[rayiner]

That's not how fractional reserve banking works.

Say I deposit $100 in a bank. The bank has $100. Now, say the law requires a 10% reserve. They can lend $90--which they actually have. That person takes the loan, and deposits it in their bank. Now, there are $190 in deposits from the original $100. But the bank never lent money it didn't have. Instead, the money creation comes from the fact I get to treat my $100 deposit as good as cash on hand, even though 90% of it has been lent to another person.

[phaemon]

No, read the pdf I linked. Yours is the first misconception they address.

In summary, though, if we imagine that the bank is required to hold 10% reserve: I go to the bank and get a loan for $900. This is credited to my account. There is no requirement for this money to actually exist. The same day, you go and deposit $100 in actual dollar bills. Your account is credited with $100.

The bank's liabilities are now $100 (in your account) plus $900 (in my account) for a total of $1000. The banks reserve is $100 (real dollar bills you gave them). This is 10% reserve so the bank is legally OK. $900 has been created.

That's how it works. More detail in the PDF I linked.

[makomk]

Quite. Now suppose you take that $900 you've been loaned and spend a mere $90 of it buying goods from a supplier that uses a different bank. Suddenly your bank cannot meet its reserve requirements. However, if the supplier used the same bank everything would be fine. The amount banks can lend is constrained not by how much deposits they currently have, but whether it could cause a net outflow of deposits to other banks in the future.

Amongst other things, this means that how profligate a bank can be in lending money depends heavily on how much all the other banks are lending. So long as all the other banks are lending just as much out and their savings terms are competitive, the outflow of loaned funds will be balanced by an inflow of other banks' loaned funds. What happens in practice is that there's a glut of easy credit during booms which dries up during busts, making the boom-bust cycle worse. You can find some discussion of this here: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/documents/workingpap...

[poof131]

Thanks for the pdf and this comment. The source seems reputable and it definitely changed my understanding of how money is created. I thought banks could only lend the money they took in through deposits or borrowing and had no idea they had the authority to actually create money directly.

[RobertoG]

It's a very common misconception.

It's interesting to realize that you can create money in the same way that a bank. Just give your friend a promise that you will pay him in the future and he could use it as money with third parties. Most people wouldn't accept it, but that is a different issue.

If somebody is in the mood to destroy more preconceptions about economy I recommend Warren Mosler 'Seven deadly innocent frauds of economic policy', it can be a good introduction to Modern Monetary Theory:

http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf

[blue1]

> Deadly Innocent Fraud #1: The federal government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.

Unfortunately, in the (deadly?) Eurozone this is indeed how it works.

[RobertoG]

Yes, but most people, including me, didn't realized at the time what was going on.

And most don't realize yet.

[spdionis]

But if they can borrow from the European Central Bank what's the problem?

[nabla9]

Anyone who reads Modern Monetary Theory should keep in mind that its somewhat fringe (not outside fringe like Austrian school, but very criticized and not widely accepted).

[RobertoG]

What you mean is that it's not mainstream. That's true.

Despite that, I can't recommend it enough. It's just after starting to read it that what was going on in the economy of the world made any sense to me.

Also, mainstream economy is just totally wrong in many of its descriptive aspects, but they continue teaching falsehoods anyway. An example at hand is how the fractional banking and the creation of new 'money' by banks works in, virtually, all the modern economies.

This is the reason that the linked PDF by someone a few posts above is so important. They say what Modern Monetary Theory have been saying all the time but the source is the Bank of England.

I think it deserve to be linked again: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...

As Henry Ford said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

[vezzy-fnord]

The problem with MMT is that it extrapolates far too much from accounting identities and treats both the financial system and the state as a closed vacuum divorced from all issues of public choice and expectations. This is what leads to Mosler's "Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds" and his policy proposals. That they're frauds is technically correct from a national accounting POV, but taking them literally as the MMTers do can be disastrous. In fact, it's not taking them literally that separates MMTers and other people. It's not that mainstream economists aren't aware of the logical implications of ex nihilo fiat money creation.

Also, MMT is nothing new or groundbreaking, contrary to their claims. There have been chartalist and endogenous money creation theories for ages, and most mainstream economists are quite aware of them, contrary to the assertions of many MMTers. What separates MMT from the rest is its fusion with more dubious Post-Keynesian theories.

[frankchn]

Under your scenario, if a bank can lend out $900 for every $100 it collects in deposits, then won't we see runaway monetary growth? Consider the following scenario:

1) Alice deposits $100 in Bank X

2) Bob takes out $900 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y

3) Charlie takes out $8,100 loan from Bank Y and deposits it in Bank X

4) Eve takes out $72,900 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y

5) ... the cycle continues ...

Also, I would assume that the interest rates that my bank pays for my deposits would be a lot higher if it could lend out 9x as much as it holds in deposits.

The model where a bank lends out 90% of its total deposits still makes more sense to me and will result in $900 of total money created per $100 initially deposited.

1) Alice deposits $100 in Bank X

2) Bob takes out $90 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y

3) Charlie takes out $81 loan from Bank Y and deposits it in Bank X

4) Eve takes out $72.90 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y

5) ... the cycle continues ...

and if you sum the geometric series, which in this case is finite, you get $900 of total additional money created for the initial $100 Alice put in.

