[Imustaskforhelp]

I recently discovered narrow banking (https://www.narrowbanking.org/) which basically states the idea of narrow banking which can only make it so that the bank doesn't have the issues with fractional reserve banking if you are worried about it

Stablecoins feel the most practical way I suppose for narrow banking although there is this UK bank and this Danish bank as well which are the two examples of narrow banking.

Honestly I am sort of interested in gold pegged currencies right now because US Dollar (let's be honest) feels really shaky right now and even America's debt itself is fueled by it being de-facto currency and I am feeling like previously it helped but I feel like debating that even America itself would benefit from if less foreign nations held US treasury bonds.

There already are some gold pegged stablecoins and theoretically with things like revolut or some instant way to sell crypto without too much hassle/losses and transfering it easily, its rather possible to do such.

[mothballed]

Narrow banking was denied a depositor account at the fed IIRC so it's basically DOA as they've envisioned it.

IIRC the fed said that narrow banking threatens the stability of the banking system since private credit expansion (and ultimately, the risks that come with that) is in their estimation desirable. Regulators want nothing but to crush the idea.

[Imustaskforhelp]

> IIRC the fed said that narrow banking threatens the stability of the banking system since private credit expansion (and ultimately, the risks that come with that) is in their estimation desirable. Regulators want nothing but to crush the idea.

But why? I don't understand, I feel like certain exceptions like (credit cards?) or house loans can be built or some personal loans but we all see a disaster which will be billed by govt. thus impacting everybody

The govt itself can then buy ETF's once again / invest money from one way or other via pension funds or other funds (sovereign funds?) to the stock markets themselves or other avenues.

banks basically arbitrage the fact that they are FDIC insured and loans. Nothing wrong with it except the fact that most banks would keep most of the money with themselves and only give chump change to average person or even 0%. If that's the case, why isn't there a bank which can just provide 3% treasury funds or similar or (gold?) and then just help the average person.

I saw a lot of points I agreed upon the narrow banking website on and I'd love to discuss more about the harms of narrow banking compared to fractional and why regulators shot it down/just comparing the two of them.

[em500]

Here's John Cochrane take on Fed vs Narrow Banks: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/03/fed-vs-narrow-ban...

TLDR: Cochrane thinks the Fed wants keep a lid on narrow banking because it believes it can cross-subsidizing lending to households and businesses from retail deposits.

[staplers]

  There already are some gold pegged stablecoins

Which require blind faith in reserve numbers.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I wouldn't call it blind faith similar to how it isn't blind faith to get usd stable coins

I think paxos and xaut have audits etc. from what I know/ I have heard.

Although having more audits is always a neat idea but I was just proposing that there are ways to invest in things like gold and have things like liquid gold perhaps via stablecoin or some other means too basically allowing you to instantly sell gold and gold is a pretty good hedge against stablecoin imo.

I actually once wrote about this idea of narrow banking discovering it accidentally where I wanted a bank which could invest in treasury bonds for inflation protected money or gold.

https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/c3db4eb84da96decfc...

[philipwhiuk]

> I think paxos and xaut have audits etc. from what I know/ I have heard.

Ah, yes, the almighty auditors.

Auditing proves you passed the audit. Nothing more, nothing less. The audit can be at any level that suits the person paying for the audit. In this case it's the company who has the vested interest in passing the audit.

[msla]

Hey, so does gold-backed currency!

How do you know how much gold the government is holding? Ask them!

How do you know the government isn't lying? Ask this question loudly enough and meet people with guns!

[eru]

That's why you should bank with private counterparties, not the government.

If you buy eg a gold ETF, you can ask all these questions without any guns coming out. You can also go and exchange them for physical gold whenever you feel like it. Without any guns coming out.

If they break their promises, you can sue them. Without any guns coming out.

[philipwhiuk]

> If they break their promises, you can sue them. Without any guns coming out.

Providing you and they are in a country who is prepared to use 'guns coming out' to enforce the outcome of said suing.

