How is Money Created? – Everything You Need to Know

[Music] [Music] this episode is a more detailed follow-up to my 2017 video who controls all of our money I'm going to focus on the United States in this video only because they're the world reserve currency but everything in this video affects all of us because the central banks around the world are all doing the same thing with that being said let's begin around the world today we see central bank's printing money so here's a question we're told from young age that money is hard to come by we should study to work our whole life to

earn it how then can all this money suddenly come from nowhere how is money created who's going to pay it back what exactly does all of this mean and what's going to happen next in this episode we'll explore the three ways that money's been created and some of the consequences that are going to happen I'm also going to show you the true origins of wealth inequality if you watch this episode the whole way through you should have a well-rounded idea of what's going on today it's important for people to know I'm really just trying to

help with that this journey starts off simple enough but by the end you'll start to see the insanity of what we're dealing with you are watching ColdFusion TV [Music] the first form of money is the one created by government in practice it's outsourced to the central bank Royal Mint but controlled by the government physical money comes in two forms either paper money or coins this physical money is a tiny fraction of the economy and in many economies this kind of money only makes up about 3 to 8 percent this physical money is created in order

to meet the obligations of private banks when you go to an ATM and try to withdraw cash banks need to make sure that they have enough cash in order to meet those obligations so let's take a $10 note for example it costs approximately 3 cents in order to print this note this means that there's approximately nine dollars and 97 cents of profit for creating a ten dollar note this $9.97 of the government this revenue is called senior rich so since the government makes profit from printing and minting coins and can reduce the amount of Taxation

on the public you might be thinking why don't governments just always print physical money the main reason that governments don't create the majority of money is because of politicians if the politician running the office could create money at will there would be a massive conflict of interest there'll be an urge to keep printing to fulfill campaign promises or fund Wars this would in theory destroy the currency by excessive printing causing massive devaluation the more money you have in circulation the less it's worth and that's a key point for example if massive inflation takes place and

the average Joe has a million dollars but that million dollars only buys an apple how much is a million dollars actually worth the loss in purchasing power of money over time is called inflation and when inflation gets out of hand money becomes worthless some recent examples of runaway inflation include Argentina Zimbabwe and Venezuela in this animation you can graphically see just how fast inflation can run away you don't see it coming and as the inflation rate goes up people quickly lose faith in the currency for example here we can see some people in Venezuela using

money to make handbags and to draw pictures on because if simply isn't worth anything anymore you can think of money as a measuring stick of value a measuring stick that is highly elastic and can change depending on how much of it there is for thousands of years gold was the measuring stick of valley gold was kind of like a physical anchor keeping the money supply in check and governments responsible in 1971 President Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value since that point money the measuring

stick of Valley has become elastic since the US dollar backs all other currencies as a reserve currency Nixon's decision changed the world in all of this you might still notice that despite politicians supposedly not being able to influence money creation it's happening anyway this may cause problems as we'll see later in the episode so to recap the government creates physical forms of money like notes and coins only about three to eight percent of money is made this way sine Ridge is the income from that physical money this income is both a benefit to the government

and the taxpayer it reduces debt for the government and reduces the burden on the individual taxpayer the reason governments don't create more of this money is cuz of the inflation risk from politicians decisions let's move on to number two private banks and debt based money the vast amount of money created today is done by the private banking sector in most developed economies about ninety seven percent of the entire money supply is created digitally by banks and therefore most money in the world is privatized banks invented digital money when they managed to persuade lawmakers after many

early bank runs a bank run is an event where depositors try to get their money out all at once but the banks don't have it from these events banks argued that they should be legally allowed to create more deposits than actually exist based upon debt and this is how governments outsource to the creation of digital money the idea of using debt as money begins much earlier than this English innovators set the stage for banks to become the creators of money across the globe in 1704 the English Parliament passed the promissory notes Act take a good

look at your screen what you are seeing is a promissory note in this case it's a written promise to say that you'll pay back the $20.00 you borrowed under the law this piece of paper was as good as 20 dollars today we digitized this agreement and call it debt if it helps whenever I say debt in this episode you can think of this piece of paper remembering that it's as good as money okay so banks will authorize to be able to use these debt notes to circulate as money from this point banks were free to

create and destroy debt and hence money from themselves rented out at interest in the modern world as you'll see the whole world's economy is based upon these promises let's take a look at how it works today when you go to a bank to borrow some money the banking license gives that bank the ability to create money every time they issue a loan they do this through the double accounting system for example if you buy a $500,000 house the bank creates $500,000 in their account and you have $500,000 in debt that is the promise to pay

