There's no such thing as a free minimum wage hike

Paul Kirby, who was head of the No. 10 Policy Unit until last year, has a long post calling for a “dramatic, historic increase" to the minimum wage, bringing the levels from the current £6.10/hour to £10/hour in London and £8/hour in the rest of the country. It’s a bold post, but ultimately most of his arguments fail. In this post I try to address the key points he makes in favour of a hike.

Low wage earners are, overwhelmingly, providing services for domestic consumers within the UK economy. They work in shops, cafes and hotels. They cut our hair, they clean our houses, they look after our kids and they care for our elderly.  They are not  in manufacturing, competing on the price of their labour with other countries. What they do has to be done in this country. Nor is it tradable with other countries. If the Minimum Wage increases, it impacts equally on all of an employer’s competitors, so there is no disadvantage.

Even though nobody can switch to a cheaper hairdresser in India, they can get their hair cut less often, or have their homes cleaned less frequently, or send their children to creches with fewer minders per child or their parents to care homes with fewer carers. Kirby is assuming that demand for domestic services is inelastic – that is, it does not change much according to price. Obviously, this may differ between different services, but in without evidence to the contrary (Kirby gives none) it does not seem reasonable to assume that people’s demand for services will stay the same even if the prices of those services rise.

Bear in mind that a minimum wage increase would only affect the bottom of the market, where you would expect customers to be the most price-sensitive. The economic evidence suggests that increases in the minimum wage lead to slower job growth, particularly for young workers and in industries with a high proportion of low-paid staff.

Raising the lowest wages does not mean that employers simply have to, or will, just cut jobs or working hours to keep the wage bill constant. The evidence is clear that employers find a variety of solutions.  Firstly, they restrain pay growth for their better paid staff. Secondly, they increase prices to consumers. Thirdly, they improve productivity and get more out of each hour that they are paying for. And then they squeeze their profits. Through productivity gains, they either earn more revenue or cut the amount of labour they need.

Employers do not try to ‘keep the wage bill constant’. They try to make a profit on the labour they hire. If hiring an extra manager led to extra profits, it wouldn’t matter that doing so also increased the overall wage bill. A minimum wage imposes a price floor on labour, so any worker whose total productivity is less than the minimum wage floor represents a net loss to their employer – which a profit-maximising firm will respond to by firing the worker. It makes no difference whether or not that firm has ‘restrained pay growth’ for its other workers: if an employee is loss-making at the lowest wage a firm can pay them, a profit-maximising firm will fire them. (Or simply not hire additional workers who would be loss making on net.) Even if firms can only tell the average productivity of their workers, because of information problems, they will demand less labour in total.

On the possibility of raising prices to make the worker profitable, see the previous point: if demand for the service is price inelastic, this might work, but it’s quite a claim to say that this is the case for most minimum wage-supplied labour.

Wages are not the only cost of labour to firms, either. Firms may reduce costs in response to minimum wage increases by cutting back on perks like lunch breaks and sick leave, as Starbucks did after it agreed to pay additional corporation tax in 2012.

Increasing low pay has a limited impact on the overall costs of most businesses. In some sectors, very few earn less than the living wage, e.g only 6% in manufacturing. Even in hotels and catering, which is one of the biggest sector for the Minimum Wage, only 17% of jobs are below the living wage and raising the Minimum Wage to the Living Wage would only add 6% to the wage bill. This is the highest impact for any sector. More importantly, labour is only a proportion of all costs, e.g. 25-35% for restaurants.

Is a 2.1% increase in costs for labour-intensive firms not something to be concerned about? The fact that ‘most businesses’ would not be affected seems beside the point. (The reverse of this is true too: if Kirby’s other points were correct, would his suggested minimum wage hike be a bad idea because it would affect “only” 17% of workers?)

There is no real evidence of any minimum wages in the world adversely effecting employment levels.

