Another — from Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England and now a Bloomberg Opinion columnist — would limit the issuance of short-term debt to the amount of collateral that institutions pledged in advance to the central bank (minus haircuts, which could be as high as 100% for undesirable assets). Both would allow the central bank to safely guarantee all short-term debt, by ensuring that institutions had ample assets to back it.
Even these proposals are widely seen as radical. But that’s a matter of perspective. What’s actually the aberration? A system in which the government maintains some control over the creation of money, or one in which it must repeatedly devise unprecedented measures to backstop forms of money over which it has no control?
The larger and more desperate those measures become, the more a major redesign will start to make sense.
Mark Whitehouse writes editorials on global economics and finance for Bloomberg Opinion. He covered economics for the Wall Street Journal and served as deputy bureau chief in London. He was founding managing editor of Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily.