(Bloomberg) -- Could crypto cure defaults?
It’s a provocative question that’s been nagging at Jordi Visser, chief investment officer at the $1.3 billion hedge fund Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers. Cryptocurrencies, after all, were invented to replace banks, the thinking goes, so it makes sense that the next step would be to eliminate borrowing through bonds.
Gaining inspiration from Manu Saadia’s book "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek," which hypothesizes about a world unconstrained by a scarcity of goods, Visser says we’re transitioning from the industrial age to an era in which devices supplant infrastructure as the building blocks of economies.
Within the financial industry, that means bonds -- which paid for the physical building blocks of our world -- will lose relevance, Visser said. Some time in the near future, crypto assets and other technological innovations such as three-dimensional printing could eliminate the need to raise capital through traditional means. Projects that bonds previously financed will be printable.
"I don’t see defaults in the future," he says. "Long-term borrowing isn’t a necessity. We can 3-D print homes. Why do you need a bond if you can already print homes and buildings?"
Visser’s futuristic vision is wildly at odds with the Wall Street consensus. Bonds offer a structure with rules, contracts and regulations that the crypto world lacks. At the moment, money managers are lapping up debt at a record pace as sellers scramble to lock in low yields before the Federal Reserve’s next interest-rate increase. Bitcoin, which lost more than half its value from a mid-December peak, rose 4.1 percent to $8,418 as of 9:10 a.m. in New York Thursday.
"I believe in digital currencies and the blockchain over the next 20 years," said Visser, who says he doesn’t own any cryptocurrencies. "Guessing which one, if any specific one, is the winner is speculation to me, similar to the Internet names in 2000: Many failures, a few big winners and many which have done very little."
While bonds remain a necessity for now as less developed countries borrow for infrastructure projects, Visser says blockchain technology and crypto assets -- aimed at decentralizing governments, banks and corporations -- will curb the supply of debt as they cut costs by eliminating middlemen and speed the completion of those public works projects.
Debt is already less visible these days in the corporate universe. Even without blockchain, the world’s largest companies are relying less on bond sales than their predecessors. Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN).’s total debt to market capitalization is 6.3 percent, compared with 97 percent for century-old General Electric (NYSE:GE) Co. Silicon Valley titans Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc. (0.5 percent) and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). (0 percent) have even lower ratios. Meanwhile, sovereign default rates since 2011 have been relatively low for a span of slumping capital flows and commodity prices.
Technological advancements should continue climbing, the hedge fund manager says, citing Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by Intel Corp (NASDAQ:INTC). co-founder Gordon Moore predicting exponential growth in computing power. Global yields remain below the levels of September 2008, before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in part because technology has helped make the amount of debt issued in recent years more manageable.
Visser points to two pivot points that have changed the bond market: Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL).’s 2007 launch of the iPhone, which marked the beginning of "exponential innovation," and the first Baby Boomer turning 65 in 2011, which signaled a demographic shift. Blockchain and bitcoin will probably be the next innovations to shake up debt markets, Visser says.
"Markets are telling you it will be important," he says. "It’s not a question of whether it will be useful, but when."