Fractional Reserve Banking
Channel: Conza
Date: 2017-03-11

Fractional Reserve Banking simplified. An excerpt from Hoppe's author presentation at the ASC 2006, LvMI. Talking about his book, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. 

See also:

Daily Bell: How about the free-banking paradigm? Is private fractional banking ever to be tolerated or is it a crime? Who is to put people in jail for private fractional banking?

Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Assume gold is money. In a free society you have free competition in gold-mining, you have free competition in gold-minting, and you have freely competing banks. The banks offer various financial services: of money safekeeping, clearing services, and the service of mediating between savers and borrower-investors. Each bank issues its own brand of "notes" or "certificates" documenting the various transactions and resulting contractual relations between bank and client. These bank-notes are freely tradable. So far so good. Controversial among free bankers is only the status of fractional reserve deposit banking and bank notes. Let's say A deposits 10 ounces of gold with a bank and receives a note (a money substitute) redeemable at par on demand. Based on A's deposit, then, the bank makes a loan to C of 9 ounces of gold and issues a note to this effect, again redeemable at par on demand.

Should this be permitted? I don't think so. For there are now two people, A and C, who are the exclusive owner of one and the same quantity of money. A logical impossibility. Or put differently, there are only 10 ounces of gold, but A is given title to 10 ounces and C holds title to 9 ounces. That is, there are more property titles than there is property. Obviously this constitutes fraud, and in all areas except money, courts have also considered such a practice fraud and punished the offenders. On the other hand, there is no problem if the bank tells A that it will pay interest on his deposit, invest it, for instance, in a money market mutual fund made up of highly liquid short-term financial papers, and make its best efforts to redeem A's shares in that investment fund on demand in a fixed quantity of money. Such shares may well be very popular and many people may put their money into them instead of into regular deposit accounts. But as shares of investment funds they would never function as money. They would never be the most easily and widely saleable commodity of all.

http://www.thedailybell.com/1936/Anthony-Wile-with-Dr-Hans-Hermann-Hoppe-on-the-Impracticality-of-One-World-Government-and-Western-style-Democracy.html

And - 'The Yield from Money Held' Reconsidered." http://mises.org/daily/3449

    "The second example [of supposed anti-Hutt thinking] is from closer at home, i.e., from the proponents of "free banking" such as Lawrence White, George Selgin, and Roger Garrison. According to them, an (unanticipated) increase in the demand for money "pushes the economy below its potential," (Garrison) and requires a compensating money-spending injection from the banking system.

    Here it is again: an "excess demand for money" (Selgin & White) has no positive yield or is even detrimental; hence, help is needed. For the free bankers help is not supposed to come from the government and its central bank, but from a system of freely competing fractional-reserve banks. However, the idea involved is the same: the holding of (some, "excess") money is unproductive and requires a remedy."