banks create money

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Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

The way monetary economics and banking is taught in many — maybe most — universities is very misleading and what this book does is help people explain how the mechanics of the system work.” David Miles, Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England “It is amazing that more than a century after Hartley Withers’s ‘The Meaning of Money’ and 80 years after Keynes’s ‘Treatise on Money’, the fundamentals of how banks create money still need to be explained. Yet there plainly is such a need, and this book meets that need, with clear exposition and expert marshalling of the relevant facts. Warmly recommended to the simply curious, the socially concerned, students and those who believe themselves experts, alike. Everyone can learn from it.”

WHAT DO BANKS DO? 2.1. The confusion around banking 2.2. Popular perceptions of banking 1: the safe-deposit box 2.2.1. We do not own the money we have put in the bank 2.3. Popular perceptions of banking 2: taking money from savers and lending it to borrowers 2.4. Three forms of money 2.5. How banks create money by extending credit 2.6. Textbook descriptions: the multiplier model 2.7. Problems with the textbook model 2.8. How money is actually created 3. THE NATURE AND HISTORY OF MONEY AND BANKING 3.1. The functions of money 3.2. Commodity theory of money: money as natural and neutral 3.2.1.

The term ‘money supply’, usually refers to cash and bank deposits taken together, with the latter being by far the most significant. On the Bank of England’s standard definition of the money supply, known as M4, this type of money now makes up 97.4 per cent of all the money used in the economy.‡ In this book we refer to the money created by banks as commercial bank money. 2.5. How banks create money by extending credit The vast majority of money in our economy was created by commercial banks. In effect what the UK and most other countries currently use as their primary form of money is not physical cash created by the state, but the liabilities of banks. These liabilities were created through the accounting process that banks use when they make loans (Section 2.8).


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

Banks had retained, albeit imperfectly, their ability to create substitutes that could function as money. In order to make the most of their money creation powers, banks were forced to innovate in order to find ways around the new legislation. The use of cheques became common as they made it easier for businesses and individuals to make payments to each other using bank-created money (bank liabilities, or ‘deposits’) in place of cash. At the same time, the development of wholesale money markets (where banks could borrow from each other) and the willingness of the Bank of England to provide funds on demand to banks in good health, further reduced the amount of Bank of England money that banks needed to hold, relative to their customer deposits: “[C]entral banks have facilitated settlement in central bank money by allowing low-cost transfers across their books, either of gross amounts (above all for wholesale payments, facilitating this by providing banks with cheap intraday liquidity) or of multilateral net amounts (more usually for retail payments, minimising the amount of liquidity that participating banks need to hold).”

In all the examples below, we ignore all balance sheet items apart from the ones in question. We also assume that balance sheet items are zero before the transaction in question takes place. This is purely to keep the examples simple and uncluttered. Creating money by making loans to customers How do banks create money by making loans? In this example, a self-employed builder, Jack, walks into MegaBank and asks to borrow £10,000 to buy a new van and some power tools. (Chapter 3 will show that loans to productive businesses like this make up just a small proportion of all bank lending.) Jack signs a contract with the back confirming that he will repay £10,000 over a period of five years, plus interest.

So if the numbers that banks add to your bank account are not money, but just credit, then there must be some credit risk attached to that money. In other words, there must be a risk that the bank won’t be able to repay you. The Bank of England makes this argument in a distinction between cash and bank-created money – the 2010 Q3 Quarterly Bulletin states: “Bank of England notes are a form of ‘central bank money’, which the public holds without incurring credit risk. This is because the central bank is backed by the government” (p.302). They imply that cash has no credit risk because it is backed by the central bank, which is in turn backed by the government.


pages: 248 words: 57,419

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

The true explanation is that a dozen or so central banks have printed nearly $7 trillion worth of fiat money between 1971 and 2007 (and $3 trillion more subsequently) in order to manipulate the value of their currencies so as to achieve strong export-led growth. Exhibit 2.4 lists the countries responsible. EXHIBIT 2.4 Foreign Exchange Reserves Source: IMF How It Works Exactly how do central banks create money and accumulate foreign exchange reserves? China has the largest amount of foreign exchange reserves. Therefore, it will be used as the case study to illustrate how central banks accumulate reserves. In 2007, China’s trade surplus with the United States was $259 billion. In other words, China sold the United States $259 billion more in goods and services than the United States sold to China that year.

Despite the massive government borrowing that was required to fund that deficit, the interest rate the government pays on its benchmark bond is 2 percent, which is extraordinarily low. The government demand to borrow money is very high, but the government supply of new fiat money (i.e., the money created by the Fed) is also extraordinarily high. Fiat money creation is financing the government’s budget deficit. When a central bank creates money and uses it to finance the government’s budget deficit, it is said that the central bank is monetizing the debt. With QE1 and QE2, the Fed monetized part the U.S. government debt. That is the main reason U.S. government bond yields—and all other interest rates in the country which are benchmarked off the government bond yield—are so low.

Commodities generally perform well in an inflationary environment and suffer in times of disinflation or deflation. Gold and silver benefit most from quantitative easing, which undermines public confidence in the national currency. 2. Stocks tend to rise (1) in a healthy economic environment, (2) when central banks create money and pump it into the financial markets (so long as they don’t cause too much inflation), (3) when the government runs a budget surplus and crowds in the private sector, and (4) when the trade deficit is larger than the budget deficit. The last two will be explained below. Stocks tend to perform badly when inflation at the CPI level exceeds 4 percent, in a weak economic environment, and, particularly, during a severe period of debt deflation. 3.


pages: 233 words: 71,775

The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy

banking crisis, banks create money, carbon tax, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, full employment, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, green new deal, high net worth, Jeremy Corbyn, land value tax, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, offshore financial centre, price elasticity of demand, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, savings glut, seigniorage, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing

And the deficit that gave rise to the Treasury bond or gilt has now been replaced by newly created money, which just goes to prove that this is exactly what a government does when it runs a deficit – it creates government-made money. If you don’t believe this you wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, the person who in my opinion was the second greatest economist of the last century, J. K. Galbraith, said: The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.8 He was right: the process is so simple that we’re repelled by it. But now you know it’s true, and the Bank of England said so in 2014. It’s also true that the UK’s quantitative easing funding has effectively cancelled government debt, as evidenced by the fact that the Bank of England now hands the interest paid to it by the Treasury as a result of it owning government debt straight back to the Treasury from whence it came.

