O Depósito Bancário como uma fraude e causa dos Ciclos Económicos

Nota: Os "austriacos " tendem a ser assim. Todos os economistas deviam ser assim. A procura da verdade nua e crua.

"5. The non-consideration of juridical arguments

(...) Thus, in the first place, it should be noted that the practice of banking with a fractional reserve involves a logical impossibility from the legal point of view. In fact, whenever a bank grants loans against money which has been deposited with it at demand, a dual availability of the same sum of money is created: first, it is available to the original depositor and, second, it is available to the borrower who receives the loan. It is clear that two individuals cannot simultaneously enjoy the availability of one and the same thing and that to make the same thing available to a second person is a fraudulent act.(39) The undue appropriation and fraud are evident and were committed at least in the initial stages of the formation of the modern banking system.

Once the bankers obtained from the government the privilege of acting on the base of a fractional reserve, their criminal status disappeared, at least from the standpoint of positive law. But this privilege in no way endows the monetary bank deposit contract with an adequate legal nature. On the contrary, this contract appears, on most occasions, as a contract which is null and void as, from the point of view of its purpose, one of the parties, the depositor, makes the transaction considering it as a deposit, while the other, the depositary banker, receives it as a loan. And, according to the most standard legal principles, when each of the participants in an exchange believes that they are making a different contract, that contract is null and void.

Thirdly, even if the two parties, the depositors and the bankers, coincided in the belief that the transaction were a loan, the legal nature of the monetary bank deposit contract would not be resolved. This is the case because, from an economic point of view, it is impossible that the banks can, under all circumstances, comply with the obligation to return the deposits they have received for an amount in excess of the reserves they hold. This impossibility is, furthermore, aggravated to the extent that the practice of fractional-reserve banking tends to generate banking crises and economic recessions which recurrently place the solvency of the banks in danger. And contracts which are impossible to put into practice under certain circumstances are also null, according to general legal principles. Only by maintaining a 100 per cent reserve which guaranteed that the supposed "loans" granted (by the depositors) may be repurchased (by the banks) at any moment, or through the existence and support of a central bank which provided all the liquidity necessary in moments of difficulty, could these "loan" contracts with a covenant for the repayment of their nominal value at any moment be made possible and, therefore, valid."

A CRITICAL NOTE ON FRACTIONAL-RESERVE FREE BANKING, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Professor of Political Economy, King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, Spain