[eru]

Private contracts are a lot more robustly enforced in most parts of the world than promises of the government.

You can also do jurisdiction shopping: many companies deliberately contract under eg London law instead of local law.

[philipwhiuk]

Welcome to "monopoly over violence" - it's only been around 12,000 years or so.

[littlestymaar]

> here already are some gold pegged stablecoins

Something backed by a volatile asset isn't, by definition, a stablecoin, though.

[dghlsakjg]

Stable coins are stable relative to their backing asset, not necessarily US dollars or any other currency.

[mothballed]

On a long timescale gold is way more stable than the dollar. Dollar is nonvolatile on a long timescale in the sense the expected returns are negative and it does it reliably at usually anywhere from a return around negative 2-10%. But in terms of price stability gold would be far far far far more stable on anything but the most short-sighted of timescales.

[Dylan16807]

I guess. But you can fix the slow drain of inflation by using long-term treasury bonds instead of actual cash. That's pretty much a dollar and doesn't do badly.

[eru]

Long-term treasury bonds are fairly volatile. That's how Silicon Valley Bank went under: their long-term bond holdings dropped in value enough to make them insolvent.

[Dylan16807]

They can swing a few percent. So can gold. Either one could make a bank insolvent. In the long term treasury bonds are not volatile, especially if you hold them to maturity.

[eru]

What does holding to maturity have to do with their current value?

[kaibee]

> On a long timescale gold is way more stable than the dollar.

This is a nonsense claim. How many flat screen TVs could you buy for a pound of gold over a 'long time scale'? Cancer treatments? Acres of land in midwest? Hours of a normal person's time? The fact of the matter is that you cannot actually store labor or time for later, so the amount of stuff you can get your gold is gonna vary wrt the broader economy. Economic reality on the ground is what actually determines the 'value' of your gold. And look, if you want some asset that you're pretty sure you could still trade for bread after the apocalypse or whatever, gold isn't the worst choice. And its deflationary, as the amount of gold isn't increasing at pace with the productivity of the global economy. And people like to hoard it when the future becomes less certain, because of the aforementioned 'tradeable for bread after the apocalypse', so I guess its an okay speculative hedge?

[mothballed]

Non-responsive paragraph.

You've attacked what could interchangeably be dollar or gold asking what it might buy or store, failing to recognize I was measuring relative stability rather than absolute stability.

The dollar has lost over 95% of its value since inception of the federal reserve (at which time dollars nature changed significantly) in 1913 against some imperfect measures of CPI. That gives you a 20x difference over time, downward. Gold has not perform nearly that bad at price stability.

We could go back further than that when the dollar was a lot more stable... but at that time dollar was backed by gold and there wasn't (mostly) a central bank nor gold possession bans that let them mess with the price quite in the same way they did later.

[eru]

The US always had really weird and restrictive financial regulations. Right from when the country got started.

Look to Canada for a much stabler system that didn't have banking crisis all the time. See eg https://archive.is/v13TM

[littlestymaar]

Classical liberals are akin to communists in that when the practical application of their ideas fail, it's obviously because it was only a corrupted version that ended up being really put in practice. “It wasn't really Communism” and “It wasn't deregulated enough”.

[eru]

You are mixing up a lot of different ideas and concepts.

Historically, the combination of fractional reserve banking and the classic gold standard was very successful. Just because your bank uses grams of gold as the unit of accounting (or something that's effectively equivalent to grams of gold), doesn't mean they need to have that much of gold in their vaults. Similar to how today a bank will give you dollar bills when you ask for them, but that doesn't mean they need to have their vaults stuffed full of dollar bills. They just need enough solid assets to sell for dollars, so they can give you dollars when you want to withdraw. (Having some gold or dollars on hand is just a convenience, so you don't have to wait for the bank to liquidate assets.)

About narrow banking: there's at least two different definitions of the idea. What your website describes might be called 100% reserve banking. The website is a bit silly: you can already get 100% reserve banking today, if you want it.