First of all, the best, and in reality the main reason to use taxation is that tax lets a government reclaim the money it has spent into the economy, in order to stop the money supply over-expanding. I have shown that both the government and the banks can create money out of thin air, and do so. In the case of commercial banks control is maintained by requiring that loans are repaid. That process of loan repayment, as noted above, quite literally destroys bank-created money. That’s important: loan repayment stops the amount of money in the economy increasing without check, which would result in inflation. It is just as necessary that the government has available to it a means of destroying the money it can create and spend at will into the economy, and that mechanism is taxation.

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks: Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits. In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits. Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system. Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to maintain the resilience of the financial system.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Hence, via the issuance of debt, commercial banks create money, credit, and purchasing power. The vast majority of what we consider money is created in this manner. Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up between 97%–98% of the amount currently in circulation. Only 2%–3% is in the form of notes and liabilities of the government (McLeay et al., 2014). How much debt commercial banks issue and how that debt is utilized are therefore topics of great importance. Rather than exchanging currency , most consumers use their bank deposits as a store of value and as the medium of exchange. Once a bank creates money by issuing debt, most people use that money to make and receive payments via their deposits rather than currency, especially as transactions today are mostly digital.

Although this liability previously did not exist, and hence does not have any physical representation in the form of currency, it is in effect an entry in the bank’s account. But as all these entries can be converted into currency, the instant it issues debt the commercial bank is creating new money. Hence, loans create deposits and not the other way around. Th manner in which commercial banks create money by making loans or issuinig credit may be hard to digest if this is the first time you are reading about it, but it is how money is created today. When a commercial bank issues a loan to a client, for example to buy a house, it does not give this loan in cash. Instead, it credits their account with a deposit that amounts to the mortgage.

As such, they are responsible for ensuring how much debt is issued by commercial banks, without which they would not be able to control the supply of money. This lever of control exists in the form of capital requirements . Capital requirements play an important role in the production of debt-based money as they offer, among other things, a safeguard to a bank run. Since a bank creates money as it makes out loans, they are at risk of running out of physical currency in the case that a large number of the depositors decide to withdraw their deposits. To address this risk, commercial banks are obliged to hold some amount of currency to meet deposit withdrawals and other outflows, but using physical banknotes to carry out these large volume transactions would be extremely cumbersome.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Many of the headlines used to describe the Covid-19 economic aid programme involved the printing of banknotes: the Fed was ‘firing up the printing press’, the European Central Bank (ECB) was ‘priming the money-printing gun’ or, for those of a more digital bent, the ‘Money Printer Go Brrr’ meme. Evocative, but misleading; just as ‘sending’ money isn’t what banks do to make payments, ‘printing’ isn’t the way that central banks create money. Paradoxically, printing banknotes and putting them into circulation through the banking system does not typically increase the money supply. Central banks create money by increasing reserves, the deposits that commercial banks hold at central banks, and reserves could exist quite happily in a world without cash. While the private sector has ample motive to promote a move away from cash – the banks to lower their costs, the merchants to reduce commercial friction and overheads, and the card industry, wallet and e-payment providers to increase their revenue – the public sector is also keen.

For them, this is real money that they can use whenever they need to make a payment. It is the same as having the coins in their purses, but without the bother. Meanwhile, the borrowers also have their 75 coins to spend as they need. So by taking the deposited coins and making the loan, the bank has just created 75 gold coins. Abracadabra! Modern banks ‘create’ money in much the same way. Customers deposit their money at banks which in turn use much of it to make loans. The banks deposit the rest of the money at central banks to ensure there’s sufficient liquidity to meet the demands of customers who want to withdraw their money. Banks can pay out the proceeds of loans in cash or deposit the proceeds in borrowers’ accounts.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And the loan is not created out of deposits: Loans create deposits, not the other way around’ (Pettifor, 2014, p 25). 67 This means that they don’t necessarily wait until they (the bank) first has a certain level of reserves. ‘In the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and look for the reserves later’ (Alan Holmes Senior Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1969), cited by Positive Money at http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/how-banks-create-money/proof-that-banks-create-money/). 68 Pettifor (2006), p 56. Geoff Mulgan uses the metaphor of ‘predation’, but in most cases this is too strong: predators kill their victims rather than just free-ride on them: Mulgan, G. (2013) The locust and the bee: Predators and creators in capitalism’s future, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 69 Ryan-Collins et al (2011). 70 Pettifor (2006), p 62. 71 See David Harvey’s Limits to capital for an analysis of fictitious capital ((1982), London: Verso). 72 As Hudson comments, ‘Finance and banking courses are taught from the perspective of how to obtain interest and asset-price gains through credit creation or by using other peoples’ money, not how an economy may best steer savings and credit to achieve the best long-term development.’

Of course, there are defences of interest on credit, but before we consider them, there’s a common misunderstanding of bank lending and where credit comes from that we need to rectify. It’s a misunderstanding that has long allowed the financial sector to escape serious scrutiny, and there’s a risk the delusion may persist. How banks create money for nothing and charge us interest for it The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending. (Martin Wolf)61 I believe it is absolutely fundamental to understand that banks do not intermediate already existing money.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

That is why people hold money, despite the costs of doing so, relative to high-yielding assets or desirable goods and services. Money needs to be safe. Indeed, people keep their money in banks because this is normally safer and more convenient than if it is under a mattress. Moreover, people do not just deposit the money they have in banks. As Mr Milne also reminds us, ‘banks create money by lending’.12 Indeed, nearly all the money in a moderately sophisticated modern economy is a by-product of bank lending – the creation of credit – by these private businesses. Banks, in turn, are profit-seeking, risk-taking financial intermediaries. Inevitably, these institutions are least safe during a crisis, which is precisely when everybody is most concerned about their safety.

Finally, since money creation would no longer need private debt, the level of such debt could fall dramatically. Indeed, in the transition, the government could use the excess of the total supply of money over its own debts to fund a dramatic decline in private debt, through buy-backs. I would add to these benefits that the extinction of conventional bank-created money would almost certainly shrink the financial sector, reduce the aggregate incomes earned by bankers and so improve the distribution of income. The fiscal implications alone would be dramatic. According to an important International Monetary Fund working paper on the Chicago Plan by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, total bank deposits in the US are around 180 per cent of GDP.41 Assume the demand for money merely grows in line with nominal gross domestic product, at about 5 per cent a year.

This consists of currency, again, and the deposits of banks at Federal Reserve banks (that is, the central bank). The monetary base is the government-created money in the system: it is a liability of government. The rest of the money supply is the liability of banks. The monetary base is sometimes called ‘outside money’ and the bank-created money supply ‘inside money’. Until the recent crisis, virtually all M2 was inside money – a by-product of the rapidly expanding lending activities of private financial intermediaries. The monetary base barely grew. In the early years of the crisis, however, lending to the private sector by financial intermediaries shrank.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

In Asia, the local commercial banking systems responded to this increase in their available reserves in the way that one would expect, and they accelerated their loan growth and their money creation. That commercial banks, and not central banks, create most of the money we spend every day is a fact that is still not fully understood properly by all investors. The most eloquent description of how they do so still comes from the pen of John Kenneth Galbraith: The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent. The deposits of the Bank of Amsterdam (1609–1791) were, according to the instruction of the owner, subject to transfer to others in settlement of accounts. The coin on deposit served no less as money by being in a bank and being subject to transfer by the stroke of a primitive pen.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Money Whence it Came, Where it Went, 1975 The reserves commercial banks hold today with the central bank fulfil the role that gold once did. As long as they hold sufficient reserves with the central bank and meet other regulatory requirements, they are free to create money just as Galbraith describes. This commercial bank-created money does not usually circulate as bank notes, a privilege still retained by governments in most if not all jurisdictions, but it is created in the form of a transfer to the borrower that becomes their deposit. The borrower spends those new deposits on, say, their house purchase and the house seller then spends the deposits and thus new money has been created and circulates in the economy.

Indeed, just as I wrote a recommendation that the company should buy shares of Citibank, the company was removing clients’ deposits from the same bank just in case the bank collapsed! However, my time was not wasted. Learning about how commercial banks work was the most valuable thing I have ever done in my career. There are many mysteries to commercial banking and many of them remain mysteries even to investors with decades of experience. How banks create money and how their balance sheets impact their earnings are crucial mechanisms that anyone investing in any stock market needs to understand. It may be that that understanding is rarely useful; but when it is useful, it is incredibly useful. That there were skunks among the Asian banking system was not hard to determine if you had already lived through a credit boom and bust.


pages: 310 words: 90,817

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Money that has an essentially stable or on trend appreciating purchasing power would be powerful competition to fractional-reserve deposits and government debt. Other components of the paper money infrastructure further enhance the state’s control over economic resources. There is the state-owned central bank. Central banking is usually profitable. The central bank creates money at almost zero cost and lends it to the banking sector at interest or it buys interest-bearing securities with the newly created money. This gain usually goes to the state. Obviously, to the extent that the central bank buys government bonds, the government pays interest to the central bank first and then collects the central bank’s profits later.

Furthermore, the direct monetization of government debt has been a constituting feature of central banks from the beginning. We have seen that it was one of the key objectives behind the founding of the Bank of England. From the start, the Bank of England was allowed to issue notes against obligations of the Crown. Central banks create money by buying things and paying for them by crediting the account of the seller with newly created money, thus monetizing whatever the central bank buys. Although this could, in theory, be practically anything, the state usually encourages the central bank to buy state debt. The official reason is that the central bank should not risk incurring losses by buying risky assets, and that it should thus mainly monetize safe government bonds.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

Many apparently ‘non-financial’ companies do these things too, but there are some specific functions that only financial companies can perform. Bank credit creation Most people know that banks ‘make money’, but this is usually understood to mean that they register big profits. Few realise that the phrase is literally true: banks create money in their credit operations. This topic is often poorly covered by Marxist writers, who can give the impression that banks merely take in deposits from a myriad of people and companies and then lend this money out to others. In other words, they see banks acting only as middlemen with existing sums of money.7 Banks do take in deposits, but the credit creation process is even more important and highlights one way in which command over society’s resources does not have to depend directly upon value production.

For example, the US Federal Reserve is the monopoly issuer of US dollar currency, as are other central banks with their own currencies, and a $20 bill costs only 10 cents to produce. Yet, the vast bulk of what we call money is created in quite a different way via the banking system. This happens through banks making loans. For example, a bank creates money by making a $200,000 mortgage loan to a property buyer, or a $50 million investment loan to a company, and credits their bank accounts with the funds. These funds in the borrower’s account should be seen as fictitious deposits, since they are created out of thin air by the bank and do not depend upon how much actual cash the bank has at its disposal at the time.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

Department of State, “Volume I” in Proceedings and Documents of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, July 1–22, 1944. 13 Hans‐Hermann Hoppe, “How Is Fiat Money Possible?” Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 7, no. 2 (1994). 14 This is an important but often underappreciated feature of government money. Because banks create money when they issue loans, the repayment of loans or the bankruptcy of the borrower leads to a reduction in the money supply. Money can have its supply increase or decrease depending on a variety of government and central bank decisions. 15 Source: World Bank. 16 Source: World Bank for all countries, and OECD.Stat for Euro area. 17 Source: OECD.Stat. 18 Steve Hanke and Charles Bushnell, “Venezuela Enters the Record Book: The 57th Entry in the Hanke‐Krus World Hyperinflation Table,” Studies in Applied Economics, no. 69 (December 2016). 19 This is termed the Cantillon Effect, after the Irish‐French economist Richard Cantillon, who explained it in the eighteenth century.

