How the Creation of Credit Comes about?
Posted in Finance on January 19th, 2011 by Jim – Comments OffWhen bankers create credit it is a creative process. There are several steps as to how this comes about. It is only a small portion of deposits is drawn in cash, it follows that banks have considerable facilities to create credit.
Imagine approaching a bank(not your own) to request flexible lending facilities up to $2000. They open a bank account and sends you a check book. If you wander down the street r writing checks to the value of $2000. The recipients pay the checks into their accounts and the amounts are credited to them three days later and debited to you. The bank has created $2000 of expenditure that did not exist one week earlier. The suppliers of the goods have $2000 in bank accounts — disposable money. Where does it come from? Not from you, because you didn’t have any. It came from the bank that allowed you to overdraw the value of $2000 — the bank has created money. Link lending equals spending, and excessive spending may mean unacceptable inflation and imports the nation can’t afford.
When banks create credit it has several implications: a reminder that banking depends on confidence, governments and central banks will want to control it in view of the implications for inflation and imports, banks will need internal controls called the liquidity ratios, an external control enforced by bank supervisors called capital ratios is required.
Banking itself depends on confidence. The system works because we have confidence in it and accept checks in payment of debt. Where is the gold and silver behind this? Of course, there isn’t any. Money is as much an entry on a computer as anything else. The economist, Benham, in his well-known textbook economics, points out that paper money could be seen as a gigantic confidence trick. It works as long as people believe in it. This trick is what we are faced with today. How much longer can we be fooled?
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