This is totally wrong. In 2006 Neumark and Wascher reviewed over one hundred existing studies of the employment impact of the minimum wage. Of these, two-thirds showed a relatively consistent indication that minimum wage increases cause increases in unemployment. Of the thirty-three strongest studies, 85 per cent showed unemployment effects. And “when researchers focus on the least-skilled groups most likely to be adversely affected by minimum wages, the evidence for disemployment effects seems especially strong”.

Few people stay on low-wage jobs for their whole lives: minimum wage work is usually a stepping-stone to something better where employees can acquire human capital. There is evidence that suggests that minimum wages deter young workers from acquiring these skills that allow them to get better jobs in the long run. Note also that minimum wages have been used explicitly to kick away the ladder for minorities: by whites in pre-Apartheid South Africa; by anti-Hispanic campaigner Ron Unz in California; and by, er, Polly Toynbee in a recent Guardian column.

Tyler Cowen reminds us to make sure our views of sticky wages and minimum wages are consistent: if “worker-imposed minimum wages” (sticky wages) lead to unemployment, as most Keynesians (among others, including me) believe, why would “state-imposed minimum wages” not also do so? (“Have you no respect for the law (of demand)?”, asks Will Wilkinson.)

Given that we know that minimum wage increases usually cause some unemployment, why take this chance when we could just give money to poor people directly? As we’ve been saying for years, the difference between the current pre-tax minimum wage and the post-tax “living wage” is roughly as much as a minimum wage worker pays in income tax and national insurance: in other words, if that worker didn’t pay tax, they would be earning a living wage. It looks as if the personal allowance will soon rise to the minimum wage level, but the national insurance contribution threshold needs to rise too.

But let’s go even further: if we replaced the tax credit and welfare systems with a Negative Income Tax (or Basic Income – call it whatever you want), we would top-up the wages of low-paid workers directly. Jeremy Warner calls for this in the Telegraph today, and I outlined something similar a few weeks ago. Yes, I’d like all the standard supply-side deregulations as well, but a Negative Income Tax would act as an insurance policy against the potential down-sides of such deregulations, strengthening workers’ bargaining power and addressing the fears of those who worry that deregulations will hurt some workers.

I understand that many Conservatives are coming to see a minimum wage hike as a political ‘free lunch’ – a popular and surprising way of showing an interest in the welfare of the poor that does not affect the government’s balance sheet. I hope this is not true. Contrary to Kirby’s claims, there are good empirical and theoretical reasons to think that raising the floor on the price of labour will cause more unemployment. And unemployment destroys lives. There are lots of things we can and should do to help the poor right now. Raising the minimum wage isn't one of them.

The most appalling drivel from the New York Times

This drivel from the New York Times is so bad that it's actually painful to read. It's following on from the paper's hit job on your friend and mine, Craig Pirrong. The argument is about how does, or how doesn't, speculation alter prices. And as I say this is so bad that it really is painful. I quote at length so you don't think I'm cheating or anything:

The academic debate about what role, if any, the surge of financial speculation played in the run-up of commodity prices during the past decade remains unresolved. It is generally accepted that the price increases were in large part caused by market fundamentals – increasing demand in China and other developing countries, currency fluctuations, the diversion of grains to biofuels. Numerous studies by economists find little evidence that speculation played a major role. Studies by other economists find that price increases and volatility were fueled, to a significant degree, by the vast amount of speculative money that has entered the market since the rise of investment funds — particularly index funds — that track commodities.

The task of definitively answering the question is complicated by the murkiness of the data. Most trading data is considered proprietary and is therefore not released to the public or researchers. The information released by federal regulators and the exchanges is often difficult to work with because it is aggregated in ways that make it tricky to separate investors speculating on where prices will go from those simply trying to hedge their risks. When the Commodity Futures Trading Commission gave researchers from Princeton and the University of Michigan access to actual trade data, the resulting study found evidence suggesting that financial speculation had played a role in price swings during certain time periods.

