[dav_Oz]

>They can use their international reach to try to sidestep taxes and regulations. And, since their debts to each other are a very real kind of private money, when the banks are fragile, the entire monetary system of the world also becomes vulnerable. We are still trying to figure out what to do with these banks. We cannot live without them, it seems, and yet we are not sure we want to live with them. Governments have long sought ways to hold them in check. Sometimes the approach has been laissez-faire, sometimes not. Few regulators have been quite as ardent as King Philip IV of France.

Very interesting leaps taken to come to the conclusion that Philip IV ("government") was trying to "regulate" the private money sector, back then.

First of all he waged very costly wars (against Aragon, England and Flanders) and found himself - no surprise - with unmanageable debt i.e. not enough silver (also a very important difference between today's "banking") in 1295. By that time even the Templars hadn't enough money to help him out so he began to loan from the much richer Florentine bankers and to devalue his own royal currency (tied to silver) with the high price of social unrest/domestic instability.

The crackdown on Templars preceded a power struggle with the clergy (a common theme in the centuries before and afterwards) represented by the pope Boniface VIII. Long story short: Philip IV won and consequently established the nearly 70 years long so called "Avignon Papacy". The next pope Clement V was basically under his thumb. Only in this greater context could he go on and "restructure" the "Templar Banks", technically the property of the Church.

Of course in this cascade of perpetual debt and wars he utilized all his domestic "regulatory" powers[0]: constantly raising taxes (1289), seizing assets of Lombard merchants (1292), heavily debasing currency (1295), unheard/provocative taxation (50%) of the French clergy (1296), expelling Jews and seizing all their assets (1306).

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_IV_of_France#Finance_...

[coliveira]

> he waged very costly wars

Kings of the time didn't think of the modern trick: (1) making gold useless to make tax payments and (2) creating your own fiat money, with no backing on anything but the power to make more wars.