Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)
professorwerner.org
professorwerner.org
Feels like the whole argument is going on inside his own head, and whilst I've heard economists conclude policies they used to advocate wouldn't work before, I've never seen them handwave their earlier beliefs away as "totalitarian" without even acknowledging they actually used to hold them.
When interest rates entered negative territory, something deemed formally impossible a decade earlier, a huge alarm should have sounded in Economics. Instead, we got some after-the-fact explanations that are untestable, and continue applying the same old models.
Science is about constant questioning of assumptions, and I have the feeling Economics fails at this crucial step.
Now, the mantra is that near zero negatives are still within the efficacy envelope. It was not predicted, but stated after the fact. This is, to me, a clear sign that the model is wrong, and should be reviewed with no barriers to questioning basic assumptions.
The bulk of the article is an elaborate straw man followed by cherry picked statistics.
Maybe it's because I played poker in the past that I can intuitively see it? In poker usually players play against each other in a zero sum game. The best takes the biggest piece of the cake. But when you play in a Casino it will take a "rake", meaning a tax from big payouts. Usually on higher stake games that doesn't matter much, but on lower level stakes the average percentage of rakes is so high, that even the best players can't make a profit. Everybody will lose, no matter his skill.
And since the banking system got more and more deregulated they paid themselves higher and higher bonuses. That means even if you are the best investor today, as long as you pay banking fees it's likely you are paying all your profit plus some more, considering a normal 5-digit yearly income.
Sometimes I wonder if in fact in this system the best approach is to borrow a lot of money that you know you can't pay back and hope that for some lucky coincidence you are not put into private bankruptcy, maybe keeping yourself afloat by borrowing more money to pay off fees/interest on old debt.
Mostly the holders of treasuries. Holders of other assets would seem to be fine!
So it seems to me to be like any other default, except on a larger scale. Price the sovereign debt risk into the calculation and diversify into real assets.
Basically, once the bankers have inflated financial bubbles everywhere, the impending crash is bad for the common man, UNLESS you're one of the lucky individuals that somehow became cash rich during the bubble, and can use the cash to buy up while the market/lending falls to pieces. Funnily enough, the cash rich ones seem to be the bankers, who, laden with bonuses from the bubble days, buy up property which they can rent to plebs to get a comfortable 6-10% pa return.
A great system, isn't it?!
In the United States, defaulting on Sovereign Debt would basically guarantee the death of social security. If you're in the USA, by far the best way you can insulate yourself against sovereign debt is by:
1) organizing your life's expenses so that you can retire (or at least continue to live) with $0.00 from social security.
2) Ensuring that you don't rely on any federal pension (including military retirement).
Of course, that isn't possible for most people. So in the USA, the answer to "who loses?" is "old people".
3) Ensuring you will have be able to afford healthcare in old age without medicare.
The rate of return on those assets will decline in proportion to the new money chasing them. On the margin, (and more so over time) new productive opportunities will occur as the cost of capital to business declines, but in the short run all you are doing is inflating a bubble.
SS and other entitlement/retirement programs hold a monstrous amount of the total federal debt. I doubt the federal gov't could divest even a small fraction of those securities without destroying market for them.
As a result, real wealth is destroyed.
Government seems to be the group that controls the military.
In desperate times, the government will print more money to pay for the military.
If they lose the war/freedom, the new government will erase the value of the old money and write their own.
Government printing money seems to be necessary for the own survival, good or bad.
They also generally don't operate like a casino. They have customers, and sell products. The securitized RMBS products at least in theory offered social benefit: decreasing cost of housing without increasing risk. The idea was that by pooling mortgages you could reduce risk through diversification. Risk reduction through diversification is a very well established phenomenon. So buying mortgages, bundling them to reduce risk and selling them in theory (and in practice, til the bust) enabled more people to get mortgages and own homes
The bad stuff happened 1) when realty diverged from their models and 2) the market evolved into a complex beast with a massive snowball of people doing unethical stuff (inside and outside of banks).
So in theory and in reality before the bust, rmbs provided a benefit to investors who got products that provided them a good financial return and lowered the cost of owning a home. Greed played a role in popping the bubble but so did incompetence
Not sure what your investing situation is but your second to last paragraph isn't true. The rise of ETFs has enabled average investors to invest with very low fees and many banks offer commission free trades. If you're the "best investor today" you probably have a lot of money and thus get decent deals from banks. If you are losing money it's bc too much competition from other investors due to easy money rather than banks squeezing you
I agree that what you describe covers most bankers. But you only need one person to come up with something like a CDO secured by credit default swaps. And you only need one person at the top of one of the biggest banks to promote this strategy. Then everybody else needs to follow suit, because profit is not just the source of their bonusses, it's also their protection against predatory competitors. So the number of people who need to start this is quite small, and I still claim that these few people knew exactly what they got us into, and they also knew that they could get away with it.
> in theory offered social benefit: decreasing cost of housing without increasing risk.
That is a foolish idea. The only way you can reduce your own risk is by putting the risk on other people's shoulders. You cannot make risk go away.
