The Chicago Plan Revisited

Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof

Revised Draft of February 12, 2013

Abstract
At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a
proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the
separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100%
reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this
plan: (1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden
increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money.
(2) Complete elimination of bank runs. (3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt.
(4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous
debt creation. We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated
model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all
four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state
inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. The authors are grateful for helpful comments
and suggestions from George Akerlof, Olivier Blanchard, Michael Burda, Michael Clark,
Timothy Congdon, Ulf Dahlsten, Herman Daly, Heiner Flassbeck, Erhard Gltzl, Charles
Goodhart, Carol Hopson, Joseph Huber, Michael Hudson, Jess Huerta de Soto, Zoltan
Jakab, Steve Keen, Uli Kortsch, Larry Kotlikoff, Douglas Laxton, Stefan Lewellen,
Bernard Lietaer, Falk Mazelis, Thorvald Grung Moe, Dirk Muir, Antonio Pancorbo,
Johannes Priesemann, Romain Rancire, Liliya Repa, Adair Turner, Kenichi Ueda,
Richard Werner and Steven Zarlenga, and from seminar participants at the Bank of
England, European Central Bank, Global Utmaning, Humboldt University Berlin, IMF,
LSE, New Economics Foundation, Norges Bank, UNCTAD and Virginia Tech.

JEL Classification Numbers: E44, E52, G21

Keywords: Chicago Plan; Chicago School of Economics; 100% reserve banking; bank
lending; lending risk; private money creation; bank capital adequacy;
government debt; private debt; boom-bust cycles.

