I’m talking about commercial banks themselves being in the process of creating money, which in the UK was indeed not an established fact until the 2000s. I’m on my phone but I remember reading about that in an Economist issue a few years ago, I’ll try to find it once I get in front of a computer.
Later edit: Found an Economist review [1] of this article/book itself, which I think it’s not what I had in mind but close enough:
> This often-cited short paper lucidly explains how commercial banks create money and central banks influence that process. It dispels many common misconceptions about money. For instance, most introductory economic textbooks say that commercial banks lend out the money that savers deposit in them. In fact banks can lend money and create corresponding deposits even without savings flowing in–in other words, banks are quite literally creating “new money” when they make a loan and a corresponding deposit.
Most probably you were thinking about Central Bank money creation, or, if not, those introductory economy courses seem to have not had any effect on the educated masses, hence why The Economist still has to re-iterate to its educated readers how money creation works.
> I’m talking about commercial banks themselves being in the process of creating money, which in the UK was indeed not an established fact until the 2000s.
There is a concerted effort amongst some fringe economists to make this argument, which is superficially plausible to the sort of laymen easily convinced that reading a couple of blogs arguing that an entire field is wrong is a substitute for reading anything written by that field.
But of course the Bank of England knew that commercial banks were involved in the process of creating money all along. Propping up private bank money was literally their job.
> Propping up private bank money was literally their job.
I thought their job was limiting the private money creation that without them would be totally unrestricted which would result in uncontrolled inflation and runs on banks.
Private banks create monetary aggregates by lending it to private borrowers. The fact that money is created as credit means there are already natural limits to private bank money creation (there aren't unlimited numbers of bank customers who want to borrow money and pay back more later, and some of the people and companies that would like to borrow are not people the bank trusts to be able to make the repayment)
The role of the Bank of England is providing the banks with central bank reserves they can borrow as and when needed to back that privately created money up. So it gets to influence the demand for borrowing private bank money by setting the basic interest rate at which the banks can borrow reserves (mainly by intervening in secondary markets for them, but that's an implementation detail), which means it can make it more expensive to borrow reserves, which will lead to banks lending money at higher interest rates to fewer people, which will lead to less money creation
But if the private banks already have some money they can lend it again to borrowers. So they could be inflating money supply pretty much indefinitely. Sure, the number of private borrowers is limited but they are happy to sign all of their future life earnings away in exchange for some money now. And as supply of money grows inflation happens so borrowers need more and more money feeding creation of more money and further inflation.
The role of central bank as a limiter of credit action (through fractional reserve) is way more important than feeding new core money into the private banking system so it can be borrowed by private borrowers. Feeding new money is kinda optional and it's most important role is possibly enabling new banks to be created. In absence of it only companies that already have a lot of money could create a bank.
The other thing is that if economy development outpaces growth of money supply created by private banks whole system could get stuck in deflation. Which was not great last time it happened.
Honestly, I have no idea why you're arguing popular misconceptions about central banks under a paper written by a central bank explaining how central banking works...
Banks have absolutely no incentive to provide money to everyone that wants to borrow all their future life earnings now, not because of hard limits on their funds but because they want their lending to be repaid at a profit (when it won't be, you get 2008). So the quantity of money at a given interest rate is ultimately set by the demand of creditworthy borrowers at that interest rate, which is certainly not unlimited.
Central banks were created to stop banks with solvent loan portfolios collapsing due to demands on their reserves, by ensuring banks could always borrow the reserves to back up the numbers on their spreadsheet. The "reserve requirement" (technically replaced by a capital requirement) isn't something central banks tinker with, and it's not "kinda optional" for them to provide enough reserves for the system's day to day needs. Instead, they influence credit action by adjusting the price of borrowing those reserves, and thus the demand for credit in the wider economy.
> Banks have absolutely no incentive to provide money to everyone that wants to borrow all their future life earnings now, not because of hard limits on their funds but because they want their lending to be repaid at a profit (when it won't be, you get 2008).
2008 happened because clearly the banks do have that incentive. The only thing that stops them are the regulations.
> The "reserve requirement" (technically replaced by a capital requirement) isn't something central banks tinker with,
In the last two decades that requirement was adjusted at least 5 times in my country so tinkering with it is definitely a tool that some central banks use. In the nineties it was even set to 30% to quench hyperinflation.
> Central banks were created to stop banks with solvent loan portfolios collapsing due to demands on their reserves, by ensuring banks could always borrow the reserves to back up the numbers on their spreadsheet.
First formal central bank, The Bank of England was created to finance the war. Central banks gradually acquired their modern roles as they developed.
The role you so much focus on is called being 'lender of last resort' to private banks. Private banks use it only if they can't get money cheaper anywhere.
