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By Detlev Schlichter, on 5 November 11
Reproduced by kind permission of Jacob Wolinsky at ValueWalk.com
Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
I studied economics in my home country, Germany, and joined J.P. Morgan as a trader in Frankfurt in 1990. By 1996 I had become a portfolio manager in J.P. Morgan’s asset management division and moved to London, which I still call my home. I specialized in European and global bond portfolios. From 1998 to 2001 I worked at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, which has since become part of BlackRock, and in 2001 I joined Western Asset Management, the Pasadena-based bond specialist. For Western I oversaw their London-based investment team and was lead portfolio-manager for all their global strategies. When I left Western in 2009 my team there oversaw roughly $65 billion in assets under management for institutional clients from around the world. I look back on my years in the business with many fond memories. I worked with some interesting people and had some fascinating clients. But by 2009 I had become very pessimistic on our financial system as a result of my study of Austrian School economics and my own experience after almost two decades in the business. The two perspectives combined to form a rather unpleasant outlook. I wanted to step outside the industry, think things through, and write a book about it.
What investing style do you subscribe to?
I am not sure I subscribe to any identifiable style, or that I even consider it particularly desirable to do so. Let me explain. I spent almost 20 years in the institutional asset management business. There is very limited room to develop your own style to begin with. These companies are asset-gathering companies. They need to constantly grow and attract new clients. In order to do that they not only try to establish a decent track record but also a specific house style and a clear and distinguishable process that they can market. They try to create a brand. As a portfolio manager you have to play along and do things in a way that fits the process. Incidentally, that was something I was actually quite good at. Now it so happens that certain styles work for some time and then stop working. Markets constantly change. In the industry, however, whenever somebody has good numbers for a while and a good story about how those numbers have been generated, he is usually in a sweet spot. New clients come rushing in. But I have become very cynical in this regard. That is usually the moment you should sell these firms or money mangers. I accept that my take on the style-question is unusual. But that is how I see it.
The truth is I tried many different things over the years. Only now, that I am out on my own, outside the mainstream industry, can I look at things with an entirely open mind, which is refreshing. I like Doug Casey’s distinction between traders, investors and speculators. Many people call themselves investors when what they really do is trading. This is certainly true of many ‘investors’ in the asset management industry. I would now call myself a speculator. Most of the time you do nothing. Until you spot a major dislocation, or a major event or an opportunity, something that you have a completely different view on from most other people. That’s when you go in and take risk. Example: I am convinced this crisis is misunderstood by most. We are witnessing the failure of our fiat money system. This will get much worse. I try to position myself for it.
What attracted you to the Austrian school of thought?
I came across some writings by F.A. Hayek by chance more than twenty years ago. I can honestly say that I felt immediately that I was reading something special, something that made sense, that was true. I found it exceptionally convincing, and it made a huge impression on me. For the next four years I read everything Hayek wrote. Then, I discovered the other Austrians, Mises, Rothbard, Menger. To sum it up, I would say that it is the methodology that makes the Austrian School so special. Ludwig von Mises, for me, is the unsurpassed master of the Austrian School. He understood better than anybody what economics is about, what it can do and what it cannot do, and how it should go about it. Austrian School Economics starts with the individual actor. Purposeful individual action and human cooperation on markets is the driving force behind all economic phenomena. From the starting point of the individual, the Austrians reconstruct and explain all institutions of the market – from the bottom up, so to speak. By contrast, most modern economists approach economics as if it was a natural science, where we must collect observations, statistical data, and look for patterns. This is the right approach for natural sciences because in nature we can’t perceive of purposeful action. But we do understand the actions of humans in the economy. The approach can be and has to be different. Furthermore, macroeconomists implicitly assume that the statistical aggregates and the large wholes that they work with in their models (consumption, investment, retail spending, aggregate demand, and so forth) are what really interact with one another in the real world. This is a tremendous intellectual error. The economy is ultimately driven by countless individual decision-makers. The Austrians do not lose sight of that.
It is no surprise to me that the Austrian School has such a strong appeal for real-life entrepreneurs and risk-takers. No other school of thought understands entrepreneurship, risk-taking, capital accumulation and capital maintenance, relative prices and the real-life elements of time and error, like the Austrian School does. Of course, politicians, central bankers and state bureaucrats are, by contrast, drawn towards mainstream macroeconomics. It gives them the illusion that the economy can be planned and manipulated from the top down.
What inspired you to write a book?
When you begin to understand Austrian monetary theory you realize that our financial system is built on quicksand – elastic, constantly expanding fiat money to be produced without limit and at full discretion by the central banks. I realized that the growing instabilities and dislocations that I observed in my work-life as a portfolio manager over the past two decades were the inevitable consequence of our monetary infrastructure. What amazed me was that nobody around me saw it that way. Whenever a credit boom threatened to turn into a credit bust – as it sooner or later must – everybody was calling for a monetary stimulus, for lower rates and for policy accommodation to extend the credit boom further. Such a policy may indeed prevent a correction now, but only at the cost of making an even bigger correction necessary in the future. But everybody in financial markets is so indoctrinated with a specific and narrow subset of modern macroeconomics – I would say the most toxic aspects of Keynesianism and Monetarism – that everybody believes any policy to be a good one if it only creates some near-term GDP boost. There is no perception of long-term dislocations and market imbalances, of what the consequences of such a policy of artificially cheap credit must ultimately be. I think a gigantic intellectual bubble exists in which most financial market participants operate. That bubble will probably only get pricked by real events, i.e. the massive crisis that is now unfolding. But I wanted to try and give people a different perspective, to debunk some of the erroneous common wisdom that is readily accepted by so many people in the business.
Can you explain to people what your definition of money is?
Money is the medium of exchange. It is the most fungible good in the economy and therefore most readily facilitates exchange of property. It is neither a consumption good nor an investment good. We hold it not to satisfy any of our consumption needs, nor to generate a return. We have demand for it because it gives us flexibility. To hold money balances means to hold purchasing power in its most readily tradable form.
Capitalism developed on the basis of inelastic, inflexible and apolitical commodity money, such as gold and silver – inelastic in its supply and outside political control. Today we live in a world of entirely elastic paper money under discretion of the state, and for the first time in history, such a system spans the entire globe. Remember also, that today’s fiat money system only came into full bloom on August 15, 1971.
Today, most mainstream economists maintain that the perfect elasticity of the money supply is a plus. My book argues that this is wrong. The relative inelasticity of gold makes gold a superior form of money. Elastic money systems must ultimately collapse. Throughout history they always have.
Can you tell us about the US system pre-Fed era?
I should stress first that I am not a monetary historian, although there is a short chapter on the history of paper money systems in my book – all of these systems collapsed by the way. Understanding monetary systems requires theory. History can illuminate concepts or raise new questions. Only theory can explain.
