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Economics Essay 83: Commercial Banks

 Explain the role of commercial banks in the economy.

Commercial banks are financial institutions that play a vital role in the economy by offering a range of financial services to individuals, businesses, and other entities. Here's an explanation of the role of commercial banks:

1. Facilitating deposits and withdrawals: Commercial banks provide a safe and convenient place for individuals and businesses to deposit their funds. They accept deposits, such as savings accounts and checking accounts, allowing customers to securely store their money. Additionally, banks facilitate withdrawals, providing customers with access to their funds through various channels like ATMs, checks, and electronic transfers.

2. Lending and credit creation: One of the primary functions of commercial banks is to provide loans and credit to individuals and businesses. Banks use the deposits they receive to extend loans to borrowers for various purposes, including personal loans, mortgages, business loans, and working capital. By providing credit, banks stimulate economic activity, support investment, and facilitate the growth and expansion of businesses.

3. Payment processing and money transfers: Commercial banks play a crucial role in facilitating payments and money transfers within the economy. They offer services such as online banking, electronic funds transfers, wire transfers, and payment cards (debit cards, credit cards). Banks act as intermediaries, ensuring the smooth and secure transfer of funds between individuals and businesses, both domestically and internationally.

4. Financial intermediation: Commercial banks act as intermediaries between savers and borrowers. They channel funds from depositors (savers) to borrowers (individuals, businesses, governments) in need of capital. By connecting surplus funds with those in need, banks facilitate the efficient allocation of capital in the economy, promoting investment, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

5. Currency exchange and foreign trade facilitation: Banks provide currency exchange services, allowing individuals and businesses to convert one currency into another for international transactions. They also offer trade finance services, such as letters of credit, export/import financing, and foreign exchange services, to facilitate international trade and cross-border transactions.

6. Risk management and financial advisory services: Commercial banks assist customers in managing financial risks and offer advisory services. They provide insurance products, investment products, and wealth management services to help individuals and businesses safeguard their assets, plan for the future, and navigate complex financial decisions.

7. Monetary policy implementation: Commercial banks play a critical role in the implementation of monetary policy set by the central bank. They are responsible for managing reserves, lending to other banks, and influencing interest rates through their lending and deposit activities. Commercial banks' actions affect the overall money supply and liquidity in the economy, impacting economic conditions and inflation.

Overall, commercial banks are essential institutions that support the functioning of the economy by providing financial services, mobilizing savings, facilitating lending, and contributing to economic growth and stability.

Economics Essay 48: Central Banks and Exchange Rates

Discuss the extent to which it is desirable for a central bank to use foreign currency reserves to support its exchange rate.

Central banks use foreign currency reserves as a tool to manage their exchange rates and support their domestic currencies. By intervening in the foreign exchange market, central banks buy or sell currencies, utilizing their reserves to influence the supply and demand dynamics. This intervention can help stabilize or influence the exchange rate.

The use of reserves by central banks for exchange rate support has both benefits and drawbacks. On the positive side, it can contribute to exchange rate stability, providing certainty for businesses engaged in international trade and reducing exchange rate risk. Stable exchange rates can also attract foreign investment, promote price stability, and foster confidence in the domestic economy.

Central banks also utilize reserves to intervene during periods of excessive volatility or speculative attacks. By buying or selling currencies, they can mitigate disruptions to the economy and financial markets. Additionally, reserves can be used to support international trade by ensuring competitive exchange rates, making a country's exports more affordable and attractive in foreign markets.

However, the use of reserves for exchange rate support has limitations. Depletion of reserves over time can leave a country vulnerable to external shocks and reduce its ability to respond to future crises. Holding reserves also incurs an opportunity cost as these resources could have been invested in other productive areas. Furthermore, continuous intervention in the foreign exchange market can create a moral hazard and undermine market dynamics if market participants become overly reliant on central bank support.

In considering the desirability of using reserves for exchange rate support, central banks need to carefully manage their reserves, communicate their policies clearly, and take a comprehensive approach to economic development. While maintaining exchange rate stability is important, central banks should also prioritize long-term economic growth, sustainable development, and policy credibility.

