会公开表明，政府债务的上限并没有那么重要，只要确保政府每年的财政收入可以覆盖国债的利息便是可持续路径了。预计在未来5-10年的时间内，现代货币理论的范式将在西方国家央行的实践中确立一个牢固的地位。\nII.3 政府负债的边界 – 财政可持续路径问题\n过度印钱引发的通胀与政府负债的可持续路径应该是“传统”理论对现代货币理论质疑最集中的两个方面。\n首先要明确的是，我们并不认为现代货币理论对这些质疑有非常科学完美的解释和回应，但是它对这些问题的回答也存在着一定的可取之处。\n我们先直接引用一个非常符合直觉的宏观经济学结论：\n当经济体的利率r高于其增长率g，它的负债率便会一直增长。（可以直觉地理解为，经济体每年新赚到的钱(g)无法偿还利息(r)，所以负债率只能一直上升），所以如果始终处于r > g的情况下，那么政府继续新增负债的空间就比较有限了。\n【对于学术一点的读者有关这个结论可以详细看一下James Galbraith的经典模型：\n△d = -s + d * [ (r -g) / (1 + g) ]\n其中d是负债对GDP的初始比率，s是减去净利息支出后的财政盈余对GDP的比率，r是实际利率，g是GDP的实际增长率】\n而我们可以很直观地看到当r < g时，负债对GDP的比率也是负值，也就是负债在健康地逐渐减少。\n那么如何实现呢？一个能让政府很自然的掌控的情形便是让利率r尽量地小，这样g不就更容易大于r了嘛。因此，在金融危机后的近十年时间中，我们看到了全球所有国家的基准利率显著地下降。在新冠危机打断了美国加息进程之后，我们又一次看到了所有发达国家的基准利率降低到了基本等于0的降无可降的位置。而欧盟，日本，瑞典，瑞士等国家则更进一步打开了对负利率的尝试。这不得不说是现代货币理论范式获得实践的一个结果。\n那么如果r已经降低到了这么低的位置，实际增长率g还是无法大于r怎么办呢？朋友们，这便是目前现代货币理论尚在探讨的最前沿的学术问题了，就我们所知，目前的MMT理论无法给出一个明确的答案。\n这里必须要说明的是，尽管有流动性陷阱的约束，但是r是由政府来掌控的，并不存在一个绝对的下限。比如当觉得0都不够低的时候，美联储是完全可以宣布把基准利率一夜之间降到-10%的。当考虑以这种绝对疯狂的姿态来刺激所有即时消费的情形时，我们便反而回到了现代货币理论同传统宏观经济学的根本区别上，即政府信用的来源——政府组织与税收驱动货币这个现代货币理论最大的基石。可以说，这时我们需要面对的本质上不再是经济学问题，而是社会学意义上的问题。具体而言，美国与美元这样有政治，科技与军事基础支撑的国家可能并不会出现什么困难，但在某些小国家，因民众或者世界其他经济体丧失对该国货币与政府的信任，他们将面临同时失去政权统治与法定货币效力的危险。但无论如何，在MMT的理论框架中，政府的财政可持续路径问题是有解决方式的，但其带来的后果与约束可能需要社会学的辅助视角来进一步完善与支撑。（类似行为经济学的理论框架需要引入心理学的理论来支撑。）\nII.4 政府负债的边界 – 通胀问题\n最后让我们来探讨一下所有人在直觉上对于现代货币理论的最大质疑：通货膨胀问题。\n如弗里德曼那句著名的话一样：“通货膨胀无论何时何地都是一种货币现象”，那么现代货币理论在提出必要情况下解除政府支出和债务上限大规模印钱的同时，又是如何确保国家不进入通货膨胀自我强化的恶性螺旋的呢？\n事实上，在回答与通胀有关的问题方面，现代货币理论是非常描述性的，甚至可以说，现代货币理论本身便仅仅是对于主权货币运行方式的描述。如上文所述，它有很好的理论与思想框架来解释主权国家及其货币如何运作，但是却没有足够科学与量化的手段来为这种运作方式划下不可逾越的边界。\n现代货币理论中对于通货膨胀问题的探讨大概分为两个方向。\n第一个方向避免了直接回答通胀问题，而是否定了现行的主流宏观框架，认为菲尔普斯曲线揭示的通胀与就业的关系完全可以通过政府的干预来避免。\n这个方向的奠基人便是著名的经济学家勒纳(A.Lerner)及其提出的“功能财政理论”。勒纳在其理论中强调了政府在制定财政预算时，应从其对经济的功能来着手，而不应该加入财政收支平衡的限制。这与上一小节中探讨的现代货币理论对于财政可持续路径的摒弃简直是天作之和，也因此，后续的现代货币理论研究者在勒纳的基础上提出了“就业保障/最终雇主”模式。\n考虑到这是一个崭新的框架，所以在这里我们不深入展开而是从直观上描述一下这种模式的主要逻辑。\n从上文中，根据现代货币理论的框架，我们知道了政府是可以无限发行本国货币的，那么为什么不让政府作为最终雇主并承诺为本国全部符合资格且有工作意愿的公民提供工作机会呢？这样失业率便会直接降低为0，小康社会也就直接实现了。\n在这个理论框架中，全国所有的失业人口会被政府作为最终雇主雇佣，并且提供等同于就业保障的最低薪资。而后私营部门可以通过提供高于就业保障的薪资来从这部分政府雇佣的人群中择优筛选劳动力进行雇佣。\n想象一下，如果现在我国政府执行这个框架，那么全国所有失业人口都可以去本地政府领取到一份工作，薪资为政府支付的2000元/月。具体工作可以是因地制宜的本地农业采摘，也可以由政府支出主导的基建项目统一调配，或者干脆成为外卖骑手，由政府把这部分就业保障薪资透过像美团这样的平台公司来发放。\n看起来，在这样的理论框架下，通胀确实变得不那么相关了。在经济繁荣期，私营部门的雇主可以通过为工人提供比就业保障薪资（2000元/月）更高的工资来从就业计划中雇佣工人，例如美团可以提供3000元/月的薪资来把效率高的骑手雇佣到自己公司内。而在经济衰退期，私人部门可以辞退工人，让他们返回政府的最终雇主计划以获取至少2000元/月的就业保障薪资。这样一来，就业保障薪资将在经济繁荣时降低通货膨胀的压力，并在经济衰退时降低通货紧缩的压力。\n于是，现代货币理论框架通过设立政府保障薪资终于得以找到一个主权货币的“锚”。在这套完整的MMT框架下，主权货币的边际价值便等于其可以雇佣的劳动力数量。政府通过计划实现了充分就业，并且可以通过调整就业保障薪资来调整边际劳动力价值来完美控制通胀。\n但是这套理想国理论的问题也显而易见——即便抛开汇率与通胀这类在II.3中讨论过的MMT在政府开支过大时所面临的问题不谈，我们依然需要注意的一个重要事实是，这套框架忽略了所有个体的主观能动性与就业的激励问题。\n比如政府提供的工作需要进行12小时的艰苦劳动，那么如果一个个体认为这12小时的劳动仅仅获得2000元的工资太少了，那么他便会自动从就业保障计划中退出。这将直接造成实际失业率重新上升。\n又比如美团的就业保障骑手不需要做太多事情，一天送3单就可以领取2000元/月的工资，那么本来在市场竞争环境下需要一天送30单才可以领取5000元/月工资的美团骑手可能便愿意选择躺平以加入就业保障计划，从而使社会的整体效率与需求被扭曲。\n另外这套就业保障/最终雇主计划其实是一种典型的“大政府”的框架。为了有效得到执行，政府需要拥有高度垄断的权利与资源。针对这种情形，Piketty在其新书Capital and Ideology中进行了深入的探讨，他通过对于近代社会左派与右派主张观点的变迁指出了大政府的框架在苏联解体后面临的末日般的意识形态困境。也因此，这套就业保障/最终雇主模式恐怕很长一段时间只能存在于部分现代货币理论学者的纸面理想国中了。\n既然短期无法在实践中彻底跳出主流货币主义理论的框架，现代货币理论学者们也在主流框架中沿着第二个方向尽可能地解释了通胀问题。\n在我们看来，这部分解释的学术意义多少有些乏善可陈，因为MMT的理论框架中始终没有提出一个明确的方法去计算出主权政府的可支出上限。因此在这个方向上，MMT支持者们的论据主要集中在实践经验上。注意到在过往的大概40年时间里，全球主流经济体基本上都处于极度缺乏通胀的环境中，甚至在大规模印钱后，依然没有看到通胀上升的迹象，所以他们认为，考虑到现代社会供给过于充分，生产要素变革等未知因素，主权政府提升赤字印钱是非常难以引发通胀的。而历史上出现过的恶性通胀，一是数量并不多，二是多发生在津巴布韦、巴西等自身经济体系过于脆弱的发展中国家，而且多数情况下往往发生于该国受到了不寻常的国内外地缘或政治冲击的时候，因此并不具有普遍性。\n尽管这种解释模糊而有点近乎耍赖，但如果基于这点而对现代货币理论学者们进行指责也有失公平，毕竟主流货币主义学者们对于量化宽松的效果以及其如何传导到实体经济的解释也并不出色。例如，为什么全球各国央行为了应对2008年金融危机而发行的天量货币始终没有导致这些国家的通胀上升？针对这一问题，主流学界始终没有找到令人信服的理论框架来给出回答。关于这一点，想来最困惑的人应当是安倍与黑田东彦，日本央行的印钱水平早已远远打破传统货币主义认为的财政赤字上限，甚至到了即将把整个日本企业界国有化的程度，但是人们却依然找不到日本通胀上升的蛛丝马迹。\n从这点来看，本次新冠危机可能是现代货币理论的一个试金石，因为起码截止二季度，在史无前例的全球最大放水浪潮中，我们终于看到了一点点通货膨胀起来了的迹象。但是目前，就是这一点点迹象，美联储与市场的主流预期依然是，这些通胀是“暂时性”的，在疫情结束，货币政策边际正常化后便会自行褪去。\n如果故事真的如此进展，那么本着科学实用的精神，通货膨胀对于现代货币理论的桎梏与批判可能真的无效了，毕竟政府目前在不要求人们就业的情况通过直升机撒钱的方式直接就给出了一个丰厚的就业保障薪资，这种放水程度其实已经远超现代货币理论学家们之前纸面上的想象。倘若在如此情况下都看不到通胀，那么传统货币主义学家们确实可以烧掉弗里德曼的货币数量论来拥抱宏观的新时代了。\nIII．小结\n本文尽可能地梳理了现代货币理论范式这一目前全球探讨与实践最为火热的宏观货币理论，尽可能通俗地阐述了现代货币理论的理论基础与重要框架，并对其局限性进行了探讨。\n现代货币理论的结论使那些只接触过传统货币观点的人感到震惊。它挑战了关于政府财政和财政预算赤字的正统观点，挑战了菲利普斯曲线确立的就业与通胀的权衡关系，也挑战了争取经常账户盈余的行为。\n但它本质上却是凯恩斯主义的正统延续，其对于一个主权国家财政部与中央银行该当如何协调运作与各自权责义务的理解显著超脱了经典货币主义的局限。","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":4022,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":199155992,"gmtCreate":1620692476716,"gmtModify":1704346736614,"author":{"id":"3577221458132518","authorId":"3577221458132518","name":"更深得蓝","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577221458132518","authorIdStr":"3577221458132518"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"mark","listText":"mark","text":"mark","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/199155992","repostId":"1190822039","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1190822039","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1620652366,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1190822039?lang=en_US&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-05-10 21:12","market":"fut","language":"zh","title":"Goldman Sachs In-Depth Report: Rising Commodities, Chaos in the US? How much room is left for the surge?","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1190822039","media":"格隆汇","summary":"越是泡沫与牛市傻傻分不清楚的时候，幺蛾子就越多。","content":"<p>Author: Sansi Macroeconomics</p><p>The core logic of this article is based on Goldman Sachs' bullish report last month, but due to the recent rapid rise in commodities, many stocks...<b>In just one month, it exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target for increases.</b></p><p>Therefore, our current views differ from those when this article was first published on Knowledge Planet on April 15th.</p><p>There are many unexpected events in the later stages of a bull market. Although the overall bullish outlook remains unchanged, please remain vigilant against certain stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>Regarding the trade proposed by Goldman Sachs last month, we do not intend to take profits immediately; we intend to fly in the bull market bubble for a while longer.</p><p>However, we also do not recommend that individual investors who have not previously joined the trend follow suit at this time.</p><p>A simple truth: when a single conference call can attract more than 4,000 investors, it is clearly no longer a good place to build a position.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5000bb6a5f8d798bcaa39f04e9461bc7\" tg-width=\"408\" tg-height=\"384\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>preface</b></p><p>The sharp rise in commodity prices has attracted much attention in recent times. Despite repeated calls from national ministries to cool down the commodity market, it has not stopped the sharp rise in the prices of commodities such as copper, iron ore, crude oil, and agricultural products, which inevitably makes people rethink the logic behind the rise in commodities.</p><p>Sansi Society has discussed commodities and inflation several times in previous articles.</p><p>On April 13, Goldman Sachs released another major report, \"Copper is the New Oil\" (see chart below). The report analyzed the supply and demand outlook for copper from the perspective of carbon emission reduction and green energy transition, and raised the target price for copper to $11,000 for the next 12 months.</p><p>Since the report was released, copper prices have risen steadily, with an increase of 20%.</p><p>Image: The image below is a screenshot of the candlestick chart on May 5th.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d207689a018d4f149a60ec1b6f6f35f4\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"569\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>But Goldman Sachs' bullish moves did not stop there.