Prior to the founding of a central bank, the Federal Reserve, in 1913 and the subsequent abandonment of a gold anchor in 1933 (domestically) and 1971 (internationally), the US used, for the most part, commodity money. I say ‘for the most part’ as America conducted some interesting experiments with paper money as well, all of them complete disasters. In fact, one of the first historic examples of a paper money system outside Medieval China, was Massachusetts, which, in 1690 when still a British colony, issued paper money to fund military excursions into French Quebec. Then there were the famous continentals, a paper money issued by the Continental Congress in 1775 to fund the Revolutionary War. These early experiments with paper money ended like they always do – with worthless paper tickets. Then in the early part of the 19th century the dollar was defined as a specific amount of gold. This was proper commodity money, a gold standard. There was no central bank. Gold was money. Commercial banks had to redeem their banknotes in specie, which set tight limits on bank credit creation. But the government couldn’t stop interfering, in particular whenever it needed cheap credit, usually to fund wars. Requirements to redeem in physical gold were lifted on a couple of occasions, so in the wake of the War of 1812, when the US was fighting Britain again, and most famously during the Civil War, when the greenbacks were issued and soon inflated into worthlessness. In 1879, the US joined Britain, and in fact most of the then industrialized world, in what became known as the Classical Gold Standard. After the inflation of the greenback era, a corrective deflation was allowed to unfold (but strong economic growth continued nevertheless), and from 1879 to 1914 there was no meaningful deflation or inflation in the system at all. This was a time of hard, inflexible and stable money. This was a period– in the US and globally – of solid economic growth, rising living standards and growing international trade, and of harmonious economic relationships between countries. The Classical Gold Standard was not perfect but probably the best monetary system we have had so far.
Many people have proposed going back to the gold standard? We had many depressions and recessions while on the gold standard, do you think it would be a good idea?
Yes, we should definitely return to a gold standard — not one that is “managed” by the government, but a proper gold standard with no involvement of the state. I wouldn’t hold my breath, however. As we have seen, governments love fiat money. It gives them control over the economy. We will eventually return to some form of gold standard but only after the complete collapse of the present system in a major crisis.
The elasticity of money – which means periods of money expansion and credit booms followed by periods of monetary stagnation or contraction – is the main cause of business cycles. How did this occur under a gold standard? Answer: the spread of deposit banking and fractional-reserve banking, in particular in the late 19th century. These banking practices introduced an element of elasticity into the money supply. They can be profitable for the banks but they are risky and are destabilizing for the broader economy, even under gold standard conditions. That is why many Austrians argue for a 100-percent gold standard, for 100 percent reserve banking. I am not in that camp. I think fractional-reserve banking should not be banned, cannot be banned, and ultimately does not need to be banned. Many of these issues can be solved in a free market. We may have the occasional recession but the system can cope with that.
However, the Fed was founded in a joined effort by politicians and bankers in order not to restrict and contain fractional-reserve banking but, to the contrary, in order to encourage and subsidize it. Money has since not become less elastic but much more elastic. Of course, credit cycles still occur. They now only get much, much bigger. We had a thirty-year credit boom. We will now get a major credit bust. Compared to what we are facing now, the recessions of the gold standard era will look like a walk in the park.
Why do most policy makers seem to be in the Keynesian school and not the Austrian school of thought?
Please remember my answer to the question above about the appeal of the Austrian School. The methodology of the Austrians is superior, but the methodology of mainstream macroeconomics, and Keynesianism in particular, is appealing to politicians. These schools perceive the economy as an organism that sometimes performs below potential, which then provides a convenient excuse for the politicians to get involved. Keynesianism has popularized the concept of ‘aggregate demand’. A recession is now seen simply as a lack of aggregate demand. So politicians have a pseudo-scientific excuse to run deficits and spend money they don’t have. Strangely, the fact that “lack of aggregate demand” can at best be a symptom but hardly an explanation of the recession does not appear to bother too many people.
Truth is, the recession is the result of imbalances that the economy accumulated during the previous artificial credit boom. Once these dislocations (such as excessive levels of debt, overextended banks and inflated asset markets) exist, the cleansing of a recession is needed and unavoidable. That is not a popular message among politicians.
Greece was forced to implement austerity and the budget deficit as % of GDP went up and unemployment skyrocketed. What are your thoughts on the reason why this occurred?
That is not surprising at all. You have to remember that in today’s world GDP is a very poor measure of economic health. In the EU, 50 percent of recorded economic activity is conducted by the public sector. In my adopted home country, the UK, it is 53 percent. The public sector spends more money than all private individuals and corporations put together. This is more socialism than capitalism.
We don’t have to assume that everything the state does is pure waste. For some of these things there would be a proper demand even in a state-less free market. However, we – and in fact the state bureaucrats as well – have no means of telling what is truly demanded by the buying public and what is of marginal or of no productivity, and what is thus complete waste, because the public sector operates outside of market prices and without the guidance of profit and loss. But whatever the state does enters the GDP statistic just the same.
So whenever the state is being cut back – which hardly ever happens, only in cases of default, which is why I am a big advocate of government defaults – a lot of things drop out of the GDP statistics and unemployment goes up because public sector employees are laid off. This drop in GDP is not a lasting problem. We know that a lot of state activity was at least suboptimal to begin with. Now resources (including labor) are being redirected to the private sector, where they will eventually be employed again, and this will enhance wealth and prosperity in the long run. In my view, Greece should stop paying anything to her creditors, declare full default, and shrink the state drastically. For a short while, the statistics would look dreadful. Then Greece would have a massive and lasting recovery. With no debt, a small state and a free economy it could, after some time, outperform everybody else in Europe.
Taxes went up in the Clinton era and the economy still boomed, do you think slightly increasing taxes will be detrimental to the economy?
I object to taxes for moral and ethical reasons (which are subjective) and economic considerations (which are objective). Taxes are always detrimental to the economy. They were so, too, under Clinton. It so happened that other things outweighed their negative impact. Remember, the mega credit boom that started in the early 80s was still in full swing, the Greenspan put was still operable, the NASDAQ bubble was still being inflated. Some of the growth of those years was genuine, that is, based on entrepreneurship, capital creation and innovation, but a lot of it was also the result of easy money. Under these circumstances the tax hikes were not felt that much, that is all.
Today’s environment is very different. The credit boom has ended, and has ended for good. The state and the financial sector have benefitted most from decades of cheap credit and are now severely overstretched. The economy overall is much weaker. Higher taxes would be detrimental. Also, the idea that the gigantic government deficits could be closed with higher taxes is idiotic. To the US I would give the same advice as I just gave to Greece: default, shrink the state massively, go back to hard money. Alas, they won’t do it.
I am curious what you think about the major currencies; Dollar, Euro, Yen, some of the emerging countries?
They are all locked in a deadly race to the bottom. All these currency-areas face the same problems, which are the typical problems of a fiat money system reaching its endgame: massive public debt, uncontrollable deficits, weak banks, addiction to cheap credit and constant asset price inflation. None of these governments want to face up to the reality that they are broke and that what the economy needs is for the market to be allowed to liquidate unsustainable levels of debt and other economic imbalances. As that is deemed politically unacceptable, they will continue to try and buy time by producing ever more currency units and injecting them into financial markets. Inflation and currency destruction will be the endgame. I would stay away from paper money as much as I can. Buy gold and silver instead, and certain other real assets. To guess which of these paper currencies will hit the bottom first is a mug’s game, in my view.
Is inflation or deflation a bigger threat right now?
Inflation and deflation are both unpleasant but it is wrong to call them both an equal threat right now. Allowing deflation now would have a clear advantage, namely it would bring the economy back to a state of balance and toward more proportionate and sustainable structures. A deflationary correction that would allow the liquidation of market dislocations would be painful but it would ultimately restore the economy to health.
If all market interventions, including cheap money from the Fed, would cease now, we would indeed face a sharp economic contraction and most likely a period of deflation. But this is ultimately unavoidable anyway. Current economic structures are simply unsustainable, and the market has a way of dealing with what is unsustainable: liquidate it. The market is craving a cleansing recession, including drops in certain prices. As I said before, this is deemed politically unacceptable. That is why we will get ever more aggressive monetary policy and ever more money printing. This will not solve our problems but it will lead to inflation and most likely complete currency collapse. My outlook for the coming years is inflation, much higher inflation, not deflation. The reason for that is policy.
