Take our Treasury Bonds, Bank Reserves and TT&L Accounts ... PLEASE!

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Or Self Parody?

High school Home-Ec, TT&L Accounts, Bank Reserves, National Debt ... and You. Arch Satire? Or Dark Comedy?

Human's really are curious creatures. It's amazing that they create whole fantasy worlds, then use those fantasies to design Reserve Banking and Tax regulations, and even imagine resulting national debts and "limits to fiat," ... all while not bothering to tell any other citizens what the terms mean, or why they were imagined in the 1st place.

Worse, remarkably few ever bother to ask for a simple definition of terms. Not even Presidents of the USA, who run on fantasy political planks, and gravely intone on the solemn nature of fantasy threats to our fiat finance imaginations. It truly is a taxing task simply to delve into the rabbit hole and sort out the characters.

Take our Treasury Bonds, Bank Reserves and TT&L Accounts ... please!

Before anyone discusses national debts, bank reserves, T-Bonds or TT&L accounts ... EVER again, please at least read the following 3 historical references.

These references, explaining the shenanigans invented with specific "account" types, show how obligatory PrimaryDealerBank purchases of T-bonds (when done through specific TT&L accounts) don't add to banking reserves, but selling them back to the Fed DOES drain mounting banking reserves. Convenient? Of course. Difficult? Depends on your perspective. It took the Fed many man hours at inflated salaries to invent these dodges around their own, sacred, Double-Entry Accounting rules. If it's any consolation, humans have done even stranger things .. but not much stranger.

"The Treasury tax and loan account system was designed as a mechanism for minimizing the dislocations on bank reserves and the money market arising out of the sizable and irregular transfers between the Government and the public."

Read on, MacDuff!

Treasury tax and loan accounts and Federal Reserve open market operations

TTL Note Accounts and the Money Supply Process
(good history but 2nd part destroys perspective by invoking the money multiplier)

Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances

Reading these articles is simply amazing.

It's rather analogous to most faculty at engine mechanics schools just now discovering there's this technology called fuel-injection, and that most auto & truck engines haven't run on carburetors for decades. (Please, don't ask them - or economists - if the Earth isn't flat, or if Newton's Laws aren't precise. Just move along.)

Forget academic economists, why don't we just tell all students this stuff, in highschool Home-Ec classes? Instead, we build Storm-P or Heath Robinson machines and scare ourselves with the results we've lost track of.

Canada & some other countries were simpler - if not smarter - and just didn't require fiat banking reserves. Hence, they don't have to drain them! Duh!

Don't ask ME how Canada manages to scare themselves with their own fiat budgets. Every regional fantasy is expressed in their own way.

Meanwhile, we don't let chimps write software code any more. Why let them write our Reserve Banking and Tax rules & regs? It's like a Reoder Felgen bycycle. Sure, it SEEMS to work, but why on earth do it THIS way? Prof. Zihni Sinir could do a better job.

OUR policy idiots tried to spell H-A-C-K, and ended up with "TT&L" and "IRS" and fiat ceilings! Really? Is that all it amounts to? Weepin' Buddha on a decline! Is that the best we can come up with?