The Bank of England Lights A Fuse Under the Field of Economics
Ther will be many people who don’t care, there will be many more who don’t understand, and there will be boatloads who refuse to believe it’s true, but it still is. The Bank of England, in one single document, discredited, just at first count, 1) the majority of economics textbooks, 2) vast swaths of the entire field of economics, run as it is by economists educated by those same textbooks, 3) most governments’ economic policies, designed by these economists, 4) much of its own work, also designed by the same economists, 5) Paul Krugman and 6) the “committee” that hands Krugman and his ilk their Not-So-Nobel Prizes.
Indeed, the message the Bank’s people send is so devastating to economics as it is taught today that their document will most likely simply be ignored, even though that probably shouldn’t really be possible with an official central bank report. As my friend Steve Keen, whose take on this I touched on yesterday, put it:
Now if I believed in the tooth fairy, I would hope this emphatic denunciation of the textbook model would cause macroeconomics lecturers to drastically revise their lectures for next week. But I’m too long in the tooth to have such a delusion. They’ll ignore it instead.
Their dominant “tactic” — if I can call it that — will be ignorance itself: most economics lecturers won’t even know that the bank’s paper exists, and they will continue to teach from whatever textbook bible they’ve chosen to inflict upon their students. A secondary one will be to know of it, but ignore it, as they’ve ignored countless critiques of mainstream economics before. The third arrow in the quill, if they are challenged by students about it (hint hint!), will be to argue that the textbook story is a “useful parable” for beginning students, and a more realistic vision is introduced in more advanced courses.
Still, to see the Bank of England admit that the entire model most governments, including that of England, use to conduct policies, including austerity, should really be thrown out the window, is noteworthy.
Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate published in the Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1 a document entitled Money Creation in the Modern Economy, and introductory document, Money in the Modern Economy: An Introduction, and two videos that unfortunately seem shot with the express intent of losing the viewer’s interest within 10 seconds, but are still worth watching.
• This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans.
• Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’ central bank money to create new loans and deposits.
• The amount of money created in the economy ultimately depends on the monetary policy of the central bank. In normal times, this is carried out by setting interest rates. The central bank can also affect the amount of money directly through purchasing assets or ‘quantitative easing’.Where they say “banks do not act simply as intermediaries”, they do away in one fell swoop with Paul Krugman, who in his discussions with Steve Keen has always maintained just that: banks are mere intermediaries. Instead, Steve’s argument that banks create money, an argument ridiculed by Krugman, is now confirmed by the BoE. We await Krugman’s reaction.
Since I have two very good interpretations of the BoE document that I think you should read, and they’re long enough as they are, I’m not going to try and add a third one myself. I suggest you first try and stomach and process Steve Keen, plus David Graeber’s take as the Guardian published it. One thing: this confirms what most people already know, though most have never defined it as such. That makes it all the more peculiar that economists are not educated that way, and that economic policies are based on their recommendations.
Here’s Dave Graeber:
The Bank of England’s dose of honesty throws the theoretical basis for austerity out the window
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”, co-authored by three economists from the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.
To get a sense of how radical the Bank’s new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don’t suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.
The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.
It’s this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say “there’s just not enough money” to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending “crowding out” the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true.
To quote from its own initial summary: “Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits” … “In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.”
In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it.
They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with “quantitative easing” they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.
What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there’s no question of public spending “crowding out” private investment. It’s exactly the opposite.
Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it’s obviously true. The Bank’s job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It’s possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.
But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.
Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that’s what’s happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.
And Steve Keen:
A couple of weeks ago I took a swipe at Bank of England over a speech by its Governor Mark Carney that was unrealistic about the dangers of a bloated financial sector (Godzilla is good for you? March 3). Today I’m doing the opposite: I’m doffing my cap to the researchers at Threadneedle Street for a new paper “Money creation in the modern economy,” which gives a truly realistic explanation of how money is created, why this really matters, and why virtually everything that economic textbooks say about money is wrong.
The bank is going gangbusters to get its message across, with an introductory paper on what money is, and two short videos on what money is and money creation, both shot in its gold vault. It clearly wants economic textbooks to throw out the neat, plausible but wrong rubbish they currently teach about money, and connect with the real world instead.
Economic textbooks teach students that money creation is a two-stage process. At the start, banks can’t lend because of a rule called the “Required Reserve Ratio” that specifies a ratio between their deposits and their reserves. If they’re required to hold 10 cents in reserves to back every dollar in deposits, then if deposits are $10 trillion and reserves are $1 trillion, the banking sector can’t lend any money to anyone.
Stage one in the textbook money creation model is that the Fed (or the Bank of England) gives the banks additional reserves — say $100 billion worth. Then in stage two, the banks lend this to their customers, who then deposit it right back into banks, who hang on to 10% of it ($10 billion) and lend the remaining $90 billion out again. This process iterates until an additional $1 trillion of deposits are created, so that the reserve ratio is restored ($1.1 trillion in reserves, $11 trillion in deposits).
That model goes by the name of “Fractional Reserve Banking” (aka the “Money Multiplier”), and depending on your political persuasion it’s either outright fraud (If you’re of an Austrian persuasion like my mate Mish Shedlock) or just the way things are if you’re a mainstream economist like Paul Krugman. In the latter case, it lets conventional economists build models of the economy that completely ignore the existence of banks, and private debt, and in which the money supply is completely controlled by the Fed.
