Moneyness = 22?

Courtesy of Kerry Taylor's twitter feed, here is a chart which was presented during a recent investing conference in Toronto. Apparently bitcoin has a moneyness score of 22 while cowry shells ring the bell at 15, both of them exceeding the moneyness of U.S. dollars at 13. The presentation that contains the chart was created by angel investor Sean Walsh and is available here.

Since my blog is called moneyness, and I've written quite a lot on this topic, I feel somewhat obligated to chime in. Let's start with the good bits about the chart. Instead of classifying items as money-or-not, we can appraise objects by their degree of moneyness. Because every valuable object or instrument is exchangeable, some more easily than others, everything lies somewhere on the money spectrum. The diagram below illustrates this idea. This way of looking at things can provide some insights that we don't normally get when taking the money-or-not approach, and its nice to see that folks like Walsh are using it. (For a longer explanation of moneyness, go here).

Now the not-so-good bits. Let's go and see what Walsh means by the term moneyness. On page 14 he lists six characteristics of money including scarcity, durability, divisibility, recognizability, fungibility, and tranportability. Walsh compiles an instrument's moneyness score by assigning a value from 0-4 for each characteristic and then summing this up. The maximum score is 24, with bitcoin losing just a point on durability and fungibility. He gives no explanation for how or why some instrument might get a 3 for, say, recognizability instead of a 4, so I guess we'll just have to assume he has a consistent method for rewarding points.

There are two reasons why I disagree with this approach. First, even if we accept Walsh's definition of moneyness and his choice of rankings for each instrument, his list of attributes is incomplete. It is missing one of the most important ones: price stability. When people accumulate balances in anticipation of spending needs, they expect those balances to hold their value for a few days, maybe weeks. If the medium's purchasing power is volatile, then there is a risk that the stuff in their wallets won't allow them to meet tomorrow's spending requirements, which means it isn't doing a very good job as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin probably has the lowest stability of the instruments in the chart. 

My second and more important criticism has to do with the way that Walsh measures moneyness. In a hard science like chemistry or geology, ranking each objects' physical characteristics might pass muster. For instance, geologists use the Mohs Hardness Test, a scale from 1-10 for testing the resistance of a mineral to being scratched. Walsh is running something like the Mohs Hardness Test, except for monetary instruments.

But economics involves humans. And in economics, we are not interested in the physical characteristics of the goods and services people buy, say how hard a mineral is, or how cushy a couch is, or how fast a car can go. Rather, we are interested in the subjective evaluation economic actors place on those objects and the manifestation of these preferences in the form of market prices.

So the way to accurately measure moneyness isn't to design the equivalent of Mohs Hardness Test for monetary instruments, but rather to find out what price people actually put on that moneyness. One way to do this is by asking how much compensation people would expect to earn if they were to give up an object's moneyness for a period of time. More specifically, say you are offered a deal to buy one bitcoin but are prohibited from selling that bitcoin for one year. How much less would you be willing to pay for this locked-in bitcoin than a regular bitcoin that you will probably hold for at least one year anyways? If a locked-in bitcoin is worth, say, $500 less to you than a regular bitcoin, that means that you place $500 on a regular bitcoin's one-year tradeability, or its moneyness.     

We can also think about moneyness in terms of interest rates. What rate would you need to earn on a locked-in bitcoin to compensate you for the nuisance of giving up its ability to be used as an exchange medium? 10%? 5%? The extra interest you expect on locked-in bitcoin is the degree to which you value a regular bitcoin's tradeability, or moneyness, over that time-frame.

The price of a dollar's moneyness is easy to measure. Someone who will have a spare $10,000 on hand for the next year can hold it in a government-insured chequing account and earn 0% or they can lock that amount into an insured term deposit and earn around 0.85% (I'm using Canadian numbers for non-cashable 1-year GICs). By locking in the $10,000, an individual's ability to mobilize these dollars as a medium for making payments has been effectively destroyed for 365 days. They cannot buy stocks or bonds with it, nor convert it into cash, nor purchase peaches, tables, labour, travel, etc. Their dollar are inflexible; they have no moneyness.

People are willing to accept this burden but only if they are compensated to the tune of 0.85%. Put differently, the 0.85% rate represents a large enough carrot that marginal depositors are roughly indifferent between holding money in a chequing account for a year or locking it in. So if $10,000 in a term deposit provides a pecuniary return of $85, then $10,000 dollars held in a 0%-yielding chequing account provides around $85 in non-pecuniary monetary services, or moneyness, over the course of the year.

We can also go through this process with gold. Head over to Kitco and you can see that the 12-month lease rate is at 0.2%. Say you are hoarding $10,000 in gold under your mattress. If you are willing to forfeit the ability to make any transactions with your $10,000 stash for one year, a bank will compensate you with $20 ($10,000 x 0.2%) for your pains. Put differently, $20 is the amount that the bank needs to provide the marginal gold hoarder to tempt them into giving up the moneyness of gold. (The implied moneyness of $20 is far less than the $85 a Canadian chequing account offers, contrary to Walsh's chart, which ranks gold above dollars. Note that I am ignoring storage costs.)

To carry out this measurement for bitcoin, we'd have to determine what sort of rates a large international bank provides to bitcoin term depositors. I doubt this measurement can be made since reputable banks don't deal in bitcoins. So bitcoin's moneyness is not 22. We have no real idea what it is.