Hopefully you won’t consider the following analogy tasteless but to ask what is the bigger threat, inflation or deflation, is a bit like asking a cancer patient what is the bigger threat, death or chemotherapy. Nobody will readily embrace either. But it appears to me that in constantly telling us that we need to avoid deflation at all cost, today’s policy establishment is telling us that we should avoid chemotherapy and accept death by hyperinflation.
What are your opinions on Gold?
Gold is the essential self-defense asset. Whenever fiat money systems enter their endgame and are about to collapse, gold comes back. It is the eternal form of money. As Greenspan once said (and he said it when he was already the head the world’s foremost paper money central bank): In extremis, nobody accepts paper money. Gold will always be accepted.
At its current price of $1,720 an ounce I still consider it cheap. Much more fiat money will be created in coming months and years. You want to own something that is not simultaneously somebody else’s liability (such “money in the bank” on your deposit or savings account) and that cannot be created for political purposes at will and without limit, such as paper dollars.
Don’t trade gold, accumulate it.
QEII, Operation Twist, thoughts?
These operations get ever more extreme. It is just part of the logic of the system. We are in a mess because of the trillions that were created out of thin air in the past. To keep the system going a bit longer, the central banks now have to produce ever more money ever faster. Will it stimulate the economy? Yeah, right.
Like a little hamster in his wheel, Bernanke will have to run ever faster to keep the printing press humming and keep the system from correcting. We will get QE 3 and QE 4, no question. By the way, Operation Twist could already be QE3 in disguise. On the face of it, the Fed is just selling short duration Treasuries and buying long duration Treasuries. But the Fed also promised to keep interbank rates near zero for a long time (meaning: forever), and to achieve that they may be buying back short-term Treasuries pretty soon. Listen, there are no exit strategies. The Fed’s balance sheet will continue to grow. It is already bigger than M1. We will get more and more money……
Flashback to September 2008, what do you think the Government should have done?
Nothing. I like Jim Grant’s term: “constructive inaction”. If you believe that the Fed and the government saved us from another Great Depression with all their bailouts and quantitative easing, think again. All they did was postpone the depression – and to make the final disaster worse. All these imbalances are still with us, many of them are larger and have been moved to the state’s balance sheet. Nothing is fixed.
But if you think that this advice – do nothing – is unrealistic and that the government, after having actively supported the build-up of this credit edifice for decades, cannot simply walk away from it once the house of cards finally unravels, then I would suggest the following: Any actions by the government should have been directed toward sustaining the payment infrastructure and maybe to minimize the fallout for bank depositors, who for a long time have actively be lured into entrusting their savings to an increasingly leveraged, government-supported banking system, which has now checkmated itself. I am not suggesting a debt-funded bailout of the deposit base. But the US government allegedly sits on 260 million ounces of gold, some of it confiscated from its own population. Current market value: $450 billion. That could have been handed back to the banks as a backstop against their deposits. This could have been the first step towards abolishing the Fed and returning the country to a gold standard.
If you were Ben Bernanke what would you do now?
Abdicate. His mandate is contradictory and impossible. He is supposed to provide a stable medium of exchange for the American public, and at the same time provide an unlimited backstop for Wall Street and Washington. Well, it is one or the other. We already know which one he chose.
Same question, Barack Obama?
Abdicate is again a good option.
I am not an American so I am looking at this from a distance. It strikes me that the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barrack Obama were both unmitigated disasters for their country. I don’t even think the two as men are necessarily bad or evil. As individuals they may be decent and have good intentions. But the politics are just shockingly bad. The growth of the state, of government involvement in the economy and in all walks of life, the budget deficits, the ever-growing debt pile, the aggressive monetization of debt and the dependency on cheap credit and ongoing market manipulation – this is a complete shipwreck by any standard but, if I may say so, particularly shameful for a country that for freedom-loving people around the world was once a beacon of liberty, opportunity and capitalism. As a generally pro-American libertarian, I can’t tell you how much it hurts to see this once great country go to bits like this.
What needs to be done? Stop printing money, return the country to a gold standard, default on the debt (it will never be repaid anyway!), shrink the state aggressively, stop all foreign wars – the military is the government’s biggest single expenditure item at close to $1 trillion a year.
If you think this is unrealistic then let me tell you that I think all of this will ultimately happen – but not by choice but by necessity, as a result of a massive crisis.
If you were Angela Merkel or Jean-Claude Trichet?
I think that what I said about Bernanke and Obama broadly applies to Merkel and Trichet as well. At the core, the problems are the same. Europe’s problem is not that many different countries share the same currency. Many more and much more different countries did the same between 1879 and 1914 under the gold standard, and it worked very well. The problem is precisely that they do not share an international, apolitical and inelastic commodity money, but a fully elastic and politicized fiat money that comes with built-in expectations of government and bank bailouts. Stop printing money, return to hard and de-politicized money, preferably a gold standard, and shrink the state – the advice is the same.
Who are you endorsing for US President? Ron Paul?
I think the entire political process, not only in the US, but in all modern mass democracies, has become a most degrading and dispiriting spectacle. I agree with P.J. O’Rourke: Don’t vote. It only encourages the bastards. Politics needs to be thoroughly delegitimized as a problem-solving device. It creates more problems than it solves. So I am not endorsing anybody.
Having said this, Ron Paul is, of course, by far the best choice from my point of view. I don’t think that this will surprise you considering what I said above. He is right about ending the wars, abolishing the Fed, returning to a gold standard, shrinking the state. But I fear that he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to win the presidency. So the crisis will continue. Don’t bet on politics. Trust your own reason. Be prepared.
By Steven Baker MP, on 15 August 11
A very old and well known story is told in Genesis 11. It is the story of the curse of Babel:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
I retell this tale not for the sake of the theology but for the sake of our present debates. In what follows, the names have been omitted in the hope that I may be excused any hint of misrepresentation…
When I first approached a prominent worldwide leader of the Austrian School, in frustration at the pitiful state of economic debate, to ask who were the UK’s best Austrians, with a view to starting a UK-based Austrian-School think tank, things seemed ever so easy. I had mostly read Mises and a touch of Rothbard. I understood the Austrian school and the monetary theory of the trade cycle but I was not broadly read into the scholarly debate over money.
And then I discovered the curse of Babel amongst the monetary scholars of the free-market.
One eminent free-market British academic believes that central banking, fiat money and fractional reserve deposit taking are institutions which have evolved naturally in society and which should be preserved. He believes the Bank of England should be privatised.
Most Monetarists seem to think central banking and fiat money are just fine, together with the Keynesians, some of whom at least think they are free market, but some advocate various forms of full-reserve banking.
Most, perhaps all, Austrians think the central banks are a plain instrument of statism which should be abolished, together with deposit insurance, legal tender laws and various other privileges. They reject fiat money outright, more often than not, as a creature of interventionism and a tool of the enemies of liberty.
But one faction believes that fractional reserve deposit taking is a breach of sound property rights — a thoroughly libertarian concept — and that it emerged out of fraud to be legitimised by the state.
The other faction pay little heed to the theory of property rights in demand deposits, emphasising freedom of contract. They believe fractional reserve deposit taking is a natural and honest phenomenon which enjoys the consent of depositors. They argue that full-reserve deposit taking is only ever a product of the state and deride the full-reservers willingness to restrict freedom.
