Try this one with your friends. Tell them that if there were no debt, there would be no dollars, because debt and dollars are the same thing.
You can quote the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Marriner Eccles[0]: "That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."
This is a simplification, but it's an accurate one, and is widely understood by anyone paying attention[1].
Without even getting into a debate about the merits of our central banking system (or cryptocurrencies), most people are surprised by this fact. Most folks I have spoken to think that the dollar is still backed by gold.
And if you take it a step further, you learn that debt and IOU's are at the very heart of human transactions, going back as far as society has existed. The currency needs to reflect the lossy nature of payments that people make between each other.
Yeah. The common myth is that barter preceded currency, like primitive man was going around, trying to swap his carcass for some arrowheads or something. The myth is that the development of currency followed from that, as a way to facilitate barter.
The book actually says the opposite: Currency is a standardized to-the-bearer IOU, a credit that always has a corresponding debt or obligation somewhere else, usually from the issuer.
The US dollar, for example, has always been a debt instrument, even if that debt was once "IOU some shiny metal" as opposed to "IOU services", or "IOU -1 on your tax bill".
Even with rare-metal coinage, it was important to users that the issuer would honor its stated debt-units, even if its value as a "X grams of metal Y" could go lower.
The easiest way to see that currency is not a store of value is to consider how many old bills get shredded to scrap fibers and replaced with fresh ones, all without triggering a crisis over the "value destruction" going on. It's impossible to imagine the same with, say, burning worn-down diamonds into carbon-dioxide.
I think you're ignoring the larger "currency" and focusing on "fiat currency".
When people traded in gold (or Native Americans traded wampum, etc) it was certainly never destroyed! And there was no one in particular who would necessarily trade it for something specific, so it was not an IOU.
The book sounds great, and I loved his other book The Democracy Project. I will have to check it out.
But just because debt came first, and fiat currencies have always been based on debt, does not mean that all currencies have to be or have been.
> After all, banks remained basically insolvent in this fractional reserve scheme.
This is incorrect. Bank solvency has to do with the assets of the bank, even in markets with commodity (e.g., gold) or representative money (e.g., gold-backed paper). The assets of a bank include loans, the liabilities are the money the bank owes to depositors. There is no reason a bank can't take a gold deposit and loan it out (thereby, "creating" gold).
The purpose of a central bank, at least in orthodox economics, is to loan to solvent banks that are nonetheless cash-poor. Imagine a mismanaged bank, that has loaned too much, and cannot meet the demands of depositors. If the loans + cash are more valuable than the deposits, the central bank will loan to the bank to meet their temporary cash shortage. [0]
This is essentially what happened in the case of AIG. The Fed believed that the value of AIGs assets were greater than its liabilities, and loaned them the money at a penalty rate. The Fed believed that AIG was _solvent_. There were a number of extenuating factors here that I'm glossing over, but that is the underlying point. The reason that Lehman was not saved was that the Fed had substantial reason to believe that the assets (primarily the sub-prime loans) were not worth more than the liabilities, and the Fed will not lend into hole. Lehman was _insolvent_.
Fractional reserve banking, by itself, does not suggest solvency or insolvency. Without fractional reserve banking, there cannot be credit. Sharia banking is an example of full-reserve banking, because interest is prohibited, so there is no incentive to loan. (There are ways Islamic banks get around these prohibitions).
[0] I would suggest looking at Bagehot (1873) for a full description of this idea.
There is no well defined financial distinction between insolvency and whatever you want to call the situation in which the marked to market net value of a bank's assets goes negative due to a fall in prices during a liquidity crisis.† There almost certainly were such situations during the last crisis, when a bank's book value went negative, and yet it was not deemed to be insolvent.
That's because in practice insolvency is not so much a financial concept but an accounting and legal one, and in those domains it refers only to situations in which a corporation cannot meet its financial obligations as they come due. In ordinary circumstances that convention gives corporations some leeway to re-negotiate their obligations to stave off insolvency. But during a liquidity crisis it means that an institution whose book value goes negative (temporarily?—who knows?) will or won't become insolvent in part depending on whether third parties are willing to lend to it to plug the hole that exists in its books at the moment. That means that solvency during such periods is a bit of an artificial thing, depending in part on the of vagaries of the marketplace, as well as the judgement and munificence (or whim, if you'd like) of central bankers and other governmental actors.
> Without fractional reserve banking, there cannot be credit.
This is not true. There can be credit, just not with the simultaneous fiction that creditors retain access to the money they've lent. Bond markets and old-fashioned money-market bank accounts operate without that fiction, for instance.
