1. Fallacy: the Bank of Canada “controls the money supply”. It does so only indirectly, at best. In fact, the money supply depends directly upon commercial banks’ lending behaviour.
2. Interest rates explanation:
a. TheBank of Canada sets the overnight rate (a range, whose low end is the policy rate). The commercial banks use this rate to settle their accounts daily among themselves.
b. Bank of Canada website: “The public doesn’t access this overnight market to borrow or lend money.”
c. Rather, the policy rate is the benchmark for the much higher mortgage and other loan rates to the public.
3. Settlement balances (approx $400 billion[?]) earn interest for commercial banks – before, at 0.25%. Now, they are paid at the policy rate
4.25% (as of Dec 2022). How were the settlement balances established? Recall from Episode 5:
Ed: I'm going to repeat this back to you and make sure I got it right. The Bank of Canada purchases securities, government bonds and so on, not directly from the federal government in the primary market (which they do, but here you're speaking about the secondary market -- it's the bonds that are already floating out there in circulation among various institutions). So it purchases these or it acquires these securities and in return it creates money out of nothing to establish on the liability side of its ledger the settlement balance...
Jeff: Correct.
Ed: ... the amount that it used to purchase the security, and then the entities that sold it to the Bank of Canada the securities in the first place, these various institutions, banks and so on, they say, hey, you have to pay interest on [the amounts for] these bonds that we sold you. So the Bank of Canada says, okay, that's no problem. I'll create money out of nothing and pay you interest and provide you with all kinds of liquidity on these settlement balances that you have on account with us.
Jeff: Right.
Ed: The crucial thing about that is that the commercial banks exercise their privilege to create money out of nothing in order to purchase those bonds, and then they are due back these principal and interest payments [correction: settlement balance account interest payments].
Jeff: Correct.
4. PMC does not currently have a solution to the problem of how to finance house purchases, but acknowledges that this is one of the many important areas that must be addressed by reforms.
5. Contrary to textbook implications, the requirement for “reserves” disappeared (back in 1994).
6. It was the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that blew the lid off the fallacy that Canadian commercial banks did not require government bailouts in 2008-2009 -- they most certainly did.
7. Capital adequacy requirement rations are in place, but a) there is a time lag to accomplish this, and b) these obscure and seemingly arbitrary requirements are determined by the banks themselves in a system that, for them, is self-serving.
8. In the “circular flow of income” diagram, are banks really just innocuous “intermediaries” in the financial system?
9. These and similar misconceptions permeate the higher education economics materials.
10. Evidence for deliberate corruption of academic curricula: the “philanthropic” foundations; cultural Marxism; American imperialism.
11. Evidence of moneyed interests at the root of major historical developments makes the case: monetary reform is perhaps the essential and most underrated issue of our time.
RESOURCES
Points 11, 12:
Norman Dodd Foundations: The Enemy Within (historical intro + interview; control of education starts at 51:40)
William Lind Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism (documentary)
Yuri Bezmenov Psychological Warfare, Subversion and Control of Western Society (lecture)