> The rise of ETFs has enabled average investors to invest with very low fees
Yes, but google what ETFs will mean at some point for the economy? Normal value creation becomes less and less fruitful. So in the end the whole market goes down and again the small time investors will lose while the big whales get bail outs and eat the smaller fish in the sea.
Also just because the fees in passive management are lower doesn't mean they can't be higher compared to the provided value. McDonalds is cheaper than a really good burger with really good fries, but you also get machine produced blurb in exchange, and in the end McD probably makes a bigger profit than your average, family owned burger shop.
I agree that thinking you can "magically" decrease risk is probably foolish, but some really smart ppl believe that they can model risk better than anyone, and with they deploy a lot of money based on that conviction. Sometimes they're ultimately right, but if they're wrong for long enough they still lose everything (see LTCM)
Similarily one could say: "Gambling houses don't operate like a casino. They have customers, and sell entertainment products.
And then continue describing the product details and trivia such as the exact rules of this or that casino game...
Governments can print Euros and Dollars. But not Bitcoin and Ethereum. Popular theory is that governments have a good grip on currency usage because they can decide which currencies they accept for tax payments. And because they can force merchants to accept certain currencies. It will be interesting to see if this grip holds up.
That said since no blockchain currently offers a credit system it’s not really possible to test this out fully since there is no true equivalency.
A better question would be not if we need central banks but rather should the economic system be based on credit and interest or not.
Heck, bitcoin exchanges can even print ""dollars"" in the form of USDT.
> should the economic system be based on credit and interest or not
This is almost unavoidable - remember that every not yet paid invoice is a form of credit.
With most cryptos, there is really a strict pre-established monetary policy baked into the algorithm with really no flexibility at all.
"A better question would be not if we need central banks but rather should the economic system be based on credit and interest or not."
I think a better way to say it: "Do we need monetary policy or not" - and I think the answer is 'yes' - so whether it's crypto or not ... there will have to be some kind of group/committee making those rules, and that's de-facto the central bank.
If you just sit on your Bitcoin it collects 0% Bitcoin-denominated interest. Maybe you'd prefer to make a loan to a bank and have them pay you interest. For the term of the loan that money isn't sitting in an address you control, it's been given to the bank and they're consequently free to lend it out to other people. Viola, Bitcoin have been created, just not on-chain.
EDIT: I was referring to physical dollars. As in, dollar bills and actual coins. I'm aware that Chase creates money, but it cannot literally print money.
Yes, it can, that's what fractional reserve means. Banks create (most of) the money they lend. This is regulated by the central banks but carried out via ordinary retail banking. When you swipe your credit card, buy a car, etc. money is being created out of thin air. The universe remains balanced because it corresponds to your obligation to repay; as you do, the money ceases to exist.
Nobody but the Treasury can cause physical dollars to be created, but that doesn't prevent fractional reserve from occurring.
So, anybody who claims Bitcoin doesn't support fraction reserve based solely on the fact that banks can't create new Bitcoin is incorrect.
I'm Chase Bank.
How do I issue 600 BTC given I have 20 BTC in my account.
There is zero allowance in the protocol for this to happen.
Since virtually all of the exchanges are unaudited, sketchy “businesses” I wouldn’t be surprised if they all run this way. It might come to pass the almost all of the exchange volume consists of trading fake bitcoin that is backed by almost no real bitcoin.
So still a commercial bank can not fractional reserve bank BTC, only fractional reserve bank promises for BTC. For a while people may fall for such a scheme but players learn...
> The minimum reserve is generally determined by the central bank to be no less than a specified percentage of the amount of deposit liabilities the commercial bank owes to its customers.
If someone gives Chase $100, Chase is allowed to loan out up to $90 of it, and must keep the remaining $10 in reserve.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement
The protocol allows someone with 100BTC to send someone else 90BTC.
[1] Well, except current regulators, but they obviously do not exist in bitcoin economy...
The system does include IOUs but those don't move around. When you give your hard cash to the bank it creates an IOU, that's what the balance you see when you login is. Your bank then lends out the hard cash to other people.
When you pay with your credit card the bank is still giving the merchant real money, the merchant would receive actual on-chain Bitcoin, but you're simultaneously creating a Bitcoin IOU which you promise to pay the bank.
When I pay coffee shop with a debit cards, exactly what happens is that the bank just tells me that hey, we owe you now less, and we owe the coffee shop a bit more. At that point there is nothing else happening. I am definitely not giving any "real" dollars because I do not have them left, but I have lent them to the bank so that I have only the IOU from the bank left.
What you see in your bank account is at the same time real money (as usually talked about), but really really nothing but a bank's promise to pay you some later day real real dollars.
And because it is so convenient, most people are perfectly happy with moving around these IOUs, the coffee shop owner can then walk to the bank and request that the bank actually pays the dollars (or bitcoins) that the bank owes, but it is quite rare that happens - and that is the whole point of fractional reserve banking.
> What you see in your bank account is at the same time real money (as usually talked about), but really really nothing but a bank's promise to pay you some later day real real dollars
We completely agree on this part.
> When I pay coffee shop with a debit cards, exactly what happens is that the bank just tells me that hey, we owe you now less, and we owe the coffee shop a bit more
I don't think this is true. Or, I don't think this is always true.