But before more studies could be done to test their findings, the C.F.T.C. research program was shut down because the Chicago Mercantile Exchange complained that a subsequent study, which was critical of high frequency trading, had improperly released confidential details about its clients. Outside of academia, many commodities traders, financial institutions and oil industry executives have asserted in recent years that speculation is a major factor behind rising prices and market volatility.

The public policy debate has also been moving toward more regulation to prevent any possible price impact of increased speculation in the future. In the United States, restrictions on speculation were included in the Dodd-Frank package of financial reforms in 2010. While those rules were blocked by a court challenge funded by the financial-services giants, the C.F.T.C. in November approved a new set of position limits that would curtail Wall Street speculation. — David Kocieniewski

This is just nonsense: the writer of a front page New York Times piece appears entirely ignorant of what he discusses.

Absolutely everyone agrees that speculation changes prices. No doubt about it whatsoever.

We're entirely certain that speculation in the market for physical goods changes the prices for physical goods. We're equally sure that speculation in futures and options changes the prices of futures and options. These aren't things up for discussion: they just are.

The actual subject under discussion is whether speculation in futures and options changes the underlying physicals prices. And the answer to that is, in the absence of changes in physical stocks, no. Even Paul Krugman of the New York Times agrees with that.

But this is the way that the public debate seems to be conducted these days. Read the extract again: at no point at all does the distinction between speculations in futures and options or speculations in physicals get mentioned. And it's precisely that this distinction is not made that allows the horrible mistakes. Including, obviously, the entirely untrue implication that futures speculation changes physicals prices and therefore we must regulate futures trading more.

If I thought these reporters were bright enough to recognise a bribe I'd assume they've taken one: given that I don't it must simply be that they do not understand the subject they are attempting to explain.

Old Economy Steven would have been better off now

An interesting essay from Chris Maisano over at Jacobin Magazine drifts over many topics—full employment, growth since the 1970s and neoliberalism, worker activism and the 40-hour week. Its essential case is that full employment is important, because it makes workers better off in lots of ways, including giving them more leisure time. There are some interesting points in the piece, and I agree that full-ish employment is an important goal, but overall I think it rests on a huge number of misconceptions—indeed data is used in very weird ways, with what I see as obvious questions left entirely uninterrogated.

Maisano points to the "Old Economy Steven" meme, which looks back to an idealised post-war era:

Steven pays his yearly tuition at a state college—with his savings from his summer job! He graduates with a liberal arts degree—and actually finds suitable entry-level employment! ... But Steven doesn't just enjoy the material comforts of Old Economy abundance. He possesses a degree of everyday power scarcely imaginable by working people today. Steven can tell his boss to shove it, walk out and get hired at the factory across the street.

The contrast with popular views about today's economy, at least since the recession, is obvious. But full employment policies have been demoted—indeed since the late 1970s and especially since central bank independence most developed countries have centred their macroeconomic policies around stable inflation, not high employment. In fact, central banks now see a Non-Accelerating-Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) as the optimal situation. But is this an "ideological response" as Maisano suggests?

There will always be some unemployment, from the numerous supply side restrictions on labour, and from job switching, especially with sectoral shifts. Inducing unexpected inflation can temporarily take unemployment below this "natural" level, for example through money illusion—where workers think nominal pay is actually real pay—but it is unsustainable. Once unions and individual workers compute this level of demand growth into their calculations the natural rate will return and the monetary authorities will need to push inflation yet higher to subvert this equilibrium.

Many economists, including Milton Friedman, argue that something like this caused the rampant, out of control inflation of the 1970s, something that was only reigned in by harsh recessions in both the UK and USA (attempting to control wages and prices was an abject failure everywhere). Acknowledging this means acknowledging that aiming for unemployment as close as possible to zero is a bad idea; it is better to aim for the lowest level of unemployment achievable without acceleration inflation. It's certainly possible to argue that monetary policymakers have failed to do this—but it hardly seems like a specifically ideological development, more like progress in economics.

