Capitalism and the Market Economy: Bringing Back Together What Banking Pulls Apart

McMillan, a joint pseudonym for Jürg Müller, an economics editor at Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and an unnamed employee of a global bank, who claims his position necessitates anonymity, follows up 2014’s The End of Banking with a bracing treatise on the history of banks and how they can be made more stable. The authors explain that the concept of credit arose from interpersonal trade relationships when humans still lived primarily in small groups, and created in turn the idea of risk. Bankers could act on their belief that a debt would be repaid and loan money borrowed from customers’ deposits. Such exchanges created centuries of instability because loans were not always repaid, causing “recurring boom-and-bust cycles, banking panics, and deep economic crises.” To avoid such volatility, the authors recommend establishing a license to certify financial institutions that “stay systemically solvent at all times” and incentivizing safe practices by exempting licensed institutions from risk regulations, reasoning that solvent banks would never need state bailouts. Though the authors sometimes come across as overly taken with their own boldness (“This is a foolishly audacious endeavor,” they write in the introduction), the license system is genuinely thought-provoking. Readers of David Graeber’s Debt will want to take a look. (Self-published)