Essay of the Day: Should we go back to the Public Creation of Money?

Key thesis defended here by Michael Hudson: Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically.

Europe’s catastrophic decision to choose deficit-financing by banks, By Michael_Hudson:

“Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically – to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse.

So the plan has backfired. When “hard money” policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made.

For starters, the ECB’s €489 billion in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the “carry trade”) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market – after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price – gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain.

How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today’s debt overhead in the first place?

Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit – leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay – indeed, impossible.

So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits – at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders.

I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This “solution” relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees.

Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive – just the opposite of what is promised.

Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.

This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility.

Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the “real” economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough:

* Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices?

* Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit?

* Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class?

Solving the Eurozone’s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the “unearned increment” of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed.

A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents – along with interest – are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess.

Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it “interferes” with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector’s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way.

It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today’s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation.”

3 Comments Essay of the Day: Should we go back to the Public Creation of Money?

  1. AvatarRobert Searle

    Yes, it is good to see that Hudson makes the VITAL POINT that money can be created electronically. Infact, MONEY = ELECTRONIC DATA. Ofcourse, people including economists do not like to talk, or write about it in these terms. The reason is largely psychological rather than rational. We “hate” to think that something as valuable as our money is just electronic data in the main. This stark reality though must be faced, and the implications are fantastic if we are able to understand TRANSFINANCIAL ECONOMICS which I believe will revolutionize the future….if humanity does indeed have a future…..

  2. AvatarTom Crowl

    I don’t even know why its a question… (other than the inertia and power of vested interests)…

    Credit creation favors the creators of credit. NO centralized, self-interested group can achieve “objectivity” in the process… (which is the fantasy justifying the creation of privately-owned and narrowly-governed central banks along with the IMF, World Bank, etc.)

    Sooner-or-later this will have to be addressed. However, here again the devil will be in the details.

    There’s a problem is scaling here… and once again its root is in the altruism problem… and the failure to recognize, study and address it in any rigorous way.

    Issues in Scaling Civilization: The Altruism Problem
    http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2012/02/issues-in-scaling-civilization-altruism.html

  3. AvatarDan Sullivan

    There is no such thing as a free market in money and credit issuance so long as government accepts some moneys and not others in the payment of taxes and debts. For government to demand that a tax be paid in a currency that government did not create is to enslave taxpayers to the private parties on whose currencies they must rely.

    Absolutely, create the money publicly. Here is what early American progressives (Benjamin Butler and Terence Powderly) had to say about it.

    http://savingcommunities.org/docs/butlerbenjaminf/finance.html

    http://savingcommunities.org/docs/powderly.terence/30years09.html

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