In conclusion, central banks utilize foreign currency reserves by intervening in the foreign exchange market to manage exchange rates and support their domestic currencies. The use of reserves can contribute to exchange rate stability, trade support, and policy autonomy. However, careful reserve management is necessary to strike a balance between short-term stability and long-term economic development. Prudent policies, effective communication, and a comprehensive approach to economic management are essential to ensure that the use of reserves for exchange rate support is beneficial to the overall economy.

Do Government Bailouts of Banks Worsen Economic Conditions?

 Ruchir Sharma in The FT 

As bank runs spread, it has become clear that anyone who questions a government rescue for those caught underfoot will be tarred as a latter-day liquidationist, like those who advised Herbert Hoover to let businesses fail after the crash of 1929. 

Liquidationist is now challenging fascist as the most inaccurately thrown insult in politics. True, it’s no longer politically possible for governments not to stage rescues, but this is a snowballing problem of their own making. The past few decades of easy money created markets so large — nearing five times larger than the world economy — and so intertwined, that the failure of even a midsize bank risks global contagion. 

More than low interest rates, the easy money era was shaped by an increasingly automatic state reflex to rescue — to rescue the economy from disappointing growth even during recoveries, to rescue not only banks and other companies but also households, industries, financial markets and foreign governments in times of crisis. 

The latest bank runs show that the easy money era is not over. Inflation is back so central banks are tightening, but the rescue reflex is still gaining strength. The stronger it grows, the less dynamic capitalism becomes. In stark contrast to the minimalist state of the pre-1929 era, America now leads a rescue culture that keeps growing to new maximalist extremes. 

Today’s troubles have been compared to bank runs of the 19th century, but rescues were rare in those days. America’s founding hostility to concentrated power had left it with limited central government and no central bank. In the absence of a financial system, trust was kept at a personal, not an institutional level. Before the civil war, private banks issued their own currencies and when trust failed, depositors fled. 

Had the US Federal Reserve existed at the time, it would not have helped much. The ethos of contemporary European central banks was to help solvent banks with solid collateral — in practice they were tougher, protecting their own reserves and “turning away their correspondents in need”, as a Fed history puts it. 

A restrained government was a key feature of the industrial revolution, marked by painful downturns and robust recoveries, resulting in strong productivity and higher per capita income growth. Right into the 1960s and 1970s, resistance to state rescues still ran deep, whether the supplicant was a major bank, a major corporation or New York City. 

Though the early 1980s is seen as a pivotal moment of broader government retreat, in fact this era was marked by the rise of rescue culture when Continental Illinois became the first US bank deemed too big to fail. In a move that was radical then, reflexive now, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation extended unlimited protection to Continental depositors — just as it has done for SVB depositors. 

Recent bank runs have been compared to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Triggered in part by regulation that made it impossible for S&Ls to compete in an environment of rising rates, the crisis was resolved by regulators who wound down more than 700 of these “thrifts” at a cost to taxpayers of about $130bn. The first preventive rescue came in the late 1990s, when the Fed organised support for a hedge fund deeply tied to foreign markets, in order to avoid the threat of a systemic financial crisis. 

Those rescues pale next to 2008 and 2020, when the Fed and Treasury smashed records for trillions of dollars created or extended in loans and bailouts to thousands of companies across finance and other industries at home and abroad. In each crisis, rescues held down the corporate default rate to levels that were unexpectedly low, compared with past patterns. They are doing the same now even as rates rise and bank runs begin. 

The hazards are not just moral or speculative, as many insist — they are practical and present. The rescues have led to a massive misallocation of capital and a surge in the number of zombie firms, which contribute mightily to weakening business dynamism and productivity. In the US, total factor productivity growth fell to just 0.5 per cent after 2008, down from about 2 per cent between 1870 and the early 1970s. 

Instead of re-energising the economy, the maximalist rescue culture is bloating and thereby destabilising the global financial system. As fragility grows, each new rescue hardens the case for the next one. 

No one who thinks about it for more than a minute can wax nostalgic for the painful if productive chaos of the pre-1929 era. But too few policymakers recognise that we are at an opposite extreme; constant rescues undermine capitalism. Government intervention eases the pain of crises but over time lowers productivity, economic growth and living standards.

