Ben Bernanke eta ‘dirua inprimatzea’

Jadanik ikusia dugu[1].

Baina ona litzateke berriz gogoratzea, orain Bernanke-k Fed utzi duenean.

Izan ere, hona hemen zer zioen[2]2012ko martxoaren 29an:

 “Now, you might ask the question, well, the Fed is going out and buying 2 trillion[3] dollars of securities – how did we pay for that? And the answer is that we paid for those securities by crediting the bank accounts of the people who sold them to us, and those accounts, at the banks, showed up as reserves that the banks would hold with the Fed.Sothe Fed is a bank for the banks. Banks can hold deposit accounts with the Fed, essentially, and those are called reserve accounts. And so as the purchases of securities occurred, theway we paid for them was basically by increasing the amount of reserves that banks had in their accounts with the Fed.”

“Sometimes you hear that the Fed is printing money in order to pay for the securities we acquire. And I’ve talked about that in some, you know, in giving some conceptual examples.But as a literal fact, the Fed is not printing money to acquire these securities, and you can see it from the balance sheet here, the light blue line is basically flat. The amount of currency in circulation has not been affected by these activities.”

“…reserve balances. Those are that accounts that banks, commercial banks, hold with the Fed, and they are assets of the banking system and they are liabilities of the Fed, and that’s basically how we paid for those securities.And so, the banking system has a large quantity of these reserves, but they are electronic entries at the Fed. They basically just sit there. They’re not in circulation. They’re not part of any broad measure of the money supply. They’re part of what’s called the monetary base, but again, they’re not,they certainly aren’t cash.

Beraz, FED ezin da dirurik gabe geratu, inoiz ez.

Horixe da, behin eta berriz, DTM-koek errepikatu dutena.

Antzekoa zioen zergei buruz aritzerakoan[4].

Honela zioen Bernanke-k 2009[5]:

Asked if it’s tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, “It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.“

Hortaz, berriz, FED ezin da dirurik gabe geratu, inoiz ez.

Eta Bill Mitchell-ek gogoratzen digunez[6],

“And then we might just recall what the current US Federal Reserve Governor matter-of-factly told the US Congress (Committee on Financial Services) on July 14, 2011 (Ron Paul is part of that Committee). The Chair Congressman Duffy asked him:

DUFFY: … When — when you buy assets, where does that money come from?

BERNANKE: We create reserves in the banking system which are just held with the Fed. It does not go out into the public.

We can argue about the technicalities but the essence is that there is no revenue-constraint operating here.

The discussion continued:

DUFFY: Does it come from tax dollars, though, to buy those assets?

BERNANKE: It does not.

Once again technicalities aside (for example, the purchase of interest-bearing assets from the private sector reduces private incomes which some might consider to be a “tax”), this reinforces the fact that the government, in this case, the federal reserve, is not revenue-constrained.

DUFFY: Are you basically printing money to buy those assets?

BERNANKE: We’re not printing money. We’re creating reserves in the banking system.

This is the electronic version of “printing money” which in Modern Monetary Theory we refer to as adding financial assets to the non-government sector.

The point here though is that the central bank acts as “part” of the overall US government (consolidated treasury-central bank) and can credit bank accounts at will. Please read my blog – [Nationalising the banks[7]] – for more discussion on this point.

Think about what a US dollar is. Anyone holding one can present them (or the electronic version, deposits) to the US government in return for a tax credit (payment of their tax liabilities). So when the Federal Reserve credits bank accounts it is really providing Treasury tax credits to the holders of those accounts.”

Beraz, dirua ez da inprimatzen, konputagailuaren teklatua erabiltzen da.

Argi?

Funtsezko kontua da.

Ekonomialari askok, gehiegik, ez dakite deus horretaz, kazetariek are gutxiago…

Eta EHn?