Apply HN: Gresham Dollar – Viral Currency for Basic Income

A pretty fundamental question: why the Gresham Dollar and not regular dollars?

Political reasons. The United States government could technically fund a basic income through deficit spending, but they won't. The Fed will inject money into the banks through TARP and QE etc, but there's no easy way for them to inject money at the consumer level, nor do they want to.

I mean, there's no practical limitation on the monetary authority creating more real dollars to pump into the economy.

Exactly. But they're not going to do it, so I'll do it myself.

The reason it doesn't (and the reason why it's fashionable to separate monetary authority from fiscal authority) is because of beliefs about pervasive inflation caused by large increases the supply of money, particularly if that comes in the form of handouts to those with a high marginal propensity to spend it.

Yes. That's exactly right. Last Spring, before I came up with the idea for Gresham Dollar, I realized that these inflationary concerns are unfounded. Obviously, if you dump $8 trillion into consumers' hands all at once, you'll have some kind of a problem, but an increase in spending is not inherently inflationary if we can scale our production to meet the new demand.

I could go on about this forever. But the bottom line is that printing money and handing people a basic income does not necessarily cause general price inflation and there are always ways to manage price levels.

But as far as I can see based on your outline, Gresham dollars are at best functionally equivalent to regular dollars in their effects on demand in the economy.

Yes. That's the idea.

Demand increases when they're handed out, supply lags, ergo prices go up.

In the short term, prices for certain things can go up. But, thanks to technology, our collective means of production is getting ever more scalable. That means prices can even come down as we produce more. It's not entirely clear what will happen to prices, but I have a few different models for different types of goods. Another example is that a basic income will likely cause people to migrate away from big cities and could put downward pressure on real estate prices in places like Silicon Valley.

It's all very fascinating. Anyway, the government thinks this kind of thing will automatically cause inflation. I don't. So I'm doing it.

But you can add in a [very] slight increase in cost of sale for merchants accepting GD, especially if they need to convert to regular dollars to pay their suppliers.

I'm not sure we need to do that. At first, the GD business will only be a small part of the sales these merchants make, so they can still pay their suppliers in USD and wait for their GD to convert. Later on, more businesses, including possibly their suppliers, will be accepting GD.

So why Gresham dollars? Why not just hand out newly minted regular dollars?

I wish they'd do that. Then I wouldn't have to work on this project.

Or food stamps, if the aim is to socially engineer how they're spent?

The idea isn't to socially engineer how they're spent. The idea is to subsidize consumer spending for the entire economy. I don't want to cause distortions in the markets. I receive food stamps myself and they are very economically inefficient.

As far as I can see, all the differences are disadvantages (confusion, costly new infrastructure, discouraging saving behaviour amongst low income beneficiaries)

Confusion and costly new infrastructure are certainly disadvantages. I disagree that discouraging saving behavior is a disadvantage. Especially in today's economy, consumer spending could use a boost.

The trouble is that, as you've pointed out, the government firmly believes that putting newly minted money into consumers hands is a leading cause inflation. So they're not exactly going to be wildly keen on what you plan to do.

And the government has a very strong and very legitimate interest in regulating financial instruments. Particularly financial instruments which promise to pay people dollars at some time in future but are under-collateralized and don't appear to be attached to any [significant] independent revenue stream.

So the biggest question anyone considering involving themselves with your startup would have to ask is: why would regulators permit your service to exist?

I'm trying to solve the problem of how to get income to consumers in a reliable and efficient way that causes a minimum of economic distortion.

Consumers must be able to spend in order for the economy to function. Historically, we have relied on the labor market to distribute money to consumers. We have expected consumers to be able to trade their labor to employers in exchange for money to spend.

But the labor market's primary function is not to distribute spending money. It is to match labor with the businesses who utilize it. Different businesses require different types and amounts of human labor. It would be an amazing coincidence if compensation for labor somehow aligned with a favorable distribution of incomes in our economy. That's why it doesn't. That's why it never has and it never will.

And because consumers lack adequate income, we produce less and our productive capacity gets under-utilized. If it gets too bad, you have a collapse like the Great Depression during which, we shut down factories and actually lost productive capacity.

Our society has this belief that you jump-start the economy through investment (bank loans), etc. In the run up to 2008, spent credit that they had to pay back. If they had real money instead instead of borrowed money.

The problem I'm trying to fix is the business cycle, or at least its harmful effects on the real economy.

I'm also ultimately hoping to provide a universally accepted currency for the global economy.

TL;DR: The problem I'm trying to fix is an inefficient economy.

* Who needs GD and why can't they use USD instead? *

If the government wanted to hand me the printing press, this whole enterprise would be a lot simpler. One way to think about Gresham Dollar is that it's a work-around for not being able to print more USD.

* You mention basic income. Why is another currency needed for that? *

It's not. But you do need to be able to create the money that you hand out to people. I used to think that the best way to pay for a basic income is through taxation, but I don't think that anymore. It'd be easier to do it through issuing new currency (i.e. deficit spending).