In this new paper, the Bank of England states emphatically that “Fractional Reserve Banking” is neither fraud, nor the way things are, but a myth — and it rightly blames economic textbooks for perpetuating it. The paper doesn’t beat about the bush when it comes to the divergence between reality and what economic textbooks spout. In fact, as the paper explains it:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits. (p. 1)
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits… (p. 1)
- Rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks… (p. 2)
- 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… (p. 2)
Now if I believed in the tooth fairy, I would hope this emphatic denunciation of the textbook model would cause macroeconomics lecturers to drastically revise their lectures for next week. But I’m too long in the tooth to have such a delusion. They’ll ignore it instead.
- 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. (p. 2)
Their dominant “tactic” — if I can call it that — will be ignorance itself: most economics lecturers won’t even know that the bank’s paper exists, and they will continue to teach from whatever textbook bible they’ve chosen to inflict upon their students. A secondary one will be to know of it, but ignore it, as they’ve ignored countless critiques of mainstream economics before. The third arrow in the quill, if they are challenged by students about it (hint hint!), will be to argue that the textbook story is a “useful parable” for beginning students, and a more realistic vision is introduced in more advanced courses.
Here the Bank of England has unfortunately given them a useful “out”, by politely pretending that the money multiplier model “can be a useful way of introducing money and banking”. But of course this feint will be pure malarkey. Firstly, the model is utterly misleading — it’s about as useful an introduction to the nature of money and banking as the Book of Genesis is an introduction to the theory of evolution. Once people believe the money multiplier model, they can rarely get their heads around the reality that bank lending creates money, and that this has drastic effects on the level of economic activity.
Secondly, the undergraduate lecturer’s “it gets better higher up” line is a ruse. Masters and PhD level courses continue to ignore banks, and though mainstream modellers are introducing all sorts of “financial frictions” into their DSGE models (as Noah Smith pointed out recently), none of them — with the sterling exception of Michael Kumhof of the IMF — are actually incorporating banks and their capacity to both create and destroy money into their models.
Why? Because if you admit the reality that banks create money by lending, and that money is destroyed by debt repayment (a point I have to admit that I took some time to appreciate), all the simple equilibrium parables of conventional economics fly out the window. In particular, the level of economic activity now depends on the lending decisions of banks (and the repayment decisions of borrowers). If banks lend more rapidly, or if borrowers repay more slowly, there will be a boom; if the reverse, there will be a slump. As the Bank of England puts it, if new loans simply make up for old ones being repaid, then there is no effect, but if new loans exceed repayment then aggregate demand will increase.
“There are two main possibilities for what could happen to newly created deposits,” the bank says. “First, as suggested by Tobin, the money may quickly be destroyed if the households or companies receiving the money after the loan is spent wish to use it to repay their own outstanding bank loans…
“The second possible outcome is that the extra money creation by banks can lead to more spending in the economy (p. 7).”
So from a realistic, hands-on perspective, the Bank of England declares that money matters in macroeconomics because it affects the level of economic activity. This really shouldn’t be a big deal — it’s what most people actually believe anyway — but incredibly, mainstream economics pretends that money only affects prices, that it has no impact (or only temporary one) on real activity, and that monetary disturbances are all the fault of the government (read central bank) anyway, because a quintessential market institution like a bank couldn’t do anything wrong, could it?
Leading economists can’t just ignore this paper, or blithely dismiss it as the foot-soldiers of the profession will do. But I seriously doubt that they will let it challenge their current position.
I will in particular be curious to see whether Paul Krugman notes this paper, and how he reacts to it. Krugman has been the most visible and aggressive defender of the proposition that banks don’t matter, with this including throwing a haymaker at me for making the case that the Bank of England is now making.
“In particular, he [Keen] asserts that putting banks in the story is essential,” Krugman wrote in 2012. “Now, I'm all for including the banking sector in stories where it's relevant; but why is it so crucial to a story about debt and leverage?
“Keen says that it's because once you include banks, lending increases the money supply. OK, but why does that matter? He seems to assume that aggregate demand can't increase unless the money supply rises, but that's only true if the velocity of money is fixed; so have we suddenly become strict monetarists while I wasn't looking? In the kind of model Gauti and I use, lending very much can and does increase aggregate demand, so what is the problem?”
Since then Krugman has continued to press the belief that banks are “mere intermediaries” in lending, that they can be ignored in macroeconomics.
“Yes, commercial banks, unlike other financial intermediaries, can make a loan simply by crediting the borrower with new deposits, but there’s no guarantee that the funds stay there,” he said in the article Commercial Banks As Creators of “Money”.
And in the same piece he wrote: “Banks are just another kind of financial intermediary, and the size of the banking sector — and hence the quantity of outside money — is determined by the same kinds of considerations that determine the size of, say, the mutual fund industry.”
Now that he has been directly contradicted on these points, not by some Antipodean heterodox economist, but by Threadneedle Street itself, I expect Krugman’s riposte will be the KISS principle: that while the “loans create deposits” argument is technically true, it doesn’t make any real difference to macroeconomics.
After all, Krugman certainly can’t just dismiss the Bank of England as being staffed by “Banking Mystics”, as he has brushed off the contrary views of others.
