Tag: securities

Unconditional claim, remember? Educational about debt-based securities

My editorial on You Tube

 

Here comes another piece of educational content, regarding the fundamentals of finance, namely a short presentation of debt-based securities. As I will be discussing that topic,  here below, I will compare those financial instruments to equity-based securities, which I already discussed in « Finding the right spot in that flow: educational about equity-based securities ».

In short, debt-based securities are financial instruments which transform a big chunk of debt, thus a big obligatory contract, into a set of small, tradable pieces, and give to that debt more liquidity.

In order to understand how debt-based securities work in finance, it is a good thing to put a few clichés on their head and make them hold that stance. First of all, we normally associate debt with a relation of power: the CREDITOR, or the person who lends to somebody else, has a dominant position over the DEBTOR, who borrows. Whilst being sometimes true, it is true just sometimes, and it is just one point of view. Debt can be considered as a way of transferring capital from entity A to entity B. Entity A has more cash than they currently need, whilst B has less. Entity A can transfer the excess of cash to B, only they need a contractual base to do it in a civilized way. In my last educational, regarding equity-based securities, I presented a way of transferring capital in exchange of a conditional claim on B’s assets, and of a corresponding decisional power: that would be investing in B’s equity. Another way is to acquire an unconditional claim on B’s future cash flows, and this is debt. Historically, both ways have been used and developed into specific financial instruments.

Anyway, the essential concept of debt-based securities is to transform one big, obligatory claim of one entity onto another entity into many small pieces, each expressed as a tradable deed (document). How the hell is it possible to transform a debt – thus future money that is not there yet – into securities? Here come two important, general concepts of finance: liquidity, and security. Liquidity, in financial terms, is something that we spontaneously associate with being able to pay whatever we need to pay in the immediate. The boss of a company can say they have financial liquidity when they have enough cash in their balance sheet to pay the bills currently on the desk. If some of those bills cannot be paid (not enough cash), the boss can say ‘Sorry, not enough liquidity’.

You can generalize from there: liquidity is the capacity to enter into new economic transactions, and to fulfil obligations resulting from such transactions. In markets that we, humans, put in place, there is a peculiar phenomenon to notice: we swing between various levels of required liquidity. In some periods, people in that market will be like immerged in routine. They will repeat the same transactions over and over again, in recurrent amounts. It is like an average Kowalski (the Polish equivalent of the English average Smith, or the French average Dupont) paying their electricity bills. Your electricity bill comes in the form of a six-month plan of instalments. Each month you will have to pay the same, fixed amount, which results from the last reading of your electricity counter. That amount is most likely to be similar to the amounts from previous six-month periods, unless you have just decided to grow some marijuana and you need extra electricity for those greenhouse lamps. If you manage to keep your head above the water, in day-to-day financial terms, you have probably incorporated those payments for electricity into your monthly budget, more or less consciously. You don’t need extra liquidity to meet those obligations. This is the state of a market, when it runs on routine transactions.

Still, there are times when a lot of new business is to be done. New technologies are elbowing their way into our industry, or a new trade agreement has been signed with another country, or the government had the excellent idea of forcing every entity in the market to equip themselves with that absolutely-necessary-thingy-which-absolutely-incidentally-is-being-marketed-by-the-minister’s-cousin. When we need to enter into new transactions, or when we just need to be ready for entering them, we need a reserve of liquidity, i.e. we need additional capacity to transact. Our market has entered into a period of heightened need for liquidity.

When I lend to someone a substantial amount of money in a period of low need for liquidity, I can just sit and wait until they pay me back. No hurry. On the other hand, when I lend during a period of increased need for liquidity, my approach is different: I want to recoup my capital as soon as possible. My debtor, i.e. the person which I have lent to, cannot pay me back immediately. If they could, they would not need to borrow from me. Stands to reason. What I can do is to express that lending-borrowing transaction as an exchange of securities against money.

