This morning has brought a consequence of the actions of the European Central Bank into focus. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic it found itself out of interest-rate ammunition having already cut interest-rates to -0.6%. Or rather interest-rate ammunition for businesses and consumers as of course it has set a record low of -1% for The Precious! The Precious! So it found itself only able to employ more unconventional measures such as Quantitative Easing ( QE) and credit easing ( TLTROs). Of course it was already indulging in some QE which is looking ever more permanent along the lines such about by Joe Walsh.
I go to parties sometimes until four
It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door
Money Supply
We have been observing the consequences of the above in this area for some months now. Today is no different.
Annual growth rate of narrower monetary aggregate M1,, comprising currency in circulation and overnight deposits, stood at 12.6% in June, compared with 12.5% in May.
If we look back we see that it was 7.2% a year ago and then the extra monetary easing of the autumn of 2019 saw it rally to around 8%. So the new measures have pretty quickly had an impact. That has not always been true as regular readers will know. Also whilst we have seen an annual rate of 13.1% in the past ( late 2009 when the credit crunch hit) the money supply is much larger now. Mostly of course due to all the official effort pushing it up!
In terms of totals M1 pushed past the 9.7 trillion Euros barrier in June and also cash in circulation pushed past 1.3 trillion. Cash is not growing as fast as the rest but in other terms an annual growth rate of 9.7% would be considered fast especially as it has been out of favour as a medium of exchange for obvious possible infection reasons. More woe for the media reporting of it.
Broad Money
As you can see this is on the surge too.
The annual growth rate of the broad monetary aggregate M3 increased to 9.2% in June 2020 from 8.9% in May, averaging 8.8% in the three months up to June. The components of M3, showed the following developments. The annual growth rate of the narrower aggregate M1, which comprises currency in circulation and overnight deposits, stood at 12.6% in June, compared with 12.5% in May. The annual growth rate of short-term deposits other than overnight deposits (M2-M1) stood at 0.7% in June, unchanged from the previous month. The annual growth rate of marketable instruments (M3-M2) increased to 10.1% in June from 5.7% in May.
The relative move has been even stronger here as the annual rate of growth on a year before has doubled from 4.6%. In more recent terms it has risen from around 5.5% if we ignore the odd print at the end of 2019. As to the breakdown much of the growth (8.5%) is M1 and it is noticeable that M2 seems very out of fashion these days. I guess with interest-rates so low why have your money deposited for longer terms? But M3 growth has picked up noticeably. We should not be surprised as that is one of the main targets of ECB policy both implicitly via corporate bond purchases and explicitly such as the purchase of commercial paper.
So we have more overnight deposits backed up by more cash and more money market fund shares. There was also a noticeable slowing in June to 95 billion Euros as the growth rate ( Taking us to 13.89 trillion)
There is another way of looking at this and as usual let me remind you not to take these numbers too literally. That went horribly wrong in my home country back in the day.
the annual growth rate of M3 in June 2020 can be broken down as follows: credit to the private sector contributed 5.1 percentage points (down from 5.3 percentage points in May), credit to general government contributed 5.0 percentage points (up from 3.6 percentage points), net external assets contributed 1.0 percentage point (as in the previous month), longer-term financial liabilities contributed 0.3 percentage point (up from 0.0 percentage point), and the remaining counterparts of M3 contributed -2.0 percentage points (down from -0.9 percentage point).
It was only a few days ago I pointed out that the main role of the ECB these days seems to have become to make sure the Euro area government’s can fund themselves cheaply.
Credit
I consider this to usually be a lagging indicator but there are some points of note and the credit to governments leaps off the page I think.
The annual growth rate of credit to general government increased to 13.6% in June from 9.8% in May, while the annual growth rate of credit to the private sector stood at 4.8% in June, compared with 4.9% in May.
Credit to government was -2% as recently as February so the pedal has been pushed to the metal.
The ECB will be troubled by the latter part of the numbers below.
The annual growth rate of adjusted loans to the private sector (i.e. adjusted for loan sales, securitisation and notional cash pooling) decreased to 4.8% in June from 5.3% in May. Among the borrowing sectors, the annual growth rate of adjusted loans to households stood at 3.0% in June, unchanged from the previous month, while the annual growth rate of adjusted loans to non-financial corporations decreased to 7.1% in June from 7.3% in May.
Private-sector credit declined noticeably in the circumstances when adjusted but that seems to go missing in the detail. So let me help out.
New bank loans to euro area corporates slowed to €9bn in June, following a massive increase of €245bn over the previous three months. ( @fwred)
Putting it another way credit growth fell to 178 billion Euros in June of which 153 billion went to governments.
Comment
The response of the ECB to the Covid-19 pandemic has been to sing along with MARRS.
Brothers and sisters!
Pump up the volume
Pump that beat
Brothers and sisters!
Pump up the volume
We gonna get ya!
But just like their other moves of applying large interest-rate cuts and then negative bond yields it does not seem to be working. Back in the day I was taught this as “pushing on a string”. As a concept it is clear but in the intervening decades the monetary system has changed enormously. Personally I think the concepts of money and credit have merged in certain areas such as people paying for things with their phone. Another is the use of credit cards.
Putting it another way the economic impact is money supply multiplied by velocity with the catch being we do not know what velocity is. We can have a stab at what it was but right now we neither know what it is nor what it will be. So we know it has fallen over time undermining the central bank efforts making it push on a string but we can only say that looks like it is happening all over again, we cannot measure it with any precision.
Thus a likely consequence from this is inflation. We can see this in two ways. The official denials combined with increasingly desperate efforts to miss measure inflation. Or as the news overnight has highlighted and my subject of a few days ago, another high for the price of Gold.
Let me offer an olive branch to economics 101. How is the Euro rallying ( 1.17 versus the US Dollar). Well the US Money Supply is growing even faster.
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