A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 6: The Reserve-Deposit Multiplier

In my last post in this series, I observed that an economy’s “base” money serves as the “raw material” that commercial banks and other private-market financial intermediaries employ in “producing” deposits of various kinds that can themselves serve as means of exchange. If they could do so profitably, these private intermediaries would, by making their substitutes more attractive than base money itself, collectively gain possession of every dollar of base money in existence. In some past monetary arrangements, most notably that of Scotland before 1845, banks came very close to achieving this ideal, thanks to the their freedom to supply their customers with circulating paper banknotes as well as with deposits, and to the fact that between them these two substitutes could serve every purpose coins might serve, and do so more conveniently than coins themselves. All save a handful of commercial banks today are, in contrast, able to supply deposits only, so that only base money itself can serve as currency, that is, circulating money. The extent to which national money stocks have been “privatized,” in the sense of being made up mainly of private IOUs of various kinds rather than officially-supplied base money, has been correspondingly limited, as has the extent to which private money holdings have served as a source of funding for bank loans. When banks and other private-market intermediaries acquire base money, they do so, not for the sake of holding on to it, ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs