The Future of Money and the Death of Banks, Part II

Banks make money from payment systems

I recently made arrangements for a trip to Africa I dealt directly with local tour operators there. Today that can be done easily and cheaply with the help of email, the internet and skype. Yet, when it came to paying the African tour operators I had to go through a process that has not changed much from the 1950s. Not only were British and African banks involved. There were also correspondence banks in New York. This took time and, of course, cost money in form of additional fees.

Imagine if we could have used gold or Bitcoin! The payment would have been as easy and fast as all the email communication that preceded it. There would have been no exchange rates and little fees (maybe there would have in the case of gold) or no fees (in the case of Bitcoin).

Another example: Last year I gave a webinar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI). The LvMI is located in Auburn, Alabama. I did the seminar from my home in London, the LvMI’s technology officer sat in Taiwan, and the seminar attendees were spread all over the world. All of this is now possible – cheaply, quickly and conveniently – thanks to technology.

Yet, when the LvMI paid me a fee it had to go through a few banks – again, correspondent banks in New York – it took quite some time and it incurred additional costs. And the fee from LvMI was paid in a currency that I cannot use directly in my home country.

Banks make money from monetary nationalism

Future economic historians will pity us for having worked under a strange and inefficient global patchwork of local paper currencies – and for having naively believed that this represented the pinnacle of modern capitalism. Today, every government wants to have its own local paper money and its own local central bank, and run its own monetary policy (of course, on the basis of perfectly elastic local fiat money). This is naturally a great impediment to international trade and the free flow of capital.

If I want to spend the money I got from the LvMI and spend it where I live in Britain, I have to exchange the LvMI’s dollars for pounds. I can only do that if I find someone who is willing to take the opposite side of that transaction, someone who is willing to sell pounds for dollars.

The existence of numerous monies necessarily re-introduces an element of partial barter into money-based commerce. Sure, the 24-hour, multi-trillion-dollar a day fx market can accommodate me, and do so quickly and cheaply. But this market is only a second-best solution, a highly developed makeshift to cope as best as possible with the inefficiencies of monetary nationalism.

The better, most efficient and capitalist solution would be to use the same medium of exchange around the world. The gold standard was a much superior monetary system in this respect. Moving from the international gold standard to a system of a multitude of state-managed paper currencies meant economic regression, not progress.

One hundred years ago, you could take the train from London to Moscow and use the same gold coins all along the way for payment. There was no need to change your money even once. (Incidentally, neither did you need a passport!)

The notion of the ‘national economy’ that needs a ‘national currency’ was always a fiction. So was the idea that economies work better if money, interest rates and exchange rates are carefully manipulated by local bureaucrats. (This fiction is still spread by many economists who make a living off this system.)

The biggest problem with monetary policy is that there is such a thing as monetary policy. But in today’s increasingly globalized world, these fictions are entirely untenable. Capitalism transcends borders, and what it needs to flourish is simply hard, apolitical and thus international money. Money that is a proper tool for voluntary human interaction and cooperation and not a tool for politics.

Banks benefit from the present monetary segregation. They profit from constantly exchanging one paper money for another and from trading foreign exchange. Non-financial companies that operate internationally are inevitably forced to speculate in currency markets or to pay for expensive hedging strategies (again paying the banks for providing them).

Banks make money from speculation

There is, of course, nothing wrong with speculation in a free market. However, in a truly free market there would be few opportunities for speculation. Today the heavy involvement of the state in financial markets, the existence of numerous paper currencies, all managed for domestic political purposes, and the constant volatility that is generated by monetary and fiscal policy create outsized opportunities for speculation.

Additionally, the easy money that central banks provide so generously to prop up their over-extended fractional reserve industry is used by many banks to speculate in financial assets themselves. This is often done by anticipating and front-running the next move of the monetary authorities with which these banks have such close relationships. And to a considerable degree, banks pass the cheap money from the central banks on to their hedge fund clients.

Remember that immediately after the Lehman collapse, investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which previously had shun deposit and retail banking but have always been heavily involved in securities trading, quickly obtained banking licenses in order to benefit from the safety-net the state provides its own fiat-money-deposit banks.

Banks channel savings into investment

Yes, to some degree banks still do channels savings into investment. And this is indeed an important function of financial intermediaries. However, asset managers can do the same thing, and they do it without mixing this services with FRB and money-creation.

In general, the asset management industry is much more transparent about how it allocates its clients’ assets. It has a clear fiduciary responsibility for these assets. It cannot use them as “reserves”. In the gold or Bitcoin economy of the future [as explained in yesterday’s article] you will, of course, be free to allocate some of your money to asset managers who mange investments for you.

Conclusion

Have I been too harsh on the banks? Maybe.

The bankers will say in their defense that they are not the source of all these inefficiencies. That they simply help their clients deal with the inefficiencies of a state-designed and politicized monetary system. And that they reap legitimate rewards for the help they provide.

Fair enough. To some degree that may be true. But it is very clear that the size, the business models, the sources of profitability, and the problems of modern banks are uniquely and intimately linked to the present, fully elastic paper money system.

Even if the paper money system was meant to last – and it certainly is not – the forces of capitalism, the constant search for better, more efficient and durable solutions, coupled with technological progress, would put enormous market pressures on the present banking industry in the years to come in any case.

But given that our present system is not the outcome of market forces to begin with, that a system of fully elastic, local state monies is not necessary, that it is suboptimal, inefficient, unstable, and unsustainable, and that it is already in its endgame, I have little doubt that modern banks will go the way of the dodo.

Banks are to the next few decades what the steel and coal industries were to the decades from 1960 to 1990. They are parastatal dinosaurs, joined at the hip with the bureaucracy and politics, bloated and dependent on cheap money and state subsidy for survival. They are ripe for the taking.

The demise of the paper money system will offer great opportunities for a new breed of money entrepreneurs. In that role, I could see gold storage companies, payment technology companies, Bitcoin service providers and asset management companies. If some of these join forces, the opportunities should be great. The world is ready for an alternative monetary system, and when the present system collapses under the weight of its own inconsistencies, there would be something there to take its place.

The present fiat money economy is ripe for some Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’.

Regards.

Detlev Schlichter