This article is within the scope of WikiProject Economics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Economics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EconomicsWikipedia:WikiProject EconomicsTemplate:WikiProject EconomicsEconomics
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Finance & Investment, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Finance and Investment on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Finance & InvestmentWikipedia:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentTemplate:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentFinance & Investment
You ought to understand that the printed money represent 3 (THREE) %of all the money in the system. The rest, or 97% (or near that %), is created by commercial banks. The money are digital, and the monetary expansion is due to credit (or money generation).
There are only a few ways money is created (at least in the US, or any economy with a central bank). Discussion in this article should be focused on these topics:
Counterfeiting
Printing money
The Federal Reserve and should be discussed in that article
buying/selling t-bills and t-bonds
changing the federal funds rate (discount rate)
and changing the reserve ratio
Finally... if a history of money creation is desired, discussion over the history of 'fractional reserve banking' could be discussed here or in that article.C. Nelson03:27, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree with your list excluding the Money Multiplier mechanism, as it does create actual currency, although not in its minted or printed variety. But I do suggest that the article should be generalized to avoid being US-centric, therefore removing much of the Federal Reserve example and replacing it with a general example portraying the actions of a generic bank and possibly the underlying connections with a generic national central bank. Only afterward specific national differences can and should be discussed. manu3d15:02, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Money is not currency. You counterfeit and print currency, not money. The article is a good (if somewhat vague) intro to money creation. A very small portion of money is in the form of currency. The US Mint does not create money, it produces currency, a useful medium for small money transactions. This is why the Mint doesn't care that it costs more to make a penny than one cent. The penny can be used thousands of times in order to represent thousands of cents.
Ummm... perhaps you mean "Currency is not the only form of money. You counterfeit and print currency, which is one form of money." But in any case, this issue certainly hinges on what is defined as money.
Many would contend (such as Ludwig von Mises) that checks aren't money, but rather "money substitutes." This "money multiplier" effect basically consists of counterbalancing assets and liabilities listed in bank accounts. Now, besides paying with cash, you can pay by creating new obligations or canceling out old obligations. It doesn't necessarily result in ten times the amount of "money" freely circulating in the economy (with 10% reserve requirement) as most of the time the "money" stays right where it is, in the bank... and if it doesn't stay right where it is, if everyone in the country starts issuing checks left and right, up to the full balance of their accounts, then the smaller the banks' reserves, the more strain they're under, and the greater the likelihood that they'll fail to meet their obligations.
Without banks, in a little closed system between three friends who are completely broke, we can see "money creation" in effect, along with a "money multiplier." Al has no money, but he likes Betty's bike, so he offers to pay her later for a bike today. He doesn't even write her an I.O.U., he just says "I'll pay you later." Betty agrees. Now Betty has a 100 dollar asset, even though no one in the economy has any money! She decides to spend her money. She goes to Carl's shop and buys 100 dollars in groceries. He's glad for the business, as he too is flat broke. Betty doesn't pony up the cash right away, she just says "I'll pay you later," but Carl trusts her. Now Al, who has a carrot garden, brings in a heap of carrots to Carl's shop looking to make a deal. "I'll sell you these carrots for one hundred bucks," says Al. "Sure, I've got a hundred bucks coming to me real soon, so I'll settle up with you later." "Great, 'cause I need the money to pay for my bike." Now three people have a $100 asset each. True, they also have a $100 liability each, for a net balance of zero, but the economy is apparently working. Goods are being produced and taken to market. People are making exchanges, so that the people with differing values profit from the trade. They can all settle up as soon as someone issues an I.O.U., or settles their debt in another way, by an exchange of goods or services, and the settlement passes down the line. If there was a bank in the middle, then these people wouldn't have to trust each other, they'd just have to trust the bank, and the bank could make a profit on the difference between what they charge for loans and what they pay for deposits. Numbers would be juggled, and everyone would be happy until someone demanded cash. But the bank might easily placate them by issuing a check, taking it back in deposit, canceling a liability against an asset, and magically all the obligations and money substitutes disappear.zadignose02:46, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You have to see where the money originates. Nobody in your example has the right to create accepted currency. "I'll pay you later" is not a universally accepted currency and, eventually, has to be replaced with money. Money is created at the bank. What you describe in your post (including the example) is how money circulation would work, if banks were loan banks. But today, banks are a mixture of loan and deposit banks. To understand the distinction, look at the example of the goldsmiths in 17th century England (who were deposit bankers): If you were to deposit one pound of gold at a goldsmith, he would give you a piece of paper that is nothing more than a voucher (or receipt) that you redeem against the gold you have deposited. However, instead of going back to him and picking up the gold to pay somebody, you could just give them the voucher, which turns these vouchers into a form of paper currency. Soon, the goldmiths realized that only a small percentage of the gold was ever redeemed at any given time. So, they gave out additional vouchers and paid for a service with a voucher that represented the same gold that somebody already had a voucher for (Note: This is not the same "amount" of gold, it's the same gold!) So, if anybody deposited one pound of gold, they might give out, for example, 5 vouchers that each represented one pound of gold, and thereby increasing the money supply (the paper money in circulation) by the representation of 4 pounds of gold that didn't actually exist. In the 19th century, loan banks have been awarded the rights of deposit banks, which has led to the fractional reserve banking we know today. However, the fact that this is now legal doesn't make it less fraudulent.
What makes our system so complicated is that paper has now replaced gold (meaning: the gold standard has been abolished) and you have paper representing and "backing" paper (or numbers on a computer backing paper, if you will). Hence the importance of the distinction of what actually constitutes the "gold" and what the "voucher" (the "monetary base" and the "money supply" as they are called in England).
The Wiki page on central banks mentiones this under "reserve requirements": "The money deposited by commercial banks at the central bank is the real money in the banking system; other versions of what is commonly thought of as money are merely promises to pay real money. These promises to pay are circulatory multiples of real money".
The creation of money (for the purpose of this Wiki article) is an increase in money supply (as opposed to the "monetary base", i.e. the deposits at the central bank).
I highly recommend Murray Rothbard's book "The Mystery of Banking" (available here You might want to "Save target as..."). It explains the process of money creation very well, and also gives the example of goldsmiths in greater detail. Dngrs08:21, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Money is not currency
"Currency" in this context means 'circulating medium of exchange'.
Bank money created through loans is a form of pseudo money that cycles between being borrowed and repaid (reset to zero).
Currency remains circulating indefinitely once it is spent into the economy.
In the last paragraph of "An example of the creation of new money in the USA" -- It says: the same process also runs backwards - Federal Reserve may sell Treasury securities it holds as assets to primary dealers, taking money out of circulation and reducing money supply.
Should this not be buy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ossworks (talk • contribs) 15:40, 31 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
We must add to the equation the currency drain ratio (the propensity of the public to hold cash rather than deposit it in the banking system),the clearing house drain (the loss of deposits from the system due to interactions between banks), and the safety reserve ratio (excess reserves beyond the legal requirement that commercial banks voluntarily hold - usually a very small amount). Also, most jurisdictions require different levels of reserves for different types of deposits. Foreign currency deposits, domestic time deposits, and government deposits often have different cash reserve ratios.
I agree with the dispute tag. This article goes completely against modern (post 1920) economic theory. Money is more than coins and banknotes, it includes electronic money, and bookkeeping entries - anything that represents a liability of the central bank. Not being allowed to talk about the Fed??!! Obviously something is wrong here Smallbones15:01, 17 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Could you please explain your point of view and why do you assert that the article goes against post-1920 economic theory? manu3d14:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with the dispute and suggest the author insert the word 'banknote' before the word 'money' to make the phrase 'banknote money' with the added rider about credit money which is a very significant proportion of money in use. IRG 23 November 2006
I also think that it is important that a discussion about credit card debt be included; I'm not sure if this is money "created" or if it is actually money held by and paid by the bank issuing the card, though. (Meathelmet, 11/26/06)
Credit Card Debt is just one facet of the Money Multiplier mechanism. I'd suggest to reframe the whole article and its examples from the point of view of a single bank dealing with individual customers, and then explain the bank's connection with a generic national bank along similar lines. Doing so, any kind of non-cash withdrawal (money transfers, plastic money) is properly contextualized. What you do think? - manu3d12:42, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
--- Credit card debt is not -new- money and is therefore not created and should not be included.
What makes you say this? (And, please sign your comments). I just got a new credit card with a spending limit of £500. If I buy goods worth £500 why is that not new money? The receipts of the shops add up to an extra £500 which they would not have without my new credit card.--Janosabel21:44, 11 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I must support Janosabel 100% here. Credit card debt is no different from any other kind of debt. The credit card company creates money which it is then generating revenue from. Standard money creation. MartinDK10:34, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Credit card debt is not money creation. When you make a credit card purchase the card issuer has to pay the shop or business immediately and cover this payment using their existing funds, they later reclaim this money from the carholder. As such they are lending out money which they already have and not creating money.--81.86.104.84 (talk) 22:44, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Credit card debt is definitely "money" creation. Correct, it is vague if it is new "printed money" creation. One should wonder, does extensive use of credit cards, increases "money" circulation or not? I believe it is. Also, I don't believe that large companies send the boy Monday morning to bring the cash from the Bank. Sorry for the style of writing, I am trying to be clear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexopth1512 (talk • contribs) 22:27, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. When you get a zero balance $5000 credit card, those dollars are your dollars to spend as you wish. Credit card debt is often securitised so that de facto new deposits are created in favour of the holders of the securities and in return the bank gets the full amount of deposits available for more lending, and under Basel only requires to have capital for a small fraction of the full amount of lending - the bank is levered with respect to its capital. Under Basel the portion of unused Helocs, credit cards and other unused lines of credit are not counted as loans and do not require any allocated capital against the agreed dollar amounts.User:Andrewedwardjudd|Andrewedwardjudd]] (talk) 09:32, 19 April 2011 (UTC)andrewedwardjudd[reply]
9/8/07. I'm not an expert on this, but would it help this discussion to distinguish - as the govt. does - between M1, M2, and M3 "money supply" ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.52.215.27 (talk) 15:42, 8 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
In any fractional banking system this is the primary method of money creation. M1 (currency + demand deposits) is almost insignificant when compared with M2+. What does that have to do with the multiplier and the creation of money? The banks create money by loaning out excess reserves and the process repeats its self until (in a perfect world devoid of leakage etc..) the amount of money created is Deposit * (1/required reserve ratio). Further more, in addition to printing money, the central bank often uses drawdowns and redeposits. For example in Canada all of the Chartered banks hold accounts with the BOC, the BOC then deposits or withdraws money (which it can create) into these institutions and it cycles through the banking system. Curiously, Canada does NOT have a required reserve ratio as per the Banking act of 1992 -to compensate the BOC is the lender of last resort.
What i'm trying to say is that the money multiplying effect of the banking system IS the primary method of money creation.
