Manmohan Singh is a Senior Economist at the IMF in Washington DC. He continues to write extensively on topical issues including deleveraging in financial markets, rehypothecation of collateral, and counterparty risk in OTC derivatives. He was the first to identify the role cheapest-to-deliver bonds as a proxy for recovery value in CDS instruments.
Peter Stella is Director of Stellar Consulting LLC providing macroeconomic policy advice and research to central banks, governments, and private clients in Asia, Europe, the United States and Latin America.
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The world of credit creation has shifted over recent years. This column argues this shift is more profound than is commonly understood. It describes the private credit creation process, explains how the ‘money multiplier’ depends upon inter-bank trust, and discusses the implications for monetary policy.
One of the financial system’s chief roles is to provide credit for worthy investments. Some very deep changes are happening to this system – changes that surprisingly few people are aware of. This column presents a quick sketch of the modern credit creation and then discusses the deep changes are that are affecting it – what we call the ‘other deleveraging’.
Modern credit creation without central bank reserves
In the simple textbook view, savers deposit their money with banks and banks make loans to investors (Mankiw 2010). The textbook view, however, is no longer a sufficient description of the credit creation process. A great deal of credit is created through so-called ‘collateral chains’.
We start from two principles: credit creation is money creation, and short-term credit is generally extended by private agents against collateral. Money creation and collateral are thus joined at the hip, so to speak. In the traditional money creation process, collateral consists of central bank reserves; in the modern private money creation process, collateral is in the eye of the beholder. Here is an example.
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