Amongst all this, the protagonists accuse one another variously of economic or legal ignorance or a misinterpretation of history. All sides have their scholars and their literature. Both factions claim the term “free banking” as a rejection of central banking. Sometimes they claim the support of the same scholars…
It seems once we go beyond money as the means of exchange, universal agreement stops. Truly, when it comes to the institutional arrangements for money, we are under the curse of Babel.
It is a pity then that money is dying.
Right across the western world and perhaps shortly in China, we see state-supplied money running out of control, with all the distortions and maladjustments that implies, across sectors, regions and time. It seems the state’s response to every setback is more borrowing and more debasement. Unable to sensibly measure the money supply and unsure whether circumstances are inflationary or deflationary, the authorities wrestle to prop up a system damned by its own inadvertent design, a design which emerged out of the failure of Bretton Woods, itself a system condemned to a youthful death.
Five years ago, I would have wondered how the monetary authorities of the Weimar Republic could be so stupid…
At The Cobden Centre, we are agreed that honest money is a product of the market subject to the laws of property and contract, not the will of authority. With Richard Cobden, we agree that the very terms of regulating and managing the currency are an absurdity: the currency should regulate itself. Unfortunately and despite endless study, we seem to be able to agree neither what the proper institutions of such a system would be nor how to get there.
We have previously published an admittedly incomplete list of ten plans for reform. Since I agree with Sir Mervyn King (PDF) in that “of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today”, I could happily accept most of them as a step forward. Perhaps Bagus’ “button-pushing” withdrawal of the state would have disruptive consequences beyond our imagination but it seems mere perseverance with our present system is little more predictable, except in as much as it shall fail.
The original curse of Babel was cast, it seems, to prevent a people speaking as one: for speaking as one, nothing they planned to do would be impossible for them. Perhaps we shall not aspire so high, but we must change if we are to rise above the level of The People’s Front of Judea and win a battle which, it seems, must be won in our lifetimes.
By Anthony J. Evans, on 31 March 11
Regular readers of this site may be aware of a debate relating to the contractual devices that banks might use to ensure that they are solvent. One of the terms that has been used is a “notice of withdrawal clause”, but what is this?
It might be argued that a notice of withdrawal clause (or a “withdrawal clause”) is merely another term for the more often invoked “option clause”. This has received extensive treatment in the “free banking” literature (for example Dowd (1988), Selgin & White (1994, 1997)), and we can use the following definition:
option clauses… give banks the option of deferring redemption of their notes provided that they later pay compensation to the noteholders whose demands for redemption are deferred” (Dowd, 1998, p.319)
The confusion may stem from the fact that in some instances option clauses and withdrawal clauses are used interchangeably. For example Selgin & White (1997) say:
one possible run-proofing device discussed in the literature is an “option clause” or “notice of withdrawal clause” allowing a bank temporarily to suspend the redeemability of some or all of its liabilities (notes or demand deposits) provided the bank pays a pre-specified (penalty) rate of interest on the suspended liabilities
However, I believe there is stronger textual support for the idea that they are distinct devices. In an earlier article Selgin & White (1994) say the following:
a bank might contractually reserve the option to suspend for a limited time the redeemability of its notes or demand deposits, as Scottish banks did with banknotes before 1765 (when the practice was outlawed) and as banks do today when they include “notices of withdrawal” clauses in deposit contracts
My reading is that they are often used interchangeably (or perhaps as though a withdrawal clause is a type of option clause), because they perform the same economic function. But a detailed reading would reveal them to be different.
In my working paper on the sound money debate I define a withdrawal clause as follows:
In addition to the option clause banks might also offer (and historically did offer) a “notice of withdrawal” clause, specifying that their customers were required to give
30 days notice prior to making a redemption claim. The fact that this clause existed (to protect the bank from a legal point of view if it were ever to suffer a liquidity crisis) does not mean it is always invoked, and banks could routinely not enforce this rule and satisfy immediate redemption requests.
Firstly, note that this is presented as a different clause to the option clause. But secondly, we can see that it differs from the option clause in terms of the default nature of the contract.
Recollect that an option clause allows banks – under certain conditions – to convert a demand deposit into a timed deposit (thus giving them time to generate liquidity whilst avoiding firesale losses). This is seen to be good for the banks (obviously!) but also good for the customers (since it’s better to receive the deposit plus interest at some point in the future than to see the bank being wiped out).
However in the case of the withdrawal clause there is a notice period written into the contract – it is technically a timed deposit (where the notice period serves as a minimum term). But if the bank wanted to offer an instant access account it can simply publicise the fact that it does not routinely enforce this notice period and that it satisfies redemptions on demand.
I suspect the reason withdrawal clauses received less explicit attention in the literature is that unlike the option clause they are not a uniquely “free banking” concept. Indeed, notices of withdrawal are routinely used in contemporary banking. Investopedia define it as follows:
A notice given to a bank by a depositor. As its name implies, a notice of withdrawal states the depositor’s intention to withdraw funds from an account. This notice applies to both time-deposit and NOW accounts
In short, the option clause means that a de jure demand deposit can be treated as a de facto timed deposit. The withdrawal clause means that a de jure timed deposit can be treated as a de facto demand deposit. They are two sides of the same coin – both allow instant access fractional reserve accounts, the only difference is the default position.
So perhaps provisions such as option clauses and withdrawal clauses allow banks to offer fractional reserve accounts that aren’t fraudulent or reliant on legal privilege, but does that make the 100% reserve argument wrong? Not necessarily. The withdrawal clause in particular “works” precisely because it changes the de jure status of the account. A counter argument might be “if a withdrawal clause applies to a timed deposit then you are admitting that fractional reserve banking is irreconcilable with demand deposits”. From the view of legal theory (and depending on your definitions), this may well be correct. However the de facto status of this account is instant access and redeemable “on demand”. In terms of the economic function of the account it exists exactly as “free bankers” envisage.
References
By Mark Goodhand, on 3 December 10
Steven Horwitz writes
In some free-market circles fractional reserve banking (FRB) is blamed for everything from business cycles to bad breath. Defenders are seen as apologists for inflation and fraud. Thankfully these views remain a minority because they are gravely mistaken. As I, and other Austrian monetary theorists, such as George Selgin and Larry White, have argued, there’s nothing wrong with FRB that getting rid of a central bank can’t cure. Fractional reserve banking works just fine in a free market.
As you’d expect, his post has kicked off a lively discussion. The debate rolls on.
By Toby Baxendale, on 8 November 10
Cross posted at Mises.org and The Coordination Problem.
Come the Revolution, in a free banking world, where there is at least no lender of last resort, commodity backed money with no possibility of over issuing above that commodity in reserve and no deposit insurance, it would be possible for safe deposit accounts and savings accounts where money is lent to borrowers to exist. Both 100% Reserve Free Bankers and Fractional Reserve Free Bankers would be happy thus far. If an instant access demand deposit is offered that is fractional in nature, we get heated debate within the free banking community; the arguments will be familiar to readers of this site. So I am going to throw in a left field ball and see what comes out in debate about what I see as a potential solution to this. I will remain silent on the thread until all comments are in.
The Third Type of Account (not named yet, will not use 100% or Fractional in the title due to fear of the verbal abuse that will come forth!)