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The DWP has become Britain’s biggest debt collector.

Gordon Brown in The Guardian

Prime Minister Sunak talks about the need for “compassion” from the government this winter. But how far do social security benefits have to fall before our welfare system descends into a form of cruelty?

Take a couple with three children whose universal credit payment is, in theory, £46.11 a day. However, when their payment lands they have just £35, because around a quarter of their benefit has been deducted to pay back the loan they had to take out on joining universal credit to cover the five weeks they were denied benefit. And an extra 5% has been deducted as back payment to their utility company. According to Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) rules, money can be deducted for repayment of advance or emergency loans, and even on behalf of third parties for rent, utilities and service charge payments.

With gas and electricity likely to cost, at a minimum, £7 on cold days like today, and with a council tax contribution to be paid on top, they find that they have just £25. 80 a day left over, or £5.16 per person, to pay for food and all other essentials. Even if the Scottish child poverty payment comes their way, clothes, travel, toiletries and home furnishings remain out of reach. Parents like them are just about the best accountants I could ever meet , but you can’t budget with nothing to budget with. And that’s why so many have had to tell their children they can’t afford presents this Christmas. No wonder they need the weekly bag of food they get from the local food bank. But they also need a toiletries and hygiene bank, a clothes bank, a bedding bank, a home furnishings bank, and a baby bank.

The DWP has now become the country’s biggest debt collector, seizing money that should never have had to be paid back, from people who cannot afford to pay anyway. In fact, the majority of families on universal credit do not receive the full benefit that the DWP advertises. More than 20% is deducted at source from each benefit payment made to a million households, leaving them surviving on scraps and charity as they run out of cash in the days before their next payment. In total, 2 million children are in families suffering deductions.

Gordon Brown with workers at the Big Hoose multi-bank project, Fife, 8 November 2022. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

When the money runs out, and the food bank tokens are gone, parents become desperate and ashamed that their children cannot be fed, and fall victim to loan sharks hiding in the back alleys who exploit hardship and compound it, and prey on pain and inflame it.

The case for each community having its own multi-bank – its reservoir of supplies for those without – is more urgent this winter than at any time I have known. Since the Trussell Trust’s brilliant expansion of UK food banks, creative local and national charities have pioneered community banks of all kinds offering free clothes, furnishings, bedding, electrical goods and, in the case of the national charity In Kind Direct, toiletries.

In Fife, Amazon, PepsiCo, Scotmid Fishers and other companies helped to set up a multi-bank. It’s a simple idea that could be replicated nationwide: they meet unmet needs by using unused goods. The companies have the goods people need, and the charities know the people who need them. With a coordinating charity, a warehouse to amass donations and a proper referral system, multi-banks can ensure their goods alleviate poverty.

But the charities know themselves that they can never do enough. With the state privatisations of gas, water, electricity and telecoms, the government gave up on responsibility for essential national assets. But now, with what is in effect the privatisation of welfare, our government is giving up on its responsibility to those in greatest need – passing the buck to charities, which cannot cope. Just as breadwinners cannot afford bread, food banks are running out of food.

Charities, too,are at the mercy of exceptionally high demand and the changing circumstances of donors whose help can be withdrawn as suddenly as it has been given. And so while voluntary organisations – and not the welfare state – are currently our last line of defence, the gap they have to bridge is too big for them to ever be the country’s safety net.

According to Prof Donald Hirsch and the team researching minimum income standards at Loughborough University, benefit levels for those out of work now fall 50% short of what most of us would think is a minimum living income, with their real value falling faster in 2022 than at any time for 50 years since up-ratings were introduced. And still 800,000 of the poorest children in England go without free school meals.

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I’m so cold I live in my bed – like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Marin

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When it comes to helping with heating, the maximum that any family will receive, no matter its size, is £24 a week emergency help to cover what the government accepts is the £50 a week typical cost of heating a home. From April, the extra payments will be even less – just £16 to cover nearly the typical £60 a week they now expect gas and electricity to cost. And then, as Jeremy Hunt says, help with heating will become a thing of the past.

