Art by Daniel Krawisz

The narrative that drives any speculative market needs constant fuel in order to attract new buyers. Bitcoin is no exception, which is why recent events in Zimbabwe have been recruited—albeit sloppily—by the bitcoin press to provide more fuel.

The facts of the matter are this: if you head over to Golix, Zimbabwe's only bitcoin exchange, you'll see that bitcoin last traded at $13,800 whereas its price on an American exchange like GDAX is $8260. That's a difference of around $5000. Strange, right?

The bitcoin press, and I'll pick on Zerohedge here, has interpreted this divergence to mean that bitcoin usage is skyrocketing in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans are seemingly so desperate to get their hands on some bitcoin that they are willing to pay $5000 more per coin than they would pay if they bought on an international exchange like GDAX.   

Recall that one of bitcoin's earliest and most potent use cases was to provide unbanked Africans with an efficient way to transact. The effort to bring bitcoin to Africa has significantly underperformed the earlier hype—but nevertheless the dream of helping out the poorest continent still beckons. Well, we've finally got a real-world case of bitcoin being used by Africans. And if Zimbabweans have adopted the stuff as money, goes the story, then it's only a matter of time before other developing countries and then the whole world goes full hyperbitcoinization. This last term refers to an oft-quoted idea originating from Daniel Krawisz that currencies will fail to compete with bitcoin, leading to a rapid bitcoinization of the world. Think of it as dollarization, except really fast.


The truth is that Zimbabweans are not paying $5000 more per bitcoin than everyone else. As I've written many times on this blog, and recently at BullionStar (see my postscript at the bottom of this post), Zimbabwe is no longer on a U.S. dollar standard, having had a new Zimbabwean currency thrust on it by the government over the last year or two. This new currency was supposed to be fully convertible into U.S. dollars, a promise that has proven to be illusory. It has since slipped to a large discount to the dollar.

So when Zimbabweans buy bitcoin for $13800—they aren't paying with U.S. dollars, they are paying with this new unit. The Zimbabwean price for bitcoin therefore deviates from the U.S. dollar price  for the same reason that the Mexican bitcoin price of Mex$153,000 deviates from the U.S. dollar price—Zimbabwe, like Mexico, has its own freely-floating currency. This explanation for Zimbabwe's peculiar bitcoin price certainly makes for less interesting headlines than the explanation put forward by the bitcoin press.



Here's why I find the price of bitcoin in Zimbabwe interesting. The prices of easily transportable items with high value-to-weight ratios should trade at the same real price all around the world. Included in this category are things like human blood, diamonds, plutonium, gold and silver, heroin, $100 bills, stock certificates, and of course bitcoin.

From Evil Mad Scientist, the Monetary Density of Things

The law of one price prevails because if the price of gold in a country like Zimbabwe falls below the world price, than arbitrageurs will buy gold in Zimbabwe and sell it overseas until the price has converged back up to the world price. If the gold price rises above the world price, they'll buy overseas and export it to Zimbabwe until the price falls.

Items with high-value-to-weight ratios like gold and bitcoin provide an opportunity to infer currency exchange rates. Because a bitcoin trades for Mex$153,000 in Mexico and $8260 in the U.S., we don't even have to visit a foreign exchange website to know that the exchange rate is about 19 Mexican pesos to US$1. Just divide $153,000 by $8260. Likewise in Zimbabwe. Given a bitcoin price of $13,800 in Zimbabwe and $8260 in the U.S., we can safely assume that the exchange rate is around 1.70 Zimbabwean currency units to US$1.

This ability to back out an exchange rate using items with high value-to-weight ratios is especially handy for researchers and reporters who are observing countries from afar that lack official venues for trading currency. In Zimbabwe, the market exchange rate is set unofficially, on street corners and such. Without an on-the-ground data gathering network to canvas street corners, an outside observer can get a decent proxy for the exchange rate by gathering bitcoin prices on the internet.

In fact, inflation researchers like Steve Hanke have long-since been gathering data on high value-to-weight items to back out exchange rates, although they have typically used the prices of inter-listed stock rather than bitcoin for this purpose. In this post I described the inter-listed stock technique being used in Zimbabwe, and here I describe how it could be used in Greece and Ecuador. In the future, bitcoin exchanges may offer yet another way to formally gather unofficial exchange rates.


 Zimbabwe's autocratic leader Robert Mugabe was put under house arrest by the army on November 14. Let's use what we now know about bitcoin prices to observe what has happened to the exchange rate since then. The price of bitcoin on Golix has been stuck in a range between $12,000 to $15,000 even as the U.S. dollar price on bitcoin exchange GDAX has jumped by ~$1500, or 26%. Golix prices are incredibly variable, far more so than international prices, so I don't want to overstate my case, but it seems likely that the purchasing power of Zimbabwean currency—inferred from bitcoin prices—has actually improved since the coup. 

As I said in my BullionStar article (again, see note at bottom), this firming up of the Zimbabwean currency may indicate that markets see some improvement in the odds that a stable new regime emerges in Zimbabwe, one that enjoys acceptance by the international community. Due to its pariah status, the Mugabe government has been unable to get aid from the World Bank or IMF for many years now. If its status changes, a new loan could allow the country to a re-peg the Zimbabwean currency at a 1:1 rate with U.S. dollars.

The improvement in the exchange rate that I've inferred from bitcoin prices is corroborated by looking at the prices of other items with high value-to-weight ratios. As I pointed out earlier, Steve Hanke uses inter-listed stocks to back out exchange rates, in Zimbabwe's case the shares of Old Mutual which are traded both in Harare and London. The ratio between the two listings is known as the Old Mutual Implied Rate, or OMIR. Gareth from Twitter, who knows a lot about Zimbabwe's financial situation, sends me the following chart of OMIR (the green line).



You can see that there has been a big decline (35.1%) in the Zimbabwean price of Old Mutual (white line), but almost no change in its London price (orange line). As a result, the green line—the ratio of the London price to the Zimbabwe price—has moved higher. Which means that the purchasing power of Zimbabwean currency has improved since Mugabe's arrest, albeit just by a bit, corroborating what we already learned from the Golix-to-GDAX bitcoin ratio.


None of this is evidence of hyperbitcoinization in Zimbabwe. In fact, if you spend some time on Golix you'll quickly notice that volumes are very thin and the trading range incredibly wide. Over the course of a few hours, I saw the price on Golix rise and fall by $1,500 whereas the U.S. price on GDAX has been relatively immobile. Bitcoin is attracting some traders, but it hardly seems popular. Any Zimbabwean who wants a safe haven has probably been buying U.S. dollars on the street corners. Sorry folks, but as far as I can tell Africa still lacks a bitcoin use case.

---

P.S. I am happy to announce that for the first time I'm being paid to blog. The folks at BullionStar will be hosting blog posts from me over the next few months. Expect the posts to be on some of the same topics I blog about here; monetary policy, gold, bitcoin, and more. My first effort gives a quick overview on the Zimbabwean monetary situation. I am always looking for more opportunities for paid blogging in my general area of expertise; contact me if you have any leads.

If the world had a single cauldron for mixing various monetary phenomena, it would be Zimbabwe. Over the last two decades, it has experienced pretty much everything that can happen to money, from hyperinflation to deflation, demonetization to remonetization, dollarization and de-dollarization, bank runs, bank walks, and more.

Adding to this mix, the Zimbabwe Industrial Index—an indicator of local stock prices—has recently gone parabolic, having more than tripled over the last twelve months. That's a good sign, right? Beware, these gains aren't real. As is often the case in Zimbabwe, the rise in stock prices is a purely monetary phenomenon.

