저자: RayDalio · 외국인
요약 보기
경제는 거래의 총합이며 생산성 증가, 단기 부채 사이클(5~8년), 장기 부채 사이클(75~100년)이라는 세 힘으로 움직인다. 등락의 주된 원인은 혁신이나 노동량이 아니라 신용(부채)의 양이다. 신용은 지출을 앞당기는 것이라 대출이 늘면 소비·소득이 증폭되고, 이후 상환 부담으로 수축이 온다. 영상은 개인 가계와 경제 전체에 같은 원리가 적용된다고 설명하는 교육용 모델 소개이며, 특정 자산의 가격 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
How the Economic Machine Works in 30 Minutes: The economy works like a simple machine, but many people don't understand it or disagree on how it works, and this has led to much unnecessary economic suffering. I feel a deep sense of responsibility in sharing my simple but practical economic model, although unconventional.
It helped me anticipate and circumvent the global financial crisis and has worked well for me for over 30 years. Let's begin. Although the economy may seem complex, it works in a simple and mechanical way. It is composed of a few simple parts and many simple transactions that are repeated indefinitely a zillion times.
These transactions are above all driven by human nature and create three main forces that drive the economy: number one, productivity growth; number two, the short-term debt cycle; and number three, the long-term debt cycle. We will see these three forces and how putting them on top of each other creates a good model to track economic movements and find out what is happening now.
Let's start with the simplest part of the economy: transactions. An economy is simply the sum of the transactions that compose it, and a transaction is a very simple thing: you make transactions. Every time you buy something, you create a transaction. Each transaction consists of the exchange of money or credit by a buyer with a seller for goods, services, or financial assets.
Credit is spent exactly like money, so by adding the money spent and the value of the credit spent, you can know the total expenditure. The total value of expenditures drives the economy. If you divide the value spent by the quantity sold, you get the price, and that's it. That's a transaction; it's the foundation of the economic machine.
All cycles and all forces in an economy are driven by transactions. Therefore, if we can understand transactions, we can understand the entire economy. The market consists of all buyers and all sellers making transactions for the same thing. For example, there is the wheat market, the car market, the stock market— markets for millions of things.
An economy consists of all transactions in all its markets. If you add up the total expenditure and the total quantity sold in all markets, you will have everything you need to know to understand the economy. Simple as that: people, companies, banks, governments carry out transactions in the way I just described, exchanging money and credit, goods, services, and financial assets.
The biggest buyer and seller is the government, which consists of two important parts: a government. A central bank, which collects taxes and spends money, is different from other buyers and sellers because it controls the amount of money and credit in the economy, influencing interest rates and printing new money.
For these reasons, as we will 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 largest and most volatile. Just as workers and sellers go to the market to make transactions, the same happens with lenders and borrowers.
Lenders generally want to turn their money into more money, and borrowers generally want to buy something they cannot afford, such as a house or a car, or want to invest in something, such as starting a business. Credit can help lenders and borrowers achieve what they want. Borrowers promise to repay the borrowed amount, called principal, plus an additional amount called interest.
When interest rates are high, there are fewer loans because they are expensive. When interest rates are low, loans increase because they are cheaper. When borrowers promise to pay and creditors believe in credit, any two people can agree to create credit out of thin air. This seems quite simple, but credit is complicated because it has different names.
As soon as credit is created, it immediately transforms into debt. Debt is both an asset for the lender and a liability for 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, they can increase their spending, and remember, spending drives the economy.
This happens 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 spends. So when you spend more, someone else earns more. When someone's income increases, lenders are more willing to lend them money because now they deserve more credit.
A creditworthy borrower has two things: the ability to repay and collateral. Having a high income relative to their debt gives them the ability to pay. If they can't pay, they possess valuable assets to use as collateral that can be sold, so lenders comfortably lend them money. Therefore, increased income allows for increased borrowing, which allows for increased spending.
And since one person's spending is another's income, this leads to an even greater increase in indebtedness, and so on. This pattern of self-force leads to economic growth, and that's why we have cycles in a transaction: you have to give something to get something, and how much you receive depends on how much you produce.
Over time, we learn, and this accumulated knowledge raises our standard of living. We call this productivity growth. Those who are creative and hardworking increase their productivity and their standard of living more quickly than those who are complacent and lazy. But this isn't necessarily true in the short term; productivity is more important in the long term, but credit is more important in the short term.
This is because productivity growth doesn't fluctuate much, so it's not a major driver of economic oscillations. Debt exists because it allows us to consume more than we produce when we acquire it and forces us to consume less than we produce when we have to pay it. Debt fluctuations occur in two major cycles: one takes about 5 to 8 years, and the other about 75 to 100 years.
Although most people feel the fluctuations, they don't usually see them as... Cycles, because we see them up close day after day, week after week. In this chapter, let's take a step back and examine these three major forces and how they interact to constitute our experiences. As mentioned, the fluctuations are not due to the amount of innovation or hard work that exists; they are mainly due to the amount of credit that exists.
Let's imagine for a second an economy without credit. In this economy, the only way to increase my spending is to increase my income, which requires me to be more productive and work harder. And increased productivity is the only path to growth. Since my spending is someone else's income, the economy grows each time I or anyone else is more productive.
If we follow the transactions and listen to this, we will see a progression similar to the productivity growth line. But because we borrow, we have cycles. This is not due to any laws or regulations, but rather to human nature and the way credit works. Lending is simply a way to advance spending. To buy something you can't afford, you need to spend more than you earn.
To do this, you essentially need to borrow from your future self. By doing this, you create a moment in the future when you will need to spend less than you earn. Repaying it very quickly resembles a cycle; basically, every time you take out a loan, you create a cycle. This is as true for the individual as it is for the economy. (This is a comment on the website.)
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