== Agree with the dispute. Money as is known in all of economic science goes beyond the actual amount of minted or printed currency, and is defined as including money created by the system's banks. It is a bit of a semantic discussion, but the common use if the word money includes money created by banks. As in "how much money do you have?" when answered by "10,000 dollars", means your money in the bank, not the money in your pocket. (Financeeditor00:40, 16 April 2007 (UTC))[reply]
WRONG. Money is created ONLY by central banks. Commercial banks can only create deposits and loans, but this operatione does not change the money supply. Try to "create" money using accounting operations and simple banace sheets. You won't be able to do it. Ultimaratioregum (talk) 07:54, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"As a loan is paid back, more commercial bank money disappears from existence than was created (assuming an interest rate above zero). "
Surely this is wrong? The borrower must pay back interest + loan to the lender. When the capital sum is paid back the original loan is annihiliated, but the bank retains the interest. So this line should be deleted. OK? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doc Richard (talk • contribs) 21:27, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"There is currently neither an explanation on where the money comes from to pay the interest on all these loans" [...]
The example is a series of loans to the government. If government keeps increasing its borrowings over time in the manner described, then an increasing percentage of its spending becomes interest repayments, requiring further funding from either borrowing or taxation. This can be seen in real-life in government accounts, and has a natural limit.
[...] "nor is there an explanation as to how the United States Department of the Treasury manages default on said loans (see Lehman Brothers)."
It isn't clear how Lehman Brothers is relevant. This is not an example of a bank defaulting on a loan from the government: the loans in the example are from banks to the US government - there is no risk to the government or the Federal Reserve to manage here.
Ape A scratches back of Ape B. Ape B now owes 1 Backscratching to Ape A. --> Total Amount of money = 1
Ape B fulfills liability and scratches back of Ape A. --> Total Amount of money = 0
Ape A scratches back of Ape B. Ape B now owes 1 Backscratching to Ape A. --> Total Amount of money = 1
Ape A sells receivable back scratch to Ape C in return for Banana. Now Ape B owes 1x Backscratching to Ape C and Ape C owes one banana to Ape A. --> Total Amount of money = 2
Ape B pays his 1x Backscratching liability to Ape C by taking over the liability to owe one banana to Ape A. --> Total Amount of money = 1
Ape B goes to the jungle to harvest banana and gives banana to Ape A. --> Total Amount of money = 0
money = amount of liabilities outstanding; money is created when promises/liabilities are made. money is destroyed when promises/liabilities are fulfilled/broken.
Interests:
Ape A is hungry now. Ape B gives one banana to Ape A. In Return Ape A now owes 2 bananas to Ape B (100% interest rate).
Ape A goes to the jungle and harvests 2 bananas. He gives both to Ape B to fulfill liabilities and interests.
Interests = Price of Liabilities.
--> There is always enough "money" to pay interest. It just means more backscratching/harvesting to do.
For the wiki page:
Explanation: Money is a medium of exchange for Goods_and_services. Deposit_accounts are a form of Liability_(financial_accounting). Liabilities are obligations or promise to provide services. Interests are a Payment for a Liability. Payments are made by providing services. Money is created when promises to provide services are made. Money is destroyed when promised services were provided. Money to pay for interests is created by promising to provide services.
--> There is always enough "money" to pay interest. It just means more backscratching/harvesting to do
Interesting modeling
But there must be a fallacy in the logic: Interest is exogenous (meta) to the principal.
My hunch is that the scenario assumes an open system (the jungle with an infinite supply of bananas), while the system of principal/interest is a closed one.
We don't see a discussion about "high powered money" that allows the creation "out of thin air", ten times the reserves depositied with the Fed as bank capital. This makes a multiplier approaching 100 times the orignial amount. Many deposits like checking accounts don't bear interest, plus bank float apears in two places at once and is counted twice as reserves for both banks. Through holding companies banks can eliminate the reserve requirements. under $2M requires no reserves. Under $45M requires only 3%. Coin, of course, is good money issued at no interest and doesn't count. We would have prosperity and little debt if it was all coin.
We have skipped entirely the discussion of the flip side when money is extinguished. When loans are repaid at comericial banks money dissapears. When the Fed gets repaid by the Government or when the Fed's Open Market Commitee sells bonds money disappears big time because commericial banks have to call laon to get their reserves in line. But wait, while the original pricipal money is gone, the obligation to pay the interest still exists. And guess what somebody forgot to create anymoney to pay the interest with. Seems like an ingenous way to collect all the wealth of the world to me.
There is a good video on the subject if you Google Money as Debt.
Let not forget all the other private money like travel checks, prepaid phone cards, Disney Dollars, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.138.20.209 (talk • contribs) 05:16, 20 May 2007
I think following questions should be addressed in the article:
-who is the owner of the newly created money?
-which fraction of the newly created money is equivalant to the obligation to pay back the interest?
-when the economy is growing through the creation of profit, how this growth is distributed throught the money creation? or can be the total profit created in a certain period of time higher than the obligation to pay the interest?
The article does not discuss who creates money, and how the regulation of the finance industry inluences this.
If all lending is forbidden, or if all lending need a 100% reserve, then 100% of the money creation is made by the government and the central bank who then have a monopoly on money emission.
If no reserve are required, if the financial market is loosely regulated, then private agents, bamks or investors, create money at will, close to 100% of the money creation is made by private agents.
PLease not that the government can still control the amount of private money creation through the interest rate policy.
I think it would be very interesting to provide historical data on the ratio Base money/other money agregates in the USA and other countries, so as to show how historically the states have progressively privatized the money creation business.
This article is all about precious metal coins and bank notes, which account for less than 10% of the US money supply. The minting section has no relevance in today's world, e.g. what percentage of the face value of coins is in precious metal coins? In the US, I'd guess it rounds to 0.00%, and almost the same with almost all other countries. 0.00% times 10% = irrelevance. Smallbones (talk) 18:56, 9 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
On the example of how money is created in the US, and the precise point where money is created
(Cf. point 5 in the list, "This lending of money that it has on deposit is the precise point at which new money is created, because the depositor still has his money, ...")
The statement "the depositor still has his money" is in my opinion a kind of a short cut of the true fact. The depositor has NOT got the money anymore, rather he is in possession of the bank's promise to repay him money. (In case of a money transfer, the amount would have been deducted from the sender's bank's cash position.) Thus (net) money is not created, as the bank got in possession of the actual money, which is proven by the fact that the sum of total deposits and total loans in the list below that paragraph net out to the original depositted (physical) money.
It is of course true that by the prevailing mechanism implicitly the same money comes to use as collateral for loans of value a multiple times of the money's nominal value -- clearly increasing the buying power in the economy; this effect however is not appropriately coined as "money creation". (To give a further clearifying analogy: If a company owns 10000 USD and prepares a statement with many asset and liability positions, then even though the sum of absolute values of all these figures exceeds 10000 one would not say that the company has created money. These are just numbers.)
Don't delete this page! I only just discovered this page after having numerous fights on the fractional reserve banking page. A major problem at the FRB page is that it contains a rather muddled mix of ideas which are partly "FRB in theory" and "money creation as it goes on in the world today (which can scarcely even be described as FRB)". This page is the perfect place to make a clean break from the FRB page and become the definitive source of information about "how money is created in the real world today".
Note that the "reserve requirements" in many countries is *zero* and the restrictions on money creation are now based entirely on capital adequacy instead. Even in countries which still have some reserve requirements for some types of loan, they often have zero requirements for others. Reissgo (talk) 19:16, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
When the money that is created with a loan instrument is destroyed, is it just the principal, principal + interest, interest only or what? 74.78.162.229 (talk) 02:05, 8 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I meant the above as a pointed and essentially rhetorical question. The English language contains the truth of this matter in the relation beween the expressions "Making Money" and "Money Creation". See also "usury". Lycurgus (talk) 01:44, 25 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear, my conviction is that the labor theory of value is the essential underlying truth. Socially useful labor is the essential thing that creates the value symbolically represented in money, that truth expressed (paraphrastically) by Adam Smith in his assertion that the Wealth and Power of Nations is embodied in their ability to produce goods and services. It is the exercise and application of socially useful labor that creates the real underlying value. The creation of the symbolic form which commands the real underlying form in exchange is an artifact of the prevailing social order. In primitive societies exchange occurs directly between the real producers and the symbolic form of value does not as yet exist. It is the epitomé of commodity fetishism to see the money commodity as the real form of value rather than the thing it represents. The symbol (e.g. gold) in this case comes to be considered the real thing instead of the thing represented. 74.78.162.229 (talk) 02:06, 25 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Or considered to be a magical rather than a (merely) symbolic representation. Whence the analogy to fettishes in primitive societies/belief systems, e.g. voodoo dolls, where the representation of a person takes on magical properties. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 15:02, 29 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I have searched extensively and found nothing reliable to support the idea that the money created through interest on loans is destroyed when the loan is paid back. So, without objection, the statement: "The destruction of money created through loans occurs as the loans are paid back (deleveraging)[citation needed]" should be removed. Also, the link to deleveraging dose not imply anything about the destruction of money.172.130.206.193 (talk) 04:26, 9 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
See that current text only refers to the destruction of currency not general money, so the objection upon which I started this thread appears to be mooted. FTR though, the principal isn't any different from any other part of the sum as general money, it is abstract value which is neither created nor destroyed but only assigned as I noted above, i.e. socialized in the so-called "real economy", that is to say socialized per the current dominant mode of production of said underlying value, that in turn an extension of the basic kind of social organization under which the real values produced are assigned their socially approved relative numeric values or claims made on future production. 72.228.177.92 (talk) 11:47, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The term "destruction" of money in this article doesnt have to do anything with lets suppose "real" market asset and values destruction. With the term destruction it means the money removed from circulation, printed or not. Of course new loans are always issued and money "recirculates" and unless money is printed you cant identify the money that was assinged to you, can you? The destruction concerns principal AND interest, this is what you pay to the Bank isn't it? And yes if everybody wanted to pay back their loans there is NOT enough money circulating (and i dont mean only the printed money) Alexopth1512 (talk) 21:55, 26 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Generally speaking when you get a bank loan, you do not get a cash loan but instead get a new amount of broad money created by the banking system so that somewhere a new deposit is created for that loan in the banking system. Once the loan is repaid then this amount of created money no longer exists. For example the broad money deposits you have earnt from the economy pass to the bank to repay the loan and then these broad money deposits no longer exist. The interest comes from existing money or other created money that is not 'destroyed' when the loan is repaid. The idea that there is insufficient money in circulation of all types to repay loans is one that is not supported by evidence. In a manner of speaking a bank is like a plumber. It offers a service and the fees/interest come from the economy and existing money. The power of the loans goes outwards to the economy to do work today, rather than in the future, and then in the future this power is returned to the bank for a net zero result so that the banks liability, caused by their money creation which claims their assets, is ended.Andrewedwardjudd (talk) 10:39, 27 April 2011 (UTC)andrewedwardjudd[reply]
Hmmm, I dont know if there is any source of created money other than banks (commercial or not) in the quantity it is created there. But in reality you cant separate private and public sector (this is an opinion of mine). So if money circulating is only created by banks, when loans are created the interest amount is not created. So you get the extra money to pay you loan from other sources, most probably other created money by other banks. I guess if i find a goldmine i will create money and central bank must print more money. For the system to be stable, you must have growth (more loans) that is bigger than the average interest rate, so more loans create the difference of the demanding interest amounts. You DO have a point that when a loan returns to the bank, logistically the amount is not destroyed, it is the profit of the bank. This profit comes from money created from other loans. However, what I mean is that since interest amount is NEVER created, if ALL loans should be returned NOW there is no sufficient amount of money. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexopth1512 (talk • contribs) 13:45, 28 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You dont seem to have understood what i was saying. Loan monies are not profits for the banks.