I can see it being true as a special case: If both you and the merchant use the same bank then sure, probably all that happens is two different IOU tallies are updated.
But I'm currently visiting Turkey, and when I swipe my card Chase definitely does not "owe the coffee shop a bit more", Chase has absolutely no relationship with the Turkish coffee shop I'm sitting in.
And maybe a temporary IOU is created between Chase and whatever Turkish bank the coffee shop is using, but I expect that IOU to be quickly resolved in a few days, when settlement happens. Real money is moved from your bank to the acquiring bank, and an associated IOU shows up in the bank account of the merchant.
Admittably I made some shortcuts. Obviously chase does not likely have a relationship with that Turkish coffee shop, but it does have a relationship (which may be complex, involving visa, mastercard etc.) with the bank of that coffee shop.
So practically Chase says that now that you paid your coffee in turkey, we owe you a bit less, but at the same time we as a bank have agreed to owe that amount of dollars to the Turkish bank, who the on owes to the coffeeshop owner some turkish lira. (and someone makes also the currency conversion there). The banks have between themselves some credit/limit arrangement that they do not need to actually start moving "real" central bank money [1] every time I buy a coffee. At the end of the day, most of the time the customer payments should not have a systematic drift (if there were, it would be called bank run), so banks just work within these credit limits.
It may sound like turtles all the way down, but that is exactly what the modern financial system is. Credit all the way down. There is very little else than credit in the system.
[1 ]which the turkish bank does not even have access but that is one more complexity layer I ignore here...
It still seems to me, however, that at the end of the day there's a net settlement process which happens at the central bank and moves real central bank money between the banks as a result of your transaction. (I'm can't figure out what the international equivalent is but assume there is one)
Do you have any links I could read which say otherwise?
> At the end of the day, most of the time the customer payments should not have a systematic drift (if there were, it would be called bank run)
I don't think this would constitute a run, I think it just results in the banks shipping central bank money to each other to settle the difference.
I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to Google this, would love any pointers you can give.
There is a daily settlement process via central bank, but you do not need to settle daily. Imagine only transaction today was me sending 10 bucks to your bank account. Your bank would likely say that hey, pay that 10 bucks (plus interest) some day later when there is a bigger payment coming. And by tomorrow someone from your bank paid to my bank 10 bucks, so then there was no need to do transfers. Banks do run credit lines against each other. Obviously, if I were to send one hundred million bucks, your bank would cough and say that okay, let's see when the money is at our central bank account....
> I don't think this would constitute a run,
If there is a long term systematic and significant outflow of money from a bank, that is definitely a bank run. Banks can't create central bank money, so if my bank needs to send daily money to your bank and is not receiving anything back, it needs to start liquidating some of the assets.
> I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to Google this, would love any pointers you can give.
Unfortunately I have found very little good information on money, these thoughts are just based on lots of thinking on the fascinating thing called money... Most sources belong to two camps:
1. Basic , naive economics that is saying that money is created when I deposit money and then bank lends it to you so that you have the cash in hand and I have the money in the account so the amount of money is doubled in society
2. The ones who think they are smart and say that hey, that naive theory is false. Actually banks just create money with double accounting wizardy and loans. Or something like that.
The first one fails to capture the technical details of money creation and the second ones fails to capture the economics.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
There are a lot of misconceptions about money around, many based on older ideas of physical or commodity-backed currencies.
And if you do fractional reserve off the blockchain then your crypto isn’t currency but rather closer to say what gold was during the gold standard era.
And yes Chase can “print” dollars that’s what the fractional reserve system means for every dollar they store in the central bank they can loan X dollars. When you ask for a mortgage Chase essentially creates most of those dollars out of thin air.
Indeed, but what does credit mean in a trustless system?
I think there will be many more approaches before one becomes the 'everyday' crypto currency.
Credit is a voluntary thing. Both sides can agree to create credit lines (trustlines) out of thin air without any third party ledger or permission. (Well maybe except Usury laws.)
Now the problem with credit is that you don’t know how solvent the debtor is and many debts they have. Credit agencies have sprung up to try to address this somewhat.
But the whole POINT of value based money is to introduce a third party representation of real assets, and that real world scarcity requires solving the double spend problem.
So the whole thing with every technology is remembering that A paid B, and not forgetting it (eg make collusion really infeasible).
Many blockchains are just append only databases stored on every node. They elect a leader based on PoW or PoS and it’s horribly inefficient. There are far better ways.
But anyway back to credit. Money is a social phenomenon that benefits from a network effect. A casino’s chips are worthless as a medium of exhange outside the context of the casino and the same goes for JPY, EUR etc.
Inside a community currency where everyone began to accept it, you can have the ability to print more money same as a Harvard Facebook has the ability to add features you don’t like but you keep using it. The only difference is that these decisions can be done democratically. So like living in a city whose policies you don’t all agree with.
They can use this money for Basic Income and other things like public infrastructure.
They can peg to an outside currency AND print/dilute it gradually to redistribute wealth in a voluntary way that even anarchco capitalists will accept.
That’s one of the features of Intercoin.
Citation needed since PoS / PoW is the way Bitcoin uses to solve the many generals problem.
What will happen when the blockchain doesn't fit in a median harddrive?
The decentralization narrative will go away. Only a few people will have enough storage for the blockchain and you will go back to having to trust someone.
With a pruning client you only need to store a small subset of the blockchain and there are no major changes in regards to trust. Your client still verifies every single transaction, but it removes data from the chain that it won't need anymore in the future (e.g., an old transaction that already has been spent).
With a SPV client your client only stores the chain headers and then only requests the required data from a server. SPV clients need a small amount of resources and can run on mobile phones. At the same time most of the important functionality (transaction signing, transaction verification, ...) happens still locally and the level of trust that you need to put into the servers is quite small.
The blockchain is currently at 160~GB, and I believe it will grow around <60GB a year. [1] In 10 years it may be ~760GB, but the median hard drive shouldn't be too far from this.
If you want to be a "Big Boy" country, you have to have your own monetary policy and currency. The problem is, managing your monetary policy and currency is really difficult. Countries that experience hyper-inflation are usually ones where monetary policy isn't done right. The other side of it is, when you do have the right monetary policy and currency controls, it allows to survive and possibly thrive in the financial world.
> The present currency of Ecuador is the United States dollar.
There are a number of countries who's currencies are pegged to the US dollar at fixed exchange rates. Notably Hong Kong, as well as gulf states such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.
This means their central banks have very limited scope to control domestic money supply and interest rates via monetary policy.
So it kinda does make sense they accept it, since they can ultimately use it.
It's almost like cryptocurrency zealots don't know shit about system design or something.
Actually you mean central banking enables these things. The whole point of central banking is double spending and money creation.
And the governing body of a central bank will likely have an agency problem. There is a significant incentive to capture some of the growth in the markets that use the currency via manipulation of the money supply. The market would prefer that nobody be in a position to capture that growth, because then everybody wins in an expansion, but then the downside is that everybody loses in a contraction. But then again, the market also prefers a currency with a stable value.
The fixed coin-creation schedule in Bitcoin was intended to remove any central authority for currency creation. But as it turns out, it's really hard to predict the demand for a currency that far into the future.
For a long time, the old standard, gold, was mined, refined, and coined at roughly the same rate as economic growth. The world economy grew by 2-3% per year, and the total gold supply grew by 2-3% per year. So gold was a very stable currency. It took large movements of metal, such as Mansa Musa going on Hajj, or the exploration and exploitation of the Americas, to push the markets out of tolerance.
Central banks have the capability to replicate that stability. But they do not. They skim off the top with monetary inflation that outpaces economic growth, to make currency that is held slowly lose its buying power, and prices slowly rise over time. The public justification is that currency that appreciates in value is spent less frequently, but that buying power has to go somewhere. It doesn't go to the people already holding currency. It goes to the one that creates the new money.
I'm not certain that cryptocurrencies have the ability to mint new coins at exactly the rate of economic growth and also distribute the new coins fairly. At the least, spends within the system could be gamed to simulate growth that does not actually exist, and at the worst, someone could figure out how to profit from that.
I can't count how many people there are who assume that because the problem is too hard for them, they need the government to intervene.
> but at 1000x the energy expenditure and with no guarantee of avoiding a 51% attack by a coordinated network of rogue actors.
Was double-spending a major problem prior to 1917? No, because there were assets that couldn't be double spent to move around (cash) as well as a somewhat decentralized trust-based system between banks that didn't fail just because the government wasn't there to hold your hand. We don't need cryptocurrencies for decentralized banking transactions, but they could definitely optimize the system and bridge the gap for the modern world, where money moves to the other side of the world frequently (not v0 Bitcoin-based protocols like you are familiar with, but assets which use a combination of proof-of-stake and master nodes which prioritize reputation in the system over computational power -- Dash is one example, although not yet good enough for this purpose). I suspect the environmental/economic cost of maintaining such a network would be much less than physically moving cash or gold around for backbone transactions.
One somewhat useful (although still not without controversy) function central banks perform (and really, it's mostly the US Fed for most of the world's financial system) is indeed clearing bulk transactions between banks worldwide. However, the true value is the ability to reverse "mistakes" or theft -- for a VERY short time, we should note -- although this is also a negative if you are on your government's naughty list. Cryptocurrencies enable both more autonomy (the Saudi government wouldn't necessarily be able to freeze the assets of a dissenting citizen who is trying to escape, for example), and less ability to reverse mistakes, so I am torn on whether or not any existing cryptos would be ideal for this role, although I'm sure emerging cryptos/upgrades will continue to be better suited. In any case, it's kind of a tangent to the whole central bank discussion.
>> It's almost like cryptocurrency zealots don't know shit
This is a straw man. The article does not advocate for cryptocurrencies at all.
Bitcoin's transation rate and energy use are a big deal.
But Bitcoin does solve the problem of the central bank itself creating too much money, which has been an issue in the past and is generally recognized to be a big temptation on the part of governments in general.
I'm not saying it's going to replace any major currency, just that there is a goal Bitcoin is meeting not mentioned above.
But this is one of the main things central banks do. They have a monopoly to counterfeit money. And in conjunction with their affiliated government people are forced to use it to pay taxes.