it back with interest this $500,000 debt can enter the wider economic system because when you purchased the house the owner of that house can use that fresh debt that was created by the bank that they received from you to buy other things in the economy this means in our current system if we want to have more growth we need more debt the key point here is that debt is actually money just from a different point of view to the lender it's an asset of money into the borrower it's a liability of debt but they are

one in the same it sounds a bit complicated but all you need to know is that when a bank issues alone it's not somebody else's savings it's not money that the bank had it's essentially brand-new money that they create they simply type it into a computer and it appears as a digital representation of the government's money which you can spend the beneficiary of this brand-new money is actually the bank because they get to charge interest on that money and that's how they make a profit later when you repay this loan the debt disappears and the

money also disappears but the bank's profit from the interest remains the real estate and property markets are the largest tools for creating digital money this is because banks have decided that it's the safest yet most profitable form of creating debt because if you can't repay the loan the banks can simply take your house in developed nations vast amounts of money is backed by the mortgage market in Australia where I live it's become particularly bad for decades now the banks have abandoned investment into the wider economy and have shifted their focus to investments in housing this

has pushed up the housing prices as people take on more debts to buy houses that they are couldn't afford but the banks make more money this cycle over many decades has caused one of the biggest property bubbles on the planet we're addicted to debt yes we were adept addicted to debt as individuals as households you know the ratios are way higher than all this every other country so that's lanes but what about deposit we need to pause a cash into a bank you are no longer the legal owner of that money the banks are they

keep 10% of your deposits on reserve and can line out 90% of that money to someone else and that other person can deposit that money into another bank and then that bank can loan out 90% and so on this is known as fractional reserve lending if they say we'll transfer it to your account that's wrong because no money is transferred at all because what we call a deposit is simply the bank's record of its debt to the public now it also owes you money and its record of the money it owes you is what you

think you're getting as money and that's all it is when all is said and done an initial deposit of $100 with a tempest and reserve requirement can ultimately lead to a thousand dollars in total money circulation well at least that was how it used to work until March the 26th 2020 there is now a zero percent reserve requirement according to the Federal Reserve quote this action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions end quote so banks can now create infinite amounts of money with no reserves and it doesn't stop there when banks hold your deposit

they can along with hedge funds gamble with it through investments in financial instruments such as derivatives and securities they do this in order to make superior returns most of the time these instruments are basically just bets on if the price of an asset will rise or fall but when taken to the extreme it can get ridiculous remember in my Enron video how I talks about how they use financial instruments to bet on the weather these crazy classes of financial instruments is what brought down the housing market and the subsequent global economy in thousand and eight

but the problem today is that banks are playing with so many derivatives sometimes stacked on top of each other with leverage multiplying factors that nobody actually knows how much money is tied up in this gambling some estimates put the derivative market at over one quadrillion dollars over ten times the global economy in booms everyone takes on debt that is loans from a bank and they spend it on things that they normally couldn't afford but this causes economic growth eventually people can't afford to take on more debt and can't pay it back the bank stopped lending

and default start to take place and the economy takes a downturn this is natural and has happened over centuries but in 2008 everything changed the world didn't want to go through the pain of a downturn and some analysts mark this as the very point that the real economy died in 2008 banks had become so large intertwined and integral to the supply of money that when they're about to collapse the government's had to use the central banks to bail them out remember banks are creating 97% of all money as debt and if this can't be paid

back it can cause a systemic failure a risk of collapse of the entire global monetary system since 2008 the economy was dead but has been on life support ever since a decade of hyper low interest rates which basically made the cost of borrowing money free of caused market distortions so large that has compounded the entire problem there were short-term gains for the consequence of long term pain when private banks make risky bets and incur losses central banks can rescue them with their infinite wallet as mentioned by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell in a recent interview for

CNBC s a 60 Minutes fair to say you simply flooded the system with money yes we did that's another way to think about it we did where does it come from do you just print it we print it digitally so we you know we as a central bank we have the ability to create money digitally and we do that by buying Treasury bills or for bonds or other government guaranteed securities an act that actually increases the money supply but by law chairman Powell's Federal Reserve can only lend money that must be paid back we'll get

to central banks in the next section but as you'll soon see we have to pay these debts back all of this money that's being created is like that piece of paper we saw with the promise on it except is signed by all of us and we signed that we're going to pay this back through taxation us and our future generations it's important to note that governments don't actually support the people it's the people that support government's through taxation taxation and trade are the two major ways that governments can raise money this raise money is used