A private bank is like you. You can create a liability for you(that is against your advantage), that you give to me(that is for my advantage), that i can use as loan money to buy something from your father if your father is happy to be owed money by you. You are then no longer liable to me but are now liable to your father. I just pay you a fee for that service. If your father wants 'real money' then you are liable to provide it. If i repay the loan then the form of your liability is changed because now you are only liable to repay your father with what you already possess. So far the only profit you have made is the interest, but you do have the use of the money . Once you pay your father you have no liabilities and only the interest profit.Andrewedwardjudd (talk) 14:26, 28 April 2011 (UTC)andrewedwardjudd[reply]
Perhaps we might understand the destruction of debt money from its creation. A bank loan is created by a bank borrowing from the deposit accounts and increasing the borrower's balance. The loan then becomes money because the increase in the borrower's balance is recognized as money by virtue of the bank being part of the banking system. This money is then distributed by the borrower by using the increased balance, but it is not destroyed. The borrower's payments, like the sale of the loan contract, give the lending bank the equivalent value of the loan in existing money, so they do not destroy the debt money the loan created. Indeed, as part of the bank's reserves, loan payments increase its ability to create more debt money. Nor does a default destroy money; it only prevents the transfer of existing money from the borrower to the current holder of the loan. It is not to the payment or lack of payment that we should look, but at the internal accounts of the bank, even if those accounts are not explicitly kept by the bank.
A bank's own activity can be separated into two accounts: a deposit account, similar to other depositors' accounts, and a loan account. The loan account never holds a positive balance but rather is a negative balance representing the unpaid principal on the various loans it has made. When the loan is made, i.e. when the debt money is created, an equivalent amount is deducted from the loan account balance so that the total balance over all accounts remains the same. At the same time, the debt money is converted into general money so we do not care how it is distributed afterwards. The money supply has been increased by the loan amount while the bank's loan account holds the equivalent 'anti-money'.
What happens then with a loan payment is that general money is received by the bank with the interest going into the bank's deposit account, while the principal is converted into debt money and then consumed by the same amount of 'anti-money' in the bank's loan account. Another way to think of this is that the bank is repaying its loans from the deposit accounts, including its own. Similarly, when the loan is sold to a third party, the proceeds from the sale are divided into interest and principal, with the amount of the principal being converted into debt money and then consumed by the loan account. On the other hand, if the loan is transferred, then this operation is preceded by the new lender borrowing from his depositors the amount needed to purchase the loan from the original lender.
Taking this a step further, we see that a default, write-down or write-off of a loan will consist of the bank withdrawing money out of its deposit account to consume a portion or all of the remaining principal in its loan account. When a bank does not hold a sufficient balance in its deposit account to do this and cannot stall until it does, it can, in the proverbial phrase, 'beg, borrow or steal' the requisite funds. In more modern terminology, the bank can get a bailout, increase its inter-bank borrowing or assess new and spurious charges and 'service fees'.
Since these are all internal, hypothetical accounts we are talking about, they may not reflect the bank's explicit bookkeeping. Thus, the aggregate listing of balances given by the banks may not give an accurate accounting from which to calculate the debt money supply. Fortunately, the negative of the balance of the possibly hypothetical loan account is easily counted by adding the principal outstanding on all active loans at each bank. Aggregating these balances gives the negative of the total debt money supply. Therefore, the total debt money supply is the total outstanding principal of all active loans in the banking system. When that principal increases, the debt money supply expands and when it decreases the debt money supply contracts. The determination of the amount of debt money supply creation and destruction ends up being an unnecessary complication when measuring the debt money supply.
--InpoliticTruth (talk) 20:01, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I feel there should be a discussion around how second mortgages affects M0 money supply. Commercial bank money created through the multiplier in fractional reserve banking shouldn't affect the market as long as it is only used on real estate and loan installments (i disregard interest in this case), but in the case of a second mortgage the money can be used on anything.
If these second mortgages are repaid, the only effect is a 1-30 years boost on the money supply. Whenever this turns into a foreclosure / bankruptcy however, the first mortgage is repaid but the second remains in the system.
In these times, couldnt this have a significant effect on M0? --Aravn (talk) 09:58, 5 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
After reading this article I spent a little time trying to find historical examples of competive minting. The only thing I have found resembling competetive minting is competition between city states or smaller states in the middle ages, which is very different from the kind of competetive minting described in this article. I think this part of the article might be a complete fiction, or if such minting has ever existed then it was in a far more limited form than minting by governments. Perhaps the article could be changed to reflect this, as it is misleading in its current form.--81.86.104.84 (talk) 22:49, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The correct referent of this is the contractural relations between the state and the private enterprises, normally purveyors to the Crown, that produced the actual currency. The monopoly on general money is more or less identified with the state power and has been throughout civilized history, so it's only the production of speciæ by different shops that are referred to and I think you should be able to find a fairly rich history behind that. i.e. in those places and times where the state didn't also monopolize the actual production and distribution of the currency. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 01:26, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Of course in the current period, with the creation of exotic and derivative forms of money, in a case like that of the United States, a relatively small portion of the total effective "money" supply is state created. 72.228.177.92 (talk) 18:10, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Our current Money System is NOT real. It is totally reliant on "Faith", and believers (Sheeple). It is an elaborate Ponzi scheme, which relies on the printing of new dollars every year (The expansion of the money supply), for lenders to lend at near zero interest rates, and then wrap debt in a bow and sell it on the stock market (cmo's cdo's). If the CMO investment goes bad, then the FED might actually buy some of this toxic "debt", and then sit on it and call it an asset. Trivial expansion of the money supply is healthy for the economy (Georgism), but we passed trivial in the 1950's. George Bush passed legislation to move money directly from the FED to the Treasury (and call it "Interest payments"). It's nothing more then a tax most people do not know they are paying (Truth is, the next generation pays the bill). Under Obama the payments have skyrocketed, and this acceleration is not maintainable. Acceleration cannot continue forever, it ends, or there is a crash. We have double the money we had 7 years ago, and every dollar will buy less. While that would normally be alarming, other countries are just as bad. Leading you to the interesting sticking point, is that the currency market is the most unpredictable market. Willie Nelson said it best when he said, If I owe you a dollar, I have a problem, if I owe you a million dollars, then you have a problem. Other countries cannot afford for the USA currency to collapse. 68.226.162.229 (talk) 11:10, 12 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Article should either focus on US money creation or expand
This article should either focus on "money creation" in the U.S. only OR it should expand and provide information or links to differing money creation systems such as "the gold standard" or "lawful fiat", etc. If the latter is chose, the article could provide a table of countries and what "money creation system" each uses. The article is misleading in its current form and suggests that all countries in the world use the U.S. fractional reserve system. Also, this article is also misleading in using the IMF 20% reserve requirement as an example when the article clearly references the U.S. system on the most part. I think this article needs a bit of review on these things. In it's current form it can be misleading, especially for people who are just learning about this subject.
--Mozkill (talk) 20:06, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Fractional reserve banking is almost universal. The USA is not very special in this respect. (although certain fringe beliefs about economics may be fairly common in the USA but rarer elsewhere)
Do you have any examples to the contrary? If so, I'm sure the article would benefit from well-sourced additions.
Similarly, in the 21st century, few countries have much interest in tying their currency to one particular shiny metal.
(I moved your comments to the bottom of the talkpage, per convention. I hope you don't mind - I didn't change the content at all).
Doesn't work also create money?
E.g. you take some wood make a chair and sell it. Haven't you cretaed money worth the diference between materials, labour etc and the selling price?
If so can someone who understands this please add to the article. If not cn someone who understands also please add to the article as a common misconception.
Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.239.160.54 (talk) 13:35, 8 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, work doesn't create money because money must already be in existence to pay for the chair. At the very least, one could talk about added value, but not money creation. --2.80.42.207 (talk) 15:19, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to see the process of "creating money" in today's banking system explained and clarified through simply listing the balance sheet operations in which a bank records the process.
This should take the following form for the creation of "bank money":
1) Balance sheet of commercial bank in t1 (before creating new "bank money")
2) Balance sheet of commercial bank in t2 (after creating new "bank money")
3) Comparison of balance sheet in t1 and balance sheet in t2 with respect to changes in assets, liabilities, and net assets (equity).
And the following form for the creation of central bank money:
1) Balance sheet of central bank in t1 (before creating new central bank money)
2) Balance sheet of central bank in t2 (after creating new central bank money)
3) Comparison of balance sheet in t1 and balance sheet in t2 with respect to changes in assets, liabilities, and net assets (equity).
Since there are different forms of central bank money, I would like to see the balance sheet operations for creating
a) Central Bank Notes (not the creation of the paper notes, but the balance sheet operations of releasing them into the economy)
b) Electronic Central Bank Money
c) Coins (again, not the production of the coins themselves, but the balance sheet operations of releasing the into the economy)
a) and b) would also clarify the process of creating so-called "fiat money".
Should not a simple description of what banks actually do when they create money be the very least we can expect from an article attempting to clarify how money is created? There should be no mystery in simple balance sheet operations. Thanks, folks Thewolf37 (talk) 12:37, 26 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This page talks a lot about how money is created, but it says very little about why anyone cares. IE - what are the implications of changes in money supply. Clearly an increase in money supply is correlated with inflation, but that isn't always true. Are there other implications? It seems silly to talk about the "money supply" without assessing what it means to change the supply of "money".
You're missing a key component to Re-Lending: The other 80 of the original deposit can also be used to fractionally lend money into existence making the total amount of money that can be loaned into existence from step A to B, based on a 20% reserve rate, is not 80 but 400. Of course, if that depositor requests any money back, the bank will be over their reserve ratio.
Your table should look more like this (with a 25% ratio):
A 100 400 500
B 400 1600 2100
C 1600 6400 8500
.....
Why is it that most people seem to think that some how, magically, only a fraction of deposits become reserves? By using the reserve ratio for this fraction, it's only perpetuating a misconception and biasing wikipedia. The reserve ratio only has to do with the amount of money banks can lend into existence, not how much of a deposit becomes reserves. For a bank, the whole deposit becomes new reserve, not some little fraction of the deposit. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Javalizard (talk • contribs) 21:27, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If you have 20 in reserves with a 20% reserve ratio, the amount of money that can be loaned into existence is 20/0.2 or 100. This table shows subtraction of the original deposit by the reserve to create tho money loaned into existence (for you math types, 100-100*0.2=80) When it should be division: 20/0.2=100. See the previous section. The math should be 100/0.2 for the total amount of reserves that can be created being 500.
A short passage was added to address the maximum of each step instead of just the example. People make wild assumptions about how initial deposits are then converted to reserves by some reserve ratio based on the example. The example is just that and doesn't address the maximums. Would some of you stop deleting the passage on the maximum relending in each step based on your false ideas derived from the example? It is rather crafty that people keep imposing their false ideas of how relending works. You are stopping others from understanding the process by imposing your own limited and false view of relending. If you look at the math in the example, they don't even use the money multiplier properly between the reserves and the relending amount created, how can anyone thus assume it is correct or meaningful in any way? The example doesn't even say maximum amounts any where. The issue was un-addressed before the passage on maximums was added.