But this is not how a capital market functions in any modern economy today, thanks to the invention of the modern central bank and its incessant interventionist meddling in the most critical of markets. Central banks determine the interest rate and the supply of loanable funds through a variety of monetary tools, operating through their control of the banking system.6 A fundamental fact to understand about the modern financial system is that banks create money whenever they engage in lending. In a fractional reserve banking system similar to the one present all over the world today, banks not only lend the savings of their customers, but also their demand deposits. In other words, the depositor can call on the money at any time while a large percentage of that money has been issued as a loan to a borrower.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

How does a nation inflate its currency? There are two primary routes: maintaining very low interest rates encourages borrowing (which, with fractional reserve banking, results in the creation of more money); or direct injection by government or central banks of new money into the economy. This in turn can happen via the central bank creating money with which to buy government debt, or by government creating money and distributing it either to financial institutions (so they can make more loans) or directly to businesses and citizens. Those who say we are heading toward hyperinflation argue either that existing bailouts and stimulus actions by governments and central banks are inherently inflationary; or that, if the economy relapses, the Federal Reserve will create fresh money not only to buy government debt, but to bail out financial institutions once again.

But, this “re-set” would give us the opportunity — if we took advantage of it — to restructure our economic and financial systems to be more sustainable and resilient. The second strategy would consist of governments or central banks creating debt-free money. This is how economist Richard Douthwaite, founder of the organization FEASTA and editor of the book Fleeing Vesuvius, describes it: The solution is to have central banks create money out of nothing and to give it to their governments either to spend into use, or to pay off their debts, or give to their people to spend. In the eurozone, this would mean that the European Central Bank would give governments debt-free euros according to the size of their populations. The governments would decide what to do with these funds.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

What’s the problem with this? One is that almost all the money in our economy is owed back to banks with interest. This means our overall debt burden is considerably higher than it needs to be. Another is that private banks are walking off with a lot of money that could otherwise flow to us. Instead of letting banks create money by lending it to us, the Treasury or Fed could wire equal dividends to us directly, without interest or principal repayment required. This wouldn’t create any more money than banks now do; it would just create it in a different way.11 Think about the board game Monopoly. Cash is added to the game every time a player passes Go.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Today’s economies are financially addicted to growth because at the heart of the current financial system lies the pursuit of the highest rate of financial return. That in turn puts publicly traded companies under pressure every quarter to show that they have growing sales, growing profits and growing market share. And, since banks create money as debt which bears interest (every time they make a mortgage or a loan), repaying those debts likewise adds to the financial pressure for continual growth. The Economist’s Growth Curve Our economies are politically addicted to growth because pension funds and the job market have become structurally dependent upon it.


pages: 177 words: 38,221

Financing Basic Income: Addressing the Cost Objection by Richard Pereira

banks create money, basic income, behavioural economics, carbon credits, carbon tax, income inequality, job automation, Lyft, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, quantitative easing, sovereign wealth fund, Tobin tax, transfer pricing, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Wall-E

Since property makes up a major proportion of their balance sheets, a reduction in property prices will affect their capital base. Another approach is to enforce 100% reserve requirements on banks, which would prevent them from creating credit and would restrict them to only loaning out deposits on hand, serving as intermediaries between depositors (savers) and borrowers. If there is any doubt that banks create money, consider that private central banks in the US, EU and Japan have created trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” a euphemism for (electronic) money printing. This money was then given to banks in exchange for their non-performing assets. Profits for the big four Australian banks (National Australia Bank [NAB], Commonwealth Bank [CBA], Australia and New Zealand Banking Group [ANZ] and Westpac [WBC]) totalled $27 billion (cash basis, 2011–2012), with dividends of $16 billion.


pages: 365 words: 56,751

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

Credit expansion is necessarily finite. So let us revisit the scenario where Bank creates credit at negative reserve (i.e. out of thin air), this time considering spending. For example, on deposits of 0oz Bank intends to issue a loan of 1000oz. Instead of relying on reserved money to eventually settle the loan, Bank “creates money” on its balance sheet. Bank then increases Borrower’s credit and debt accounts, representing the borrowed money and the obligation to repay respectively: Savings Money Credit Debt Asset Liability Bank 1000oz 1000oz 1000oz 1000oz Borrower 1000oz 1000oz 1000oz 1000oz When Borrower trades 1oz (from his credit account) for a car, his credit account is decreased by 1oz and Merchant’s is increased by 1oz.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

Well, banks (not central banks, but so-called ‘private banks’; the likes of HSBC or Wells Fargo) create money when they make loans. Consider the sale of my house. The purchasers took on a mortgage to buy it, as is normal. In issuing the mortgage (for which they took the deeds of the house as collateral), the lending bank created money, which was then paid to me. The funds didn’t come from investors or from the deposits of others. The money did not previously exist. Thus modern electronic money – dollars, pounds and euros – is created through lending. Of course, governments create money through such processes as quantitative easing, but, even so, most money is lent into existence.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

In order to meet the higher interest payments, countries had to raise taxes or cut spending. This would make unemployment, which was already high, go even higher. This, in turn, would mean lower tax revenues, which would make it harder to pay off the debt. There was a traditional way out of this trap: the central bank created money and bought government bonds on the open market. This lowered interest rates, which encouraged businesses to borrow, invest, and hire more workers, which in turn led to more tax revenues, which made it easier for the government to pay its debt. There was another benefit, as well: the lower interest rates tended to drive down the value of the currency, which made the country’s exports cheaper for foreign buyers.


pages: 1,202 words: 424,886

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Banks and thrifts are in fact the only entities allowed to offer checking accounts, as state and federal laws require that an entity hold a bank charter in order to offer checking accounts. Second, in the course of their lending activity, banks create money. The reason is that demand deposits, which are a bank liability, count as part of the money supply—no matter how one defines that supply, and although the focus on the aggregate growth in the money supply does not grab as much attention as it once did, the supply of money is immensely important in determining economic activity. Just how banks create money takes a little explaining. We have to introduce a simple device known as a T-account, which shows, as the account below illustrates, the changes that occur in the assets and liabilities of a spending unit—consumer, firm, or financial institution—as the result of a specific economic transaction.

