Greedy bankers are not to blame for this crisis - the monetary system is
By
Tim Price Jan 19, 2011
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The last three years have been something of a detective story. A whodunnit, if you will, of the banking crisis. How did the economies of the West get into such a diabolical mess? Who was really to blame? And was there any alternative?
Popular opinion blames greedy bankers. There's some truth in that, but I think the ultimate answer is more profound. It touches on the fundamental financial infrastructure of our global monetary system. Whether we can change the orientation of that system is down to each of us as voters and active participants in a game that is currently rigged against the individual. First, a whistle-stop tour of monetary history.
Man has used various things as money during the evolution of civilisation. These include cattle, shells, nails, tobacco and cotton. In the classic economic definition, money does three things. It serves as a unit of account - a uniform pricing measure for different goods and services. It serves as a medium of exchange, handily replacing the cumbersome barter of different goods. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it acts as a store of value. We use money as a way of storing wealth when we choose to defer spending.
Over time, and for the last 6,000 years, people invariably settled on using gold and silver to perform all three functions. Their attributes as 'natural money' include scarcity, durability, divisibility, and beauty. We grew used to using precious metals as money out of what Jörg Guido Hülsmann, author of The Ethics of Money Production (see www.guidohulsmann.com), calls "the spontaneous convergence of many individual choices, a convergence that was prompted through the objective physical characteristics of the precious metals".
Remember, nobody has ever been compelled to use gold or silver as money. More to the point, at no period in human history has paper money spontaneously emerged in a free market. As Jörg points out, "No western writer before the 18th century seems to have even considered that the existence of paper money was possible."
We use paper money as a matter of course today, purely for convenience. But until comparatively recently, the paper was always backed by precious metal. So in 1971 US President Nixon caused something of a shockwave when he infamously took the dollar off gold. That move ended any form of convertibility between US dollars and bullion. From that point on, central banks could realistically print as much money as they liked. They were freed from the tiresome burden of restraint imposed by the need to have a stock of precious metal to back it up. The result, inevitably and predictably, has been inflation ever since.
The second part of the story relates to the role of fractional reserve banks. Under a fractional reserve banking system, in operation everywhere in the world today, banks are obliged to keep only a tiny fraction of their customer deposits as cash reserves. They can lend out the rest, and thus allow loans to generate more loans. Just as central banks can effectively create money out of thin air, so can the commercial banks. But the problem with fractional reserve banking is that it's nothing more than a giant Ponzi scheme. In the event of a crisis of confidence - or what we now call a bank run - depositors rush to claim their money. But if sufficient depositors make those claims at the same time, a bank is unable to fulfil them.
Remember that scene in It's A Wonderful Life when customers of James Stewart's Bailey Building and Loan besiege the bank to get their money out? The risk of that scene replaying itself exists for all banks, everywhere and always, under a fractional reserve system. The banks count on managing depositor confidence to forestall such an outcome. And when confidence fails, they count on governments and taxpayers to bail them out. The rest is all recent history.
Government-sponsored money - which only exists because the government enforces its monopoly powers to issue money with the backing of a police force - in conjunction with a fractional reserve banking system means a permanently inflationary money system. Because many banks (and now many governments) are effectively insolvent - they have more debts than assets - government administrations internationally are doing all in their power to bail them out. This comes at our expense as taxpayers - think zero% interest rates, austerity measures, tax rises, spending cuts…
In Jörg's words, the main reason monetary institutions were created was to "allow an alliance of politicians and bankers to enrich themselves at the expense of all other strata of society". So the truth is the bankers have no monopoly on blame for this mess. That said, they're hardly innocent bystanders - the bonuses currently being dispensed across the Square Mile and beyond, by fundamentally insolvent institutions, are an insult to workers, and taxpayers, everywhere.
* Tim Price is director of investment at PFP Wealth Management. He also writes The Price Report newsletter http://www.moneyweek.com/TPR
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