The website is also extremely misleading and dishonest about fractional reserve banking. You can eg just follow their own link to the Bank of Amsterdam and read up on it.

The second definition of 'narrow banking' can be seen at eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow_banking

> Narrow banking is a proposed banking system that would restrict commercial banks to hold only safe and liquid assets, like government bonds, against customer deposits, while prohibiting traditional lending activities. Under this model, banks would function as custodians and payment processors, separate from the lending function performed by other financial intermediaries.

This is like a normal fractional reserve bank, but the only asset they invest in is government bonds. This can still go wrong, if you are not careful: Silicon Valley Bank invested mainly in government bonds, but had a maturity mismatch. Their long term government bonds lost in value (because market interest rates went up), so they went bankrupt. Alas, they still got bailed out.

You can approximate this kind of narrow bank for yourself, by just putting your money either in government bonds directly, or into a money market fund that only invests in government bonds.

> [...] I feel like debating that even America itself would benefit from if less foreign nations held US treasury bonds.

In what sense would America benefit? On an inflation adjusted basis, foreigners often get a negative real interest payment, ie they lose money, for the privilege of lending to the US. That seems like an extremely good deal for America.

> There already are some gold pegged stablecoins and theoretically with things like revolut or some instant way to sell crypto without too much hassle/losses and transfering it easily, its rather possible to do such.

Wise offers to keep your money in a fund and they transparently sell your fund shares, when you are buying a coffee with your card. They transparently buy fund shares, when money comes into your account.

See https://wise.com/help/articles/3luodUQFD9YWzNc8PvIfVK/holdin... and https://wise.com/sg/interest/ and https://wise.com/help/articles/74dYRhMCItIf2IBJLTpFQs/how-do...

---

Addendum narrow banking in the sense of only holding government bonds:

I think that should be legal for banks to do, and in fact it's a good argument in favour of eliminating deposit insurance. At least the (explicitly or implicitly) government backed deposit insurance that you have eg in the US. It creates a moral hazard where the incentives for monitoring risks are all but dulled.

People who still want the equivalent of deposit insurance should just put their money into a bank that only invests in short term government bonds: after all, a government backed deposit insurance can't really be safer than these short term government bonds anyway.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Thank you for your detailed response. I find the idea of wise's being able to store even liquid cash into stocks.

How does the taxation aspect of it work? Would I have to pay short term capital gains on each transaction that I then make?

They also provide daily interests which seem interesting and about on par with treasury rates so it technically sort of can act as the end result of narrow banking for what I wanted (instead of banks borrowing and spending and containing huge chunks of profit in between, it invests into a safe investment)

> In what sense would America benefit? On an inflation adjusted basis, foreigners often get a negative real interest payment, ie they lose money, for the privilege of lending to the US. That seems like an extremely good deal for America.

Ah it seems that you are right but also that there are some inflation protected treasury but you might be right and I thought about it and doesn't it also bring a new set of problems that America faces.

Basically US can get real goods by giving debts and the real value of what US pays actually lessens over time because of inflation so in a sense, US is able to offset some costs by debt itself but it still has a vicious loop where you start borrowing money just to pay your debt and this starts cutting into your infrastructure hurting the poor the most but also reducing the ability of care etc. effectively making things private if govt cant fund it for many (healthcare) which would impact the poor the most

And this is really tricky as the current model really favours overconsumption and that makes more goods be easily sold and this is why other countries are willing to do this in the first place.

From what I could observe, the biggest winners would be corporations as US pays corporations get funding or the stock market looks more lucrative etc. Low real rates inflate asset values and this would disproportionately benefit the rich

It also starts to overconsume from other countries and just make it financially unable to operate at the same level combined with globalization to compete globally at everything but the software (doubtful, we will see what happens in the near future) and at the financial level.

So basically from my understanding, it increases inequality, increases overconsumption, benefits the rich and hurts the poor.

Also, basically US loses all major exports for this financial hack of sorts. Doesn't it fundamentally weaken the reality of US?

