pywong
29th March 2010, 10:53 AM
I am not sure whether this should go under "The Rat Race", "Financial Crisis" or just plain "Letter from Dad". But whatever it is, spend 20 minutes reading it. It can make a big difference to your life as it explains what is coming up financially. There's no way I know enough to draft such a letter to my kids. So I do the next best thing - copy...
In the first part, John talked about his struggle as a young man in the 70's. How it took him more than 10 years to get out of the Rat Race. How banks take away your umbrella just when you need it most (happened to me also). What is coming up in the US.
And finally, a ray of hope. We will get by eventually but we have to pay the price.
Reading John's letters was what brought my attention to the subprime problem in late 2006 and triggered my decision to get out of the US market, in the nick of time.
Suggestion: Print out this article to read it a few times. Then subscribe to be on his email list.
-----------------------------------------------------
Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter
What Does Greece Mean to You?
by John Mauldin
March 26, 2010
In this issue:
What Does Greece Mean to Me, Dad?
We need banks. They are like the arteries in our bodies; they keep the blood (money) flowing. And when our arteries get hard, we can be in danger of heart attacks.
Dear Kids,
Ubiquity, Complexity Theory, and Sandpiles
Fingers of Instability
Washington DC, Albuquerque, and Guy Forsythe
"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear..." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Any explanation is better than none." And the simpler, it seems in the investment game, the better. "The markets went up because oil went down," we are told, except when it went up there was another reason for the movement of the markets. We all intuitively know that things are far more complicated than that. But as Nietzsche noted, dealing with the unknown can be disturbing, so we look for the simple explanation.
"Ah," we tell ourselves, "I know why that happened." With an explanation firmly in hand, we now feel we know something. And the behavioral psychologists note that this state actually releases chemicals in our brains that make us feel good. We become literally addicted to the simple explanation. The fact that what we "know" (the explanation for the unknowable) is irrelevant or even wrong is not important to the chemical release. And thus we look for reasons.
How does an event like a problem in Greece (or elsewhere) affect you, gentle reader? And I mean, affect you down where the rubber hits your road. Not some formula or theory about the velocity of money or the effect of taxes on GDP. That is the question I was posed this week. "I want to understand why you think this is so important," said a friend of Tiffani. So that is what I will attempt to answer in this week's missive, as I write a letter to my kids trying to explain the nearly inexplicable.
But first, let me note to Conversations subscribers that we have posted a Conversation I recently did with Professors Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, authors of This Time It's Different, which has my vote for most important book of the last few years.
Last week we also posted a Conversation with two noted hedge-fund managers, Kyle Bass of Hayman Advisors (and his staff) here in Dallas and Hugh Hendry of the Eclectica Fund in London. Our discussion centered on what we all think has the potential to be the next Greece, but on a far more serious level.
That got a lot of positive response. Herb wrote, "Wow. What a great discussion. What smart guests, how little BS. Congratulations. It's the best of your Conversations that I've listened to."
And ACK wrote: "Wow!! Just the most important discussion I have been treated to as an investor and fund manager this year or last. Your product is dreadfully underpriced, as it delivers more value and education than almost any other subscription that I have... Thanks so much... This particular conversation was just mind-blowing!"
Actually, we get that last comment almost every issue, as we somehow seem to connect the dots for different listeners. When we started, I promised to do 6-8 a year, and we have already posted 5 timely Conversations in the first 3 months of this year, including my special Biotech Series as well as the Geopolitical Series with George Friedman.
For new readers, Conversations with John Mauldin is my one subscription service. While this letter will always be free, we have created a way for you to "listen in" on my conversations (or read the transcripts) with some of my friends, many of whom you will recognize and some whom you will want to know after you hear our conversations. Basically, I call one or two friends each month and, just as we do at dinner or at meetings, we talk about the issues of the day, back and forth, with give and take and friendly debate. I think you will find it enlightening and thought-provoking and a real contribution to your education as an investor.
And as you can see, I can get some rather interesting people to come to the table. Current subscribers can renew for a deeply discounted $129, and we will extend that price to new subscribers as well. To learn more, go to http://www.johnmauldin.com/newsletters2.html. Click on the Subscribe button, and join me and my friends for some very interesting Conversations. (I know the price says $199 on the site, but for now you will only be charged for $129 ? I promise.)