Authors E-Mail Addresses: jbenes@imf.org; mkumhof@imf.org

2
Contents
I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
II. Answers to Common Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
A. The Transition Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
B. Debt-Financed Investment Trusts and Near-Monies . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
C. Maturity Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
D. Competitiveness of the Banking System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
E. Deation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
F. Ination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
G. Government Control over Money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
H. Government Control over Credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
I. Compromise Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
J. Open Economy Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
III. The Chicago Plan in the History of Monetary Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
A. Government versus Private Control over Money Issuance . . . . . . . . . 23
B. The Chicago Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
IV. The Model under the Current Monetary System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
A. Banks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
B. Lending Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
C. Transactions Cost Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
D. Equity Ownership and Dividends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
E. Unconstrained Households . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
F. Constrained Households . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
G. Unions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
H. Manufacturers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
I. Capital Goods Producers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
J. Capital Investment Funds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
K. Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
1. Monetary Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2. Prudential Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3. Fiscal Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4. Government Budget Constraint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
L. Market Clearing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
V. The Model under the Chicago Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
A. Banks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
B. Households . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
C. Manufacturers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
D. Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
1. Monetary Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2. Prudential Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3. Fiscal Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4. Government Budget Constraint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5. Controlling Boom-Bust Cycles - Additional Considerations . . . . . 54
3
VI. Calibration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
VII. Transition to the Chicago Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
VIII. Credit Booms and Busts Pre-Transition and Post-Transition . . . . . . . . . . 65
IX. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Figures
1. Changes in Financial Sector Balance Sheet in Transition Period (percent of
GDP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
2. Changes in Government Balance Sheet in Transition Period (percent of GDP) 80
3. Changes in Financial Sector Balance Sheet - Details (percent of GDP) . . . . 81
4. Transition to Chicago Plan - Financial Sector Balance Sheets . . . . . . . . . 82
5. Transition to Chicago Plan - Main Macroeconomic Variables . . . . . . . . . . 83
6. Transition to Chicago Plan - Fiscal Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
7. Business Cycle Properties Pre-Transition versus Post-Transition . . . . . . . . 85
4
I. Introduction
The decade following the onset of the Great Depression was a time of great intellectual
ferment in economics, as the leading thinkers of the time tried to understand the apparent
failures of the existing economic system. This intellectual struggle extended to many
domains, but arguably the most important was in the eld of monetary economics, given
the key roles of private bank behavior and of central bank policies in triggering and
prolonging the crisis.
During this time a large number of leading U.S. macroeconomists supported a fundamental
proposal for monetary reform that later became known as the Chicago Plan, named after
its strongest proponent, professor Henry Simons of the University of Chicago.
1
It was also
supported, and brilliantly summarized, by Irving Fisher of Yale University, in Fisher
(1936). The key feature of the Chicago Plan was to call for the separation of the monetary
and credit functions of the banking system, rst by requiring 100% backing of deposits by
government-issued money, and second by ensuring that the nancing of new credit can
only take place through earnings that have been retained in the form of government-issued
money, or through the borrowing of existing government-issued money from non-banks,
but not through the creation of new deposit money, ex nihilo, by nancial institutions.
Fisher (1936) claimed four major advantages for this plan. First, it would allow for a
much better control of credit cycles, by preventing nancial institutions from creating
their own funds during credit booms, and then destroying those funds during subsequent
contractions. Second, it would completely eliminate bank runs. Third, allowing the
government to issue money directly at zero interest, rather than borrowing that same
money from banks at interest, would lead not only to a reduction in the interest burden of
government nancing, but also to a dramatic reduction of (net) government debt, given
that irredeemable government-issued money represents equity in the commonwealth rather
than debt. Fourth, given that money creation would no longer require the simultaneous
creation of mostly private debts on bank balance sheets, the economy could see a dramatic
reduction not only of government debt but also of private debt.
We take it as self-evident that if these claims can be veried, the Chicago Plan would
indeed represent a highly desirable policy. Profound thinkers like Fisher, and many of his
most illustrious peers, based their insights on historical experience and common sense, and
were hardly deterred by the fact that they might not have had complete economic or
econometric models that could formally demonstrate the desirability of avoiding
credit-driven boom-bust cycles, bank runs, and high public and private debt levels. We do
in fact believe that this approach made them superior thinkers about issues of the greatest
importance for the common good. But we can also point to recent empirical evidence and
theoretical results in support of the desirability of Fishers four claims. For boom-bust
credit cycles and bank runs, the evidence of Reinhart and Rogo (2009) documents the
high costs of such events throughout history. For high debt levels, there are separate
literatures which show that these are associated with more frequent crises, higher real
interest rates, and lower growth. Schularick and Taylor (2012) provide supporting
evidence for Fishers view that high debt levels are a very important predictor of major
1
Other commonly used names for this type of monetary reform are full reserve banking and 100% reserve
banking. We will use these terms interchangeably.
5
crises. This is also consistent with the theoretical work of Kumhof and Rancire (2010),
who show how very high debt levels, such as those observed just prior to the Great
Depression and the Great Recession, can lead to a much higher probability of nancial
and real crises. Laubach (2009), Engen and Hubbard (2004) and Gale and Orszag (2004)
have estimated that higher U.S. public debt levels lead to economically signicant
increases in real interest rates. Arcand et al. (2012) and Cecchetti and Kharroubi (2012)
have shown that at high private debt levels, exceeding around 100% of GDP, further
increases in debt can have sizeable negative eects on growth.
We now turn to a more detailed discussion of each of Fishers four claims concerning the
advantages of the Chicago Plan. This will set the stage for a rst illustration of the
implied balance sheet changes, which will be provided in Figures 1 and 2.
The rst advantage of the Chicago Plan is that it permits much better control of what
Fisher and many of his contemporaries perceived to be the major source of business cycle
uctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit, and therefore of money,
that are not necessarily driven by the fundamentals of the real economy, but that
themselves change those fundamentals.
In the current nancial system, which requires little or no reserve backing for deposits,
and where government-issued cash has a very small role relative to bank deposits, changes
of a nations broad monetary aggregates depend almost entirely on changes in banks
willingness to create deposits. But bank deposits can only be created (or destroyed)
through the creation (or destruction) of bank loans. Sudden changes in the willingness of
banks to extend credit must therefore not only lead to credit booms or busts, but also to
an instant excess or shortage of money, and therefore of nominal aggregate demand.
Crucially, the present system imposes almost no constraints on the ability of banks to act
on such changes in sentiment. The reason is that banks are able to generate their own
funding, deposits, in the act of lending, an extraordinary privilege that is not enjoyed by
any other type of business. Specically, and without exception, whenever a bank makes a
new loan to a non-bank customer X, it creates a new loan entry on the asset side of its
balance sheet, and at the same time it creates a new and equal deposit entry on the
liability side. Both entries are in the name of customer X. There is therefore no
intermediation whatsoever at the moment a new loan is made. No resources need to be
diverted from other uses, by other agents, in order to be able to lend to borrowers. What
is needed from third parties (i.e. other than the bank and X) is not a new deposit, but
only the acceptability of the newly created money in payment for goods and services. This
is given by legal at and therefore never in question. Note that at the level of the
aggregate banking system it makes no dierence that the new deposit (or the new loan,
e.g. through securitization) might subsequently be transferred to another bank so long
as the loan remains outstanding at some bank, so does the deposit, at some other bank.
The aggregate money supply has therefore increased.
In contrast to the current nancial system, under the Chicago Plan the quantity of money,
which is now provided exclusively by government but administered by private banks, and
the quantity of credit, which continues to be provided by private nancial institutions,
would become completely independent of each other. This would make it much easier to
control the volatility of these two key aggregates. The growth of broad monetary
aggregates could be controlled directly via a money growth rule, and the banks
6
administering this money supply would be completely safe without any need for deposit
insurance, which could therefore be abolished. Control of potentially destructive credit
cycles would become much more straightforward because lending banks, now referred to as
investment trusts, would no longer be able to generate their own funding in the act of
lending. Rather, they would become what many erroneously believe banks to be today,
pure intermediaries that depend on obtaining outside funding before being able to lend it
to potential borrowers. This would much reduce their ability to create credit cycles,
because in this world what is needed from third parties is a deposit of existing
government-issued money, and making this deposit involves a real economic trade-o.
Namely, by giving up their money balances depositors lose the benet of real economic
transactions, and they also lose the guaranteed safety of their money balances as an
investment asset, while they gain a higher, but risky, return on lending. In such an
environment the need to attract investors, and the constant vigilance of investors in the
face of risk, would impose serious additional constraints on the ability of the nancial
sector to start lending booms that are not supported by economic fundamentals. In
addition, we will show that policy could also become more eective under this system, by
using a set of instruments that are mostly already available today, but whose eectiveness
in controlling credit growth is circumscribed by banks ability to create their own funding.
The second advantage of the Chicago Plan is that having fully reserve-backed bank
deposits would completely eliminate bank runs, thereby increasing nancial stability. This
would greatly improve the eectiveness of banking, by allowing one set of nancial
institutions to concentrate on the core lending function, without worrying about funding
uncertainties from the liabilities side of their balance sheet, while at the same time
allowing another set of nancial institutions to concentrate on the core function of
managing the payments system, without worrying about the eect of asset quality
problems on the safety of transactions liabilities. The elimination of bank runs will be
accomplished if two conditions hold. First, the banking systems monetary liabilities must
be fully backed by reserves of government-issued money, which is of course true under the
Chicago Plan. Incidentally, these monetary liabilities can have various degrees of liquidity,
or money-ness, and they can include even longer-maturity assets that nevertheless
exhibit some substitutability with money because they are safe, and because they can be
used as collateral for borrowing transactions balances. Associated with these dierent
degrees of liquidity would be a range of interest rates, including perhaps also negative
interest rates for the most liquid liabilities, as suggested by Gesell (1958). Second, the
nancial systems credit assets must be funded by non-monetary liabilities that are not
subject to runs. This means that policy needs to ensure that such liabilities cannot
become near-monies. The literature of the 1930s and 1940s discussed three institutional
arrangements under which this can be accomplished, namely lending by non-bank
investment trusts funded by treasury credit, by private equity, or by private non-monetary
deposits (or some combination of the three).
The easiest of these is to require that investment trusts fund all of their credit assets with
a combination of equity and loans of money from the government treasury, and completely
without private debt instruments, thereby ruling out bank runs. This is the core (but not
the only) element of the version of the Chicago Plan considered in this paper, rst for
reasons of model economy, because it allows for a clearer exposition of the results, and
second because this arrangement has a number of advantages that go beyond decisively
7
preventing the emergence of near-monies. But both in the model and in the real world a
greater extent of private funding can easily be incorporated.
There is an important reason why privately funded investment trusts need to be part of
any real-world solution. Our model makes the conventional assumption of representative
agents, with no borrowing and lending within each agent group. In that world the
treasury credit solution alone can be sucient to fund all lending. But in the real world
there continues to be a need, after the implementation of the Chicago Plan, for lending
between highly heterogeneous net savers and net borrowers within each group, and the
treasury loans solution is insucient to satisfy this need. It must therefore be
accompanied by either one or both of the other two institutional arrangements.
One of these is investment trusts that are funded exclusively by net savers equity
investments, with the funds either lent to net borrowers, or invested as equity if this is
feasible. This is the solution favored by Kotliko (2012) in his Limited Purpose Banking
proposal. The other institutional arrangement is investment trusts that are funded by a
combination of equity and private debt. However, unlike todays banks, these institutions
would be true intermediaries, in that the trust can only lend government-issued money to
net borrowers after net savers have rst deposited this money in exchange for risky and
non-monetary debt instruments issued by the trust.
2
The third advantage of the Chicago Plan is a dramatic reduction of (net) government
debt. The overall outstanding liabilities of todays U.S. nancial system, including the
shadow banking system, are far larger than currently outstanding U.S. Treasury liabilities.
Because under the Chicago Plan banks have to borrow reserves from the treasury to fully
back these large liabilities, the government acquires a very large asset vis--vis banks, and
government debt net of this asset becomes highly negative. This asset, which we will refer
to as treasury credit, represents a very large stock seigniorage gain by the government. In
eect the government reappropriates, in one instant, banks cumulative historic money
creation, which is equal to their stock of deposits. Governments could leave the separate
gross positions of government debt and treasury credit outstanding, or they could buy
back government bonds from banks against the cancellation of treasury credit. Fisher had
the second option in mind, based on the situation of the 1930s, when banks held the
major portion of outstanding government debt. But today most U.S. government debt is
held outside U.S. banks, so that the rst option is the more relevant one. The eect on
net debt is of course the same, it drops dramatically.
In this context it is critical to realize that the stock of reserves, or money, newly issued by
the government is not a debt of the government. The reason is that at money is not
redeemable, in that holders of money cannot claim repayment in something other than
money.
3
Money is therefore properly treated as government equity rather than
government debt, which is exactly how treasury coin is currently treated under U.S.
accounting conventions (Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (2012)). It is
therefore instructive to think of the Chicago Plan as requiring that all money in existence
must have the same status as treasury coin.
2
This would not be a dramatically new type of institution, because many non-bank nancial institutions
operate today without the ability to create and allocate new money.
3
Furthermore, in a growing economy the government will never have a need to voluntarily retire money
to maintain price stability, as the economys monetary needs increase period after period.
8
The fourth advantage of the Chicago Plan is the potential for a dramatic reduction of
private debts. As mentioned above, the establishment of full reserve backing by itself
would generate a highly negative net government debt position. Instead of leaving this in
place and becoming a large net lender to the private sector, the government has the option
of spending part of the windfall by repaying large amounts of private bank debt. This can
be accomplished through a transfer of a part of government-held treasury credit balances
to citizens by way of a citizens dividend, whose mandatory rst use is the full repayment
of any outstanding private debts by the recipient. Because this policy would have the
advantage of establishing low-debt sustainable balance sheets in both the private sector
and the government, it is plausible to assume that a real-world implementation of the
Chicago Plan would involve at least some, and potentially a very large, repayment of
private debt. In the simulation of the Chicago Plan presented in this paper we will assume
that the citizens dividend covers all categories of private bank debt except loans that
nance investment in physical capital. Another way to look at this result is that much
lower private debt levels would be the natural longer-term outcome for a world in which
money creation no longer requires the simultaneous creation of debt on bank balance
sheets.
We study Fishers four claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated
model of the U.S. nancial system in a state-of-the-art monetary DSGE model of the U.S.
economy.
4
We nd strong support for all four of Fishers claims, with the potential for
much smoother business cycles, no possibility of bank runs, a large reduction of debt levels
across the economy, and a replacement of that debt by debt-free government-issued money.
At this point in the paper it may not be straightforward for the average reader to
comprehend the nature of the balance sheet changes implied by the Chicago Plan. A
complete analysis requires a thorough prior discussion of both the model and of its
calibration, and is therefore only possible much later in the paper. But we feel that at
least a preliminary presentation of the main changes is essential to aid in the
comprehension of what follows.
5
In Figures 1 and 2 we therefore present the changes in
bank and government balance sheets that occur in the single transition period of our
simulated model. The gures ignore subsequent changes as the economy approaches a new
steady state, but those are small compared to the initial changes. In both gures
quantities reported are in percent of GDP. Compared to Figure 3, which shows the precise
results, the numbers in Figure 1 are rounded, in part to avoid having to discuss
unnecessary details.
As shown in the left column of Figure 1, the balance sheet of the consolidated nancial
system
6
prior to the implementation of the Chicago Plan is equal to 200% of GDP, with
equity and deposits equal to 16% and 184% of GDP. Banks assets consist of government
bonds equal to 20% of GDP, investment loans equal to 80% of GDP, and other loans
(mortgage loans, consumer loans, working capital loans) equal to 100% of GDP. The
implementation of the plan is assumed to take place in one transition period, which can be
broken into two separate stages. In the rst stage, as shown in the middle column of
Figure 1, banks have to borrow from the treasury to procure the reserves necessary to
4
To our knowledge this is the rst attempt to model the Chicago Plan in this way. Yamaguchi (2011)
discusses the Chicago Plan using a system dynamics approach.
5
We thank George Akerlof for this suggestion.
6
As discussed in Section VI on model calibration, this includes the shadow banking system.
9
fully back their deposits. As a result both treasury credit and reserves increase by 184% of
GDP. In the second stage, as shown in the right column of Figure 1, the principal of all
bank loans to the government (20% of GDP), and of all bank loans to the private sector
except investment loans (100% of GDP), is repaid.
7,8
Government debt is cancelled
against treasury credit, while private debt is repaid through the citizens dividend.
Furthermore, banks pay out part of their equity to keep their net worth in line with now
much reduced capital requirements, with the government making up the dierence of 7%
of GDP by injecting additional treasury credit. The separate balance sheets for deposit
banks and credit investment trusts in the right column of Figure 1 represent the now
strict separation between the monetary and credit functions of the banking system.
Money remains unchanged, but it is now fully backed by reserves. Credit shrinks
dramatically, it consists only of investment loans, which are nanced by a reduced level of
equity equal to 9% of GDP, and by what is left of treasury credit, 71% of GDP, after the
repayments of government and private debts and the injection of additional treasury
credit following the equity payout.
Figure 2 illustrates the balance sheet of the government, which prior to the Chicago Plan
consists of government debt equal to 80% of GDP, with unspecied other assets used as the
balancing item. The issuance of treasury credit equal to 184% of GDP represents a large
new nancial asset of the government, while the issuance of an equal amount of reserves,
in other words of money, represents new government equity. The repayment of private
debts is a charge against government equity, it therefore reduces both treasury credit and
government equity by 100% of GDP. The government is assumed to levy a lump-sum tax
that is equal to the equity payout of banks to households, and then to inject those funds
back into the investment trusts as treasury credit. This increases both treasury credit and
government equity by 7% of GDP. Finally, the cancellation of bank-held government debt
reduces both government debt and treasury credit by 20% of GDP.
To summarize, our analysis nds that the government is left with a much lower, in fact
negative, net debt burden. It gains a large net equity position due to money issuance,
despite the fact that it spends a large share of the one-o seigniorage gains from money
issuance on the repayment of private debts. These repayments in turn mean that the
private sector is left with a much lower debt burden, while its deposits remain unchanged.
Bank runs are obviously impossible in this world. These results, whose analytical
foundations will be derived in the rest of the paper, support three out of Fishers (1936)
four claims in favor of the Chicago Plan. The remaining claim, concerning the potential
for smoother business cycles, will be veried towards the end of the paper, once the full
model has been developed. But we can go even further than Fisher (1936), because our
general equilibrium analysis highlights two additional advantages of the Chicago Plan.
The rst additional advantage of the Chicago Plan is that, in our calibration, it generates
longer-term output gains approaching 10 percent. This happens for three main reasons.
First, monetary reform represents a very large economy-wide debt-to-equity swap. This
leads to large reductions of real interest rates, as lower net debt levels lead investors to
7
The assumption that both stages take place in one period is made to simplify the exposition. There are
practical reasons why a more gradual implementation of stage 2 may be advantageous. But stage 1 can and
should be implemented immediately.
8
The government could of course allocate the citizens dividend dierently so that, for example, mortgage
loans rather than investment loans remain outstanding. This is a policy choice.
10
demand lower real interest rates on both government and private debts. This stimulates
investment and output. Second, monetary reform permits much lower distortionary tax
rates, due to much higher seigniorage income (despite lower ination) in the government
budget. And third, monetary reform leads to lower credit monitoring costs, because far
fewer scarce resources have to be devoted to monitoring loans whose purpose was to create
an adequate money supply that can easily be created debt-free.
The second additional advantage of the Chicago Plan is that liquidity traps cannot exist,
which in turn implies that steady state ination can drop to zero without posing problems
for the conduct of monetary policy. The separation of the money and credit functions of
the banking system allows the government to control multiple policy instruments,
including a nominal money growth rule that controls the broad money supply and thereby
ination, a Basel-III-style countercyclical capital adequacy rule that controls excessive
uctuations in the quantity of investment trust lending, and nally an interest rate rule
that controls the price of treasury credit to investment trusts. The latter replaces the
conventional Taylor rule for the interest rate on government debt, with the determination
of that rate now being left to the market. A critical implication of this dierent monetary
environment concerns liquidity traps. Liquidity traps are episodes during which the
central bank cannot eectively stimulate the economy, either because increases in the
narrow money supply under its control are ineective in stimulating growth in broader
monetary aggregates, or because reductions in policy rates are impossible because of a
zero interest rate oor. Neither of these traps can exist under the Chicago Plan. First,
the aggregate quantity of broad money in private agents hands can be directly increased
by the policymaker, without depending on nancial institutions willingness to lend in
order to grow broader monetary aggregates. And second, because the interest rate on
treasury credit is not an opportunity cost of money for asset investors, but rather a
borrowing rate for a credit facility that is only accessible to investment trusts for the
specic purpose of funding physical investment projects, it can temporarily become
negative without any practical problems.
9
In other words, a zero lower bound does not
apply to this rate. This makes it feasible to keep steady state ination at zero without
worrying about the fact that nominal policy rates are in that case more likely to reach
zero or negative values.
10
Furthermore, our model simulations will show that near-zero
ination can be reached almost immediately upon the implementation of the Chicago
Plan, not just in the new steady state.
The critical feature of our theoretical model is that it exhibits the key function of banks in
modern economies, which is not their largely incidental function as nancial intermediaries
between depositors and borrowers, but rather their central function as creators (and
destroyers) of money for use by its borrowers. The loanable funds model of banking
that still dominates virtually the entire macroeconomic literature on the subject misses
the fact that under the present system banks categorically do not have to wait for
depositors to appear and make funds available before they can on-lend, or intermediate,
those funds. Rather, they create their own funds, deposits, in the act of lending.
11
We will
9
Of course this requires the assumption that diversion of funds to non-investment uses can be eectively
prevented. There is no reason why this should be dicult.
10
Zero steady state ination has been found to be desirable in a number of recent models of the monetary
business cycle (Schmitt-Groh and Uribe (2004)). However, see Akerlof et al. (1996) for a contrary view
that advocates moderate positive ination due to downward nominal wage rigidity.
11
Another common terminology in the macroeconomic literature on banking, namely that banks collect
11
show that, once a correct model of banks as money creators rather than intermediaries is
adopted, the implications for the ability of banks to create credit cycles are profound.
The fact that banks create their own funds in the act of lending can be veried in the
description of the money creation process in many central bank statements
12
and in the
older economics literature, particularly of the rst half of the twentieth century.
13
It is
also obvious to anybody who has ever lent money and created the resulting book entries.
14
In other words, new bank liabilities are not macroeconomic savings that have been
withdrawn from other uses. Savings are a state variable, so that by relying entirely on
intermediating slow-moving savings, banks would be unable to engineer the rapid lending
booms and busts that are frequently observed in practice. Rather, bank liabilities are
money that can be created and destroyed at a moments notice. The critical importance of
this fact only appears in the modern macroeconomics literature in Werner (2005), and to
some extent in Christiano et al. (2011).
15
Our model generates this feature in a number of
ways. First, it introduces agents who have to borrow for the sole purpose of generating
sucient deposits for their transactions purposes. This means that they simultaneously
borrow from and deposit with banks. This is true for many households and rms in the
real world, as we will discuss in Section VI on model calibration.
16
Second, the model
introduces nancially unconstrained agents who do not borrow from banks. Their savings
consist of multiple assets including a xed asset referred to as land, government bonds and
deposits. This means that a sale of mortgageable xed assets from these agents to
credit-constrained agents (or of government bonds to banks) results in new bank credit,
and thus in the creation of new deposits that are created for the purpose of paying for
those assets. Instantly, and in arbitrarily large amounts, so long as banks are satised
with borrowers creditworthiness. Third, even for conventional deposit-nanced
deposits, is also misleading. Individual banks do indeed collect deposits, in the form of various instruments
drawn on accounts at other banks, in their daily business. But the aggregate banking system, with the
quantitatively insignicant exception of cash deposits, does not collect deposits from non-banks. Rather, it
creates (and destroys) deposits for non-banks. To understand how problematic the notion of the aggregate
banking system collecting deposits from non-banks is, it helps to ask the following question: When a customer
walks into a bank to make a non-cash deposit, what is it, exactly, that the bank collects from him/her?
If it appears that there is no good answer to that question, it is because there is none.
12
Berry et al. (2007), which was written by a team from the Monetary Analysis Division of the Bank of
England, states: When banks make loans, they create additional deposits for those that have borrowed the
money. Keister and McAndrews (2009), sta economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, write:
Suppose that Bank A gives a new loan of $20 to Firm X, which continues to hold a deposit account with
Bank A. Bank A does this by crediting Firm Xs account by $20. The bank now has a new asset (the loan
to Firm X) and an osetting liability (the increase in Firm Xs deposit at the bank). Importantly, Bank A
still has [unchanged] reserves in its account. In other words, the loan to Firm X does not decrease Bank
As reserve holdings at all. Putting this dierently, the bank does not lend out reserves (money) that it
already owns, rather it creates new deposit money ex nihilo. See Ryan-Collins et al. (2012) for an excellent
overview of the modern money creation system.
13
A particularly clear statement is due to Schumpeter (1994): But this ... makes it highly inadvisable
to construe bank credit on the model of existing funds being withdrawn from previous uses by an entirely
imaginary act of saving and then lent out by their owners. It is much more realistic to say that the banks
... create deposits in their act of lending, than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted
to them. (p. 1114)
14
This includes one of the authors of this paper.
15
We emphasize that this exception is partial, because while bank deposits in Christiano et al. (2011) are
modelled as money, they are also, with the empirically insignicant exception of a possible substitution into
cash, modelled as representing household savings. The latter is not true in our model.
16
It would in fact be perfectly feasible to construct a model that features no intermediation whatsoever.
We have veried that such a model economy works very similarly to the one presented in this paper.
12
investment loans the transmission is from lending to investment to savings and not the
reverse. When banks decide to lend more for investment purposes, say due to increased
optimism about business conditions, they create additional purchasing power for investors
in plant and machinery by crediting their accounts. It is this new purchasing power that
makes the actual investment possible. And it is the transfer of the deposit account
balance from the investor in plant and machinery to the seller of plant and machinery that
generates the corresponding saving, which is therefore a consequence of the creation of
purchasing power and of physical investment activity. This issue is in fact of much broader
policy signicance. Because it implies that, at least to the extent that investment is
bank-nanced, the often heard prescription that in order to generate adequate levels of
investment the economy rst needs to generate sucient savings is fundamentally
mistaken. Because the credit system will generate the saving along with the investment.
Finally, the issue can be further illuminated by looking at it from the vantage point of
depositors. We will assume, based on empirical evidence, that the interest rate sensitivity
of deposit demand is high at the margin. Therefore, if depositors decided, for a given
deposit interest rate, that they wanted to start depositing additional funds in banks,
without bankers wanting to make additional loans, the end result would be virtually
unchanged deposits and loans. The reason is that banks would start to pay a slightly
lower deposit interest rate, and this would be sucient to reduce deposit demand without
materially aecting funding costs and therefore the volume of lending. For a given credit
demand, the nal decision on the quantity of lending and therefore of money in the
economy is therefore almost exclusively made by banks, and is based on their optimism
about business conditions and thus about borrowers creditworthiness.
Our model completely omits two other monetary magnitudes, cash outside banks and
bank reserves held at the central bank. This is because it is privately created deposit
money that plays the central role in the current U.S. monetary system, while
government-issued money plays a quantitatively and conceptually negligible role. In this
context it should be mentioned that both private and government-issued monies are at
monies, because the acceptability of bank deposits for commercial and ocial transactions
has had to rst be decreed by law. As we will argue in Section III, virtually all monies
throughout history, including precious metals, have derived most or all of their value from
government at rather than from their intrinsic value.
Rogo (1998) examines U.S. dollar currency outside banks for the late 1990s. He
concludes that it was equal to around 5% of GDP for the United States, but that 95% of
this was held either by foreigners and/or by the underground economy. This means that
currency outside banks circulating in the formal U.S. economy equalled only around 0.25%
of GDP, while we will nd that the current transactions-related liabilities of the U.S.
nancial system, including the shadow banking system, are equal to around 200% of GDP.
Bank reserves held at the central bank have also generally been negligible in size, except
of course after the onset of the 2008 nancial crisis and quantitative easing. But this
quantitative point is far less important than the recognition that they do not play any
meaningful role in the determination of wider monetary aggregates. The reason is that the
deposit multiplier of the undergraduate economics textbook, where monetary aggregates
are created at the initiative of the central bank, through an initial injection of
high-powered money into the banking system that gets multiplied through bank lending,
13
turns the actual operation of the monetary transmission mechanism on its head. This
should be clear under the current ination targeting regime, where the central bank
controls an interest rate and must be willing to supply as many reserves as banks demand
at that rate.
17
But as shown by Kydland and Prescott (1990), the availability of central
bank reserves did not even constrain banks during the period, in the 1970s and 1980s,
when the central bank did in fact ocially target monetary aggregates. These authors
show that broad monetary aggregates, which are driven by banks lending decisions, led
the economic cycle, while narrow monetary aggregates, most importantly reserves, lagged
the cycle. In other words, banks ask for reserves after they have decided to lend more, and
the central bank obliges. Reserves therefore impose no constraint, they are a consequence
rather than a cause of bank credit and money creation. The deposit multiplier is simply,
in the words of Kydland and Prescott (1990), a myth.
18
And because of this, private
banks are almost fully in control of the money creation process.
19
The one qualication to this is that the central bank does have some eect on the money
supply through the policy rate. However, that control is quite weak and indirect.
20
The
policy rate works through its eects, by arbitrage, on the deposit rate and thereby on bank
lending rates. But in order to have a signicant eect on credit and therefore on money by
using this price instrument, the central bank has to literally raise the price of credit to the
point where it makes signicant numbers of potential borrowers not creditworthy. This
makes the policy rate a very blunt and indiscriminate tool for aecting the money supply,
and one that is not likely to be frequently used for this purpose. By contrast with the
policy rate, banks decisions on lending standards have a much stronger and direct eect
on the availability and cost of credit, and therefore on the quantity of money.
Apart from the central role of bank-based money creation, other features of our banking
model are based on Benes and Kumhof (2011). This work diers from other recent papers
on banking along the following dimensions: First, banks have their own balance sheet and
net worth, and their prots and net worth are exposed to non-diversiable aggregate risk
determined endogenously on the basis of optimal debt contracts.
21
Second, banks are
lenders rather than holders of risky equity.
22
Third, bank lending is based on the loan
contract of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999), but with the crucial dierence that
lending is risky due to non-contingent lending interest rates. This implies that banks can
17
The absence of a deposit multiplier channel in the current U.S. nancial system has been conrmed
empirically by Carpenter and Demiralp (2010), in a Federal Reserve Board working paper. It is also stated
very clearly in ECB (2012), which explains that the ECBs reserve requirements are backward-looking, and
therefore only apply after banks have made a loan decision. Furthermore, The Eurosystem ... always
provides the banking system with the liquidity required to meet the aggregate reserve requirement.
18
This is of course the reason why quantitative easing, at least the kind that is intended to work by
making greater reserves available to banks and not to the public, can be ineective if banks decide that
lending remains too risky.
19
Incidentally, we do not refer to the money created by banks as endogenous money precisely because
that term is associated with the deposit multiplier, where the exogenous shock is the central bank injection
of high-powered money. Bank-based money creation is partly endogenous, but only with respect to standard
business cycle shocks. If on the other hand the shock is to bank sentiment about borrower riskiness,
which then leads to changes in lending conditions, bank-based money creation is more properly classied as
exogenous.
20
See Altunbas et al. (2009) for empirical evidence that conrms this for Europe.
21
Christiano, Motto and Rostagno (2010) and Curdia and Woodford (2010) focus exclusively on how the
price of credit aects real activity.
22
Gertler and Karadi (2010) and Angeloni and Faia (2009) make the latter assumption.
14
make losses if a larger number of loans defaults than was expected at the time of setting
the lending rate. Fourth, bank capital is subject to regulation that closely replicates the
features of the Basel regulatory framework, including costs of violating minimum capital
adequacy regulations. Capital buers arise as an optimal equilibrium phenomenon
resulting from the interaction of optimal debt contracts, endogenous losses and
regulation.
23
To maintain capital buers, banks respond to loan losses by raising their
lending rate in order to rebuild their net worth, with adverse eects for the real economy.
Fifth, acquiring fresh capital is subject to market imperfections. This is a necessary
condition for capital adequacy regulation to have non-trivial eects, and for the capital
buers to exist. We use the extended family approach of Gertler and Karadi (2010),
whereby bankers (and also non-nancial manufacturers and entrepreneurs) transfer part of
their accumulated equity positions to the household budget constraint at an exogenously
xed rate. This is closely related to the original approach of Bernanke, Gertler and
Gilchrist (1999), and to the dividend policy function of Aoki, Proudman and Vlieghe
(2004).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II discusses answers to some
common questions concerning the Chicago Plan. Section III contains a survey of the
literature on monetary history and monetary thought leading up to the Chicago Plan.
Section IV presents the model under the current monetary system. Section V presents the
model under the Chicago Plan. Section VI discusses model calibration. Section VII
studies impulse responses that simulate a dynamic transition between the current
monetary system and the Chicago Plan, which allows us to analyze all but one of the
above-mentioned claims in favor of the Chicago Plan. The remaining claim, regarding the
more eective stabilization of bank-driven business cycles, is studied in Section VIII.
Section IX concludes.
II. Answers to Common Questions
Since this paper was rst published as IMF Working Paper 12/202 in August 2012, we
have received an enormous amount of feedback from around the world. Nobody has so far
challenged our economic model or the model simulations. But there were many questions
concerning the feasibility and/or desirability of implementing a modern version of the
Chicago Plan. We have therefore added this new section, which covers the major issues
raised in these questions in a small number of subsections.
The questions can be divided into two groups, those that concern the diculties of
correctly designing a dierent monetary and nancial system, and those that argue that
such a system, even if designed as intended, could have major shortcomings. The rst set
of questions, which is covered in subsections II.A II.B, is of course entirely justied. Any
major monetary reform requires very careful attention to detail, and the Chicago Plan
would be no exception. The critiques underlying the second set of questions, which is
covered in subsections II.C II.J, have mostly turned out to be based either on
misconceptions of what the Chicago Plan proposes, or on insucient attention to the
23
Van den Heuvel (2008) models capital adequacy as a continously binding constraint. Gerali et al. (2010)
use a quadratic cost short-cut.
15
historical evidence. Responding to these questions has in many cases helped us to further
illuminate the advantages of the Chicago Plan.
A. The Transition Period
The key question in any major monetary reform is whether the risks of transitioning to a
dierent monetary system are justied by the benets once that transition is complete.
We have already discussed that the benets of the Chicago Plan, in terms of output,
output volatility, and debt levels would be very large, and will demonstrate this
quantitatively in the second half of the paper. The risks and uncertainties of the
transition period would therefore have to be extreme to counsel against attempting a
transition. But there is no reason for thinking that they would be extreme. In fact, both
Fisher (1935) and Friedman (1960) express the view that the transition would be a simple
matter. The very rst stage of the Chicago Plan, the implementation of full reserve
backing for all existing deposits, is quite straightforward to implement. It would of course
have to be designed with careful attention to detail, given the complexity of todays
nancial markets and nancial products. The subsequent steps, including the citizens
dividend and the gradual transition to a low-ination, low-interest-rate and low-tax
environment, can be spread out over time to minimize potential disruptive eects. In the
process, from a position of formidable scal strength, the authorities would gain the
experience necessary to ne-tune the details of the new monetary system.
B. Debt-Financed Investment Trusts and Near-Monies
The question is whether and how the creation of money substitutes, or near-monies, by
the investment trust sector can be prevented, given that a proliferation of near-monies
could make the control of money and thus ination very dicult. Henry Simons and
Irving Fisher were very aware of this problem, but did not think of it as prohibitive. Nor
did the other advocates of full reserve banking. The obvious solution is to insist on
equity-funded or treasury-funded investment trusts, which would most directly prevent
the emergence of near-monies. But even for debt-funded investment trusts it should be
straightforward to design eective institutional and regulatory safeguards that accomplish
the same objective. We will list ve such safeguards, with the initial ones designed to
create economic incentives against the creation of near-monies, and the later ones designed
to outlaw them completely. A policymaker could choose any combination along this
spectrum. Legal prohibitions may be more extreme than necessary, but this could only be
nally decided in the light of experience with lighter-touch alternatives.
The rst and most important safeguard would be that none of the liabilities of the
investment trusts should be protected by any kind of government-backed deposit
insurance, either explicitly or implicitly, so that from the point of view of the investor they
would represent risky investments rather than money. Incidentally, any objection that the
removal of deposit insurance would severely increase systemic risk misses one of the most
important points of the Chicago Plan, namely that under the new system, completely
unlike the present one, large-scale loan defaults would have no implications whatsoever for
16
the money supply and the safety of the payments system, which remains fully insulated
from the credit system.
The second safeguard against the emergence of near-monies would be a legal requirement
that all remaining short-term lending, of which there will be much less under the Chicago
Plan, must be nanced exclusively through equity-funded investment trusts, while
longer-term lending can be nanced by debt, but with strict regulations on maturity
mismatches, and with very high penalties for early withdrawal.
The third safeguard would be the complete removal of any tax advantages for debt
relative to equity, or even the creation of tax disadvantages for debt. This would make
equity-funded investment trusts more attractive than their debt-funded competitors.
The fourth safeguard would be incentive-compatible penalties against institutions issuing
near-monies. Particularly eective would be laws whereby the penalty would not be
payable to the government but rather to the parties receiving a payment (or collateral) in
something other than government-issued money, as this would ensure cooperation from
such parties in the enforcement process.
Finally, the fth and most extreme safeguard would be to simply outlaw the creation of
near-monies, and to conscate the assets of all institutions in violation of that law.
C. Maturity Transformation
A very common question concerning the Chicago Plan is whether it would destroy the
benets of maturity transformation that are currently provided by banks. Diamond and
Dybvig (1986), which is still frequently cited in defense of the status quo, argue that it
would. A careful analysis of what we propose shows that it would not. We begin that
analysis by pointing out that the existence of maturity transformation is clearly not an
end in itself. Rather, what matters are the benets derived from it, and whether these
benets would be lost under the Chicago Plan.
24
These benets have two relevant aspects,
cost of borrowing and access to desired maturity proles of assets and liabilities.
The Chicago Plan clearly imposes no additional constraints on the latter. Investors have
access to an undiminished range of generally shorter maturities on safe monetary deposits,
plus to longer-term maturities on non-monetary, risky investment trust liabilities.
Borrowers, especially but not only physical investors, can access long-term funding
through investment trusts without any problems. If the government wants to maintain low
interest rates in the investment trust sector while longer-term nancial investors prefer to
switch to safe monetary investments at those rates, treasury credit can be used to supply
additional funds. Otherwise interest rates can be allowed to rise to attract sucient
funding for investment trusts.
This takes us to the second aspect of maturity transformation, cost of borrowing. In
Section VI we estimate, based on U.S. data, that the average interest cost on bank
24
Incidentally, maturity transformation between highly liquid transactions balances and valuable long-
term assets clearly also takes place when the government, as under the Chicago Plan, uses the proceeds of
money creation to nance spending on long-term physical and human capital such as infrastructure, eduation
and public health.
17
deposits, broadly dened, is around 100 basis points below the rate on short-term
government securities. If, as assumed in our model, banks currently pass this cost
advantage on to borrowers, the adoption of the Chicago Plan would, ceteris paribus, raise
lending rates by 100 basis points, by removing cheap deposits as a source of funding loans.
But this misses several more important considerations. First, based on empirical studies
that are also cited in Section VI, we estimate that the large debt-equity swap of the
Chicago Plan would lower real interest rates on government securities themselves by
around 200 basis points, and this is under the conservative assumption that the
government decides not to completely repay all previously outstanding government debt,
but rather to leave separate gross positions of government debt and treasury credit
outstanding. Because private lending rates would follow rates on government securities,
the 200 basis points reduction in government borrowing rates far outweighs the cost of
losing low-cost deposit funding. Second, because under the Chicago Plan money no longer
needs to be created through debt, debt levels throughout the economy would be very
much lower, so that households and rms would be far less aected by borrowing costs
than before. Third, if banks, instead of passing their funding cost advantage on to
borrowers, were currently appropriating this prot by exploiting market power, then the
implementation of the Chicago Plan would simply transfer these monopoly prots from
banks shareholders to the taxpayer.
25
D. Competitiveness of the Banking System
Some have questioned whether the dramatic benets of the Chicago Plan would come at
the expense of diminishing some of the other core useful functions of a private nancial
system. We would argue that the exact opposite is true. Under the Chicago Plan private
nancial institutions would continue to play a key and in fact a much more eective role
in providing a state-of-the-art payments system, facilitating the ecient allocation of
capital to its most productive uses, and facilitating intertemporal smoothing by
households and rms. The payments system could be operated highly eciently without
having to worry about asset quality risks, while the credit system could be operated with
a long-run focus, with far fewer reasons to worry about liability management risks,
including the risk of bank runs. Credit, especially socially useful credit that supports real
physical investment activity, would continue to exist, and would in addition be
signicantly cheaper. What would cease to exist however is the proliferation of credit
created, at the almost exclusive initiative of private institutions, for the purpose of
creating an adequate money supply that can easily be created debt-free.
E. Deation
The question here is whether the Chicago Plan would cause massive deation by causing
nancial institutions to stop lending.
26
This involves two issues. One of them, deation,
clearly confuses matters by applying the logic of our current debt-based monetary system,
where a reduction in bank lending does indeed lead to a reduction in the money supply, to
25
We thank Olivier Blanchard for pointing this possibility out to us.
26
See the remarks by Timothy Congdon cited in Evans-Pritchard (2012).
18
a completely dierent system where the money supply, and therefore the risk of deation,
is completely under the control of monetary policy, and completely independent of
lending. Deation can therefore never become a problem.
The question of whether nancial institutions would stop lending therefore has no bearing
on the size of the overall money supply, but rather on its ecient allocation among
non-bank agents via intermediation. Sucient lending however is surely only a question of
the right price and, as discussed in subsection II.C, we estimate that equilibrium funding
rates under the Chicago Plan would drop so much that lending rates could drop while still
allowing investment trusts to make an adequate return on their capital.
27
F. Ination
Interestingly, others have raised precisely the opposite concern, by questioning whether
the Chicago Plan could avoid being highly inationary. Two dierent arguments are made
in this context. One is based on theory and is dealt with in this subsection, while the
other is based on economic history and is dealt with in the next subsection. The brief
answer is that neither theory nor history support this claim.
In our model of the Chicago Plan steady state ination is determined by the money growth
rate, and as we have already argued zero steady state ination can be achieved without
complications, due to the absence of liquidity trap problems. Ination along the transition
path is determined by the relative supplies of money (deposits) and goods. The Chicago
Plan, as Figure 1 shows very clearly, involves no signicant initial changes in the supply of
money, which starts and ends the single transition period at 184% of GDP, and thereafter
remains tightly controlled by a money growth rule. This cannot be inationary.
28
A critical misinterpretation in some arguments against the Chicago Plan concerns the
creation of a large new stock of reserves at the outset. The point is that this is not at all a
case of printing new money, but rather one of changing what the existing stock of money
represents. Under the present system money needs to be created through debt, and
uctuations in the recovery of that debt, or in banks willingness to create debt, must lead
to uctuations in the supply of money. In that sense money is highly destructible.
Under the Chicago Plan money is created independently of debt to satisfy the demand for
a stable medium of exchange, with no risk at all from the credit sector of the economy.
This money is therefore indestructible. This critical and highly benecial change in the
nature of money is what happens along the transition path, not ination.
27
On this, see Admati and Hellwig (2013), who argue against the notion that policymakers should be
concerned with banks return on equity on welfare grounds.
28
Any short-term inationary concerns could furthermore be very eectively dealt with through a combi-
nation of a slow disbursement of the citizens dividend, an initially more conservative money growth rate,
a very gradual lowering of the interest rate on treasury credit, and licensing requirements for investment
trusts that mandate conservative lending policies such as high downpayments.
19
G. Government Control over Money
A frequently-raised question is whether government can be trusted with control of the
money supply, given the historical record. The very common claim that it cannot will be
comprehensively refuted in Section III, which shows that, both in ancient societies and in
Western nations, it was periods of private control over money issuance that have been
plagued by nancial crises, while periods of government control have exhibited much more
stability.
This wealth of historical evidence for comparatively responsible government money
issuance dates back several centuries in many (but not all) cases. As an argument in favor
of the Chicago Plan it is therefore commonly countered by pointing to the many examples
of unsuccessful government monetary policy and ination throughout the twentieth
century. This however represents a serious logical error. The reason is that the Chicago
Plan proposes, as in the much older experiences, government control of broad monetary
aggregates and the complete elimination of all private debt-based money creation. This
has not been the case, even approximately, in any twentieth century experience. To the
contrary, private banks have had a great deal of monetary control, albeit not always to the
extent of the United States today. This could in fact be used to turn the argument
around, by concluding that recent episodes of monetary instability must have been caused
to a very signicant extent by private banks, not by governments. As we will show in
Section III, the German hyperination of 1923 is completely consistent with this
alternative interpretation. One really does have to look centuries into the past to nd
examples of the type of government monetary control advocated in this paper. This is
what we do in Section III, and that record undeniably supports the Chicago Plan.
This leaves the question of how precisely, in our modern monetary environment, to best
ensure responsible government money issuance. Here we suggest that the management of
money growth should ideally be entrusted to a fourth power of government, with a
constitutional independence similar to that of the Supreme Court. This would insulate the
issuance of money not only from government pressures, but also from pressures that come
from private nancial interests.
H. Government Control over Credit
One aspect of the balance sheet changes illustrated in Figure 1 frequently gives rise to
concerned questions, namely the fact that the government appears to end up funding and
therefore indirectly controlling all private credit, with the quantitatively small exception
of investment trust equity. This is seen as undesirable. There are four responses to this.
First, we already discussed that investment trusts that intermediate between private net
savers and borrowers would continue to exist under the Chicago Plan, but are omitted
from the model, and from Figure 1, because of the representative agent assumption.
Second, the investment trusts shown in Figure 1 do not have to be predominantly nanced
by treasury credit. A perfectly feasible alternative assumption is that the government
spends a further 60% of GDP of its treasury credit balance to redeem all remaining
government debt held outside the nancial system. The nal result would be investment
20
trusts that are nanced by equity equal to 9% of GDP, treasury credit equal to 11% of
GDP, and private non-monetary debts equal to 60% of GDP. This has a potential
drawback in that government debt has been a very important benchmark asset for
nancial markets, so that full repayment of all government debt could be inferior to
having separate gross debt and gross treasury credit positions outstanding.
29
However, it
is not clear that this benchmark role could not be played by government-issued money
under the Chicago Plan.
Third, even the sizeable treasury credit funding in Figure 1 does not need to imply that
the government must have a major inuence on the quantity of private credit. We will
show that if the government made treasury credit available at an interest rate that follows
a conventionally-calibrated Taylor-type rule, this would allow for money creation that is
almost as elastic as under the present system. The volume of credit would still be mostly
controlled by private nancial institutions, and the allocation of that credit would be
completely controlled by them.
However, and this takes us to the fourth point, in light of the historical experience with
private credit creation, presented in much more detail in Section III, we argue that this is
not a desirable outcome, and that greater government control over credit can be highly
benecial. In our model simulations we will in fact be able to demonstrate that an
additional tool, quantitative lending guidance, can be used very eectively. Specically,
highly countercyclical capital adequacy requirements, as permitted under the new
Basel-III regulations, can dramatically smooth business cycle uctuations driven by bank
sentiment concerning the creditworthiness of potential borrowers.
Policies of quantitative lending guidance have historically for the most part been highly
successful. Quantitative and qualitative guidance of bank credit was at some stage used
by almost all central banks in the world (Goodhart (1989)). The experience that has been
documented in greatest detail, using econometric and qualitative primary data and
institutional analysis, is that of Japan in the post-war era, known as window guidance
(Werner (1998, 2002, 2003a)). According to Werner (2003a), the Japanese system was the
basis for the window guidance introduced in Korea, Taiwan (Wade (1990)), and China
(Chen and Werner (2011)). In turn, the Japanese system was introduced from Germanys
Reichsbank, which pioneered the practice in 1912 (Werner (2003a, 2003c)). It was
subsequently used by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Banque de France,
and the central banks of Austria, Greece, Thailand, Malaysia and India, among others
(Werner (2000a, 2000b, 2005)). According to Werner (2003b, 2005) historical experience
shows that, provided sensible rules for the design of credit guidance were observed, the
system was eective and garnered the support of the banking industry.
The principle of credit guidance is to ensure that bank credit creation is used mainly for
sustainable purposes that do not impose unjustiable costs on society. Hence bank credit
for productive purposes would generally be encouraged (especially credit for the
manufacturing and export industries), while unproductive credit would be discouraged
(especially credit for nancial and asset transactions, including many real estate
transactions). On occasion quantitative lending guidance was misused, as in the case of
Germany during the 1920s (Werner (2003a, 2003c)), Japan during the 1980s (Werner
29
The possibility of an insucient stock of government debt was a signicant concern in the United States
at the end of the 1990s. See Reinhart et al. (2000).
21
(1998, 2002, 2003a)), and Thailand during the 1990s (Werner (2000a)). Werner (2005)
argues that misuses were only made possible by excessive secrecy surrounding the use of
this policy by central banks. The lesson from these episodes is therefore that quantitative
lending guidance should be implemented in a transparent fashion, ensuring full
accountability of the central banks involved. But there were many more highly successful
episodes. According to Werners quantity theory of credit, credit guidance has in fact been
a very powerful policy tool for achieving high and sustainable growth in numerous
countries. Specically, he argues that it was the single most important factor in the East
Asian economic miracle, and this argument is supported by a World Bank study on this
topic (IBRD, 1993).
Quantitative lending guidance under a regime of full reserve banking can be thought of as
the price that investment trusts have to pay for the much greater funding exibility
oered by treasury credit. In a world of pure nancial intermediation, as opposed to the
present world of private money creation, investment trusts would have to attract existing
privately-held money balances in order to be able to lend them out. Compared to this,
treasury credit gives them the option to have the government create additional money for
them.
30
This is not dramatically dierent from being able to create money themselves, as
long as it is subject only to an interest rate rule that is fairly elastic. Under quantitative
lending guidance the government demands an additional price for the privilege of retaining
this exible access to money, namely the backing of above-trend loan creation by a greater
amount of capital.
I. Compromise Solutions
A commonly asked question is whether it would not be more pragmatic to advocate less
comprehensive forms of monetary reform than the Chicago Plan, either because they
would face less resistance, or because they are claimed to have advantages of their own.
One suggested alternative is the maintenance of the current monetary system with higher,
but not 100%, reserve requirements. There are at least three problems with this
suggestion. First, it unnecessarily foregoes a large part of the dramatic debt-reduction
benets of the Chicago Plan, while still leaving banks in charge of money creation at the
margin, with all that that implies for macroeconomic volatility. Second, it is not clear at
all how to combine a system of eective and substantial reserve requirements with an
ination targeting regime, because this would imply the simultaneous targeting of a price
and a monetary quantity. Third, historically most regimes of limited reserve requirements
have suered from gradual attrition, as lobbies succeeded in having the ratios lowered.
This would be much harder under a full reserve banking regime.
Another suggested alternative is a much greater use of complementary currencies that are
not debt-based. Stodder (2009), Lietaer et al. (2010) and Ulanowicz et al. (2009) discuss
that complementary currencies have been successfully used in systems of centralized
exchange (like the Swiss WIR) that contribute to stabilizing the business cycle, and at the
30
Of course this would remain within the overall envelope of money creation envisaged by the money
growth rule. Higher money demand by banks would therefore lead to less money being put into circulation
through other budgetary channels such as government spending.
22
local level to accomplish specic socially valuable objectives. Their many examples of
complementary currencies are persuasive, and there may be scope for more of the local
schemes. Economy-wide systems, as shown by Stodder (2009), can stabilize the money
supply under a system of fractional reserve banking. But under a system of full reserve
banking alternative currencies, if they were to become large, could potentially pose
problems with national monetary and thus ination control.
31
More importantly,
complementary currencies could become a distraction if they were proposed as the main
solution to the problems identied by Fisher and his contemporaries, because this would
very likely leave bank-based money creation at the core of the nancial system. Finally,
the great democratic potential of national rather than private control over money issuance
means that full reserve banking may be able to accomplish many of the desirable social
objectives outlined in Lietaer et al. (2010) without the use of complementary currencies.
The third suggested alternative is not really a monetary reform at all. We nevertheless
mention it here because it is currently much discussed. This is the proposal of the trillion
dollar platinum coin, to be deposited in the Federal Reserve against cancellation of an
equal amount of government debt, thereby avoiding the U.S. debt ceiling. The one
positive aspect of this solution is that it does reect an understanding that a government
does not need to be in stiing debt if it exercises its sovereign right to create money. But,
apart from perhaps permitting the government to dodge the debt ceiling
32
, this device
would not accomplish anything of substance. The reason is that the implications for the
consolidated government and central bank balance sheet, and also the ow budgetary
implications, are zero. For stocks, the transaction does not change either government or
central bank liabilities vis-a-vis the public. For ows, the Federal Reserve already remits
its prots, which include interest earnings on government debt, back to the government,
therefore a transaction that remains purely between the Federal Reserve and the treasury
has no signicant budgetary implications. The key shortcoming of this approach relative
to the Chicago Plan is therefore that it does not recognize the central importance of
private debt-based money creation for public (and private) debt levels.
J. Open Economy Considerations
The nal question is whether the existence of globalized nancial markets would make it
dangerous for one country to go it alone, by implementing full reserve banking while
others retain the present system.
If the concern is only with speculative attacks on a countrys currency due to weak
economic fundamentals, the answer to this question is clearly no. The traditional
rst-generation, or fundamentals-based literature on balance of payments crises
33
stressed
weak scal fundamentals as the key reason for an attack on a currency. But following the
implementation of the Chicago Plan, particularly if the initial disbursement of the
citizens dividend was implemented very gradually rather than instantaneously, the
governments scal position would become extremely strong compared to that of virtually
31
This is a question that needs further research.
32
This is a legal question on which the authors do not claim any expertise.
33
See Krugman (1979) and Calvo (1987). Balance of payments crises under ination targeting are analyzed
in Kumhof et al. (2007).
23
any other country. The same is true of prospects for the real economy. In addition,
especially if the implementation were to take place during global nancial market turmoil,
the indestructible and completely safe money oered by the countrys banks would
become highly attractive as a safe haven asset that is virtually immune to credit risks.
However, the concern may not be with economic fundamentals, but rather with an
irrational speculative attack on a new and therefore unfamiliar monetary system. This
type of speculative attack also turns out to be much less of a concern under full reserve
banking. As shown by the experience of the German hyperination of 1923, which will be
recounted in some detail in Section III, a determined central bank can quickly crush
speculators if the latter do not have access to a private banking system that creates local
currency on demand, and more so if the government is in a much stronger scal position
than that of Germany in 1923.
If this should not be enough, it is always possible to implement temporary capital
controls
34
until the system has had time to start proving its many advantages.
III. The Chicago Plan in the History of Monetary Thought
A. Government versus Private Control over Money Issuance
The monetary historian Alexander Del Mar (1895) writes: As a rule political economists
do not take the trouble to study the history of money; it is much easier to imagine it and
to deduce the principles of this imaginary knowledge. Del Mar wrote more than a century
ago, but this statement still applies today. An excellent example is the textbook
explanation for the origins of money, which holds that money arose in private trading
transactions, to overcome the double coincidence of wants problem of barter.
35
As shown
by Graeber (2011), on the basis of extensive anthropological and historical evidence that
goes back millennia, there is not a shred of evidence to support this story. Barter was
virtually nonexistent in primitive and ancient societies, and instead the rst commercial
transactions took place on the basis of elaborate credit systems whose denomination was
typically in agricultural commodities, including cattle, grain by weight, and tools.
Furthermore, Graeber (2011), Zarlenga (2002) and the references cited therein provide
plenty of evidence that these credit systems, and the much later money systems, had their
origins in the needs of the state (Ridgeway (1892)), of religious/temple institutions (Einzig
(1966), Laum (1924)) and of social ceremony (Quiggin (1949)), and not in the needs of
private trading relationships.
36
Any debate on the origins of money is not of merely academic interest, because it leads
directly to a debate on the nature of money, which in turn has a critical bearing on
arguments as to who should control the issuance of money. Specically, the private
trading story for the origins of money has time and again, starting at least with Adam
Smith (1776), been used as an argument for the private issuance and control of money.
34
On this topic, see the IMF Sta Position Note by Ostry et al. (2010).
35
A typical early example of this claim is found in Menger (1892).
36
See Goodhart (1998) for a very similar argument.
24
Until recent times this has mainly taken the form of monetary systems based on precious
metals, especially under free coinage of bullion into coins. Even though there can at times
be heavy government involvement in such systems, the fact is that in practice precious
metals tended to accumulate privately in the hands of the wealthy, who would then lend
them out at interest. Since the thirteenth century this precious-metals-based system has,
in Europe, been accompanied, and increasingly supplanted, by the private issuance of
bank money, more properly called credit. On the other hand, the historically and
anthropologically correct state/institutional story for the origins of money is one of the
arguments supporting the government issuance and control of money under the rule of
law. In practice this has mainly taken the form of interest-free issuance of notes or coins,
although it could equally take the form of electronic deposits.
There is another issue that tends to get confused with the much more fundamental debate
concerning the control over the issuance of money, namely the debate over real
precious-metals-backed money versus at money. As documented in Zarlenga (2002), this
debate is mostly a diversion, because even during historical regimes based on precious
metals the main reason for the high relative value of precious metals was precisely their
role as money, which derives from government at and not from the intrinsic qualities of
the metals.
37
These matters are especially confused in Smith (1776), who takes a
primitive commodity view of money despite the fact that at his time the then private
Bank of England had long since started to issue a at currency whose value was
essentially unrelated to the production cost of precious metals. Furthermore, as Smith
certainly knew, both the Bank of England and private banks were creating checkable book
credits in accounts for borrowing customers who had not made any deposits of coin (or
even of bank notes).
The historical debate concerning the nature and control of money is the subject of
Zarlenga (2002), a masterful work that traces this debate back to ancient Mesopotamia,
Greece and Rome. Like Graeber (2011), he shows that private issuance of money has
repeatedly led to major societal problems throughout recorded history, due to usury
associated with private debts.
38
Zarlenga does not adopt the common but simplistic
denition of usury as the charging of excessive interest, but rather as taking something
for nothing through the calculated misuse of a nations money system for private gain.
Historically this has taken two forms. The rst form of usury is the private appropriation
of the convenience yield of a societys money. Private money has to be borrowed into
existence at a positive interest rate, while the holders of that money, due to the
non-pecuniary benets of its liquidity, are content to receive no or very low interest.
Therefore, while part of the interest dierence between lending rates and rates on money
is due to a lending risk premium, another large part is due to the benets of the liquidity
services of money. This dierence is privately appropriated by the small group that owns
the privilege to privately create money. This is a privilege that, due to its enormous
benets, is often originally acquired as a result of intense rent-seeking behavior. Zarlenga
37
For example, in many of the ancient Greek societies gold was not intrinsically valuable due to scarcity,
as temples had accumulated vast amounts of gold over centuries. But gold coins were nevertheless highly
valued, due to government at declaring them to be money. A more recent example is the collapse of the
price of silver relative to gold following the widespread demonetization of silver that started in the 1870s.
38
Reinhart and Rogo (2009) contains an even more extensive compilation of historical nancial crises.
However, unlike Zarlenga (2002) and Del Mar (1895), these authors do not focus on the role of private versus
public monetary control, the central concern of this paper.
25
(2002) documents this for multiple historical episodes. We will return to the issue of the
interest dierence between lending and deposit rates in calibrating our theoretical model.
The second form of usury is the ability of private creators of money to manipulate the
money supply to their benet, by creating an abundance of credit and thus money at
times of economic expansion and thus high goods prices, followed by a contraction of
credit and thus money at times of economic contraction and thus low goods prices. A
typical example is the harvest cycle in ancient farming societies, but Zarlenga (2002), Del
Mar (1895), and the works cited therein contain numerous other historical examples where
this mechanism was at work. It repeatedly led to systemic borrower defaults, forfeiture of
collateral, and therefore the concentration of wealth in the hands of lenders. For the
macroeconomic consequences it matters little whether this represents deliberate and
malicious manipulation, or whether it is an inherent feature of a system based on private
money creation. We will return to this in our theoretical model, too.
A discussion of the crises brought on by excessive debt in ancient Mesopotamia is
contained in Hudson and van de Mierop (2002). It was this experience, acquired over
millennia, that led to the prohibition of usury and/or to periodic debt forgiveness
(wiping the slate clean) in the sacred texts of the main Middle Eastern religions. The
earliest known example of such debt crises in Greek history are the 599 BC reforms of
Solon, which were a response to a severe debt crisis of small farmers, brought on by the
charging of interest on coinage by a wealthy oligarchy. It is extremely illuminating to
realize that Solons reforms, at this very early time, already contained many elements of
what Henry Simons (1948), a principal proponent of the Chicago Plan, would later refer
to as the nancial good society. First, there was widespread debt cancellation, and the
restitution of lands that had been seized by creditors. Second, agricultural commodities
were monetized by setting ocial monetary oor prices for them. Because the source of
loan repayments for agricultural debtors was their output of these commodities, this
turned debt nance into something closer to equity nance. Third, Solon provided much
more plentiful government-issued, debt-free coinage that reduced the need for private
debts. Solons reforms were so successful that, 150 years later, the early Roman republic
sent a delegation to Greece to study them. They became the foundation of the Roman
monetary system from 454 BC (Lex Aternia) until the time of the Punic wars (Peruzzi
(1985)). It is also at this time that a link was established between these ancient
understandings of money and more modern interpretations. This happened through the
teachings of Aristotle that were to have such a crucial inuence on early Western thought.
In Ethics, Aristotle clearly states the state/institutional theory of money, and rejects any
commodity-based or trading concept of money, by saying Money exists not by nature but
by law. The Dialogues of Plato contain similar views (Jowett (1937)). This insight was
reected in many monetary systems of the time, which contrary to a popular prejudice
among monetary historians were based on state-backed at currencies rather than
commodity monies. Examples include the extremely successful Spartan system (approx.
750-415 BC), introduced by Lycurgus, which was based on iron disks of low intrinsic
value, the 390-350 BC Athenian system, based on copper, and most importantly the early
Roman system (approx. 700-150 BC), which was based on bronze tablets, and later coins,
whose material value was far below their face value.
Many historians have attributed the eventual collapse of the Roman republic to the
emergence of a plutocracy that accumulated immense private wealth at the expense of the
26
general citizenry.
39
Their ascendancy was facilitated by the introduction of privately
controlled silver money, and later gold money, at prices that far exceeded their earlier
commodity value prices, during the emergency period of the Punic wars. With the
collapse of Rome much of the ancient monetary knowledge and experience was lost in the
West. But the teachings of Aristotle remained important through their inuence on the
scholastics, including St. Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274). This may be part of the reason
why, until the Industrial Revolution, monetary control in the West remained generally
either in government or religious hands, and was inseparable from ultimate sovereignty in
society. However, this was to change eventually, and the beginnings can be traced to the
rst emergence of private banking after the fall of Byzantium in 1204, with rulers
increasingly relying on loans from private bankers to nance wars. But ultimate monetary
control remained in sovereign hands for several more centuries. The Bank of Amsterdam
(1609-1820) in the Netherlands was still government-owned and maintained a 100%
reserve backing for deposits. And the Mixt Moneys of Ireland (1601) legal case in England
conrmed the right of the sovereign to issue intrinsically worthless base metal coinage as
legal tender. It was the English Free Coinage Act of 1666, which placed control of the
money supply into private hands, and the founding of the privately controlled Bank of
England in 1694, that rst saw a major sovereign relinquishing monetary control, not only
to the central bank but also to the private banking interests behind it. The following
centuries would provide ample opportunities to compare the results of government and
private control over money issuance.
The results for the United Kingdom are quite clear. Shaw (1896) examined the record of
monarchs throughout English history, and found that, with one exception (Henry VIII),
the king had used his monetary prerogative responsibly for the benet of the nation, with
no major nancial crises. On the other hand, Del Mar (1895) nds that the Free Coinage
Act inaugurated a series of commercial panics and disasters which to that time were
completely unknown, and that between 1694 and 1890 twenty-ve years never passed
without a nancial crisis in England.
The principal advocates of this system of private money issuance were Adam Smith (1776)
and Jeremy Bentham (1818), whose arguments were based on a fallacious notion of
commodity money. But a long line of distinguished thinkers argued in favor of a return to
(or, depending on the country and the time, a maintenance of) a system of government
money issuance, with the intrinsic value of the monetary metal (or material) being of no
consequence. The list of their names, over the centuries, includes John Locke (1692, 1718),
Benjamin Franklin (1729), George Berkeley (1735), Charles de Montesquieu (1748, in
Montague (1952)), Thomas Paine (1796), Thomas Jeerson (1803), David Ricardo (1824),
Benjamin Butler (1869), Henry George (1884), Georg Friedrich Knapp (1924), Frederick
Soddy (1926, 1933, 1943), Pope Pius XI (1931) and the Archbishop of Canterbury (1942,
in Dempsey (1948)).
The United States monetary experience provides similar lessons to that of the United
Kingdom. Colonial paper monies issued by individual states were of the greatest economic
advantage to the country (Franklin (1729)), and English suppression of such monies was
one of the major reasons for the revolution (Del Mar (1895)). The Continental Currency
39
See Del Mar (1895), Toynbee (1965) and Hudson (2010). Livy, Diodorus and Plutarch all attributed the
Roman decline to this cause.
27
issued during the revolutionary war was crucial for allowing the Continental Congress to
nance the war eort. There was no over-issuance by the colonies, and the only reason
why ination eventually took hold was massive British counterfeiting (Franklin (1786),
Schuckers (1874)).
40
The government also managed the issuance of paper monies in the
periods 1812-1817 and 1837-1857 conservatively and responsibly (Zarlenga (2002)). The
Greenbacks issued by Lincoln during the Civil War were again a crucial tool for nancing
the war eort, and as documented by Randall (1937) and Studenski and Kroos (1952)
their issuance was responsibly managed, resulting in comparatively less ination than the
nancing of the war eort in World War I.
41
Finally, the Aldrich-Vreeland system of the
1907-1913 period, where money issuance was government controlled through the
Comptroller of the Currency, was also very eectively administered (Friedman and
Schwartz (1963), p. 150). The one blemish on the record of government money issuance
was deationary rather than inationary in nature. The van Buren presidency triggered
the 1837 depression by insisting that the government issuance of money had a 100%
gold/silver backing. This completely unnecessary straitjacket meant that the money
supply was inadequate for a growing economy. As for the U.S. experience with private
money issuance, the record was much worse. Private banks and the privately-owned First
and especially Second Bank of the United States repeatedly triggered disastrous business
cycles due to initial monetary over-expansion accompanied by high debt levels, followed by
monetary contraction and debt deation, with bankers eventually collecting the collateral
of defaulting debtors, thereby contributing to an increasing concentration of wealth.
Massive losses were also caused by spurious private bank note issuance in the 1810-1820
period, and similar experiences continued throughout the century (Gouge (1833), Knox
(1903)).
42
The large expansion of private credit in the period leading up to the Great
Depression was another example of a bank-induced boom-bust cycle, although its severity
was exacerbated by mistakes of the Federal Reserve (Friedman and Schwartz (1963)).
43
Finally, a brief word on a favorite example of advocates of private control over money
issuance, the German hyperination of 1923, which was supposedly caused by excessive
government money printing. The Reichsbank president at the time, Hjalmar Schacht, put
the record straight on the real causes of that episode in Schacht (1967). Specically, in
May 1922 the Allies insisted on granting total private control over the Reichsbank. This
private institution then allowed private banks to issue massive amounts of currency, until
half the money in circulation was private bank money that the Reichsbank readily
exchanged for Reichsmarks on demand. The private Reichsbank also enabled speculators
to short-sell the currency, which was already under severe pressure due to the transfer
problem of the reparations payments pointed out by Keynes (1929).
44
It did so by
granting lavish Reichsmark loans to speculators on demand, which they could exchange
40
The assignats of the French revolution also resulted in very high ination partly due to British counter-
feiting (Dillaye (1877)).
41
Zarlenga (2002) documents very persistent attempts by the private banking industry, throughout the
late 19th century, to have the Greenbacks withdrawn from circulation.
42
The widespread nancial fraud committed prior to the U.S. S&L crisis (Black (2005)) and prior to
the Great Recession (Federal Bureau of Investigations (2007)) is the 20th- and 21st-century equivalent of
fraudulent bank note issuance - of counterfeiting money.
43
This interpretation of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) is not shared by all students of history. Keen
(2011) argues that the main cause of the Great Depression was excessive prior credit expansion by banks.
44
The transfer problem arises when a large foreign debt is denominated in foreign currency, but has to be
serviced by raising revenue in domestic currency. As this leads to the domestic currencys rapid depreciation,
it makes debt service harder.
28
for foreign currency when forward sales of Reichsmarks matured. When Schacht was
appointed, in late 1923, he stopped converting private monies to Reichsmark on demand,
he stopped granting Reichsmark loans on demand, and furthermore he made the new
Rentenmark non-convertible against foreign currencies. The result was that speculators
were crushed and the hyperination was stopped. Further support for the currency came
from the Dawes plan that signicantly reduced unrealistically high reparations payments.
This episode can therefore clearly not be blamed on excessive money printing by a
government-run central bank, but rather on a combination of excessive reparations claims
and of massive money creation by private speculators, aided and abetted by a private
central bank. It should be pointed out that many more recent hyperinations in emerging
markets also took place in the presence of large transfer problems and of intense private
speculation against the currency. But a detailed evaluation of the historical experiences of
emerging markets is beyond the scope of the present paper.
To be fair, there have of course been historical episodes where government-issued
currencies collapsed amid high ination. But the lessons from these episodes are so
obvious, and so unrelated to the fact that monetary control was exercised by the
government, that they need not concern us here. These lessons are: First, do not put a
convicted murderer and gambler, or similar characters, in charge of your monetary system
(the 1717-1720 John Law episode in France). Second, do not start a war, and if you do, do
not lose it (wars, especially lost ones, can destroy any currency, irrespective of whether
monetary control is exercised by the government or by private parties).
To summarize, the Great Depression was just the latest historical episode to suggest that
privately controlled money creation has much more problematic consequences than
government money creation. Many leading economists of the time were aware of this
historical fact. They also clearly understood the specic problems of bank-based money
creation, including the fact that high and potentially destabilizing debt levels become
necessary just to create a sucient money supply, and the fact that banks and their ckle
optimism about business conditions eectively control broad monetary aggregates.
45
The
formulation of the Chicago Plan was the logical consequence of these insights.
B. The Chicago Plan
The Chicago Plan provides an outline for the transition from a system of privately-issued
debt-based money to a system of government-issued debt-free money. The history of the
Chicago Plan is explained in Phillips (1994). It was rst formulated in the United
Kingdom by the 1921 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Frederick Soddy, in Soddy
(1926).
46
Professor Frank Knight of the University of Chicago picked up the idea almost
immediately, in Knight (1927). The rst, March 1933 version of the plan is a
memorandum to President Roosevelt (Knight (1933)). Many of Knights distinguished
University of Chicago colleagues supported the plan and signed the memorandum,
45
This understanding is evident in statements by leading economists at the time, including Wicksell (1906),
The lending operations of the bank will consist rather in its entering in its books a ctitious deposit equal to
the amount of the loan... and Rogers (1929), a large proportion of ... [deposits] under certain circumstances
may be manufactured out of whole cloth by the banking institutions themselves.
46
See Daly (1980) for an excellent review of Soddys thought.
29
including especially Henry Simons, who was the author of the second, more detailed
memorandum to Roosevelt in November 1933 (Simons et al. (1933)). The Chicago
economists, and later Irving Fisher of Yale, were in constant contact with the Roosevelt
administration, which seriously considered their proposals, as reected for example in the
government memoranda of Gardiner Means (1933) and Lauchlin Currie (1934), and the
bill of Senator Bronson Cutting (see Cutting (1934)). Fisher supported the Chicago Plan
for the same reason as the Chicago economists, but he had one additional concern not
shared by them, the improved ability to use monetary policy to aect debtor-creditor
relations through reation, in an environment where, in his opinion, over-indebtedness had
become a major source of crises for the economy.
Several of the signers of the Chicago Plan were later to become known as the founders of
the Chicago School of Economics. Though they were strong proponents of laissez-faire in
industry, they did not question the right of the federal government to have an exclusive
monopoly on money issuance (Phillips (1994)).
47
The Chicago Plan was a strategy for
establishing that monopoly. There was concern because it called for a major change in the
structure of banking, but 1933 was a year of major nancial crisis, and ...most of us
suspect that measures at least as drastic as those described in our statement can hardly
be avoided, except temporarily, in any event. (Knight (1933)). Furthermore, in Fisher
(1935) we nd supportive statements from bankers arguing that the conversion to 100%
reserve backing would be a simple matter. Friedman (1960) expresses the same view.
Many dierent versions of the Chicago Plan circulated in the 1930s and beyond. All of
them were very similar in their prescriptions for money, but they diered signicantly in
their prescriptions for credit. For money, all of them envisaged 100% reserve backing for
deposits, either immediately or over time, and all of them advocated monetary rules rather
than discretion. For credit, the original plan advocated the replacement of traditional
banks with investment trusts that issue equity, and that in addition sell their own private
non-monetary interest-bearing securities to fund lending. But Simons was always acutely
aware that such securities might over time develop into near-monies, thereby defeating the
purpose of the Chicago Plan by turning the investment trusts into new creators of money.
There are three alternatives that avoid this outcome. Simons himself, in Simons (1946),
advocated a nancial good society where all private property eventually takes the form
of either government currency, government bonds, corporate stock, or real assets. The
investment trusts that take over the credit function would therefore be both funded by
equity and invest in corporate equity, as private debt disappears completely. The critical
feature for avoiding the emergence of near-monies is of course that they must be funded
by equity, there would be no problem if they invested in risky debt securities. The second
alternative is to maintain private debt-nanced investment trusts, but subject to strict
institutional and regulatory constraints. These were discussed in Section II.B. The third
alternative is for investment trusts to issue their debt instruments to the government
rather than to the private sector. This option is considered in the government versions of
the plan formulated by Means (1933) and Currie (1934), and also in the academic
proposal by Angell (1935). Beyond preventing the emergence of new near-monies, this
alternative has three major additional advantages. First, it makes it possible to eect an
immediate and full transition to the Chicago Plan even if the deposits that need to be
47
Furthermore, unlike todays free market economists, they argued for a strong government role in in-
frastructure provision and in regulation, see e.g. Simons (1948).
30
backed by reserves are very large relative to outstanding amounts of government debt that
can be used to back them. This was the main concern of Angell (1935). The reason is that
when government funding is available, banks can immediately borrow any amount of
required reserves from the government. Second, switching to full government funding of
credit can maximize the scal benets of the Chicago Plan. This gives the government
budgetary space to reduce tax distortions, which stimulates the economy during the
crucial transition period. Third, when investment trusts need to switch their funding from
cheap deposits to more expensive privately held debt liabilities, their cost of funding, and
therefore the interest rate on loans, increases relative to the rate on risk-free government
debt. While in our simulations this will be more than oset by a large drop in the rate on
risk-free government debt itself, it is still true that, ceteris paribus, this tends to reduce
any economic activity that continues to depend on lending. When the switch is to
treasury-held debt liabilities, the government is free to set a lower funding interest rate
that keeps interest rates on investment trust loans to private agents aligned with
government borrowing costs. It is for all of these reasons, and for analytical simplicity,
that we exclusively use this version of the Chicago Plan for the core of our theoretical
model. Specically, after the citizens dividend that exactly repays all non-investment
loans, the remaining credit function of the nancial sector is carried out by private
institutions that fund conventional investment loans with a combination of equity and
treasury credit provided at a policy-determined rate.
In our formal model there is no need for Simons privately-funded investment trusts. This
would not be true in a real-world implementation if the government were to distribute an
even larger share of its stock seigniorage gains to households by way of a citizens
dividend. This would leave households with surplus funds, which would then be converted
to private non-monetary deposits in investment trusts. Nor would it be true if the
dierent classes of private bank debtors did not have identical debt levels within each
class. In our representative agent framework, a fair citizens dividend, in the sense that
the government makes equal per capita transfers to each debtor within a given group,
leads to the exact repayment of the debts of every single agent that receives a citizens
dividend, which in our illustrative simulation means all agents except investors in physical
capital. But if the same transfers were to be received by agents with highly heterogeneous
debt levels, e.g. due to idiosyncratic income processes, some agents would end up with a
residual debt while others would end up with a residual nancial asset. In order to
prevent the latter from adding to the money supply, by becoming near-monies,
intermediating these assets by way of Simons investment trusts would be the natural
solution. Under the version of the Chicago Plan considered in this paper these trusts
would be quantitatively less signicant than originally envisaged by Simons, because
treasury-funded investment trusts remain at the core of the nancial system. But they
retain a key function by facilitating intertemporal smoothing by households and rms.
In another respect our proposal remains very close to Simons: After the large-scale debt
repayments made possible by the governments initial seigniorage gains, credit to
households can in net aggregate terms be completely eliminated, as can short-term
working capital credit to rms. This is because credit is no longer needed to create the
economys money supply, with both households and rms replacing debt-based private
money with debt-free government-issued money. The only credit that remains is lending
for productive investment purposes. In terms of the composition of nancial institutions
31
assets, our remaining banking system therefore ends up closely resembling the banking
structures in pre-World-War-I/II France (advocated by the Saint-Simonians) and
especially Germany. It should be remembered that prior to World War I Germanys
industrial successes were widely viewed as reecting the superior eciency of its nancial
system, which was based on the notion that successful industrial development needed
long-term stable nancing and government support. This view was articulated in
Naumann (1915), with subsequent support from both UK and U.S. economists (Foxwell
(1917a,b), Veblen (1921)). Simons (1946) is essentially in the same tradition. The main
reason why the more short-term-oriented Anglo-Saxon tradition of nance has come to
dominate throughout the world is the victory of the United States, Britain and their allies
in the two world wars.
The Chicago Plan was never adopted as law, due to strong resistance from the banking
lobby. But it played a major role in the passage of the 1935 Banking Act, which also faced
resistance but was considered more acceptable to banks. As documented in Phillips
(1994), the 1935 Act was at the time not considered the nal word on banking reform, and
eorts by proponents of the Chicago Plan, especially by Irving Fisher, continued for many
years afterwards. The long list of academic treatments in the 1930s, almost universally
sympathetic, includes Whittlesey (1935), Douglas (1935), Angell (1935), Fisher (1936) and
Graham (1936). Advocacy for full reserve banking continued after the war, with Allais
(1947, 1984), Friedman (1960), who was a lifelong supporter, Tobin (1985), and more
recently Zarlenga (2002) and Robertson (2012).
48
The many contributions of Richard Werner
49
are in a very similar spirit. One of his
arguments is that bad debt problems in a countrys banking system can be eectively
dealt with by central bank purchases of the bad debts against the issuance of new reserve
money. If this is accompanied by a new reserve requirement on banks whereby the new
reserves are permanently required to back certain types of deposits, this amounts to a
small-scale version of the Chicago Plan.
The narrow banking literature is in the same tradition, but generally with a narrower
focus on the safety of the deposit part of banks business. See Phillips (1994) for
references. The most prominent recent proponent is Kotliko (2012). His Limited Purpose
Banking proposal has two principal components. The rst is 100% reserve backing for
transactions deposits. The second is conversion of all bank lending activity into mutual
funds that continue to hold loans, but that are funded entirely by equity, a very similar
proposal to Simons equity-funded investment trusts. Limited Purpose Banking exhibits
three sets of dierences with the Chicago Plan that should be explored in future research.
The rst concerns the control of money and thus ination. The key question is how the
supply of transactions deposits would be managed under Limited Purpose Banking,
because neither central bank policy nor the quantity of private bank lending imposes any
obvious quantitative constraints. The second set of dierences concerns the fact that
Limited Purpose Banking rules out debt-funded investment trusts, while the Chicago Plan
keeps them as an option. The reason is that under the Chicago Plan uctuations in this
sector, including through defaults, would have no eects on the broad money supply. This
48
See also Huerta de Soto (2012). His analysis of the problems with the contemporary monetary system
is very similar to ours. His solution, while calling for full reserve banking, diers in some important details
from ours.
49
See for example Werner (2005).
32
greatly limits the eects of credit uctuations on economic activity. The third set of
dierences between the Chicago Plan and Limited Purpose Banking is that under the
latter system debts would remain unchanged, with no major conversion of private and
government debt into equity as under the Chicago Plan. While Limited Purpose Banking
dramatically reduces the systemic implications of debt defaults, the full benets for
economic activity and economic stability that come with lower debt levels could therefore
not be realized.
Among the advocates of full reserve banking, Friedmans work is especially important. In
Friedman (1967) he explains that his support for the Chicago Plan is partly based on
dierent arguments from those of Simons and Fisher. Simonss and Fishers main concern
was the instability of bank credit in a world where that credit determines the money
supply. They therefore advocated more governmental control over the money creation
process via more control over bank lending. Friedman was interested in precisely the
opposite, his concern was with making the government commit to xed rules in order to
otherwise keep it from interfering with borrowing and lending relationships. This would
become possible because under the Chicago Plan a xed money growth rule would give
the policymaker much more control over actual monetary aggregates than under the
current monetary system. Simons and Fisher also advocated a xed money growth rule,
so in this respect the Chicago Plan would satisfy both sides. But the degree to which it
otherwise approximates the ideals of these thinkers depends on details of the
implementation on the credit side. Our proposed implementation is closer to Simons and
Fisher than to Friedman, by limiting and regulating private debt funding (but not equity
funding) of the nancial systems residual lending business, because of the multiple
above-mentioned advantages of this approach.
IV. The Model under the Current Monetary System
The model economy consists of two household sectors, a productive sector, a banking
sector and a government. It features a number of nominal and real rigidities. A
comprehensive model, with multiple sectors and multiple rigidities, has three major
advantages for the task we set ourselves in this paper. First, it provides an integrated
framework where all of the critical dierences between the Chicago Plan and current
monetary arrangements emerge simultaneously. Second, it generates an empirically
realistic scenario for the transition to the Chicago Plan, based on an accurate (as far as
possible) estimate of the balance sheet sizes of dierent types of bank borrowers. Third, it
makes our model consistent with the ndings of the empirical DSGE literature, which has
identied a number of nominal and real rigidities that are critical for the ability of such
models to generate reasonable impulse responses.
Four types of private agents interact directly with banks. Financially unconstrained
households have large nancially unencumbered investments that include not only bank
deposits but also land and government debt. Financially constrained households own bank
deposits and land that serve as collateral for consumer loans and mortgages.
Manufacturers own bank deposits that serve as collateral for working capital loans.
Capital investment funds own physical capital that serves as collateral for investment
loans. Other sectors include capital goods producers, who produce the economys capital
33
stock subject to investment adjustment costs, and unions, who supply labor subject to
nominal rigidities in wage setting.
The economy experiences a constant positive technology growth rate g = T
t
/T
t1
, where
T
t
is the level of labor augmenting technology. When the models nominal variables, say
X
t
, are expressed in real normalized terms, we divide by the price level P
t
and the level of
technology T
t
. We use the notation x
t
= X
t
/ (T
t
P
t
) = x
t
/T
t
, with the steady state of x
t
denoted by x. The population shares of unconstrained and constrained households are
given by and 1 .
Our exposition of each agents optimization problem is kept brief in the interest of space.
A complete derivation is contained in the Technical Appendix. Because of their central
role in the economy, we start our exposition with banks.
A. Banks
Banks lend to constrained households by way of consumer loans secured on bank deposits
(superscript c) and of mortgages secured on land (superscript a), to manufacturers by way
of working capital loans secured on bank deposits (superscript m), to capital investment
funds by way of investment loans secured on xed capital (superscript k), and to the
government by way of holding part of the outstanding stock of government bonds.
Banks maintain deposits for unconstrained households (superscript u), constrained
households and manufacturers. Bank deposits are modelled as a single asset type with a
one-period maturity. We emphasize that in our calibration this will correspond to all bank
liabilities, and therefore includes not just demand deposits but also all other near-monies.
This will allow our model to address some of the concerns with near-monies stressed by
Simons (1946, 1948), Angell (1935) and Allais (1947).
Apart from deposits, banks own net worth is another important source of funds. The
reason why banks maintain positive net worth is that the government imposes ocial
minimum capital adequacy requirements (henceforth referred to as MCAR), to neutralize
the moral hazard created by the fact that banks operate under limited liability. These
regulations are modeled to closely resemble the current Basel regime, by requiring banks
to pay penalties if they violate the MCAR.
50
Banks total equity exceeds the minimum
requirements in equilibrium, in order to provide a buer against adverse shocks that could
cause equity to drop below the MCAR and trigger penalties.
Moral hazard creates an incentive for banks to not protect themselves against negative
shocks to prots that are larger than their existing equity base. In the absence of
regulation, banks therefore have an incentive to take on large amounts of lending risk and
to minimize their own equity base. As this would mean that depositors would be exposed
to signicant risks of capital losses, one solution is for deposit contracts to reect that
risk, and to thereby discipline bankers. But this solution is impractical, as it requires
depositors to engage in costly monitoring, and also because it may leave the nancial
system prone to bank runs. The preferred policy solution has therefore generally been
50
Furne (2001) and van den Heuvel (2005) contain a list of such penalties, according to the Basel rules
or to national legislation, such as the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991.
34
some form of deposit insurance that obviates the need for complicated deposit contracts,
and that minimizes the probability of bank runs. But in that case, given that deposit
insurance schemes are generally not suciently funded to insure against systemic crises,
the risks of large capital losses accrue to taxpayers rather than depositors. Deposit
insurance therefore has to be accompanied by direct capital adequacy regulations that
penalize banks for maintaining an insucient equity buer, and thereby exposing
taxpayers to the risk of capital losses. That is the environment assumed in this paper, and
the calibration of these regulations will be such that the probability of banks becoming
insolvent and having to call on deposit insurance is vanishingly small.
Banks are assumed to face heterogeneous realizations of credit and non-credit risks, and
are therefore indexed by j. We sometimes use the general notation x {c, a, m, k, u} to
represent the dierent groups of agents with which banks interact. Banks nominal and
real normalized loan stocks between periods t and t + 1 are given by L
x
t
(j) and

