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Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by missedthecue on Thursday December 29, 2022 @10:57PM (#34181613)
The interest rate would be set by how many people want to borrow money (buy) and how many people want to lend (sell). The convergence point would be the price of money aka interest rate.

How does it not make sense?

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by chii on Thursday December 29, 2022 @11:11PM (#34181693)
The poster is alluding to the fact that an authority such as the Feds have the inclination to change this convergence point (for whatever reason). Therefore, this breaks the assumption that the money market is free.
Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by SSJPython on Thursday December 29, 2022 @11:47PM (#34181900)
Because it is not realistic. In every nation that has ever existed, the supplier of money has always been a monopolist. And this is precisely because the supplier has requested taxes to be paid in that currency that they supply. If you have multiple suppliers of money, then you literally destroy the entire basis of the state. The whole thing comes crashing down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by WalterBright on Friday December 30, 2022 @12:10AM (#34182028)
> In every nation that has ever existed, the supplier of money has always been a monopolist.

In the era of free banking in the US, banks issued their own currency.

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by SSJPython on Friday December 30, 2022 @12:13AM (#34182045)
What do you mean by their own currency? They still issued USD, which was the only legal currency.
Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by dragonwriter on Friday December 30, 2022 @12:34AM (#34182157)
> They still issued USD, which was the only legal currency.

As I recall, they issued the paper version of stablecoins: they were denominated in units of US dollars, but they weren’t government money, and they traded at floating values, typically (aside from many other factors influencing value) declining in value with distance from the issuing bank.

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by WalterBright on Friday December 30, 2022 @12:40AM (#34182191)
The discount on the notes was inevitably related to the probability that the issuing bank would honor the notes and redeem them with gold.

When the Fed lost all credibility with exchanging their banknotes for gold, we had the Great Depression. FDR then defaulted on the gold bonds, basically stealing from the good citizens who had trusted the government.

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by JumpCrisscross on Friday December 30, 2022 @01:33PM (#34188201)
> When the Fed lost all credibility with exchanging their banknotes for gold, we had the Great Depression

This was not a cause of the Great Depression. (You are correct on the default, however.)

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by WalterBright on Friday December 30, 2022 @12:28AM (#34182127)
> What do you mean by their own currency?

I mean exactly that. They issued banknotes (that's why paper money is sometimes called banknotes). The banknotes were denoted in dollars, like bank checks today.

Here's an article with some pictures:

https://thismatter.com/money/banking/history/free-banking-na...

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by logicchains on Friday December 30, 2022 @12:27AM (#34182124)
No, they literally created their own currencies and issued them.
Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by JumpCrisscross on Friday December 30, 2022 @01:31PM (#34188175)
> era of free banking in the US, banks issued their own currency

The free banking era illustrates the problem. Rates are endogenous to the money supply. That circularity promotes a hyper-volatile credit cycle. There is no natural counter-balance we’ve discovered to that tendency. (Apart from ruinous boom-and-bust cycles.)

Re:Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Centra... by imtringued on Friday December 30, 2022 @06:30AM (#34184089)
The money supply is endogenous, that is, the people demanding money via loans are the ones that create their own money. The supply of money is effectively infinite and only limited by regulations, the banks risk assessment of the borrower and the profitability of the business Vs the interest rate.

So there is no market for the interest rate of money that can be created.

If you have a fixed money supply then the interest rate isn't set by supply and demand of funds either but by liquidity preference. As the interest rate falls below liquidity preference people will simply hold cash or keep their money in checking accounts. The interest available for borrowing does not fall all the way to zero. It gets stuck at some positive value. This money is "saved" in the sense of deferred spending but it is not "saved" in the sense that it is not lent out and only available in the future once the loan is repaid, no, it is available today to spend.

The difference between classical and Keynesian economics is effectively that in the former you only have saving and consumption but in Keynesian economics you also have a third state "cash" (including bank account deposits) that is a hybrid of the two. It is neither consumption nor classical saving and this is what's the setting of the interest rate in the open market.

Dieter Suhr effectively argues that this liquidity premium is the effect of money being a social network. Just like Facebook extracting profits from your data, people with cash/deposits benefit from the network effects of money and can sell these network effects for money keeping the interest rate high and if they can't sell them they will try to benefit from them directly (e.g. speculation) as that is more profitable than lending money. Businesses and consumers are the ones creating the network effect so they should be compensated and not the idle who do nothing with their money.