Ever since the great Zimbabwean hyperinflation led to the domestic currency becoming worthless in 2008, U.S. dollars have served as the nation's currency and unit of account. However, Zimbabwe's central bank, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), has spent much of the last two or so years surreptitiously bringing a new parallel monetary unit into circulation. These new units, informally referred to as RTGS dollars, are a digital form of money, specifically a deposit held at the central bank. (I described them here).

At the outset, RTGS dollars were denominated in U.S. dollars and supposedly convertible into genuine U.S. banknotes. We now know these units were only masquerading as U.S. dollars. By early 2016, huge lineups began to appear outside banks as Zimbabweans unsuccessfully tried to convert their deposits into real U.S. cash. When conversions finally became possible it was only because the RBZ had introduced its own paper currency, a 'bond note', in late 2016. These bond notes were themselves supposed to be fully fungible with U.S. dollars thanks to a promise of 1:1 convertibility, at least if you believed the nation's central banker, but this has never been the case.   

Over the last year a great redenomination has been occurring as all Zimbabwean prices—including that of ZSE-listed stocks—are shifted over from a genuine U.S. dollar standard to an RTGS dollars/bond note standard. Prior to 2016, if you sold a stock or received a dividend, you'd get U.S. dollars, or at least a pretty decent claim on the real thing. Now, you get RTGS dollars—which can only be cashed out into an equally dodgy parallel currency, bond notes.

The incredible 300% rise in the Zimbabwe Industrial Index is a reflection of the redenomination of stocks into an inferior monetary unit and that unit's continued deterioration. For instance, if you were willing to sell your shares of Delta Brewing for $10 prior to the redenomination, you'd only be willing to sell them at a much higher level post-redenomination, say $15, in order to adjust for the diminished purchasing power of the money you'll receive upon sale. RTGS dollars are not U.S. dollars. After adjusting the Zimbabwe Industrial Index for the decline in the value of the money in which stocks are denominated, things certainly wouldn't look as bullish as the chart above indicates.

What is the actual exchange rate between RTGS dollars/bond notes? We can get a pretty good idea by looking at the prices of dual-listed shares. The shares of Old Mutual, a global financial company, trade in both Harare and on the London Stock Exchange. See chart below, courtesy of Gareth on Twitter.


Old Mutual investors have the ability to deregister their shares from one exchange and transfer them for re-registration on the other. Arbitrage should keep the prices of each listing in line. After all, if the price in London is too high, investors need only buy the shares in Zimbabwe, transfer them to London, sell, and repurchase in Zimbabwe, earning risk-free profits. If the price in Zimbabwe is too high, just do the reverse.

The ratio of the two Old Mutual listings (the green line above) provides us with the implicit exchange rate between genuine U.S. dollars and dollars held in Zimbabwe. In 2009 the two listings traded close to parity (i.e. around $2 each), which makes sense because Zimbabwe had dollarized by then, and dollars-in-Zimbabwe were fungible with regular dollars. From 2010 to 2016 the dollar-denominated price in London was above the price in Zimbabwe. This discrepancy may be due in part to the fact that Harare-listed Old Mutual shares aren't very liquid, so they suffer a liquidity discount. Another reason is that the authorities place a ceiling (i.e. fungibility limits) on the number of Old Mutual shares that can be deregistered from the Harare market and dropshipped into London. With all of the space under the ceiling having presumably been used up, it would have been impossible to arbitrage the difference between the two prices, the Harare counter falling to a permanent discount.

So the Old Mutual ratio was probably not a good indicator of the implicit exchange rate between 2010 and 2016. However, in June 2016 this ceiling was raised, at which point arbitrage would have once again been possible. As such, the ratio would have probably returned to providing a decent indicator of the exchange rate between a dollar-in-Zimbabwe and a genuine dollar. 

You can see that Old Mutual is currently valued at $5.80 in Zimbabwe whereas it only trades in London for around $2.66 per share (after converting from pounds into US dollars). This means that Zimbabweans are willing to put $5.80 in one end of the sausage maker in order to get $2.66 out from the other. So a dollar-in-Zimbabwe, which was trading at par to U.S. dollars just two years ago, is now worth just 46 cents. That's quite the inflation rate. I don't see things slowing down, either.

---

P.S.: Some investors will no doubt want to say the same thing is going on with the US and Europe with loose monetary policy creating so-called asset price inflation. I disagree.

P.P.S: Gareth has provided another chart. It shows the implied exchange rate between dollars-in-Zimbabwe and genuine U.S. dollars using the only other fully transferable dual-listed counter, PPC, a cement company that is also listed in Johannesburg. Note how close the PPC rate follows the Old Mutual rate.

Americans and Canadians take for granted that fact that while a multiplicity of dollar brands circulates in our respective nations, a dollar is always equal to a dollar. In the U.S.'s case, whether it be a VISA card, paper money issued by the Federal Reserve, or a deposit created by a either a big bank like Wells Fargo or a tiny one like Wisconsin Bank & Trust, a retailer will (almost always) accept each of these monies at the same rate.

Compare this to Zimbabwe where a phenomenon called three-tier pricing has emerged over the last few months. Retailers have begun to charge customers three different prices for goods and services depending on the brand of dollar being used: a paper U.S. dollar price, another in "plastic money" (i.e. local U.S. dollar-denominated bank deposits transferable by debit card), and the last price in terms of relatively new parallel paper money called bond notes.

To better illustrate three-tier pricing, here is a photo of a Zimbabwean store sign:

#Zimbabwe different prices for when you pay in bond notes, US dollar or use your card pic.twitter.com/kA7ySG8zPf

— harumutasa/aljazeera (@harumutasa) April 4, 2017

You can see that the list of goods being sold is denominated in U.S. dollars, bond notes, and "swipe" i.e. plastic money. Under three-tier pricing, those who pay with U.S. dollars get the lowest price while anyone who pays with plastic money faces the highest price. For instance, the item labelled Kingsize (cigarettes maybe?) retails for $9 in U.S. banknotes, $9.50 in bond notes, and $10 in plastic money. Given these rates, the shop estimates that a US$100 bill is worth $105 in bond notes and $111.11 in deposits.

These rates are generous. There are reports (see here, here, and here but there are many more examples) that bond notes and plastic money often trade at discounts as deep as 20-30% to U.S. dollars.

Three-tier pricing may seem odd, but it is actually the market's natural response to a breakdown in the fungibility, or substitutability, of various types of money. While plastic money and U.S. paper money used to be perfect substitutes (i.e. they traded at par) from 2009-2015, over the last twelve months the quality of plastic money has rapidly deteriorated relative to U.S. paper dollars as it has become increasingly apparent that a bank deposit is a claim on the Zimbabwe government rather than on an actual U.S. dollar. Needless to say an IOU issued by the Zimbabwe government is not a very good claim to own.

As for bond notes, a paper dollar look-alike originally issued by the central bank at the end of November 2016, they were supposed to be pegged 1:1 by equivalent U.S. dollars held in accounts at an international development bank, the African Export Import Bank. But this promise has proven to be a dubious one as the peg has not held. In this context, three-tier pricing is a way to recognize the  fundamental breakdown in fungibility by rewarding users of the highest quality medium, U.S. banknotes, with the most advantageous price, and penalizing users of the lower quality mediums--bond notes and plastic money--with less advantageous prices. (To see why bond notes are worth more than plastic money, see the appendix below).

This panoply of prices is quite embarrassing to President Robert Mugabe and his cronies as it makes the government look weak. They are trying to put an end to three-tier pricing by forcing retailers to set one universal price for goods. To this effect, recently-passed legislation says:

Retailers and wholesalers shall sell any particular product for the same price irrespective of the mode of payment and desist from multiple pricing of goods on account of mode of payment (cash, Real Times Gross Settlement (RTGS) and Point of Sale or a combination of any two or more of them).

