How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio (1)

How the economic machine works, in 30 minutes.

The economy works like a simple machine.

But many people don't understand it

— or they don't agree on how it works

— and this has led to a lot of needless economic suffering.

I feel a deep sense of responsibility

to share my simple but practical economic template.

Though it's unconventional,

it has helped me to anticipate and sidestep the global financial crisis,

and has worked well for me for over 30 years.

Let's begin.

Though the economy might seem complex, it works in a simple, mechanical way.

It's made up of a few simple parts and a lot of simple transactions

that are repeated over and over again a zillion times.

These transactions are above all else driven by human nature,

and they create 3 main forces that drive the economy.

Number 1: Productivity growth

Number 2: The Short term debt cycle

and Number 3: The Long term debt cycle

We'll look at these three forces and how laying them on top of each other

creates a good template for tracking economic movements

and figuring out what's happening now.

Let's start with the simplest part of the economy:

Transactions.

An economy is simply the sum of the transactions that make it up

and a transaction is a very simple thing.

You make transactions all the time.

Every time you buy something you create a transaction.

Each transaction consists of a buyer

exchanging money or credit

with a seller for goods, services or financial assets.

Credit spends just like money,

so adding together the money spent and the amount of credit spent,

you can know the total spending.

The total amount of spending drives the economy.

If you divide the amount spent

by the quantity sold,

you get the price.

And that's it. That's a transaction.

It is the building block of the economic machine.

All cycles and all forces in an economy are driven by transactions.

So, if we can understand transactions,

we can understand the whole economy.

A market consists of all the buyers

and all the sellers

making transactions for the same thing.

For example, there is a wheat market,

a car market,

a stock market

and markets for millions of things.

An economy consists of all of the transactions

in all of its markets.

If you add up the total spending

and the total quantity sold

in all of the markets,

you have everything you need to know

to understand the economy.

It's just that simple.

People, businesses, banks and governments

all engage in transactions the way I just described:

exchanging money and credit for goods, services and financial assets.

The biggest buyer and seller is the government,

which consists of two important parts:

a Central Government that collects taxes and spends money...

...and a Central Bank,

which is different from other buyers and sellers because it

controls the amount of money and credit in the economy.

It does this by influencing interest rates

and printing new money.

For these reasons, as we'll see,

the Central Bank is an important player in the flow

of Credit.

I want you to pay attention to credit.

Credit is the most important part of the economy,

and probably the least understood.

It is the most important part because it is the biggest

and most volatile part.

Just like buyers and sellers go to the market to make transactions,

so do lenders and borrowers.

Lenders usually want to make their money into more money

and borrowers usually want to buy something they can't afford,

like a house or car

or they want to invest in something like starting a business.

Credit can help both lenders

and borrowers get what they want.

Borrowers promise to repay the amount they borrow,

called the principal,

plus an additional amount, called interest.

When interest rates are high,

there is less borrowing because it's expensive.

When interest rates are low,

borrowing increases because it's cheaper.

When borrowers promise to repay

and lenders believe them,

credit is created.

Any two people can agree to create credit out of thin air!

That seems simple enough but credit is tricky

because it has different names.

As soon as credit is created,

it immediately turns into debt.

Debt is both an asset to the lender,

and a liability to the borrower.

In the future,

when the borrower repays the loan, plus interest,

the asset and liability disappear

and the transaction is settled.

So, why is credit so important?

Because when a borrower receives credit,

he is able to increase his spending.

And remember, spending drives the economy.

This is because one person's spending

is another person's income.

Think about it, every dollar you spend, someone else earns.

and every dollar you earn, someone else has spent.

So when you spend more, someone else earns more.

When someone's income rises

it makes lenders more willing to lend him money

because now he's more worthy of credit.

A creditworthy borrower has two things:

the ability to repay and collateral.

Having a lot of income in relation to his debt gives him the ability to repay.

In the event that he can't repay, he has valuable assets to use as collateral that can be sold.

This makes lenders feel comfortable lending him money.

So increased income allows increased borrowing

which allows increased spending.

And since one person's spending is another person's income,

this leads to more increased borrowing and so on.

This self-reinforcing pattern leads to economic growth

and is why we have Cycles.

In a transaction, you have to give something in order to get something

and how much you get depends on how much you produce

over time we learned

and that accumulated knowledge raises are living standards

we call this productivity growth

those who were invented and hard-working raise

their productivity and their living standards faster

than those who are complacent and lazy,

but that isn't necessarily true over the short run.

Productivity matters most in the long run, but credit matters most in the short run.

This is because productivity growth doesn't fluctuate much,

so it's not a big driver of economic swings.

Debt is — because it allows us to consume more than we produce when we acquire it

and it forces us to consume less than we produce when we pay it back.

Debt swings occur in two big cycles.

One takes about 5 to 8 years and the other takes about 75 to 100 years.

While most people feel the swings, they typically don't see them as cycles

because they see them too up close -- day by day, week by week.

In this chapter we are going to step back and look at these three big forces

and how they interact to make up our experiences.

As mentioned, swings around the line are not due to how much innovation or hard work there is,

they're primarily due to how much credit there is.

Let's for a second imagine an economy without credit.

In this economy, the only way I can increase my spending

is to increase my income,

which requires me to be more productive and do more work.

Increased productivity is the only way for growth.

Since my spending is another person's income,

the economy grows every time I or anyone else is more productive.

If we follow the transactions and play this out,

we see a progression like the productivity growth line.

But because we borrow, we have cycles.

This isn't due to any laws or regulation,

it's due to human nature and the way that credit works.

Think of borrowing as simply a way of pulling spending forward.

In order to buy something you can't afford, you need to spend more than you make.

To do this, you essentially need to borrow from your future self.

In doing so you create a time in the future

that you need to spend less than you make in order to pay it back.

It very quickly resembles a cycle.

Basically, anytime you borrow you create a cycle.?

This is as true for an individual as it is for the economy.

This is why understanding credit is so important

because it sets into motion

a mechanical, predictable series of events that will happen in the future.

This makes credit different from money.

Money is what you settle transactions with.

When you buy a beer from a bartender with cash,

the transaction is settled immediately.

But when you buy a beer with credit,

it's like starting a bar tab.

You're saying you promise to pay in the future.

Together you and the bartender create an asset and a liability.

You just created credit. Out of thin air.

It's not until you pay the bar tab later

that the asset and liability disappear,

the debt goes away

and the transaction is settled.

The reality is that most of what people call money is actually credit.

The total amount of credit in the United States is about $50 trillion

and the total amount of money is only about $3 trillion.

Remember, in an economy without credit:

the only way to increase your spending is to produce more.

But in an economy with credit,

you can also increase your spending by borrowing.

As a result, an economy with credit has more spending

and allows incomes to rise faster than productivity over the short run,

but not over the long run.

Now, don't get me wrong,

credit isn't necessarily something bad that just causes cycles.

It's bad when it finances over-consumption that can't be paid back.

However, it's good when it efficiently allocates resources

and produces income so you can pay back the debt.

For example, if you borrow money to buy a big TV,

it doesn't generate income for you to pay back the debt.

But, if you borrow money to buy a tractor —

and that tractor let's you harvest more crops and earn more money

— then, you can pay back your debt

and improve your living standards.

In an economy with credit,

we can follow the transactions

and see how credit creates growth.

Let me give you an example:

Suppose you earn $100,000 a year and have no debt.

You are creditworthy enough to borrow $10,000 dollars

- say on a credit card

- so you can spend $110,000 dollars

even though you only earn $100,000 dollars.

Since your spending is another person's income,

someone is earning $110,000 dollars.

The person earning $110,000 dollars

with no debt can borrow $11,000 dollars,

so he can spend $121,000 dollars

even though he has only earned $110,000 dollars.

His spending is another person's income

and by following the transactions

we can begin to see how this process

works in a self-reinforcing pattern.

But remember, borrowing creates cycles

and if the cycle goes up, it eventually needs to come down.

This leads us into the Short Term Debt Cycle.

As economic activity increases, we see an expansion

- the first phase of the short term debt cycle.

Spending continues to increase and prices start to rise.

This happens because the increase in spending is fueled by credit

- which can be created instantly out of thin air.

When the amount of spending and incomes grow faster than the production of goods:

prices rise.

When prices rise, we call this inflation.

The Central Bank doesn't want too much inflation

because it causes problems.

Seeing prices rise, it raises interest rates.

With higher interest rates, fewer people can afford to borrow money.

And the cost of existing debts rises.

Think about this as the monthly payments on your credit card going up.

Because people borrow less and have higher debt repayments,

they have less money leftover to spend, so spending slows

...and since one person's spending is another person's income,

incomes drop...and so on and so forth.

When people spend less, prices go down.

We call this deflation.

Economic activity decreases and we have a recession.

If the recession becomes too severe

and inflation is no longer a problem,

the central bank will lower interest rates to cause everything to pick up again.

With low interest rates,