Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Matt Taibbi

One way that money is created is through new issuance of private credit; when private banks issue new loans, they essentially create money out of thin air. The Fed supervises this process and theoretically monitors the amount of new loans issued by the banks. It can raise or lower the amount of new loans by raising or lowering margin requirements, i.e., the number of hard dollars each bank has to keep on hand every time it makes a loan. If the margin requirement is 10 percent, banks have to keep one dollar parked in reserve at the Fed for every ten they lend out. If the Fed feels like increasing the amount of money in circulation, it can lower the margin rate to, say, 9 percent, allowing banks to lend out about eleven dollars for every one kept in reserve at the Fed. The bank can also inject money into the system directly, mainly through two avenues. One is by lending money directly to banks at a thing called the discount window, which allows commercial banks to borrow from the Fed at relatively low rates to cover short-term financing problems. The other avenue is for the Fed to buy Treasury bills or bonds from banks or brokers. It works like this: The government, i.e., the Treasury, decides to borrow money. One of a small group of private banks called primary dealers is contracted to raise that money for the Treasury by selling T-bills or bonds or notes on the open market. Those primary dealers (as of this writing there are eighteen of them, all major institutions, includ...