There are internal discrepancies with how the bankers describe the system working and what their equations actually do.
The process of money creation in a fractional reserve banking system is elementary. Suppose Bank A has 100 in assets. If the reserve rate is 20%, the bank must retain 20 in reserve and is free to lend 80. If that money is deposited in Bank B, it must keep 16 in reserve and is free to lend 64. If 64 is deposited in Bank C, it must keep 12.80 in reserve and can lend 51.20. After just three steps, the total money created would be 80 + 64 + 51.20 or 195.20. The money multiplier at this stage would be 195.20/80 or 2.44. If the process is continued indefinitely, the money multiplier would be 1/0.2 or 5 and the total money created would be 5 times 80 or 400. Virgil H. Soule (talk) 03:12, 28 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to ask politely that people stop calling the relending section original research when it is a summation of facts on the same page in a reordered fashion, plain mathematics, visual displayed on a chart in the same page, or pulled from a related page, such as money multiplier. When someone can explain to me how you get reserve ratio of 20% when you divide 20 / 80, then you can keep your edits that suggest the relending series original text doesn't need clarification. It seems extremely clear to me that 20/100 is 20%. The original text even states that it is a 20% reserve RATE. How obvious is it to people that 20/80 on the other hand is a 25% reserve ratio? The section on the money multiplier even discusses how it is calculated. So, I calculated it! People are removing my edits because they don't understand math. These undos are an affront to the reality of math everywhere. I find this kind of wikipedia behavior reprehensible. Can we do something about these disinformation users?
Javalizard (talk) 10:44, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Seriously, I was just looking at the section on relending trying to understand what it was about the math that was so difficult. It even states how the reserve rate and reserve ratio are computed in the example! How much more clear does it need to be before you stop calling it OR? Javalizard (talk) 10:51, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You need to properly cite the chart, you can't just cite another wikipedia article. Also I'd like to see your calculations; what you've been posting here is difficult to follow and the numbers you have don't sound right. Voiceofreason01 (talk) 23:16, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'll also add that that table is visually displayed in the graph below it in the section money multiplier. Unsourced is verifiably incorrect. Javalizard (talk) 00:48, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As if [Wikipedia:Verifiability|citing another wikipedia page] wasn't bad enough, you've been editing that page too. Are you trying to "cite" your own edits to wikipedia articles? bobrayner (talk) 01:13, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, I am not citing my own edits. I am clarifying. The money multiplier is "maximum amount of money commercial banks can legally create for a given quantity of reserves" So if the reserves of 100 are 20 and are expanded to 80 then 80/20 gives a money multiplier of 4, a reserve ratio of 25% and a reserve rate of 20% Stop trying to confuse people. Javalizard (talk) 01:36, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You you people stop calling the relending section Original Research! Showing ppl how the equations work by changing the numbers they use is not original research. If I was showing original equations or using the equations to produce some other abstract mathematical result based on some set of obscure facts, that would be something else, but no one has shown me how this is original research nor how any of the reversions make mathematical sense. I've found all my facts in other places in the world and here on the wiki and I've linked everything together so you can see that if you do your research, it's not original research. For the love of god, what is it that you don't get? Javalizard (talk) 04:11, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You cannot cite another wikipedia article. If you want to use the chart here you MUST bring the sources over from the other article. I would do the work for you except your calculations don't appear to be factually correct and you refuse to clarify your position or post your calculations. I also have WP:WEIGHT concerns about including the chart in this article because it lacks the context provided in money multiplier. Voiceofreason01 (talk) 18:28, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My position is extremely clear in what i wrote in the article. The mathematical progression of feeding the numbers back into the same equation on the same page, as described, is listed, the numbers are listed. If you can't see the pattern in this "100 is expanded to 400, 400 to 1600" followed by (100, 400, 1600, 6400, 12800....) that's not my fault. Those numbers are right in front of you. Javalizard (talk) 18:03, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Javalizard, please stop attacking other editors in your edit summaries. It won't make people take your ideas seriously. It might be a good idea to seek consensus on the talkpage before making these changes. bobrayner (talk) 23:19, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently you don't think it's appropriate to point out in edit summaries that "they computed 80/20 to equal 5 thus i reverted their edits." Since when is calling a spade a spade an attack? You may not be comfortable pointing out logical flaws in other peoples' thinking in comments as reasons for edits, but I think it good to point these things out. Edits are made by people for reasons. The people and reasons should be pointed out in our grand discussion that is wikipedia. no? Javalizard (talk) 00:35, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Please don't try to twist words even further; it merely discredits you further.
The personal attacks are visible in the history. "ppl that can't do math", indeed, and pretending that anybody who disagrees with your WP:OR is incapable of simple arithmetic. "just in case people cannot connect the dots in the chart themselves". And then there's "Lawrencekhoo who can't figure out that math makes different equations have different results".
Please stop attacking people. If you really believe the stuff that you're adding to the article, show us a good source. Rhetoric is no substitute for references. bobrayner (talk) 00:41, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Please stop pretending that this is a matter of simple arithmetic. It's a problem of a large block of WP:OR. Pretending that people who disagree with you are innumerate really doesn't help your case. It really doesn't. bobrayner (talk) 01:18, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My comment that "just in case people...." was referring to all the zillions of internet users out there that may not be able to get it because, clearly, this is a difficult concept for most people to get. I'm using your misunderstanding of the topic to make the section as great as possible and to address all the concerns that you have about my passage. Your inability to understand the difference between the reserve rate and reserve ratio shouldn't be my problem but ppl keep claiming it as OR, which is incorrect. Javalizard (talk) 01:28, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Computed by self-iterating the same exact mathematical concept in the sentence above. It's called Mathematical induction. Because the base case is same as the inductive step it is a mathematical process, not research. I fail to understand how doing this (((((100*4)*4)*4)*4)*4)*4)....) is research or original research when the equations are on the same page, they are computed once, and then just done a few times back to back with the middle steps left out. Where exactly should the line of OR be drawn? Should it be drawn at the first usage of the text in the money multiplier section? second? the third iterative maximum? 10th? I don't think iterating math is OR. In fact, the chart the Fed's use is iterating math/induction as well. We shouldn't fear that. For discussion, should these middle steps be shown? Would that help everyone's understanding? Javalizard (talk) 02:18, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't come up with those numbers. I used the info on the page and money multiplier to calculate the max by using the same equations the Fed's use in their lending series but by changing the reserve rate to 100%. As shown in Principles of Macroeconomics, the initial deposit is multiplied by the reserve ratio to find the max it can be expanded to. Thus. 400. So you just feed that back into the same equation instead of 100 you use 400, instead of 100 you use 1600. It's very simple math. Really I'm showing you that if x*y=z then any of the following cases will work 2*4=8 as well as 2*5=10. This is not original research as I believe basic mathematics is not original. You're welcome to cite a source that states otherwise. Javalizard (talk) 18:07, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I cited my source that allows my to do this the first time. Mankiw, N. Gregory (2001), Principles of Macroeconomics. Doing it a second time or third time isn't research if it can be done the first time. Javalizard (talk) 18:10, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Javalizard, you seem to have added the same content five times in the last 24h. That's a bit more than 3RR. Please stop editwarring. If you want your text to be added to the article, cite a source instead of hitting "revert". If you can't find a source that agrees with you, drop the stick and walk away from the dead horse. bobrayner (talk) 05:22, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I did cite the source. It's teh text called Modern Money Mechanics. Did you even see that I added that as the source, just as you suggested? Please go read that and stop editwarring. Javalizard (talk) 06:05, 31 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have read the source. It does not support your claim. I explained that on your talkpage but will repeat here.
Your preferred source says "Thus through stage after stage of expansion, "money" can grow to a total of 10 times the new reserves supplied to the banking system"
You said that, through stage after stage, money can grow 4194304 times.
Central banks don't expand money through fractional lending/fractional relending. Commercial banks do. Source does support the claims that the reserve ratio and reserve ratio create an equation, these two variables are independent, and which can be show with any numbers to show how it works. If you read the source and were able to figure it out, that is not my problem, it's yours. Show how an equation works is not original research. Showing one instance of x*y=z is 1*2=2 and then adding in another instance of 2*4=8 is not original research as you claim. It is showing how the equations from Modern Money Mechanics work. They even show how different variables in an the equation produced different mathematical results in the section with the graph called Money Multiplier ON THE SAME PAGE. If that is original research you had better delete the entire wiki page called money multiplier too! Claiming that telling people how an equation works is original research is crazy talk. It's not original research and your claims that is original research is bunk. I'll leave the section blank for the moment because there are more of you people that believe it is original research or some uncited BS despite my telling and showing you everything you demand. It is not my fault if you can't figure out how the Federal Reserve equations work. They show you how the equations work in their one instance. As I have tried to tell you, the reserve rate and the reserve ratio are not linked together. Other pages on wikipedia have information that show that the reserve rate and the reserve ratio are independent. If this violates your sensibilities, that doesn't mean it's wrong. In fact, it means that you are trying to keep information from people that should have it, and it means YOU are the one edit warring.
Please stop the personal attacks. You've been warned before about this.
If you still cannot accept that 10 (what the source says) is radically different to 4194304 (what your spreadsheet says) then it's unlikely we can make much further progress. bobrayner (talk) 21:59, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You need to stop calling facts, data, and formulation ON THE SAME PAGE original research Javalizard (talk) 01:56, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
Also, stop calling the Federal Reserve monetary expansion models Original research, they aren't. Javalizard (talk) 02:00, 2 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
From the same page: "As a formula, if the reserve ratio is R, then the money multiplier m is the reciprocal, m = 1 / R, and is the maximum amount of money commercial banks can legally create for a given quantity of reserves."
The maximum reserve ratio in the example would be 25% based on 20/80. 20 being the reserves and 80 being the money created given the reserves. This is inclusive of 20%, or the reserve rate. This also means that the model is just as valid for a reserve ratio of 25% as it is for 20% as it is for 0.0001%. So for the last time, stop edit warring calling this original research. Javalizard (talk) 19:40, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just as the paper MMM iterates math, iterating the same mathematics with different numbers is not OR. Anyone can do that and replicate the results. In fact, the chart in the section money multiplier uses the same mathematics with different numbers in it too! By your definition that would be OR as well. But it's not. That's my point. I am not saying anything new. Javalizard (talk) 20:23, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You claim they are the same. Please. Cite your source and prove me wrong. In fact, why don't you just change money creation to say that with sources. It would help my understanding of the world. Javalizard (talk) 04:07, 2 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You are mistaken, it is up to you to prove your contention that such a distinction exists. See WP:PROVEIT: "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material." I would also add that the term "reserve rate" does not exist in the index for the several macroeconomics text books that I happen to have on hand (Mankiw, Krugman and Wells, Abel and Bernanke, Barro, and Sachs and Larrain).
