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Banking's Dangerous Alchemy: When Money and Risk Collide
In 2007, the financial world stood on the precipice of disaster. What began as a seemingly contained problem in the American subprime mortgage market would cascade into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Behind the spectacular collapse lay a profound truth that former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King exposes in his groundbreaking work: our entire financial system rests upon a form of alchemy-the magical transformation of risky, illiquid assets into seemingly safe, liquid liabilities. This alchemy, while powering centuries of economic growth, contains the seeds of its own destruction.
"The End of Alchemy" has become required reading in financial circles since its 2016 publication, with luminaries from Janet Yellen to Bill Gates praising its insights. King's unique perspective as both academic economist and central bank leader during the crisis gives him unparalleled authority to diagnose what went wrong and prescribe solutions. The book's cultural impact extends beyond economics, influencing political discourse about banking regulation and monetary policy worldwide. Unlike many financial tomes, King's work speaks to both experts and general readers, explaining complex concepts with clarity while offering a compelling narrative about capitalism's greatest vulnerability.
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The Dilemma of Growth and Stability
For centuries, capitalism has proven the most successful route from poverty to prosperity. The West built institutions to support it-rule of law, intellectual freedom, anti-trust regulation, and collectively financed infrastructure-creating a balance between freedom and restraint. This transformed living standards, with 2.5% annual growth raising real national income twelvefold over a century.
Adam Smith identified specialization as the source of economic growth. His famous pin factory example demonstrated how division of labor dramatically increased productivity. This specialization required both money to exchange goods and banks to finance capital equipment. After a millennium of stagnation, productivity began rising from the mid-eighteenth century as money and banking evolved to support the Industrial Revolution.
From the late 1970s, the Western world embarked on three bold experiments in economic management. First, central banks were given greater independence to target inflation and achieve price stability. Second, capital was allowed to move freely between countries while fixed exchange rates were encouraged both within Europe (culminating in monetary union) and in rapidly growing economies like China. Third, banking regulations were removed to promote competition and allow diversification.
These experiments produced three consequences-the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Good was the "Great Stability" between 1990-2007, with unprecedented stability in output and inflation. The Bad was rising debt levels as interest rates fell and asset prices rose. Between 1986-2006, household debt rose from 70% to 120% of income in the US and from 90% to 140% in the UK. The Ugly was an extremely fragile banking system where deregulation allowed banks to double in size, become interconnected through complex financial products, and operate with dangerously high leverage ratios of 30 or more-meaning just a 4% fall in asset values could wipe out shareholders' equity.
By 2008, the Ugly led the Bad to overwhelm the Good. The crisis was the failure of all three experiments. Greater stability concealed major disequilibrium in spending patterns. Some countries borrowed too much while others saved excessively. Total world savings drove interest rates to unsustainably low levels. Fixed exchange rates exacerbated debt burdens, while highly leveraged banks collapsed with even modest confidence losses.
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The Perfect Storm: How Global Imbalances Created Crisis
The crisis began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989-ironically marking not just communism's end but the beginning of capitalism's greatest crisis since the Great Depression. After socialist economies embraced international trade, the global labor pool tripled. China alone created 70 million manufacturing jobs, exceeding the combined 42 million manufacturing workers in the US and Europe by 2012.
Emerging economies, particularly China, pursued export-led growth by fixing their currencies at low rates against the dollar. China's share of world exports rose from 2% to 12% between 1990-2013. These economies produced more than they spent, creating massive trade surpluses. Chinese households saved extraordinary amounts due to weak social safety nets and the one-child policy limiting family support in retirement.
Meanwhile, Western economies embraced spending rather than saving. This global imbalance created what Ben Bernanke called a "savings glut" that pushed down long-term interest rates worldwide. The average ten-year world real interest rate fell from about 4% when the Berlin Wall fell to 1.5% when the crisis hit, eventually reaching zero. This made previously marginal investments appear profitable, like countless new shopping centers across the UK.
Strangely, capital flowed "uphill" from developing to advanced economies-the reverse of historical patterns. These flows passed through Western banks, creating a "banking glut" as balance sheets expanded rapidly. Banks created increasingly complex derivatives to satisfy investors' desperate "search for yield" in a low-interest environment. The risk premium was inadequate compensation for the actual risks-all too close to financial alchemy.
Banks created obscure instruments like collateralized debt obligations while their assets ballooned-reaching 100% of GDP in the US and over 500% in Britain. Leverage ratios soared to astronomical levels, sometimes exceeding 50:1. Regulators took a benign view as rising asset prices masked the fragility. The toxic combination of global savings imbalances and explosive bank growth made the crisis inevitable.
The crisis finally erupted on August 9, 2007, when BNP Paribas suspended redemptions from funds invested in asset-backed securities due to "complete evaporation of liquidity." Though regulators initially believed the $1 trillion subprime mortgage market was too small to threaten major banks, derivative contracts had created a web of counterparty risk. Banks stopped lending to each other as trust evaporated. Lehman Brothers' collapse on September 15, 2008 triggered a wholesale run on banks, forcing central banks to provide emergency support-including 60 billion from the Bank of England to RBS and HBoS in a single day.
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Money: The Misunderstood Foundation of Commerce
Money is profoundly misunderstood despite its familiarity in our daily lives. We use the word to mean various things: physical currency, our total wealth, or even the power that wealth confers. Whatever it is, we seem to be in thrall to it, as St. Paul bluntly noted in his warning that "the love of money is the root of all evil."
Money evolved from commodity exchange when specialization created the need for trade. Without a "double coincidence of wants," barter proved inefficient, so various commodities became mediums of exchange-from grain and cattle in ancient Egypt to cowrie shells in Asia and even rum in colonial New South Wales. Precious metals eventually dominated due to their convenience, with standardized coins appearing by 250 BC throughout the Mediterranean. Paper money, first used in 7th century China, offered even greater convenience.
Beyond the traditional view of money as a medium of exchange lies an alternative history focusing on money as a store of value. During the era of "free banking," banknotes issued by private banks traded at varying discounts from their face value depending on distance from the issuing bank and perceptions of creditworthiness. Publications like Van Court's Counterfeit Detector tracked these discounts, which could reach 50% for some banks. This revealed the inherent tension between bank liabilities functioning as money (requiring stable value) and the risky nature of bank assets. This tension led to bank regulation and eventually the creation of the Federal Reserve and deposit insurance.
For money to function effectively, its purchasing power must remain relatively stable. Trust in the issuer-usually governments-determines money's value, yet this trust has been repeatedly violated throughout history. From coin clipping to currency devaluation, governments worldwide have found ways to renege on their promises. The past 150 years feature numerous examples of currency debasement, from medieval China to Revolutionary France to Zimbabwe in 2008. During government crises, people often flee from paper money, causing currency collapse and hyperinflation.
The debate between gold and paper money has raged for centuries with passionate advocates on both sides. Gold has served as money across civilizations since ancient Egypt, with paper money historically gaining acceptance through its convertibility to gold. Gold's appeal lies in its fixed supply independent of human decisions, but it has two critical drawbacks: physical inconvenience and inflexibility during crises. When liquidity demand spikes, paper money can be created quickly while gold cannot-the gold standard was typically suspended during financial panics, as in Britain in 1797.
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Banking: The Beautiful Deception
Banking has transformed dramatically since Walter Bagehot's 1873 classic "Lombard Street." While bank balance sheets remained stable relative to GDP for nearly a century after Bagehot, they've exploded in the past fifty years. US banking assets grew from 20% of GDP a century ago to around 100% today, while UK banking assets ballooned from 50% to over 500% of GDP. Concentration increased dramatically, with the top ten US banks now holding assets worth 60% of GDP-six times larger than fifty years ago.
Leverage ratios skyrocketed from Bagehot's typical 6:1 to astronomical levels before the crisis. This growth created institutions "too important to fail," generating an implicit taxpayer guarantee that incentivized even riskier behavior. The implicit subsidy reached $200-300 billion in major economies by 2011. Banks exploited this through increased short-term wholesale funding while reducing liquid asset holdings from one-third to less than 2% of their balance sheets, creating extreme vulnerability to funding disruptions.
