Britische Staatsschuld in Viktorianischer Zeit ("Economist") (...) "There was really only one kind of
investment from the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the railway boom of the
1840s: government debt. British government debt was the only security
traded on the Stock Exchange at its foundation in 1801, and remained so
until 1822. Thanks to luck and skill, the government managed to finance a
century's worth of horrendously expensive wars in a way that not only did
not cripple commerce but mobilised commercial resources for new
challenges. The key piece of skill was the mechanism of
“funding” that secured interest payments. When William and Mary
re-established the Protestant monarchy in 1688, Parliament wanted both to
shore up the royal finances and establish its control over them. Funded
borrowing did both. Parliament passed taxes sufficient to pay interest on
a certain amount of debt — just over £1m in the first instance — then
tacked on a bit more tax to pay down the principal gradually. The monarch
could borrow against this “funded” amount fairly easily, but found it hard
to borrow more, which gave British debt unparalleled stability. In 1715-70
France reneged on the terms of its debt five times; Britain never missed
an interest payment. The big piece of luck was the South Sea Bubble. In
order to issue debt more cheaply, the government hit upon the wheeze of
tying debt issues to the grant of trading privileges, which cost it
nothing but persuaded investors to part with their money at a lower rate
of interest. In 1693 the going rate on government debt was 14%. In 1698
the East India Company was prevailed upon to lend £2m at a rate of 8% in
return for an extension of trading privileges. This understandably
appealed to ministers. In 1711, the government raised a further £10m from
the South Sea Company in return for exclusive trading rights to Spanish
South America. Finally, in 1719, the South Sea Company proposed to take
over the finance of the entire national debt. The government agreed.
Fortunately for posterity, the directors of the
South Sea Company were greedy and incompetent. They promptly began talking
up the price of their shares with inflated estimates of the value of their
trading and financing rights, which helped to fuel a dotcom-style
speculative bubble. After the bust, the government went off the idea of
entrusting its finances to a single company. So it set about devising
securities that could sell into a broader
market. Early flirtations with lotteries and annuities
were generally disappointing. So were “tontines”, a sort of group annuity
in which many paid into a general pot, and the last few survivors split
the income. What did sell, hesitantly at first, were bonds—albeit ones
which were often sweetened with “douceurs” like a lottery ticket or
two. The government consoles itselfIn 1751 Henry
Pelham's Whig government pulled together the lessons learnt on bonds to
create the security of the century: the 3% consol. This took its name from
the fact that it paid 3% on a £100 par value and consolidated the terms of
a variety of previous issues. The consols had no maturity; in theory they
would keep paying £3 a year forever. Between 1751,
when the funded national debt was only a tad over £70m, and 1801, when it
climbed over £450m, the government issued £315m of consols. Lord North
particularly liked them because they carried a low nominal interest rate.
He argued that lower rates were better because “it was the interest that
the people were burdened with the paying of and not the capital.” That
said, Lord North issued new consols at £60 or so, to create a 5% interest
rate. Why he thought a discounted 3% bond was better value than a 5% bond
sold at par is unclear. William Pitt
the Younger, however, discovered the downside of discounted bonds when he
tried to reduce the national debt during the lull between the American war
and the Napoleonic wars. In theory, the consols could be redeemed by the
government at their par value of £100. In practice, doing so would have
given a windfall to bondholders: nearly double their capital as well as
interest payments. Pitt instead created a sinking fund, using tax revenue
to buy back bonds in the market. The sinking
fund continued in operation through the Napoleonic wars, though in an
increasingly bizarre fashion. By the end of the wars, the government was
borrowing all of the money for the fund from the same markets that the
fund bought from, in the deluded belief that reinvesting the interest on
the bonds held by the fund would yield compound returns sufficient to pay
off the whole of the national debt. Clearly, the
financial markets of Jane Austen's time were not sophisticated. But they
were robust. There were no alternatives to easily tradeable,
interest-bearing securities, and lots of people wanted them. Merchants put
spare cash into the funds, which, as they would not otherwise have earned
interest on the money, boosted their profits and competitiveness. Some
landowners traded back and forth between funds and land in search of
better returns. Others saw the funds as a new way to maintain their wealth
without farming. From a
speculator's point of view, this was a lively market. The fact that early
bonds had no fixed maturity date ensured that any change in interest rate
was fully reflected in the capital value of the bond. Rates, in turn,
fluctuated in response to foreign affairs in general and military ones in
particular. When the British won a battle, investors anticipated the day
that the government would stop issuing new bonds and turn to buying old
ones via the sinking fund. Rates fell and values rose. When British forces
lost, investors anticipated new issues coming to market, and the opposite
happened. Compounding these movements were poor communications: nobody
really knew what was going on in the wars. One officer
rushed from Portsmouth to London with forged dispatches proclaiming the
fall of Paris and the rout of Napoleon, while at the coffee houses his
confederates sold into the rising market and netted about £10,000. Even
with full information, early markets did not always do what a modern
trader would expect. In theory, the prices of various securities should
have converged around a general market interest rate. Not so in fact.
William Fairman of Royal Exchange Assurance noted that “the very great
disparity between the current prices of different funds evidently shows
that exact observers among the monied men are not numerous”. There was
also a persistent fear that the government might have so over-extended
itself with debt that a general failure of markets was inevitable.
(…) While trading
in the coffee houses was open to all, a booming industry of brokers and
bankers arose to serve those who did not wish to brave the hubbub in
person. (…) In 1801, the Stock Exchange was founded as a members-only
institution intended to bring some order to the markets — and in
particular to ban from membership those who reneged on their
deals. By the end of
the Napoleonic wars in 1815, the debts of the British government reached
£745m. But instead of calamity and national bankruptcy, the rise in debt
simply brought a hunger for more investments. As the government itself
stopped issuing new bonds, and started retiring old ones through the
sinking fund, investors turned first to foreign-government securities in
the 1820s and then to shares in the new, capital-intensive companies, such
as railroads, leading the industrialisation of the 19th century. Both
markets were highly speculative, to say the least. Foreign-government debt
included bonds from one entirely fictitious country, Poyais, and most of
the new industrial ventures failed." (...)
Gekürzt aus: The Economist, 22.12.05 |