> they influence credit action by adjusting the price of borrowing those reserves, and thus the demand for credit in the wider economy.
That the thing they do most often but not their most powerful tool.
> 2008 happened because clearly the banks do have that incentive. The only thing that stops them are the regulations.
2008 happened because banks overestimated the resilience of the value of housing collateral that backed their loans to an economic downturn, meaning they got back less than they lent out, not because they had any incentive to inflate money supply pretty much indefinitely, which they obviously didn't do (I mean, if they really had no practical constraints on money creation, they could have solved 2008 for themselves by loaning unlimited amounts to pump house prices back up again...). Inflation wasn't even high in 2008.
> The role you so much focus on is called being 'lender of last resort' to private banks. Private banks use it only if they can't get money cheaper anywhere.
And how do they get cheaper money elsewhere? They borrow it on the interbank lending market, the one which the central bank actively intervenes in to set the base interest rate by buying and selling bonds in sufficient quantities to drive the rate up or down (Why does the interbank lending market even exist? Because the 'lender of last resort' makes lending spare reserves to other banks a low risk activity equivalent to exchanging them for government bonds) Seriously, I suggest you read TFA which explains all this rather than continuing to insist that it is wrong ...
> That the thing they do most often but not their most powerful tool.
It's their most powerful tool in normal circumstances, and how monetary policy works. Preventing private credit creation isn't a tool, it's a nuclear weapon, and one most likely to be introduced and enforced by a government department which isn't a central bank...
> Does that mean that currently US banks don't need to hold any fractional reserve?
They still need to maintain some reserves to permit cash withdrawals and certain transfers, and are still incentivised to lend out at a higher rate than the base interest rate the central bank controls (and reserves still count towards the bank capital requirements which are the actual limiting factor on a particular bank's ability to lend). So the central bank still can act to encourage or discourage money being created by lending exactly as before, the banks just don't have an arbitrary reserve target to hit.
It's not a policy which hasn't been adopted much earlier in other parts of the world, or a cause of the current inflation. The UK had no reserve requirement at all during the mostly low inflation period since 2009, and small symmetric reserve targets chosen by the bank where they incurred a penalty for having too many as well as too few reserves between 1980 and 2009 (a period where inflation came down from pre-1980 record highs to an unprecedented long, stable period of low inflation)
>2008 happened because clearly the banks do have that incentive. The only thing that stops them are the regulations.
It’s truly absurd to argue that banks have no incentive to limit lending to make sure they get paid back. The 2008 crisis proves no such thing. Banks simply made a lot of bad bets.
They had all the incentives to make all those bad bets. And to counteract those incentives further regulations needed to be enacted.
What's good for the company in the long run is not necessarily what really happens because companies consist mostly of short sighted decision makers driven by short term incentives. They will happily collectively burn their respective markets to the ground if it brings them short term profit.
What helps large corporations to survive this is their sheer inertia. Banks are kind of special because they, despite being huge, can topple very quickly.
Funny that, because I distinctly remember participating in an early 2000s competition the Bank of England organised for schoolkids to teach us about monetary policy. Of course, that didn't exactly guarantee participants a graduate-level understanding even if their team got through the first round, but it's not exactly the action of an entity that's trying to hide what they do!
Maybe people not understanding the mechanics of complicated things isn't actually the result of a conspiracy to stop them from understanding complicated things. Perhaps they'd also be somewhat more likely to understand how complicated things work if they didn't start from the premise that the people who know how they work are inherently untrustworthy...
The role that commercial banks in money creation has been known since much before the 2000s. It's all laid out in Keynes' General Theory which was published in 1936, and it wasn't even a novel idea at the time.
Like I said previously, the Bank of England wasn’t acknowledging that as a fact publicly until quite recently, which most probably had an effect on their actions/decisions.
For example the same Keynes had some other better known takes which have also not been acknowledged as facts to this day.
So you're saying that the Bank of England was involved in a conspiracy that wouldn't acknowledge something that has been public knowledge for over a century?
Later edit: Found an Economist review [1] of this article/book itself, which I think it’s not what I had in mind but close enough:
> This often-cited short paper lucidly explains how commercial banks create money and central banks influence that process. It dispels many common misconceptions about money. For instance, most introductory economic textbooks say that commercial banks lend out the money that savers deposit in them. In fact banks can lend money and create corresponding deposits even without savings flowing in–in other words, banks are quite literally creating “new money” when they make a loan and a corresponding deposit.
Most probably you were thinking about Central Bank money creation, or, if not, those introductory economy courses seem to have not had any effect on the educated masses, hence why The Economist still has to re-iterate to its educated readers how money creation works.
[1] https://archive.ph/7yXme