@Coincube - Wikipedia? Webster's dictionary?
Please tell me you got these from Google. (If so I get to ROFL)
Would you happily accept a $1,000,000 IOU from a guy who is $5Tn
"in the hole" than a $1 IOU from me (I am debt-free)?
We are discussing banking, and I'm going with narrow definitions:
JP Morgan : "Gold is money and nothing else"
Bitcoin, Gold, a Central Bank Note, and an IOU from minor transgression.
Of these only Bitcoin and Gold have no counterparty risk, and are money.
The others are valued entirely on the creditworthiness of the issuer,
and are credit. Where Notes are issued by government or a Central Bank,
they create both a credit and a debt.
Similarly when you spend with a credit card, you expand the supply of credit,
and when you spend with a debit card, the supply of credit decreases. No new
bitcoins or gold (real money) are created or destroyed in these transactions.
This point is relevant because at one time real money was the "Reserve" in
fractional reserve banking. History provides a list of bitter experience
where prudent lending limits were exceeded.
Fractional Reserve Banking implies a hard limit on the supply of credit.
An important consideration is that as the limit is approached, there is a
reasonable expectation that rates of interest on loans will rise. This
should provide some measure of stability to an otherwise unstable system.
In my humble opinion, fractional reserve banking ceased when Nixon took
the dollar off the gold standard in 1971, and I harbour some doubts that
it was ever effective post 1913. Clinton and Brown buried it in the 2000's
via "light touch regulation" and "risk-based regulation".
Haldane, "Why Banks Failed the Stress Test" speech [p12], 2009, summing up
the beyond-laissez-faire ethos perfectly:
"No. There was a much simpler explanation according to one of those present. There
was absolutely no incentive for individuals or teams to run severe stress tests and
show these to management. First, because if there were such a severe shock, they
would likely lose their bonus and possibly their jobs. Second, because in that
event the authorities would step-in anyway to save a bank and others suffering
a similar plight."
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2009/speech374.pdfThese perverse incentives render further discussions moot until we can
agree on some basic definitions. Asking me to believe in fractional reserve
banking where the "reserve" is conjured up after the fact out of thin air, is
asking an awful lot. Once we understand each other we can talk.
I will put up a new thread to handle further discussion on this topic.
@TPTBNW thanks for the heads-up on whatsapp. Somehow the MSM was able to keep that
request for a backdoor well away from the front page.