PART ONE Some Fundamentals Copyright © 2007, 1990, 1983, 1978 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. CHAPTER 2 Funds Flows, Banks, and Money Creation Copyright © 2007, 1990, 1983, 1978 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. As preface to a discussion of banking, a few words should be said about the U.S. capital market, how banks create money, and the Fed’s role in controlling money creation. This will provide background for Chapters 6 and 7, which cover domestic and Eurobanking, and Chapter 9, where we examine in greater detail the Fed’s role. Roughly defined, the U.S. capital market is composed of three major parts: the stock market, the bond market, and the money market.

goals is now defunct, having expired in May 2000. In its place, the Fed has gone back to pegging the funds rate and nudging it up or down when it wants to adjust its monetary policy. REVIEW IN BRIEF • In order to understand banking, it is important to have a grasp of funds flows in the capital markets, how banks create money, and the Fed’s role in controlling money creation. • Every spending unit in the economy is constantly receiving and using funds, with some entities running funds surpluses, which finance the funds deficits of other entities. • Historically, households have been the major supplier of funds, channeling their funds to the business sector.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

By lending more to the business sector than flows in as savings from the household sector, the banking system will cause the circular flow to expand, and the price level to rise. When banks are lending more than the public wishes to save, there is no check to the expansion of money and rise in prices. Wicksell asks us to imagine a giant bank that is the source of all loans and in which all the community’s money is deposited. In giving customer A a loan, the bank creates money out of nothing. When A spends the loan, he increases customer B’s deposits in the same bank, the spending of which increases customer C’s deposits, and so on. In other words, the first loan enables prices to rise without limit. As Wicksell said, the upward movement of money ‘creates its own draught’.18 The conclusion suggested by this thought experiment is that governments do not have direct control of the money supply; money in modern economies is created by commercial banks when they make loans.

The context of these discussions was the radical volatility of prices, very different from the muted modulations of the previous century: post-war hyperinflation in some countries being followed by price collapses. John Maynard Keynes and Edwin Cannan debated the causes of the wartime and post-war inflations in a re-run of the Currency versus Banking School debates of the early nineteenth century. Cannan, a professor of economics at the LSE , denied that banks create money. To him they were simply cloakroom attendants, who issued tickets for money deposited with them. It was the central bank that produced the ‘extra’ money. Thus the problem of stopping inflation boiled down to limiting the issue of central bank notes. Cannan wrote as much in his book The Paper Pound, first published in 1919: ‘Burn your paper money, and go on burning it till it will buy as much gold as it used to do!’


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, regulatory capital rules—as well as risk aversion to the real economy and lack of loan demand by shell-shocked enterprises and households—have stuffed bank balance sheets with sovereign bonds. Central bank balance sheets are whole multiples of pre-crisis levels due to bad asset purchases and “quantitative easing”—central banks creating money to buy debt securities. Scene Ten The finance crisis seems contained, and states and banks hope for a return to something resembling pre-crisis conditions or recovery while they continue to patch over difficulties ad hoc (e.g., Greece, Ireland, US house prices). Recovery in the real economy and meaningful reductions in unemployment remain elusive.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15217615 4 TARP was a programme of the US government that helped to stabilise the financial system through a series of measures that included the TARP bailout programme, authorising $700 billion to bail out banks, AIG, and auto companies. It also helped credit markets and homeowners. Quantitative easing (QE) – or large-scale asset purchases – refers to monetary policy that entails a central bank creating money that is used to buy predetermined amounts of government bonds or other financial assets in order to inject liquidity into the economy. 5 Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) is a programme of the European Central Bank under which the Bank makes purchases (outright transactions) in secondary, sovereign bond markets, under certain conditions, of bonds issued by euro area member states. 6 Balatti, M., Brooks, C., Clements, M.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

However, politicians of all parties continue to assure us that there is no money available for hospitals and flood defences. But government and Central Bank money-creation is only the first and most obvious way that money can be created out of nothing. There is also a less obvious, but far more important, way: private sector banks create money. As Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of the Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate explained, in a society like the UK that operates a fiat currency: In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way is through commercial banks making loans.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

There’s no need to go deeper into this mechanism at this juncture, but it is useful to note the following three key points in the Bank of England’s high-level description of the current money-creation regime. Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, it is bank lending that creates deposits. Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system. Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities to maintain the resilience of the financial system.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