For the avoidance of doubt, retailers and wholesalers shall not charge any premium for the sale and purchase of their wares on the basis of mode of payment. Similarly any cash or quantity discount shall, in accordance with best practice, be granted in the normal course of business and not on the basis of the multiple pricing system.

The penalty for not accepting cash and plastic money at par is up to seven years in jail.

By forcing retailers to accept all brands of money in Zimbabwe at par, Mugabe is interfering with the market's natural response to a breakdown in the relative quality of different monies. His actions will inevitably set off a specific set of responses dictated long ago by Gresham's law: if the government specifies the exchange rate at which money must be accepted by the populace, then the good, or undervalued money will be chased out by the bad, or overvalued money.

We know from its relative position in the three-tier pricing mechanism that plastic money is Zimbabwe's worst money. By requiring retailers to accept the two paper monies--U.S. dollars and bond notes--at par with the inferior money, plastic, Mugabe is forcing retailers to dramatically undervalue paper currency. As per Gresham's law, Zimbabwean shoppers who own U.S. dollars and bond notes will prefer to hoard and/or export them rather than spend them at artificially undervalued rates, using only plastic money to buy things. Thus the bad chases out the good. Media reports concur with this prognosis. U.S. paper money, which had already started to disappear back in November when bond notes were declared legal tender, is all but impossible to find. And now bond notes are getting more elusive too.

To try and fix the very problem it has created, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe--the nation's central bank--has initiated a whistle-blowing campaign against cash hoarders. Good luck with that; cash is very easy to hide. If the authorities really want to end cash hoarding, they should re-legalize three-tier pricing. With the market sorting mechanism reestablished, the true value of cash will once again be recognized and banknotes will flow back into the market. Of course, these prices will only bring back the premium on U.S. dollars, making it terribly obvious to all how poorly the government's credit is esteemed by the market. Unfortunately, this is exactly why three tier pricing is unlikely to be legalized. This situation won't have a happy ending.

---

Appendix

I had been meaning to include the following bits in the main body, but on second thought decided to put them into an appendix. What follows is a quick history of how each of the three tiers has developed.

First Tier

As readers will probably remember, a hyperinflation of the local currency finally ended with the populace spontaneously adopting the U.S. dollar in 2008. Deposits denominated in the local currency became worthless with banks only offering U.S. dollar deposits to their customers. Since then, Zimbabwean prices have been mostly been in set in terms of dollars.*

Second Tier

In 2016 a two-tier system emerged when U.S. banknotes and "plastic money" ceased being fungible (bond notes had not yet been created). The nation's central bank--the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ)--reopened for business sometime after the nation had dollarized. It began to offer U.S. dollar accounts, or IOUs, to local banks for the purposes of settling interbank payments, later forcing them to keep a certain amount of money on deposit at the RBZ. In theory, these IOUs were supposed to be fully backed and convertible into genuine U.S. dollars, a promise that has proven to be a tenuous one as the RBZ has been rationing access to U.S. dollars since early 2016.

This has left local banks in the lurch. Stuck with a bundle of more-or-less inconvertible RBZ IOUs, they now lack the resources to meet their depositors' U.S. dollar redemption requests. As a result, a nationwide bank run developed in early 2016 which led to the imposition of strict withdrawal limits. Ever since then, long queues at ATMs have been a perpetual phenomenon as bank customers, desperate for cash, wait--often overnight--to withdraw their quota of U.S. banknotes.**

With redemption now impeded, U.S. dollar deposits had effectively been decoupled from U.S. cash. By mid-2016 a black market of sorts had developed in which cash, the superior money, now traded at a premium to deposits, or plastic money. To cope with this lack of fungibility, retailers came up with an ingenious workaround; they began to set a cash price and a "plastic money" price, the cash price being lower.

Any retailer that did not set a lower price for U.S. dollars would not be able to "lure" U.S. dollars out of customers' pockets with the proper market reward. And without U.S. dollars, it would be difficult to import products from overseas to sell to customers.  An alternative strategy to two-tiered pricing is to simply require U.S. dollars only, like here:

Source

But this single-tier pricing strategy inconveniences customers with bank accounts and may attract the disapproval of authorities.

Third Tier

The third tier emerged when the RBZ introduced its own parallel issue of U.S. dollar banknotes, called bond notes, at the end of November 2016. This parallel currency currently comes in $1, $2, and $5 denominations, although the RBZ had earlier promised to introduce higher denominations.

In its initial announcement, the government had promised that bond notes would be fully backed and redeemable in genuine U.S. dollars provided by an international development bank, the African Export Import Bank. But this redemption promise is not being kept [source]. Those who want to redeem bond notes for U.S. banknotes have found that they face the same hurdles as those who want to redeem deposits. Thus, just as deposits have been decoupled from U.S dollars and fallen to a discount, so have bond notes.

Although deposits and bond notes are both inferior imitations of the U.S. dollar they do not themselves trade at par with each other, bond notes being valued at a premium to plastic money. My guess is that this has to do with the fact that, till now at least, the supply of bond notes has been kept to ~$120 million, with the government reportedly unwilling to issue more. [source] Given the fact that many Zimbabweans do not have bank accounts and only transact with paper, the limited amount of bond notes that has been created is insufficient to meet the nation's demand for cash. So there is a scarcity premium built into the price of bond notes.

* Some prices were also set in rand, the South African currency
** The other way of emptying one's bank account, wiring dollars overseas, has likewise been constricted as foreign exchange is tightly rationed by the central bank.

Sir Thomas Gresham

Anyone who makes an effort to study monetary economics quickly encounters the concept of Gresham's law, or the idea that bad money can often chase out good. Gresham's law is usually used to explain the failures of bygone monetary systems like bimetallic and coin standards. But the phenomenon isn't confined to ancient times. I'd argue that a modern incarnation of Gresham's law is occurring right now in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe's stock market has blown away all other stock markets by rising 30% in the last month-and-a-half. The chart below compares the Zimbabwe Industrial index to the U.S. S&P 500, both of which are denominated in U.S. dollars. I'd argue that the extraordinary performance of Zimbabwean stock is an instance of Gresham's law. With the imminent arrival of newly printed Zimbabwean paper money, known as bond notes, "bad" paper money is poised to chase out "good" money, stocks being one of the few places where Zimbabweans can protect their savings.


What follows is a quick summary of bond notes (alternatively, read my two earlier posts). The Mugabe government, which began discussing the idea of a new paper currency earlier this year, says that it will issue low denomination bond notes into circulation before the end of the November. Recall that Zimbabwe has been using U.S. dollars since 2008 after a brutal hyperinflation destroyed the value of the local currency. The regime claims that a $1 bond note will be worth the same as a regular $1 Federal Reserve note. It says it has received a U.S. dollar line of credit from the African Export-Import Bank that will guarantee the peg.

Enter Gresham's law, which says that if two different media circulate, and the government dictates that citizens are to accept the two instruments at a fixed ratio—say via legal tender laws—then the undervalued medium will disappear leaving only the overvalued one to circulate. So called bad money drives out good.

Medieval coinage systems were often crippled by Gresham's law. For instance, say a new debased silver penny was introduced into circulation along with existing pennies. Because it contained a smaller amount of silver, the new penny was worth less than the old. However, legal tender laws required that all pennies be accepted without discrimination in the settlement of debts. Medieval debtors would thus always prefer to discharge debts with new pennies rather than old ones since they would be giving up less silver. The result was that only "bad money," or debased coinage, circulated. Because "good money," or undebased coinage, was undervalued, people either hoarded it, sent it overseas, exchanged it on the black market at its true value, or melted it down.