A second sticking point is how growth has declined since neo-liberalism replaced the post-war consensus as the dominant political framework in at least the US and UK. This is true. But it's also true that every developed country saw a growth slowdown in the 80s and 90s relative to the post-war era. Economic historians are divided on the causes but since the most neo-liberal countries grew much faster than the more left-leaning states, one'd be hard placed to see that as a key cause. But even though growth has slowed down it has not stopped—and despite a few bumps we are much much richer today than in the 1970s. Just think, if had the opportunity to be whizzed to the 1970s to have the same standard of living as someone in your income percentile did then, would you?

My third disagreement is on hours worked. Maisano heavily implies that the consistently looser labour markets since the 1960s and 1970s have resulted in workers forced to work longer hours. He's clearly looked at the numbers, since he compares the US's average 1,778 in 2010 (1,742 on the FRED numbers I've seen) worked unfavourably to "continental European and the Scandinavian social democracies". But is that a germane comparison? To me it seems like the best way to compare the wellbeing of workers now, following decades of neo-liberalism and below-full-employment, and workers then, is to directly compare them. On average, during the 1970s, an employed person worked 1,859 hours (in 1970 it was 1,912 hours), in the ten years up to and including 2011 the average was 1,772.9. Maybe Maisano believes that with a greater focus on full employment incomes would have grown even more and hours would have fallen even faster—but if he thought that maybe he should say it.

Bitcoin is a win-win for liberty

Depending on who you ask, cryptocurrency is either: (1) the future or (2) stupidity.

Some early adopters claim that 1 BTC could reach $40,000; others ask whether BTC will become “Gold 2.0”.

The ASI's own Tim Worstall (among others) disagrees, pointing to the fact that a cryptocurrency can effectively be created out of thin air—“with no scarcity comes no value”—and likens BTC, whose rivals (wow) multiply, as akin to that of “the Golgafrinchan B Ark using leaves as money. They...have to burn down the forest to stop inflation.”

This view is wrong. Cryptocurrency is not presently scarce: there are perhaps hundreds of cryptocurrencies with active userbases, many of which are actively traded. Yet despite being functionally identical to BTC some are near-worthless (1 DOGE = $0.00035) while others are prized (1 LTC = $24.00). Why, then, is 1 BTC worth $760?

The answer, of course, is that cryptocurrencies aren't money, but rather “more of a payment system like Visa than a currency like the dollar,” and ones with some unique characteristics at that: low transaction costs, increased anonymity, and a distributed network architecture. This alone has value.

BTC also benefits from its “first-mover status (which) grants it some advantage over its competitors in the form of network effects,” with its value deriving, “at least in part, on the number of other users willing to transact.” (Luther, 2013).

In this respect its lead is commanding. As for its closest analogue, credit cards, network effects in respect of these have resulted in there being “only three major credit card companies in the world… (and as such) cryptocurrency network externalities are likely to be high.” Though cryptocoins are obscenely easy to mint, the dominance of a few large players will mean joke currencies become increasingly difficult to trade.

As yet, cryptocommerce has only been adopted by small, distinct groups of individuals (libertarians, internet denizens, and black marketeers (Luther, op. cit.)). For each of the above, crypto serves a distinct purpose and success or failure has a distinct meaning. For those who see crypto as a creature of politics (as I do), at this early stage, it should not matter what a particular cryptocurrency is worth from time-to-time. It matters only that a few are (1) capable of holding value and (2) are actually used.

The value of the eventual frontrunners will undoubtedly bear a relationship to black market demand – as put by one commentator, “if Bitcoin succeeds, it will be because of the War on Drugs and other policies that increase demand for a quasi-anonymous, internet-transportable currency,” exactly the kind of disruptive function the crypto-anarchist manifesto predicted in 1988.