I am copying this to the article talk page. From now on, please reserve all article talk to the article talk page. All further such communications will be copied there. LK (talk) 04:42, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It appears from the above and a bit of google-fu that the term "required reserve rate" is a synonym for "required reserve ratio" used mainly in China and a few other countries in East Asia. See for example page 16 of this book [2] --LK (talk) 10:06, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I very much admire the WP:PROVEIT philosophy. Here is the issue in this circumstance: Rate is not the word Ratio. They are different words. I cannot prove they are different as they are different unless proven the same. I can't prove a negative. I've looked for the positive proof, but never found a source. Javalizard (talk) 19:48, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect people equate the two because they sound about the same, look about the same, have similar meanings, and the expansion models the Fed uses fits both the % of deposits going into reserves AND how much it is expanded. This can confuse a lot of people. The max reserve ratio is not OR as this is given within the same page. Given that "The money multiplier is multiplied by the initial deposit to show the maximum amount of money it can be expanded to.[1]" That supports what I am saying in that a reserve rate of 100% is equal to the initial deposit and the money multiplier comes from the reserve ratio. To me, this implies that some peoples' ideas that they are the same, isn't true. Javalizard (talk) 20:11, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
References
^Mankiw, N. Gregory (2001), Principles of Macroeconomics
My last point is to show you what happens if the words are reversed: Reserve Rate becomes The Rate of Reserves. The Reserve Ratio becomes the Ratio of Reserves. In the first case, the word rate implies change which is what what happens to initial deposits as they are changed to reserves. The word ratio doesn't have a time dynamic implicitly built in which makes the ratio of reserve to money loaned out appropriate.
As per the Maximum Reserve Ratio math shows, it is specific to the ratio of reserves to the money loaned out. To assume that it is anything else is mathematically inaccurate. Yet it seems in all the Feds examples they give a percent and call it "reserves". Thus given that "reserve ratio" is already mathematically defined, I only makes sense that what some people call the reserve rate could only be the conversion from deposits to reserves. The table, before being deleted again despite also found in money multiplier, even said 20% reserve rate which is very simple to compute and even makes sense... 20/100=reserves/deposit. That was there before I started my editing and the "reserve rate" language is in the graph in the money multiplier section. The max RR was also on the page before my edits. Applying info on the page to examples on the page is not Original Research Javalizard (talk) 21:18, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So yes, if you believe that the mathematical definition of reserve ratio is qualitatively synonymously defined as reserve rate (which seems to me to be a mathematically distinct number), please, enlighten me with your citations. Javalizard (talk) 21:37, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is only one concept described in academic papers, text books and various banking regulations. This concept is variously called the R, rr, reserve ratio, required reserve ratio, reserve rate, required reserve rate, required reserves. They all mean the same thing, the fraction of deposits that a bank is required by law or regulation to keep as reserves in the form of cash or other liquid instruments. This fraction is calculated as [required reserves/total deposits]. All sources cited in the article and above on this talk page attest to this fact.
It is your own uncited and rather strange idiosyncratic assertion that the ratio [reserves/funds loaned] is somehow relevant, and further that bank deposits are also reserves (when all sources state that only cash or other liquid instruments are reserves). Everyone else involved in this discussion has found this assertion incorrect and unsupported by the sources cited. This is the clear consensus here.
You are actively doing a disservice to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia if you keep on continually reintroducing your own idiosyncratic assertions. Please do not revert to your contentious version against the clear consensus of the other editors here. Doing so is edit warring and against policy. Slow edit warring without technically breaking WP:3RR is still edit warring, and you can be blocked for doing so. Continually doing so even after being blocked, will lead to your being banned from editing Wikipedia. LK (talk) 05:01, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
They are not the same. Mathematically RR is defined as the money loaned out over the reserves. You're calling it something else which it is not. You have failed to explain how you get 20% if 80/20=4. None of your descriptions make consistent logical sense. You can't call two different mathematical equations the same thing. You can't make the same equation do two different things. This is not OR. You are not making any logical mathematical sense. Javalizard (talk) 17:57, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You are doing a disservice to wikipedia by continuing to confuse people about these two mathematically distinct numbers. You can't even cite any sources that they are the same. I can't prove a negative! I've looked and looked for a positive but can't find ANY! So the burden of proof is on you to show that they are indeed MATHEMATICALLY the same concept! None of this, they confused it so we should keep it confused here. stop deleting this section on relending. Javalizard (talk) 18:00, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm willing to take the risk of getting banned from Wikipedia. This stuff is consistent (which is key, unlike your supposition that one mathematical concept means two things), is research, is cited, is confirmed, and the reason why I am willing to take such risks of getting banned from Wikipedia is because I have verified how this works personally with my own bankers. I do not cite that research as it is original but I am, thus, willing to get banned over it, for it is how things work. Javalizard (talk) 18:48, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I did iteratively add things. As editors removed my content, I addressed their issues. Despite asking to take it to talk they continued deleting. I kept reverting but changing to address those concerns. Javalizard (talk) 18:52, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You are describing your own personal opinion, not backed up by any sources whatsoever. This is no justification to continually reintroduce the same text against the clear consensus of editors here. What you are doing is against Wikipedia policy. Stop. LK (talk) 06:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Human beings have been creating private monies for thousands of years.
Anybody offering credit services to facilitate trade can create a private money providing they can retain creditors or have their own claimable assets.
money creation is not reserved for governments and central bankers. Private monies exist in the economy that are not counted as part of the official money supply. For example a bar tender has a chalk board with the available newly created money allowing customers to buy drinks where repayment with interest could be required. If he wanted and was legally allowed he could get rid of the chalk board and issue loaned tokens that could be used in the local community amongst people who knew and trusted him and these could be redeemable for cash if people came to his bar or 'deposited with him' for an interest payment or used to buy his services.
Surely wiki can do a better job at being encyclopediatic than some particularly important pages are doing? Doesnt the word mean 'all incompassing teaching' ? Andrewedwardjudd (talk) 10:10, 14 April 2011 (UTC)andrewedwardjudd[reply]
Does the money multiplier model still apply in the UK ?
Where does money come from? by Andrew Jackson,Richard Werner,Tony Greenham,Josh Ryan-Collins (12 December 2012) produced by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) based on documents supplied by the Bank of England, claims that the growth in money supply in the UK was based on commercial banks willingness to lend up to 2007 (before the start of the financial crisis), and that interest rates and the reserve requirement had little effect in restraining lending between 1997 and 2007. Banks increased their lending and then sought the reserves afterwards. (talk) 23:30, 29 August 2013 (UTC)brandsby[reply]
The source is not suitable for the statements attributed to it. Moreover, the statements would need to relate to the context of the narrative to which they are added. Please read this page: WP:RS and this page WP:V.
More economists express doubts about the money multiplier model and banks lending out "reserves"
I think the following needs to at least be on the talk page, even if it appears to be banned from the main page. Please note the calibre of the economists listed.
Michael Kumhof, Deputy Division Chief, Modelling Unit, Research Department, International Monetary Fund said "the textbook treatment of money in the transmission mechanism can be rejected”.
Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England 2003 to 2013 said “Textbooks assume that money is exogenous.” … “In the United Kingdom, money is endogenous”.
Professor Charles Goodhart CBE, FBA, ex Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England said of the money multiplier model: “It should be discarded immediately”.
Professor David Miles, Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England said “The way monetary economics and banking is taught in many, maybe most, universities is very misleading”.
Senior Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1969, said “In the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and look for reserves later”.
Money creation in the modern economy by Bank of England states on page 3:
"While new broad money has been created on the consumer’s balance sheet, the first row of Figure 1 shows that this is without — in the first instance, at least — any change in the amount of central bank money or ‘base money’. As discussed earlier, the higher stock of deposits may mean that banks want, or are required, to hold more central bank money in order to meet withdrawals by the public or make payments to other banks. And reserves are, in normal times, supplied ‘on demand’ by the Bank of England to commercial banks in exchange for other assets on their balance sheets. In no way does the aggregate quantity of reserves directly constrain the amount of bank lending or deposit creation.
This description of money creation contrasts with the notion that banks can only lend out pre-existing money, outlined in the previous section. Bank deposits are simply a record of how much the bank itself owes its customers. So they are a liability of the bank, not an asset that could be lent out. A related misconception is that banks can lend out their reserves. Reserves can only be lent between banks , since consumers do not have access to reserves accounts at the Bank of England."
ECB Bulletin May 2012 states on page 21-22:
"Eurosystem, however, as the monopoly supplier of central bank reserves in the euro area, always provides the banking system with the liquidity required to meet the aggregate reserve requirement. In fact, the ECB’s reserve requirements are backward-looking, i.e. they depend on the stock of deposits (and other liabilities of credit institutions) subject to reserve requirements as it stood in the previous period, and thus after banks have extended the credit demanded by their customers.
In the current situation of malfunctioning money markets, the Eurosystem supplies central bank reserves to each counterparty elastically against the provision of adequate collateral, through fixed rate tenders with full allotment. This ensures that each individual counterparty is able to meet its reserve requirements, as well as any additional liquidity needs. In the case of normally functioning interbank markets, the Eurosystem always provides the central bank reserves needed on aggregate, which are then traded among banks and therefore redistributed within the banking system as necessary. The Eurosystem thus effectively accommodates the aggregate demand for central bank reserves at all times and seeks to influence financing conditions in the economy by steering short-term interest rates.
In sum, holdings of central bank reserves are thus not a factor that limits the supply of credit for the banking system as a whole. Ultimately, the growth of bank credit depends on a set of factors that determine credit demand and on other factors linked to the supply of credit."
Bank of International Settlements working paper, Monetary policy implementation: Misconceptions and their consequences states on page 14:
"While being highly intuitive, the utilization of the money multiplier in expositions of monetary transmission can be misleading. This is illustrated, for example, in the literature on the bank-lending channel (Bernanke and Gertler 1995; Bernanke and Blinder 1988). Three assumptions are responsible for engendering banks a special role in this particular view of the transmission mechanism: i) binding reserve requirements limit the issuance of bank demand deposits to the availability of reserves;.
...
From a monetary policy implementation perspective, however, the problem is in assumption i). This is premised on the notion that central banks set the level of reserves as the operational target of policy and that banks’ deposit base, and thus their supply of loanable funds, is linked directly to variations in reserves through the money multiplier mechanism. In fact, the true causal relationship actually runs in exactly the opposite direction. The banking system creates deposits as they are demanded by the private sector, and the central bank’s main liquidity management task is to ensure a sufficient supply of balances for the system as a whole to maintain reserve requirements, if any, associated with those deposits. It is the amount of deposits that the banking sector can attract that determines the level of reserves not the other way around."
These three banking institution papers clearly state that money multiplier story is not valid. Money creation page should be modified to explain how money is created in reality.
Whoever is going to zap this soon, please man up, say who you are, and why you wish to delete. Don't hide behind an anonymous IP address.
This source, legal forgery is well researched and sourced, so have a look at it before you remove the link. It is relevant to alternative
views. Thank you. Brandsby (talk) 14:38, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Here I am, "manned up" (but WP has lots of female contributors). The source you want to add looks like a personal blog. See WP:SPS for guidance. Now if your source was Professor Billy Davies from American University, then Professor Davies' blog might work. But these are not the same guys. What you might do is look at the sources that your Davies has utilized and incorporate those sources into the article. – S. Rich (talk) 15:25, 5 September 2013 (UTC) PS: This does not mean that you can cite sources and link them to Bill's article. The sources you cite must be WP:RS in and of themselves. 15:31, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for "maning or womaning" up, appreciate that.