And we are starting a renewal cycle with the subscriptions and have found a small bug in the software we purchased to handle them. Renewals are therefore not instantaneous. It may take a day, and for that we apologize. We are fixing it.
Oh, and by the way, since the Conversation on Japan was so well-received, the next one will be on China. Two brilliant managers (maybe three) with VERY divergent views. I may just toss in a few grenade-type questions and stand back and watch the show. And now on to this week's letter.
What Does Greece Mean to Me, Dad?
Tiffani had been talking with her friends. A lot of them read this letter, and they were asking, "Ok, I get that Greece is a problem. But what does that mean for me here?"
The same day, a friend told me about a conversation she had with her 17-year-old Cal Tech daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, who is also headed to Cal Tech. These are really smart kids, and they were asking her about some of my recent letters. "We understand what's he saying, but we just don't see what it means." (For what it's worth, the boyfriend wants to grow up to be Mohammed El-Erian of PIMCO. Go figure; I just wanted to be Mickey Mantle.)
Twice in one day is a sign, I am sure, so I will try and see if I can explain. And since all my kids must be wondering the same thing, this is kind of letter from Dad to see if I can help them understand why things are not going as well as they would like.
(A little background. I have seven kids, five of whom are adopted. A fairly colorful family, so to speak. Pictures at the end of the letter. Ages almost 16 through 33. Daughter Tiffani runs my business and, except for the youngest boy, they are all out on their own. Four are married or attached. It is not easy to watch them struggle to make ends meet, but Dad is proud. But listening to their stories, and the stories of their friends, help keep me in the real world.)
Dear Kids,
I know what a struggle it has been for most of you, and now three of you have a kid of your own. Expensive little hobbies, aren't they? I know that you read my letter (well, except for Trey) and wonder what it means to you trying to pay your bills. Let me see if I can make a connection from the world of economics to the world of paying your bills. Sadly, what I am going to say is not going to make you feel any better, but reality is what it is. We'll get through it together.
While life looks pretty good for Dad now, when I graduated from seminary in December of 1974 unemployment was at 8%, on its way to 9% a few months later. We lived in a small mobile home, which seemed wonderful at the time. I was proud of it. We scrimped and got by. My first job was a dead end, so I left after a few months. I guess I was lucky that no one would hire me, because I had to figure out how to make it on my own. All I really knew was the printing business I had grown up in, so I started brokering printing. Pretty soon I was doing just direct mail, and then designing direct mail. But there was never enough money. We were still in that mobile home six years later.
And prices were going up like crazy. We had inflation. I remember going to a bank in the late '70s and borrowing money for my business at 18%, so I could buy paper for a job I had sold. Forget about borrowing for a new home or car. All I knew was that I was struggling to make ends meet (with a new kid!). There were a lot of nights where I would wake up at two in the morning with panic attacks about whether I could make payroll or pay bills until someone paid me. I didn't understand that what the Fed and the government were doing was causing high inflation and unemployment.
I had a bank line I used to buy paper with. One day the bank abruptly cancelled that line and demanded their money, which I didn't have ? all I had was a warehouse full of paper and a contract that said I had a year to pay for it. The bank didn't care. I told them they would just have to wait. I swear, they actually called my mother and told her they would ruin me if she didn't pay that $10,000 line. She was scared for me (after all, you had to be able to trust your banker) and paid it without asking me. Turned out the bank finally went bankrupt later in the year. They were just desperate and trying anything they could do to get money, so they wouldn't lose everything. They did anyway.
In short, times were not all that good, but we got through it. And now, 35 years later, it seems like déjà vu all over again. Every time we talk it seems like someone we know has lost a job.
And so how do the problems in a small country like Greece make a difference to you? There is a connection, but it's different than the old "hip bone is connected to the thigh bone to the knee bone" thing. It is a lot more complicated. Let's go back to a letter I wrote four years ago, talking about fingers of instability. One of the best analogies your Dad has ever written, according to many of his 1 million friends. So read with me a few pages, and then we'll get back to Greece.