The same conditions that created Gresham effects in medieval times are emerging in modern day Zimbabwe. Rather than two different medieval coins, we've got two different types of dollars; bond notes and regular U.S. cash. The next ingredient for Gresham's law is a decree that dictates the rate at which people are to accept the two instruments. In Zimbabwe's case, the government has already declared that bond notes (once they appear) are to be legal tender along with U.S. Federal Reserve notes, which means that Zimbabwean creditors will have to accept bond notes at par as a means of discharging all debts, even if they'd prefer the genuine thing.

Since a chequing deposit is a debt incurred by a bank to a depositor, this means that Zimbabwean banks can—in theory at least—meet depositors' demands for redemption by providing bond notes. So a Zimbabwean bank deposit is no longer just a claim on actual dollars, but a claim on some mysterious as-yet unissued Zimbabwean government liability.

The last ingredient for Gresham's law is an overvaluation of one of the two media. In Zimbabwe, this will most likely occur as the market value of bond notes falls below that of genuine U.S. dollars. While many countries maintain successful currency pegs to the U.S. dollar, they have the resources to do so. I'm skeptical that the isolated and corrupt Mugabe regime has the resources to pull a peg off.

Bond notes have yet to be issued, but because existing bank deposits—or electronic dollars—are likely to be payable in this new paper currency, we can think of deposits as a surrogate for the bond note. The first bit of evidence that Zimbabwe has run into Gresham's law is that physical U.S. dollars are beginning to disappear from circulation, replaced entirely by electronic dollars. Why might this be happening? Start with the assumption that Zimbabwean bank deposits have become "bad," meaning they are worth less than actual physical dollars. If a Zimbabwean citizen needs to buy $100 in groceries, and the grocer is required by law to accept deposits and cash at the same rate, our citizen will naturally spend only overvalued deposits and hoard "good" and undervalued cash.

In fact, we have direct evidence that deposits have become "bad". In the black market, dealers will only sell physical cash at a premium. I've seen anywhere from 5% to 20% mentioned.

More evidence is provided from the stock market. The shares of Old Mutual, a global financial company, trade on both the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE) and the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Because investors have the ability to deregister their shares from one exchange and transfer them for re-registration on the other, arbitrage should keep the prices of each listing in line. After all, if the price in London is too high, then investors need only buy the shares in Zimbabwe, transfer them to London, sell, and repurchase in Zimbabwe, earning risk-free profits. If the price in Zimbabwe is too high, just do the reverse

Oddly, Old Mutual trades in London for around $2.30 per share (after converting into US dollars) whereas it is valued at $3.20 in Zimbabwe. Here's the article that first tipped me off to this. As the chart below shows, this rather large gap has progressively emerged as the introduction of bond notes becomes more likely. Why is no one arbitraging the difference by purchasing Old Mutual in London for $2.30, then transferring it to Zimbabwe to be sold for $3.20? The large discrepancy likely reflects the growing risk that any dollar sent to Zimbabwe is likely to be trapped and re-denominated into a bond note.


The ratio of the two Old Mutual listings implies that the exchange rate between genuine U.S. dollars and dollars held in Zimbabwe is around 0.72:1, i.e. one Zimbabwean U.S. dollar deposit is only worth 72 cents in genuine U.S. dollars. While transaction costs and other frictions may explain part of the gap, this is still an incredibly wide discount.

Those with long memories will remember that during Zimbabwe's last hyperinflation, the cross-rate between Old Mutual listings was a popular way to measure the true exchange rate between the hyperinflating Zimbabwe dollar and the U.S. dollar. The official rate maintained by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was not the true rate as it dramatically overvalued the Zimbabwe dollar. In the chart below of the hyperinflation, pinched from a paper by Steve Hanke, the Old Mutual Implied Rate—or OMIR—appears along with the black market rate for U.S. dollars. (I once discussed the OMIR here. The same trick was used in Venezuela using ADRs.)

From Hanke and Kwok

Once all the ingredients for Gresham's law are in place, inflation is never far behind. Because U.S. dollars are being undervalued, Zimbabweans will refuse to buy stuff with anything other than overvalued deposits. If they don't update their sticker prices, retailers will soon discover that they are receiving fewer real dollars than before. To maintain the real value of their revenues, they will have to mark up their prices, thus compensating for the fact that only "bad" money is flowing into their tills.

While retail prices are usually sticky, financial prices are not. And that may be why we've seen such a huge jump in Zimbabwean stock prices but little movement in Zimbabwean consumer price inflation. With Gresham's law beginning to push good money out of circulation, nimble owners of Zimbabwean shares are demanding a higher share price from potential share buyers in order to compensate for the risk of holding soon-to-be issued bond notes. Less nimble retailers have yet to demand this same compensation from their customers. Don't expect this to last; consumer price inflation can't be too far behind asset price inflation.

If you haven't heard, protests are breaking out in Zimbabwe and unpaid civil servants are going on strike. This sort of thing hasn't happened in many years.

It's possible to trace at least some of the motivation for these developments to monetary mischief. Over the last twenty years, no nation has suffered more problems with its money than Zimbabwe has. Everyone remembers the hyperinflation and subsequent dollarization in late 2008. The most recent episode has seen a nation-wide bank run break out as Zimbabweans queue at ATMs to withdraw U.S. dollars, the local currency.

Remember last year's Greek bank run? I'd argue that Zimbabwe's bank run is similar. If you recall, Greek depositors were worried that—in the event of a Greek exit from the Eurozone—their deposits would be redenominated from euros to a Greek version of the euro or even a new drachma. Better to cash out in good euros before getting stuck with something worse. Line-ups grew outside Greek banks until authorities had no choice but to shut the system down.

Like Greece, there is a decent chance that Zimbabwean bank deposits might be made payable in funny money, namely a Zimbabwean version of the U.S. dollar rather than the actual U.S. banknotes. This may explain why Zimbabweans have been desperately queuing up at bank machines—they want to cash out before the worst case scenario happens.

To understand what I mean by 'Zimbabwean version of the U.S. dollar', we need to take a quick tour of the Zimbabwean banking system. A nation's central bank usually runs the plumbing that connects local banks. These banks keep accounts at the central bank—in Zimbabwe's case the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ)—and use balances held in these accounts to clear and settle among each other. These accounts, along with central bank-issued banknotes, constitute a nation's supply of base money, the quantity of which determines its price level. When Zimbabweans spontaneously stopped using the local currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, in late 2008, RBZ accounts (and cash) became worthless. The RBZ-managed plumbing system had imploded.

Zimbabweans still needed to bank, however, so local banks soon began offering U.S. dollar accounts to clients. A new plumbing system was re-erected overseas; instead of maintaining clearing accounts at the now defunct Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, local banks held U.S dollar accounts at banks in Europe and the U.S., otherwise known as nostro accounts. They used these offshore accounts to settle interbank Zimbabwe payments. [1]

To understand how this offshore plumbing system worked, say Joseph (who lives in the capital Harare) writes a cheque to Robert (who lives in Bulawayo). Joseph's local bank might settle the cheque thousands of miles away by having its New York bank wire funds to the nostro account of Robert's bank, which might be based in London. Circuitous, right?

As for cash, say Joseph wants to withdraw $100,000 in U.S. banknotes from his Zimbabwe bank account. His bank would request its New York bank to debit its nostro account by $100,000 and then ship the $100,000 in banknotes to Zimbabwe. Joseph now has a suitcase full of Ben Franklins.

This offshore plumbing system worked pretty well. However, it didn't take long for the RBZ to re-insinuate itself into the works by offering local banks U.S. dollar accounts. These accounts allowed the local banks to use the RBZ's re-christened real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) to settle interbank payments rather than using the offshore plumbing system. After having lost its printing press, the RBZ had got back into the monetary printing game. It had created a Zimbabwean version of the U.S. dollar.