You can find an accurate description of that link between actual business, its required liquidity, and all the lending business in: Adam Smith – “An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth of Nations”, Book II: Of The Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock, Chapter IV: Of Stock Lent At Interest: “Almost all loans at interest are made in money, either of paper, or of gold and silver; but what the borrower really wants, and what the lender readily supplies him with, is not the money, but the money’s worth, or the goods which it can purchase. If he wants it as a stock for immediate consumption, it is those goods only which he can place in that stock. If he wants it as a capital for employing industry, it is from those goods only that the industrious can be furnished with the tools, materials, and maintenance necessary for carrying on their work. By means of the loan, the lender, as it were, assigns to the borrower his right to a certain portion of the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, to be employed as the borrower pleases.”

Here, we come to the concept of financial security. Anything in the future is subject to uncertainty and risk. We don’t know how exactly things are going to happen. This generates risk. Future events can meet my expectations, or they can do me harm. If I can sort of divide both my expectations, and the possible harm, into small pieces, and make each such small piece sort of independent from other pieces, I create a state of dispersed expectations, and dispersed harm. This is the fundamental idea of a security. How can I create mutual autonomy between small pieces of my future luck or lack thereof? By allowing people to trade those pieces independently from each other.

It is time to explain how the hell can we give more liquidity to debt by transforming it into securities. First things first, let’s see the typical ways of doing it: a note, and a bond. A note, AKA promissory note, or bill of exchange, in its most basic appearance is a written, unconditional promise to pay a certain amount of money to whoever presents the note on a given date. You can see it in the graphic below.

Now, those of you, who, hopefully, paid attention in the course of microeconomics, might ask: “Whaaait a minute, doc! Where is the interest on that loan? You told us: there ain’t free money…”. Indeed, there ain’t. Notes were invented long ago. The oldest ones we have in European museums date back to the 12th century A.D. Still, given what we know about the ways of doing business in the past, they had been used even further back. As you might know, it was frequently forbidden by the law to lend money at interest. It was called usury, it was considered at least as a misdemeanour, if not a crime, and you could even be hanged for that. In the world of Islamic Finance, lending at interest is forbidden even today.

One of the ways to bypass the ban on interest-based lending is to calculate who much money will that precise interest make on that precise loan. I lend €9000 at 12%, for one year, and it makes €9000 *12% = €1 080. I lend €9000, for one year, and I make my debtor liable for €10 080. Interest? Who’s talking about interest? It is ordinary discount!

Discount is the difference between the nominal value of a financial instrument (AKA face value), and its actual price in exchange, thus the amount of money you can have in exchange of that instrument.

A few years ago, I found that same pattern in an innocently-looking contract, which was underpinning a loan that me and my wife were taking for 50% of a new car. The person who negotiated the deal at the car dealer’s announced joyfully: ‘This is a zero-interest loan. No interest!’. Great news, isn’t it? Still, as I was going through the contract, I found that we have to pay, at the signature, a ‘contractual fee’. The fee was strangely precise, I mean there were grosze (Polish equivalent of cents) after the decimal point. I did my maths: that ‘contractual fee’ was exactly and rigorously equal to the interest we would have to pay on that loan, should it be officially interest-bearing at ordinary, market rates.

The usage of discount instead of interest points at an important correlate of notes, and debt-based securities in general: risk. That scheme with pre-calculated interest included into the face value of the note is any good when I can reliably predict when exactly will the debtor pay back (buy the note back). Moreover, as the discount is supposed to reflect pre-calculated interest, it also reflects that part of the interest rate, which accounts for credit risk.

There are 1000 borrowers, who borrow from a nondescript number of lenders. Each loan bears a principal (i.e. nominal amount) of €3000, which makes a total market of €3 000 000 lent and borrowed. Out of those 1000, a certain number is bound to default on paying back. Let it be 4%. It makes 4% * 1000 * €3000 = €120 000, which, spread over the whole population of borrowers makes €120 000/ 1000 = €120, or €120/€3000 = 4%. Looks like a logical loop, and for a good reason: you cannot escape it. In a large set of people, some will default on their obligations. This is a fact. Their collective default is an aggregate financial risk – credit risk – which has to be absorbed by the market, somehow. The simplest way to absorb it is to make each borrower pay a small part of it. When I take a loan, in a bank, the interest rate I pay always reflects the credit risk in the whole population of borrowers. When I issue a note, the discount I have to give to my lender will always include the financial risk that recurrently happens in the given market.