x
t
(j),
while their deposit stocks are D
x
t
(j) and

d
x
t
(j), holdings of government bonds are B
b
t
(j)
and

b
b
t
(j), and net worth is N
b
t
(j) and n
b
t
(j). Banks nominal and ex-post real deposit
rates are given by i
d,t
and r
d,t
, where r
d,t
= i
d,t1
/
t
, and where
t
= P
t
/P
t1
. Their
wholesale cost of funding loans is given by i
,t
and r
,t
for all loans except mortgage loans,
and by i
h
,t
and r
h
,t
for mortgage loans. Banks retail nominal and real lending rates, which
add a credit risk spread to the wholesale rates, are given by i
x
r,t
and r
x
r,t
. Finally, nominal
and real interest rates on government debt are denoted by i
t
and r
t
. Bank js balance
sheet in real normalized terms is given by
(1 )
_

c
t
(j) +

a
t
(j)
_
+

m
t
(j)+

k
t
(j)+

b
b
t
(j) =

d
u
t
(j)+(1 )

d
c
t
(j)+

d
m
t
(j)+ n
b
t
(j) , (1)
where for future reference we dene

t
(j) = (1 )

c
t
(j) +

m
t
(j) +

k
t
(j),

h
t
(j) = (1 )

a
t
(j),

t
(j) =

t
(j) +

h
t
(j), and

d
t
(j) =

d
u
t
(j) + (1 )

d
c
t
(j) +

d
m
t
(j).
Banks can make losses on each of their four loan categories. Losses are given by

b
t
(j) = (1 )
_

c
t
(j) +

a
t
(j)
_
+

m
t
(j) +

k
t
(j). The stock of government bonds on
banks balance sheets is assumed to equal a xed share of the total balance sheet,

b
b
t
(j) = s
b
_

d
t
(j) + n
b
t
(j)
_
. This cash constraint specication is based on the fact that
banks, on a daily basis, require government bonds as collateral in order to be able to make
payments to other nancial market participants. This is therefore a nancial markets
equivalent to the usual goods market rationale for cash constraints. We assume a cash
constraint rather than a cash-in-advance constraint because this simplies the analysis
without losing any important insights.
Our model focuses on bank solvency considerations and ignores liquidity management
problems. Banks are therefore modeled as having no incentive, either regulatory or
precautionary, to maintain cash reserves at the central bank. Because, furthermore, for
households cash is dominated in return by bank deposits, in this economy there is no
demand for government-provided real cash balances. Empirically, as discussed in the
introduction, such balances are vanishingly small relative to the size of bank deposits.
Banks are assumed to face pecuniary costs of falling short of ocial minimum capital
adequacy ratios. The regulatory framework we assume introduces a discontinuity in
outcomes for banks. In any given period, a bank either remains suciently well
capitalized, or it falls short of capital requirements and must pay a penalty. In the latter
case, bank net worth suddenly drops further. The cost of such an event, weighted by the
appropriate probability, is incorporated into the banks optimal capital choice. Modeling
35
this regulatory framework under the assumption of homogenous banks would lead to
outcomes where all banks simultaneously either pay or do not pay the penalty. A more
realistic specication therefore requires a continuum of banks, each of which is exposed to
idiosyncratic shocks, so that there is a continuum of ex-post capital adequacy ratios across
banks, and a time-varying small fraction of banks that have to pay penalties in each
period.
Specically, banks are assumed to be heterogeneous in that the return on their loan book
is subject to an idiosyncratic shock
b
t+1
that is lognormally distributed, with E(
b
t+1
) = 1
and V ar(ln(
b
t+1
)) =
_

b
t+1
_
2
, and with the density function and cumulative density
function of
b
t+1
denoted by f
b
t
(
b
t+1
) and F
b
t
(
b
t+1
). This risk can reect a number of
individual bank characteristics, such as diering loan recovery rates, and diering success
at raising non-interest income and minimizing non-interest expenses, where the sum of the
last two categories would have to sum to zero over all banks.
The regulatory framework stipulates that banks have to pay a real penalty of

t
(j) +

b
b
t
(j)
_
at time t + 1 if the sum of the gross returns on their loan book, net of
gross deposit interest expenses and loan losses, is less than a fraction
t
of the gross
risk-weighted returns on their loan book. Dierent risk-weights will be one of the critical
determinants of equilibrium interest rate spreads. We assume that the risk-weight on all
non-mortgage loans is 100%, the risk-weight on mortgage loans is , and the risk weight
on government debt is zero. Then the penalty cuto condition is given by
_
r
,t+1

t
(j) +r
h
,t+1

h
t
(j) +r
t+1

b
b
t
(j)
_

b
t+1
r
d,t+1

d
t
(j)

b
t+1
(j) (2)
<
t
_
r
,t+1

t
(j) +r
h
,t+1

h
t
(j)
_

b
t+1
.
Because the left-hand side equals pre-dividend (and pre-penalty) net worth in t + 1, while
the term multiplying
t
equals the value of risk-weighted assets in t + 1,
t
represents the
minimum capital adequacy ratio of the Basel regulatory framework. We denote the cuto
idiosyncratic shock to loan returns below which the MCAR is breached by
b
t
. It is given
by

b
t

r
d,t

d
t1
+x

b
t
_
1
t1
_
r
,t

t1
+
_
1
t1

_
r
h
,t

h
t1
+r
t

b
b
t1
. (3)
Banks choose their loan volumes to maximize their pre-dividend net worth, which equals
the sum of gross returns on the loan book minus gross interest charges on deposits, loan
losses, and penalties:
Max

t(j),

h
t
(j)
E
t
__
r
,t+1

t
(j) +r
h
,t+1

h
t
(j) +r
t+1

b
b
t
(j)
_

b
t+1
r
d,t+1

d
t
(j)

b
t+1
(j)
_

t
(j) +

h
t
(j) +

b
b
t
(j)
_
F
b
t
(
b
t+1
)
_
.
The optimality conditions are shown in full in the Technical Appendix.
51
They state that
banks wholesale lending rates i
,t
and i
h
,t
are at a premium over the deposit rate i
d,t
by
magnitudes that depend on the size of the MCAR
t
, the penalty coecient for
51
While the optimality conditions are in terms of expected real interest rates, which are subject to uncer-
tainty in ination, our discussion is in terms of the unconditional (except for default) nominal interest rates
actually set by banks. Our course ination aects all real rates in the same fashion.
36
breaching the MCAR, and expressions F
b
t
_

b
t+1
_
and f
b
t
_

b
t+1
_
that reect the expected
riskiness of banks
b
t+1
and therefore the likelihood of a breach. Banks retail rates i
x
r,t
on
the other hand, whose determination is discussed in the next subsection, are at another
premium over i
,t
and i
h
,t
, to compensate for the bankruptcy risks of the four dierent
borrower types. A sensible interpretation of the wholesale rate is therefore as the rate a
bank would charge to a hypothetical borrower (not present in the model) with zero default
risk. Note that the policy rate i
t
does not enter these optimality conditions as the
marginal cost of funds, because the marginal cost of funds is given by the rate at which
banks can create their own funds, which is i
d,t
.
52
Another outcome of this optimization problem is banks actually maintained Basel capital
adequacy ratio
a
t
. This will be considerably above the minimum requirement
t
, because
by maintaining an optimally chosen buer banks protect themselves against the risk of
penalties while minimizing the cost of excess capital. There is no simple formula for
a
t
,
which in general depends nonlinearly on a number of parameters. We will however
calibrate its steady state value
a
below.
Given the linearity of banks technology, balance sheet items can be easily aggregated over
all banks, and we can therefore drop bank-specic indices. Banks aggregate net worth n
b
t
represents an additional state variable of the model, and is given by the gross return on
loans, minus the sum of gross interest on deposits, loan losses, penalties incurred, and
dividends. The cost of penalties, which is partly a lump-sum transfer to households and
partly a real resource cost, is