One hundred years ago, Winston Churchill was moved to talk of the unacceptable contrast between the accumulated excesses of unjustified privilege and “the gaping sorrows of the left-out millions”. Our long term priority must be to persuade a highly unequal country of the need for a decent minimum income for all, but our immediate demand must be for the government to suspend for the duration of this energy crisis the deductions that will soon cause destitution.

Ministers have been forced to change tack before. In April 2021 the government reduced the cap on the proportion of income deducted from 30% to 25%. During the first phase of Covid, ministers temporarily halted all deductions. In April, they discouraged utility firms from demanding them, but deductions as high as 30% of income are still commonplace.

There is no huge cost to the government in suspending deductions, for it will get its money back later. But this could be a lifesaver for millions now suffering under a regime that seems vindictive beyond austerity. Let this be a Christmas of compassion, instead of cruelty.

A political backlash against monetary policy is looming

Martin Sandbu in The FT

Three weeks ago, Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister, retweeted a link to an article by a Finnish academic together with the following quote: “There is something seriously wrong with the prevailing ideas of monetary policy when central banks protect their credibility by driving economies into recession.” 

Defenders of those prevailing ideas predictably pushed back, warning against second-guessing independent central banks or not valuing their credibility. But defensiveness is the wrong response. Not just because Marin didn’t actually criticise any central bank actions. But, more profoundly, because avoiding a debate over whether our macroeconomic regime is fit for purpose is more perilous than having one. 

Comparisons with the 1970s often fail to notice one important lesson of that decade: a macroeconomic regime that cannot justify itself will be toppled, first intellectually, then politically. It was from the ashes of 1970s monetary chaos that theories were born justifying independent central banks with a mandate to keep inflation low. Before the century was out, independent inflation-targeting was de rigueur in most advanced economies. 

Forty years on, a new intellectual and political reckoning would be less surprising than the absence of one. The “great moderation” produced by the 1980s monetary revolution has in many countries long been accompanied by stagnant wages for the low paid. The glacial recovery from the global financial crisis prompted the world’s two biggest central banks to revise their policy framework during the pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank vowed to tolerate a period of higher inflation if employment had further to rise or there would be little room to loosen policy in case of a downturn. But this new attitude fell at the first hurdle. 

With cost of living crises biting and recessions looming in key advanced economies, what are the odds of avoiding a more profound reckoning for much longer? Marin is not the only national leader expressing unease about central banks. French president Emmanuel Macron recently worried aloud about “experts and European monetary policymakers telling us we must crush European demand to contain inflation better”. 

Precisely because central bankers are independent, it falls to political leaders to tell their citizens why it is right to meet Russian energy blackmail with actions to clamp down further on incomes and jobs. They would be remiss if they did not question whether this is the best we can do. 

In comparison, central bankers have it easy. They have legally imposed inflation-fighting mandates, which are not for them to question. And they have an argument: that losing their “credibility” — by which they mean people no longer believe they can keep inflation low — will cost even more jobs and lost income. 

But the credibility of central banks itself is only as good as the credibility of the macroeconomic regime as a whole. That is not to say central bank independence should be jettisoned, but to ask openly whether it actually works for the economy. 

In pursuit of individual mandates central banks may be collectively overtightening, as Maurice Obstfeld has suggested. Or monetary policy uncoordinated with fiscal policy may be making matters worse, as Marin hinted in follow-up comments. 

The IMF has warned governments against budgeting “at cross-purposes” with monetary tightening. But raising interest rates puts monetary policy at cross-purposes with fiscal policy priorities such as investing in the green transition or, indeed, in energy infrastructure that would itself remedy energy-induced inflation. Even if monetary considerations should take priority, such monetary dominance is undoubtedly something to be democratically debated, not technocratically imposed. 

It may even be that central bankers are not independent enough but cave in to the political pressure arising from each new monthly record in current inflation, rather than coolly focusing on their benign medium-term forecasts. 

Like in the 1980s, in time bright economists will suggest better ways of designing monetary policy against energy price shocks. And unless we have a lucky escape from a sharp downturn this winter, a political backlash is surely coming too. The alternative to openly debating these issues in a democratic space is to let that backlash fester until it breaks out in the more radical and dangerous form of a populist assault on institutions. Central banks’ credibility would not be worth much then.

