Thursday, June 29, 2017

Seigniorage model, in the news

Dean Baker proposes that government take an income stream from central banking:

In the last couple years, the financial transactions tax (FTT) has moved from a fringe idea to a policy proposal treated seriously by even the mainstream of the Democratic Party. 
The decision by Senator Bernie Sanders to make it a central part of his presidential campaign certainly helped, but a number of members of Congress, including Keith Ellison and Peter DeFazio, have also pushed FTT proposals for many years.The FTT is also gaining momentum overseas. There’s a push to enact an FTT in the eurozone. 
And in England, an expanded FTT — the London stock exchange has long levied a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades — was included in the Labour Party’s platform in the recent election.
The financial markets decompose the scheme into a loan on record at the central bank, and earn interest on the subsequent reserves.  Since government never amortizes, the accumulation becomes a burden on the bond industry, and indeed the availability of liquidity to cover government debt dries up.

Central banking is joining the sandbox anyway, so these schemes is implemented by opportunistically defaulting on some portion of government debt, a relatively instantaneous creation of loose digits, inflation. We are going to release the government default machine, available to government everywhere.

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