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Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

professorwerner.org

91–100 of 176 posts

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#91
post #40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant. Continually proven wrong again and again and again but sure to be right eventually. Damn those irrational actors. Why can't everyone be as rational as an Austrian.

Rationality and efficient markets are never mentioned once, to my knowledge, in Man, Economy, and State.

if ME&S represents the sum of Austrian economics, then it has little hope indeed.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting this information from? Surely interest on deposits is accounted for as a funding cost and is paid out of the bank's revenues (same for staff costs). I don't know why you're calling double accounting "trickery". It's literally the way a bank operates. I mean, it's enshrined in law for god's sake. A public company has to publish accounts every year, and the double-entry analysis you see in most di…

> Where are you getting this information from? Mainly my own personal thinking. No other sources. > Surely interest on deposits is accounted for as a funding cost and is paid out of the bank's revenues (same for staff costs). Of course. But before those are paid, they do not (need to) exist anywhere (but in the profit account if you want to take an accounting view) > I don't know why you're calling double accounting…

> Mainly my own personal thinking. No other sources.

I'd suggest reading a summary of the Basel rules before contributing to a discussion on money creation and banking. Wikipedia has a halfway decent one.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#93
post #36

I zoned out at Section II ("The Central Banking Narrative Has Collapsed") because every single paper he cites is written by him (and in fact so are 18 of the 20 publications he cites in the entire article)

Weirdly, some of the organizations and theories he's attacking are also his own (he was the lead author on the [weak] Positive Money paper which proposed making the Bank of England directly control the money supply he's now insinuating is some central banker astroturfing campaign, and the unconventional recommendation central banks broaden their remit to tackle Japanese economic stagnation by taking on some of the as…

Hey, if it were actually an astroturf campaign, who would be in a better position to know than one of the principals?

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#94
post #2

It's interesting to think about how the role of central banks might change in the age of crypto currencies. Governments can print Euros and Dollars. But not Bitcoin and Ethereum. Popular theory is that governments have a good grip on currency usage because they can decide which currencies they accept for tax payments. And because they can force merchants to accept certain currencies. It will be interesting to see if…

So far there does not seem to be any serious threat to any national currency because of cryptocurrency.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#95
post #2

It's interesting to think about how the role of central banks might change in the age of crypto currencies. Governments can print Euros and Dollars. But not Bitcoin and Ethereum. Popular theory is that governments have a good grip on currency usage because they can decide which currencies they accept for tax payments. And because they can force merchants to accept certain currencies. It will be interesting to see if…

Bitcoin so far doesn't scale. Not only in terms of transaction fees and processing times... but also at the most basic of levels. What will happen when the blockchain doesn't fit in a median harddrive? The decentralization narrative will go away. Only a few people will have enough storage for the blockchain and you will go back to having to trust someone.

That depends if the Bitcoin blockchain size is growing at a faster rate than the storage available on a median hard drive.

The blockchain is currently at 160~GB, and I believe it will grow around [1] https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/blockchain-size

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What free banking actually looked like: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/filelegacydocs/... TLDR: Banks regularly collapsed and not just because of fraud, but started to collapse less as they got regulated more. The system functioned (for certain values of "functioned"), but shockingly enough the man on the street did not turn out to be better at evaluating a bank's solvency than central banks. They were…

If you consider fractional reserve banking as fraud (banks should only be allowed to lend out funds that you have lent to the bank for a period of time, not funds that you are merely storing in your checking account; a bank run in this context is when account holders want to withdraw their money and it is not there), the system should be fairly stable without a "lender of last resort". I don't really see why fraction…

If you want full-reserve banking then (i) that's a different thing from free banking in practice and (ii) full reserve banking would result in interest rates wildly fluctuating because currency reserves are fixed in the short term, and the business sector's need to borrow for cashflow reasons varies. Wildly fluctuating short term interest rates deters longer term investments => slower growth

Also, since most full reserve proposals don't ban credit creation altogether (i.e. you can still issue and exchange IOU notes), but simply restrict credit creation and acceptance by institutions calling themselves banks, you end up with the economy relying on an unregulated shadow banking system even more prone to booms and busts to fulfil credit needs.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#97
post #90
post #3

Probably not. I suspect the Austrian school of economics will be proven right about money and credit eventually.

Okay, but when? I ask because I've seen this claim made about Austrian economics lots and lots, but haven't seen anything telling a consistent story -- just a lot of "it's coming, keep waiting". Seriously interested in seeing these claims either supported by a real world narrative.

Most people that make predictions and call themselves Austrians are IMO in the business of selling something. Mises, who was perhaps the most influential Austrian economist, instead took the tack of demonstrating that if you wanted X that Y either would lead to it or would not lead to it (eg minimum price laws on supply of a good). He was against making value judgments and emphatically argued that they had no place in economics as a science. He also was against economics being construed as a science capable of making predictions about eg the macroeconomy. Modeling in general Austrians consider a fool's errand.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly, some of the organizations and theories he's attacking are also his own (he was the lead author on the [weak] Positive Money paper which proposed making the Bank of England directly control the money supply he's now insinuating is some central banker astroturfing campaign, and the unconventional recommendation central banks broaden their remit to tackle Japanese economic stagnation by taking on some of the as…

Hey, if it were actually an astroturf campaign, who would be in a better position to know than one of the principals?

Extraordinary claims require slightly better evidence than someone darkly hinting that one of the organizations whose policy objectives he helped shape "appears well funded in the country of its founding (the UK), and it seems suggestive that its members have appeared at national and international events and conferences together – and apparently singing from the same hymn sheet – with the Bank of England and the George Soros (Gyorgy Schwartz)-funded INET (‘Institute for New Economic Thinking’)" whilst failing to acknowledge he was its most reputable contributor and disavowing the policies he's advocated in various capacities for quarter of a century before that only implicitly (whilst continuing to cite other parts of the papers anyway).

Feels like the whole argument is going on inside his own head, and whilst I've heard economists conclude policies they used to advocate wouldn't work before, I've never seen them handwave their earlier beliefs away as "totalitarian" without even acknowledging they actually used to hold them.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#99
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What free banking actually looked like: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/filelegacydocs/... TLDR: Banks regularly collapsed and not just because of fraud, but started to collapse less as they got regulated more. The system functioned (for certain values of "functioned"), but shockingly enough the man on the street did not turn out to be better at evaluating a bank's solvency than central banks. They were…

If you consider fractional reserve banking as fraud (banks should only be allowed to lend out funds that you have lent to the bank for a period of time, not funds that you are merely storing in your checking account; a bank run in this context is when account holders want to withdraw their money and it is not there), the system should be fairly stable without a "lender of last resort". I don't really see why fraction…

It is if you want passive interest rates above negative. Storing money without touching it at all costs money. Worst of all to society the value is nill or negative compared to investing it in something and collecting dividends. There was even an ancient parable about that involving a lord giving money to peasants for safekeeping for a few years. He scolded the one who buried it and praised the one who used it for investments and started collecting the profits.

Theoretically if it is that much of an anathema one could have a 1:1 reserve and explicit money market style transactions for everything but the question is what would be gained? The liquid cash would be "safe" from bank runs at the cost of guaranteed losses to depreciation and storage fees. Keeping it insured and interest generating is a winner as an option.

Re: Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a cosensus protocol that can be used to propose and approve a change the crypto, this is no more difficult than changing a monetary policy it’s just different. The code changes isn’t the hard part the policy itself is.

"hard part the policy itself is" which is ultimately the point of a 'central bank' really.

Except they keep scamming...
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