No. That's not what counterfeiting is. Counterfeiting is creating imitation money to be passed off as the genuine article.
Don't have an exhaustive list of financial panics offhand, but for ex:
Panic of 1837 was thought to be as bad as it was in part bc central banks weren't strong enough to step in
American economy recovered from Great Depression in part due to increased govt spending in ww2
Panic of 1907: Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan acted as financial backstop
2008 financial crisis response led largely by central banks
China's stock market is managed very tightly by central bank
1) That interest rate movements follow the economy, not the other way around. This is false if you simply consider a different time frame for action. If you look at the graphs next to one another it may appear that his theory is correct, but if you consider a longer term causality ... then he's wrong and the bankers are right.
2) More disturbingly - he basically looks at post-war China, German, Japan and Korea as examples of where you can achieve 'high growth' without the neoclassical market liberalism type approach.
This is ridiculous. It's very difficult to find value creating projects in mature economies. When your country is flat on it's back after a war - it's dam easy - especially if that country needs to 'rebuild what was already there' after a war (i.e. social/governmental institutions intact) - as opposed to 'building what was never there on the back of nothing' i.e. African countries.
Heyzeus everyone knows this. Germany had no factories for gosh sakes. Maybe build some factories? Some roads? Power stations? etc. etc..
Most civilized nations rebounds sharply after disaster and it can be done with 'government intervention' because the investments needed are generally fairly obvious and lend to that governmental kind of stuff anyhow, i.e. infrastructure.
So basically, his primary claims are false, the second one, surely so.
Surely there are other options than having Central Banks - and they could feasibly operate more mechanically etc. - and surely we could just have stricter rules about money ... but if we want monetary policy of some kind, well then there's going to be a 'Central Bank' however you want to call it, 'committee' or whatever. Even if we go crypto, if there is flex in that crypto, then someone will have to decide how that algorithm works and evolves, and that team will effectively be 'the central bank'.
TLDR: Banks regularly collapsed and not just because of fraud, but started to collapse less as they got regulated more. The system functioned (for certain values of "functioned"), but shockingly enough the man on the street did not turn out to be better at evaluating a bank's solvency than central banks. They were of course also less able to bail themselves out if they misjudged a bank's solvency.
I don't really see why fractional reserve banking is necessary.
Also, since most full reserve proposals don't ban credit creation altogether (i.e. you can still issue and exchange IOU notes), but simply restrict credit creation and acceptance by institutions calling themselves banks, you end up with the economy relying on an unregulated shadow banking system even more prone to booms and busts to fulfil credit needs.
Theoretically if it is that much of an anathema one could have a 1:1 reserve and explicit money market style transactions for everything but the question is what would be gained? The liquid cash would be "safe" from bank runs at the cost of guaranteed losses to depreciation and storage fees. Keeping it insured and interest generating is a winner as an option.
1. Depositors will have to explicitly give up/lock their funds for a set period of time if the funds are to be lent out and they are to earn interest. Early withdrawals come with a significant fee. This makes bank runs very unlikely, eliminating the need for a central bank. The longer you want to lend the money for, the higher the interest. But you can also lend money overnight.
2. No money creation, leading to proper alignment of time preferences of investors/consumers and businesses. Interest rates correctly reflect this time preference. If money represents a claim on real resources, then a business can only use as many of these resources for investment as consumers are willing to forego consuming. Interest rates reflect the actual supply and demand of resources/consumption at different time horizons and do not get artificially "set" or otherwise manipulated.
Because of these two properties, the boom-bust leverage cycle is greatly dampened, if not completely eliminated.
(1) Because maturity transformation is no longer permitted, every time somebody wishes to take out, say, a mortgage, the bank has to find somebody who has >$200k they're not even going to consider spending for quarter of a century. As a result, costs of borrowing go massively up, which is bad for everybody except for a small proportion of rentiers sufficiently wealthy to be entirely unworried by liquidity. Joe Sixpack proves to be even less adept at managing an overnight lending portfolio than full time professional bankers, and loses money as a result.
(2) The money supply is artificially "set" at a particular level on the basis of the unambiguously false assumption that real resources do not change over time rather than being allowed to fluctuate and grow to properly align itself with creditworthy borrowers' growth projections in a way commensurate with price stability. The boom bust cycle is replaced by permanent bust.
2. The money supply could grow predictably, e.g. like Friedman's proposal of replacing the Fed with a computer that expands the money supply in a predictable manner.
2. Friedman's k% rule is better than a fixed money supply, but it's still every bit as arbitrary and further removed from the relevant market indicators of resource constraints (creditworthy borrower demand and price inflation) than the current system.
Another way to prevent credit expanding indefinitely would be to eliminate fractional reserve lending. But that wouldn't work out well for governments who often borrowed from banks to finance wars and other actions that were not supported by their citizens.
(Which, as a side note, is something I would be more than curious to know from cryptocoiners, how they are going to stop fractional reserve banking to flood crypto currency supply, as for sure there is no regulator that is going to stop that.)
