Medidas "Draghonianas"

Steven Keen sobre las medidas "Draghonianas" de bajar el tipo de interés del activo un 0,05% anual y del pasivo un 0,2% anual: Draghi basa la efectividad de tales movidas (jajajaja) en que activarán el multiplicador bancario. Es decir, un tipo "terriblemente" negativo sobre los depósitos que la banca tiene en el BCE, y una bajada "terrorífica" del tipo al que presta el BCE a la banca, harán menos rentables esas reservas y la banca buscará otras colocaciones más rentables. Eso aumentara el crédito al sector privado. Pero, como dice Keen -y demostraba aquel magnífico artículo, tantas veces citado, del Bank Of England-, la banca no da crédito según sus reservas y depósitos, sino que es al revés: el crédito crea los depósitos. Un banco abre un depósito cuando concede un crédito, sin mirar si tiene reservas ni depósitos. Si luego necesita liquidez para cuadrar su balance, acude al banco central.

You’ve just made your morning coffee, and look up in horror as you realise that the gas burner has set your kitchen ablaze. So you take decisive action: you pour your coffee on the floor.
Such is the real impact of the European Central Bank’s latest attempt to revive the European economy, which cut rates a whopping 0.1 per cent (from 0.15 per cent to 0.05 per cent), and increased the negative interest rate imposed on bank reserve deposits from a huge -0.1 per cent to a gargantuan -0.2 per cent...

... I’ll say that again, this time quoting the Bank of England:

As with the relationship between deposits and loans, the relationship between reserves and loans typically operates in the reverse way to that described in some economics textbooks. Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them … It is these lending decisions that determine how many bank deposits are created by the banking system. The amount of bank deposits in turn influences how much central bank money banks want to hold in reserve …, which is then, in normal times, supplied on demand by the Bank of England.

To summarise the Bank of England -- and to repeat myself -- reserves are irrelevant to bank lending. They only exist so that one bank can settle its accounts with another, and banks keep these accounts as low as they can manage. So charging private banks a trivial interest rate on their trivial reserve accounts is about as effective at stimulating an economy as pouring your coffee on the floor is at stopping a kitchen fire. If this is the best that the ECB can manage, then Great Depression levels of unemployment in Europe will persist.