Fractional-reserve banking. Most people have no idea what it is, probably a good thing. You could argue that it’s not a “secret”, but most people aren’t aware of it regardless. I don’t think most people would be fond of grinding for $15 an hour if they knew banks could just lend money they don’t actually have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
I’m always surprised how few people know about this. The banks are literally gaining interest on money they never had. It should be illegal.
Well, they have it in the sense that somebody deposited it with them, and they have some fraction of it held in reserve to cover withdrawals.
Edit: Well, in the form of capital, so that’s actually the wrong terminology.
Yes, they still have it. It’s just not in cash.
Fractional reserve banking works because most people don’t need all their money as soon as they get paid. Most businesses keep some money in the bank too. Banks have a required percent of deposits that they must keep on hand to allow these withdrawals. And if they run low on cash, they just borrow money for a day from other banks (literally just one day). The US government can adjust the percent of required reserves or the overnight lending rate to keep banks from lending too much money out.
Banks use this money to loan to businesses or people buying houses. It works well because whenever the money is loaned out it is used for a purchase and just redeposited in another bank. A percentage of that money is retained by the bank and the rest is loaned out again. And again and again. This way money is “created” when people buy things in the economy.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Without fractional reserve banking, the economy would be more difficult to control. I would recommend a quick macroecon video or something.
I myself took quite a while to really understand why this was legal even during my macroecon credit. It actually makes sense when you think about it.
I’ve been thinking about it and it still doesn’t make sense. I’m a scientist, not an economist, so it’s wildly out of my wheelhouse. Would you mind pointing me in the right direction?
Here’s where I’m hung up. Let’s assume a 10% fractional reserve and, for the sake of simplicity, just one bank and a dramatically simplified deposit/loan scenario, just to minimize the number of hypothetical people and transactions.
Person A deposits $1000. Bank lends $900 to person A which is sent to Person B.
Person B deposits $900. Bank lends $810 to person B which is sent to Person C.
Person C deposits $810. Bank lends $729 to person C which is sent to Person D.
Person D deposits $729. Bank lends $656 to person D which is sent to Person E.
Let’s stop there. So we have one initial deposit of $1000, which has resulted in an additional $2,493 in deposits ($3,493 in total) and $3,095 in loans. The bank is now receiving payments, plus interest, on over 3x the amount of actual money it was actually given. To me, it seems like the bank is figuratively “printing money” and gaining interest on it. Nothing I’ve read on fractional reserve lending has suggested this is incorrect.
Halp!
I didn’t know what it was called, but I think it’s common knowledge at this point that banks don’t actually have all our money. Pretty sure we (Americans at least) found that out during the great depression when everyone was trying to withdraw their money at the same time.
Fractional-reserve banking
That has already become outdated, at least according to some economists.
Banks can just create loans out of thin air without having to check their own reserves first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_of_money
So if I understand correctly, the reason it’s outdated is not because we don’t need those pesky banking regulations any more, but that it has been found that banks will just take out their own loans to cover the reserves they need from the central bank, so they can just lend as much as they want, no seatbelts. And the central bank will never run out of loans to give, since they have insane reserves, in their own currency it is technically unlimited.
So money is not really the thing we think it is. If banks overextend themselves and fuck up, the only thing we’ll see instead of failing banks is runaway inflation in the consumer and asset (housing) markets. Wonder where I’ve seen that.
Not true any more. Banks don’t have to hold cash.
I don’t think you understand how fractional reserve banking works. The first paragraph of that Wikipedia page already clearly contradicts you. The banks can still only lend money they have (otherwise how would they lend it? Where would it come from? Only the central bank can print currency). What fractional reserve banking is saying is that banks can invest some portion of the customer deposits that they hold into non-liquid assets, often in the form of loans to other customers, but it could also be invested in other things eg government bonds. The interest banks earn by doing that helps pay for the interest they pay to customers on their saving. They also have to carefully manage their liquidity: maximising returns while still holding enough liquid assets to cover any potential spikes in withdrawals.
Even when investing customer funds, banks still have to meet captial requirements set by the regulators which basically say that their risk-adjusted assets have to cover the liabilities of customer deposits, so that for example they can’t just invest all the deposits in Bitcoin as that would pose too high a risk of insolvency. The reason SVB went insolvent recently was that they successfully lobbied the Trump administration to relax capital requirements for banks of their size, then made risky investments that lost money and they suddenly had less money than they owed their customers.
