BlackRock is wrong: nationalising capitalism is a bad idea

published 30 July 2019

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB) © Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images — Mario Draghi has promised to do "whatever it takes"

Earlier this week BlackRock executive Rick Rieder urged the European Central Bank (ECB) to stimulate the eurozone economy by printing money and using it to buy equities.

This idea has attracted rather less comment than it should have, even though it's not a new idea. The Bank of Japan has been buying domestic equities for years: it owns about 75% of the country's exchange-traded fund market and is a top ten shareholder in 40% of Japan's listed companies.

The ECB has also long been incredibly dovish: it has provided more than €2trn of quantitative easing (QE), negative interest rates, endless cheap loans and lots of forward guidance making it clear that this will go on and on and on.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

The market has become used to the idea that it somehow makes sense to pay 0.3% or more a year to lend money to the German government for a decade. Thursday's ECB meeting told us that interest rates are expected to remain "at their present or lower levels" at least through the first half of 2020. The language also suggested that a new package of measures is coming with discussion under way about "options for the size and composition of potential new net asset purchases".

More QE isn't as simple as it looks

Buying equities with new money is therefore a possible solution. Brian Pellegrini of Intertemporal Economics explains that it would "respect the capital key" (the relative national shareholdings in the ECB) by buying German assets while also helping to weaken the euro.

Equity purchases could also be a neat way to compensate EU residents for the past decade of extreme monetary policy. If you are a German saver faced with making negative returns on cash deposits for the rest of your life, a stockmarket bubble might make you feel a little better. It might even prompt a little of the wealth effect that works so effectively in the US to prompt consumer spending.

ECB President Mario Draghi said seven years ago that he would do "whatever it takes" to get Europe moving. If he still reckons the eurozone needs his help (which is not a given not all the data is bad), this is about the only option left in his box of monetary tricks.

The trouble with buying equities

But the naked self-interest isn't the main issue here. Nor is the fact that buying equities is unlikely to be of much use. It hasn't worked in Japan and, while I can see how it might push up equity prices (which is nice for people who have equities already), it is harder to see how a central bank buying shares helps anyone else.

To see the real problem with this, we have to step back a long way. Our senses have been dulled by increasingly extreme monetary policy over the past decade, so we must try and look at it afresh. What is being suggested here is that the ECB, a publicly owned institution, prints money and uses it to buy equity stakes in private companies. In other words, the only way to save capitalism is to begin to nationalise it.

Global elites have a full-on meltdown every time the UK opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, suggests some kind of "people's QE" or nationalising a couple of utility companies. Yet when BlackRock says this no one blinks.

It isn't quite the same utility nationalisation isn't good for big asset managers, for starters. But it isn't all that different either. Public equity purchases distort pricing signals; they are anti-free markets; they will be almost impossible to unwind; and think of the governance issues. BlackRock likes to promote the idea that big shareholders should be active when it comes to corporate governance. What if one of those big shareholders is a central bank? Should they be active too?

QE isn't working

Instead they would be remembering former Bank of England governor Mervyn King's comments in the depths of the financial crisis in 2009 "any policy measure that is desirable now appears diametrically opposite to the direction in which we need to go in the long term" and they'd be lobbying for something completely different.

Still, there is good news embedded in here. Nervous investors need no longer wonder what to do with their cash: if more QE is coming in the EU and there is even a chance that some of it will involve buying European equities, they should buy European equities BlackRock just put out a note suggesting their clients do that.

This article was first published in the Financial Times

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.