My understanding is that as time passed the RBZ forced local banks to "repatriate" their clearing accounts from the overseas system and deposit them at the RBZ. In effect, local banks were told to wire U.S. funds from their foreign-based nostro accounts into an RBZ account held at a European/American bank. In turn, the local bank was credited with an equal quantity of U.S. dollar deposits on the RBZ's own books. Voila, local banks had gone from holding U.S. dollars in relatively safe foreign banks located in places like London to holding the domestic RBZ version of the dollar. I can't imagine that bank managers were terribly fond of this forced switch given the RBZ role in igniting the 21st century's first hyperinflation.

Let's see how this new system works. Now when Joseph wants $100,000 in cash, Joseph's bank—call it the Commonwealth Bank of Zimbabwe—has two choices. Use its foreign nostro account as before. Or it can ask the RBZ to debit the Commonwealth Bank RTGS account and provide the proper number of U.S. banknotes. The RBZ in turn sources the cash by requesting its foreign bank to debit the RBZ account—now plump with confiscated dollars—and send the cash to Zimbabwe by plane. The RBZ's overseas dollar accounts in effect "back" the dollar deposits that the RBZ has issued to local banks.

On paper this sort of system should work fine... as long as the RBZ doesn't abscond with the funds in the foreign bank accounts. Unfortunately, this may be exactly what happened. The RBZ had effectively gone from being bankrupt to having amassed large amounts of U.S. funds overseas. This proved tempting, and according to former finance minister Tendai Biti the regime began dipping into the RBZ's foreign stash to pay for expensive junkets and to finance public sector salaries. The upshot it that there may not be enough U.S. funds in the RBZ's foreign accounts to back its promises to local banks.

This means that now when Zimbabweans go to their banks to get U.S. cash, the banks—which before had no problems meeting these requests via their nostro accounts—are hamstrung. They have U.S. dollar accounts at the RBZ but the RBZ is unable to draw on its depleted overseas accounts to get the requested cash. The lineups that have developed are the public's attempt to squeeze out whatever spare dollars remain in the system, an attempt that is rendered much hard given the withdrawal limits that have been instituted to slow down the run.

Zimbabweans are already starting to see a divergence between the price of an electronic dollar and a paper dollar. Various media reports say the practice of "cash burning" has re-emerged for the first time since the hyperinflation of 2007-08. Anyone who needs to convert deposits into cash, frustrated by long lines at ATMs and withdrawal limits, can instead approach an informal dealer who offers to buy their deposits at a discount of 10-20% of their cash value (see here and here). Think of the 'cash burning' discount as the market value of an RBZ-backed bank deposit. If the regime has indeed wasted all the money in its nostro accounts, this discount will only widen.

The theory that the regime has absconded with the RBZ's overseas funds is consistent with a flurry of official proclamations over the last month or two. If the RBZ is indeed bankrupt, it would make sense for the ruling regime to adopt the same strategy that Greece did last year; implement capital controls to trap as many U.S. dollars in the banking system as possible, thus limiting the damage and buying time for the government to rebuild the balance sheets of both the RBZ and the local banks before reopening for business. This would probably require some sort of loan from China or elsewhere. Under this scenario, Zimbabwean deposit holders could very well have to take a large haircut.

As in Greece, the RBZ has started to ring-fence the system by instituting daily withdrawal limits (of around $100); enough to allow Zimbabweans to get by but not enough to hurt the banking system. To coax people into accepting electronic dollars rather than paper dollars, the central bank has suddenly decreed much lower fees on bank payments and transfers. The government has also invoked the Bank Use Promotion and Suppression of Money Laundering Act, which punishes citizens and business if they refuse to deposit their money in banks. More radically, it has imposed severe import restrictions on a broad variety of goods from furniture to beans to fertilizer, a policy that presumably prevents cash leaking over the border. Together, all these regulations seem designed to help stuff as many U.S. banknotes back into the RBZ as possible.

Alternatively, it's possible the Zimbabwe government cribs from the Argentina play book and sets up a corralito, or coral, followed by a redenomination of dollar accounts into the local unit. Unlike Argentina, which had pesos, Zimbabwe is fully dollarized and doesn't have its own paper currency in which to redenominate deposits. But so-called bond notes (which I wrote about last month), an issue of paper money set to debut this fall in denominations of $2, $5, $10 and $20, may be a step in the Argentinean direction. Rather than meeting conversion requests by providing U.S. dollars, the RBZ will be able to print off any quantity of bond notes it deems necessary. In this way U.S. dollar claims on Zimbabwean banks will cease to be payable in actual dollars but in the RBZ's peculiar brand of U.S. banknotes, probably worth far less than the real thing.

It seems perverse that Zimbabwe could see another hyperinflation while on the very dollar standard that was meant to immunize it from a hyperinflation scenario, but I'm starting to worry this could happen. Consider that Robert John Mangudya, the head of the RBZ, claims that retailers are beginning to put two different price tags on one product, a higher one for electronic payments and a lower one for cash. If the RBZ-issued electronic dollar continues to inflate then electronic dollar sticker price will rise but the U.S. paper dollar price will stay constant. This second set of prices would at least provide some modicum of price stability to the nation.

Not so fast. Mangudya warns that the central bank will prosecute any retailer that sets two prices. If retailers comply and set only one price for their wares, that effectively undervalues U.S. banknotes and overvalues RBZ-issued U.S. electronic dollars. Gresham's law will take hold as shoppers use only bad electronic dollars to pay for things while hoarding their good, and undervalued, paper dollars in their wallets. Unwilling to be the dupes and accumulate overvalued and unwanted electronic dollars, retailers will have no choice but to jack up their prices, essentially adopting the RBZ U.S. e-dollar as the standard unit of account, or unit in which they set prices. With U.S. dollars no longer being used as a medium of exchange and unit of account, price stability in Zimbabwe will cease to exist.

One hopes that rumors that the regime has absconded with the RBZ's funds are false and that the current bank run and potential inflation is just a temporary spate of animal spirits. But in my experience, most sustained bank runs are underpinned by something real.


[1] I get much of this information from here.

A Zimbabwean washes U.S. dollars, from NPR Planet Money

Here's a surprising development.

Zimbabwe, a dollarized nation, is on the verge of issuing its own $2, $5, $10, and $20 banknotes. Here is is the central bank's press release. Let's back up a bit. Zimbabwe suffered one of the worst hyperinflations in history during the 2000s thanks to awful policies by the government. Citizens were so fed up that they spontaneously dropped the Zimbabwe dollar in late 2009, the U.S. dollar being recruited as media of exchange and unit of account and the South African rand serving a backup role as small change.

Since then the rand has been steadily moving to the background in Zimbabwe monetary affairs:

Currency utilization levels in Zimbabwe [source]

Another change is that last year Zimbabwe re-entered the world of monetary production by minting its own 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50 cent coins, otherwise known as bond coins. At the time I was in favor of bond coins because Zimbabwe was following the blueprint set by dollarized nations like Panama and Ecuador. These nations mint their own small change to complement Federal Reserve-printed dollar banknotes, and for good reason. Coins are heavy while not being particularly valuable, which means that shipping costs are prohibitive. As a result, local banks prefer to import paper dollars, the ensuing coin shortages that develop making it difficult for locals to engage in basic transactions.

While I was a fan of bond coins, I don't like the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe's decision to print bond notes. It departs from the dollarization blueprint--neither Panama nor Ecuador (or any other dollarized nation that I know of) have chosen to get into the business of printing notes. Panama in particular is a highly successful dollarized nations, so if Zimbabwe wants to depart from the Panama model one would expect it to have a very good reason for doing so.