Banks are special financial intermediaries that transform short-term, liquid, safe liabilities (deposits) into long-term, illiquid, risky assets (loans). This alchemy creates profit through maturity and risk transformation, but makes banks inherently fragile. The banking system's vulnerability stems from two fundamental problems: banks operate with minimal equity cushions, meaning small losses can threaten deposits, and bank runs are self-fulfilling-if depositors suspect trouble, rational behavior dictates withdrawing funds immediately before others do, potentially collapsing the entire system.
Risk in the banking system isn't measured by averaging individual bank risks-it's systemic. A simple example illustrates this: imagine 100 banks, each engaging in only six months of maturity transformation, but collectively creating a system where demand deposits fund 50-year investments. Regulators examining each bank individually might miss this massive system-wide transformation. Interconnectedness extends beyond banks to who holds loss-absorbing bank securities. If pension funds or insurance companies hold these securities, they may not be best positioned to absorb banking risks.
The pre-crisis growth of shadow banking-particularly money market funds with $7 trillion in liabilities by 2008-created additional vulnerabilities. These funds presented themselves as safe alternatives to bank deposits while investing in securities with fluctuating values, becoming significant funding sources for conventional banks. Financial engineering allowed banks and shadow banks to create additional assets almost without limit, making the system more interconnected and expanding balance sheets beyond the scale of the real economy.
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Radical Uncertainty: The Fundamental Challenge
We cling to an "illusion of certainty" in economic matters despite overwhelming evidence against it. Economic forecasts are demanded with absurd precision, unlike Edmund Halley's comet prediction which relied on scientific laws rather than unpredictable human behavior. Our reluctance to accept uncertainty reflects discomfort with probability theory-a relatively recent intellectual development.
Even sophisticated financiers become disoriented in genuinely uncertain times, as when Goldman Sachs' CFO claimed to witness statistically impossible "25-standard deviation moves" during the 2007 crisis. This desire for certainty leads to irrational decisions, like Americans switching from flying to driving after 9/11, resulting in approximately 1,600 additional road deaths. We cope with uncertainty by putting faith in experts claiming certainty and extrapolating past trends, but this creates dangerous illusions, as seen in housing markets and banking stability before the crisis.
Knight's 1921 distinction between risk and uncertainty provides essential clarity. Risk involves precisely definable outcomes with assignable probabilities based on past experience, allowing for insurance contracts. This explains the large industry supplying insurance against fire, theft, accidents and death. Uncertainty, however, concerns events where we cannot define or imagine all possible outcomes, making probability assignment impossible and leaving such eventualities uninsurable.
Traditional economic theory assumes people optimize decisions by calculating probabilities, but under radical uncertainty, humans employ coping strategies instead. David Tuckett's research shows emotions aren't irrational but help economic actors when reason alone is insufficient. Behavioral economics identifies cognitive biases but problematically assumes humans are hardwired for irrationality rather than struggling with genuine uncertainty.
A better approach recognizes heuristics (rules of thumb) as rational ways to cope with an unknowable future. These deliberately ignore information not because humans are limited, but because less information can be more useful when we don't understand how the world works. Coping strategies comprise three elements: categorization of problems, heuristics for non-optimizable problems, and narratives that integrate key information to guide decisions.
Financial markets connect present and future under conditions of radical uncertainty. They serve three crucial purposes: channeling savings into business investment, enabling risk-sharing through insurance and hedging, and providing continuous valuations of economic activities. The global financial system, worth over $200 trillion, comprises three basic contracts: equity (claims on company earnings), debt (fixed repayment obligations), and insurance (payments under specified contingencies).
