I think that fractional reserve banking assumes it starts with a person saving in a bank, but the article asssumes this is the reverse
"""This article explains how, rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks.(3)"""
and
"""
While the money multiplier theory can be a useful way of introducing money and banking in economic textbooks, it is not an accurate description of how money is created in reality.
"""
As such there is a new understanding of money developing - QE, lending and even MMT are involved.
So I think this article says quite clearly that the Econ 101 idea of fractional reserve lending as a money multiplier based on deposits made is just out of date
I do see this as a good argument to remove money creation from banks because
"""
Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them
"""
which is determined by time horizons and risk appetite much more than central bank interest rates - and why most lending needs collateral.
Government lending (government as a VC) however has much longer time horizons
Yes, the article expands on simplifications used in economics textbooks as an illustration of how leverage can works. But none of this is "new understanding" of the fractional reserve system operates in practice, least of all to the Bank of England that oversees its operation.
> Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them which is determined by time horizons and risk appetite much more than central bank interest rates
Hardly "much more", the delta between the rate the bank offers and the central bank rate is the bank's profit, adjusted over a timescale as a net present value calculation and reduced by expected losses. More importantly, it's also the cost of the loan to the person or company deciding on whether borrow or not, so when banks bump their loan rates up in response to a raise in the central bank rate, fewer people wish to borrow and so the bank has fewer profitable opportunities to lend. Time horizons and risk appetite just give banks and companies reason to turn down probably profitable/beneficial loans that are outside their comfort zone. And how does a central bank respond to the banks collectively reducing their risk appetites? It lowers the interest rates....
> Government lending (government as a VC) however has much longer time horizons
Ultimately I'd rather have market as VC (government can participate as well) than government as the only VC...
1. It's nuts that all central banks globally have one lever to pull - interest rates.
2. yes the central bank sets the interest rate, but the banks choose how much to lend and to whom. I think that if interests rates are at zero, that implies (?) an infinite amount of investment opportunities - ability to grow productive capacity. And yet most loans are real estate or real estate backed (ie collateral). VC is a drop in the ocean of land based lending - and yet our entire economy is based on small amounts of land use for amazing factories and power stations
3. banks aren't doing the business of lending to those capable of productive capacity generation - and they won't cause they want safe near term returns.
VC speculative investment should not be the small corner case - it should be the norm. Industry investment should be not left to crazies willing to risk family house or wealthy with enough to spare.
I’m talking about commercial banks themselves being in the process of creating money, which in the UK was indeed not an established fact until the 2000s. I’m on my phone but I remember reading about that in an Economist issue a few years ago, I’ll try to find it once I get in front of a computer.
Later edit: Found an Economist review [1] of this article/book itself, which I think it’s not what I had in mind but close enough:
> This often-cited short paper lucidly explains how commercial banks create money and central banks influence that process. It dispels many common misconceptions about money. For instance, most introductory economic textbooks say that commercial banks lend out the money that savers deposit in them. In fact banks can lend money and create corresponding deposits even without savings flowing in–in other words, banks are quite literally creating “new money” when they make a loan and a corresponding deposit.
Most probably you were thinking about Central Bank money creation, or, if not, those introductory economy courses seem to have not had any effect on the educated masses, hence why The Economist still has to re-iterate to its educated readers how money creation works.
> I’m talking about commercial banks themselves being in the process of creating money, which in the UK was indeed not an established fact until the 2000s.
There is a concerted effort amongst some fringe economists to make this argument, which is superficially plausible to the sort of laymen easily convinced that reading a couple of blogs arguing that an entire field is wrong is a substitute for reading anything written by that field.
But of course the Bank of England knew that commercial banks were involved in the process of creating money all along. Propping up private bank money was literally their job.
> Propping up private bank money was literally their job.
I thought their job was limiting the private money creation that without them would be totally unrestricted which would result in uncontrolled inflation and runs on banks.
