is there any documentation here or elsewhere that discusses a 100 percent reserve bank (or bank like thing) that actually operated…was in business, iow…and why it failed or isnt in business now?
aside from maybe some venetian warehouses?
I don’t know of anything.
The bank of Holland was 100% reserve for a while before the tullip bubble. Later on it claimed to be 100% reserve but in reality was emiting more notes than it had gold to loan to the king (goverment will allways favor credit expansion). When this was discovered it had to admit it and operate as a fractional reserve bank. There is a short pdf about the tullip bubble here on mises.org that explains it. Search “tullip bubble” in the mises.org search.
there is a lot of talk about 100% reserve banks, but that concept is not libertarian. plus it is unnecessary to make a rule about banking reserves. all you have to do is put a firewall between the banking system and the pockets of the US Taxpayer. banks will behave responsibly if there is no chance of bailout.
Aren’t stocks and commodity tickets traded on a 100% reserve basis? 
Never heard of Scottrade of Wachovia selling off their customers stock…
Aren’t basically all warehouses except for money warehouses (banks) operating on full reserve?
Yep.
Same thing for theater tickets, deposit boxes, etc. It’s nothing more than having a title to something.
a 100% bank is libertarian if people want money substitutes fully backed. nothing unlibertarian about it all. if i crack your skull to force it on you then perhaps that might be unlibertarian.
but a theatre ticket seems different that gold or silver a s money. once the show is over…it doesnt offer much.
i am not sure about the bank of holland. and that is probably a lie on your part.
do stocks now operate like the many here claim the banks do? on some fractional basis?
unbacked stock notes for promises of stocks?
is there a fundamental difference in the way 100% percent reserve bank would operate and the nature of stocks? arent stocks priced in money?
You can short sell the stock (sell the stock that you don’t own but you borrowed it from a broker). Also there is naked short selling, which means some people (rather institutions) can sell stocks that they don’t own and have not borrowed it before they sell. It’s basically reserved for market-makers. So, to some extent, you can hold a claim to non-existent property when you buy some stocks.
Why do you ask?
It’s called a safety deposit box.
The confusion about 100% reserves arises because some people believe that banks were initially designed to be warehouses. I’m not aware of any evidence for this. More likely, banks were designed to be loan making institutions that enabled the common man to earn a return on the little wealth he had by aggregating individual savings. Eventually, due to competition, accounts arose that allowed funds to be withdrawn on demand. The FRB debate is confused because people generally forget or ignore this point.
I’m not sure this is a fair accusation. While it should be conceded, perhaps, that 100-percent reservists do not have strong historical evidence for their claims as banks as money warehouses (not that 100-percent reservists necessarily say that that’s all what banks do or did), it’s not as if you have provided any concrete evidence irrefutably proving your position either (in fact, the way that you stated it it made it seem more like opinion).
So, if 100-percent reservists have forgotten or ignored your point, you have forgotten and ignored theirs. Obviously, that sentence doesn’t make sense, and that is my point.
I think banks started before money, so I doubt they were originally designed to make loans.
Jesus Huerta de Soto describes the very succesful Bank of Amsterdam, created in 1609, in his excellent must read treatise, Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, (See pages 98 thru 106). The Bank of Amsterdam operated under a 100 percent reserve ratio for almost 150 years. B/c of this adherence to strict traditional laws of banking and avoidance of fractional reserve banking, it was a haven of finacial safety throughout Europe until, unfortunately, in 1802 it too came under the sway of corrupt practices and it resorted to the practice of fractional reserve banking, which led to its ultimate demise. I highly recommend de Soto’s book. It lays out other historical instances of 100 pecent banking going back to the Romans, which is actually the tradition in law and finance.
It is also why, it would be far better to suffer a one-shot deflationary contraction
of the fraudulent fractional-reserve banking system, and go back to a sound system of 100%
reserves. ~
http://mises.org/journals/fm/fm391.pdf
this was taken from a pdf that says it was authored by a murray rothbard. it says ‘go back’.
was the alleged cornell graduate mistaken in his claim of going back to a 100 percent resreve system???
and go back to a sound system of 100% reserves. ~
http://mises.org/journals/fm/fm391.pdf
can anyone speak to the “go back” part of the above excerpt? iow, which particular 100 percent reserve era or occurence is being mentioned in the above link?
is it falsified information?