Ubiquity, Complexity Theory, and Sandpiles
We are going to start our explorations with excerpts from a very important book by Mark Buchanan called Ubiquity, Why Catastrophes Happen. I HIGHLY recommend it to those of you who, like me, are trying to understand the complexity of the markets. Not directly about investing, although he touches on it, it is about chaos theory, complexity theory, and critical states. It is written in a manner any layman can understand. There are no equations, just easy-to-grasp, well-written stories and analogies. www.Amazon.com
We all had the fun as kids of going to the beach and playing in the sand. Remember taking your plastic buckets and making sandpiles? Slowly pouring the sand into ever-bigger piles, until one side of the pile started an avalanche?
Imagine, Buchanan says, dropping just one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. Most of the time it is a small one, but sometimes it gains momentum and it seems like one whole side of the pile slides down to the bottom.
Well, in 1987 three physicists, named Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Weisenfeld, began to play the sandpile game in their lab at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Now, actually piling up one grain of sand at a time is a slow process, so they wrote a computer program to do it. Not as much fun, but a whole lot faster. Not that they really cared about sandpiles. They were more interested in what are called nonequilibrium systems.
They learned some interesting things. What is the typical size of an avalanche? After a huge number of tests with millions of grains of sand, they found out that there is no typical number. "Some involved a single grain; others, ten, a hundred or a thousand. Still others were pile-wide cataclysms involving millions that brought nearly the whole mountain down. At any time, literally anything, it seemed, might be just about to occur."
It was indeed completely chaotic in its unpredictability. Now, let's read these next paragraphs slowly. They are important, as they create a mental image that helps me understand the organization of the financial markets and the world economy.
"To find out why [such unpredictability] should show up in their sandpile game, Bak and colleagues next played a trick with their computer. Imagine peering down on the pile from above, and coloring it in according to its steepness. Where it is relatively flat and stable, color it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, 'ready to go,' color it red.
"What do you see? They found that at the outset the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger spots grew until a dense skeleton of instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behavior: a grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots. If the red network was sparse, and all trouble spots were well isolated one from the other, then a single grain could have only limited repercussions.
"But when the red spots come to riddle the pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sandpile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever."
Something only a math nerd could love? Scientists refer to this as a critical state. The term critical state can mean the point at which water would go to ice or steam, or the moment that critical mass induces a nuclear reaction, etc. It is the point at which something triggers a change in the basic nature or character of the object or group. Thus, (and very casually for all you physicists) we refer to something being in a critical state (or use the term critical mass) when there is the opportunity for significant change.
"But to physicists, [the critical state] has always been seen as a kind of theoretical freak and sideshow, a devilishly unstable and unusual condition that arises only under the most exceptional circumstances [in highly controlled experiments]... In the sandpile game, however, a critical state seemed to arise naturally through the mindless sprinkling of grains."
Then they asked themselves, could this phenomenon show up elsewhere? In the earth's crust, triggering earthquakes; in wholesale changes in an ecosystem or a stock market crash? "Could the special organization of the critical state explain why the world at large seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals?" Could it help us understand not just earthquakes, but why cartoons in a third-rate paper in Denmark could cause worldwide riots?
Buchanan concludes in his opening chapter, "There are many subtleties and twists in the story ... but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to be ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few years have found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of all the upheavals I've mentioned so far [earthquakes, eco-disasters, market crashes], as well as in the spreading of epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which instructions trickle down from managers to workers in the office, and in many other things.
"At the heart of our story, then, lies the discovery that networks of things of all kinds ? atoms, molecules, species, people, and even ideas ? have a marked tendency to organize themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work where they have never seen them before."
Now, let's think about this for a moment. Going back to the sandpile game, you find that as you double the number of grains of sand involved in an avalanche, the likelihood of an avalanche is 2.14 times as unlikely. We find something similar in earthquakes. In terms of energy, the data indicate that earthquakes simply become four times less likely each time you double the energy they release. Mathematicians refer to this as a "power law," or a special mathematical pattern that stands out in contrast to the overall complexity of the earthquake process.