† — Or for that matter during a classic bank run, which is another form of liquidity crisis. A typical bank operating on fractional reserve is solvent in the sense that over some indefinite future time horizon it should be able to give its depositors their money if they demand it, since the money the bank is owned in loans exceeds the money the bank owes its depositors. But a bank does not enough money in its vaults to pay all its depositors if they all want it back at the same moment; if no third party is willing to lend cash to the bank suffering the run ("provide it liquidity"), then it will become insolvent, no matter what its book value.
I agree that the definition of solvency is wrapped up in the value of the assets, which can be difficult to assess. That's why I said "The Fed /believed/ that the value of AIGs assets were greater than its liabilities" [emphasis added]. That being said, I think we can agree this has very little to do with fractional reserve banking as a concept. To put it simply, you can only have insolvent banks in a fractional reserve system, but a fractional reserve system doesn't necessitate insolvency by any means.
I'll agree to the second critique re: the credit in a full-reserve banking case.
This is full of misunderstandings about monetary policy and money creation.
Currencies that are not designed to lose value over time can not be stable.
Intrinsically worthless tokens engineered to have better than market risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted, real returns compared to real productive investment will always be unstable and fluctuate increasingly wildly as they get more popular. This is a result of physical limits of production. As people hoard worthless tokens, their price increases which causes more people to hoard them instead of investing in real businesses with real production capacity.
This eventually causes production capacity to drop. That's right, when enough people do it, token hoarding displaces investment in businesses and factories and lowers global production capacity. This means token hoarding causes a future drop in things available to buy with these tokens.
Eventually there will be people who want to buy real things with their stock of tokens. The tokens will be chasing fewer goods which means prices for stuff will rise (tokens will lose value). This might happen suddenly when people with large stockpiles of tokens notice that value is dropping and that there are tons of other tokens waiting on the sideline to make it drop even further. Hoarders might rush to get rid of their stockpile all at the same time before they're worthless which will cause their fall to worthlessness. This drop will bring the tokens closer to their natural intrinsic value of zero. The cycle can then start again, such is aggregate economics.
The 1920s and 1930s suffered from this type of cycle but with gold tied currencies instead of cryptocoins. It happened to a lesser extent in 2007 when western world central banks failed to keep inflation rates high enough. It's important for the world's sake to not let deflationary currencies become too popular.
When savings or financial promises are insufficiently tied to future production or to accumulation of real goods, there will be disappointment when many people try to exchange them for real stuff. That is true for crypto currencies as well as government currencies (that is why the system is designed to make banks invest people's money in real businesses and minimize the proportion of money that is stockpiled idly).
It's true that crypto currencies are currently not sufficiently widely held to significantly affect the macroeconomy but speculation already keeps them rather volatile and the knowledge that as they get more popular you get additional volatility pressures, will keep the speculation wild and the deflationary cryptocoins unstable.
The problem you point out is real; similarly Gresham's law. And while something like gold does have an intrinsic value based on its engineering uses, that value tends towards relative zero as the monetary bubble inflates. And I suppose you could say something similar about Bitcoin, with its intrinsic worth being the value of a distributed-trust ordering (eg timestamping) system, but I digress.
But the problem pointed out by the hard money enthusiasts is real as well. Once more tokens are being created for systemic reasons, a principle agent problem on who gets those newly created tokens is also created. In our present system it's the banking cartel, as they can spin it to sound as if they're impartial by loaning most of the money out. But they do take the first cut (points) and ongoing fees (interest) for use of the money that their privileges conjured, and nowadays have even dropped all pretense of being symmetric by stopping paying out interest.
We don't know what the resolution is between these conflicting frameworks (otherwise, the problem would be solved). But it's not particularly surprising that when the second problem grows in scope as it has in our modern society, benefiting the well connected while further eroding the power of the masses at the edge, that the first problem will be ignored while seeking refuge from the second.
The "banking cartel" doesn't create new money and doesn't get new money for free. They can only borrow it at market rates. The central bank can create money but it is not allowed to spend it. It can only lend it or swap it for collateral.
If what you have in mind is fractional reserve lending as indirect money "creation", this also creates liabilities for the banks. The banks owe to depositors all the money they "create" this way. It's not free money.
This is pretty good. The one element that I don't see here is the connection between money supply growth and increases in population and productivity. If money is a representation of the value that people generate, we need a source of money that roughly grows at the rate of growth in value created by humans. Otherwise, we end up with significant inflation or deflation, both of which are bad.
So to summarize your points, if Bitcoin, or what crypto-currency comes to dominate, becomes a serious global currency to rival that of the dollar, if it's horded and not used to transact or invest in the economy, which is a danger due to its deflationary nature, then that will have dire consequences. But so long as its used as a currency and not primarily as a value store, then it's not a problem. Which is concerning. What concerns me about bitcoin currently is that it's not used a currency, AFAICT most people use it as an investment vehicle. It is worth pointing out that not all crypto-currencies are deflationary. Ethereum for instance, has no limit on the number of tokens.
I think it's important to differentiate between the potential of crypto-currencies as currency, and the technology that powers them - the blockchain. I think the blockchain has a huge potential to revolutionize many industries. Whether crypto-currencies like Bitcoin actual take off as real currencies is less certain and may have some negative effects. But whatever happens, the blockchain itself (and presumably ether that powers the smart contracts) will be around for a long time.
I really can't agree with your take on inflation being a necessity for stable societies.
It's a fallacy.
Eventually developed countries hit a point where they are just chasing the next economic hit only to cause disastrous misallocation of resources. Japan went down this path decades ago, the west is next.
Reserve banks should target 0% inflation. Dividing the dollar down to 8 decimals neatly solves hoarding issues.
This is basically what happened to Bitcoin itself in the early days, isn't it? People hoarding them, then the value crashing as a scare causes people to try and dump their stash.
While I agree with that person's comments, I am not sure i'd aggree that is what happened in the first Bitcoin bubble. The main event was that Mt Gox got hacked, and a number of other things happened around that time (for instance the IRS recognized bitcoin as an asset so they could tax it) that culminated in a big crash for the market as confidence was lost all of a sudden, after a big spike in prices.
The part about the Liberty Dollar is fearmongering. It was shut down because it looked and sounded too much like the US Dollar.
Toronto Dollars existed. Bristol Pounds exist now and are thriving. Oakland just opened their own bank. Nebraska had its own banks. There are time banks, Berkshares, and so on.
I used to think local currencies are illegal but as long as they are Complementary Currencies and fiat is still legal tender for all debts, that's not true.
Look it up on wikipedia (virtual currencies, complementary currencies). Congress retains the power to mint coins, that's it. There has never been a court case that tested whether Congress can crack down on complementary currencies. And the USA never did, except in the Liberty Dollar case for sounding too similar.
So the article is wrong about that. You can actually make a centralized currency as a city or even as a community. What do you think payment networks like VISA, PayPal, Patreon etc. do? Sure some need to register as money transmitters. But others are just marketplaces like AirBNB. They do payouts via Stripe etc.
Dumb question, because I'm still trying to grasp bitcoin... Doesn't the recent "split" show that bitcoin still isn't addressing the common need? It still appears that a few central players are controlling how it is created, backed and exchanged.
This might be wrong, someone correct me if so... I'm thinking of the split that occurred as being nearly if not actually just like a stock or other securities split. In effect some portion of the original security 20% or so left. That reduced the market cap of the original security, and created a new market cap for the new one.
Now it's possible the new one could eventually become worth 0 and the original would increase back to it's pre-split. A question this then raises for me, is if you went through this split, would you account for this in capital gains the same way you would with a stock split?
> People used to pay each other in gold and silver. Difficult to transport. Difficult to divide.
It would be interesting to hear some of the history behind why gold and silver were decided to have value. What are the steps leading up to the first point in this post?
Gold really wasn't used for currency outside of the main area known to ancient Western civilization. China did use silver for bullion, but mostly avoided it in the everyday coinage, which would be made out of metals like iron, copper, or bronze. Other civilizations chose a variety of things for coinage--Aztecs, for example, used cacao beans and bolts of cloth.
So why did gold and silver become the major standard in the Western world? Well, gold and silver are fairly unreactive--you're not going to lose coinage by leaving them it in open air to spoil. Gold is also remarkably malleable, and both metals are fairly easy to work with in terms of metallurgy. The final notable feature is that gold and silver are actually relatively rare in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. By contrast, where they were quite common--the Americas in particular--they were purely used for decoration and ornamentation, never for currency. Thus the Spanish conquest of the New World was promulgated because they found cultures who were literally covering their walls in money, and Spain was desperately short of cash for their commitments in the Wars of Religion in the 16th century.
You can quote the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Marriner Eccles[0]: "That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."
This is a simplification, but it's an accurate one, and is widely understood by anyone paying attention[1].
Without even getting into a debate about the merits of our central banking system (or cryptocurrencies), most people are surprised by this fact. Most folks I have spoken to think that the dollar is still backed by gold.
[0] https://mises.org/library/our-money-based-debt
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/10/21/141510617/what-...