John Mangudya, head of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, says that he wants to get back into the note-printing game thanks to a "shortage of U.S. dollars" that seems to be bedeviling the nation. Since March, line-ups have developed at ATMs all over the country as people try to withdraw U.S. dollar cash. This is true, the local press is full of articles on banking queues. Strict limits have been placed on the amount of cash that Zimbabweans can withdraw from their accounts.

I'm skeptical of Mangudya's dollar shortage story. There is a very simple process whereby a dollar shortage in a dollarized nation is remedied. Zimbabwean farmers, desperate to get their hands on U.S. dollars, will reduce their selling prices for tobacco and cotton, two important cash crops with flexible prices. Gold miners will do the same. The moment Zimbabwean crop and gold prices fall below the international price arbitrageurs will bring dollars into Zimbabwe to buy cheap these goods for shipment overseas. Since cash crystallizes a large amount of value in a small volume, handling costs are very low--unlike coins. Domestic commodity prices need only deviate by a small wedge from the international price before arbitrage is profitable and U.S. paper currency flows back into the country. Unless the government is interfering with this process, I can't see it taking more than a week or two for markets to rectify a dollar shortage.

Zimbabwean authorities are notorious for tampering with Zimbabwean industry--this may be short-circuiting the simple process I've just described. If so, why introduce bond notes to fix the problem when the underlying cause is silly government rules preventing cross-border markets from functioning?

On the other hand, if the government hasn't been preventing this process from playing out then Zimbabwe doesn't have a genuine dollar shortage. Lineups at ATMs may simply be the result of an insolvent banking system. Zimbabwe is currently battling a slowdown in growth as commodity prices fall. The U.S. dollar's  rise over the last year or two has reduced the nation's competitiveness. This slowdown may be taking a toll on banks. However, wads of newly-imported U.S. dollar bills or freshly-printed bond notes can't fix a sick banking system.

So Mangudya's reason for departing from the Panama model seems like a poor one to me, one made worse by the fact that the same nutcase who destroyed Zimbabwe's monetary infrastructure in the previous decade, Robert Mugabe, remains in power. Bond coins were one thing, but bond notes give Mugabe much more latitude to engage in monetary mischief.

How much mischief? Many Zimbabweans are worried that the introduction of bond notes will bring about a repeat of the hyperinflationary 2000s. I'm not as worried as them. The U.S. dollar not only circulates as Zimbabwe's medium of exchange but also serves as its unit of account. The fact that prices across the nation are expressed in terms of the dollar affords Zimbabweans a significant degree of protection from Mugabe.  If bond notes are to be introduced, they may very well circulate along with U.S. dollars as a medium of exchange but they will not take over the unit of account role. A nation's unit of account, like its language or its religion, is a set of rules and standards that, once adopted, is not easily changed. In the same way that society is locked-in to using the QWERTY keyboard, it gets yoked to using a certain language of prices.

This means that if the bond note turns out to be a sham and begins to inflate, Zimbabwean prices--expressed in U.S. dollars--will stay constant. Instead, the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and bond notes will bear the burden of adjustment, bond notes falling to a discount to dollars. Because this leaves the price level unaffected, the process of adjusting to a bond note collapse would be far less burdensome to Zimbabweans than the hyperinflation of the 2000s. The move might even backfire and cause Mugabe significant embarrassment since a bond note discount could not be blamed on anything other than his own incompetence.

Even if the bond notes can never do as much damage as Zimbabwe dollars did in the previous decade, the fact remains that there is no rational for issuing them. Let the market work its magic as it does in Panama and solve any cash shortage problems. The decision to return to paper money is a particularly insensitive one given the fact that many citizens' livelihoods were destroyed by Mugabe's Zimbabwe dollar hyperinflation. Zimbabweans are right to be upset over the bond note; it's a shame that Mangudya, having so ably brought the bond coin idea to fruition, is now promoting a regressive idea.      

Issued a little less than a year ago, Zimbabwe's bond coin is one of the world's newest monetary units. The bond coin is designed to solve one of the most venerable problems in the pantheon of monetary conundrums; the big problem of small change—a nice turn of phrase coined by economists Tom Sargent and François Velde (excuse the pun).

Some background first. When Zimbabweans spontaneously ceased to use worthless Zimbabwe dollars in 2009 they simultaneously adopted a ragtag collection of currencies including the South African rand and U.S. dollar. Unlike cash, coins are heavy—shipping them over to Zimbabwe from the U.S. is prohibitively expensive. So while Federal Reserve banknotes have tended to be used in large value transactions, rand coinage from neighbouring South Africa has been recruited for use in smaller transactions. Unfortunately, there has never been enough coins to conduct trade. The demand for small change is so large that items like gum or candies or IOUs have often been used as coin-substitutes.

The bond coin is a brave attempt by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe's (RBZ) incoming Governor John Mangudya to fix the small change problem. Issued in denominations of 1, 50, 10, 25, and 50 cents, each bond coin is worth an equivalent amount of U.S. cents. Issuing small change is an entirely sensible goal for a central banker to pursue. It's low hanging fruit—a cheap solution to a significant problem that disproportionately hurts those who rely on coins the most, the poor.

But how can an institution that has lost all credibility—and deservedly so—successfully float a new monetary unit? Only with a little bit of help, it seems. The RBZ's FAQ on bond coins says that the new issue is backed by a "bond facility." What does this mean? Unfortunately the RBZ forgot to answer that question in its FAQ, as the screenshot below indicates (ht Twitter finance's @guan).


Oh dear.

Reading through some earlier news reports, let me try and answer on their behalf. We know that the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), based in Cairo, opened up a US$200 million line of credit with the RBZ last year. Presumably some portion of this line of credit will be used to ensure that bond coins stay pegged to the U.S. dollar. Should the bond coin fall below the dollar, for instance, the RBZ will have to draw down on its bond facility with Afreximbank to repurchase the coins. Thus the moniker "bond coin." At least, that's the story that the RBZ Governor John Mangudya has been providing. So far the value of bond coins has held, so Zimbabweans see Afreximbank backing as credible.

The minting of U.S. dollar tokens isn't a novel idea. Other dollarized nations have introduced coins to make up for the lack of U.S. change. Panama, for instance, has the balboa while Ecuador and East Timor have the centavo. Zimbabwe's is a well-trodden path.

The RBZ's new coins were initially greeted with a large amount of skepticism. No wonder. This is an institution that generated an inflation rate of 79.6 billion percent (with the help of Robert Mugabe's insane fiscal policy). However, a sudden glut of news articles say that Zimbabweans have begun to embrace bond coins in earnest. At the same time, no one wants South African currency anymore, with retailers and banks increasingly refusing rand coins.

Why is that? Zimbabweans have been transacting with both rand and dollars since 2009 but they have been setting prices in the latter. The dollar, not the rand, is the unit of account. This means that any transaction involving rand is inconvenient as it requires a foreign exchange conversion back into dollars prior to consummation. Over the last few years, Zimbabweans have solved this problem by the informal adoption of a "street" rate of ten rand-to-the dollar.  They use this rate as a rule of thumb even though the market exchange rate has deviated quite far from it. The advantage of a nice round number is that it reduces the calculational burden of a two currency system.

For instance, one of the more ubiquitous commercial experiences in Zimbabwe, a ride on a privately operated bus, or kombi, has been priced at $0.50, or five rand, for many years now. It's interesting that this price has undervalued the rand relative to its actual market rate. In 2012-2013 the U.S. dollar was worth around eight rand, so a kombi ride should have only cost commuters four rand, not five. But convenience seems to have trumped exactitude, especially with small change being so hard to come by.

