What would a world without banking look like, and is it a vision worth exploring? Jonathan McMillan says yes. The pseudonym for two people—an investment banker and an economist—McMillan has a front row view of the international banking landscape, and he doesn’t like what he sees.
French bank BNP Paribas says the technology underpinning bitcoin has the potential to make existing companies "redundant," a huge admission from one of the world's biggest banks.
Radical bank reform is mostly endorsed by academics, commentators and crackpots. So it is certainly worth taking note when a senior person in a real government calls for a top-to-bottom makeover of banks and the monetary system.
An anonymous investment banker explains why the banking system is just big enough to fail, and will collapse soon, to be replaced by peer-to-peer networks.
In the same way that it has torn apart newspapers, radio and the postal service, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney worries that technology will disrupt
The mainstream media is vociferously ignoring a recent court ruling in Canada in a case involving two Canadians who sued to restore the Bank of Canada to its original operational philosophy and mission.
Banking has gone from somewhere you go to something you do. If we are to believe that the sharing economy will shape our future, banking and all financial..
Archived from the live Mises.tv broadcast, this lecture was presented by Robert P. Murphy at the Mises Circle in Houston on 14 January 2012. Subscribe (it's FREE!) for more videos posted...
One of the most important economic invention has been banking because of the multiplier effect it has on the money supply of a country. Simply put, most of the money just sits in some vault most of the time rather than being used for a transaction.
An international trade deal is being negotiated that could – in theory – give large international banks an opportunity to sue governments that implement monetary reform. Peter Verity, coordinator of the Sheffield Positive Money group, considers whether this might be a threat to Positive Money.
A few days ago, Bankir.ru published an interesting feature by Corezoid founder and PrivatBank’s e-business center head, Alexander Vityaz. His predictions stating that VISA, not Bitcoin or blockchain technology, will eventually destroy the banking system, have gone viral across media and social networks. ForkLog talked with Alexander to make things clearer.
The current banking system is a closed and centralised system accessible only to banks that obtain licenses through a central bank, and which then need to go through this same central bank to carry out any external transactions. These banks are the only organisations that enjoy the power to create money, something they do using credit expansion, meaning that 97% of the money creation that exists today in national currencies is by private banks, and whose actions thereby determine the economic and political policies within society.
Who knew that the revolution would start with those radical Icelanders? It does, though. One Frosti Sigurjonsson, a lawmaker from the ruling Progress Party, issued a report today that suggests taking the power to create money away from commercial banks, and hand it to the central bank and, ultimately, Parliament.
This paper presents the first empirical evidence in the history of banking on the question of whether banks can create money out of nothing. The banking crisis has revived interest in this issue, but it had remained unsettled. Three hypotheses are recognised in the literature. According to the financial intermediation theory of banking, banks are merely intermediaries like other non-bank financial institutions, collecting deposits that are then lent out. According to the fractional reserve theory of banking, individual banks are mere financial intermediaries that cannot create money, but collectively they end up creating money through systemic interaction. A third theory maintains that each individual bank has the power to create money ‘out of nothing’ and does so when it extends credit (the credit creation theory of banking). The question which of the theories is correct has far-reaching implications for research and policy. Surprisingly, despite the longstanding controversy, until now no empirical study has tested the theories. This is the contribution of the present paper. An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks individually, "out of thin air".
While it may not have been as iconic culturally significant as its 1984 Super Bowl ad, Apple’s “Think different” marketing campaign from 1997 to 2002 remains the stuff of advertising legend.
Rainbow over Brattleboro, Vermont. Photo credit: Professor Bop / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND. Article cross-posted from Yes! Magazine. Written by Alexis Goldstein.
The Bank of England is to conduct an enquiry into the risk of fossil fuel companies causing a major economic crash if future climate change rules render their coal, oil and gas assets worthless.
Could the real cause of today's financial malaise have less to do with greedy bankers, bad regulation and poor monetary policy, and more to do with the effects of the information technology age on banking?
That at least is the argument proposed in a new book, "The end of banking - money, credit and the digital revolution" by Jonathan McMillan, a collective pseudonym for two authors who are keeping their identities secret, but who hail from the world of banking and academia.
Not to say the financial system was free of instability before the IT age, it's just that the way in which the instability was dealt with was entirely different.
As regulators around the world attempt to get a handle on the emerging virtual- and crypto-currency phenomenon, today, Canada’s Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce is meeting in a session called “Study on the use of digital currency.”
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