A Basic Income Alternative to the Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Global Finance

Governments and central banks do not issue their economy's money supply as debt-free "fiat money." Commercial banks create the money supply of nations as repayable loans of bank credit: credit-money owed as repayment debt. A credit-debt money system cannot accommodate long-term money-saving. Saving Crashes the system. Banks create money and debt by expanding their balance sheets: issuing new deposit liabilities to purchase new interest-bearing debt-assets. The bank's new deposit liability is the borrower's new spendable deposit account "money." Bank-issued deposit liabilities are the original source of the economy's "money supply." All of which is owed back to banks as debtors' loan account debts. A bank loan creates new money and new debt. Repaying the loan uncreates -- "extinguishes" -- the money and the debt in a voluntary balance sheet reduction: a credit/debt paydown. Savings/debts imbalances build up within the credit-debt money supply. Debtors owe all the debts and can't earn their borrowed money back because savers "have" most of the money and aren't "spending it"; which makes debtors' debts arithmetically unpayable, which makes creditor-banks' credits arithmetically uncollectable. Instead of voluntary credit/debt "paydowns," banks' uncollectable credits and debtors' unpayable debts are extinguished in involuntary debtor and bank "bankruptcies": credit-debt writedowns. "Bail-ins" involuntarily use depositors' savings to forestall -- put off -- their bank's bankruptcy. Resolution-by-bankruptcy "cleans the slates" of all the unpayable debts, uncollectable credits, depositors' credit-money savings, and bankrupt banks. The system works in long supercycles of credit-expansion recovery and prosperity during which debtors' debts are increasing equally as the economy's money supply and savers' savings are increasing. Credit/debt expansion rises to a peak then ends in mass debtor defaults and bank bankruptcies, monetary system Collapse, and debt deflation Depression; like 1914-1939; and like 1939-2008 and ongoing. World War spends the bankrupt world out of Collapse and Depression with renewed bank credit expansion to debt-finance government deficit-spending on War production and War waging. Debtor default and bankruptcy, bankrupts creditor-banks. Billions of savers' credit-money savings were "extinguished" in the 1930s end-of-supercycle bank bankruptcies. Today trillions of depositors' savings would be transferred to banks as depositor bail-ins to forestall bank bankruptcies; and ultimately extinguished in the bank bankruptcies. But this kind of Collapse is not inevitable. Today central bank liquidity injections and regulatory forbearance are forestalling the bank bankruptcies: the problem of creditor-banks' uncollectable credits. But forestalling is not preventing, and the problem of debtors' unpayable debts needs to be addressed. Governments and their central banks could -- but presently do not -- create positive sum debt-free fiat money, and add it as a supplement into their zero sum credit-debt money supply. By adding monthly Basic Income deposits of newly created debt-free fiat money into citizen bank accounts, debtors' unpayable debts to banks become payable, which makes creditor-banks' uncollectable credits collectable, which prevents the bail-ins and bankruptcies that extinguish depositors' savings. Bailouts reduce taxpayers' money to increase banks' money. Bail-ins and bankruptcies reduce savers' savings equally as they reduce debtors' -- and debtor banks' -- unpayable debts owed to their creditors. A fiat money-funded Basic Income is an additive solution rather than a reductive solution to "resolution" of the problem of creditors' uncollectable credits owed as debtors' unpayable debts. A fiat money-funded Basic Income is a macro monetary-fiscal policy alternative to bail-ins, bankruptcies, and ongoing Collapse of the credit-debt money supply system: at n

About the Author :
Derryl Hermanutz is an independent researcher and writer.