With the greenback having spiked in late 2014 and 2015, the U.S. dollar is now worth around fourteen rand. In this context, the old informal ten-to-one exchange rate no longer makes much sense. A massive coordination problem seems to have developed. While kombi drivers still charge fifty U.S. cents per ride, they have reportedly begun to charge as much as seven rand for a trip, or a 14-to-one exchange rate, thus breaking with the traditional ten-to-one street rate. Customers are not happy. When they pay with US$1, they are now asking for a 50 cent bond coin as change. After all, if they get five rand in change, that won't be enough to afford the new seven rand price on their next ride.

The period of economy-wide haggling necessary to settle on a new generally accepted "street price" for the rand no doubt imposes significant costs on Zimbabwean society. Thorny issues of fairness come to the forefront. And if the new rate isn't a nice round number, payment calculations becomes a burden. Before the bond coin's appearance on the scene, Zimbabwe would simply have endured this period of rand-induced calculational turmoil as it slowly groped to a new equilibrium. But this time there's a small change alternative to the rand. The sudden adoption of the once unpopular bond coin by Zimbabwean society may be a convenient hack for getting around the complexity of adjusting to rand volatility. If so, all that the bond coin needed for mass adoption was either a sharp rise or fall in the rand. Without that volatility—i.e. if the rand exchange rate had stayed near ten-to-one forever—then the requisite chaos for bond coin acceptance would never have appeared.

Monetary economists have long debated the idea of a divorce between a nation's unit-of-account and its medium-of-exchange. (See Tyler Cowen, for instance, on New Monetary Economics). This is the notion that a nation's prices can be set in terms of one unit and its transactions carried out in another; a notion exemplified in Zimbabwe where prices are set in dollars but rand trades hands. I think Zimbabwe's recent adoption of the bond coin bears out economist and blogger Larry White's stance on the subject. White, who wrote a skeptical paper on the prospects for medium-unit divergence, maintains that the practice of harmonizing the unit in which we transact with the unit for posting prices is an evolutionary inevitability. A divorce is simply not in the self interest of economic actors. Harmonization-

...economizes on time spent in negotiation over what commodities are acceptable in payment and at what rate of exchange. More importantly, it economizes on the information necessary for the buyer's and the seller's economic calculation.

For these reasons, a unit of account is typically "wedded" to a general medium of exchange, says White. In Zimbabwe, the convenience of wedding the medium-of-exchange with the unit-of-account is playing out in the mass disgorgement of rand and adoption of US$-denominated bond coins. This is just another chapter in Zimbabwe's ongoing game of monetary musical chairs. Having spontaneously demonetized the Zimbabwe dollar in 2009 for the rand, they are now demonetizing the rand in favour of Zimbabwean U.S. dollars. If White is correct, expect this new evolution to be a permanent one.

National Bank of Greece depository receipt certificate (source)

If you're like me and you like to: 1) explore anomalies in markets; and 2) mix equity analysis with monetary analysis, then you'll like this post. A sneak peak: by the end, we'll be able to use equity markets to figure out the unofficial exchange rate between a Greek euro and non-Greek euro.

For the last few weeks shares of Greek banks have diverged dramatically from their overlying depository receipts (see chart below). A bit of background first. A depository receipt is much like an exchange-traded fund, except where an ETF holds a bundle of different stocks, a depository receipt represents just one stock. That stock is usually listed on an out-of-the-way market (like Greece), whereas the depository receipt trades on a major exchange like New York. Investors interested in owning a foreign stock can avoid currency conversion costs and foreign settlement problems and instead purchase the New York-listed depository receipt hassle-free.

In general, the parent security and its offspring should trade in line with each other. Recently, however, the US-listed depository receipts of the National Bank of Greece and Alpha Bank have risen to a massive premium relative to their Greek-listed parents. For instance, in mid-August investors could have bought National Bank's New-York listed depository receipt for €0.73. However, the Greek-listed stock was trading for just €0.60. For some reason, investors are paying 30% more for a security that provides the exact same stream of earnings. We've got a gross violation of the law of one price.*

This is especially interesting given that a redemption/creation mechanism for depository receipts links the price of parent and offspring via arbitrage. In the same way that an investor deposits cash at a bank and gets a bank deposit, an investor can buy a National Bank of Greece share listed in Athens and 'deposit' that share at a custodian, receiving in return a newly-created New York-listed depository receipt. If either security can be bought for less than the other, an arbitrage opportunity arises. For instance, in mid-August one might (in theory) have bought Greek-listed National Bank of Greece shares for €0.60, converted them into New York-listed depository receipts, sold the depository receipts for €0.73, wired the proceeds from New York to Greece, and repurchased Greek-listed National Bank of Greece shares for €0.60. Rinse and repeat. (This works the other way, too. In the same way that a bank deposit can be converted into cash, investors can purchase a depository receipt and redeem it for underlying equity.)




The effect is that as investors clamour to harvest arbitrage gains, any premium or discount between a New York-listed depository receipts and its Greek parent equity should quickly fall towards zero. Why hasn't this been the case in Greece of late?

There are several explanations for persistent premia/discounts between depository receipts and their underlying shares. The first is liquidity differences. If the depository receipt is more liquid than the underlying equity, then investors will be willing to pay a bit more for the depository receipt. In the case of National Bank of Greece, the depository receipt tends to attract higher trading volumes than the underlying Athens-listed shares, which probably explains why the receipts have tended to trade at a premium.

Premiums or discounts can also occur when the redemption/creation mechanism is inhibited. Depository receipts for Taipei-listed Taiwan Semi Conductor rose to an incredible 60% premium to the shares in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The reason for this premium can be traced to the fact that Taiwan restricts foreign ownership of local companies. This effectively prevented the closing of the premium via purchases of local shares for conversion into depository receipts. These premia evaporated when Taiwan removed foreign ownership restrictions in 2003. (Here is a good summary).

In a 2006 paper, Saxena found that the New York-traded depository receipts of a handful of Indian stocks, including Infosys, Wipro, State Bank of India, MTNL, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Satyam Computers, habitually traded at substantial premium to the underlying Indian-listed equity. Infosys's premium (which reached 60% in 2002) had existed since its U.S. listing in 1999. However, German, South Korean, and Hong Kong-listed companies with New York-listed depository receipts showed negligible premia.

Why was this? Saxena found that Indian depository receipts suffered from limited two-way fungibility. Depository receipts could be freely converted into Indian-listed shares, but Indian-listed shares could only be converted into depository receipts to the extent that there was available 'head room'. The amount of headroom in turn depended on the extent of past conversion of depository receipts into shares. Since headroom in the above shares had been all used up, when American investors flocked to buy depository receipts, thus driving them to a premium relative to the Indian-listed equity, there was no way for arbitrageurs to close the difference.

In the case of Greece, the imposition of capital controls on June 29 seems to have inhibited the redemption/creation mechanism. The Athens stock exchange was closed the same day (the New York-listed receipts continued to trade), but when it reopened on August 3, capital controls remained in place. Since reopening, a wedge has appeared between the prices of National Bank of Greece's depository receipts and its underlying shares, implying that there has been much more demand for the former than the latter. Typically, arbitrageurs would close this gap, buying the underlying Athens-listed shares and turning them into new deposit receipts. Presumably the Greek authorities have asked that banking intermediaries cease allowing the conversion of Greek shares into receipts, so arbitrage has not been possible.

That ended on August 27, 2015. According to a press release for BNY Mellon, clarification requested from Greek authorities regarding conversions of depository receipts had finally been received and, as a result, deposit receipt books would be re-opened for issuance and cancellation. With the ability to arbitrage receipts and the underlying shares once again available, the National Bank of Greece depository receipt premium collapsed from around 30% to 10% when markets opened on August 28. It has been shrinking ever since and now lies within its historical range.


That explains the anomaly and its disappearance. But that's not the end of the story. Going forward, watching the relative price of National Bank of Greece's depository receipts and its share price may provide valuable insights.