</p><p>Before the May Day holiday, Goldman Sachs once again released a special report, continuing to be bullish on commodities.</p><p>The report is highly practical, breaking out of the traditional framework and offering many insights and reflections in light of the new policy environment, with its viewpoints being quite insightful.</p><p>Today we have extracted the core points of this Goldman Sachs report for your reference.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e75a75763fdb6d43c33bf6758adf235e\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"293\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>Article</b></p><p><b>1) Commodities have a 13.5% upside potential.</b></p><p>In the two months leading up to the report's release (April 13), commodity prices had been consolidating (see the candlestick chart above). The reasons for the consolidation, besides digesting the previous round of gains, are more importantly fundamental factors: the re-lockdown in Europe has led to stagnant demand growth, as well as macroeconomic resistance brought about by rising interest rates and a stronger dollar.</p><p>However, these factors are now gradually reversing. Economic activity, as measured by travel metrics, is returning to an upward trajectory, especially after Europe accelerated vaccination. Meanwhile, a seasonal recovery in transportation, manufacturing, and construction has also begun and will continue to accelerate until June this year.</p><p>Figure 1: Global Travel Index by Region (left) & the US Dollar Index and Commodity Index (right)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0114a3921f19a70c8d6c5cd030bf5886\" tg-width=\"1027\" tg-height=\"348\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Commodity prices are driven by quantity (or the level of demand). When demand exceeds supply, a scarcity premium (i.e., the spot premium) appears, and this premium is difficult for the market to price in advance. Because commodity supply lacks elasticity in the short term, the extent of supply shortages in the face of upcoming large-scale demand growth is easily underestimated. Because suppliers cannot dig a new mine or grow a new crop in a few months.</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that overall commodity prices will rise by 13.5% over the next six months (compared to April 28, when the report was released), with oil prices reaching $80 per barrel (CME group' WTI crude oil price at $75 per barrel) and copper prices (CME group ticker symbol HG) reaching $11,000 per ton.</p><p>Figure: Goldman Sachs' price forecast table for major commodities</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>2) Tightening supply and demand support spot premiums</b></p><p>Since the surge in economic activity was fully anticipated by the market, why didn't commodity prices immediately reflect this? (Cashing out has already begun this month)</p><p>Before the commodity spot premium can be sustained, inventory reduction will inevitably occur. If the spot price is higher than the forward price, the surplus inventory of physical goods will be released and sold at the higher spot price, pushing the market back to its initial level (Figure 2).</p><p>Figure 2: Destocking and Price Curve</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/793f9e6761c22130c4fcc177e6735efd\" tg-width=\"784\" tg-height=\"508\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, only physical shortages can sustain spot premiums. Currently, more than half of the commodity markets have spot premiums, especially in agricultural products (Figure 3). The spot premium rate of commodities on major exchanges such as CME, ICE, and LME has reached a 15-year high (Figure 4).</p><p>Figure 3: Commodity spot premium rate</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/fcc075f153ff86f0b4b3a58b0376c42f\" tg-width=\"518\" tg-height=\"378\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Figure 4: Global commodity spot premium rates</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/43262a854e47779ee6ff339a88e6de03\" tg-width=\"631\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs believes that the continued spot premium indicates that the commodity market is experiencing insufficient inventory and a tightening spot market.</p><p><b>3) The wealth gap and the commodity bull market</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the shortage of commodities will not only affect the entire commodities industry, but also multiple regions and industries, from the United States, China and Europe to construction, automobiles and retail. The surge in demand is everywhere, and the core reason is that policymakers are more inclined to solve social problems than to focus on macroeconomic stability.</p><p>From the EU Recovery Fund allocating 50% of its funds to Italy and Spain to President Biden’s latest economic stimulus package, low-income families have clearly received policy favoritism. Over the past month, Powell has visited homeless people in Washington multiple times and frequently mentioned “forgotten corners” of the economy, indicating that the Federal Reserve’s policy focus has shifted towards employment and is more concerned with the balance of economic recovery than inflation.</p><p>Policies that address income and wealth inequality transfer the excess savings of a few high-income households to low-income households with a higher marginal propensity to consume, whether through debt, taxation, or other means, almost always ensure strong demand growth, which is precisely what underlies the overheated economy and real inflationary pressures. This can be seen everywhere in the United States, from rising gasoline demand to meat consumption increasing demand for grain feed.</p><p>Image: American residents primarily consume chicken, and the price of boneless chicken breast in the United States has recently doubled.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/09adea1a029ae67905475213f9709bf9\" tg-width=\"625\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It is not difficult to see that every major commodity bull market and economic inflation in history has been accompanied by populist policies that reduce people's income, increase wealth inequality, and redistribute wealth (Figure 5).</p><p>Figure 5: Narrowing the income gap mainly during periods of economic overheating</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/feae6950164428c16dddb04dde09fe33\" tg-width=\"754\" tg-height=\"395\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>4) China is no longer the only source of growth</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the commodity bull market of the first decade of this century was the result of global redistribution.</p><p>After China joined the WTO, as manufacturing jobs and wages flowed from the West to China, income and wealth shifted from American workers to a large number of low-paid Chinese workers.</p><p>Although multinational corporations have profited handsomely, the Western working class has also been impacted. The loss of jobs has accelerated the decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate, while at the same time, demand from China has begun to boom (Figure 6).</p><p>Figure 6: US-China Labor Market and Commodity Bull Market</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ed6517258040a669a3d62731f3f6f12f\" tg-width=\"1036\" tg-height=\"322\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It's not just government-led infrastructure projects; Chinese households have also begun to buy large quantities of physical goods after gaining new income, just as low-income households in the United States and Europe did in the late 1960s and 1970s.