M
b
t
=

x
_

t1
+

h
t1
+

b
b
t1
_
F
b
t
_

b
t
_
. Dividends, which will
be discussed in more detail below, are given by
b
n
b
t
. Then we have
n
b
t
=
1
x
_
r
,t

t1
+r
h
,t

h
t1
+r
t

b
b
t1
r
d,t

d
t1
_

b
t


M
b
t

b
n
b
t
. (4)
B. Lending Technologies
Almost identical forms of the borrowing problem are solved by constrained households (for
consumer and mortgage loans), manufacturers and capital investment funds. In this
subsection we again use general notation, with x {c, a, m, k} representing the four
dierent types of loans. Borrowers use an optimally chosen combination of nominal/real
bank loans L
x
t
(j)/
x
t
(j) and internal funds to purchase nominal/real assets X
t
/x
t
. The
ex-post nominal/real returns on the latter are denoted by Ret
x,t
and ret
x,t
.
After the asset purchase each borrower of type x draws an idiosyncratic shock which
changes x
t
(j) to
x
t+1
x
t
(j) at the beginning of period t + 1, where
x
t+1
is a unit mean
lognormal random variable distributed independently over time and across borrowers of
type x. The standard deviation of ln(
x
t+1
), S
z
t+1

x
t+1
, is itself a stochastic process that
will play a key role in our analysis. We will refer to this as the borrower riskiness shock. It
has an aggregate component S
z
t+1
that is common across borrower types, and a
type-specic component
x
t+1
. The density function and cumulative density function of

x
t+1
are given by f
x
t
(
x
t+1
) and F
x
t
(
x
t+1
).
52
The policy rate would equal the marginal cost of funds if banks were able to appropriate the funding
cost advantage of cheap deposits as a monopoly prot.
37
We assume that each borrower receives a standard debt contract from the bank. This
species a nominal loan amount L
x
t
(j) and a gross nominal retail rate of interest i
x
r,t
to be
paid if
x
t+1
is suciently high to rule out default. The critical dierence between our
model and those of Bernanke et al. (1999) and Christiano et al. (2011) is that the interest
rate i
x
r,t
is assumed to be pre-committed in period t, rather than being determined in
period t + 1 after the realization of time t + 1 aggregate shocks. The latter, conventional
assumption ensures zero ex-post prots for banks at all times, while under our debt
contract banks make zero expected prots, but realized ex-post prots generally dier
from zero. Borrowers who draw
x
t+1
below a cuto level
x
t+1
cannot pay this interest
rate and go bankrupt. They must hand over all their assets to the bank, but the bank can
only recover a fraction (1
x
) of the asset value of such borrowers. The remaining
fraction represents monitoring costs, which are assumed to be partially paid out to
households in a lump-sum fashion, with the remainder representing a real resource cost.
Banks ex-ante zero prot condition for borrower group x, in real terms, is given by
E
t
_
r
,t+1

x
t
(j)
_
_
1 F
x
t
(
x
t+1
)
_
r
x
r,t+1

x
t
(j) + (1
x
)
_

x
t+1
0
x
t
(j)ret
x,t+1

x
f
x
t
(
x
)d
x
__
= 0 .
This states that the payo to lending must equal wholesale interest charges r
,t+1

x
t
(j).
53
The rst term in square brackets is the gross real interest income on loans to borrowers
whose idiosyncratic shock exceeds the cuto level,
x
t+1

x
t+1
. The second term is the
amount collected by the bank in case of the borrowers bankruptcy, where
x
t+1
<
x
t+1
.
This cash ow is based on the return ret
x,t+1
on the asset x
t
(j), but multiplied by the
factor (1
x
) to reect a proportional bankruptcy cost
x
. The ex-post cuto
productivity level is determined by equating, at
x
t
=
x
t
, the gross interest charges due in
the event of continuing operations r
x
r,t

x
t1
(j) to the gross idiosyncratic return on the
borrowers asset ret
x,t
x
t1
(j)
x
t
. Using this equation, we can replace the previous
equation by the zero-prot condition
E
t
_
r
,t+1

x
t
x
t
ret
x,t+1
(
x,t+1

x
G
x,t+1
)
_
= 0 , (5)
where
x,t+1
is the banks gross share in the earnings of the underlying asset

x,t+1
=
_

x
t+1
0

x
t+1
f
x
t
(
x
t+1
)d
x
t+1
+
x
t+1
_


x
t+1
f
x
t
(
x
t+1
)d
x
t+1
,
and
x
G
x,t+1
is the proportion of earnings of the asset that the lender has to spend on
monitoring costs

x
G
x,t+1
=
x
_

x
t+1
0

x
t+1
f
x
t
(
x
t+1
)d
x
t+1
.
In other words, the bank will set the terms of the lending contract, in particular the
unconditional nominal lending rate i
x
r,t
, such that its expected gross share in the earnings
of the underlying assets is sucient to cover monitoring costs and the opportunity cost of
the loan. The borrower is left with a share 1
x,t+1
of the assets earnings.
The remainder of the analysis is very similar to Bernanke et al. (1999). Specically, the
borrower selects the optimal level of investment in the respective assets by maximizing
53
For mortgage loans, due to a lower Basel risk-weighting, the wholesale interest rate r
h
,t+1
is lower than
r
,t+1
.
38
E
t
{(1
x,t+1
) x
t
ret
x,t+1
} subject to (5). Borrower-specic indices can in each case be
dropped because the problems are linear in balance sheet quantities. For the case of
capital investment funds, whose owners will be referred to as entrepreneurs, the condition
for the optimal loan contract is identical to Bernanke et al. (1999),
E
t
_
(1
k,t+1
)
ret
k,t+1
r
,t+1
+

k
t+1
_
ret
k,t+1
r
,t+1
_

k,t+1

k
G
k,t+1
_
1
__
= 0 , (6)
with

k
t+1
=

k,t+1
/
_

k,t+1

k
G

k,t+1
_
, and where

k,t+1
and G

k,t+1
are the derivatives
of
k,t+1
and G
k,t+1
with respect to
k
t+1
.
For the remaining three types of loan contract there are some small dierences to (6).
First, the nature of the asset is dierent. For capital investment funds the value of the
asset equals x
t
= q
t
k
t
, where k
t
is the real capital stock and q
t
is the shadow value of
installed capital (Tobins q). For mortgages this is replaced by the value of constrained
households land p
a
t
a
c
t
, where a
c
t
is holdings of land and p
a
t
is the price of land. For
consumer loans and working capital loans it is replaced by the value of deposit balances d
c
t
and d
m
t
. Second, for these last two cases deposit balances enter a transactions cost
technology, so that in the conditions for the optimal loan contracts of those two agents
there will be additional terms due to monetary wedges. Similarly, land enters the utility
function of constrained households, which means that the condition for the optimal
mortgage loan contract contains an additional utility-related term.
The net worth evolution of each borrower group is aected by banks net loan losses.
These are positive if wholesale interest expenses, which are the opportunity cost of banks
retail lending, exceed banks net (of monitoring costs) share in borrowers gross earnings
on their assets. This will be the case if a larger than anticipated number of borrowers
defaults, so that, ex-post, banks nd that they have set their pre-committed retail lending
rate at an insucient level to compensate for lending losses. Of course, if losses are
positive for banks, this corresponds to a gain for their borrowers.
According to Fisher (1936), banks optimism about business conditions is a key driver of
business cycle volatility. We evaluate this claim by studying, in both the current monetary
environment and under the Chicago Plan, a standardized shock S
z
t
that multiplies each
standard deviation of borrower riskiness,
x
t
, x {c, a, m, k}. Similar to Christiano et al.
(2011) and Christiano et al. (2010), this shock captures the notion of a generalized change
in banks perception of borrower riskiness. We assume that it consists of two components,
S
z
t
= S
z1
t
S
z2
t
. We specify the rst component as consisting of the sum of news shocks

news
t
received over the current and the preceding 12 quarters, lnS
z1
t
=
12
j=0

news
tj
, while
the second component is autoregressive and given by lnS
z2
t
=
z
lnS
z2
t1
+
z2
t
.
C. Transactions Cost Technologies
Unconstrained households, constrained households and manufacturers (with superscripts
x {u, c, m}), require bank deposits for transactions purposes. Our specication of the
transactions cost technologies follows Schmitt-Groh and Uribe (2004), with a nonnegative
transactions cost term s
x
t
that is increasing in velocity v
x
t
, or in other words decreasing in
39
the amount of deposits held by the respective agent,
s
x
t
= A
x
v
x
t
+
B
x
v
x
t
2
_
A
x
B
x
. (7)
The velocity term v
x
t
is dierent for dierent agents. For households, total consumption
expenditures equal c
x
t
(1 +
c,t
) (1 +s
x
t
), where c
x
t
is the consumption level,
c,t
is the
consumption tax rate, and velocity is given by
v
x
t
=
c
x
t
(1 +
c,t
)
d
x
t
. (8)
For manufacturers, total expenditures on inputs equal (w
t
h
t
+r
k,t
k
t1
) (1 +s
m
t
), where w
t
is the real wage, h
t
is aggregate hours, r
k,t
is the return to capital, and velocity v
m
t
is
given by
v
m
t
=
w
t
h
t
+r
k,t
k
t1
d
m
t
. (9)
D. Equity Ownership and Dividends
In our model the acquisition of fresh capital by banks, manufacturers and entrepreneurs is
subject to market imperfections. This is a necessary condition for capital adequacy
regulations to have non-trivial eects on banks, and for external nance premia to arise in
the interactions between banks and their borrowers. We use the extended family
approach of Gertler and Karadi (2010), whereby bankers, manufacturers and
entrepreneurs transfer part of their accumulated equity positions to the household budget
constraint at an exogenously xed rate.
Each unconstrained and constrained household represents an extended family that
consists of four types of members, workers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs and bankers.
Manufacturers, entrepreneurs and bankers enter their occupations for random lengths of
time, after which they revert to being workers. There is perfect consumption insurance
within each household. Workers supply labor, and their wages are returned to the
household each period. Each manufacturer (entrepreneur, banker) manages a rm (capital
investment fund, bank) and transfers earnings back to the household at the time when his
period as a manufacturer (entrepreneur, banker) ends. Before that time he retains
accumulated earnings within the rm (capital investment fund, bank). This means that
while the household ultimately owns rms (capital investment funds, banks), equity
cannot be freely injected into or withdrawn from these entities. That in turn means that
equity and leverage matter for the decisions of rms (capital investment funds, banks).
Specically, at a given point in time a fraction (1 f) of the representative households
members are workers, a fraction f (1 b) m are manufacturers, a fraction f (1 b) (1 m)
are entrepreneurs, and a fraction fb are bankers. Manufacturers (entrepreneurs, bankers)
stay in their occupations for one further period with unconditional probability p
m
(p
k
, p
b
).
This means that in each period (1 p
m
)f (1 b) m manufacturers, (1 p
k
)f (1 b) (1 m)
entrepreneurs, and (1 p
b
)fb bankers, exit to become workers, and the same number of
workers is assumed to randomly become manufacturers (entrepreneurs, bankers). The
shares of workers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs and bankers within the representative
40
household therefore remain constant over time. Distribution of net worth by
manufacturers (entrepreneurs, bankers), at the time they revert to being workers, ensures
that the aggregate net worth of the corporate and banking sectors does not grow to the
point where debt nancing (deposit nancing in the case of banks) becomes unnecessary.
Finally, the representative household supplies startup funds to its new manufacturers
(entrepreneurs, bankers), and we assume that these represent small fractions
m
(
k
,
b
) of
the existing stocks of aggregate net worth in these three sectors. Each existing
manufacturer (entrepreneur, banker) makes identical decisions that are proportional to his
existing stock of accumulated earnings, so that aggregate decision rules for these three
sectors are straightforward to derive. Therefore, the parameters that matter for aggregate
dynamics are the shares of aggregate rm net worth n
m
t
, capital investment fund net
worth n
k
t
, and banking sector net worth n
b
t
paid out to households each period,
(1 p
m
)f (1 b) mn
m
t
, (1 p
k
)f (1 b) (1 m) n
k
t
, and (1 p
b
)fbn
b
t
, net of startup funds

m
n
m
t
,
k
n
k
t
and
b
n
b
t
. As all of these terms are proportional to the aggregate stocks of net
worth, their net eects can be denoted by
m
n
m
t
,
k
n
k
t
and
b
n
b
t
, and our calibration is
therefore simply in terms of
m
,
k
and
b
. These parameters can alternatively be thought
of as xed dividend policies of the rm, capital investment fund and banking sectors, and
for simplicity we will utilize this terminology in the remainder of the paper.
E. Unconstrained Households
The utility of a nancially unconstrained household, indexed by i, at time t depends on an
external consumption habit c
u
t
(i) c
u
t1
, where c
u
t
(i) is individual per capita consumption
and c
u
t
is aggregate per capita consumption, and where consumption is a CES aggregate
over goods varieties supplied by manufacturers, with elasticity of substitution . Utility
also depends on labor hours, h
u
t
(i), and on the real quantity of land held, a
u
t
(i). Lifetime
expected utility at time 0 of an individual household is given by
Max E
0

t=0

t
u
_
(1
v
x
) log(c
u
t
(i) c
u
t1
)
h
u
t
(i)
1+
1

1 +
1

+log(a
u
t
(i))
_
, (10)
where
u
is the discount factor, v indexes the degree of habit persistence, is the labor
supply elasticity, and and x the utility weights of labor and land. All unconstrained
households have identical initial endowments and behave identically. The household index
i is therefore only required for the distinction between c
t
(i) and c
t1
, and can henceforth
be dropped.
The assets held by unconstrained households include land a
u
t
, whose real normalized price
is given by p
a
t
, real domestic government debt

b
u
t
, and real bank deposits

d
u
t
. The time
subscript t denotes nancial claims held from period t to period t + 1. The recent
empirical literature has found that equilibrium real interest rates exhibit a small but
positive elasticity with respect to the level of government debt (see section VI). The model
replicates this feature by assuming that the holding of nancial assets requires a small
transactions cost
_

b
u
t
+

d
u
t
_

b
_
b
rat
t

b
rat
_
, where b
rat
t
=

b
g
t
/
_
4g

dp
t
_
is the government
debt-to-GDP ratio, and

b
rat
is its initial steady state value.
54
This cost is taken as
54
The assumption of transaction costs that are quadratic in the debt-to-output ratio is commonly used in
41
exogenous by unconstrained households, and is redistributed back to them by way of a
lump-sum transfer

u
t
.
Unconstrained households receive after-tax labor income w
h
t
h
u
t
(1
L,t
), where w
h
t
is the
real wage received from unions and
L,t
is the proportional labor income tax rate, and
they pay net lump-sum taxes
uu
t
to the government. They also receive, in a lump-sum
fashion, the prots and investment adjustment costs of the capital goods producing sector,

k
t
+

C
I,t
, price adjustment costs

C
P,t
, and a share (1 ) / of other income o
t
. The latter
includes total dividends distributed by manufacturers, entrepreneurs and banks, plus a
portion of overall monitoring costs

M
t
and transactions costs

T
t
. The remaining portion
of

M
t
and

T
t
is a real cost that enters the aggregate resource constraint. Monitoring costs
arise in connection with the bankruptcy monitoring costs payable by bank borrowers, and
also with the capital adequacy penalties payable by the banking sector itself, while
transactions costs arise due to the monetary wedges s
x
t
mentioned above.
We have the overall budget constraint
_

b
u
t
+

d
u
t
_ _
1 +
b
_
b
rat
t

b
rat
__
+ p
a
t
a
u
t
(11)
=
r
t
x

b
u
t1
+
r
d,t
x

d
u
t1
+ p
a
t
a
u
t1
+

u
t
c
u
t
(1 +s
u
t
)(1 +
c,t
)
uu
t
+ w
h
t
h
u
t
(1
L,t
)
+

k
t
+

C
I,t
+

C
P,t
+
1

o
t
.
The unconstrained household maximizes (10) subject to (11). We obtain a set of standard
optimality conditions that are listed in full in the Technical Appendix.
F. Constrained Households
The lifetime utility function of a nancially constrained household is identical to that of
an unconstrained household, with the sole exception that the discount factor
c
is allowed
to dier from
u
. We have
Max E
0

t=0

t
c
_
S
c
t
(1
v
x
) log(c
c
t
(i) c
c
t1
)
h
c
t
(i)
1+
1

1 +
1

+log(a
c
t
(i))
_
. (12)
Constrained households can invest in bank deposits

d
c
t
and land a
c
t
. However, unlike
unconstrained households they cannot nance the desired levels of these assets completely
out of their own resources, and therefore have to borrow from banks. The associated
consumption and mortgage loans are denoted by

c
t
and

a
t
. Constrained households
budget constraint in period t, in real normalized terms, is given by

d
c
t
_
1 +
b
_
b
rat
t

b
rat
__
+ p
a
t
a
c
t

c
t

a
t
=
r
d,t
x

d
c
t1
(1
c
G
c,t
) +

c
t

r
,t
x

c
t1
+ p
a
t
a
c
t1
(1
a
G
a,t
) +

a
t

r
h
,t
x

a
t1
c
c
t
(1 +s
c
t
) (1 +
c,t
)
cc
t
+ w
h
t
h
c
t
(1
L,t
) +

c
t
+

1
o
t
+
u
n
u
t
.
other literatures. The main example is the open economy literature with incomplete asset markets (Schmitt-
Groh and Uribe (2003), Neumeyer and Perri (2005)). In the closed economy literature, Heaton and Lucas
(1996) have used the same device.
42
The terms on the second line represent the net cash ows from debt-nanced investments
in bank deposits and land, with
c
G
c,t
and
a
G
a,t
denoting the shares of gross asset
returns spent on monitoring costs, and

c
t
and

a
t
representing banks net losses (and thus
borrowers gains) on the respective loans. All other terms are familiar, with an
appropriate change of notation, from the cash ow of unconstrained households, except for
the dividends of unions
u
n
u
t
, which are assumed to be received only by constrained
households. For utility maximization we also need to consider the budget constraint in
period t + 1, which is identical in form to the time t budget constraint, except that the
terms on the second row become
(1
c,t+1
)
r
d,t+1
x

d
c
t
+ (1
a,t+1
) p
a
t+1
a
c
t
,
where (1
c,t+1
) and (1
a,t+1
) denote the expected shares of gross returns on deposits
and land retained by households, that is after either repaying bank loans or going
bankrupt. These terms are familiar from the description of the optimal loan contract
studied in subsection IV.B. Most of the optimality conditions for constrained households
are standard and shown in the Technical Appendix. We list here only the conditions for
the optimal consumer loan contracts,

c
t
_
1 +
b
_
b
rat
t

b
rat
__
_
1 s
c

t
(v
c
t
)
2
_
(13)
= E
t

c
x

c
t+1
r
d,t+1
_
(1
c,t+1
) +

c
t+1
(
c,t+1

c
G
c,t+1
)
_
,

c
t
= E
t

c
x

c
t+1

c
t+1
r
,t+1
,
and for optimal mortgage loan contracts,

c
t


p
a
t
a
c
t
(14)
= E
t

c
t+1
p
a
t+1
p
a
t
_
(1
a,t+1
) +

a
t+1
(
a,t+1

a
G
a,t+1
)
_
,

c
t
= E
t

c
x

c
t+1

a
t+1
r
h
,t+1
.
We observe that these take a very similar form to the optimal loan contract for capital
investment funds in (6), except for the presence of a monetary wedge in (13), and of a
utility wedge in (14).
G. Unions
Unions have unit mass and are indexed by i. Each union buys homogenous labor from
households at the nominal household wage W
h
t
, and sells labor variety i to manufacturers
at the nominal producer wage W
t
(i). Each manufacturer demands a CES composite of
labor varieties, with elasticity of substitution
w
, so that unions steady state gross
markup of W
t
(i) over W
h
t
equals
w
=
w
/(
w
1). The aggregate nominal producer
wage is given by W
t
. Unions face wage adjustment costs C
W,t
(i) that, as in Ireland (2001),
make it costly to change the rate of wage ination: C
W,t
(i) =

w
2
h
t
T
t
_
Wt(i)
W
t1
(i)
/
W
t1
W
t2
1
_
2
.
Their optimization problem yields a familiar New Keynesian Phillips curve for wages.
Unions are owned by constrained households, who receive the full value of the unions cash
ow as a dividend in each period.
43
H. Manufacturers
Manufacturers have unit mass and are indexed by j. Each buyer of manufacturing output
demands a CES composite of goods varieties with elasticity of substitution , so that
manufacturers gross steady state markup of their nominal price P
t
(j) over nominal
marginal cost MC
t
equals = /( 1). Manufacturers face price adjustment costs
C
P,t
(i) that, as in Ireland (2001), make it costly to change the rate of price ination:
C
P,t
(i) =

p
2
y
t
_
Pt(j)
P
t1
(j)
/
P
t1
P
t2
1
_
2
. Demand for manufacturers output is given by
y
t
(j) = y
t
(P
t
(j)/P
t
)

, while their technology is given by a standard Cobb-Douglas

production function in labor and capital y
t
(j) = (T
t
h
t
(j))
1
k
t1
(j)

. Manufacturers
need to maintain bank deposits to reduce the transactions costs associated with payments
for their inputs. They nance deposits

d
m
t
partly out of their own net worth n
m
t
, and
partly by borrowing from banks

m
t
, with their balance sheet constraint given by

d
m
t
=

m
t
+ n
m
t
. (15)
Manufacturers time t optimization problem, in nominal terms, is
Max
P
t
(j),h
t
(j),k
t
(j),D
m
t
(j),
m
t+1
(j),

m
t+1
(j)
E
t
__
P
t
(j)y
t
_
P
t
(j)
P
t
_

+ (1
m,t+1
) i
d,t
D
m
t
(j)
+MC
t
_
(T
t
S
a
t
h
t
(j))
1
k
t1
(j)

y
t
_
P
t
(j)
P
t
_

_
(W
t
h
t
(j) +R
k,t
k
t1
(j)) (1 +s
m
t
(j))
P
t
T
t
F P
t
C
P,t
(i)]
1
i

t
P
t+1
C
P,t+1
(i)
+

m
t+1
(j) [(
m,t+1
(j)
m
G
m,t+1
(j)) D
m
t
(j)i
d,t
i
,t
D
m
t
(j) +i
,t
N
m
t
(j)] + ...
_
The rst line shows sales revenues plus earnings on deposits net of the share going to
banks. This latter expression is familiar from our general exposition of the optimal loan
contract in subsection IV.B. The second line imposes the constraint that supply equals
demand for good j. The term on the third line is the input cost of labor and capital, with
an added transaction costs term that depends on the amount of deposits held. The rst
term on the fourth line is a xed cost, and the remaining terms are ination adjustment
costs. The fth line is the bank participation constraint.
We assume that all manufacturers have identical initial stocks of bank deposits, loans and
net worth. In that case all manufacturers make identical choices in equilibrium, and we
can drop the index j in what follows. The optimality conditions for price setting and
input choice are standard, except for the presence of a monetary wedge in marginal cost
terms. They are shown in the Technical Appendix. We list here only the condition for the
optimal loan contract for working capital loans:
E
t
__
(1
m,t+1
) i
d,t
+s
m

t
(v
m
t
)
2
_
+

m
t+1
__

m,t+1
S
x
t+1

m
t+1
G
m,t+1
_
i
d,t
i
,t

_
= 0 .
(16)
44
Similar to the condition for the optimal consumer loan contract, this features a monetary
wedge, but it is otherwise identical to the optimality condition for investment loans (6).
Finally, the net worth accumulation of manufacturers is given by
n
m
t
=
r
d,t
x

d
m
t1
(1
m
G
m,t
) +

m
t

r
,t
x

m
t1
(17)
+ y
t

_
w
t
h
t
+r
k,t

k
t1
x
_
(1 +s
m
t
)