Consider this, a depositor goes into his bank, he is offered a safe deposit account that is safe, but gives no interest, his time preference is such that he wants to earn some interest. The bank worker shows him to his colleague who offers him a savings account. Our depositor loves the rate of interest offered, but notes that he has to put his money away for at least a month, 3,6,9, 18 months, X number of years to get a proceedingly better rate of interest. This does not satisfy our depositor as he wants to have instant access and interest. He wants to have his cake and eat it. He gets taken to see the Third Type of Account manager. This manager says this account is a timed deposit account in nature i.e. your money is locked away for at least a month, 3,6,9 18 months X number of years, but the bank will allow instant access, by exception for the liquidity that it keeps in reserve all the time. However, should there be too much call on liquidity, the bank reserves the right to point out that you the depositor are actually a de jure timed depositor / creditor to the bank for at least a month, 3,6,9 18 months X number of years and are going to he held to the time period you freely signed up to.
This third type of account always allows the bank to be reliant on no legal privilege and no accounting standard that is different to other commercial organisation to keep its current and long term creditors whole at all points in time as the creditor in question is in fact a timed depositor who has instant liquidity by exception and not by demand. The reality is this liquidity would be almost at all times there bar the period of bank runs. In fact, dare I say it (I can feel the avalanche of invective building up already) that this is a robust 100% reserve type account form an accounting an legal point of view, with all the benefits of a fractional reserve account of instant access, with none of the inflationary business cycle inducing consequences hotly alleged by the 100% Reserve Bankers.
By Anthony J. Evans, on 12 August 10
When discussing the “fraudulent” nature of fractional-reserve banking, the crux of the issue seems to be how the law distinguishes between banks and other businesses. I think all sides accept that accounting requirements are different for banks than for other businesses, however accounting principles are different for different types of business. I simply don’t have enough knowledge of auditing law to pass judgement on whether banks are treated differently because of legal privilege, or simply because they have unique attributes that auditors attempt to interpret accounting law in light of. (Note: and neither do the auditors I have asked about this!)
The argument against fractional reserves relies on the assertion that “normal” businesses are unable to operate in the same way as banks, and are forced to maintain “100% reserves” at all times. Here is an example that I’d be interested in feedback on. Consider the following bet:
“The FTSE 100 will rise by 5% or more within the next week”
I am willing to bet £1,000 that it *will*, and you are willing to bet £1,000 that it will *not*
- From a legal point of view, based on current UK law – have I committed fraud?
- From a free market perspective – have I done anything wrong?
Is it possible to answer those questions from the information given? If so, how do your answers to those questions change based on the following information:
Scenario A: When we make the bet I do not have £1,000 in cash available and have no hope of having £1,000 in cash at any point in the near future. I win the bet though, so this isn’t revealed
Scenario B: When we make the bet I do not have £1,000 in cash available and have no hope of having £1,000 in cash at any point in the near future. I lose the bet. I can’t pay you
Scenario C: When we make the bet I do not have £1,000 in cash available, however my salary is due to enter my account before the end of the week, which would mean that I do have the cash available. I also have lots of highly liquid assets that I could liquidate should I need to. I am able to convince a reasonable person that should I lose the bet, I would be able to pay out.
Scenario D: When we make the bet I have £100,000 in cash available, and have £1,000 set aside in an envelope with your name on it, just in case I lose
Which of the above scenarios would make you answer “yes” to either question 1 or 2? It strikes me that A and B do, and D does not. So the real issue is scenario C. If you told me that scenario C is illegal I’d be very surprised – how often do you make an agreement to make a future payment and have the finances available throughout? If C is illegal this suggests that if I bet £1m at odds of 150-1 that Everton will win the Premier League, the bookies is required by law to increase their cash reserves by £151,000,000 today and to maintain this for the duration of the season. Do they?
Here’s how I think the analogy ties into the fractional reserve debate:
- You and I have a £1 bet on whether the FTSE 100 will rise by more than 1% by 1pm
- I lose the bet, and don’t have £1 on me. So I write you an IOU that says “I promise to pay the bearer of this note £1″ and you are willing to accept it
- You go to a cafeteria, and ask to use the IOU to pay for your cup of coffee. The barista agrees to accept it as payment
- The following day the barista comes to me and wants to redeem the IOU. I now have £1 and give it to him
- Seeing how the barista is happy to accept this, I issue 100 similar notes. People voluntarily accept them
- Since I don’t want to have to keep £100 cash on me, I put a small caveat on the note saying that I reserve the right to not pay out, but will pay an interest rate for any day that I don’t
Which of those events (1-5) are illegal? Which should be illegal?
Cross posted at The Filter^
By Robert Thorpe, on 26 June 10
On this website Toby Baxendale presented his plan for monetary reform. He offered a reward of £1000 for anyone who can provide a logical reason why it won’t work; naturally this provoked a lot of discussion. In my opinion Toby’s plan has a major problem, and I discussed this with Toby and the Cobden Centre team over email. Toby doesn’t agree that I’ve found a major flaw in his plan. However, we both think that the debate should be opened up. This article summarises the discussion we’ve had so far.
The Cobden Centre recognize the need for monetary reform, as do I. Reform of money and banking is urgently needed to avert future economic crises. I also agree that Austrian Economics provides a sound understanding of the issues. However, I doubt that the Baxendale plan could be successful. In my opinion if the plan were enacted there would be a burst of price inflation immediately after. The reasons for my concern come from simple economic theory.
What Task Does Money Perform?
Ludwig von Mises described the job of money as follows:
“What is called storing money is a way of using wealth. The uncertainty of the future makes it seem advisable to hold a larger or smaller part of one’s possessions in a form that will facilitate a change from one way of using wealth to another, or transition from the ownership of one good to that of another, in order to preserve the opportunity of being able without difficulty to satisfy urgent demands that may possibly arise in the future for goods that have to be obtained by way of exchange. So long as the market has not reached a stage of development in which all, or at least certain, economic goods can be sold (that is, turned into money) at any time under conditions that are not too unfavourable, this aim can be achieved only by holding a stock of money of a suitable size.” [1]
What Tasks Do Bank Accounts Perform and How Do They Work?
The economics of banking is important here because bank accounts are pivotal to the Baxendale plan. A balance in a bank account that provides on-demand payments and transfers provides services that are similar to those of note and coin money. Again, Mises gives a good description of the situation:
“The cash balance held by an individual need by no means consist entirely of money. If secure claims to money, payable on demand are employed commercially as substitutes for money, being tendered and accepted in place of money, the individuals’ store of money can be entirely or partly replaced by a corresponding store of the substitutes.” [2]
In Mises’ terminology notes and coins are money-in-the-narrower-sense. A bank balance in an on-demand account is a money-substitute. Money-in-the-broader-sense is the sum of money-in-the-narrower-sense and money-substitutes such as bank account balances.
A balance in a bank account is a debt that the bank owes to the account holder. As Toby writes in his article “… your bank-statement is a mere IOU”. Banks invest the money deposited into accounts, often in loans and mortgages. Banks keep only a small amount of “reserves” of money-in-the-narrower-sense. The diagram below shows the situation:
Entries marked in blue on the diagram are money-substitutes. Entries marked in green are money-in-the-narrower-sense.
The Baxendale Plan
Toby Baxendale’s plan is based on a similar plan by Jesús Huerta de Soto, an economist of the Austrian School from Spain. The essence of the Baxendale plan is that it makes all money-substitutes into money-in-the-narrower-sense. Lorry loads of notes are shipped to banks to make this happen. After the plan is enacted a bank statement that says £550 means that the bank is holding a corresponding £550 in notes and coins. The legal relationship between the customer and the bank is altered, after the plan the customer is no longer lending to the bank, instead the bank is acting as custodian of the customer’s cash. The bank becomes a “money warehouse” [3]. Since the balances of on-demand accounts become possessions of the customer, not debts, they no longer appear on the bank’s balance sheet. So, after the plan the banks will have an asset surplus. Rather than allow the banks to profit from this Toby intends to use these assets to pay off the national debt. Specifically, Toby proposes that the asset surplus be removed and put into a mutual body to pay off the national debt.
