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Comment by twobits | Hacker News Reader

It's totally unfair and undemocratic for some people to be able to print money and for the rest to not be able to. Gives the former huge advantage, and creates economic inequality.

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You can print money; if you hand a friend a piece of paper that says "I owe you $10" or "I owe you ten apples", you've printed money. The nominal economic value of that paper becomes the value of what it promises. Your friend could then trade that marker to one of his friends on its nominal value, as long as his friend trusts that you're good for it.

You perhaps can't print currency, but you can create money in exactly the same fashion that banks do - any time you issue a debt marker, money is created.

This is an interesting angle. The important thing to note is the "I owe you $10" piece of paper is worth roughly $10 when it comes from a trusted source.

I think if I wrote that it might not be worth the full $10 in "publicly traded" circumstances.

There's an interesting exercise in how bank-like you can become before you need to register as a financial institution.

Though that trust is mostly based in how big a pile of money you have, and how stable it seems to be, even if you act nothing like a bank.

The real difference is that you can't force the FDIC to 'insure' your 'debt marker', while a bank can. If there were no deposit insurance, depositors would actually have to worry about the soundness of their bank - and probably would demand 'full reserve' banking.

Banks allocate real resources in the economy, and the instrument by which they exercise this power is making loans (printing money) for projects they deem appropriate. I think often people get the causality backwards: banks don't have more power than other institutions and people because of their ability to loan money into being, they have the ability to make loans because of their existing power. That is, loans are merely the mechanism by which banks exert their power over resource allocation in the real economy. This Swiss referendum may put the kibosh on this particular style of loan generation, but I see no evidence that private banks won't just create a new system of loan accounting and money creation for the central bank to implement which will accomplish the same outcome within the parameters of the new referendum.

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