C
P,t
F
m
n
m
t
.
The terms on the rst line represent the net cash ow from debt-nanced investment in
bank deposits, with
m
G
m,t
denoting the share of gross returns spent on monitoring costs,
and

m
t
representing banks net losses (and thus borrowers gains) on the loan. The terms
on the second line represent the net cash ow from goods production, including a xed
cost F, minus the dividend payment.
I. Capital Goods Producers
As in Bernanke et al. (1999), the production of the capital good k
t
is performed by a
separate agent that is subject to investment adjustment costs
C
I,t
= (
I
/2) I
t
(I
t
/ (I
t1
x) 1)
2
, where I
t
is investment. We obtain a standard Euler
equation for optimal investment over time. Capital accumulation is given by
k
t
= (1 )k
t1
+I
t
, where is the depreciation rate.
J. Capital Investment Funds
The balance sheet constraint of capital investment funds is given by
q
t

k
t
= n
k
t
+

k
t
. (18)
The ex-post return to capital is ret
k,t
= (r
k,t
+ (1 ) q
t

k,t
(r
k,t
q
t
)) /q
t1
, where

k,t
is the tax rate on capital income. The condition for the optimal loan contract of
capital investment funds was shown in (6). Their net worth accumulation takes the by
now familiar form
n
k
t
=
ret
k,t
x
q
t1

k
t1
_
1
k
G
k,t
_
+

k
t

r
,t
x

k
t1

k
n
k
t
. (19)
K. Government
1. Monetary Policy
Monetary policy is given by a conventional ination forecast-based interest rate rule
i
t
= (i
t1
)
m
i
_
x

u

_
1 +
b
_
b
rat
t

b
rat
__
_
(1m
i
)
_

4,t+3
( )
4
_
(1m
i
)m

4
, (20)
where the second term on the right-hand side is the steady state nominal interest rate,
which takes into account that the steady state nominal interest rate is increasing in the
government debt-to-GDP ratio, and where
4,t
=
t

t1

t2

t3
.
45
2. Prudential Policy
We assume that prudential policy under the current monetary regime follows a xed Basel
rule that sets a constant minimum capital adequacy ratio,
t
= .
3. Fiscal Policy
Fiscal policy follows a structural decit rule. Specically, the governments long-run target
for the decit-to-GDP ratio gd
rat
t
=
_

b
g
t

b
g
t1
/ (x
t
)
_
/g

dp
t
is xed at gd
rat
. But because
of automatic stabilizers the decit is allowed to uctuate with the output gap
ln(g

dp
t
/gdp
ss
),
gd
rat
t
= gd
rat
d
gdp
ln
_
g

dp
t
gdp
ss
_
. (21)
We assume that the labor income tax rate
L,t
is endogenized to make this rule hold over
the business cycle, with the other two distortionary tax rates following labor income tax
rates in proportional fashion. This requires the auxiliary rules
(
c,t

c
) /
c
= (
L,t

L
) /
L
and (
k,t

k
) /
k
= (
L,t

L
) /
L
. Lump-sum taxes
are given by
ls,t
=
uu
t
+ (1 )
cc
t
, and we assume that the portion payable by
constrained agents is determined by the parameter f
cc
in
cc
t
= f
cc

ls
t
/ (1 ).
Government spending spending g
t
is assumed to equal a xed fraction s
g
of GDP.
4. Government Budget Constraint
The government budget constraint is given by

b
g
t
=
r
t
x

b
g
t1
+ g
t

t
, (22)
where tax revenue is given by

t
=
c,t
c
t
+
L,t
w
h
t
h
t
+
k,t
(r
k,t
q
t
)

k
t1
x
+
ls,t
. (23)
For future reference we note that the steady state relationship between debt- and
decit-to-GDP ratios is given by the accounting relationship b
rat
=
_
gd
rat
/4
_
x
x 1
, where
the factor of proportionality 1/4 is due to the fact that our model is quarterly.
L. Market Clearing
The goods market clearing condition is given by y
t
= c
t
+

I
t
+ g
t
+ F + r
_

M
t
+

T
t
_
, where
r is the fraction of monitoring and transactions costs that represents a real resource cost,
and where the remaining fraction 1 r is a lump-sum transfer to households. The labor
market clearing condition is given by h
t
= h
u
t
+ (1 ) h
c
t
, land market clearing by
a = a
u
t
+ (1 ) a
c
t
, where a is the xed and exogenous supply of land, and bonds
market clearing is given by

b
u
t
+

b
b
t
=

b
g
t
. Finally, aggregate consumption is dened as
c
t
= c
u
t
+ (1 ) c
c
t
, and GDP as g

dp
t
= c
t
+

I
t
+ g
t
.
46
V. The Model under the Chicago Plan
We now describe the model economy under the Chicago Plan. We will refer to this as the
post-transition economy, while the economy under the current monetary regime will be
referred to as the pre-transition economy. Except when specically mentioned in this
section, the preferences, technologies and calibration of the two economies are identical.
The transition is assumed to take place in exactly one period, and in this period budget
constraints contain additional terms that relate to large one-o stock changes on balance
sheets. We therefore introduce a dummy parameter that will be set to d = 1 in the
transition period, and to d = 0 in all subsequent periods. Banks, households,
manufacturers, and the government exhibit dierences under the Chicago Plan, and we
now deal with each in turn. As before, we start with banks.
A. Banks
The key requirement of the Chicago Plan is that banks are required to back 100% of their
deposits

d
t
by government-issued reserves m
t
:

d
t
= m
t
. (24)
This implies that nancial institutions are split into two groups with entirely dierent
functions, and with neither of them being able to lend by creating new deposits. Deposit
banks administer government-issued money and provide payments services. They are (for
simplicity) assumed to have no equity, and their balance sheet is given by (24).
Investment trusts inherit a stock of investment loans that has to be backed by a
combination of its own equity and non-monetary liabilities

f
t
. For the reasons discussed in
section III.B, we assume that this funding

f
t
is supplied exclusively by the government
treasury. We will therefore refer to

f
t
as treasury credit. Private agents are limited to
holding either investment trust equity or monetary bank deposits

d
t
that do not fund any
lending.
55
Under this funding scheme the government separately inuences the aggregate
volumes of credit and the money supply.
The transition to these new balance sheets conceptually takes place in two stages that
both happen in a single transition period. In the rst stage, banks instantaneously
increase their reserve backing for deposits from 0% to 100%, by borrowing from the
treasury, so that

f
t
= m
t
=

d
t
. In the second stage, the government can independently
control money m
t
and treasury credit

f
t
. It exercises this ability by cancelling all
government debt on nancial institutions balance sheets against treasury credit, and by
transferring part of the remaining treasury credit claims against banks to constrained
households and manufacturers, by way of a citizens dividend paid into restricted accounts
that must be used to repay outstanding loans. This second stage leaves only investment
loans

k
t
outstanding, with money m
t
unchanged and treasury credit

f
t
much reduced. Net
interest charges from the previous period remain the responsibility of the respective
borrowers. With this, the overall nancial sector balance sheet becomes
55
We reiterate that alternative assumptions, with a much more substantial role for private funding of
credit, are perfectly feasible. Of course private agents can also hold real assets and government debt.
47

k
t
+ m
t
=

f
t
+

d
t
+ n
b
t
, while the balance sheet of investment trusts is simply given by

k
t
=

f
t
+ n
b
t
. (25)
The government aects the price of lending through its control of the interest rate on
treasury credit i
f,t
. It can also aect the volume of lending through capital adequacy
regulations. But unless those regulations are tight, investment trusts retain considerable
power to determine the aggregate quantity of credit. And of course they remain
completely in charge of choosing the allocation of that credit. There is therefore nothing
in the monetary arrangements of the Chicago Plan that interferes with the ability of the
private nancial sector to facilitate the allocation of capital to its most productive uses.
Other important details change for the nancial sector. First, the government sets the
nominal interest rate on reserves i
m,t
. We assume that the deposit function of banks is
perfectly competitive, and that deposit banks face zero marginal costs in providing deposit
services. This means that deposit banks pass i
m,t
on to depositors one for one, i
m,t
= i
d,t
.
We will therefore describe policy in terms of the government directly setting i
d,t
. Given
that private credit is now only extended to capital investment funds, the expression for
total loan losses simplies to

b
t
=

k
t
. Capital adequacy regulation now only applies to
investment trusts, but otherwise takes an identical form to the current arrangements.
Details are shown in the Technical Appendix. Investment trusts optimality condition for
the optimal volume of loans takes the same form as before, but in this case it determines
the spread between the wholesale rate i
,t
and the government-determined treasury credit
rate i
f,t
, rather than between i
,t
and the privately determined deposit rate i
d,t
.
The net worth accumulation of the overall nancial system is given by
56
n
b
t
=
1
x
_
r
,t

t1
+r
h
,t

h
t1
+r
t

b
b
t1
r
d,t

d
t1
_

b
t


M
b
t

b
n
b
t
(26)
+
1
x
_
r
d,t
m
t1
r
f,t

f
t1
_
d

nw
t
.
The rst line is identical to the pre-transition economy, although several of the lagged
entries remain at zero after the transition period. The second line is new. The rst item is
gross interest on the reserve backing of deposits paid by the government to deposit banks.
The second item is gross interest on treasury credit paid by investment trusts to the
government. The third item is a one-o equity payout in the transition period. The reason
for the latter is that, after a large portion of loans is repaid at an unchanged MCAR,
equity requirements of investment trusts drop signicantly, so that they would ordinarily
respond by temporarily reducing their lending margin to run down their equity. An
instantaneous equity payout of appropriate size ensures that the loan repayment has no
signicant eect on the pricing of the remaining loans. We assume that the excess equity
is paid out to shareholders according to the formula

nw
t
= n
b
t1

a

k
t
,
where
a
is the unchanged steady steady capital adequacy ratio.
56
We note that this reduces to the net worth accumulation of investment trusts, as deposit banks are
assumed to have zero equity to start with, and their subsequent receipts r
d,t
mt1/x and payments r
d,t

dt1/x
are equal and can be cancelled.
48
In the above analysis we make the simplifying assumption, common in macroeconomic
models, that there is no heterogeneity in debt levels across constrained households, or
across manufacturers. This is certainly not true in the real world. But it is straightforward
to understand the implications of this additional complication. If we make the reasonable
assumption that a government would not want to penalize low-debt individuals in a debt
repayment, then the repayment would take the form of a at per capita transfer

d
new
t
into
the above-mentioned restricted private accounts.
57
For individuals whose outstanding
bank debt

old
t
equals

d
new
t
this would exactly cancel the debt as before. But individuals
that started out without debt would be left with the full new balance

d
new
t
, while
individuals with debt that exceeds

d
new
t
would be left with the residual debt. To make
sure that the balances of net savers do not add to the money supply, they could then be
converted into the equity shares or non-monetary debt instruments of the investment
trusts envisaged by Simons. Because treasury-funded investment trusts remain at the core
of the nancial system, the privately-funded trusts would be less important than envisaged
by Simons. But their presence ensures that there is nothing in the monetary arrangements
of the Chicago Plan that prevents households and rms from intertemporal smoothing.
B. Households
Upon the announcement of the transition, due to the complete repayment of household
debt by the government, all households become unconstrained. We model previously
distinct households as identical post-transition by setting the population share parameter
to
t
= 1 from the transition period onwards. The new overall budget constraint correctly
reects the inherited assets and liabilities of both household groups. In the transition
period households only pay the net interest charges on past debts incurred by constrained
households to the banking sector. The principal is instantaneously repaid through the
citizens dividend. From that moment onwards the household sector has zero net debt to
the nancial sector
58
, while its nancial assets consist of government bonds and deposits,
the latter now being 100% reserve backed. The new household budget constraint is
_

b
u
t
+

d
u
t
_ _
1 +
b
_
b
rat
net,t

b
rat
__
+ p
a
t
a (27)
=
r
t
x

t1

b
u
t1
+
r
d,t
x
_

t1

d
u
t1
+ (1
t1
)

d
c
t1
_
+ p
a
t
a +

u
t
c
u
t
(1 +s
u
t
)(1 +
c,t
)
ls
t
+ w
h
t
h
u
t
(1
L,t
)
d (1
t1
)
_
r
,t
x
1
_

c
t1
d (1
t1
)
_
r
h
,t
x
1
_

a
t1
+ o
t
d
once
t
.
The transition-period-only terms on the last line are new relative to the pre-transition
period. The rst two terms state that households pay the net interest due on consumer
loans and mortgages in the transition period. The dividend portion of other income o
t
57
A at per capita transfer is a natural starting point for this thought experiment. But it should be clear
that the transition to the Chicago Plan would represent a unique opportunity to address some of the serious
income inequality problems that have developed over recent decades, by making larger transfers to lower-
income households. As shown in Kumhof and Rancire (2010) and Kumhof et al. (2012), inequalities can
make economies more vulnerable to nancial crises, and they can contribute to current account imbalances.
58
Again, with heterogeneity within household groups gross asset and liability positions would continue to
exist.
49
now includes one additional term, d
nw
t
. This represents the above-mentioned one-o
equity distribution (share buyback) from nancial institutions to households in the
transition period. The nal item on the last line,
once
t
, is a one-o lump-sum tax levied
by the government in the transition period. We set
once
t
=
nw
t
, so that the government
can nance the additional treasury credit to investment trusts that is necessary to replace
the lost equity, without having to resort to temporarily higher distortionary taxation.
The government-debt-related interest rate premium on nancial assets is now determined
by b
rat
net,t
rather than b
rat
t
, where
b
rat
net,t
=
(

b
g
t

f
t
)
4g

dp
t
. (28)
Here indicates the weight that investors attach to treasury credit, that is to government
assets vis--vis the private sector, in computing net government debt. That weight, in our
calibration, will be determined by the relative interest burdens of these two nancial
instruments. Other changes to the budget constraint reect the fact that all lump-sum
transfers and other income are now received by one household group. Also, the monitoring
cost term in other income is much reduced due to the repayment of a large stock of bank
loans.
C. Manufacturers
For manufacturers, the equations describing the technology, optimal input choice, and
ination dynamics remain unchanged. In the transition period manufacturers only pay the
net interest charges on past debt incurred to the banking sector. The principal is
instantaneously repaid through the citizens dividend, which is paid to both households
and manufacturers. From that moment onwards the manufacturing sector has zero debt to
the nancial sector. Manufacturers main nancial asset remains bank deposits, which are
now fully backed by reserves and thus debt-free. The debt repayment therefore implies a
large increase in the net worth of this sector, which from this moment onwards is nanced
almost exclusively by equity.
We assume that, post-transition, manufacturers can still smooth business cycle
uctuations through borrowing and lending. But given their much lower credit risk after
the debt repayment, they can now access the market for riskless debt, in the same way as
the government. The net steady state level of this borrowing is however zero.
59
We denote
manufacturers net holdings of riskless debt by

b
m
t
. Their post-transition balance sheet is
given by

d
m
t
+

b
m
t
= n
m
t
. (29)
Manufacturers opportunity cost of holding bank deposits is therefore now given by the
spread between the rate on riskless debt and the deposit rate, with optimal money
holdings determined by
i
t
= i
d
t
+s
m

t
(v
m
t
)
2
. (30)
59
Similar to the case of households, non-bank investment trusts could accommodate the credit needs of
heterogeneous manufacturers.
50
Finally, manufacturers net worth accumulation is now given by
n
m
t
=
r
d,t
x

d
m
t1
+
r
t
x

b
m
t1
d
_
r
,t
x
1
_

m
t1

m
n
m
t
+ y
t

_
w
t
h
t
+r
k,t

k
t1
x
_
(1 +s
m
t
)

C
P,t
F .
This reects the absence of a bank lending relationship, and of associated monitoring costs.
D. Government
1. Monetary Policy
In the pre-transition environment the government only has a single policy instrument, the
nominal interest rate on short-term government bonds, to aect the quantities of both
money and credit. As we have discussed, the eect on each is indirect and generally weak.
In the post-transition environment the government directly controls the quantity of money.
Its control over credit is still indirect but if desired it can be made stronger than before.
Money
For money, the government follows a Friedman money growth rule whereby the nominal
quantity of money grows at the constant (gross) rate
m
,

d
t
=
m

d
t1
x
t
. (31)
The main reason why monetarism had to be abandoned in the 1980s is the fact that under
the present monetary system the government can only pursue a rule such as (31) for the
narrow monetary aggregates under its direct control. This is only eective if there is a
stable deposit multiplier that relates broad to narrow monetary aggregates. However, as
discussed in Section I, the deposit multiplier is a myth.
Under the current monetary system, broad monetary aggregates are created by banks as a
function, almost exclusively, of their attitude towards credit risk, without narrow
aggregates imposing any eective constraint. On the other hand, under the Chicago Plan
the rule (31) directly controls the broadest monetary aggregate. In other words,
monetarism can become highly eective at achieving its main objective of controlling price
ination by controlling the money supply. This is a key reason why Friedman (1967) was
in favor of the 100% reserve solution.
Furthermore the government, as the sole issuer of money, can directly control the nominal
interest rate on reserves, and given our assumptions about deposit banks technology, this
rate is passed on to depositors one for one. We assume, without loss of generality, that the
governments long-run deposit rate equals
d
= 1, in other words the government
eventually pays zero interest on money. However, during a brief period following the
implementation of the Chicago Plan real interest rates can become excessively volatile if
the deposit rate is lowered too fast. For the immediate post-transition period we therefore
assume a xed autoregressive path for the nominal deposit interest rate, with an initial
51
value that equals the privately determined deposit interest rate of the last pre-transition
period:
i
d,t
= (1
d
)
d
+
d
i
d,t1
. (32)
Credit
To control credit growth, policy is assumed to control the nominal interest rate on treasury
credit i
f,t
and, if desired, a countercyclical component of capital adequacy requirements

t
. As the latter falls under prudential policy, it is discussed in the next subsection.
Because ination is controlled by the money growth rule, control of the nominal interest
rate on treasury credit is equivalent to control of the real interest rate on treasury credit,
which then aects the real interest rate on credit from investment trusts.
The zero lower bound on the policy interest rate in the present monetary environment
binds because at a less than zero nominal interest rate on bonds private agents can switch
their investment to cash. This is not a relevant consideration for treasury credit, which is
not an investment asset but a strictly limited funding source that is only accessible to
investment trusts for the specic purpose of funding investment loans. The policy rate i
f,t
is therefore not constrained by a zero lower bound. The government thus has the ability
to charge investment trusts a negative nominal/real interest rate on treasury credit during
severe downturns, and thereby to oset the higher spreads (due to higher lending risk)
during such periods. The absence of a zero lower bound implies that policy can switch to
an environment with both zero ination and very low steady state treasury credit rates,
without running the risk of losing the ability to lower rates further during a downturn.
For the purpose of our simulations we again distinguish between two dierent
environments for the policy rate i
f,t
. In the rst environment the economy has reached its
new post-transition steady state, while in the second we describe the immediate
post-transition period. Around the new post-transition steady state we assume a feedback
rule
i
f,t
= (
f
)
1m
i
(i
f,t1
)
m
i
_

4,t+3
( )
4
_
(1m
i
)m
. (33)
This has an identical functional form to the pre-transition policy rule (20) for i
t
. But
apart from this there are major dierences. First, there is no natural rate for this policy
rate, so that the government is free to choose the steady state rate
f
. Second, there is no
zero lower bound for i
f,t
. Third, this rate, through the nancial system, only aects
decisions on physical investment directly, with no direct eect on decisions on land
purchases, consumption, or working capital purchases. It is therefore easier to use this
rate in a targeted fashion if the nature of shocks is known.
The immediate post-transition period is characterized by a xed autoregressive path that
gradually lowers the treasury credit rate from the pre-transition deposit rate i
d,t1
to the
long-run target
f
:
i
f,t
=
_
1
f
_

f
+
f
(di
d,t1
+ (1 d) i
f,t1
) . (34)
For the simulation of this transition, we are less concerned with the business cycle
stabilizing properties of the new policy rate, and therefore ignore policy feedback to
52
ination. Reintroducing this feature would make only a minimal dierence to our results.
We assume that the policymaker sets the steady state rate
f
so that in the long-run the
steady state rate on wholesale lending

(before risk spreads) equals the steady state rate

on government bonds . In other words, by providing relatively cheap credit the
government subsidizes investment trusts to equalize the average funding costs of the
government and of the lowest-risk private corporations.
We have found that if the transition to
f
was modelled as taking place very rapidly, the
result would be an immediate explosion in investment demand, with destabilizing eects,
through ination and real interest rates, on the rest of the economy. We therefore
calibrate the speed of the reduction in this interest rate to be fairly slow, by choosing a
high value for
f
.
2. Prudential Policy
We recall that in the pre-transition economy we had assumed a Basel regime with a
constant MCAR,
t
= . We retain this assumption when simulating the transition to the
new steady state of the Chicago Plan. However, when describing the economys behavior
in response to business cycle shocks under the Chicago Plan, we will assume that
prudential policy can have a strong countercyclical component, as permitted under the
new Basel-III rules.
As shown in Benes and Kumhof (2011), a Basel regime can be made more exible, and
increase welfare, by responding to the state of banks balance sheet. However, when banks
lend to a variety of dierent borrowers, and when a variety of dierent shocks hit the
economy, it may become hard to eciently calibrate the response of a prudential rule to
an appropriate target variable. This problem is very much reduced under the version of
the Chicago Plan simulated in this paper, because investment trusts that have access to
treasury credit exclusively nance physical investment projects.
60
In this case prudential
policy can focus on limiting volatility in the amount of investment nanced by investment
trusts. Because the level of investment can be aected by both the price and the quantity
of credit, it is preferable to target neither of those variables through the prudential rule,
but rather to target the quantity of investment directly. The rule we postulate is

t
=
_

I
t

I
_
p

, (35)
where p

> 0. In other words, the minimum reserve requirement is raised when the
quantity of investment is at a cyclical high, thereby forcing investment trusts to hold more
equity per unit of loans if they decide to approve an exceptionally large volume of
investment loans. The result is a combination of reduced lending and higher lending rates
on the remaining loans.
This means that policy can, if desired, control credit not only through the interest rate on
treasury credit, but also through a policy that resembles the quantitative lending guidance
discussed in Section II.H. While lending guidance is assumed to be exible in that
investment trusts make the ultimate decision on the volume of investment loans, policy
60
Recall that all other lending is carried out by privately-funded investment trusts.
53
can nevertheless impose very costly penalties on excessively volatile lending. As we will
see, this can be an extremely eective way to limit the business cycle eects of lenders
attitudes towards credit risk.
3. Fiscal Policy
The scal policy rule under the Chicago Plan remains unchanged, as do the rules
endogenizing tax rates, and the exogenous process for government spending. But because
the scal rule targets the government decit, which equals the change in the stock of
government debt, it needs to be modied for the transition period. The reason is that at
that time there is a large discontinuous change in the stock of government debt, due to the
repayment of the government debt held by the banking system. We therefore have
gd
rat
t
= (1 d)
_
gd
rat
d
gdp
ln
_
g

dp
t
gdp
ss
__
+ d
bg
t
, (36)

bg
t
= 4
_

b
rat
t


b
rat
t1
x
t
_
g

dp
t
/g

dp
t1
_
_
, (37)
where the last expression follows directly from the long-run relationship between debt and
decits. Note that the steady state debt-to-GDP ratios are here shown with time
subscripts, because in the transition period there is an instantaneous and permanent
reduction in the steady state debt-to-GDP ratio, due to the repayment of bank-held
government debt against the cancellation of treasury credit.
4. Government Budget Constraint
Relative to the pre-transition government budget constraint (22), the post-transition
budget constraint features two new ow terms related to money issuance and treasury
credit issuance, as well as one-o stock adjustment terms in the transition period. We have

b
g
t
+ m
t

f
t
d
comp
t
=
r
t
x

b
g
t1
+
r
d,t
x
m
t1

r
f,t
x

f
t1
+ g
t

t
, (38)

t
=
c,t
c
t
+
L,t
w
h
t
h
t
+
k,t
(r
k,t
q
t
)

k
t1
x
+
ls,t
+ d
once
t
. (39)
The rst new ow term is net seigniorage from government money provision
m
t

r
d,t
x
m
t1
. In a steady state with r
d
= 1 and a positive growth rate x this represents a
cash inow that is equal to the real money stock multiplied by the real economic growth
rate. The second new ow term is net cash ow from treasury credit provision

f
t
+
r
f,t
x

f
t1
. In steady state this represents a cash outow when, as we will assume, the
government keeps the real interest rate on treasury credit below the growth rate, r
f
< x.
The new stock items in the transition period need to be discussed carefully. On impact
there is a one-o cash ow m
t

f
t
. At the moment when banks purchase their new
reserve backing, this cash ow is exactly equal to zero. But we assume that this is
54
instantaneously followed by another set of transactions whereby the government, directly
or indirectly, repays a number of government and private debts by cancelling them against