During the first two decades of the 20th century, the Liberal Party fell under the sway of a group of Guayaquil cacao producers and the trading firms and banks associated with them.7 The party’s control of the government enabled some business figures to divert revenue flows to LONGER-TERM ORIGINS OF ECUADOR’S “PREDOLLARIZATION” CRISIS 23 themselves or their supporters, while the banks extended profitable loans to cover a growing public deficit. The banks created money (there was neither a central bank nor a banking supervisor), causing an inflation problem. This “system” collapsed in the 1920s when a series of external shocks struck the cacao economy. Fungal disease sharply reduced output, while growing cacao exports by British colonies (and later, the onset of the world Depression) drove down world prices.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Squires ‘Content islanders reject capitalism for traditional trade’, New Zealand Herald, 12 December 2007. 78 GREEN ECONOMICS volume The Ecology of Money explores the history of money creation and makes clear the instability of the present money system, where commercial banks are permitted to lend money to the public, which then accrues value to the banking system as a whole. Here is Porritt’s description of the way that banks create money, and the advantages this gives them: For instance, about 97 per cent of the UK’s money supply is created by commercial banks more or less out of thin air as interest-bearing (profit-making) loans . . .The banks in the UK make about £20 billion a year in interest from this arrangement. … The money supply created in this way is not linked to real resource use or to the amount of goods and services in the national economy – it is based entirely upon the banks’ commercial judgement about the ability of an individual or an enterprise to pay their loans.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Canada Cancer Capital Capital account Capital account liberalisation Capital accumulation Capital Adequacy Ratios (CARs) Capital control Capital costs, falling Capital flows, uphill Capital inflows Capitalism, ‘substantially broken’ Capitalist class Capitalist economies, governance problems Capitalist heaven Capital, misallocation of Capital, returns to Capital-labour Capital-labour ratios Capital misallocation Capital per worker in Japanese manufacturing, rising Capital stock Carbon tax Care, eligibility criteria for public funding Care homes Care(rs) Carers, cost of support by ‘Care Supplement’ Care workers Care workers, need for increase in Japan Caribbean Caring expenses, rising Caring services, hard to raise productivity Cash, abolition of Cash flow Cavendish, Camilla, Extra Time The Cavendish Review CBO Report Centenarians, high risk of dementia Central Bank Central Bank Independence (CBI) Central Bank Independence, a ‘paper tiger’ Central Bank Independence, a surety of financial rectitude Central Bank Independence, its glory years Central Bank Independence, populist backlash against Central Bank Independence, under threat Central banks, best friends of Ministers of Finance Central banks, constraints on raising interest rates Central banks, create money Central banks, inflation targets of Central banks, recently best friends of Ministers of Finance Central banks, reverting to normal policies Central bank inflation target Central Bank targets Certificate of Fundamental Care Changing life cycle Cheap labour Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chief Executive Officer, has information and power Chief officers Child rearing, age of delayed Children Children, age of having Children, staying at home longer Chile China China’s ascent China’s ascent, benefiting AEs China, absence of welfare state China, administration China, ageing population China, ascent in 1990s China, bank deposits of China, big four state-owned banks China, capable of debt cancelation China, continuing strong investment China, corporate debt with lower risk of default China, credit growth unsustainable China, current account balance declining China, current account surplus peak China, debt conversion into equity China, debt is misguided the conventional wisdom China, debt less likely to lead to a crisis China, demographic reversal China, developed coastal regions of China, early stage of development China, educated labour force China, entry of foreign banks China, excess capacity China, financial markets China, focus on raising productivity China, growth decline China, growth decline in 2018/19 China, high personal sector saving China, internal migration, dominated by Eastern Region China, investment ratio China, labour force dynamics changing direction China, land subsidized China, leverage ratio China, low interest rates as a tax on households China, manufacturing sector China, no longer a deflationary force China, one child policy China, past contribution to global growth China population China, property sector China, rapidly ageing population China, remarkable demographic dynamics China, shrinking workforce China, social safety net insufficient China, special economic zones China, surging credit growth China, trade balance with USA China, under-developed interior regions China, unit labour costs China, upgrading technology China, urban savings reduced as interest rates fall China, WTO membership after long negotiations Chinese bonds Chinese elderly care Chinese, more than Americans Chinese seniors Civil Service Climate change Cognitive decline, a common story Cognitive impairment Colombia Commodity price Commodity price shocks Commodity prices, rising Commodity producers Commodity supercycle Communism The Communist Manifesto See alsoEngels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl Communist Party Comparative bargaining power Compertpay, R.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Thompson, H. (2009), “The Political Origins of the Financial Crisis: The Domestic and International Politics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac”, Political Quarterly, vol. 80 10 This account draws on: Keynes (1936); Minsky (1986); Shiller (2000); Knight (1921); Haldane, A. and May, R.M. (2011) “Systemic Risk in Banking Ecosystems”, Nature, vol. 469. 11 This account draws on: Jablecki, J. and Machaj, M. (2009) “The Regulated Meltdown Of 2008”, Critical Review, vol. 21; Lockwood, E. (2014) “Predicting the Unpredictable: Value-At-Risk, Performativity, and the Politics of Financial Uncertainty”, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 22; Colander, D. and Haas, A. (2009) “The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of the Economics Profession”, Critical Review, vol. 21; Haldane and May (2011); Lysandrou, P. and Nesvetailova, A. (2015) “The Role Of Shadow Banking Entities in the Financial Crisis: A Disaggregated View”, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 22; Michell, J. (2016) “Do Shadow Banks Create Money? ‘Financialisation’ and the Monetary Circuit”, University of the West of England Economics Working Paper 1602 http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/28552/1/1602. pdf; Moosa, I. (2010) “Basel II as a Casualty of the Global Financial Crisis”, Journal of Banking Regulation, vol. 11; Tobias, A. and Hyun Song, S. (2009) “The Shadow Banking System: Implications for Financial Regulation”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Paper 382; Adrias, T. and Ashcraft, A. (2012) “Shadow Banking Regulation”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report 559 12 This account draws on: Tooze (2018); Wray (2015); McCabe, P. (2010) “The Cross Section of Money Market Fund Risks and Financial Crises”, Finance and Economics Discussion Series Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C. 13 This account draws on: Tooze (2018); Michell (2016); Lysandrou and Shabani (2018) “The Explosive Growth of the ABCP Market Between 2004 And 2007: A ‘Search for Yield’ Story”, Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, vol. 41; Adrian, T. (2013) “Repo and Securities Lending’, Federal Reserve Bank Of New York Staff Reports 529; Acharya, V. and Schnabl, P. (2010) “Do Global Banks Spread Global Imbalances?


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

The move away from gold and fixed exchange rates allowed three fundamental reflexes of the neoliberal era to kick in: the expanded creation of money by banks, the assumption that all crises can be resolved, and the idea that profits generated out of speculation can go on rising for ever. These reflexes have become so ingrained in the thinking of millions that, when they no longer worked, it induced paralysis. It is news to some people that banks ‘create’ money, but they always have done: they have always lent out more cash than there was in the safe. In the pre-1971 system, though, there were legal limits to such money creation. In the USA, for savings that could be withdrawn at any time, banks had to hold $20 in cash against every $100 of deposits.


