Zealand Free Banking

The more I read Mike Reddell's blog, the more I like it.

Here's Reddell on free banking:

The Reserve Bank of Australia yesterday put out a Research Discussion Paper containing some discussion of the nature, and estimates of the size, of the social costs of counterfeiting of Australian banknotes.

It is good to see a central bank producing research in this area, and opening it to public scrutiny.  But I question the starting point.  I wonder how confident the Reserve Bank of Australia (and perhaps more importantly, the Australian Treasury as advisers to the Treasurer) can be that the statutory monopoly on physical currency  – which is what the anti-counterfeit measures are protecting –  is itself socially beneficial?

Without that statutory monopoly (on notes in section 44 of the RBA Act, and on notes and coins in section 25 of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act) banks would have been likely to have gone on issuing their own notes (and perhaps coins).  New Zealand banks issued their own notes until 1934, when the first Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act prohibited them from offering that payments medium, as part of (but not a necessary part of) the establishment of a central bank in New Zealand.

If the monopoly were removed today, it is likely that private issuance would resume, and central bank notes would revert to being issued/used primarily in quite extreme crises, when there was a generalised loss of confidence in liabilities of the banks.   

There is no obvious reason why, in normal times, people would be any more reluctant to hold, say, ANZ banknotes delivered from an ANZ ATM than they would be to hold an ANZ demand deposit (as they were doing just prior to withdrawing the notes through the ATM).  People happily hold notes from the (legally limited) private issuance in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

There's good basis for it too. Larry White worked through the equimarginal conditions showing that banks would be constrained against overissuance.