by lakeweb » Wed 16 Nov 2005, 22:26:09
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rolypolyman', 'A')nyhow I am trying to understand the money multiplier, which makes no sense....
Well then, how about from the horses mouth?
http://landru.i-link-2.net/monques/mmm2.html
What Makes Money Valuable?
In the United States neither paper currency nor deposits have value as
commodities. Intrinsically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper,
deposits merely book entries...
Mainly, it is the confidence people have that they will be able to
exchange such money for other financial assets and for real goods and
services whenever they choose to do so....
---
Who Creates Money?
Then, bankers discovered that they could make loans merely by giving
their promises to pay, or bank notes, to borrowers. In this way, banks
began to create money. More notes could be issued than the gold and
coin on hand because only a portion of the notes outstanding would be
presented for payment at any one time. Enough metallic money had to be
kept on hand, of course, to redeem whatever volume of notes was
presented for payment.
Transaction deposits are the modern counterpart of bank notes. It was a
small step from printing notes to making book entries crediting
deposits of borrowers, which the borrowers in turn could "spend" by
writing checks, thereby "printing" their own money.
---
Read carefully....
How do open market purchases add to bank reserves and deposits? Suppose
the Federal Reserve System, through its trading desk at the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, buys $10,000 of Treasury bills from a dealer
in U. S. government securities.(3) In today's world of computerized
financial transactions, the Federal Reserve Bank pays for the
securities with an "telectronic" check drawn on itself.(4) Via its
"Fedwire" transfer network, the Federal Reserve notifies the dealer's
designated bank (Bank A) that payment for the securities should be
credited to (deposited in) the dealer's account at Bank A. At the same
time, Bank A's reserve account at the Federal Reserve is credited for
the amount of the securities purchase. The Federal Reserve System has
added $10,000 of securities to its assets, which it has paid for, in
effect, by creating a liability on itself in the form of bank reserve
balances. These reserves on Bank A's books are matched by $10,000 of
the dealer's deposits that did not exist before.
And it gets better...
Assuming that the banks holding the $9,000 of deposits created in Stage
1 in turn make loans equal to their excess reserves, then loans and
deposits will rise by a further $8,100 in the second stage of
expansion. This process can continue until deposits have risen to the
point where all the reserves provided by the initial purchase of
government securities by the Federal Reserve System are just sufficient
to satisfy reserve requirements against the newly created deposits.
Best, Dan.