The discount rate is a price of debt, just as the interest rate. Both can be used, and the prevalence of one or the other depends on the market. Whenever debt gets massively securitized, i.e. transformed into tradable securities, discount becomes somehow handier and smoother to use. Another quote from invaluable Adam Smith sheds some light on this issue (

Adam Smith – “An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth of Nations”, Book II: Of The Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock, Chapter IV: Of Stock Lent At Interest): “As the quantity of stock to be lent at interest increases, the interest, or the price which must be paid for the use of that stock, necessarily diminishes, not only from those general causes which make the market price of things commonly diminish as their quantity increases, but from other causes which are peculiar to this particular case. As capitals increase in any country, the profits which can be made by employing them necessarily diminish. It becomes gradually more and more difficult to find within the country a profitable method of employing any new capital. There arises, in consequence, a competition between different capitals, the owner of one endeavouring to get possession of that employment which is occupied by another; but, upon most occasions, he can hope to justle that other out of this employment by no other means but by dealing upon more reasonable terms.”

The presence of financial risk, and the necessity to account for it whilst maintaining proper liquidity in the market, brought two financial inventions: endorsement, and routed notes. Notes used to be (and still are) issued for a relatively short time, usually not longer than 1 year. If the lender needs to have their money back before the due date of the note, they can do something called endorsement: they can present that note as their own to a third party, who will advance them money in exchange. Presenting a note as my own means making myself liable for up to 100% of the original, i.e signing the note, with a date. You can find an example in the graphic below.

Endorsement used to be a normal way of assuring liquidity in the market financed with notes. Endorsers’ signatures made a chain of liability, ordered by dates. The same scheme is used today in cryptocurrencies, as the chain of hash-tagged digital signatures. Another solution was to put in the system someone super-reliable, like a banker. Such a trusted payer, who, on their part, had tons of reserve money to provide liquidity, made the whole game calmer and less risky, and thus the price of credit (the discount rate) was lower. The way of putting a banker in the game was to write them in the note as the entity liable for payment. Such a note was designated as a routed one, or as a draft. Below, I am presenting an example.

As banks entered the game of securitized debt, it opened the gates of hell, i.e. the way to paper money. Adam Smith was very apprehensive about it (Adam Smith – “Wealth of Nations”, Book II: Of The Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock, Chapter II: Of Money, Considered As A Particular Branch Of The General Stock Of The Society, Or Of The Expense Of Maintaining The National Capital”): “The trader A in Edinburgh, we shall suppose, draws a bill upon B in London, payable two months after date. In reality B in Lon- don owes nothing to A in Edinburgh; but he agrees to accept of A ‘s bill, upon condition, that before the term of payment he shall redraw upon A in Edinburgh for the same sum, together with the interest and a commission, another bill, payable likewise two months after date. B accordingly, before the expiration of the first two months, redraws this bill upon A in Edinburgh; who, again before the expiration of the second two months, draws a second bill upon B in London, payable likewise two months after date; and before the expiration of the third two months, B in London redraws upon A in Edinburgh another bill payable also two months after date. This practice has sometimes gone on, not only for several months, but for several years together, the bill always returning upon A in Edinburgh with the accumulated interest and com- mission of all the former bills. The interest was five per cent. in the year, and the commission was never less than one half per cent. on each draught. This commission being repeated more than six times in the year, whatever money A might raise by this expedient might necessarily have cost him something more than eight per cent. in the year and sometimes a great deal more, when either the price of the commission happened to rise, or when he was obliged to pay compound interest upon the interest and commission of former bills. This practice was called raising money by circulation”

