THE CONFIDENCE MACHINE: How Banks Create Money Out of Nothing, and Why the Trick (Almost) Never Fails
M. Muñoz
M. Muñoz
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123
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About this ebook
Your bank balance is not a pile of cash waiting in a vault. It is a promise, an entry in a private ledger, the direct descendant of a receipt a London goldsmith wrote three and a half centuries ago. This book follows that promise from its origin in seventeenth-century Lombard Street to the trading floors of 2023, explaining, slowly and with the cards face up, how a loan becomes a deposit, how the Bank of England admitted in 2014 that ninety-seven percent of money is created by commercial banks, and why economics textbooks got the mechanism backward for generations. Along the way, readers meet the goldsmiths who discovered fractional reserve banking, the journalist Walter Bagehot who wrote the rulebook for financial fires, and the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank who triggered the fastest bank run in history from their phones. The Confidence Machine explains the safety nets built after each collapse—capital requirements, central bank plumbing, deposit insurance—and shows why a system built on nothing more solid than trust keeps working, almost every time. A clear, rigorous guide to the machinery beneath every bank statement you have ever read.
Your bank balance is not a pile of cash waiting in a vault. It is a promise, an entry in a private ledger, the direct descendant of a receipt a London goldsmith wrote three and a half centuries ago. This book follows that promise from its origin in seventeenth-century Lombard Street to the tradin...
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