Bank Services and Interest Payments
A balance in an on-demand account isn’t just a money-substitute, it entitles the account holder to extra services from the bank. In Britain banking services such as payments and transfers are free, some on-demand accounts also pay interest. A balance in an on-demand account provides the holder with two things. Firstly, it provides a reserve of wealth that may easily be exchanged, just as notes and coins do. Secondly, it provides access to banking services and in some cases interest payments. Toby plan is that the banks’ assets will be used to pay off the national debt. That should lead us to ask: what role are those assets currently employed in? The answer is that they provide the income that is used to provide free banking services and interest.
It’s the income from a bank’s assets that funds free services and interest-bearing accounts. If the Baxendale plan were enacted then this stream of income would dry up. Banks would have to start charging fees for services and stop paying interest on balances in on-demand accounts. It’s difficult to estimate what the effect of this change would be. Some people would be indifferent to the change, those who use few banking services and don’t qualify for interest-bearing accounts, for example. It’s doubtful though that every account holder will fall into this category — if they did then these extra services would never have been commercial successes in the first place. Many other account holders will be sensitive to this change. I myself have been a user of interest-bearing on-demand accounts for more than a decade; I’ve always used a portion of my balance as savings.
Let’s suppose the plan is enacted and interest payments cease. Those savers like me who hold balances in on-demand accounts in order to receive interest will have to change our ways. The change will be permanent: the type of saver who once held a large balance in an on-demand account as an investment can no longer exist. Consequently, there will be a fall in the demand for these accounts’ balances when the plan is enacted. This is a fall in the demand for money. The savers in question will invest elsewhere, in interest-bearing bonds for example. Banks today offer notice accounts where the account holder must give a few weeks notice before they can withdraw. The Baxendale plan doesn’t extend to timed savings, so these accounts will operate as before; they are the obvious alternative to on-demand accounts.
Higher charges for banking services will also have widespread consequences. Businesses and individuals will have an incentive to avoid using banks for payments and transfers. Alternative methods of payment will become more attractive. Businesses will be more likely to use debt agreements and reciprocal cancellation. Suppose two wholesale companies A and B regularly trade with each other. Before the plan they make payments using bank services. After the plan they decide this method is too expensive, so they each keep a record of the debt that is owed to them by the other. Then at a regular interval they settle the net debt using money or bank transfer [4]. This will also cause a reduction in the demand for money.
The purchases of alternative investments will trigger what is called an injection effect. The type of saver I mention above will withdraw a part of his or her balance and put it into other investments. That extra demand will raise the price of such investments. The sellers of these investment products will receive that money and spend it themselves causing further price rises elsewhere. The sellers of these investments are not required to store the money they receive, they can spend it on investment projects. In time the money will spread through a large swath of the economy and price inflation will result. It’s a very similar situation to an injection of money by the central bank. These price rises will impair the planning and economic calculations of all individuals and businesses.
To recap, my opinion is that the Baxendale Plan would lead to damaging price inflation. By removing the extra services that bank accounts provide the plan will cause a fall in demand for money. If the stock of money remains the same while the demand for it diminishes then the value of each unit of money will fall.
Toby Baxendale’s Responses
Toby doesn’t agree with my criticism, we discussed this by email. Toby gave four counter-arguments:
Bank Services
Toby suggested that after the plan banks will use free services and possibly interest payments to attract customers. Toby wrote:
“Banks should charge for services rendered, why not? Maybe they will choose to subsidise the custodianship of cash storage. I sell fish for a living and to get hotels and restaurants to buy all of our fish species we sell, we have to discount the fastest moving lines, for example the salmon, and sell for virtually nothing. We are happy to do this as we work our margin in on the less important lines to our customers. Tesco sell cans of beans at £0.07p. This can not be even covering direct costs, but it gets people to walk into their store to buy other things that they make a full and sustainable margin on.”
This is called “loss leading”, a business offers a product or service at a loss in order to attract customers and build up a relationship with them. This hopefully gives the business an opportunity to sell them other products and services that are profitable. I agree that banks are likely to do this.
But, on-demand accounts attract customers to use other banking services now under the existing banking laws. What we should examine is the change: how would things change if the Baxendale plan were implemented? The situation at present is that a bank gains in two ways from offering on-demand accounts. Firstly, the bank can lend out the funds it receives from account holders, secondly, the account services can be used to attract customers towards other services. If the plan were enacted then afterwards only the latter incentive would apply. So, I think that if the plan were enacted then the provision of free banking services would decline, all other things being equal.
The Scale of the Problem
In Toby’s opinion the size of the effect I’ve described here would be small. If the total sum of balances in interest-bearing on-demand accounts is small then the cessation of interest would not have a great effect on the wider economy. Toby found some statistics on this from the Bank of England [5], these show that in March there was £386 billion in on-demand accounts that pay interest. As discussed above quite a large proportion of that amount would remain in on-demand accounts after the plan is enacted, though it’s impossible to accurately predict the proportion. However, I think it’s still useful to compare this figure to the stock of money-in-the-broader-sense. Anthony Evans and Toby Baxendale have made a measure of the UK money stock that’s consistent with the concepts of Austrian Economics [6]. By this measure the money stock is presently about £1 trillion. So, interest-bearing balances make up approximately a third of the total. The Bank of England use a different measure – “M4″ – which is based on different principles. According to that measure the money stock is about £2.2 trillion. I’ll concede that if the arguments put forward by Austrian economists against the M4 metric are wrong then I’m wrong about interest-bearing accounts. But, I think the arguments make by Frank Shostak [7] against the M metrics are persuasive.
However, interest payments are only one part of the issue, the cost of banking services is the other. If the banks were to significantly raise the fees for their services then the demand for balances in their accounts would fall. This depends, to some extent, on how the banks decide to charge. If the banks were to charge a monthly storage fee proportional to the account balance then that would be akin to a negative interest rate. That would be a strong incentive not to hold a large balance, but other charging schemes would have a similar albeit lesser effect. There are several historical precedents for this, Irving Fisher wrote about some of those in his booklet “Stamp Scrip” [8]. Fisher thought that reducing “hoarding” of money could be economically beneficial, I disagree. But, he provides evidence that charging for storage of money reduces the amount of it that people hold.
Price Deflation Afterwards
Toby writes:
“With a fixed money supply, the ongoing productivity gains by the entrepreneurs means that more goods will be offered for sale at better prices, this means the purchasing power of money has gone up. As this is the only way that we have economic progress with a fixed money supply, people will be more fixated on what their money buys rather than what the numerical value is supposedly going up by.”
In the long run Toby is correct, but, in the short run the purchasing power of money is affected by the demand for money. Steady price deflation could occur in the long run after the short term effects I’ve discussed here have played out. But, the stumbling block is the period directly after the plan is enacted. If I’m right and price inflation occurs then the government may call a halt to the plan and reintroduce the current banking system.
Effect of the Plan on Production
Toby writes:
“I concur with you that price realignments will take place as people adjust to the brave new world. This is wholly right and good, as what consumers want will be more aligned with what producers produce. What producers produce will correspond more closely with what savers want to buy when they spend their money. Only bubble based activity will be deprived of credit.”