Frances Coppola [0] has written fairly extensively on this topic, as has the Bank of England [1]
[0] http://www.coppolacomment.com/2017/10/money-creation-in-post... [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
There is no need for double entry accounting trickery nor loans to create money. All bank needs to do is to say that they owe me money and they have created money at that very moment.[1] Simple as that. And they do create money without lending all the time! It is nothing special. When a bank "pays interest" to your account, do you think there exist some new loan that is needed for that money to exist? Nope. Bank just decides that now it is time to add some more money to your account. That's it. Or when bank pays salaries to the personnel or dividends to the shareholders? Nope. No lending associated whatsoever. Just money added to their bank accounts. (for simplicity's sake, I assume that the stakeholders have their bank accounts in the same bank)
[1] Which to me implies that there is not that much interesting happening at that point. I mean, a bank could enter a few centillion dollars to my account, and technically the money would be created. But in practice that is laughable. Nobody in their right mind would imagine a second that the bank would be solvent and actually be able to pay me the money, so in reality that money does not exists (no credit...). So even if the traditional model of banks lending deposits forward is technically even more wrong than the banks create money from double entry accounting trickery, in reality that describes much better what actually economically is happening in the financial industry. But that is just my opinion...
I don't know why you're calling double accounting "trickery". It's literally the way a bank operates. I mean, it's enshrined in law for god's sake. A public company has to publish accounts every year, and the double-entry analysis you see in most discussions of money creation shows where assets are entered on the balance sheet.
Mainly my own personal thinking. No other sources.
> Surely interest on deposits is accounted for as a funding cost and is paid out of the bank's revenues (same for staff costs).
Of course. But before those are paid, they do not (need to) exist anywhere (but in the profit account if you want to take an accounting view)
> I don't know why you're calling double accounting "trickery".
Because that's what these people claim that double entry accounting is some magic wand that is needed to create money. You could operate a bank without double entry accounting that would not change the economics of the bank operations anyhow. You do not need to have double entry accounting to make a loan nor write an IOU. I Can write you an IOU that says that beefield will pay 10 bucks to the holder of this paper and you could use that as a money to buy stuff at least from me and my mom. Not sure if anyone else would trust that... No lending, no double entry accounting needed.
I'd suggest reading a summary of the Basel rules before contributing to a discussion on money creation and banking. Wikipedia has a halfway decent one.
There will for sure be a regulator to stop that. In fact, there are already numerous regulators to stop it. If you want to hold deposits for your customers who happen to be California residents, then you are a bank and will need a banking license from the California Department of Business Oversight. California does not care what currency those deposits are denominated in. I expect this to be true everywhere else in the world, cryptocurrency is not some alternative universe where the old rules won't apply.
And I am not familiar with Californian regulations, but I think there may be some challenges in trying to enforce the regulations if a californian makes a bitcoin deposit to a remote chinese "bank"?
Central Banks exist to be a monopoly creator of money and credit for the purposes of manipulating the market. They exist to execute macroeconomic policy.
You can see the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfNgntAQ6EM&t=35s
> There are overcapacities in the banking sector of some countries” in the Eurozone. Which country could he have been talking about? Germany boasts by far the largest number of banks – about ten times as many as the global centre of international finance, the UK.
Same here in Austria. Per capita, the people employed in the banking sector is significantly higher than in other countries.
I work in this sector, and the overcapacity is notable. To question this is basically a statement of ignorance.
> 80% of these banks in Germany are local, not-for-profit community banks, which do not pay bankers’ bonuses, and which serve ordinary people and small firms, creating a strong SME sector (the main employer in most countries).
Without knowing the German banking sector that well, this is almost certainly hyperbole.
I believe he is talking about Genossenschaftsbanken, Raiffeisen et al. There's a historical reason why these banks have most of the banking licenses issued (the 80% he alludes to), but that reason is no longer relevant. It's also misleading, since most of these banks are tiny, basically your typical savings & loan.
> Why is the ECB taking policies that are killing the majority of banks in the Eurozone – the beneficial not-for-profit community banks – while helping big banks with its asset purchases?
Because it's an anachronism. There was a time in Austria when we had the saying "A Raika (Raiffeisen Bank) and Post in every village", regardless of the village size. This is where the insane 80%-number comes from!
This is horribly inefficient. It might have been a valid approach at a time when everything was rural and a village was effectively a microcosm, but in today's world with online banking and such, it's horribly outdated.
Operating these banks costs money. These costs are passed on to the customers. Reducing the banking sector size is therefore in the interest of the customers.
> Central banks have proposed the abolition of cash
No, they haven't. Some guys employed there might have toyed with the idea as a thought experiment, but nobody even close to policy-making has proposed such nonsense, not that it would work anyway.
> Central banks have proposed the introduction of central bank cybercurrency
I'd trust a central bank far more than Coinbase or any other of the centralized controllers of currently-so-popular cybercurrencies.
I've spotted numerous other smells in the article, but the above were the easiest to point out.
Yet it's usually a hassle to find an ATM in Austria (which is the most important thing related to banking that I can't do online), because ATMs are usually only located at banks.
Compare that to the US where every other shop as a private ATM that you can use. They usually charge $2 or something like that, but (better) banks usually refund those fees at the end of the month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene_extinction
We are running out of topsoil, fresh water, fish, pollinators, oil... the oceans are becoming an acid mess full of plastic, species are going extinct, forests and the ecosystems they contain are disappearing.