Notes were quick to issue, but a bit clumsy when it came to financing really big ventures, like governments. When you are a king, and you need cash for waging war on another king, issuing a few notes can be tricky. Same in the corporate sector. When we are talking about really big money, making the debt tradable is just one part, and another part is to make it nicely spread over the landscape. This is how bonds came into being, as financial instruments. The idea of bonds was to make the market of debt a bit steadier across space and over time. Notes worked well for short-term borrowing, but long-term projects, which required financing for 5 or 6 years, encountered a problem of price, i.e. discount rate. If I issue a note to back a loan for 5 years, the receiver of the note, i.e. the lender, knows they will have to wait really long to see their money back. Below, in the graphic, you have the idea explained sort of in capital letters.

The first thing is the face value. The note presented earlier proudly displayed €10 000 of face value. The bond is just €100. You divide €10 000 into 100 separate bonds, each tradable independently, at you have something like a moving, living mass of things, flowing, coming and going. Yep, babe. Liquidity, liquidity, and once again liquidity. A lot of small debts flows much more smoothly than one big.

The next thing is the interest. You can see it here designated as “5%, annuity”, with the word ‘coupon’ added. If we have the interest rate written explicitly, it means the whole thing was invented when lending at interest became a normal thing, probably in the late 1700ies. The term ‘annuity’ means that every year, those 5% are being paid to the holder of the bond, like a fixed annual income. This is where the ‘word’ coupon comes from. Back in the day, when bonds were paper documents (they are not anymore), they had detachable strips, as in a cinema ticket, one strip per year. When the issuer of the bond paid annuities to the holders, those strips were being cut off.

The maturity date of the bond is the moment, when the issuer is supposed to buy it back. It is a general convention that bonds are issued for many years. This is when the manner of counting and compound the interest plays a role, and this is when we need to remind one fundamental thing – bonds are made for big borrowers. Anyone can make a note, and many different anyones can make it circulate, by endorsement or else. Only big entities can issue bonds, and because they are big, bonds are usually considered as safe placements, endowed with low risk. Low risk means low price of debt. When I can convince many small lenders that I, the big borrower, am rock solid in my future solvency, I can play on that interest rate. When I guarantee an annuity, it can be lower than the interest paid only at the very end of maturity, i.e. in 2022 as regards this case. When all around us all of them loans are given at 10% or 12%, an annuity backed with the authority of a big institution can be just 5%, and no one bothers.

Over time, bonds have dominated the market of debt. They are more flexible, and thus assure more liquidity. They offer interesting possibilities as for risk management and discount. When big entities issue bonds, it is the possibility for other big entities to invest large amounts of capital at fixed, guaranteed rate of return, i.e. the interest rates. Think about it: you have an investment the size of a big, incorporated business, and yet you have a risk-free return. Unconditional claim, remember? Hence, over time, what professional investors started doing was building a portfolio of investment with equity-based securities for high yield and high risk, plain lending contracts for moderate yield (high interest rate) and moderate risk, and, finally, bonds for low yield and low risk. Creating a highly liquid market of debt, by putting a lot of bonds into circulation, was like creating a safe harbour for investors. Whatever crazy s**t they were after, they could compensate the resulting risk through the inclusion of bonds in their portfolios.

I am consistently delivering good, almost new science to my readers, and love doing it, and I am working on crowdfunding this activity of mine. As we talk business plans, I remind you that you can download, from the library of my blog, the business plan I prepared for my semi-scientific project Befund  (and you can access the French version as well). You can also get a free e-copy of my book ‘Capitalism and Political Power’ You can support my research by donating directly, any amount you consider appropriate, to my PayPal account. You can also consider going to my Patreon page and become my patron. If you decide so, I will be grateful for suggesting me two things that Patreon suggests me to suggest you. Firstly, what kind of reward would you expect in exchange of supporting me? Secondly, what kind of phases would you like to see in the development of my research, and of the corresponding educational tools?

Finding the right spot in that flow: educational about equity-based securities

 

My editorial on You Tube

 

I am returning to educational content, and more specifically to finance. Incidentally, it is quite connected to my current research – crowdfunding in the market of renewable energies – and I feel like returning to the roots of financial theory. In this update, I am taking on a classical topic in finance: equity-based securities.

