The positive money idea refuses to die
This idea is being given another run around in The G today.
But the 1844 law was never updated to apply to electronic money and still only applies to paper notes. Metal coins and paper notes now make up just 3% of all the money in the UK. The remaining 97% of money consists of essentially numbers in high street banks' computer systems. Banks create this electronic money through a simple accounting process whenever someone takes out a loan.
Yup, same ol' same ol'.
If the Bank of England created all that electronic money instead of the private banking system creating it then we'd be in the clover. And as ever, the idea just doesn't work. Consider just this one point:
Government finances would receive a boost, as the Treasury would earn the profit on creating electronic money, instead of only on the creation of bank notes. The profit on the creation of bank notes has raised £16.7bn for the Treasury over the past decade. But by allowing banks to create electronic money, it has lost hundreds of billions of potential revenue – and taxpayers have ended up making up the difference.
OK, that number for seigniorage is roughly correct on the physical money. But what's wrong with the number for electronic money? Hundreds of billions? Well, the contention is that this value has been created by those private banks: that's how, if the BoE creates it instead then the BoE gets that hundreds of billions in revenue. Excellent: so, if the private banks have been creating all this money then those private banks must have been making those hundreds of billions. Or someone, somewhere, has been.
And the thing is, there just isn't anyone out there who has that hundreds of billions. There just ain't. Therefore, somehow, the creation of that credit (to give it its proper name, not money) doesn't carry a seigniorage profit of hundreds of billions. And thus the BoE cannot appropriate that non-existent seigniorage by doing the credit creation directly.
I agree entirely that it is indeed the banking system (but not an individual bank) that creates credit. But there isn't some hundreds of billions of profit to be made out of doing so: for no one is in fact making that hundreds of billions. Thus it's not possible to the Bank of England to appropriate that hundreds of billions.
It's interesting to note that this idea is backed by Andrew Simms of Not Economics Frankly fame. Sigh.