Zum Grand Supercycle oder so: Zentralbanken, ja oder nein.

verfasst von Aireymouse, 25.07.2000, 00:19

Ich habe was interessantes im Economist gefunden, Mitliederteil,
zur Frage ob Znetralbanken noch gebraucht werden. Unten habe ich etwas Rot eingesetzt.

Grüsse.

22-28 July 2000, The economist

ECONOMICS FOCUS

E-money revisited

OUR Economics Focus of January 22nd discussed a recent
paper by Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, which argued that
technology in the form of e-money might render central banks
obsolete. At a conference this month in Washington, DC,
organised by the World Bank, the IMF and International
Finance, several economists examined Mr Friedman’s
much-discussed idea and declared it wrong.

Mr Friedman’s argument went roughly as follows. Central
banks can control short-term interest rates because they are
monopoly suppliers of “base money”—currency, plus deposits
by banks at the central bank. Suppose that technology
eliminates both kinds of base money. In such a world the
central bank would no longer have the fulcrum it currently
uses to change interest rates.

Why might the demand for base money evaporate? Electronic
cash, stored on memory-cards, PCs and other devices, could
replace physical cash. And banks’ deposits at the central bank
would disappear if banks themselves vanished. This is
imaginable. Instead of holding deposits at banks, people might
store their assets with a custodian (such as a computer
company), which itself neither issued liabilities nor extended
credit (ie, was not a bank). When people bought or sold
something, settlement would take the form of an immediate
transfer of ownership of those assets. There would be no bank
“money”.

Several papers presented at the meeting questioned this vision,
for different reasons. The one by Charles Goodhart of the
London School of Economics (and formerly of the Bank of
England’s monetary policy committee) was the clearest.

First, Mr Goodhart argued, e-money is unlikely to retire
ordinary currency in the foreseeable future. The great
advantages of currency are simplicity and anonymity. Even if
the first is eroded by technology, the second will remain.
Anonymity in transactions is something that buyers and sellers
often want—and not always so that they can break the law.
Forms of e-money might be technologically capable of
providing anonymity, but they would still rely on trust
between the parties (trust, that is, in the other party’s promise
not to reveal the information the transaction has conveyed).
Cash leaves no tracks, and makes no demands on anybody
else’s integrity.

What about the demand for banks’ deposits at the central bank,
the other component of the monetary base? Mr Goodhart
argues that banks are no more likely to disappear than
currency. Specialised financial intermediaries will always be
needed to help people and firms choose their asset portfolios
and to distinguish between good and bad credit risks. But the
clients of these necessary intermediaries then need to
distinguish (using limited information) good intermediaries
from bad. How? “The obvious answer is to make the
information purveyors hold the loans/assets that they
recommend on their own books, using enough of their own
capital to keep them honest, and then finance the rest of their
financial requirements by offering various kinds of deposit, or
mutual-fund-unit, liability.” In other words, the obvious
answer is banks.

If people still want currency, and still want banks, there will
be a monetary base and central banks will stay in business. But
Mr Goodhart concludes by asking what happens if, despite all
of the above, currency and banks alike do in fact disappear.
Even in this extremely unlikely event, he contends, a central
bank would still be able to set short-term interest rates.

Even in a world without currency or banks, the market will set
a long-term interest rate that matches borrowers’ demand for
e-money to lenders’ supply. Fundamental “real” factors
(productivity growth and pure “time preference”) will
determine this figure. In the short term, though, the central
bank can raise the interest rate simply by offering to borrow
e-money at more than the prevailing market rate; or it can
lower it by offering to lend e-money for less than the
prevailing market rate. <font color=red> True, in undertaking these transactions,
the central bank may suffer losses: in this respect, and under
these assumptions, it is just like any other borrower or lender.
Except, of course, for one big difference: unlike other
borrowers and lenders its operations (and possible losses) are
backed in the end by the government’s power to raise taxes.</font>


This puts central banks’ future in a new light. <font color=red> If governments
want them to retain control over short-term interest rates, they
can always arrange it.</font> They can do it directly, through
regulation. Governments could oblige tax payments to be
settled with central-bank liabilities, for instance, thus
preserving a monetary base on which to act. <font color=red> Or, indirectly,
even without a monetary base, governments can simply stand
behind central banks when they act in loss-making ways to
move interest rates. But in either case, governments would be
explicitly acting to keep their central banks working—and
would have to explain why. </font>

If Mr Goodhart is right, central banks will never disappear
over governments’ objections, even though they may in the
end become technologically dispensable. <font color=red> The real challenge to
central bankers in an e-money world will be to justify their
existence, something at which they have had very little practice
up to now.
</font>

The paper by Benjamin Friedman that started this debate was “The Future of
Monetary Policy”; it appeared in the November 1999 issue of International
Finance. Mr Goodhart’s paper, and the others, will appear in a forthcoming
issue of that journal.


Papers von der Konferenz hier

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• Zum Grand Supercycle oder so: Zentralbanken, ja oder nein. - Aireymouse, 25.07.2000, 00:19