Fingers of Instability
So what happens in our game? "... after the pile evolves into a critical state, many grains rest just on the verge of tumbling, and these grains link up into ?fingers of instability' of all possible lengths. While many are short, others slice through the pile from one end to the other. So the chain reaction triggered by a single grain might lead to an avalanche of any size whatsoever, depending on whether that grain fell on a short, intermediate or long finger of instability."
Now, we come to a critical point in our discussion of the critical state. Again, read this with the markets in mind:
"In this simplified setting of the sandpile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes. After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size."
Now let's couple this idea with a few other concepts. First, one of the world's greatest economists (who sadly was never honored with a Nobel), Hyman Minsky, points out that stability leads to instability. The longer a given condition or trend persists (and the more comfortable we get with it), the more dramatic the correction will be when the trend fails. The problem with long-term macroeconomic stability is that it tends to produce highly unstable financial arrangements. If we believe that tomorrow and next year will be the same as last week and last year, we are more willing to add debt or postpone savings for current consumption. Thus, says Minsky, the longer the period of stability, the higher the potential risk for even greater instability when market participants must change their behavior.
Relating this to our sandpile, the longer that a critical state builds up in an economy or, in other words, the more fingers of instability that are allowed to develop connections to other fingers of instability, the greater the potential for a serious "avalanche."
And that's exactly what happened in the recent credit crisis. Consumers all through the world's largest economies borrowed money for all sorts of things, because times were good. Home prices would always go up and the stock market was back to its old trick of making 15% a year. And borrowing money was relatively cheap. You could get 2% short-term loans on homes, which seemingly rose in value 15% a year, so why not buy now and sell a few years down the road?
Greed took over. Those risky loans were sold to investors by the tens and hundreds of billions all over the world. And as with all debt sandpiles, the fault lines started to show up. Maybe it was that one loan in Las Vegas that was the critical piece of sand; we don't know, but the avalanche was triggered.
You probably don't remember this, but Dad was writing about the problems with subprime debt way back in 2005 and 2006. But as the problem actually emerged, respected people like Ben Bernanke (the chairman of the Fed) said that the problem was not all that big, and that the fallout would be "contained." (I bet he wishes he could have that statement back!)
Part II to follow...
In the first part, John talked about his struggle as a young man in the 70's. How it took him more than 10 years to get out of the Rat Race. How banks take away your umbrella just when you need it most (happened to me also). What is coming up in the US.
And finally, a ray of hope. We will get by eventually but we have to pay the price.
Reading John's letters was what brought my attention to the subprime problem in late 2006 and triggered my decision to get out of the US market, in the nick of time.
Suggestion: Print out this article to read it a few times. Then subscribe to be on his email list.
-----------------------------------------------------
Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter
What Does Greece Mean to You?
by John Mauldin
March 26, 2010
In this issue:
What Does Greece Mean to Me, Dad?
We need banks. They are like the arteries in our bodies; they keep the blood (money) flowing. And when our arteries get hard, we can be in danger of heart attacks.
Dear Kids,
Ubiquity, Complexity Theory, and Sandpiles
Fingers of Instability
Washington DC, Albuquerque, and Guy Forsythe
"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear..." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Any explanation is better than none." And the simpler, it seems in the investment game, the better. "The markets went up because oil went down," we are told, except when it went up there was another reason for the movement of the markets. We all intuitively know that things are far more complicated than that. But as Nietzsche noted, dealing with the unknown can be disturbing, so we look for the simple explanation.
"Ah," we tell ourselves, "I know why that happened." With an explanation firmly in hand, we now feel we know something. And the behavioral psychologists note that this state actually releases chemicals in our brains that make us feel good. We become literally addicted to the simple explanation. The fact that what we "know" (the explanation for the unknowable) is irrelevant or even wrong is not important to the chemical release. And thus we look for reasons.
How does an event like a problem in Greece (or elsewhere) affect you, gentle reader? And I mean, affect you down where the rubber hits your road. Not some formula or theory about the velocity of money or the effect of taxes on GDP. That is the question I was posed this week. "I want to understand why you think this is so important," said a friend of Tiffani. So that is what I will attempt to answer in this week's missive, as I write a letter to my kids trying to explain the nearly inexplicable.
