Banking Reform Debate in Parliament – Monday 29th November

Yesterday saw a bankbencher’s banking debate in Parliament. Much of the debate concerned the typical superficial analysis and focused on the symptoms of the problem rather than addressing the root of the problem. But Steve Baker and Douglas Carswell both made very relevant points. Whether other MPs understood them or not is another question!

Extracts from the two speeches are below, and you can read the full text here.

Steve Baker MP:

NB: ‘Fiduciary media’ here refers to the numbers in your bank account.

“To challenge the terrain of this debate, I should like to take the House back to a landmark in the development of British monetary and banking orthodoxy-the Bank Charter Act 1844, also known as Peel’s Act. It represented the victory of the currency school over the banking school. The former had realised that systemic crises and banking collapses were largely attributable to the excess creation of fiduciary media-that is, claims on money not backed by a fund of actual money. The Act, introduced by Peel, therefore eliminated the practice of banks issuing their own notes. Unfortunately, the currency school had not realised the economic equivalence of notes and demand deposits, so the Act left the banks virtually unmolested in their ability to issue fiduciary media.

“My hon. Friend Sajid Javid mentioned the wall of money that hit the markets, and we might reasonably ask where that wall of money came from. It has become common practice to say that interest rates were too low for so long, and therein lies the insight. When that happens, people are encouraged to borrow and the banks are encouraged to extend fiduciary media well in excess of real savings. Low interest rates ought to indicate prior production and real savings, but when central banks deliberately suppress interest rates and issuing banks pour fuel on the fire by issuing fiduciary media, what we find is that wall of money hitting the market. In our case, that money principally headed off into the housing market.

“At the heart of our difficulties is the fact that there was an omission in the 1844 Act. The deposit-taking banking system is built upon that Act and a body of case law, which have left the banks with the legal privilege of treating demand deposits as their own property. That allows the system as a whole to create a wall of fiduciary media. That is the heart of our crisis, but it is not part of the mainstream contemporary debate, and I believe that it should be.”

Douglas Carswell MP:

“Banking is undoubtedly corporatist. To put it another way, if one were to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and to replace the words “railroad” and “rail company” with the words “credit” and “bank”, one would get a pretty good description of what has been going on in recent years. We have had a failure of the free market in the allocation of credit in this country. It is extraordinary that we compound that failure by talking ourselves into seriously suggesting that politicians and technocrats should ration credit. The absence of a pricing mechanism at the heart of the banking system is ultimately what caused the credit boom and the banking failure. In a normal market, when demand for a product increases, the price for that product goes up. That, in turn, stimulates supply.

“In banking, unfortunately, things are a little different. When demand for credit increases, the price-the interest rate-is kept low or constant. Pricing does not therefore stimulate increased supply. On the contrary, a supply of additional credit is not met through higher savings. It is met by the creation of candyfloss credit-by banks being able to conjure up credit out of thin air. Banks do not meet the additional supply of credit by encouraging more people to save; on the contrary, they continue to lend IOUs on the basis of IOUs on the basis of IOUs. At the height of the credit crunch, for every pound deposited in a bank, IOUs had been written out some 44 times through the miracle of fractional reserve banking.

“Banks have a legal privilege to conjure up credit out of nothing that ultimately stems from their ability-this is an extraordinary fact-to call a depositor’s deposit their own, to treat it legally as if it were their own, and to lend against it many times. It is that practice that has resulted in a credit pyramid and runaway credit booms, unrestrained by the pricing mechanism that would normally apply and would normally restrain demand and supply. The demand is unrestrained, the supply is unrestrained, and the price is low. The result is Ponzi credit bubbles. An incredibly distortive and disruptive effect is created every 20 or 30 years in supposedly free-market economies that have corporatist banking at their heart, and it leads to sugar-rush booms.

“If a whisky distiller sold empty bottles or a food manufacturer sold empty food packets, they would be done for selling thin air, yet banks are essentially allowed to sell empty IOU promises-and people dare to call that the basis of the credit system that fuels capitalism. No wonder capitalism appears to be at risk. We have a crony system of corporate capitalism rather than free market banking.

“Since the credit crunch, experts in orthodoxy have talked about three different solutions, the first of which is low interest rates. We have had pretty low interest rates, and do you know what? It has not really stimulated an increase in the supply of credit. That should not surprise us. Keeping prices low does not stimulate production. Secondly, people have printed more money: big government has shored up a big corporatist banking pyramid on the back of the real wealth creators. It is a system of indirect taxation, inflation and debauching the currency. Thirdly, people have talked about breaking up the banks.

“I disagree with all those proposed solutions, but I take issue particularly with the idea of breaking up the banks. I think that instead of crude institutional separation of the banking system, we need an alternative that allows legal separation within existing banking structures. We need a new legal status for deposits, so that a depositor who opens an account can choose to ensure that his deposits are legally his property, and the bank cannot endlessly lend against them. That would not abolish fractional reserve banking, but it would allow us to decide over a long period, organically, whether we needed to move away from the banking system that we have at present, which allows endless candyfloss credit to be manufactured.

“Banks do need reform, but I do not believe that they need more controls. We need to address fundamental flaws in the banking system, but in a way that ensures that the pricing mechanism allocates the supply of credit properly. We need less from central banks and fewer controls from central bankers, not more.”