f
t
, thereby reducing

f
t
. First, there is a one-o negative cash ow

b
g
t

rt
x

b
g
t1
that is
exactly balanced by a commensurate reduction in

f
t
. This is the repayment of government
debt held by banks, where

b
g
t
is signicantly smaller than

b
g
t1
. Second, there is a one-o
negative cash-ow from the payout of the citizens dividend for the purpose of repaying
the principal of private debts. This again represents a reduction in

f
t
:

comp
t
= (1
t1
)
_

c
t1
+

a
t1
_
+

m
t1
. (40)
Third, without an additional tax the governments cash ow in the transition period
would suer from the fact that nancial institutions distribute part of their stock of equity

nw
t
to households in that period, and need to make up the lost funding by borrowing
additional funds from the government, thereby raising the required

f
t
. By raising a one-o
lump-sum tax
once
t
=
nw
t
, the governments cash ow remains smooth and does not
require a large spike in distortionary taxes in the transition period in order to procure the
additional funds. A maintained assumption in this argument is of course that the
government maintains its scal rule at all times. With this set of assumptions the regular
ow items of the governments budget constraint remain insulated from the large one-o
stock eects of the transition.
In terms of stock items, the government and the private sector share the benets of
replacing debt-based private money with debt-free government-issued money. The
government swaps debt for equity. First, the large new stock of irredeemable
government-issued money represents government equity rather than government debt.
This is not traded equity that pays dividends, but rather equity in the commonwealth,
whose return comes in the form of lower government interest costs, lower distortionary
taxes, and lower nancial market monitoring costs. Second, treasury credit to investment
trusts dramatically reduces the governments overall net debt. The non-bank private
sector also swaps debt for equity. In this case this is due to the citizens dividend, which
increases private sector net worth by reducing debt levels.
5. Controlling Boom-Bust Cycles - Additional Considerations
Two additional considerations suggest that the eectiveness of countercyclical policy
would be further enhanced under the Chicago Plan relative to the present monetary
system. We mention them in a separate subsection because, unlike the other arguments in
favor of the Chicago Plan, they cannot be analyzed using our formal model.
First, nancial institutions that are subject to a 100% reserve requirement know that they
cannot create their own funds to fuel a lending boom. Instead, they have to either attract
existing money balances from private agents, who hold them both for their safety and for
transactions needs and who will therefore need an incentive to part with them, or they
have to borrow money from the government at rates that increase in a lending boom, and
where the additional lending could furthermore be subject to much higher capital
requirements. Arguably this knowledge makes it much less likely that nancial institutions
will develop their intermittent bouts of optimism and pessimism in the rst place.
55
Second, under the present monetary regime, especially during a boom, capital adequacy
requirements impose virtually no eective constraint, because the money that is injected
as equity does not need to represent other agents savings. Instead, any additional funds
required as equity by Bank A can simply be created by Bank B as credit to a household,
who then injects those funds as equity into Bank A.
61
This is impossible under the
Chicago Plan, because the nancial system is unable to create its own funds through
credit, while any government credit is specically earmarked for investment projects.
Therefore, just like in the case of the money growth rule, a prudential MCAR rule
becomes far more eective under the Chicago Plan.
VI. Calibration
We calibrate the steady state of our model economy, for the period prior to the transition
to the Chicago Plan, based on U.S. data for the period 1990-2006, where available. The
reason is that 2006 is the last full year before the onset of the Great Recession, which led
to massive uctuations in many of the data required for our calibration, particularly in
balance sheet data. For most of our calibration of the real economy we use data for the
full 1990-2006 period to compute averages. However, for balance sheet data, including
balance sheets of banks, rms, households and the government, we use a calibration based
on the nal years preceding the crisis. This is because balance sheets, unlike most key
ratios in the real economy, have changed dramatically since the early 1990s, so that earlier
data are no longer representative as a starting point when trying to evaluate the eects of
policies whose immediate impact is on balance sheets. In the interest of space we do not
display the data underlying our calibration choices. Detailed gures are shown in the
Technical Appendix. One period corresponds to one quarter.
The trend real growth rate x is calibrated at 2% per annum and the average ination rate
at 3% per annum. The historical average for the real interest rate on short-term U.S.
government debt is around 2.5%-3.0% per annum. We calibrate it at 3% per annum. The
population share of unconstrained households is assumed to be 10%, or = 0.1. The
parameter , which determines the relative income and therefore consumption levels of
unconstrained and constrained household, is xed to obtain a steady ratio of
unconstrained to constrained households per capita consumption of 4:1, in line with
evidence from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finance. The parameter r, which determines
the share of monitoring and transactions costs that represent real resource costs rather
than lump-sum payments back to households, is xed at r = 0.25.
The labor income share is calibrated at 61% by xing . This is in line with recent BLS
data for the U.S. business sector. This share has exhibited a declining trend over recent
decades, and we therefore base our calibration on the more recent values. The private
investment to GDP ratio is set to 19% of GDP, roughly its average in U.S. data. The
implied depreciation rate, at close to 10% per annum, is in line with much of the
literature. The investment adjustment cost parameter, at
I
= 2.5, follows Christiano et
al. (2005). The price and wage markups of monopolistically competitive manufacturers
and unions are xed, in line with much of the New Keynesian literature, at 10%, or
61
See Huber (2011).
56

p
=
w
= 1.1. Together with the assumptions for the price and wage ination stickiness
parameters of
p
= 200 and
w
= 200, this implies an average duration of price and wage
contracts of 5 quarters in an equivalent Calvo (1983) setup with full indexation to past
ination. This is consistent with the results of Christiano et al. (2005). Unions dividends
are assumed to be fully distributed to constrained households in each period,
u
= 1.
The government accounts are calibrated in considerable detail, because the eects of the
Chicago plan include a substantial reduction in both gross and net government debt, and
large eects on decits coming from the previously non-existent items net seigniorage and
net new treasury credit. To evaluate the desirability of such a development, it is critical to
study its implications for interest rates and for dierent types of distortionary taxation,
the latter starting from levels that are consistent with the data. The government spending
to GDP ratio is set to its approximate historical average of 18% of GDP. Tax rates on
labor, capital and consumption are xed to reproduce the historical ratios of the
respective tax revenues to GDP, which are 17.6% for labor income taxes, 3.2% for capital
income taxes, and 4.6% for consumption taxes. The implied initial steady state tax rates
are
L
= 0.317,
k
= 0.259 and
c
= 0.073. The implied steady state value for
ls
is a
lump-sum transfer to households of 6.6% of GDP, of which constrained households are
assumed to receive 95% by setting f
cc
= 0.95. The calibrated value for the government
debt-to-GDP ratio, at 80%, is based on the most recent available data. The elasticity of
the real interest rate with respect to the level of government debt is calibrated at 3 basis
points for each percentage point increase in the government debt-to-GDP ratio. This is
consistent with the empirical estimates reported in Laubach (2009), Engen and Hubbard
(2004) and Gale and Orszag (2004). Fiscal policy can be characterized by the degree to
which automatic stabilizers work, in other words by the size of d
gdp
. This has been
quantied by the OECD (Girouard and Andr (2005)), whose estimate for the United
States is d
gdp
= 0.34. We adopt this for the business cycle comparison of the pre-transition
and post-transition economies, but for the illustration of the transition dynamics without
business cycle shocks we simplify by assuming a balanced budget rule with d
gdp
= 0.
62
All
three distortionary tax rates are assumed to move in proportion. We assume a
conventional calibration of the monetary policy rule, similar to what has for example been
used in the Federal Reserves SIGMA model, by setting m
i
= 0.7 and m

= 2.0. For the

prudential rule, we set p

= 0 except for one of the simulations of business cycle shocks in

the post-transition economy.
In household preferences, all parameters except for the discount factors are identical across
unconstrained and constrained households. We set the labor supply elasticity 1/ to one, a
common choice in the business cycle literature. The degree of habit persistence is v = 0.7.
For banks, the parameter determining the Basel minimum capital adequacy ratio is set
to 8% of risk-weighted assets, as under both the Basel-II and the new Basel-III
regulations.
63
Both Basel-II and -III regulations feature a 35% risk weight for residential
property and a 100% risk weight for commercial real estate. We therefore set the
parameter , which represents the risk weight for mortgages in the model, to an
intermediate value of = 0.5. Other parameters are calibrated to be consistent with the
assumption that banks maintain an average actual capital adequacy ratio of 10.5%, which
62
The eects of this simplication on the results are minor.
63
Details on the Basel III regulations are available at http://www.bis.org/bcbs/basel3.htm.
57
means that they maintain a buer of 2.5%, as envisaged under Basel-III. The percentage
of banks violating the minimum capital adequacy ratio is set to 2.5% of all banks per
quarter.
Our calibration of the interest rate margin between the policy rate i
t
and banks deposit
rate i
d,t
is based on Ashcraft and Steindel (2008), who nd a margin of 1.34%, in 2006,
between the average rate of commercial banks portfolio of treasury and agency securities
on the one hand, and their overall portfolio of liabilities on the other hand. We have
repeated their computations for a longer time span, and found similar spreads in the 1990s
and more recently, but lower spreads from 2001-2004. During that period the policy rate
was lowered to unprecedented levels while interest rates on bank liabilities, of which a
signicant portion is of longer duration, did not drop to the same extent. This in fact
suggests that during times of steady policy rates the margin of Ashcraft and Steindel
(2008) may be biased downwards because banks portfolio of liabilities has a longer
average duration, and thus a larger term premium, than their portfolio of government
securities. On the other hand, our paper uses a broader concept of deposit-like liabilities
than Ashcraft and Steindel (2008), who focus only on commercial banks, while we include
all nancial institutions that oer liquid liabilities, including the shadow banking system.
The liabilities of non-bank nancial institutions are less liquid on average than those of
commercial banks, and therefore need to oer a larger interest rate. Our compromise
calibration is to choose a steady state interest rate margin between i
t
and i
d,t
of 1%.
Finally, the steady state interest rate margin between the deposit rate i
d,t
and the rate
that banks would charge on riskless private loans i
,t
is xed at 1.5% per annum in steady
state.
64
This means that the margin of the riskless private lending rate over the policy
rate is 0.5%, which is roughly equal to the historical spread of the 3-month US$ LIBOR
over the 3-month treasury bill rate. The implied value for penalty costs equals around
0.7% of the value of assets. This is not an unrealistically large number, because it only
applies to the small fraction of banks that do violate the minimum capital adequacy
requirement in any given period. As a fraction of the value of total assets of the banking
system the penalty only equals 0.02% per period in steady state.
The overall size of the nancial systems balance sheet is calibrated at 200% of GDP, with
liabilities at 184.25% of GDP and bank equity at 15.75% of GDP. The gure for liabilities
is a compromise, in that it exceeds the 100% of GDP reported for 2006 by the Federal
Financial Institutions Examination Council (2007), while it is well below the almost 350%
of GDP reported for safe or information-insensitive nancial assets by Gorton et al.
(2012). Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (2007) includes U.S.
commercial banks, U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks, thrift institutions, and
credit unions, but it excludes the shadow banking system, while Gorton et al. (2012)
include shadow banks. Similar numbers to Gorton et al. (2012) are provided by Pozsar et
al. (2010), who use the Flow of Funds database to show that, just prior to the onset of the
2007 crisis, total liabilities of the U.S. commercial banking sector equalled around 100% of
GDP, while the size of the shadow banking sector was around 150% of GDP, and despite a
large subsequent contraction it still exceeded the size of the commercial banking sector in
2010. Gorton (2010) emphasizes that a key component of the shadow banking system is
the repo market, but that its size is very hard to estimate reliably due to a lack of
64
While in the model no borrower is charged the rate i
,t
, it is important as the base lending rate to which
dierent risk-based spreads are added.
58
comprehensive data coverage. Nevertheless, available estimates for the most recent period
range between U.S.$ 10 trillion (gross) according to Hrdahl and King (2008) and U.S.$
12 trillion according to Gorton (2010). Our reason for including at least a conservative
estimate of the liabilities of the shadow banking system is that these liabilities perform
money-like functions that must not be omitted from a model of the modern U.S. nancial
system. This is also emphasized by Gorton et al. (2012), who describe the functions of
safe or information-insensitive nancial sector liabilities as follows: To the extent that
debt is information-insensitive, it can be used eciently as collateral in nancial
transactions, a role in nance that is analogous to the role of money in commerce. A
large share, and perhaps by now the majority, of nancial system debt can therefore
command an interest rate discount below the policy rate by yielding these nancial, rather
than purely goods market, transactions services. Because, in terms of our model, the full
menu of safe assets considered by Gorton et al. (2012)
65
, and also by Pozsar et al. (2010),
includes items not always intermediated by the nancial system (e.g. treasuries) and items
that would represent double-counting in a model with a single aggregated banking system
(e.g. interbank loans), we adopt the compromise calibration of approximately 185% of
GDP
66
, with a total balance sheet size of 200% of GDP.
This gure also turns out to be approximately consistent with Flow of Funds information
on the size of borrowing exposures of the U.S. corporate and household sectors. Just
before the onset of the recent crisis, the total amount of credit market debt outstanding
for non-nancial businesses reached 80% of GDP. Ueda and Brooks (2011) show that
around 20%-25% of this was short-term debt with a maturity of up to one year. We
therefore set the steady state values of short-term or working capital loans

m
t
equal to
20% of GDP.
67
We allocate the remaining 60% of GDP to long-term or investment loans

k
t
. Similarly, just prior to the crisis the ratio of residential mortgages to GDP reached
around 80% of GDP. Our model does not feature housing investment, but rather a xed
factor referred to as land. A signicant portion of housing investment does of course
represent the acquisition of the underlying land, and a signicant portion of the remainder
represents purchases of pre-existing houses where additional investment is only a minor
consideration. We nd that very important insights can be gained by representing such
investment as investment in a xed factor. On the other hand, housing construction does
of course play an important role, and in fact in the ocial U.S. statistics it is included as
part of private investment. Out of the stock of residential mortgages, we therefore allocate
one quarter or 20% of GDP to

k
t
, to represent the housing component of investment
loans, taking the total to 80% of GDP. We allocate the remaining 60% of GDP to
mortgage loans

a
t
. The Flow of Funds data show that short-term consumer loans reached
just under 20% of GDP prior to the onset of the crisis, and we therefore set

c
t
to equal
20% of GDP in steady state.
68
Finally, the nancial system also holds signicant amounts
65
The asset categories included in safe assets by Gorton et al. (2012), who use the Federal Reserves Flow of
Funds database, include bank deposits, money market mutual fund shares, commercial paper, federal funds,
repurchase agreements, short-term interbank loans, treasuries, agency debt, municipal bonds, securitized
debt and high-grade nancial sector corporate debt.
66
Primarily due to the inclusion of the shadow banking system, this gure is much larger than traditional
measures of the money supply such as M2, MZM or M3 (discontinued in 2006), with even M3 only reaching
around 80 percent of GDP in 2006.
67
Bates et al. (2008) show that, as in our model, nonnancial rms simultaneously borrow and hold large
amounts of cash, reaching a cash-to-assets ratio of 23.2% in 2006.
68
Laibson et al. (2001) mention that, as in our model, typical U.S. households simultaneously borrow and
59
of government debt, but, unlike at the time of the Chicago Plan in the 1930s, the majority
of U.S. government debt is nowadays held outside the banking system. We therefore
calibrate the model so that the domestic nancial system holds, and therefore
intermediates, government debt equal to 20% of steady state GDP. This is equal to
around 25% of total outstanding marketable debt.
The composition of the liability side of various borrowers balance sheets is mainly
determined by our assumptions about their leverage, on which we comment next. Ueda
and Brooks (2011) contain information on the leverage or debt-to-equity ratio of all listed
U.S. companies. For the overall non-nancials group this has uctuated around 140%
since the early 1990s, while for the core manufacturing and services sectors it has
uctuated around 110%. Leverage for unlisted companies is likely to have been lower on
average due to more constrained access to external nancing. We therefore choose a
steady state leverage ratio of 100% for both working capital loans and investment loans.
For consumer loans, data are not readily available to make a similar determination. We x
leverage for these loans at the same 100% level as for working capital loans. For
mortgages we use data from the Flow of Funds and Fannie Mae to decompose the total
value of the U.S. housing stock into its equity and mortgage-debt components. We then
deduct one third of the value of the housing stock from the equity component, to account
for the fact that one third of U.S. residential property is owned free and clear, based on
the 2005 U.S. census.
69
In our model this mortgage-free component of the housing stock is
owned by unconstrained households, and therefore needs to be removed in computing the
leverage of constrained households. The ratio of mortgages to the remaining equity
equalled around 200% in the two decades prior to the crisis (since then it has risen
dramatically), and we use this to calibrate our steady state.
Steady state interest rate spreads over the policy rate i
t
are computed from average
margins between dierent corporate and household borrowing rates over 3-month U.S.
treasury bill rates. Ashcraft and Steindel (2008) compute, for 2006, a 2% spread for real
estate loans, a 3% spread for commercial and industrial loans, and a 5% spread for credit
card and other consumption loans. We therefore x the following steady state spreads: 2%
for mortgage loans, 5% for consumer loans, 3% for working capital loans, and 1.5% for
investment loans. Only the latter deviates from Ashcraft and Steindel (2008), principally
because these authors only consider the commercial banking sector, while long-term
corporate funding, to the extent that it does not come directly from capital markets,
comes to a signicant extent from the shadow banking system where spreads tend to be
lower. For example, in the commercial paper market average spreads prior to the crisis
averaged less than 0.5%.
We calibrate additional parameters by xing steady state loan default rates at levels that
are consistent with the data. Ueda and Brooks (2011) show that the default rate for
non-nancial listed U.S. companies has averaged around 1.5% since the early 1990s.
Default rates for smaller, non-listed companies are known to be higher. We therefore set
the steady state default rate for investment loans to 1.5% of all rms per period, and the
default rate for working capital loans to 3%. As for household loans, the average personal
bankruptcy rate has been just under 1% over the last two decades. But, as discussed in
hold cash balances.
69
This information is available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahs05/tab3-15.pdf.
60
White (1998), only a fraction of households who default le for bankruptcy, even though
in her estimation 15% of households would benet nancially from doing so. For banks it
is often more cost-ecient to simply write o the debt, especially for smaller personal
loans. And even for mortgage loans, lenders may be willing to incur signicant costs in
restructuring the loan before forcing the borrower to resort to the protection of
bankruptcy. In our model such plans and associated costs, and not only outright
bankruptcy, do represent default events. We therefore x the steady default rate on
mortgages at 2.5%, and on short-term household loans at 4%. These high rates can also
be justied by appealing to the U.S. credit score distribution and associated delinquency
rates, where delinquency is a 90+ days late payment on any type of debt. In the United
States, 15% of households fall into a score range that exhibits a delinquency rate of 50% or
more, and another 12% into a range that exhibits a delinquency rate of around one third.
The interest semi-elasticity of money demand is the percent change in money demand in
response to a one percentage point increase in the opportunity cost of holding money.
Traditional empirical studies have estimated money demand equations separately rather
than as part of an overall general equilibrium model, and have found interest
semi-elasticities of -0.05 (Ball (2001)) or even lower (Ireland (2007), OBrien (2000)). We
nd that when such elasticities are adopted for a general equilibrium model where money
is a very broad aggregate representing all transactions-related (goods and nancial
markets transactions) liabilities of the nancial system, the implications are highly
counterfactual. Specically, a bank lending boom triggered by greater optimism about the
creditworthiness of borrowers raises the volume of lending and therefore of deposits.
However, despite the fact that lending spreads over the deposit rate fall, with a low
interest semi-elasticity the overall cost of lending would rise dramatically, because the
increase in deposits would require a much larger increase of deposit interest rates relative
to the policy rate. This has not been a feature of interest rate data during lending booms.
To the contrary, the data suggest that the marginal depositor is willing to increase his
holdings of deposits with little increase in deposit rates relative to policy rates. In other
words, the marginal depositors money demand exhibits a high interest semi-elasticity. We
accommodate this by assuming that unconstrained households have an interest
semi-elasticity of -1.00. Their money demand can be thought of as representing the
demand for liquidity in nancial transactions stressed in the recent literature. On the
other hand, the money demand of constrained households and of manufacturers represents
a more traditional demand for goods and factor market transactions, and for this group
we therefore adopt the conventional semi-elasticity of -0.05.
The combination of the above assumptions about capital adequacy, interest margins,
leverage and money demand implies the composition of the liability side of the nancial
systems balance sheet, with equity equal to 15.75% of GDP
70
, constrained households
and manufacturers deposits each equal to 40% of GDP, and unconstrained households
deposits equal to 104.25% of GDP. The overall initial steady state balance sheet is shown
as the leftmost of three balance sheets in Figure 3.
We now proceed to discuss the calibration of the post-transition economy that operates
under the monetary arrangements of the Chicago Plan. Most importantly, we assume that
70
This is below the 21% suggested by a simple-minded application of the 10.5% steady state Basel ratio.
The reason is the less than 100% risk weighting of government bonds and mortgages.
61
all the main structural parameters are identical to those of the pre-transition economy.
The exceptions are mainly due to the fact that the size of post-transition balance sheets is
very dierent. There are also some new policy parameters.
We start with the latter. The nominal growth rate of money
m
is set equal to the real
growth rate of output x, which ensures zero ination in steady state. The steady state net
nominal interest rate paid on reserves is set equal to zero,
d
= 1. The interest rate
charged by the government on treasury loans to the banking system is set to ensure that
banks wholesale rate equals the rate on government bonds in steady state,

= . The
rates at which the deposit and treasury credit rates converge to their new steady state
values during the transition period are determined by
d
= 0.25 and
f
= 0.9. The steady
state value of the gross government debt-to-GDP ratio is, following the permanent
repayment of the government debt held by the banking system, reduced from 80% to 60%.
The coecient that is used to determine the net government debt-to-GDP ratio, which
in turn determines long-run equilibrium real interest rates, is set equal to = 0.5. This
takes into account the approximate ratio between the real interest cost on government
bonds

b
g
t
and on treasury credit

f
t
. Specically, steady state nominal (and real) interest
rates in the Chicago Plan economy are 1.07% on government bonds, 0.49% on treasury
credit, and 0% on deposits.
The monetary policy rule for the treasury credit rate is calibrated identically to the
pre-transition rule for the policy rate, m
i
= 0.7 and m