First things first, a short revision of what is equity. We have things, and we can have them in two ways. We can sort of have them, or have them actually. When I have something, like a house worth $1 mln, and, in the same time, I owe to somebody $1,2 mln, what is really mine, at the end of the day, is a debt of $1 mln – $1,2 mln = – $0,2 mln. As a matter of fact, I have no equity in this house. I just sort of have it. In the opposite case, when the house is worth $1,2 mln and my debt is just $1 mln, I really have $1,2 – $1 mln = $0,2 mln in equity.

There is a pattern in doing business: when we do a lot of it, we most frequently do it in a relatively closed circle of recurrent business partners. Developing durable business relations is even taught in business studies as one of the fundamental skills. When we recurrently do business with the same people, we have claims on each other. Some people owe me something, I owe something to others. The capital account, which we call « balance sheet », expresses the balance between those two types of claims: those of other people on me, against my claims on other people. The art of doing business consists very largely in having more claims on others than others have on us. That “more” is precisely our equity.

When we do business, people expect us to have and maintain positive equity in it. A business person is expected to have that basic skill of keeping a positive balance between claims they have on other people, and the claims that other people have on them.

There are two types of business people, and, correspondingly, two types of strategies regarding equity in business. Type A is mono-business. We do one business, and have one equity. Type B is multi-business. Type B is a bit ADHDish: those are people who would like to participate in oil drilling, manufacturing of solar modules, space travel to Mars, launching a new smartphone, and growing some marijuana, all in the same or nearly the same time. This is a fact of life that the wealthiest people in any social group are to be found in the second category. There is a recurrent pattern of climbing the ladder of social hierarchy: being restless, or at least open in the pursuit of different business opportunities rather than being consistent in pursuing just one. If you think about it, it is something more general: being open to many opportunities in life offers a special path of personal development. Yes, consistency and perseverance matter, but they matter even more when we can be open to novelty, and consistent in the same time.

We tend to do things together. This is how we survived, over millennia, all kinds of s**t: famine, epidemies, them sabretooth tigers and whatnot. Same for business: over time, we have developed institutions for doing business together.

When we do something again and again, we figure out a way of optimizing the doing of that something. In business law, we (i.e. homo sapiens) have therefore invented institutions for both type A, and type B. You look for doing the same business for a long time, and doing it together with other people, type A just like you? You will look for something like a limited liability partnership. If, on the other hand, you are rather the restless B type, you will need something like a joint stock company, and you will need equity-based securities.

The essential idea of an equity-based security is… well, there is more than one idea inside. This is a good example of what finance is: we invent something akin to a social screwdriver, i.e. a tool which unfolds its many utilities as it is being used. Hence, I start with the initial idea rather than with the essential one, and the initial one is to do business with, or between, those B-type people: restless, open-minded, constantly rearranging their horizon of new ventures. Such people need a predictable way to swing between different businesses and/or to build a complex portfolio thereof.

Thus, we have the basic deal presented graphically above: we set a company, we endow it with an equity of €3 000 000, we divide that equity into 10 000 shares of €300 each, and we distribute those shares among some initial group of shareholders. Question: why anyone should bother to be our shareholder, i.e. to pay those €300 for one share? What do they have in exchange? Well, each shareholder who pays €300, receives in exchange one share, nominally worth €300, a bundle of intangible rights, and the opportunity to trade that share in the so-called « stock market », i.e. the market of shares. Let’s discuss these one by one.

Apparently the most unequivocal thing, i.e. the share in itself, nominally worth €300, is, in itself, the least valuable part. It is important to know: the fact of holding shares in an incorporated company does not give to the shareholder any pre-defined, unconditional claim on the company. This is the big difference between a share, and a corporate bond. The fact of holding one €300 share does not entitle to payback of €300 from the company. You have decided to invest in our equity, bro? That’s great, but investment means risk. There is no refund possible. Well, almost no refund. There are contracts called « buyback schemes », which I discuss further.

The intangible rights attached to an equity-based security (share) fall into two categories: voting power on the one hand, and conditional claims on assets on the other hand.

Joint stock companies have official, decision-making bodies: the General Assembly, the Board of Directors, the Executive Management, and they can have additional committees, defined by the statute of the company. As a shareholder, I can directly execute my voting power at the General Assembly of Shareholders. Normally, one share means one vote. There are privileged shares, with more than one vote attached to them. These are usually reserved to the founders of a company. There can also be shares with a reduced voting power, when the company wants to reward someone, with its own shares, but does not want to give them influence on the course of the business.

The General Assembly is the corporate equivalent of Parliament. It is the source of all decisional power in the company. General Assembly appoints the Board of Directors, and, depending on the exact phrasing of the company’s statute, has various competences in appointing the Executive Management. The Board of Directors directs, i.e. it makes the strategic, long-term decisions, whilst the Executive Management is for current things. Now, long story short: the voting power attached to equity-based securities, in a company, is any good only if it is decisive in the appointment of Directors. This is what much of corporate law sums up to. If my shares give me direct leverage upon who will be in the Board of Directors, then I really have voting power.

Sometimes, when holding a small parcel of shares in a company, you can be approached by nice people, who will offer you money (not much, really) in exchange of granting them the power of attorney in the General Assembly, i.e. to vote there in your name. In corporate language it is called power of proxy, and those people, after having collected a lot of such small, individual powers of attorney, can run the so-called proxy votes. Believe me or not, but proxy powers are sort of tradable, too. If you have accumulated enough proxy power in the General Assembly of a company, you, in turn, might be approached by even nicer people, who will propose you (even more) money in exchange of having that conglomerate, proxy voting power of yours on their side when appointing a good friend of theirs to the Board of Directors.

Here you have a glimpse of what equity-based securities are in essence: they are tradable, abstract building blocks of an incorporated business structure. Knowing that, let’s have a look at the conditional claims on assets that come with a corporate share. The company makes some net profit at the end of the year, and happens even to have free cash corresponding to that profit, and the General Assembly decides to have 50% of net profit paid to shareholders, as dividend. Still, voting in a company is based on majority, and, as I already said, majority is there when it can back someone to be member of the Board of Directors. In practical terms it means that decisions about dividend are taken by a majority in the Board of Directors, who, in turn, represent a majority in the General Assembly.

The claim on dividend that you can have, as a shareholder, is conditional on: a) the fact of the company having any profit after tax, b) the company having any free cash in the balance sheet, corresponding to that profit after tax, and c) the majority of voting power in the General Assembly backing the idea of paying a dividend to shareholders. Summing up, the dividend is your conditional claim on the liquid assets of the company. Why do I say it is a conditional claim on assets, and not on net profit? Well, profit is a result. It is an abstract value. What is really there, to distribute, is some cash. That cash can come from many sources. It is just its arithmetical value that must correspond to a voted percentage of net profit after tax. Your dividend might be actually paid with cash that comes from the selling of some used equipment, previously owned by the company.

Another typical case of conditional claim on assets is that of liquidation and dissolvence. When business goes really bad, the company might be forced to sell out its fixed assets in order to pay its debts. When really a lot of debt is there to pay, the shareholders of the company might decide to sell out everything, and to dissolve the incorporation. In such case, should any assets be left at the moment of dissolvence, free of other claims, the proceeds from their sales can be distributed among the incumbent shareholders.

Right, but voting, giving or receiving proxy power, claiming the dividend or proceeds from dissolvence, it is all about staying in a company, and we were talking about the utility of equity-based securities for those B-type capitalists, who would rather trade their shares than hold them. These people can use the stock market.