* Who needs GD and why can't they use USD instead? *

The economy needs more dollars to be distributed to consumers. Since we can't create new USD, GD is a substitute. Anyone who lacks an income needs GD. Any business who wants business from those people needs GD. Mostly, the overall macro-economy needs GD.

Furthermore, the ultimate goal of GD is to be the world's currency. At some point, there may be Gresham Euros or Gresham Yen, but the end goal is to have a universal currency.

* How will the basic income be provided, wouldn't you essentially have to fund it out of your own pocket. *

We will need investors not only to fund our operations, but also to supply the USD reserves necessary to back the Gresham Dollar currency itself. The return on these investments will come in a different currency (GD) than the currency that was initially invested (USD). This works because, by the time we've succeeded (which I call the transition date), GD will have supplanted USD as the primary currency that people use. If we succeed, the investors won't care about USD anymore. If we fail, as with any investment, investors will lose their money anyway.

As issuers of our own currency, we are in the position of being able to negotiate exact returns with our investors. We can therefore fund ourselves entirely by issuing a peculiar type of debt, which we call Future Gresham Dollars (FGD). If an investor provides us an initial investment of $5 million USD, for example, we can promise to pay them back e.g. $50 million GD at the transition date. That investor will be said to own 50 million FGD. A Future Gresham Dollar is essentially an IOU for a Gresham Dollar payable at the transition date. Since our FGD debt is denominated in GD, it's impossible for us to default on the debt. We create new GD to pay it.

Gresham Dollar is crowd funded. Any time we want to boost our USD reserves, we can do so by selling new FGD. We will provide an interface to allow any Gresham Dollar user to buy FGD. While we may receive some large investments, anyone can participate in the crowd funding by investing any amount.

Future Gresham Dollars are essentially discount bonds that all share the same date of maturity (the transition date). This means that Future Gresham Dollars are fungible – i.e. one investor's FGD is interchangeable with another investor's FGD. Investors can therefore trade FGD amongst themselves thereby creating secondary market for FGD. Users can set their own buy and sell prices for FGD. They can make money by dealing in FGD.

We will set our own price for selling FGD to the market. Whenever our USD reserves are growing faster than we need, we will raise our FGD sell price to slow down our influx of USD. Investors may then prefer to buy FGD from each other on the secondary market. Selling FGD to another investor before the transition date can yield a more immediate profit. Furthermore, if we properly underprice our initial offering of FGD, our initial investors will be able profit right away.

We may additionally set our own FGD buy price to prevent the value of FGD from falling too far. Our buy and sell prices, taken together, will define a price spread inside which FGD dealers can trade. When we buy FGD, we'll only ever pay in GD rather than USD because paying in GD has less of an effect on our USD reserves.

Given that FGD is fungible and freely traded, we can conceptualize FGD as a currency of its own. Immediately prior to the transition date, because it will soon convert to GD, FGD will already have been circulating at close to the value of GD. Although FGD's value fluctuates with time, it will inevitably converge to the value of GD as the transition date approaches. The payout simply consists of relabeling all FGD as GD. Nothing dramatic happens on the transition date. There's no impact on the economy or the money supply.

In addition to setting personal buy and sell prices, users can always buy and sell FGD at whatever price is offered by the market (spot price). When making Gresham Dollar purchases, users can pay using FGD by automatically, at the time of payment, exchanging FGD for GD through the dealer market at the spot price.

In addition to the money they stand to make, individuals might invest (buy FGD) because they support our objective to provide people with a basic income and stabilize the world economy. Investors often care about changing the world for the better.

* If you think someone else would fund it, how would you make sure GD are used? [untangle the currency from basic income for me] *

The basic income is a primary way in which new GD is introduced into the economy. Once the money is created, the GD can circulate freely among people who accept it. It has value on its own because it will convert into USD when people hold it. At first, only a few thousand people will have the basic income, but the plan is to expand to cover more and more people.

GD are basically the same as USD, but people get paid their basic income in GD because we can't create new USD. Is that what you meant when you asked me to untangle the currency from the basic income?

* Someone with a deep pocket decides to buy as much as possible at a high discount, say 1 cent per dollar, and wait 30 days and get a 100x gain in a month. (There are some funds that specialize in this kind of operations with bond from developing countries. Usually it takes more than a month to get the money, but sooner or later the country has to pay, because whatever is in the land is essentially a collateral. (Hi from Argentina!))

* Nobody in their right mind would buy the money, no merchant, no exchange, no other user because all of them think that the value will continue to decrease. So the only option is to save them in a drawer and wait 30 days, and after 30 days they are convertible to dollars. (At the 29th day, you can choose to sell it to someone that will have to wait 30 days or exchange it for a few cents, or wait 24 hours and get a whole dollar.)

By creating our own currency, we can be the ones to "print" the money and hand it out.