The author has looked at the subject of money creation for over 40 years. For example this is in Chapter 6, based on work by Nigel Jenkinson, ex Bank of England. I will try and cite further sources from the work. I am not Bill Davies, by the way. Mr Davies wrote and researched much of this before the huge advance of computers and the Internet, even though the work is only available on the Internet.
"Many people still believe that the textbook reserve base system places a limit on monetary expansion by the banks but in fact the UK authorities have never used such a system. Chapter 6 is based on a paper written in April 2008 by Nigel Jenkinson, Executive Director for financial stability at the Bank of England. . Today there is no credit multiplier apart from statutory liquidity ratios and a bank can easily purchase eligible liquid assets out of profits, the statutory liquidity ratio was 32% when the Bank of England was nationalised in 1947. It was then steadily reduced until it was finally replaced by a cash ratio deposit regime in 1981, which in 1996 was calibrated to ensure that a bank had enough highly liquid assets to meet its outflows for the first week of a liquidity crisis without recourse to the inter-bank market, in order to allow the authorities time to explore options for an orderly resolution. As a restraint on lending this was virtually non existent." Brandsby (talk) 16:03, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is a sourcing issue for Wikipedia. At this stage we are not concerned with "what" Davies says. Rather, "who" is Davies. If he were a university professor in the subject of economis, and had published these ideas on his blog, then we could use it. But Davies is not a professor or published author. Wikipedia has restrictions on the type of source we allow. In this case, because Davies is simply providing his accumulated wisdom, we cannot use it, no matter how "true" or "correct" it is. To compare, the 2008 paper by Nigel Jenkinson might be an acceptable source. Where was it published. – S. Rich (talk) 16:44, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have asked Davies to provide further sources if possible. Davies was going to publish his book in physical book form, but owing to the cost and limited audience, he decided to put his work on the Internet. This does not make his work any less valid because it has not been published as a physical book. I have looked for Nigel Jenkinson's speech when he was at the Bank of England in 2008 on the Internet, unfortunately the B of E seem to have removed it. The problem I and other users have with Wikipedia is that the "published sources" are sometimes incorrect. There is a growing body of evidence that is bringing the multiplier model of fractional reserve banking into disrepute, and yet it receives top billing on this page and on the fractional reserve banking page, because the multiplier model is what is described in many text books on economics. This therefore misdirects students of economics and banking, and sometimes policy makers. See further up this page "Does the money multiplier model still apply in the UK ?" Brandsby (talk) 10:31, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This paper from the Bank of England effectively refutes most of the assertions in this article (that money creation is mostly about fractional-reserve banking and the money multiplier). Is this article therefore wrong? (I ask objectively, not to make any political or academic point).
Thanks. This paper is a major contribution from one of the most authoritative institution on this topic. Yet, the way the paper is being sourced in the wiki article is misguiding. Indeed, the way it is referenced seem to give credit to the fractional reserve banking theory, whil in fact the paper clearly argues that some of this theory is wrong, in particular the role of reserves, and whether those reserves are being 'multiplied' by private banks (which the BoE says it's wrong). See this excerpt:
Another common misconception is that the central bank determines the quantity of loans and deposits in the economy by controlling the quantity of central bank money — the so-called ‘money multiplier’ approach. In that view, central banks implement monetary policy by choosing a quantity of reserves. And, because there is assumed to be a constant ratio of broad money to base money, these reserves are then ‘multiplied up’ to a much greater change in bank loans and deposits. For the theory to hold, the amount of reserves must be a binding constraint on lending, and the central bank must directly determine the amount of reserves. While the money multiplier theory can be a useful way of introducing money and banking in economic textbooks, it is not an accurate description of how money is created in reality. Rather than controlling the quantity of reserves, central banks today typically implement monetary policy by setting the price of reserves — that is, interest rates.
In reality, neither are reserves a binding constraint on lending, nor does the central bank fix the amount of reserves that are available. As with the relationship between deposits and loans, the relationship between reserves and loans typically operates in the reverse way to that described in some economics textbooks. Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them — which will, crucially, depend on the interest rate set by the Bank of England.
The availability of savings of real resources does not constitute a limit to lending and deposit creation, nor does the availability of central bank reserves. Modern central banks pursue interest rate targets and must supply as many reserves as the banking system demands at those targets. This fact flies in the face of the still very popular deposit multiplier narrative of banking, which argues that banks make loans by repeatedly lending out an initial deposit of central bank reserves.
Thank you for those informations. It seems that your first reference (Bank of England) is cited in the article, but not the other two (The Guardian and the International Monetary Fund). What about adding them? Adèle Fisher (talk) 17:06, 18 March 2018 (UTC).[reply]
I have just added archive links to one external link on Money creation. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add {{cbignore}} after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}} to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
Looked this subject up out of curiosity and I'm trying to understand this paragraph:
Money creation (also known as credit creation) is the process by which the money supply of a country or a monetary region (such as the Eurozone) is increased. A central bank may introduce new money into the economy (termed "expansionary monetary policy", or "money printing" by detractors) by purchasing financial assets or lending money to financial institutions. Commercial bank lending also creates money in the form of demand deposits. Through fractional reserve banking, bank lending multiplies the amount of broad money beyond the amount of base money originally created by the central bank. Reserve requirements and other capital adequacy ratios imposed by the central bank can limit this process.
Central banks monitor the amount of money in the economy by measuring monetary aggregates such as M2. The effect of monetary policy on the money supply is indicated by comparing these measurements on various dates. For example, in the United States, money supply measured as M2 grew from $6.407 trillion in January 2005, to $8.319 trillion in January 2009.
So money is created to increase the money supply and central banks monitor the amount of money.
Why does the amount of money need to be increased and does this process go on indefinitely such that there is more and more money going around in, say, the Eurozone?
That a central bank may introduce new money seems to indicate that this is occasional. So does credit creation mean that lending through banks is the usual means of creating money?
What about pre-existing money? How was it introduced to begin with?
The last part of the section on Money Multiplier is incomprehensible and probably nonsensical. It is not even grammatical. To quote it:
credit creation process in commercial banks is an important attribute in the economy. Money deposited with commercial banks some part of this derivative deposit is kept as statutory reserve ratio as stated by the central bank. For example 20% of the demand deposits of axis bank is kept (20% of 1000) and other other part is advanced as loan to another commercial bank canara bank as a deposit there then canara bank will keep the 20% and forward the other part to icici bank this process continues but it is not a never ending process...
I can't make any sense of this, but phrases such as "other other part" show that it isn't just my ignorance. This cries out for rewriting. I'm no authority on this stuff; if I was, I would attempt to rewrite it. I'm tempted to try to rewrite it anyway on the reasoning that anything I might provide will probably be an improvement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paul Abrahams (talk • contribs) 05:51, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Could someone find sources to support this statement.
A central bank may introduce new money into the economy (termed "expansionary monetary policy", or by detractors "printing money") by purchasing financial assets or lending money to financial institutions. However, in most countries today, most of the money supply is in the form of bank deposits, which is created by private banks in a fractional reserve banking system.
Hi I don't understand why you reverted my clarification of the rather garbled language with the weaselly "however" and confusing reference to bank deposits, which is unsourced because it is so unclear and misleading that no accredited author or publisher will be found saying that. At any rate, my edit was an improvement to the text, regardless of whether you were disappointed that no source exists for the words you reinserted, so I'd ask you to consider reinstating my edit, which I believe reflects the content of the article, and therefore doesn't need separate sourcing in the lede. Please consider. SPECIFICOtalk18:40, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @SPECIFICO:, sorry about that. Must have been late at night so must have partly misread your contribution. Here's to clarify.
Commercial banks that purchase these assets or that borrow from the central bank, may make commercial loans that introduce money in circulation up to a permitted multiple the amount of reserves thus acquired from the central bank. Reserve requirements, capital adequacy ratios, and other policies of the central bank determine the limits of the amount of circulating money that can be created from a given issuance of reserves from the central bank.
According to the BoE, loans create deposits so it would be factual to say that deposits are created through credit.
The "however" is important according to how the previous contributor expressed things as it dispels the view that central banks are the currency emitter with banks just being distributive arms.
True, some loans are credited in the form of bank deposits. That does not mean that all deposits are created from loans. The first of your three links doesn't appear to be a Reliable Source. The money multiplier is not a "myth" -- it is a heuristic. And the BOE would be appalled to see how its good name is being used on Wikipedia. I think there are better ways to cover this material. SPECIFICOtalk01:58, 13 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have changed the title of the page to money creation and destruction because the existing title gives the (incorrect) impression that the money supply can only ever increase. There may have to be some additional edits to make the page contents better fit the new title but I am not going to attempt them until I see the reaction to the title change.
Note that the fact that the money supply can shrink is not the slightest bit controversial amongst economists and there is already a (single!) sentence in the main body which alludes to this fact, namely "As a loan is paid back through reductions in the demand deposit liabilities the bank owes to a customer, that commercial bank money disappears from existence." Reissgo (talk) 18:56, 30 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Please start a formal "Request to move" if you want to do this. The question is not whether money supply can shrink or not, but whether "money creation" is WP:COMMONNAME for this phenomenon in general. Volunteer Marek 19:27, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm... you have a point... and it led me to consider what exactly "this phenomenon" is that being presented. If this "this phenomenon" is "fractional reserve banking" then why have this page at all? There is already a page on that in Wikipedia. If its just the "creating" half of the creation+destruction process than that's a rather odd thing to have. It would be like having one page on Wikipedia called "jumping in the air and then landing" and a separate page devoted to just "jumping in the air". Reissgo (talk) 11:26, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Volunteer Marek:@Crashed greek:On November 13th Crashed greek made a series of edits which Volunteer Marek undid with the comment "this has been discussed to death". Indeed it has on the fractional-reserve banking page. Conclusions have been reached and the agreed state of that page has been stable for some time.
Roughly speaking it has been agreed that the BoE paper "money creation in the modern economy" is a RS and nobody on the FRB page is fighting to say anything which contradicts it. The money multiplier section of the FRB page includes the words "Rather than holding the quantity of base money fixed, central banks have recently pursued an interest rate target to control bank issuance of credit indirectly so the ceiling implied by the money multiplier does not impose a limit on money creation in practice". Finally the FRB page has a section entitled "Criticisms of textbook descriptions of the monetary system".
So yes, indeed these things have been discussed at length - but please don't lose sight of the conclusions that have been reached. Reissgo (talk) 16:21, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I had added few citation needed tags. Removal of those tags is not allowed. It should only be replaced by a proper reliable source reference. I will complain in WP:3RR if he reverts again. Crashed greek (talk) 04:49, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The current section entitled "re-lending" contains a single sentence. I assume (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) that this refers to the errmmm, "model" of fractional reserve banking in which money deposited with banks gets re-lent to other borrowers. I say model in quotes because it's not actually what happens in the real world - indeed the Fed say so quite explicitly in their document Modern Money Mechanics with the words "Of course, they do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits." - I thought that the fact that the re-lending model did not correspond to reality was highly pertinent to a section called "re-lending", so I added the Fed's own words to the article. SPECIFICO then undid my edit with the comment "undue here". Should the Fed's words go here or not? Reissgo (talk) 13:40, 16 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
No, sir, Reissgo sir, come on, on the subject of how additional money enters the economy there is no place in Wikipedia for the stated opinion of ignoramuses such as the Federal Reserve System's authors about how additional money enters the system even if the Fed is the very vehicle through which, as the Fed itself "admits", additional money enters the system. Plus, this article is about something different - it's about money creation, or, in other words, about how additional money enters the economy! Can I be more sarcastic? Possibly. Can I be more dumbfounded at the stubbornness of ideological agendas within Wikipedia? Probably not. Ah well. -The Gnome (talk) 16:39, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You're being sooo sarcastic that I'm not completely sure what you are saying! But at a guess you're saying that the fed must surely be correct in saying that banks lend out money that is deposited with them. Therefore for me to suggest otherwise must mean that I am some kind of idiot. I have a few things to say about that.