The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

Instead, me new money game was generating a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants. This is how today's money system pits the participants in the economy against each other. This story isolates the role of interest - the eleventh round - as part of the money creation process, and its impact on the participants. When the bank creates money by providing you with your Pound 100,000 mortgage loan, it creates only the principal when it credits your account. However, it expects you to bring back Pound 200,000 over the next twenty years or so, if you don't, you will lose your house. Your bank does not create the interest; it sends you out into the world to battle against everyone else to bring back the second Pound 100,000.


pages: 350 words: 109,220

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

Its primary tool was still the “federal funds rate,” the interest rate at which banks lend to one another. No consumer ever borrows at the overnight federal funds rate, but any change in that rate normally ripples through the economy by moving other interest rates. To lower rates, the Fed (or any other central bank) creates money from nothing, a process called “printing money,” even though it is electronic, and uses that money to buy U.S. Treasury securities from the portfolios of the banks. The banks then have fewer securities but more money to lend. This increased supply of money lowers the federal funds rate, the price of money.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Central banks brought interest rates down to historical lows – for example, the Bank of England cut its interest rate to the lowest level since its foundation in 1694. When they could not cut their interest rates any more, they engaged in what is known as quantitative easing (QE) – basically, the central bank creating money out of thin air and releasing it into the economy, mainly by buying government bonds. Soon, however, free-market orthodoxy came back with a vengeance. May 2010 was the turning point. The election of the Conservative-led coalition government in the UK and the imposition of the Eurozone bail-out programme for Greece in that month signalled the comeback of the old balanced budget doctrine.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

Ironically, the disastrous big bank behaviour that triggered the 2008 crash forced regulators (especially in Europe) into further lengthening and complicating an already arduous process for obtaining a new licence, frustrating their plans to unleash a hungry horde of ‘challenger banks'. In issuing licences sparingly, governments and central banks were quietly admitting something they were still reluctant to announce publicly: the extraordinary power of private-sector bank lending to affect the pace of money creation, and therefore economic growth. That banks create money is still a highly contested notion. It was politically unmentionable in 1980s America and Europe, where economic policy was predicated on a ‘monetarism' in which governments precisely controlled the supply of money, whose growth determined inflation. Banks traditionally presented themselves purely as financial intermediaries, usefully channelling household depositors' savings into business borrowers' investment.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Most money circulating in advanced economies is created by commercial banks, almost literally ‘out of nothing’.31 When a bank agrees to create a loan to a business or a household, it simply enters the amount as a loan on the asset side of its balance sheet and the same amount as a deposit on the liability side of its balance sheet. This deposit is then available to spend on goods and services in the economy. Banks create money by making loans.32 There are a number of important implications of this debt-based money system. One of them is the degree of instability that ensues when things go wrong. Another is that government itself can only finance social investment through commercial (interest-bearing) debt. Another still is that the investment portfolio outlined in this chapter ends up having to compete for credit-worthiness against all sorts of other sometimes unsavoury commercial investments.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

At the same time, the bank loans out the money to a spender and issues a credit to the spender’s account as well. There are now two deposits, and, importantly, both of these deposits can be used to pay for things. Voilà! The bank has just created money. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith has described it, “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent.”2 Banking has two important consequences for the world of capitalism. The first is that banks, wherever and whenever they have existed, exert an unusually strong influence on the surrounding economy.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

Put simply, bank lending is not constrained by deposits or reserves. If that were the case, the economy would have halted in its tracks a century ago. Customer deposits are a major source of bank assets, but the relationship between deposits “in” and loans “out” is not direct. In fact, deposits are created by bank loans. To repeat, commercial banks create money, or bank deposits, by making new loans. For example, when a bank makes a mortgage loan, it does not just give someone $100,000 in cash to go purchase a house. Instead, it creates a credit—a deposit—in the borrower’s bank account for the size of the mortgage. “At that moment, new money is created,” explain Bank of England economists; this is “referred to as ‘fountain pen money,’ created at the stroke of bankers’ pens when they approve loans.”9 It works the same in the United States.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

However, the banking sector remained highly fragmented until 1976, when Maine became the first state to legalize interstate banking. It was not until 1993, after the Savings and Loans crisis (see Chapter 5), that the number of national banks fell below 3,600 for the first time in nearly a century. In 1924 John Maynard Keynes famously dismissed the gold standard as a ‘barbarous relic’. But the liberation of bank-created money from a precious metal anchor happened slowly. The gold standard had its advantages, no doubt. Exchange rate stability made for predictable pricing in trade and reduced transaction costs, while the long-run stability of prices acted as an anchor for inflation expectations. Being on gold may also have reduced the costs of borrowing by committing governments to pursue prudent fiscal and monetary policies.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

It undermines democracy, as without economic democracy our political democracy can be sold to the highest bidder. It forces people to behave competitively when they don’t want to and would choose not to if they had a real choice. Money is issued through privately owned banks whose fundamental goal is to create profits for their shareholders, not serve the common good of the people. Banks create money as and when they can profit from it, forcing citizens into wage slavery to repay the bank for money it created out of nothing (unbelievable, but true). The expansion and contraction of the money supply locks us into a “boom and bust” cycle of never-ending, unsustainable growth. At some point, a crash is inevitable, and vast amounts of suffering ensue.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

From his vantage point as editor of The Economist, Bagehot observed the 1866 crisis and drew the conclusion that when faced with a sudden and large increase in the demand for liquidity by the public, in other words a bank run – a ‘panic’ – the responsibility of the central bank was to meet it: ‘a panic, in a word, is a species of neuralgia, and according to the rules of science you must not starve it’.40 One of the unique roles of central banks is the ability to create ‘liquidity’.41 Banks create money, but if people lose faith in banks, the ultimate form of money is that created by the central bank – provided it is backed by the tax-raising power of a solvent government. In Germany in October 1923, as the hyperinflation was nearing its peak, the government was close to insolvent with only 1 per cent of its expenditure financed by taxation.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