It is a historical fact that whenever and wherever it became a common practice to incorporate business in the form of companies, and to issue equity-based securities corresponding to shares, a market for those securities arose. Military legions in Ancient Rome were incorporated businesses, which would issue (something akin to) equity-based securities, and there were special places, called ‘counters’, where those securities would be traded. This is a peculiar pattern in human civilisation: when we practice some kind of repetitive deals, whose structure can be standardized, we tend to single out some claims out of those contracts, and turn those claims into tradable financial instruments. We call them ‘financial instruments’, because they are traded as goods, whilst not having any intrinsic utility, besides the fact of representing some claims.

Probably the first modern stock exchange in Europe was founded in Angers, France, somehow in the 15th century. At the time, there were (virtually) no incorporated companies. Still, there was another type of equity. Goods used to be transported slowly. A cargo of wheat could take weeks to sail from port A to port B, and then to be transported inland by barges or carts pulled by oxen. If you were the restless type of capitalist, you could eat your fingernails out of restlessness when waiting for your money, invested in that wheat, to come back to you. Thus, merchants invented securities, which represented abstract arithmetical fraction of the market value ascribed to such a stock of wheat. They were called different names, and usually fell under the general category of warrants, i.e. securities that give the right to pick up something from somewhere. Those warrants were massively traded in that stock exchange in Angers, and in other similar places, like Cadiz, in Spain. Thus, I bought a stock of wheat in Poland (excellent quality and good price), and I had it shipped (horribly slowly) to Italy, and as soon as I had that stock, I made a series of warrants on it, like one warrant per 100 pounds of wheat, and I started trading those warrants.

By the way, this is where the name ‘stock market’ comes from. The word ‘stock’ initially meant, and still means, a large quantity of some tradable goods. Places, such as Angers o Cadiz, where warrants on such goods were being traded, were commonly called ‘stock markets’. When you think of it, those warrants on corn, cotton, wool, wine etc. were equity-based securities. As long as the issuer of warrants had any equity in that stock, i.e. as long as their debt was not exceeding the value of that stock, said value was equity and warrants on those goods were securities backed with equity.

That little historical sketch gives an idea of what finance is. This is a set of institutionalized, behavioural patterns and rituals, which allow faster reaction to changing conditions, by creating something like a social hormone: symbols subject to exchange, and markets of those symbols.

Here comes an important behavioural pattern, observable in the capital market. There are companies, which are recommended by analysts and brokers as ‘dividend companies’ or ‘dividend stock’. It is recommended to hold their stock for a long time, as a long-term investment. The fact of recommending them comes from another fact: in these companies, a substantial percentage of shares stays, for years, in the hands of the same people. This is how they can have their dividend. We can observe relatively low liquidity in their stock. Here is a typical loop, peculiar for financial markets. Some people like holding the stock of some companies for a long time. That creates little liquidity in that stock, and, indirectly, little variation in the market price of that stock. Little variation in price means that whatever you can expect to gain on that stock, you will not really make those gains overnight. Thus, you hold. As you hold, and as other people do the same, there is little liquidity on that stock, and little variation in its price, and analysts recommend it as ‘dividend stock’. And so the loop spins.

I generalize. You have some equity-based securities, whose market value comes mostly from the fact that we have a market for them. People do something specific about those securities, and their behavioural pattern creates a pattern in prices and quantities of trade in that stock. Other people watch those prices and quantities, and conclude that the best thing to do regarding those securities is to clone the behavioural pattern, which made those prices and quantities. The financial market works as a market for strategies. Prices and quantities become signals as for what strategy is recommended.

On the other hand, there are shares just made for being traded. Holding them for more than two weeks seems like preventing a race horse from having a run on the track. People buy and sell them quickly, there is a lot of turnover and liquidity, we are having fun with trade, and the price swings madly. Other people are having a look at the market, and they conclude that with those swings in price, they should buy and sell that stock really quickly. Another loop spins. The stock market gives two types of signals, for two distinct strategies. And thus, two types of capitalists are in the game: the calm and consistent A type, and the restless B type. The financial market and the behavioural patterns observable in business people mutually reinforce and sharpen each other.