[RobertoG]

"2) Bob takes out $900 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y"

If Bob takes cash from Bank X and deposits in Bank Y, Bank X has less cash, that movement is reflected in their balance and in their reserves.

If Bob makes and electronic transfer from Bank X to Bank Y, at the end of the day, Bank X and Y have to clear their balance with each other. As some people have moved money in the opposite direction, from Bank Y to Bank X, the balance could be compensated.

If for some reason, people only retire money from a bank without never making deposits, you have a bank run and it's an indicator of mistrust in that bank.

[dogma1138]

Transfer of money from one bank to another is on it's own (in the simplest of terms) a loan.

[chimeracoder]

Put another way, if everyone tried to withdraw all of their money from the bank at the same point, 90% (100% - 10% = 90%) of people's cash assets would be wiped out[0].

This is known as a bank run, or (when it happens to lots of banks simultaneously) a bank panic. During the Great Depression, banks were frozen, and people were barred from withdrawing money from the bank for a certain period of time. The motivation for doing this was to halt the bank panics that were occurring.

Raising the required reserve ratio has very far-reaching implications. Broadly speaking, it tightens liquidity, making loans more difficult to come by, which decreases investment in infrastructure. This slows economic growth, because it's harder to find capital with which to start businesses, and it's harder for people to obtain money to purchase a home, further their education, etc.

[0] in the aggregate; not everyone would lose 90%, but 90% of aggregate cash assets would be.

[BlackFly]

The loans are easy to come by because the fractional reserve requirements allow the banks to create money which they use to provide loans.

When the government creates the same amount of money and directly spends it on infrastructure as opposed to loaning it to infrastructure providers... what changes other than the fact that the infrastructure becomes cheaper to the public since the provider does not need to pay back the loan?

[chimeracoder]

> When the government creates the same amount of money and directly spends it on infrastructure as opposed to loaning it to infrastructure providers what changes?

It's massively less efficient. It's important to note that this is true by definition, not by assumption.

For starters, the provider absolutely does still "pay back" the loan either way. Infrastructure investment isn't free, and if the aggregate value produced by the investment adds up to less than what it cost in the first place, then we would have been better off not doing anything at all.

Secondly, the government isn't able to spend on all types of infrastructure, and when it does, it's almost always less efficient. Public works are only one type of infrastructure spending, and they're pretty much the only one that remains exclusively in the domain of government projects these days.

To give you an example of what "infrastructure" can look like, look at the website we're on. Silicon Valley has a robust network of companies and organizations that both provide capital as intermediaries[0] and increase the ROI of that capital[1]. This wouldn't be possible if there weren't sufficient liquidity

When money is created by the banks, it's created in response to market forces. Banks have to turn an economic profit of zero on the aggregate of all loans they extend, which means that they price them accordingly, and therefore the price of capital converges (in the long run) to the value added by that investment. This makes it difficult (though not impossible) to secure capital for projects that have an inferior risk-adjusted payoff.

By contrast, the government does not create capital in response to market forces. Keynesians would argue that this is the entire point of government economic policy - to smooth out short-term cyclical trends. The problem with "spending" all newly-created money on smoothing short-term cyclical trends is that it leaves zero liquidity allocated to long-term economic growth.

[0] most startups are still funded by banks, at the end of the day, with VCs serving as intermediaries - venture capitalists get their money from LPs, which tend to be institutional investors like banks (or substitutes for institutional investors).

[1] even aside from the money that YC provides a company, YC makes companies more successful (or at least more likely to succeed) through the other, intangible assets it provides.

[jsprogrammer]

You claim less efficiency, 'by definition', but fail to provide a definition. You then state a non sequitur (the provider doesn't exist under the posited scenario).

[PhantomGremlin]

This is known as a bank run

George Bailey explained this, in one of the greatest movies ever made.[1]

   CHARLIE
   I'll take mine now.

   GEORGE
   No, but you . . . you . . . you're thinking of
   this place all wrong. As if I had the money back
   in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in
   Joe's house . . .
   (to one of the men)
   . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy
   house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred
   others. Why, you're lending them the money to
   build, and then, they're going to pay it back
   to you as best they can.

I have absolutely no idea what Switzerland will wind up with if they vote for this. But it certainly won't be banking as we know it.

[1] http://www.aellea.com/script/itsawonderfullife.txt

[seivan]

I take it those with large loans would be affected as potential buyers couldn't loan as much for real estate. However it also seems like it would be more sustainable.

[mg1982]

Additionally, this $90 deposit can then be treated as 'real' money and loaned out according to the same 10% reserve - $81. In the manner of a babushka doll, this can be deposited and loaned out ($72.90, $65.61, $59.05... etc.) until the amount becomes vanishingly small.

Relevant section from 'Money as Debt': https://youtu.be/jqvKjsIxT_8?t=12m57s

[slv77]

While this is a textbook example reserve requirements haven't been a significant constraint on bank monetary creation since the 80's. The Bretton Woods system put in place after WWII and Nixon closing the gold window in the 1970's made reserves a less unique.

The creation of non-bank demand deposits like money market funds put the nail in the coffin of using reserve requirements to manage the amount of money in the economy.

Today the biggest constraint to monetary creation is bank capital ratios. Under current rules banks have to have roughly 1 dollar if equity for every 12 dollars of loans and that can vary based on the type of loans the banks make.