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Central Banks: Heroes and Villains
Central banks, once shrouded in mystery, have emerged into the spotlight of public attention and controversy. Despite their reputation as ancient, wise institutions compared to the "wild excesses" of finance ministries, most central banks are relatively young. Sweden's Riksbank (1668) and the Bank of England (1694) are among the oldest, while the Federal Reserve wasn't established until 1914 after two earlier failed attempts at American central banking.
Experience has proven the necessity of a public body-typically the central bank-to manage money in capitalism through two key functions: maintaining price stability in good times and providing sufficient liquidity in bad times. These seemingly simple objectives correspond to price stability and the "lender of last resort" role.
The relationship between money supply and prices has been understood since the 18th century through the quantity theory of money, yet governments consistently succumb to the temptation of currency debasement. In the 25 years before the Bank of England adopted inflation targeting in 1992, prices rose by over 750%, more than the previous 250 years combined.
Inflation targeting, pioneered by New Zealand in 1990, spread globally as a solution. It combines a medium-term inflation target with discretionary responses to short-term economic shocks. This "constrained discretion" framework allows central banks to balance inflation control against employment concerns while maintaining accountability. Unlike rigid policy rules that quickly become outdated as economic understanding evolves, inflation targeting provides a simple, adaptable heuristic: central banks set policy to achieve the target rate, while the private sector anchors expectations to that same rate.
Central banking has evolved from mystique to transparency. When King joined the Bank of England in 1991, Paul Volcker advised one word: "Mystique." Today, confidence must be earned through openness rather than intimidation. Central bank governors have literally become shorter over time-from tall figures like Volcker to shorter successors-symbolizing how they now rely less on height and hauteur and more on transparency.
Economic decisions depend on future expectations, making anticipated monetary policy as important as current policy. This leads to what King calls the "Maradona theory of interest rates." Just as Maradona beat five English defenders in 1986 by running in a straight line (because they expected him to move sideways), central banks can sometimes influence the economy with minimal interest rate changes because markets anticipate future moves.
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The Monetary Union Experiment
European Monetary Union has faced profound governance challenges since the 2011 crisis. The ECB dramatically overstepped traditional central bank boundaries when it pressured Italy through a letter demanding drastic public expenditure cuts and employment law reforms. When this became public, Berlusconi's authority collapsed, leading to his resignation and replacement by unelected technocrat Mario Monti.
The crisis deepened in early 2012, with Greece experiencing a depression worse than America's 1930s Great Depression-output fell over 27% between 2007-2015, with domestic spending plummeting 35%. By March 2012, Greece defaulted on its debt, with most being transferred from private to public creditors. By 2015, about 80% of Greek sovereign debt was owed to EU institutions or the IMF. Rather than fostering integration, monetary union had become Europe's most divisive post-war development.
The turning point came in July 2012 when ECB President Mario Draghi declared he would "do whatever it takes to preserve the euro." Backed by Merkel and Hollande, this statement transformed market sentiment, dramatically reducing bond yields across struggling nations. By 2014, even Spain could borrow more cheaply than the United States. However, this intervention raised serious constitutional questions about the ECB's mandate, particularly regarding the "no bailout" clause in European treaties.
The euro area faces four unpalatable options, with European leaders adopting "Mr. Micawber's strategy"-muddling through while hoping something turns up. Germany remains unwilling to commit to permanent transfers, unenthusiastic about higher inflation or breakup, yet depression-led competitiveness restoration isn't working. The "progress through crisis" doctrine assumes Germany will "pay whatever necessary" to preserve the euro, but this remains untested and could undermine fiscal discipline.
Brussels and Frankfurt-dictated policies have imposed enormous costs on European citizens, leading to voter disillusionment and support for non-mainstream parties. Creating monetary union before political union has forced the ECB to behave like a supranational fiscal authority without proper mandate. The crisis will continue until Europeans confront the choice between returning to national currencies with democratic control or transferring political sovereignty to a European government.
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Ending the Alchemy: A Path Forward
For centuries, our money and banking system has been based on alchemy-the pretense of transforming risk into safety. When many people simultaneously try to convert assets into liquid form, they often discover liquidity has vanished. This sudden demand spike typically triggers crises, exposing the alchemy for what it is. Risk and its impact on bank solvency is equally problematic, as solvency concerns in uncertain environments generate bank runs. We need joint measures addressing both solvency and liquidity problems.