Another aspect is that since it favours the stock market or overvaluates them, these help vc funds and these vc funds trickle down to startups who can only compete at the software level so they end up subsidizing all costs (mostly human software engineering) plus hardware costs and make them able to offset/run at losses.

Now VC funds end up enshittening most solutions in order to extract maximum profit down the line usually basically impacting the end consumer and thus hurting the reputation of VC companies (and sometimes for good measure)

Theoretically this also subsidizes open source in a very minute way. Software engineers get rich and are able to enjoy the craft and there are subsidies of free storage and server access from basically github aka microsoft and others to basically streamline the whole process as well since these cloud/others also extract some values of open source.

But open source ends up creating better alternatives to VC funded solutions if those solutions exist in the most human-friendly way where profits arent even thought of usually and are run via donations.

Combine this with the fact that in India and China,developers are cheaper and they are having a boom in their VC industry/startup culture as well and they are willing to undercut America because they are simply leaner and usually pick less VC funding overall as well imo

So in a way US's software success can only be relied upon on full monopolies support considering open source and cheaper alternatives and also moral focuses where EU companies would prefer to support EU as US wreckballs into political disaster.

Also in my opinion, most of US software success recently aside from the monopolies or maybe even including them is so reliant on including "AI" and AI fundamentally lacks any moat most of the times and they are actively losing/making 0 profit while spending billions in hopes of beating the competition.

US's export of financial products basically loops this cycle back to probably an over-reliance on AI itself.

So US economy is so damn reliant on AI which is fundamentally unstable partially due to it "earning profit in the middle" or taking this lucrative deal.

Y'know what I feel the issue with this is? that in other countries there is a cap of the amount of destruction/reliance. Usually most countries suffer from the other side of spectrum but America has removed this cap because of it and this weird blend of hyper capitalism just converted into late stage capitalism.

So (when) the AI financial bubble explodes, How would America even rebuild itself?

I don't think there is a free lunch. Not even in this case, what ended up happening was that America took short term profits in long term structural losses and this hyper capitalism lured companies as well to outsource or build factories in china and other countries actively increasing the extent of the loss and there just wasnt any cap.

Something which is lucrative but not sustainable and now its starting to bite back.

A lot of issues I felt that were in America are now starting to feel intentional.

I mean one of my questions is that how can America even be optimistic at this state considering that everyone I talk to admits that AI is an bubble, so yea AI companies still make profits but long term everyone sees an impending doom. It's like a time bomb and I already feel at unease and I observe the same feeling of unease as well from other people.

Another point was that America helped foreigners into the American dream (by exporting a story) or perhaps the silicon valley dream (a lot of S&P companies are built by people who came to america) as it losses even that.

In a way America just incentivized a new form of grifting called financial innovation in this AI bubble era in my opinion by this decision. I am genuinely not sure what America can do at this stage.

I am sorry to say but the future seems bleak. I hope I am wrong but I wish the average american the best of luck and hope in a better future for the whole world combined but being honest, the future doesn't feel good for America.

[eru]

> How does the taxation aspect of it work? Would I have to pay short term capital gains on each transaction that I then make?

Sorry, I have no clue, you need to investigate that by yourself. My jurisdiction doesn't have capital gains taxes, so I didn't look into this. Let me know what you find.

> Also, basically US loses all major exports for this financial hack of sorts. Doesn't it fundamentally weaken the reality of US?

Your view of exports is a bit too narrow. A 'trade deficit' mostly just means that the US 'exports' financial assets. The US is really good at producing financial assets. Eg when people globally buy into a hot US IPO that officially counts as widening the trade deficit, even though you could say in a sense that effectively the US is exporting Google shares. And they are really good at making new companies.

Btw, in aggregate the US earns more from their investments abroad than they send foreigners for their investments in the US. Despite the foreigners investing more overall. That's a pretty good deal for the Americans (in aggregate).

I agree that an unsustainable government deficit is bad, but that's bad regardless of whether it's foreigners or locals who finance the government.