But first, let me note to Conversations subscribers that we have posted a Conversation I recently did with Professors Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, authors of This Time It's Different, which has my vote for most important book of the last few years.
Last week we also posted a Conversation with two noted hedge-fund managers, Kyle Bass of Hayman Advisors (and his staff) here in Dallas and Hugh Hendry of the Eclectica Fund in London. Our discussion centered on what we all think has the potential to be the next Greece, but on a far more serious level.
That got a lot of positive response. Herb wrote, "Wow. What a great discussion. What smart guests, how little BS. Congratulations. It's the best of your Conversations that I've listened to."
And ACK wrote: "Wow!! Just the most important discussion I have been treated to as an investor and fund manager this year or last. Your product is dreadfully underpriced, as it delivers more value and education than almost any other subscription that I have... Thanks so much... This particular conversation was just mind-blowing!"
Actually, we get that last comment almost every issue, as we somehow seem to connect the dots for different listeners. When we started, I promised to do 6-8 a year, and we have already posted 5 timely Conversations in the first 3 months of this year, including my special Biotech Series as well as the Geopolitical Series with George Friedman.
For new readers, Conversations with John Mauldin is my one subscription service. While this letter will always be free, we have created a way for you to "listen in" on my conversations (or read the transcripts) with some of my friends, many of whom you will recognize and some whom you will want to know after you hear our conversations. Basically, I call one or two friends each month and, just as we do at dinner or at meetings, we talk about the issues of the day, back and forth, with give and take and friendly debate. I think you will find it enlightening and thought-provoking and a real contribution to your education as an investor.
And as you can see, I can get some rather interesting people to come to the table. Current subscribers can renew for a deeply discounted $129, and we will extend that price to new subscribers as well. To learn more, go to http://www.johnmauldin.com/newsletters2.html. Click on the Subscribe button, and join me and my friends for some very interesting Conversations. (I know the price says $199 on the site, but for now you will only be charged for $129 ? I promise.)
And we are starting a renewal cycle with the subscriptions and have found a small bug in the software we purchased to handle them. Renewals are therefore not instantaneous. It may take a day, and for that we apologize. We are fixing it.
Oh, and by the way, since the Conversation on Japan was so well-received, the next one will be on China. Two brilliant managers (maybe three) with VERY divergent views. I may just toss in a few grenade-type questions and stand back and watch the show. And now on to this week's letter.
What Does Greece Mean to Me, Dad?
Tiffani had been talking with her friends. A lot of them read this letter, and they were asking, "Ok, I get that Greece is a problem. But what does that mean for me here?"
The same day, a friend told me about a conversation she had with her 17-year-old Cal Tech daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, who is also headed to Cal Tech. These are really smart kids, and they were asking her about some of my recent letters. "We understand what's he saying, but we just don't see what it means." (For what it's worth, the boyfriend wants to grow up to be Mohammed El-Erian of PIMCO. Go figure; I just wanted to be Mickey Mantle.)
Twice in one day is a sign, I am sure, so I will try and see if I can explain. And since all my kids must be wondering the same thing, this is kind of letter from Dad to see if I can help them understand why things are not going as well as they would like.
(A little background. I have seven kids, five of whom are adopted. A fairly colorful family, so to speak. Pictures at the end of the letter. Ages almost 16 through 33. Daughter Tiffani runs my business and, except for the youngest boy, they are all out on their own. Four are married or attached. It is not easy to watch them struggle to make ends meet, but Dad is proud. But listening to their stories, and the stories of their friends, help keep me in the real world.)
Dear Kids,
I know what a struggle it has been for most of you, and now three of you have a kid of your own. Expensive little hobbies, aren't they? I know that you read my letter (well, except for Trey) and wonder what it means to you trying to pay your bills. Let me see if I can make a connection from the world of economics to the world of paying your bills. Sadly, what I am going to say is not going to make you feel any better, but reality is what it is. We'll get through it together.