Crypto therefore presents states with a dilemma: repress it, or compete against it. Choose the former, and cryptocurrency will serve as a check on state power. Choose the latter, and it will have been a powerful catalyst for reform.

Either way, liberty wins.

A little note for our Robin Hood Tax friends and the World Development Movement

You will recall one of the arguments put forward by the Robin Hood Tax crowd: that lots of speculators in futures and options markets drives up prices. This has also been put forward by the World Development Movement, another group of teenage trots only lately out of their mothers' basements. The problem with this idea, as has been endlessly pointed out, is that future prices can only affect current, spot ones, if there is a rise in inventories. And that's not something we've seen in recent price booms.

And here is Craig Pirrong, fresh from the mendacious hit job the NYT did on him, to explain why in more detail:

Back in the 1990s and early 00s, gold prices were low. Very low. $300 and below. Back then, the hue and cry was that prices were artificially low because . . . wait for it . . . producers were massively short because of hedging programs.

Well, if producers were massively short that means that speculators were massively long. So if speculators drive prices, why weren’t gold prices stratospherically high in the late-90s early-00s? After all, supposedly in 2008, and the last couple of years, the massive long speculative positions were inflating prices. Why didn’t the massive long speculative gold positions a decade ago inflate gold prices?

Flipping things: If short commercial positions were depressing gold prices a decade ago, why didn’t they depress oil prices in 2007-2008, and over the last couple of years? Hence the danger of superficially examining net positions and claiming that one side of the market is inflating (or depressing) prices: an equally legitimate argument is that the other side of the argument is depressing (or inflating) prices.

But the point is that neither argument is legitimate: both are equally illegitimate. Derivatives positions net out to zero. Derivatives are in zero net supply. Looking at one side of the market, and ignoring the other, makes no sense.

In the absence of changes in physical stocks driven by those future prices, futures speculation simply will not change current, spot, prices.

Worth adding I think my favourite mistake by the WDM on this point. They looked at grain prices in 2008. Wheat and corn (maize) moved a bit. Rice moved massively. OK: but they used this as proof that futures and options speculation really does change spot prices. Failing to note that the futures market for rice is very thin and small while those for wheat and corn are vast and deep. Thus the grains with more speculation in them had lower price rises: not exactly a confirmation of their thesis.

The effect of rising consumerism

We're all aware of the standard critique of consumerism: that we shouldn't in fact want more at all. We should be happy with our lot, accept that there are limits and, you know, just sorta vegetate with what we can currently do and make. However, as Virginia Postrel points out, that's not really how the human race works:

Rising expectations aren’t a sign of immature “entitlement.” They’re a sign of progress -- and the wellspring of future advances. The same ridiculous discontent that says Starbucks ought to offer vegan pumpkin lattes created Starbucks in the first place. Two centuries of refusing to be satisfied produced the long series of innovations that turned hunger from a near-universal human condition into a “third world problem.” Complaining about small annoyances can be demoralizing and obnoxious, but demanding complacency is worse. The trick is to simultaneously remember how much life has improved while acknowledging how it could be better. In the new year, then, may all your worries be first world problems.

We only ever moved out of the caves because someone thought that house sharing with a hungry bear was unsatisfactory, only ever invented the car because of the rising tide of horse dung, it's the very things that we find unsatisfactory currently that drives the vast wave of innovation that has been sweeping us along these past few centuries.

And the real strangeness of this is that while we might indeed be desiring more transport, or food, or communication ability, whatever it is, that innovation manages to bring us that more at the expense of using fewer resources. Smartphones are, obviously, using fewer resources than trying to run Facebook on semaphore flags. So contrary to the standard story it is our very consumerism that reduces resource use via the mechanism of innovation.