to pay back the central bank loans with interest so when governments use the central bank's to bail out private banks for their risky behavior the government's are left with the debt which eventually has to be paid back by the taxpayers in the future so to recap private banks create the vast majority of money about 97% of it and they do so by creating loans which is debt the process is as simple as typing numbers into a computer banks can to an extent spend and gamble consumer deposits as they legally own it too big to fail

banks are backed up by the central bank creating a moral hazard and that brings us to the final and most insane form of money creation central bank digital money the third form of money is quantitative easing or QE quantitative easing is a new form of money that was invented by the Japanese central bank in 1989 it was later popularized by the Federal Reserve in the United States during the 2008 crisis QE is where a central bank creates money in order to issue loans directly to the banking sector large corporations and most recently the public it's

a way of flooding money into the economy at times of extreme events like the financial crisis of 2008 as a result of this the central bank's balance sheets have gone completely out of control in order to prop up the economy a little bit longer in 2008 during the crisis and the first time this was tried outside of Japan the 700 billion dollar bailout of QE was very controversial bailing out Wall Street is the only way to save Main Street so says the president the house of cards was much bigger beyond star to stretch beyond just

Wall Street that's how the president defended one of the largest proposed financial rescue plans in US history Treasury Department and congressional staffers are working through the weekend hammering out the details the president's plan would allow the Treasury to buy up to seven hundred billion dollars worth of bad loans like many of those subprime mortgage deals but those bad debts then go on the American public stab Congress will have to raise the legal limit on the national debt from ten point six trillion to eleven point three trillion dollars it was thought to be a one-off emergency

scenario but over the next decade the Federal Reserve was unable to reverse it to give you an idea of how significant all of this was it took from the foundation of America in 1776 all the way up to 2008 for the nation to attain less than the trillion dollars in debt by 2014 that number had expanded to four point four trillion and since the onset of the covert pandemic three trillion was added in the span of three months now the US central bank is creating hundreds of billions of dollars in mere hours it's seeming to

have less of an effect as it continues we have a lot of good faith based on the the prowess of the US printing press I mean the United States maintains reserve currency status it's very money though that's not real money that's fake money that's true and I'm sure you're known as a fake money oh really I know but it's all based on faith how long is this - how long is a sustainable though how to go at that pace the argument then becomes about the taxpayer who's pissed off insane let me get this straight you

can constantly bail yourself out and you can constantly go print money with this quantitative easing why the hell do I have to pay taxes why do I pay taxes these are the seeds of social unrest in this country you can only drive so big of a wedge between the haves and the have-nots especially when you're getting out the middle class in the process the Federal Reserve monetizing the u.s. debt is what enables all of this so how does this money into the system central banks use their magic money to buy the equivalent amount of bonds

from the government they do this through the bond market which exists to lend money to corporations or governments although the stock market gets more press the bond market is actually bigger so what is a bond for the purposes of this video it's basically the same as debt but is issued by a government or corporation central banks which have no savings can create money to buy these bonds so he is an important question can a central bank go bankrupt well according to the European Central Bank which published a paper in 2016 central banks are protected from

insolvency due to their ability to create more money if you think this sounds a bit unfair just wait governments in our current situation are stuck between a rock and a hard place they can't raise money except for raising taxes but owed trillions to central banks the hope is that the borrowed money can kick-start the economy but something else is happening when central banks buy bonds given by the government or corporations they can end up owning a lot of the world's assets for example the balance sheet of the Japanese central bank is bigger than the entire

GDP of Japan they own 80 percent of their stock market that's right the Central Bank of Japan is their stock markets largest shareholder the Swiss central bank owns ninety billion dollars in American stocks including Apple Microsoft Google and Amazon when I first heard of this a few years ago I simply couldn't believe it was legal so these central banks are creating money out of nothing and they can't go bankrupt but yet they're buying real assets even a toddler can see that something is wrong here it turns out they're creating money out of nothing and buying

things does have some consequences these sorts of central bank interventions remove stock markets from reality throughout the 20th century the stock market actually used to reflect the economy but recently that's gone completely out of whack the US stock market has become almost twice as big as the entire nation's GDP which literally makes no sense central bank intervention is the main reason why in April 20 2013 million people became unemployed in the United States but the stock market had its best month since 1987 the central bank printed trillions gave it to banks and hedge funds with

almost zero percent interest rates this money made it straight into the stock market while the real economy barely got any help earlier we discussed that money printing leads to inflation so why haven't we seen it yet well we have we've seen inflation globally in housing prices and stock markets the printed money ends up in all of these assets pushing up the prices so the few people who own large amounts of stocks end up ridiculously wealthy while there's no growth in the real economy the rich get richer and the poor get poorer a lot of people

