I am also a free banking theorist

George Selgin wrote a very true post on Freebanking.org. He claims that we are all, in a way or another, free banking theorists. Why? As Selgin very well explains:

Consider: an economist says that central banks prevent or limit the severity of financial crises, or that without mandatory deposit insurance even sound banks are likely to face runs, or that banks can never be expected to hold enough capital unless we force them to, or that commercially-supplied banknotes will tend to be discounted. All such claims–which is to say any claims about the need for or consequences of government intervention in banking–depend, if not on an explicit understanding of the nature and workings of a laissez-faire banking system, then on some implicit understanding. And this understanding in turn implies a theory of some sort, for reference to experience alone won’t suffice for drawing the sort of sweeping conclusions I’m talking about. It follows that all economists who have anything to say about the effects of government intervention in the banking system are either self-proclaimed free banking theorists or are free banking theorists who don’t admit (and perhaps don’t realize) it.

Indeed, most banking academic research studies and banking reform proposals base their ideas and models on certain assumptions of how the banking system, left to its own device, would behave, and how to correct the market failures that could possibly arise from such systems.

As my (and most people’s) experience can also testify, this tacit conventional wisdom is present in the mind of the general public and finance practitioners (I can still remember my father’s face when I told him we should get rid of central banks. Like he had just spotted some sort of ghost). The success of the usual US-centric misrepresentation of banking history is almost complete.

With this blog, I have been trying to explain what would (not) have happened if we had left banking free of all the rules that distort its natural behaviour. Seen this way, I am also a free banking theorist. I am trying to get back to the roots, asking questions such as: let’s supposed we never implemented Basel rules, would have real estate lending grown that much over the past three decades? What about securitization? Or interest rates on sovereign debt? And banks’ capital and liquidity buffers? What if we hadn’t had central banks nor deposit insurance over the period? What compounded what?

A lot of this is counterfactual, hence uncertain. Still, the intellectual challenge this represents is worth it, as current banking reformers and regulators still rely on and take for granted the inaccurate conventional story to justify the exponential growth of increasingly tight rules. Rules which, as I explain on this blog, are more likely to harm the banking system than to make it safer.

Larry White once says that free banks should be ‘anti-fragile’, and that the only reason they remain fragile is because of government-institutionalised rules that prevent them from self-correcting and learning. I have also already said that this does not mean that banks would never fail or that no crisis would ever occur. But it is likely that the accumulation of financial imbalances, which under our current system slowly emerge hidden behind the regulatory curtain until it is too late, would appear much sooner, limiting the destructive potential of any crisis. The market process, in order to become anti-fragile, needs to learn through experience. The more ‘safety’ rules one implement the less likely market actors will learn and the more likely the following crisis is going to be catastrophic. Institutionalised paternalism is self-defeating.

Unfortunately, the conventional story has seriously twisted everyone’s mind, and it is highly likely that any government announcing the end of the Fed/ECB/BoE/deposit insurance/currency monopoly would trigger market crashes and a lack of confidence in banks. Most commentators would describe the move as “crazy given what we’ve learnt from history”. In short, it would be a ‘history misreading-induced’ panic. While this would be short-lived, this would also be damaging. It is our role to tell the public that, in fact, it should not fear such changes. It should welcome them.