> So (when) the AI financial bubble explodes, How would America even rebuild itself?

You can look at what happened in the past after similar episodes.

Btw, for an interesting history lesson look at what happened after 1987's Black Monday: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/356376-black-monday-less...

> I am sorry to say but the future seems bleak. I hope I am wrong but I wish the average american the best of luck and hope in a better future for the whole world combined but being honest, the future doesn't feel good for America.

I don't live in America, but from the outside it seems like the place still has a lot of life and dynamism left.

The main thing that would keep me from moving there is their asinine NIMBYism in the big cities and car infestation of the whole country. I'm not too worried about their economy, and I have about 50% of my investment portfolio in US stocks.

[Imustaskforhelp]

> Sorry, I have no clue, you need to investigate that by yourself. My jurisdiction doesn't have capital gains taxes, so I didn't look into this. Let me know what you find.

I will look into it later, thank you. I don't think the stocks thing is available in my country but I will check

> Your view of exports is a bit too narrow. A 'trade deficit' mostly just means that the US 'exports' financial assets. The US is really good at producing financial assets. Eg when people globally buy into a hot US IPO that officially counts as widening the trade deficit, even though you could say in a sense that effectively the US is exporting Google shares. And they are really good at making new companies.

Y'know actually this is the crux of my comment as well.

That, America is in this particular position where its only exports are usually finance. The issue is that its finances are extremely overvalued (even more so with the AI bubble), even investing in S&P 500 doesn't feel safe to me because its a matter of (when) and not if, that the bubble bursts.

This is what I am worried about, I am not American as well but when the AI bubble bursts and People panick essentially taking in a second all the "exports" that US economy made, This is the only thing stopping America from breaking all hell loose. And I don't think this is the right thing because this export of finance or just this nationalistic focus of financialization caused the AI bubble to exist in the first place.

At the end of the day, any technological innovation just gets wedded to finance and some of them are really really shady like the AI bubble and the crypto bubble.

I am not even talking about the global influence of this leads when companies will do so many immoral things that we are witnessing in the tech giants (google,facebook,twitter,amazon,microsoft)

I think that most americans who live there are actually really net negative and they are impacted the most out of this as I said, and this is part of the struggle because I feel like that the majority shouldn't be subdued by the minority's interests or have the idea of inequality persists which actively hurts the majority.

It's mostly their country and they don't even have a say in this arguably, the most important matter.

Perhaps this is capitalism and I don't have too much faults with the capitalism model Adam smith presented but I very much have a problem with this late stage capitalism.

Much of the system is inequal but the people there are taught to be on the good side of that line and let it continue. The social and moral effects of it are already visible in the country.

The baseline of a country even with finance is inherently linked to these factors as well which America's failing in. It's not visible in the graphs the things I said in the S&P because it can be at an all time high but this just goes on to show the decoupling of finance from reality and how it can come to bite again if things go bad because if things go bad, they will go really really bad and anything that can happen will happen and the current politics of US is fundamentally shaky as well and that reflects in their finance as well.

Overall, my heart just goes out to the average american suffering from all this. Whose budgets are being cut to please the large tax cuts of the rich and who suffers the most from inflation and the bubble bursting.

America's economy right now is shaky. Anything can happen, nothing bad has happened because people think that they are rich because of the S&P so consumption still happens and things are barely okay even if there are so many cracks in the system right now.

But when S&P breaks loose due to the AI bubble bursting. I genuinely worry that America can really go through a lot of internal turmoil because of it.

So at the end of the day, I feel like AI investments financially would lead to disaster and this might impact the world as well but it will really harshly impact America the most.

Also, no, if stock markets rise then the money isn't flowing in US govt bonds where the interest rates are low, this is the first time in many years perhaps I think during the tarrifs that people weren't putting money in either of these things and genuinely looked for other outcomes and the US govt had to pay higher interest rates which is very contrary to what usually happens and that was the sign of something bad and I don't know if I am able to make my stance clear but I genuinely feel like a country's major exports shouldn't really be finance.