Competition and Credit Control

This chapter explores the 1971 Competition and Credit Control financial liberalization, which saw the British state relinquish most of its direct controls over credit creation and instead rely on interest rates to govern lending. In the 1960s, Britain’s worsening trade performance had resulted in a series of currency crises, to which Harold Wilson’s government responded in 1967 by devaluing sterling. In aid of devaluation, the government enacted a series of contractionary measures. An important element of this disciplining strategy was the tightening of monetary policy through state-imposed lending ceilings. However, people proved resistant to this reduction in their living standards, and thus endeavoured to combat income losses by extending their bank borrowing. Further, due to falling profitability, companies faced a liquidity crisis that threatened to derail the export recovery. As such, the state authorities sought to use the lending ceilings to both restrict credit to persons and extend credit to companies. This hybrid disciplining/palliation strategy was extremely difficult to operate with the blunt monetary instruments at hand. In addition, the lending ceilings were becoming increasingly politicized. Consequently, the Treasury and Bank sought to discover a better system of monetary governance. It was the Bank that designed the uniquely arm’s-length CCC proposals. Yet these proposals were accepted by the Treasury and government in significant part because they appeared to offer a depoliticized mechanism through which the state could redistribute credit resources from persons to companies in aid of augmenting Britain’s world market competitiveness in a moment of intensifying crisis.

Treasury Single Account and Fraud Management in Nigeria: Benefits and Challenges

Treasury systems are designed to manage several critical aspects of public expenditure management. Key treasury system functions include financial planning, control of the budgetary process and management of government cash flow. However, for any treasury system to be effective, government has to ensure that it has sufficient liquidity to deal with payments, while ensuring that such liquidity costs are kept within the barest minimum. TSA is a (system of) unified structure of government bank accounts enabling optimal utilization and consolidation of government cash resources. In TSA a bank account or a set of linked bank accounts is used for all government transactions all its receipts and payments and gets a consolidated view of its cash position at any given time. This study investigates Treasury Single Account (TSA) and Fraud Management: Benefits and Challenges in Nigeria. Adopting a survey design, the study made use of primary data collected mainly through administering a set of questionnaire to104employeesofselected three Corporate Affairs Commissions in South-East, Nigeria comprising Enugu, Imo and Abia.100copiesofthequestionnaireoutof the total number of retrieved copies of questionnaire were validly completed and useful for analyses. Findings interlaid revealed that: TSA significantly reduced the incidence of fraud in public enterprises; TSA in public enterprises to a large extent reduces the credit creation of deposit money banks. The study recommends that the TSA policy will be effective if, the Fiscal Sunshine Bill is to be put in place, and if enacted will open up all financial activities of government in a way that there will be no more hiding place for those who divert or loot government money. Just like the Fiscal Sunshine Act is in place with budgeting process, implementation and contract awards, should be open for Nigerians to see how both revenues are generated and how public money is being spent by those in government, and why; Government should overhaul the capacity of the Federal Ministry of Finance and the CBN in order to cope effectively with the challenges associated with enforcement of the provisions of the TSA.

When Good Cash Goes “BADs”: The Role of Bankers’ Acceptance Drafts as a Cash Substitute in China’s Economy

Bankers’ acceptance drafts (BADs) are transferrable promissory notes that are designed to facilitate trade and that circulate among firms much like large-denomination bank notes. They play an important role in facilitating sales between industrial companies in China, particularly during straitened economic times. They have also been used to commit widescale fraud as bankers took advantage of the lack of insight regulators had into BADs’ circulation. However, BADs’ true value is as a tool that banks—and, to a lesser extent, companies—have repeatedly used to meet the often contradictory demands made of them by Beijing as it regulates the economy. In the years after the 2008 stimulus, banks used BADs to harvest deposits (companies must place a portion of the face value of a BAD issued on their behalf on deposit at the issuing bank), allowing them to meet strict loan-to-deposit ratios even as the practice resulted in ballooning off-balance-sheet credit creation. When Beijing cracked down on local government borrowing, some local governments got around the strictures by structuring BADs in creative ways that ensured ongoing access to funding. And starting in 2018, banks met Beijing’s demand that they reduce risk while increasing lending to small private companies—a group banks regard as the riskiest potential borrowers in the economy—by massively increasing their discounting of BADs, an approach that technically realized the competing demands but had none of the stimulatory effects Beijing had hoped for. This article will look at how BADs—and their counterpart, commercial acceptance drafts—give banks and state firms the flexibility to balance the political demands of the state with their own perceived interests. It will focus on how banks used BADs in 2018 and 2019 to deal with Beijing’s concerns about lack of funding for small private firms.

How to create a banking & monetary system for the 21st century: the Huerta de Soto and Chicago plans reworked