In permitting depository receipt redemption and creation, the Greek government has effectively removed capital controls. Currently, Greeks cannot withdraw more than €420 in cash per week from their bank accounts and are not permitted to transfer more than €500 per month to a foreign account. Businesses must go through tedious application processes to get access to their funds. However, with the depository receipt window open, businesses and individuals can simply spend all their bank deposits on Athens-listed National Bank of Greece, convert the shares into depository receipts, sell them in New York for dollars, and convert the funds back to euros. Voila, capital controls evaded.

This loop hole doesn't seem very fair to me. After all, only the financial elite will be aware of the depository receipt escape, with widows, orphans, and the rest oblivious that capital controls have been effectively lifted. Loosening up the depository receipt window only make sense if it is twinned with similar effort to help the broad public, say a higher ceiling on cash withdrawals.

Depending how tightly Greece's capital controls bind, Athens-listed National Bank of Greece shares might actually lose their traditional discount and rise to a premium relative to New York-listed depository receipts (in euro terms). If depository receipts are the best route to evade capital controls, then those desperate to get their money out of Greece will be willing to pay a 'fee' for that privilege. By purchasing National Bank of Greece shares in Athens for, say 0.65 euro, and converting them into depository receipts that trade for just 0.60 euros, investors effectively lose 0.05 euros. The size of that fee, the premium, will equal the cost of the next best alternative for evading capital controls. If controls are leaky, the premium will be small. If they aren't, it could be quite wide.

A number of studies have found that during the Argentinean corralito, Buenos Aires-listed shares rose to a huge premium relative to their New York-listed depository receipts. Brechner, for instance, finds that the premium reached over 40% in January 2002. This gap represented the amount that Argentinians were willing to pay to use depository receipts as a vehicle for moving their wealth from frozen Argentinean bank deposits into liquid U.S bank deposits. When share conversions were restricted in March 2002, that premium disappeared.

Greece seems on its way to being mended. Capital controls should be loosened soon, and people no longer seem anxious about an imminent drachma conversion. So if a premium on local National Bank of Greece shares were to develop, I doubt it would be large like the sort of premia that prevailed in Argentina. However, if things were to get worse, we might see a large gap develop.

In closing, now that depository receipt conversion has been reopened but capital controls remain in place, the exchange rate between Athens-listed National Bank of Greece shares and New York-listed depository receipts serves as the "black market" rate between Greek euros and non-Greek euros. After Hugo Chavez imposed capital controls in 2003, Venezuelans used the rate between Caracas-traded CA Nacional Telefonos de Venezuela (CAN TV) shares relative to New York-listed depository receipts as a shadow rate for the Venezuelan bolivar, until CANTV was nationalized in 2007. Likewise burdened by capital controls, Zimbabweans used the exchange rate between Old Mutual shares listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange and those listed in London as the implicit Zimbabwe dollar exchange rate. It even had a name: the OMIR, or Old Mutual Implied Rate.

So watch the National Bank of Greece equity-to-depository receipt rate closely. It's conveying information about Greek euros.


* More accurately, the depository receipts were trading for US$0.83. To calculate their euro price, I use the 9:30-10:30 price of New York-listed National Bank of Greece depository receipts and converted them into euros at the prevailing dollar-to-euro exchange rate.

Here's an interesting fact. Remember all those worthless Zimbabwe paper banknotes? The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), Zimbabwe's central bank, is officially buying them back for cancellation. According to its recent monetary policy statement, the RBZ will be demonetizing old banknotes at the "United Nations rate," that is, at a rate of Z$35 quadrillion to US$1. Stranded Zimbabwe dollar-denominated bank deposits will also be repurchased.

As a reminder, Zimbabwe endured a hyperinflation that met its demise in late 2008 when Zimbabweans spontaneously stopped using the Zimbabwe dollar as either a unit of account or medium of exchange, U.S. dollars and South African rand being substituted in their place. Along the way, the RBZ was used by corrupt authorities to subsidize all sorts of crazy schemes, including farm mechanization programs and tourism development facilities.

Upon hearing about the RBZ's buyback, entrepreneurial readers may be thinking about an arbitrage. Buy up Zimbabwe bank notes and fly them back to Zimbabwe for redemption at the RBZ's new official rate, making a quick buck in the process. But don't get too excited. The highest denomination note ever printed by the RBZ is the $100 trillion note. At the RBZ's demonetization rate, one $100 trillion will get you... US$0.003. With these notes selling for US$10 to $20 as collectors items on eBay, forget it—there's no money to be made on this trade. If you've already got a few $100 trillion Zimbabwean notes sitting in your cupboard, you're way better off hoarding them than submitting them to the RBZ's buyback campaign.

But this does give us some interesting data points about the nature of money. Last year I wrote two posts on the topic of whether money constituted an IOU or not. With the gold standard days long gone, central banks no longer offer immediate redemption into some underlying asset. But do they offer ultimate redemption into an asset? A number of central banks—including the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve—make an explicit promise that notes constitute a first claim or paramount lien on the assets of the central bank. This language implies that banknotes are like any other security, say a bond or equity, since each provides their owner with eventual access to firm assets upon liquidation or windup of the firm.

George Selgin is skeptical of the banknotes-as-security theory, replying that a note's guarantee of a first claim on assets is a mere relic of the gold standard. However, the Bank of Canada was formed after Canada had ceased gold convertibility. Furthermore, modern legislation governing central banks like the 2004 Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) Law declares that banknotes "shall be a first charge on the assets of the CBI." [See pdf]. So these promises certainly aren't relics of a bygone age. The Zimbabwean example provides even more evidence that a banknote constitutes a terminal IOU of sorts. After all, Zimbabwean authorities could have left legacy Zimbabwe dollar banknotes to flap in the wind. But for some reason, they've decided to provide an offer to buy them back, even if it is just a stink bid.

Given that banknotes are a type of security or IOU, how far can we take this idea? For instance, analysts often value a non-dividend paying stock by calculating how much a firm's assets will be worth upon break up. Likewise, we might say that the value of Zimbabwean banknotes, or any other banknote, is valued relative to the central bank's liquidation value, or the quantity of central bank assets upon which those notes are claim when they are finally canceled. If so, then the precise quantity of assets that back a currency are very important, since any impairment of assets will cause inflation. This is a pure form of the backing theory of money.

I'm not quite willing to take this idea that far. While banknotes do appear to constitute a first claim on a central bank's assets, the central bank documents that I'm familiar with give no indication of the nominal quantity of central bank assets to which a banknote is entitled come liquidation. So while it is realistic to say that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe always had a terminal offer to buy back Zimbabwe dollars, even during the awful hyper-inflationary period of 2007 and 2008, the lack of a set nominal offer price meant that the value of that promise would have been very difficult to calculate. More explicitly, on September 30, 2007, no Zimbabwean could have possibly know that, when all was said and done, their $100 trillion Zimbabwe note would be redeemable for only US$0.003. The difficulty of calculating this terminal value is an idea I outlined here, via an earlier Mike Friemuth blog post.

While the final chapter of the Zimbabwe dollar saga is over, the first chapter of Zimbabwe's U.S. dollar standard has just begun. Gone are the days of 79,600,000,000% hyperinflation. Instead, Zimbabweans are experiencing something entirely new, deflation. Consumer prices have fallen by 1.3% year-over-year, one of the deepest deflation rates in the world and the most in Africa. With prices being set in terms of the U.S. dollar unit of account, Zimbabwean monetary policy is effectively held hostage to the U.S. Federal Reserve's 12 member Federal Open Market Committee. Most analysts expect the Fed to start hiking rates this year, so I have troubles seeing how Zimbabwean prices will pull out of their deflationary trend. Few people have experienced as many monetary outliers as the citizens of Zimbabwe over such a short period of time. I wish them the best.