= 2.0. For the prudential rule, we

set p

= 0 as in the pre-transition economy, but when discussing countercyclical policies

we also consider an alternative calibration with p

= 8.
Under our chosen money demand specication, it can be shown that the average interest
semi-elasticity of money demand across unconstrained and constrained households in the
pre-transition economy is equal to a simple weighted average of their individual
semi-elasticities. We set the post-transition money demand coecients of unconstrained
households such that their interest semi-elasticity equals that pre-transition average.
Finally, the balance sheets of the nancial sector and of manufacturers change
dramatically following the stock transactions in the transition period. Our calibration
ensures that investment trusts steady state Basel ratio continues to equal 10.5%, and that
the steady state leverage ratio of manufacturers remains at the 0% reached immediately
after the debt repayment of the transition period.
VII. Transition to the Chicago Plan
In this section we study the response of the model economy to the implementation of the
Chicago Plan, including its eects in the single implementation period itself, and the
subsequent adjustment towards a new steady state. This will allow us to study all but the
rst claim of Irving Fisher (1936) mentioned in the abstract and in Section I. The rst
claim relates to the business cycle properties of the model, and is studied in the next
section.
Figure 3 shows bank balance sheets in the transition period. It repeats Figure 1, which is
discussed in Section I, but contains more details concerning the composition of loans and
62
deposits. For continuity with the subsequent discussion, we repeat here the main points
made in our discussion of Figure 1. The gure breaks the transition into two separate
stages. First, the original balance sheet remains unchanged but banks have to borrow
from the treasury to procure the reserves necessary to fully back their deposits. As a
result both treasury credit and reserves increase by 184.25% of GDP. Second, the principal
of all of banks original loans to the government and the private sector, except investment
loans, is cancelled against treasury credit, either directly, in the case of government debt,
or indirectly through the citizens dividend. Furthermore, banks pay out part of their
equity to keep their net worth in line with the now much reduced capital adequacy
requirements. The balance sheets on the right of Figure 3 show that the overall volume of
deposits only drops very slightly, with a drop in household deposits nearly matched by an
increase in manufacturer deposits. The split into two balance sheets represents the now
strict separation between the monetary and credit functions of the banking system,
between deposit banks and credit investment trusts. The credit function consists only of
investment loans, which are nanced by a reduced level of equity and by what is left of
treasury credit after the repayments of other debts. The slight increase in investment
loans reects the beginning of a sustained increase in investment as the economy starts to
move towards a new steady state.
Figure 4 shows the full dynamic adjustment of nancial sector balance sheets to the
Chicago Plan over the rst 60 quarters. In this and all subsequent gures the dotted lines,
which jump in the transition period, represent the pre- and post-transition steady states
of the model, while the solid lines represent the dynamic adjustment paths. Loans to the
private sector and to the government drop by 100% and 20% of GDP on impact, with
bank net worth dropping by around 7% of GDP, and treasury credit rising from zero to
initially just over 70% of GDP, to replace deposits and the paid-out equity as the funding
source for investment loans. Investment loans subsequently increase by almost 20% of
GDP, but due to the assumed very slow reduction of the cost of treasury credit this
adjustment happens very gradually, and therefore does not lead to excessive short-run
volatility. It is accompanied by an equally gradual increase in investment trust net worth
that keeps the capital adequacy ratio within a fairly narrow range. The volume of
household deposits falls, due to a slightly larger spread between bond and deposit rates,
while manufacturers deposits increase due to growing economic activity, with an overall
long-run decline in deposits of around 4% of GDP. Reserves rise from zero to around 180%
of GDP to back this level of deposits. The riskiness of nancial institutions drops
dramatically, with the share of investment trusts violating the MCAR dropping from 2.5%
to around 0.8% per period. Finally, monitoring costs as a share of GDP drop from 2.0% to
0.7%. In the pre-transition economy extensive monitoring is required to facilitate the
private creation of the economys money stock at an acceptable risk to banks. When this
is replaced by debt-free government money creation, a large share of these monitoring
costs, which are costly both because they use signicant real resources and because they
lead to higher equilibrium real interest rates, becomes unnecessary. The only exception is
the monitoring of productive investment projects, which represents a core function of the
remaining nancial system.
Figure 5 shows the macroeconomic eects of the balance sheet changes illustrated in
Figure 4. The post-transition economy exhibits a very large output gain that eventually
approaches 10% for GDP. This is mainly driven by a 27% increase in investment, and
63
accompanied by an eventually almost 5% increase in consumption. Over the rst few
years however consumption drops, because the very rapid increase in investment initially
crowds out some consumption. The reason for the large output gain is a combination of
lower real interest rates, lower distortionary taxes and lower monitoring costs. The latter
has already been discussed, while the other two are illustrated in Figure 5.
The balance sheet changes in Figure 4 cause major drops in equilibrium real interest rates.
Gross government debt drops from 80% to 60% of GDP, and with treasury credit jumping
to around 70% of GDP on impact, and to 90% of GDP eventually, unadjusted net
government debt immediately, and then increasingly, turns negative. But it is the
adjusted net government debt b
rat
net,t
that determines investors desired real interest rates.
Because this net debt applies a weight of = 0.5 to treasury credit, it drops from 80% of
GDP to an eventually very much lower but still positive 16% of GDP. The consequence is
a gradual 1.93% per annum reduction in real bond and deposit rates, with an additional
3% per annum reduction in the corresponding nominal rates due to the elimination of
steady state ination. The reduction in the nominal deposit rate is allowed to happen
almost instantaneously, while the nominal treasury credit rate, which is shown in Figure 5
relative to the initial nominal deposit rate, is only allowed to fall very gradually. This
cautious credit policy is desirable because of its eects on the dynamics of investment. An
investment boom begins immediately upon the implementation of the Chicago Plan, due
to much lower distortionary tax rates, most importantly capital income tax rates, made
possible by the favorable scal eects of the plan (see below). An initial slight increase in
the treasury credit rate, and therefore in the real lending rate on investment loans,
followed by a gradual rate reduction, insures that this boom does not become too rapid
and destabilizing. The extent of the ultimate drop in the treasury credit rate is
determined by the governments objective to equalize the real wholesale rate and the real
government bond rate. This requires an eventual drop in the real treasury credit rate of
1.51% per annum, to 0.49% per annum, which compares to a 2% per annum drop, to 0%,
in the real deposit rate. Real wholesale lending rates eventually drop even further than
bond and deposit rates, by 2.43% per annum. Retail real rates on investment loans on the
other hand drop somewhat less, by 1.64% per annum, because corporate leverage increases
in the new steady state, which calls for a higher external nance premium.
Figure 5 also illustrates the third reason for the output gains under the Chicago Plan,
very large drops in distortionary tax rates, by almost 5 percentage points for the labor
income tax rate, 4 percentage points for the capital income tax rate, and just over one
percentage point for the consumption tax rate. The explanation requires a detailed
analysis of the budgetary implications of the Chicago Plan.
Figure 6 illustrates the dramatic benecial eect of the Chicago Plan on government
nances.
71
Debt service, that is net nominal interest charges on government debt, drops
by 4.2% of GDP. Only the smaller part of this is due to the 20 percentage point reduction
in government debt, while the major part is due to a large drop in nominal interest rates
from 6% per annum pre-transition to just over 1% per annum post-transition. More than
half of this is in turn due to the 3% per annum reduction in ination, with the remainder
due to much lower real interest rates. The reduction in ination is the main reason why
71
Several subplots of Figure 6 show a gap in the transition period. This concerns all ow variables that
represent changes in nancial stocks, given that the latter exhibit large jumps in the transition period.
Showing these values in the transition period would render the remaining values unreadable.
64
the government is able to reduce its decit ratio by 2.8% of GDP.
72
The reduction in real
interest rates on the gross debt is sucient to nance the governments issuance of net
new treasury credit, which requires an ongoing budgetary expenditure of 1.3% of GDP
because the 0.49% steady state real interest rate on treasury credit is below the economys
2% growth rate. The two main remaining budget items, seigniorage and tax revenue, are
equal but of opposite sign. Government issuance of a large stock of reserves allows it to
collect ow seigniorage equal to 3.6% of GDP. This number is so large not because of an
ination tax, because ination is zero in steady state. Rather, its size is due to the large
size of the stock of reserves at over 180% of GDP, combined with the fact that 2% per
annum economic growth exceeds the zero nominal and real rate paid on reserves.
73
The
government is assumed to use this new source of revenue to nance a reduction in
distortionary taxes equal to 3.6% of GDP. This is the reason for the above-mentioned
drops in tax rates. It should be added that other ways of spending the additional
seigniorage revenue could be considered, including spending on public infrastructure.
Finally, government spending remains constant as a share of GDP, while transfers are kept
constant in real terms and therefore decline by 0.6 percentage points relative to GDP.
We conclude that Fishers (1936) claims (2) through (4) regarding the Chicago Plan, as
listed in the abstract of this paper, are validated by our model:
First, bank runs can obviously be completely eliminated. Solvency considerations are no
longer an issue in the safety of bank deposits, because money is now debt-free and
indestructible. A run on credit investment trusts is impossible to the extent that they
are either nanced by equity, or issue debt liabilities that are held by the government. A
run on private-debt-nanced investment trusts can be prevented through the regulations
that we discussed above. Note however that even if a run on a debt-nanced investment
trust were to occur, this would have no implications whatsoever for the money supply and
thus for the safety of the payments system.
Second, government debt net of treasury credit goes from being highly positive to highly
negative if unadjusted for the real interest burden, and to a positive but much smaller
fraction of GDP if adjusted for that burden. The large new stock of government-issued
money is irredeemable, and represents equity in the commonwealth rather than debt.
Third, private debts can be dramatically reduced, because money creation no longer
requires simultaneous debt creation. In principle, net private debts in our model could be
reduced to almost zero if the government were to also repay investment loans through an
even larger citizens dividend. But the monitoring of industrial projects is a core and
highly useful function of nancial institutions in which they should continue to be
involved, even though some authors, like Simons (1946), might argue that this could best
be accomplished by equity-funded rather than debt-funded institutions. However, most
other pre-transition lending activities of banks in our model served the main purpose of
mortgaging various types of assets in order to be able to create a debt-based money
supply at an acceptable risk to banks. This is not necessary, because providing a money
72
This follows mechanically from the fact that the factor of proportionality between long-run decit- and
debt-to-GDP ratios is the steady state nominal growth rate.
73
A small positive steady state ination rate, even if considered acceptable for non-budgetary purposes,
would not generate additional scal revenue. In fact, due to the high interest elasticity of money demand at
the margin, it would reduce seigniorage income unless the interest rate on deposits is raised accordingly.
65
supply does not need to involve risk. It can instead be done by the sovereign, debt-free, at
much lower cost.
By validating these claims in a rigorous, microfounded model, we were able to establish
that the advantages of the Chicago Plan go even beyond those identied by Fisher (1936).
First, output gains are very large, approaching ten percent, due to a combination of lower
real interest rates, lower distortionary tax rates, and lower monitoring costs in the
nancial system. Second, the model provides a compelling answer to those who claim that
giving the government the power to issue such a large stock of money would be highly
inationary. The opposite is true. Not only does Fishers proposal not imply any initial
increase in the stock of money held by the private sector, and therefore by construction no
increase in initial nominal spending power and thus in ination, but furthermore it allows
the government to achieve much lower steady state ination without any risk of falling
into a liquidity trap, because the government controls a policy rate that is not subject to a
zero lower bound.
VIII. Credit Booms and Busts Pre-Transition and
Post-Transition
Figure 7 illustrates how the pre-transition and post-transition monetary regimes cope with
a credit boom-and-bust cycle driven by volatile nancial sector sentiment concerning
borrower risk. Specically, we construct a standardized experiment whereby lenders
receive a succession of good news shocks
news
t
such that the standard deviation of the
riskiness of all their borrowers falls gradually and cumulatively by 60% by the end of
quarter 12. For the post-transition economy this only concerns
k
t
, the riskiness of
investment loans, while for the pre-transition economy we assume that all four standard
deviations are reduced by a common factor. This shock leads to a very large three-year
expansion in credit. We assume that in quarter 13 lenders suddenly reverse their
assessment of borrower riskiness. They not only start to completely discount the news
previously revealed, which otherwise would have continued to support strong lending until
petering out after another 12 quarters, but they also now perceive an additional adverse
autocorrelated shock to borrower riskiness
z2
t
. The net eect is to make borrower riskiness
jump from 40% of its steady state value to 125% of its steady state value in period 13,
after which it gradually reverts back to its steady state value. This simulation, which uses
borrower riskiness shocks in a very similar way to Christiano et al. (2011) and Christiano
et al. (2010), captures a highly realistic phenomenon that has been repeatedly observed
throughout history, as detailed in Section III. In a credit boom, nancial institutions tend
to compete with each other in providing easy credit and discounting lending risk, and the
availability of credit and associated economic expansion create the very conditions that
make optimism about borrower riskiness look justied. But there comes a point where the
debt burdens of borrowers have become so widespread and so large that nervousness sets
in about their ability to repay. At that point the perception of borrower riskiness can
suddenly turn, and again this sharp contraction of credit creates the very conditions that
justify the pessimism. This sudden change in the perception of borrower riskiness is the
models simplied way of capturing the economys Minsky moment (Minsky (1986)).
66
But dierent monetary regimes cope with this shock in very dierent ways. The solid line
in Figure 7 shows the response of the pre-transition economy. Bank loans grow very
strongly over the initial boom period, by over 50% of GDP, and banks create the
corresponding bank deposits to fund the additional lending. A decomposition shows
that about 70% of the additional lending is due to higher mortgage loans, while the
remaining three loan types account for approximately another 10% each. The reason why
mortgages grow so strongly is the fact that the asset securing the loan is neither limited by
the amount of the loan itself, as is the case for consumer and working capital loans that
are backed by credit-based money, nor does the asset have to be produced rst, subject to
adjustment costs, as for investment loans. Rather, land already exists in unencumbered
form on the balance sheet of unconstrained households, and easier credit terms simply
enable constrained households to purchase this land from them, on credit created by banks
against the security of that land. Unconstrained households instantaneously exchange
their land against the additional bank deposits, while constrained households end up with
additional land, of which they initially held a lower amount due to their borrowing
constraint. Unconstrained households end up awash with liquidity, and therefore increase
their consumption. This is the main reason why both consumption and investment
increase strongly under the pre-transition monetary regime. But deposits increase more
generally across the economy, albeit by smaller amounts than for unconstrained
households, because the lending expansion across all borrower classes creates large
amounts of additional money. During this boom phase investment grows by 2.5% relative
to its trend, while consumption grows by 1.5%, with GDP ending up just under 2% higher
at the end of quarter 12. At the peak of the boom the ination rate exceeds its target by
over 3% per annum, and the real policy rate has risen by 2% per annum.
The rst feature to note about the credit contraction at the end of the third year is its
massive size, with bank loans dropping by almost 70% of GDP in a single quarter. This
discontinuous credit contraction is a feature that pure loanable funds models of banking
are entirely unable to deliver, because they model banks as intermediaries of slow-moving
savings. On the other hand, with a model of banks as creators or destroyers of money this
feature emerges naturally, because money creation or destruction can happen
instantaneously.
Compared to the cumulative gains of the boom phase, the credit contraction has much
larger negative eects on activity, with output dropping by over 5%, consumption by
around 3%, and investment by well over 10%. The main reason for this is not that the
shock to creditworthiness at that point is around 30% larger than the cumulative shock
over the rst three years. Rather, what matters is the suddenness of the reversal.
Households have no choice but to respond to the sudden destruction of money with an
equally sudden contraction in consumption. More importantly, banks make very large
lending losses, with capital adequacy ratios dropping by well over 2 percentage points, and
more than 20% of all banks violating the MCAR. This leads to an approximately 2% per
annum increase in the wholesale real lending rate as banks try to rebuild their capital
base, and to an even larger 5% per annum increase in the average real retail lending rate
as banks require compensation for higher lending risk. This increase in lending rates
across all borrower categories is the main reason why aggregate activity contracts, with
investment being more seriously aected than consumption.
The dashed blue line in Figure 7 illustrates the response of the economy under the
67
Chicago Plan, under the assumption that the government pursues an interest rate rule for
the treasury credit rate, but that it does not pursue quantitative lending guidance through
countercyclical capital adequacy regulations. The rst important observation is that the
quantities of credit and money now evolve completely independently of each other.
Because debt is now much less pervasive throughout the economy, and especially because
loans that create money on the security of land or deposits are no longer observed, the
increase in credit is now much smaller as a share of GDP. Investment loans do rise, and
continue rising until well after the negative shock hits in period 13, because the capital
stock that requires continued nancing only declines gradually thereafter. Investment
trust net worth declines immediately after the negative shock due to lending losses, as in
the pre-transition economy. The uctuations in GDP in this economy are almost identical
to those in the pre-transition economy, but the underlying uctuations in consumption
and investment are dierent. Because only investment is now subject to borrower riskiness
shocks, an increase in investment trusts optimism now has much larger eects on
investment, while consumption is not directly aected by increased lending, and is
crowded out by higher investment. The treasury credit rate responds to higher ination
with a similar behavior to the policy rate in the pre-transition economy, but with a large
swing during the credit bust that takes it well into negative territory, in real but especially
in nominal terms. As emphasized above, under the Chicago Plan this does not need to be
problematic because there is no zero lower bound for the policy rate. Nevertheless, despite
these large swings in the treasury credit rate, the economy remains volatile. The much
larger increase in the capital stock relative to its long-run equilibrium value under this
scenario implies that the reversal of lending optimism has a larger eect on the valuation
of capital, and therefore leads to larger losses at that time. As this impairs investment
trusts capital adequacy more severely, it leads to a larger spike in the wholesale rate, but
the main eect is a much larger spike in the retail lending rate to compensate investment
trusts for temporarily elevated credit risk. The highly volatile investment under this
scenario would likely be considered undesirable by policymakers. A much more aggressive
interest rate response would make nominal treasury credit rates far more volatile, which
may also be undesirable. The problem is that an exclusively price-based credit policy still
gives investment trusts a great deal of discretion to choose the overall volume of lending.
To avoid this and stabilize the economy more eectively, policy needs to avail itself of an
additional quantitative tool. This however is readily available.
The red dotted line in Figure 7 illustrates this possibility. The government is now assumed
to pursue exible quantitative lending guidance via countercyclical adjustments of
minimum capital adequacy requirements for investment trusts.
74
As stressed in Section
V.D.5, MCAR are a far more eective tool under the Chicago Plan, because the nancial
system is unable to create its own equity. In this simulation, investment trusts have to
raise their capital adequacy ratio from 10.5% to around 15% during the boom, so that the
wholesale lending rate, and thus also the retail lending rate, remains very much higher
during that time. As a result the increase in investment is only one third as large, with a
commensurate reduction in the uctuations in consumption. At the time of the reversal in
lending optimism this makes the economy far more resilient, rst because capital
investment funds are now much less exposed to a collapse in their asset values, and second
because they are far more resilient by being able to respond to the shock by reducing their
74
The lending volume of the aforementioned privately-funded investment trusts, which are not part of the
formal model, could also be regulated by countercyclical capital adequacy requirements.
68
capital adequacy ratio from a very comfortable level. As a result the spike in lending rates
under this scenario is also much milder, and smaller than in the pre-transition
environment, while the treasury credit rate can be far less volatile. Finally, the amplitude
of GDP uctuations throughout the entire boom-bust cycle is about half that under the
other two scenarios.
We conclude that Fishers claim (1) regarding the advantages of the Chicago Plan can also
be validated, provided policy avails itself of the appropriate tools. What that means is that
policy does not just use a countercyclical policy for the interest rate at which the treasury
makes credit available to lenders, but also uses direct targets for the quantity of lending,
to prevent excessive volatility in the quantity of investment projects approved by lenders.
IX. Conclusion
This paper revisits the Chicago Plan, a proposal for fundamental monetary reform that
was put forward by many leading U.S. economists at the height of the Great Depression.
Fisher (1936), in his brilliant summary, claimed that the Chicago Plan had four major
advantages, ranging from greater macroeconomic stability to much lower debt levels
throughout the economy. In this paper we are able to rigorously evaluate his claims, by
applying the recommendations of the Chicago Plan to a state-of-the-art monetary DSGE
model that contains a fully microfounded and carefully calibrated model of the current
U.S. nancial system. The critical feature of this model is that under the current
monetary system the economys money supply is created by banks, through debt, rather
than being created debt-free by the government.
Our analytical and simulation results fully validate Fishers (1936) claims. The Chicago
Plan could signicantly reduce business cycle volatility caused by rapid changes in banks
attitudes towards credit risk, it would eliminate bank runs, and it would lead to an
instantaneous and large reduction in the levels of both government and private debt. It
would accomplish the latter by making government-issued money, which represents equity
in the commonwealth rather than debt, the central liquid asset of the economy, while
nancial institutions concentrate on their strength, the extension of credit to investment
projects that require monitoring and risk management expertise. We nd that the
advantages of the Chicago Plan go even beyond those claimed by Fisher. One additional
advantage is large steady state output gains due to the removal or reduction of multiple
distortions, including interest rate risk spreads, distortionary taxes, and costly monitoring
of macroeconomically unnecessary credit risks. Another advantage is the ability to drive
steady state ination to zero in an environment where liquidity traps do not exist, and
where a growth rule for the broad money supply becomes desirable because the
government does in fact control broad monetary aggregates. This ability to generate and
live with zero steady state ination is an important result, because it answers the
somewhat confused claim of opponents of an exclusive government monopoly on money
issuance, namely that such a monetary system would be highly inationary. There is
nothing in our theoretical framework to support this claim. And as discussed in Section
III, there is very little in the monetary history of ancient societies and Western nations to
support it either.
69
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79
Figure 1. Changes in Financial Sector Balance Sheet in Transition Period (percent of GDP)
80
Figure 2. Changes in Government Balance Sheet in Transition Period (percent of GDP)
81
Figure 3. Changes in Financial Sector Balance Sheet - Details (percent of GDP)
82
Figure 4. Transition to Chicago Plan - Financial Sector Balance Sheets
-150
-100
-50
0
50
-150
-100
-50
0
50
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Private Loans/GDP
(pp Difference)
0
20
40
60
80
100
0
20
40
60
80
100
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Treasury Credit/GDP
(pp Difference)
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Net Worth/GDP
(pp Difference)
0
5
10
15
20
0
5
10
15
20
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Investment Loans/GDP
(pp Difference)
-80
-60
-40
-20
0
20
-80
-60
-40
-20
0
20
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Mortgage Loans/GDP
(pp Difference)
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Government Bonds/GDP
(pp Difference)
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Working Capital Loans/GDP
(pp Difference)
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Consumer Loans/GDP
(pp Difference)
0
50
100
150
200
0
50
100
150
200
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Reserves/GDP
(pp Difference)
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Deposits/GDP
(pp Difference)
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Household Deposits/GDP
(pp Difference)
0
1
2
3
4
5
0
1
2
3
4
5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Corporate Deposits/GDP
(pp Difference)
-0.2
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
-0.2
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Basel Capital Adequacy Ratio
(pp Difference)
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Banks Violating Minimum CAR
(pp Difference)
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Monitoring Costs/GDP
(pp Difference)
(___ = transition path, - - - = nal steady state)
83
Figure 5. Transition to Chicago Plan - Main Macroeconomic Variables
0
2
4
6
8
10
0
2
4
6
8
10
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
GDP
(% Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Consumption
(% Difference)
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Investment
(% Difference)
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Nominal Bond Rate
(pp Difference)
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Nominal Deposit Rate
(pp Difference)
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Nominal Treasury Credit Rate
(pp Difference)
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Real Bond Rate
(pp Difference)
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Real Deposit Rate
(pp Difference)
-2
-1
0
1
2
-2
-1
0
1
2
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Real Treasury Credit Rate
(pp Difference)
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Real Wholesale Rate
(pp Difference)
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Real Investment Loans Retail Rate
(pp Difference)
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Inflation
(pp Difference)
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-6
-4
-2
0
2
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Labor Tax Rate
(pp Difference)
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Capital Tax Rate
(pp Difference)
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12162024283236404448525660
Consumption Tax Rate
(pp Difference)
(___ = transition path, - - - = nal steady state)
84
Figure 6. Transition to Chicago Plan - Fiscal Variables
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
5
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Government Debt/GDP
(pp Difference)
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Gross Debt Service/GDP
(pp Difference)
-3.0
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-3.0
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Government Deficit/GDP
(pp Difference)
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Net New Treasury Credit/GDP
(pp Difference)
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Seigniorage/GDP
(pp Difference)
-4.0
-3.5
-3.0
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4.0
-3.5
-3.0
-2.5
-2.0
-1.5
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Tax Revenue/GDP
(pp Difference)
-0
0
-0
0
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Government Spending/GDP
(pp Difference)
-0.6
-0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
-0.0
0.1
-0.6
-0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
-0.0
0.1
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56 60
Lump-Sum Transfers/GDP
(pp Difference)
(___ = transition path, - - - = nal steady state)
85
Figure 7. Business Cycle Properties Pre-Transition versus Post-Transition
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
2
-4
-3
-2
-1
0
1
2
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
GDP
(% Difference)
-10
-5
0
5
-10
-5
0
5
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Consumption
(% Difference)
-20
-10
0
10
20
30
-20
-10
0
10
20
30
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Investment
(% Difference)
-20
0
20
40
60
-20
0
20
40
60
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Bank Loans/GDP
(pp Difference)
-20
0
20
40
60
-20
0
20
40
60
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Bank Deposits/GDP
(pp Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Bank Basel Ratio
(pp Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Nominal Bond Rate
(pp Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Nominal Deposit Rate
(pp Difference)
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Nominal Treasury Credit Rate
(pp Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Real Bond Rate
(pp Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Real Deposit Rate
(pp Difference)
-4
-2
0
2
4
-4
-2
0
2
4
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Real Treasury Credit Rate
(pp Difference)
-5
0
5
10
-5
0
5
10
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Real Wholesale Rate
(pp Difference)
-5
0
5
10
15
20
-5
0
5
10
15
20
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Real Investment Loans Retail Rate
(pp Difference)
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
-4 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
Inflation
(pp Difference)
__ = Pre-Transition, - - - = Post-Transition, p

= 0, .... = Post-Transition, p

= 8