Since the crisis, regulators have been hyperactive at both national and international levels. Through the Basel Committee, G20 countries have raised minimum capital requirements and established liquidity coverage ratios. Regulators are examining the shadow banking sector and conducting stress tests. Countries like Sweden and Switzerland have imposed additional capital requirements beyond international minimums, while the UK and US have introduced legislation separating basic banking from complex investment activities.
Yet these reforms aren't enough. Under radical uncertainty, sentiment toward financial firms can shift dramatically-regulations appearing burdensome one moment seem inadequate the next. Risk-weighted capital requirements fail under uncertainty, as regulators couldn't anticipate how risky mortgage lending and sovereign debt would become. Similarly, defining permanently "liquid assets" proved impossible during the crisis. Regulation has become extraordinarily complex without addressing the core problem of alchemy.
The traditional lender of last resort concept is outdated in today's financial environment. When banks hold insufficient liquid assets, central banks must lend against "bad" collateral during crises, often at inadequate haircuts.
Under King's proposed "pawnbroker for all seasons" (PFAS) approach, banks would pre-position assets with the central bank, which would calculate appropriate haircuts to determine borrowing capacity. This amount plus existing reserves constitutes a bank's "effective liquid assets," which must exceed their "effective liquid liabilities" (demand deposits and short-term debt up to one year). This simple rule would replace most existing prudential regulations except leverage limits.
The PFAS offers six key advantages: it recognizes central banks as the only true liquidity source in crises; provides a natural transition away from financial alchemy; allows banks flexibility in balance sheet structure while limiting risk; solves moral hazard problems through pre-positioned collateral and appropriate haircuts; builds on today's expanded central bank balance sheets and collateral assessment infrastructure; and drastically simplifies regulation.
Implementation could occur gradually over 10-20 years. When banks fail, the PFAS would allow a year for reorganization without panic, as deposits and pledged collateral could be transferred to another bank. A minimum equity ratio of 10% (versus today's 3-5%) would complement the PFAS rule.
By 2014, UK banks had pre-positioned 469 billion with the Bank of England with an average 33% haircut. Combined with 317 billion in reserves, effective liquid liabilities reached 632 billion against 1820 billion in total deposits. While alchemy remains substantial, about one-third of deposits are backed by effective liquid assets, making the elimination of alchemy through PFAS realistic. This could be achieved by increasing required equity while maintaining central bank balance sheets at current levels.
The world economy remains trapped in stagnation years after the banking crisis ended. Despite unprecedented monetary stimulus, growth in advanced economies remains well below pre-crisis rates. This weak recovery defies historical patterns where sharp downturns typically produce equally sharp rebounds.
The problem isn't merely temporary "headwinds" but a fundamental disequilibrium in the global economy. What began as an international savings glut has morphed into a profound imbalance between saving and spending within economies. Desired spending is simply too low to absorb our productive capacity. Central banks are like cyclists pedaling up an ever-steeper hill, injecting more stimulus just to maintain minimal growth.
The prisoner's dilemma prevents countries from rebalancing their economies independently, as unilateral action could leave them worse off. A coordinated move to a new equilibrium would benefit all. With interest rates near zero and fiscal policy constrained by high government debt, many countries now aim to lower their exchange rates to boost growth. This competitive depreciation is a zero-sum game as nations attempt to "steal" demand from each other.
To address the prisoner's dilemma while preserving national sovereignty, we should use the price mechanism rather than suppressing it. Fixed exchange rates have proven deflationary. We need to: reinvigorate the IMF through voting reforms; establish permanent swap agreements between central banks; accept floating exchange rates; and agree on a timetable for economic rebalancing with the IMF as custodian.
Money and banking have proven to be not financial alchemy but capitalism's Achilles heel. As man-made institutions, however, they can be remade. The challenge is finding the political will to implement reforms before the next crisis forces our hand.