1. The fed does not really claim that banks lend out the money that is deposited with them. This is just a not-quite-true story that they are happy to tell students and the public because there is some mathematical equivalence (long story to explain exactly how). They then correct themselves later in the document with the "not really" comment.
2. The Bank of England (presumably equally authoritative as the Fed) make this all super explicit in their much referenced paper Money Creation in the Modern Economy which is aimed at a higher level than undergraduates.
So my "stubbornness" and "ideological agenda" is simply my attempt to suggest that the Bank of England is correct about how money creation works. Reissgo (talk) 17:31, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@SPECIFICO, you're close to engaging in an edit war. Before you slip down that path, please explain here in some detail the reasons why you oppose the inclusion of a small piece of text coming from a quite relevant and evidently reliable source. Deleting the text without providing a justification will not do. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 12:42, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty simple, Gnome. This unencyclopedic comment -- an aside, "of course..." appended to the end of our exposition of the heuristic/pedagogical model of the money multiplier is a snide synth passive-aggressive expression of user that editor's activist opinions about world monetary institutions. There might be ways for WP to discuss the connection between the "money multiplier" exposition and the management of a bank or of a central bank's monetary policy, but this is not one of them. FYI this editor has been disrupting a slew of money and banking articles for years. It won't end anytime soon, so if you want to champion his cause, you'll find you have a new best friend and a new hobby. SPECIFICOtalk13:55, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not here to defend persons; only the rules. The viewpoint of the central bank of one of the biggest countries in the world is by definition relevant and appropriate in any subject related to monetary matters. We are, of course, free, to post up different or even opposite viewpoints to those of a major central bank - provided they are presented in a neutral manner and adequately supported. As to "hobbies" and "best friends", you are engaging in subtle threats already, I see. Be sure that this will not get you very far in Wikipedia. The Fed comment stays up. Feel free to add context. -The Gnome (talk) 16:06, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
What is the specific violation of WP:SYNTH that occurred? You have to specify that "x" was added as text to the article and referenced to sources "a" and "b", but "x" was never stated nor implied in "a" or "b". As to WP:WEIGHT, if WP:SYNTH is shown not to apply, there is no question of placing "undue weight" on the mere mention of the viewpoint of a major central bank. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 09:05, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Reissgo, for the record, my frustration with the erroneously promoted agendas in Wikipedia is only surpassed by my inability to correctly channel it! My sarcasm was not directed at your (justified) query but at the refusal to include in the article the Fed's position as well as the Bank of England's. So, apologies for the inconvenience caused. I'll try and be more clear next time. And this, importantly, is not about promoting some opposite agenda; merely, the frustration of seeing how easy it is to prevent entirely appropriate content from appearing in an article, when the opposition is determined. Edit wars are out of style. But we can do better, I still think. Take care, all. -The Gnome (talk) 18:47, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This has been discussed, discussed, discussed, discussed and discussed. SPECIFICO is correct. There's no consensus for these changes (whatever the newest form they take) and it is SYNTH.Volunteer Marek (talk) 09:12, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the comment. Why, please, should we omit the Fed's viewpoint about how money is lent and/or created? Is the Fed viewpoint misrepresented in the text? (In which case, we'd have a violation of at least WP:SYNTH.) If so, in what way exactly? If the Fed viewpoint is not misrepresented, no case can be made for omitting it. The disputes about "how money is created" are practically over in Economics. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 09:46, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Volunteer Marek deleted the sentence about banks not loaning out of their customer's deposits, which was sourced to the Chicago Fed. Can I ask why? And what is the background to the edit comment "how many years has this been going on now"? The fact that commercial banks are not loaning out of their deposits, nor out of their reserves, has been firmly established in Economics. Are we going to argue that the sky is not blue next? -The Gnome (talk) 09:53, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Quoting directly from the BoE paper: "The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks: Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits." The key part is "differs from the description found in some economics textbooks" - that's actually an understatement, it should have said "differs from the description found in most economics textbooks". Wikipedia is supposed to reflect the consensus amongst experts and some editors have taken this to mean the consensus amongst textbooks. So now we have an issue of what counts as experts. If you say that the textbook writers are the experts then wiki should publish the textbook story, even if it's false! If you say that the experts are the central bankers that actually run the system then wiki should publish the (correct) central banker's view. Of course there are more descriptions of the monetary system written by non-monetary specialist economists than there are from central bankers, so on the basis of quantity the textbook story wins... of course on the basis of quality the central banker's story wins. That's the battle in a nutshell. Reissgo (talk) 10:17, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Some experts are more expert than other experts. All joking aside, what you wrote reflects current reality in academia, the media, and politics; We will not have a consensus there any time soon, or a paradigm shift. Yet, when a chorus of central bankers (and, what's more, coming from major world economies) declare that money is created ex nihilo along with other facts of finance, the door stopping tomes of yesterday lose value rather drastically - even though they continue to be taught in myriads of classes. All we can do is allow space for the descriptive viewpoints offered by reliable sources. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 13:01, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NOTFORUM. Why not do the work to write an integrated and well-sourced section of article content instead of enabling WP:NOTHERE ignorant and obstinate disruption by a single purpose accounnt. This article could use plenty of improvement. It's truly remarkable that there's this ongoing campaign to make it even worse than it already is. SPECIFICOtalk13:14, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For starters, the sentence was written in a non-encyclopedic manner. Second, the fruitcake this has to do with the Physiocrats? Then there's third, fourth and fifth, but no point in bringing those up already.Volunteer Marek (talk) 13:41, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I concede that the sentence (a literal quote from the Fed) is not perfectly encyclopedic - but this is has largely come about through bitter experience. If I put something in my own words then SPECIFICO will claim it is WP:SYNTH. BTW, I have no idea how Pysiocrats came into this discussion. Reissgo (talk) 15:44, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You will either need to improve Wikipedia articles in line with site policies and guidelines or you'll need to stop wasting everyone's time. No need for chatter. Get to work or go away. SPECIFICOtalk15:50, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
An effort has been made by your humble servant to produce a significantly more coherent, unbiased, and sourced presentation. Comments are welcome and will be appreciated. Take care, all. -The Gnome (talk) 21:00, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well done with the edit, much appreciated. I have a couple of comments...
Perhaps Money Creation by Bank lending should be top of the list because it corresponds to the greatest proportion of the money supply. Maybe even say so explicitly.
In the Money multiplier section you have the words "provides the money supply with more liquidity" - I don't think it is very obvious what this actually means.
Given that money is destroyed by loan repayments, it is perfectly possible for the rate of money creation to be less than the rate of money destruction and so the money supply can be shrinking even whilst money is being created. I think this is a highly relevant fact and should be stated explicitly somewhere on the page especially because so many people would naturally assume that money creation was a one way process of expansion. Reissgo (talk) 10:42, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the comments, Reissgo; they're appreciated. I agree about the still poor state of the section on the money multiplier, so I did a bit of work on it. Hope it's a little better now. About the proposed change in the order of presentation, the current one reflects the hierarchy of monetary instruments. All strands of economic analysis pretty much concur that state-created money comes on top, then we have whatever new money the central bank manages to create, and next the bank created stuff. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 17:34, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Volunteer Marek: The improvement has taken a significant effort and lots of work. Whereas before it was full of unsourced, personal (and possibly biased) material, now it is, at the very least and beyond all other improvements, fully sourced. But, of course, you too are invited to raise objections and comment on the write up. Please do not revert the whole text of the article under the inadequate justification of a few words. Kindly point out where specifically the text needs to be improved and, most importantly, why. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 18:55, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
To the point: One of your objections is based on an erroneous assumption. You inserted the following text: "Money issued by central banks is called base money, or reserves, while money issued by commercial banks or other intermediaries is termed broad money." Your justification for this edit was "[it is] probably a good idea to define terms before we start using them." I believe it is a great idea but you missed the wikilinks: There are ample wikilinks in the article about "base money", "broad money", "reserves", and all the rest. In any case, reserves are created by the central bank but not only by the central bank: When a commercial bank makes a deposit into its account at the central bank, the reserves are increased. Incidentally, you are perhaps correct in that examples have no place in the lead section (which, again, is not a "lede"). -The Gnome (talk) 19:05, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I realize that the article currently... is sort of crappy. However, not all the changes you made were an improvement. Some were good, some were bad. As an example of the latter, the whole section on "Money creation by government spending" is essentially bunk (where do you get from Mankiw - I'm assuming the textbook since you don't actually fully cite or link your source - that "Deficit spending increases the money supply"?
Another example: "The central bank is the banker of the government" - generally no, though it differs by institutional setup of a particular country. Usually the Treasury is the banker of the government. The Central Bank is the monetary authority which is a different, although related, thing.Volunteer Marek (talk) 20:45, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Another example: Spencer (1975) is wayyyyyy outdated. At least in the US, but also in most countries, the Central Bank has abandoned money supply targeting in the early 1980's.Volunteer Marek (talk) 20:46, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This one relates to the relationship of "money" to "credit". Money is so 20th Century. That's why we need to keep broadening the definition of the aggregates to keep pace with institutional innovation of new forms of liquidity. Also, I doubt there's any book that says deficit spending in creases the money supply, so this throws all the rest of the references into some doubt. This is a big subject. We should outline it first and then chip away. SPECIFICOtalk22:34, 11 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks very much for the input. I'm addressing below your concerns which I find valid from both an encyclopaedic and scientific viewpoint. -The Gnome (talk) 08:40, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. You wrote: "I doubt there's any book that says deficit spending increases the money supply, so this throws all the rest of the references into some doubt." Going back to your point about the inadequacy of the Wikipedia article on money itself, let me just say that there is a trivial consensus that new money can be and is created by the state; therefore, the question about whether deficit spending can increase the money supply is moot. But there are, of course, bifurcations about the process, the effects, etc, of state-created money among schools of economic analysis. And there's a very large body of literature going back decades about money creation that present non-mainstream views. I already included some pointers towards that direction. But, in case, you find the links inadequate or too few, please clarify and I'll try my best to improve the presentation of state-augmented money supply. -The Gnome (talk) 08:40, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The relevant phrasing though suggests that deficit spending AUTOMATICALLY increases money supply. This is just not true. It can. Or not. The special case where it does, on an ongoing basis is the case of monetizing the deficit. But in most cases fiscal policy and monetary policy can operate independently.Volunteer Marek (talk) 17:39, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Volunteer Marek: It's a matter of national accounting and nothing more. When the state spends money into the national economy, where does this money go? To the economy, and specifically to the private sector. It is practically a tautology. The money spent by the state are added to the private sector's financial assets. That's the money supply right there; this all that we're saying! We are not saying that the money supply increases for good (it might decrease the next second from an irrelevant cause, e.g. loans being retired), and we are not saying this is the only way the money supply increases. State spending that goes into the domestic peconomy, as a matter of accounting definition, adds value to the financial assets held by the private sector. Those assets are the money supply. (Debt monetization is simply the central bank exchanging one set of financial assets, i.e. bonds, for another asset, i.e. bank reserves. Money in the bank instead of bonds; the total net financial wealth of the private sector is not changed. Only "liquidity" is affected, with many quotation marks.) -The Gnome (talk) 23:15, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"It's a matter of national accounting and nothing more" - ummm, no. (the question you forget to ask is "where does this money come from"). Anyway, sources or no go.Volunteer Marek (talk) 02:53, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
All money is created by the state or with the state's permission. This is simply a fact and not "ideology". You are free to create your own kind of money but you cannot create state money; you'd go to jail. As an economist once put it, "Everyone can create their own money. The problem is how to get it widely accepted!"
All modern money is fiat money and all fiat money is created ex nihilo, precisely as the men who create it testify:
"...Now, you might ask the question, well, the Fed is going out and buying 2 trillion dollars of securities – how did we pay for that? And the answer is that we paid for those securities by crediting the bank accounts of the people who sold them to us, and those accounts, at the banks, showed up as reserves that the banks hold with the Fed. The Fed is a bank for the banks. Banks hold deposit accounts with the Fed, essentially, and those are called reserve accounts. And so as the purchases of securities occurred, the way we paid for them was basically by increasing the amount of reserves that banks had in their accounts with the Fed." Ben Bernanke, 4th lecture at George Washington University, March 2012
There is no more debate about how money is created. Even before we abandoned the gold standard, all the money was fiat money and not commodity money, but this is something rather esoteric and here irrelevant. The crux of the matter is that modern money can be created out of thin air, as they say, and this is simply an operational fact. -The Gnome (talk) 09:32, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is a pretty big deal. Because many folks, including most likely Pres. Ronald W. Reagan and many WP editors, buy into the claim that government spending, like fornication and Demon Rum, debases sacred human values. And it's certainly not going to help readers understand "money mechanics". Anyway, it's a political talking point, no more. SPECIFICOtalk17:49, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well put, SPECIFICO, on both points. Yes, macroeconomics is pure politics; and, yes, state spending is where the private sector gets its money. If we imagine the first year that a country gains independence and creates its own currency, we can understand that deficit spending is not only virtuous :-) but a financial necessity! People, at the end of the year, need to have more money than they are paying to the state in taxes. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 23:15, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For once I'm going to back Specifico and Marek here. This is a very MMT viewpoint (which may deserve a spot here, but it should be presented as such and perhaps put this section in connexion with the section on monetary financing, and in any case because it's controversial this shouldn't be the 1st section). Government spending only increase the money supply if you have the central bank buying government debt. Otherwise deficit spending simply means some people swapping cash in exchange for bonds. No new units of money are created. You might want to say it increases the velocity of money, but not the actual money supply. Stanjourdan (talk) 21:17, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Terms: The article is about Money creation. An article cannot define every term in it before expanding on its subject. Links to other Wikipedia articles exist precisely to facilitate navigation towards the definition of terms. At best, what we do is define (in a footnote or in the main text body, perhaps) a term that belongs to the process of explaining the subject. But, for instance, about "money" itself, we cannot have the definition of "money" here: That belongs to the article about money!
The "truth": First of all, we must keep reminding ourselves at all times that Wikipedia is relying on third-party, reliable sources. The truth (unless it is self-evident) takes a bask seat to verifiability. Therefore, the presentation of dissident, minority viewpoints, although they might well be the scientifically correct ones, must be done with extreme care - and, for better or worse, with full inclusion of the mainstream views, since by definition the latter ones take up most of the space in the available sources. So, the guide for this re-write (a re-boot, really) was neutrality and verifiability and then fuller exposition of the subject.
Outline: Start by the brief definition of the term. It is often used also (and legitimately) for the history of money, so we distinguish between the two. Then we define what exactly is affected by money creation, i.e. the money supply. Then, we move on to the processes through which the money supply is augmented, going through the hierarchy of money in the typical descending order. The money multiplier, which had before a prominent place in the article, is now part of the money creation process by the banks - where it rightly (i.e. per all sources) belongs. Next, we cover "monetary financing" ("debt monetization") since it is a closely related issue, but we cover it here to the extent that it expands our understanding of the process and the effects of money creation. Beyond that, what we have on "monetization" belongs to the main article - which, also, is another right mess. Can we have a constructive discussion about the outline of the "Money creation" article before we move on to points about the text itself?
Remains of the day: I agree that almost all articles in the field of state finances are in dire need of an overhaul, for the same reasons as hinted above. But this cannot humanly be done all at once! Therefore, SPECIFICO (and others) might be correct that we're defining money creation while we have not yet properly defined money itself. However, all this means is that we should keep stacking this up block by block (article by article) until we have in Wikipedia a building of which we can be proud, instead of embarrassed. Am I asking too much, fellow Wikipedians? -The Gnome (talk) 08:40, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Money creation - Where's the definition of this? I'm considering whether this is a good title for a WP article? Money mechanics is clear. Credit creation is +/- clear. Money creation not so clear. SPECIFICOtalk17:52, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Your suggestion is more accurate. But if an RfC were initiated I'd have to reluctantly vote for "Money creation" on the basis of the relevant rule. A search in online and offline literature shows that "creation" is the term that has stuck. In any case, I personally consider the essence of the mechanics much more important educationally than the nomenclature. -The Gnome (talk) 09:32, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Does "Money creation" not seem to be the most appropriate and usual term for this topic? I would say yes. And Wikidata confirms that it is the most common term in other languages too. Adèle Fisher (talk) 17:09, 18 March 2018 (UTC).[reply]
I find 'money mechanics' much less clear about what the article is about. This would sound like this entry could be about anything such as transactions, money markets, money laundering and whatever else involves money and some kind of dynamics around it. Yes "money creation" is probably a bit simplistic, but does it matter when contrasted with the benefit of making this page accessible to the greater number of people who are genuinely wondering how money is created ? Central bankers are doing very well when it comes to obfuscating stuff, but perhaps we don't need to copy them. My 2 pennies. Stanjourdan (talk) 21:03, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Off-topic discussion unrelated to the organizational issues of this thread
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Modern Money Mechanics is a terrible source. The reason being that throughout most of the text it implies that banks lend money out of the deposits customers leave with them but then right at the end says "Of course, they do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits." So what are we supposed to make of it? Which exactly of the earlier parts does the "not really" apply to? The BoE paper is both more recent, aimed at a higher level and doesn't contain any "we were only kidding about the earlier stuff" sentences. Reissgo (talk) 11:17, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I am referring to that paper. I did not have any particular sentences in mind - but I just found this for example: "The remaining $9,000 is 'excess reserves.' This amount can be loaned...". Without reading it all again I can say that the authors must be aware that earlier text could mislead readers into thinking that banks lend deposits, otherwise they would not have felt the need to add the "not really" comment. Reissgo (talk) 12:06, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I just noticed that the "not really" comment appears near the start of this version of MMM... I have seen this paper in more than one format and from memory it appears near the end in an earlier incarnation - maybe in some sort of appendix - too busy to check right now. Reissgo (talk) 12:11, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It all seems alright. Under a regime of mandatory minimum reserves, banks may end up with excess reserves, i.e. above the mandated minimum. What do they do with those excess reserves? If the central bank wants to retain control of the interest rate, then it pays interest on the (excess) reserves. Otherwise, with zero interest paid on reserves/excess reserves, the banks burdened with excess reserves will compete to loan them out in the interbank lending market, and this inevitably drives the overnight rate down to zero, if left unchecked by the central bank. The Chicago paper explains all that, however, often using language from the prevalent economic analysis. There is also the BIS paper, "Unconventional monetary policies: an appraisal " which you also might know. -The Gnome (talk) 12:26, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If the following facts are obvious to the reader then I do not mind which sources are used. 1) The money supply can be falling despite money being created (when the rate of destruction is greater than rate of creation). 2) The money multiplier formula does not put a cap on the money supply in the real world (because central banks have a policy of creating reserves on demand and also because minimum reserve ratios are zero in many coutries). Reissgo (talk) 13:17, 13 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
'Money creation by bank lending' rewritten and split up
I have rewritten the section 'Money creation by bank lending', including 'Money multiplier', and split it into 'Fractional reserve theory of money creation' and 'Credit theory of money' in order to make it more clear that there are two conflicting theories, and that the latter theory is gaining increasing support. I have tried to make the text clear to non-professionals but it could still benefit from some refinement and clarification. Some of the heavy and theoretical stuff about Schumpeter and Neo-Keynesian and Post-Keynesian analysis also needs to be made more readable, or perhaps moved to a footnote or separate section. Bolarno (talk) 12:43, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Money creation by bank ledning is not a theory. Its a fact.
Please check out "credit mechanics" too, by Bank of England, Working Paper 761 and Papers by Decker/Goodhart (2018 & 2021) about Wilhelm Lautenbach's credit mechanics. In a crisis like 1930ies deficits (debt financed by german government) did not heightening bank money amount. Because receiving debtors used it to reduce their bank liabilities - so bank money amount did not change and did not arrive in real economy in the beginning of "deficit spending". 62.240.134.202 (talk) 18:57, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
BoE (2014) trying to present a synthesis between aggregated and single bank view. In: Money Creation in the Modern Economy [incl. some troubles in consistency of descriptions, CGB]. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.240.134.130 (talk) 17:58, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Adding once more: If netsavers (creditors) give expenditures to debtors and they will use their receivements to pay back loans (reducing bank liabilities) result is bank money destruction - "credit mechanics" (by Wilhelm Lautenbach et al., described by Frank Decker & Charles Goodhart 2021). "Credit mechanics" means a third phase of theory of money creation (credit theory 3.0), developed between late 1920ies and 1960ies by german economists, leaded by Wilhelm Lautenbach. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.240.134.202 (talk) 19:11, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In most developed countries, central banks conduct their monetary policy within an inflation targeting framework,[4] whereas the monetary policies of most developing countries' central banks target some kind of a fixed exchange rate system.
[5]
--Veridelisi (talk) 08:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Central banks use the Open Market Operations for increasing banking's reserve not coin or paper money.
Central banks can increase the quantity of banking's reserve directly, by engaging in open market operations.
--Veridelisi (talk) 08:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Last 20 years, central banks, IMF , BIS and also Fed published document in this issue. There is no fractional reserve banking system in the world. Loans create the deposits and if is necessary, central banks give the reserves to the banks .
Also there is no reserve requirement USA, Canada and New Zealand.
--Veridelisi (talk) 08:46, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What you write here does not seem to warrant any changes to the article. According to the definition in Fractional-reserve banking, it is a system in which banks that take deposits from the public keep only part of their deposit liabilities in liquid assets as a reserve, typically lending the remainder to borrowers. This appears to be the case in all countries, reserve requirement or not. --Økonom (talk) 12:52, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
_-_Pic-Fusion_comparing_Aggregated_View_to_Single_View_(Pic_Source_Bank_of_England_2014).PNG)