Here Toby is referring to the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle. That theory indicates that if the quantity of money and the demand for money remain stable then unsustainable bubbles become much less likely to form. But, like the price deflation argument this is a long term theory. It can’t tell us what will happen while the demand for money is settling down from the initial disturbances caused by the implementation of the plan.
Further Discussion
I’m sure lots of people will have opinions about this, and there are many more questions that remain to be explored. I think it’s likely that there is no way of transitioning to a better monetary regime without disturbances. However, we should endeavour to predict what disturbances may occur and plan for them. For now we can continue the discussion in the comments thread below.
References
[1] Ludvig Von Mises “The Theory of Money and Credit” Liberty Fund Edition, p.170.
[2] ibid, p.154.
[3] Murray Rothbard “The Case Against the Fed”, p.34.
[4] Ludvig Von Mises “The Theory of Money and Credit”, p.314-315 describes cancellation in more detail.
[5] Bank of England “Monetary & Financial Statistics May 2010″ table A6.1 column BF96 p. 52.
[6] Anthony J. Evans & Toby Baxendale “The monetary contraction of 2008/09: Assessing UK money supply measures in light of the financial crisis”
[7] Frank Shostak “The Mystery of the Money Supply Definition” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics vol.3, no.4 (Winter 2000).
[8] Irving Fisher “Stamp Scrip” this booklet is no longer in print. It is available here.
By Tom Burroughes, on 10 June 10
Last night, yours truly, along with a number of other Cobden Centre supporters and assorted free marketeers, listened to Toby Baxendale talk about a radical proposal to sort out the UK national debt. He talked about a good many other things, but the centrepiece of his talk was how, as part of a key reform, we could slash the debt burden and save future generations from the crippling expense of the current debt.
What interested me, beyond the core of Toby’s talk, was the reaction from the audience. A number of people I spoke to – their conversations are off-the-record so I will not name them – told me they were skeptical about Toby’s reasoning on the national debt point, although they accepted that, at face value, there may be a vital point they were missing. I must say that I am not entirely convinced myself but that may because I have not understood the point and need to do a bit more thinking and reading. In particular, there is a worry that the Cobden Centre might appear, unless we thrash these issues out clearly, to be pitching some sort of “magic bullet” solution. And I am sure that Toby does not regard there being anything magical about honest money.
One simple issue that arises from any plan to wipe out a lot of debt is the law. In debt restructurings, for example, one point that bankers have to deal with is the seniority of debt holders. The UK’s national debt is held by a variety of different people, foreign and domestic; it is held by a variety of institutions. Any plan to adjust debt, or cut it, has to take into account the kind of people who hold it and any contractural issues that may arise. It may sound nick-picky but it is the sort of detail that is actually very important in resolving debt issues at the corporate level, for example.
I was mightily impressed by the few words of Steven Baker in reference to his maiden speech on the issue in the House of Commons. It almost seems too good to be true that we have a sitting MP who actually understands, and wants to spread understanding of, these issues. (The fact that Steven has actually had a serious job as an engineer is also a refreshing change). For far too long, the free market position has suffered from a lack of articulate defenders in parliament (there have been honourable exceptions, such as the late Nicholas Budgen or Jock Bruce-Gardyne). Simply conveying the message that states make a mess of money is a key argument to make. It would be good for other MPs and commentators in the mainstream media to be more acquainted with the Austrian school. There are already signs that this might be stirring: consider this article on banking by Dominic Lawson, who seems to have inherited his father’s grasp of good economics.
By Toby Baxendale, on 18 May 10
I offer a £1,000 reward for anyone who can tell me why this logically won’t work, practical politics, for now, being another matter.
What follows is an attempt to show you that this can be done.
Remember the story about the Emperor whose only concern was not the welfare of his people but the state of his clothes? Lacking a new outfit for his procession, he instructs the finest clothe-makers to propose designs. Step forward Slimus and Slick, promising that only clever people will be able to see their splendiferous garments; they will be invisible to anyone stupid. In exchange for gold coin – real money – they make something special for the King. The King, seeing nothing when presented with these designs made out of thin air, worries that he must be stupid because he pretended to the fraudsters that they were wonderful. Word goes round that only clever people can see the garments, so everyone cheers the naked King during his procession. It takes a small child, on top of his father’s shoulders, to exclaim: “the Emperor has got nothing on!” Everyone falls silent. Then, one by one, they start muttering, “the Emperor is naked!”
I am going to tell you that our Emperor – the government – has no clothes and is indeed naked with respect to our money. The sooner we realise this the better. Then we can make real progress and prevent the imminent misery. Indeed, the realisation of its nakedness should reveal that we have a unique moment in history to do something very special: to make banking secure, pay off the national debt, and even enable a 28.5% income-tax cut.
We all know what notes and coins are: money, or cash. It allows us to exchange the fruits of our work for the goods of others. When we deposit cash in Bank A – say £100 – we lend this money to the bank. This may come as a surprise to most, as we think what we deposit in a bank actually remains “ours” beyond this point. But as soon as you make a deposit it becomes the bank’s i.e. “theirs.” They then lend what is called credit of £100 to an entrepreneur, who banks it in bank B. Like magic, we now have you, who have a claim to “your” £100, and the entrepreneur, who also has an equally valid claim to “his” £100. This happens 33 times for every £100 deposited in the UK economy on average, meaning that for every £100 deposited, it is lent out to 33 people. Some of the banks did this up to 60 times. This cash cannot exist in two places at the same time, let alone 60 places at once. So what bank A does, is write you an IOU. Yes, your bank-statement is a mere IOU, the bank saying “ bank A owes you £100 on demand.” This is called a demand-deposit. We now see that demand-deposits are created out of thin air! Indeed, these are just ledger-entries from one bank customer to another.
Tesco groceries can be paid by electronic transfer. All we are doing is moving our bank’s IOU to Tesco’s bank in exchange for their groceries. This is how the world works. Do we care that we are buying goods and services out of thin air? Like the Emperor, does he care – as long as all believe he is clothed? Well, the customers of Northern Rock did. So when more than a small percentage of them asked for their IOUs from Northern Rock to be repaid – or, as they thought, for “their” money back – it could not be, as the bank had already lent it many times, making it impossible to reimburse all they owed. Indeed, if the government had not pledged to underwrite all deposits, then there would be a very good chance that the whole system would have collapsed.
If we accept that the Emperor is naked then the path to solving all our current financial problems becomes clearer.
Consider this following programme of reform:
- Print cash and replace all the demand-deposits/IOUs that exist in the system with that cash. This means the government printing approx £850 billion in cash and injecting it directly into the vaults of the banks and into the accounts of individuals. Thus, if you deposited £100 once thinking it was “yours,” it now really exists in cash, with the bank acting as custodian of your money.
- Mandate all banks to hold your cash (100% reserved) on demand at all times.
- Wipe from the bank ledgers all the demand-deposits/IOUs as banks would not owe you money anymore. This means the “thin air” money disappears, to be replaced exactly with cash money. Note: this is not inflationary, as the cash replaces the demand-deposit which acted as money. As we have established, it is only thin-air that the banking system has created to facilitate the multiplicity of lending of the same bit of money, so its total replacement with cash would mean the money supply stays exactly the same.
- Require all banks to lend real savings that people knowingly place with banks to lend to businesses to get a return of interest and capital back when the business repays that loan. This is nice, simple and safe utility banking. This is what Mervyn King advocates.
- As you are not a creditor of the bank anymore, the banking system will only have its assets and its capital, i.e. no liabilities. This means that there never again could be a bank run.