</p><p>Under this trend, China has become the dominant force in commodity demand over the past 20 years, and China has also become synonymous with commodity demand. Many investors regard Chinese demand trends – whether in terms of credit, policy, or trade – as a leading indicator of commodity prices.</p><p>However, after two decades of record export-led growth, the 'arbitrage window' between China and the West has largely closed. Not only is real wage growth in China 22 times faster than in the United States, but policymakers on both sides of the Pacific are also beginning to realize the drawbacks of this 'open arbitrage'.</p><p>On the one hand, Trump's protectionist trade policies are aimed at addressing job losses and wage stagnation in the U.S. manufacturing sector. On the other hand, China is also tired of the high environmental costs it incurs in dealing with the world's waste and producing highly polluting products. In a series of policies introduced over the past three years, China has closed its doors to imports of foreign waste and cut capacity in highly polluting and energy-intensive industries such as steel to improve the quality of life for its residents.</p><p>These policies will not stop China's economic growth, but they will slow China's demand for physical goods. As China gradually shifts towards an information-based, renewable energy-dominated economy, it will no longer be the sole major source of growth in commodity demand over the next decade (Figure 7).</p><p>Figure 7: Major Sources of Future Commodity Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6857fd14772a6f89394c6a7434fbf128\" tg-width=\"1016\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>5) Decarbonization becomes the keynote of macroeconomic policy</b></p><p>From Biden's Green New Deal to China's industrial policies based on carbon emission reduction and energy transition, \"decarbonization\" is becoming the global macroeconomic policy tone, which means that the left-tail risk of green capital expenditure has been greatly reduced.</p><p>When Biden wrapped up his climate summit last month, he focused on how green capital spending would create jobs, not unlike past power infrastructure projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority under the New Deal, which also addressed both environmental and social issues at the time.</p><p>Extending to trade policy, following areas related to traditional protectionist policies such as agriculture, technology transfer, and manufacturing employment, the United States, China, and Europe have all begun to focus their trade policy debates on carbon border taxes and strategic competitiveness.</p><p>In fact, \"carbon security\" is now becoming an important issue for a country—do countries have the opportunity to acquire low-carbon technologies and raw materials to develop key green industries within their countries?</p><p>According to the attitudes of the Biden administration and the Chinese government, industries that cannot decarbonize are at risk before the imposition of a carbon emissions tax.</p><p>While setting provincial emissions targets, China has also set caps on national emissions capacity, laying the foundation for tightening commodity supplies.</p><p>Among industrial metals, steel (accounting for 17% of China's carbon emissions) and aluminum (accounting for 4% of China's carbon emissions) were most affected (Figure 8).</p><p>Unlike the supply-side reforms of 2016, the long-term nature of the decarbonization target means that capacity constraints will persist, thus having a more lasting impact on fundamentals and prices.</p><p>Figure 8: Main sources of carbon emissions in China</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ae2613c479ee4e2a82dd9ab00f2d8f96\" tg-width=\"1011\" tg-height=\"413\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>6) Economic restart and oil price reassessment</b></p><p>Over the past six months, global crude oil demand has remained at around 95 million barrels per day (see chart below). Goldman Sachs predicts a sharp rebound in global crude oil demand in the coming months (Figure 9).</p><p>Figure 9: Global crude oil demand will rebound sharply in the second quarter.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3c0daa427227ee5704db352496678890\" tg-width=\"502\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>First, the impact of the pandemic on economic/travel activities is diminishing due to more targeted pandemic prevention policies and a continued increase in vaccinations. There is clear evidence that countries with leading vaccination rates (the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom) are traveling more. For example, gasoline demand in the United States is approaching 2019 levels (Figure 10), and aviation fuel demand has also increased by 20% since March.</p><p>Figure 10: US Gasoline Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e979bd8b0d58e5f3f2c757004bab8197\" tg-width=\"816\" tg-height=\"834\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>In addition, the epidemics in South America and Europe have also reached a turning point, and the growth rate of the epidemic in India has finally slowed down.</p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs expects global oil demand to increase significantly starting in June, from the current 94.5 million barrels per day to 99 million barrels per day in the third quarter.</p><p>As the pace of vaccination accelerates in Europe, pent-up travel demand will be released. In particular, the easing of international travel restrictions starting in May is expected to lead to a recovery of 1.5 million barrels per day in global aviation fuel demand (although it is still 30% lower than pre-pandemic levels).</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that Brent crude oil prices will reach $80 per barrel in the next six months, and CME group' WTI crude oil prices will reach $75 per barrel.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>7) Copper is the new oil</b></p><p>Finally, we return to the central theme of this report: 'Copper is the new oil'.</p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that green capital spending is the theme of the next commodity supercycle, with copper being a top priority.</p><p>However, what is worrying is that copper is facing supply pressure due to severe underinvestment. After experiencing the trauma of the price crash in the mid-2010s, copper miners have been cautious about increasing capital support, and are now just over two years away from the peak of copper supply.</p><p>Goldman Sachs pointed out that a record high in copper prices is the only way to solve the supply crisis. Just as oil exhibited during the commodity super bull market of the first decade of the 21st century.</p><p>Goldman Sachs estimates that the green revolution will spur the strongest decade of growth in copper demand history, with the share of green demand rising from 3% now to 16% by 2030 (Figure 11).</p><p>Figure 11: Changes in Copper Demand and Share of Green Energy Capacity</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5a149e30db025e20fed7325e1dcfe0c1\" tg-width=\"1034\" tg-height=\"372\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Since last year, the stimulus policies accompanying the pandemic have supported a demand recovery despite stagnant supply (China has contributed significantly), leading to a further intensification of the copper deficit. These dynamics will peak just as the copper market experiences its largest medium- to long-term deficit in history.</p><p>The Chinese spot market is currently in a brief period of weakness, providing investors with a short buying window (this report was first published in mid-last month) until destocking is completed and replenishment begins, which will continue into the second half of the year.