Private banks create monetary aggregates by lending it to private borrowers. The fact that money is created as credit means there are already natural limits to private bank money creation (there aren't unlimited numbers of bank customers who want to borrow money and pay back more later, and some of the people and companies that would like to borrow are not people the bank trusts to be able to make the repayment)
The role of the Bank of England is providing the banks with central bank reserves they can borrow as and when needed to back that privately created money up. So it gets to influence the demand for borrowing private bank money by setting the basic interest rate at which the banks can borrow reserves (mainly by intervening in secondary markets for them, but that's an implementation detail), which means it can make it more expensive to borrow reserves, which will lead to banks lending money at higher interest rates to fewer people, which will lead to less money creation
But if the private banks already have some money they can lend it again to borrowers. So they could be inflating money supply pretty much indefinitely. Sure, the number of private borrowers is limited but they are happy to sign all of their future life earnings away in exchange for some money now. And as supply of money grows inflation happens so borrowers need more and more money feeding creation of more money and further inflation.
The role of central bank as a limiter of credit action (through fractional reserve) is way more important than feeding new core money into the private banking system so it can be borrowed by private borrowers. Feeding new money is kinda optional and it's most important role is possibly enabling new banks to be created. In absence of it only companies that already have a lot of money could create a bank.
The other thing is that if economy development outpaces growth of money supply created by private banks whole system could get stuck in deflation. Which was not great last time it happened.
Honestly, I have no idea why you're arguing popular misconceptions about central banks under a paper written by a central bank explaining how central banking works...
Banks have absolutely no incentive to provide money to everyone that wants to borrow all their future life earnings now, not because of hard limits on their funds but because they want their lending to be repaid at a profit (when it won't be, you get 2008). So the quantity of money at a given interest rate is ultimately set by the demand of creditworthy borrowers at that interest rate, which is certainly not unlimited.
Central banks were created to stop banks with solvent loan portfolios collapsing due to demands on their reserves, by ensuring banks could always borrow the reserves to back up the numbers on their spreadsheet. The "reserve requirement" (technically replaced by a capital requirement) isn't something central banks tinker with, and it's not "kinda optional" for them to provide enough reserves for the system's day to day needs. Instead, they influence credit action by adjusting the price of borrowing those reserves, and thus the demand for credit in the wider economy.
Funny that, because I distinctly remember participating in an early 2000s competition the Bank of England organised for schoolkids to teach us about monetary policy. Of course, that didn't exactly guarantee participants a graduate-level understanding even if their team got through the first round, but it's not exactly the action of an entity that's trying to hide what they do!
Maybe people not understanding the mechanics of complicated things isn't actually the result of a conspiracy to stop them from understanding complicated things. Perhaps they'd also be somewhat more likely to understand how complicated things work if they didn't start from the premise that the people who know how they work are inherently untrustworthy...
The role that commercial banks in money creation has been known since much before the 2000s. It's all laid out in Keynes' General Theory which was published in 1936, and it wasn't even a novel idea at the time.
Like I said previously, the Bank of England wasn’t acknowledging that as a fact publicly until quite recently, which most probably had an effect on their actions/decisions.
For example the same Keynes had some other better known takes which have also not been acknowledged as facts to this day.
So you're saying that the Bank of England was involved in a conspiracy that wouldn't acknowledge something that has been public knowledge for over a century?
"""This article explains how, rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks.(3)""" and
""" While the money multiplier theory can be a useful way of introducing money and banking in economic textbooks, it is not an accurate description of how money is created in reality. """
As such there is a new understanding of money developing - QE, lending and even MMT are involved.
So I think this article says quite clearly that the Econ 101 idea of fractional reserve lending as a money multiplier based on deposits made is just out of date
I do see this as a good argument to remove money creation from banks because
""" Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them """
which is determined by time horizons and risk appetite much more than central bank interest rates - and why most lending needs collateral.
Government lending (government as a VC) however has much longer time horizons