- As for the banks, not having you the depositor as a liability anymore, they will suddenly be £850 billion better off, with no current liabilities and only assets (loans to business etc), post reform. The government can now put those assets into Mutuals, which would then immediately pay off the national debt, and leave the banks in exactly the same position net worth wise as they were prior to the reform, owned by their existing shareholders. As the national debt is still just under the £850 billion, which would be available as surplus assets of the banks, this could still be achieved.
- No national debt means no interest costs (currently £40 billion p.a) associated with paying for our borrowing. Therefore, give an immediate 28.5% income-tax cut. Total income-tax raised is £142 billion.
The boy in the story stood on his father’s shoulders. I stand on the shoulders of great men who have advocated part of this reform: Irving Fisher, the greatest American economist, the Nobel Prize winners Soddy, Hayek, Buchanan, Tobin, and Allais. Recently, Kotlikoff of Boston University has published an excellent book, “Jimmy Stewart is Dead” advocating a similar reform. It is endorsed by more Nobel Winners: Akerlof, Lucas, Fogel, Prescott, and Phelps. I count 36 endorsements from the great and the good for the book. All endorse Kotlikoff’s move to what he calls Limited Purpose Banking which is another way to get 100% reserved (i.e. secure) deposits backed by cash rather than thin-air.
The Economist Huerta De Soto, in “Money, Bank Credit & Economic Cycles,” has seen the opportunity that presents itself to reform for 100% money while also paying off the National Debt. Following on from this, I suggest a substantial wealth-creating tax cut for the people. Just like the boy in the story, I do hope that people start to realise that the emperor really has no clothes, and that an enlightened approach can address this.
By Andy Duncan, on 29 April 10
If What Has The Government Done To Our Money? is an hors d’oeuvre, then The Mystery of Banking is the main appetiser in our quest to understand how the current financial global crisis arose. Far meatier than its predecessor, The Mystery of Banking paints the Mona Lisa’s face, where the earlier book simply sketches out the smile.
There are some who say that Murray N. Rothbard’s greatest work is Man, Economy, and State, which some hail as the successor to Human Action. Others say that the mantle of his greatest work lies with The Ethics of Liberty, the pulsating heart of the American libertarian movement. Yet more people declare that it must be Conceived in Liberty, the stunning four-volume series describing the genesis of the American revolution.
Everyone, of course, is right. Because all choices are subjective. However, if I were to be forced to become a Robinson Crusoe and made to occupy a desert island, with hopefully an inexhaustible supply of Gin & Tonic, and only allowed by some great Dictator in the sky to take just one Rothbard masterpiece to the island, then it would have to be The Mystery of Banking, in the same sense that if given the choice of whether to take Beethoven or Mozart, I would have to take Mozart, because although Beethoven is much deeper than our Salzburgian hero, Mozart carries a good tune which I could whistle on the beach. (Though I might also be tempted by The History of Economic Thought, but that’s a different thread in a different story.)
The Mystery of Banking has become an underground classic, with dog-eared copies of the book recently fetching hundreds of dollars on Amazon before the Mises Institute re-published a new edition, also making available a lovingly-produced PDF of the book online. (There is also a stunning version available on Scribd.)
The book has gained a hard-core underground following because it is simply amazing in the sense that it maps out the incredibly dense maze of fractional reserve banking, the Aladdin’s nest of myth and fantasy which since the Florentine banking domination of the Medici clan, has taken the western world to the brink of absolute financial collapse more times than Madonna has re-engineered her underwear. Man, Economy, and State and Conceived in Liberty are perhaps the greater works, due to their sheer undiluted mass, but pound for pound, The Mystery of Banking packs a far more devastating power-to-weight ratio as a water-slashing racing boat skating between high-momentum supertankers.
From its opening, with its dedication to three hard money champions — Thomas Jefferson, Charles Holt Campbell, and Ludwig von Mises — The Mystery of Banking is a remorseless Austrian dissection of what lies at the heart of the western world’s financial system; which some might say is “absolutely nothing at all” and which others might say is “fractional reserve banking”. (Or do I repeat myself?)
Professor Rothbard spends the first hundred pages of his incisive book describing money, its origins out of barter, its purposes, its uses, and its evolution, eventually leading towards the creation of loan banking and free banking from the late medieval period onwards.
Rothbard then describes a more developed world in which twenty dollars became a fixed weight of gold just under one ounce, and how the mathematical genius Isaac Newton defined the pound as a fixed weight of gold just under a quarter of an ounce. (From these fixed weights and their stable exchange rate, the division of labour between the two currency areas can thus be easily integrated into a single wealth-creating whole.)
Although Man, Economy, and State remains the more powerful book, The Mystery of Banking is far more dangerous to the establishment, because it blows the gaffe on their monopoly of money management and reveals who always benefits first from their nefarious practices of printing money directly from thin air (i.e. the government and its friends) and who pays for this benefit (i.e. everyone else).
Although this is obvious to all when a private counterfeiter spends his ill-gotten “money” in local stores, government has wrapped so many emerald-coloured curtains around the alchemy of their nationalisation of the money supply, that this wealth transference effect is much harder to discern with government-regulated fractional reserve banking.
Rothbard shreds these curtains, making it clear how the government always benefits first and why they are motivated to do it — even given an ability to tax — and how they have escaped detection for so long, with otherwise intelligent economic commentators in recent times demanding that governments engage in quantitative easing, to “help” the rest of us, which is like a householder demanding that a burglar steal his possessions in order to help with his insurance claim.
Rothbard blows away the rulers of the emerald city through clear analogy and example, such as beaming down the Angel Gabriel from heaven to double the supply of money in everyone’s pockets overnight, before examining the results of such an action in the morning, thus revealing that any supply of money is equally optimal; this leads to some startling implications.
However, this is just one example. There are many others like it, in the book.
Having carefully used historical precedent to reveal the history of money, in the second half of the book, Rothbard then gradually un-weaves the most insidious double-blind deception in history, which is the rise of central banking and the creeping nationalisation of the banking industry, to follow the nationalisation of money. Starting in England, and then spreading like a virus to the rest of the world, Rothbard lifts stone after stone in his unrelenting mission to expose the light-shy creatures underlying central banking, allowing none of these segmented arthropods to escape back into the darkness and the slime before he scores them with his acidic pen.
The final section of the book examines a Rothbardian seven-part plan, in the Cobden and Bright tradition, to return us all to a hard money standard. The annotated highlights of this plan are:
- Redefining money to be a fixed weight of gold
- Government gold deposits to be returned to their rightful owners, i.e. the holders of government paper money
- Central banks to be abolished
- Fractional reserve banking to be replaced by 100% gold reserve banking for all demand deposits
- Banks to become free to issue their own gold-certificate cash notes
- The complete de-nationalisation of money and the removal of government guarantees on bank accounts, to re-introduce the ‘healthy gale’ of bank runs back into the banking industry — one of Rothbard’s alleged favourite movie scenes is the collapse of the bank of Danglars in The Count of Monte Cristo!
- The abolition of government-mints to be replaced once again by the private minting of gold money
For all true followers of hard money, The Mystery of Banking is thus an essential element on the pathway to understanding how and why we can achieve the goal of honest money, which even the former alchemist Isaac Newton knew was impossible to manipulate over the long term. Let us also hope that if the Rothbardian plan outlined above comes to pass, that the new international name for the fixed weight of gold will be “The Rothbard”, in memory of this hero of hard money, whether this is one gramme, 10 grammes, or a good old-fashioned one Troy-ounce of gold.
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