</p><p>Against this backdrop, Goldman Sachs has raised its copper price target for the next 12 months to $11,000/ton, compared to $11,875/ton in 2022, $12,000/ton in 2023, $14,000/ton in 2024, and $15,000/ton in 2025.</p><p>However, it should be noted that within a month of Goldman Sachs releasing its report, copper prices had risen by more than 20%. Although the long-term outlook remains positive, the short-term gains are relatively large.</p><p><b>8) Are the agricultural products overheated?</b></p><p>It's not just copper. The tightening supply outlook for agricultural products, coupled with a surge in Chinese imports and severe weather in Brazil and the United States, led to further increases in grain and oilseed prices in April, with corn prices exceeding $6.50 per bushel and soybeans exceeding $15 per bushel, the highest prices since the drought in early 2010 (Figure 12).</p><p>Figure 12: Agricultural product price increases (Data from the CME website, as of April 28, prices are much higher today)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f45b49342b1bf36ccd462d062b25e6c2\" tg-width=\"643\" tg-height=\"277\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Following this surge in grain prices, the market will face two prospects. If the U.S. crop harvest is poor in the summer (a freeze warning has been issued in the U.S. corn belt, and 8% of planted crops are at risk of early damage), inventories will drop to extremely low levels, and prices will need to rise further first to suppress demand. Then, the expected yield after expanding the planting area may bring corn and soybean prices down to $4.50 and $13.50, respectively.</p><p>In addition, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that rising ethanol consumption and strong demand for soybean oil have boosted soybean crushing profits. Therefore, at current price levels, it is difficult to maintain market equilibrium by suppressing demand for older crops.</p><p>Given the extremely tight supply and demand of soybeans in the United States, and the recent better performance of new corn prices than soybeans, which will lead to a shift in crop planting area towards corn (Figure 13), this indicates that soybean futures prices (the CME soybean futures price expiring in November used by Goldman Sachs) will catch up with the increase in corn prices in the coming months.</p><p>Figure 13: Soybean/Corn Price Ratio</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/1222688aa1ac4b2958d90ff1a1554bfe\" tg-width=\"529\" tg-height=\"414\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Goldman Sachs has raised its recent corn price target to $7.30 per bushel to reflect reduced competition from Brazilian exports in the summer.</p><p>Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs raised its soybean price forecasts for the next 6 months and 12 months to $14.80 and $14.00, respectively, to reflect the impact of limited planting area expansion.</p><p>Similarly, based on severe cold weather in winter wheat-producing areas and the substitution effect of wheat for corn, Goldman Sachs raised its wheat target prices for March, June, and December to $7.40, $7.30, and $7.20, respectively.</p><p>In addition, Goldman Sachs is optimistic about cotton prices, citing the recent low cotton prices that will lead to a large-scale reduction in cotton planting area.</p><p>However, in the past few days, CME soybean, corn, and wheat futures prices have all exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target price. Whether the market is overbought or Goldman Sachs is being conservative is for readers to consider.</p><p><b>9) The battle for digital currencies</b></p><p>Since early March, Bitcoin has stagnated relative to gold (Figure 14), and Goldman Sachs believes there are two main reasons behind this:</p><p>First, due to the surge in global COVID-19 cases, risk sentiment has become more cautious, the market has returned to favoring defensive assets, and risky assets are losing momentum.</p><p>Figure 14: Bitcoin Gold Price Ratio (Shallow) & Goldman Sachs Risk Appetite Indicator (Deep)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/182c60f92df9d71310a21c4fa0eae0ca\" tg-width=\"511\" tg-height=\"329\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Secondly, Bitcoin has given way to other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH), highlighting the fact that competition among cryptocurrencies for store-of-value dominance still exists, and holding Bitcoin adds an additional source of risk.</p><p>Traditional long-term stores of value, such as gold, art, diamonds, wine, and collectibles, have use value in addition to being stores of value. Use value is important because utility demand can absorb fluctuations caused by investment demand, thus smoothing out price fluctuations, which means that asset prices are unlikely to be zero. Therefore, it is too early for Bitcoin and gold to compete for safe-haven demand, but the two can coexist.</p><p>While Bitcoin has benefited from loose liquidity, its high energy consumption, lack of practical value, and weak ESG score make its store of value needs easily replaced by another, better-designed cryptocurrency.</p><p>Bitcoin has significantly underperformed Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, this year, with Ethereum (ETH) prices continuing to hit new highs after the May Day holiday.</p><p>It's not just the price; Ethereum's trading volume is also climbing. Since CME group (CME) launched ETH futures in February, the product's trading volume and open interest have continued to climb (Figure 15), indicating that market acceptance of ETH is increasing.</p><p>Figure 15: ETH futures trading volume and open interest</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/dc492e64bba846c7aa673c29b59f3d32\" tg-width=\"571\" tg-height=\"319\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Note: Data is from the CME website and is current as of April 28.</p><p>The following table shows the basic elements of ETH futures in CME group.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f072fb91a65dbd153a4dbe30a308111c\" tg-width=\"428\" tg-height=\"162\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>We've discussed some of the hot applications of Ethereum before, but this rapid increase still exceeded our expectations.</p><p>Overall, Goldman Sachs' two reports are quite good in terms of both theoretical viewpoints and practical results.</p><p>However, please remain vigilant against these stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>The more confusing the distinction between a bubble and a bull market, the more trouble there will be.</p>","source":"gelonghui_highlight","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Goldman Sachs In-Depth Report: Rising Commodities, Chaos in the US? How much room is left for the surge?</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nGoldman Sachs In-Depth Report: Rising Commodities, Chaos in the US? How much room is left for the surge?\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">格隆汇</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-05-10 21:12</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p>Author: Sansi Macroeconomics</p><p>The core logic of this article is based on Goldman Sachs' bullish report last month, but due to the recent rapid rise in commodities, many stocks...<b>In just one month, it exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target for increases.</b></p><p>Therefore, our current views differ from those when this article was first published on Knowledge Planet on April 15th.