Every economics textbook will tell you that banking is at its core a process of intermediation designed to facilitate the transfer of savings into investment. In some respects fractional reserve banking does this much too well. It is a system which takes deposits and lends them out. The problem is that this process is built on – for want of a better word – deceit. Borrowers are offered secure term contracts, while depositors are promised their money back whenever they want it. This deceit only works because most depositors are happy to keep their money in the banking system most of the time. Supporters of fractional reserve banking would say – so what. The fact that the system exploits this trait of depositors – to keep their money in banks rather than under their mattresses – is surely a good thing. Without such a system, lending would not happen to anywhere near the same degree, credit creation would be severely impeded and economic activity adversely affected. The problem with this system is that it has a tendency to max out on credit creation in the good times, but chronically undersupply credit in the bad times – thus greatly accentuating the natural ups and downs of the business cycle. And over a course of time, it results in an accumulation of debt in society that is not economically very healthy. Recent events underline these concerns. Any proposed reform of the banking and monetary system needs to be able to illustrate that such a system will be capable of delivering the «right amount» of credit in good times and bad – so as not to impede economic activity in downturns, but also not to act as an accelerator for the good times. We can refer to this as the «optimal» quantity of credit over the course of the business cycle. In this paper, I assess two models. One is a derivative of the so-called «Chicago Plan», and set out in the IMF Working Paper by Michael Kumhof and Jaromir Benes titled The Chicago Plan Revisited published in August 2012. The other is an equity-based proposal which I call the «Huerta de Soto Plan», and derived from proposals set out by Professor Jesus Huerta de Soto in his book Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, published as far back as 1998. The Kumhof/Benes proposal puts monetary policy at the heart of the credit creation process in a way that is far more effective than under the current system. Governments end up achieving far greater control of the levers of monetary power than under today’s fractional reserve system. By contrast, the Huerta de Soto Plan opts for a free-market based approach to money resulting in a free and genuinely open market for credit that is driven entirely by the forces of competition and where governments and central banks have no role to play in monetary policy. This paper spells out the mechanics underlying both plans, and assesses their relative merits. Neither plan is perfect. Both propose extremely radical reform of the modern monetary system, and they can result in – I believe – some potentially very inflationary and damaging behavioral effects in the process of the transition from the present system to what is proposed. The Kumhof/Benes proposal is far and away the weaker of the two – not only would it be economically and politically unworkable – the behavioral consequences would be harder to control. By contrast, the Huerta de Soto Plan – although more radical in many respects – would also be more palatable, albeit it would need certain tweaks, and the adverse behavioral impacts arising from the implementation of this plan would be somewhat easier to offset. Key words: Huerta de Soto, Kumhof/Benes, Chicago Plan, Fractional Reser-ve, Mutuals, Quantitative Easing. JEL Classification: B31, B53, E42, E52.

Impact of Monetary Policy on Bank Credit in Nigeria

Objective – The aim of this study is to examine the impact of monetary policy on credit creation ability of banks in Nigeria. Specifically, it investigates the impact of monetary policy rate, money supply, liquidity ratio, and change in maximum lending rate on bank credit in Nigeria. Design/methodology – A monthly time series data from 2007-2019 were sourced from the Central Bank’s of Nigeria statistical bulletin. The sourced data was subjected to multiple regression analysis using the fully modified ordinary least square regression to estimate the parameters of the model. Results – Findings reveal that money supply significantly and positively influence bank credit in Nigeria; while liquidity ratio significantly but negatively influence bank credit in Nigeria. On the contrary, monetary policy rate and maximum lending rate were found not to significantly affect bank credit in the case of Nigeria.Policy Recommendation - Study therefore, recommend that monetary authorities especially, the Central Bank of Nigeria should pay more attention to lowering the liquidity ratio while increasing money supply in order to engender banks credit creation ability and further stimulate the Nigerian economy for growth.

The Impacts of China's Shadow Banking Credit Creation on the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy

This paper researches the impact that shadow banking in China has upon credit creation and the potential effectiveness of monetary policy. Using a credit creation model, we derive the effect that shadow banking has upon the money multiplier and the money supply. The model shows that shadow banking can change the money multiplier, potentially increasing it during an expansion and decreasing it during a contraction. Introducing shadow banking in a CC-LM model results in a shift of the CC and LM curves resulting in a higher equilibrium output. A vector autoregressive model is used to empirically estimate the impact of shadow banking deposits' growth rate on the growth rates of the broad money supply, GDP, and the CPI. The results show that shadow banking's credit creation function in China has a pro-cyclical characteristic, potentially reducing the money supply's controllability and increasing the difficulty in effectively regulating monetary policy. This paper introduces shadow banking into the currency creation process of traditional commercial banks, accounting for the reserve requirement ratio, the excess reserve ratio, the shadow bank leakage rate, and the reserved deduction rate. Future research can determine whether coordinating monetary policy and leverage ratio regulation mitigates the impact of shadow banking. Another area of research is how the shadow banking of non-financial companies affect monetary policy.

ADB COVID-19 Policy Database: A Guide

The ADB COVID-19 Policy Database displays the measures taken and monetary amounts announced or estimated by the 68 members of the Asian Development Bank, two institutions, and nine other economies (i.e., a total of 79 entries) until May 2020, to fight the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Measures are classified according to (i) the path a given measure takes to affect the financial system, spending, production, and so forth, i.e., provide liquidity, encourage credit creation by the financial sector, or directly fund households; and (ii) the effects on the financial statements of households, businesses, government, i.e., whether the measures create more debt or more income. This gives a total of nine categories. When the information is available, we report the amounts that governments have announced (intentions) they will allocate to each measure (in many cases, no amount is provided because the measure does not entail spending, e.g., interest rate reductions). These are a mix of actual amounts and estimates, today and in the future (without specifying when). The database will be updated, revised, and expanded as information is released. It is available at https://covid19policy.adb.org/.

Avoiding a Great Depression in the Era of Climate Change

If loan issue falls faster than repayments, money becomes increasingly scarce, leading to deflationary pressures and unemployment. Central banks have responded by ‘quantitative easing’, a regressive form of money printing which buys off the national debt. Such credit could instead finance green infrastructure, health and social care, a basic income, and debt relief. Fiscal policy expansion which is not monetised, in contrast, results in crowding out. Given the ecological crisis caused by greenhouse emissions, the aim ought not to be resumption of business as usual. A social-ecological response to the crisis would deploy a mixture of public credit creation deployed in prioritised sectors, progressive taxation, and direct curbs on greenhouse emissions.