can feel and see the wealth inequality but they have no idea where it's coming from I'm going to show you in three charts since the 1980s the wealth of the upper echelon of society has been tied to the stock market since 2008 when the economy went on life-support the stock market became glued to the Federal Reserve the more they print the more the stock market goes up and the richer they become since 1980 their wealth has grown four hundred and twenty percent when central bank's print money the first recipients of that newly printed money enjoy

higher standards of living at the expense of the later recipients of that money when inflation has already taken hold this phenomena is known as the one effect experts believe that when the rich finally starts selling their stocks and real estate so as to buy other assets and times of distress the money velocity that is the rate at which money changes hands in the economy will start to pick up and that is when we'll start seeing real inflation in the general economy there is so much more to this but I'll leave it here for today so

to recap central banks have no savings in their account they can't go bankrupt but can create infinite amounts of money by buying government bonds a bond is an exchange of money for a promise that the government would eventually pay it back with interest this money eventually must be paid back by future citizens of a country either through taxation or inflation so what do we do it's clear that people out there who have lost their jobs need help though just in my opinion I think printing money is only a band-aid the real solution was in the

past decades ago societies and nations should have focused on wealth creation instead of excessive housing financialization and gambling that is banks should have made loans to productive areas of society small and medium businesses entrepreneurs education manufacturing innovation research and development all of these kind of things just imagine how our world would be today if banks invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these kind of things instead of property or gambling or if the price of something will go up or down just imagine it's riskier for the banks but the benefits lead to more jobs more

innovation better competition and better living standards in the long run also governments can collect more taxes from these incomes without necessarily raising taxes these extra taxes from generally higher living standards can then be spent on social programs to help those who are truly in need you can print money but you can't print wealth but focusing on wealth creation and productivity takes time effort and hard work and it just seems today that people don't have the appetite for that and frankly it's too late for this option if we focused on funding wealth creation before covert hit

all of our economies would be much less fragile most individuals and businesses would have a healthy amount of savings to write it out like in the late 20th century but for now we're just going to have to deal with the consequences of a fragile system so what's going to happen next in my view I think this is all going to lead to something very big and unpleasant over the next decade I don't know how it's going to look like but it may involve massive amounts of inflation and slow economic growth a situation known as stagflation

this happened in the 1970s but this time it could be much worse due to excessive amounts of debt with the added effect of social instability the mainstream view is that eventually the world will lose faith in the US dollar though some macro economists think that the American dollar may actually rise in value as other nations try to sell their goods or exchange falling currencies for the US dollar because it's the cleanest economy out of a world of falling economies this is called the dollar milkshake Theory some people think that Digital stable coins will be able

to solve a lot of problems there are others still who argue that nations can print infinite amounts of money just as long as they keep producing enough goods to pay the interest on the debt that the government owes the central banks the argument here is that the debt actually never has to be paid back only the interest this is called modern monetary theory I can't comment on if this will work or not I don't think anyone can because it's never been tried before but I can't help but think that this looks like another fragile solution

small communities in Venezuela and a small town in Italy have taken the power back themselves and just issued their own currency all in all who knows what's going to work I have no idea on the bright side all of the events to come might spawn massive reform as I did learn while writing my book out of the worst circumstances the best innovations arise so what can the individual do obviously I can't give financial advice I'm definitely not qualified for that but it might be worth thinking about converting some of your money into other assets that

aren't debt based as a form of insurance if you're older you may be thinking about gold since no central bank can print gold Bank of America and even Goldman Sachs the last people on earth hear you and think to be positive I've seen Gold's potential and they're calling it the money of last resort even other central banks like China and Russia have been buying gold in record amounts for years I think they understand what's about to happen if you're younger you may be attracted to cryptocurrencies governments and the banking system are starting to take the

technology seriously now if you're more daring you can play the central bank's game against them study and invest in the assets that you think they'll cause to rise in price ultimately I can't tell you what to do here you have to think for yourself and research to find out what you believe is best the way money is created and the overall banking system seems like madness and people have started to notice that the system is no longer working the monetary system is so ingrained and so pervasive it becomes invisible to see nobody ever questioned it

when things started going wrong they pointed at the things that were visible things that look like problems surface issues which you could see and understand looking at the surface some would point the finger at capitalism but you have to dig deeper and when you do you can see it's an unfortunate and untimely mix of the debt based system extreme financialization moral hazards and a rampant Cantillon effect that's causing extreme fragility and ever-increasing amounts of massive wealth inequality [Music]