i’m just going through some basic financial philosophy discussions and i’m just trying to clarify the basics.
how much money is there in total, in the world?
up until yesterday i had assumed that the total amount of money in the world is zero ($0) because what one person has in bank account, another person has in debt at the same time, since money is literally nothing else than a codified form of debt.
now i’m wondering, is this even accurate? if a big bank takes out a loan from the central bank, say, it takes $1B in loan, then it has $1B in money on the account but also $1B in liability at the same time, so the sum is zero. However, there is an interest on the loan, let’s say 2%. Then the bank owes $1.02B actually, while only having $1B on the account. So the total amount isn’t zero, it’s negative. Is this correct?
This diagram is very outdated and doesn’t exactly answer your question but it is very pretty:
Source: xkcd
Fractional reserve banking. You’re assuming a 1:1 ratio of debt to assets. That’s not the case at all. A bank can have $1 mil on hand and lend out $10 mil plus, as long as they have a high enough percentage available for withdrawals.
Banks have an infinite money cheat code. In a way. If person gets a loan from a bank, $10 million, which requires the bank to have $1 million on hand. That person then uses the $10 million to pay people. If those people then go… put their money in the bank… The bank now has the same $11 million on hand they started with, a guy who owes them $10 million plus interest, and could now theoretically loan out another $9 million to another person. At that point they’d have $2 million on hand, 2 guys who owe them $19 million. Still within their 10% cash reserves. But wait… one more thing. I was assuming a 10% reserve as a rule. But in same cases they don’t even require banks to keep any specific percentage on hand. So the debt to assets ratio could become even more insane.
the total amount isn’t zero, it’s negative. Is this correct?
Negative at a 10:1 ratio, maybe even more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
The Federal Reserve does not impose a reserve requirement, but pays interest on reserve balances, influencing the general interest rate level in the economy in that way.[19]
Just as taking out a new loan expands the money supply, the repayment of bank loans reduces the money supply.[20]
A bank can have $1 mil on hand and lend out $10 mil plus, as long as they have a high enough percentage available for withdrawals.
yeah but they have to pay back the $10M eventually, at least formally, so they have that as debt (or liability, or whatever they call it) at the same time. thus the sum is zero, where they were before.
In this example the bank started with $1 million total. Loaned out $10 million. If the guy paid back $10 mil, the bank would have 10x their starting money.
No, because they gave that $10 million to someone else first.
The bank became $10,000,000 in debt, then recovered it (with interest) what the bank gets in the end is the interest above the $10,000,000.
An example would be that a bank goes into $10,000,000 debt on paper, recovers $11,000,000 including interest, now bank has $1,000,000 extra due to it’s risk that the person paid their debt.
Assuming the bank is FDIC insured - If that money wasn’t paid back, the bank would have to sell that debt to a collector to get some of it back. If they did their risk calculations correctly than enough people would pay rather than default that they make a sizeable amount of money. If they didn’t, then the federal government takes over the bank, sells it to someone who can afford to handle the debt/credit load, and covers accounts due any lack of funds.
In theory this means that the bank is still required to keep their risk low enough to maintain their FDIC status. In practice it’s a lot more complicated and sometimes (but rarely) banks don’t get punished for risky bets that don’t pay off.
Hopefully the millionaires can make enough. It’s been thought out there.
In fractional reserve banking, money and debt are not a one to one ratio as your post suggested. It’s often a 9 to one or more. Many countries don’t even have reserve requirements. After 2008, one big change was creating contingent capital to hold banks accountable. That is, in the event of losses they can’t pay back due tonexcessive risk taking, they pull from bank stock and convert to funds to repay debts before governments bail them out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
As to how much money in the world?
Not sure if anyone has a good grip on that as each country has their own systems, what counts as money, etc…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
It’s probably easier and somewhat accurate to say there is infinite money. We just make as much as we need, on demand.
