QOTD: The Global Glut of Stored Time

Ever since writing my Abundance post in February, I’ve been seeing echoes of it everywhere. I think they call this “synchronicity”, which is also the title of a great Police album.

The basic notion I had was that malinvestment everywhere and non-profit seeking behavior on the part of well-financed businesses are doing a lot of damage in the economy, and that it might be better if we had a flush.

Eric Peters, writing in his wknd notes letter, puts up an anecdote that tells the story from a different perspective. I thought this was an incredible insight:

“People work in order to convert their time into a unit of account,” he said. “We call that money, and it’s an invention that allows us to store time.” Most people have stored little or none. So when they receive money, they quickly purchase necessities; food, shelter, health care. “People who are able to save money inevitably purchase real estate, stocks, bonds – all of which are alternative vehicles for storing time.” One share of Google stores 30 hours of work for the average American, or 30 minutes of copying-and-pasting formation documents for the average hedge fund attorney. “Bill Gates has stored enough time to fund a 1bln person army for 20 years.”

As the gulf between people’s income has grown, the amount of stored time has accumulated in fewer hands. “Wealthy people convert their hours into financial assets so that they can accumulate excess hours relative to their fellow man. But the average worker is simply thinking how to exchange hours for dollars and then exchange those for food.” Central banks face a different problem altogether. They need to get people who’ve saved time to exchange it for something other than clever inventions that store it. They’ve largely failed. So now, everything that stores time is extremely expensive and offers little or negative return, while the pace of economic activity slows. “The problem that we face now is that there is simply too much time that’s been saved. Another way of saying it is that there’s too much capital in the world, in too few hands.”

To restart the system, capital needs to exchange hands or be destroyed, spurring people to rebuild their store of time, rather than just save it. “It is an elemental truth that at some point, through inflation, war, or confiscation and redistribution, this imbalance will correct, and the system will then restart.”

Source:

One River Asset Management