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So, I'm a layman here, but I feel like he makes narrow banking (i.e. full-reserve or maturity-matched banking) sound more dangerous than it probably is, for ins

So, I'm a layman here, but I feel like he makes narrow banking (i.e. full-reserve or maturity-matched banking) sound more dangerous than it probably is, for instance: > Take an exploding mortgage, the only way to finance homes in a dystopian alternate universe. It’s like the mortgages you are familiar with, except it is callable on demand by the bank. If you get the call and can’t repay the mortgage by the close of the day, you lose your house. What did you do wrong to make the mortgage explode? Literally nothing; exploding mortgages just explode sometimes. Keeps you on your toes. It sounds to me like this could simply be solved with mortgage insurance. Granted, that insurance might be more expensive than it is now, but when a mortgage explodes you end up owning your house outright. Seems like not a bad deal. To reduce their risk (and consequently the cost of the insurance) the insurer would probably take on responsibility for finding alternate lending in the case of the loan being called, and the home owner would never hear about it until after the new lending was secured. I'm sure there would be other problems, but it is not at all clear to me that those problems are worse than the ones we have now.

fwlr 4y ago
An exploding mortgage wrapped in mortgage insurance has exactly the same shape as a conventional mortgage from a fractional reserve bank. The insurer would be doing something like “fractional reserve insurance”, i.e. only holding some fraction of the total insurance payout it’s liable for, and you’d have the same problems. If you legislate that insurers can’t do fractional reserve insuring, the cost of insurance would go up so high that the only people who could afford insurance are people who could plausibly afford to buy the house outright. The reason “fractional reserves” keep creeping back in whenever you try to offer mortgages to more than just rich people is because fractional reserves are a way to invent money out of thin air, and you have to invent money out of thin air because the not-rich people buying the houses do not have the money to afford the house (but they can make that money if they focus on it for 10 or 20 or 30 years). You often see people demand to know why banks are allowed to do fractional reserve banking. And this is the reason: it lets banks offer mortgages and credit cards to most of the public. Most people don’t have much money, but do have a lot of future earnings. Giving people access today to large chunks of their future earnings is a big social good but it fundamentally requires money to be invented from thin air, and that invented money is then gradually filled in with real money over time as the earnings come in. So somebody somewhere has to be inventing trillions of dollars. This is risky. The capitalist way is to have private entities who profit when they manage their risk well, since that provides the strongest incentives for competency. And the democratic-capitalist way is to heavily regulate those private entities, eating some portion of their profit to provide some extra value to the public.
- lliamander 4y ago
  You raise some interesting points. Let me see if I can address them. > An exploding mortgage wrapped in mortgage insurance has exactly the same shape as a conventional mortgage from a fractional reserve bank. The insurer would be doing something like “fractional reserve insurance”, i.e. only holding some fraction of the total insurance payout it’s liable for, and you’d have the same problems. They are similar in that in both cases we have an institution that may not be able to pay its obligations. Those kinds of risks will always be present in society. However, I do think that the shape of these risks are different in important ways. First, in the full-reserve scenario, no money is being invented out of thin air. Insurance is a risk pooling scheme, that is it. Second In a fractional-reserve system, bank runs are self-fulfilling prophesies, because the game-theoretic optimal move in the event of a bank run (or a reported bank run) is to run on the bank! Because no other conditions are necessary for a bank run (other than a widespread belief that one is happening) a bank run can literally be memed into existence. I believe that, to a certain extent, the functioning of a fractional reserve system relies on the general public being ignorant of how it actually works. I don't think insurance acts like that. You can't make an insurance claim just because other people are doing it: you have to actually have a qualifying event. It also doesn't seem reasonable to assume that calling of the mortgage loans would start spreading just because of a rumor - there would have to be some other cause. > You often see people demand to know why banks are allowed to do fractional reserve banking. And this is the reason: it lets banks offer mortgages and credit cards to most of the public. Most people don’t have much money, but do have a lot of future earnings. Giving people access today to large chunks of their future earnings is a big social good but it fundamentally requires money to be invented from thin air, and that invented money is then gradually filled in with real money over time as the earnings come in. I think lending is an essential economic service, but I don't think the easy credit enabled by inventing money is a good thing. At a macro level, there are arguably all sorts of market distortions caused by too much money chasing too little "stuff" to invest in. At a micro-level, easy credit plus inflation incentivizes bad habits of spending money for instant gratification and discourages prudent saving and financial preparedness for most people.a instant gratification of spending more money noa instant gratification of spending more money no