Edit. A bank takes a loan and pay 2%, but they lend it 10 times over at 4% the money supply grows very quickly, 2% vs 4%x10, but if the loans went to productive things, the economy should be bigger, so this should not be inflationary.
Nobody manages money supply vs inflation if that is what you’re getting at. These days it’s mostly interest rates and CEO groupthink of layoffs to control inflation.
Nobody manages money supply vs inflation
It’s managed via interest rates, which to a degree are controlled by the world bank.
It’s like you read and restated what I said. ;)
I may have beaten you to it by like 1 minute.
yeah i’m actually asking not so much with inflation in mind, more out of general interest into how things work. i’m just trying to understand the distribution of money and wealth throughout the world, for which it would help to understand the total sum of all money, and of all wealth (which is not the same!) in the first place.
money and wealth is not the same btw. by money i mean money issued by the central bank (i.e. USD) while wealth is the sum of all assets, which can include ownership of land and real estate, for example.
i suspect that the total amount of money in the world is close to zero, because what the central bank gives out in loans, becomes liabilities to the loan holder to pay back, so the sum of money + liability is zero. since you (at least formally) have to pay back what you took out as loan. meanwhile the amount of total wealth in the world is larger than zero, because the amount of total real estate in the world is larger than zero. so these two terms are not the same at all.
sum of money + liability is zero
Not everywhere practices the same forms of loaning money into existance, plus quantitative easing/tightening.
Do you consider gold money?
Do you consider gold money?
no, i mean in today’s money system.
Money is fundamentally made up. It’s whatever the other party is willing to accept as a token that they trust will in turn be accepted by someone else they want a service or item from. Fiat currency just has its backing from being used in transactions with the state.
It also follows that the total value of global money is entirely dependent on people’s trust in it. The nominal value of global money supply, whether it is 1 quintillion USD or 100 trillion USD, doesn’t directly affect the worth I, or anyone else, ascribe to having 1 USD myself. It’s the things that I perceive myself to be able to trade that 1 USD for that do.
What I’m trying to say is that the philosophical idea you’re looking for might be more along the lines of “how much of their own resources (time and belongings) is the combined global populace willing to trade for a promise of trading it for someone else’s resources in the future”.
It is considered by many to be harder currency than currency, even today.
You’re right. All the debts and all the credits add up to zero. Thus all the actual money, adds up to zero.
In your example, the interest on the loan the central pays back, is just a debt on someone else’s balance sheet, offsetting the credit that was given to the central bank. So it too balances to zero.
In my opinion, money is not just debt. It simply looks that way because our current monetary system revolves so much around debt.
I see it as a valuation placed on work already done. And yes, sometimes people are paid unfairly, but it still only measures whst your labour was worth to the employer. If they don’t pay what you’re worth, their fault for having a crap sense of value.
Money exists for a real purpose - to make all exchanges fairer (whether it currently does that is irrelevant) and therefore should not be dismissed as “fake.”
This is analogous to the power grid of the country - electricity comes from so many different sources, like Wind, Coal and Hydro, and it then is utilised in all sorts of ways to keep peoples day to day lives running. Similarly, power we tap into at home is the sum of work already done by power stations. Like the electrical grid, Modern finance shifts around value willy-nilly, skimming value off the top of several millions of common people just to dump into harebrained schemes, like investments.
All money, similarly, ultimatrly exists because some human did work or made a machine, beast or force of nature do work for them. Any other money is simply circulated, not based on value that’s created.
This is why printing more money to pay off government debts eventually causes inflation. If it doesn’t keep pace exactly with the rate of value added to the country (which is hard to know) then it’s just diluted, because the ratio of cash to work done gets bigger and bigger; not every new printed dollar is tied to a dollarsworth of work done.
In my opinion, money is not just debt.
Money is literally an “I owe you” note. It is issued by a central bank, and has no intrinsic value. The entire value of money is based on trust, that this “I owe You” note will good when you need to spend the value of whatever you did to earn the note.
