Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Banks are fundamentally unnecessary and actually dangerous for bitcoin
by
JoelKatz
on 02/08/2011, 08:35:16 UTC
Perhaps that's what he meant. However, I believe this economic analysis is incorrect. You're saying that by keeping the money in the bank, and having the bank loan it out, that this was good for the economy. There was some positive contribution of wealth that would not have happened without loaning that money out. I believe this is wrong because the total quantity of money is irrelevant. You're not going to improve things by adding money into the system (and I'm well aware that Ben Bernanke disagrees, but he's wrong). So long as the money is sufficiently divisible, the sum total of it is an irrelevant quantity.
I agree with that. However, see my post above. If you don't loan your money out and someone else does, you will turn 100 bitcoins into 100 bitcoins while someone else turns 100 bitcoins into 108 bitcoins.

Quote
In practice, inflating a money supply does not increase the wealth. It merely redistributes the purchasing power of the money to the people who get the new money. It is a way of taking wealth from everyone who uses the money and giving it to the people who get the new money. It's equivalent to counterfeiting. For some reason, everyone understands that when a non-banker counterfeits a dollar, it is wrong. But when bankers do it, they think it is right and good, when in fact it is equally as bad.
You are entirely correct in the case of, say, a government printing money. However, this is not correct in the case of loans. The people who get the money pay it back with interest. They get purchasing power today (presumably when they need it more) in exchange for foregoing purchasing power in the future when they expect to need it less.

If people are willing to pay interest, it will typically be because they can make better use of the purchasing power today. Loans help people to efficiently time-shift consumption and production in cases where the most efficient pattern isn't produce-consume.

The obvious example is the guy who gets a job that pays 20% more than he's making, but he needs a car. He can't produce the value he needs to consume in the form of a car without the job. A loan allows how to consume the car now when he needs it, and produce the value of the car later when he will most likely be able to.

Certainly banks do some bad things and certainly people take bad loans. But the fundamental logic of banking and loans is completely sound.