</p><p>There are many unexpected events in the later stages of a bull market. Although the overall bullish outlook remains unchanged, please remain vigilant against certain stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>Regarding the trade proposed by Goldman Sachs last month, we do not intend to take profits immediately; we intend to fly in the bull market bubble for a while longer.</p><p>However, we also do not recommend that individual investors who have not previously joined the trend follow suit at this time.</p><p>A simple truth: when a single conference call can attract more than 4,000 investors, it is clearly no longer a good place to build a position.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5000bb6a5f8d798bcaa39f04e9461bc7\" tg-width=\"408\" tg-height=\"384\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>preface</b></p><p>The sharp rise in commodity prices has attracted much attention in recent times. Despite repeated calls from national ministries to cool down the commodity market, it has not stopped the sharp rise in the prices of commodities such as copper, iron ore, crude oil, and agricultural products, which inevitably makes people rethink the logic behind the rise in commodities.</p><p>Sansi Society has discussed commodities and inflation several times in previous articles.</p><p>On April 13, Goldman Sachs released another major report, \"Copper is the New Oil\" (see chart below). The report analyzed the supply and demand outlook for copper from the perspective of carbon emission reduction and green energy transition, and raised the target price for copper to $11,000 for the next 12 months.</p><p>Since the report was released, copper prices have risen steadily, with an increase of 20%.</p><p>Image: The image below is a screenshot of the candlestick chart on May 5th.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d207689a018d4f149a60ec1b6f6f35f4\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"569\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>But Goldman Sachs' bullish moves did not stop there.</p><p>Before the May Day holiday, Goldman Sachs once again released a special report, continuing to be bullish on commodities.</p><p>The report is highly practical, breaking out of the traditional framework and offering many insights and reflections in light of the new policy environment, with its viewpoints being quite insightful.</p><p>Today we have extracted the core points of this Goldman Sachs report for your reference.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e75a75763fdb6d43c33bf6758adf235e\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"293\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>Article</b></p><p><b>1) Commodities have a 13.5% upside potential.</b></p><p>In the two months leading up to the report's release (April 13), commodity prices had been consolidating (see the candlestick chart above). The reasons for the consolidation, besides digesting the previous round of gains, are more importantly fundamental factors: the re-lockdown in Europe has led to stagnant demand growth, as well as macroeconomic resistance brought about by rising interest rates and a stronger dollar.</p><p>However, these factors are now gradually reversing. Economic activity, as measured by travel metrics, is returning to an upward trajectory, especially after Europe accelerated vaccination. Meanwhile, a seasonal recovery in transportation, manufacturing, and construction has also begun and will continue to accelerate until June this year.</p><p>Figure 1: Global Travel Index by Region (left) & the US Dollar Index and Commodity Index (right)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0114a3921f19a70c8d6c5cd030bf5886\" tg-width=\"1027\" tg-height=\"348\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Commodity prices are driven by quantity (or the level of demand). When demand exceeds supply, a scarcity premium (i.e., the spot premium) appears, and this premium is difficult for the market to price in advance. Because commodity supply lacks elasticity in the short term, the extent of supply shortages in the face of upcoming large-scale demand growth is easily underestimated. Because suppliers cannot dig a new mine or grow a new crop in a few months.</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that overall commodity prices will rise by 13.5% over the next six months (compared to April 28, when the report was released), with oil prices reaching $80 per barrel (CME group' WTI crude oil price at $75 per barrel) and copper prices (CME group ticker symbol HG) reaching $11,000 per ton.</p><p>Figure: Goldman Sachs' price forecast table for major commodities</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>2) Tightening supply and demand support spot premiums</b></p><p>Since the surge in economic activity was fully anticipated by the market, why didn't commodity prices immediately reflect this? (Cashing out has already begun this month)</p><p>Before the commodity spot premium can be sustained, inventory reduction will inevitably occur. If the spot price is higher than the forward price, the surplus inventory of physical goods will be released and sold at the higher spot price, pushing the market back to its initial level (Figure 2).</p><p>Figure 2: Destocking and Price Curve</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/793f9e6761c22130c4fcc177e6735efd\" tg-width=\"784\" tg-height=\"508\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, only physical shortages can sustain spot premiums. Currently, more than half of the commodity markets have spot premiums, especially in agricultural products (Figure 3). The spot premium rate of commodities on major exchanges such as CME, ICE, and LME has reached a 15-year high (Figure 4).</p><p>Figure 3: Commodity spot premium rate</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/fcc075f153ff86f0b4b3a58b0376c42f\" tg-width=\"518\" tg-height=\"378\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Figure 4: Global commodity spot premium rates</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/43262a854e47779ee6ff339a88e6de03\" tg-width=\"631\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs believes that the continued spot premium indicates that the commodity market is experiencing insufficient inventory and a tightening spot market.</p><p><b>3) The wealth gap and the commodity bull market</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the shortage of commodities will not only affect the entire commodities industry, but also multiple regions and industries, from the United States, China and Europe to construction, automobiles and retail. The surge in demand is everywhere, and the core reason is that policymakers are more inclined to solve social problems than to focus on macroeconomic stability.</p><p>From the EU Recovery Fund allocating 50% of its funds to Italy and Spain to President Biden’s latest economic stimulus package, low-income families have clearly received policy favoritism. Over the past month, Powell has visited homeless people in Washington multiple times and frequently mentioned “forgotten corners” of the economy, indicating that the Federal Reserve’s policy focus has shifted towards employment and is more concerned with the balance of economic recovery than inflation.</p><p>Policies that address income and wealth inequality transfer the excess savings of a few high-income households to low-income households with a higher marginal propensity to consume, whether through debt, taxation, or other means, almost always ensure strong demand growth, which is precisely what underlies the overheated economy and real inflationary pressures. This can be seen everywhere in the United States, from rising gasoline demand to meat consumption increasing demand for grain feed.