fwlr 4y ago

An exploding mortgage wrapped in mortgage insurance has exactly the same shape as a conventional mortgage from a fractional reserve bank. The insurer would be doing something like “fractional reserve insurance”, i.e. only holding some fraction of the total insurance payout it’s liable for, and you’d have the same problems. If you legislate that insurers can’t do fractional reserve insuring, the cost of insurance would go up so high that the only people who could afford insurance are people who could plausibly afford to buy the house outright. The reason “fractional reserves” keep creeping back in whenever you try to offer mortgages to more than just rich people is because fractional reserves are a way to invent money out of thin air, and you have to invent money out of thin air because the not-rich people buying the houses do not have the money to afford the house (but they can make that money if they focus on it for 10 or 20 or 30 years). You often see people demand to know why banks are allowed to do fractional reserve banking. And this is the reason: it lets banks offer mortgages and credit cards to most of the public. Most people don’t have much money, but do have a lot of future earnings. Giving people access today to large chunks of their future earnings is a big social good but it fundamentally requires money to be invented from thin air, and that invented money is then gradually filled in with real money over time as the earnings come in. So somebody somewhere has to be inventing trillions of dollars. This is risky. The capitalist way is to have private entities who profit when they manage their risk well, since that provides the strongest incentives for competency. And the democratic-capitalist way is to heavily regulate those private entities, eating some portion of their profit to provide some extra value to the public.

lliamander 4y ago
You raise some interesting points. Let me see if I can address them. > An exploding mortgage wrapped in mortgage insurance has exactly the same shape as a conventional mortgage from a fractional reserve bank. The insurer would be doing something like “fractional reserve insurance”, i.e. only holding some fraction of the total insurance payout it’s liable for, and you’d have the same problems. They are similar in that in both cases we have an institution that may not be able to pay its obligations. Those kinds of risks will always be present in society. However, I do think that the shape of these risks are different in important ways. First, in the full-reserve scenario, no money is being invented out of thin air. Insurance is a risk pooling scheme, that is it. Second In a fractional-reserve system, bank runs are self-fulfilling prophesies, because the game-theoretic optimal move in the event of a bank run (or a reported bank run) is to run on the bank! Because no other conditions are necessary for a bank run (other than a widespread belief that one is happening) a bank run can literally be memed into existence. I believe that, to a certain extent, the functioning of a fractional reserve system relies on the general public being ignorant of how it actually works. I don't think insurance acts like that. You can't make an insurance claim just because other people are doing it: you have to actually have a qualifying event. It also doesn't seem reasonable to assume that calling of the mortgage loans would start spreading just because of a rumor - there would have to be some other cause. > You often see people demand to know why banks are allowed to do fractional reserve banking. And this is the reason: it lets banks offer mortgages and credit cards to most of the public. Most people don’t have much money, but do have a lot of future earnings. Giving people access today to large chunks of their future earnings is a big social good but it fundamentally requires money to be invented from thin air, and that invented money is then gradually filled in with real money over time as the earnings come in. I think lending is an essential economic service, but I don't think the easy credit enabled by inventing money is a good thing. At a macro level, there are arguably all sorts of market distortions caused by too much money chasing too little "stuff" to invest in. At a micro-level, easy credit plus inflation incentivizes bad habits of spending money for instant gratification and discourages prudent saving and financial preparedness for most people.a instant gratification of spending more money noa instant gratification of spending more money no