Coppola Comment

  It's now widely accepted, though still not universally, that banks create money when they lend. But it seems to be much less widely known that they also create money when they spend. I don't just mean when they buy securities, which is rightly regarded as simply another form of lending. I mean when they buy what is now colloquially known as "stuff". Computers, for example. Or coffee machines.  Imagine that a major bank - JP Morgan, for example - wants to buy a new coffee machine for one of its New York offices (yes, it has more than one). It orders a top-of-the-range espresso machine worth $10,000 from the Goodlife Coffee Company, and pays for it by electronic funds transfer to the company's account. At the end of the transaction JP Morgan has a new coffee machine and Goodlife has $10,000 in its deposit account.  What exactly is this money, and how is it created? I had a long argument with people on twitter who insisted that JP Morgan would pay for the coffee ma...

This post was sparked by conversations with people who have opposing views of how money creation works. Some people think that classical models such as IS-LM don't work with endogenous money theory, therefore the models need to be discarded: others think that there's nothing wrong with the model and the problem is endogenous money theory. Personally I think that simple models like IS-LM can be powerful tools to explain aspects of the working of a market economy, and it behooves us therefore to find ways of adapting them to work with an endogenous fiat money system. So this is my attempt to reconcile IS-LM with endogenous money. I don't claim that it is anything like the final word on the subject, so comments are welcome.  The IS-LM model looks like this: : where M is the quantity of money in circulation, L is the "liquidity preference" (the degree to which investors prefer to hold interest-bearing, less liquid assets rather than to zero-interest, highly liquid mon...

It is 2.30 am, and I can't sleep. Today I must file my final piece for American Express's FXIP blog , which is being mothballed. Writing for that blog has been my main source of income for the last four years. Once it is gone, my income will once again become precarious and inadequate, as it has been all too often in the past. Hence my sleeplessness. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry that the blog is closing. I've done some interesting work for it, and learned a lot. And it has been a reliable source of income during the difficult times of the last three years. For that, I am grateful. But I don't enjoy writing for it. The house style is dry to the point of desiccation, devoid of all opinion, emotion and metaphor. It is also SEO-driven, so I am constantly trying to find ways of including key words assigned by someone else. True, the key words are set from the brief, but it means there is no flexibility. I can't simply go where my mind leads, as I do wh...

In a recent article for the New Statesman , the economics commentator Grace Blakeley makes an extraordinary claim. Writing about the origins of the IMF, she says: Seventy-five years have passed since these international financial institutions were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Back then, delegates sought to tame the power of international finance, the growth of which helped to cause the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. JM Keynes – who led the British delegation – arrived at Bretton Woods with the aim of “euthanising” a financial elite he viewed as parasitic on productive economic activity. I thought that Bretton Woods was about free trade and economic cooperation, not "taming the power of international finance." But I can be wrong. So I checked it out. According to the U.S. State Department , Bretton Woods was indeed born from the U.S.'s dreadful experience in the worldwide depression of the early 1930s. But it was no...

Here is a Public Service Announcement. Since @Galgitron, who I think is certifiably insane, has  called for the XRP Army to deprive me of income by spamming the adverts on Forbes, I have decided to write future posts about XRP here on Coppola Comment. Moving to Coppola Comment negates accusations that I make money from posting what Ripplers call "FUD" on Forbes. Coppola Comment is widely read, but certainly doesn't have the reach of Forbes. There are no adverts here and I don't get paid for writing on my own blog.  I can, however, write freely and say what I really think. And I will. I have taken so much abuse from XRP supporters now that I am distinctly uninterested in soothing their aggrieved egos with gentle words. If they behave like disgusting rabid hyenas, that is what I will call them. The same applies to the other social media harpies that descend whenever I say something that ruffles their delicate feathers. To those who allege that I accept money ...

In my last post , I said that the fact that a government can buy anything that is for sale in its own currency is not sufficient to confer monetary sovereignty. A country which is dependent on essential imports, such as foodstuffs and oil, for which it must pay in dollars is not monetarily sovereign. Some people disputed this on the grounds that such a country could earn the dollars it needs through exports. So I thought I would write a post discussing how realistic this is in practice. Strictly speaking, the only country in the world that can always pay for everything it needs in its own currency is the United States. However, most developed  countries that issue their own currencies have deep and liquid FX markets that enable them to exchange their currencies freely for other currencies; many also have swap lines with the Federal Reserve. Eurozone countries don't issue their own currencies, but the bloc as a whole issues the world's second reserve currency. It is not go...

How many countries can really claim to have full monetary sovereignty? The simplistic answer is "any country which issues its own currency, has free movement of capital and a floating exchange rate." I have seen this trotted out MANY times, particularly by non-economists of the MMT persuasion. It is, unfortunately, wrong .  This is a more complex definition from a prominent MMT economist: 1. Issues its own currency exclusively 2. Requires all taxes and related obligations to be extinguished in that currency 3. Can purchase anything that is for sale in that currency at any time it chooses, without financial constraints. That includes all idle labour 4. Its central bank sets the interest rate 5. The currency floats 6. The Government does not borrow in any currency other than its own. This appears solid. But in fact, it too is wrong.   The big hole in this is the external borrowing constraint - item 6 in the list. If a government genuinely could purchase...

This piece grew from a number of conversations with people of Austrian economic persuasion, mostly Bitcoiners and goldbugs (which these days seem mysteriously to have converged). I thought of calling this "Monetarism for goldbugs", but decided to preserve the mathematical slant of the previous pieces in this series. But it's monetary arithmetic, of course. And as Austrians tend to obsess about "sound money", it is specifically sound monetary arithmetic . (Note: Someone has pointed out on Twitter that the arithmetic in this piece is considerably more advanced than the equations themselves suggest. If you are bit rusty on the mathematics of change, I suggest reading the first piece in this series, Calculus for Journalists ).  Inflation is complicated As "sound money" seems to mean "no inflation", let's start by defining what we mean by inflation. In mainstream economics, "inflation" usually means a general increase in...