It is absolutely vital that you deploy your consumerism responsibly

I thought this was rather good from Julian Baggini in The Guardian: although it does have one terrible error in it:

You might dismiss this kind of ethical consumerism as mere gesture. Waving my right-on debit card as a badge of honour as I pack my Fairtrade chocolate into a canvas tote bag can look like a poor surrogate for revolution. This is part of a knowingly superior narrative of impotence that tells us our day-to-day choices can't lead to meaningful political change. "The system" is inherently corrupt and to believe we can affect it by our choices is to buy into the very myth of consumer power that late capitalism promotes in its own interest. It is to believe that virtue can be bought, when the vice of the system is precisely that it puts a price on everything, including a clear conscience.

But this narrative is wrong. It portrays capitalism as though it were a kind of entity with a will of its own, whose only desire is to maximise profit. In fact capitalism is amoral, not immoral. It doesn't care for right or wrong, only for what people demand. If we demand goods and services at the lowest price, capitalism will provide them, and damn the social and environmental consequences. If, however, we demand Fairtrade bananas or recycled toilet paper, capitalism will provide them too, as it demonstrably has done.

These are not things done by capitalism: they are things done by markets. Where there is choice then it is indeed possible for people to have a choice on how, with whom and upon what they spend their money. A capitalism without markets (ie, monopoly capitalism) would provide none of those choices: just as any other economic system without the choice offered by markets would not allow the consumer to express their preferences. Capitalism and markets are simply not the same thing at all and it is markets here that Baggini is praising.

Other than of course he's precisely spot on. If you want things to be produced in a certain manner then it's up to you to spend your money so as to encourage producers to do their production in that manner. You not only can but you ought to express your moral choices in the way you decide upon who to buy from. I tend to buy from factories located in poverty stricken hell holes as that's the best way to alleviate poverty we've yet found. Agreed, others might differ on this: but it's still true that you should deploy your financial firepower to make the world a better place by your own lights.

It is, after all, vastly better to light a candle than to curse the darkness and every pound spent on your moral goals brings them that one pound closer.

The net migration cap is hurting Britain

This morning's Guardian carries a letter by the ASI, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Institute of Directors, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Entrepreneurs Network and Conservatives for Liberty, on why we oppose the government's migration cap. I wrote about why more free marketeers should care about immigration recently — we're lucky that the UK's foremost free market think tanks do.

The government's net migration cap is hurting Britain's economic recovery and long-term fiscal health. It can take around three months for a business to apply for a visa for a prospective employee, a significant unseen cost of the cap, and international firms may prefer to base themselves in countries where they can bring in staff from abroad more easily than they can in the UK.

Entrepreneurship is being affected, too: more than a quarter of Silicon Roundabout startup founders are foreign-born, and more than half of tech startups in California's Silicon Valley are founded by immigrants. The cap on immigration is a cap on the innovative industries Britain needs to thrive.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, without net immigration of at least 260,000 people per annum, public debt will approach 100% of GDP by 2060 as we struggle to pay for a ballooning pensions and healthcare bill. Countless studies have shown immigrants create jobs, raise natives' real wages and even boost productivity.

Public concerns about benefits tourism are legitimate but are better addressed by reforms that restrict access to the welfare state. The migration cap does not discriminate between the small number of would-be welfare tourists and the many people who would like to work productively to create a better life for themselves and their families. The cap is hurting Britain and should be scrapped.

Sam Bowman, Research director, Adam Smith Institute,

Mark Littlewood, Director general, Institute of Economic Affairs,

Simon Walker, Director general, Institute of Directors,

Ryan Bourne, Head of economic research, Centre for Policy Studies,

Philip Salter, Director, The Entrepreneurs Network,

Thomas Stringer, Director, Conservatives for Liberty.

Should fans be concerned by Bitcoin's fall in value?

The last few months has seen a breathtaking rise in the price of Bitcoin. Starting around $15 at the beginning of the year, Bitcoin's price went from round $200 to a peak of over $1,200 just during November. Then from early December BTC's price began to falter, with a sudden drop and a low of $550 on the 18th: less than half its price just weeks before.