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Boris Johnson claims the UK is rooting out dirty Russian money. That’s ludicrous

 Oliver Bullough in The Guardian

We were warned about Vladimir Putin – about his intentions, his nature, his mindset – and, because it was profitable for us, we ignored those warnings and welcomed his friends and their money. It is too late for us to erase our responsibility for helping Putin build his system. But we can still dismantle it and stop it coming back.

Russia is a mafia state, and its elite exists to enrich itself. Democracy is an existential threat to that theft, which is why Putin has crushed it at home and seeks to undermine it abroad. For decades, London has been the most important place not only for Russia’s criminal elite to launder its money, but also for it to stash its wealth. We have been the Kremlin’s bankers, and provided its elite with the financial skills it lacks. Its kleptocracy could not exist without our assistance. The best time to do something about this was 30 years ago – but the second best time is right now.

We journalists have long been writing about this, but it is not simply overheated rhetoric from overexcited hacks. Parliament’s intelligence and security committee wrote two years ago that our investigative agencies are underfunded, our economy is awash with dirty money, and oligarchs have bought influence at the very top of our society.

The committee heard evidence from senior law enforcement and security officials. It laid out detailed, careful suggestions for what Britain should do to limit the damage Putin has already done to our society. Instead of learning from the report and implementing its proposals, Boris Johnson delayed its publication until after the general election and then, when further delay became impossible, dismissed those who took its sober analysis seriously as “Islingtonian remainers” seeking to delegitimise Brexit.

That is the crucial context for Johnson’s ludicrous claim this week to the House of Commons that no government could “conceivably be doing more to root out corrupt Russian money”. That is not only demonstrably untrue, it is an inversion of reality. On leaving the European Union, we were told that we could launch our own independent sanctions regime – and this week we saw the fruit of it: a response markedly weaker than those of Brussels and Washington.

The Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, speaking with parliamentary privilege on Tuesday, listed the names of 35 alleged key Putin “enablers” whom the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has asked to be sanctioned. Blocking the assets of everyone on that list and their close relatives would be a truly significant response from Johnson to the gravity of the situation. But it would still only be a start.

Relying solely on sanctions now is like stamping on a car’s accelerator when you’ve failed for years to maintain the engine, pump up the tyres or fill up the tank, yet still expect it to hit 95mph. Other announcements in the last couple of days have amounted to nothing more than painting on go-faster stripes. Tackling the UK’s role in enabling Putin’s kleptocracy, and containing the threat his allies pose to democracy here and elsewhere, will require far more than just banning golden visas or Kremlin TV stations.

For a start, we need to know who owns our country. Some 87,000 properties in England and Wales are owned via offshore companies – which prevents us seeing who their true owners are or if they were bought with criminal money. Companies House makes no checks on registrations, which is why UK shell structures have featured in most Russian money-laundering scandals. Imposing transparency on the ownership of dirty money in this way would strike at the heart of the London money-laundering machine. Governments have promised to do this “when parliamentary time allows” for years, yet the time has never been found, and instead they’ve listened to concerns from the City that such regulations would harm its competitiveness.

Above all, we need to fund our enforcement agencies as generously as oligarchs fund their lawyers: you can’t fight grand corruption on the cheap. Even good policies of recent years, such as the “unexplained wealth orders” of 2017, which were designed to tackle criminally owned assets hidden behind clever shell structures, have largely failed because investigators lack the funds to use them. We must spend what it takes to drive kleptocratic cash out of the country.

Johnson is not the first prime minister to fail to rise to the challenge – Tony Blair and David Cameron both schmoozed with Putin even when it was obvious what kind of a leader he was. And I don’t think Johnson is personally corrupt or tainted by Russian money; he’s lazy, flippant and unwilling to launch expensive, laborious initiatives that will bring results only long after he himself has left office and is unable to take the credit for them. It is time, however, for his colleagues to step up and force him into action. This is a serious moment, and it requires serious people willing to invest in the long-term security of our country and the future of democracy everywhere.

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