reply to post by Lapislazuli
I'm sorry. It's an interesting idea but a 100% reserve banking system wouldn't work under any conditions I can see. Unless, perhaps, he means
something different by it.
This year the Federal Government will borrow and print $1.4 Trillion Dollars.
Eventually this money ends up deposited in a bank. The Banks just like a magician are allowed to take that $1.4 Trillion Dollars and turn it into $14
Trillion Dollars in loans or anything they want and in doing so they also Increase the Money Supply by total of $14 Trillion Dollars.
Under
a 100% system you have to keep 100% of the deposits on hand in case it's needed by a depositor. Keeping it on hand means you can't commit it
anywhere else, like a loan or an investment. That means $1.4 Trillion comes into the bank and the bank has to sit on it.
That means the banks can't make loans to anybody. It can't use the money for itself to provide the income to provide for staff or electricity. A
100% system is identical to putting your money in a can and burying it in the back yard.
As for the rest of the plan, sorry, more problems. Print up 14 trillion dollars and what happens to the value of the dollar? It falls drastically,
that means inflation goes sky high. Every country in the world will run to dump dollars and the value of the dollar will fall even further. Dollars
will stop being the world reserve currency.
We print a ton of dollars and hope to find people who will give up their interest bearing bonds for non-interest bearing. Why would they do that?
Besides our debt isn't entirely to foreigners. As you say $10 trillion is owed to our citizens. What happens when we tell Social Security
recipients that they only get half (or less) of their purchasing power because we devalued the dollar. Same with food stamps or any other program.
It will cost the American people a ton. Every dollar they have in their wallets or in savings will suddenly be worth 10 cents, or whatever the new
value of the dollar is. (I'm too lazy to figure it out.)
Sorry, I'm getting tired. Someone else can finish the explanation of why 100% and monetarization of the entire debt won't work.