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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 7/22/15

The Great Unbinding Part 3.2

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Derryl Hermanutz
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This is what Turner is advocating: an expansion of QE. What Australian macroeconomist Steve Keen calls "QE for the economy; QE for the people and their governments". Fortifying the banks is only a stop-gap if you do not address the deeper problem: the banks' debtors cannot possibly pay their debts, so the banks cannot possibly pay their depositors. The banking system collapse has been forestalled. But the next phase down has not been prevented. Depositors' savings remain at imminent risk of involuntary bail-ins.

The ancient world enjoyed some macroeconomically literate rulers like Hammurabi and Solon. When their economies became paralyzed by credit-debt imbalances, they "cleaned the slates". We suffer the same paralysis, and require the same kind of solution. But it can be accomplished without forcing creditors to suffer their losses as you clean the slates of unpayable debts, by having central banks add money into the equation.

The new central bank money should not be given directly to the banks. In the US it should be given directly to the people, via something along the lines of Friedman's negative income tax that pays out monthly basic minimum income payments. Indebted people can use this "unearned income" to pay down their bank debts. You deleverage the banks by deleveraging the banks' debtors.

In Europe, in addition to or instead of the ECB giving new euros directly to the people, it might be better to give equal amounts to national governments. The rich get richer. The poor get out of debt. Unpayable private debt has already been transferred onto the public balance sheet of now debt-shackled nations like Greece and Spain. So governments need the euros to pay down their bond debts, as much or more than their citizens need the euros to pay down their bank loans.

Commercial bank lending and bond purchases creates new credit/debt-money, which adds to the currency system's total money supply and total debt. Repaying loans and redeeming bonds uncreates the credit-money and the debt, which reduces the currency system's money supply and debt. By creating new central bank money to give to debtors, who use the money to pay down their debts, the new money is uncreated along with the old debts. But the old credit-money that the bank loan had created remains as somebody's savings.

So you reduce debts without reducing the money supply. The money supply is "owned", after all, by people who earned and saved the money. Savers need not be punished in order to solve an arithmetic problem. We can do "adding to", as readily as we can do "subtracting from".

Having central banks purchase debt-assets (MBS and government bonds) from commercial banks is QE for the commercial banking system: it replaces debt-assets with cash assets: new central bank-issued "money".

Having central banks (the ECB, the Fed, etc.) purchase new bonds directly from governments is QE for governments: it can permanently reduce old bond debts by redeeming them with new money. And it provides non-debt funding for government deficit spending.

Friedman advocated this, with his overt money funded government deficit spending that funds the negative income tax and other socially and economically beneficial elements in Friedman's program.

Turner knows that "the powers that be" believe in the impossible arithmetic of "sound money". Money profits, and the unlimited saving up of money profits as "capital accumulation", are good. An increase in the total quantity of money is bad, because money supply expansion dilutes the purchasing power of the pre-existing money supply.

So the unlimited increase in accumulation of money savings is good, but we must not increase the total supply of savable money. The money supply must both increase and not increase at the same time, to satisfy the arithmetically impossible demands of "sound money".

In fact the money supply has been increasing for centuries, via commercial bank creation of credit/debt money. Capitalists and savers earn the credit-money as their profits and incomes, and accumulate the credits as their capital/savings. Meanwhile, the debt-financed buyers of capitalist-produced stuff owe all that credit-money as the economies' and the governments' debts to the commercial banks that issue all the credits and charge all the debts. All of the credits and debts coexist on commercial bank balance sheets as liabilities and assets.

A bank's assets are the government's and the economy's interest-bearing debts; and the bank's liabilities are savers' accumulations of credit-money. Savings are saved, not spent or lent. When debtors can't earn ongoing newly issued-and-spent credit-money to pay their debts, banks can't pay money to their creditors (depositors). When uncollectable credit meets unpayable debt on bank balance sheets, the banking system fails. But creditors/depositors nonetheless demand to be paid "their money".

Enlightened macroeconomists like Adair Turner recognize that the most politically feasible solution to impossible arithmetic is central bank issuance of additional new money. Unlike commercial bank-issued credit money, central bank-issued money "is money": the final form of money that is not convertible to some even more fundamental form of money.

Central banks are not businesses that must earn money profit to survive. Central banks are money-issuing institutions whose purpose is to keep the money system and the money payments system functioning. So the addition of new central bank money into the credit-debt gap -- via overt money funding of government deficit spending -- is the arithmetically necessary and politically feasible alternative to just letting the system collapse, which wipes out all the uncollectable credit and unpayable debt.

Turner says that to pass political muster (circumvent sound money objections) the overt money funding might have to be done a bit covertly, via a revival of the issuance of consols: perpetual bonds.

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I spent my working life as an independent small business owner/operator. My academic background is in philosophy and political economy. I began studying monetary systems and monetary history after the 1982 banking crash that was precipitated by (more...)
 

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