“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
Every year the value of our money goes down because the government keeps printing more of it like its a cocaine addiction.
Unless you’re getting huge raises every year you’re never going to get ahead, and if you’re getting nothing, you’re actually losing money.
It’s way worse than that.
I suggest you go read the paper entitled “Money making in the modern economy” from the Bank Of England, but I’ll summarize it here:
The “good” old days when all the money was created by governments has been gone since the 90s and the advent of digital account keeping and digital money transfers. A banking license is de facto a license to print money, though within certain conditions, with central banks somewhat limiting that money creation by imposing reserve ratios on banks (i.e. money that they do have to put aside against those outstanding loans) which can be as little as 2% of the outstanding amount.
Digital account keeping has been a thing since the 1950’s. And doing it on a computer didn’t change that all banks lent out more than they had. It’s the premise of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Bank runs were a thing for as long as banks have existed.
There’s a lot more to it than just that (such as, how do banks settle interbank transfers or even things like how the end of the gold standard paved the way for it) but I didn’t want to complicate the explanation with too much details, though the main difference is the widespread use of digital transfers, especially by consumers which actually dates back a bit further than the 90s but definitelly not all the way to the 50s.
If you really want to know it in depth, I recommend you read the paper I pointed which is here. (By the way, I got the name slightly wrong: it’s “Money creation in the modern economy”)
Digital transfers are not necessary for banks to loan money. As your link says, it’s the loan, which gives money to a business or consumer that the bank doesn’t physically have, that creates money.
Electronic fund transfers and ATM’s started in the 1960’s. Nasdaq the first completely computerized exchange (no people involved) started in 1971.
Digital transfers are now the dominat way for money to be exchanged in trades, replacing mainly cash, i.e. the coins and currency that can only be made by the Mint.
The less people use cash to pay, the less the cash withdrawls from the banks, the less the banks need to procure cash - in a world world were payments are almost all done via payment orders, typically digital, the banks only need to procure cash for periodic settlement of the differences in payments between them: for example, if person 1 does an electronic transfer of $1000 from their account in bank A to person 2’s account in bank B and person 3 does an electronic transfer of $900 from his account in bank B to person 4’s account in bank A, all that bank A has to procure to settle the difference is $100 and bank B nothing at all, even though $1900 changed hands between various otherwise unrelated parties. If they were cash transfers, bank A would have to get $1000 in notes and coins from the mint (to give to person 1) and bank B would have to get $900 (to give to person 3). Now imagine this times hundreds of thousands fold of transactions a day and you can see how much money can change hands without the banks having to get the actual coins and notes (or treasuries and so on: the stuff they can’t produce) that ultimatelly would come from the government.
This is also possible with cheques, but it was the widespread use of electronic transfers, namelly electronic payment methods, that really reduced the need for banks to procure actual money tokens that they can’t legally make themselves, such as cash.
It wasn’t the invention of electronic transfers that made this happen (as I said, cheques also enable a similar thing), it was its widespread use - replacing most cash transactions out there - that made this mechanism become dominant over the traditional one were banks needed to get cash in as deposits so that they could give cash out as withdrawals that then were used by people and businesses for payments and came back on the other side as deposits.
Without such a high need to provide cash to their customers, banks can have a much higher percentage of IOUs (in the form of mere numbers in computers) to cash than before only requiring cash (and ither such forms of money such a treasury certificates) for the periodic settlement of the pending differences between banks of inflows minus outflows, ad per my example above.
People don’t venmo at grocery store checkout. It’s all credit cards. The credit card craze started in the 60’s which unsurprisingly coincided with banks switching to eft’s.
Exactly. A 3% rise when inflation is 8% is effectively a paycut.
Also if you’re getting raises below the cost of living increase (which most people are), you’re losing money. If you get laid off, which hundreds of thousands of tech workers are, you’re definitely losing money. It’s not a great time right now.
This is false and understanding why it’s false is important in order for us to be able to do the right choices which allow us to both keep inflation in check and avoid pointless deep recessions or depressions. You can find a decent overview here. Creating money (multiple ways, check video) is required for a growing economy to keep prices stable (inflation close to 0). This isn’t new either. It was done even in ancient Greece with silver as it is easy to see the need for it once you have all the variables in front of you. The problem isn’t with money creation per se, it’s with the amount but most importantly its distribution. Where does it go. Does it go towards the creation of an additional bag of chip which we have little real constraint to do, or does it go towards a house in an area where there’s bidding wars for houses and no new houses can be built.