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JanisL

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JanisL
·5 年前·議論
I think there's a massive difference between the government owning things and the central bank owning things for the reasons you mention about accountability.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
Bitcoin had design goals in mind to avoid certain downsides of centralized currencies. The cryptocurrency space however lives inside the broader economy and questions about what money is and the regulations around it don't go away just because a specific cryptocurrency thought about some of these aspects in it's design. Even if bitcoin were to solve everyone's problems as some maximalists would claim how do we even implement this? Considering much of the world doesn't have holdings in bitcoin what are we to do? Similarly what do we do about people who don't have the infrastructure to run full nodes? What about dealing with interference with using the cryptocurrency imposed by external actors?

There's good reasons why people discuss these ideas, bitcoin, much like anything else is just part of the direction things can go in and it doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
I'm trying to encourage a discussion about what money itself should be. I think without this discussion it will be very hard to make effective regulations around money and the implications this has on the operations of the banking system. Once people are more informed about these topics better regulation will be possible. Frankly I don't see people talk about the fundamentals of money much, the current monetary system is convenient enough for most people such that they don't have to think about the details of how it works in their day to day lives.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
It would seem that the temptation to set the price of everything is increased when there are impediments to setting the interest rate (since this removes an important monetary policy lever). I think this has been seen lately as the zero-lower-bound on nominal interest rates has started to come into play in many places.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
I'm not sure why you'd take from this that I'm ignoring the role of regulation when I'm commenting on a situation whereby the regulatory framework of central banks allows them to take actions that damage the signaling power of pricing. I most definitely think that banks and central banks must be carefully regulated because they have the special privilege of creating money and with this comes a lot of responsibility.

The other part though is that if money is corrupted it impacts the process of regulation itself. For example creating good regulation to tax companies is made far more difficult when there's fundamental differences between the nature of the money that those companies themselves have access to. I'm sure it would be possible with a large amount of effort to have regulations with non-fungible money but there's challenges there that would be substantially difficult to address and the complexity of that regulation would come with it's own non-zero costs to society.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completely unprofitable if it could get access to freshly printed money every quarter to prop it up. What then happens to all the other businesses who don't get access to that freshly created money? When we have situations like the BoJ owning more than 60% of the Nikkei 225 we really ought to be asking some serious questions about if we really have free markets? We also should be asking some questions about the properties we desire in money itself. If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional monetary policy such as purchasing equities we can quickly have a situation whereby an unelected group of bureaucrats can damages the ability of money to be used as a means to convey information. Further there's questions about picking winners and losers that comes up there too. As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be. It seems that these difficult questions really fell out of favor a while ago and as a result things have been drifting in a direction that many people aren't comfortable with.

If we don't ask these questions then technological approaches to money, like various cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies are unlikely to actually cause long lasting improvements. We have some serious monetary policy problems in the world right now and while some tech could help (in some cases) these aren't primarily technological problems.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
I'm aware that capital requirements have mostly taken over from reserve requirements over time (in such a way that the banking system is even less sound than the average person assumes), but the point I was making is that in all these these systems there will be liquidity issues if all the depositors were to try to withdraw their money to spend it on something at the same time.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
In the modern world we primarily have banking systems that are based on fractional reserve banking and currencies without any explicit backing. This means that from a forex point of view the currencies are only worth as much as there is confidence in them. (National currencies often derive power in a practical sense due to taxes having to be paid in those currencies even without any explicit backing of the currencies value). Because of these dynamics if everyone were to try to withdraw their money from the bank at the same time there would be a major problem because the banks don't have the money to cover it. An event that makes people in a country all want to withdraw their money will cause a crisis just about everywhere at the moment. Sure you'll get people from the central bank saying they can create enough money to pay everyone out, which they can pretty easily do due to the fact that most money now is just entries in a database. But the problem in all modern banking crisis situations isn't so much the act of giving people money its what you can buy with that money. (A caveat, when things get really bad like they did in Venezuela the currency degraded so much that the government had problems paying for the printing and transport of new banknotes with even more zeros, but that's a rather exceptional case that occurred very late in a crisis, again the money was buying less)

Banking crisis conditions can come about for a variety of different reasons but they all involve some lack of confidence in the ability to be able to exchange money for goods at a later point in time. This can come about because people aren't able to access their money in the banks (Eg Cyprus crisis) or because the value of the money is rapidly deteriorating (Eg Yugoslavian Hyperinflation) or because there's some event that devalues the currency. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it shows that different things in different places can cause crisis situations to emerge. There's some interesting work that was done by the Bank of International Settlements about the early warning indicators for systemic banking crises. Seeing what was happening in Turkey inspired me to write about bank bail ins. Along with bail outs this is something that you'll likely see in banking crises. More detail about the early warning indicators and bail in mechanisms here: https://www.lesinskis.com/bank-bail-ins.html

I also talk about this in the article but I don't think it's easy to neatly determine where currency crisis situations "start". There's at least 14 countries in the world that are in what could be the early stages of a banking and currency crisis but it's likely that people will only say they are in a crisis at a much later stage where the problems are so big they are impossible to ignore. Other places like Canada get ignored routinely but the situation there could rather easily turn into a major crisis unless something changes there.
JanisL
·5 年前·議論
Its not a real black swan because it's so painfully obvious to anyone who's looked at it in depth but the demise of Tether will have an enormous impact on BTC.