Commentary has been just as volatile, with some seeing BTC's rising price as its explosion onto the scene and proof of its revolutionary potential. Others have scoffed, calling the whole thing a bubble inflated by overoptimistic geeks and people looking for a quick profit. Now that BTC's price has come tumbling, should proponents of the crypto-currency be humbled and/or worried?

Recent rises and falls in Bitcoin's price have reflected developments in China.  In November Bitcoin exchange BTC China secured $5m investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and surpassed Mt Gox as the largest exchange in terms of trading volume. However, on the 5th December the People's Bank of China announced that it does not consider Bitcoin a currency, barring banks & other financial institutions from dealing with it. Around this time Bitcoin's price took a sharp downwards turn. Then, on Monday, the central bank banned 3rd-party payment companies from working with Bitcoin exchanges. This left Chinese exchanges unable to take deposits, and the price cfurther tumbled.

This is potentially bad news for entrepreneurs who want to see Bitcoin widely adopted, as well as for more ideological fans who consider Bitcoin's strength its decentralised and stateless nature. Governments will never be able to stamp out Bitcoin completely, but making it as difficult as possible to use will hamper the objectives of both groups. The Mercatus Centre's Bitcoin Primer explicitly urges policy makers to consider the technology morally neutral, warning against restricting its development and its use by non-criminal users. Whilst China cracks down on BTC its uptake in developing countries -particularly amongst the unbanked-is strong, and Denmark has just announced that it will not regulate Bitcoin or its exchange. China may well realise that it is missing a trick and relax its hostility.

Nevertheless, innovation around this problem will occur if it continues. Bitcoin is a global start-up project, with swathes of  passionate and seriously techie fans.

Some take Bitcoin's crash as proof that that it is an unstable and unsustainable folly- nothing more than a risky virtual commodity bet.

Certainly, Bitcoin's volatility is an established fact, with its last big crash in April wiping out 80% of Bitcoin's value over 6 days. Nevertheless, BTC has always recovered and increased in value. Indeed, since the 18th Bitcoin's price has been creeping up yet again.

Calling bubbles is a funny thing, because both falls in price and continued rises offer 'proof' of the hypothesis. It is perhaps more accurate to say that Bitcoin is undergoing a long period of 'price discovery'. A lot of purchases have been speculative or made out of curiosity, but as more users and ways to spend the currency emerge, so will a clearer and more stable idea of its price. Bitcoin's shifting price isn't even that much of an issue for those using it for purchases: vendors adjust their Bitcoin prices regularly to reflect the changing exchange rate. It is short-term investors and those calling Bitcoin the 'new gold' who should perhaps be more wary.

Others say that Bitcoin's falling price reflects underlying concerns with the currency - such as issues with security and fraud, and exchanges' ability to cope with demand. Some suggest these issues mean that Bitcoin will never be much more than a digital curiosity. But at the early stages of the computer and the internet few thought they would be so transformative, or could imagine how they would evolve. Bitcoin is certainty not ready for mainstream adoption or about to cause a central banking crisis, but that is zero reason to write it off.  So much of how Bitcoin can and should operate is yet to be discovered, let alone decided. Despite all the recent attention it is still in its infancy, and growing pains and price shifts are an inevitable path of its development.

Even if Bitcoin's price were to come crashing devastatingly down, the world's first digital, decentralised ledger-based currency has created a new paradigm: a new way of thinking about money, transactions, anonymity and even our relationship with the state. Even some of Bitcoin's biggest fans say it could one of the alternative, retweaked and 'improved' cyrpto-currencies which will really take off.

On which note- why care about the price of Bitcoin when you can be an early adopting millionaire of everyone's favourite meme-cum-cryptocurrency, the shibe-tastic, very money Dogecoin! (wow)

Video: Ayn Rand Lecture 2013 by Lars Seier Christensen

Lars Seier Christensen is CEO and Founder of Saxo Bank. You can read a full transcript of this speech here.