Categoría: Dinero

Como bien saben los seguidores de Dinero Positivo, los bancos crean dinero de la nada y lo distribuyen en forma de préstamos (crean dinero en el mismo instante en que conceden un préstamo). Cuantos más préstamos, más dinero ganan en forma de intereses. Eso les proporciona un inmenso incentivo para prestar, incluso asumiendo cada vez un mayor riesgo de impago. De esa manera se infló la burbuja inmobiliaria. No fue que ‘la gente vivía por encima de sus posibilidades’, como algunos han tratado de hacer creer para desviar la culpabilidad. Fue la enorme entrada de dinero en el sector inmobiliario (recordemos, dinero recién ‘inventado’, por lo que se podía inventar más y más, sin límite) lo que hizo subir los precios, incrementando con ello la especulación, en un círculo vicioso. La mayoría de la gente simplemente quería una casa para vivir, y pagaba por ella un precio ‘de mercado’.

Todos sabemos cómo terminó aquello: el círculo vicioso se rompió, los especuladores abandonaron el sector y los precios comenzaron un doloroso proceso de ajuste hacia valores más normales. Pero el precio ha sido terrible: todo un sector de la economía arrasado, junto con los sectores auxiliares (muebles, electrodomésticos, reformas, etc.); millones de personas al paro, y la pesadilla de los desahucios. El 60% de los procesos de desahucio tiene su origen en hipotecas firmadas entre 2004 y 2007, en plena burbuja, siendo el peor año 2007. Pese a los ‘brotes verdes’ de la economía, las ejecuciones han aumentado un 8,4%.

Todo esto no tenía que haber sucedido. El sistema monetario que propone Dinero Positivo no fomenta la creación de burbujas. Los bancos prestan ‘dinero real’ de los inversores, lo que impide que el riesgo se descontrole. No hay incentivos para la especulación. No fluye el dinero fácil recién fabricado. Es un sistema sobrio y sostenible.

El desastre social de los desahucios nos recuerda que para curar a un enfermo no tenemos que centrarnos solamente en los síntomas. Hay que curar la raíz de la enfermedad. Hay que reformar el sistema monetario actual y sustituirlo por un sistema basado en Dinero Positivo.

Most of money in the UK is created by banks when they make loans. The only way to get extra money into the economy is to borrow it from banks, leaving us all trapped under a mountain of personal debt and mortgages.

The Problem
1. Banks create new money when people go into debt

When you take out a loan, new money is created. As people borrow more, more new money comes into the economy. All the extra spending this newly created money funds gives people the impression the economy is doing well, which encourages them to borrow even more. As the debt goes up, so does the amount of money.

2. For every pound of money, there’s a pound of debt

Because banks create money when people borrow, for every pound of money in the economy there will be a pound of debt. If there’s £100 in your bank account, someone else must be £100 in debt. Across the whole economy there will be as much debt as money.1

3. If we want more money in the economy, we have to go further into debt

If we need to get more money into the economy – for example, during a recession – then we have to go further into debt to the banks. This is why the government is desperate to get banks lending again: if banks start lending more, they’ll create more new money in the process, and the people who borrowed will spend this new money.

But if the financial crisis was caused by people having too much debt, how can the solution be for people to take on more debt?

4. If we try to pay off debt, then money disappears

When you pay down your debts, the money that leaves your bank account doesn’t go to anyone else – it just disappears. This is because loan repayments are just the opposite process to money creation: banks create money when they make new loans, and effectively ‘destroy’ money when they repay loans.

So when lots of people try to pay down their debts at the same time, money disappears from the economy. As a result of there being less money and less new lending spending slows down. When this happens, it’s like draining the oil from the engine of a car: pretty soon, everything stops working.

This means that it’s almost impossible to reduce our debts without causing a recession. And you personally can only pay off your debts using money that was created when someone else went into debt. This creates a debt trap, where over time the level of personal debt in the economy has to keep growing.

Watch the video to find out how money is at the root of high debt, inequality and unaffordable house prices, and how we can fix it.

The money that banks create isn’t the paper money that bears the logo of the government-owned Bank of England. It’s the electronic deposit money that flashes up on the screen when you check your balance at an ATM. Right now, this money (bank deposits) makes up over 97% of all the money in the economy. Only 3% of money is still in that old-fashioned form of real cash that you can touch.

Banks can create money through the accounting they use when they make loans. The numbers that you see when you check your account balance are just accounting entries in the banks’ computers. These numbers are a ‘liability’ or IOU from your bank to you. But by using your debit card or internet banking, you can spend these IOUs as though they were the same as £10 notes. By creating these electronic IOUs, banks can effectively create a substitute for money.
The following video from the Bank of England explains how money is created by commercial banks:

In the video below Professor Dirk Bezemer at the University of Groningen and Michael Kumhof, an IMF Economist explain where money comes from in less than 2 minutes:

Every new loan that a bank makes in this way creates new money. While this is often hard to believe the first time you hear it, it’s common knowledge to the people that manage the banking system. In March 2014, the Bank of England release a report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”, where they stated that:

Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England from 2003-2013, recently explained this point to a conference of businesspeople:

And Martin Wolf, who was a member of the Independent Commission on Banking, put it bluntly, saying in the Financial Times that: ”the essence of the contemporary monetary system is the creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending” (Article).

By creating money in this way, banks have increased the amount of money in the economy by 11.5% a year over the last 40 years. This has pushed up the prices of houses and priced out an entire generation.

Of course, the flip-side to this creation of money is that with every new loan comes a new debt. This is the source of our mountain of personal debt: not money that had been prudently saved up by pensioners, but money that was created out of nothing by banks and lent to people who could not repay. Eventually the debt burden became too high, resulting in the wave of defaults that triggered the start of the financial crisis.