The Ultimate Con Recall the observation in chapter 3 that money is simply an accounting chit created out of nothing, without substance or intrinsic value, which has value only because we believe it does and therefore willingly accept it in exchange for things of real value. In modern financial systems, Modern Empire 139 banks create money when they issue a loan. The bank opens an account in the name of the borrower and enters a number representing the amount of the loan in the account. The bank in essence rents to the borrower money it has created from nothing at whatever interest rate the market will bear. It may also acquire a mortgage on the home, farm, or other real property of the borrower.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

When I defended Bernanke and the Fed in a Wall Street Journal column, I, too, was attacked by Palin, who argued that “it’s time for us to ‘refudiate’ the notion that this dangerous experiment in printing $600 billion out of thin air, with nothing to back it up, will magically fix economic problems.” It was as if Palin and others had just discovered that central banks create money—and decided they didn’t like it. The furor over QE2 surprised and puzzled Fed policy makers. The policy was less radical than, say, QE1; after all, central banks have been buying (and selling) government bonds forever. It was telegraphed well in advance, so markets barely moved when it was announced.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Collectively, the leaders of the G20 nations agreed at a summit in London to pump $1.1trn into the global economy, by extending the ability of the IMF and World Bank to make loans. In addition, central banks kept cutting rates to stimulate borrowing. By the end of 2008, the Federal Reserve’s main rate was 0.25%; just 15 months previously it had been 5.25%. Quantitative easing (QE) also began that year. This involved central banks creating money and using it to buy government bonds. The aim was twofold. First, it prevented the kind of shrinkage in the money supply that occurred in the 1930s. When the central banks bought bonds, the sellers ended up with more money in their accounts. The second aim was to reduce the long-term bond yield as well as the short-term borrowing rate.


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

That same day, he also sent a letter to Phillips, remarking that White’s “actual technical solution strikes me as quite hopeless. He has not seen how to get round the gold standard difficulties and has forgotten all about the useful concept of bank money.” This was Keynes’s notion that the Clearing Union could create new international money out of thin air, just as a bank creates money by lending out its depositors’ funds. “But,” Keynes then offered, “is there any reason why, when once the advantages of bank money have been pointed out to him, he should not collect and re-arrange his other ideas round this technique?” This was classic Keynes thinking: these Americans are in a lamentable muddle, yet once things are explained to them all will be well.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The banking system that evolved in the Renaissance survives remarkably unchanged to this day. It is the basis of money machines—a financial perpetual motion device. John Kenneth Galbraith summed it up: The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.24 Not everybody supported these developments. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury, warned: If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.25 Debt Clock Paper money represents a claim on itself.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In accordance with its environmentalist language, Douthwaite’s position, too, is based on a certain kind of fear, namely, of the contribution that extant forms of money have been making to the emergence of our “unsustainable, unstable global monoculture” (Douthwaite 2006: 2). On this particular connection, Douthwaite’s argument—in common with the New Economics Foundation in Britain (Ryan-Collins, Greenham et al. 2012)—is that the monetary system as it is currently configured in advanced capitalist countries (with banks creating money as they create loans) supports an economic system that is underpinned by the belief (and corresponding policies) in perpetual growth. Given that interest payments are necessary to service the debts that money consists of, “the economy must grow continuously if it is not to collapse,” and continual growth is unsustainable (Douthwaite 2006: ch. 1).


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

But I expect Bernanke was underwhelmed by the magnitude of the change: inflation rose from minus 2.1 percent to a peak of 2.7 percent, and it rapidly fell back to a rate of just 1 percent. That is very little inflationary bang for a large amount of bucks. According to the conventional model of money creation – known as the ‘Money Multiplier’ – this large an injection of government money into the reserve accounts of private banks should have resulted in a far larger sum of bank-created money being added to the economy – as much as $10 trillion. This amplification of Bernanke’s $1.3 trillion injection should have rapidly revived the economy – according to neoclassical theory. This is precisely what President Obama, speaking no doubt on the advice of his economists, predicted when he explained the strategy they had advised him to follow, twelve weeks after he took office: 12.10 The volume of base money in Bernanke’s ‘quantitative easing’ in historical perspective And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks – ‘where’s our bailout?’


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

It is when this stage in the evolution of Money has been reached that Knapp’s Chartalism—the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of the State—is fully realized … To-day all civilized money is, beyond the possibility of dispute, chartalist.27 This does not mean that the state necessarily creates money. Money is credit, it can be brought into being by private contractual agreements (loans, for instance). The state merely enforces the agreement and dictates the legal terms. Hence Keynes’ next dramatic assertion: that banks create money, and that there is no intrinsic limit to their ability to do so: since however much they lend, the borrower will have no choice but to put the money back into some bank again, and thus, from the perspective of the banking system as a whole, the total number of debits and credits will always cancel out.28 The implications were radical, but Keynes himself was not.


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

Paper is useful, of course, because it is light. With it you can transfer large sums in an envelope, whereas even medium-sized amounts of specie are cumbersome (recall Georgia-man John Springs’s ride north to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1806, in which the gold in his saddlebags beat up the sides of his horse).32 But more importantly, bank-created money has to be paper (or mere numbers on paper) because only then can money be created out of nothing. And thus only paper money can lead to real economic growth. Imagine an economy that uses only gold and silver, also known as “specie.” A bank in such an economy could lend no more than it received in deposits, and that bank would simply be a glorified mattress.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

The classic theory of Spanish decline blames gold and silver for a certain laxity of governance. 19. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1857–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 20. Note that there is no such thing as a “money printing press” in the following sense: when a central bank creates money in order to lend it to the government, the loan is recorded on the books of the central bank. This happens even in the most chaotic of times, as in France in 1944–1948. The money is not simply given as a gift. Again, everything depends on what happens next: if the money creation increases inflation, substantial redistribution of wealth can occur (for instance, the real value of the public debt can be reduced dramatically, to the detriment of private nominal assets).