Tag Archives: Sovereign money

ifo Schnelldienst 16/2018, August 23, 2018. PDF.

ifo Schnelldienst 16/2018, August 23, 2018. PDF.

On Sunday 10 June 2018, Switzerland’s electorate voted on a referendum calling for the country’s commercial banks to be banned from creating money. In a country world-famous for its banking industry, this was quite an interesting turn of events. Known as the Sovereign Money Initiative or ‘Vollgeld’, the referendum was brought to the Swiss electorate in the form of a ‘Popular Initiative‘. The Sovereign Money referendum...

On his blog, John Cochrane argues that banks could, and should be 100% equity financed. His points are: (1) There are plenty of safe assets—government debt—out there and banks do not need to “create” additional safe assets—deposits. I share this view partly. First, I don’t know what amount of safe assets are sufficient from a social point of view. Second, I don’t consider government debt to be a safe asset. Third, debt has safety and liquidity properties. The question is not only whether...

In: Thomas Moser, Carlos Lenz, Marcel Savioz and Dirk Niepelt, editorial committee, Monetary Economic Issues Today, Festschrift in Honour of Ernst Baltensperger, Swiss National Bank/Orell Füssli, Zürich, June 2017. PDF of draft. The sovereign money initiative (Vollgeldinitiative) seeks to gain greater control over the money and credit supply, to increase financial stability and to achieve a fairer distribution of seigniorage income. The initiative’s suggested approach – a ban on active...