Author Archives: Dirk Niepelt

The Swiss “Vollgeldinitiative”

On June 3, 2014 the Swiss group “Monetäre Modernisierung” (monetary modernisation) started to collect signatures with the aim to force a national referendum on changes to the Swiss constitution. (The group needs to collect 100,000 signatures within an 18 month period in order to succeed.) The referendum would put the “Vollgeldinitiative” (sovereign money initiative) to vote, an initiative that seeks to fundamentally change Switzerland’s monetary system. The group “Monetäre Modernisierung” is part of a broader international movement with partner groups in the UK, the European Union and the US.

According to the proposal, deposit claims vis-a-vis commercial banks would be transformed into claims vis-a-vis the central bank and deposit liabilities of commercial banks would be transformed into liabilities of those banks vis-a-vis the central bank. Within a certain time span, commercial banks would have to repay those liabilities. Moreover, they would be prohibited from ever creating deposits again—that is, all money should be base money. The proposal envisions the Swiss National Bank to bring new base money into circulation by transferring reserves to the treasury, allowing the government to partly finance its expenditures by means of “original seignorage,” or to citizens. The Swiss National Bank could also lend reserves to banks, against interest, to accommodate fluctuations in money demand. (The resulting interest seignorage would add to government revenues as well.) The initiative aims at a complete separation between money and debt; accordingly, base money would be booked as equity in the central bank’s balance sheet rather than debt.

The proposal goes further than Irving Fisher’s 100% money plan and other proposals for full-reserve banking (and narrow banking) where banks are required to keep the full amount of deposited funds in cash/reserves (or very liquid, safe assets). Under the “Vollgeldinitiative,” the amount of deposited funds does not only have to be kept in cash/reserves but deposits are abolished altogether.

Some background information (in German):

  • The text of the proposed constitutional amendment, with explanations.
  • Background paper by one of the intellectual father’s of the initiative, Joseph Huber. He explains that the name “Vollgeld” is the short form of “voll gültiges gesetzliches Zahlungsmittel,” or legally speaking, “unbeschränktes gesetzliches Zahlungsmittel.”

Some quotes from the Q&A section on the technical implementation of the proposed reform (in German):

Die Girokonten der Kunden werden aus der Bankenbilanz herausgelöst und separat als Vollgeldkonten geführt. Die Guthaben auf den Girokonten bleiben eins zu eins bestehen, werden Vollgeld und somit zu gesetzlichen Zahlungsmitteln gleich Münzen und Banknoten. Ab dann ist nur noch die Nationalbank autorisiert Zahlungsmittel zu schöpfen. Dadurch geschieht mit dem unbaren Giralgeld heute das gleiche wie vor hundert Jahren mit den Banknoten. …

Das bisherige Banken-Giralgeld wird von Gesetzes wegen zu Vollgeld umdeklariert. Liesse man es dabei bewenden, kämen die Banken mit einem Schlag in den Besitz von Vollgeld, obwohl sie nicht das (neue) Vollgeld, sondern nur das (alte) Giralgeld geschaffen haben. Deshalb übernimmt die Nationalbank im Moment der Umstellung alle bisherigen Giralgeld-Verbindlichkeiten der Banken und verpflichtet sich damit, den Bankkunden anstelle von Bankengiralgeld Vollgeld auszuzahlen. Diese Auszahlung erfolgt sofort, damit die umlaufende Geldmenge nicht vermindert wird, und sie erfolgt auf Geldkonten ausserhalb der Bankbilanz, also auf Konten, auf die die Bank keinen Zugriff mehr hat. Für die Bankkunden ist diese Umstellung äusserst relevant: Sie sind jetzt im persönlichen Besitz von gesetzlichem Zahlungsmittel in der Höhe der bisherigen Sichtkonten, die vor der Umstellung blosse Geldversprechen auf Konten der Bank, aber kein Geld waren. …

Nach der Vollgeld-Umstellung gibt es nur noch Nationalbank-Geld. Das elektronische Geld ist genauso vollwertiges Geld wie heute Münzen und Banknoten. Das heisst, die Vollgeld-Zahlungsverkehrskonten der Kunden befinden sich dann nicht mehr in der Bilanz der Banken, sondern diese werden von Banken wie heute Wertpapierdepots verwaltet. Das Geld auf dem Konto gehört nur dem Kunden, wie das Bargeld im Tresor, und ist nicht mehr wie heute, eine Forderung an die Bank. So hat auch der Zahlungsverkehr nichts mehr mit Forderungen und Verpflichtungen zwischen den Banken zu tun, weshalb das heute übliche Banken-Clearing unnötig wird. Wenn ein Kunde eine Überweisung an einen Kunden tätigt, wird einfach Vollgeld von einem Konto auf das andere transferiert. Es passiert dann das, was fast alle Menschen heute meinen, was bei einer Überweisung geschieht.
Diese direkte digitale Übertragung von Vollgeld vereinfacht den Zahlungsverkehr, da die bisherige komplizierte Verrechnung von Forderungen und Verbindlichkeiten zwischen den Banken und eventueller Ausgleich mit Nationalbank-Guthaben entfällt. Statt dessen können Überweisungen sofort ausgeführt und gebucht werden, genauso wie heute der Kauf von Aktien und Wertpapieren. Die bisherige Wartezeit von mehreren Tagen, bis das Geld ankommt, entfällt. Nach wenigen Minuten wird man den Geldeingang auf dem Konto sehen können.