</p><p>Image: American residents primarily consume chicken, and the price of boneless chicken breast in the United States has recently doubled.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/09adea1a029ae67905475213f9709bf9\" tg-width=\"625\" tg-height=\"327\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It is not difficult to see that every major commodity bull market and economic inflation in history has been accompanied by populist policies that reduce people's income, increase wealth inequality, and redistribute wealth (Figure 5).</p><p>Figure 5: Narrowing the income gap mainly during periods of economic overheating</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/feae6950164428c16dddb04dde09fe33\" tg-width=\"754\" tg-height=\"395\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>4) China is no longer the only source of growth</b></p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that the commodity bull market of the first decade of this century was the result of global redistribution.</p><p>After China joined the WTO, as manufacturing jobs and wages flowed from the West to China, income and wealth shifted from American workers to a large number of low-paid Chinese workers.</p><p>Although multinational corporations have profited handsomely, the Western working class has also been impacted. The loss of jobs has accelerated the decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate, while at the same time, demand from China has begun to boom (Figure 6).</p><p>Figure 6: US-China Labor Market and Commodity Bull Market</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ed6517258040a669a3d62731f3f6f12f\" tg-width=\"1036\" tg-height=\"322\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>It's not just government-led infrastructure projects; Chinese households have also begun to buy large quantities of physical goods after gaining new income, just as low-income households in the United States and Europe did in the late 1960s and 1970s.</p><p>Under this trend, China has become the dominant force in commodity demand over the past 20 years, and China has also become synonymous with commodity demand. Many investors regard Chinese demand trends – whether in terms of credit, policy, or trade – as a leading indicator of commodity prices.</p><p>However, after two decades of record export-led growth, the 'arbitrage window' between China and the West has largely closed. Not only is real wage growth in China 22 times faster than in the United States, but policymakers on both sides of the Pacific are also beginning to realize the drawbacks of this 'open arbitrage'.</p><p>On the one hand, Trump's protectionist trade policies are aimed at addressing job losses and wage stagnation in the U.S. manufacturing sector. On the other hand, China is also tired of the high environmental costs it incurs in dealing with the world's waste and producing highly polluting products. In a series of policies introduced over the past three years, China has closed its doors to imports of foreign waste and cut capacity in highly polluting and energy-intensive industries such as steel to improve the quality of life for its residents.</p><p>These policies will not stop China's economic growth, but they will slow China's demand for physical goods. As China gradually shifts towards an information-based, renewable energy-dominated economy, it will no longer be the sole major source of growth in commodity demand over the next decade (Figure 7).</p><p>Figure 7: Major Sources of Future Commodity Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6857fd14772a6f89394c6a7434fbf128\" tg-width=\"1016\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>5) Decarbonization becomes the keynote of macroeconomic policy</b></p><p>From Biden's Green New Deal to China's industrial policies based on carbon emission reduction and energy transition, \"decarbonization\" is becoming the global macroeconomic policy tone, which means that the left-tail risk of green capital expenditure has been greatly reduced.</p><p>When Biden wrapped up his climate summit last month, he focused on how green capital spending would create jobs, not unlike past power infrastructure projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority under the New Deal, which also addressed both environmental and social issues at the time.</p><p>Extending to trade policy, following areas related to traditional protectionist policies such as agriculture, technology transfer, and manufacturing employment, the United States, China, and Europe have all begun to focus their trade policy debates on carbon border taxes and strategic competitiveness.</p><p>In fact, \"carbon security\" is now becoming an important issue for a country—do countries have the opportunity to acquire low-carbon technologies and raw materials to develop key green industries within their countries?</p><p>According to the attitudes of the Biden administration and the Chinese government, industries that cannot decarbonize are at risk before the imposition of a carbon emissions tax.</p><p>While setting provincial emissions targets, China has also set caps on national emissions capacity, laying the foundation for tightening commodity supplies.</p><p>Among industrial metals, steel (accounting for 17% of China's carbon emissions) and aluminum (accounting for 4% of China's carbon emissions) were most affected (Figure 8).</p><p>Unlike the supply-side reforms of 2016, the long-term nature of the decarbonization target means that capacity constraints will persist, thus having a more lasting impact on fundamentals and prices.</p><p>Figure 8: Main sources of carbon emissions in China</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ae2613c479ee4e2a82dd9ab00f2d8f96\" tg-width=\"1011\" tg-height=\"413\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>6) Economic restart and oil price reassessment</b></p><p>Over the past six months, global crude oil demand has remained at around 95 million barrels per day (see chart below). Goldman Sachs predicts a sharp rebound in global crude oil demand in the coming months (Figure 9).</p><p>Figure 9: Global crude oil demand will rebound sharply in the second quarter.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3c0daa427227ee5704db352496678890\" tg-width=\"502\" tg-height=\"365\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>First, the impact of the pandemic on economic/travel activities is diminishing due to more targeted pandemic prevention policies and a continued increase in vaccinations. There is clear evidence that countries with leading vaccination rates (the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom) are traveling more. For example, gasoline demand in the United States is approaching 2019 levels (Figure 10), and aviation fuel demand has also increased by 20% since March.</p><p>Figure 10: US Gasoline Demand</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e979bd8b0d58e5f3f2c757004bab8197\" tg-width=\"816\" tg-height=\"834\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>In addition, the epidemics in South America and Europe have also reached a turning point, and the growth rate of the epidemic in India has finally slowed down.</p><p>Therefore, Goldman Sachs expects global oil demand to increase significantly starting in June, from the current 94.5 million barrels per day to 99 million barrels per day in the third quarter.</p><p>As the pace of vaccination accelerates in Europe, pent-up travel demand will be released. In particular, the easing of international travel restrictions starting in May is expected to lead to a recovery of 1.5 million barrels per day in global aviation fuel demand (although it is still 30% lower than pre-pandemic levels).</p><p>Goldman Sachs predicts that Brent crude oil prices will reach $80 per barrel in the next six months, and CME group' WTI crude oil prices will reach $75 per barrel.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94c4e1aa387486e55f5e64e434babbbe\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"377\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p><b>7) Copper is the new oil</b></p><p>Finally, we return to the central theme of this report: 'Copper is the new oil'.</p><p>Goldman Sachs believes that green capital spending is the theme of the next commodity supercycle, with copper being a top priority.</p><p>However, what is worrying is that copper is facing supply pressure due to severe underinvestment. After experiencing the trauma of the price crash in the mid-2010s, copper miners have been cautious about increasing capital support, and are now just over two years away from the peak of copper supply.</p><p>Goldman Sachs pointed out that a record high in copper prices is the only way to solve the supply crisis. Just as oil exhibited during the commodity super bull market of the first decade of the 21st century.</p><p>Goldman Sachs estimates that the green revolution will spur the strongest decade of growth in copper demand history, with the share of green demand rising from 3% now to 16% by 2030 (Figure 11).</p><p>Figure 11: Changes in Copper Demand and Share of Green Energy Capacity</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5a149e30db025e20fed7325e1dcfe0c1\" tg-width=\"1034\" tg-height=\"372\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Since last year, the stimulus policies accompanying the pandemic have supported a demand recovery despite stagnant supply (China has contributed significantly), leading to a further intensification of the copper deficit. These dynamics will peak just as the copper market experiences its largest medium- to long-term deficit in history.</p><p>The Chinese spot market is currently in a brief period of weakness, providing investors with a short buying window (this report was first published in mid-last month) until destocking is completed and replenishment begins, which will continue into the second half of the year.</p><p>Against this backdrop, Goldman Sachs has raised its copper price target for the next 12 months to $11,000/ton, compared to $11,875/ton in 2022, $12,000/ton in 2023, $14,000/ton in 2024, and $15,000/ton in 2025.</p><p>However, it should be noted that within a month of Goldman Sachs releasing its report, copper prices had risen by more than 20%. Although the long-term outlook remains positive, the short-term gains are relatively large.</p><p><b>8) Are the agricultural products overheated?</b></p><p>It's not just copper. The tightening supply outlook for agricultural products, coupled with a surge in Chinese imports and severe weather in Brazil and the United States, led to further increases in grain and oilseed prices in April, with corn prices exceeding $6.50 per bushel and soybeans exceeding $15 per bushel, the highest prices since the drought in early 2010 (Figure 12).</p><p>Figure 12: Agricultural product price increases (Data from the CME website, as of April 28, prices are much higher today)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f45b49342b1bf36ccd462d062b25e6c2\" tg-width=\"643\" tg-height=\"277\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Following this surge in grain prices, the market will face two prospects. If the U.S. crop harvest is poor in the summer (a freeze warning has been issued in the U.S. corn belt, and 8% of planted crops are at risk of early damage), inventories will drop to extremely low levels, and prices will need to rise further first to suppress demand. Then, the expected yield after expanding the planting area may bring corn and soybean prices down to $4.50 and $13.50, respectively.</p><p>In addition, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that rising ethanol consumption and strong demand for soybean oil have boosted soybean crushing profits. Therefore, at current price levels, it is difficult to maintain market equilibrium by suppressing demand for older crops.</p><p>Given the extremely tight supply and demand of soybeans in the United States, and the recent better performance of new corn prices than soybeans, which will lead to a shift in crop planting area towards corn (Figure 13), this indicates that soybean futures prices (the CME soybean futures price expiring in November used by Goldman Sachs) will catch up with the increase in corn prices in the coming months.</p><p>Figure 13: Soybean/Corn Price Ratio</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/1222688aa1ac4b2958d90ff1a1554bfe\" tg-width=\"529\" tg-height=\"414\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Goldman Sachs has raised its recent corn price target to $7.30 per bushel to reflect reduced competition from Brazilian exports in the summer.</p><p>Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs raised its soybean price forecasts for the next 6 months and 12 months to $14.80 and $14.00, respectively, to reflect the impact of limited planting area expansion.</p><p>Similarly, based on severe cold weather in winter wheat-producing areas and the substitution effect of wheat for corn, Goldman Sachs raised its wheat target prices for March, June, and December to $7.40, $7.30, and $7.20, respectively.</p><p>In addition, Goldman Sachs is optimistic about cotton prices, citing the recent low cotton prices that will lead to a large-scale reduction in cotton planting area.</p><p>However, in the past few days, CME soybean, corn, and wheat futures prices have all exceeded Goldman Sachs' one-year target price. Whether the market is overbought or Goldman Sachs is being conservative is for readers to consider.</p><p><b>9) The battle for digital currencies</b></p><p>Since early March, Bitcoin has stagnated relative to gold (Figure 14), and Goldman Sachs believes there are two main reasons behind this:</p><p>First, due to the surge in global COVID-19 cases, risk sentiment has become more cautious, the market has returned to favoring defensive assets, and risky assets are losing momentum.</p><p>Figure 14: Bitcoin Gold Price Ratio (Shallow) & Goldman Sachs Risk Appetite Indicator (Deep)</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/182c60f92df9d71310a21c4fa0eae0ca\" tg-width=\"511\" tg-height=\"329\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Secondly, Bitcoin has given way to other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH), highlighting the fact that competition among cryptocurrencies for store-of-value dominance still exists, and holding Bitcoin adds an additional source of risk.</p><p>Traditional long-term stores of value, such as gold, art, diamonds, wine, and collectibles, have use value in addition to being stores of value. Use value is important because utility demand can absorb fluctuations caused by investment demand, thus smoothing out price fluctuations, which means that asset prices are unlikely to be zero. Therefore, it is too early for Bitcoin and gold to compete for safe-haven demand, but the two can coexist.</p><p>While Bitcoin has benefited from loose liquidity, its high energy consumption, lack of practical value, and weak ESG score make its store of value needs easily replaced by another, better-designed cryptocurrency.</p><p>Bitcoin has significantly underperformed Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, this year, with Ethereum (ETH) prices continuing to hit new highs after the May Day holiday.</p><p>It's not just the price; Ethereum's trading volume is also climbing. Since CME group (CME) launched ETH futures in February, the product's trading volume and open interest have continued to climb (Figure 15), indicating that market acceptance of ETH is increasing.</p><p>Figure 15: ETH futures trading volume and open interest</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/dc492e64bba846c7aa673c29b59f3d32\" tg-width=\"571\" tg-height=\"319\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>Note: Data is from the CME website and is current as of April 28.</p><p>The following table shows the basic elements of ETH futures in CME group.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f072fb91a65dbd153a4dbe30a308111c\" tg-width=\"428\" tg-height=\"162\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p><p>We've discussed some of the hot applications of Ethereum before, but this rapid increase still exceeded our expectations.</p><p>Overall, Goldman Sachs' two reports are quite good in terms of both theoretical viewpoints and practical results.</p><p>However, please remain vigilant against these stocks that have risen too quickly.</p><p>The more confusing the distinction between a bubble and a bull market, the more trouble there will be.</p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> source：<a href=\"https://www.gelonghui.com/p/464985\">格隆汇</a></p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/bac730ff187b3128886ce735bf21c2b8","relate_stocks":{".DJI":"道琼斯"},"source_url":"https://www.gelonghui.com/p/464985","is_english":false,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/6b8fa6424aebe95f6781d04ef17a1852","article_id":"1190822039","content_text":"作者：三思宏观人‍‍本文的核心逻辑乃基于高盛上月的看多报告，但由于近期大宗商品涨幅过快，不少标的仅一个月就超过了高盛提出的一年目标涨幅。因此，我们现在的观点，已与本文在4月15日首发在知识星球的时候有所不同。牛市后期幺蛾子多，虽然整体看多的方向不变，但对于某些涨幅过快的标的，大家请保持警惕。对于高盛上月提出的这套交易，我们并不打算马上止盈，打算再在牛市泡沫中飞一会。但是，我们也不建议之前没有上车的个人投资者在这个时间点还来跟风参与。一个简单的道理：当一次电话会议就能吸引4000多位投资人参会的时候，已明显不再是一个好的建仓点。前言过去一段时间，大宗商品价格大幅上涨备受关注。尽管国家部委多次发声给大宗商品市场降温，却依然挡不住铜、铁矿石、原油和农产品等大宗商品价格的猛烈上涨，这不免让人重新思考大宗商品上涨的逻辑。关于大宗商品和通胀，三思社已在往期内容中有过多次讨论了。在4月13号，高盛再次发布了一篇重磅报告《铜是新的石油》（见下图），报告从碳减排、绿色能源转型的角度分析铜的供需前景，并将未来12个月铜目标价提升至11000美元。报告发布后，铜价一路上涨至今，涨幅达20%。图：下图为5月5日K线截图。但高盛的多头动作并未止步于此。五一节前，高盛再一次发布专题报告，继续看多大宗商品。该报告实战性较强，跳出了传统框架，结合新的政策环境提出了不少洞见和思考，观点颇具启发性。今天我们把这篇高盛报告的核心观点提炼出来，供各位参考。 正文1）大宗商品存在13.5%的上涨空间在报告（4月13日）发布前的两个多月，大宗商品的价格一直在盘整（见上图的K线走势）。盘整的原因，除了消化上一轮的涨幅以外，更重要还是基本面因素：欧洲重新封锁导致需求增长停滞以及利率上升、美元走强带来的宏观阻力。然而现在，这些因素正在逐步逆转。以出行指标衡量的经济活动正在重回上升轨迹，尤其在欧洲加速接种疫苗之后，这种势头越发强劲。与此同时，交通运输、制造业和建筑业的季节性复苏也已开始，而且会在今年六月前持续加速。图1：全球各地区出行指数（左）&美元指数与大宗商品指数（右）大宗商品价格是由量（或者需求水平）驱动的，当需求量超过供应量，稀缺性溢价（即现货溢价）就出现了，而这种溢价又很难在事前被市场定价。由于大宗商品供应在短期内缺乏弹性，面对即将到来的大规模需求增长，供应不足的程度很容易被低估。因为供给方不可能在几个月时间里就新挖一座矿或者新种一种农作物。高盛预计，在未来6个月，大宗商品的整体价格存在13.5%的上行空间（相较于报告发布的4月28日），油价将达到80美元/桶（芝商所旗下的WTI原油价格为75美元/桶），铜价（芝商所代码为HG）将达到1.1万美元/吨。图：高盛对主要大宗商品的价格预测表2）供需趋紧支撑现货溢价既然经济活动激增已被市场充分预期，那为什么大宗商品价格没有立即反映这一点?（这个月已开始兑现）在大宗商品现货溢价得以持续之前，必定会出现去库存。如果即期价格高于远期，实物商品的库存盈余将会出库，在较高的即期价格下被出售，将市场推回到初始水平(图2)。图2：去库存与价格曲线因此，只有实物短缺才能使现货溢价持续，而目前超过一半的大宗商品市场存在现货溢价，尤其农产品较为突出(图3)，CME、ICE、LME等几大交易所的大宗商品现货溢价率已经创下15年新高(图4)。图3：大宗商品现货溢价率图4：全球大宗商品现货溢价率因此，高盛认为：持续的现货溢价表明，大宗商品市场正处于库存不足、现货趋紧的状态。3）贫富差距与大宗商品牛市高盛认为，大宗商品的紧俏不仅会波及整个大宗行业，还会影响从美国、中国和欧洲到建筑、汽车和零售等多个地区和行业。需求井喷的状况随处可见，核心原因是决策者更倾向于解决社会问题，而不是聚焦宏观稳定。从《欧盟复苏基金》将50%的资金分配给意大利和西班牙，到总统拜登最新经济刺激方案，低收入家庭明显受到了政策倾斜。过去一个月，鲍威尔多次访问华盛顿的无家可归者，频繁提及经济中“被遗忘的角落”，表明美联储政策重心已经向就业倾斜，更关注经济复苏的均衡性而不是通胀问题。解决收入和财富不平等的政策将少数高收入家庭的多余储蓄，转移到边际消费倾向更高的低收入家庭，无论是通过负债、征税还是其他方式实现，它几乎总能确保强劲的需求增长，而这正是经济过热和实物通胀压力背后的原因。这一点在美国随处可见，从汽油需求增长到肉类消费提高谷物饲料需求。图：美国居民以鸡肉消费为主，而近期美国的无骨鸡胸肉已涨价一倍。不难发现，历史上每一次大的商品牛市和经济通胀，都无一例外的伴随着百姓收入减少、财富不平等、财富再分配的民粹主义政策(图5)。图5：缩小收入差距主要在经济过热时期4）中国不再是唯一增长源高盛认为，本世纪头十年的大宗商品牛市，就是全球再分配的结果。中国加入世贸组织后，随着制造业工作机会和工资从西方流向中国，收入和财富从美国工人转向大量低报酬的中国工人。虽然跨国企业从中获利颇丰，但西方的劳工阶层也受到冲击。就业机会的流失加速了美国劳动参与率下降，而与此同时，来自中国的需求开始繁荣(图6)。图6：中美劳动力市场与大宗商品牛市不只是政府主导的基建工程，中国家庭在获得了新收入后，也开始大量购买实物商品，正如上世纪60年代末和70年代美国和欧洲低收入家庭所做的那样。在这趋势下，中国在过去20年里成为了大宗商品需求的霸主，中国也成了大宗商品需求的代名词。许多投资者将中国需求动向——无论是信贷、政策还是贸易——视为衡量大宗商品价格的前瞻指标。然而，在经历了二十年创纪录的出口导向型增长之后，中西方之间的‘套利窗口‘已基本关闭。不仅中国的实际工资增长速度比美国快22倍，太平洋两岸的政策制定者也开始意识到这种'开放套利'的弊端。一方面，特朗普的贸易保护主义政策旨在应对美国制造业就业流失和工资停滞。另一方面，中国也已厌倦了为处理世界垃圾和生产高污染产品所承担的高昂环境成本。在过去三年颁布的一系列政策中，中国关闭了洋垃圾进口的大门，并削减高污染高耗能行业譬如钢铁行业的产能，以提高居民的生活质量。这些政策不会阻止中国的经济增长，但它将减缓中国对实物商品的需求。随着中国逐渐转向以信息为基础、可再生能源为主导的经济体，下个十年的中国，将不再是大宗商品需求的唯一主要增长源(图7)。图7：未来大宗商品需求主要来源国5）脱碳成为宏观政策的基调从拜登的绿色新政到中国基于碳减排和能源转型的产业政策，“脱碳”正成为全球宏观的政策基调，这意味着绿色资本支出的左尾风险大大降低。拜登在上个月的气候峰会做总结时，重点谈到了绿色资本支出将如何创造就业，这与过去的电力基础设施项目没有什么不同，比如罗斯福新政中的田纳西河谷管理局，它当时也同时解决了环境问题和社会问题。延伸到贸易政策，自农业、技术转让和制造业就业等与传统保护主义政策相关的领域之后，美国、中国和欧洲都开始将贸易政策的争论焦点围绕碳边境税和战略竞争力展开。事实上，“碳安全”现在正成为一个国家的重要问题——各国是否有机会获得低碳技术和原材料，以发展国内的关键绿色行业?根据拜登政府和中国政府的态度，征收碳排放税之前，无法脱碳的行业都存在风险。中国在制定省级排放目标的同时，也对全国排放能力设定了上限，这为大宗商品供应收紧奠定了基础。在工业金属中，钢铁(占中国碳排放的17%)和铝(占中国碳排放的4%)受影响最大(图8)。与2016年的供给侧改革不同，脱碳目标的长期性质意味着产能限制将持续存在，进而对基本面和价格产生更持久的影响。图8：中国碳排放主要来源6）经济重启与油价重估过去6个月，全球原油需求水平一直保持在约9500万桶/天的水平（下图）。高盛预计未来几个月全球原油需求将出现大幅反弹(图9)图9：全球原油需求二季度将大幅反弹首先，疫情对经济/出行活动的影响正在减弱，原因是防疫政策更有针对性和疫苗接种持续增加。有明确的证据表明，疫苗接种领先的国家(美国、以色列、英国)出行活动更多，例如，美国的汽油需求已接近2019年的水平(图10)，航空的燃油需求也自3月份以来增长了20%。图10：美国汽油需求此外，南美和欧洲的疫情也已出现拐点，印度疫情也终于增速放缓。因此，高盛预计6月份开始全球石油需求将大幅增加，从目前9450万桶/天增加到第三季度9900万桶/天。随着欧洲疫苗接种步伐加快，被抑制的旅行需求将得到释放。特别是，预计5月份开始的国际旅行限制放松，将导致全球航空油需求恢复150万桶/天(尽管仍比疫情前的水平低30%)。高盛预计，在未来6个月，布伦特原油价格将达到80美元/桶，芝商所旗下的WTI原油价格将达到75美元/桶。7）铜是新的石油终于回到了本报告的中心主旨：'铜是新的石油'。高盛认为绿色资本支出是下一轮大宗商品超级周期的主旨，而铜则是重中之重。但令人担忧的是，铜正面临严重投资不足的供应压力。在经历了2010年代中期价格暴跌带来的创伤后，铜矿企业对增加资本开支持谨慎态度，现在距离铜矿供应峰值只有两年多的时间。高盛指出，铜价飙出历史新高是解决供应危机的唯一途径。就像石油在21世纪头十年的大宗商品超级牛市中所呈现的那样。高盛估计绿色革命将催生铜需求历史上最强的十年增长期，绿色需求份额将从现在的3%上升到2030年的16%(图11)。图11：绿色能源产能的铜需求量及份额变化去年以来，相伴于疫情的刺激政策在供应停滞的情况下支撑了需求复苏（中国贡献很大），导致铜赤字进一步强化，这些动态正好将在铜市场出现有史以来最大的中长期赤字时达到顶峰。中国现货市场目前处于短暂疲软阶段，为投资者提供了短暂的买入窗口（本报告于上月中旬首发），直到去库存结束并开始补库存，后者将持续到下半年。在此背景下，高盛将未来12个月铜目标价提高到1.1万美元/吨，2022年为11875美元/吨，2023年为1.2万美元/吨，2024年为1.4万美元/吨，2025年为1.5万美元/吨。但需注意的是，在高盛发报告后的一个月之内，铜价已涨幅逾20%。虽然仍长期看好，但短期涨幅较大。8）农产品过热了么？不止于铜。由于中国进口激增再叠加巴西和美国的恶劣天气，农产品的供应前景也日益趋紧，这导致4月份谷物和油籽价格进一步上涨，玉米价格超过6.5美元/蒲式耳，大豆超过15美元/蒲式耳，创下自2010年初干旱以来的最高价格(图12)。图12：农产品价格涨幅（数据来自CME官网，数据截至4月28日，今天的价格又高了不少）这次谷物价格大涨后，市场将面临着两种前景。如果夏季美国农作物收成不好（美国玉米带出现冰冻预警，8%的种植作物面临早期受损风险），库存将降至极低水平，价格需要先上涨更多以压抑需求；然后预期扩大种植面积后的产量可能又会使玉米和大豆价格分别降至4.5美元和13.5美元。此外，美国能源情报署(EIA)报告称，乙醇消费量不断上升、豆油需求强劲，这拉升了大豆压榨的利润。因此，在当前的价格水平上很难通过压抑旧作物需求来维持市场均衡。由于美国大豆供需也极度偏紧，以及最近新玉米价格表现好于大豆将导致作物种植面积向玉米倾斜(图13)，这预示着未来几个月，大豆期货价格（高盛用的11月到期的CME大豆期货价格）也将迎头赶上玉米的涨幅。图13：大豆/玉米价格比高盛将近期玉米目标价上调至7.30美元/蒲式耳，以反映夏季来自巴西出口的竞争减少；同时高盛将未来6个月和12个月大豆预测价上调至14.80美元和14.00美元，以反映种植面积扩张受限的影响。同理，基于冬小麦产区出现严寒天气以及小麦对玉米的替代效应，高盛将未来3/6/12月的小麦目标价上调至7.40/7.30/7.20美元。此外，高盛还看好棉花价格，理由是近期棉价低迷会导致棉花种植面积大规模减少。但这几天的CME大豆、玉米、小麦期货价格均已超过了高盛的一年目标价，是市场超买了还是高盛保守了，这就交给各位读者思考了。9）数字货币的争斗自3月初以来，比特币相对于黄金表现已经停滞(图14)，高盛认为这背后主要有两个原因：首先，由于全球新冠肺炎病例激增，风险情绪变得更加谨慎，市场重新青睐防御性资产，风险资产正在失去动能。图14：比特币黄金价格比（浅）& 高盛风险偏好指标（深）其次，比特币让位于以太币(ETH)等其他加密货币，这凸显了一个事实：即加密货币之间对价值储存主导地位的竞争仍然存在，持有比特币增加了额外风险来源。传统的长期价值储存方式如黄金、艺术品、钻石、葡萄酒和收藏品，除了作为价值储存方式外，都具有使用价值。使用价值之所以重要，是因为实用需求能够吸收因投资需求带来的波动，从而抚平价格波动，这意味着资产价格不太可能为零。因此，比特币与黄金争夺避险需求还为时过早，但两者可以共存。虽然比特币受益于流动性宽松，但由于其高能耗，缺少实用价值和较弱的ESG评分，这使得它的价值存储需求很容易被另一种设计更好的加密货币替代。今年以来，比特币表现明显跑输第二大数字货币以太币，在五一假期结束后，以太坊(ETH)价格持续创下新高。不只是价格，以太坊的交易量也在攀升。自芝商所（CME）2月份推出ETH期货以来，该产品成交量和持仓量持续攀升（图15），这表明市场对ETH的接受度正在不断上升。图15：ETH期货成交量和持仓量注：数据来自CME官网，数据截至4月28日下表为芝商所ETH期货的基本要素关于以太坊的一些热点应用，我们在前文有过讨论，但这么迅猛的涨幅还是超出我们预期了。总的来说，高盛的这两篇报告无论是理论观点还是实战效果都是不错的。但是，对于这些涨幅过快的标的，请大家务必保持警惕。越是泡沫与牛市傻傻分不清楚的时候，幺蛾子就越多。","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{".DJI":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":3574,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":325912033,"gmtCreate":1615856987322,"gmtModify":1704787503114,"author":{"id":"3577221458132518","authorId":"3577221458132518","name":"更深得蓝","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577221458132518","authorIdStr":"3577221458132518"},"themes":[],"title":"","htmlText":"mark","listText":"mark","text":"mark","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/325912033","repostId":"1147867743","repostType":4,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":3670,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"lives":[]}