Posted on 03/29/2008 6:48:20 PM PDT by ovrtaxt
How is Money Created? |
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago used to publish a pamphlet entitled Modern Money Mechanics, which explains M1, M2, and M3. It is a truly fascinating read. That pamphlet is no longer in print, and the Chicago Fed has no plans to re-issue it. However, electronic copies are available (see link).
In it, the process by which the Fed creates money "out of thin air" is detailed. Consider the opening paragraph:
"Money is such a routine part of everyday living that its existence and acceptance ordinarily are taken for granted. A user may sense that money must come into being either automatically as a result of economic activity or as an outgrowth of some government operation. But just how this happens all too often remains a mystery." (Modern Money Mechanics, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, page 2)
Really read that paragraph.
The USFed, in one of its own publications, is stating right there in black and white that money is not created from economic activity, nor from a government operation. How then is it created?
"The actual process of money creation takes place in the banks." (Modern Money Mechanics, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, page 3)
The pamphlet uses an example of $10,000 being deposited from the Federal Reserve Bank to "Bank A" and shows how that develops into an increase in assets to the amount of an additional $90,000.
Essentially the Federal Reserve simultaneously creates an asset and liability of the same amount with a private bank. The net sum is zero. This money is "deposited" in the bank's federal reserve account. The private bank can then use this money as a reserve through which they can lend out additional money to the public. This reserve rate is generally 10%. Thus, a "deposit" of the USFed of $10,000 will transform into the private bank being able to loan out $90,000.
A couple of points.
Firstly, if I loaned your company $10,000 would the net worth of your company increase by that amount? The answer is no, because while assets went up by $10,000 so did the liability. It would be fraudulent for you to report an increase in net worth of $10,000.
Secondly, your company could not lend out $90,000 from the initial $10,000 you borrowed from me. You simply would not have the funds and if you claimed to have them, again you would be committing fraud.
Thirdly, I would like to take a quote from another Reserve Bank publication, this time from page 8 of Philadelphia's The National Debt:
"The Federal Government, with the cooperation of the Federal Reserve, has the inherent power to create money - almost any amount of it. This power makes technical bankruptcy out of the question."
So not only are the banks committing fraudulent activity in the sense that they claiming asset value from their debt and secondly loaning out more than they have borrowed, they are protected from any risk of bankruptcy courtesy of the public! You and I would pay more for prices of goods and services should the Fed have to dilute the money supply further by printing sufficient money to prevent bankruptcy of a bank!
This is nothing short of outrageous.
Published on http://DollarDaze.org - Jun 6, 2006.
Todd, we were discussing this the other day- the mechanics of fractional reserve banking, the loan to deposit ratio, etc. The Chicago Bank’s handbook looks like an interesting read.
Very interesting article here. I’ve been looking for an explanation of how central banks actually work.
This is the way it has always been and the way it will always be until the collapse of the free market economy and this country.
Get used to it.
Well, that depends on if you’re talking about real money, or fiat paper “reserve notes”. Banks and the fed don’t create any real money at all.
bump for later read
Really read that paragraph.
The USFed, in one of its own publications, is stating right there in black and white that money is not created from economic activity, nor from a government operation. How then is it created?
Rich people know this.
If you would care to embrace this, you too may be rich.
The thing is, not only can money be created “from nothing” as it were, but money can also be extinguished. An inadvertent example would be the huge gaping, leveraged hole where Bear Stearns once stood.
Thanks for the link.
Money? As in U.S. Dollars?
North Korea cranks it out on a printing press.
And we do nothing about it.
I would suggest that you check out the pamphlet itself, linked in the post. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to. Looks interesting.
Bump for later read.
Hopefully there will come a day when central bankers are found hanging from lamp posts like Mussolini, but I think we need the whole system to collapse for that to happen.
Bookmark.
ML/NJ
I don’t think people will ever fully realize it. Some will, but probably not joe six-pack.
Keynes said this, quoting Lenin:
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens...There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” (John Maynard Keynes)
I've never gotten a big chunk of CASH from a bank. I've gotten big electronic transfers to my account and big checks.
Those ones and zeros, and those slips of paper with "Pay to the order of" in front of my name are created money.
$10,000 in cash money in the vault allows them to back $100,000 in loans, issued in the cash "equivalents" of a note in my deposit book.
And we do nothing about it.
At this point, I would be less than astonished if we outsourced the printing of our currency to DPRNK.
*sigh* That would be something.
Currency is NOT money..
Bump for later
This is all covered well in standard economics textbooks.
To facilitate trade between currency zones, there are exchange rates, which are the prices at which currencies (and the goods and services of individual currency zones) can be exchanged against each other. Currencies can be classified as either floating currencies or fixed currencies based on their exchange rate regime. In common usage, currency sometimes refers to only paper money, as in coins and currency, but this is misleading. Coins and paper money are both forms of currency.
In most cases, each country has monopoly control over the supply and production of its own currency. Member countries of the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union are a notable exception to this rule, as they have ceded control of monetary policy to the European Central Bank.
