Operating without the proper licenses carries significant risk for all those involved in the bitcoin company but the bitcoin community also has an enormous opportunity to work with regulators to set up the proper systems.
This will take longer and be much more complicated than the bitcoin community anticipates, but it is also the only way for bitcoin to become legitimate. Because the alternative is no alternative at all.Jumping through the (significant) hoops. Not easy, and expensive.
This is not at all unusual. Any company entering a highly regulated industry faces similar obstacles in getting federal approval and approval in all 50 states to go national. Then there are the cross-border issues. Not impossible but expensive and time-consuming, and requires submitting to ongoing oversight. All of the this is rather antithetical to the concept of alternative currency. But failing to do so invites civil and criminal penalties designed to be onerous.
Paul Krugman agrees that banks create money but not really:
ReplyDeletehttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/commercial-banks-as-creators-of-money/?_r=0
But are there really two sides in this "debate", or is it all a matter of semantics?
ReplyDeleteIn the paper that Krugman quotes, Tobin writes this (on page 413):
The banking system can expand its assets...(b) by lending to finance new private investment in inventories or capital goods or buying government securities financing new public deficits...In case (b), new private saving occurs matching dollar for dollar the private investment or government deficits financed by the banking system".
Upon reading this passage, one is left with the impression that Tobin anticipated by a few decades the Mosler statement defining saving as "the accounting record of investments".
So, if Krugman agrees with Tobin and Tobin anticipated Mosler, could it be the case that - semantic divergences notwithstanding - in the end, when push comes to stove, "we're all MMTers now"?
Inquiring minds want to know.
the debate continues:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.interfluidity.com/