Sort of in the shade of those ‘big’ strategies, there is another one. We have ambitions, but we have no capital. We convince other people to finance the equity of a company, where we become Directors or Executive Management. With time, we attribute ourselves so-called ‘management packages’, i.e. parcels of the company’s stock, paid to us as additional compensation. We reasonably assume that the value of those management packages is defined by the price we can sell this stock in. The best price is the price we make: this is one of the basic lessons in the course of macroeconomics. Hence, we make a price for our stock. As Board of Directors, we officially decide to buy some stock from shareholders, at a price which accidentally hits the market maximums or even higher. The company buys some stock from its own shareholders. That stock is usually specified. Just some stock is being bought back, in what we call a buyback scheme. Accidentally, that ‘just some stock’ is the stock contained in the management packages we hold as Directors. Pure coincidence. In some legal orders, an incorporated company cannot hold its own stock, and the shares purchased back must be nullified and terminated. Thus, the company makes some shares, issues them, gives them to selected people, who later vote to sell them back to the company, with a juicy surplus, and ultimately those shares disappear. In other countries, the shares acquired back by the company pass into the category of ‘treasury shares’, i.e. they become assets, without voting power or claim on dividend. This is the Dark Side of the stock market. When there is a lot of hormones flowing, you can have a position of power just by finding the right spot in that flow. Brains know it better than anyone else.

Now, some macroeconomics, thus the bird’s eye view. The bird is lazy, and it prefers having a look at the website of the World Bank, and there it picks two metrics: a) Gross Capital Formation as % of GDP and b) Stock traded as % of GDP. The former measures the value of new fixed assets that pop up in the economic system, the latter estimates the value of all corporate stock traded in capital markets. Both are denominated in units of real output, i.e. as % of GDP, and both have a line labelled ‘World’, i.e. the value estimated for the whole planet taken as an economic system. Here comes a table, and a graph. The latter calculates the liquidity of capital formation, measured as the value of stock traded divided by the gross value of fixed capital formed. Some sort of ascending cycle emerges, just as if we, humans, were experimenting with more and more financial liquidity in new fixed assets, and as if, from time to time, we had to back off a bit on that liquidity.

 

Year Gross capital formation (% of GDP), World Stocks traded, total value (% of GDP), World Year Gross capital formation (% of GDP), World Stocks traded, total value (% of GDP), World
1984 25,4% 17,7% 2001 24,0% 104,8%
1985 25,4% 23,7% 2002 23,4% 82,8%
1986 25,1% 32,4% 2003 23,9% 76,0%
1987 25,4% 46,8% 2004 24,7% 83,8%
1988 26,2% 38,1% 2005 25,0% 99,8%
1989 26,6% 44,5% 2006 25,4% 118,5%
1990 26,0% 31,9% 2007 25,8% 161,9%
1991 25,4% 24,1% 2008 25,6% 140,3%
1992 25,2% 22,5% 2009 23,4% 117,3%
1993 25,0% 30,7% 2010 24,2% 112,5%
1994 25,0% 34,0% 2011 24,5% 104,8%
1995 24,8% 34,1% 2012 24,3% 82,4%
1996 24,7% 41,2% 2013 24,2% 87,7%
1997 24,7% 58,9% 2014 24,4% 101,2%
1998 24,5% 73,1% 2015 24,2% 163,4%
1999 24,1% 103,5% 2016 23,8% 124,5%
2000 24,5% 145,7%

I am consistently delivering good, almost new science to my readers, and love doing it, and I am working on crowdfunding this activity of mine. As we talk business plans, I remind you that you can download, from the library of my blog, the business plan I prepared for my semi-scientific project Befund  (and you can access the French version as well). You can also get a free e-copy of my book ‘Capitalism and Political Power’ You can support my research by donating directly, any amount you consider appropriate, to my PayPal account. You can also consider going to my Patreon page and become my patron. If you decide so, I will be grateful for suggesting me two things that Patreon suggests me to suggest you. Firstly, what kind of reward would you expect in exchange of supporting me? Secondly, what kind of phases would you like to see in the development of my research, and of the corresponding educational tools?