And all of this has been done in the name of a dumb belief system we call modern economics. A better name for it is collective suicide, because that's what it is in the long term.
The idea that you can have a bunch of banks making infinite money to fund an endless amount of economic activities for infinite people has nothing to do with reality: a finite planet with finite resources with finite species that can only go extinct once, and a fragile ecosystem that needs to be taken care of and is beyond our means to repair.
Maybe we don't need central banks, but we need fucking reason governing our economy, not the greed of a few shortsighted apes.
Yet, apart from the problem of humans still having to be in actual close physical proximity to each other for economic activity, which results in housing problems in major cities, I do not see the signs of overpopulation or too much economic activity in Western countries. If anything, the situation in terms of the ecology seems to be getting better, not worse.
Deindustrialization of the West led to improvements in ecology as well, I imagine.
Is it enough? Aren't these changes being more than offset by increased emissions elsewhere?
> Deindustrialization of the West led to improvements in ecology as well, I imagine.
It seems doubtful, since production didn't stop but simply moved to other places, often with much looser regulatory regimes.
Then, if factories move from one country to another, with a higher carbon footprint, the global emissions don't go down. You are just moving [while increasing] emissions to somewhere else.
So, the "cleaner environment" is just a local phenomenon and a global level it is not the case.
Your comment is complete off topic.
Please read the hacker news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Everyone here is trying to take a short break and learn and talk about current events. It's a lot more fun when we're not all yelling at each other.
There are a couple which apply here:
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I find Austrian ideas very interesting. Yet the usefulness of an economic theory can be demonstrated in two ways:
1. How well the implemented ideas/policies work in practice. This is usually difficult to evaluate, as it involves counterfactuals (we never know what would have happened if other policies had been followed). Sometimes one may be able to draw a comparison between two similar economies/time periods that followed different paths, however.
2. How well the economic theory predicts the effect of certain policies / what is going to happen. The track record of the Austrian school is poor on this one; the most recent example being the prediction of the consequences of Fed's response to the "great recession" of 2009. As far as I know, both Austrian academics and practitioners (Robert Murphy, Peter Schiff) predicted that the Fed's actions would result in high price inflation, weak dollar, and would generally not be effective in promoting economic growth. Both have been wrong so far, and investors that have listened would have lost money.
Of course, you can say that the economic growth has been "malinvestment" that will need to be corrected, but without a time horizon such predictions are useless. It's been a decade now since 2009. Has the US economy been malinvesting since the abandonment of the gold standard in the 70s? At what point can we say that the Fed did a reasonably good job at stabilizing the economy and promoting economic growth?
If you give your money to a bank it won't be sitting in an account you have the key to, it'll be the bank's to control and they'll be free to lend it to other people.
This might even be a desirable state of affairs: money which you don't give to a bank collects 0% interest.
However, I am unsure to how the latter will be solved without a central, trusted party. What is the digital analogue of a passport or driver's license, a piece of identification that is hard to forge?
To add on to why fractional reserve will be hard to implement with cryptocurrencies, another unexplained problem is the issue of collateral backed by a volatile asset.
If that underlying asset rises in value, then the effective interest rate would be equal to the original interest rate + % increase in value; if the opposite occurs, a decrease in value, the 'bank' in this scenario might lose money on that lend.
You might argue that a digital stable-coin is a possible solution. But a digital asset backed by a physical object is probably bound to encounter regulations; and the performance of a stable-coin backed by algorithms is currently unknown to work.
These are two hard problems that have to be solve before fractional reserve is viable on a blockchain.
I'm imagining a contract with a bank. As in, you literally go and talk to Chase bank and draw up a contract and give them Bitcoin and they promise to give it back to you later plus interest.
Such a system is very possible today, and in that sense Bitcoin _does_ support fractional reserve. Fractional reserve is not a feature you explicitly add, it's an emergent property of a banking system, you really don't need to do very much to "support" it.
It's true that today you would probably find it difficult to find someone who will take your Bitcoin and pay you Bitcoin-denominated interest with it. However, there's no fundamental reason why it couldn't happen.
The process is: You give your Bitcoin to a bank. It is put into a UTXO which they control, and you don't control. In exchange, you have a balance in the bank which you can withdraw when you choose. Your balance is "virtual bitcoin", but is still real money, because it represents your ability to ask the bank to pay people for things. (By swiping your debit card)
At the same time, the bank has the original on-chain Bitcoin, and is free to use it however it wants, probably by lending it out to somebody else.
In this way, there is now more Bitcoin than there were previously. Fiat currency is not involved in any way. I'm not an economist, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same as the difference between M0 and M1.
If anything some of the larger blockchains “naturally” move towards a “central bank” like model.
Say you have a blockchain that requires you to sync 100’s of terabytes if not petabytes of information to setup a new node and 100’s of gigabytes a day to keep it upto date.
It’s not going to be feasible for individuals to talk to it directly.
Now you already have exchanges that keep ledgers other than the blockchain and that already do most of their transactions off the blockchain these are your banks.
In this model the blockchain essentially offers only value store for the exchanges and keeps only the exchanges honest this is essentially your central reserve.
The blockchain offers also a consensus protocol where either the miners if it’s PoW or the exchanges if it’s PoS hold the important seats, that’s your board of directors.
So yes I don’t think that current crypto is incapable of mimicking the model of banking we currently use some already do it unintentionally to some extent.
But currently there isn’t a single crypto that offers a built in fractional reserve and credit system as part of its blockchain its off possible to implement it.
> supported by current mainstream cryptos
There's nothing that needs to be supported. Bitcoin already "supports" it, in the same way that cash does. All you have to do is find a counterparty and draw up a contract.
> it’s not practiced
That part's mostly true because with this kind of volatility who would risk owing you a bunch of bitcoin, but loans involving Bitcoin are starting to appear: https://saltlending.com/
I wouldn't necessarily trust https://www.bitbond.com/ with _my_ bitcoin, but theoretically I could, and this is starting to look a lot like fractional reserve.
If you want to do fractional reserve in say crypto you need to have a blockchain where the “bank” can print crypto like they do with current currency until then it’s off the books accountign or a ponzy scheme like MtGox.
Okay, I think maybe what we're arguing about is definitions. I'm trying to say, "off the books accounting" is perfectly legitimate fractional reserve. It is not possible to create more on-chain Bitcoin, but something which looks exactly like fractional reserve is possible today and would end up creating "off-chain" Bitcoins, increasing the Bitcoin money supply without increasing the number of on-chain Bitcoin beyond 21 million.
Maybe you don't think that such a system should be called Fractional Reserve, I guess that's where we disagree.
> you can’t loan more bitcoins than you have
Fractional reserve isn't about loaning more than you have. In fact, kind of the the entire point is that you must loan less than you have: you loan out at most some fraction of your deposits and reserve the rest.
> if you are using two units of account that’s not a fractional reserve
The system I described only has one unit of account, Bitcoin. It doesn't matter whether they're on-chain or "virtual", they're both Bitcoin, and are worth the exact same amount.
> If you loan less than your total then again it’s not fractional lending it’s simply lending.
You have misunderstood fractional reserve banking. Banks are not allowed to give out more money than they have received in deposits. Here's Wikipedia:
> Fractional-reserve banking is the practice whereby a bank accepts deposits, makes loans or investments, but is required to hold reserves equal to only a fraction of its deposit liabilities.
Say the reserve ratio is 10%. Then, given $100, the bank is allowed to give out $90 and must keep $10 on hand.
Ofc it matters because those bitcoins cannot be used as part of the bitcoin network they aren't bitcoins at point at best they are some weirdly defined bitcoin option. As long as I won't be able to spend those bitcoins as bitcoins and as long as it's not enforced by the network itself this won't really be fractional reserve banking, or at least not what people consider FRB since CAR is an important part of it.
>You have misunderstood fractional reserve banking. Banks are not allowed to give out more money than they have received in deposits. Here's Wikipedia:
I think you misunderstood my point I should've been perhaps more clear about how money generation through fractional reserves works currently and how multipliers on deposits work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation I assumed based on the topic we've discussed so far "creating new bitcoins" it was a given state.
I'm not versed in economics, and generally find it overwhelming to look into, because of deeply-set political opinions and implications buried in all of it. Is "economic school" a political choice (differing goals) or a choice of tooling/methodology?
That...depends on the “school”, and exactly the bounds of the “political”. The choice between the Austrian school and most of the rest of economics is between an interpretive framework that eschews empirical science as inappropriate for the field of economics (Austrian school) vs. various approaches that at least outwardly aspire to the norms of empirical science (most of the rest of economics.)
Among the schools espousing empiricism, confirmation bias (and thus political preconceptions) still plays a role between, say, neoclassical schools like Chicago and Keynesianism and it's offshoots, but that's at least in part because economics is hard due to confounding variables, and actually avoiding influence of confirmation bias in such circumstances is difficult even when intelligent people are acting in the best of faith.
Re: my previous comment, that, in short, money and credit are like any other markets.
If you're interested in a gentle introduction to the Austrian school of thought I recommend the book Man, Economy, and State. Skip the final section of the book entitled Power and Market. [1]
[0] https://mises.org/library/economic-science-and-austrian-meth...
[1] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-ma...
Empiricism is a philosophical approach; Austrian economics isn't any closer to “philosophy” than empirical economics is, it just is closer to the particular (and widely rejected in most of modern Western philosophy though it survives in a form within some schools of Christian theology as well as Austrian economics) philosophical belief that claims about material facts can be justified a priori by deduction from axioms alone without reference to a posteriori knowledge.
I ask because I've seen this claim made about Austrian economics lots and lots, but haven't seen anything telling a consistent story -- just a lot of "it's coming, keep waiting".
Seriously interested in seeing these claims either supported by a real world narrative.
Edit: I changed "proved" to "demonstrated" ;-)
Continually proven wrong again and again and again but sure to be right eventually.
Damn those irrational actors. Why can't everyone be as rational as an Austrian.
The central bank's job is still important, it is lender of last resort and it is an important regulatory body for the banking and financial sector. It is something we need if we want to prevent those financial crisis like in 2008.