I discuss the initiative here.

“Vollgeld, Liquidität und Stabilität (100% Money, Liquidity and Stability),” NZZ, 2014

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 12, 2014. PDF. Extended version in Ökonomenstimme, May 13, 2014. HTML.

  • A 100% money regime reduces the risk of credit bubbles, but requires more and better fine-tuning by the central bank.
  • Central banks can already implement higher reserve requirements. If the fact that they don’t reflects policy failure, then the 100% money proposal risks handing more power to one source of the problem.
  • A 100% money regime increases financial stability, at least temporarily, but it forces banks to find new sources of funding and lowers the interest rate for depositors, which is fine.
  • If lender of last resort support by the central bank occurs at too low interest rates then seignorage revenues are privatised and costs socialised under the current regime. Moving to a 100% money regime would help but so would simple Pigouvian taxation.
  • How can a 100% money regime be enforced if market participants end up coordinating to use other securities than deposits as means of payment?
  • More stable deposits in a 100% money regime do not imply a more stable banking system unless other regulation is imposed that completely prevents “maturity transformation.”
  • Aggregate liquidity cannot be created out of nothing, with or without deposit insurance.
  • Societies have to take a stand on whether they want to guarantee broader monetary aggregates than base money. If so, the cost of the guarantee should be privatised. Problems arise if societies pretend not to provide such guarantees but central banks nevertheless feel obliged to step in ex post and market participants are aware of that fact ex ante; bad, self-fulfilling equilibria are the consequence.
  • Commitment on the part of policy makers is key; it requires independent central bankers and regulators.

History of Finance and Financial Regulation

The Economist reviews the history of finance and financial regulation, arguing that

institutions that enhance people’s economic lives, such as central banks, deposit insurance and stock exchanges, are not the products of careful design in calm times, but are cobbled together at the bottom of financial cliffs. Often what starts out as a post-crisis sticking plaster becomes a permanent feature of the system. … The response to a crisis follows a familiar pattern. It starts with blame. New parts of the financial system are vilified: a new type of bank, investor or asset is identified as the culprit and is then banned or regulated out of existence. It ends by entrenching public backing for private markets: other parts of finance deemed essential are given more state support.

The Economist identifies five major events that shaped modern finance:

  • Hamilton’s bank bailout in 1792.
  • The creation of joint-stock banks in England after the “emerging markets” crisis of 1825.
  • The railroad crash of 1857, global panic and the Bank of England’s stricter requirements for discount houses to hold cash.
  • Financial fraud and low cash holdings, the 1907 panic, the National Monetary Commission’s demand for a lender of last resort and the 1913 Federal Reserve Act establishing the (third) central bank in the US.
  • Recession and financial meltdown in 1929, the bank holiday of 1933, publicly funded bank recapitalization, Glass-Steagall and the FDIC.

Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) Models

Noah Smith wonders in a blog post why the private sector does not use DSGE models for forecasting purposes if these models are useful. He writes:

As far as I’m aware, private-sector firms don’t hire anyone to make DSGE models, implement DSGE models, or even scan the DSGE literature. There are a lot of firms that make macro bets in the finance industry – investment banks, macro hedge funds, bond funds. To my knowledge, none of these firms spends one thin dime on DSGE. I’ve called and emailed everyone I could think of who knows what financial-industry macroeconomists do, and they’re all unanimous – they’ve never heard of anyone in finance using a DSGE model.

Self-Correcting Research?

The Economist doubts that science is self-correcting as “many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn.”

Referees do a bad job. Publishing pressure leads researchers to publish their (correct and incorrect) results multiple times. Replication studies are hard and thankless. And everyone seems to be getting the statistics wrong.

A researcher suffers from a type I error when she incorrectly rejects an hypothesis although it is true (false positive); and from a type II error when she incorrectly accepts an hypothesis although it is wrong (false negative). A good testing procedure minimises the type II error given a specified type I error that is, it maximises the power of the test. While employing a test with a power of 80% is considered good practice actual hypothesis testing often suffers from much lower power. As a consequence, many or even a majority of apparent “results” identified by a test might be wrong while most of the “non-results” are correctly identified. Quoting from the article:

… consider 1,000 hypotheses being tested of which just 100 are true (see chart). Studies with a power of 0.8 will find 80 of them, missing 20 because of false negatives. Of the 900 hypotheses that are wrong, 5%—that is, 45 of them—will look right because of type I errors. Add the false positives to the 80 true positives and you have 125 positive results, fully a third of which are specious. If you dropped the statistical power from 0.8 to 0.4, which would seem realistic for many fields, you would still have 45 false positives but only 40 true positives. More than half your positive results would be wrong.

The Financial Crisis

The Economist’s “schools briefs” on the financial crisis: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Quoting from the first part:

… it is clear the crisis had multiple causes. The most obvious is the financiers themselves—especially the irrationally exuberant Anglo-Saxon sort, who claimed to have found a way to banish risk when in fact they had simply lost track of it. Central bankers and other regulators also bear blame, for it was they who tolerated this folly. The macroeconomic backdrop was important, too. The “Great Moderation”—years of low inflation and stable growth—fostered complacency and risk-taking. A “savings glut” in Asia pushed down global interest rates. Some research also implicates European banks, which borrowed greedily in American money markets before the crisis and used the funds to buy dodgy securities. All these factors came together to foster a surge of debt in what seemed to have become a less risky world.