While life looks pretty good for Dad now, when I graduated from seminary in December of 1974 unemployment was at 8%, on its way to 9% a few months later. We lived in a small mobile home, which seemed wonderful at the time. I was proud of it. We scrimped and got by. My first job was a dead end, so I left after a few months. I guess I was lucky that no one would hire me, because I had to figure out how to make it on my own. All I really knew was the printing business I had grown up in, so I started brokering printing. Pretty soon I was doing just direct mail, and then designing direct mail. But there was never enough money. We were still in that mobile home six years later.
And prices were going up like crazy. We had inflation. I remember going to a bank in the late '70s and borrowing money for my business at 18%, so I could buy paper for a job I had sold. Forget about borrowing for a new home or car. All I knew was that I was struggling to make ends meet (with a new kid!). There were a lot of nights where I would wake up at two in the morning with panic attacks about whether I could make payroll or pay bills until someone paid me. I didn't understand that what the Fed and the government were doing was causing high inflation and unemployment.
I had a bank line I used to buy paper with. One day the bank abruptly cancelled that line and demanded their money, which I didn't have ? all I had was a warehouse full of paper and a contract that said I had a year to pay for it. The bank didn't care. I told them they would just have to wait. I swear, they actually called my mother and told her they would ruin me if she didn't pay that $10,000 line. She was scared for me (after all, you had to be able to trust your banker) and paid it without asking me. Turned out the bank finally went bankrupt later in the year. They were just desperate and trying anything they could do to get money, so they wouldn't lose everything. They did anyway.
In short, times were not all that good, but we got through it. And now, 35 years later, it seems like déjà vu all over again. Every time we talk it seems like someone we know has lost a job.
And so how do the problems in a small country like Greece make a difference to you? There is a connection, but it's different than the old "hip bone is connected to the thigh bone to the knee bone" thing. It is a lot more complicated. Let's go back to a letter I wrote four years ago, talking about fingers of instability. One of the best analogies your Dad has ever written, according to many of his 1 million friends. So read with me a few pages, and then we'll get back to Greece.
Ubiquity, Complexity Theory, and Sandpiles
We are going to start our explorations with excerpts from a very important book by Mark Buchanan called Ubiquity, Why Catastrophes Happen. I HIGHLY recommend it to those of you who, like me, are trying to understand the complexity of the markets. Not directly about investing, although he touches on it, it is about chaos theory, complexity theory, and critical states. It is written in a manner any layman can understand. There are no equations, just easy-to-grasp, well-written stories and analogies. www.Amazon.com
We all had the fun as kids of going to the beach and playing in the sand. Remember taking your plastic buckets and making sandpiles? Slowly pouring the sand into ever-bigger piles, until one side of the pile started an avalanche?
Imagine, Buchanan says, dropping just one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. Most of the time it is a small one, but sometimes it gains momentum and it seems like one whole side of the pile slides down to the bottom.
Well, in 1987 three physicists, named Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Weisenfeld, began to play the sandpile game in their lab at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Now, actually piling up one grain of sand at a time is a slow process, so they wrote a computer program to do it. Not as much fun, but a whole lot faster. Not that they really cared about sandpiles. They were more interested in what are called nonequilibrium systems.
They learned some interesting things. What is the typical size of an avalanche? After a huge number of tests with millions of grains of sand, they found out that there is no typical number. "Some involved a single grain; others, ten, a hundred or a thousand. Still others were pile-wide cataclysms involving millions that brought nearly the whole mountain down. At any time, literally anything, it seemed, might be just about to occur."
It was indeed completely chaotic in its unpredictability. Now, let's read these next paragraphs slowly. They are important, as they create a mental image that helps me understand the organization of the financial markets and the world economy.
"To find out why [such unpredictability] should show up in their sandpile game, Bak and colleagues next played a trick with their computer. Imagine peering down on the pile from above, and coloring it in according to its steepness. Where it is relatively flat and stable, color it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, 'ready to go,' color it red.
"What do you see? They found that at the outset the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger spots grew until a dense skeleton of instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behavior: a grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots. If the red network was sparse, and all trouble spots were well isolated one from the other, then a single grain could have only limited repercussions.
"But when the red spots come to riddle the pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sandpile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever."
Something only a math nerd could love? Scientists refer to this as a critical state. The term critical state can mean the point at which water would go to ice or steam, or the moment that critical mass induces a nuclear reaction, etc. It is the point at which something triggers a change in the basic nature or character of the object or group. Thus, (and very casually for all you physicists) we refer to something being in a critical state (or use the term critical mass) when there is the opportunity for significant change.
"But to physicists, [the critical state] has always been seen as a kind of theoretical freak and sideshow, a devilishly unstable and unusual condition that arises only under the most exceptional circumstances [in highly controlled experiments]... In the sandpile game, however, a critical state seemed to arise naturally through the mindless sprinkling of grains."
Then they asked themselves, could this phenomenon show up elsewhere? In the earth's crust, triggering earthquakes; in wholesale changes in an ecosystem or a stock market crash? "Could the special organization of the critical state explain why the world at large seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals?" Could it help us understand not just earthquakes, but why cartoons in a third-rate paper in Denmark could cause worldwide riots?
Buchanan concludes in his opening chapter, "There are many subtleties and twists in the story ... but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to be ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few years have found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of all the upheavals I've mentioned so far [earthquakes, eco-disasters, market crashes], as well as in the spreading of epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which instructions trickle down from managers to workers in the office, and in many other things.
"At the heart of our story, then, lies the discovery that networks of things of all kinds ? atoms, molecules, species, people, and even ideas ? have a marked tendency to organize themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work where they have never seen them before."
Now, let's think about this for a moment. Going back to the sandpile game, you find that as you double the number of grains of sand involved in an avalanche, the likelihood of an avalanche is 2.14 times as unlikely. We find something similar in earthquakes. In terms of energy, the data indicate that earthquakes simply become four times less likely each time you double the energy they release. Mathematicians refer to this as a "power law," or a special mathematical pattern that stands out in contrast to the overall complexity of the earthquake process.
Fingers of Instability
So what happens in our game? "... after the pile evolves into a critical state, many grains rest just on the verge of tumbling, and these grains link up into ?fingers of instability' of all possible lengths. While many are short, others slice through the pile from one end to the other. So the chain reaction triggered by a single grain might lead to an avalanche of any size whatsoever, depending on whether that grain fell on a short, intermediate or long finger of instability."
Now, we come to a critical point in our discussion of the critical state. Again, read this with the markets in mind:
"In this simplified setting of the sandpile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes. After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size."
Now let's couple this idea with a few other concepts. First, one of the world's greatest economists (who sadly was never honored with a Nobel), Hyman Minsky, points out that stability leads to instability. The longer a given condition or trend persists (and the more comfortable we get with it), the more dramatic the correction will be when the trend fails. The problem with long-term macroeconomic stability is that it tends to produce highly unstable financial arrangements. If we believe that tomorrow and next year will be the same as last week and last year, we are more willing to add debt or postpone savings for current consumption. Thus, says Minsky, the longer the period of stability, the higher the potential risk for even greater instability when market participants must change their behavior.
Relating this to our sandpile, the longer that a critical state builds up in an economy or, in other words, the more fingers of instability that are allowed to develop connections to other fingers of instability, the greater the potential for a serious "avalanche."
And that's exactly what happened in the recent credit crisis. Consumers all through the world's largest economies borrowed money for all sorts of things, because times were good. Home prices would always go up and the stock market was back to its old trick of making 15% a year. And borrowing money was relatively cheap. You could get 2% short-term loans on homes, which seemingly rose in value 15% a year, so why not buy now and sell a few years down the road?
Greed took over. Those risky loans were sold to investors by the tens and hundreds of billions all over the world. And as with all debt sandpiles, the fault lines started to show up. Maybe it was that one loan in Las Vegas that was the critical piece of sand; we don't know, but the avalanche was triggered.
You probably don't remember this, but Dad was writing about the problems with subprime debt way back in 2005 and 2006. But as the problem actually emerged, respected people like Ben Bernanke (the chairman of the Fed) said that the problem was not all that big, and that the fallout would be "contained." (I bet he wishes he could have that statement back!)
Part II to follow...