I know I haven’t posted in a long while, but I thought I’d give some news. And no it’s not an April fools’!

Work and personal matters have taken much of my time and left me unable to allocate time to blogging so my only ‘efforts’ have been on Twitter.

MMT revived the econ scene recently, which has led to my old endogenous money posts resurfacing. The Cato Institute finance and monetary blog Alt-M recently republished one and linked to others.

I also thought this post was the right time to show some practical evidence that banks do require funding to lend. As a comment on my old post on Alt-M says, a bank branch employee does not have to deal with funding requirements before lending. This would be a practical nightmare given the number of clients that deposit, withdraw and borrow small amounts. And indeed, retail banks’ funding is managed on a macro/aggregate level from the head office.

Things are however quite different in the case of corporate banks, as much larger amounts are involved. A typical example would be an RCF (i.e. revolving credit facility), which allows a large corporation to withdraw ‘on demand’ any amount it requires within the limits set by its loan agreement.

Most, if not all, revolvers comprise a timetable in their appendix that specifies how long before drawing on the facility the borrower needs to warn the treasury and operations department of the bank (or the agent in the case of a syndicate of banks) through a ‘utilisation request’. This is needed to allow the treasury to make sure they can fund the drawdown and prevent the bank running out of liquidity. And this is a direct real life counter-example to endogenous money theory.

See a publicly available example here. The utilisation request form is on page 154 and the timetable (reproduced below) is on page 172. Note how any drawdown requires the borrower to send an utilisation request one to three days before the effective drawdown. Any drawdown request occurring later than this deadline can be legally refused by the bank’s operation and treasury teams as they might not be able to secure, and then deliver, the funds.

Again, this is something that corporate bankers know, and that a number of academics seem to ignore.

____

In other news, Reuters report that the EU “approved new rules to lower capital requirements for insurers’ investments in corporate equity and debt” in order to “facilitate investment in small and medium-sized companies and provide long-term funding to the EU economy”.

This is again another example of policymakers demonstrating their clear understanding that banks (and insurers) capital requirements significantly affect the investment choice that they make. They definitely cannot pretend any longer that Basel rules had no effect on the mortgage boom of the past three decades…

____

That’s it for today. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to blog again. Could be next week, could be in six month time. I’d really like to blog more however, believe me.