In cases where a country does have control of its own currency, that control is exercised either by a central bank or by a Ministry of Finance. In either case, the institution that has control of monetary policy is referred to as the monetary authority. Monetary authorities have varying degrees of autonomy from the governments that create them. In the United States, the Federal Reserve System operates without direct interference from the legislative or executive branches.
It is important to note that a monetary authority is created and supported by its sponsoring government, so independence can be reduced or revoked by the legislative or executive authority that creates it. However, in practical terms, the revocation of authority is not likely. In almost all Western countries, the monetary authority is largely independent from the government.
btt
WRONG... Money are tangible assets.. Currency is a BILL, an invoice.. an I.OWE.You.. A dollar bill is in fact a bill.. thats why its called a bill..
I posted information, I did not write it. If you want to advocate your definition fine. Seems like a semantical argument that either side could win.
You know that there is nothing federal about the federal reserve banks.. They are privately OWNED company assets..
Yes..............and
“This is nothing short of outrageous.”
The writer seems a bit excited about his discovery. It’s how banks have always operated.
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.
Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.
The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.
What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable......A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity......
.....Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce, has significant advantages over all other media of exchange. Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange. If all goods and services were to be paid for in gold, large payments would be difficult to execute and this would tend to limit the extent of a society's divisions of labor and specialization. Thus a logical extension of the creation of a medium of exchange is the development of a banking system and credit instruments (bank notes and deposits) which act as a substitute for, but are convertible into, gold.
A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus to create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security of his deposits). But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.
When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth. When gold is accepted as the medium of exchange by most or all nations, an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade.....Credit, interest rates, and prices tend to follow similar patterns in all countries. For example, if banks in one country extend credit too liberally, interest rates in that country will tend to fall, inducing depositors to shift their gold to higher-interest paying banks in other countries. This will immediately cause a shortage of bank reserves in the "easy money" country, inducing tighter credit standards and a return to competitively higher interest rates again.
...prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled. Periodically, as a result of overly rapid credit expansion, banks became loaned up to the limit of their gold reserves, interest rates rose sharply, new credit was cut off, and the economy went into a sharp, but short-lived recession. (Compared with the depressions of 1920 and 1932, the pre-World War I business declines were mild indeed.) It was limited gold reserves that stopped the unbalanced expansions of business activity, before they could develop into the post-World Was I type of disaster. The readjustment periods were short and the economies quickly reestablished a sound basis to resume expansion.
But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a business decline-argued economic interventionists-why not find a way of supplying increased reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely-it was claimed-there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913. It consisted of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks nominally owned by private bankers, but in fact government sponsored, controlled, and supported. ..........Technically, we remained on the gold standard; individuals were still free to own gold, and gold continued to be used as bank reserves. But now, in addition to gold, credit extended by the Federal Reserve banks ("paper reserves") could serve as legal tender to pay depositors.
When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage.....if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain's gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates. The "Fed" succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process.....
With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain's abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed "a mixed gold standard"; yet it is gold that took the blame.) But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state).....the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.
Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which-through a complex series of steps-the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
“Well, that depends on if you’re talking about real money, or fiat paper “reserve notes”.”
Banks operated the same under the gold standard. Mises makes a distinction between credit and money in his writing, money being specie or having a specie backing, though both credit and money act the same. But fractional banking is what banks have done since the days of the Renaissance.
“No...currency is not money.”
Sure it was, even using von Mises’ technical definition of money. The currency in question simply had to be gold certificates, exchangeable for specie. You’ll find such notes issued in series prior to FDR’s confiscation act.
bump
IIRC; North Korea is the #1 counterfeiter of U.S. Currency in the world.
Yep. IIRC, We shipped then our old presses, one of which still had the plates in it. Whoopsies.
True; I have some of those saved. Now all this country issues is IOU's.
More like I-don’t-owe-you’s
oops....what I have are $2 red seal United States Notes...1953 series. : )
True, lol!
US Notes were issued directly by Congress, bypassing the Fed.
Imagine what would have happened to us if Congress could still issue its own money!
Until recently, here's how it worked. Buy a home. Hire someone to appraise my home for more than I bought it for. Go to a bank and with draw that amount of money.
Great. So if all they have is $10,000 where does the $100,000 come from?
That is a lot of lamp posts!
Officials of the Bank of England asked [Benjamin] Franklin how he would account for the newfound prosperity of the colonies. Without hesitation he replied:“That is simple. In the colonies, we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers... In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”
How is money created? It’s called a printing press. Perhaps it’s been heard of.
The primary difference between the United States Note and the Federal Reserve Note is that a United States Note is created by the government directly as a bill of credit, and thus there is no interest for the Government to pay for the creation of that dollar.A Federal Reserve Note, on the other hand, is bank currency, and the U.S. has to pay interest on the treasury bonds that it gives the Federal Reserve System in exchange for the right to produce a like quantity of Federal Reserve Notes. This, in turn, increases the tax burden on the people. Abraham Lincoln advocated the use of United States Notes because they avoid the usury and debt multiplication aspects of debt-based currencies, and thus save the Government immense sums of interest. Thomas Jefferson also believed that the issuing power of money should rest with the US Treasury, and not the private banks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note
tooo damn funny...
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