That’s actually the valuing (wealth) definition of money. But money doesn’t have to be that way. There are economic theories that propose decoupling value from debt by having two different mechanisms for each function. Part of the inequality reproduction problem is that both debt and wealth are coupled in our current fiat money systems without any real underlying value equivalence.
First forms of money made sense when money was made of valuable metals. The value was intrinsic to the physical object. Debt was managed by paper accounting. Or paper money like in China. Then paper debt was based on gold, like the early xix century money. Finally, modern fiat money stopped being backed up by gold and today it is purely debt, though it is still used as value. Which has accelerated the negative effects of capitalist labor extraction.
Like, Jeff Bezos doesn’t do $55k per minute of labor. But, amazon does extract and steal that amount of labor and funnels it towards his pockets (actually steals much more). While the workers receive an infinitesimal fraction of their own labor. They can do that because there’s no friction from having to transform said labor into an actually valuable medium, like silver or gold.
This is why the other response to OP’s question is that fiat money is actually infinite. The us treasury snaps their fingers and billions come into existence. It’s pure abstract value.
up until yesterday i had assumed that the total amount of money in the world is zero ($0) because what one person has in bank account, another person has in debt at the same time, since money is literally nothing else than a codified form of debt.
Nah, money is constantly growing. Whenever anyone does anything of value, there is more money. People are alive and doing things every second of every day. Unless there’s a catastrophic bubonic-plague level event, the total value of money in the world is constantly increasing.
Money isn’t real so this is a meaningless question. The total amount isn’t negative though. Consider that the total GDP of the world is positive.
financial philosophy
Surely this would just be economics, no? Especially as your question pertains to the money supply, which is squarely in the domain of macroeconomics.
how much money is there in total, in the world?
I can only summarize what my economics course at uni covered, but you’d have to start with defining what should be counted as money. Even if we looked at an isolated island nation, what is and isn’t money is not readily apparent. If I write out a check/cheque drawn against my bank account, is that money? Can my cheque be circulated as if it were currency? How about a banknote against the gold reserves of a national bank or treasury? What if that banknote isn’t directly redeemable for gold or anything, but is a floating currency? What if it’s neither redeemable nor is managed as if a currency, and yet it is readily accepted by Canadians and has actual buying power at a national retail chain.
Then we get to second-order candidates that could be money (or not): goods and services, land and houses, ongoing businesses, these all have some value and are tradable. Are these money? Are they at least a store of value? If a company is incorporated and is imbued with some starting investment, and then grows that value through business operations, does that create money?
To deal with this messy reality, economists have multiple definitions for money supply, found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply. If two people use differing definitions, then of course they’ll conclude different values for the world’s total money supply.
Then the bank owes $1.02B actually, while only having $1B on the account. So the total amount isn’t zero, it’s negative
Not correct, because: 1) this fails to account for the interest the bank can generate through re-lending the money, and 2) interest is not a front loaded charge but is an expense over time.
For #1, it would be some profligate mismanagement of money for a bank to just obtain a loan “for the lolz” and there would be some sort of plan to actually make it do work. In that sense, capital should be viewed as if it were a powderkeg: very capable if applied carefully, very dangerous if mishandled. As for whether or not a bank’s future revenue can be immediately reflected on their books – since the revenue is only theoretical yet the central bank loan is already a certainty – that’s a question for accountants.
For #2, the mistake is that interest – although continually accruing, or by other terms – is somehow entirely due at the very beginning, which is not how most loans are structured. At any given point in time, yes, the bank could have negative net value, but they could also have positive net value, depending on their cash inflows. And even with negative cash flow, accounts receivable could still boost their net value because future value is still value.
My recommendation would be to review some basics in economics or accountability, as these sorts of questions have been hashed out over the course of hundreds of years. And even when economic theories don’t exactly describe this reality, they are still useful as models, which is still more rigorous an approach than divination.
For #1, it would be some profligate mismanagement of money for a bank to just obtain a loan “for the lolz”
yeah i know that no bank just takes out a loan “for the lolz” but it helps to understand what would happen if it did.
